Look, as I’ve said many times before, I’m no economist. But, I’m not stupid, either. According to reports, the new conventional financial wisdom is that Americans must support the bailout bull bill, or the credit crunch will get so bad that we won’t be able to get mortgages, car and student loans, etc. Obama, from AP:
“This is not a plan to just hand over $700 billion of your money to a few banks on Wall Street,” the Illinois senator said.
Without a rescue for the financial sector, ordinary people will soon begin to suffer, Obama said.
“If we do not act, it will be harder for you to get a mortgage for your home or the loans you need to go to college or a loan you need to buy a car to get to work,” Obama said.
Who can afford those things now? Isn’t Detroit trying to get 25 billion or so from the government for it’s own auto industry bailout? Per Newsweek:
With just two weeks in the current session of Congress left to land potentially life-saving federal loans, Detroit’s car companies and Michigan’s congressional delegation were in a state of chaos. Michigan lawmakers trying to sell the deal to a skeptical Congress were frustrated by what they saw as a lack of effort from the automakers, several congressional sources tell NEWSWEEK. Auto execs were annoyed that they were being lumped with the Wall Street bailout crowd, which didn’t help Detroit’s plea for $25 billion in low-cost federal loans to see it through its cash crisis. The acrimony came to a head in a tense conference call Sept. 11 involving 25 power brokers in Washington, D.C., and Detroit, including some of the Big Three CEOs, according to Congressional sources. As congressmen and their staffers debated the minutia of how to craft the legislation for the loans, the CEOs on the other end of the line kept asking everyone to speak up. “We were very much in the weeds, which is not a good idea with a conference call of 25 people,” says Rep. Dave Camp, a Republican from Midland, Mich. “It’s been difficult to get consensus [with the carmakers]. It’s been very frustrating.”
Frustrating? Tell me about it. Time has an interesting, myth-busting piece that’s worth a look here. Seems to me, though, the fact that nobody can afford houses, cars and credit is what lead to people defaulting on existing loans in the first place, so it’s hard to see how opening up the lines of credit is going to change things for the better. But, like I said, I’m no economist.
And I’m not getting any of the 700 billion, either.
*UPDATE: I missed this earlier. Breitbart says Detroit got it’s money in the Pentagon package.
…I swear, I’m going to run naked into the streets, sobbing uncontrollably, screaming incoherently at the top of my lungs, while yanking large clumps of hair from my head one handful at a time, stopping only long enough to frighten any small children and animals I might come across, as I try to explain to them the approaching danger of an Obama presidency, knowing only the innocent offer any hope of salvation and redemption at this point.
I’m not kidding.
I can’t take it any more.
The man’s voice grates on my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. Or Styrofoam packing popcorn in the hands of an obnoxiously mischievous child. Or that “here comes the guy with the axe” music in horror movies. I’m serious, I think he’s giving me a rash. Or maybe those huge, festering welts appearing all over my skin are a result of my compulsive flesh-rending whenever one of his pontificating ads come on, which is all the damned time! It’s gotten so I can tell when they’re coming before they even start, just by the spooky change in the atmosphere surrounding the television set.
It’s bad enough I had to watch this…guy thug his way through the primaries and caucuses, cheating his way to the nomination with the help of Dr. Deanenstein and his demon bride, Nasty Pelosi, along with their Our Gang spawn, Harry, Donna, Larry, Moe, Curly, Manny and Jack and all the other AWOL-from-hell minions working with them to defeat the far more qualified Hillary Clinton. And before the Obamaniacs start up with the whiny, “He’s just as qualified as Lincoln (Kennedy, Clinton…pick one, they do)” happy crappy; shut the hell up. I don’t care if he graduated from the Universal Space Academy on Mars with a Phi Beta Yabba Dabba Doo, he’s not as qualified as Hillary Clinton for the simple reason that she’s a gazillion times more talented. She can form complete sentences without a TelePrompTer or having Axelrod’s hand up her butt. I swear, sometimes when I hear him say the say exact thing, the same exact way, with the same exact mannerisms and expressions, over, and over, and over again, I’m sure he must be lip-syncing to track. Either that, or he’s a hologram from Lucas Arts or Disney since Warner Brothers doesn’t make Looney Tunes any more.
I know I’m losing it, but it’s been almost 2 years of the Chinese water torture of this guy being crammed further, and further, and further down my throat, little by little, inch by inch…slowly, I turned, step by…wait a minute!
(Shaking head, breathing deep, counting to…infinity – and beyond!)
I’m okay, now.
Really.
Even though it would probably take counting to infinity to really get my blood pressure down. Either that, or just make him go away. Send him back to the Senate, make them listen to him stutter and stammer as he drones on and on about everything and nothing. Better yet, send him back to the classroom, let the students sleep through his lectures on their parent’s dime. They like him, and pretty much the only difference between that scenario and what’s happening now is…now they’re sleepwalking and don’t even know it. And there are a lot of them. But, they’re young, they just like being together outside.
Help me.
I really am not looking forward to all the screaming and running I see in my future. Sure, I could use the exercise, but at my age, I just don’t look that good naked anymore. And unlike a certain someone who shall not be named, I know my limitations.
More than half of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including some of Barack Obama’s stanchest supporters, voted against today’s House bailout bill. Jesse Jackson Jr. and Bobby Rush, both of Illinois, were among the 21 members of the group who said no, according to The Daily Voice:
CBC members voting against the bailout plan (21): G.K. Butterfield, Andre Carson (IN), William Clay (MO), Emanuel Cleaver (MO), John Conyers (MI), Elijah Cummings (MD), Donna Edwards (MD), Al Green, Jesse Jackson Jr. (IL), Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX), William Jefferson (LA), Hank Johnson (GA), Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI), Barbara Lee (CA), John Lewis (GA), Donald Payne (NJ), Bobby Rush (IL), David Scott (GA), Robert Scott (VA), Bennie Thompson and Diane Watson (CA).
CBC members voting for the bailout plan (18): Sanford Bishop (GA), Corrine Brown (FL), Yvette Clark (NY), James Clyburn (SC), Artur Davis (AL), Danny Davis (IL), Keith Ellison (MN), Chaka Fattah (PA), Alcee Hastings (FL), Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX), Kendrick Meek (FL), Gregory Meeks (NY), Gwendolynne Moore (WI), Charles Rangel (NY), Laura Richardson (CA), Edolphus Towns (NY), Maxine Waters (CA) and Mel Watt (NC).
Obama, though reported to be only tepidly supporting the bailout, claimed credit for all the improvements that he believed should have made it acceptable. During an appearance on CBS’s Face The Nation, Obama touted his contribution :
In response to Thursday’s meeting at the White House, attended by both Obama and McCain, at which the tentative brokered agreement was upset by House Republicans, prompting further tense negotiations, Schieffer asked Obama if McCain should get any credit for helping to get the bailout package settled.
“No,” Obama said. “Look, here are the facts: For two weeks, I was on the phone every day with Secretary Paulson and the congressional leaders, making sure that the principles that have ultimately been adopted were incorporated into the bill. None [of the amendments in the package] were in the president’s provision. They are identical to the things I called for the day that Secretary Paulson released his package. That, I think, is an indication of the degree to which, when it comes to protecting taxpayers, I was pushing very hard and involved in shaping those provisions.
Sources at the meeting said that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, a Clinton supporter, expressed the desire that Obama and his campaign would reach out the millions of women still aggrieved about what happened in the campaign and still disappointed that Clinton lost.
Obama agreed that a lot of work needs to be done to heal the Democratic Party, and that he hoped the Clinton supporters in the room would help as much as possible.
According to Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., Obama then said, “However, I need to make a decision in the next few months as to how I manage that since I’m running against John McCain, which takes a lot of time. If women take a moment to realize that on every issue important to women, John McCain is not in their corner, that would help them get over it.”
Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif., a longtime Clinton supporter, did not like those last three words — “Get over it.” She found them dismissive, off-putting.
“Don’t use that terminology,” Watson told Obama.
Since the voting pattern today does not coincide with Clinton support, it seems that opposition to Obama by fellow black Congressmen and women simply does not reflect the expectation of racial unanimity Obama’s campaign forces on the larger electorate. Unlike the majority of the black community, it seems Obama’s co-workers reserve the right to vote conscience over race.
Bloomberg.com is reporting that the Federal Reserve is pumping billions into the “global financial system:”
The Federal Reserve will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system, flooding banks with cash to alleviate the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression.
The Fed increased its existing currency swaps with foreign central banks by $330 billion to $620 billion to make more dollars available worldwide. The Term Auction Facility, the Fed’s emergency loan program, will expand by $300 billion to $450 billion. The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan are among the participating authorities.
The Fed action came hours before the House defeated a $700 billion financial bailout plan, ignoring urgent pleas by Bush and Bernanke to move swiftly.
snip
By pledging to provide “a very large” cash infusion, the Fed hopes the actions will “reassure financial market participants.”
Sept. 24, the House approved a 630 billion dollar spending bill according to OhMyGov.com:
Yesterday, the house passed an Omnibus Bill that would give the Pentagon its biggest budget ever. Media attention on the massive Wall Street bailout has allowed the omnibus spending bill to move through Congress with relatively little scrutiny. The spending bill, which passed 370-58, was fueled by a need to keep the government running past the Oct. 1 start of the new budget year. Passage also was greased by 2,322 pet projects totaling $6.6 billion.
The bill calls for $488 billion for the Pentagon and another $40 billion for the Department of Homeland Security. The bill wraps together a record Pentagon budget with increased funding for Gulf Coast hurricane relief, provides a multi-billion dollar bailout to US auto manufacturers, and increased health care funding for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a major victory for Republicans, Democrats capitulated and agreed to lift the offshore drilling ban. The legislation, which the Senate is expected to approve and send to President Bush for his signature, is flying under the political radar compared with the White House’s contentious plan to bail out Wall Street.
The administration also succeeded in blocking Democrats’ efforts to extend unemployment insurance, increase food stamp payments and help states deal with shortfalls in their Medicaid budgets.
Even with supply problems in areas of Georgia, Tennessee and the western half of the Carolinas, motorists are likely to see retail gas prices inch down a bit this week, AAA said Monday.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the refineries along the upper Texas Gulf Coast and western Louisiana that were most affected by hurricanes Gustav and Ike are in varying stages of operation. Four refineries remain off-line due to no power; five are in the process of restarting; and nine others have begun production at reduced capacity.
snip
“There is still a lot of uncertainty in the market with the U.S. government’s $700 billion bailout situation unresolved. Nevertheless, it is likely retail gasoline prices will drop this week,” Bly said.
It’s a good thing I don’t really have any commentary to offer about what this all means to the bailout or the election, ’cause I gotta rush out and get measured for my tinfoil hat.
Oh, man, I kid you not. These two stories were featured on BuzzTracker, and anti-Obamabot that I am, I just had to pass them along. First, The Charlotte Observer reports that Fort Mill, S.C. mayor Danny Funderburk let his curiosity about Obama’s potential Antichrist status compel him to pass along a scurrilous email:
Fort Mill Mayor Danny Funderburk says he was “just curious” when he forwarded a chain e-mail suggesting Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is the biblical antichrist. “I was just curious if there was any validity to it,” Funderburk said in a telephone interview. “I was trying to get documentation if there was any scripture to back it up.”
snip
When asked if he believed Obama was the antichrist, Funderburk replied, “I’ve got absolutely no way of knowing that.”
Can’t be too careful, eh, Dan-O? Moving quickly on, Politico is claiming that Camp O went out looking for a rape victim, any rape victim, to appear in an unspecified ad:
Barack Obama’s campaign earlier this month sought to find a rape victim to appear in a campaign commercial, according to an e-mail obtained by Politico.
Kiersten Steward, director of public policy at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, served as a conduit between the campaign and victims and women’s advocates.
“Obviously, this is a big ask and I haven’t seen a script but presumably it will be a brief ‘this is what happened to me, we need someone who will fight for women like me, these are the guys to do it,’” Steward wrote in a Sept. 15 e-mail. ”Again, that’s just my assumption, given how these things
usually go.”
Mikele Shelton-Knight, who declined to appear in the ad, speculated that it might have something to do with Sara Palin and rape kit charges:
And though she never was told about the nature of the commercial, Shelton-Knight said she thought that the focus of the ad may be about the practice in Wasilla, Alaska, to charge rape victims to pay for their own exams.
The law was on the books when Sarah Palin became mayor of the small city, and it’s unclear whether she supported it or opposed it during her tenure.
But Shelton-Knight said Palin should not be criticized for having governed a city with such a law as they were quite common until recent years.
Alaska didn’t pass a bill until 2000 requiring state and local law endorcement to pay for the exams. And Shelton-Knight said it wasn’t until lobbying by her and others that Virginia last year put the financial burden on localities. Many states still charge victims for the cost of the exam.
Well, I guess if you were a senator from a state that charged for rape kits and were looking for a victim to exploit in an ad claiming your opponent was guilty of the heinous crime of doing the same thing, you would qualify as the Antichrist. But since “Antichrist” literally means “not Christ,” I’d say we all fit the description. Gotta lotta problems with Obi-WanNaBePresident, but his being a demon is not one of them. His all-too human flaws are more than enough, thank you.
But, Lord, how many times and ways can you victimize a rape victim for fun and profit? Hire an actress, run a disclaimer. Take the high road for once.
According to House Republicans, this is the reason many of them voted “no” on the bailout bill. Sounds like a giant middle finger salute to me. Way to go Nancy! Way to go, guys! Who pisses next?
Looks like the House of Representatives has rejected the bailout bill, according to MarketWatch:
The U.S. dollar pared its gains Monday after reports that the U.S. House of Representatives surprisingly voted against a proposal to prop up financial institutions being dragged down by losses on non-performing debt.
What was supposed to be a 15-minute vote stretched past the half-hour mark as leadership scrambled for support. Investors who had been counting on the rescue plan sent the Dow Jones industrial average down as much as 700 points while watching the measure come up short of the necessary support, before rebounding slightly. The key stock reading was down more than 500 points.
The measure needs 218 votes for passage. Democrats voted 141 to 94 in favor of the plan, while Republicans voted 65 to 133 against. That left the measure with 206 votes for and 227 against.
Several Republican aides said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had torpedoed any spirit of bipartisanship that surrounded the bill with her scathing speech near the close of the debate that blamed Bush’s policies for the economic turmoil.
Without mentioning her by name, Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., No. 3 Republican, said: “The partisan tone at the end of the debate today I think did impact the votes on our side.”
snip
“We could have gotten there today had it not been for the partisan speech that the speaker gave on the floor of the House,” House Minority Leader John Boehner said. Pelosi’s words, the Ohio Republican said, “poisoned our conference, caused a number of members that we thought we could get, to go south.”
Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., the whip, estimated that Pelosi’s speech changed the minds of a dozen Republicans who might otherwise have supported the plan.
Barney Frank, however, disagrees:
“Well if that stopped people from voting, then shame on them,” he said. “If people’s feelings were hurt because of a speech and that led them to vote differently than what they thought the national interest (requires), then they really don’t belong here. They’re not tough enough.”
But hey, ol’ Barn’s got his own credibility issues:
Yeah, what he said! Dennis, that’s exactly what we want to know. Why are we jumping on this before anything has really happened, other than some predatory financial…well, predators have made a bunch of predatory moves? Smells like a con job to me. Not even a good one, like the modified pyramid scheme the bankers and Wall Street guys are pulling, where “confidence“ is being bandied about as the whole reason we have to rescue a deliberately exploited system, like “confidence” is not what “con” is short for. And, yeah, it’s a pyramid scheme.
In the classic “pyramid” scheme, participants attempt to make money solely by recruiting new participants into the program. The hallmark of these schemes is the promise of sky-high returns in a short period of time for doing nothing other than handing over your money and getting others to do the same.
Why does the current mess qualify? Because it’s based on credit, not real estate or any other tangible product. Not only that, it’s credit often-times extended based on nothing other than “good faith,” if that. We’re being told that because a bunch of bankers loaned money to people they shouldn’t have, if Wall Street doesn’t get all our money, right now, they won’t loan each other any more. Not only is it a pyramid scheme, it’s extortion, Blazing Saddles-style. Congress’ manufactured hysteria is a con, too, only more juvenile. They’re worse than a teenager who runs over the neighbor’s cat in the family car and uses it as an excuse to badger his parents for one of his own. It’s more like a prom date whining, “Ooo, ooo, it really hurts! Ya gotta kiss it, or it’ll fall off!” Just like I’d say to that prom date, I say, “Sounds painful, but what’s it got to do with me?” From today’s Washington Post:
“A vote for this bill is a vote to prevent economic damage to you and your community” by stabilizing financial markets and renewing the flow of credit, Bush said, attempting to undercut arguments that the proposed legislation bolsters Wall Street at taxpayers’ expense. “This is a bold bill that will keep the crisis in our financial system from spreading through our economy.”
And while we’re pacing to and fro, fretting and debating the merits of using taxpayer money to bail out the people who issued bad loans at inflated prices to taxpayers, we’re not supposed to pay attention to the people behind the curtain doing this:
The legislation comes amid great upheaval in the nation’s financial system. On Monday morning, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures deposits at failed banks, arranged for the sale of the banking assets of Wachovia (WB, Fortune 500), the nation’s No. 4 bank holding company, to Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) for $2.2 billion in stock.
That follows three weeks of other shocks: the Treasury Department’s seizure of mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae (FNM, Fortune 500) and Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500); Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy filing; rival Merrill Lynch (MER, Fortune 500) purchase by Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500).
In addition, the Fed bailed out insurance giant American International Group (AIG, Fortune 500), loaning it $85 billion in return for a nearly 80% stake. while Washington Mutual (WM, Fortune 500), the nation’s largest savings and loan, became the largest bank failure in history.
See my post below for info on some of the people on Barack Obama’s financial team who are chin-deep in this bs on the profit side. And, then, just for fun, compare which of these companies gave oodles of dough to Barack Obama and/or John McCain.
There are some strange relationships involved in the Obama bailout resolution, you know, the tentative one he said he deserved all the credit for? Well, I’m no economist, so I don’t know what it all means, but some things just don’t feel right, you know? Obama said that he’s been on the phone 24/7 with Henry Paulson, you know, the guy from Goldman Sachs, the one who headed up the midwestern division out of Chicago? Anyway, he and Obama have been jawing pretty regularly, according to Obama, who says he just wants to protect the little guy in all this. Oh, really? How much of the 700 billion do we get?
American Spectator blog via Chicagoans Against Obama alleges that the cozy relationship between Obama and Goldman Sachs has been recently beneficial regarding bailout negotiations:
When Sen. Barack Obama was given the floor to speak during White House negotiations, according to White House aides, he did so raising concerns about a House Republican alternative to the Paulson/Bernanke $700 billion bailout. But those concerns weren’t necessarily his, as he was not aware of the GOP plan before reviewing notes provided him by Paulson loyalists in Treasury prior to entering the meeting.
According to an Obama campaign source, the notes were passed to Obama via senior aides traveling with him, who had been emailed the document via a current Goldman Sachs employee and Wall Street fundraiser for the Obama campaign. “It was made clear that the memo was from ‘friends’ and was reliable,” says the campaign source.
On Friday, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley changed status from investment banks to bank holding companies. From Time:
The Federal Reserve said Sunday it had granted a request by the country’s last two major investment banks — Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — to change their status to bank holding companies.
The Fed announced that it had approved the request of the two investment banks. The change in status will allow them to create commercial banks that will be able to take deposits, bolstering the resources of both institutions.
The change continued the biggest restructuring on Wall Street since the Great Depression.
According to CNN Money/Fortune, Obama has a pretty stellar economic team, including Jason Furman, his economic policy advisor:
That bench also includes poverty expert Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute; Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economist who has been at Obama’s side since the start of the race; and Georgetown University law professor Daniel Tarullo. Investor Warren Buffett and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker top off the list of regular advisers. A larger circle also includes CEOs Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo (PEP, Fortune 500), and Eric Schmidt of Google (GOOG, Fortune 500).
The Telegraph UK lists a few other Obama money folks:
Obama’s main public support comes from Penny Pritzker, whose Chicago-based clan is one of the wealthiest in America, and JP Morgan Chase’s head of corporate responsibility William Daley, whose brother, Richard, just happens to be Chicago’s mayor.
In July, Obama rallied the guys ’round the table for the bi-partisan “group I will be convening periodically over the next few months,” CBS News reported:
The list of attendees was long and impressive: Warren Buffett participated by phone; former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J.; Gov. Jon Corzine, D-N.J.; JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, former SEC Chairman under President Bush, William Donaldson; Chairman of Pepsi, Indra Nooyi; Former Treasury Secretary under Bush, Paul O’Neill; Former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, Robert Reich; Google CEO, Eric Schmidt; AFL-CIO President John Sweeney; former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, among others.
The JP Morgan Chase/Obama relationship is interesting because of recent moves the company has made. Said to be largely unaffected by the subprime mortgage mess, JPM has been involved in the Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual deals/rescues. CNN says of the second acquisition of the year by company CEO Jamie Dimon:
The acquisition is JPMorgan Chase’s second major purchase this year following the mid-March acquisition of investment bank Bear Stearns, a deal that was also engineered by the government.
Bear Stearns, one of the nation’s biggest and most prominent investment banks, stunned Wall Street Friday by announcing it had turned to rival JP Morgan Chase and the federal government for an emergency bailout.
The surprise, last-ditch rescue effort, announced just before the stock market opened, was the latest troubling sign of how a cascading credit crisis is threatening the liquidity of even Wall Street’s most established firms.
Though it’s hard to see how Obama might have directly influenced anything so far, there’s no doubt he and JPM CEO Jamie Dimon have a relationship. In July, he told CNN/Fortune:
I got to know Jamie Dimon quite well when he was in Chicago. I think he’s a very smart person, and I think he’s doing his best to manage his bank under difficult circumstances.
The Wall Street Journal claims Dimon is on the short-list for Secretary of the Treasury in an Obama administration, though Timothy Geithner is said to be the front-runner:
Geithner is a solid choice in many ways: he has plenty of Treasury experience and he played a leading role in this year’s Bear Stearns drama that was a critical point in the credit crunch. Should he win the post, it would be at the expense of several prominent current and former Wall Street bankers–including prominent Democratic contributors–who names have been floated as candidates for the job.
Two others mentioned in that Real Time Economics post are J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.
I guess it’s good to know that while Senator Obama is diligently looking out for the little guy, he has so many big guys on his side. I mean, the guy involved with some of the more interesting aspects of the country’s corporate restructuring is flying under the radar as one of Obama’s most trusted advisers. You’d have to be, to be on the short-list for Treasury Secretary, right? If this was a Grisham novel, I’d say this would be the guy to watch. And we’ve barely even mentioned Penny Pritzker. We’ll save that and some of the other Obama financial team intricacies for later, shall we?
*UPDATE: From AP-Yahoo News, re: the tentative bailout agreement:
While the plan broadly aims to prevent banks from profiting on the sale of troubled assets to the government, there is an exception made for assets acquired in a merger or buyout, or from companies that have filed for bankruptcy.
This detail could allow JPMorgan Chase & Co. to sell toxic mortgages and other assets it gained control of last week when it purchased Washington Mutual Inc. for a higher price than the failed thrift paid for them.
That’s not really the premise of the Newsweek article I’m quoting, but it’s the gist. The article starts with talk-radio host, Michael Baisden asking the question:
‘How do we change our futures now that we have someone who might actually care about us in the race?’
Might? There’s a black man running for president and black people still aren’t sure he’s down with our program? This is a good thing? Anyway, the article quickly devolves into the now tiresomely predictable question supposedly keeping black people up at night, “what if he loses?” (Cue scary horror movie music with offstage scream, here.) Of course, the first person asked is…Snoop Dogg:
“People that I know that have never cared about politics are registering to vote this time: gang members, ex-cons, you name it,” says rapper Snoop Dogg. “I hate to see a lot of that hope go down the drain, and if he loses, it will.”
I’m sure Camp O will be encouraged to know their “gang member, ex-con get out the vote” efforts are working. We are then introduced to various reasons black people are supporting Obama, like, he’s married to a black woman:
“I’ve never forgotten that he is a smart, articulate black man with a smart, articulate black wife,” says Linda Wright, 34, a nurse’s assistant from Houston.
Our kids like him:
“My kids love Obama and they think it’s so obvious he should be the president,” says actor D. L. Hughley.
And, if he loses, we’ll be pissed:
“I’m going to be mad, real mad, if he doesn’t win,” says Daetwon Fisher, 21, a construction worker from Long Beach, Calif. “Because for him to come this far and lose will be just shady and a slap in black people’s faces.
Daetwon is also down for whatever if that happens:
I know there is already talk about protests and stuff if he loses, and I’m down for that.”
Baisden’s pleas for people to chill show that his heart is in the right place, even though his logic is faulty:
“Look, if he loses we have no one to blame but ourselves because that meant we all didn’t go out and vote in the numbers we should have,” says Baisden. “Yes, people will be upset, but it will be in a productive way. There will be a rational reaction if things are fair.”
Uh, Mike, every black person in America could vote for Obama twice and he’d still lose if that’s the only support he gets. Good to know that as long as things are not perceived to be “shady” we won’t riot, like the racists keep saying we will. As far as I’m concerned, anybody who pushes that garbage, black or white, for whatever reason, is racist. And you know what, it’s even good to know that people like Jacon Richmond, who served time for marijuana possession and once thought voting was pointless, is now feeling empowered, even though it’s kind of sad that he’s still not sure exactly how to feel:
“I know it’s crazy to go from not thinking a black man counts to thinking one should win the president of the United States for sure, but I’m not sure how I’ll handle that if it doesn’t happen.”
While I certainly understand the expressed sentiments, I can’t get past the word “might” in the first statement. That black Americans are being exploited to vote for a man they’re not 100% convinced is on their side after damned near 2 years of campaigning, pisses me off. And you can add that to the laundry list of reasons why this black woman won’t vote for him; right under number one, his race-baiting sucks.
In Friday’s debate, Barack Obama made a big deal about his ability to restore America’s world image. Why should that be a big deal? Is it? Business Week debates whether when you get right down to it, the world might be initially pleased with a president so far from Bush on so many levels, (though really, the main difference is probably physical, imho) ultimately, will they be disappointed? And, more importantly, exactly how is he going to accomplish such a thing?
CNN reports that Obama somehow relates world image to national security. On the question of the potential of another 9/11:
McCain that another attack on the scale of the September 11 hijackings is “much less likely” now than it was the day after the terrorist attacks.
“America is safer now than it was on 9/11,” he said, “But we have a long way to go before we can declare America safe.”
Obama agreed that the United States is “safer in some ways” but said the country needed to focus more on issues such as nuclear non-proliferation and restoring America’s image in the world.
This is a song Camp O has been singing for months now, and it makes no more difference (or sense) to me now than it did when I first heard it. Are we supposed to give up nukes so people will come play with us? Why are so many people so concerned with who we elect as president, anyway? Are they really, or is this just more Axelrod astroturfing? There’s a World Wants Obama Coalition on the net, MoveOn.org has a page, “Obama in 30 Seconds,” with a diplomacy section dedicated to quick validation of the idea; who can forget his World Tour Like A Rock Star and the now famous, World Wants Obama poll? Maybe Axelrod read Dennis Ross’ book, “Statecraft: And How To Restore America’s Standing In The World,” and took it to heart, though I’m not sure either one of us buys the whole “chicken-and-egg” premise that if people like what they think about you, the threat of danger is automatically sufficiently minimized. Unless he’s making the case that for terrorists, to know us is to love us, what is the point of giving a good hot damn what the rest of the world thinks? And, who would say that with a straight face? That’s kind of a “blame the victim in advance” sucker bait attitude, in my opinion. When you sit down to talk to foreign leaders, with or without pre-conditions, how effective can you be if you’re preoccupied with getting them to like you? If the country is being governed properly, world respect will come. If all it takes is having a guy with the “right look” to get the globe on board, maybe their opinion isn’t really worth cultivating. At least, that’s what my mama taught me.
Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame Democrats. The lenders blame the government. The government blames the lenders. And, in the media, everybody blames poor people. Cut it out.
Poor people did not cause the economic crisis in this country. Think about that. They’re poor. They didn’t have any money in the first place, now they have less. Even if it’s a lot less, it’s not enough to account for the current mess we’re in. It ain’t 700 billion dollars worth of less. If poor people were buying substandard housing at fair market prices, even if they all defaulted on their mortgages, what’s the big deal? Let’s face it, if this whole housing mess only involved poor people and minorities, only poor people and minorities would care.
Sure, the laws on the books were exploited to the point that we’re in full economic free fall right now, but it’s the exploitation at fault, not the law or it’s intention. The Community Reinvestment Act’s stated purpose was a noble one. The worst it could be accused of being is “naively optimistic.” But then, Carter was president.
The Community Reinvestment Act is intended to encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with safe and sound banking operations. It was enacted by the Congress in 1977 (12 U.S.C. 2901) and is implemented by Regulations 12 CFR parts 25, 228, 345, and 563e. (See Regulation)
The CRA requires that each insured depository institution’s record in helping meet the credit needs of its entire community be evaluated periodically. That record is taken into account in considering an institution’s application for deposit facilities, including mergers and acquisitions. (See CRA Ratings) CRA examinations (see Exam Schedules) are conducted by the federal agencies that are responsible for supervising depository institutions: the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS).
As I blogged about a couple of days ago, all you’d have to do is watch HGTV or any of the other real estate-oriented shows all over the airwaves and you’d have seen the problem unfold before your very eyes, starting years ago. Everybody got subprime loans. Young professional singles, couples, retirees, middle class, lower middle class, lower upper class, and a bunch of other categories and sub-categories of Americans in between, bought all kind of houses with 100% financing. No down payment is the norm. Very few of these shows feature unemployed minority families.
In fact, money was so easy to get, there was a rise in shows dedicated to home “flipping,” or buying houses just to sell them. Whole shows about whole companies dedicated to inflating the housing market for profit. This has nothing to do with poor people, minorities, CRA, ACORN or any other alphabet soup organization, in fact, house flipping takes advantage of low-income housing, since it means that before a family has access to a home, it has to be bought and sold twice. At a profit.
And don’t think that all these “flippers” could afford their “investment,” either. Most of them bought houses to flip with 100% financing and often faced the prospect of carrying 2 mortgages; one on the “flip” house, and their own home loan. All too often, they couldn’t sell the flip house in time to avoid selling at a loss, or worse, going into default. Yet nothing stopped them from trying again once they got out from under.
When seeing people play the “blame poor people” game, remember that “subprime” refers to the loan, not the recipient. Congresspeople and entertainers have faced losing their homes, too. An environment of unlimited credit, plus the illusion of unlimited opportunity created by profiteers benefiting from the hysteria over-inflated, out-of-the-ballpark numbers can generate put us in our current situation. The scam artists and con men on both sides of the aisle have gotten caught with their hands in the cookie jar and now want to blame their underpaid maids for making cookies in the first place. And, if that doesn’t work, those guys shouldn’t sell such nice stoves, or maybe people shouldn’t write cookbooks. But if you want to know who the real crooks are, you probably don’t have to look any further than the guys yelling, “Hey, it’s not my fault!”
What happened to the meltdown? I thought the country was “in the midst of the greatest financial threat since the Great Depression.” So, where are all the news media doom-and-gloom dire predictions of imminent economic collapse today? Seems they took the weekend off. Oh, sure, there is an AP story quoting Harry Reid about “making progress:”
Congressional leaders said Saturday they hoped to reach an agreement on a multibillion-dollar bailout plan for the financial sector before the markets open Monday, even if House and Senate votes would come later.
“The goal is to come up with a final agreement by tomorrow,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said during an unusual weekend session of Congress. “We may not be able to do that, but we’re trying very hard.”
They’re “trying hard?” Good to know. It’s enough to make a cynical person think that maybe the media was being fed over-hyped crisis stories to build up interest in a ho-hum debate between two candidates both parties regret choosing as presidential nominees. But, the Democrats and Republicans wouldn’t sink low enough to try to dupe the American electorate with that kind of fearmongering, would they?
Naaaah.
And, speaking of the debate, what about those two polls giving Obama a decisive edge in public opinion?
Fifty-one percent said Obama, the Democrat, did a better job in Friday night’s faceoff while 38 percent preferred the Republican McCain, according to a CNN-Opinion Research Corp. survey of adults.
snip
In a CBS News poll of people not committed to a candidate, 39 percent said Obama won the debate, 24 percent said McCain and 37 percent called it a tie. Twice as many said Obama understands their needs than said so about McCain.
Considering Team O’s exhortations to it’s loyal followers to watch the debates on CNN, anything from them has to be taken with a grain of salt about the size of a lick.
“Watch Barack Obama debate John McCain tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern on CNN,” the message said. Also, remind friends to register to vote at VoteforChange.com. Please forward this message.
Now, I will readily admit to a certain amount of cynicism here, given the fact that, though I have no affinity for either major party candidate, I truly dislike Barack Obama and the party that, by foisting him upon me, drove me out. So, yeah, I’m going to look for any excuse to bash him, and them, but I am grateful that their combined incompetence, chicanery, and over-all slimy-ness makes doing so very easy.
Okay, I’m cruising the internet, like I like to do in the morning, visiting my favorite news and “screw Obama” sites (they used to be “pro-Hillary” sites, but she’s an Obot now) and I come across a funny song on The Mountain Sage. They got the song from a Time Magazine story about Obama and McCain’s now-famous, failed bi-partisan attempt turned Senate pissing contest, that lead to school-boy-like nasty-note exchanges, which was written up in today’s Washington Post, and blogged about at the time by Chicago Sun-Times’ Lynne Sweet. Seems Obama channeled his inner Shecky at the 2006 Gridiron Dinner, complete with a song-and -dance routine. (A real one, not the usual hemming, hawing, shucking, jiving, bamboozling, hoodwinking thing he always does.) Man, oh, man, where was this guy last night? I mean, sure, he and McCain, while not really saying squat of any significance about the financial meltdown, managed to lessen it’s global impact considerably, as evidenced by the complete lack of the same kind of urgency that plagued the media for the last few days in today’s reporting, but this…this could have been a game changer.
Sweet reports that Barack’s zingers were penned by none other than that astroturfing funnyman, David Axelrod, which makes me wonder if, when off-TelePrompTer, does David resort to sticking his hand up Obama’s ass shirt while he talks for him and makes his lips move? Anyway, I just feel compelled to share the wit and wisdom of Barack Obama as he shared his Bob Hope-esque dinner show talents that night, in it’s entirety. I’m sure that after experiencing it, you, like me, will be even more determined to end this man’s presidential hopes so he can get out on the boards where he belongs. Also, be sure to visit Lynne’s Place for even more good times and hilarity from the other clownsjokersentertainers speakers that evening. But, now, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, heeeeere’s Obie!
Thank you very much:
It’s great to be at the Gridiron dinner. Wow, What an extravaganza! Men in tails. Women in gowns. An orchestra playing, as folks reminisce about the good old days. Kind of like dinner at the Kerrys.
Nice to see you Mr. President and Mrs. Bush. I think it takes a great spirit for the President, who we all know is an early riser, to sit here until midnight and hear himself lampooned, when he could be back at the White House enjoying a quiet, peaceful night, watching TV and approving secret wiretaps.
I don’t see the Secretary of State is here tonight. You know, the President promised a muscular foreign policy. And anyone who’s seen the Condi Rice workout tapes knows he means business.
The truth is, I’m terrified to be here. Not because you’re such a tough audience, but because they’re serving drinks, I’m standing about 30 yards from the Vice President, and…Mr. Vice President this is too easy!
Mr. Vice President, I know you came here expecting to be a target, which, it turns out, may prove easier for you than shooting at one. But I do want to thank you: for years, we Democrats have succeeded in doing little more than shooting ourselves in the foot. You’ve taught us a valuable lesson: aim higher.
There’s probably only one person more sick of these jokes than you… and that’s your wife. It’s an honor to share this stage with Lynne Cheney — a great personage in her own right. Scholar. Author. A few years ago she wrote a book called, “Telling the Truth,�? or as they call it in the Vice President’s office, “Telling the Truth-24 hours later.�?
The Vice President and I do have one thing in common, we both married up. I want to acknowledge my wife, Michelle, who is here tonight. This is a true story: a friend sent me a clip about a new study by a psychologist at the University of Scotland, who says sex before a public speaking engagement actually enhances your oratorical powers. I showed this clip to Michelle, before we arrived here tonight. She looked it over, handed it back and said, “Do the best you can!�?
This appearance is really the capstone of an incredible 18 months. I’ve been very blessed. Keynote speaker at the Democratic Convention. The cover of Newsweek. My book made the best-seller list. I just won a Grammy for reading it on tape. And I’ve had the chance to speak not once but twice before the Gridiron Club. Really what else is there to do? Well, I guess…. I could pass a law, or something…
About that book, some folks thought it was a little presumptuous to write an autobiography at the age of 33, but people seemed to like it. So now I’m working on volume two-the Senate Months.
My Remarkable Journey from 99th in Seniority to 98th.
(With an introduction by Nelson Mandela.)
Believe me, when you’re the last guy to ask questions at every committee hearing, you have plenty of time to collect your thoughts. Especially when Joe Biden’s on the committee.
I’ll tell you, that Grammy was a big surprise. I thought, for sure, Jack Abramoff would win for his rendition of “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.�?
As I said, it’s great to be here speaking opposite Lynne Cheney. As you may know, Mrs. Cheney was a late substitution for Senator John McCain. And speaking of Senator McCain.
This whole ethics thing has been an adventure. I was really excited when they asked me to be the lead Democratic spokesman. But I don’t know. Turns out, it’s a little like being given the Kryptonite concession at a Superman convention. I mean, how did I know it was a freshman hazing? It gets a little depressing. So as I sometimes do when I get a little down, I wrote a song. Maestro?
(To the tune of “If I Only Had a Brain�?)
I’m aspiring to greatness, but somehow I feel weightless
A freshman’s sad refrain
I could be a great uniter, making ethics rules much tighter
If I only had McCain
I could bring us all together, no storm we couldn’t weather,
We’d feel each other’s pain
Red and blue wouldn’t matter, party differences would shatter
If I only had McCain
Oh why is it so hard, for honest men of good will to agree,
If we ever found a way to strike a deal, would we survive… politically?
When a wide-eyed young idealist, confronts a seasoned realist
There’s bound to be some strain
With the game barely started, I’d be feeling less downhearted
If I only had McCain
Still I hope for the better, though I may rewrite my letter
Cause I gotta have McCain
Needless to say, my Grammy was in the spoken word category!
I should say that I really do get along well with Senator McCain. But as you know, not everyone in politics does. Because of his superstar status, his virtuous image, the kind of hero worship treatment he gets from all of you, some of my colleagues call John a prima donna. Me? I call him a role model. (Think of it as affirmative action. Why should the white guys be the only ones who are overhyped?)
By the way, before I forget, raise your hand if Karl Rove didn’t tell you about Valerie Plame?
You know, The Gridiron Club is an aging institution with a long, proud history, known today primarily for providing a forum for jokes. To some, that may sound like the Democratic Party.
You hear this constant refrain from our critics that Democrats don’t stand for anything. That’s really unfair. We DO stand for anything.
Some folks say the answer for the Democratic Party is to stop being so calculating, and start standing up for principle. In fact, Harry Reid’s appointed a task force to study this option.
But really, they say our party doesn’t have ideas? We have ideas.
Take John Edwards. He’s leading a new war on poverty… from his Chapel Hill estate. And he’s educating us. I had no idea there was so much poverty in New Hampshire!
Speaking of New Hampshire, a lot of speculation that that 2008 campaign could come down to Senator McCain and Hillary Clinton. The thing I don’t think people realize is how much John and Hillary have in common: They’re both very smart. Both very hardworking. And they’re both hated by the Republicans!
A lot of folks want to be President, but, I mean, wow, it really has been a rough period for you, Mr. President. I missed the Oscars, so when I picked up the paper the next morning and saw “Crash�? in the headlines, I just assumed it was another Bush poll story.
And how about that ports deal? I feel for you, sir. It’s tough getting trapped in a storm, when no one comes up to help!
And then there’s the flap about global warming. You know, the Bush Administration’s been a little skeptical about the whole concept of global warming. It’s actually not the warming part they question. It’s the globe.
The President was so excited about Tom Friedman’s book, The World is Flat. As soon as he saw the title, he said, “You see, I was right!�?
But when people say the administration is hostile to science, that’s really a bad rap. Just last week they asked for a hundred million dollars for the NIH to fund new research into leech therapy.
I was told that this dinner is off-the record… no taping or recording of this event, unless, of course, secretly authorized by the President.
I completely trust the President with that authority, by the way. But just out of an abundance of caution, and not implying anything, I’ve asked my staff to conduct all phone conversations in the Kenyan dialect of Luo.
Truth is, this domestic spying has all kinds of useful applications for Homeland Security. And I have a suggestion, in this regard, Mr. President: You can spy on the Weatherchannel, and find out when big storms are coming.
You all watch the winter Olympics? Mrs. Bush was there, representing our country, and that was great. I’m sure a lot of us in politics were following that figure skating, because we can identify with performers who spin wildly and sometimes fall on their butts.
And the curling. Wasn’t that something? I hear Andy Stern from the SEIU loved the curling so much he’s trying to organize the sweepers.
I also enjoyed that biathlon, where they ski and shoot at the same time. Probably not your sport, Mr. Vice President.
Hey, it’s been great fun to be a part of this tonight. But before I go, I want to say a few words about the work you do.
For a democracy to succeed and flourish, people must have full and free access to information about what’s going on in their world and, yes, in their government.
The framers of the Constitution understood that, which is why the very first amendment deals with the indispensable freedoms of speech and press. Those rights, those freedoms, the access to information citizens absolutely require in a democratic society are no less important today.
Pursuing that information is not always easy. Sometimes you meet resistance from powerful institutions that would sooner operate in secrecy. And sometimes, as in Iraq, you literally risk your lives to keep the American people informed.
Tonight, even as we laugh together, I want to thank you for that important and often courageous work and extend my prayers to those journalists and their families who have made and continue to make great sacrifices to fulfill this essential mission.
And most of all, I want to thank you for all the generous advance coverage you’ve given me in anticipation of a successful career. When I actually do something, we’ll let you know.
What did Obama win in the debate? He didn’t totally lose. In a forum he and his camp admit he sucks at, he didn’t quite suck. Though he did smirk, seem to get angry, and interrupt often, the only potentially embarrassing segment came at the end with his unnecessary reference to his Kenyan father. What was the point of that? It only served to bring to mind his recent “Fight the Smears” admission of dual citizenship. His overly familiar usage of Senator McCain’s first name was annoying, it’s a bad habit he has of dismissing his opponent to no good end. (You’re likable enough, Hillary.) Small point, but noticeable.
Basically, both men were predictable. McCain held to his position that Obama was not ready to lead, Obama held to his the “war was a mistake” theme. McCain hammered Obama about meeting with world leaders without pre-conditions and The Weekly Standard already has an exception to Obama’s statements about Henry Kissinger’s position on it’s website:
Henry Kissinger believes Barack Obama misstated his views on diplomacy with US adversaries and is not happy about being mischaracterized. He says: “Senator McCain is right. I would not recommend the next President of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level. My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my friend Senator John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality.”
Though Obama backpedaled on that and tended to agree with McCain a lot, as I said, he didn’t totally suck or stutter as much as usual. Obama sounded like a professor discussing theories, McCain sounded like a veteran. McCain, imho, won, but since he didn’t knock him out with the ACORN stuff, Obama didn’t totally lose.
Coffee or tea? Black or with cream? Sweet or dry? On the rocks or neat? Gay or straight? At the end of the day, whether you take the Republican or Democratic side of the questions surrounding the bailout comes down to, “how do you like it?” Because, either way, you’re getting screwed.
There are no clean hands regarding the economic meltdown we face. While there are certainly fingers to be pointed at the people who put the loopholes in the system, the fact is, both sides have inserted themselves in those loopholes and moved in and out of them until they reached satisfaction, if you get my drift. It all boils down to how you prefer to be financially raped, with flowers, candy and GHB, (Democrats) or taken by brute force (Republicans).
Especially since he has successfully re-framed the terms of the debate.
Checkmate.
What was supposed to be a foreign policy debate will instead be a “what-do-you-have-to-do-with-ACORN-and-the-bailout, Mr. Obama?” debate.
Obama, who will be over-prepared for foreign policy, will…probably cry.
He will stutter and stammer about regulations.
He will confuse McCain with George Bush.
Just like he always had trouble telling Bill and Hillary Clinton apart.
He will chant, “change,” “hope,” and “the American people” in the same sentence.
Over and over again.
Whether appropriate or not.
Like he always does.
And he will lose.
Of course McCain wouldn’t want to miss that.
He set it up.
Pay no attention to the pundits, they’re paid party hacks. Read Uppity Woman, No Quarter, any of the right-wing blogs, or check out my last post, below (she said humbly.) Whether you agree or not, the point is, these are now the relevant questions.
Spero News (whoever they are) says ACORN has been involved in government since the Carter administration:
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was given life during the Carter administration, and empowers four federal financial supervisory agencies to oversee the performance of financial institutions in meeting the credit needs of their entire community, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Whenever an institution wants to make virtually any change in its business operation, such as merging, opening up a new branch, or getting into a new line of business, it must first prove to regulators that it has made ample loans to the government’s preferred borrowers, those in low- and middle-income neighborhoods who normally would not qualify for a loan. Lenders with low ratings can be fined by the government.
The Carter administration used tax dollars to fund numerous “community groups” that helped the government enforce the CRA by filing petitions against banks whose “cooperativeness” didn’t measure up, and sometimes stopping their efforts to expand their operations. Banks responded by giving money to the community groups and by making more loans. One of those organizations was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). An active associate of ACORN in the 90s was a young public-interest attorney named Barack Obama.
These organizations long ago predicted that a crisis in the housing market would result in a staggering increase in foreclosures and cause the largest loss of personal net worth since the Great Depression.
Now these folks are seething because the proposed bailout of financial institutions fails to include any provisions to directly help the people at the center of this crisis. To fund the bailout, $700 billion of Treasury securities would be issued to finance the purchase of troubled mortgage assets.
Basically, these organizations want bankruptcy provisions:
Nonprofit leaders want any bailout bill to include a provision that would give bankruptcy judges the discretion to modify primary mortgages.
“This is an effective way of providing relief to homeowners at no cost to taxpayers,” AARP President Bill Novelli wrote in a letter to the leadership of the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee.
If bankruptcy court judges could modify people’s mortgages, this might give homeowners leverage to compel lenders to restructure loans or face a forced modification in bankruptcy, said Bruce Marks, chief executive of the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America.
The Chicago Tribune reported on the 23rd that the bankruptcy issue could be a deal-breaker:
An area drawing the most furious lobbying is around Sen. Christopher Dodd’s desire to modify the bankruptcy law to allow courts to reduce homeowners’ mortgage debt, a practice called “cram downs” as in “we’ll let judges cram down the throats of lenders reductions in the housing loans they hold and thus their profits.”
Bankers successfully blocked such provisions from the bankruptcy reform law Congress passed in 2005 and ever since then have resisted consumer advocates’ attempts to get “cram downs” into federal law.
The blogosphere is alive with the news, supposedly mentioned by Lindsey Graham during an appearance on Greta van Sustern’s On the Record, but reported first by Michelle Malkin, that while such provisions may indeed be at the heart of the breakdown, seemingly, ACORN seeks more than that, and the Democrats seem willing to give it:
Just heard from several readers that Lindsay Grahamnesty told Fox that the Mother of All Bailouts includes a reported $100 million more in funding for the left-wing housing entitlement thugs and heavily tax-subsidized fraudsters at ACORN. Under the original bailout proposal, apparently, a large portion of any repayment of the $700 billion would go to Barack Obama’s good friends at ACORN with a smaller allocation to debt repayment. Readers heard him say it was 20 percent.
Could those ties be the reason nobody called Barack Obama to come help with the bailout negotiations until McCain, who was called by Democrats and Republicans alike, challenged President Bush to do so? Exactly what dynamics are at play here? This seems to cut deeper than any mere stunt, or even normal presidential political one-upsmanship. Obviously, somebody with more journalistic expertise than I possess is going to have to do some digging and apply some clear, non-partisan analysis to give us a even hint of an answer, since I don’t understand why “cram down” provisions should, would, or could coincide with direct funding for ACORN.
In conjunction with partner, Brave New Pac, which shares office space with Brave New Foundation, an organization that lists Acorn, Code Pink,and DFA among others on their partners page, and Brave New Films, DFA has shown how low they will go to with this, the second of two attack ads so far. The Brave New folks, on the other hand, have loads of attack ads of their own on their webpages. This is the first:
Two liberal political action committees are making an issue of John McCain’s past bouts with skin cancer in a television commercial that features his facial scar and demands that the Republican presidential nominee release his medical records to the public.
The 30-second ad, so far airing for $50,000 only on MSNBC, is paid for by Brave New PAC and Democracy for America, a political group headed by James Dean, the brother of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
Hey, Howie, here’s a thought. Why not spend some dough promoting your guy instead of ripping the other guy? But then, there’s not enough time or money in the world to make that work, is there, Howard?
When is a deal not a deal? When everybody’s lying about it, that’s when. It seems that in our current economic crisis, image is everything. President George Bush (he is still president, isn’t he?) bluntly admitted as much, says The Boston Globe.
“The market is not functioning properly,” the president said. “There has been a widespread loss of confidence, and major sectors of America’s financial system are at risk of shutting down.”
In that kind of climate, care must be taken to insure that skittish investors see some light at the end of the tunnel. Hence, talk of a deal. From The New York Times:
House leaders and the White House on Thursday announced a tentative agreement on an economic stimulus package of roughly $150 billion that would pay stipends of $300 to $1,200 per household, and more for families with children, plus provide tax incentives for businesses to encourage spending.
Financial markets grew more upbeat Thursday as political leaders said they struck an agreement in principle on a massive spending plan to revive the crippled financial system. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped about 200 points on optimism about the bailout, and demand for safe-haven assets remained high but eased slightly as some investors placed bets that a deal would help unclog credit markets.
US lawmakers were still working Thursday to agree an unprecedented Wall Street bailout package, Democrats and Republicans said after White House crisis talks.
Lawmakers are “working on it,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid, as he emerged from the talks called by President George W. Bush.
“Still have a lot of issues to be worked on. Making progress. A lot more to discuss,” he added.
And now that the markets are way closed for the day, from AP:
Key members of Congress claimed agreement Thursday on an outline and crucial details of an urgent multibillion-dollar plan to stave off national economic disaster, but a historic White House meeting with President Bush, the two men fighting to replace him and other congressional leaders broke up with conflicts in plain view.
And while perceptions are being furiously managed, Democrats and Republicans are still bickering over the merits of John McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign until the problem is resolved, even though Newsbusters is reporting that he was asked to do just that:
John McCain got involved in the bailout negotiations after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told Sen. Lindsey Graham yesterday that the bailout plan would fail unless McCain came in and brought balky Republicans aboard. That’s what Bob Schieffer reported on this morning’s Early Show. Schieffer’s account stands in stark contrast with the allegation by Dems like Barney Frank and their MSM cohorts that McCain’s moves of yesterday were nothing more than a political “stunt.”
Bailouts? Earmarks? Gas profits? If we’re going to concentrate time and effort looking into misappropriation of funds, why not determine how much money “journalists” make to report stories like these? AP-Yahoo News wants to know why Sarah Palin kept a $1,000 donation from a guy she “urged to resign” for corruption:
Sarah Palin felt so strongly about the public corruption indictment of a Republican state senator this summer that she urged him to resign — but not strongly enough to return the $1,000 he gave to help elect her governor.
The donation from John Cowdery was one of three from Alaska legislators who contributed to Palin’s 2006 campaign weeks after the FBI raided their offices. The sprawling public corruption scandal that followed became a rallying point for candidate Palin, who was swept into office after promising voters she would rid Alaska’s capital of dirty politics.
The article points out that while the contribution does not suggest any wrongdoing, both John McCain and Barack Obama have “given back” money in the past.
Over the years, both McCain and Democratic nominee Barack Obama have returned campaign donations tied to corruption, expressing regret in both cases. Obama’s campaign says he’s given to charity $159,000 tied to convicted Chicago real estate developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko. In the early 1990s, McCain returned $112,000 from Charles Keating, a central figure in the savings and loan crisis, after a Senate ethics inquiry.
By those standards, maybe Obama should have sold Rezko back his land. AP-Yahoo also has this story (horrors!) of Palin being “blessed from witchcraft.”
A video on her hometown church Web site shows Sarah Palin being blessed three years ago by a Kenyan pastor who prayed for her protection from “witchcraft” as she prepared to seek higher office.
Good to know she was elected in spite of not being a witch. In more pressing news, the Chicago Tribune has the “exclusive:” Barack Obama prefers the Stones over the Beatles! On his way to the White House for meeting with the president about the nation’s economic woes, the press put the question to the Democratic nominee:
Now the news: apparently there were a few Capitol Hill reporters waiting outside his office. He was asked by one whether he was a Rolling Stones or Beatles guy. “Stones,” Obama reponded to a CQ reporter, per Psaki. She said he also said that he would make some comments after the White House meeting about the bailout agreement.
Nice to know he had time to work something in about that bailout stuff. Not to be outdone, The New York Times, on it’s blog, The Caucus had to share this “news” about David Letterman’s snit over McCain’s cancellation from his show in order to deal with that pesky bailout thing.
David Letterman was so unhappy that Mr. McCain canceled his scheduled appearance on his show Wednesday night that he spent much of the first segment assailing the senator’s decision and suggesting “something doesn’t smell right” about the Senator’s plan to go to Washington to work on the financial crisis.
Mr. Letterman told his audience that Senator McCain had called him directly on short notice Wednesday, to tell him he had to cancel his appearance. After expressing his admiration for Mr. McCain and his sacrifice as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Mr. Letterman said, “When you call up at the last minute and cancel, that’s not the John McCain I know.” He repeated that “something smells right now” and he suggested “somebody must have put something in his Metamucil.”
If it wasn’t for that damned First Amendment, I’d say it was time for some government oversight into this question of who pays these “journalists,” how much, and why?
Traveling around from internet news site to internet news site, a thought occurred to me: be afraid, be very afraid. Not only is there the threat of a major, global economic collapse hanging over our heads, even with the tentative agreement lawmakers just reached, the entire rest of the political news is just as frightening, in a goofy scary kind of way.
Politico’s Ben Smith, seeming more annoyed today by his perpetually twisted knickers than ususal, says Bill Clinton’s not sufficiently being Barack’s surrogate. Awwwwww…Ben, who always seems to be in a snit about something, is stomping his widdle foot at the former president for having the temerity to refuse to carry Barack Obama’s water. The nerve of that Clinton guy, huh?
Introducing John McCain at the Clinton Global Initiative in Manhattan, Bill Clinton doesn’t mention that he’s endorsed another candidate, or that there’s a campaign on.
Actually, it’s Politico’s Jonathan Martin giving flavor to Ben’s words, since for some reason, Jonathan chose to do a seperate post basically reprinting Ben’s post, with ‘tude. Both mention Clinton’s defense of McCain on Good Morning America, which is not surprising, since they’re the same frigging post.
Then there’s the Harry Reid’s “I want you, stay, I hate you, go away” strange courtship of John McCain.
Yesterday, ABC’s Jake Tapper reported Harry Hippy now says McCain’s help wasn’t needed or welcome.
A Democrat tells ABC News that, in a phone call late this afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that it would NOT be helpful for him to come back to Washington, D.C., to work on the Wall Street bailout bill.
Meanwhile, back at CNN, yesterday Florida Congressman, Alcee Hastings, told a Jewish audience that they should be as afraid of Sarah Palin as black people are:
Rep. Alcee Hastings told an audience of Jewish Democrats Wednesday that they should be wary of Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin because “anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks.”
snip
“For those of you like me that supported Sen. Hillary Clinton, she lost! Get over it!”
Get over this, Alcee. Anyway, looks like Obama may be losing a little luster, just using his name is no longer enough to guarantee huge crowds. Seems his Faith Tour flopped on it’s first stop.
For the new Barack Obama “faith tour” to have any success, it needs to be able to draw young and evangelical voters. Yet, at its first stop in the Virginia back yard of well-known pastor Jerry Falwell, just 15 people showed up for the event.
Hey, all the guys in my neighborhood like to hand out millions of dollars to people who were only eight years old when they bombed stuff. RBO has more on this here.
And who the hell is Khalid Al-Mansour, and why does his name keep coming up?
When the talking heads, politicians and pundits talk about the “economic crisis,” the “housing bubble,” “sub-prime loans” and “bailouts” why do they always act surprised? Don’t these people watch TV? I admit freely, I’m no economic expert; though I have owned properties before, I haven’t been a homeowner for years, for a number of personal reasons. But I’m not stupid. Which you would have to be not to have seen this coming years ago. And you don’t have to be a CNBC junkie either, Home and Garden tells you all you need to know.
For years, I’ve been watching homebuying shows where people too easily purchased too much house for too much money. There you have it, the whole housing bubble in a nutshell. Nothing complicated about it. People on these shows from every socio-economic class got 100% financing on homes with too many bedrooms and bathrooms, huge yards, lavish kitchens, “bonus” rooms, outdoor living space to rival other people’s indoor living space, offices, pools, and closets you could set up shop in. And the “experts” didn’t “see it coming?”
Then there were the “flippers.” Nobody, it seems, can buy a house, fix it up to their tastes, for their purposes and just live in it. Nope, uh-uh, no way. For one thing, if they do, they’ll never be able to sell it, and selling it is the only reason to buy it. Get it? First, somebody else has to buy it, (at 100% financing) “renovate” it, which could mean anything from applying fresh paint to ripping up floors and knocking down walls, then sell it at a profit. Then the people who can’t afford it, buy it to live in it, and have to pay too much for stuff they probably don’t even want (at 100% financing). Then, they can get another loan to redecorate it the way they want it, laying new floors and putting walls back up, and end up not being able to pay for any of it. Well, duh. Yet, nobody knows nuttin’.
Right.
Of course, that doesn’t take into account the fact that by the time the new suckers buyers get it, the mortgages have already been sold a gazillion times to people who make money buying and selling mortgages on houses they’ve never even seen. And we’re supposed to believe that this whole economic crisis is the fault of the little guys who just want to own a home, but are the ones getting screwed royally, nine ways to Sunday, by people they’ll never meet?
Puh-leeze.
Who’s gonna bail them out? Why should they trust anybody when everybody lied to them? “The housing market is sound.” “Real estate is always a good investment.” “Always buy as much house as you can afford.” “Interest rates are steady.” “You can always refinance.” “God’s not making any more land, ha, ha, ha.” Ha, ha, hell. “The check’s in the mail” and “I won’t come in your mouth” are more trustworthy statements than those.
Now, everybody’s money is in jeopardy, whether they fell for the schemes or not. And taxpayers are supposed to trust the government to bail them out of their individual economic crises with their tax money by bailing out the very people who put them in this predicament in the first place at the same time? What’s wrong with this picture? Who cares if some CEO gets his ridiculous salary or not when all the rest of the mortgage-moving scam artists are flying under the radar with everybody’s money in their pockets? And why is everybody focusing on the big banks and lenders when the whole damned system is corrupt? Realtors, builders, E-Z Credit ripoff artists, contractors, banks, mortgage holders, investment brokers, escrow holders, home-improvement stores, and all the rest of the corporate rapists, big and small, had a jolly good time thugging the electorate for the past few years, but nobody in a position to do anything about it “saw it coming,” so now they all want to point fingers and shrug shoulders and look pitiful until we all pitch in to help them out in order to save ourselves?
Pardon me if I’m having a hard time giving a shit.
John McCain has skillfully maneuvered Barack Obama into a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” position smack dab in the middle of a rock and a hard place. No matter what you think of the merits of McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign and return to work, ostensibly to lend his “expertise” to the effort to fix the country’s current economic problems, at least it’s bold and decisive action that forces Obama to respond in kind; boldly and decisively. So far, though, he’s just been wimpy.
CNN reports that while Obama has been making speeches:
“It’s my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person will be the next president,” Obama said in Clearwater, Florida. “It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once. It’s more important than ever to present ourselves to the American people.”
John McCain has been, well, doing stuff:
Announcing his decision to suspend his campaign, McCain said, “I am calling on the president to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Sen. Obama and myself. It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.”
snip
Salter also said McCain called President Bush and talked to colleagues in Washington and learned that passage of the bailout plan was next to impossible.
McCain’s campaign also said that he had canceled his appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman” on Wednesday night.
Now, given that Obama “suspended” his campaign, canceled his “Saturday Night Live” appearance and went home due to Hurricane Ike, he can’t very well stand on principle here. Besides, McCain’s call to Bush worked. An AP-Yahoo News headline screams so:
Bush invites McCain, Obama to White House meeting
With extraordinary stakes on the line, President Bush invited both men vying to succeed him and key congressional leaders to a White House meeting to hammer out a massive financial rescue plan. The president also was appealing directly to Americans in a prime-time address Wednesday to help push his tough-sell bailout into reality.
snip
So, not long before his planned 12-minute address to the nation from the grand East Room, Bush took the unusual step of calling Democrat Barack Obama to invite him to the White House for the meeting on Thursday, said presidential spokeswoman Dana Perino. The White House said the presidential invitation was also extended to Republican John McCain and to Republican and Democratic leaders from Capitol Hill.
So, on a day when all the stars were supposed to be lined up in his favor, Obama finds himself playing defense after being slapped upside the head with the unwelcome news that poll lead, or no poll lead, he is not yet president and still has a day job that requires his attention. And, darn it to heck, he can’t even blame the messenger.
Who’s “playing politics” with the bailout? Depends on who you ask. Republican presidential nominee, John McCain has suspended his campaign and asked Democratic rival Barack Obama, to join him and postpone Friday’s debate. Obama says, no way. According to AP News:
NEW YORK – Republican John McCain said Wednesday that he wants to postpone Friday’s debate to deal with the nation’s financial problems, but Democrat Barack Obama said “it’s more important than ever” that the country hear from its next president.
McCain says that putting politics aside, the need to address the economic crisis requires both candidates to rise above partisanship, and get back to doing the work they were already elected to do:
“It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration’s proposal,” McCain said. “I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.”
Obama was quick to point out however, that working together to “issue a statement” was his idea:
Obama repeatedly stressed at his news conference that he called McCain first to propose that they issue a joint statement in support of a package to help fix the economy as soon as possible. He said McCain called back several hours later, as Obama was leaving a rally in Florida, and agreed to the idea of a statement but also said he wanted to postpone the debate and hold joint meetings in Washington.
Obama said he suggested they first issue a joint statement showing bipartisanship.
“When I got back to the hotel, he had gone on television to announce what he was going to do,” Obama said.
Whether you believe, as some do, that McCain, reacting to increasingly bad poll numbers, is looking to jumpstart his favorabilty by trying to appear decisive and presidential, or that Obama, the heretofore reluctant debater, is showing strength by pressing on and claiming that the debate schedule must be adhered to, since the people need to hear from the candidates and presidents need to be able to multitask, one thing is clear; even in unusual times, we get politics as usual.
My take?
Seems to me, while enjoying his Walter Mitty-ish visions of press conferences-to-come praising him for “reaching across the aisle” to his politically wounded opponent, in an effort to jointly reassure Americans worried about the economy that he and his rival were “above politics,” Barack Obama got “politicked.” In fact, he got blindsided in plain sight. Like a sadistic little schoolyard bully sucker-punching a kid in a wheelchair, only to get his ass karate-kicked by a better-prepared-than-expected “victim,” Obama got played.
What he does next will say a lot about who he really is.
Clarence Page has an article about the “Bubba vote” that’s just sad. But then, most of Mr. Page’s articles are, nowadays. See, as a black journalist naturally seeking mainstream validation, Page and others, like Eugene Robinson and Bob Herbert, don’t even realize they’re being pimped out on behalf of Massah’s newest HNIC, “obasee-uh” appointee, Barack Obama, and thus, they happily acquiesce to the not-so-subtle beseechments of Camp O and “Call out the Toms and Bubbas fuh ya, suh, yessuh!”
In today’s Chicago Tribune article, Page hones in on “the Bubba vote”:
What’s Barack Obama’s biggest remaining obstacle on his road to the White House? A nationally prominent Republican sums it up in a word: “Bubba.”
“The Bubba vote is there, and it’s very real, and it is everywhere,” former House Majority Leader Dick Armey recently said. “There’s an awful lot of people in America, bless their heart, who simply are not emotionally prepared to vote for a black man.”
Using homespun comparisons of black vs. white “Bubba” definitions, Page contorts himself into a pretzel tying the “Bradley effect” to the “Bubba factor” using the recent AP/Yahoo News poll as justification for his concerns about the potential for “race-based voting to derail Obama’s presidential hopes. Just another “objective” look at America’s bias against black folks, as defined by the astroturfing Axelrod-influenced media.
However, we’ve moved beyond mere “astroturfing,” defined as manufacturing fake grassroots support to give the illusion of real grassroots support. When combined with the DeaNC, 50 state strategy and the Donna Brazile adaptation of Karl Rove “ratfucking” tactics, we now enjoy the benefits of Democratic party sanctioned “astrofucking,” or winning dirty by any means necessary. Howard Dean has backed Obama since 2004 when his Democracy For America tapped him as one of Dean’s Dozen, and Obama’s adaptation of Dean’s 50-state theory has provided a vehicle for Howard’s quest for vengeance. That Dean saw his presidential bid’s derailment as the fault of the centrist, Clintonian, Democratic Leadership Council wing of the party is no secret. An opportunity for revenge had to be too tempting for the mad political scientist to pass up.
Brazile’s long-term friendship with Karl Rove is likewise, no secret, and she also expressed an affinity for tapping into the “Obama factor” years ago. Though no friend of Howard Dean, their common desire to remake the Democratic party forges an uneasy alliance. Like Dean, Brazile has conducted her undercover sabotage in plain sight, feigning neutrality when any blind fool could see otherwise. Her actions throughout the primaries speak for themselves, as DeaNC Voting Rights Chair and race-baiting spokeswoman on CNN, Donna has maneuvered and manipulated opinion in a number of instances, and her Florida/Michigan, Rules and Bylaws Committee machinations unfairly altered the outcome of the primary contest by giving Camp O opportunities to exploit.
The above-referenced AP/Yahoo News poll was conducted by Knowledge Networks, a company founded in 1998 by two Stanford professors, whose press release page reads like an Obama supporter’s wet dream-come-true. A sample of the polls done between April ‘08 and the present shows an Obama dominance in focus:
09/23/08
Obama struggling to win over Clinton voters – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
09/22/08
Poll shows gap between blacks and whites over racial discrimination – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
09/20/08
Racial views steer some white Dems away from Obama – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
09/19/08
People prefer Obama over McCain as teacher – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
09/19/08
Obama tops McCain as football-watching buddy – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
07/18/08
Poll: McCain’s backers less fired up than Obama’s – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
07/08/08
Poll: Pet owners prefer McCain over Obama – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
07/07/08
Old Guy Vs Change: McCain, Obama Images Take Shape – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
07/03/08
The ‘mushy middle’ hard to reach for Obama, McCain – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
07/03/08
A look at the political center – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
07/02/08
Obama would get more barbecue invitations than McCain – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
07/02/08
Poll: Public cool to Michelle, doesn’t know Cindy – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
06/30/08
9 in 10 see rising gas prices causing family hardship – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
06/26/08
Obama Winning Over Former Clinton Supporters – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
04/21/08
Economy the top worry, but barely affecting votes – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
04/18/08
Ongoing nomination fight hurting Clinton more than Obama – The Associated Press | Yahoo! News Poll
Yet there’s no doubt that Axelrod is involved with trying to get Bill and Hillary Clinton to do Obama’s bidding to white folks, especially in light of the fact that the DLC has just released a “toldya so” poll of their own, showing that no matter how many new black, young or latte-sipping voters they register, they still need the “Bubba” vote to increase dramatically. That’s why Bill Clinton is being deployed to Florida, according to a Politico review of tonight’s Big Dawg appearance on Larry King. Clinton said:
“You know, they think that because of who I am and where my politic[al] base has traditionally been, they may want me to go sort of hustle up what Lawton Chiles used to call the ‘cracker vote’ there.”
“Bubbas,” “crackers,” and all other assorted racists and bigots picking on poor Barack Obama is a theme not so much reflective of true American emotion, as it is of careful seeding and nurturing of deliberately laid astroturf. The gardeners of this faux movement are guilty of ratfucking on a national scale, picking at our country’s racial scabs to advance the career of an inferior candidate for their own selfish purposes. If that ain’t “astrofucking,” I don’t know what to call it.
The Reuter’s headline reads: “Obama Ahead Of McCain Amid Wall Street Turmoil”
The opening paragraphs:
Democrat Barack Obama has opened a 9-point lead over Republican John McCain in the U.S. presidential race amid turmoil in the financial system and growing pessimism about the economy, according to a Washington Post-ABC News national opinion poll released on Wednesday.
Among likely voters, the poll found Obama now leads McCain by 52 percent to 43 percent. Two weeks ago the race was essentially even, with McCain at 49 percent and Obama at 47 percent, the Post reported.
The article proceeds to list various poll results from “likely voters,” “those polled,” “respondents,” “Independents” “white voters,” and “white women.” The last paragraph:
The survey of 1,082 people, including 916 registered voters, was conducted Friday through Monday. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus three percentage points and four points for the sample of 780 likely voters.
MSNBC leads with the “9 point” headline and buries the above paragraph in the middle of their story. They also add more categories: “Obama supporters,” “McCain supporters,” “Republicans,” “conservatives” and “white evangelical Protestants.”
I expected to read what “guys named Josh” and “girls who have vibrators” thought, but, alas, that wasn’t there. I guess when you poll about 1,000 people and have roughly the same number of categories as people, sooner or later you run out. Of course, “guys named Josh” who know “girls who have vibrators” might get counted more than once if they’re also “white, Republican, evangelical, conservatives who drive Volvos and are likely to vote if they have time,” but those kind of guys probably don’t hang out with that kind of girl.
Does Axelrod have pollsters on the payroll or does he just spoon feed their results to the media?
And that’s kinda the point, isn’t it? Like many bloggers, I’ve noticed the dramatic upswing in racially oriented reporting in the media regarding national attitudes and their potential affect on the Obama campaign. Like those same bloggers, I wondered why. Why all of a sudden are there so many polls, analyses and opinion pieces documenting and dissecting our common, or uncommon biases? Is something coming down the pike so devastating about Barack Obama, or some aspect of his candidacy, that it needs to have our attention diverted in advance?
Probably not.
What lead me to this conclusion was a confluence of recent events; the rash of polls, the accusations of David Axelrod-style “astroturfing” against Sarah Palin, which were borne out, and a number of opinion pieces, one in the Chicago Sun-Times, by race reporter Mary Mitchell, in particular. Now, I have no idea whether “race reporter” is part of Ms. Mitchell’s official employment designation, but since everything I’ve read that she’s written deals with the subject, I figured that must be her job. Besides, you can tell from the picture that accompanies every post that she’s black, so, it must be at least sort of a big deal to her. Anyway, it was after reading her take on the AP-Yahoo News poll when it all came together in my mind.
Now, we all know that “astroturfing” is the “art” of building fake grassroots support and that the acknowledged master is David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s campaign manager. And, as today’s AP-Yahoo News poll about the effect of disaffected Clinton supporters on Obama’s candidacy shows, many of those polled are skeptical of Obama’s competence. Many of them also happen to be white women. Barack Obama is a black man. Therefore, white women who supported Hillary Clinton are disproportionately unlikely to vote for the black man.
Get where I’m going with this?
Coming on the heels of the earlier AP-Yahoo News poll (or maybe the same poll with different data analysis) saying that racism among Democrats could cost Obama the election, the racial implications are magnified. Now add today’s ABC News/USA Today/Columbia University poll showing that black people think having a black president is a very good thing, and it becomes clear that the intention is to make the election a referendum on race, not a contest between candidates. Because when resumes are objectively compared, Obama loses. Period. Do not pass “Go.” Do not collect squat. Clinton supporters have always known that, it is the basis for our continued outrage and rejection of the Democratic ticket. The “vote for him because he’s black and if you don’t you’re a racist” drumbeat is meant to be heard by all audiences and filtered through each individual’s and group’s particular lens. (Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a mixed metaphor, but I like ‘em, so sue me, or suck it up). Basically, Axelrod and crew gets to re-seed the oh-so-successful, combination “white guilt and black pride” astroturf planted early in the primaries and watch it grow. Obama performs badly in the debates? So what, he’s still black. He attacks black people’s lifestyles, values and behavior? Hey, it’s better than a white man. He flip-flops on every hint of a campaign promise he’s ever offered from a TelePrompTer? Yeah, but aren’t you proud to be an American?
The actual analysis of the various polls is irrelevant, they say what you would expect them to say. Same is true of anything Ms. Mitchell writes. Even when she says something relatively unexpected, like she did today, that Obama is not really black or white, it still comes down to a “yeah,…and?” kind of thing. Because, while we as Americans still have a lot of racial hang-ups, our lives are not usually motivated, or even largely affected by them. But that’s not the point. The point is we’re being bamboozled, hoodwinked and astroturfed by an “internet community organizer” (Axelrod) who believes he is so good of an illusionist that he can sell us that by pissing in our faces, the astroturf will think it’s rain, and grow flowers.
Could the recent bickering between Barack Obama and his running mate Joe (Oops, I Did It Again) Biden be the first bricks being laid in the groundwork to dump old Joe for Hillary Clinton, who, according to Bill Clinton, doesn’t want the job anyway?
Maybe.
Today, Barack said that Joe “should have waited” before disagreeing with him, like there’s ever a good time to do so. Here’s the video:
Looks like Obie got caught playing politics, while JoBi was being apolitical, i.e., honest. Can’t have that in a running mate for an astroturfed presidential candidate, can we? After all, appearances are everything.
The rumors of a planned Obama-Biden divorce are still floating around, (my favorite is the lack of available Obama-Biden merchandise is the “proof” that such a thing is in the works) however getting such a thing done might be a problem for a number of reasons. What possible excuse might work? The old “Muskie tears“ and “Eagleton-esque mental issues” routines are out, hoping Sentimental Joe might break down and turn on the waterworks, and the fun of watching him try to extract his foot from his mouth fast enough to say something even more stupid are the only reasons anybody shows up to see him speak anymore . Health problems probably won’t work either, as long as McCain is in the race. No, looks like Obi-Wan-NaBePresident is stuck with Shoeless (Makes It Easier To Insert Foot) Joe, which serves him right for picking a guy who said he sucked in the first place.
Yet another poll gets the numbers right (maybe) but skews the reasons for the numbers all to hell. The AP-Yahoo News Poll out today shows that former supporters of Hillary Clinton are pretty unlikely to vote for Barack Obama, and are unlikely in the same numbers they always have been.
Duh.
Barack Obama’s support from backers of Hillary Rodham Clinton is stuck smack where it was in June, a poll showed Tuesday, a stunning lack of progress that is weakening him with members of the Democratic Party in the close presidential race.
Though the poll finds that most former Clinton supporters never supported Obama based on his qualifications, and still don’t, the article goes on to break down the numbers with a sense of bewilderment I find puzzling. There is also the obligatory “it must be because he’s black and they’re stupid” implication:
As during her primary battle against Obama, Clinton supporters are likelier to be female, white, and less educated than those who did not back her.
Yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah…
Let me explain something to The Clueless Followers of the Obama Messiah Myth, and I promise to speak slowly and use simple little words.
Clinton recieved support from a large number of working class white people in the primaries.
Most of them were women.
Many of HRC’s supporters have always believed that Barack Obama sucks as a presidential candidate.
A lot of the people who supported Clinton still think Obama sucks.
The white ones are still white.
Most of the white ones are working class women.
Who needs a freaking poll? Especially when there are pictures and news stories? The Chicago Sun-Times says Obama is having trouble drawing crowds to venues, like the one in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that McCain recently sold out.
Just a week ago, John McCain and his vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin — who can bring out crowds the way Obama can — appeared in this same stadium, Resch Center, to a crowd of 10,000 fans. There were an uncharacteristic amount of empty orange seats for Obama’s rally.
ABC’s Jake Tapper provided the pictures. Note that not all of the people who stayed away were under-educated white women. Like the people who know a real presidential candidate when they see one, and will accept no imitations, those who didn’t show up to see Obama on what looks like a bright sunny day, come in all shapes colors and sizes.
Okay, I admit it, I was wrong. Earlier today, in a post called “Astroturfing or Ratfucking” I put forth the theory that accusations of wrongdoing by agents aligned with the Obama campaign were being manufactured by the other side. My reasoning was simple, no one would be stupid or inept enough to bungle a simple operation so badly. I was wrong.
The Jawa Report claimed that an anti-Palin ad was produced by a firm associated with David Axelrod, Obama’s “Astroturfer in Chief.” “Astroturfing” is the art of using phony grassroots support to give the impression of real grassroots support, or, the Obama campaign in a nutshell. How could any organization ratfuck the country as well as Axelrod and friends have with the Obama presidential run, then turn around and make such a Bush League play?
Anyway, turns out the Jawa Report was right. The video producer, Ethan Winner of Winner & Associates, sent them an e-mail admitting culpability. The full text is available at the highlighted link, but here’s the gist:
The following is in response to questions I have received regarding the post on the Jawa Report website.
I produced and posted on the Internet the video entitled “Sarah Palin: A Heartbeat Away.”
The idea for the video was mine. No one paid me to produce it. The only out-of-pocket cost will be the fee for the voice-over narrator, which I will pay personally when I receive an invoice. Contrary to the allegation in the Jawa Report, the voice-over artist has never done any work for the Obama campaign. I retained her through a talent agency based solely on the quality of her voice.
Neither the Obama campaign nor any independent political action committee has had a connection with the making and/or posting of this video. Just like the thousands of Americans who have posted videos on the Internet regarding the current Presidential campaign, I produced this video as an expression of my right to free speech, which is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Sorry, Obama supporters, your guy’s team is even more pitiful than I gave them credit for. See what I get for trying to be objective? That’s it, from now on, no matter what, your guy sucks.
Let me begin this post by saying I don’t care one way or the other if Barack Obama is a Muslim. He says he’s not, that’s good enough for me. A person’s religious beliefs must be considered sacrosanct, whatever they are, and I respect all faiths and every individual’s right to hold them, or not, as they see fit. I do care about the truth, though.
Andy Martin, who has his own credibility problems, has nonetheless asked a question in a recent blog post that has been troubling me for quite a while; was Barack Obama ever baptized, and if so, when? The International Herald Tribune, in an April, 2007 article, says that Obama was baptized at Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988, giving a rather convoluted attribution for this information to either Obama’s book, “Dreams From My Father,” or his half-sister:
It was a 1988 sermon called “The Audacity to Hope” that turned Mr. Obama, in his late 20s, from spiritual outsider to enthusiastic churchgoer. Mr. Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Obama was seeing the same thing in public housing projects where poor residents sustained themselves through sheer belief.
In “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama described his teary-eyed reaction to the minister’s words. “Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Those stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope — became our story, my story.”
Mr. Obama was baptized that year, and joining Trinity helped him “embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound,” said Ms. Soetoro, his half sister.
On Obama’s website, he speaks of his decision to join Trinity:
” Obama said, “So one Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, He would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in Him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life. It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth and carrying out His works.”
I didn’t see anything on that page about baptism, though, and the link to his religion page just rehashed the highlights of the first page. The Christian Science Monitor,The New York Daily News, The Weekly Standard, MSNBC and about a zillion other websites mention his marriage and children’s baptisms at Trinity as fact, but are largely silent on Obama’s actual baptism. This, from The Christian Science Monitor, is typical:
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. married Barack and Michelle Obama, baptized their daughters, and inspired the title of Senator Obama’s bestselling book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
I was baptized at age 13, of my own free will; my mother sent me to church, but attended Catholic services herself, which I didn’t like. The day I joined the church was not the same day I was baptized, in most of the churches I have attended, baptisms are scheduled on the following First Sunday of the month, so it is unlikely that Obama was baptized the day he joined Trinity. Yet, no one ever mentions when this milestone actually occurred, a date more important, in my opinion, than the day one basically makes an appointment to become a Christian.
As I said, it’s not that I believe that Obama is a Muslim. i just wonder why the specifics of his baptism are never mentioned. Though I can’t put my hands on my baptismal records, I could provide enough information for anybody who so desired to look them up. The mystery surrounding this simple question is in itself maddeningly puzzling, why the reticence to open up about it? Answering the question won’t make me vote for him, but it might make me slightly less skeptical about his motivations for running for president. As it stands now, I just don’t see any reason to trust this man about anything.
Ya gotta love Joe Biden; he’s never dull. The fact that his brain doesn’t always seem connected to his mouth is a source of constant entertainment. The latest incidence of “Joespeak” has the Democratic veep candidate calling out the guy who picked him as a running mate (you can’t make this stuff up) for one of his ads. In an interview with Katie Couric, Joe criticized Obama’s “McCain can’t use a computer ad” before catching himself and trying to talk it back:
Couric asked: “Are you disappointed with the tone of the campaign? The ‘lipstick on the pig’ stuff, and some of the ads – you guys haven’t been completely guilt-free making fun of John McCain’s inability to use a computer.”
“I thought that was terrible by the way,” Biden said.
“Why did you do it then?” Couric asked.
“I didn’t know we did it and if I had anything to do with it, we would have never done it,” Biden said. “And I don’t think Barack, you know. I just think that was …”
Did Obama approve that ad?
“The answer is I don’t think there was anything intentional about that,” Couric said. “They were trying to make another point. That’s very different than deliberately taking a vote Barack Obama had to teach children about how to deal with child-predators and saying he was teaching them sex education in kindergarten. Very different in degree.”
To make bad matters worse, the above statement was mis-transcribed on the CBS website, attributing Biden’s last line to Couric.
Has the addition of Sarah Palin to McCain’s ticket caused an upswing in “vaginal voting?” If it has, Bill Clinton understands why. Politico reports that since Palin came aboard, John McCain has had a surge of support from women:
Since picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has obliterated what had been a 34-percentage-point deficit in a poll of likely women voters on the question of which candidate has a “better understanding of women and what is important” to them.
The two are now effectively tied, with McCain’s 44 to 42 percentage lead within the margin of error of the most recent poll conducted by pollsters Kellyanne Conway and Celinda Lake for Lifetime Television. In Lifetime’s July poll, women preferred Barack Obama on the same question by nearly three-to-one— 52 to 18 percent.
Of course, we’re talking white women here.
All summer Obama had roughly similar support among white women as Al Gore did in 2000.
Gallup finds McCain now leads with white women 51 to 40 percent, a wider gap than the GOP enjoyed among white women eight years ago.
Meanwhile, AP reports that the former president “gets” Palin’s appeal because he’s from Arkansas:
Speaking to reporters before his Clinton Global Initiative meeting, the former president described Palin’s appeal by adding, “People look at her, and they say, ‘All those kids. Something that happens in everybody’s family. I’m glad she loves her daughter and she’s not ashamed of her. Glad that girl’s going around with her boyfriend. Glad they’re going to get married.’”
Clinton said voters would think, “I like that little Down syndrome kid. One of them lives down the street. They’re wonderful children. They’re wonderful people. And I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races. Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy.”
On “The View” The Big Dawg said that his wife would have been the best VP choice, politically speaking, that is, even though she really didn’t want the job, anyway. So reports Politico again:
But despite observing that his wife would have been the best political pick, Clinton said that Hillary “didn’t” want to be Obama’s running mate.
“She said that if he asked ‘I’ll do it because it’s my duty’ but I think, look, she loves being a senator from New York.”
Clinton said that “the main thing she thought is ‘I should have no opinion on this. I need to get out of this.’”
In common usage, “astroturfing” is Democratic “ratfucking,” which is a term usually attributed to GOP tactics.
Karl Rove is said to be the reigning king of ratfucking. From Salon, August 13, 2007:
Donald Segretti, ringmaster for the Committee to Reelect the President of a gang of dirty tricksters engaged in what he called “ratfucking,” recruited Rove.
His alter-ego, David Axelrod, is today’s master of astroturfing through his company, ASK Public Strategies, which shares office space with his primary firm, AKP&D Message and Media, from which he astroturfs the campaign of Barack Obama. According to a March 14, 2008 article in Business Week:
On behalf of ComEd and Comcast, the firm helped set up front organizations that were listed as sponsors of public-issue ads. Industry insiders call such practices “Astroturfing,” a reference to manufacturing grassroots support.
The reason I bring all this up is that the blogosphere is abuzz today with speculation that Camp Obama is behind a supposedly “grassroots” You Tube smear of Sarah Palin. These allegations stem from a post on the website, The Jawa Report, which claims:
Evidence suggests that a YouTube video with false claims about Palin was uploaded and promoted by members of a professional PR firm.
The same voice-over artist has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign.
David Axelrod is Barack Obama’s chief media strategist.
The family that runs the PR firm has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.
Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in a concerted effort to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. Yet this effort took place on company time.
Evidence suggests that these distribution efforts included actions by at least one employee of the firm who is unconnected with the family running the company.
The voice-over artist used in this supposedly amateur video is a professional.
This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David Axelrod’s firm, which has a history of engaging in phony grassroots efforts, otherwise known as “astroturfing.”
The “professional PR firm” in question is Winner & Associates, the “employee” said to be responsible for uploading, then yanking, the video is “eswinner” or Ethan S. Winner, son of company president Charles N. Winner and Leslie Song Winner. Winner & Associates is a large PR group affiliated with an even bigger international PR group, Publicis Groupe, and sounds a lot like Axelrod’s ASK, though the Jawa Report links “eswinner” to Axelrod through a common voice-over artist used by the producers of the Palin smear video and Axelrod’s AKP&D firm.
The Jawa article goes to great lengths to “prove” it’s case, and I’m okay with it, to a point. Even if all the connections pan out, one question remains. Why would the “master of astroturfing” job out a smear campaign to a “major PR firm” stupid enough to leave it’s fingerprints all over it?
Doesn’t make sense to me.
On the flip side, there’s another “grassroots” entity making You Tube ads critical of one of the presidential candidates. This one, “weneedmccain” has a series of anti-Obama ads up and it’s producer is just as cryptic. Like the Palin video, these are professional quality ads, the voice-over artist sounds like an actor, not an “average guy” in his basement. Yet when techPresident’s Micah L. Sifry went looking into “weneedmccain”’s identity, he concluded that “Michael Brown” was indeed just a really committed Republican private citizen with seemingly unlimited access to sophisticated digital recording equipment and the resources to use them at will. Yeah, right. Who is techPresident? How and why did he get onto this story? How did he debunk it within hours of reporting it? Why?
Seems to me, one aspect of “ratfucking,” which has been around longer than “astroturfing,” btw, might be to set up a compelling scenario of wrongdoing by the other guy and then yell, “fire.” I’m just not so sure in this instance that the guys doing the yelling aren’t on the same team as the guys with the matches and gasoline on their breath.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, America’s last two investment banks, and two of Barack Obama’s largest donors, have been granted a request by the Federal Reserve to change status to “bank holding companies,” according to AP News.
The Fed announced that it had approved the request of the two investment banks. The change in status will allow them to create commercial banks that will be able to take deposits, bolstering the resources of both institutions.
What does it mean?
The change of status means both companies will come under the direct regulation of the Federal Reserve, which regulates the nation’s bank holding companies. The banking subsidiaries of the two institutions will face the stricter regulations that commercial banks are required to meet. Previously, the primary regulator for Goldman and Morgan Stanley was the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In related news, Politico announced that Obama says he will likely keep Henry Paulson “involved” in his administration, if elected:
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said Sunday that if he’s elected, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would be “involved” in the new administration’s transition – a very unusual move when the White House changes parties.
Paulson, 62, is the wealthy former chairman and chief executive of the investment bankGoldman Sachs, and is widely respected on Wall Street.
Kevin Hall, of McClatchy News, wonders if that is a good idea:
Making the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson repeatedly said today’s financial problems were long in the making. He should know. He was part of the Gold Rush that has brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse.
Paulson presided over one of the most profitable runs on Wall Street as chairman and chief executive officer of investment banking titan Goldman Sachs & Co. from 1999 until President Bush nominated him on May 30, 2006 to take over the Treasury Department .
Goldman Sachs ($208,395) and Morgan Stanley ( $233,272) have both donated to John McCain, too, but not quite as much. Obama got $691,930 from GS and $318,070 from MS.
Applications for registration must be completely filled out without any assistance or suggestions of any person or memorandum.
After 10 days applicants names and addresses are published for two consecutive weeks in the newspaper. They cannot be ruled on for 14 days after the second publication. Therefore it can take as long as 33 days before we can give you an answer as to your application being accepted or rejected.
Your indulgence is appreciated.
The Registrar.
Is the recent media push for early voting somehow tied to the recent media push for racializing the election? In the past few days so many articles have featured so many people speculating, implying and downright accusing Americans of harboring enough racial animus to prevent Barack Obama from prevailing in his White House bid solely by nature of his blackness, that it is hard not to wonder, as our friends at HillBuzz do, what’s everybody really so afraid of? The HillBuzzers contend that John McCain’s new “attacks by association are fair game” attitude might have something to do with it. Well, of course attacks by association are fair, if not, Obama’s whole campaign is out of bounds, since it’s built on a “McSame, 4 more years of Bush” foundation. A visit to McCain/Palin’s TV Ads website shows no new Rev. Wright or Rezco or Ayers ads, but that doesn’t mean none are forthcoming. And there are those 527’s and other party loyalists with digital video skills and You Tube accounts to consider.
There have also been a lot of articles and blog posts about early voting. Some states, like Virginia, have already begun the process. While mailing in a ballot is certainly more convenient than standing in line at a voting booth, it’s doubtful that concerns for minimizing voter’s free time sacrifice is what drives both campaigns to encourage it. The increased potential for fraud would also have to be a concern to both campaigns. So, why the push, especially by Camp O? Maybe a fear of “the bloom falling off the rose?”
For one thing, votes cast now are binding and can’t be “taken back.” Anything can happen between now and election day. What happens if one of those legions of subliminally rabid racists has a change of heart and decides that voting for the black guy is the only way to get to heaven? If one of the candidates performs horribly in the debates, or makes a major public speaking gaffe, or is implicated in a high profile scandal, or even kicks a puppy or bites a baby’s nose instead of kissing it, there’s no recourse for an early voter’s resultant “buyer’s remorse.” Since I don’t plan to vote for either one of the major party candidates, it doesn’t matter whether or not I don’t do it early. That being said, even if I did think one of these guys was worth voting for, if some devastating information came to light affecting one of the them between now and the election, I would want my options open.
Besides, I’ve never had to stand in line to vote in my life.
“But, I don’t think you’ll see it clearly. Barring some unforeseen development like in — something happens in the debates we don’t know about. I — I — I — it may not be apparent in the polls until last week or two of the election. But, I believe that it will be apparent on election day. I think that — I think Senator Obama will win this election.” – Bill Clinton
Given the recent spate of articles in the press about America’s pervasive undercurrent of latent racism, like this, and this, as well as this, this, this, and this, and it’s potential to derail the presidential aspirations of Barack Obama, it’s time to revisit Geraldine Ferraro’s controversial comments about the role such racism plays. On March 11, 2008, ABC News’ Jake tapper reported:
Clinton campaign finance committee member, former vice presidential candidate, and former Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, D-NY, told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Ca., that, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”
Of Clinton, Ferraro said that the press “has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.”
“I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he’s going to be able to put an end to partisanship. Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship – that’s the way our country is.”
Let’s see, right off the bat, it’s pretty obvious that if Obama was white, Ferraro never would have had a reason to make that statement and would still be considered a grande dame of the Democratic party. It’s just as obvious that Barack Obama would also not have thrown his hat in the ring this year and would not now be said party’s nominee. Even he knows that much.
It’s hard to imagine that the Democrats would have supported the presidential run of the 99th ranked, brash young senator from Illinois under any other circumstances. He has no breakout legislation to his credit, he does not come from a political family, he is not a veteran and he has some rather “eyebrow raising” associations.
Obama’s resume would not be nearly as compelling if he were white. He probably would never have been invited to speak at the 2004 convention. He surely would not have been assured of 90 percent of the black vote in the primaries if Hillary and Bill Clinton had not been characterized as an out-of-touch, racially insensitive, white couple, making black America’s identification with Obama’s ethnicity more sympathetic.
John Kerry’s assessment of his protege’s foreign affairs potential would have had even less basis, and Obama’s articulate, eloquence might not have been considered quite as noteworthy, either, if he ever did have occasion to display it. How many rock concert-sized crowds does the average US Senator ranked 99th in seniority get to address?
I came to Washington with a celebrity that, to be honest, was a bit inflated, and a bit undeserved. What many people don’t realize is that in the Senate, it’s seniority, not celebrity, that’s important. Right now, I’m 99th in seniority in the minority party, so when I got here they handed me a toothbrush and said, hey Obama, go clean the bathrooms.
If Obama was a white man, it’s almost a certainty that he would never have joined Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church, even if he embraced the United Church of Christ. Videos of Wright’s sermons could have been sold on the internet forever without creating enough of an uproar to cause Obama to give a history making speech “worthy of Abraham Lincoln, in an ultimately futile attempt to cover his ass.
If Obama was white, his life story wouldn’t be very interesting, either. For one thing, he wouldn’t be Obama. At least his name wouldn’t be. There’d be no “Kenyan father, white mother from Kansas,” or “skinny kid with a funny name,” or “Selma got me born” stories to exploit. The fact that he went to Harvard would be no big deal, since 7 other white alumni have already broken that well trod ground. Jr. Harvard Grad, son of Mr. and Mrs. Average America is, well, pretty ordinary in politics.
The question is not only “what role will racism play in Obama’s potential defeat?” but also, “how many ways did racism help him secure the nomination?” Because, the most striking, yet always unspoken, truth is that if Barack Obama was an urban black man, he probably wouldn’t even be a senator. On the other hand, if Obama was a white man, Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee.
Bottom line?
If Barack Obama was not a mixed-race black man, he would not be where he is.
And the country wouldn’t owe Geraldine Ferraro half an apology.
*UPDATE: Today’s obligatory Politico article about race and Obama gives us some insight into the candidate’s long-held feelings on the subject. Quoting Obama after the NH primary, (the one where Jesse Jackson, Jr. invoked the image of O. J. Simpson “attacking a white woman” to contextualize the scope of his challenge against Hillary Clinton) Obama said at the time:
“I’m less interested in a conversation about race in the abstract,” he said. “All the self-flagellation, it’s not useful. African-Americans get all riled up, and whites get defensive.”
Wonder what the cross-bred offspring of Munchkins and Keebler elves do.
While outlet after outlet of the mainstream and not-so-mainstream media tell me over and over that Sarah Palin is a doomed Republican desperation gimmick of a pick because of her “lack of experience,” her “flip-flops,” and “lies,” a similar number of similar outlets are telling me that her political evil twin, Barack Obama, whose “experience,” “flip-flops” and “lies” are just as questionable, is only doomed because he’s black.
Huh?
Let’s get one thing straight. Barack Obama is no blacker now than he was when he started this race. There has been no humongous influx of foreign born, white supremicists, naturalized as citizens just in time to thwart Obama’s presidential plans. As far as we know, there is no data that supports the theory that formerly liberal non racists have suddenly become bigots in such large numbers as to have a negative impact on the outcome of this election. No one has suggested that a surprising number of racists reproduced a bumper crop of chip-off-the-old-block offspring nearly eighteen years ago, who are now on the brink of voting age eligibility.
So, what gives? Why all the sudden interest in exploring America’s latent racism, especially in the last few days, approximately since the time Obi-Wan-NaBePresident’s poll numbers reached bottom? AP-Yahoo News, in conjunction with Stanford University (a big Obama contributor, along with the University of California, Harvard University and University of Chicago) has a new poll showing that of the white people who don’t like black people, most of them won’t vote for Obama. The poll also showed that a lot of people think he just plain sucks.
Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.
Of course, that info doesn’t lead the story, no way. It’s tucked in the middle, surrounded by all sorts of damning statistics showing that bigoted Democrats, especially those bitter, backwoods Clinton supporters, are not falling in line behind the black guy. There’s also a nifty little interactive thingy where you can see the results in black and white, complete with illustrated stick people.
Here’s the thing, though, the poll attempts to show that Barack Obama’s troubles with Democrats are racially motivated. But that’s like taking your temperature when you stub your toe. What’s the point? More than half of the Democrats who voted in the primaries decided Barack Obama sucked, and didn’t vote for him. A lot of those people were white. A lot of those people seem to have not yet been convinced that he has suddenly stopped sucking. A lot of the people who voted for Obama were black. They seem not to care so much whether he sucks or not. A lot of people who voted for Obama in the primaries were Republicans and Independents encouraged to cast a one-time Democratic vote against Hillary Clinton. They always thought he sucked.
So, yeah, the poll data might be accurate, but it doesn’t exist in a vaccuum. When you look at the big picture, when all things are considered, maybe the real, bottom-line reason that some people, Democrats, blacks, whites, whatever, won’t vote for Obama for president is…(drumroll, please)…because he just plain sucks.
It seems that everybody else has. Most of the people bringing up the race of the Democratic nominee do so in an attempt to explain away his potential loss. Some of those mentioning Obama’s blackness are clearly in need of supervision. Dick Meyer, writing for NPR, seems to fit into both categories. It is his theory that the subconscious racism of undecided voters will be the determining factor in their ultimate decision to vote against him.
This polling indicates something else astonishing to the politically plugged in: Many undecideds haven’t really connected their negative feelings about race to Obama yet. Their view of Obama is unformed, and their negative feelings toward African-Americans could be easily triggered when they finally tune in.
edit
But some who have been doing recent research on race believe there is a current of racism that has not been triggered and that is likely to be — perhaps triggered intentionally by Republicans, but also as a natural consequence of the undecided voters finally focusing. And plenty of pundits and advice-givers think Obama is not doing enough to minimize or counter the racial impulses of undecided voters. (I am not convinced there is any way to spin this: What is, is.)
That someone who would suppose something might happen if something undocumented and unproven happens to happen, would then claim that his suppositions amount to the reality of “is,” obviously indicates a cerebral malfunction of some sort, resulting in seriously flawed thinking. Yet, Mr. Meyer is not alone. Time’s Karen Tumulty says John McCain is already trying to capitalize on America’s pervasive undercurrent of subliminal racism. She says the following ad is racist.
While Tumulty believes the attack on Obama’s record to be fair game, the fact that Franklin Raines is featured is a problem:
This is hardly subtle: Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman.
Let me stipulate: Obama’s Fannie Mae connections are completely fair game. But this ad doesn’t even mention a far more significant tie–that of Jim Johnson, the former Fannie Mae chairman who had to resign as head of Obama’s vice presidential search team after it was revealed he got a sweetheart deal on a mortgage from Countrywide Financial. Instead, it relies on a fleeting and tenuous reference in a Washington Post Style section story to suggest that Obama’s principal economic adviser is former Fannie Mae Chairman Frank Raines. Why? One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black.
The idea that two black men being accused of unethical activity is racist, is in itself racist. Washington Post linked Obama/Raines on more than one occasion, here, and, in an article on the candidates and the economy called “Tough Decision Coming,” on August 28:
McCain also released a second ad feturing Jim Johnson the following day. The monumentally devastating impact on women, blacks and other minority victims of the sub prime mortgage crisis has been examined by The Nation, USA Today, The New York Times and The Boston Globe, to name but a few. The role of racism inherent in the exploitation of minorities by the sub prime lending industry and its effects in the current crisis is the real story. Since the referenced racism is so hard to see in the above examples, being mainly implied and inferred, one can only conclude that these are cases of personal projections, or, of the pot calling the kettle white. And, yet, the attacks about imaginary racism against Barack Obama, just keep on coming. From Ohio’s WYTV:
Monday afternoon, state Representatives Bob Hagan of Youngstown and Tom Letson of Warren met with reporters.
They argue many voters who call themselves “Democrats” or “Independents”, but won’t vote for Obama, have only one excuse, with Letson saying, “I would say that a lot of it is they’re not going to vote for ‘the black guy’”.
According to Politico, when asked what happens if Obama fails to win, Donna Brazile also got into the act:
“If he doesn’t, then Obama didn’t lose,” she said. “The country just wasn’t ready.”
Yet, none of these race card plays are as inexcusable as the one made by “comedienne” Sandra Bernhard in her re-vamped “Without You, I’m Nothing” show. The New York Daily News comments on one of many intentionally provocative and controversial lines in the show:
The Republican V.P. nom would be “gang-raped by my big black brothers” if she enters Manhattan, Bernhard said. Palin is said to be making a campaign stop in New York next week.
Forgive me if gang-rape jokes don’t greet my ears as oddly and subtly positive, as the Examiner suggests, and forgive me if gang-rape jokes aren’t “a rotating sprinkler that a spectator washes in most happily,” like the Washington Post insists.
First of all, Sandra doesn’t have any “big, black brothers,” and anyone who equates black maleness with gang rape does not deserve any. The invocation of D. W. Griffith-esque imagery of lust-crazed black savages hell-bent on ravaging a white woman, at the behest of another white woman, no less, is too irresponsible to justify the energy and creativity it would take to channel the generated vitriol required to denounce it properly.
The sudden increase in the number of baseless cries of racism on Barack Obama’s behalf are more than troubling, they are as scary as they are creepy and wrong. If, and when, Obama loses, it will be because he is the lousiest candidate imaginable and the American people will have woken up to the fact that they have become the victims of the world’s largest scale practical joke. Racism will have nothing to do with it. Racial manipulation by ill-intentioned political pranksters with no regard for the potentially devastating consequences of their misguided and irresponsible actions will be behind the door of the house upon whose steps blame should be placed.
Some Obamaniac (which I think might be far too kind a term in this instance, since it gives her implied credit for having some brains) named Lea Lane has posted one of the most offensively clueless pieces (article is too dignified a word) that the Huffington Post has ever sunk low enough to print. This ridiculous post is based on the supposition that now Hillary Clinton supporters are so desperately needed by Camp O, that his supporters should do anything to appease us, even lie, placate and condescend. While belittling every legitimate concern of, and without mentioning PUMA by name, Ms. Lane encourages her fellow Obots to suck up.
If you’ve been an outspoken Obama supporter from the beginning, it’s time to make amends with Hillary supporters you know. Arguing with, or browbeating them to get on board is counterproductive, but showing you’ve come around to respecting Hillary may ease their hurt enough to do the trick. (Even if you don’t mean it. This is politics.)
Take a flying leap, Lea. Your candidate sucks; deal with it. And if you get in my face and try to make a case for his sorry behind, no matter how nice you try to pretend to be, I’ll make you understand exactly why that’s such a very, very, bad idea
Only two days after Democratic nominee Barack Obama exhorted his followers to “get in the faces” of his detractors, the Senator was hit in the face with the cold water of a dose of his own medicine. International Business Times reports that at a rally at the University of Miami, Obama was heckled.
He was speaking inside an arena at the university in Coral Gables, Florida when about a dozen people began to wave homemade signs.
Among the signs were handwritten messages which stated “Blacks against Obama,” “Obama for Gay Marriage.” Obama has come out in support of civil unions but not gay marriage.
Another one read “endorsed by the KKK.” One stated, “Jesse Jackson hates Obama.” The signs all had the words Michael Warns written at the bottom.
A visit to Michael Warns website leads one to be directed to another website, michaeldefeatssatan, complete with a funky Marvin Gaye intro. Though I haven’t done enough of Michael’s website perusing to be sure, my initial impression is that he’s along the lines of a younger Rev. Manning.
Makes you wonder what’s up with Obi-Wan-NaBePresident and Florida’s black population, though. It was in St. Petersburg, on Aug. 1, when Obama was heckled by 3 young men representing the Uhuru Movement, who held up a sign saying, “What About The Black Community, Obama?”
Obama is rarely heckled, in fact, when the U of M protest began, Obama seemed more concerned with getting back to his prepared TelePrompTed speech than anything else. Perhaps that is the cruelest cut possible from the double edged “get in their face” sword. When it comes back at him, it throws him off-message, leaving him dangerously vulnerable to contracting “foot-in-mouth” disease in front of the cameras. But like Donna Brazile’s mother surely could have told him, “Only have your supporters do unto others that which you are prepared to have done unto you.”
As I’m sure you are aware, one of the presidential candidates in this year’s election is inordinately fond of your product. While most politicians, actors, spokespersons and others in the public eye have occasion to make use of your products, there are those rather informal situations where it is preferable to project a more impromptu image. Let’s face it, sometimes a full TelePrompTer setup is impractical.
With that in mind, as well as the future of our country, I would like to suggest a few innovations you might consider. First, perhaps a collaboration with Apple might develop a new “iProd” or “iProne,” a hand held device with multiple capabilities, allowing a user, say, a politician, to have immediate, discrete online access to answers from his campaign headquarters during small gatherings. With such a device concealed in a breast pocket, and small, pocket-mirror sized screens placed discretely around the room, say, propped on the visor of an unsuspecting reporter’s baseball cap, such a politician need never be at a loss for an appropriate answer to an unexpected question. The magnified TelePrompTer script, with the addition of remote scrolling capabilities and a speakerphone function make the “iProne” far superior to anything currently available to a harried politician on-the-go.
(*If the snooty Apple people don’t go for it, try the snooty BlackBerry people. TeleBerry works just as well.)
Next, how about a marriage of TelePrompter and Ray Ban for fashionable question-and-answer assistance in stylish eyewear? Mounted inside the lenses like small mirrors, TeleBanTer would likely sell itself.
The same would be true of a merger between the capacities of your product with those of a hearing aide. MiraclePrompt would be ideal when visual screen access is restricted.
Finally, one never knows when a presidential candidate might be called upon to engage in negotiations of a more intimate nature for the good of his country, like they do in those political spy thrillers. On those occasions, proper equipment is a must. For more intimate engagements, TeleBraTor would give Cyrano de Bergerac-style instruction, as well as spur-of-the-moment interrogation techniques to an intrepid lover/undercover operative, while distracting an unsuspecting, yet potentially suspicious and dangerous partner with heretofore unknown levels of pleasure.
Please feel free to further explore these suggestions as soon as possible, if you would. No potential world-leader-wannabe dependent upon your products and services should ever be forced to face a hostile interview unprepared again. As I said earlier, the future of the free world, nay, the entire universe, could depend on it.
Don’t think anybody cares which presidential candidate you would rather watch a football game with? Fat lot you know. Do you think some people, like Associated Press/Yahoo will use any metric to try to make it seem like Barack Obama is the “people’s choice?” Me, too. Do you not care about the football watching companion preferences of the average yahoo who took the poll? I feel your pain.
Obama was the pick over McCain by a narrow 50 percent to 47 percent, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll released Friday that generally mirrored each presidential candidate’s strengths and weaknesses with voters. Women, minorities, younger and unmarried people were likelier to prefer catching a game with Obama while men, whites, older and married people would rather watch with McCain.
C’mon, let’s be honest. When I’m ready for some football, I don’t want to have to listen to Barack Obama stutteringly pontificate about the history of football theory and the ramifications of it’s implications on the socio/economic dynamics vis-a-vis the corporate American infrastructure. Nor do I think that three or four hours in the company of John McCain, for any reason, would be particularly pleasant. If I had to do it, okay, but, come Sunday, Johnny Mac probably shouldn’t waste any time sitting by the phone waiting for an invitation from me. Just saying.
The poll did show that Obama still has problems with those pesky Clinton supporters, but the AP writer was quick to point out a trouble spot for McCain, too, to balance things out.
With Obama struggling to win over former supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the poll had worrisome news: 35 percent of them would rather watch with McCain, well above the 23 percent figure for all Democrats.
There was also a danger sign for McCain: About three in 10 voters are still undecided or say they may switch candidates. That group leans narrowly toward Obama as their football companion.
I don’t want to watch football, or have dinner, or take a hot air balloon ride or anything else with either one of them. I don’t even want to see another one of their commercials during a football game, or any other show, for that matter. Even if I did, that doesn’t mean I would vote for them. Thinking back on all the pleasant afternoons and evenings I’ve spent watching sports in the company of friends, strangers, friends of friends, one or two fair weather friends, a few drunks, a couple of acquaintances and at least one witch I really can’t stand to this day, I can’t think of one time when I thought to myself, “Gee, what a wonderful president that guy/girl over there would make. Wish I could vote for him/her.” Considering this new poll, maybe I should give those boisterously enthusiastic guys and gals a second look.
And a note to the pollsters trying to find creative new ways to measure these uninspiring candidates’ popularity, I don’t think anybody wants to see either one of them naked, either, btw.
And they know that. So do most rational people. The only people who seem to be confused are the Obama camp and their henchmen in the Obamedia and Barackosphere. These Nervous Nellies, anxious to assure an increasingly unlikely victory for their empty-invisible-suit wearing Emperor, continuously put forth the offensive equivalent of an adult fairy tale that the objects of their irrational Clinton Derangement Syndrome machinations should prostrate themselves in supplication to their whip weilding dominator.
Fat freaking chance.
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have done more than enough stumping on Obama’s behalf. Far as I’m concerned, they could go off on a well deserved family vacation to an undisclosed remote island location until November 5, and should. Let the guy who branded them as racially insensitive, high-minded, incompetent, self-entitled heirs to a fraudulent dynasty, fend for his damned self.
But, being the good Democratic soldiers they are, they won’t.
The latest episode of the “Bill/Hill Help A Brother Out Tour” starring the former president on CNBC’s Closing Bell, with Maria Bartiromo is already being unflatteringly reviewed by the Obamedia. ABC News’ Jennifer Parker takes Bubba to task for speaking more highly of his wife than of the Democratic presidetial nominee. The nerve! But then the Big Dawg did say that Obi-Wan NaBePresident should win…unless something bad happens between now and the election, like, the debates:
“Barring some unforeseen development like in– something happens in the debates we don’t know about. I– I– I– it may not be apparent in the polls until last week or two of the election. But, I believe that it will be apparent on election day. I think that– I think Senator Obama will win this election,” Clinton said.
Meanwhile, the day after two prominent former Hillary backers, Donald Trump and Lynn Forrester, Lady de Rothschild, announced their respective endorsements of John McCain, Senator Clinton was promptly pressed into service to try to put a stop to Obie’s bleeding. According to Newsday:
After most members had left the Democratic state committee meeting on Monday evening, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton greeted a small gathering of party regulars and activists in a penthouse suite at the Sheraton New York in midtown and talked about Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
“She thanked those who traveled so far for her in her own campaign, and said they need to do the same for Obama because the race is closer than we’d have liked,” a Clinton loyalist said on the way out of the hotel. Another person who’d been in the room confirmed that was the essence of her remarks, but was careful to stress that any reference to the close race was conveyed with the most earnest intentions.
Proving themselves to be card carrying media Obamaniacs, the article goes on to put Clinton’s loyalty on the defensive. Whatever. Last I heard, Barack Obama was supposedly the “nominee,” making the task of convincing people to vote for him his responsibility. Typically, the delusional Barackophiles refuse to accept the obvious; they picked the wrong guy.
Three days ago, CNN announced that Barack Obama was taking his TelePrompTer on the road. People, including me, scoffed. How could anyone take a candidate seriously who suddenly needs such a device to deliver a 2 year old stump speech? (If you don’t count the first variation delivered at the 2004 Democratic convention.) Yet, it seems that, once again, Campaigner Extraordinaire has prevailed and proven himself Master Wizard In Chief.
Sept. 15, the day of the Monumental TelePrompTer Announcement, Rasmussen Reports had John McCain up 2 points. Today, the two candidates are tied. Gallup has Obama +4, but on the 15th, they were virtually even. Coincidence? I think not. AP attributes Obama’s recent “surge” in the polls to a number of factors, chiefly the candidates’ response to our recent economic crisis. AFP via Yahoo News, reaches similar conclusions regarding the across-the-board reversion to pre-convention polling levels. However, since neither candidate seems to have much of a handle on the problem, I’m not so sure.
No, I’m convinced it was the novel, strategic inclusion of the groundbreaking TelePrompTer-On-The-Campaign-Trail tactic that did it. What vision! What leadership! Recognize a potentially disastrous problem and take action to fix it! No more “57 states!” No more “lipsticked (stuck?) pigs!” That’s what we need in a president. Problem solving. Though…
Obama, on the trail in New Mexico, had this to say of McCain:
“And today he accused me of not supporting what the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank did with AIG despite no evidence whatsoever that that’s what I had said.”
To recap, when I wrote earlier today that Obama supported the bailout, I quickly was instructed by his staff that this was not the case. He just didn’t oppose it, I was told.
Now he’s so adamant about not opposing the Fed’s move that he’s complaining about McCain’s portrayal.
Where, I wonder, is the line between not opposing and, ya know, supporting.
Got a feeling there might be a couple of used TelePrompTers for sale by the Obama camp in the near future. That is, if those polls don’t hold.
Many a Barack Obama supporter is likely to face rejection on a grand scale, not to mention increased potential for a good, old-fashioned beatdown, if they do what Obama tells them to do. At a TelePrompTed rally in Elko, Nevada yesterday, the good senator ended his scripted remarks by encouraging people to “get in the faces” of their neighbors and friends and make his case for him.
This seems to me to be a very bad idea. Personally, I loathe Senator Obama and all he stands for, and I’m a black (former) Democrat. You’d think that I would be ripe for persuasion since I “fit the demographic,” but you would be very, very wrong. The very idea of someone, anyone, getting in my face about why I should support Mr. “I Can Barely Win Even When All The Big Shots In My Party Cheat For Me” Obama makes a large vein somewhere in the vicinity of my left eye start to twitch, causing me to squint uncontrollably. It’s happening right now, and the attendant fist clenching, shortness of breath and increased heartrate make it difficult to finish this post.
How dare he say something like this with a straight face? All of his other gaffes have been excused and explained away by the fact that he didn’t have a TelePrompTer handy. The fact that this is a monumentally lame excuse in the first place is not important, I’ll just concede the point that while such a deficiency in any other candidate would be grounds for disqualification as a contender, it is perfectly acceptable as a justification for any St. Obama misspeak. But he had a TelePrompTer here. Let’s even pretend that a TelePrompter for a political candidate at an outdoor rally in a baseball stadium is the norm, there’s still no excuse for irresponsibly inciting people who aren’t even there to violence.
Obamaniacs are obnoxious enough as it is. The last thing they need is permission from their “Dear Leader” to be moreso. Even non-confrontational ones, like the guy in the following video, make you want to smack them upside the head repeatedly, with enthusiasm, like Desi Arnaz playing “Babalu.” This guy thinks it’s cute to vent his wrath at a McCain supporter he overheard at the Post Office. Nevermind the fact that he was eavesdropping, what’s striking is, the man this guy is so offended by was obviously so intimidating that running home and making a snarky video was seen to be the most attractive option available. Maybe instead of making a You Tube video, he should have watched Obama’s You Tube video so he could learn from The Most Obie On-High that the proper thing to do was “get in Post Office Man’s face.” I’m sure whatever offering Video Guy put out after he recovered would have been lots more entertaining and interesting.
Everybody’s heard of the “Bradley effect,” which is based on the premise that white Americans are wimpy, racist liars at heart. From Wikipedia:
The term Bradley effect, less commonly called[1] the Wilder effect, refers to a frequently observed discrepancy between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in Americanpolitical campaigns when a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other.[2][3][4] Named for Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California governor’s race despite being ahead in voter polls, the Bradley effect refers to a tendency on the part of white voters to tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for a Black candidate, when, on election day, they vote for his/her white opponent.[5]
Now, it should be noted that the “Bradley and Wilder effects” were terms coined by a loser and a barely-winner to rationalize their unexpected results. Conversely, there is no “Patrick effect” or “Kilpatrick effect” to explain wins by Deval and Kwame and the impact that race may or may not have had in their elections. We also don’t have a “Kerry effect” to explain how big a role Swiftboating, or a “Gore effect” explaining how to lose before all the chads are unhung, can play.
The PUMA effect, which is a new phenomenon, will not be fully appreciated until the impact of disaffected Hillocrats can be assessed, examined and evaluated after the election. A number of relatively high-profile women who supported Hillary Clinton for president have been quite vocal about their disenchantment with the Democratic Party and it’s eventual “selectee.” The latest, Lynn Forrester, Lady de Rothschild, joins Wisconsin delegate, Debra Bartoshevich, Rules and Bylaws Committe ejectee, Harriet Christian, whose invective filled rant fully expressed what most of us awakening PUMAs were thinking and feeling, and Ann Price Mills, whose heartfelt disappointment with the sham roll call vote at the Democratic National Convention was preserved forever on tape by CNN. (To clarify, I do not agree with every word spoken by each of these women, what I do agree with is the overwhelming sense of outrage brought about by the Democratic Party’s betrayal of it’s principles.) Though not identifying themselves publicly as PUMAs, they exhibit all the known characteristics; a disdain for this season’s nominating process, enmity for the party elite who orchestrated the charade, and a total, flat-out, complete rejection of Barack Obama. That these women do not call themselves PUMAs is not surprising; though there is a real PUMA coalition online, the movement has always been a reflection of a shared sentiment, not a dues-paying political action entity. Not all of those qualifying as PUMAs will ever be identified as such, nor will they all vote the same way.
That’s the DeaNC’s problem. When trying to quantify the resistance to their chosen one, they rely on unreliable methodology, like polling and website traffic. That might work in other areas of assessment, to a degree, but it is unlikely to yield them any real usable data in this instance. Most of the people (not just women, not just white, not just old) who are resistant to Obama’s “charms” because he is an illegitimate candidate with a postage stamp sized resume who has to carry a TelePrompTer around to stump speeches or else he forgets how many states there are, don’t fall into neat, tidy, categories, and most don’t blog even if they are online. They are not racists, they are not bitter, and a lot of them aren’t even Democrats anymore, at least not in their hearts, no matter what their voter’s registration card says. The one thing they have in common is, they’re heartbroken.
The Welby effect is my own terminology for the potential for voters to subconsciously prefer the image of a white-haired, older, seasoned Marcus Welby-type professional in matters of grave importance, over the leap of faith required to entrust one’s country or health-care to a promising newcomer like the one played by James Brolin on the old ABC series. Some might conclude that such a preference is due to racism, and while there is an element of that in play, it is small. I’m not sure there would be much difference if McCain were black and Obama white, the imagery holds. We like to put our lives, when necessary, in the hands of those we imagine know what the hell they’re doing, having done it hundreds of times before. No matter how many other doctors refer us to the young Doogie Howser-like genius innovating exciting new techniques in just the areas we need addressed, we still want to know that when our procedure is being done, our old trusted family physician will be there, too. The Obama camp is hoping that the selection of Joe Biden will offset this reality, but that begs the question, is Joe Biden trustworthy? Do voters think so?
Then there are the “issues.” Everyone wants to pretend this election, unlike any other, is about “issues.” “Issues,” schmissues. “Issues” never win elections because the “issues” candidates lie about in this phase of the campaign are far different than the ones that will define their presidency. Nixon didn’t say “Vote For Me and I’ll Betray Yor Trust,” Cater didn’t say “Hey, Y’all I’m A Pushover,” Clinton didn’t promise to be impeached for lying about being a bad husband, and George Bush didn’t get a single vote because he promised to take us to war within 2 years of taking office. Screw “issues,” who can I trust my country to? That choice comes down to gut feeling just as much as handicapping horses does. No matter how many variables you factor, how much rainy-day research you do about history and conditions, that damned mudder is probably going to show. At best. If that.
So, if any of these “effects” are real and come into play, Obama will have a hard time winning. If all of them do, he loses in a landslide.
Warning: The first clip is Obama’s two minute ad re: the economy. I don’t know about you, but it was easier for me to read than listen to. Given it’s length, I think it should come with a 2-minute warning.
Amid recent grumblings in the blogosphere that Barack Obama should dump running mate Joe (What Did I Say Now) Biden for Hillary Clinton, who many, including Biden, seem to feel should have been offered the position in the first place, it seems that Camp O has settled on a unique new strategy: run Biden/Clinton together. The AP reports that Clinton and Biden will even make campaign appearances together, like this one:
Biden and Clinton held an online video forum with women voters where they took questions on pay equity, abortion rights and other issues. The forum was to be broadcast Wednesday evening on Obama’s campaign Web site.
According to the story, the O Team is just tickled pink with Clinton’s efforts on their behalf so far:
“We couldn’t be happier,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said, adding that officials would ask Clinton to step up campaign appearances after the Senate adjourns this month.
It also appears that HRC’s cancellation of a protest event appearance featuring Republican VP candidate, Sarah Palin, likely came at the behest of the OBidens:
Advisers to party nominee Barack Obama and to Clinton say that she will resist pressure to speak out against Palin, believing it would diminish her own stature while creating a “cat fight” sideshow that would only distract voters from the contest at the top of the ticket. Any mention Clinton makes of Palin will only be in the context of her partnership with GOP nominee John McCain, aides said.
Hey, I guess when you’re co-running mate with the guy who thinks you’d be a better pick than him, sometimes you gotta take one for the team. Lord knows the team could use all the help it can get. Politico’s Roger Simon lays out the problems Obama is facing and ends with the sum-it-all-up quote from Donna (My Mama Taught Me Race Is The Bottom Line) Brazile:
“He has had some moments where he seems unsure of his own voice,” Brazile said, “but I still think he can pull this off.”
And if he doesn’t?
“If he doesn’t, then Obama didn’t lose,” she said. “The country just wasn’t ready.”
“They’re going to try to tell you John McCain is good, but you’re smarter than that. After eight years of George Bush, you know we can’t afford another white guy. George Bush is bad. John McCain knows George Bush personally. That makes John McCain bad.
But you know that. Even though your lives suck because you’ve got no money, because there are no jobs available, and when you do work, your taxes are too high, and if you get sick, you’re probably gonna die because George Bush won’t give you health insurance, and John McCain knows George Bush. You deserve health insurance. But Washington doesn’t work that way. George Bush doesn’t work that way. And John McCain knows George Bush 90% of the time.
That’s why it’s time to change. We don’t need 8 to 10 more years of the same old policies we’ve had under George Bush. We need to change. John McCain is not going to change Washington, he’s been there 26 years. We need a new direction, we need hope. Now is the time for a different way of doing things. Can we really afford more of the same? Now is the time for change. Now is the time for hope.
But we can’t just hope to end the war. We’re fighting 2 wars, and John McCain says that’s okay. He wants to fight George Bush’s war for the next 100 years. But you know better. You can’t keep fighting the wrong war, the dumb war. I’ve been against this war from the beginning, and when I’m president I will end this war. But not the other one. After eight years of George Bush’s failed policies, we know John McCain won’t. He wants to raise your taxes. He doesn’t get it. He can’t use a computer. He’s really old. That’s why the special interests that run Washington want John McCain, but we can’t afford 4 more years of the same old thing.
Now is the time for you to tell Washington that you want change. Send a message to the special interests that they can no longer expect business as usual. Tell them it’s time for a black man. With your help, I will fix Washington, I will say “no” to the special interests, I will end this war, I will always work for you, the middle class, the little guy. I’m not like the other presidents. I’ve got a funny name. But I love my country too much to let you hold that against me. I believe the time is now. I believe we need to change. I believe we can do better than four more years of the same old George Bush policies John McCain wants. But it starts with you. If you have hope, we can change. Do you want change? Do you like hope? Then vote for me, because I’m not the other guy.”
I was going to try to write up that speech interpretation as it might be delivered sans TelePrompTer, but after only a few moments of typing, I could no longer bear the excruciating pain of trying to actually read what I was writing, nor could I see clearly through the tears. Plus, my head was really starting to…uh…umm…well…hurt. So maybe that’s not an exact transcription, but it’s what his speeches, ads and news stories sound like to me. Or, should I say, sounded like. The only time I hear him speak nowadays is when unwittingly duped into visiting undercover Obots masquerading as “friends” and forced to listen to Obi-Wan-NaBePresident against my will. On those increasingly rare occasions, I’ve learned to put something crunchy in my mouth and chew loudly, even if it annoys my hosts and their guests, since I have also learned that such behavior is preferable to them than having me put my fingers in my ears and make loud “la-la” noises. I’ll admit, I’ve learned not to even try to listen closely for fear that doing so will make my eyes glaze over as I grind my teeth to a powder while my ears begin to bleed copiously, and I really don’t like it when that happens.
Okay, that’s not exactly what he said, but he did say Obama was “different” because he’s so smart he couldn’t be from your neighborhood. It was the woman who introduced Biden in Flat Rock, Michigan Monday, Barbara Theaker, who called Sarah Palin a “bucket of fluff.”
The video below, from MSNBC’s Morning Joe, shows the whole sordid mess, though interestingly, there’s nothing of note about it on their website. For the details, you gotta do a little, but not much, digging. Newsbusters gives the quote from Theaker:
Barack Obama has made an intelligent choice for the vice-presidency. How so very different this is from that bucket of fluffthat the Republican candidates have chosen for the same position.
Gateway Pundit quotes Joe (Stop Me Before I Speak Again) Biden: (their emphasis)
“All this stuff about how different Barack Obama is, they’re not just used to somebody really smart. They’re just not used to somebody who’s really well educated. They just don’t know quite how to handle it. Cause if he’s as smart as Barack is he must not be from my neighborhood.”
ABC News says that Joe responded to Theaker’s comments approvingly before telling an audience member to pipe down at a later point when the crowd got rowdy:
“You are good! My Lord!”
edit
“Shush up for a second will ya?” he said bluntly.
The ABC article also mentions another lively introduction Joe got about a week ago:
This is not the first time a Biden supporter has used the introduction to hit out at Palin.
Last Tuesday in St. Louis, Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan said of the Alaska governor, “There’s no way you can dress up that record, even with a lot of lipstick.”
That Carnahan guy sure has a unique clerical hobby. I guess he couldn’t find any pigs in need of a makeover. Either that or he didn’t get the official “Obama Lipstick/Pig/Palin And How To Sneak It In” memo. Anyway, here’s Joe and Mika on Joe and Barbara:
Many have wondered exactly when race was first injected into Barack Obama’s campaign. Was it the “race memo,” that whiny release sent to the Huffington Post complaining that the Clintons and their surrogates were deliberately using racially insensitive language against him? No. Was it when Jesse Jackson, Jr. asked “how does an African American candidate attack a white woman,” on January 4, 2008? Uh-uh. How about when Jesse Jackson, Jr. (same guy) four days later questioned Hillary Clinton’s motivations for crying at an appearance before the New Hampshire primary? As reported at the time:
…there were tears that melted the Granite State. And those are tears that Mrs. Clinton cried on that day, clearly moved voters. She somehow connected with those voters.
But those tears also have to be analyzed. They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs. Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina where 45% of African-Americans who participate in the Democratic contest, and they see real hope in Barack Obama.
While that certainly is an example of intentionally, and inappropriately, bringing race into a situation where it doesn’t belong, it is not the first one either. Nor was Michell Obama’s “black people will wake up and get it” statement during a MSNBC interview in November of 07. Neither was Roland Martin’s CNN on-air entreaty for Obama to blacken up in October of that year.
The date was May 03, 2007, the day it was announced that Barack Obama would be placed under Secret Service protection, though no credible threat had been received. CNN quoted Dick Durbin:
Illinois’ senior senator, Democrat Dick Durbin, told reporters Thursday night that he relayed concerns about the size of the crowds Obama was drawing and other issues to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Reid decided to take the matter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff as an issue for a congressional advisory board, Durbin said.
“I knew the crowds were large … but some of the other information given to us, unfortunately I think, raised a concern among many of [Obama's] friends,” Durbin said.
“Unfortunately, some of the information we found was racially motivated. It is a sad reality in this day and age that Mr. Obama’s African-American heritage is a cause for very violent and hatred, hated reactions among some people.”
Durbin would not elaborate. “I’ve been advised not to talk about any specific security problems or any threats,” he said. He also would not say how he received the information, only that it was from “credible sources.”
This dispicable plan has been woven into the fabric of Obama’s presidential campaign since it’s inception. Unfortunately, it worked against his Democratic rival, which is unsurprising given the degree of Democratic complicity in the plot. Campaign memos and stupid statements by surrogates is one thing, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin enlisting an unwitting government agency is something altogether different. Hopefully, the Republican party will continue to thwart Obama’s similar attempts against them. However, they will have to be ever-vigilant against his “I don’t look like all the other candidates” statements, his surrogates, like Joe Biden’s “he will be transformational for America because he’s black” comments, as well as all the willing co-conspirators in the press.
Last night, I put up a post about outside groups doing ads against John McCain on behalf of Barack Obama. To be sure, one of the groups involved in the pro-Obama push, Democracy For America, is not an “outside” group at all. Founded by Howard Dean almost immediately after his famous scream ended his presidential hopes, it is currently chaired by his brother, and also tagged Barack Obama as one of the first of Dean’s Dozen politicians to watch. That’s about as “inside” as you can get.
The American Issues Project was founded to champion the conservative values that have made the United States of America a blessed nation: smaller government, a strong and ready national defense, lower taxes, and a government that encourages entrepreneurship and new job creation in America. We also know how critical it is for America to win the war against the radical Islamic extremists abroad so we do not have to fight them here on American soil.
“Do You Know Enough To Elect Barack Obama?” seems to be the group’s first effort. Not so for the second, more enigmatic entity with a provocative video. This one is not even technically an “ad,” it’s more of a “viral video” posted on You Tube and the creator’s website. “weneedmccain” says this, in his You Tube profile:
Dedicated to promoting the McCain/Palin 08 Campaign and exercising my freedom of speech to speak my mind over matters critical to the future of this nation.
“Dear Mr. Obama: Who Are You?” is his latest video, preceded by “Dear Mr. Obama: Economics 101″ and the first, entitled simply, “Dear Mr. Obama.” Though not much is known about the videos’ producer, a Google search of “weneedmccain” does lead one to some info, however. techPresident.com’s, Micah L. Sifry, whoever he is, appears to have tried to dig up something on whoever “weneedmccain” is, with mixed results.
“Dear Mr. Obama” was posted on YouTube by someone using the handle “weneedmccain.” When I emailed that person asking for information about the making of the video, I got this reply:
“I wish I could currently spend some time with you, but this can’t be about me right now. Too much going on.
I may be doing an interview with the soldier, who he is, what he believes, some Iraq stories and his parents views in the near future.”
More e-mail correspondence gave techPresident the filmmaker’s name: Michael Brown. His piece is worth a read, but does not defeinitively answer the questions, “who is Michael Brown? who does he work for? Is he a Mccain campaign GOP sanctioned operative, or a staunch Republican with video studio access and time on his hands?” techPresident has a follow-up article on the subject, suspiciously dated the same day as his first, which seems to lead Sifry, after a phone conversation with “Michael Brown” to the gut-feeling conclusion that the video is voter-generated.
Whoever produced and distributed these ads, here they are:
Every time Hillary Clinton makes an appearance on behalf of Barack Obama, she makes him look bad. She doesn’t do it on purpose. It’s not even her fault; she says and does all the right things, with much more sincerity evident in her demeanor than one might imagine possible. The problem for Barack is, she just looks so damned impressively presidential doing it.
Every time she offers a suggestion about how a Democratic presidential candidate should handle an issue, it highlights another Obama deficiency. Those rabidly suffering wretches infected with virulent cases of Clinton Derangement Syndrome will, of course, suggest that she’s doing it on purpose, just to make Obama look bad. Once again, the Obama Delusionally Faithful give their Messiah way too much credit.
Hillary Clinton is the superior candidate. To Barack Obama. To John McCain. To Bill Clinton. That’s what her supporters saw, and what made us vote for her. That’s what made the sexism and downright mysogyny directed at her so infuriating. That’s what made the bogus racial exploitation by her opponent, with the blessings of the greedy, misguided Democratic leadership, so egregious.
While Obama flounders in the waters of his own political undoing, further fouling his prospects for rescue by pissing in the pool, he might want to consider that deploying Hillary Clinton to do his dirty work is like asking someone to throw you a cement lifeline. Even a sincere desire to fulfill your request puts you down.
Hillary’s GMA interview this morning was bittersweet. She looked relaxed and comfortable, sounded poised and composed, and, as always, had a firm grasp of the issues. She handled the questions easily, even the attempted “gotcha” ones about Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. She expressed her disappointment with the outcome of the primaries while imploring her supporters to vote Democratic. She said she was excited to work for an Obama/Biden ticket, and in the process of doing her very best to make them both look good, made them both look pitiful.
The DeaNC, Obama, Biden, Pelosi, et al, should have remembered something I’m sure Donna Brazile’s mama taught her:
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get stuck with it.
It appears Barack Obama’s teleprompter is hitting the campaign trail.
The Democratic presidential nominee has never tried to hide the fact he delivers speeches off the device, though normally he doesn’t use one at standard campaign rallies and town hall events.
But the Illinois senator used a teleprompter at both his Colorado events Monday — making for a particularly peculiar scene in Pueblo, where the prompter was set up in the middle of what is normally a rodeo ring.
Makes you wonder, though, how come these political geniuses didn’t come up with this after “57 states” and before “lipstick on a pig” if they’re so damned smart?
What’s next, lip-syncing speeches to track?
Then he could be Milli Vanilliand a modern day Paladin.
*Check out the great snark on Obama’s economic response originally posted on his website.
Democracy for America is our nation’s largest progressive political action community. With over 725,000 members nationwide, DFA is a grassroots powerhouse working to change our country and the Democratic Party from the bottom-up. We provide campaign training, organizing resources, and media exposure so our members have the power to support progressive issues and candidates up and down the ballot. Join us in the fight to take our country back!
an organization, now chaired by his brother, James, in conjunction with Brave New Pac, has a new Swift Boat-style ad aimed at John McCain. The ad features former Navy Midshipman Philip Butler, who was imprisoned with McCain, claiming that McCain’s “volatile” temper makes him “unfit to lead.” DFA is already planning for a second ad:
Thanks to your support, our ad featuring former POW Dr. Phillip Butler is already making a splash and exposing John McCain as “unfit to lead.”
This is just the beginning of our aggressive, hard-hitting ad campaign to expose the real McCain. It’s time to take it to the next level.
For our next ad, we want to hear your ideas. DFA has always believed in the power of the grassroots over Beltway consultants. We need to continue unmasking the real McCain. The ad should be aggressive, creative and truthful.
Fox News reports that the new “527’s are okey-dokey” attitude of the Obama camp seems to be encouraging other outside groups to jump into the fray:
The Service Employees International Union, a labor group backing Obama, launched its own ad campaign Sunday, announcing a $2 million ad buy in targeted markets in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Iowa.
The ad, titled Family, features a mother talking about the strain of trying to provide for her family in an economy defined by higher costs, lower wages and lost jobs, and draws distinctions between Obama and McCain on their approach to the economy.
Marc Ambinder reported on Camp O’s new thinking in The Atlantic on September 9:
The upshot: Obama’s campaign will no longer object to independent efforts that hammer John McCain, just as, in their mind, the McCain campaign has not objected to those efforts targeted at Obama. “I assume with their 527s stirring, some [Democratic] ones will as well,” another senior campaign official said.
Jim Dean is the current Chair of Democracy for America (DFA). As DFA’s key spokesperson and fundraiser, Jim keeps DFA in the national spotlight. Jim brings DFA’s mission across the country to all 50 states. He meets with candidates, organizers, party leaders and activists, inspiring everyone to get involved and take back our country. Jim has been involved with DFA since our founding in 2004. He has a long history of political involvement and was a key fundraiser for his brother, Howard’s campaigns for President, Governor and Lt. Governor.
Governor Howard Dean, Founder
Governor Howard Dean founded Democracy for America in 2004 to build on the grassroots momentum for reform that his bid for the presidency sparked. The movement propelled DFA into a successful national organization committed to the “50 State Strategy.”
In early 2005, DFA ran a people-powered campaign to elect Governor Dean to chair the Democratic National Committee. Democrats nationwide badly wanted reform and found the answer in Dean. In February 2005 Governor Dean resigned from the leadership of DFA to take his new post as chair of the Democratic National Committee.
One of Democracy of America’s first acts was to name Barack Obama one of the newly initiated Dean’s Dozen politicians to watch.
Maybe the two guys running for president, John (He Did Say That) McCain and Barack (At Least I’m Not The Other Guy) Obama, should just use the feet they both have stuck firmly in their mouths as pacifiers and suck on them like the big babies they are and keep quiet. On Good Morning America today, Obama proved he can’t even defend himself right. Asked about negative ads, Obie said:
“If we’re going to ask questions about, you know, who has been promulgating negative ads that are completely unrelated to the issues at hand, I think I win that contest pretty handily,” Obama said.
Hey, who am I to argue? Meanwhile, AP reports that in Jacksonville, Fl., McCain commented about his Lipstick/Pig-gate ad:
Did Barack Obama really call Sarah Palin a pig, as a John McCain ad leads people to believe? “No,” McCain said Monday. The Republican presidential nominee defended the ad anyway, saying Obama “chooses his words very carefully.”
So, I guess that while Obama didn’t call Palin a “pig,” he implied that she was. Any way you look at it, a pig’s a pig, right?
Geez.
These are our only two choices?
Of course, there’s always Joe (Somebody Rescue Me) Biden, a guy you can count on to speak his mind, whether you want him to or not:
Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, campaigning in North Carolina where black votes could help swing the state to the Democrats, said today that electing a black person to the White House would be transformative.
“That will be a transformative event in American politics and internationally,” Biden said. “That all by itself will be significant.”
Now, vote for the black guy, dammit, transform America. Tell ‘em Joe said so.
All of a sudden, rabidly anti-anything Hillary and pro-anything Barack, Huffington Post is floating the “dump Biden for Clinton” trial balloon. Why? Could poll panic have prompted a 3:00 am phone call from Camp O to Huff Po?
“Arianna? Ya gotta help me! We need to do something, quick! We’re freaking desperate over here! The big guy’s been stammering and stuttering at the top of his lungs for days! I don’t know what to do! Huh? Oh, sure, you’re right, dahling…deep breath…whoooooo…ya still there? Okay, what I need is, uh, what I mean is, see…oh, what the hell, can you find out if those PUMA bitches will behave if we put…“her” on the ticket? Whaddaya mean, “her” who? You know perfectly well…come onnnnn, waaaah…don’t make me say it, please…do you know what time it is here? I’ll never get to sleep! Oh, all right! Hillary! Hillary! Hillary! Ya happy now? Geez! Sooooo…will ya do it? Get somebody to write a piece putting the idea out there, see what kind of response you get? Don’t bother calling back, the big guy’s finally resting…and Lord knows I don’t want to be the one to wake him up, if I don’t have to. There’s only so much whining I can take. Any more would be above my pay grade. Yeah, that was a good one, too bad he stole it when he did. How many times do I have to tell him, if it’s not on the TelePrompTer…right, sure, I know you know exactly what I mean. Thanks Ari. Huh? Oh, yeah, Arianna, I forgot myself for a minute. Anyway, you’re a dear, dahling, thanks again. Of course I owe you, how could I forget? You fax the running tab every fuc…uh, day. Anyway, thanks again. Kisses to you, too. M’bye.
Whew!”
They’ll never get it. Once a lousy boyfriend has the nerve to dump a chick, that’s it. And Obie’s one lousy boyfriend.
I don’t trust Barack Obama. On anything. Never have. For one thing, I have never believed that he raised gazillions of dollars from millions of legal, under-two hundred dollar donations. How did he get to be such a fundraising phenom in the first place? When and from whom did he learn this fine art? Why couldn’t he use some of his prodigious money-making mojo to fund a few programs benefiting the South Side residents he was so generously giving of his precious time and talents while being St. Community Organizer Extraordinaire? Call me crazy, but maybe a few hundred “small donors” pooling their resources back then could have had real, tangible reason to “hope” for “change,” even if their fearless leader abruptly abandoned them to pursue his own collegiate ambitions before they could accomplish anything of note.
The New York Post says you can’t trust Obama about the war, either. Big surprise. Once you realize that the only recordings that exist of the foundational anti-Iraq war speech upon which Obama’s whole campaign is built were faked by the Obama campaign because nobody thought it was notable enough at the time to record it, you know pretty much all you need to know about the guy. Anyway, Amir Taheri, in a Post opinion piece claims that Obama tried to pimp the war when he was in Iraq this July:
WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.
“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.
Meanwhile, a couple of blog sites are revisiting some old allegations re: SuperCommunityMan. One, Sweetness and Light explores claims made July 9, on another site called Analyze This that Obama truly does the impossible and actually pads his Gillette-thin resume to it’s current anemic thickness:
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of Barack Obama, the Illinois freshman senator and hot young Democratic Party star. But after reading his autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s.I know because I sat down the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can’t say I was particularly close to Barack – he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers – but I was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book.
Now, I’m not vouching for any of these sites and stories, I didn’t go out of my way to find them, just visited BuzzTracker and there they were. And you know what? I don’t really care if they’re true. Obama will fail because he reached his public service level of incompetence way back in Altgeld Gardens, that’s why he left the community he was supposed to be organizing high and dry and ran off to law school. He certainly doesn’t seem to have helped anyone as a community organizer/politician. As days go by, he will continue to expose the obvious simply by embodying the truth of his thin resume and will inevitably prove himself to be what he is, a school teacher.
Everything else is just somebody else’s lipstick on a pig.
Randall Kennedy writes another race-baiting article in the Washington Post, entitled The Big What If, asking the hypothetical question, what happens if Barack Obama is defeated in the election? The answer is simple, he loses. Big deal. But Kennedy, of course, does not take that rational position. How could he when the subtitle of his article is: “The hopes of black America ride on his shoulders. But the outcome’s way up in the air”?
Come on, enough. This whole article is based on the proposition that Barack Obama is qualified to be president. He is not. If he were a white man, he’d be considered to be exactly what he is, a pretty unexceptional junior senator. He has been selected, propped up and greased through the nomination for the sole reason that he is black, by people convinced that that fact could be exploited to their benefit. So far, they’ve succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
There is no need to go through Obama’s record, the lack of it speaks for itself. He is being graded on a curve by people afraid to assess him on merit for fear of being labeled “racist.” Yet, the opposite is true, giving him the benefit of unreasonable and unearned doubt is the real height of racist behavior. He is not an Affirmative Action candidate as some have claimed, Affirmative Action supposes that all things being equal, qualified minority applicants must be granted extra consideration in an attempt to level the playing field. Obama’s being given a pass is racial exploitation on a par with extortion.
Kennedy claims that he was born in 1954, the year of Brown vs. The Board of Education. So was I. Raised in Chicago, the Civil Rights struggle was an integral part of my upbringing. Schools, in an effort to integrate, were regularly re-assigned to me because of redlining and “white flight,” dinner conversations were filled with discussions of the nightly news stories of demonstrations, protests, sit-ins, bombings, beatings, hosings, attack dogs and all the other tragedies, successes and failures of the brave men and women putting their lives, and the lives of their families, friends, and sometimes entire neighborhoods and communities on the line in their efforts to affect true equality for me and other children like me. I watched my parents work harder at upward mobility than most people work at their jobs in a lifetime, squeezing every drop out of a series of blue-collar positions, moving from changing neighborhood to changing neighborhood, scrimping and saving, all to afford me the promise of American success that the Movement allowed them to dream of. Their strength, determination and dedication shaped my life and gave me the confidence to think for myself, pursue my dreams and demand to be treated fairly in all my endeavors.
The pathetic attempt to attach the hopes and dreams of black America to Barack Obama’s bandwagon pisses me off. Due to lessons learned at the knee of the Civil Rights Movement, I expect any black person anywhere to be able to represent himself and other black people with pride and dignity, not to run from their blackness in order to lessen any perceived potential offense to those who might be uncomfortable in it’s presence. I am black, deal with it. I bring it with me everywhere I go and wear it proudly. Barack Obama does not.
He deserves no loyalty from black America. He joined one of our churches because he wanted to ingratiate himself with the poor, pitiful people he had appointed himself to save from their wretched, miserable lives. When that religious affiliation became inconvenient to white people, he abandoned it as quickly as he abandoned those South Side residents he had earlier failed to help. He refuses to appear at political functions designed to present and address concerns of the voting bloc he depends on for his political life, doing so only when he can score points by belittling those voters in front of white people, playing out his Oedipal complex at the expense of those he characterizes as “boys.” In his “historic speech” commemorating his “milestone accomplishment” of securing the nomination for president, the man upon whose shoulders he claims to proudly stand wasn’t even mentioned by name. Can Mr. Kennedy imagine Dr. King or any other Civil Rights leader in his lifetime trying not to appear to be “too black” in order to appease white people, for any reason? Would that not be a price too high? What, in such an event, would be the point? What is the point now?
In an America truly free, a black man would not have to compromise his very blackness to succeed. In this current America, most people, black and white, instinctively know this and subliminally resent any man who does so. For their own purposes, many Americans, black and white, pretend that such things must be done because other Americans demand such capitulation. Bullshit. Anybody whose prejudice would preclude them from voting for a black man is not going to vote for him because he pretends not to be. Such a person would only resent him more for his wimpiness.
“The Big What If” is not related to an inevitable Obama loss and the possibility that mass disappointment of black Americans might lead to rash behavior or an across-the-board setback of race relations. The real fear is that a loss would cause the scam to unavoidably be exposed, leading to the disillusionment of all of so-called liberal America. In order to prevent the truth of this Democratic Blaxploitation-gate coming to light, the farce must succeed, or the blame for it’s failure must be placed at the feet of America’s racist past. Otherwise, if the blinders are removed, allowing people to see the reality of the grand-scale manipulation of racial guilt for political gain, people, black and white, just might riot.
Putting a black face, ashamed of it’s blackness, on the appearance of racial conciliation is unacceptable, shameful and wrong. What if Mr Kennedy wanted no part of it and used his voice in a national newspaper to proclaim so?
Hillary Clinton, good little trooper that she is, once again hit the campaign trail for Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, emploring her supporters to vote for him.
“This election is going to be a game-changer,” Clinton said at Lorain County Community College, about 30 miles east of Cleveland. “We have the opportunity to go beyond the failed policies of the last eight years.”
The Washington Post, reporting on the same event, the first of two in Ohio, says Clinton concluded her remarks with this:
“Those who supported me, I ask you to support Barack Obama.”
Nope, can’t do it, Hillary. Doesn’t matter how many times you ask me, either. According to CQ Politics, I am not alone.
Pollster William Arnone, a former Clinton adviser, has found that many of the New York senator’s backers are still at risk of defecting to McCain. He surveyed 328 of Clinton’s “most fervent” supporters during the week of the GOP convention in St. Paul and found that 77 percent planned to vote for Obama, 11 percent back McCain, and the rest are either undecided or plan to stay home.
The article quotes Women Count PAC founder Rosemary Campsano, who says her organization, though they backed Clinton in the primaries, is now not going to endorse anyone.
“Our membership is very skewed in how they are going to go,” Camposano says. “By far most will remain loyal to the Democratic Party, but a lot of women feel the Democrats abandoned women and women’s issues. They are mad enough to abstain, write in Hillary Clinton or vote for McCain.”
Another women’s group mentioned has their own plans:
Meanwhile, another group of Clinton backers, calling themselves Democrats For Principle Before Party, has already bought space for a print ad in the battleground state of Michigan aimed at undermining Obama, and is pledging more to come. “Can the country trust a presidential candidate who is the product of a corrupt process?” asks the ad, which ran in the Lansing State Journal.
They also highlight Heidi Li Feldman’s efforts to have HRC appointed Senate Majority Leader after ousting Harry Reid.
All the energy the group put into winning Clinton a convention vote “is now going to be channeled into making sure the Democratic Party does not inherit such incompetent leadership as we have had to endure this election season,” she says.
Lynette Long, who has chronicled voter fraud in the primaries and caucusses, has a more in-depth look at the issues inherent in women switching to McCain/Palin. She has another one in the Baltimore Sun today.
All of those things are A-OK with me, but joining a group to oppose Obama is not something I feel the need to do. Sure, I pledge allegiance to the principles of the loose coalition of PUMA, but even if there was no Just Say No Deal or Denver Group, I still wouldn’t vote for Obama. That decision has nothing to do with any of those people or groups, or Sarah Palin, or Hillary Clinton, for that matter. Also, I don’t know about other women, but the last thing I need is another scary Roe v. Wade article or lecture. I support a woman’s right to choose wholeheartedly, I just support a voter’s right to an honest choice more. I decided almost two years ago that Barack Obama was an inferior, unacceptable candidate. That’s why I never supported him. Nothing I’ve seen, or anybody has said since, has encouraged me to change my mind. In fact the more I see, the stronger my resolve. So, Hillary, you can ask me to vote for Obama a million more times and the answer will remain the same, no. Not gonna vote for McCain/Palin, either. None of the above, that’s what my vote comes down to.
A couple of months ago, Barack Obama stated that he wanted to create a “national security force” equal in size and funding to the military.
A longer clip of his full Call To Service speech in Colorado Springs , July 2, 2008, with the pertinent quote at approx. 16:42, can be found here. What does this mean?
Only conservative sites seem to question this statement, calling it Stalinesque, but I’m not so sure. I don’t know what the heck to make of it. The fact that these statements do not appear in the prepared text does concern me however. Why not? The Chicago Tribune did report on the statement:
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” he said Wednesday. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
True, the initial red flag was thrown by World Net Daily, then followed up by Hot Air.com, but Savage Politics and No Quarter, along with such diverse sites as Real Rap Talk and Cops Online have weighed in, too. There doesn’t seem to be any real consensus as to the exact nature and meaning of “civilian national security force” or of it’s implications.
Obama provides more insights himself, however in a July 2 interview with Military Times, (video here) printed on it’s website July 8:
I mean, we still have a national security apparatus on the civilian side in the way the State Department is structured and [Agency for International Development] and all these various agencies. That hearkens back to the Cold War. And we need that wing of our national security apparatus to carry its weight. When we talk about reinventing our military, we should reinvent that apparatus as well. We need to be able to deploy teams that combine agricultural specialists and engineers and linguists and cultural specialists who are prepared to go into some of the most dangerous areas alongside our military.
Q: What Secretary Gates has called soft power.
A: Absolutely, but the only problem with soft power is the term itself makes people think it’s not as strong as hard power. And my point is that if we’ve got a State Department or personnel that have been trained just to be behind walls, and they have not been equipped to get out there alongside our military and engage, then we don’t have the kind of national security apparatus that is needed. That has to be planned for; it has to be paid for. Those personnel have to be trained. And they all have to be integrated and that is something that we have not accomplished yet, but that’s going to be what’s increasingly important in our future to make sure that our military has the support that it needs to do what it does the best, which is fight wars.
Is this really what he means by “civilian defense?” If so, why does it need to be funded equally with the military? If he wants to increase the size of the military and raise salaries of servicemen and women (he does) then will his proposed civilian defense budget be on par with the old military budget or the new?
I think that, given the responsibilities that they have, doing a better job of making sure they’re keeping pace with inflation, and their overall pay package allows them to care for their families, I think we can do a much better job than we’re doing right now.
Expand to Meet Military Needs on the Ground: Barack Obama supports plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marines by 27,000 troops. Increasing our end strength will help units retrain and re-equip properly between deployments and decrease the strain on military families.
Obama also mentions civilian participation:
Integrate Military and Civilian Efforts: An Obama administration will build up the capacity of each non-Pentagon agency to deploy personnel and area experts where they are needed, to help move soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines out of civilian roles.
Create a Civilian Assistance Corps (CAC): An Obama administration will set a goal of creating a national CAC of 25,000 personnel. This corps of civilian volunteers with special skill, sets (doctors, lawyers, engineers, city planners, agriculture specialists, police, etc.) would be organized to provide each federal agency with a pool of volunteer experts willing to deploy in times of need at home and abroad.
If this is what Obama is referring to in his Call To Service speech, why scrub the prepared text? Even if there is no Socialist/Communist implication, as the right-wingers seem to suggest, why don’t we hear more about these plans? If there is to be a reliance on volunteers, why the proposed funding?
I’ll be honest, I don’t have a clue as to what all this means. It troubles me that there seems to be an element of subterfuge at work here; whether that is an accurate reflection of Camp O’s motives or a result of right-wing hysteria requires more information in order to decide. For me, the bottom line is, do we really need or want the kind of military/civilian participation Obama’s proposing? And finally, what exactly is he proposing?
Any information, or opinion, or even educated guesses would be appreciated.
Check out the comments of Michelle Obama about 7:33 into this speech at UCLA:
“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual – uninvolved, uninformed.”
He reached the $66 million mark with help from more than a half million new donors.
These are unofficial numbers, of course.
More details about the campaigns’ finance are expected later this week, when their monthly financial reports are due at the Federal Election Commission
So, the numbers aren’t due out until next week, but Camp O felt the need to release the $66 mil from half a mil small donors now. Why? It’s still less than he needs.
Obama’s fundraisers have estimated that he still has to do better in September and October, than the August haul of $66 million, to remain on par with McCain and the Republican National Committee. The RNC has more money to spend on McCain’s behalf than the Democratic Party has to aid Obama.
Reuter’s says that McCain might actually be in better financial shape given his option to accept public financing and the financial and the fundraising prowess of the Republican Party. Obama, on the other hand, will actually have to work for his money:
Despite his prodigious private fundraising, Obama may not have as much of an advantage as he would when it comes to the amount of money he will have available to spend on advertisements and get-out-the vote efforts.
McCain benefits from money contributed to the coffers of the Republican National Committee, which has been more successful at raising money than the Democratic Party.
The need to raise money privately also means Obama needs to take more time off the trail to headline events with donors. On Tuesday, Obama is attending a glitzy Beverly Hills fundraiser that will include a performance by singer-actress Barbra Streisand, a long-time Democratic activist. That event could be one of the biggest Democratic fundraisers of the election cycle.
The Obama campaign said its cash on hand at the end of August was more than $77 million and that its total number of donors is now 2.5 million.
So, Obama raised $66 million in August, but he only has $77 million on hand now. That means out of the gazillion total he’s raised so far, he’s already spent most of it. There’s also the question, at least in my mind, who are these “small donors?” Where do they come from? How much have they donated? How much of the $66 mil comes from large donors? Unfortunately, the last question is the only one Obama has to answer. The rest of these 2.5 million donors can remain forever anonymous, sending 5, 10, 20 dollar donations forever and we’ll never know any details about them. I guess, like the caucus system, Barack Obama’s practices highlight the need for campaign finance reform, too.
So, to recap, Obama has spent about, what, 90% of a gazillion dollars (okay, I’m guessing here, but you get my drift) from 2.5 million donors and he’s kinda tied in the polls. I wonder how much it’s going to cost to actually win. And where, oh where, will all those new, unnamed “small donors” come from?
By forgetting that if black Democrats are encouraged to vote for Obama on the basis of race, without directly addressing their issues, the tactic could be exploited to encourage women to vote for a woman on the basis of gender.
Little did I know that there was already a hotbed of PUMA activity elsewhere in the blogosphere. Over at Riverdaughter’s “The Confluence” — inspired by the very same RBC ruling — a commenter known as “SM” (now “SM77″) had shouted out that very acronym, and Riverdaughter leapt into action with “The PUMA Unparty.” Soon thereafter, their fellow ‘Conflucian’, Darragh Murphy, would set “PUMA Pac” into motion.
I, too, have written of my memories of PUMA’s birth. On August 24, I wrote a post laying out the reasons I feel Obama to be an illegitimate candidate. A quick trip through my archives or through the archives of any number of Just Say No Deal or NoBama Network will tell the same story through different lenses. In the face of such unanimity of opinion, its hard to imagine a compelling counter-argument from the DeaNC. For the record, I do not support the NoBama Network, it seems too much like a Republican plant to me. That being said, the actions of the DeaNC are solely responsible for creating such a rich environment for exploitation by Republicans, if that is indeed the case. If it is not, I humbly apologize.
The fact that the DeaNC created fertile grounds for Republican pickin’s is borne out by the content of the other aforementioned article, this one published in the UK’s Times Online, highlighting the migration of women to Sarah Palin:
Jessica Goral had pretty much made up her mind two weeks ago: she was going to vote for Barack Obama. Then John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running-mate.
“She empowers a lot of women,” said Mrs Goral, a mother of two in Macomb County – a national bellwether in the battleground state of Michigan and an area rich in white, working-class swing voters who will play an important role in deciding the election in November.
edit
If Mr Obama should be in any doubt how gravely the vice-presidential nomination of the Governor of Alaska has imperilled his White House ambitions, then a day spent in Macomb County will make this clear: white women who voted for John Kerry in 2004 are suddenly deserting the Democratic Party.
Another of the original Just Say No Deal websites, HireHeels.com provided the links to these 2 stories in their comments section. Diane Mantavoulos, one of it’s founders, has been one of the most visible faces of the PUMA movement as well as one of it’s hardest workers.
While the DeaNC might want to wish away the evidence of it’s self-inflicted wounds that PUMA represents, the truth is that the PUMA movement only represents the online presence of a national sentiment. No matter what the polls say, there is no doubt within the PUMAsphere that Barack Obama will lose, primarily because so many diverse entities are so fervently dedicated to make it happen. The DeaNC shot itself, the only merciful thing to do is help it die without dignity.
What issues do John McCain and Sarah Palin support? I didn’t really know so I took a look around their official website to get a feel for where they’re coming from.
Roe v. Wade:
John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench.
Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe v. Wade, returning the abortion question to the individual states. The difficult issue of abortion should not be decided by judicial fiat.
However, the reversal of Roe v. Wade represents only one step in the long path toward ending abortion. Once the question is returned to the states, the fight for life will be one of courage and compassion – the courage of a pregnant mother to bring her child into the world and the compassion of civil society to meet her needs and those of her newborn baby. The pro-life movement has done tremendous work in building and reinforcing the infrastructure of civil society by strengthening faith-based, community, and neighborhood organizations that provide critical services to pregnant mothers in need. This work must continue and government must find new ways to empower and strengthen these armies of compassion. These important groups can help build the consensus necessary to end abortion at the state level. As John McCain has publicly noted, “At its core, abortion is a human tragedy. To effect meaningful change, we must engage the debate at a human level.”
Doesn’t seem to be much room for debate in that viewpoint, does it?
Barack Obama understands that abortion is a divisive issue, and respects those who disagree with him. However, he has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as President. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in that case.
“Suppose for example you’re a voter. And you’ve got candidate X and candidate Y. Candidate X agrees with you on everything, but you don’t think that person can deliver on anything. Candidate Y disagrees with you on half the issues, but you believe that on the other half, the candidate will be able to deliver. For whom would you vote?”
“When I’m President, I will appoint judges to our courts who understand that Roe v. Wade isn’t just binding legal precedent, it is the touchstone of our reproductive freedom, the embodiment of our most fundamental rights, and no one – no judge, no governor, no Senator, no President – has the right to take it away.”
Oh, man, this election gets weirder and weirder by the second. Now some enterprising conservative entrepreneurs claim they had “no idea” their politically satirical “Obama Waffle” mix just might be racially offensive. What planet do they think we’re living on?
Values Voter Summit organizers cut off sales of Obama Waffles boxes on Saturday, saying they had not realized the boxes displayed “offensive material.” The summit and the exhibit hall where the boxes were sold had been open since Thursday afternoon.
Are you kidding me?
While Obama Waffles takes aim at Obama’s politics by poking fun at his public remarks and positions on issues, it also plays off the old image of the pancake-mix icon Aunt Jemima, which has been widely criticized as a demeaning stereotype. Obama is portrayed with popping eyes and big, thick lips as he stares at a plate of waffles and smiles broadly.
Placing Obama in Arab-like headdress recalls the false rumor that he is a follower of Islam, though he is actually a Christian.
On the back of the box, Obama is depicted in stereotypical Mexican dress, including a sombrero, above a recipe for “Open Border Fiesta Waffles” that says it can serve “4 or more illegal aliens.” The recipe includes a tip: “While waiting for these zesty treats to invade your home, why not learn a foreign language?”
Meanwhile, Free Republic re-printed a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago by Gary Fields and Jonathan Kaufman entitled, What If Obama Loses? that suggests such a result might trigger 60’s style rioting in the black community. The Freepers got it from The Citizen.com. The first quote comes from African American talk show hostess, Bev Smith:
Black talk-show hosts and black-themed Web sites are being flooded with callers and bloggers reflecting a nervousness—and anger—over the campaign. Monday night, Bev Smith, a nationally syndicated black talk-show host in Pittsburgh, devoted her entire three-hour show to the question: “If Obama doesn’t win, what will you think?”
“My audience is upset,” she said. “Some people said they would be so angry it would be reminiscent of the [1960s] riots—that is how despondent they would be.”
Oh, please. Everybody needs to just chill on the bullshit. If Obama loses it will be because he sucks. Period. Why a candidate who is only black when convenient, preferring to pretend to be “colorless” the rest of the time, would stir passions in the black community is as much an invention of Caucasian manipulated media narratives of a mythical “color-blind” Utopian society as is the inevitability of large-scale looting if he, as he should, loses. That black people would gleefully participate, yet unwittingly assist, this kind of clairvoyant rabble rousing is equally irresponsible and just as worrisome.
Cut it the fuck out.
Besides, how many of America’s riots were racially motivated? If we rioted every time we were disappointed, America would have burned to the ground a long time ago.
With a deadly hurricane aimed at Texas, Barack Obama cancelled his appearance on Saturday Night Live this evening, spokesman Jen Psaki in a statement.
“In the light of the unfolding crisis in Texas, Senator Obama has decided it is no longer appropriate to appear on Saturday Night Live tomorrow evening,” she said.
Gee, I’m thinking it might have been very appropriate to appeal for help for Hurricane Ike victims in front of such a large audience. But, hey, what do I know? He did appeal to his supporters for help at a rally in Manchester, N.H. that his previously also-scheduled-to-attend running mate, Joe Biden (who?) didn’t:
Barack Obama urged his supporters Saturday to help victims of the monstrous Hurricane Ike but also vowed to work for all hard-pressed Americans suffering “quiet storms” in their own lives.
edit
“Even as we think about this enormous hurricane that’s moving its way through the Gulf, one of the things I’ve learned over the last 19 months is that a lot of people are going through their own trials and their own tribulations,” Obama added.
“There are a lot of quiet storms that are taking place throughout America,” he said pointing to rising job losses, home seizures and a healthcare crisis — to all of which, he said, McCain had no answers.
Though damage is widespread, the latest reports are that it will be less than feared. Obama has said he will honor the severity of the situation by refraining from attacks on his rival, John McCain, says Ben Smith:
AFP reports that campaign aides say they will “scale back his savage attacks on McCain of recent days to avoid a show of overt partisanship in Ike’s potentially tragic trail.”
Huh?
What will Obama do instead of SNL?
Obama planned to return to Chicago after the New Hampshire rally and spend the rest of the weekend at home.
Barack Obama put out an “attack” ad that should be pulled immediately. Not only because it is insensitive and wrong; because it is stupid. It is also the wimpiest “attack” ad ever produced and shown, and everyone associated with it should be fired.
That being said, it is also insensitive and wrong. The ad was meant to demean John McCain’s lack of internet expertise, thereby casting him as “out of touch” with the approximately 72.5% of American internet users. If that was the only problem, it would still be a big one since McCain doesn’t have to personally operate a computer to have access to it’s resources.
But that’s not the only problem, not by a long shot. Those aforementioned internet users will be Obama’s undoing, even the ones who don’t necessarily support McCain. As it stands now, the political blogosphere is comprised of two main factions, those who hate Obama and those who don’t. No more Republican vs. Democrat or left vs. right, it has now come down to pro-Obama or anti-Obama. Period.
McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He’s an avid fan – Ted Williams is his hero – but he can’t raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.
Then, there’s this New York Times piece where McCain explains his internet relationship:
Q: What websites if any do you look at regularly?
Mr. McCain: Brooke and Mark show me Drudge, obviously, everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics, sometimes.
(Mrs. McCain and Ms. Buchanan both interject: “Meagan’s blog!”)
Mr. McCain: Excuse me, Meagan’s blog. And we also look at the blogs from Michael and from you that may not be in the newspaper, that are just part of your blog.
Q: But do you go on line for yourself?
Mr. McCain: They go on for me. I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need – including going to my daughter’s blog first, before anything else.
Q: Do you use a blackberry or email?
Mr. McCain: No
Mark Salter: He uses a BlackBerry, just ours.
Mr. McCain: I use the Blackberry, but I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail. I read e-mails all the time, but the communications that I have with my friends and staff are oral and done with my cell phone. I have the luxury of being in contact with them literally all the time. We now have a phone on the plane that is usable on the plane, so I just never really felt a need to do it. But I do – could I just say, really – I understand the impact of blogs on American politics today and political campaigns. I understand that. And I understand that something appears on one blog, can ricochet all around and get into the evening news, the front page of The New York Times. So, I do pay attention to the blogs. And I am not in any way unappreciative of the impact that they have on entire campaigns and world opinion.
Six months ago, no one would have pegged McCain as the most cybersavvy of this year’s crop of candidates. At 63, he is the oldest of the bunch and because of his war injuries, he is limited in his ability to wield a keyboard. But McCain’s job as chairman of the Senate commerce committee forced him to learn about the Internet early on, and young Web entrepreneurs such as Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos fascinate him. Well before he announced his exploratory committee, McCain had assimilated the notion that the Web could be vital to the kind of insurgent, anti-establishment campaign he wanted to run. In December 1998, he sent his longtime political aide Wes Gullett to Minnesota to study Jesse Ventura’s successful gubernatorial campaign, which was the first to use the Web in an effective and innovative way. “Wes went up to Minnesota and talked to Ventura’s people,” McCain told reporters on the Straight Talk Express yesterday. “That’s really where we got the idea.”
Most of these anti-Obama bloggers come to the conclusion that Team Obama “elitism” is the cause of it’s latest miscalculation, but I beg to differ. Sure, they’re elitist, clueless and more than a little stupid, but that’s not how they got into this mess. The simple Google search so many people recommend as a solution-in-hindsight would not have worked. In fact, such a search just might have been the tour guide down this particularly unfortunate garden path.
Site after Google site mocks McCain’s lack of internet savvy. Condescending, rude pro-Obama bloggers paint him as an out-of-touch dinosaur unfit to lead America in the 21st century. Even the “ladies” on The View tried that tack this morning. Didn’t really work, McCain said if he needed help using technology to reach out to young people, he’d ask his kids. Besides, the Obama ad was out by the time the show aired, anyway.
You’d think that since Google is one of Obama’s biggest donors, they could have pulled his coat about the huge pile he was creating for himself to step in with both feet. I mean, even though you would have had to search pretty hard to find these debunking stories on Google before the anti-Obama bloggers responded (which leads a reasonable person to consider the possibility of a clever setup by the Straight Talk Express) a well-timed phone call from Camp O to Mountain View should have done it. Too bad nobody thought of it. Like the lipstick/pig/hockey mom flap, whether they intended to be viciously bitchy or not doesn’t matter at all. They deserve to go down because they should have known better.
This is one of the saddest stories I’ve written about since I started this blog. Nobody is paying any attention to Joe Biden. Now, I mentioned just yesterday that nobody was paying attention to Joe Biden, but according to CNN, absolutely nobody is paying any attention to Joe Biden.
Sen. Joe Biden faces a paradox: He offers the most unfiltered contact with the media of any of the big four. But he’s the least likely to be covered.
Poor Joe. It’s all Sarah Palin’s fault.
On Wednesday, Palin’s staff told the press corps traveling with the governor her plane had become too heavy, and asked for volunteers to fly commercial.
There’s plenty of room on Biden’s plane. At one point this week, only six reporters climbed aboard. But they got one thing the press traveling with Palin didn’t: access to the candidate.
Don’t worry, Joe, I’ll keep telling people you want out. I don’t have a lot of readers, but maybe if we both say it often enough, somebody will listen to one of us. Hillary would have been a better pick.
Sarah Palin told Charlie Gibson that Barack Obama will live to regret not choosing Hillary Clinton as his running mate. Okaaaay?
“I think he’s regretting not picking her now, I do. What, what determination, and grit, and even grace through some tough shots that were fired her way — she handled those well,” the Alaska governor told Charles Gibson in her third and final exclusive interview with ABC News.
Wow! Clearly, Obama has been making major mistakes, the first of which was to reject Hillary. The over-the-top “I’m the Messiah” stuff and the grandiose backdrops haven’t sold well either, except with impressionable liberal college kids.
Child, it’s getting dee-e-ee-ee-eep! Everybody in the world seems to be talking about it. Joe Biden even came out and said he even thinks HRC would have been a better pick. Ain’t that something?
Speaking at rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday, Mr Biden said: “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice-president of the United States of America. Let’s get that straight.”
He continued: “She’s a truly close personal friend…quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me. But she’s first rate, I mean that sincerely, she’s first rate.”
If you’ve only been paying as much attention to the election as say, you would to a ringing telephone in the next apartment while you’re on the toilet, you would still know that Barack Obama’s campaign message is that he’s not John McCain. John McCain is George Bush. Got it? Good. Now, you’d think Camp O had been perfectly clear enough on that score, but noooooo, some whiny old wimpy downticket Dems, worried about their own asses, want Obie to stop with the wussy “hopey, changey” stuff that’s got him this far, and get tough. Happy to oblige, this is what the O Team came up with.
Enjoy.
Of course, old Johnny Mack has an attack ad of his own, doncha know? I don’t know, maybe Obie should watch wrestling or something for tips. Or hire McCain’s pr guys. This is what a tough ad looks like.
Well it’s come to this. With Barack Obama’s recent less-than-stellar performance and sinking poll numbers worrying the hell out of Democrats and the Obamedia everywhere, some concerned hip hoppers are launching a new get out the vote campaign. According to a press release dated today, Vote4BamBam is the latest grassroots effort to mobilize urban voters.
That ought to fix it.
September 12, 2008 – Young Hip Hoppers have banded together to initiate the interactive ‘Vote For BamBam’ Voter Registration and Election Awareness grassroots campaign in support of Senator Barack Obama’s bid for the Presidency. The campaign is headed by the popular hip hop entrepreneur and social activist Roc Cayard. According to Cayard, “Since the launch of this campaign, one of the most disturbing discoveries that our volunteers have encountered in almost every major urban city is that a large percentage of the young adults that are eligible to vote are not even aware of their respective states voter registration deadline. Aside from that, at least a good 30 percent of them are not even aware of the exact date of the actual presidential election”.
Okay, let’s register all the young people who don’t care enough to care. That should make the nervous down-ticket Dems feel much better. They didn’t think of that. They want the original, “I’m Not The Other Guy” candidate to say it louder, in a really mean voice.
Senator Barack Obama will intensify his assault against Senator John McCain, with new television advertisements and more forceful attacks by the candidate and surrogates beginning Friday morning, as he confronts an invigorated Republican presidential ticket and increasing nervousness in the Democratic ranks.
Oh, man, you can’t make this stuff up. Popcorn, anyone?
The candidates running for president and vice-president pretended to take the day off from campaigning to honor the memory of the victims claimed on 9/11/2001, but they really didn’t.
Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama made ground zero their common ground for one rare day, free of politics and infused with memory. Putting their partisan contest on a respectful hold, they walked together Thursday into the great pit where the World Trade Center towers once stood and, as one, honored the dead from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Since neither candidate ran ads today, the “non-campaigning” thing holds up. In an alternate universe kind of way. However, at a televised community service forum, they did mention campaign stuff. I guess if 9/11 victims and their families attend, it doesn’t violate the “no-campaigning” thing.
Republican John McCain declined to disavow Thursday the tough criticism by his campaign of his Democratic opponent’s experience as a community organizer, saying politics is “tough business” even as he praised Barack Obama’s service.
“Our campaign from the beginning has been about changing government,” he said, recalling some great accomplishments of American government: Civil rights legislation, the interstate highway system, and the National Park system.
Obama would, he said, “transform Washington” and “make government cool again.”
“This is not about politics today,” Biden said, seated on a stage alongside five first responders. “This is about remembering our fallen heroes and remembering that there are a whole lot of people like the people I’m sitting with here today and many of you who will and are ready to God forbid respond to anything that would happen.”
Not about politics, huh? Suuuurrre, we all went to an American Legion hall today, Joe. Joe also was supposed to show up at the forum, but it seems like either nobody noticed, or nobody cared, since nobody mentioned him. Sarah Palin, meanwhile, spent the day sending her son off to the military at a “non-campaign” deployment ceremony.
“We’re going to miss you,” she said at Fort Wainwright, a large Army installation near Fairbanks. “We can’t help it. We’re going to miss you.”
“With our prayers and with great pride, we are sending off these brave men and women,” she said.
Since this appearance had been scheduled before she was tapped as McCain’s veep pick, she deserves some slack. Besides, she was sending her kid off to war, for Goodness’ sakes, or else she’d be 9/11 sham scum in my book, too, just like the fellas. On second thought, her Charlie Gibson interviewwas taped shortly before the ceremony, so maybe she is 9/11 sham scum, after all.
“I predict that Sen. Obama will win and win pretty handily,” he said.
Obama added: “You can take it from the president of the United States. He knows a little something about politics.”
Let’s just say, this is the first time I’ve disagreed with the former president. Mainly because when he was in office I didn’t pay much attention to politics at all. It was the 2000 contest that began to pique my interest. Something never seemed quite right about George Bush to me, and I desperately wanted him to lose. Both times. He didn’t, so, here we are now.
Sure, I was aware of Bill Clinton as president. To tell you the truth, what I knew about him, I liked. It wasn’t necessarily his politics, though; I’m still no political maven and was about 100 times less so back then. No, it was his “aw shucks” demeanor, his “two-fer” candidacy, his gay and lesbian advocacy and his promise of health care reform that got me. And, to be perfectly honest, I just liked the guy.
I never understood the rabid Republican anti- anything Clinton stance, either. Okay, the homophobia and fear of real reform of the health care industry I get, but the “Hillary hatred” always seemed over the top. What was so bad about an Alan Alda, Phil Donahue-ish marital stance being representative of American manhood? Hillary always seemed more than competent enough to justify it, in fact, she always came across as the real “power-behind-the-throne.”
Everything surrounding Bill Clinton’s presidency seemed over-hyped to me. His “Sister Souljah” moment could probably have been handled better, but so could Sister Souljah’s statements that set off the media firestorm in the first place. The media was also being pretty irresponsible at the time, if memory serves. Gays should be allowed to serve equally in the military, bullets kill them just as dead as they kill straight people, so why discriminate when enemy fire doesn’t? The fact that every American deserves affordable health care is so obvious that any objection has to carry an ulterior motivation. Bottom line is, I never understood why Bill Clinton got so much grief.
Okay, so he had an affair or two, or twenty. Not my business. It certainly wasn’t the first time in my living memory that such a thing happened. Why were Clinton’s transgressions impeachable when none of the Kennedy brothers’ were? Quite the opposite, in fact, their extra-marital activities were held up to the world as sure fire-signs of All-American male virility. Why was Hillary Clinton’s defense of her husband lamentable when Jackie Kennedy’s tacit approval was laudable? When JFK’s mistress sang him “Happy Birthday” on national TV, it was a ratings bonanza even though the first lady, for some reason, urgently felt the need to take that opportunity to take the kids on an imperative horse-riding trip. Was Kennedy’s fondness for movie stars and glamor girls enough to excuse his behavior, while Clinton’s more “ordinary” tastes were not?
Who knows? Anyway, I never thought he should have been impeached for a marital indiscretion. And don’t give me the “he lied” bullshit. There never should have been an official interrogation on the subject in the first place. Besides, what would you expect any married man or woman facing that question to say? Oh, sure? The Clinton witch-hunt by the Republicans is a big part of the reason I’m skeptical of that party to this day. My memories of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Oliver North and Clarence Thomas, among others, don’t help allay my concerns. Not to mention the Bush administrations, all three of them.
Fast forward to today’s meeting between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton says Obama will win handily. That may or may not be true, but Clinton’s implication that Obama should win, if it exists, is what bothers me. Yes, Obama “beat” Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Right. Whatever. But it’s not my disappointment that HRC didn’t win that motivates me now, it’s the fact that Barack Obama did that gets my jaws tight. There’s a difference.
I wish I could support this black man for president. His nomination is indeed a milestone. But I don’t want a government made in Obama’s image; I’m not even sure what that would be. I don’t want a president so racially cavalier that he will exploit black people when it benefits him and ignore them completely for the same reasons. A gaffe-prone, seemingly weak, wishy-washy, scared to make waves kind of guy is not my ideal first black president. Why can’t he be decisive? Why can’t he have principles? Why can’t he get angry? Of course he could and should; Obama’s inherent personality flaws drive the media and campaign created pr narrative that he shouldn’t.
So, for all those who want to tell me that I owe allegiance to Barack Obama because we’re both black, screw you. I’d rather have a good president than a black one. And to those who claim that now that the race is down to the Democrat, Obama vs. the Republican, McCain, I should vote for the Democrat by default, screw you, too. I don’t have to vote for either one, there are third party choices and I could always exercise my right as an American to decline to participate at all in an election I feel to be non-representative. Lastly, to you, Mr. Clinton, if you are indeed suggesting that Barack Obama should win, handily or otherwise, then…well…let’s just say I strongly disagree, and leave it at that, okay?
And, oh, Bill? I hate to break it to you this late in the game, but in my opinion, you’re no Hillary.
“I’m not sure I’d advise everybody to run for president,” Obama said with a smile. “I’ve been sleeping out of hotel rooms for two years now and I miss my kids.”
He also told them that at their age he was a “goof-off.” No mention of the “Junkie. Pothead” thing, though. Meanwhile, Joe Biden said Hillary Clinton “might have been” a better VP pick. You get the feeling these guys know they’re in way over their heads and are ready to pack it in?
We can only hope.
Maybe if these two would just give it up, we could talk the “better pick” than either of them into rescuing us all from this increasingly farcical travesty of a campaign.
“You can put lipstick on a pig,” he said as the crowd cheered. “It’s still a pig.”
Whether Obama was talking about Palin directly is immaterial, the timing sucks. Either he was being sneakily sexist, or he’s stupid. On The David Letterman show he explained:
“Keep in mind that, technically had I meant it this way –- she would be the lipstick!”
“The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig,” Obama says. “I mean, just following the logic of this illogical situation.”
Logic? No, Senator O, if logic were involved, you’d take your buddy Joe and go home. Leave the politics to the grown-ups. They’re always the “better pick,” and they usually know exactly what to say. Surprisingly, I do agree with you on one thing, though, B.O.
Seven out of 10 voters (69%) remain convinced that reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and this year by a nearly five-to-one margin voters believe they are trying to help Barack Obama.
According to Rasmussen Reports Dems don’t think they’re trying to help the other guy either.
Interestingly, while 83% of Republican voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama, 19% of Democrats agree, one percentage point higher than the number of Democrats who believe they are trying to help McCain. Unaffiliated voters by a 53% to 10% margin see reporters trying to help Obama.
Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats say most reporters are providing unbiased coverage in the current presidential campaign, but only 20% of unaffiliateds and nine percent (9%) of Republicans agree.
So, there you have it, proof that Obama supporters are delusional.
Barack Obama’s vice-presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., Wednesday said that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, might have been a better pick for the position than him.
At a rally in Nashua, New Hampshire, a man in the audience told Biden how glad he was that Obama picked him over Hillary “not because she’s a woman, but because look at the things she did in the past.”
“Make no mistake about this,” Biden responded. “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Let’s get that straight. She’s a truly close personal friend, she is qualified to be president of the United States of America, she’s easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me. But she’s first rate, I mean that sincerely, she’s first rate, so let’s get that straight.”
Spokesman Ben Porritt offered this response from the McCain camp: “Barack Obama’s most important decision of this election and Biden – the candidate he selects – suggests himself that he wasn’t the right man for the job and that Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice. Biden certainly has a credible viewpoint on this.”
Duh.
And, ouch.
*This is the only clip I could find of the event so far. Depending on your point of view, either ignore the sarcastic laughter, or enjoy it.
“John McCain says he’s about change,” Obama said, before listing issues on which he said Arizona Senator McCain had the same position as Bush. “That’s not change. That’s just calling the same thing something different. You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.”
Obama-One-Note has been hyping “change” his whole career. The sad thing is, he’s sincere. Obama seriously believes that if Washington/Chicago/The World would just “change,” he and others could “get things done.” Unfortunately, whether he wins or loses, he’s going to find out that’s not how things work.
His “community organizing” days should have taught him that lesson. Though I left Chicago a hundred years ago, it seems, even I know better than that. Nobody wants somebody to come to them and tell them that if they would just do things his way, everything would be cool. Anyone who tries that approach will likely find himself talking to the hand, then the back, then an empty room. What people in Chicago expect of “community organizers” is for them to be “a guy who knows a guy who can pay a guy” to do stuff for them. The natural response of a Chicagoan to a suggestion that something can be fixed is, “how much is it going to cost me?” The reason they expect this is simple, it works.
The famous “we don’t want nobody nobody sent” line ascribed to Chicago politics is true. When you’re looking for somebody to grease the system on your behalf, you want to be able to trust them. Plus, if it doesn’t work out, you need to have a name of somebody to go to who can make things right.
This is how all politics work. People in Chicago and Boston, Philadelphia and New York simply see no reason to pretend otherwise. Yet, upon meeting this reality, instead of adjusting his impractical ideologies to the process, Obama refused to play along while stubbornly insisting that his failure was the fault of the system. The system exists because the system works. Obama’s failure in it is his own.
Sure, he has had to compromise his idealized principles along the way, but only to the extent that it moves him along the path he’s chosen to prove himself right. Sooner or later though, he’s going to have to adjust. As Steely Dan said in their hit Show Biz Kids,
“While the poor people sleepin’ with the shade on the light
While the poor people sleepin’ all the stars come out at night
Stars, snakes and all manner of predators work best in the dark. While everyone benefits if the predatory beasts are fed, no one wants to actually see them feed. Or take a chance on becoming dinner themselves. Rather than being duped, the “poor people” are active participants in the process; as long as the Washington snakes are making their sausage in the dark, the “poor people” can sleep easy until they need to “find a guy.”
To be sure, there are things that need to change. As Hillary Clinton discovered when initially attracted to the Alinsky-style organizing Obama seems to embrace, sometimes its more practical to make small changes to the system from within. Obama on the other hand, seems hell-bent on working up the system for the purpose of over-hauling it, stripping it to it’s bare bones then remaking it in his image. The flaw in this ointment is that while he may have the best interests of the “poor people” in mind, the “movement” required is not being driven by them, it is being manufactured and exploited by Obama. Thus his “people powered” government plans of public service, including civillian defense are likely to be met with the same hand, back, empty room sequence his small scale organizing did. After all, if I’m going to do all the work, what do I need you for?
America, including black America, is not eager for a revolution of the type Obama envisions. Letting the black guy from Chicago run things for a while is about as much “change” as they’re looking for. If Obama was really smart, he’d try to be “the guy” and stop trying to “change” the “poor people” who are looking for “a guy of their own” to help them while they sleep “with the shade on the light”.
Be the star, Obie, stop trying to bring the light.
Yesterday, facing questions about Barack Obama’s shrinking poll numbers, Camp O went into full “We ain’t ‘fraid of no polls!” mode:
“The notion that people are swinging back and forth in the span of a few weeks or a few days this wildly generally isn’t borne out,” Obama told reporters during a campaign stop in Riverside, Ohio.
David Plouffe, responding to a Washington Post reporter about the WaPo/ABC News poll indicating white women were abandoning his boss in droves, went on the attack:
“Your poll is wrong.”
It remains to be seen whether the WaPo/ABC poll, along with all the other polls showing a dip are wrong. But there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that the Obama forces are scared. And rightfully so. Sarah Palin is a nightmare of the Obama camp’s making. For some reason, it’s taken them and the media this long to realize what any PUMA could have told them months ago: since white women have never liked him very much, this is what you could expect without Hillary Clinton on the ticket.
Quinnipiac University Polling Institute Assistant Director Peter A. Brown said the Obama campaign is fooling itself if it discounts the importance of the problem. “This isn’t about Hillary; it’s about Obama’s problem with white women voters,” he said. “Hillary won about 10 million votes from women voters in the Democratic primaries — there are 52 million women voting in the general election.”
Like most frightened animals, Team O has predictably lashed out at both the source of their fear and those who call them on it. Like most frightened animals in this predicament, they’re apt to make potentially fatal mistakes.
Today, Obama fell into the trap of trying to extricate himself from a trap by yelling at the trap. Never works:
Speaking at a high school in Norfolk, Obama took a few moments to address what he calls “the made-up controversy” of the day, Amie Parnes reports.
Obama said the McCain campaign moved to “seize an innocent remark and take it out of context because they knew it’s catnip for the news media.”
Of course, The Mac Attack was just waiting to pounce:
“Barack Obama can’t campaign with schoolyard insults and then try to claim outrage at the tone of the campaign. His talk of new politics is as empty as his campaign trail promises, and his record of bucking his party and reaching across the aisle simply doesn’t exist.”
Speaking on the House floor, Tennessee Rep Steve Cohen sought to defend recent attacks over Obama’s stint as a community organizer by picking up a recent blogger refrain, that “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus.”
Al Capone and the Black Panthers were community organizers, too.
Long, long ago, in the days of black and white TV, aired a classic episode of I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball, with guest star Harpo Marx. The “mirror routine” they performed was a tribute to an even more classic scene from the Marx Brothers’ movie “Duck Soup.” We are living in a real-life political replay of this comedic gem, where one character befuddles another by imitating his/her every move, this time starring Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.
The premise of the skit is that the character being imitated (Obama) can’t quite figure out what’s real. Is the image replicating his movement a true reflection, or some kind of prank?
In this case, it’s both.
Sarah Palin makes an excellent Harpo. She knows she doesn’t have to say anything, she just has to be. As long as she stays in Obama’s mirror, everything he does becomes comical. She’s not him, but as his mirror image, she might as well be.
The beauty of the skit is that once the imitated character (Groucho/Harpo/Obama) buys into the farce, there’s no escape. Even when he does something unexpected, the Harpo/Palin character simply scrambles to catch up, further messing with her rival’s head. Unless the mirror image gives up the gag, or an outside force interferes, the laughs just keep on coming.
Palin and her Republican scriptwriters show no signs of letting up. They have successfully cast Obama in the hapless funnyman-in-the-mirror role, and no matter whether he catches on or not, he’s at their mercy until they let him off the hook. And since Camp O’s options to flip the script are now as limited as their imaginations, there’s not much left for us voters to do but sit back with a bowl of popcorn and a beer and let the hilarity ensue.
Everybody in the world wants Barack Obama to be president, except me. At least that’s what a BBC poll seems to say.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may be struggling to nudge ahead of his Republican rival in polls at home, but people across the world want him in the White House, a BBC poll said on Wednesday.
All 22 countries covered in the poll would prefer to see Obama elected U.S. president ahead of Republican John McCain. And in 17 of the 22 nations, people expect relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world to improve if Obama wins.
Y’all can have him if you pick him up by tomorrow, as far as I’m concerned. Bill O, on the other hand says Obie needs to pick better friends.
Was Barack Obama talking about Sarah Palin when he said “lipstick on a pig?” Maybe not, ’cause let’s face it, even if you put lipstick on a barcauda, it still hurts when she takes a chunk outta that a**.
Besides, sometimes even the most innocent comments can be taken out of context.
Face it, Barack, you’re toast. Running as a gimmick in Howard Dean’s revenge scheme might have seemed like a good idea in the beginning, but it was always doomed to fail. Sure, it got you through the early primaries and caucuses, but it faded pretty quickly, and by the convention, you were really dragging ass. If it wasn’t for Dean’s maniacally desperate need to prove himself worthy (a nearly impossible task,) along with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi’s desire to prove themselves relevant (equally undoable) and Donna Brazile’s bet with her BFF, Karl Rove, you never would have even been invited to Denver. To be fair, the self-interests of John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and James Clyburn played a role too, but it wasn’t as significant as even they would like to believe.
All the polls show you spiraling downward and the word on the street is that your fundraising is lagging. Whether the abandonment by the early Republican mischief makers you and Dean so obviously exploited is now playing enough of a major role in your imminent demise to be definitive, and/or other equally devastating miscalculations by you and your crew are to blame, the bottom line is, you’re screwed.
Being black when convenient works to an extent, but it’s not sufficient to win the big game. The truth is, there are people who will vote for you because you’re black and probably an equal number who won’t for the same reason. However, that’s never been the sole reason you can’t win, and the new developments in the contest have nullified any imagined advantage you might have had in that regard.
You’ve been played. See, the “bro’s before ‘ho’s” mentality is wrong on so many levels that if even one of those levels comes into play, you lose. Too bad that now they all are. Hillary beat you, Barack. You, I and everyone else who’s been paying attention knows that. For one thing, there are just more “‘ho’s” than “bro’s.” And to make bad matters worse, at least some of the “‘ho’s” come from the “bro” side. That’s one problem. Another is, McCain, that savvy old pro, along with his team, knows the game, too, and by picking Sarah Palin, he steals some of your “‘ho’s” and gives some of your racist foes a convenient place to park their racism. See, they don’t have to wear the big “R” on their cowboy hats to vote against you. They can plaster the big “F U” of feminist understanding proudly across their chests.
So, yeah, Palin’s a gimmick, too. But unlike you, where a lot of people in your party really, really don’t like you, primarily for the way you’ve played the game, her side sees her as the ace in the hole that trumps you. They love that. And as for those “bro’s” you thought you could count on, some of them are not going to be there for you, either. See, you’re not really there for them and they know that. You put them down, call them “Pookie;” lazy boys who can’t be depended upon to man up to their responsibilities, and believe it or not, a lot of them plain don’t like that. Go figure. Just the fact that you would exploit the “bro” thing subliminally rankles, too, Barack. Black men usually don’t even refer to each other that way. I’ve never heard it, and I’ve been black longer than you. The word is “bruh.” The fact that you and your t-shirt making cronies don’t know that, may seem like a small thing, but it speaks volumes about on whose behalf you put black people down.
Oh, yeah, bruh, you’re gonna lose. And racism nor sexism will be the cause. Those two gimmicks cancel each other out in the long run. The reason you don’t have a prayer is because you and your “sell-out-the-base-for-a-pipe-dream” crew just aren’t as good at the game as the other guys. Clinton offered you the best deal going early on; her running mate. Sure-fire win. No gimmick from the other side plays against that dynamic ticket. But you and your boyz got greedy enough to convince yourselves you were not only better than the other teams you would face, but that you were better than you actually are. That’s clearly delusional thinking on the part of people who can’t even do basic math. “Bro’s” vs. “ho’s?” “Ho’s” win, hands down.
The leaders of a women’s political organization that launched earlier this year to support Hillary Clinton are speaking out against what they say are examples of media sexism toward Sarah Palin and urging members to tell the press corps “to back off.”
A: Because they’d like to see a woman elected to high office.
The group notes, however, that they do not approve of Palin’s politics. ”We cannot pretend that Governor Palin meets any standard of progressive politics or social values,” Camposano writes.
Unlike other feminist organizations which have taken up against Palin because of her conservative views, however, WomenCount says they’ll ”work to stamp out sexism when we see it on the campaign trail.”
“To paraphrase the words of one blogger who said it best over the weekend: We will defend Sarah Palin against misogynist smears not because we like her or support her, but because that’s how feminism works.”
A: It’s a girl thing.
Q: What did Hillary Clinton say about feminism in this election?
No, that’s wrong, too, sorry.
“You know what? I don’t think that’s what this election is about,” Clinton said at a rally in Kissimmee. “This election is about the differences between us and the Republican Party,”
Ed Koch is not getting enough rest. That’s the kindest motive I can ascribe to his latest rants about the presidential race. Asked what made him endorse Barack Obama, the former Mayor of New York said:
“The designation of Palin to be vice president,” he said. “She’s scary.”
Scary? Ed, Ed, Ed. Didn’t you support Hillary Clinton? Didn’t you say Barack Obama was a loser that the super delegates would protect the Democratic party from?
I don’t think that Obama can win a general election. I believe the superde legates will exercise their discretion just as they’re supposed to in order to protect the party from a loser.”
Get back on the meds, Ed, you’re starting to make less sense than ever. Did you really mean to say Palin is scary because of a question she asked a librarian? Did you really mean to say it out loud?
“Any time someone goes to the library and says, ‘I want to ban books,’ and the librarian says ‘no,’ and she threatens to fire them — that’s scary,” he said.
I guess you did not know that she said it was a “rhetorical question”, and that no books were actually banned, huh? True, she did fire the tattletale librarian, but that’s not scary, that’s bitchy. Plus, I heard she hired her back. There are worse things in life, Ed. And, by the way, didn’t you endorse George Bush?
“I think [Bush has] been terrific. And I have never voted in the past for a Republican president…. But I am voting for George Bush this time around. And I will tell you why. He has created what is now known as the Bush Doctrine, equal to the Monroe Doctrine. And what is the Bush Doctrine? That we will go after the terrorists and the countries that harbor them. And he’s kept his commitment, unlike anybody else in the world. And certainly unlike any of the nine or so Democratic candidates for president. And the worst one is Howard Dean. I mean, that’s McGovern II.”
Okay, Ed, I promise not to make any sudden moves if you just stay calm and agree to take your nap. There are a lot of reasons to be scared of Sarah Palin, Ed. She can shoot a moose and eat it, for Goodness sakes. But she’s not running for president, Ed. Barack Obama is.
That’s scary.
(And I agree with you about Howard Dean.)
*UPDATE: I guess Ed wasn’t sleepy, after all. Click here for Ed on Ed’s reasons to support Obama.
He said Palin has an interesting biography — “Mother, governor, moose shooter. That’s cool,” he said — but the election should be about who can change people’s lives for the better.
Now, come on, Barack. If you’re going to use “mother” and “moose shooter” in the same insult, it goes, “Your mother is a moose shooter!” Or maybe, “Do your kids know their mother is a moose shooter?” And you never end a dig with “that’s cool.” That is so not cool. And that “for it before she was against it” line, you did that one wrong, too.
When it came to the bridge to nowhere, she was for it until everybody started raising a fuss about it and she started running for governor and then suddenly she was against it!
You remember that? For it before you were against it? I mean you can’t just make stuff up. You can’t just recreate yourself. You can’t just reinvent yourself. The American people aren’t stupid.
“Oh, so first you were for the bridge, then you were against it? Who do you think you are, John Kerry?” That’s the line, Barack. So what if Kerry gets dissed, too? Everybody disses Kerry. Besides, when you’re trying to score in the “dozens,” you gotta be willing to go all the way, know what I mean? Like with this one:
“You don’t have to tell the people of Flint or the people of Michigan that our economy is not in good shape,” Obama said to shouts of “Yeah!” from the audience. “You do need to tell John McCain — because just a few weeks ago he said the economy was fundamentally sound.”
Too many words, B., not enough punch. Here’s the right way to do that one. “You know why John McCain thinks the economy is sound, don’t you? He’s got a job!”
Pow! Hit ‘em, get in, get out. I hope you learn your lesson quick, Obie. Otherwise, the people of Philadelphia might get the last laugh. They’re going around saying your mama was a white woman. And they’re on your side.
Joe Dougherty, business manager for Ironworkers Local 401, which hosted Biden’s morning event, also said race is an issue for many Democrats.
“I hear it in the neighborhood, and I hear it in the union,” Dougherty said. “But I remind them (Obama’s) mother was white. He sees all sides, and he could be just what we need to bring this country together.”
Give it up, you media-horny droolers looking for a Clinton/Palin mud wrestling smackdown. Hillary Clinton is not going to indulge your political wet dreams. How many times does she have to tell you? In case you missed the first memo:
“She’s not the answer when it comes to winning conservative women — she never was — and we’re not going to be anybody’s attack dog against Sarah Palin,” said a Clinton insider.
“This election is about issues, and that’s what’s going to matter to people at the end of the day,” she told reporters who asked her about the Alaska governor at a rally for a Democratic congressional candidate at Wagner College.
Today in Kissimmee, Fl., Clinton said this about Palin’s VP selection:
“It is a great accomplishment,”
Did Clinton endorse Palin? Of course not, she’s a Democrat.
“Women as well as men make their decisions after they weigh the evidence,” Clinton said. “As Americans go into that voting booth, what they have to ask themselves is not so much who am I for, as who is for me? And I don’t think it’s an even close question that we have the ticket that is going to do the best job in restoring the American promise.”
Hillary went on to explain:
Clinton said: “I didn’t run because I was a woman but I was very conscious of the fact that my campaign meant a lot to so many, and I appreciate that. But this election is about the two parties, and the two presidential nominees, where they stand, what they would do, what our country needs right now.”
So for all those hoping for a little girl-on-girl violence, grow up. Go take a shower and start trying to figure out a way for your “nominee” prove he belongs in the race. As long as he and his campaign allow this “Hillary should help me beat up the new girl” song and dance to go on, the weaker he looks. I mean, if HRC’s is so darned effective, why isn’t she the nominee? And who wants a pouty, whiny, foot-stomping president? Face it, you guys are stuck with this boring race and the candidate you picked to run it. If Obama can beat up on the girls in his own party, what makes him think any of them would want to help him beat up somebody else’s sister?
Word to the new Democratic base re: Clinton/Palin:
A lot of people claim to be upset with Oprah Winfrey because she refuses to book Sarah Palin on her show. Why? By throwing her unwavering support behind Barack Obama’s presidential bid, Oprah long ago ceded any pretense of impartiality. Anyone attempting to hold her to such journalistic principles is obviously just trying to stir up trouble. And completely missing the point.
There are many valid reasons to watch/not watch the Oprah Winfrey Show. The main ones being, you either like her, or you don’t. No matter who she has on, I can’t imagine anyone tuning in just to see the guest. The whole point is to see whoever it is get “Oprah-ized.” They’re either going to be skewered or fawned over by her, and that’s what people tune in to see. Given her Obama endorsement, is it so hard to imagine which fate would likely befall Palin? Why should Sarah bother?
Oprah’s show is the foundation of her dynasty. She is the queen. She is not going to annoint Sarah Palin, so having her on the show serves no purpose. She can not endorse Palin and keep the slot open for one of her increasingly looney pet projects. The net effect is exactly the same.
Oprah’s non-invitation to Sarah Palin serves both women well. Oprah retains her all-important air of queenly superiority, and Palin gets the sympathetic press the faux-outrage from such a non-endorsement creates. It’s the classic “win-win” situation.
The only potential downside comes if Palin does appear. Oprah might get a one-time ratings boost, but it could be offset in the long-term by treatment of Palin perceived to be hostile. Palin, on the other hand, could always say something stupid.
And it ain’t gonna happen, anyway.
Anyone seeming to expect the situation to change is merely fanning the flames of a non-fire for their own selfish purposes.
Audiences understand when he mentions his years as an Illinois state legislator, or his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate. But a community organizer? What’s that?
Even Obama didn’t know when he first gave it a try back in 1985. “When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly,” Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. “Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.”
York goes on to chronicle Obama’s community organizing efforts in depth. It’s worth a read. York concludes:
When he left for law school, Obama wondered what he had accomplished as an organizer. He certainly had some achievements, but he did not — perhaps could not — concede that there might be something wrong with his approach to Chicago’s problems. Instead of questioning his own premises, he concluded that he simply needed more power to get the job done. So he made plans to run for political office. And in each successive office, he has concluded that he did not have enough power to get the job done, so now he is running for the most powerful office in the land.
And what if he gets it? He’ll be the biggest, strongest organizer in the world. He’ll dazzle the country with his message of hope and possibility. But we shouldn’t expect much to actually get done.
Pretty much the same conclusion I came to.
I still don’t have a really good grasp on what a community organizer does, but I’m not sure it’s the noble, heroic profession-on-a-par-with-the-accomplishments-of Jesus that Obamamaniacs suggest. In fact, I’m not even sure Obama is good at it. It seems to me, every job he left, he left seeking that “just one more” element that would allow him to actually make a difference.
Yesterday it was Gallup saying Obama was tanking, showing McCain up 48% to 45%. Today, a CNN/Opinion Research poll reflects a dead even race. USA Today/Gallup shows McCain with a 10 point lead. Rasmussen has McCain up by one. RealClearPolitics average has McCain leading by 2.1%, with two old polls included.
Looks like Obama has been summoned to the principal’s office, and finally had sense enough to go. The New York Times politics blog, The Caucus, is reporting that during a September 11 visit to New York, Obama will join Clinton for lunch at his Harlem Clinton Foundation headquarters:
When Mr. Clinton learned that Mr. Obama would be in New York on Thursday for two appearances, he invited him to lunch at the foundation offices, aides said.
Lest anyone think this is a friendly get-together between political allies, the article states:
The terms of the Clinton-Obama meeting have been negotiated warily for weeks through a veil of mutual suspicion. Mr. Clinton has felt for months that Mr. Obama has not paid him the proper respect as a former president and many close to Mr. Obama believe that Mr. Clinton dealt dismissively with him during the campaign.
I guess when he’s tanking in poll, after poll, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
Oh, man, the news is just coming fast and furious today. The website Chicagoans Against Obama is reporting via the New York Times that the Clinton-bashing duo we all know and hate is being broken up.
MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.
That experiment appears to be over.
After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.
Matthew Weaver, posting on No Quarter is asking the question, “Where’s Hillary?” Matthew wants to know what Clinton’s role should be for the remainder of the election:
Should she be a nice girl and keep her mouth shut and campaign for Obama and/or down ticket candidates? (That might work for expediency but there is there future upside to this course, whether Obama wins or loses. Importantly, if she says nothing of the hate, does this mean it is okay to use hate against another party but not within the party?)
Should she punt and say that this is not her fight? The party rejected her and she’ll just sit out the campaign, thank you. (Just take a break for a few months. Return after the vote in November to help rebuild the defeated party.)
Should she fill the moral and leadership vacuum and say no, this campaign of hate has gone on far too long, enough-is-enough, I want no part of it? (My preferred choice as leadership requires grownup action, whatever the cost. Right and wrong are important judgments that are not a matters of expediency and convenience.)
Don’t talk about it as all we do is feed the critics.
Personally, I believe Clinton should not do anything to help Obama in any way. He’s the one who said,
“I am confident I will get her votes if I’m the nominee,” Obama stressed. “It’s not clear she would get the votes I got if she were the nominee.”
Let him try. He stole the election fair and square, now let him rape the country’s women by himself. That’s the American way, right?
“I don’t know how many, but I can tell you, with all due respect to previous administrations, it is not going to be a single, ‘Well, we have a Democrat now,”‘ McCain said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
One obvious McCain pick would be Joe Lieberman. But he faces a backlash from Dems, even though he’s technically an Independent. An equally obvious McCain pick, given their friendship and history, would be Hillary Clinton. However, to avoid a possible Lieberman-esque situation requires a delicate political dance. I don’t know if Clinton hears the music, but supporting downticket Dems while avoiding Palin-bashing seems like the most sensible first move in an intricate bipartisan two-step to me.
I think that should be a viable ballot option. It’s the only thing in this election I would want to votefor. Nobody is running for anything anyway, everybody’s running against.
“If they like what they’ve had over the last eight years, then they’ll go with McCain. And if they don’t like it, hopefully they’ll go with me,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Both candidates talk a lot of hooey about change, but the truth is, no matter who wins, the president will change and little of anything else will. The pundits and strategists implore voters to vote on issues, forgetting that we tried that in 2006, “changing” the hell out of things, and as far as we can see, we’ve been royally screwed; no less and no more than we were in 2005. The Washington Post claims that we voters are not as smart as everybody seems to think, but I think, as a whole, we’re a lot smarter than the Washington Post. We don’t need fancy degrees, high-priced experts or libraries full of poll data to show us who’s lying and who’s not. They all are.
Most of the coveted unregistered voters that the Obamacrats are so desperately courting are pretty smart, too. That’s why no matter how many are actually added to the rolls, it won’t matter much. Those voters not only know that their votes don’t really count, they know that no matter who is in office, their lives won’t change. They might be black, Obama might be black, but those black voters know what the South Side of Chicago looked like before Obama got there, and they know what it looks like now.
Most Americans are not blind, either. We can see that McCain is not George Bush; in fact, when it comes to experience and the snake oil Bush pushed to get elected, Georgie’s got a lot more in common with Obie than Johnny. We know that Sarah Palin is no Hillary Clinton, too; but that’s not the problem. The problem is, Barack Obama is no Hillary Clinton, either. Like Hillary or not, by the end of the primaries you not only had to admire her, you got the feeling you could trust her.
I don’t trust John McCain or Barack Obama. Nobody cares about Joe Biden one way or the other. Sarah’s a woman, and that’s about all I can say in her favor. I don’t want to hang out and have a beer or any other food or beverage with any of them. I don’t want any one of them running my country, either. The other candidates running don’t have a real shot, maybe that’s too bad, maybe it isn’t. But none of them have made me want to vote for them any more than the major party candidates do. I should be able to vote, dammit, and express my displeasure with the process at the same time, without rewarding an unworthy candidate with a vote they don’t deserve.
NONE OF THE ABOVE.
That’s who I want to vote for now.
Every other disaffected voter who agrees with me should do the same. Hopefully, that would include just about every voter in America. Let all the remaining votes cast cancel each other out. Why should we be the ones to have to flip a coin?
Barack Obama wants to prove he can out shoot Sarah Palin. On the basketball court, that is, not on the range. Gotta give it to the man, he knows his limitations. In an interview on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” Obama responded to a viewer-submitted question about a possible match-up with the Republican VP hopeful:
“You know, I would play her a game of horse,” said Obama. “She looks like she’s got some game.”
Palin was a standout high school basketball player whose skills on the court earned her the nickname Sarah Barracuda. But Obama said he doesn’t fear her.
“On the basketball court, I think I’d stand up pretty well,” he said.
Still, Obama said he wouldn’t want to go head-to-head with Palin in another sport: target shooting.
“I know she’s a sharpshooter, and I know that — I probably wouldn’t do target practice with her,” he said. “I think she’d be a better shot than me.”
Obama also said he was “puzzled” about why the Republicans would mock his community organizer creds. Maybe he should ask Michelle Malkin:
Let me clarify something. Nobody is mocking community organizers in church basements and community centers across the country working to improve their neighbors’ lives. What deserves ridicule is the notion that Barack Obama’s brief stint as a South Side rabble-rouser for tax-subsidized, partisan non-profits qualifies as executive experience you can believe in.
Explaining his lack of military cred, Obama implied that since there was no war going on when he became eligible for service, there was no point.
The Democratic candidate said he briefly considered joining the military after graduating high school, but decided against it.
“I graduated in 1979. The Vietnam War had come to an end. We weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point. And so, it’s not an option that I ever decided to pursue,” he said.
He also characterized his Saddleback Conference “above my pay grade” answer to the question about when life begins as being “too flip.”
But Obama told Stephanopoulos “what I intended to say is that, as a Christian, I have a lot of humility…all I meant to communicate was that I don’t presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions.”
Finally read the briefing, eh, Obie?
*I went looking for a basketball clip to accompany this post and found one of the most racially insensitive cartoons I’ve ever seen. Made in 1975, it’s still the first clip you find in a You Tube search for “Basketball Jones Cheech and Chong.” The one posted is the “Space Jam” remake featuring Barry White and Chris Rock.
Some people will go a long way to try to turn a negative to a positive. But I’ve seen few try so hard as AP’s Charles Babington, who wants us to believe that Barack Obama’s rehashed 2 year old stump speech is a such a thing of beauty, it’s a work of art akin to Michelangelo, Picasso, or at the very least, Marcel Marceau. Whatever. Chuck’s got to be kidding.
We can all paraphrase Obie’s standard speech in our sleep.
“Now is the time to stand up and hope to change the world. George Bush sucks. John McCain is just like George Bush. I’m not John McCain. I’m Barack Obama and I approved this message.”
That’s about it. Throw in about ten minutes of, “uhh’s” and “ummmm’s,” a few, “ya know’s” and a coupla “and…and’s” and you’re done. But Babington has the nerve to try to surgically dissect the thing, looking for what? Nuance? Good luck with that, Charley.
Obama delivers it without notes or changes from week to week. A campaign centerpiece for 19 months, the full-blown stump speech probably has done more than anything to rocket him to fame and to a lead over Republican John McCain in some national polls.
The sad thing is, this guy’s serious. He writes a lot more paragraphs to prove it, too. Since both the speech and the article about it are almost too sad for words, Obie, Chucky, here’s a video lesson to help you both become a little more entertaining over the next couple months. Use it. ‘Cause to tell you the truth, you’re both starting to bore the hell out of people.
That’s what some guy named Charley James, on a website called The Progressive Curmudgeon, claims that Sarah Palin said in a restaurant full of people upon hearing Barack Obama had secured the nomination. Charley says Lucille the Waitress told him, but didn’t really want him to tell anybody.
This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.
Okay, that’s enough of that. Here’s Charley on Charley:
If you’re born in Milwaukee, you are born a Democrat. And so I gravitated naturally to liberal politics, first as journalist and then an activist. I’ve been writing since I was eight years old and, after working in newsrooms for far too long, I have devoted much of the past decade as an independent investigtative jouralist. When not writing about politics or George Bush, I scribble out essays on the peculiarites of modern times.
The Progressive Curmudgeon on The Progressive Curmudgeon:
A progressive (read: liberal) look at US political, foreign policy, social, law and war-and-peace issues through the eyes of a politically concerned and somewhat deranged ex-pat Yank writing from the relative safety of Canada.
Hey, I just report ‘em, you gotta read ‘em.
Or not.
UPDATE: I had hoped to convey my contempt for this article and “journalist,” (I would never call myself such, I’m a chick with a blog.) but in case I didn’t, here are a couple of other takes on Charley and his story, and there’s always Michelle Malkin. This is the website credited with “breaking” Charley’s story. Sounds like a “whisper campaign” to me.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has no intention of becoming a Sarah Palin attack dog — but has no qualms about going after John McCain, people close to the former first lady say.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton marched for labor and stumped with Democrats on Saturday, but sidestepped questions about the woman who has taken her place as the nation’s most-talked-about female leader.
In three stops on the campaign trail Clinton mentioned Palin once.
“No way, no how, no McCain, no Palin,” she said.
While I’m glad Clinton is staying above the fray, it is rather cruel to leave Obie on his own like that. In Terra Haute today he sounded pretty pathetic.
“I know the governor of Alaska has been, you know, saying she is change,” Obama said at a town hall meeting here. “And that is great. She is a skillful politician. But when you [have] been taking all these earmarks when it is convenient and then suddenly you are the champion anti-earmark person.
“That is not change, come on,” Obama continued. “I mean, words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up. You can’t just make stuff up. We have a choice to make and the choice is clear.”
The choice was clear Obie; you, Pelosi, Brazile and the rest of the DeaNC gang just made the wrong one. Sarah’s gonna clean your sorry clock. She dissed you good in Wisconsin this morning:
Palin said: “Just last night, Senator Obama finally broke and brought himself to admit what all the rest of us have known for some time, and that’s thanks to the skill and valor of our troops, the surge in Iraq has succeeded,” she said. “Senator Obama said, and I quote, ‘it succeed beyond our wildest dreams.’
“‘I think,’ Senator Obama said, ‘that the surge succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated.’ I guess when you turn out profoundly wrong on a vital national security issue, maybe it’s time to pretend that everyone else is wrong, too,” Palin said.
Oh, well, I guess you’re stuck with the old reliable race card, Obie. It’s getting pretty old though, besides, you just used it yesterday:
“I know that I’m not your typical presidential candidate,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told executives and employees of the Schott glass company Friday afternoon, “and I just want to be honest with you. I know that.”
“And I know that the temptation is to say, ‘You know what? …The guy hasn’t been there that long in Washington.,’ You know, ‘he’s got funny name,’ You know, ‘we’re not sure about him,’” Obama continued. “And that’s what the Republicans, when they say, ‘This isn’t about issues, it’s about personalities,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘We’re going to try to scare people about Barack. So we’re going to say that you know, maybe he’s got Muslim connections or we’re going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals or he’s not patriotic.’
Or something like that. At least, that’s what the Obamaniacs want you to believe. That, and he can raise the tides and heal the world. But then, as far as I can tell, that’s what community organizers do.
Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.
I included this quote just so we could all be on the same page as far as Obamaman’s stated goals are concerned. I thought it would be helpful to keep in mind as we go forward on this journey of discovery toward enlightenment to reveal the truth about just what the hell does a community organizer do? After scouring the left, right, center and sideways views available on the internet, I must be honest and tell you that I still have no freaking idea.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago during the Civil Rights Movement, attended public schools, joined my first union at 16, was Baptized in a Missionary Baptist church, and have relatives representing every Christian faith known to black America, some who are very actively involved in their respective churches. Yet, to my knowledge, I have never in my life met a community organizer. Even after learning that Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King and Ghandi were also community organizers, I still can’t think of one I’ve met personally.
Community organizing is a process by which disempowered people – most often low- and moderate-income people – are brought together to act in their common self-interest. Most often these organizations seek populist goals and the ideal of participatory democracy. Community organizers create popular movements by building a large base of concerned folks, mobilizing these community members to act, and developing leadership from and relationships among the people involved.
“The nation’s largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families, working together for social justice and stronger communities,” the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, says they too are involved in “empowering low- and moderate-income people to improve their communities.”
ACORN has been building organizations and developing leadership among low- and moderate- income residents in neighborhoods throughout the United States for 38 years. During that time, ACORN chapters have worked individually and collectively to organize innovative grassroots campaigns on a number of critical issues. As the nation’s largest grassroots community organization with more than 400,000 member families, ACORN employs 400 organizers that carry a huge responsibility of helping disenfranchised people in their communities.
# Largest radical group in America, with 175,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 850 chapters in 70 US cities
# Implicated in numerous reports of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams during the 2004 election
# Maintains close ties to organized labor
Many sites examine Obama’s ties with ACORN though given their various perspectives, it’s hard to know whether ACORN is a noble enterprise or the Devil’s Disciples. Judge for yourself. It can be said though that “agitating” is a core principle of Saul Alinsky’s community organizing model, upon which all community organizing appears to be based. As far as I can tell, when it comes to community organizing, Alinsky’s “da man.” After reading quite a few articles, I’ve come to the conclusion that Alinsky-style community organizing boils down to sticking your nose into other people’s business and trying to make them do what you think they should do to make their miserable lives better. I admit, I could be wrong.
But words like “agitator” keep popping up, a word which evokes childhood memories of school-yard “instigators” who would try their best to incite violence between reluctant combatants. When I was growing up, most often the violence was turned toward the person trying to egg on the fight. So, what is the real benefit to the community organizer or the communities organized?
In return, organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents could never aspire to – it is through these stories and songs of dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife, subtlety and laughter, that organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves.
Great, really, great. But, what the hell do they do? I still don’t know for sure. I do know that Obamaman’s most famous efforts involving asbestos removal from the Altgeld Gardens Housing Project was pretty much a failure. And I’m pretty sure that most of the conditions he described back in 1990 still exist in the communities he organized, pretty much the way they were when he started. To be fair, organizing successful voting drives, which by all accounts he did and was good at, is a very good thing. But who has benefited more, the register (Obamaman) or the registrees (the people still living in the conditions Obama found so compelling)?
“ ‘We are not making large-scale change, and I want to be involved in doing that,’ ” Mr. Kellman said Mr. Obama had told him.
I still don’t have a really good grasp on what a community organizer does, but I’m not sure it’s the noble, heroic profession-on-a-par-with-the-accomplishments-of Jesus that Obamamaniacs suggest. In fact, I’m not even sure Obama is good at it. It seems to me, every job he left, he left seeking that “just one more” element that would allow him to actually make a difference. So, far from swooping into troubled situations and making them right with a single Superman-like act, he seems more like the Superman Big Bank Hank of the Sugar Hill Gang famously described:
“He may be very sexy or even cute
But he looks like a sucka in a blue and red suit”
And I’m not even sure the Naked Emperor’s wearing that much.
Whoopi Goldberg is not only “aggravated” by Sarah Palin, she thinks the woman is “very dangerous.” On the View and in an article on the website, WOW (Women On the Web) Ms. Whoop let it be known that when it comes to Sara P., Whoopi got issues. She said Sarah gave an “amazing speech,” she’s a “tough chick and a babe” and a “mom” who gave the Republicans the “message they wanted to hear,” which I suppose, was all well and good, until she stepped over the line.
“…I thought once she began her discussion about community organizers and that they don’t have real responsibilities … I guess I can’t say I don’t know where she’s been living, because she’s been living in Alaska and maybe they don’t have community organizers there but they do in Chicago. Anyone who leaves their gig from school and goes to the people who most need help, that seems to me an admirable American way of thinking. It used to be in America that you helped people if you could, you organized them you made sure their rent was paid, made sure they had heat and all those other things and that helps to build character. If you want to become a politician you can at least say, “I understand how people live, I understand what happens when people lose everything and this is how we can work on it.”
WOW is right! There are so many things wrong with this take on things, I don’t know where to start. In the proverbial “interest of full disclosure,” let me be very clear, I am not a Republican. I don’t think I could possibly care less whether Sarah Palin is John McCain’s running mate or the next contestant on Dancing With The Stars. (Okay, I would care about that, but you get the point.) On the face of it, given that I am a black woman with a pretty good sense of humor, you’d think I would have much more in common with the Whoopster. But not on this.
Second, Palin’s point was not that community organizing is not worthwhile, it was that it is not as demanding as being mayor of even a small town. Given that Obama’s efforts affected relatively small enclaves of a large city, with no governing responsibility, I don’t see how you can argue with that.
Another thing that got Whoopi’s panties in a bunch was Palin’s assertion that her daughter’s pregnancy is a family affair, which Whoopi agrees with, but kinda doesn’t because if it was a black teenager or Chelsea Clinton, it would be different. Okaaaay. She goes on and on about that.
Whoopi also said on The View that McCain’s POW experience is no more “adverse” than the crises Obama, Biden or any other American has had to face in life. I’m not sure I buy that, but I don’t think that was Palin’s point, anyway. In relating McCain’s experience, she was saying that the only guy in the race who has had to put his life on the line for his country was John McCain. As far as I know, neither Biden or Obama served in the military.
There are many reasons not to support Palin. She’s a Republican who supports the Republican platform. That does it for me. But as far as I’m concerned, she’s no more “dangerous” than Obama. And he’s running for president.
Whoop, that makes all the difference in the world.
Okay, I saw this over on HillBuzz and just had to post it. I don’t know if Roland Martin is Donna Brazile’s “boo” or not, or whether Anderson Cooper knows, or cares. Frankly, I can’t really imagine Donna being anybody’s “boo,” but that’s probably because I’ve got a lousy imagination. I mean, Donna’s what I would call a “handsome woman;” handsome in the slightly masculine sense, not the “she’s got a face like a horse and I’m trying to be nice” sense, so somebody must love her for her. They certainly can’t love her for her dance moves. But then, Roland’s no John Travolta, either.
Politico just posted a story that could best be called, “catty.” It certainly isn’t “newsy.”
While Sarah Palin’s supporters tout her personal warmth and openness, the newly minted Republican vice presidential nominee can be brusque to allies, advisers and employees who fall from her favor.
That’s the lead paragraph. I kid you not. Oooooooo, some people don’t like Sarah. Oh, my. Whoda thunk it? Maybe it’s because she fired them.
Palin has unceremoniously ended relationships with an aide who was dating a family friend’s soon-to-be ex-wife, a campaign adviser whose mother-in-law fought Palin’s legislative agenda, a local political mentor who she felt represented the “old boys’ network,” a police chief who she said tried to intimidate her with “stern look[s]” and a state commissioner who refused to fire her sister’s ex-husband.
Believe it or not, this article goes on. And on. And on. Full of earth-shattering revelations like this one from some guy named Bitney:
Still, Bitney took a line from the “Seinfeld” character Elaine, deeming Palin “a bad breaker-upper.”
A “bad breaker-upper?” How many people did they have to talk to to get that dirt? For sure, they didn’t get any help with this expose from Mac and Sarah:
The McCain-Palin campaign declined to answer questions about Palin’s personnel moves or personal rifts.
No fools they. The media whores schmoos have been bitching all day about Republicans bitching about the media. Even Merdith Viera, who I love to death, was rather unreasonable on the Today Show this morning, saying only bloggers went after Palin. Those “fair and balanced” blogger guys at Newsbusters “question” that. Yesterday, Obama’s personal news network, MSNBC, couldn’t wait to de-bunk the “media’s picking on Sarah” notion, saying Obama and Biden didn’t say anything out of line, some guy who works for them said it. Like that’s news. And what does that have to do with the media? McCain/Palin said Obama/Biden Democrats were picking on them. Democrats, like the schmoos, maybe?
I guess stuff like this, and this and this really is newsworthy. To somebody. Maybe it was only bloggers like this and this and this that wrote stuff that made it seem like this chick running for veep had to be hiding something.
What these schmoos don’t get is that it doesn’t matter if they’re right or wrong, or if they’re leading the pack or following it. It only matters what the public thinks; and it seems that the public just might be on Palin’s side.
Us Weekly, which unlike People and OK!, chose a rather caustic cover line (“Babies, Lies and Scandal”) is said to have lost thousands of subscribers in just the first 24 hours following the printing of the issue.
“I’m hearing it’s 5,000, maybe more,” says one well-placed source in the industry. Another source claimed that as many as 10,000 readers have already cancelled their subscriptions. A spokesperson for Wenner Media, which publishes Us, says “it is completely false that we are losing 10,000 subscribers.” As for the 5,000 estimate, the spokesperson only said “that is false, too,” but wouldn’t comment further.
I guess those subscribers just don’t get that the media’s just doing their jobs. It’s those damned bloggers ya gotta watch out for.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has no intention of becoming a Sarah Palin attack dog — but has no qualms going after John McCain, people close to the former first lady say.
“She’s not the answer when it comes to winning conservative women — she never was — and we’re not going to be anybody’s attack dog against Sarah Palin,” said a Clinton insider. “To be fair to Obama’s people, they haven’t asked us to do that.”
Senator Barack Obama will increasingly lean on prominent Democratic women to undercut Gov. Sarah Palin and Senator John McCain, dispatching Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to Florida on Monday and bolstering his plan to deploy female surrogates to battleground states, Obama advisers said Thursday.
However, lest anyone be unclear about HRC’s position, “her people” went on to say:
Slamming Palin to win back women already hostile to Obama is pointless, the insider said, because Clinton’s most loyal base is working-class voters, not women in particular. “Attacking Palin is checkers, attacking McCain on the economy is chess.”
Uh, guess you’re in check, Barack.
The former first lady, who is due to appear at an Obama event in Florida on Monday, hasn’t gotten back to them yet. When she does, she’s likely to add a few stops of her own — fundraisers, including at least one in Texas to help her repay more than $20 million in debt incurred during the primary.
“They probably don’t want her in Texas, but, hey, that’s where the money is, so that’s where she’s going to go,” said a source familiar with travel planning.
Prominent Clinton backer Lynn Forester told The Times of London quote, “He has provided her with a pittance compared to what the Clintons have given Obama. Her debt could have been cleared within 10 days. It’s ungracious.”
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
“We should all be proud of Governor Sarah Palin’s historic nomination, and I congratulate her and Senator McCain,” Clinton, the first woman to win a presidential primary, said in the statement. “While their policies would take America in the wrong direction, Governor Palin will add an important new voice to the debate.”
Senator Barack Obama will increasingly lean on prominent Democratic women to undercut Gov. Sarah Palin and Senator John McCain, dispatching Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to Florida on Monday and bolstering his plan to deploy female surrogates to battleground states, Obama advisers said Thursday.
Dispatch? Does Hillary Clinton work for you, now? Last I heard, the DNC was trying to put forth the message that you were the nominee. Don’t you already have a running mate? What’s the matter, Barack, scared of girls? Given that that’s what it looks like, you might want to re-think your “sic the girls on her” strategy and let your running buddy do his job. And to think, just yesterday, you showed promise when talking about “the Palin problem“:
I think she has got a compelling story, but I assume that she wants to be treated the same way that guys want to be treated, which means their records are under scrutiny.
That’s the right attitude, Barack. You were talking about the media, but the same goes for you. And while I’m at it, stop using the media to do your dirty work for you. I’ll bet you haven’t even talked to Hillary Clinton and personally tried to enlist her help about this. If you did, you might be surprised with the advice she’d give. It likely wouldn’t include pimping out various female surrogates, she’d probably tell you pretty much what I’m saying: man up and fight your own battles. And, a little heads up, don’t be surprised if HRC “misplaces” her cell phone for a while.
Advisers to Mrs. Clinton said that she stood ready to help the Obama-Biden ticket, but they urged the campaign not to overestimate the impact Mrs. Clinton could have, noting that she had other commitments this fall, like campaigning and raising money for Senate candidates.
See, Barack, women don’t like wimps. Since a lot of women don’t like you already, the worst thing you can do is look like you’re running from a girl and trying to get other girls to beat her up for you. It would just reenforce the image a lot of women already have of you as a sneaky, manipulative coward. Paradoxically, women got these impressions from the way you and your boyz treated Hillary Clinton, so even you should be able to see that trying to get her to fix something you created with your grubby, underhanded maneuvers against her in the primaries, might not be a good idea.
Oh, and by the way, we don’t like pimps either. So trying to ride Hillary off into the sunset, especially when there’s nothing at all in it for her, is not gonna play well in Peoria, Barack. Basically, you’re on your own. You “won,” remember? Act like it. I still won’t vote for you, but at least you might not seem like such a wuss.
What the hell do you call a post-racial black guy running for president? Everything anybody says seems to offend somebody else. Not Obama, though, he doesn’t seem to care what you call him. Which is not surprising, really. I mean, when you’re “post-racial” do racial epithets even apply?
“Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity.”
Supposedly, Obama, “took no offense” but when his people called Wetmoreland out on it, Westmoreland’s people pushed back:
“He meant the Webster’s definition of uppity, he didn’t mean anything racially tinged or anything used as a code word,” Robinson said in an interview. “He never heard the term used in a racially derogatory sense. He used the word as a synonym for elitist, which he stands by. He thinks the Democratic nominee has an inflated sense of self esteem and is snobbish. He is sorry if it was offensive to anyone who took it in any way that it was not.”
Sounds to me like Westmoreland said it and was glad. Doesn’t that mean the Obamas really are “elitist,” though? When another white Republican, Rep. Geoff Davis , R-Ky., criticized Obama in April, there was a mini-uproar then ,too:
“That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” Davis said. “He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country.”
The article says Davis apologized but doesn’t specify if he was sorry for the “boy” part of the statement or the “he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing” part. Probably doesn’t matter, Obie didn’t seem to mind, either way. The article lists all the familiar white Democratic racial transgressions against Obama, too, Bill Clinton compared him to a black man, Jesse Jackson, (horrors!) Geraldine Ferraro called him a black man, (it was probably the “he wouldn’t be where he is” part that rankled, though) John Kerry not only agreed with Ferraro, he basically implied it was Obama’s one and only virtue, (?) and Joe Biden said he was “clean, articulate and good-looking” (the nerve!). Through it all, even though people made a big deal about it in the media, Obie chilled. Wasn’t offended at all. In fact, he made Biden his running mate. What a guy, huh?
For him to go after Obama, using ‘fairy tale’, calling him a ‘kid,’ as he did last week, it’s an insult. And I tell you, as an African- American, I find his words and his tone to be very depressing.”
“So, we’re up against a new young kid, who’s a nice young kid. I’m only saying: think it over, tell your friends and your neighbors and your family. There’s nothing like experience,” Knoll told the crowd.
“I guess a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer except that you have actual responsibilities,” Palin added later in the night. The line drew cheers and derisive laughter, but not from Obama.
Obama’s response?
“I’ve been called worse on the basketball court,” he said. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
Damn! Too bad John McCain’s a Republican. I like the guy. He came across as a viable candidate for president, something I normally would never, ever, even consider. He’s a Republican.
Yeah, he’s got a reputation as a maverick, and maybe he is. That’s cool. Maverick was one of my very first favorite TV shows as a kid. James Garner was so handsome and strong; looking back he was probably my first crush, if such a thing can be said about a 5 year old. But I’m a long way from 5, and Johnny Mac is no Rockford.
He’s a Republican.
That’s a such a big deal for me that even listening to his speech represents a huge deal. But serious disillusionment with your former political party will do that to you. Too bad it won’t let you accept what you have found unacceptable for a lifetime.
I listened to John McCain tonight with a mind as open as I could get it. To be honest, we’re probably not talking about a very wide brain hole here. And that’s what it would take to get me to vote a Republican ticket into office, a hole in the head. He says he’ll work across the aisle, he says he will fight for me and asked me to fight with him. Being a war hero and having a long record of service to this country mean a lot to me. The fact that he chose a strong woman as his running mate is a big point in his favor, too. But I will always be a Democrat at heart. So, even though John McCain said, “America First” and I believe he believes that; even though my former party has let me down in a way I find unforgivable; and even though I still really, really like James Garner, I can’t vote for John McCain.
Everybody wants a piece of the Republican VP-in-waiting, it seems. Giving the phrase, “working both sides of the aisle” new meaning, it looks like Ms. Palin is a real money maker. Bloomberg News reports:
Barack Obama reported raising at least $10 million from more than 130,000 donors today after Palin, the Alaska governor, addressed the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, and criticized the Democratic presidential nominee.
“Sarah Palin’s attacks have rallied our supporters in ways we never expected,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said.
The very next paragraph shows Mr. Burton to be a bald-faced liar, however.
The money followed an e-mail solicitation campaign manager David Plouffe sent out right after Palin’s speech.
So, unless David Plouffe is sending out secret correspondence, Obama’s supporters expected the hell out of making money off of Sarah. But the elephant boys don’t mind at all.
McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, raised $10 million after Palin was selected as his running mate Aug. 29, part of his record $47 million haul last month.
“She’s energized the base,” said former New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato, who has raised at least $250,000 for McCain, 72. “Money will not be a problem.”
The Mac Daddy Attack had Sarah send out her own e-mail:
The McCain campaign sent out an e-mail from Palin, 44, today seeking additional donations. “We must have the finances to respond to the latest attacks the Democrats have launched at us,” she wrote.
Go, Sarah, you work that thing, girl.
I guess everybody’s using the word pander in it’s non-political sense, too.
Barack Obama has to be asking himself that question today. A new CBS News poll says it’s gone.
The presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain is now even at 42 percent, according to a new CBS News poll conducted Monday-Wednesday of this week. Twelve percent are undecided according to the poll, and one percent said they wouldn’t vote.
The favorable/unfavorable results are similar for the two candidates:
Thirty-eight percent say they have a favorable view of Obama, compared 34 percent unfavorable and 27 percent undecided. For McCain, it’s 37 percent favorable, 36 percent unfavorable and 27 percent undecided.
46% say McCain would very likely be an effective Commander in Chief, only 24% feel the same way about Obama. And the PUMA presence is slipping, but still strong:
The poll also shows that the majority of Clinton supporters continue to support Obama – 67 percent in this poll, up from 58 percent last weekend.
While Gallup has Obama +7% And Rasmussen has him up 5%, the CBS poll is significant because last week he was up 8%.
Oh, and all of them were completed before Sarah Baracuda took a bite out of that…candidate.
Shoulda thought about that a long time ago, Dr. Deanenstein and Frau Nancy Blucher. You’re the ones who gave the rabid Clinton Derangement Syndrome suffering “Anybody But Hillary” lunatic fringe free reign while you allowed your creation to traipse around the country like a real boy playing dress-up in the Emperor’s see-through suit. Now you want to complain because the McCain camp has given your monster a Lilith-like bride. Ha, ha, again.
Your pathetic little formula was so obvious and easy to copy. It only worked a little bit in the primaries, but you’re too power-lust crazed to realize that once Hillary and Co. realized what you were up to, she cleaned your clock nine ways to Sunday, even with both hands tied behind her back. By you. And your Republican mole, Donna Brazile, who along with her crew, kept the Rove playbook working overtime. You scrambled, thugged and mugged your way across the finish line, barely ahead, dragging your wounded, limping creation behind you and thought you had gotten away clean. What a schmoo.
Oh, yeah, Dr. Deanestein, your little theory worked. Even better than you hoped. That was your undoing. Drunk with the success of the midterm elections in ‘06, you thought you and your guy were ready for the big, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” tour, so you ramped up your plans and rushed off half-cocked, just like you did in your own presidential run. Good plan, lousy execution, Deanenstein trademark.
Your scheme is so transparent, so easy to copy, are you really surprised that an old warhorse like McCain borrowed the formula, Deanenstein? His feminized, Stepford-influenced clone is going to reduce your Emperor Pinocchio to a puddle and walk all over him without even taking off her glasses.
Oh, those hot mic’s! Looks like a live mic during a break is causing trouble for some white folks, this time. Equal opportunity comes to stupidity. Or vice-versa. Will they never learn?
Politico is reporting that after Chuck Todd went to break, a free-for-all broke out about McCain’s choice of running mate:
“It’s over,” said Noonan, who then responded to a question of whether Palin is the most qualified Republican woman McCain could have chosen…
…”The most qualified? No. I think they went for this — excuse me — political bullshit about narratives,” she said. “Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.”
Noonan later tried to stuff her words back in her mouth saying:
UPDATE: Noonan tries to explain her remarks, and says that what’s “over” isn’t, she meant, McCain’s campaign, but that what’s over is the truth to the belief that “whatever the base of the Republican party thinks is what America thinks.”
Huh?
Like I said, equal opportunity stupid.
“I have great passion for this campaign and traveled across the country … arguing the case for the campaign,” Jackson said. “And this thing I said in a hot-mic statement that’s interpreted as a distraction, I offer apology for that. I don’t want harm or hurt to come to this campaign.”
You done good tonight, lady, real good. But you’re no Hillary Clinton. Now, I know that’s not your fault, I mean, who is? It is a problem for you, though.
See, I supported Hillary Clinton because she supports me. She believes in the things I do, and I believe she can accomplish the things I’d like to see done. You seem like the kind of person who can do things too. But…you’re not Hillary.
I want universal health care and the right to chose. I want a responsible foreign policy; compassionate, but firm. Basically, I want the same things Democrats say they want. I’m just not sure the ones selected to lead the party can really do them. Sometimes, I’m not even sure they want to.
I don’t like the way they were selected, either. So, yeah, I’m mad at them, mad enough to not reward their unethical actions with my vote, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater and vote for you and John McCain, either.
The fact that you’re a woman is a plus, but it’s one plus against a long list of minuses. So, even though you’re the kind of woman I could see myself having lunch with, I won’t vote for you. I won’t vote for Obama, either, even though we’re both black. Gender and race are things none of us can chose or change. But the things youcan chose and change are not the things I want changed or chosen . I guess what I’m saying is, it won’t work out between us, so let’s just be friends and leave it at that.
BTW, good speech (and the no-pantsuit thing was a nice touch.)
Today, I have come back to Springfield to tell you that I’ve found that leader – a man with a distinguished record and a fundamental decency – Joe Biden.
I wonder if they vetted him? MSNBC, among others, doesn’t think Biden’s vice-presidential rival, Sarah Palin, has been vetted at all:
The Washington Post says the news that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, “Palin’s revelation continued to reshape what Republicans had hoped would be a boisterous send-off for the McCain-Palin ticket. It also left some Republicans privately voicing concern that the campaign may have missed other potentially damaging background information about McCain’s little-known pick… McCain aides pushed back hard Monday night against any suggestion that they had mishandled the selection process. ‘Nothing that has come out did not come out in the vet — she was fully vetted,’ said a senior campaign adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.”
Ya think the Democrats are holding the Republicans to a different standard, just because the Republican vice-presidential candidate is a (gasp!) woman? Oh, no, say it ain’t so, Joe. She’s so good looking!
The Progressive calls Barack Obama’s former mentor, Joe Lieberman, Benedict Joseph. Quoting Lieberman at last night’s Republican convention, they determine he has a fat lot of nerve even calling himself a Democrat.
“What, after all, is a Democrat like me doing at a Republican convention like this?”
There’s an easy answer to that one.
You shouldn’t have been there, Joe, and you certainly shouldn’t be construed as a Democrat.
The AP reports that Joe still wants his Dem cred, though.
Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Lieberman may have lined up with Republicans at their convention in Minnesota to support John McCain, but he’s still writing six-figure checks to help Democratic Senate candidates.
The Connecticut senator gave $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee last month, a sign that he may be trying to hedge his bets this election season and hang onto his Senate committee chairmanship. Lieberman also wrote a $15,000 check to the DSSC in March.
In early January of 2007, the Washington Post had this to say about Lieberman’s party affiliation, or lack thereof:
Lieberman was sworn in last week as the chamber’s one and only “independent Democrat,” with the emphasis on “independent.” On most issues, including big domestic priorities, he expects to vote as he has for the past 18 years, as a loyal Democrat. But on Iraq, Lieberman is more in sync with Bush than are many Republicans. He is a passionate defender of the war as a death struggle against Islamic terrorism.
It’s not like this is news. The Democrats have used Lieberman to their advantage all along, as the New York Observer pointed out in June:
Since the ’06 elections, Lieberman’s supposed role as the Senate’s ultimate power broker has been touted endlessly. Rejected by the party that once nominated him for vice president in the August ’06 primary, he nonetheless won reelection in the fall as a self-described “independent Democrat,” promising to caucus with Democrats and to side with them for organizing purposes in the Senate.
When Election Day produced a 49-49-2 split, Lieberman kept his word, joining fellow independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont (whose loyalty to Democrats on this matter was a foregone conclusion) to swing the chamber to Democratic control. Accordingly, Lieberman was handed the gavel of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Without Joe Lieberman, we have heard over and over, the Democrats would lose the Senate.
But Lieberman was the same Lieberman when Obama was stumping for him in March of ‘06, as reported by Boston.com:
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama rallied Connecticut Democrats at their annual dinner Thursday night, throwing his support behind mentor and Senate colleague Joe Lieberman.
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“The fact of the matter is, I know some in the party have differences with Joe. I’m going to go ahead and say it,” Obama told the 1,700-plus party members who gathered in a ballroom at the Connecticut Convention Center for the $175-per-head fundraiser.
“I am absolutely certain Connecticut is going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate so he can continue to serve on our behalf,” he said.
“As far as I am concerned he is a Baruk, which means a blessing, he is a blessing to the United States Senate to America and to our shared hopes for a better safer tomorrow for all our families. The gifts that God has given to Barack Obama are as enormous as his future is unlimited. As his mentor, as his colleague, as his friend, I look forward to helping him reach to the stars and realize not just the dreams he has for himself but the dreams we all have for him and our blessed country.”
“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.
Maybe it’s just me, but not all of these poll numbers seem so great for Camp “O.” The headline of a Yahoo News article claims “U.S. Women Turned Off By Palin Pick: Poll” then reports findings like these:
But 52 percent of voters polled in a survey for the women’s activist group Emily’s List said they would vote for the Democrat ticket of Barack Obama and his VP choice Joseph Biden, against 41 for the Republicans.
Okay, so far, so good.
The poll, carried out by random dialing of 800 women on Sunday and Monday, shows that 50 percent of women voters felt McCain picked Palin out of political expediency and not because he believes she has the experience to do the job.
All right! Let’s see, Emily’s List, women voters, got it.
The poll also showed that Palin would fail to sway disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters still angered that she was locked out of the Democratic ticket.
Some 45 percent of Clinton fans thought Palin was not very attractive as a candidate, and 55 percent said they would not be voting for McCain.
So, fifty-five percent of Hillary’s female supporters won’t vote for McCain. Doesn’t that mean forty-five percent will?
Only nine percent of Clinton supporters said they thought they would vote Republican because Palin was on the ticket.
I guess the other thirty-six percent of female Clinton supporters are voting for McCain just for the hell of it. Must be at least a small comfort to the Dems.
Take Obama out of the picture and black voters flock to Hillary Clinton. At least, that’s what a Rasmussen poll about a mythical presidential match up between Clinton and GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin says. Personally, I think polling for somebody’s wet fantasy of a girl-on-girl political smackdown is, well, stupid and kinda icky, when you think about it. It’s not gonna happen for one thing, and, if I had been required to guess who would win before reading the article, choosing Clinton would have been a no-brainer. The pollees agree, 52% to 41%, though it’s impossible to know how many people responded with, “Oh, hell, who the hell cares?” before being cajoled into giving a response more likely to satisfy a hapless pollster.
There are a lot of other uninteresting stats in the article, but the one that jumps out like a mugger from a dark alley, is buried near the bottom.
White voters are evenly divided at 47% each between the two candidates, but African-Americans prefer Clinton by a whopping 83% to eight percent (8%) margin.
Didja get that? 83 freaking percent! Guess it’s a black thing, after all. Meanwhile, Philly.com’s Fatima Ali suggests that Obama better win:
If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring crime, homelessness – and hopelessness!
I reeeeaaaallly hope she meant that race war thingy metaphorically. I think I have a prior commitment on Obama Riot Day that I’m pretty sure I can’t get out of.
Those who love New Orleans say Hurricane Gustav is proof that the billions of dollars spent to protect the city and bring it back to life after the devastating 2005 storm season was worth it.
Why on earth would it not be “worth it?” Can you measure a person’s home strictly in a “dollars and cents” sense? Why depict a suffering black family in conjunction with such a question, as this article does? Where does this fit into the current American narrative of Barack Obama being the realization of “The Dream?”
The Nation says white folks are using Hurricane Katrina to push black people out of their neighborhoods.
“It’s been like a wildfire,” said Lucia Blacksher, general counsel for the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, an advocacy group that has been leading the fight against post-Katrina housing discrimination. “Local governments have been creating legal barriers–legal, in the sense they created laws–to prevent people who are African-American from returning. And I’m saying that because we all know what we’re talking about here. Affordable housing or multifamily housing is where African-Americans lived. And if you don’t let that kind of housing back, you’re not going to give people who are African-American or Latino an opportunity to live [here].”
I’ve said publicly that I do not subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was racially-based. The ineptitude was colorblind.
Senator Obama tends to run away from questions of a positive agenda regarding race. On February 9, 2007 he said:
“If I’m talking about the issues that matter to people, if we do a good job in letting people know who I am and what I stand for … they’ll make their judgment not based on my race but based on how well they think I can lead this country,” Obama told USA TODAY.
Yet when one enjoys almost unilateral support from any group of people, shouldn’t those people be able to expect something in return? Can the fear of an imagined backlash from white voters justify a black heir to a dream of racial equality avoiding putting black issues of any sort on the table? An aspect of this question was discussed by Dr. Julianne Malveaux and Dr. Cornell West on the Tavis Smiley Show, regarding Obama’s acceptance of his historic nomination as Democratic Party candidate for president on the forty-fifth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. When asked if she thought Obama’s speech lived up to the hype, Dr. Malveaux replied:
Not at all. My heart’s broken, actually. I hoped to hear more about Dr. King. As we’ve talked about before we came on, I hoped to hear more about the poverty numbers, about the third anniversary of Katrina, but also hoped to have this brother hit one out of the park…
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…But beyond stumbling, that he could not mention the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that Dr. King was reduced to some preacher from Georgia, is just a disappointment.
Senator Obama wants to have his cake and eat it too, and black voters, by giving unconditional support, are allowing him to get away with it. But to whose ultimate benefit? The Huffington Post is putting out the “Ward Connerly wants to end Affirmative Action” stuff again.
With Barack Obama officially nominated as the Democrats’ Presidential nominee, is it time to re-think affirmative action? Ward Connerly, a long-time affirmative action opponent , thinks so.
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“I think that in some quarters, many parts of the country, a white male is really disadvantaged,” Connerly, who considers himself multi-racial, tells NOW. “Because we have developed this notion of women and minorities being so disadvantaged and we have to help them, that we have, in many cases, twisted the thing so that it’s no longer a case of equal opportunity. It’s a case of putting a fist on the scale.”
The Washington Post is reporting that Donna Brazile was hit by pepper spray at the Republican convention:
Donna Brazile was hit by pepper spray as she walked to the Xcel Center at the start of the Republican Convention here.
The well-known Democratic pundit and strategist confirmed the incident, but declined to comment further. Protests outside the convention center led to 56 arrests earlier in the day.
Brazile is the Chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Voting Rights Institute and was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
Originally from New Orleans, La., Brazile has worked on several presidential campaigns and was the campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000. She frequently appears on CNN as a political commentator.
What the hell was she doing there, visiting her BFF, Karl Rove? Story’s kinda sketchy, isn’t it, but that’s all I could find anywhere. Was it about being on the wrong political turf or “WWB” (walking while black)? Or did Donna mouth off to somebody about the “rooolz” and “cheatin’”? I guess her mama never told her about pepper spray. Maybe she should call her “boo.”
This is the third in a series of “give-em-rope-and-let-em-hang” posts about the people who drove me from the Democratic party. Today, we visit the comments of Nancy Pelosi during the primaries. As Speaker of the House she wields tremendous influence and used it more liberally than one might think prudent.
In an article found on the FlaDems website re: seating the delegates from Florida and Michigan, dated Oct. 9, 2007:
“The Democratic National Committee is the ruling authority now .. but the tradition is that the presidential candidate will decide,” Pelosi said.
She noted that she had the job in 1984 of reviewing whether states had complied with rules governing the party’s presidential primaries and caucuses.
She recalled that when she threatened the states with not seating their delegates if they broke the rules, “they said ha, ha, ha, because no presidential candidate is going to say we’re not seating New Hampshire and we’re not seating Iowa.”
“[Sen. Clinton] said it best: They’re ‘piling on’ — or whatever the words were — ‘because I’m the front-runner.’ That’s why they’re piling on,” said Pelosi. “If she was in third place, they wouldn’t say, ‘Let’s go attack a woman.’”
“Did you ever see anything like that?” asked Pelosi. “Transferring the mantle from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. It was the most stunning thing. I mean, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. And I didn’t have any time to sit there and watch TV, you know – we had a whole schedule. I just was mesmerized by it.”
Feb. 16, 2008, with Obama leading in delegates, Clinton in superdelegates:
“I think there is a concern when the public speaks and there is a counter-decision made to that,” she said, adding quickly, “I don’t think that will happen.”
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“I do think that they have a respect — it’s not just following the returns, it’s also having a respect for what has been said by the people,” Pelosi said. “It would be a problem for the party if the verdict would be something different than the public has decided.”
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“Well, I don’t think that any states that operated outside the rules of the party can be dispositive of who the nominee is. That is to say they can’t make the difference because then we would have no rules,” she said.
“I think there is a concern when the public speaks and there is a counter-decision made to that,” she said. “It would be a problem for the party if the verdict would be something different than the public has decided.”
“I don’t think it was ever intended that superdelegates would overturn the verdict, the decision of the American people,” Pelosi said. “What they are there to do is to be in place should there be a need for some change … but not to change what happened in the election.”
“As chair of the convention, I want to make sure I can moderate the matter in a fair way,” she said. “But I mean, let’s face it: Barack Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan, so how can you say that that was an election? I think Florida has a bigger case. But in each of the cases, they are outside the rules and an accommodation is going to have to be made.”
“These superdelegates have the right to vote their conscience and who they think would be the better president, or who can win, but they also then should get involved in the campaigns and make their power known there,”
In the same interview, asked about a letter she received from Clinton backers concerned that she was taking Obama’s position re: delegates:
“It wasn’t important to me.”
Asked about a Clinton/Obama joint ticket, the Chicago Tribune quotes the Larry King Show, April 24, 2008:
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Pelosi says, according to a partial transcript. “I think that first of all that the candidates, whoever he or she may be, should choose his or her own vice presidential candidate.”
There’s plenty of talent to go around to build a “good, strong ticket,” says Pelosi. “I’m not one of those who thinks that that’s a good ticket.”
In a joint statement with Howard Dean and Harry Reid, reported in the LA Times, Jun 4, 2008:
“We have come to the end of an exciting primary and caucus process — the voters have spoken. As the Democratic leaders of the Senate, House of Representatives, the Governors and the Democratic National Committee we commend all of the participants of the 2008 primary process, especially Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, for making this such a transformational election.
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“Democrats must now turn our full attention to the general election. To that end, we are urging all remaining uncommitted superdelegates to make their decisions known by Friday of this week so that our party can stand united and begin our march toward reversing the eight years of failed Bush/McCain policies that have weakened our country.
“Running for President is not for the faint of heart. This is very difficult, and people have to unwind from it in their own time, but I think the message was clear last night. The people have spoken, the elections are over for the nomination. Barack Obama is the nominee of the Democratic party,” Pelosi said.
“Is there sexism? Probably so. Is it responsible for the defeat? I really wouldn’t have the scientific knowledge, all of the information, to know that. But I do think that being a woman has a positive upside in the campaign, probably offset by more sexism, I don’t know.
“You are right. Joe Lieberman has said things that are totally irresponsible when it comes to Barack Obama,” Pelosi said. “Here we have a leader for the future, really a great leader for the future and one that comes along only every now and then, and they know it so they have to undermine him. And one of their best weapons, of course, is someone who is considered by some to be a Democrat.”
According to Politico, at a fundraiser in San Francisco, August 18, 2008, she referred to Barack Obama as…
“…a leader that God has blessed us with at this time.”
It was my intention to ignore this story, because that’s what it deserves. Let me be clear, I am not a Republican, I was born a Democrat. My party affiliation was changed in early June to “none” because of the actions and deeds of the Democrats, their surrogates and the bloggers and news services in the pocket of their selected nominee. The ones who make stories out of nothing just to try to divert attention from the fact that their chosen candidate leaves a lot to be desired; collectively known here as the schmoos. So listen up, schmoos, for what it’s worth, since I’m just another ignorant, bitter chick, here’s a bit of not-so-friendly advice. Knock it off. You’re doing more harm than good. It’s none of our business, and if you guys weren’t poking your noses into people’s business looking for non-stories to pump while you ignore real stories that actually deserve scrutiny, maybe people wouldn’t feel the need to hire lawyers. Besides, if teenage girls didn’t occasionally get pregnant, you’d all be voting for Hillary Clinton this year, anyway.
Democratic presidential nomineeBarack Obama has canceled a planned overnight stay in Milwaukee to return to his Chicago headquarters and monitor Hurricane Gustav’s damage to Gulf Coast states.
The campaign said Monday that Obama may revise his plans to campaign mainly in Pennsylvania and Ohio later this week. He canceled plans to spend Monday night in Milwaukee and to hold a small event there Tuesday morning.
Obama’s 16 campaign offices in North Carolina solicited non-perishable goods for Gustav’s victims. Other state campaign organizations may do the same, Obama spokesmen said.
As Mr. McCain traveled to Mississippi on Sunday, Mr. Obama decided to monitor the approach of Hurricane Gustav from afar. Mr. Obama was briefed on the evacuation in a telephone call with Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, on Sunday afternoon, as well as conversations with the Louisiana governor, the New Orleans mayor and other officials.
Mr. Obama told reporters that he might visit the Gulf Coast after “things have settled down.” He and his advisers discussed making a weekend trip to the region, but they concluded that visiting the area before the storm would complicate the efforts of the authorities there.
CNN is reporting that the Democratic National Coronation yielded Barack Obama no discernible “bounce” in the polls. Duh.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Sunday night shows the Obama-Biden ticket leading the McCain-Palin ticket by one point, 49 percent to 48 percent, within the statistical margin of error.
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A previous CNN poll, taken just one week earlier, suggested the race between McCain, R-Arizona, and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, was tied at 47 percent each.
Seems the convention and Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s running mate announcement cancel each other out. Double duh.
“The convention and particularly Obama’s speech seems to be well-received. And the selection of Sarah Palin as the GOP running mate, also seems to be well-received. So why is the race still a virtual tie? Probably because the two events created equal and opposite bounces assuming that either one created a bounce at all,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
I know in this economy everybody needs their jobs, but come on, do we really need “experts” to tell us that these two particular candidates are running neck and neck, and why? Does the phrase “six of one, half-dozen of the other” mean anything to you? How about, “none of the above”? “Okay if I have to pick one…?” Those reasons make just much sense as all the “poll data” in the world. More. Sheesh.
Greta Van Susteren has a question up on her blog, GretaWire, asking if PUMAs are real. Boy, is she getting an ear/eyeful! She also has an accompanying video up of Sarah Palin’s speech with John McCain, but nobody’s paying attention to that. PUMA after PUMA is expressing all the outrage we’ve felt over the way the Democrats have treated us this year. What’s interesting is that while Hillary Clinton’s name comes up, since she bore the brunt of the abuse, it probably is mentioned no more than the names of Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and Donna Brazile. All the pent-up anger and frustration we, and people like us who didn’t even know they were PUMAs, have been feeling, is pouring out from keyboard after keyboard in an unrelenting deluge.
There is this notion being put forth by some in the media, pushed by the DeaNC and the Obamacrats, no doubt, that the PUMA movement is a myth. Somebody wants people to believe that a few Republicans have been making mischief by infiltrating the Democratic party and agitating the base. Whoever is trying to peddle this poop knows better.
The way the primaries unfolded didn’t sit right with us voters not jumping on the O train, but we gave the Dems the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there was something to this guy we weren’t seeing. But week after week, more and more stink kept rising. The Rules and Bylaws committee was the last straw. See, unlike the Obots, we’re not kids. We see, and we know what we’re looking at. “Rules are rules,” “we all agreed” and all that other parental sounding happy crappy is fine and dandy if you don’t know that “the rules” are always fluid and “we all agreed” not to mention that “we all know” there are “rules around the rules.” We also know fair is fair, and “rules or no rules,” the nomination process between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was not fair. Two hour private “lunches” at a public meeting on the same day the preferred candidate “sees the light” and dumps his contentious church, for which he is rewarded with delegates he couldn’t possibly have earned, not being on the ballot, don’t exactly inspire confidence. But that’s not the point. We can re-litigate the primaries later, I’m happy to do it. But right now what I want to address is the notion that the DeaNC and the media are surprised that we exist.
We told Howard Dean! He’s the one who sat up in the RBC meeting and called for “party unity” signaling from the jump that we were going to get screwed. We knew that going in, but the blatant, dare I say it, “audacity” of these petty criminals trying to “hoodwink” and “bamboozle” people who wrote the game, in broad daylight, no less, was unbelievably appalling. That was the moment PUMA was born. Party Unity My Ass!
SM77: Our spicy Latina in Florida gave PUMA a name when she said after the RBC hearing in May: Party Unity My Ass!
The sentiment was already there, however. All the PUMA movement needed at that point was a name. And that name went viral. More than one group co-opted it and adapted it to their vision, and while different groups took different approaches, throughout this loose-knit coalition, the underlying mission was the same: screw you back, DNC!
One of the PUMA groups, PUMA Pac, changed the acronym to mean People United Means Action and, in short order, became a registered pac. But they didn’t start that way. The frustrated visitors to their new website wanted to do something so they soon started organizing various missions called “action alerts” One of the first was an e-mail campaign to Howard Dean. On Jun 5, 2008, this call to action was printed:
All Pumas, please send an email to Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee right now @ howarddean@dnc.org
Tell him that we are Democrats who will not vote for Barack Obama for president. We will not support a “Unity Ticket” with Hillary Clinton as the vice-president. We will not donate one thin dime to the DNC or any of its affiliate organizations until they wake up, listen to the voices of the voters in ALL 50 states, and start distancing themselves from this disastrous nominee.
Subsequent “action alerts” from PUMA Pac and many of the other groups, organizations and websites in, and out, of the Just Say No Deal coalition alerted the heck out of Brazile and Pelosi, too. And if you check with them, they have their own stories of how they came to be and what they’ve done about their anger. So, as you can see, the DeaNC knew about PUMA almost as soon as we did. As well they should. They started it. They started us.
Look, as I’ve said many times before, I’m no economist. But, I’m not stupid, either. According to reports, the new conventional financial wisdom is that Americans must support the bailout bull bill, or the credit crunch will get so bad that we won’t be able to get mortgages, car and student loans, etc. Obama, from AP:
Jim Dean is the current Chair of Democracy for America (DFA). As DFA’s key spokesperson and fundraiser, Jim keeps DFA in the national spotlight. Jim brings DFA’s mission across the country to all 50 states. He meets with candidates, organizers, party leaders and activists, inspiring everyone to get involved and take back our country. Jim has been involved with DFA since our founding in 2004. He has a long history of political involvement and was a key fundraiser for his brother, Howard’s campaigns for President, Governor and Lt. Governor.
Governor Howard Dean founded Democracy for America in 2004 to build on the grassroots momentum for reform that his bid for the presidency sparked. The movement propelled DFA into a successful national organization committed to the “50 State Strategy.”
