Superdelegates Turned Down $1 Million Offer From Clinton Donor

One of Sen. Hillary Clinton's top financial supporters offered $1 million to the Young Democrats of America during a phone conversation in which he also pressed for the organization's two uncommitted superdelegates to endorse the New York Democrat, a high-ranking official with YDA told The Huffington Post.

Haim Saban, the billionaire entertainment magnate and longtime Clinton supporter, denied the allegation. But four independent sources said that just before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Saban called YDA President David Hardt and offered what was perceived as a lucrative proposal: $1 million would be made available for the group if Hardt and the organization's other uncommitted superdelegate backed Clinton.

Contacted about the report, Saban, initially very friendly, became curt. "Not true," he said, "it's simply not true." He declined to elaborate. Did he talk to the YDA superdelegate? "I talk to many, many superdelegates. Some I don't even remember their names." Did he propose any financial transaction? "I have never offered them or anybody any money" in exchange for support or a vote, he said. The Clinton campaign did not return a request for comment.

Members of the Young Democrats agonized about the potential fallout of Saban's call; his financial offer represented one-third of the group's 2008 budget. Democratic officials and fundraisers were consulted about how to respond, and at times the discussions were "emotional," one participant said. "It is scary for them, Haim is very powerful, he has great influence over donors who give to them."

Another source said that Hardt and others were acutely aware of Saban's status within Democratic circles and were concerned that their organization would suffer long-term harm if they declined his offer or if news of the proposal became public.

"I said I thought that the appropriate response was to call Haim back and say thank you but we are not interested," said the source. "I also said that it was surely the case that this story would get out because it is too interesting not to and they should think about how to deal with it. It was a day or two [before they responded]. They felt afraid. They were like, 'Holy shit, this is Haim Saban.'"

Nevertheless, the group declined the overture. A YDA official cited moral reservations as well as the overwhelming consensus of its members to back Sen. Barack Obama.

The group had not directly solicited Saban's financial support prior to the call, the official said, and records show no money from Saban has been given since. He did donate $15,000 to the group's 2005 convention, a separate political entity, and is a natural benefactor for groups such as YDA, a 527 which describes itself as the "largest youth-led, national, partisan political organization."

Saban is the nation's largest political campaign contributor over the last decade, FEC records show, giving nearly $13 million since 1999 to dozens of candidates, PACs, and Democratic campaign committees.
This past week, Crystal Strait, a YDA superdelegate, publicly announced she was supporting Obama. Another YDA superdelegate from Puerto Rico, Francisco J. Domenech, endorsed Clinton several months ago. Hardt, the third superdelegate, remains uncommitted.

"Crystal made an independent decision for all the reasons that she stated and David has consistently stated his position of choosing who to support after the primary is done," Alexandra Acker, the executive director of YDA, said when asked about why the two individuals made their respective decisions.

Hardt also released a statement explaining his current neutrality: "With just five contests left, I will wait to declare my superdelegate vote until every young voter has made their voice heard. The Young Democrats of America will proudly unite behind our nominee." Strait did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Saban's offer, which was hinted at last week by John Aravosis, publisher of AmericaBlog, underscores the heightened pitch of the Democratic primary.

Those familiar with campaign finance rules say that monetary promises for superdelegates are "problematic," but may not, in the end, be legally out of bounds.

"This is not an FEC issue," said Jan Baran, a Republican campaign finance attorney. "There are federal and state laws that bar 'vote buying' but I'm not sure they apply in this situation since this involves a convention delegate and not a voter in an election. In short, I don't know whether this is illegal or just hardnosed political horse-trading."

While no other accounts of direct financial offers have surfaced, both Democratic campaigns have attempted to use the power of the check to recruit the support of influential party insiders.

In March, high-ranking donors for Sen. Clinton, including Saban, sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi chastising her for suggesting that superdelegates had a responsibility to support the candidate who finished the primary process leading in the pledged delegate count.

"We have been strong supporters of the DCCC," they wrote. "We therefore urge you to clarify your position on super-delegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August."

And in February, the Center for Responsive Politics reported that Sen. Obama's political action committee had given $694,000 to superdelegates in the previous three years. Of the 81 who had announced their support for Obama at the time, 34 had received donations totaling $228,000.

Is She a Trojan Rabbit?

by Maureen Dowd, NY Times Op-Ed Columnist
Washington, May 11, 2008

Now Barack Obama faces a true dilemma: how best to punish Hillary Clinton.

After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place.

Her last resort is to continue to press the “Psssst — he’s a black man” tactic. She insisted to USAToday, after the North Carolina and Indiana slide, that she has a broader base, citing an Associated Press article “that found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

So how does Obama repay Hillary for running a campaign designed both to unman him and brand him as an unelectable black? Is the most ingenious way to turn the screw by not choosing her as his running mate, or by choosing her?

It is, verily, a sticky wicket.

One top Hillary supporter who is black warns that, despite the giddy dreams of some punch-drunk Democrats, a fusion ticket could backfire because “Americans can’t handle too much change at once.”

But should Obama ignore that caution and appease Hillary fans by putting her on the ticket?

As president, he could announce that, because Dick Cheney abused the powers of his office so grievously, taking the title “Vice” literally, he intends to shrink the vice presidency back to its “bucket of warm spit” Constitutional prerogatives — presiding over the Senate and taking over if the president goes under anesthesia.

He might also neglect to give Bill (whose acronym would be SLOTUS, Second Lad of the United States) full White House access.

Aside from the delight Bill would get from living at the Naval Observatory and having a huge telescope to window-peep with, there wouldn’t be much joy in Hillaryland.

The lady-in-waiting would be surrounded by Obama disciples who disdained her for fighting dirty. And she would be miserable holding up the train of the young prince who usurped her dream, derailing the post-nup she had with Bill to trade places.

As de facto veep for Bill, she had enough leverage over him, due to his shenanigans, to co-opt huge chunks of policy and personnel decisions.

But in a return engagement with Obama at the top, could she really wake up every day in the back seat and wish him well, or would she just be plotting? (Fourteen vice presidents have ascended, after all.) Wouldn’t she be, in Monty Python parlance, the Trojan Rabbit behind the gates?

On a positive note, maybe she could bring back all that stuff she pilfered on her way out.

Obama’s other option, laid out by Teddy Kennedy on Friday, is to go with someone who wouldn’t be a big dark cloud over his sunshiny new politics.

Teddy told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt that Obama should choose a partner “in tune with his appeal for the nobler aspirations of the American people.”

That would be smart for another reason: Hillary has a strange, unnerving effect on Obama, and whenever he is around her, he’s unable to do his best. Probably, it’s because she’s furious, always shaking his hand off her arm, ignoring him, giving him the evil eye and emasculating him, and the Golden One is not used to such rough treatment.

In the last few days, as Hillary has deflated and Obama and the Democrats have dashed for daylight, he has been more like his old self, flashing his all-is-right-with-the-world smile on the cover of Time, joshing and charming Democrats and Republicans as he wooed superdelegates on the House floor, taking on James Carville for insulting his manhood.

“James Carville is well known for spouting off his mouth without always knowing what he’s talking about,” he told Terry Moran on “Nightline.”

Obama will never be at his best around Hillary; she drains him of his magical powers. She’s Jane Jinx to him. It’s a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn’s star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in “Pat and Mike.”

The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he’s in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, “You are the wrong jockey for this chick.”

“You know, except when you’re around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,” he says, later adding, “When you’re around, she’s no good, she’s dead, see?”

The best way Obama can punish Hillary is to reward himself. He’s no good around her, see?

Seeds of Destruction

May 10, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

By BOB HERBERT, NY Times

The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.

Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

(Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who is black and has been an absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton’s White House quest, told The Daily News: “I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”)

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.

The last time the Clintons had to make a big exit was at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term as president — and they made a complete and utter hash of that historic moment. Having survived the Monica Lewinsky ordeal, you might have thought the Clintons would be on their best behavior.

Instead, a huge scandal erupted when it became known that Mrs. Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied the president on behalf of criminals who then received presidential pardons or a sentence commutation from Mr. Clinton.

Tony Rodham helped get a pardon for a Tennessee couple that had hired him as a consultant and paid or loaned him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the protests of the Justice Department, President Clinton pardoned the couple, Edgar Allen Gregory Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, who had been convicted of bank fraud in Alabama.

Hugh Rodham was paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon of Almon Glenn Braswell, who had been convicted of mail fraud and perjury, and for the release from prison of Carlos Vignali, a drug trafficker who was convicted and imprisoned for conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine. Sure enough, in his last hours in office (when he issued a blizzard of pardons, many of them controversial), President Clinton agreed to the pardon for Braswell and the sentence commutation for Vignali.

Hugh Rodham reportedly returned the money after the scandal became public and was an enormous political liability for the Clintons.

Both Clintons professed to be ignorant of anything improper or untoward regarding the pardons. Once, when asked specifically if she had talked with a deputy White House counsel about pardons, Mrs. Clinton said: “People would hand me envelopes. I would just pass them on. You know, I would not have any reason to look into them.”

It wasn’t just the pardons that sullied the Clintons’ exit from the White House. They took furniture and rugs from the White House collection that had to be returned. And they received $86,000 in gifts during the president’s last year in office, including clothing (a pantsuit, a leather jacket), flatware, carpeting, and so on.

In response to the outcry over that, they decided to repay the value of the gifts.

So class is not a Clinton forte.

But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.

A Response From CNN's Roland Martin on Hillary's Campaign's Racial Overtones

Commentary: Democrats need more than working-class whites
Story Highlights
Roland S. Martin: Sen. Hillary Clinton argues she appeals to working-class whites
But Democrats need more than working-class whites to win, commentator says
Clinton wrongly assumes she also will get all traditional Democrats, Martin says
Candidate who's able to build a broad coalition should be nominee, Martin says

By Roland S. Martin CNN Contributor

(CNN) -- Excuse me if a look of bewilderment crosses my face when a surrogate of Sen. Hillary Clinton's starts off on the "we need hard-working white workers to win in November" mantra.

Roland S. Martin contends the Democratic nominee will need a broad-based coalition to win in November.

The candidate herself has now made that notion the primary -- and latest argument -- to superdelegates to convince them she's the best person to beat Sen. John McCain in November.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she told USA Today.

The newspaper quoted her as saying that an Associated Press article showed how Sen. Barack Obama's support among "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

Now, I know I'm not one of those voters she's talking about, but the reality is that hard-working white Americans alone will not put Clinton or Obama in the White House.

Neither will African-Americans alone or young voters, senior citizens, the college-educated, the "no-working" Americans, gays and lesbians, nonreligious voters, veterans, Hispanics, women, etc.

In fact, Democrats alone won't do it. You also must take a good portion of independents.

No Democrat can win the White House unless he or she is able to pull from all the various constituencies in the country, and it's downright silly for the Clinton campaign to assert that idea that hard-working white votes are the only ones that matter.

Sure, the Clinton camp will contend that's not what it's saying. But it sure sounds that way (and no, I don't agree with what's being said on blogs -- that this is playing the "race card").

Is Clinton suggesting that whites who voted for Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire (where she beat him by around 8,000 votes), Missouri, Iowa, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Washington state, Minnesota and so many other states were phantom voters? Were they not hard-working white voters? Were they only the "eggheads and African-Americans" whom Paul Begala referred to on CNN on election night?

Look, I get spin. And I get that Clinton must figure out some kind of argument that makes sense for the superdelegates to go her way and ignore Obama's lead among pledged delegates, the popular vote and states won. But when a Democratic candidate continues to ram home this notion that hard-working white Americans somehow are the bedrock foundation of the Democratic Party, it's just not true.

Clinton wants to make the argument that her white working-class support in Ohio and Pennsylvania -- states the Democrats need to win in November -- shows she's the best choice.

But one major failure in Clinton's argument is the assumption that all the traditional Democratic constituencies will offer her broad support if she's the nominee. And considering her high negatives, she can't afford any erosion.

Obama could make the case that she has failed miserably in the primaries in garnering young and African-American voters, and without them, she loses.

Not only that, the Democratic Party has a chance to expand the map beyond the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Democrats have a solid shot at winning Iowa, New Mexico, Missouri, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire. Of those states, Obama won four of the seven, and he had narrow losses in New Mexico and New Hampshire.

Small states? Sure. Winnable? Absolutely. Their electoral votes can be as important as the big states.
If Democrats are serious about winning, they are going to have to put on ice this notion that white working-class voters or any other constituencies are the be-all and end-all in November.

Winning the White House is about building a true broad coalition. You should judge which candidate has been able to do so in the primaries. If it's Obama, he's the nominee. If it's Clinton, then she is.

Such a coalition should be on the mind of every superdelegate -- not the debate over which ethnic group reigns supreme at the ballot box.

Roland S. Martin is a nationally award-winning journalist and CNN contributor. Martin is studying to receive his master's degree in Christian communications at Louisiana Baptist University. You can read more of his columns at http://www.rolandsmartin.com/

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.

Troubling Racial Overtones Emanating from the Clinton Campaign Again

Clinton: Obama Not Winning Over "Hard-Working Americans, White Americans"

The Huffington Post May 8, 2008 09:13 AM

USA Today notices that Sen. Hillary Clinton has begun referring explicitly to her appeal among white voters while on the campaign trail:

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters -- including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

This is the second time since Tuesday's primaries that the Clinton campaign has referred to the racial dimension of the voting electorate. Ben Smith reports from yesterday's conference call on the state of the race:

And Garin brags, specifically and explicitly, about her strength with the white vote, comparing North Carolina's white voters in North Carolina to those in Virginia. (The conversations have always been about these voters, but they're usually referred to as "blue collar" or by some less specifically racial euphemism.)

"We lost the white electorate in Virginia, started even in North Carolina among the white electorate just two weeks ago, and ended [with] a very significant win of 24 points among those voters," he said, acknowledging that among black voters, Clinton "did not do as well as we would want or need."

Hillary Loans Campaign $6 Million - Is She Asking for Repayment from Senator Obama?

I had recently heard reports on MSNBC's political coverage that (1) Senator Clinton has loaned her campaign $6 million to continue her ill-fated run; and (2) given this past Tuesday's election results, she is looking towards Senator Obama's Campaign to repay that money to her campaign, which I imagine, would in turn go back to repaying the Clintons.

I do not believe the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party owe the Clinton campaign the amount she has loaned her campaign personally. She has chosen to continue her run, long after people have stopped contributing - even her billionaire friends - with just a few of the millions she and Bill have earned in the last years. John Edwards was forced to drop out, although a worthy candidate, because of a lack of funds. Hillary Clinton chose to use her vast personal wealth to promote her campaign.. Unity or not, it would be a misuse of funds of both the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign to offer corporate welfare to a multi-millionaire who made an investment in herself which did not work out.

I hope Senator Obama does not do this. Certainly, Senator Edwards, a great and honorable man, did not make such a request. He withdrew, or suspended, his campaign. Such a request, and any agreement to such a request on the Clintons' behalf would convince me the Democratic Party is back to "business as usual".

I'm missing you now, John Edwards.

Are Black Voters Being Disenfranchised in Today's Indiana Primary? From Black Box Voting

I received this startling news from Blackboxvoting.org, yet I have seen nothing in the press on it, even though it would seem to HEAVILY affect today's Indiana primary. It also seems it would leave open the Indiana results to a legal challenge on disenfranchising black voters, if this story is true. It SHOULD be followed up in the press, I would think. With this story out there on election day in Indiana, I wonder why it hasn't appeared. CNN's lead is John McCain's take on Obama's "elitist" take on judges. That is not a story, but a report on what John McCain is saying in a political statement. Who will cover this MAJOR Indiana voting story? Posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - 6:22 am:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - 6:22 am:

---

Yesterday, we reported that according to Indiana's own figures, 1.1 million voter registrations had been cancelled, one-quarter of a million of those in just two counties. Another researcher, Steve Rosenfeld, began tracking back through data from the Election Assistance Commission, finding that the cancellation quantities didn't jive with the numbers you'd expect. According to Rosenfeld, after talking with the office of the Indiana Secretary of State the explanation is that "cancelled" does not mean "cancelled registrations" it means "changes" to registrations.

IF TRUE, THIS RAISES ANOTHER CONCERN

Because Indiana is implementing an ID requirement, and this will require that voters name and address match when the voter registration database is compared with their ID, an unscrupulous data entry person would no longer need to PURGE registrations in order to knock people off the voting rolls. All that's required is CHANGING the registration slightly, to introduce typos.

Many locations are now enamored of using "electronic pollbooks" instead of the paper printouts. We all know what happens when you enter a name with a typo: The computer says "can't find".

Try it. Use any computer program you have, and enter your name with a typo. Then do a search for your name. If I typo "Ben Harris" and search for "Bev Harris" I won't find it. Now, with the paper pollbooks, a pollworker might see that it's a typo, if my address is the same. Whether they accept that Bev Harris is Ben Harris is open to how flexible they feel at the moment.

With electronic pollbooks, they may not find the typo-name at all. And if an unscrupulous political hack enters "changes" or "updates" that introduce a typo into the address, or name and address, it may be impossible to find you at all. Example: I alter "Bev Harris" to make it read "Ben Harris" and then change "973 SW 43rd St" to "793 SW 43rd". Gone. Poof.

Some say the problems with the Florida 2000 election have now been codified into federal law nationwide. In terms of the now-mandatory statewide voter lists, that's true. These centralized records allow changes to be introduced from either your county or the state, and a single person can cook the list.

When you add voter ID into the mix, it allows very subtle attacks that will produce mismatches. Mark my words, the new watchword for 2008 will be "human error." Add "human error" to the term "computer glitch" for meaningless and unacceptable terms that introduce voter disenfranchisment without accountability.

SECOND CLASS BALLOTS

If your name is not found on the voter rolls, you are entitled to vote on a provisional ballot. However: The networks will call the race, engaging in their traditional journalistic malpractice of saying who "won" when they mean who they "project WILL win". NO PROVISIONAL BALLOTS ARE CONSIDERED AT ALL when the networks "call the race." They are taking their projections from called and faxed-in reports of the voting machine results tapes -- and no provisional ballots are in those results.

Provisional ballots are also "second class" ballots because:
- They are not counted until many days later
- Some of the rules applied to which ballots count or don't count actually disenfranchise voters based on pollworker errors. For example, in Volusia County Florida, citizen extraordinaire Susan Pynchon fought to get a whole set of provisional ballots counted that they were about to deny, based on the reason that "the poll worker didn't write the REASON it was a provisional ballot" on each one.

CANCELLED DOESN'T MEAN CANCELLED

The word "cancelled" is the one chosen by the Indiana election officials and their computers. They say it doesn't mean "cancelled." Here is a picture of Porter County from their report. Cancelled means cancelled, or cancelled means changed, but something happened in Porter County and there is no explanation as to what:




Here is a link to the original Indiana document containing voter registration information:
http://www.in.gov/sos/elections/pdfs/Statewide_Voter_Count_by_County5.1.08.pdf

According to this document, here is a map with the percentage of voter registrations cancelled or changed, along with the quantities.



If you try to vote and they can't find you on the list, please report it to us for data collection and public records actions.

DISCUSS AND EVALUATE AS VOTER REPORTS AND RESULTS ROLL IN

You can post and discuss the Indiana and North Carolina 2008 primary elections here.

Here is a compendium of links that you may find helpful when tracking incoming results. Some of them are live already, others will go live as results come in:

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/73/73764.html

--Fear, by Harry Truman "When even one American - who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all of Americans are in peril."

Hillary Should Be Dismissed From The Democratic Party For Iran Comments

Huffington Post, Ben Cohen

4 hours ago -Nobody seems to have noticed that Hillary Clinton has broken international law by threatening Iran with 'obliteration.'

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," Clinton said in an interview with ABC. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Why are alarm bells not ringing?

In chapter I, article II of the United Nations Charter, it states:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

The U.N Charter was signed in San Francisco in 1945 by the United States along with 50 other countries. Each country is bound by its articles, and the treaty prevails over all other treaties (including 'special' relationships with other nations). In other words, regardless of any hypothetical attack on Israel, the United States is legally bound not to threaten Iran or any other country. This is also enshrined in the constitution. Article IV Clause II states:
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

It is incredible that public debate regarding Hillary Clinton's threat to annihilate Iran centers around campaign strategy rather than international law. I have been scouring the mainstream media to find anything criticizing Clinton's remarks for their illegality, but can find nothing other than comments like 'Clinton's tough talk on Iran' (taken from ABC News)

While most Democrats have kept quiet, Obama rightly denounced Clinton's remarks saying, "It's not the language we need right now, and I think it's language reflective of George Bush."

» Full Story on Huffington Post

Barack Obama, Reverend Wright, and My Iron Man Suit

Chronicle and John Diaz for the chance to write the essay this video is based on. I've been a supporter of Sen, Barack Obama for President for 17 months, and one large reason is that he's like me. We share the same August 4th birthday, and have walked similar paths of racial discovery. Both of us have carved out our niche as individuals able to walk in different circles and still be ourselves. That's not easy; it comes as those around you tell you what they think your "place" in life should be; it's no wonder that I felt violated by Rev. Jeremiah Wright's National Press Club speech, as much as Senator Obama did.

Pastor Wright made me put on my Iron Man Suit again.

Manoj: Telemarketer Elite

This is funny. Except for the fact that Hillary and McCain voted FOR Bush's bill to give credit card companies more power to collect debt and raise interest rates, while simultaneously reducing the power of Americans to be able to declare bankruptcy from 30 % interest rates, even under extreme circumstances, such as health issues. (Is this their universal health care? Debtor's prison?) And.. she was FOR NAFTA before she was AGAINST it. But enjoy and smile.. perhaps a change is in the wind...

Was Jeremiah Wright's Speech Set Up By a Clinton Supporter?

Barack Obama In Philadelphia - THE Message

Because it deserves to be heard again...It is NOT business as usual. A moving speech, and worth the listen.

Judgment Day looms for Hillary Clinton the wrecker, London Times

They endorse Barack for hope, but fear that Hillary will play on our fears as Bush did.

From The Sunday Times of London
April 20, 2008 Andrew Sullivan

Even after all the hype, this Tuesday’s vote in Pennsylvania will be a watershed primary election. This isn’t because it could determine whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues on its brutal, nihilistic path towards the destruction of the most promising figure in the Democratic party since Kennedy.

It isn’t because it’s been an age since the last primary vote and every nasty toxin in American culture has been drawn to the surface by the Clinton poultice. It isn’t even because Pennsylvania is an indisputably important and large state that any Democrat needs to win in November.

It is because the Clintons have turned Pennsylvania into a microcosm of what they think the general election will be in November. And the Clintons are running as the Rove Republicans. If they fail to destroy Barack Obama as effectively as Karl Rove – Bush’s master of the dark arts – destroyed Al Gore and John Kerry in 2000 and 2004, with tactics just as brutal but even more personal, then they will have driven American politics to a critical point. They will have shown that the paradigm that has reigned in US politics for at least two decades has been shattered.

That’s what is being tested this coming week. It may be the most important vote in America until the final one in November.

For a month now, Obama has been pummelled by a Democrat in ways I have never witnessed in a primary campaign. Senator Hillary Clinton has directly argued that he is less qualified to be commander-in-chief than the Republican nominee, John McCain. She has said that she doesn’t know for sure that he is not a secret Muslim. She has said his choice of church is unacceptable to her. She has said he deliberately wants many Americans to continue scraping by without health insurance.

Her campaign has insinuated that he was once a drug dealer. Her husband has equated him with the rabble-rousing preacher Jesse Jackson. The Clintons have publicly associated Obama with domestic terrorist William Ayers, with the militant Palestinian group Hamas, and with antisemitic demagogue Louis Farrakhan. And what is remarkable about all this is that most of it was not done by surrogates, but by a former president of the United States against a senator in his own party, and directly by Clinton herself. Every time you think: “Nah, they won’t go there, will they?” – they do.

Right now, in Pennsylvania, Clinton is running only negative advertisements designed to exploit Obama’s gaffe a fortnight ago, when he described some rural Pennsylvanians as bitter, and as “clinging” to some traditional identities because they feel left out of economic and social change. It was a stupid offhand comment, easily misinterpreted, and Obama deserved a hit.

But this is what the Clintons’ actual advertisement says, voiced by several unidentified Pennsylvanians: “I was very insulted by Barack Obama.” “It shows how out of touch Barack Obama is.” “The good people of Pennsylvania deserve a lot better than what Barack Obama said.”

This is a swing state. For the Clintons baldly to coopt exactly the kind of antielitist rhetoric used to marginalise Democrats by Republicans for three decades is to take the campaign warfare to a whole new level of earth-scorching.

For good measure, the ABC News debate last Wednesday night could have been crafted by Rove. For the first three-quarters of an hour, every conceivable personal attack on Obama was aired by the moderators, including former Clinton protege, George Stephanopoulos.

Obama was asked if his failure to wear an American flag lapel pin at all times was a sign that he didn’t really love America. He was asked if he was an elitist. He was asked if he secretly condoned domestic terrorism, on the grounds that an old 1960s Weather Underground radical had sponsored a fundraiser for him. He was asked whether his former pastor, an ex-marine, was a patriot. And on each occasion, Clinton jumped in to exploit the attacks by the ABC moderators. It was so brutal and unrelenting that you almost looked away.

Obama, moreover, wilted. He didn’t punch back. He seemed completely exhausted, drained, almost detached. I’ve seen him this way before, but never before 10m viewers in prime time. It was his worst performance yet.
In one debate, all the tactics deployed by Republicans since Lee Atwater ran George Bush Sr’s guns-and-flags-and-taxes campaign in 1988 were unloaded on the rookie. Clinton grinned. The next day, her husband said she “did great”. There was almost a liberated sense in the Clinton camp that, finally, they had been able to do to a Democrat what Republicans had done to them for the past two decades: insinuate treason, lack of patriotism, elitist snobbery, countercultural deviance, and every other red-blue hot-button meme that could stroke some electoral erogenous zone somewhere.

Not since the Clintons ran radio ads in 1996, bragging that they had defended American values from homosexuals, had the adoption of pure Republican tactics been so obvious. And this time, it was against a Democrat.

This, the Clintonites tell us, is what the Republicans will do to Obama this autumn. So we’re only showing you! The strategy is to persuade super-delegates that only the Clinton brand can withstand Rove-style attacks, and so foment a revolution before or at the convention to dislodge the candidate with the most pledged delegates and the greatest number of popular votes.

They are, of course, only doing this for the sake of their party, their country and the world. That the tactic also correlates with the Clintons’ recapturing control of a party that was finally moving past them is pure coincidence.

And that’s why Tuesday will be so instructive. Hillary Clinton should win Pennsylvania easily. She had a 20-point lead until relatively recently. And if the Clintons are right about their classic Atwater-Rove tactics, she will win by double-digits after throwing the kitchen sink, the boiler, the couch and the septic tank at her opponent.

However, if Obama keeps her lead to single digits, if he goes on to win in North Carolina and Indiana, if the momentum of the race does not change, something else will be shown.

It will show that the crisis America is in now has made the kind of tactics of the past two decades moot. It will show that the issues of the Iraq occupation, the teetering economy, the unsustainable debt, the collapsing dollar, the constitutional disarray and the moral collapse of the torture programme are now more salient than cultural identity. It will show that the voters actually want to debate something more than lapel pins and who is or is not a secret Muslim or patriot. It will show we are in a new era.

Maybe we’re not. Maybe the old politics and the old patterns have one more turn of the screw to go. Maybe the Clintons are right. And that’s the beauty of democracy. On Tuesday, we will go a long way towards finding out.

Hillary Clinton's Opposing Statements on the Iraq War

So she was for it before she was against it? You can't have it both ways, and you helped get us in there, Senator Clinton.

Clinton Was Pro NAFTA before she Was Anti-Nafta, MSNBC Reports on her Untruthfulness

David Shuster reports saying that Clinton helped get NAFTA approved, 3/25. If you look at the videos, you can only conclude she was lying when she supported it, or she's lying now when she says she never supported it. But she's on record (video) as saying she fully supported it. How can she say she's always been against it? Maybe she was under sniper fire at the time.

Even Soulja Boy Gets the Issues More Than ABC

Loved this one.

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Obama endorsed by former senators Nunn & Boren; Reich does so as well

From ON POLITICS; USA Today
By: Mark Memmott and Jill Lawrence


Obama endorsed by former senators Nunn & Boren; Reich does so as well
Two former senators with long records on foreign policy and national security issues -- and who come from "red" states where Republicans dominate -- have just endorsed Sen. Barack Obama's bid for the White House.

Sam Nunn of Georgia and David Boren of Oklahoma, both Democrats (as is Obama), will also be serving as advisers on Obama's national security foreign policy team.

Meanwhile, New York magazine reports that one-time "friend of Bill" and former Clinton administration Labor secretary Robert Reich will this afternoon also endorse Obama. Reich is set to make his announcement official around 1 p.m. ET, on his blog.

Update at 1 p.m. ET. Reich makes it official:

"My avoidance of offering a formal endorsement until now has also been affected by the pull of old friendships and my reluctance as a teacher and commentator to be openly partisan," Reich says in the post he just published. "But my conscience won't let me be silent any longer."

He adds that:

"I believe that Barack Obama should be elected President of the United States.

Although Hillary Clinton has offered solid and sensible policy proposals, Obama's strike me as even more so."

Posted by Mark Memmott at 12:38 PM/ET, April 18, 2008 in Democrats, Presidential race, 2008 Permalink

ABC Debates Biased? The Reviews Are In

.. From WashPo TV critic Tom Shales:

"It was another step downward for network news -- in particular ABC News, which
hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors,
Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable
performances. For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show,
Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that
already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to
claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news
to begin with. The fact is, cable networks CNN and MSNBC both did better jobs
with earlier candidate debates. Also, neither of those cable networks, if memory
serves, rushed to a commercial break just five minutes into the proceedings,
after giving each candidate a tiny, token moment to make an opening statement.
Cable news is indeed taking over from network news, and merely by being
competent."

... even our friends across the pond, at the U.K.'s Guardian, were unimpressed with what they said was possibly "the
dumbest debate in America":

"Last night's debate -- or, more specifically, the performance of its
moderators, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos -- was by turns superficial
and disingenuous. The trouble started early. Gibson began with an utterly
fatuous inquiry about whether each candidate would pledge to ask the other to be
their vice-presidential nominee if they won, and agree to accept the veep slot
if they lost ... Stephanopoulos and Gibson deserve every bit of opprobrium being
thrown their way. They delivered a noxious blend of smear, innuendo and
diversion. But it looks like the same old political junk food no longer
satisfies an electorate hungry for real change."

... Ed Morrissey says, What were you hoping for? A game of patty-cake?

"I'm not sure what anyone expected. All of the questions asked were legitimate
questions, and the time spent on them had more to do with follow-ups by the
candidates than with the moderators. None of them had been asked in a debate before last night, and
indeed most of these issues had only been reported since the last debate. ABC
didn't break a scoop last night; all of the issues they raised in that first 50
minutes have appeared in both major media outlets and in each others'
advertising."

MSNBC Questions Clinton's Truthiness, Says She Was Pro-NAFTA

ABC Delivers Biased Debate: Obama Answers

Before last night's ABC debate, I e-mailed some questions I would like asked. I did it for the following reasons, since the debate had become debased to the point of personal attack ads by the Clinton campaign reminiscent of the Bush campaigns... complicit with a press that was afraid to press Bush on anything. This was sent out yesterday before the debate (my e-mail), and oddly enough, the debate did exactly the opposite of what I hoped it would do. It went on the offensive of one candidate, run by a former employee of the other candidate's family. The following is what I asked, followed by Senator Obama's assessment today of last night's debate, in what I thought was very accurate. I stated as follows in my e-mail:

Attacks are using fabrications or half-truths about a candidate to divide voters and cause questions in voters minds, albeit questions fabricated by the attacker.

There is a difference between that and asking direct questions of an opponent about why they actually DID do something, or why they have certain stands on issues. That is not attacking. That is winning the political fight through discussion of issues.

Facts I'D like examined are
1) Why did Hillary support the Bush's War on Iraq when Bin Laden was in Afghanistan?
2) Why did she vote to declare the Iranian Brigade a terrorist organization, thus giving Bush the ammo to go into Iran before he leaves office?
3) Why was she the ONLY Senator (Democratic or Republican) absent from the vote on granting retroactive immunity to the telecoms?
4) Why was Mark Penn on her payroll for a full year while still consulting the Colombian government on trade and jobs? - and, concurrently, how does she feel about her husband receiving an award and large sums of money from that same Colombian government as she "professes" to oppose Nafta? And Why is Mark Penn still advising, if this is an issue?
5) Why did she work so hard to support NAFTA in the beginning?
6) Why did she vote for Bush's Federal Bankruptcy Law which made it more difficult for those with mounting credit card debts to gain bankruptcy amidst the escalation of credit card rates that approaches the usury of organized crime in decades past? (30 percent in some cases)
7) How did she feel about her ultrawealthy supporters who wrote the infamous letter to the DCCC stating that they would take their money from local campaigns if the superdelegates did not go with Hillary? And, again, concurrently, how did she feel about the ties of some of those letter writers to organizations such as Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp, which Ed Rendell now calls fair and balanced, and other groups, such as the one that sold illegal weapons to the Chinese Government, was fined, and declared bankruptcy before having to pay the U.S. Government the fine?

These are not attack points. They are checkable facts that I wish and hope the newsmedia will ask her, and that the moderators in the debate will ask her. But, given my skepticism that they won't, I hope that Senator Obama DOES check the facts on these issues, and then ask her in the debate.



What we got was an hour-long questioning of Obama on such "tough" points as: Why doesn't he wear the flag pin? (Where was Hillary's, Charlie's, and George's as they asked that question?); what about someone who was on a board with him long ago who was in the Weather Underground when he was 8, while at the same time there was no follow-up with Senator Clinton as to why she didn't feel it a problem that her husband pardoned two members of the Weather Underground?; and the re-instatement of race into the campaign by our fair friends at ABC, just as Senator Obama had delivered a wonderful speech having united the various splintered groups in this country.

And why were none of the substantial questions I, as a mere blogger, could see were factual issues that needed to be addressed?