THE.personal.IS.political

Geraldine Ferraro Must Resign Immediately

A few days ago Geraldine Ferraro, one of Hillary’s top fundraisers, and member of her finance committee said the following about Barack Obama:

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.

First of all, this is incredibly demeaning and disrespectful to Senator Obama, everything he stands for, everything he has accomplished, and the millions of people who support him. He has better experience than Hillary, he has better judgment than Hillary, he has a much stronger message than Hillary, he is a better organizer and manager than Hillary, and this campaign has shown that he has a much better character than Hillary. Secondly to say a black man running for president is winning because of his race is one of the most ludicrous and ignorant things you could say about race in this country. By her own logic Jesse Jackson would have been our first black president by now, or at least our first black Democratic nominee.

To say he is only where he is because he is a black man is incredibly offensive, much more so than someone calling Hillary a “monster”, and even more offensive (and ridiculous) than him being compared to Ken Starr. For this reason, Hillary must strongly denounce and reject Ferraro’s comments and support, and Ferraro must resign from Hillary’s finance committee immediately.

A Case Study: Hillary's Doublespeak, and Her War Against Democracy

Let’s use a case study to find out who Hillary Clinton really is, to find out where her real values lie. The case we will be studying is Hillary’s attitude toward democracy.

This topic keeps coming up, mostly with respect to Florida and Michigan, where she won’t shut up about how much every voter’s voice deserves to count (nor should she, if she were genuine about it). However as we shall see (and this probably won’t be a shocker to anyone vaguely familiar with Hillary), she cares nothing about the voters, past the extent to which they can be used to further her political ambitions.

The first tussle over voters came weeks before the first vote was cast, before the Iowa caucus. Iowa had recently moved up its caucus date to maintain its status as the first state to vote, but this had the effect, intended or unintended, of making it much harder for students to participate, because the caucus now fell during their winter break. This would hurt Obama, who has always been favored by younger, college-educated crowds, and good for Hillary, who doesn’t do nearly as well with the younger, college-educated crowds. Now it should be made very clear from the start that these students are allowed by law to vote in Iowa, and indeed the law even allows for same day voter registration to make it that much easier for Iowa students to vote (because after all, who wants young adults to be apathetic?). And since these students spend 3/4 of the year living in Iowa, with most working in Iowa, and paying taxes and tuition in Iowa, they are obviously Iowa residents. So Obama, like all candidates, encouraged college students in Iowa who were legally allowed to vote to vote for him. Then we got a telling first glance at how Hillary would weigh voter rights against her own self-interest:

“This is a process for Iowans. This needs to be all about Iowa, and people who live here, people who pay taxes here.”

Two things are apparent here. A) She doesn’t want students who were originally from out of state, yet nevertheless are legally allowed to vote, spend at least 75% of the year in Iowa, work in Iowa and pay taxes in Iowa, to vote in Iowa. And B) By her own criteria the voters Obama and every other candidate, including her hypocritical self, are courting should be allowed to vote, because as I’ve pointed out, they live in Iowa and pay taxes there (not to mention keep Iowa’s higher education system afloat with their money), so she is not only trying to disenfranchise students, she is using the whole situation to try to make it seem like Obama is doing something underhanded by encouraging a historically underrepresented demographic of legal voters to exercise their democratic right by voting, thereby letting their voices be heard.

So we can clearly see, when voters get in the way of her political ambitions, their voices are unimportant, and shouldn’t be heard. This is especially callous given that young voters are for the first time in ages interested in politics and want to participate, and she responds by trying to stamp out their excitement. Unfortunately, this is a theme that will resurface again and again in this campaign.

After the Iowa caucus which Obama won by a large margin, and the New Hampshire primary, which Hillary narrowly won, came the Nevada caucus. At this point Hillary had already started to argue that caucuses were inherently undemocratic because they make it harder for some people to vote. She used this mostly as an excuse to explain why caucuses shouldn’t matter, because apparently caucuses unfairly target her demographic, white women aged 65+ who recently gave birth. Months before the Nevada caucus the rules were set, and all parties agreed that they were fair. These rules included a few extra caucus sites set up on the Las Vegas Strip to accommodate the large number of workers in that area who would otherwise be unable to vote due to time limitations or overfilled caucus sites. Good, everyone agreed that making it easier for voters to vote was good for democracy. Until the Culinary Union, which represents many workers on the Las Vegas Strip endorsed Obama over Hillary that is. Within 48 hours of the union’s decision, the Nevada teacher’s union, which is headed by a bunch of Hillary supporters, filed a lawsuit against the state to have the Strip caucuses closed because they supposedly disproportionately helped Culinary Union members (thus helped Obama). Hillary and Bill supported them all the way. The lawsuit was eventually struck down and the caucuses went ahead as planned, and in the end Hillary actually got a boost from those caucus sites because the union turnout was low and didn’t tilt toward Obama as much as everyone thought it would. Suddenly those caucus sites were fair after all, and suddenly that caucus mattered, as opposed to all of the caucuses Obama won. Nevertheless, it shows that despite all of Hillary’s talk about the voters having their voices heard, when she thinks their voices may hurt her, she would rather them be silenced, and she’s willing to use legal action to do it.

As I’ve previously written, after Obama blew through Hillary’s Super Tuesday firewall, and after she had secured unopposed “victories” in Michigan and Florida, she reversed her previous stance of indifference concerning Michigan and Florida voters and began clamoring for their voices to be heard, she wanted them seated as is, even though she was the only candidate on the ballot in Michigan, and even though both elections were little more than name-recognition tests, which she easily won, since no other candidates were able to campaign in either state. So basically she was fine with having an information blockout imposed on both states, so she could benefit from the voters not having a real choice, and then afterwards she suddenly became the hero of freedom, fighting for democracy, fighting for the people, fighting for delegates from Michigan and Florida to be seated at the Democratic Convention!!! Suddenly Hillary is a champion of voters rights! Her and her supporters have repeatedly decried the horrible disenfranchisement of the voters in these two states, saying that she won’t stand for it. Yet she is against having them do a revote with fair access to information from both sides, because she wants her previous wins locked in so she doesn’t actually have to fight a fair fight, especially when polls show Obama would probably win in Michigan now.

And while this whole mess has been going on, and while she has continued to complain that caucuses (minus Nevada’s) don’t matter because they somehow inherently disadvantage her (and that every state Obama has won doesn’t matter for a whole slew of reasons), there has also been a superdelegate war going on. This is where the hypocrisy really starts to set in. She says that it is important that every voter be counted, because democracy is all about the voters, and they all deserve to have their voices heard…yet the voters have spoken, and they have chosen Obama. And since it is virtually impossible for Hillary to win the pledged (democratically elected) delegate race at this point, her only option is to use undemocratic superdelegates to usurp the voices of the voters, and hijack the democratic process so she can win.

Now it varies by state, but the most common estimate is that one superdelegate equals over 10,000 voters. So basically, while Miss Democracy is talking the talk about wanting ever voter to count, and how it would be travesty if their votes didn’t count, her campaign strategy involves basically stuffing the ballot box with 10,000 votes at a time until she can overcome the democratically elected vote and come out ahead of Obama. That is essentially her plan, and the only way she can hope to win after you strip away her twofaced rhetoric.

The only problem is, Obama is quickly catching up in superdelegates (although he has consistently said they should not under any circumstance override the will of the people), so her power grab is going to have to extend even deeper into anti-democratic territory, if that is possible. Oh but apparently it is possible, because today she came out with this telling statement:

“There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and super-delegates, all for different reasons, and they’re all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose,” Hillary told Newsweek, when asked how she can win the nomination despite the current delegate math.

“Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we’re going to follow the process.”

Notice, there is apparently a difference now between elected delegates, and this new Hillaryland category of “caucus delegates”, because once again, caucuses don’t matter, and the people who vote in them shouldn’t have a voice, aside from Nevadans, who matter lots, because they voted for Hillary. But basically what Miss Democracy is saying here is that pledged delegates, who again represent anywhere from 4,000 to over 12,000 votes, depending on the state, and who were chosen to represent those votes, can (and apparently should) switch their votes over to her, hijacking the democratic process in the worst way. But according to her, “this is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years (hey, aren’t caucuses too?), and we’re going to follow the process.” So just because the system is set up to make it theoretically possible for pledged delegates to usurp democracy (although they almost never do), according to Hillary it is a perfectly legitimate way to win an election, even though she herself will incessantly complains about how our electoral system is unfair and out to get her.

Something doesn’t add up here. She is apparently so passionate about every voter in Michigan and Florida having their voices heard (as long as they don’t have a real choice), and she is apparently so upset that somehow voters are disenfranchised by caucuses (except Nevada’s), yet her entire campaign strategy revolves around hijacking the popular vote by using superdelegates, who essentially overrule (disenfranchise) over 10,000 voters apiece, to reverse the voters’ decision, while encouraging pledged delegates, the caretakers of the people’s voices to the Convention, to abandon the voters and switch their vote over to her. It really is astounding that she can talk, with a straight face, about how much voters matter, and how every voter counts, when she is simultaneously purposely trying to cancel out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of voters by gaming democracy in backroom deals.

My question is, why the hell won’t the media spell out the obvious? These are the incontrovertible facts. This is what “superdelegates” and “switching” pledged delegates mean when you strip away the euphemisms and see the cold ugly reality of trying to steal an election. Yet you will never find a peep of this in the media, because they, like Hillary, aren’t the least bit interested in democracy, or the sanctity of the vote, or the will of the voters. The answer is that for the media, all that matters is ratings, which means keeping this rat race alive, even though rigor mortis set in weeks ago. And for Hillary, all that matters is winning, at all costs, and she has made up her mind that she won’t let any pesky Democrats get in the way of her quest for the throne.

Update: Here is some anecdotal evidence of how she plans on canceling out the will of the people by messing with pledged delegates.

Hillary Clinton, Fratricidal Maniac (Repost)

[I’m feeling lazy today, and I want to spend time reading instead of posting, so I’m going to do some reposts. Here is a great article from The New Republic, basically stating the obvious, the same things I’ve been saying. It makes me feel better when others state the obvious, so I don’t feel so crazy when it is so obvious what she is doing, yet the MSM, the DNC and most people don’t seem to appreciate how crazy Hillary really is, and how much damage she is trying to inflict on the Democratic Party:]

Hillary Clinton, Fratricidal Maniac
by Jonathan Chait

The morning after Tuesday’s primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a memo titled “The Path to the Presidency.” I eagerly dug into the paper, figuring it would explain how Clinton would obtain the Democratic nomination despite an enormous deficit in delegates. Instead, the memo offered a series of arguments as to why Clinton should run against John McCain - i.e., “Hillary is seen as the one who can get the job done” - but nothing about how she actually could. Is she planning a third-party run? Does she think Obama is going to die? The memo does not say.

The reason it doesn’t say is that Clinton’s path to the nomination is pretty repulsive. She isn’t going to win at the polls. Barack Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates. That may not sound like a lot in a 4,000-delegate race, but it is. Clinton’s Ohio win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to pull even with Obama. She isn’t going to do much to dent, let alone eliminate, his lead.

That means, as we all have grown tired of hearing, that she would need to win with superdelegates. But, with most superdelegates already committed, Clinton would need to capture the remaining ones by a margin of better than two to one. And superdelegates are going to be extremely reluctant to overturn an elected delegate lead the size of Obama’s. The only way to lessen that reluctance would be to destroy Obama’s general election viability, so that superdelegates had no choice but to hand the nomination to her. Hence her flurry of attacks, her oddly qualified response as to whether Obama is a Muslim (“not as far as I know”), her repeated suggestions that John McCain is more qualified.

Clinton’s justification for this strategy is that she needs to toughen up Obama for the general election-if he can’t handle her attacks, he’ll never stand up to the vast right-wing conspiracy. Without her hazing, warns the Clinton memo, “Democrats may have a nominee who will be a lightening rod of controversy.” So Clinton’s offensive against the likely nominee is really an act of selflessness. And here I was thinking she was maniacally pursuing her slim thread of a chance, not caring - or possibly even hoping, with an eye toward 2012 - that she would destroy Obama’s chances of defeating McCain in the process. I feel ashamed for having suspected her motives.

Still, there are a few flaws in Clinton’s trial-by-smear method. The first is that her attacks on Obama are not a fair proxy for what he’d endure in the general election, because attacks are harder to refute when they come from within one’s own party. Indeed, Clinton is saying almost exactly the same things about Obama that McCain is: He’s inexperienced, lacking in substance, unequipped to handle foreign policy. As The Washington Monthly’s Christina Larson has pointed out, in recent weeks the nightly newscasts have consisted of Clinton attacking Obama, McCain attacking Obama, and then Obama trying to defend himself and still get out his own message. If Obama’s the nominee, he won’t have a high-profile Democrat validating McCain’s message every day.

Second, Obama can’t “test” Clinton the way she can test him. While she likes to claim that she beat the Republican attack machine, it’s more accurate to say that she survived with heavy damage. Clinton is a wildly polarizing figure, with disapproval ratings at or near 50 percent. But, because she earned the intense loyalty of core Democratic partisans, Obama has to tread gingerly around her vulnerabilities. There is a big bundle of ethical issues from the 1990s that Obama has not raised because he can’t associate himself with what partisan Democrats (but not Republicans or swing voters) regard as a pure GOP witch hunt.

What’s more, Clinton has benefited from a favorable gender dynamic that won’t exist in the fall. (In the Democratic primary, female voters have outnumbered males by nearly three to two.) Clinton’s claim to being a tough, tested potential commander-in-chief has gone almost unchallenged. Obama could reply that being First Lady doesn’t qualify you to serve as commander-in-chief, but he won’t quite say that, because feminists are an important chunk of the Democratic electorate. John McCain wouldn’t be so reluctant.

Third, negative campaigning is a negative-sum activity. Both the attacker and the attackee tend to see their popularity drop. Usually, the victim’s popularity drops farther than the perpetrator’s, which is why negative campaigning works. But it doesn’t work so well in primaries, where the winner has to go on to another election.

Clinton’s path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that the results would not count toward delegate totals. Oh, and her campaign has periodically hinted that some of Obama’s elected delegates might break off and support her. I don’t think she’d be in a position to defeat Hitler’s dog in November, let alone a popular war hero.

Some Clinton supporters, like my friend (and historian) David Greenberg, have been assuring us that lengthy primary fights go on all the time and that the winner doesn’t necessarily suffer a mortal wound in the process. But Clinton’s kamikaze mission is likely to be unusually damaging. Not only is the opportunity cost - to wrap up the nomination, and spend John McCain into the ground for four months - uniquely high, but the venue could not be less convenient. Pennsylvania is a swing state that Democrats will almost certainly need to win in November, and Clinton will spend seven weeks and millions of dollars there making the case that Obama is unfit to set foot in the White House. You couldn’t create a more damaging scenario if you tried.

Imagine in 2000, or 2004, that George W. Bush faced a primary fight that came down to Florida (his November must-win state). Imagine his opponent decided to spend seven weeks pounding home the theme that Bush had a dangerous plan to privatize Social Security. Would this have improved Bush’s chances of defeating the Democrats? Would his party have stood for it?

Hillary: Political Suicide-Bomber (Repost)

[This is a good blog post for those who deride Obama supporters for being so anti-Hillary, those who talk about Obama Hillary-haters like they are crazy and fanatical, like we hate without justification. In reality, we who can’t stand Hillary aren’t “Hillary-haters” like the Republicans are, the ones we’ve been fighting ever since the 90s, we are against Hillary because of Hillary, because of the person she is and the things she has said and done. I, like many others, came into this election either somewhat liking Hillary, or being indifferent, but as she showed her true colors, her selfishness, vindictiveness, her do and say anything to win attitude, her absolute contempt for honesty and integrity, and her complete comfort with stabbing her own party in the back, we began to dislike her, and then hate her. Anyway, this explains the process of seeing Hillary for who she really is:]

The Monster: A Loyal Clinton Soldier Turns in His Badge
by Seth Grahame-Smith

She has no idea.

She has no idea how many times I defended her. How many right-leaning friends and relatives I battled with. How many times I played down her shady business deals and penchant for scandals — whether it was Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Cattle Futures, Web Hubbell, or Norman Hsu. She has no idea how frequently I dismissed her husband’s serial adultery as an unfortunate trait of an otherwise brilliant man. For sixteen years, I was a proud soldier in the legion of “Clinton apologists” — who believed that peace and prosperity were more important than regrettable personality traits.

And then she ran for president.

After seven years of George W. Bush, America is hungry for change. Big change. And let’s face it — Hillary Clinton, the party standard-bearer and former White House denizen — isn’t it. But even after voters coalesced around Barack Obama, handing him eleven straight primaries (twelve, if you count Vermont), she refused to accept the possibility -though math, money and momentum were clearly against her — that the Bush/Clinton Family Band might not be #1 on America’s Billboard chart anymore.

So, rather than step aside and become the hero of her party, she made a strategy decision to go negative in advance of Ohio and Texas. Not just negative — personal. She cynically chided Mr. Obama’s message of hope. She played the victim card. The gender card. The Muslim card. She cried “shame on you, Barack Obama” for his campaign tactics, while (if we’re to believe Matt Drudge) simultaneously floating a picture of him in Somali garb to stir up questions of his patriotism.

She accused Mr. Obama of his own shady business deals (the irony of which nearly ripped a hole in the fabric of space/time). She accused him of being two-faced on NAFTA, when it was her campaign that had winked at the Canadians. She demanded that he “reject” the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, but remained silent when Rush Limbaugh stirred up votes for her in Texas. And she crafted the now-infamous “3am” attack ad — which used scare tactics to highlight Senator Obama’s perceived lack of experience in foreign affairs. Straight out of the ol’ Atwater/Rove playbook. Of course, all of this paled in comparison to her husband’s patronizing, racially insensitive comments earlier in the primary season.

Was this the same Hillary Clinton whose husband ran on the idea that hope was more powerful than fear? The wife of a president who had less foreign policy experience than Barack Obama when he was elected? And exactly which crisis is she referring to when she claims to have more experience? And while we’re at it, where the hell are those tax returns?

It’s clear that Hillary’s back in this thing, at least for the time being. But at what cost? Short of some cataclysmic event, there’s no way either she or Mr. Obama can reach 2,025 delegates in the remaining contests. That means she’s accepted the inevitability of a brokered convention. A convention she’ll almost certainly enter with fewer delegates than her opponent. That raises some important questions:

Will she subvert the will of the voters? Will she turn Denver into a series of shady back-room deals and arm twisting? Will she dispatch her husband to pressure superdelegates into switching allegiances at the last minute? Are we in for, as one pundit put it, a good ol’ fashioned “knife fight?”

And if she does manage to secure the nomination, what about the scores of disenfranchised Obama supporters (many of them young people with little loyalty to the Democratic Party)? How will she bring them back into the tent? Hillary seems confident that this can be remedied by offering Mr. Obama a spot on her ticket. Really? And what would his motivation be for accepting? Playing third-fiddle to Bill?

However, if Mr. Obama goes on to secure the nomination, she’ll have handed his rival a treasure trove of sound bites. All John McCain has to do between August and November is play clips of Hillary questioning Obama’s experience and belittling his platitudes. In a way, she’ll have become Mr. McCain’s second running mate.

She’s proven that she cares more about “Hillary” than “unity.” More about defeating Obama than defeating the Republicans. She’s become a political suicide-bomber, happy to blow herself to bits — as long as she takes everyone else with her.

On Friday, one of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisors, Samantha Power, resigned after calling Senator Clinton “a monster” during an off-the-record exchange. It was an unfortunate slip, but one that echoed the sentiments of many Clinton apologists like me — who’ve watched Hillary’s descent into pettiness and fear-mongering with the heartbreak of a child who grows up to realize that his beloved mother has been a terrible person all along.

Are the conservatives right about the Clintons? Will they do and say anything to get elected?

I don’t know.

All I know is…I’m through apologizing.

Super Saturday Election Roundup

Obama won the Wyoming caucus today, wasn’t even close, scoring him 3 or 4 delegates over Hillary. According to the numbers from the Obama camp (which seem to be the most reliable), that is about the same amount Hillary won on March 4th (Obama won Texas, when you add the caucus results there, so he came up with 3 more delegates in Texas total than Hillary did).

The Obama camp also pointed out, following his Wyoming win, that Hillary has to win 63% of the remaining pledged delegates now, which would mean she has to get 68% or 70% of the vote in every remaining state. Obviously this is impossible, especially with a lot more Obama wins on the horizon. Even a big win for Hillary in Pennsylvania won’t make a difference.

On that same note, after they finally finished counting the ballots in California (crazy idea, I know!) Obama gained four delegates, and Hillary lost for, netting Obama 8 more delegates, more than she gained in what the MSM likes to call her “giant comeback” in Texas and Ohio. Of course there is ZERO mention of that in the MSM, and the delegate counts offered by the MSM don’t reflect the updated numbers. Typical.

Also, we still have heard nothing about the recounts in NYC, where Obama got ZERO votes in 80 districts. I know after his votes were counted her almost tied Hillary in a few districts, but I have been unable to find any information about how that has changed the popular vote and delegate totals. I’ll see what I can find though in the next few days.

So basically, the media way overexaggerates Hillary’s wins, while ignoring Obama’s wins, even though they have a larger impact on the delegate math.

But in the most important news of the night, Democrats in Illinois were able to take Dennis Hastert’s (former GOP Speaker of the House) district (IL-14) in a special election, in part thanks to help from Obama, who took time out of campaigning to cut an ad in his home state to support the Democrat Bill Foster, as well as providing organization support (while at the same time Hillary was running around the country trying her hardest to hurt Democrats in November). Here is the full story from georgia10 at DailyKos:

Democrat Bill Foster has won the special election in IL-14, and by a stunning margin.  

This is a red district. Former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert represented this district since 1987, winning reelection by huge margins.

This district includes the city of Dixon, which is the birthplace of Ronald Reagan.

This is a district that President Bush won twice, and in 2004 he received 56% of the vote.

The NRCC poured over $1 million here to hold onto this seat — nearly a third of its cash on hand.

John McCain actually took time from his presidential campaign to come to Illinois and hold a fundraiser for Oberweis and formally endorse him.

This was an important race.  Despite the inevitable spin from the GOP tonight, the fact is that Bill Foster ran in a deeply red district, against an opponent and a Republican machine that blanketed the airwaves with attack after attack.  Republicans fought tooth and nail to keep this district, and they lost.

Congratulations to Bill Foster, and to the team of dedicated volunteers both in Illinois and around the nation that pitched in to help turn this seat blue.

Barack Obama also deserves a shout out, not just for cutting an ad for Foster and helping with the GOTV effort, but also for proving that his coattails can help even a political newcomer win in a red district. If Obama is the nominee in November, this will be a key element of building on a Democratic majority throughout the nation.

Foster will be seated soon, and will face Oberweis again in November.

For now though, Foster’s win is sure to keep Republicans up at night. As DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen explained:

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said a Foster victory in the “rock-ribbed” GOP district would “send a shock wave through the political system that people are absolutely fed up with the status quo.”

Welcome the newest Democratic member of Congress, Representative Bill Foster!

This was essentially the first proxy battle in the general election war between Obama and McCain, and Obama and the Democrats thumped McCain and the Republicans ON THEIR HOME TURF! The Obama Effect in action!

First Donna Edwards, now Bill Foster, Obama is already trashing Republicans and helping progressives and he isn’t even our official nominee yet! Wake up Dems! This is what we need!!

Sleeping Children Believe Obama Will Keep Them Safer

It’s funny how things work out when you use stock footage of sleeping children to make fearmongering ads. It turns out that one of the sleeping children in Hillary’s infamous “3am” ad is now all grown up, and a big Obama supporter:

I would much rather hear Barack Obama’s voice at the other end of the phone at 3am. Its hilarious and ironic that the child in Hillary’s ad is now of voting age and not her supporter. I’ve been campaigning for Barack since October and was a caucus precinct captain. I’ve been a very avid advocate of his and recruited a lot of folks to caucus for him in January. He’s inspired and mobilized so many already, he’s refreshing and quite simply the best option for people who want to change this country.

I’d be a bit steamed personally, if my image was used in a Republican-style ad to attack Obama with bullshit claims, without my knowledge or permission. Apparently the family was mildly annoyed by the whole thing. This reminds me of the woman who prompted the whole “Hillary tears” fiasco in New Hampshire, who although initially moved by Hillary’s show of emotion, was put off by how quickly she switched right back into political attack mode without skipping a beat, and she too voted for Obama:

I went to see Obama on Friday and he moved me to tears, I was in awe,” she said in a telephone interview with ABC News. “I’m 64 years old and nobody does that to me.

Mythbusting Hillary: Experience (Peace In Northern Ireland Edition)

[Here is a repost from the other side of the pond, where those involved in bringing peace to Northern Ireland have another take on Hillary’s claims (which she uses to support her “experience” and “ready to lead” arguments) that she was a big part of the peace process. Now there is resume fluffing, then there is egregious resume fluffing, and then there is Hillary Clinton:]

Nobel winner: Hillary Clinton’s ‘silly’ Irish peace claims
by Toby Harnden

Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a “wee bit silly” for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

“I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around,” he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely “the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets” during elections. “She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.”

Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am.

“I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland,” she told CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the parties that helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the gruelling political talks over the years.

Lord Trimble shared the Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, in 1998. Conall McDevitt, an SDLP negotiator and aide to Mr Hume during the talks, said: “There would have been no contact with her either in person or on the phone. I was with Hume regularly during calls in the months leading up to the Good Friday Agreement when he was taking calls from the White House and they were invariably coming from the president.”

Central to Mrs Clinton’s claim of an important Northern Ireland role is a meeting she attended in Belfast in with a group of women from cross-community groups. “I actually went to Northern Ireland more than my husband did,” she said in Nashua, New Hampshire on January 6th.

“I remember a meeting that I pulled together in Belfast, in the town hall there, bringing together for the first time Catholics and Protestants from both traditions, having them sitting a room where they had never been before with each other because they don’t go to school together, they don’t live together and it was only in large measure because I really asked them to come that they were there.

“And I wasn’t sure it was going to be very successful and finally a Catholic woman on one side of the table said, ’You know, every time my husband leaves for work in the morning I worry he won’t come home at night.

“And then a Protestant woman on the other side said, ’Every time my son tries to go out at night I worry he won’t come home again’. And suddenly instead of seeing each other as caricatures and stereotypes they saw each other as human beings and the slow, hard work of peace-making could move forward.”

There is no record of a meeting at Belfast City Hall, though Mrs Clinton attended a ceremony there when her husband turned on the Christmas tree lights in November 1995. The former First Lady appears to be referring a 50-minute event the same day, arranged by the US Consulate, the same day at the Lamp Lighter Café on the city’s Ormeau Road.

The “Belfast Telegraph” reported the next day that the café meeting was crammed with reporters, cameramen and Secret Service agents. Conversation “seemed a little bit stilted, a little prepared at times” and Mrs Clinton admired a stainless steel tea pot, which was duly given to her, for keeping the brew “so nice and hot”.

Among those attending were women from groups representing single parents, relationship counsellors, youth workers and a cultural society. In her 2003 autobiography “Living History”, Mrs Clinton wrote about the meeting in some detail but made no claim that it was significant.

Rather than it being the first time the women had met, Mrs Clinton wrote: “Because they were willing to work across the religious divide, they had found common ground.” Mary Fox, the wife of a former IRA prisoner and one of the seven women at the meeting, said she had been there on behalf of the Footprints community centre. “It was quite a political change for the women’s sector after the visit of Hillary Clinton. We would love to see her as president. She spoke to each of us and was very interested in our work. She was lovely.”

Mr McDevitt said: “I’ve always had a theory that these people were already well networked. Maybe they needed a bit of bringing together and she [Mrs Clinton] was an ideal focus point.” Once a peace deal was in place, Mrs Clinton supported women politicians and was always available if they visited Washington “to give them a pat on the back, give them moral support”, he added.

“So in a classic woman politicky sort of way I think she was active…She was certainly investing some time, no doubt about it. Whether she was involved on the issue side I think probably not.” Some of the people Mrs Clinton met went on to help found the Women’s Coalition, which took part in the Good Friday talks. Lord Trimble said: “The Women’s Coalition will think they were important. Other people beg to differ.”

Steven King, a negotiator with Lord Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party, argued that Mrs Clinton might even have helped delay the chances of peace. “She was invited along to some pre-arranged meetings but I don’t think she exactly brought anybody together that hadn’t been brought together already,” he said. Mrs Clinton was “a cheerleader for the Irish republican side of the argument”, he added.

“She really lost all credibility when on Bill Clinton’s last visit to Northern Ireland [in December 2000] when she hugged and kissed [Sinn Fein leaders] Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.”

Responding to inquiries from this newspaper, Hillary Clinton’s campaign issued a statement from Mr Hume. “I am quite surprised that anyone would suggest that Hillary Clinton did not perform important foreign policy work as First Lady,” the statement said.

“I can state from firsthand experience that she played a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland. She visited Northern Ireland, met with very many people and gave very decisive support to the peace process.

“There is no doubt that the people of Northern Ireland think very positively of Hillary Clinton’s support for our peace process, due to her visits to Northern Ireland and her meetings with so many people. In private she made countless calls and contacts, speaking to leaders and opinion makers on all sides, urging them to keep moving forward.”

[This, mind you, is what uniquely qualifies her to be Commander-In-Chief, this is her bringing peace to Northern Ireland, apparently. And it should be noted, she got in hot water with Israel around the same time for making the same mistake of being a little loose with her kisses with “the opposition”.]

Howard Wolfson Must Go (Or Hillary's Test Of Character)

As I wrote previously, when the Clinton campaign was asked to release their tax returns, Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s chief spokesperson, came out and instead of answering why they refuse to release them until after she has secured the nomination, decided to ridiculously say that Obama has been imitating Ken Starr in his campaign tactics.

This occurred the same day as the Samantha Power off-the-record “monster” comment came out. Of course all of the press coverage was of the monster comment, and nearly none, save Keith Olbermann, covered the Ken Starr comment. No which is more offensive? An advisor expressing a low opinion of someone, albeit hyperbolically (no one really believes she is a monster, complete with horns and fur and bloody teeth — it was simply a candid, off-the-record comment on her tactics), or a purposeful, on-the-record comment (again, on your opponents tactics) comparing him to Kenneth Starr (no hyperbole here, Ken Starr is a real person, with real tactics, which bring up real animosity in many Democrats)? I for one find the ridiculous, purposeful, and planned Ken Starr comment a little more offensive and mean-spirited (and ridiculous) than an off-the-record comment describing her as a monster. But hey, that’s just me, and Tom Daschle:

Former Sen. Tom Daschle on Friday suggested that top Clinton advisor Howard Wolfson should resign for comparing Barack Obama’s tactics to those of Ken Starr.

“It’s comments like [Wolfson’s] that make me question whether we do have the same standards,” said the former Senate Majority Leader. “I don’t think that you can make a statement like that and consider yourself within the bounds of civility. I mean, this shouldn’t be tolerated. It’s not acceptable, and it’s unfortunate.”

Daschle, an Obama supporter and mentor, said he believed it was correct for campaign advisor Samantha Power to step down after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.” He called Power’s comment regretful and said “the campaign had little choice but to do what was done.”

And while Daschle would not directly call for a similar fate for Wolfson, he suggested that would be an appropriate move.

“Well, only one person can make that decision [for Wolfson’s resignation] and that’s Hillary Clinton,” he said. “I’m just prepared to say today that the standard by which we judge civility and the degree of acceptable behavior appears to be different in the two camps. In our case, when somebody says the wrong thing, they’re gone. It appears that in their case, normal life goes on.”

In the past, Clinton surrogates have been dismissed from the campaign for bringing up Obama’s youthful drug use. On occasion, however, it has taken several days for the campaign to acknowledge wrongdoing. In a conference call with reporters earlier on Friday, Wolfson denied that his situation and Power’s were in any way comparable.

“I did not say that Senator Obama was like Ken Starr,” he said, “and I think there is a difference between engaging in the kind of ad homimen personal attack on someone’s character that Samantha Power did, and talking about the kind of campaign that team Obama has been running since Ohio and Texas.”

Asked about Clinton’s criticism that Obama had not passed the commander-in-chief threshold, Daschle fought back.

“Well,” he said, “Barack Obama has more public office experience than Hillary does, that is elected public office experience. And it’s not just a question of experience, it’s a question of judgment, and every single time Barack has been called upon to show good judgment, it’s not only his experience but his character and his courage that has caused him to make decisions that others only wish they’d made years later, including Hillary Clinton.”

So lets cut back to when the Hillary’s people were clamoring for justice, calling for Samantha Power’s head:

“Personal attacks are not the way to convince voters that you’re capable of being president of the United States,” New York Rep. Nita Lowey, a key Hillary surrogate, said. “We’re calling on Senator Obama to make it very clear that Samantha Power should not be part of this campaign.”

“It’s really a very important test for Obama,” Lowey said, adding that whether or not he fired Power was a “test of character.”

Well I’m glad you think so, I couldn’t agree more. This is a test of character indeed. Obama showed he has the right character…now do you?

Doubtful.

Hillary Crosses The Threshold, Embraces The Republicans

Did you hear the news? Hillary passed a threshold the other day! She was obviously very excited about it, indeed she wouldn’t shut up about it. Yes, yesterday Hillary officially crossed the threshold between Democrat and Republican, following in the proud tradition of fellow failed presidential hopeful Joe Lieberman, she has shown where her true loyalties lie, with John McCain and the rest of the fearmongering, warmongering, liemongering Republicans.

A few days ago I wrote about Hillary trying out to be McCain’s VP by stabbing her own party (what used to be her party) in the back by saying John McCain is more qualified to be president than Barack Obama, our nominee. Yesterday she made it obvious this was no slip of the tongue, this is apparently her new strategy:

“I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold. That is a critical criterion for the next Democratic nominee to deal with.”

She fails to explain what this threshold is, and how she has demonstrated that she has crossed it, along with McCain, while Obama apparently hasn’t. Is it that she in on the Senate Armed Services Committee? Well that shouldn’t matter, since Obama is on the Senate Foreign Relations committee and the Senate Homeland Security committee, which would seem to put him in a better position to deal with foreign policy and homeland security, while Hillary might be in a better position to invade foreign countries. But this isn’t likely the qualification.

It certainly isn’t number of years as an elected official, because Obama has four more years of legislative experience than Hillary does. It must have been from when she was First Lady, without security clearance, to a president who came into office without any foreign policy experience (and the Republicans attacked him just as she is attacking Obama now). Can you get commander-in-chief experience through having sex with someone else who has it? Is it like an STD? Maybe we should check with Monica Lewinksy and see if she’s shown any symptoms of breaking the threshold.

Maybe it was following Bush into war like a bellicose little sheep, believing Bush’s lies, giving him the “benefit of the doubt” to invade Iraq even while millions of Americans, Barack Obama included, could easily see right through the deception. McCain did that, Lieberman did that, and Hillary Clinton did that, and then continued to support the war for years, even urging against setting a timeline for withdrawal, all until it became politically unpopular to be for the war. That must be the threshold since she has no other relevant experience! And since Bush has more commander-in-chief experience than all of the candidates combined, and he was the “chief” beating the war drum from the beginning, so he must be the most qualified to be president out of everyone! And if Hillary has made it to the McCain/Bush side of the threshold, she must be the best qualified out of the Democrats. Let’s check:

As for your own qualifications: your failure to read the NIE report before you voted to authorize the Iraq war; your inexplicable and falsely characterized vote against the Levin amendment; your vote for the authorization of Bush’s war (which then became your war); and your truly astonishing vote for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment to give your President similar permission to protect us in Iran prove conclusively to me that you are as qualified to be Commander-in-Chief as Bush and McCain, no more, no less. That is to say: not at all.

Oh wait, that’s right, Bush has probably been our worst president, and McCain and Hillary voted for and supported his most destructive policy! I guess experience and crossing the “I supported the war in Iraq” threshold doesn’t actually have anything to do with being qualified to be president! Obama has been saying this for long time, he said from the very beginning that no one had more experience than Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, and look where that got us, yet we are still here talking about experience, and the pro-war threshold.

Maybe just supporting the war isn’t enough, maybe renouncing your own party and embracing the Republicans is the final step before you can officially cross that threshold. If that’s the case, Hillary finally got her bonafides the other day when she first stabbed her party in the back with the experience argument, and embraced McCain. Yesterday’s comments were just icing on the cake from someone getting all too comfortable on the Republican side of the threshold.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sure glad Obama hasn’t crossed that threshold. In fact, it should be unthinkable for any Democrat to support someone who has.

At least Keith Olbermann has the journalistic integrity to point out the obvious, while the rest of the media gets their stories from Clinton HQ:

Clinton, Genocide and a Campaign Gaffe (Repost)

[Marc Cooper wrote this today for The Huffington Post, and it helps paint a more comprehensive picture of who Samantha Power is, and why Hillary Clinton wasted no time in trying to take her down (aside from wanting to pick off one of Obama’s top advisors). It turns out maybe this hit was a bit of payback for Power “vetting” Bill just a little too much for Hillary’s liking:]

Clinton, Genocide and a Campaign Gaffe
by Marc Cooper

The Barack Obama campaign is about to pay a very high price for the inopportune words of one of its most distinguished foreign policy advisors. The dazzlingly brilliant journalist, Pulitzer-prize winning author, and Harvard professor, Samantha Power, has been forced to resign from the campaign after she recklessly told a reporter that Hillary Clinton is a “monster.”

In the pungently hypocritical game of American politics, this is just something outside the rules. Whether it’s true, or not, matters little. Nor does it matter that the object of Power’s derision has just finished spending millions on TV ads implying that Obama would be responsible for the countless deaths of millions of American children sleeping at 3 a.m. Tut, tut. Nothing monstrous about that.

Power was rightfully awarded the Pulitzer for her finely written and downright horrifying book “A Problem From Hell” which, in macabre detail, describes the calculated indifference of the Clinton administration when 800,000 Rwandans were being systematically butchered. The red phone rang and rang and rang again. I don’t know where Hillary was then. But her husband and his entire experienced foreign policy team - from the brass in the Pentagon to the congenitally feckless Secretary of State Warren Christopher - just let it ring.

And as more than one researcher has amply documented the case, the bloody paralysis of the Clinton administration in the face of the Rwandan genocide owed not at all to a lack of information, but rather to a lack of will. A reviewer of Power’s book for The New York Times, perhaps summed it up best, saying that the picture of Clinton that emerges from this reading is that of an “amoral narcissist.”

Former Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who commanded the UN forces in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, tells us a similar story in his own memoir. General Dallaire recounts how, at the height of the Rwandan holocaust, he got a phone call from a Clinton administration staffer who wanted to know how many Rwandans had already died, how many were refugees and how many were internally displaced. Writes Dallaire: “He told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify the risking of the life of one American soldier.” Eventually, ten times that many would die. And our response? A handful of years later, at a photo-op stopover in Kigali airport, Bill Clinton bit his lip and said he was sorry.

Therein resides the richest and saddest irony of all. Samantha Power has actually lived the sort of life that Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff has, for public consumption, invented for its candidate. Though not quite 40 years old, Power has spent no time on any Wal-Mart boards but has rather dedicated her entire adult life rather tirelessly to championing humanitarian causes. She has spoken up when others were silent. She took great personal risks during the Balkan wars to witness and record and denounce the carnage (She reported that Bill Clinton intervened against the Serbs only when he felt he was losing personal credibility as a result of his inaction. “I’m getting creamed,” Power quoted the then-President saying as he fretted over global consternation over his own hesitation to act).

We gave Power the Pulitzer for exposing the, well, monstrous indifference of the Clinton administration as it stared unblinkingly and immobile into the face of massive horror. But we give her a kick in the backside and throw her out the door when she has the temerity to publicly restate all that in one impolite word. Monstrous, indeed.