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"...I want to especially thank New Hampshire, over the last week I listened to you and in the process I found John Edwards' voice I found my own voice." 

You noticed too! :)

I find the time crunch of Super Tuesday to be the biggest obstacle to refining our candidates and getting them to promise campaign pledges, or at least bouncing the people's input off one another and getting it on record. I would much prefer a more stretched out primary, maybe drawn from the hat a couple of states a week. An elongated regional airing would help distill particular differences, finding more common ground, forcing candidates to listen while honing the message to a solid platform.

Agreed. I've often thought some sort of lottery system to establish primary dates would be a good idea, but regional contests make sense too. In the meantime, the best thing we've got is Edwards. 

“The healthy man does not torture others — generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.” ~~ C. G. Jung

 Obama and Hillary pulled in NH exactly the same demographics they pulled in IA

 Not so. The demographics out of IA were that Obama pulled the women vote, not Hillary. The demographics out of NH are that Hillary is pulling the women vote. Sounds very much like a machine politics to me. All of a sudden Penn's polling demographic 'the woman vote' is coming in strong for Hillary after her 'weeping lapse'. 

I don't see a conspiracy here at all.

I don't think it's a conspiracy. Just dirty politics and the political machine at work for the status quo candidate, we have seen it over and over and over for the past 4 decades in America, every since RFK was shot. The masses do not get to select the candidate as the special interests come in and derail the process, just as they bused all those folks into NH to make it appear that Hillary was bringing in crowds. Those people were from NY, Boston, Maryland...Scarborough said he saw the plates and asked the folks.  Only the status quo candidate wins. Reall easy to see the pattern.

I saw your reddit site. You're a campaign volunteer, pure and simple. I don't expect to hear anything but yesmanship for your team. Go team!

Hillary's speech was one cardboard platitude after another. Every year I heard a student council president-elect give a speech, it sounded like that. I'll bet she's had the same speech since she ran for hall monitor in kindergarten. "We will face the challenges. We will seize the opportunities.." It's enough to give you sleep apnea.

I don't expect anyone to come out with technical plans for how they're going to fulfill their visions during the propaganda phase (the whole campaign). But at least they can say something that sounds better than that. Obama did.

Worse, Hillary said she just found her voice. Because she lost Iowa. Had she won Iowa, the implication is, she'd have continued speaking with someone elses?

The problem is, by giving that knee-jerk reaction, by voting to spite the smug voices instead of voting for the candidate you feel is the best one, what's created isn't any kind of 'lesson' for the talking heads. They'll ignore it and congratulate themselves for being so amazingly right, just like they always do when they're wrong. What it does have the possibility to create is momentum and the impression of greater support for a given candidate than is accurate, and from there, the 'bump' that the victory-bandwagoneers provide. Enough of a push from that, and congratulations, knee-jerk spite voting has the chance to alter the results of the election, giving the Presidency to a candidate getting votes for their party's nomination from people who felt that someone else would do a better job.

Vote your honest preference, don't let the talking heads influence you with their talking-headedness.

That's a good question. To be honest, the election bores the tears out of me, Seashell. It's all the generalities and platitudes and the cyclic promises that are almost always broken. It's so formulaic, it seems pavlovian.

One thing that was running through my head when I asked it was whether there was distrust for Obama among the Jewish American electorate because of his childhood ties to Islam in Indonesia, and whether that reflected itself in the urban vote in New Hampshire? Does Hillary enjoy more support from segments of the Jewish American electorate? I wonder. I don't know. I'm not a Dem or a Republican.

And I've read with interest some of MJ Rosenberg's posts about the hubbub over neocon Kristol at NYT, and one of the posters in that thread referred to someone as a "righteous gentile." That implied to me that unless otherwise conferred, all other gentiles must be un-righteous. It bothered me.

Now I am over here on this thread about the election, and it seems that nearly every pundit referenced lately has had a Jewish surname, then you mention Steinem. I am noticing what seems like a disproportionate number of Jewish Americans in the commentator and journalist positions in American media companies. I have heard the tin-foil crazies who allege conspiracies etc., and recognize that for what it is, but I still have to ask about the representation question versus occurrence in the population. It seems a fairness issue in a diverse country in which proportionality is valued and in which the candidates seem to be talking about opportunity, fairness, fair shakes and the like.

IF, a big IF, there is an unfair skewing of ethnic representation on behalf of one group or another in the messaging industry, I am wondering how this could be considered a matter of diversity. I'd ask the same question if it seemed to me that most of the high profile commentators and journalists I'd been seeing anecdotally were Maldivian surnames, or Surinamian surnames, and those populations were over-represented in the messaging / analysis / news industry.

I have read Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah discussing certain industries that Jews tended to go into because of then-availability following WWII and the Holocaust as a way of flourishing but also self-protecting. Who could blame anyone for that? And Jewish Americans surely wouldn't be setting precedent in that. Irish, Italian, Greek and you-name-it Americans have historically set out cooperative goals for establishing, self-protecting and progressing as groups as they moved from new to elder immigrant status. Is that bad? No. It seems the norm. Except for one thing: the Holocaust zeroed in on the Jews of all nations. I understand how that might cause self-protective inter-cultural favoritism against the world in which anti-Semitism has emerged and re-emerged again and again. I grew up loving the book and movie "The Chosen" and one of my favorite books of all time is Pete Hammil's "Snow in August."

Personally, I wasn't in that world growing up. I heard about it, and occasionally heard kids cast aspersions at others on the basis of race or culture or tell ill-jokes, but it seemed that most races and cultures were covered, and so it was equal opportunity bad.

However, if over time, in a diverse society, there emerges favoritism for one's own ethnic group within an industry or sector of the economy or even in a government bureaucracy in a locality or region, no matter the ethnicity, is that a good thing or a bad thing in 2007? Is it unifying or divisive? Is it safer for the favored group or not? I can ask this regarding anglos also.

It wasn't long ago I watched the movie directed by Robet DeNiro, "The Good Shepherd," about the beginnings of US spy services in which Matt Damon was supposed to reflect a mixture of a number of past CIA men, mainly James Jesus Angleton the famed CIA counter-intelligence chief. In it, Joe Pesci's character, being interviewed by Damon's character, asks Damon this:

Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something... we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?
Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

You know this is a statement on ethnicity and power in America, and it is conspiracy-based. Do you believe it about anglos? It is clearly aimed at the anglo-American ID of Damon's character, and consistent with the movie's biases, it is answered to confirm the conspiracy theorems. Does Robert de Niro distrust anglos because this was kept in the film? Or the writer? Or are they offering an idea, popular perception or what have you?

I have watched an Indian-cast comedy / love story that portrayed the Indian-American family expectation that sons or daughters should be doctors or marry doctors. It was exaggerated, but it illustrates how cultural observations are considered differently from different sources.

You may want to note the following counterexamples to the gentleman's representations about me:

Steinem's column was well written and thought provoking. Some points I agree with and some seem too focused on victim-status in the sense that part of that status is permitted by the victim and should not be. More said about that fact would improve the column.

Having said that, that in no way detracts from those forces that have been trying not only to subjugate women, but also deride them should they speak freely. They are derided in the media, for example, through the Brittany's; bribed with money without regard to their capacity to handle and fully understand what's going on (forget legal capacity, I'm talking actual and evident capacity rooted in life experience or inexperience). And this is what is "celebrated."

This is what thousands of young people are trying to get or emulate on You-Tube. To become "performers" for others, like a court jester. If that doesn't show the impact of "celebrity" what does? To make someone else more money as a rising star, escape if you've got good advice, or see self-destruction if not. The fall is gleefully celebrated with false shock by the same industry / companies that bring these "examples" to the precipice. It's the same way industrial machine parts are treated. Used, shined for inspection, then recycled in a heap of to-be-destroyed items.

Look at Yahoo! alone, participating in making Brittany's humiliation a bandwitdth and mass attention hog of a puffed product, the disintegrating young woman. Before that, it was Jessica Simpson. But you know what's really strange: the dumb bimbo is almost always a white anglo saxon girl, and her undoing is an implied point. Not that any other race of person (without exception) should ever, ever act as a replacement, or arent' also portrayed awefully.

The teaching of the male-dominated PR, TV, entertainment and News industry is well exemplified by FOX News. It uses lots and lots of blonde anchor women, some who know what they're talking about, but more who do not, and instead peddle a form of propaganda for a partisan cause. They say it is in the name of balance. Of fairness. But it is not. It is part of the alignments of division within our country.

It is done via fictional characters played. Too often, whether positive or negative, the woman's role model is as a follower, nurturer of a bad man, bad-girl or what have you. The so-called heroic roles for women frequently have them imitating male heroes of past programming, and posing for fashion to cool music rather than acting well. Lower-wage workers tend to be portrayed as comedic instead of real people. They are too often clowns or outrageous people. Serving to entertain the rich folks. 

On occasion you have a hero, a pioneer, a brilliant girl, a Reese Witherspoon character, or a the lady character in the movie with Harrison Ford where the secretary becomes the boss. Boy do we need more exceptions with more bandwidth. Yet even these are shown to be exceptions and tend to emphasize the looks anyway.

The message to young women is: here is what you are for, to serve then self-destruct when you are of no more use (can't be used as an ornament).

So you bet I recognize the sexism, but note that it exists shamefully in the halls of traditional democratic contributors, with potential racial and socioeconomic undertones too. Well, if this were done to anyone else than predominantly majority race, religion or culture characters, it would be charged as covert or even overt racism or bigotry. Done to a majority member of the gender, NBD, right? Well yes it is. Because to get out of the pickle this country is in now, we need all hands to be inspired to excel, to be educated, and not to be dumbed down. Am I incorrect? We can't have a drug-like media dumbing anymore kids down. This hits poor kids the most because their folks are less able to be at home; two jobs or one parent. Boom the TV or cable is on with the babysitter or worse, they're stuck at a daycare. You ever use familywatchdog.com search around day care businesses in the lower socioeconomic locations in cities? Pretty scary.

Everyone's at stake. Now tell me that there are not business executives carefully handling this celebrity propaganda you can't get away from even while checking out from buying your food. And they don't seem to give a damn about the effects it has on the young. I'm with Steve Allen on this, 100%. I'm with Michael Medved on this issue. Culture is a highly significant topic. Why is it on the Discussion Table over there if it were not? What is healthy culture? Isn't that worth a discussion more often? Action?

What is it these firms are expecting us not to think about as they push celebrity distraction and tabloid journalism in broadcast and internet media-tainment?

Here's the link to the use of "righteous gentile" I brought up earlier:

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2008/jan/07/kristols_first_times_oped_neoconservatism_for_idiots#comment-326466 

You've said that you do not trust non-Jews who ask questions about ethnic representation within institutions that involve Jewish Americans. You have assumed the high and mighty power to condemn me as a bigot because I asked the question. By condemning my motives you show your distrust of a "gentile" in a clear case of pre-judgment of my motives. Yet I am supposed to take that because I'm a "gentile," right?

Just answer the question, if you can. It is straightforward, and meant to be straightforward, not an aspersion or as a perjorative reference. One thing that was running through my head when I asked it was whether there was distrust for Obama among the Jewish American electorate because of his childhood ties to Islam in Indonesia, and whether that reflected itself in the urban vote in New Hampshire? Does Hillary enjoy more support from segments of the Jewish American electorate? I wonder. I don't know. I'm not a Dem or a Republican.

There isn't an ounce of anti-Jewish personality in me. You can scour my writings and interview everyone I know. I have to admit I don't like your accusatory tone and the air of assumed entitlement to smear me with the label of bigot. It comes across as threatening or intimidating. You've called me a bigot on this public forum. You're making legally actionable statements about me. I'm asking you to withdraw your libel.

The question I raised about the use of the world "Gentile" or "gentile" was the use "righteous Gentile". Does it connote a default going the other way for those not so identified? Help me understand that modern usage. I take it that the usage in antiquity (NT times) was different from that used today.

I have family who have risked life in WWII and who thought it worthwhile considering the crimes against humanity Hitler perpetrated against many, many populations, but chiefly the Jews. My dad was never anti-Semitic and probably had to have someone tell him what it meant at some point. None of my siblings has ever been so. I just totally reject your statements as false, libelous and damaging and can't understand why you'd jump the gun like that after a direct, honest question.

Your not going to answer me, are you. You are going to raise the accusatory finger, judge and disappear without confronting the reality of the person you falsely judged?

Arrogance is ugly on anyone's face, and every group needs freedom from it. No exceptions.

The fact that Hillary got emotional after she lost Iowa raises questions. Does she do what she needs to do not to lose power instead of do what she needs to do to do the right thing?