Why isn't anyone here discussing Mike Connell's murder? Or did I miss something?

Who cares if McCain & Palin lie? Don't all politicians lie?

Bush & Cheney got us into a war on a lie. That lie has driven the national debt through the roof, leading to an erosion of the American dollar & has made everything more expensive from gas & home heating oil to food at the grocery store.

They lied to us while they watched New Orleans destroyed by a flood. Now reports out of Texas are that FEMA is just as incompetent.

They deregulated the financial sector & stood on the sidelines while their corporate friends lied to us about everything from Enron to Lehman.

They lied to us about allowing lobbyists to write legislation that favored private interests over public interests.

Lies matter.

They cost Americans jobs, homes, & money. The Obama Campaign needs to draw that connection.

The Obama Campaign has taken a step in the right direction by starting an ad campaign to publicize McCain's lies. But they need to go still another step further. They need to remind voters why it matters.

Many voters who will see the Lyin' Eyes ad will simply shrug & say that all politicians lie & exaggerate. A second round of ads is needed to remind them that it has been an administration that has lied to us repeatedly that has gotten us into the mess we're in now. They need to tie McCain to the Bush administration specifically on the issue of lying!

"Do you want four more years of lies that bring you job losses, eroding value of the dollar, increasing gas & home heating oil prices, financial market collapses, & Americans dying in war?"

That needs to be the mantra of the Obama campaign. Lies hurt you.

McCain promises to cut your taxes, but he proposed to tax your employer provided health care as income.

McCain promises to make you more economically secure, but he proposes to privatize your Social Security & make it subject to the same whims of the market that have brought down giant financial industries.

You get the picture. And it's pictures that the Obama campaign needs. Pictures in ads that will be indelibly burned into the minds & memories of voters. Bush 41 ran a billiant campaign - albeit sleazy - against Dukakis in 1988. Every theme of their campaign was accompanied by a picture that voters remembered: The Flag Factory, Boston Harbor, & of course Willie Horton. We didn't like it, but it was effective.

Obama needs to do the same. Lies hurt you where it hurts most. It's the economy, stupid.

There is only one thing that McCain had to do with his VP selection. He had to select someone who would be capable of taking over as president in the event that he was to die or become incapable of carrying out the duties of his office. That's it. Plain & simple.

He didn't do that.

Instead, with the selection of Sarah palin, he shot himself in the foot.

Forget about troopergate. Forget about her pregnant daughter. Ignore everything except the fact that Sarah Palin does not come anywhere close to passing the threshhold of being capable of assuming the presidency.

They say the the vice presidential selection never determines the outcome of a presidential election. Hmm . . . Maybe this time. This isn't just any presidential election. It is unique. If elected, McCain will be the oldest person ever to assume the duties of president for his first term. He is also a cancer survivor. Those 2 facts make his vice presidential selection extremely important and extremely relevant to American voters.

Sarah Palin's nomination will excite the basis & this will bring out some more voters for McCain. But it will lose him a lot more voters among undecideds. Another candidate could have survived the selection of someone so unqualified. Heck, George H.  Bush survived the selection of  Dan Quayle, one of the worst vice presidents ever. But Bush wasn't as old as McCain & he didn't have his medical history.

If McCain falls face down into his mashed potatoes even one time as Bush did, the talk of his VP will rage everywhere. If he trips & falls as Dole did, the talk of his successor will rage everywhere. If he faints from the heat or from exhaustion on the campaign trail, undecideds in droves will cross his name off their list of viable choices in light of his VP candidate.

Throughout this campaign, McCain has shown himself to be incredibly incompetent. He mismanaged his primary campaing until it went bankrupt. He rose from the dead - but only because the Republican field was so thin. He had 6 months to research possible VP candidates, but reportedly made this selection at the last minute - the day before the announcement.This shows unbelievably poor decision making skills & incompetent researching.

If he wanted to placate the religious right, he could have selected Huckabee, a governor of 10 years experience. If he wanted to select a woman, he could have selected Hutchison, a veteran of the Senate - or any number of other capable Republicna women.

The fact that he chose a candidate who would have been lughed out of the primaries if she had had the audacity to run for the presidencey on her own shows that he is willing to risk the security & well being of the United States for such a hair brained scheme. Who can reasonably put the fate of the nation in the hands of such a man?

 

Why is Florida's gay governor, Charlie Crist announcing his engagement?

Yes, it's true. Charlie Crist has announced that wedding bells are in his future after a whilwind courtship of only 9 months. And surprisingly, Crist's partner-to-be is a woman.
This can mean only one thing. Crist will be John McCain's running mate. After 30 years as an unmarried gay man, he has found a woman who will provide him with the cover he needs in the Republican party.

Either that, or he's marrying her for her money. She's got a lot more of it than he does. That worked for McCain, so it would only raise his respect for Crist.

Bon vivant, Charlie!

While the Clinton campaign is keeping this news close to the vest, sources here in Connecticut close to Joe Lieberman have revealed that Hillary is seriously considering an Independent bid for the White House.

The Clinton campaign sees John McCain as a very weak candidate & believes that they can beat him & Barack Obama in a 3-way race. They have arrived at this conclusion after a series of lengthy consultations with Sen. Lieberman, a long time friend & supporter of the Clintons. Despite his support of McCain, sources tell us that Lieberman was surprisingly frank with the Clinton people. He sees a lot of similarities between this presidential race & his successful independent run for the Senate just 2 years ago against a weak Republican candidate &an ultra-liberal Democratic nominee.

Although Lieberman believes that McCain would be the best president for the country, he is strongly of the mind that America is not ready for an Afrcian-American president - even an Ivy League educated one with a white mother. "I marched in Selma & Birmingham in the '60's, but I certainly didn't do so to open the door to this kind of ultra-left wing politics," Lieberman is quoted as saying, adding that Obama's plan to precipitously withdraw troops from Iraq make him no friend of Israel. He is convinced that Hillary would be a much better president for Israel.

Having listened to Lieberman, Hillary & her people now agree with him that identifying herself as an "Independent Democrat" is the way to go. Their assessment is that Clinton & Lieberman could form the nucleus of a new third party movement that would be built around a coalition of hard working whites & pro-Israeli militarists, who are clearly the centrist voters who have determined all American elections since 1824. (You may remember that 1824 was the election decided by the infamous "Corrupt Bargain" in the House of Representatives in favor of John Quincy Adams, thereby denying the presidency to Andrew Jackson who won the popular vote in a 4-way general election.)

According to one unnamed source close to Bill Clinton: "The beauty of this approach is that even if Hillary loses her bid for the White House as a Lieberman-style Independent Democrat, she can still caucus with the Democrats in the Senate & will successfully seek the position of Democrtic Majority Leader. Most Democrats realize that the party no longer represents Hard Working White America & that Obama has only obtained the nomination by rigging the vote in the caucus states & by exploiting his advantage as a black man with the liberal media."

In a final note on the matter, our sources have revealed that Geraldine Ferraro has agreed to run as Vice President. Our source commented: "The first all-female ticket will be both ground breaking & historic. Since women are more than 50% of the electorate, a Rodham-Clinton/Ferraro-Zaccaro combination would be unstoppable. In addition to the life time of experience that Rep. Ferraro will bring to the campaingn, she will consolidate support with the all important Mafia vote."

Because the Constitution does not permit two candidates from the same state to run as President & Vice President, Ferraro will follow the example of current VP Dick Cheney & will change her legal residence to Florida where she maintains a seond home. Ferraro insists that any similarities to Cheney will end there. "I certainly have no plans to shoot anyone in the face any time soon," she joked with some media insiders who are in the know about the Clinton plan, "but I do plan to change my historic opposition to gun regulation because it is just not compatible with the views of Hard Working White American Centrists, whose views most representat the America I stand for." She added that the change in her position on gun regulation will enable her to join Hillary on hunting trips in Central Park during the upcoming campaingn.

Hillary plans to take this campaign all the way to the election in November & beyond, so we will keep you advised as new developments become available to us. God bless America, the land of the free & the home of the brave . . . as long as they are hard working & white.

Numbers are stubborn things.

So is Terry McAuliffe. As stubborn as they come.

Terry wants to count Florida & Michigan because he wants every vote to count. But he doesn't want to address the fact that many citizens didn't vote in these primaries because they were told that they wouldn't count.

This was especially true in Michigan where you couldn't vote for Obama, Edwards, & the rest because they weren't even on the ballot. Despite this fact, enough voters turned out in Michigan that "uncommitted" received 40% of the vote. Yes, 40% of the voters said in effect "anyboidy but Hillary". Yet, the Michigan state committee wants to give the majority of the uncommitteds to Hillary! That takes gall.

Terry is strangely silent on following the will of the voters who voted uncommitted in Michigan. There is no way to count these votes as anything other than against Hillary. Since Obama is the only other candidate still in the race, these votes clearly belong to him at this point in the mind of any reasonable person. But Terry McAuliffe is not a reasonable person when it comes to this race.

Terry wants to claim that Hillary will have the majority of the popular vote when this is over. Ignoring the fact that this is irrelevant under the system to choose a nominee, Terry arrives at his numbers by ignoring the uncommitted votes in Michigan. He then goes further by ignoring the votes cast in the 4 caucus states that do not keep records of popular vote totals.

But why have any logical consistency when you're a man-on-a-mission? Terry wants to stand up & fight for the "disenfranchised" voters of Florida & Michigan by disenfranchising voters in caucus states & by disenfranchising the voters in Michigan who voted "uncommittted. When we leave the bizarro world of Terry McAuliffe, these votes must also be included in the calculations. In the real world, Obam easily wins the popular vote even with Florida & Michigan included as voted.

I must add a footnote about Carl Levin, who has totally disgraced himself in this process. Not only is he personally responsible for the debacle of the January Michigan primary, but he has now gone a giant step further by leading the Michigan delegation to award "uncommitted" delegates to Hillary. She was on the ballot! Anyone who wante to vate for her could have done so! These votes belong to anyone but Hillary.

Levin & the leaders of the Florida Democratic Party are personally responsible for disenfranchising the voters in their own states - voters whose interests they were elected to represent. They failed miserably in meeting that responsibility. They now have the nerve to claim that they are fighting to have those constituents' votes count. They should instead be coming forward on their hands & knees with "mea culpas" for creating this travesty. 

. . . and I'm not going to take it any more.

I'm angry . . . & it's the Obama campaign that I'm angry with as much as anyone else for letting this campaign unfold the way it has lately.

When is someone going to stand up to the incompetent stooges who disguise themselves as journalists?

How dare they collaborate in a campaign to make a man's practices of religious worship a criterion in a political campaign? Has the Religious Right pushed us that far away from the principles on which this country was founded?

How dare they misrepresent things that were actually said & take them out of context - including the Wright remarks? But moore importantly, how can the Obama campaign stand by like the Kerry campaing & let this happen?

If they're going to allow religious worship into the campaign, why are they not attacking Hillary with exposure of her secretive religious affiliations with right wing Republican circles who are nuttier than Wright?

How can Obama receive endorsements from 2 recent Nobel Laureate economists & let it sit there unnoticed. They called his speech on the economy last month "brilliant", called Hillary's economic policies out of date, & called her husband's repeal of large sections of the Glass-Stiegel Act respoonsible for much of our economic mess. Why isn't this playing over & over in a loop like the Wright remarks? How can they let Hillary make a successful & unchallenged appeal to those who are being hurt most by the economy?

How can the Obama campaign allow their candidate to be questioned over & over again about Bill Ayers without initiating their own smear campaign about Hillary's radical affiliations & her husband's pardon of Ayers' co-radicals?

It's time to destroy Hillary & any remaining credibility she might have. Are they going to allow her to continue to build her support so that she can proceed to the convention, gain air time on the podium, & deliver a petulant rant designed to destroy the party's nomination the way that Teddy did in 1980?

This campaign must go on the offensive. It must become aggressive. It must take on Hillary with all her warts. It must take on those elements in the press that are incompetent purveyors of sensationalism designed simply capture the widest audience.

I can't bear to see another high minded campaign go down in flames because it wouldn't get involved in trench warfare & fight back at an extraordinarily vulnerable candidate.

Hillary is wrong on the war. She's wrong on the war. She's wrong on governance. She's loaded with baggage. Go after her, cut her to pieces, & get it over with!

I'm mad as hell . . . and I'm not going to take it any more.

. . . and I'm not going to take it any more.

NBC's Tally of Pledged Delegates:

Obama = 1416, Clinton = 1252

Using the 3 most recent polls in each state, here are delegate projections for the 10 remaining contests, using Slate's delegate calculator with percentiles in parentheses, Obama first:

PA (45-55) . . . . 71 (O) - 87 (C)
Guam (none) . . . . 2 (O) -   2 (C)
IN (46-54) . . . .  33 (O) - 39 (C)
NC (57-43) . . .  66 (O) - 49 (C)
WV (33-67) . . . . 9 (O) - 19 (C)
KY (31-69) . . . .16 (O) - 35 (C)
OR (55-45) . . . .29 (O) - 23 (C)
PR (42-58) . . . . 42 (O) - 58 (C)
MT (39-61) . . . . .6 (O) - 10 (C)
SD (56-44) . . . . . 8 (O) -   7 (C)

Subtotals: 472 (Obama) - 509 (Clinton)

Projected Pledged Delegate Totals: 1679 (O) - 1551 (C)

Note: The analysis by Congressional Quarterly  states that Hillary will not get anything close to the delegate numbers that Slate projects with a 55%/45% win because of the vagueries of how Pennsylvania allocates delegates on a proportional basis.

Note: If the Florida & Michigna delegations were seated as voted in January, that would give Clinton a net gain of 50 delegates, leaving Obama with a lead in pledged delegates of 78.

What do you think?

Hillary was in Philadelphia today, comparing herself to Rocky, saying that she's not a quitter. "Imagine," she said, "if Rocky had gotten half way up the steps & said "that's far enough.'"

Guess what, Hillary. There was no Rocky Balboa. He was a fictional character. He never really ran up those steps.

This is right out of the Ronald Reagan play book, comparing yourself or your opponents to fictional characters as though they were real. I guess that this makes sense for Hillary. She doesn't seem to know the difference between fiction & reality. Rocky running up the steps. Hillary ducking for cover from sniper fire. What's the diff?

Will it never stop?

Receiving very little attention in coverage of the election in the American media is the view from overseas.

A read of the European press shows that Senator Obama is already enormously popular in Europe. His personal narrative has great appeal there - i.e. his ties to three continents that result form a white Kansas mother, an African father, and his childhood years growing up in Indonesia. He emodies "by his very essense", according to one French journalist, the idea that America has changed and that American foreign policy will change with him.

But it goes deeper than that. The European Union is now a market comparable to the American market. Europeans no longer see themselves as taking a back seat to "the world's only super power". With the re-emergence of Russia and with emerging economies in China & India, it's a new world - one that is both interconnected and interdependent. And the view around the world is that Bush has done great damage with his "go it alone" foreign policy.

Europeans have no problem seeing America as the "first among equals". What they want, however, is coolboration, and especially an America who listens to them. Their view of Barack Obama is that he is a good listener and their view on the other hand of Hillary clinton and John McCain is that they are not. Obama is seen as a keen intleect who wants to understand others and who is not interested in imposing his views on them.

The Bush years have created a disastrous war in the Middle East that threatens the stability of the region and the world, have ignored climate changes resulting from global warming & in so doing have lost valuable time, and have undermined our financial system with world wide implications. As a result, the next president will be faced with military, diplomatic, climate, and financial crises, ano one of whidh could be the major challenge for an administration.

A new president can only hope to have success in meeting these challenges by quickly engaging partners around the world and securing their cooperation. To accomplish this, a president must begin with a new vocabulary which will communicate to our partners that we understand the current global probmes, that we are on a new road, and that we can be trusted.

It is Obama's faciltiy with words and with language that makes him uniquely qualified for this task. Hillary may mock his qualifications as boiling down to "a single speech", but speeches & communicationare the tools of both leadership and diplomacy. Or does she not understand that Barak's ability to communicate is not trivial? Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, & Reagan each were able to speak to their citizens and to the people of the world generally precisely by virtue of their command of communication & oratorical skills.

The ability of the nest president to reach across the oceans to the international community is a qualification for office that has largely been ignored by an American press that has become conditioned to think only in terms of "cowboy diplomacy" and "troops on the ground".as the tools of foreign relations & conflict resolution in the international community

Because of his skills as a communicator with friend and foe alike, Barack Obama is the man for our time. Just ask the Europeans.

Where did Hillary's campaign go wrong?

She had every advantage going in: a lead in the polls, name recognition, the backing of the most popular Democratic presient in the past 40 years, fund raising, an heir of inevitability. S, how could she lose?

Hillary never gave the voters a reason to vote for her.

With George H. Bush, his problem was "the vision thing." Well, that's been Hillary's problem too. I'm sure that you can come up with the rationale for the Obama, Edwards, or McCain candidacies in a heart beat. In 25 words or less - probably in just a word or two. Ask yourself the rationale for Bill Clinton's campaign: "It's the economy, stupid."

If you had to state the rationale for Hillary's campaign in a nutshell, it would be: "Ready on day one." Unfortunately, that's not a reason to run for president. It may be a fine qualification, but it doesn't tell anyone in the electorate what you want to do on day one. It doesn't say what your vision for the future of America is.

For Reagan, it was: "Morning in America." For Hillary, it has been a laundry list of positions that she has on a variety of issues. Position papers are not a direction in which you want to take the country. They are policy positions for the wonks who want the details to analyze.

The most basic question that any candidate must answer is: "Why do you want to be president?" Hillary never answered that question satisfactorily.

Talking about "35 years of experience" is talk about yourself, not about the country. The electorate doesn't want to know how you see yourself. We want to know how you see us. We want to know where you're going to lead us. 

Without any rationale for it to continue, this campaign is quickly dying.

MSNBC reported this morning that the enormously popular Pennsylvania Senator, Bob Casey, will today announce his endorsement of Barack Obama & will campaign around the state with him.

Yesterday Obama was standing with Bloomberg & Voelker in New York, today it's Casey IN PA. I think the fat lady is about to sing. This thing could be over before we thought!

Nowhere have I read an analysis of Jeremiah Wright's preaching which describes what he actually was doing. Take away all of the theatrics and he was simply following in the time honored tradition of all preachers, dating back to the Old Testament. He was talking to his congregation about morality.

In the case of Rev. Wright, his moral teachings to his flock focused on the actions of the government of the country in which they are citizens. He talked about the violence perpetrated by the U.S. government & the consequences for America (9/11) of that kind of immorality. He certainly wasn't the first one to suggest that connection. He talked about the violence done to inner city males by immoral drug laws which disprportionately punish users of crack cocaine as compared with users of powder cocaine. The basic theme in the clips that were played were violence by the government.

Why is it worse to criticize American society for violence by the government than to do what right wing preachers do & criticize American society for the immorality of homosexuality & abortion? Whether from the left or from the right, both are attacks on American society.

Why is it any more wrong for Wright to angrily rant against American foreign policy & blame it for the attack of New York on 9/11 than it is for Rev. Hagee to rant against American social policy & blame it for the assault of nature on New Orleans in 2005?

I have not seen anyone in the media ask in what way Rev. Wright's preaching would or has influenced Sen. Obama's behaviour as a public official. This would seem to be a necessary question to establish the relevance of his comments regardless of whether they are offensive to some or not. After all, the senator is running for president and the pastor's sermon is only important if we can establish that Obama's presidency would somehow be different as a result of listening to any teachings like this.

The only relevance to an Obama presidency that I can see is that Mr. Obama might think twice before committing us to war. Is that a bad thing? He might question the consequences of wreckless foreign policy that might create blow bck for Americans here at home. Is that a bad thing? He might look at the consequences of our drug laws and question both the financial and social costs of imprisoning a large number of young minority men, thereby removing them from their communities. Would that be a bad thing?

I contrast that with the preaching of Rev. Parsley of Cincinnati, whom John McCain called "a spiritual advisor." Rev. Parsley advocates the elimination of Islam, a religion practiced by well over one billion people on this planet. Would President McCain listening to such advice be a good thing? Rev. Hagge would like to hasten the arrival of Armageddon in order to bring us to the Rapture - well, not the rest of us, but himself and his followers. Would Pres. McCain listening to his opposition to a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian problem be a good thing? Would Pres. McCain listening to the advocacy of either of these preachers for social sanctions against gay citizens be a good thing?

It seems that the media gives right wing nuts a free pass on their moral preaching regardless of how dangerous such preaching may be for the security and well being of American citizens. However, when a preacher condemns the morality of our government, the media doesn't simply report the fact. They overemphasize it in relation to the rest of the news of the day and label it with biased terms such as "incendiary" and "inflammatory." Prophets of the Old Testament frequently and repeatedly criticized Israel and called the nation of Israel to task for violating God's will. Was Rev Wright's preaching any different than those that this supposedly Judaeo-Christian nation claims to hold dear in its own religious traditions?

I found the attacks on Rev. Wright to be particularly repugnant and disgusting because they were clearly racist in their intent. The critics of Sen. Obama for his association with Rev. Wright might just as well have come out & called him the N-word. But they just didn't have the guts. They took sound bites out of context from the unique social milieu that is the black Christian church experience in America and held it up to public scrutiny. Such a milieu is so foreign to most whites in America that they might just as well have been viewing something spoken in a different language. This was the basest kind of scare tactic, designed to exploit racial fears & misunderstandings. It's bad enough that it once again brought to light the racial bigotry of the likes of Pat Buchanan & Fox News. The fact that it also brought to light this side of Hillary Clinton should be enough to tell us all that she is unfit for office.