My bet is that Obama suffers a 3% drop in support as voters who supported him on principle resort to a second level issue to make a distinction and cast a vote.

From what I gathered on the primaries I see that 15% to 18% of voters decided the candidate of their parties.

I saw that the GOP had a steady 3 to 5 % turnout for Ron Paul, independents and "principled" voters, similarily the numbers at Obama website indicate 2% of the total; 20 thousand protesting.

My point is this, that those who would take a principled stand against FISA and amnesty, and after immunity is granted, will make a next level decision or second tier decision of support.

It might be based on smaller government, gun rights, or other rather libertarian ideals, but with the FISA issue off the table, easily a 5 percent shift could occur.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is already using Obama's FISA flip-flop to attack the senator.

"Over the past several weeks, Barack Obama has made it increasingly difficult to take him at his word on anything," wrote John McCain's senior policy advisor Doug Holtz-Eakin in a memo sent out to the press Monday morning. "After pledging to accept public financing, he decided not to. After saying he would debate 'anywhere, anytime,' he decided against participating in any of the 10 joint town hall meetings.  After backing the D.C. handgun ban, he now says it was unconstitutional. After pledging to filibuster the FISA bill, he voted for it."

The real point is that Obama has been caught in a circumstance where he can't flip-flop out of the flip-flop he is in.

My bet is that the moderate, libertarian, and independent voter evaluates the support differently after this vote, and I bet that McCain and his campaign will find ample opportunities to point out that they must vote in the absence of this FISA distinction within the choice.

Arguing that those votes will go third party is not wise, asked to evaluate who has a legacy with this independent voter segment from 2000, and who has been historically more sympathetic to libertarian ideals, Obama painted as big-government flip flopper was the one break McCain needed as an issue as a summer wears on.

It has not been a kind year for the favorites, Obama made that trend easier by allienating voters who supported him on the "FISA principle of no immunity" and the people who care about this issue don't equate "principles" with "compromise."

Repeating "Flip-Flop" and "compromising principles promised" makes the McCain message easier.

This issue this fall, can make big states close if Obama cannot close the deal with Catholics and Independents.

A principled stand on FISA was one of the few wedge issues that Obama had with libertarians and independents.

He now no longer has it and McCain will not allow the voter to forget it.

It was a mistake that I'll come back to as the election nears to a conclusion.

Amy Goodman: It's not the man, it's the movement

Amy Goodman  —  7/03/2008 5:37 am

I was on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado this week when Newsweek's Jonathan Alter asked me, "Is Obama a sellout?" The question isn't whether he is a sellout or not -- it's about what demands are made by grass-roots social movements of those who would represent them.

The question is, Who are these candidates responding to, answering to? Richard Nixon's campaign strategy was to run in the primaries to the right, then move to the center in the general election. Bill Clinton's strategy was called "triangulation," navigating to a political "third way" to please moderates and undecided voters. This past week, Barack Obama has made some signal policy changes that suggest he might be doing something similar. Will it work for him?

Take the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, for example. A Dec. 17, 2007, press release from Obama's Senate office read: "Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies and has cosponsored Senator Dodd's efforts to remove that provision from the FISA bill. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same." Six months later, he supports immunity for the companies that spied on Americans.

I asked Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., about Obama's position on the FISA bill. He told me: "Wrong vote. Regrettable. Many Democrats will do this. We should be standing up for the Constitution. When Senator Obama is president, he will, I'm sure, work to fix some of this, but it's going to be a lot easier to prevent it now than to try to fix it later."

Feingold and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., are planning on filibustering the bill. It will take 60 senators to overcome their filibuster. It looks like Obama will be one of them. Disappointment with Obama's FISA position is not limited to his senatorial colleagues. On Obama's own campaign Web site, bloggers are voicing strident opposition to Obama's FISA position. At the time of this writing, an online group on Obama's site had more than 10,000 members and was growing fast. The group's profile reads: "Senator Obama -- we are a proud group of your supporters who believe in your call for hope and a new kind of politics. Please reject the politics of fear on national security, vote against this bill and lead other Democrats to do the same!"

Then there were the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on gun control and the death penalty. Obama supported the court in overturning the 32-year-old ban on handguns in the nation's violence-ridden capital. It's the court's most significant ruling on the Second Amendment in nearly 70 years. And in a blow to death-penalty opponents, Obama disagreed with the high court's prohibiting execution of those who were found guilty of raping children.

In a Jan. 21, 2008, primary debate, Obama called the North American Free Trade Agreement "a mistake" and "an enormous problem." He recently told Fortune magazine, "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified ... my core position has never changed ... I've always been a proponent of free trade." This, after the primary-campaign scandal of the alleged meeting between Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee and a member of the Canadian consulate. A Canadian memo describing the meeting suggested Obama was generally satisfied with NAFTA. Goolsbee described the accounts as inaccurate. Now people are beginning to question Obama's genuine opposition to NAFTA and "free trade."

Then there is the floating of potential vice-presidential candidates. Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post was on the Aspen panel and noted that he has been receiving e-mails from gay men who angrily oppose former Sen. Sam Nunn as an Obama running mate. They can't forget Nunn's key role in shaping "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," which prohibited gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the military. The e-mails trickled up, prompting the writing of an influential Capehart column, "Don't Ask Nunn."

It may be the strategy of the Obama campaign to run to the middle, to attract the independents, the undecided. But he should look carefully at the lessons of the 2004 Kerry campaign. John Kerry made similar calculations, not wanting to appear weak on the war in Iraq. Uninspired, people stayed home. There are millions who care about the issues from which Obama is distancing himself, from FISA to gun control to gay rights to free trade to the death penalty. Rather than staying home, they should recall the words of Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a demand."

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations, including WYOU cable access TV and WORT radio here. You can read her podcast at captimes.com.

I have to give credit for TPM covering the Timeline of Obama's flip on FISA. Rimjob at FreeRepublic would have never allowed the same on McCain's flip.

It is sad seeing these young voters, new people to the process who sent money to Obama abused in trust, to see the "icecream fall off the icecream cone" of their idea that laws mattered, that there was a set of laws for all to adhere to.

I will give TPM credit where it is due, they essentially retracted allot of what was implied negatively about Glen Fine, and covered this flip-flop on the blog.

Democracy would be improved if the GOP had the same ethics and a well managed forum to do the same.

Happy 4th of July.

Courting Jim Crow
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Hillary Clinton famously found her voice in New Hampshire, but it took the senator until West Virginia to relocate her inner child. Yes, she’s once again embraced the Goldwater Girl of her youth.

Once upon a time while she was still the front-runner, Hillary chastised Barack Obama for his naïve pledge to take unilateral action to assassinate by cruise missile Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda leadership if their hideaway in the mountains of Pakistan could ever be located. She said such a strike would be destabilizing and in contravention of international law. Now Mrs. Clinton, following in the footsteps of her hero Goldwater, is vowing to take unilateral nuclear action to obliterate an entire nation: Iran.

In Clinton’s mind, this political regression has been validated by her wins in the Wal-Mart Belt of Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky, states where her terms on the union-busting board of Wal-Mart are viewed as a political asset.

Hillary’s neo-populism seems to have been grafted from the virulent stock of Orval Faubus and George Wallace, which fused anti-bank and anti-corporate oratory with rancid segregationist rants. (For more on the origins of the southern populist Dixiecrats read Robert Sherrill’s The Gothic Politics of the Deep South, one of the most instructive books ever written on American politics.) But whereas Faubus and Wallace actually delivered some economic crumbs to poor southern whites, Hillary offers mainly hollow and strained rhetoric. Clinton is constitutionally wedded to a stern neoliberalism, a disposition she can’t fully camouflage.

Long ago, the states of Kentucky and West Virginia entered into an economic suicide pact with Big Coal. The bill for this grim Faustian bargain has finally come due with chronic unemployment, busted unions, poisoned water, pulverized mountains, rampant environmental illnesses and chronic privation. Yet, all Clinton had to offer this desolate region was a vow to fund clean coal technologies. Clean coal is the biggest con job since energy deregulation, another fraudulent scheme unleashed in Clinton time. Low-sulfur coal isn’t clean and the latest method for extracting those black seams constitutes the most devastating form of mining yet invented: mountaintop removal. Using this barbaric method, Big Coal is steadily decapitating Appalachia and burying its valleys and hollows under mounds of toxic detritus. Communities and watersheds be damned.

Another example. Hillary came to Oregon last week. She didn’t draw 75,000 people for a speech on the banks of the Willamette River in Portland, as Obama did. Instead she headed to Beaverton, the posh suburb of Portland that is home to Nike, where she held a press conference in an empty subdivision of new upscale homes that had sat unsold for the past year. Most of the people who voted for her in West Virginia don’t earn enough in ten years of hard labor to pay for one of these houses. She communed with the developer, commiserating over the hard times of the real estate industry.

In recent weeks, the growing ranks of the homeless had camped out in front of the Portland mayor Tom Potter’s office, demanding more humane treatment. It apparently didn’t occur to Hillary to ask her developer pals to open up those vacant houses to shelter the economic refugees of the Bush era.

With his solid win in Oregon, Obama has now earned a majority of pledged delegates. He has also surpassed Clinton in super delegates. But the finality of this mathematical threshold hasn’t deterred Hillary, who vows to fight on until "we have a nominee--whoever she may be." Indeed, Clinton is now claiming incredulously that she is the popular vote leader, a number that can only be achieved if ballots cast by blacks only count as half a vote. (Obama currently leads Clinton by nearly 500,000 votes.)

Increasingly, Clinton is operating in a virtual reality programmed by her pollster Mark Penn during his downtime from working for the butchers of Colombia.  Adhering to Penn’s fatal calculus, Clinton has endeavored to re-segregate the Democratic Party electorate into demographic segments and then pitted them against each other. The Clinton campaign has intentionally inflamed these simmering antagonisms: black versus Hispanic, black versus white, black versus older women, white collar versus blue collar, young versus old, under-educated versus college grad.

Back in the 1980s, Lee Atwater constructed an illusory Big Tent for Republicans, welcoming inside the Reagan Democrats—if only to soon betray their core interests.  This was called the politics of expansion. In contrast, Clinton and Penn are cynically attempting to contract the Democratic base by provoking an internal Hobbesian free-for-all—total warfare of the factions.

What was once coded is now explicit. Clinton openly talks about her appeal among “working, hard working, white voters.” The implication here is that blacks are lazy, shiftless and on the welfare dole and that perhaps only half of their votes should count. But shouldn’t someone remind her that her husband dismantled welfare? Perhaps her former mentor Marian Wright Edelman should make the call.

Coming from a Wellesley grad who just loaned her own campaign nearly $12 million, Hillary’s attempts to peg Obama as an elitist requires a degree of chutzpah that might make Alan Dershowitz tingle with envy. But when the Clintons tag Obama as an elitist, they don’t mean primarily that he is rich (which he is) but that he’s an “uppity nigger.”

The Clinton camp has become so entrenched in their racial rhetoric that I’ve begun to wonder if they begin their morning strategy sessions with a screening of the Rodney King beating tape as a motivational tool.

For the dull-witted, Clinton’s surrogates are sent out spell it out in capital letters. Obama used cocaine (Bob Johnson). Obama’s middle name is “Hussein” (Bob Kerrey).  Obama is a master of “shuck and jive” (Andrew Cuomo). Obama is another Jesse Jackson (Bill Clinton). Obama’s story is a fairy tale (ditto). And, most recently, Geraldine Ferraro told the Los Angeles Times that Obama is a “sexist” (most black men are, right?) and she won’t vote for him if he is the nominee.

To sum up: Obama is a drug abuser, a huckster, a secret Muslim, a con artist and a misogynist. And that’s without dragging Jeremiah Wright into the scenario.

Numerically, Obama sewed up the nomination back in March. Since then the Clinton campaign has been running largely on the fumes of her own ego, at a cost of a million dollars a day.  How then can she justify persisting, especially with a campiagn freighted with such malignant themes?

Her campaign now resembles a political neutron bomb that wipes out all living contenders and leaves only the super-structure of her own aspiration standing.  Apparently, the idea is to crush the interloper Obama, either in Denver, through some deus ex machina of spineless super-delegates stampeding her way, or to have McCain do her work for her so that she can challenge the septuagenarian in 2012. If so, her motto will be the familiar taunt of the schoolhouse tattletale: “I told you so.”

If Obama survives the primaries and falls to McCain in November, Hillary will attempt to remake the Democratic Party in her own image. It will replay of the origin of the conservative DLC, designed by her husband and Lieberman to keep the party from falling into the hands of Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. This time the C will stand for Clinton.

The Clintons have always been graceless and petulant in defeat. They seek to destroy any defectors from their camp (c.f., Bill “Judas” Richardson). Now that NARAL has jilted Clinton for Obama, Hillary is probably contemplating coming out in favor parental notification for teenage abortions and joining the next senate filibuster against stem cell research.

Meanwhile, Obama is daily being drained of any vestigial progressive instinct. In order to prove he’s not an appeaser of Hezbollah, Obama is pledging to beef up funding of the Lebanese army and paramilitaries, a disastrous scheme that will only exacerbate a fractious situation. If this keeps up, there will soon be demands that Obama annul his marriage to the seditious Michelle, the last affirmative reason to vote for him in my view.

With the walls closing in around her, Hillary unveiled a final argument: Karl Rove, the man John Conyers wants to put in leg-irons in the crypt of the Capitol, says she’s the better candidate against McCain. Rove also swore there were weapons of mass destruction. Clinton fell for that one, too.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net

Don't blame me for vicariously and voyeuristically watching Hillary implode.  Lets face it, after the MSM enabled this episode and she went with a wildcard desperate strategy, went millions in debt, drinks wiskey, shoots guns, dodges snippers, dismisses economists and such; well we're all just interested if she can gracefully exit or will she be yanked from the stage?

You know watching this I'm reminded how some people can take a concept that is self-grandizing, and then narcistically take that personal belief despite facts, and as a narcistic act, create a debacle.

What the Clintons have done by playing the race card repeatedly is make the democratic primaries into a racial proxy.

It just goes to show that when narcistic egos are involved that people like Rumsfeld and the Clintons will not allow facts to stand in the way of their opinons.

And in closing if Hillary is making the claim that she is more electable then why isn't she winning the primary?

Well then again, Rumsfeld wasn't much for facts either.

Isn't it amazing that Democrats were gloating that the Republicans would have a problem with establishing a candidate and going to a contested convention?

Now we have the looming spectacle of a meltdown of the Democrats.

Was it Karma?

Or is there a better explanation?

Do you think he should go negative?

She had evasive eye movements, not a good start.

First let me say that I think that Hillary means well, but it seems that she doesn't have the ability to discern between fact and fiction. 

Her statements about Bosnia and then with the healthcare issue, where essentially just a "rumor" becomes reality to her, is troubling.

To be succinct, look at what a loose cannon that George Bush proved to be, I mean look at the costs of this war in Iraq, and the "feith based inititiative" that was launched to start it, there was no need for pre-war intelligence, reasoned debate, or even facts.

The same can be said of Hillary.  Like George Bush Jr. she seems to just believe what she wants.  Sure she can laugh that off on Jay Leno, sure she can say that she was sleep derived, but factually she is in her own private Idaho and seems to be getting further and further from the reality that the rest of us share.

If she cannot handle the rigors of the candidacy race, she seems mentally incapable of handling the position of commader in chief.

Her repeated excuses and laughing off these episodes of behavior really have gone to far.  I mean honestly, would you choose a physician who just subscribed to their own reality?  Would you want an attorney who invented facts?  

I think that Hillary means well, but is not ready for the task of POTUS.

I think that she has probably been put in a position as a consequence of her husband, and has managed in the Senate, but makes a poor choice for commander in chief.

This time, this election, the person in charge matters.  Hillary cannot just pretend that her mental health is not an issue.

I think she means well, but is not up to the task.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=The+Tonya+Harding+Option&btnG=Search+News

Soprano style thumb-breaking or kneecapping next?

The Politico laid it out very clearly yesterday - and solidified what we've known for weeks - this race is over. Obama has the nomination.

Even Hillary Clinton's own campaign admits it! Politico reports, "One important Clinton adviser estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives. In other words: The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe."

It's somewhat hilarious to watch the media eat up the campaign spin on the record, that she's got a great shot to win this and win the Presidency. Of course, the race gets a whole lot more boring with lower ratings when it's Obama vs. McCain, probably with a huge lull in the campaign, where - God forbid - the news media will actually have to go out and find and report news, and not just campaign talking points sent to them.

I've been trying to figure out for weeks why Hillary Clinton is still in this campaign because the math has been obvious for quite some time now. Even Mitt Romney had the - what would you call it, decency, wisdom, common sense - to drop out after he realized it was mathematically impossible (or next to impossible) for him to win.

There is one possibility as to why Senator Clinton might still be in this race, inflicting heavy damage on the presumptive Democratic nominee. That reason is Hillary 2012.

Now that's a heavy charge. I can't read her mind, so I don't know what her true intentions are. We can only judge based on her actions. Her staff understands and agrees that she has a very, very small chance of winning, but she is still willing to go after front-runner of her own party in the strongest possible words.

Look at what she has said about the man she privately believes will be the Democratic nominee for President:

He has not crossed the "Commander in Chief threshold" like John McCain has.

He cannot be trusted to answer the phone at 3am.

His only experience is a speech from 2002.

That he is disenfranchising voters in Michigan and Florida (even though she agreed to the same rules he did when those states stepped out of line in the primary process).

And, as Bill Clinton intimated yesterday, he doesn't love our country, like Hillary and McCain do.

Those are some serious blows against someone in your own party and might seriously hurt his chances of winning the general election. In fact, every day that Senator Clinton stays in the race is another day she spends money damaging Senator Obama. And every dollar she spends is a dollar in John McCain's pocket.

It almost makes you ask - does she want him to lose?

If Obama wins, then Senator Clinton couldn't run again until at least 2016 (unless something goes terribly wrong). At which point, she would be almost as old as John McCain is now. If she's ever going to become president, she has this narrow window.

On the other hand, if Senator Obama sustains serious political wounds going into the general election and winds up losing, then Hillary Clinton is sitting pretty in 2012.

In four years, John McCain will be 209 years old, and coming off a disastrous first term. We will still be in Iraq and the country will be dying for change. If you thought the voters wanted change now, imagine what the situation will be in 2012. Imagine how starved the electorate will be for a Democrat if McCain just spent four years replicating George W. Bush's policies - as he is adamantly promising to do on the campaign trail.

At that point, Senator Clinton would be able to swoop in and say, "See, you went with Obama last time and he lost, just like I told you. Now, nominate me, and I will take this White House back like we should have four years ago!"

Having narrowly lost to Obama in the primary, she would be in a great position to say "It's my turn! Let's get this right!"

Is she that cynical? Does she care that little about her own party or her own principles? Remember, a McCain win signs us up for more years in Iraq, a possible new war with Iran, an untold number of conservative judges on the Supreme Court, a probable overturn of Roe v. Wade, four more years of economic pain for the lower and middle class and ... no healthcare reform for another four years.

Is anyone that politically craven? To risk all that so they have a better chance of winning in 2012? I hope not. I hope she is just being delusional and thrashing about in misguided desperation as she continues to wound Obama going into the general election.

But if she is doing this on purpose - and she wants Obama to lose this time around so she has a better chance of winning in 2012 - she better make damn sure that news doesn't leak. Because that kind of political crime would be unforgivable. Unforgivable.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/is-hillary-positioning-fo_b_92904.html

What a circus, can John McCain get any press?

"Mr. Richardson's endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic," Carville said.

Meanwhile, The NYT's reports on the financial problems that Clinton faces. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/03/22/2008-03-22_obama_campaign_up_20m_over_clinton_.html

I guess that we are close to that point if where somebody dragged a twenty dollar bill through a trailer park that Hillary would latch onto it for her campaign coffers.

Before this is done Hillary will be market branded a sore loser similar to Elen Sauerberry.

Damn strange~