David S. Broder just criticised John McCain on Iraq.
When one considers that Broder is a wanker who has approved invasions and killing, all the way back to Nixon, and felt that people who opposed this are dirty f*&%ing hippies, this is significant.
He is , pretty much by definition, the high priest of High Broderism, and the fact that he’s criticizing McCain on Iraq is significant.
The he goes again. Our troops fight the war that John McCain loves, but when they come home, no Iraq vet GI Bill for you. (see also here).
It appears that he’s too much of a coward to stand up to Bush and the rest of his draft dodging buddies.
Very Funny. Don’t have anything in your mouth when clicking the link.
Not exactly work safe, though.
It appears that Sean Hackbarth, “Co-eCampaign Director, Friends of Fred Thompson, Inc.” is begging for work.
He has a resume up, and his day jobs appear to have been pretty meager, and he did not graduate college (it just says “education”, not degree).
I will say that given that he is around 33, perhaps the infantry would be a good idea.
Not sure if I’m just posting because I didn’t want another chance to write, “Fredddie Thompson Clown Show”.
Huckabee seems to be rather more complex than his “Gomer Pyle” stereotype:
And one other thing I think we’ve got to remember: As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, “That’s a terrible statement,” I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I’m going to be probably the only conservative in America who’s going to say something like this, but I’m just telling you: We’ve got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, “You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus.” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.
My guess would be is that if he were still in the race, he would not be so benevolent, but it still a remarkably kind and thoughtful thing to say.
It’s an (invitation only) message board that I am on, and pyroDon said the following:
I’d still love to see Hillary waving from the white house steps in a dark wig and blue dress. With Bill’s arm around her and him waving a cigar in the other hand.
Neo-cons heads would explode all over.
(minor typos corrected)
In discussing a possible revote, I noted that I thought that objections being raised by the Obama campaign were a specious attempt to stone wall.
I’ve finally come across some of the specific issues that they have with a revote, and they are in fact quite valid.
One question is who do you allow to vote. Unlike a lot of other states, Michigan has an open primary, which means that you can choose which ballot you want when you walk into the polling area, regardless of party affiliation.
To quote Chairman Kaga, “As Memory Serves”, there were a lot of Democrats who chose to vote for Mittmentum, because they thought that he would be particularly weak in the general.
So, there is now an issue regarding what to do with the people who voted on the Republican ticket.
This is a completely legitimate issue.
My preferred solution would be to simply allow only people who were registered Democrats as of the date of the first election to participate in any revote, regardless of which ballot they took in January. I think that open primaries create too much mischief, particularly in this instance.
In any case, this issue has a number of possible solutions, and it cuts to the very core of any possible revote, so it is a very valid concern, and needs to be addressed to the satisfaction of both campaigns.
Me bad on calling it stonewalling
Talk about signs of the Apocalypse, when Charles Murray, the bigot who wrote The Bell Curve, posted on the Corner Blog of the National Review, a Magazine that never failed out to speak out in favor of bigotry and racist policies until it was too late to make a difference, just described Barack Obama’s speech as, “just plain flat out brilliant”.
You know, if I was hoping for the Rapture, I’d be looking this as a bigger sign than anything happening in Israel.
Yes, the sick old man, the one whose only claim to the presidency is his knowledge of foreign policy, claimed that Al Queida was being trained by Iran, and Joe Lieberman had to literally whisper in his ear to get him to correct it.
John McCain has no foreign policy experience, he just wants more war all the time, which is what the very serious people inside the Beltway&trade call foreign policy experience.
100 years more war in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and who knows where else this doddering old fool would take us.
First, in the interest of full disclosure, while I still read there, I have been banned from posting there, with good cause, as I was sock puppeting.
I still read it, truth be told, I think that the diaries are more interesting than the front pagers, but you have perhaps a dozen front pagers, and something like 1000 times as many diarists daily.
I started coming across various comments, some snark, and some serious, and finally tracked this all down to one user who has announced his withdrawal from Kos for the duration of the nominating process.
His complaints were justified. The place has been nuts on this lately. Hell, so has Americablog, MyDD (on the other side), Oliver Willis, Taylor Marsh, etc…..
Let’s make this clear, to quote myself, “If I had a choice I would vote for a syphilitic goat,” ahead of any Republican.
The shrillness level, and not just on Kos, regarding the Democratic Party nominations is in-bloody-sane.
Take a chill pill.
That’s the only explain the various chicken egg objections of Obama supporters, who won’t say if they support a concept of a revote unless they have finished legislation, but also say it’s not worth coming up with finished legislation unless they have sign on by both campaigns.
There is only one real issue here, making sure that the already broke state of Michigan is not left holding the bag on the cost.
In related news, the Florida Democratic party has said there will be no revote.
Truth be told, what happened in Florida was much more a Republican effort, the Dems tried to change the date, but rules are rules.
No delegates may be a good thing, because it will lead more people to question the role of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. It’s an accident of history that does not need to be repeated, particularly in South Carolina.
The worst solution is Chris Dodd’s where the delegates are split 50/50. That says, “the voters be damned, but the political big wigs should get their junket to Denver.”
Also, the super delegates, who were largely the folks who voted to set those dates at that time, should be excluded too.
OK, I guess “Mr. 100 Years” is trying to find a place where the occupation is more popular than in the good old USA, and this is it.
Yes, he’s wrong on everything, but this time, it’s not poor judgement, like Iraq, he says that Obama heard Rev. Wright’s notorious sermon, when a quick google says that he was over 1000 miles away, as would a call to the campaign.
This was for an article in the New York Times, which has to start fact checking its editorials.
Yes, Obama’s church has Just put out a press release (below), condemning the contraversy regarding Reverend Wright as an “an attack on the legacy of the African American Church”.
This is ill conceived for a number of reasons:
So, please, follow the advice of Abraham Lincoln, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool then to speak out and remove all doubt.”
Statement from Trinity United Church of Christ
“AN ATTACK ON OUR SENIOR PASTOR AND THE HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCH”
Chicago, Ill. (March 15, 2008) — Nearly three weeks before the 40th commemorative anniversary of the murder of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s character is being assassinated in the public sphere because he has preached a social gospel on behalf of oppressed women, children and men in America and around the globe.
“Dr. Wright has preached 207,792 minutes on Sunday for the past 36 years at Trinity United Church of Christ. This does not include weekday worship services, revivals and preaching engagements across America and around the globe, to ecumenical and interfaith communities. It is an indictment on Dr. Wright’s ministerial legacy to present his global ministry within a 15- or 30-second sound bite,” said the Reverend Otis Moss III, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ.
During the 36-year pastorate of Dr. Wright, Trinity United Church of Christ has grown from 87 to 8,000 members. It is the largest congregation in the United Church of Christ (UCC) denomination.
“It saddens me to see news stories reporting such a caricature of a congregation that has been such a blessing to the UCC’s Wider Church mission,” said the Rev. John H. Thomas, UCC general minister and president, in a released statement. “ … It’s time for us to say ‘No’ to these attacks and declare that we will not allow anyone to undermine or destroy the ministries of any of our congregations in order to serve their own narrow political or ideological ends.”
Trinity United Church of Christ’s ministry is inclusive and global. The following ministries have been developed under Dr. Wright’s ministerial tutelage for social justice: assisted living facilities for senior citizens, day care for children, pastoral care and counseling, health care, ministries for persons living with HIV/AIDS, hospice training, prison ministry, scholarships for thousands of students to attend historically black colleges, youth ministries, tutorial and computer programs, a church library, domestic violence programs and scholarships and fellowships for women and men attending seminary.
Moss added, “The African American Church was born out of the crucible of slavery and the legacy of prophetic African American preachers since slavery has been and continues to heal broken marginalized victims of social and economic injustices. This is an attack on the legacy of the African American Church which led and continues to lead the fight for human rights in America and around the world.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached the Christian tenet, “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Before Dr. King was murdered on April 4, 1968, he preached, “The 11 o’clock hour is the most segregated hour in America.” Forty years later, the African American Church community continues to face bomb threats, death threats, and their ministers’ characters are assassinated because they teach and preach prophetic social concerns for social justice. Sunday is still the most segregated hour in America.
H/T, TPM.
Obama has has disavowed incindiary statements made by his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and he has been removed from his campaign’s African American Religious Leadership Committee.
I’ve not been a fan of Obama, but this should be enough. For all intents and purposes, except for literal genetics, this guy is his family. He was married by him, his daughters were baptized by him.
His statement about him sometimes being like an uncle who makes statements that you disagree with is in my assessment 100% true.
In any sane world, this should close the matter. In fact, it should also remove the whole “Obama as Muslim” slime too.
He’s not a Muslim, and he has a nutty pastor to prove it.
Of course, the world of a presidential campaign is not “sane” by any measure.
This sucks.
The only bright spot is that I think that he has handled it well, which bodes well for him if he gets the nomination.
Down at TPM Cafe, FlyOnTneWall has a very interesting post on the realities of Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., the pastor at Obama’s Church.
Specifically, he discusses the Fox News (who else) coverage of a rather incendiary sermon in which he makes it clear that he supports Obama.
Ostensibly, the article is about the potential implications with the IRS, but in reality Fox uses it get some potentially disastrous sound bites on the table.
In addition to the use of the N-Word, and describing Bill Clinton as having done the Black community, “just like he did Monica”, which I think that Obama can, and did defuse with his “crazy uncle” disavowal, there are some statements that are far more troubling from a political perspective:
Brian Ross’s report for Good Morning America on Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is potentially a huge problem for Obama. In the piece, Ross has clips of Wright delivering sermons in which he says we should not say God Bless America, but God “Damn” America, in which he calls America the US of KKKA (referring to how racist the country is), and in which he says about September 11 that America’s “chickens have come home to roost.”
From a purely tactical perspective, he needs to get ahead of this story, and he needs to do so in the next few days.
If he waits until Monday, it may well be too late.
It is necessarily a painful thing, after all, Rev. Wright’s has been his pastor for over 20 years, but these are the sound bites that will be used to destroy his campaign.
Rev. Wright is not Louis Farrakhan, but the political reality in the US in 2008 is that he will have to be disavowed and denounced in the same manner, and even then you will still see his clips all over Fox News.
He needs not to repeat Clinton’s weakness with Ferraro.
The Republicans are salivating at the opportunity to turn Obama into the scary angry black man. It’s not fair, it’s just the way it is.
They need to throw Wright off the bus, and back up over him, and do it again, and then tie an anchor to him and throw him in the river.
She spoke before the publishers and editors of 200 black community newspapers at the NNPA meeting, saying, that, “I certainly do repudiate it and I regret deeply”.
Should have happened yesterday, but better late than never.
She also apologized for the government incompetence and inaction with regard to Katrina.
There will be a debate in Philadelphia on April 16, hosted by ABC.
If that wasn’t enough to make you scream, Obama upped the ante. He also accepted a debate on April 19 in North Carolina, hosted by CBS, and moderated by Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer.
So we’ve got the chipper cheerleader, and Bush’s buddy moderating the 2nd debate.
Gah!!!!
Michigan seems to be further along, with the Republicans in the state legislature being rather helpful.
The deal seems to be as follows: The state holds a new primary, and the Dems pay for it.
It’s the right thing to do, both politically and morally, but I’ve learned never to trust a smiling Republican, and the Republicans seem awfully helpful right now, which implies that they have found a way to put a proverbial turd in the punch bowl.
Hopefully, this is just my cynicism.
Florida is far more unsettledwith the state Democratic party and Senator Nelson on one side, and the congressional delegation on the other.
My guess is that if MI gets its act together, so will Florida.
From a purely tactical perspective, the Obama campaign has to see any sort of “re-vote”, even a caucus, as a losing proposition, since it adds about 300 delegates to the mix, and a large number of votes, probably a larger number than who voted in January.
Furthermore, the majority of those people will have already pulled the lever.