Hillary Mocks Obama

Nothing to add here.

Glenn Greenwald - Amnesty Day for Bush and lawbreaking telecoms

With the presidential election taking up all the oxygen and attention in the political sphere, legal expert and progressive blogger Glenn Greenwald keeps a critical eye on pivotal developments in the Bush administration's battle to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans and provide full retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms:

"Chris Dodd went to the Senate floor last night and gave another eloquent and impassioned speech, warning of the consequences for our country from telecom amnesty. He specifically focused on the permanently and comprehensively suppressive effect it will have on efforts to investigate what the Bush administration did in illegally spying on Americans.

....The Dodd/Feingold amendment to remove telecom immunity from the bill just failed by a whopping vote of 31-67 -- 20 votes shy of the 50 needed for a passage. A total of 18 Democrats joined all Republicans in voting for immunity: Bayh, Inouye, Johnson, Landrieu, McCaskill, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Stabenow, Feinstein, Kohl, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Carper, Mikulski, Conrad, Webb, and Lincoln. Obama voted against immunity, and Hillary Clinton was the only Senator not voting."

So, how could this have happened? Glenn Greenwald makes an important observation:

"There's a temptation, particularly on days like today, to talk about what motivates Democrats" -- as though they're a monolith acting collectively with the same drives. They're not. Some do what they do because their only concern is a craven desire to be re-elected. Others believe in one thing but are afraid to vote that way (because they'll be called Soft on Terror, Liberal, etc.), while others still are influenced by Beltway money and other cultural pressures. Some are motivated by a combination of those motives. But a large number of elected Democrats vote in favor of the radical Bush agenda for a very simple reason: they believe in it.

....The fault lines in the Beltway aren't primarily between Republican and Democrat but between those who support the core values of our political establishment (as reflected by the Bush administration) and those who don't."

While Senator Clinton's domestic agenda is progressive, on this issue of privacy and on so many other critical foreign policy and national security issues, it seems clear that Senator's Clinton's values are not mine. So when I hear that there is little policy difference between Obama and Clinton it's frustrating. There are very serious differences as so many analysts have attested - on authorizing the war in Iraq, on the Iran censure resolution, on the telecomm amnesty (skipping the vote in this case), on Cuba. These issues matter, and it is time for Democrats who care about such isssues to take note and take a stand.

Obama's breakthrough among whites

A historical perspective from William Saletan, with a few, very important stats:

It was possible to argue, as Clinton implicitly did, that Obama's ceiling, like Jackson's, was limited. Obama hadn't cracked 40 percent of the white vote anywhere. He hadn't even cracked 37 percent. Pundits theorized that John Edwards' presence in South Carolina helped Obama by splitting white support that would otherwise go to Hillary Clinton. The theory implied that in a two-person contest, Obama still wouldn't draw much white support.

Tonight's results crushed that argument. Even if you don't count Obama's caucus victories in Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, and North Dakota, he shattered his previous white-vote ceiling in 11 other states. In eight states, he crossed the 40 percent threshold. In Connecticut, he tied Clinton among whites. In California, he beat her. In Utah and Illinois, he won commanding majorities.

I don't mean to oversell what Obama accomplished tonight. It's easier to ascend from the 20 percents to the 40 percents when you've got only one opponent left. It's easier to climb from 30 percent to 40 percent than from 40 percent to 50 percent. And it's easier to win support from white Democrats than from white Republicans. But when you look at Obama's numbers tonight and compare them to Jackson's numbers 20 years ago, you're looking at a sea change. This is not a diversity-training exercise. It's a nationwide primary to choose the next president of the United States. The American color barrier, at its highest level, is collapsing.

That's been a central theme of Obama's campaign all along. The message of South Carolina, he suggested in his speech tonight, was that "maybe we don't have to be divided by race and region and gender." But that message didn't come from South Carolina. It came from California, Arizona, Connecticut, and the other states that voted Tuesday. And with those votes, an aspiration is becoming a reality. No matter whom you support for president, that's a victory worth celebrating.

YouTube - Why Lorna Switched from Clinton to Obama

Short, to the point, powerful endorsement from a leading prochoice advocate. It's about integrity.

Obama vs. the Phobocracy - washingtonpost.com

Obama vs. the Phobocracy - washingtonpost.com
Stunning editorial by Michael Chabon. After all the ink that has been spilled over this election it may seem pointless to post yet one more endorsement, one more argument asserting why one should support this candidate over that one. But Michael Chabon's essay is well worth reading if for no other reason than its rhetorical conviction and beauty.

But the most pitiable fear of all is the fear of disappointment, of having our hearts broken and our hopes dashed by this radiant, humane politician who seems not just with his words but with every step he takes, simply by the fact of his running at all, to promise so much for our country, for our future and for the eventual state of our national soul. I say "pitiable" because this fear of disappointment, which I hear underlying so many of the doubts that people express to me, is ultimately a fear of finding out the truth about ourselves and the extent of the mess that we have gotten ourselves into. If we do fight for Obama, work for him, believe in him, vote for him, and the man goes down to defeat by the big-money machines and the merchants of fear, then what hope will we have left to hold on to?

Thus in the name of preserving hope do we disdain it. That is how a phobocracy maintains its grip on power.

To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant. We must allow ourselves to believe in Obama, not blindly or unquestioningly as we might believe in some demagogue or figurehead but as we believe in the comfort we take in our families, in the pleasure of good company, in the blessings of peace and liberty, in any thing that requires us to put our trust in the best part of ourselves and others. That kind of belief is a revolutionary act. It holds the power, in time, to overturn and repair all the damage that our fear has driven us to inflict on ourselves and the world.

Zakaria: The Wrong Experience | Newsweek Voices - Fareed Zakaria | Newsweek.com

Fareed Zakaria's analysis of the differences between the two remaining candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination focuses on differences in policy, principle, and political will (most important).:
Zakaria: The Wrong Experience Newsweek Voices - Fareed Zakaria Newsweek.com:

"Obama has advocated easing the Bush-imposed ban on Cuban-Americans visiting the island and sending money to their relatives. He makes a broader case for a new Cuba policy, arguing that capitalism, trade and travel will help break the regime's stranglehold on the country and help open things up.

Clinton immediately disagreed, firmly supporting the current policy. This places her in the strange position of arguing, in effect, that her husband's Cuba policy was not hard-line enough. But this is really not the best way to understand Clinton's position. In all probability, she actually agrees with Obama's stand. She is just calculating that it would anger Cuban-Americans in Florida and New Jersey.

This is the problem with Hillary Clinton. She is highly intelligent, has real experience and is an attractive candidate. But she is terrified to act on her beliefs. In fact, she seems so conditioned by what she sees as political constraints that one can barely tell where her beliefs begin and where those constraints end."

So well said and well supported

Yes we can (video)

"In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."

Barack Obama for Democratic nominee - Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times has endorsed Barack Obama. As blogger Sam Graham-Felsen points out, this is big, historic even. It's the first endorsement for the Times since 1972!

Barack Obama for Democratic nominee - Los Angeles Times: "experience has value only if it is accompanied by courage and leads to judgment.

Nowhere was that judgment more needed than in 2003, when Congress was called upon to accept or reject the disastrous Iraq invasion. Clinton faced a test and failed, joining the stampede as Congress voted to authorize war. At last week's debate and in previous such sessions, Clinton blamed Bush for abusing the authority she helped to give him, and she has made much of the fact that Obama was not yet in the Senate and didn't face the same test. But Obama was in public life, saw the danger of the invasion and the consequences of occupation, and he said so. He was right."

Dawn in South Carolina

A native Tar Heel's take on the results, reflecting what so many progressive North Carolinians were thinking and talking about yesterday:

Dawn in South Carolina:

"When I was growing up in North Carolina, our neighbor South Carolina played an important role in our lives--giving us something to look down on. We fell for too many racist demagogues through the years (y'all remember Jesse Helms?), but we weren't always run by them. We didn't have no rebel flag flying over our statehouse. We elected a racially moderate governor at the height of the civil-rights backlash in 1960. It was something to say for ourselves, and we appreciated South Carolina's making us look relatively all right.

After Saturday's primary, this Tar Heel can do nothing but offer a big, deep bow to the Democrats of South Carolina. Not because I was particularly rooting for Barack Obama over John Edwards--but because of these fine folks' rejection of the Clintons' gutter politics. The majority of white Democrats, in a state where the Democratic Party was so long the organized mob enforcing Jim Crow, repelled the Clinton campaign's unspeakably vile attempt to paint Barack Obama as some kind of coke-dealing, slumlord-pimping cousin of Al Sharpton--and their equally vile assumption that Deep South whites, whether they're Democratic or Republican, can be manipulated by coded racial divisiveness in 2008 the way they were in 1968. Or, to add a bit more vileness to the mix, their assumption that they could make South Carolina blacks believe that one of their own would be 'unelectable' by definition."

Stunning Facts from Obama's SC Primary Victory

Lots of important data points in last night's historic win....

No Bradley effect in SC.
One big surprise is that Senator Obama managed to increase his share of the White vote significantly over the most recent polls, garnering nearly 25% of that demo rather than the projected 10%, a rare if not unprecedented feat for an African American candidate, especially noteworthy in the "deep south". Second, the senator's share of the white male vote was almost even with Hillary's.

Here are a couple more points, from MSNBC.com:

"COLUMBIA, S.C. - There were two true stunners Saturday night: the size of Sen. Barack Obama’s margin of victory over Sen. Hillary Clinton — 28 percentage points — but just as significantly this number: total turnout for Democrats in their primary was greater than the turnout for the Republican primary in this state, which is one of the most loyally Republican in the nation.

Four years ago about 293,000 Democrats voted in the state’s primary: Saturday Obama alone got more than that number of votes.

Why did Obama win South Carolina and what does this triumph portend for
future contests?
One short answer: He and his campaign staffers
worked."

Big congrats and much respect is due to the South Carolina democratic party for their fairness, hard work, and impeccable organization!