"Haven't we had enough of Mrs. Clinton's mad antics?"

Hillary's Popular Vote Notion only 'Popular' with the Punditocracy.

by Donald Sutherland | Huffington Post

It is incomprehensible to me that Mrs. Clinton can seriously be touting the notion, with the support of the punditocracy of CNN and Fox, that she is leading in the popular vote and should therefore be seriously considered as the most electable candidate in the November election. She's including those who voted for her in Florida and Michigan's name recognition ballot saying that to exclude them would be to disenfranchise them. What about the Democrats in Alaska, American Samoa, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, Nebraska, Washington, Hawaii and Wyoming who did not cast ballots because they were playing by the pledged delegates playbook and voted by caucus. What about them? Certainly if the rules are going to be changed and judgment is based on the 'popular' vote those voters in the eleven caucus states and Samoa will be disenfranchised. What about them?

And what about us? What about the American people? Haven't we had enough of Mrs. Clinton's mad antics in her pursuit of the realization of venal personal ambition; her 'say anything, do anything, no matter what' effort to manipulate our all too willing media to gull this country's populace into believing that her wretched illegitimacy is indeed legitimate. How much mendacity do we have to suffer, how much brazenness do we have to swallow before someone, anyone, has the decency, the common sense, to relieve us of this terrible trifle, this pathetic madness?

Vote Obama

The Great Barack Obama Insurrection

Hillary was ready. Hillary was unstoppable. Hillary was, by all accounts, a lock. What the hell happened?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, May 30, 2008

Are you paying any sort of attention to this moment in time? Are you reading bits and hints about the transformation, the shift, the unusual and slightly surreal energy coursing through the nation? Are you tattooing this seminal period on the sacrum of your sociopolitical consciousness? Are you under 50? Then there's been nothing else like this in your lifetime. And there probably never will be again.

You gotta take it all in, you know? Because it was no time at all ago, less than a year, and Hillary Clinton's presidential nomination was pretty much a given, and even I was relatively thrilled and gung-ho for her candidacy, especially given how she was so ahead in the polls and so ahead in fund raising and so ahead in public opinion her imminent nomination felt much like a slam dunk, a forgone conclusion, a sure thing.

And therefore it was all something rather otherworldly for progressives, a bit unprecedented, a Democratic race to watch only for the sheer historic value and for the surprising quality of the other candidates involved, and not because there was any doubt as to the eventual outcome.

Just a bit beyond incredible, then, what has happened since, in such a short time, in this, one of the more fascinating turning points in American history.

It almost cannot be understated: Barack Obama's steady, astounding, almost inexplicable rise to the top to not only become the presumptive Democratic nominee but also to overtake one of the strongest, smartest, most well-funded, tenacious rival candidates in American history — and also to out-poll his deeply connected Republican opponent — is both remarkable and historic on a number of fronts.

But the thing is, no matter how you crunch the data and try to logically analyze all the components that made Obamapalooza happen, there appears to be something just beyond the logic, just outside the normal machinery, that makes you shake your head in amazement, and perhaps remember this forever.

On one level, I suppose it's not all that unusual. There have been plenty of scrappy, outta-nowhere, come-from-behind victories in political races before. There are plenty of tales of one candidate holding an overwhelming lead early on, only to have his lunch eaten by some brilliant, whippersnapper upstart. JFK charmed the hell out of the planet and revealed the deep sourness of once-omnipotent Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton, the handsome, populist Arkansas governor with minimal big-stage experience but loads of effortless charisma, came from seemingly nowhere to build a phenomenal following and stomp all over the doddering, baffled, how-much-is-a-gallon-of-milk Bush 41.

But with Obama, as with just about everything about his campaign, something feels different, more historic, deeper and more profound and even a bit more, how do you say, intimate. It is not politics as usual. It is not just another smart, deeply intelligent upstart senator making a surprising play for The Show.

You have to take note. Because Obama has accomplished his astonishing rise without the normal weaponry of American politics. As of yet, there have been almost no dirty tricks. He has not really attacked Hillary, has not "gone negative" or run a nasty smear campaign or swiftboated her; he has not employed, in short, any of the disgusting tactics Karl Rove's Republican party notoriously used against Al Gore and John Kerry so as to lie themselves into a brutal and failed chokehold of power.

Verily, plethoric are the pundits who've been trying to parse just why, exactly, Obama has been so much more effective, so much more far-reaching and cross-cultural than the once-unstoppable Clinton, not to mention McCain or anyone else. What is it about him, exactly? What is it that draws such a broad circle of endorsements, from Ted Kennedy to Andrew Sullivan, John Edwards to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich?

It's the networking, they say. Obama is the first "Facebook candidate." He's the first to successfully leverage all the modern tech, the viral marketing, YouTube, Web 2.0, lovely videos by celebrity rappers who are nearly moved to tears by the man's speeches. Yes, that must be it.

Or maybe it's his remarkable, idealistic team of aides, his hotshot fresh-faced speechwriters, his wondrous oratory skill. Is it the cool campaign posters? Is it the game-altering speeches on race in America? Or is it what the terrified right-wing hatemongers are calling "liberal guilt," the feeling that we on the whiny tree-hugging ultra-PC left feel so gosh-darn guilty about how blacks, Hawaiians and Harvard-trained lawyers have been treated, lo, these many millennia — even more so than the oppressive treatment of women — that Obama gets our vote out of sheer nervous remorse?

Problem is, those explanations feel insufficient and inadequate and, in the case of that last one, exceedingly stupid. Is there not something else going on? Is there more to it than just a battle between old school/new school styles of campaigning?

Maybe the answer lies elsewhere. Maybe you need to look to the dark side for a hint, for a bit of proof that there's more to this moment in history than mere shifting times. It comes in the form of that very ugly and violent rumor that gets whispered among skeptics and conspiracy theorists and bantered about by cretins on Fox News, and even sighed by many otherwise happy, progressive idealists, those who've had their dreams shattered and hopes pummeled enough times that a form of sinister cynicism creeps in.

It is this: Some feel Obama will not survive. There are those who think something violent and lethal is bound to happen to him and not merely because he's black, but because he's too revolutionary, too much a force for harmony and peace, and the forces of darkness and oppression in America, be they troglodytic Southern racists or anarchist radicals or insular BushCo die-hards, simply cannot have that.

There is no need to invite that repulsive idea in for long. It is too dark, disquieting, pointless, not to mention how it feels like it could create some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy by mentioning it too damn much in the media. But it is worth noting for one curious aspect: It is a fear borne of a truly rare historic circumstance, the amazing idea that someone like Obama is, to put it bluntly, too good for this particular role, a bit too conscious and enlightened for what is a brutal and soul-numbing and potentially deadly political machine.

Then again, maybe, in a morose way, this is how we know transformative change is arriving, perhaps quicker than expected, but arriving nonetheless. We're already deeply scared of losing it. Really, how long's it been since we've felt anything like that?

'Soy Barack Obama' The New Face of America to the World

A new Obama ad for Puerto Rican television:

Quote for the Day

"Do you recognize and accept your own responsibility for the current evils of your society and your world? Are you now prepared to do what your heart knows is required in order to begin putting an end to man's inhumanity to man?"

Leo Tolstoy

Hillary - No Lover of Democracy

Harold Meyerson: Clinton's rules fight isn't about democracy

The rights of voters in Florida and Michigan didn't matter until she needed them.

By Harold Meyerson May 28, 2008

On Saturday, when the Rules Committee of the Democratic National Committee meets to determine the fate of Florida and Michigan's delegations to this summer's convention, it will have some company. A group of Hillary Clinton supporters has announced it will demonstrate outside.

That Clinton has impassioned supporters, many of whom link her candidacy to the feminist cause, hardly qualifies as news. And it's certainly true that along the campaign trail Clinton has encountered some outrageously sexist treatment. But somehow, a number of Clinton supporters have come to identify the seating of Michigan and Florida with the causes of democracy and feminism -- an equation that makes a mockery of democracy and feminism.

Clinton herself is largely responsible for this absurdity. Over the past couple of weeks, she has equated the seating of the two delegations with African-Americans' struggle for suffrage in the Jim Crow South, and with the efforts of the democratic forces in Zimbabwe to get a fair count of the votes in their presidential election.

The Clintonistas who have called Saturday's demonstration make it sound as if they'll be marching in Selma in support of a universal right to vote. The DNC, says one of their websites, "must honor our core democratic principles and enfranchise the people of Michigan and Florida."

Had Florida and Michigan conducted their primaries the way other states did -- that is, in accord with the very clear calendar laid down by the DNC well before the primaries began -- then Clinton's marchers would be utterly justified in their claims. But when the two states flouted those rules by moving their primaries outside the prescribed time frame, the DNC decreed that their primaries would not count and enjoined all presidential candidates from campaigning in those states. Obama and John Edwards complied by removing their names from the Michigan ballot. Clinton did not.

Seating Michigan in full would validate the kind of one-candidate election (well, 1.03, to give Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd and Mike Gravel, who also remained on the ballot, their due) that is more common in autocracies than democracies. It would mean rewarding the one serious candidate who didn't remove her name from the ballot when all her rivals, in deference to the national party rules, did just that.

What's particularly outrageous is that the Clinton campaign supported the calendar -- and the sanctions against Michigan and Florida -- until Clinton won those states and needed to have their delegations seated.

Not a single Clinton campaign official or DNC Rules Committee member, much less the candidate herself, said at the time that the sanctions imposed on Florida or Michigan were in any way an affront to democratic values. The threat that these rules posed to our fundamental beliefs was discovered only ex post facto -- the facto in question being Clinton's current need to seat the delegations whose seatings she had opposed when she thought she'd cruise to the nomination.

Clinton's supporters have every right to demonstrate, but their larger cause is neither democracy nor feminism; it's situational ethics. To insist otherwise is to degrade democracy and turn feminism into the last refuge of scoundrels.

Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large of American Prospect and the L.A. Weekly, wrote this article for the Washington Post.

© 2008 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

Water World

Mars Lander looking for any signs of 'intellligent life'

by Lisa Van Dusen/Sun Media/May 28,2008

Because the U.S. presidential race is beginning to feel like a soap opera you haven't watched since Grade 12 then stumble on 15 years later only to hear the same old conversation about the same old plot, it seemed like a good week to back slowly away from MSNBC and see what's happening outside the babble bubble.

The big non-primary news (even Drudge briefly bumped Hillary-Barack for this) is the search for life on Mars.

As a woman whose left-brain function is restricted to putting one word in front of the other and who wasn't entirely sure how much other news I'd missed since Super Tuesday, I had to be disabused of my goofball excitement on reading the "Life on Mars" headline by my 17-year-old daughter.

Apparently, NASA has not, in fact, found actual living Martians on Mars, which would have been awesome. NASA is actually trying to find water, or maybe signs that there once was water, a really long time ago, on Mars. NASA knows we have water here, but NASA's motto for this mission is "Follow the water" because they're hoping to find out there was once not just life but "intelligent life" (life that saw the sub-prime lending meltdown coming) on Mars, a really long time ago.

Also, they're interested in finding bacteria, which, if they succeed, will confirm my theory that all the bacteria that people madly try to repel with anti-bacterial soap eventually turn up somewhere else.

SEARCHING FOR LIFE

Of all the items on the brilliant "Stuff White People Like" blog (my favourites are, "Making you feel bad about not going outside," "Apologies" and "Threatening to move to Canada"), "Searching for Life on Mars" should be right up there in the top 10.

When the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down Monday on the Red Planet -- which is actually pink, but they can't call it the Pink Planet because it sounds like a gay bar -- there was video of a lot of very excited white guys in blue NASA polo shirts high five-ing each other in the control room, which was almost as funny as the video also released Monday of Hillary Clinton dancing in a Puerto Rico disco while downing a Presidente beer.

The nearly $1.2 billion NASA is spending to find out whether anyone lived on Mars a really long time ago is a sort of tribute to the old Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter.

The Mars Polar Lander crash-landed in 1999.

Mars Climate Orbiter also went AWOL in 1999, costing NASA, $125 million, because the Lockheed Martin engineering team built it to operate in miles and NASA programmed it in kilometres (suddenly, I feel like less of an eejit ... maybe the Martians really are there now, but they're just intelligent enough to hide from NASA).

They say the Climate Orbiter could now be orbiting the sun, which is totally useless because even NASA knows there's no water on the sun.

The Phoenix's cargo includes a time-capsule mini-DVD called Visions of Mars, created by the Planetary Society, the highlight of which is the late astronomer Carl Sagan, "speaking to the future Martians from near his home in Ithaca, N.Y., with a waterfall cascading in the background."

(How appropriately human ... they should've called it, "Enough about you, Marvin ... what did we think of you?").

They'd have been better off leaving the clip of Hillary Clinton doing the cha cha cha in Puerto Rico with her Presidente. Martians are no dummies ... they'll figure it out.

Barack Obama's Wesleyan Commencement Address

The Savvy Vengeance of Sonny Corleone, Versus Redemption

More brilliant writing and campaign analysis from the pen of Lisa Van Dusen - a good reminder to many U.S. journalists - wit and wisdom need not be amputated from the passion of truth - zjm




Older,white women here, everyone else, there

by Lisa Van Dusen | May 25, 2008

One of the bonuses of watching a campaign from the back of the crowd is that sense you get, which you can't from the television coverage, of why everyone else who's there is there.

You would think, given the history, that African-Americans would attach a discernible sense of vindication or settling of accounts to Barack Obama's candidacy. But most of the black voters I've met talk about redeeming history, not avenging it. "I remember what it was like in this state when people were being lynched," said an 85-year-old black man in South Carolina. "I never thought I'd live to see this."

Clinton supporters, the most passionate of whom are the white women 50 and older who make up her base, seem to identify more viscerally with their candidate. They respond to her on rope lines and in gymnasiums as though she's the receptacle and champion of all their thwarted dreams and unanswered slights. Surprisingly, they seem to see her, more than Obama's supporters see him, as the Great Avenger.

At Obama rallies, when you stand and look out at half a mile of people of every colour and age (except that notable shortage of older, white women) and catch that self-consciously un-cool, gobsmacked hush of history on the camera riser, you can't help but ponder the Democratic Party's horrible discomfort if it had to cram this genie back into the bottle.

Maybe Clinton's well-documented story -- the philandering husband, the subjugated ambitions, this new upstaging by a younger hotshot guy -- contains enough emotional touchstones to give women who've been through enough something to see in her that mirrors their own stories, whether she talks about it or not. "I've been through a lot and so has she," as one 50-year-old Philadelphia Clinton supporter put it.

CAMPAIGN STRATEGY

Clinton has not, throughout this campaign, set herself up as a champion of women. She had deliberately avoided doing so because she didn't want to ghettoize herself in an electoral demographic and, early on, was trying to establish herself as a plausible commander-in-chief by downplaying her gender.

In this brutal final stretch, when she needs that same demographic, Clinton is going to the mattresses (to cite fatally misguided political strategist Sonny Corleone): Having sealed her status as the candidate of choice of hard-working white voters, she is turning to the natural base she's been politely avoiding by unleashing, in the past week, a combination of sisterhood rhetoric and cries of sexism.

In a Washington Post interview, she decried a pattern of sexism "deeply offensive" to millions of American women while denying any racism against Obama, only days after the Post itself ran a piece outlining the storefront vandalism, slurs against volunteers and racist tirades to phone bank workers that her rival's campaign has seen.

For whatever knee-jerk sexism has been directed toward Clinton, those older white men on the sexist fringe who would never vote for her because she's a woman are outweighed by the number of older white men on the racist fringe who will never vote for Obama because he's black, at least among Democratic primary voters.

To blame all animosity toward the former first lady on her gender alone is not only an insult to women who don't operate the way she does, it diverts legitimate questions of character in a race to replace a president whose character issues, many of which were evident in 2000, have arguably made him the most disastrous and least popular president on record.

In discussions about this campaign, I've spent some time explaining my views on Clinton. Like many of those DC-based pundits she's accusing of pushing her out in order to fuel a base-driven backlash, I spent more than a few bleary mornings in Washington in the 1990s fetching the Post from the lawn and reading far more about Clinton's life than I'd ever expected or wanted to know.

RELATIONSHIP WITH POWER

It was a time -- during which she declared her intention to run for a Senate seat, flagging her presidential intentions, while her husband was still being impeached -- that revealed an awful lot about her relationship with power.

That dynamic is playing out now in a way that could cost her party the White House.

Among the signs women wave at Clinton rallies is one that reads "Hillary Cares About Me." There have indeed been signs back from the podium that that's true, at least this week.