Today is the day to rejoice! - final thoughts on election 08

There are not many days where one vote has the power to do so much. Today, a vote for Barack Obama redresses the great sin of America's past, the great sin of the human family throughout history. But a vote for Barack Obama also allows us to chart a new and transforming course for our own lives, and all those who will come after us.

November 4th, 2008 will become a landmark for all people of the world - one we will look back on as a marker of the day we changed course and began to build a new and better world.

Not many people get a chance to live on such days as today ...

All the more reason to look back this morning at those who made this day possible.

Two days ago, during the roundtable discussion on 'This Week' on ABC, longtime democratic activist, Donna Brazile spoke of the key moment of this campaign - not as something that happened this year, but with a reference to the past ... to the 'Bloody Sunday' of the civil rights era. I was profoundly moved by her remarks and sent her a note saying just that. Later in the day, on this new 'Sunday' on the eve of a new era, I received what will always be, for me, THE quote of this presidential campaign:

"Without those brave men and women -- those four little girls and countless others knocking on Freedom's door, we would have waited longer and suffered more. Their blood was our redemption. Their bravery our inspiration. Their courage our motivation. Now it's time to vote and begin an era of reconciliation and change." - Donna Brazile

zjm

ps - Obama wins early vote in New Hampshire!

from the Boston Globe

DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. - Barack Obama came up a big winner in the presidential race in Dixville Notch and Hart's Location, where the tradition of having the first Election Day ballots tallied lives on.

Democrat Obama defeated Republican John McCain by 15 to 6 in Dixville Notch, where a loud whoop accompanied the announcement. Hart's Location reported 17 votes for Obama, 10 for McCain, and two for write-in Ron Paul. Independent Ralph Nader was on both towns' ballots, but got no votes.

Dixville Notch's first voter, following tradition, was picked ahead of the midnight voting, and the rest of the town's 20 registered voters followed suit in today's first minutes.

Town Clerk Rick Erwin said the northern New Hampshire town is proud of its tradition, but added "the most important thing is that we exemplify a 100 percent vote."

With 115 residents between them, Dixville Notch and Hart's Location's get every eligible voter to the polls beginning at midnight on Election Day. The towns have been enjoying their first-vote status since 1948.

Being first means something to residents of the Granite State, home of the nation's earliest presidential primary and the central focus, however briefly, of the vote-watching nation's attention every four years.

New Hampshire law requires polls to open by 11 a.m., but that does not stop towns from opening earlier. It also allows towns to close their polls once all registered and eligible voters have cast ballots.

Hart's Location started opening its polls early in 1948, the year President Truman beat Thomas Dewey, to accommodate its resident railroad workers, who had to get to work early.

The town got out of the early voting business in 1964 after some residents grew weary of all the publicity, but brought it back in 1996.

Dixville Notch, nestled in a mountain pass 1,800 feet up and about halfway between the White Mountain National Forest and the Canadian border, started voting early in 1960, when John F. Kennedy beat Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon, the Republican, swept all nine votes cast in Dixville that year.

Before a Crowd of 20,000 in Detroit, Al Gore Backs Obama

"Good Campaign"

Obama revamped campaign tactics

by Lisa Van Dusen

In a post-primary analysis in the New York Times the other day, erstwhile Clinton strategist Mark Penn ended an exploration of what went wrong with the kicker, "And sometimes your opponent just runs a good campaign."

From the day after Barack Obama won the Iowa caucus and attention was turned to the differences between his campaign and the frontrunner's, it was clear that he and Hillary Clinton were running very different operations.

Those differences were apparent in the candidates' own public pronouncements, in the messaging from their surrogates, in their spending decisions, in their street-level tactics and, most of all, in the apparent difference of opinion in the two campaigns on the exact location of the lines you just don't cross.

For the past three decades, at least since television became a major factor and especially since the 24-hour cable cycle has taken over, there has been a list of unofficial campaign rules that cover a multitude of landmines from Supreme Court appointments to pancakes: Never wear hats, never operate heavy machinery, never, ever wear a hat while operating heavy machinery, never play a game that isn't fixed, never come out against a tax break, all fast food is political . . . there are about 30 more.

These have been compiled through so many self-immolations that they've become gospel. Obama has not only knowingly broken many of them (most recently, he recklessly flouted that no-pancake rule, based on Gary Bauer's unceremonious triple-gainer off a stage in New Hampshire in 2000 while trying to catch a rogue, airborne flapjack), he has done it with such grinning disregard for the rule book and everything it represents that million-dollar-a-month consultants such as Penn must be wondering what the weather is like in some of the friendlier emerging democracies.

In South Carolina, the Obama campaign sent white foreigners door-knocking in black working-class neighbourhoods and black volunteers into wealthy white areas. They put Upper East Side socialites and Harvard students on the phone banks to sell an African-American candidate to rural white Southerners wary of outsiders. They refused to buy votes and pack rooms with "street money," especially for the black community, despite the fact that that's how it's always been done.

Obama won South Carolina partly because the old-style, tactical campaign he was up against was derailed by those tactics when Bill Clinton started pushing race buttons. It didn't happen in every state, but at other key points along the way, there were moments when one campaign behaved the way campaigns have always behaved, only this time it backfired.

The superdelegates who put Obama over the top last week were declaring a preference for a new kind of politics even, or maybe especially, as practitioners of the old kind. They know that to millions of young people who've become involved this time, the new kind is the only kind they know, and the old kind already looks like history.

Hillary Clinton did run a good campaign, according to the old rules, and if it hadn't worked, especially in certain states, she could not have stayed in so long or finished so impressively.

Of all the explanations for what went wrong, from the neglect of caucus states to the deliberate aura of incumbency to the huge consultant bills, it may be that the changing definition of "good campaign" covers most of them.

FINALLY ... MAYBE ... TODAY

Barack in Bristol, VA: "They do not fund my campaign. They will not fund our party."

By God, For All Our Sakes, I Hope So!

Hillary Gets It Done

by Lisa Van Dusen

Hillary Clinton's decision late yesterday to suspend her campaign as of tomorrow and endorse Barack Obama did wonders to improve the prospects of the Democratic party in November.

For a moment after he proclaimed himself the presumptive Democratic nominee for president Tuesday night on a stage in St. Paul, Obama looked like he was either genuinely overcome by the moment or really, really pissed off.

Given the kind of night he was having, it could have been either one or a little of both.

Could be he was feeling a little conflicted because the opponent he had finally, indisputably defeated after a gruelingly long battle had just injected the proceedings with a definite sense of surreal, Lewis Carroll cognitive dissonance by delivering an un-concession speech so she could have more cake.

It was a great disappointment to many Democrats, including many in her own campaign, who thought that Clinton would, despite everything her behaviour had predicted up to that point, rise to the occasion.

That, in the end -- which is what it was by any sane measure -- she would say something that would remind us of a more innocent time, a time before she raised a certain kind of politics to heights previously unseen in most constitutional democracies.

But what Clinton delivered Tuesday night in New York was more of a call to arms, with a deluge of cold water thrown in for good measure.

Faced with the final, irrefutable fact of her defeat, Senator Clinton went out on that stage and delivered her stump speech, as though it was just another night on the campaign trail, only with a tribute to herself thrown in, and topped off by an appeal to the supporters she desperately wants to characterize as a critical mass-fuelled movement, to e-mail in their suggestions as to what she should do next.

There was a fleeting mention of Obama off the top, with no mention of the words won or nominee, and then onto her own plans, which in the real world would consist of a couple of weeks of dogs-up in Chappaqua followed by some targeted surrogate work for her party's historic, unexpectedly weary nominee.

But in a moment that was essentially a refutation of both the occasion and reality, both electoral and historic, Senator Clinton tastelessly raised the question of What Hillary Wants on a night when the only answer should have been "to unite the Democratic Party" and followed it by its own answer: Leverage.

Rather than displaying any of the class or generosity of spirit that the Obama campaign was squinting away at their monitors straining to hear, she commanded that leverage from the masses. Hillary Clinton put in motion an option of presenting the public and Obama with the post-Internet version of the Miracle on 34th Street courtroom mailbag scene: A claim of millions of e-mails representing an "uncontrollable" grassroots movement to either put her on the ticket or push on to a bloodbath in Denver.

She can overtake the impression she left for history and redeem Tuesday night by delivering a vastly different message tomorrow. This time, they say, she will.

28 Superdelegates Endorse Obama on Wednesday

From HQ Blog: In the wake of yesterday's historic results, a new wave of superdelegates has come forth and endorsed Barack Obama over the course of the day. Many of them took the opportunity to praise the efforts of both candidates, while expressing their support for Barack and desire for unity within the party.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (CA), Sen. Tom Harkin (IA), Sen. Ken Salazar (CO), Sen. Ron Wyden (OR), Sen. Tom Carper (DE), Sen. Frank Lautenburg (NJ), Sen. Mary Landrieu (LA) and Sen. Ben Cardin (MD) all endorsed this afternoon, issuing a joint statement that congradulated both candidates and pledged their support to Senator Obama.

As Senators who remained neutral in this contest, we are proud of Senators Obama and Clinton for breaking down barriers that some believed were unbreakable and for inspiring millions in our country to participate in our political process, many for the first time.

...Our focus now is on victory in November and on giving Barack Obama every ounce of our support, every bit of our energy, and our total commitment to do everything in our power to win the Presidency.

• DCCC Chair Rep. Chris Van Hollen (MD) for Obama:

"Now is the time for all of us to come together. I enthusiastically support Senator Obama. He will be our nominee, and now it's very important that we all unite behind his candidacy. He has energized millions of new voters, and if we can sustain that momentum by coming together, he will be the next president of the United States."

• Senator Russ Feingold (WI):

"I've spoken with Senator Obama and made it clear that he could count me as an endorsing supporter of his at the Democratic Convention this August. Senator Obama is an effective leader, capable of leading our country into a new era, and I look forward to doing everything I can to ensure his success this November."

• Former DCCC Head and Representative Rahm Emanuel (IL)
• Vice-President Walter Mondale (MN)

Other Superdelegates who endorsed Barack Obama today:

• Gov. Phil Bredesen (TN), Rep. John Salazar (CO), DNC David Strauss (ND) for Obama, DNC Paula Zellner (WI) for Obama, DNC Ed Cote (WA) for Obama, DNC Sharon Mast (WA) for Obama, Rep. Michael Michaud (ME) for Obama, DNC member Gray Sasser (TN), DNC member Inez Crutchfield (TN), Rep. Mike Doyle (PA), Rep. Tom Udall (NM), Rep. Bob Brady, DNC member Karen Hale (UT), DNC member Heather Mizeur, Sen. Herb Kohl (WI) (PA), DNC member Terry Goddard (AZ)

US elections: Jimmy Carter tells Barack Obama not to pick Hillary Clinton as running mate

Jonathan Freedland | Wednesday June 4 2008

Barack Obama should not pick Hillary Clinton as his vice-presidential nominee, former president Jimmy Carter has told the Guardian.

"I think it would be the worst mistake that could be made," said Carter. "That would just accumulate the negative aspects of both candidates."

Carter, who formally endorsed the Illinois senator last night, cited opinion polls showing 50% of US voters with a negative view of Clinton.

In terms that might discomfort the Obama camp, he said: "If you take that 50% who just don't want to vote for Clinton and add it to whatever element there might be who don't think Obama is white enough or old enough or experienced enough or because he's got a middle name that sounds Arab, you could have the worst of both worlds."

Even Bush Has a Better Grasp of Reality and Civility than the Queen of Narcissism, Hillary Rodham Clinton

This morning, President Bush, appropriately, congratulated Obama through his White House spokeswoman Dana Perino:

"President Bush congratulates Sen. Obama for clinching the Democratic party's 2008 nomination for president," Perino told reporters. "He knows from personal experience that the presidential nominating process is a grueling one and Sen. Obama came a long way in becoming his party's nominee."

Even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice got in on the act, stating that Obama's nomination is an 'extraordinary' development for the United States.

Hillary's refusal to acknowledge Barack Obama' s historic victory in the race for the Democratic Nomination is boorish at best; her refusal to congratulate him, and deal with reality, the latest evidence of her pathological narcissism (after all, it did keep her on the front pages today) and her ultimate disregard for the Democratic Party and the people of the United States.

Hil' is nothing short of a very bad joke that refuses to go away.

Worse yet, the leadership of the Democratic Party continues to salute her!

Despicable.

Please visit Obama's website and send a note of encouragement to resist the growing suicidal pressure to put HRC on the ticket.

Time to move on; time for change that does not include any of the Clintons.

zjm

From the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 to June 3, 2008: Barack Obama, Nominee of the Democratic Party

President Obama

In August, Barack Obama will give his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's 'I have a Dream' speech in Washington. In February, President Obama will lay a wreath at the Lincoln memorial on the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth.

This is HISTORY folks.

Time has come for the Clinton supporters to stop whining. You lost. Time to support the next President of the United States.

Time to get in step with History.

zjm

"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?

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.

It is you, Hillary, not what you said - YOU are the offense!

Enough Hillary, enough!

We've heard your lame-ass excuses as you claimed that you meant no offense for race baiting in South Carolina, ethnic/religious baiting by not standing by Obama during the Jeremiah Wright/Muslim smears, and your recent "hard-working white people" slurs against all working people, and Obama - and now you give the impression that your reason for staying in a campaign you lost months ago is that you are waiting for an assassination in June!

Hillary, your insincere, bullshit apology doesn't cut it - remember when you said the same thing to TIME back in March?

Sad, pathetic, mentally ill, delusional, despicable, or unabashed evil - short of some unimaginable act of contrition, Hillary, the above adjectives are apt descriptions of your shoddy political legacy.

Get the hell out of this race!

zjm

Note to the DNC - you should be ashamed for not stripping Hillary of her right to run as a Democratic candidate for the presidency.

Note to the American People - PLEASE watch the following video commentary by America's voice of conscience, Keith Olbermann,as he denounces Hillary and her reprehensible assassination comments -

Clinton Gave Voters Permission to be Racist

Cenk Uygur | Thu May 22, 2:58 PM ET | Huffington Post

Yesterday, RJ Eskow was on our show and we had an interesting discussion of why so many people in West Virginia and Kentucky admitted to pollsters that they voted based on race. This is otherwise known as racism. It's also something that people are usually loathe to admit. So, why did 21% of the voters in Kentucky freely admit that race was an important factor in their vote?

It's because Hillary Clinton's campaign gave them permission to be racist. Let me explain.

Normally the race issue is a third rail in American politics; you're not allowed to touch it. But Clinton did two important things to change that paradigm. First, she turned it into a legitimate issue by framing it as a matter of electability. The argument is -- it's not that you wouldn't vote for a black guy, but knowing how you and others around you feel, you know the black guy can't win.

This argument has soaked into the Hillary team so much that I'm afraid they've actually come to believe it themselves. That's part of the reason why they can't let this campaign go. I keep hearing them say -- we can't let the party make this kind of mistake. It is profoundly disappointing to see them internalize this ultimately racist argument.

What's interesting is that the primaries allow them to make this kind of race-based argument. In the general election, you can't say -- don't vote for this guy because he's black. But in the primaries you can say -- don't vote for this guy because you know in the general election people will not vote for him because he's black. It's not that you're racist, wink, it's that so many other people are, wink.

The second way they gave their voters permission to be racists is by using thinly veiled code words like, "I'm looking out for people like you." The very thin veil on these code words was lifted when Senator Clinton flat out said she was looking out for "hard working white Americans." And presumably Obama wasn't. And why is that? You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand the implication that he wasn't looking out for people like them because he wasn't one of them.

So, when the voter in Kentucky stepped into that booth, he didn't necessarily think, "I'm going to vote against Barack Obama because he is black and I'm racist." He thought, "Hillary Clinton is looking out for people like me. Obama cares more about his own people. And besides which he's going to lose in the general election because who would elect a black guy as president?"

Voila, he has been given permission to vote based on race. Now, how many of you think that the Clinton team stumbled upon this phenomenon and how many of you think they understood this and took full advantage of it? Well, now you understand why so many of us are frustrated and disappointed with the way Hillary Clinton has run her campaign.