Shellshocked House Republicans got warnings from leaders past and present Tuesday: Your party’s message isn’t good enough to prevent disaster in November, and neither is the NRCC’s money.
The double shot of bad news had one veteran Republican House member worrying aloud that the party’s electoral woes — brought into sharp focus by Woody Jenkins’ loss to Don Cazayoux in Louisiana on Saturday — have the House Republican Conference splitting apart in “everybody for himself” mode.
“There is an attitude that, ‘I better watch out for myself, because nobody else is going to do it,’” the member said. “There are all these different factions out there, everyone is sniping at each other, and we have no real plan. We have a lot of people fighting to be the captain of the lifeboat instead of everybody pulling together.”
...
And in a closed-door session at the Capitol, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told members that the NRCC doesn’t have enough cash to “save them” in November if they don’t raise enough money or run strong campaigns themselves.
Her farewell speech tonight was amazing. The cheering and paid-for fans faking the celebratory balloons, fanfare and party mode while the erstwhile candidate fought back tears and said her farewells - too weird indeed. Hill needs a few hours to get some balance - i predict she will be out in the next few days to formalize what everyone knows.
if i did believe in a god - tonight might be one of those times.
Borkowski said Sister Julie McGuire, one of several nuns on poll duty, wasn't pleased to turn away the nuns, some of whom were in their 80s and 90s and no longer had driver's licenses.
"Here's the supreme irony," Borkowski said. "This law was passed supposedly to prevent and deter voter fraud, even though there was no real record of serious voter fraud in Indiana. Here you have a bunch of nuns whose votes can't be accepted by a bunch of nuns ... who live with them in the polling place in their convent because they don't have an ID."
At least six other people also were relegated to filing provisional ballots at the polling place on the ground floor of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, said Amy Smessaert, spokeswoman for the convent........
GENEVA (AP) — An Iranian envoy said Monday his government will not submit to extensive nuclear inspections while Israel stays outside the global treaty to curb the spread of atomic weapons.
"The existing double standard shall not be tolerated anymore by non-nuclear-weapon states," Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh told a meeting of the 190 countries that have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Nuclear safeguards are far from universal, he said, adding that more than 30 countries are still without a comprehensive safeguard agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure full cooperation with that U.N. body.
"Israel, with huge nuclear weapons activities, has not concluded" such an agreement or submitted its facilities to the IAEA's safeguards, Soltanieh said.
BOGOTA, May 6 (Reuters) - Colombia's Congress is in crisis as scores of lawmakers are investigated for suspected collusion with right-wing death squads in a scandal creeping closer to conservative President Alvaro Uribe.
More than 60 of the country's 268 legislators are under investigation for suspected illegal dealings with drug-running paramilitaries organized as private militias in the 1980s to help landowners beat back Marxist guerrillas.
About 30 lawmakers are in prison awaiting trial and the accusations include using paramilitary thugs to intimidate voters into supporting their candidacies.
More investigations are expected, heightening worries that Congress is headed toward paralysis.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa has vowed not to renew the base's contract beyond its November 2009 expiration. And politicians drafting a new constitution have proposed banning the base or any other foreign military presence in the country.
.....
Back in Quito, political analyst Simón Pachano cannot foresee a scenario in which the Manta base might be allowed to stay open.
Unlike his predecessors, Correa is enjoying unprecedented popularity. And his aggressive anti-American and anti-Colombian stance plays well in this nation accustomed to taking a back seat in regional politics.
In exchange for using the base free of charge for 10 years, the United States agreed to expand and update the airstrip, and cooperate with Ecuador on counter-narcotics initiatives.
The fact that the 1999 deal was never approved by Ecuador's full legislature -- only that body's International Affairs Committee -- has made it a political target, Pachano said.
Submitted by edna ellen poe on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 2:06am.
You just can't trust the results. I believe Obama actually won New Hampshire and New Mexico. The Ohio and Pennsylvania results are suspect as well. It's the way the votes come in that indicate a problem. First, the totals come in rapidly. Then! In about two hours or less, the results stop. Now here comes the trickle, trickle. That means they are screwing with the vote. Students and African Americans are usually the primary targets.
We must continue to challenge the use of these machines. If you haven't seen the documentary Uncounted, please check it out.
In this case, a split was not a draw. Despite narrowly winning Indiana, while losing North Carolina, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did not fundamentally improve her chances of securing the Democratic presidential nomination. If anything, Mrs. Clinton’s hopes for overtaking Senator Barack Obama dwindled further on Tuesday night....
Beating Mr. Obama in Indiana, a state he had once been confident of winning, was an achievement for Mrs. Clinton. But it was hardly the kind of strong victory she posted in Pennsylvania and Ohio. And when paired with his comfortable victory in North Carolina — which Mr. Obama pointedly described in his victory speech as “a big state, a swing state” — it hardly seemed enough for Mrs. Clinton to convince so-called uncommitted superdelegates to rally around her candidacy.
Her showing in the two states did not permit Mrs. Clinton to cut into Mr. Obama’s lead in pledged delegates or his overall lead in the popular vote. Indeed, Mr. Obama may have widened his delegate lead over Mrs. Clinton, an outcome with mathematic and political resonance.
The result was so tight as to deprive her of the kind of clear-cut victory that would make it easy for her to fend off calls for her to drop out, raise money and campaign on into West Virginia in advance of a primary there next Tuesday where her campaign is confident of doing well.
In the last several weeks, Mrs. Clinton, seizing on the campaign’s new focus on the weakening economy, seemed to find new energy and a more populist voice. She ran hard on a proposal to suspend the federal gasoline tax, an idea that Mr. Obama scorned. As she battled away, Mr. Obama struggled to explain his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and his apparent inability to appeal to blue-collar voters. Polls suggested that Democrats were starting to develop doubts about the strength of his candidacy.
In short, Mrs. Clinton could not have asked for a better second chance to turn this campaign around and to make her central case to superdelegates: that Mr. Obama was a damaged general election candidate who would get swallowed up by the Republican Party. Yet she was unable on Tuesday to build her base of support substantially beyond the white, working-class voters who had sustained her for the last month. That will not be lost on the superdelegates, the elected Democrats and party leaders who will ultimately decide this fight....
We've just been told that General Wesley Clark, a strong Clinton supporter and fellow Arkansan, called Hillary tonight to tell her it's over.
In addition to our source, the king of the pundits, Mark Halperin, drops a tantalizing hint that something might be up with Clark:
"The biggest question: Will any of her supporters (including Wes Clark) say publicly or privately she should quit?"
We like General Clark here at AMERICAblog, and have a bit of a history with him. So we hope what we're hearing is true. But the general better watch it - this could be his most dangerous mission to date. When you take on the Clintons, the sniper fire is real.
its not the whole world its me, mother. wish i could have seen the nice ass bit, coz it would have been correct...and why would i get mad at that? being a fact!
gotta go show it to him if he can keep still for a minute, sorry i missed dat!
I hate to keep doing this, but since I always used the Whiterose Society Rhodes stream to listen when Sam was sitting in for Randi before (because it's too inconvenient to listen live in that timeslot), I haven't adapted too well.
Is there some place I can hear the shows Sam and Marc are doing? Does AAR have podcasts of it, or is a Sammyfan posting them somewhere?
i heard it on malloy the other night. mullen, the chairman of the joint chief of staff was quoted as saying that the election this year represents a threat to the security of the united states.
whats intereesting is that i've googled different combinations of mullen and election and i can't find the source. seems like somebody or something is doing a good job of burying the story.
Submitted by impeachnow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 7:44am.
on the news a little while ago
about these working families in Minn.
who are going without electricity because
they can't afford it
dammit can't somebody rig some kind of solar
thing up for these people
(and yes Minnesota does get sunshine)
people shouldn't have to live like this
The Obama campaign appears poised to begin running its general election campaign after Tuesday night’s primaries seemed unlikely to change the math or the momentum in the Democratic nomination.
David Axelrod, the top Obama strategist, told reporters that Barack Obama would compete for the six remaining Democratic contests, where 217 delegates are at stake. But he said that the campaign would soon focus on the general election because likely Republican nominee John McCain had “basically run free for some time now because we’ve been consumed with this.” He added: “I don’t think we’re going to spend time solely in primary states.”
Pressed by reporters whether that meant the campaign would make stops in general election states over the next month, Axelrod said: “You could infer that from what I said.”
The mood aboard the campaign plane was cheerful on Tuesday night, even though the campaign didn’t yet know the final result of the Indiana vote. Campaign advisors said they didn’t expect to win Indiana, but that the numbers may have been in their favor.
“We’re down 39,000 votes,” Axelrod said. “There are somewhere between 120,000 and 185,000 [votes in Lake County]. If we got 60% of them we’d come pretty darn close.”
Axelrod declined to say whether he thought Clinton still had a viable path to the nomination, but he said the path had “certainly dimmed some tonight.”
“The fact that she lost… a large important state by a landslide and she’s struggling to hold in one where she was favored where this whole issue of white working class voters was front and center I think is pretty sobering,” he said.
The strategist also attributed a share of Clinton’s narrow lead in Indiana to Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos,” where the talk show host encouraged Republican listeners to vote for Clinton in the Democratic primary in order to prolong the nomination battle.
“If we come up short, they ought to call a press conference tomorrow and thank Rush Limbaugh for the victory,” he said. “Because there’s no doubt if they do win it’ll be by a margin so narrow that the Limbaugh project will have given them the margin.”
Axelrod also argued that the debate over a three month gas-tax holiday pushed by Clinton, which Obama had heavily criticized in recent days, may have backfired for the New York senator. “People were skeptical. I think this gas tax bit really worked for us,” he said.
One reporter pressed: Why didn’t it work?
The reply was blunt: “Because it was a stupid idea and we said so.”
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:02am.
In a speech at Harvard's Institute of Politics on Monday, Chris Matthews admitted that MSNBC bosses were "basically pro-war during the war." The remark came in a larger discussion of top-down editorial control at the network — of which Matthews claimed there was none, citing the fact that many of his bosses supported Hillary Clinton while he has been very vocal for Obama.
His full statement, in response to a question whether MSNBC officially supports Obama (via Politico's Michael Calderone):
"Well, it's not official." (LAUGH) "Well, I don't think Joe Scarborough has. And I don't think Tucker Carlson did. And Keith does his thing. He does his thing--it's something and it's very successful. I do my thing. I don't think that's true. I think... my sense is that everybody that lives in New York is for Hillary. The people I work with--all my bosses--seem to be for Hillary. I just sense it. They don't actually say it, but there's no sense from the top I can tell you that it's pro-Obama.. by any means. That's not what I get. And it was basically pro-war during the war.. the bosses were. And I was up against that. And if there's anybody telling me to push Obama, I haven't heard it yet. And by the way, they're so fickle.... but there seems to be a New York thing about Hillary. Just the people from... it's like the Yankees and the Mets... it's their thing. You know? It's Hillary. You know? And I feel it. I find it. It's hard to figure sometimes. But I don't know who you are talking about. I know who you are talking about."
As revealed in the New York Times Magazine profile of Matthews by Mark Leibovich, Matthews idolizes NBC News Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert like an older brother:
Tim -- as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of "Meet the Press" -- is a particular obsession of Matthews's. Matthews craves Russert's approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous.
In her new book Right is Wrong, Arianna Huffington critiques the media for being too compliant with administration policy during the run-up to war, and she particularly lays into Russert, saying, among other things, that he helped pump up the terrorist panic:
Take Tim Russert, whose July 1, 2007, Meet the Press interview with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was about as priapic a display as you're ever likely to see outside of a porno film or the monkey cage at the zoo, with Russert desperately trying to get Chertoff to pump up the panic meter...You could almost hear the blood rushing to his loins--and the palpable sense of deflation when Chertoff refused to stroke his fantasy
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:05am.
As the battle over Indiana progressed between Sens Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton late Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, a set of depressing polls numbers were finalized for John McCain.
In the GOP primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, the basically uncontested Republican nominee did not gain more than 80 percent of the vote.
In Indiana, McCain earned the backing of 78 percent of Republican primary voters, with exited candidates Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney gaining 10 percent and five percent respectively. Congressman Ron Paul, who is still in the race, has received seven percent of the vote.
The numbers were even worse in North Carolina, where McCain won 74 percent of the vote, with Huckabee earning 12 percent, Paul earning seven percent, and four percent of Republican primary goers simply voting "no preference."
None of these totals, to be sure, will affect the Arizona Republican's almost certain path to the nomination. But it has been more than two months now since McCain became the presumptive GOP candidate, and in each state election since he achieved that measure he has continued to lose a relatively substantial chunk of Republican support. In Pennsylvania, for example, McCain won 73 percent of the vote, with Paul pulling in 16 and Huckabee 11.
The troubling figures, however, may be the popular vote totals - individuals who McCain will theoretically have to woo back into his good graces. In North Carolina more than 105,000 Republicans did not vote for McCain. And in Indiana, 85,000 voters - whether they were Republican, Democrat or Independent - cast their ballots for someone other than the Arizona Republican.
i was having real bad delays and timeouts with the blog last night right as the election returns started rolling in. what surprised me is that the number of users wasn't very high. this morning it seems back to normal.
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:14am.
Iran seeking to keep Afghanistan unstable: US official
AFP
Published: Tuesday May 6, 2008
Propel This! - Submit to Propeller.com
Iran is seeking to keep Afghanistan weak and unstable, delivering arms to the Taliban whilst ostensibly supporting Kabul's government, a senior US state department official said in Paris Tuesday.
"They (Iran) interfere in a variety of different ways, perhaps not as violently as they do sometimes in Iraq," Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for south and central Asia, told reporters at a press conference.
"But what we see is Iranian interference politically, Iranian interference in terms of the money that they channel into the political process, Iranian interference in terms of playing off local officials against central government, trying to undermine the state in that way."
Boucher was speaking in Paris as part of preparations for a major international donors' conference for Afghanistan, due to take place in the French capital on June 12.
"In many ways they (Tehran) do support the work of the government, but they also work with the political opposition, they work with the local opposition," Boucher added.
"They have funnelled some weapons to the Taliban, they seem kind of working with everybody to be hedging their bets, or just looking... like they want weakness or instability in Afghanistan more than anything else."
Boucher told reporters that "several shipments" of weapons from Iran to the Taliban had been intercepted.
"I'm not sure they (Tehran) want to see the Taliban win, but I don't think they want the government to establish good control either. I think they are just trying to hedge their bets and keep everything fluid."
Boucher said that June's conference was a chance for countries to show their will to "create an Afghan government that can deliver to the people what the people want, which is safety, justice, economic opportunity, schools, health care."
France used last month's NATO summit in Bucharest to announce it would send a battalion of around 700 troops to Afghanistan, which Boucher said was a "significant contribution" to the military effort.
"The French are filling a very important gap, they are coming down in areas that are difficult," he said.
US-led forces removed the Taliban from power in Kabul in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001, but both US and NATO forces are still battling to contain an insurgency there seven years later.
Submitted by Cat Chew on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:16am.
No problems with this site at the moment, but did have them on and off earlier. Mostly the page didn't completely load. Just saw a single column of plain text.
Pejman Yousefzadeh did a good job covering a report on ABC News that Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen issued a warning to the Democratic presidential candidates not to pull out of Iraq too fast. Mullen was quoted saying:
"I do worry about a rapid withdrawal. . . [that would] turn around the gains we have achieved and struggled to achieve and turn them around overnight."
Polls have been closed in Lake County for some 6 hours, but no results in Indiana's corner county, closely bordering Obama's homestate stronghold of Chicago and home to Gary. Tiny Union County has also failed to come up with any numbers just yet.
As of now, Indiana remains "too close to call", according to all the cable nets, with 92% of precincts (not necessarily votes, since Lake County is the second-most populace in the state) reporting. There is currently just under 20k votes reportedly between Clinton, who is currently leading, and Obama, out of more than 1.1 million "counted" so far.
For the record, Lake County uses a combination of the failed, unverifiable MicroVote Infinity DREs and paper-based MV-464's voting machines, according to Verified Voting's database of voting systems.
Union County, on the other hand, you needn't worry about, since our old friend Diebold runs the place with a combination of their hackable paper-ballot systems, and their unverifiable and hackable DRE (touch-screen) systems. But Union also has a tiny population of just more than 7k, whereas Lake has a population of just less than half a million.
Unfortunately, I don't know that I'll be able to follow this one through the night, so if I can't (or even if I can), I welcome you folks to tell the story in comments below as you are best able to figure out what seems to be going on there. Tonight, I'm guessing you can tell the story as well as (or better than) I can...
UPDATE 12:47pm ET: Results now coming in. The state could be a squeaker by a few thousand votes or less.
Let's see, with Indiana's own estimates of 43,000 voters who could be disenfranchised by their new Photo ID/voter suppression law, and less-conservative estimates suggesting several hundred thousand voters who could be robbed of their right to vote...Gosh, hope the final results in the Hoosier State don't come down to the question of a dozen or so 80 & 90 year-old disenfranchised nuns from South Bend...
Submitted by Cat Chew on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:24am.
This just in:
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Later. Got to fight the never ending battle for yard supremacy against the morning glories. Maybe I'll just plant white flags next year.
if anyone isn't subscribed to aar but wants the podcasts of seder and marc this week, you can sign up for a 2 week trial membership, get the podcasts for free then cancel it..
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:31am.
Split Result Helps Obama, But Leaves Race Undone
posted by John Nichols on 05/06/2008 @ 8:53pm
May 6, 2008
The race for the Democratic presidential nomination did not end Tuesday night.
A split result -- North Carolina solidly for Barack Obama, Indiana narrowly for Hillary Clinton -- has cheated the party of the defining moment many had hoped for.
But the two states have sent important signals.
For instance:
* Obama is much closer to the nomination. His delegate total was boosted by the combination of the big win in North Carolina and the very-nearly even result in Indiana. Also, the voting patterns suggest that, when all is said and done in June, the senator from Illinois will lead the popular vote. That denies Clinton an appeal she's hoped to have for super delegates.
* Obama does not appear to have been so badly harmed by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy as many pundits imagined would be the case. Almost half the voters in both Indiana and North Carolina said that the debate about the candidate's former pastor was an "important" factor in the contest. But the senator from Illinois essentially won the sort of places he has been winning and lost the sort of places he has been losing before the Wright controversy stirred up.
* Obama is still having trouble "closing the deal." His win in North Carolina was a comfortable one. But the loss in Indiana was agonizing. The senator needed to win a state where Clinton was presumed to be ahead. That meant he had to take Indiana. It didn't quite happen.
* Clinton did not win where she needed to. She sent husband Bill to North Carolina, hoping he could swing rural white Democrats in a southern state to his side. The former president spent much of the last week in small towns and cities. But Obama still secured more than a third of the white vote, which in combination with his strong African-American vote prevented Clinton from getting close in a state where she really needed to win.
* African-American support for Barack Obama is solidifying. Where Obama won 78 percent of the African-American vote when South Carolina voted in January. Today, in North Carolina he was well over 90 percent. In Indiana, Obama won an even higher percentage of the African-American vote.
* Obama still has a lot of work to do with white working-class voters. The risk to his candidacy has less to do with the nomination race than with the fall. In both North Carolina and Indiana, roughly half of Clinton backers indicated that they would not vote for Obama if he is the Democratic nominee in the fall. Most of the voters in that group told exit pollsters they would cast their ballots for Republican John McCain.
Hillary Clinton Loan Suspected, Campaign "Close To Broke"
Ben Smith of Politico reported Tuesday night that Hillary Clinton might have made another loan to her campaign:
I asked Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe just now whether Clinton had given or loaned her campaign more money in the run-up to North Carolina and Indiana.
"Might be. Might not be," McAuliffe said, adding that the campaign would release more fundraising details tomorrow.
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:38am.
Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Ass Groping
Posted May 6th 2008 5:15PM by TMZ Staff
A little song, a little dance, a little drizzle down your pants. That kinda sums up a blistering lawsuit filed by a former Weather Channel anchor against her colleague.
Hillary Andrews claims Bob Stokes tormented her with crude, sexual come-ons, including once allegedly asking her, "Will you lick my swizzle stick?" Andrews also claims Stokes followed her into the women's dressing room, quizzed her about her sexual relationships, and pleaded with her to say she found him attractive. Oh yeah, and then there's this... Stokes allegedly told her, "It tortures me when you wear those heels and skirt."
The Weather Channel: Click to watchAndrews took legal action against The Weather Channel, claiming it retaliated against her after she complained and then refused to take action against Stokes. Both have since been fired.
Thesmokinggun.com obtained a lawsuit filed by Andrews against Stokes. That case is pending. Our forecast....he's screwed.
Hillary Clinton, who for seven weeks has crawled, kicked and bitten her way back into contention, suffered a blow on Tuesday, halting the momentum behind her bid for the nomination just when she had begun to regain credibility.
In the universe of political clichés, she is on life support, her oxygen choked off, her knees buckling, unable to stanch the bleeding, down for an eight count, on the ropes, praying for the bell to ring, desperate to get her wind back.
The results yesterday were a split decision, with Obama winning big in North Carolina and Clinton apparently carrying Indiana by a few percentage points. Clinton was widely viewed as needing a double-digit win in Indiana, and either a close loss or actual victory in North Carolina.
Exit Polls: Limbaugh Effect Seems To Rear Its Head
Did Rush Limbaugh actually impact the Democratic primary?
The loud-mouthed radio talk show host has been encouraging Republicans to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton to continue the "chaos" in the Democratic race. And a sampling of some key exit poll information suggests he may, to a certain extent, be having an effect.
Thirty-six percent of primary voters said that Clinton does not share their values. And yet, among that total, one out of every five (20 percent) nevertheless voted for her in the Indiana election. Moreover, of the 10 percent of Hoosiers who said "neither candidate" shared their values, 75 percent cast their ballots for Clinton. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/06/exit-polls-limbaugh-effec_n_100...
WHITESVILLE: I’m working with the Obama campaign and I’m very white. And I’m white. Ever see toothpaste? You know the tube with toothpaste out? That’s sort of my color. … I was looking in the mirror yesterday after I looked up and I was like, oh, no, I have toothpaste all over my face but actually I just had face all over my face because my face is white, and just so everyone knows, I work at the Obama campaign and I’m white but my first name’s Honky.
Submitted by Crank Bait on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:51am.
Re: it's still over
Submitted by Cat Chew on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:24am.
This just in:
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead...
------
Rats. You beat me to the joke while I was busily attempting to create a "Generalissimo Election-o" tie-in.
Tonight's victory in Indiana was close, and a margin that narrow means just one thing: every single thing you did to help us win in Indiana helped make the difference.
Every call you made, every friend you spoke to about our campaign, every dollar you contributed made tonight's victory possible. And I couldn't be more thankful for your hard work.
Every time we've celebrated a victory, we've celebrated it together. And tonight is no exception. This victory is your victory, this campaign is your campaign, and your support has been the difference between winning and losing.
Thank you so much for making this campaign possible. Let's keep making history together.
The NY Time's Adam Nagourney writes about Hillary Clinton's dwindling chances and hopes for a final rescue after Tuesday night's vote tallies in North Carolina and Indiana.
Nagourney points out that the Clinton camp will ratchet up it's already aggressive attempts to have the results for Florida and Michigan - states both candidates didn't campaign in, but Clinton "won" - to be counted. HuffPost's Tom Edsall wrote Sunday about how the Clinton camp planned to carry out the "nuclear option" to get the Michigan and Florida votes counted.
no. mullen actually said that having an election puts us at risk because there will likely be a change in who's in charge. he expects iran and the terrorists to "test" us. within his reality, having bush in charge forever would be good.
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 9:29am.
funny on ko last night Rachel was saying that Hillary is going to go on strong on the issue of Michigan and Florida...Keith said, "Rachel,this is the first time that I disagree with you!"...and then he said that he did agree with Pat Buchanan...another first...
It was funny...we will see what Hillary does next...Bill looked like he was going to pop a jugular last night...he was beet red and looked very upset...what will they do next...
that we put the primary contest behind us and get it into gear showing how mccain would be so bad for the country.
on more than one news channel this morning i've heard that clinton has cancelled hear appearances and his huddling with her brain trust to decide what to do next.
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 9:32am.
she has started babbling in a big way and that girl won't shut up! dadadadadadadadadadadadad interuppted by lots of giggles....we should all be so happy...
grover and the girls are into it still so i sit and watch yourll play while i listen to music...and oo. boy a whole lot of funnyness goes on...why? do you know?
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 9:39am.
I do know...it is called samsara...the human realm...another bardo in Buddhist cosmology.....it is to be expected but transformed ultimately into compassion...
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 9:55am.
Obama, Clinton's Delegate And Superdelegate Numbers After Indiana, North Carolina Primaries
WASHINGTON — Sen. Barack Obama won the most delegates in Tuesday's primaries, moving within 200 delegates of securing the Democratic nomination for president.
Obama won at least 94 delegates in the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, according to an analysis of election returns by The Associated Press. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won at least 75 delegates, with 18 still to be awarded.
Sixteen of the outstanding delegates were from North Carolina and two were from Indiana.
In the overall race for the nomination, Obama led with 1,840.5 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. Clinton had 1,684.
Obama was 184.5 delegates shy of the 2,025 needed to secure the Democratic nomination.
There are 217 delegates at stake in the final six contests. Also, about 270 superdelegates are yet to be claimed.
Superdelegates are the party and elected officials who will automatically attend the national convention and can support whomever they choose, regardless of what happens in the primaries and caucuses.
Obama is on pace to reach a majority of the pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses in two weeks, when Kentucky and Oregon vote. Obama had a 171-delegate lead among pledged delegates.
Obama has argued for months that superdelegates should support the candidate who wins the most pledged delegates. Clinton argues that superdelegates should exercise independent judgment.
Clinton leads in superdelegate endorsements, 270.5 to 256, though Obama has been chipping away at her lead since the Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5. Both candidates picked up a superdelegate endorsement Tuesday.
Nearly 800 superdelegates will attend the national convention. About 220 remain undecided and about 50 others will be named at state party conventions and meetings throughout the spring.
The AP tracks the delegate races by calculating the number of national convention delegates won by candidates in each presidential primary or caucus, based on state and national party rules, and by interviewing unpledged delegates to obtain their preferences.
Most primaries and some caucuses are binding, meaning delegates won by the candidates are pledged to support that candidate at the national conventions this summer.
Political parties in some states, however, use multistep procedures to award national delegates. Typically, such states use local caucuses to elect delegates to state or congressional district conventions, where national delegates are selected. In these states, the AP uses the results from local caucuses to calculate the number of national delegates each candidate will win, if the candidate's level of support at the caucus doesn't change.
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 9:57am.
Lawyers for Guantanamo Inmates Accuse US of Eavesdropping
By William Glaberson
The New York Times
Wednesday 07 May 2008
One lawyer for Guantánamo detainees said he replaced his office telephone in Washington because of sounds that convinced him it had been bugged. Another lawyer who represents detainees said he sometimes had other lawyers call his corporate clients to foil any government eavesdroppers.
In interviews and a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo said they believed government agents had monitored their conversations. The assertions are the most specific to date by Guantánamo lawyers that officials may be violating legal principles that have generally kept government agents from eavesdropping on lawyers.
"I think they are listening to my telephone calls all the time," said John A. Chandler, a prominent lawyer in Atlanta and Army veteran who represents six Guantánamo detainees.
Several of the lawyers, including partners at large corporate law firms, said the concerns had changed the way they went about their work apart from Guantánamo cases. A lawyer in Chicago, H. Candace Gorman, said in an affidavit that she was no longer accepting new clients of any type because she could not assure them of confidentiality.
The new filing, by the Center for Constitutional Rights, came in a 2007 lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act in which Guantánamo lawyers are seeking records to determine whether they have been targets of surveillance.
The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday. But in a legal response in March, its lawyers said they could neither confirm nor deny that detainees' lawyers had been targets of such surveillance "because doing so would compromise the United States Intelligence Communities sources and methods."
Submitted by Fernando on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 10:03am.
C-Span will broadcast yesterdays Hearings (From DC to Guantanamo Bay with Phillipe Sands) today at 2:20pm. This was a great hearing that lays out all you need to know about what the future has in store. I found the tiny web cast fascinating. I can't recommend it enough. Grab your pop corn or a handle of vodka and get ready for some of the most amazing example of democracy coming back to life.
Guantanamo Bay and Interrogation Rules
Judiciary, Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties
Washington, District of Columbia (United States)
ID: 205193 - 05/06/2008 - 2:22
Nadler, Jerrold U.S. Representative, D-NY
The subcommittee met to discuss potential Bush administration witnesses in future hearing on detainee treatment and interrogation techniques at facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They voted to authorize a subpoena for Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff and former legal counsel, David S. Addington.
I was watching msnbc with the close captioning on yesterday and it was hillariously bad for a while. At one point it called Obama 'Senator O Bomb' and at another it said, 'chose to go to work to help people who had lost their johns in Chicago'
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 10:15am.
Out of Baracks civility, Hillary is not vetted...there is still a whole lot of dirt on her that has not come out and the repubs will take care of that....it would be double nasty....Sibelius is not very known but well liked by the dlc types(same as Hillary) I think she could attract the racists that Hillary was pandering to. She seems very vice presidential to me(not in the Cheney sense)
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 10:17am.
it is hilarious to watch the close captioning.....since I am such a junkie, I have liberal radio on, msnbc on mute, and playing here on the blog...and I don't have ADHD so it is really confusing....
that's exactly what I was doing. Probably pretty pathetic I guess~haha. Also I was holding a sleeping baby, but she's just the excuse to actually sit and watch for a while.
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who managed the campaign of Al Gore in the 2000 election, got into a heated back-and-forth with fellow talking heads on CNN amid discussions of Tuesday’s primary results.
Paul Begala, political consultant and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, began by saying, “Some of the commentary tonight kinda bothers me. If [Brazile’s] point is that there’s a new Democratic Party that somehow doesn’t need or want white working class people and Latinos, well count me out.
“We cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans,” Begala warned, which got an animated rise out of Brazile, yielding laughter and applause from those in CNN’s studio.
CNN host Campbell Brown chimed in, saying of Obama, “Why hasn’t he been able to [reach out to blue-collar white voters] yet?”
Responded Brazile, “Do you think that Barack Obama would be leading in the pledged votes, the delegate votes, the money, if it was simply because somehow or another black people … became the majority? Barack Obama has won the hearts and the minds of white voters as well as black and Hispanics.”
Submitted by Lucille on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 10:30am.
The announcement at Nasdaq in Times Square is meant to highlight Mr. Klitschko’s commitment to bringing U.S. businesses to Kiev, a goal that drove him to hire Giuliani Partners to root out corruption.
actually my baby turns 21 in a week. This one is a rental. Babysit a one year old beauty and my 3 year old granddaughter (who is also magnificent) until I figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Love the babies. They look into your eyes like they can see right into your center. When you introduce something like the itsy bitsy spider song to them, they look at you like you're brilliant. Having a hard time thinking about going out into the world where no-one will be that impressed with me :)
Submitted by Lucille on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 10:40am.
Nobody does compromise quite like the Bush administration.
If you're a regular reader of TPM, you're familiar with Hans von Spakovsky and in particular, Spakovsky's remarkable track record at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. It is because of that record -- one of ignoring, marginalizing, and intimidating career lawyers in order to institute restrictive voting laws all over the country, a pattern amounting to "institutional sabotage" as one former career attorney there put it -- that Senate Democrats (Barack Obama and Russ Feingold in particular) opposed his nomination to the Federal Election Commission.
Spakvosky was one of four nominees -- two Dems and two GOPers -- to the commission. The other three were uncontroversial. Senate Republicans insisted that all nominees be voted on together, and the Democrats objected: Spakovsky would have to get his own vote. The Republicans refused, and there things have stood for more than four months. Without the necessary number of commissioners, the FEC has essentially shut down.
It is a problem that has a relatively simple solution: if the White House were to submit another nominee, that nominee would more than likely be quickly confirmed without much trouble.
i wonder if they are using one of those voice recognition systems that you run into so often with auto attendant phone systems. either that or its been outsourced to india and the people doing the captioning don't understand the story so its real easy to make contextual errors.
at least part of the time, and the opening was not as riveting as the middle part and mostly the sands and the woman speeches (shoot I didn't catch her name I will have to rewatch she was very good and fearless)
hopefully c-span will have it available as vod at some point
I've been trying to get on since 5 AM. I think it was a server problem. My browser finally didn't load. Turned off my computer and modum about 7 times this AM.
Perhaps Americans aren't as gullible as Hillary thinks. Or maybe it's because the same damn idea was floated by the Republican candidate. My guess is that soured more than a few stomachs considering the past seven years of hell we've been through with a Republican at the helm.
Morning everyone. :)
Clinton Hangs on by Thread
The highly paid strategists of the Clinton campaign sharpened their pencils and carefully calculated their arcane political equations. Following a series of deft tactical maneuvers designed to manufacture a withering crisis, the mainstream media would subject Obama to another week on the defensive against the phantasmagorical sayings of Rev. Wright following his madcap spree of ill-advised press conferences manufactured to stimulate the undercurrents of racial intolerance still roiling just beneath the surface tension of America.
The Clintonian rationale for this round of "strategy" was at once stark and simple. The Reverend Wright machinations would be especially effective in the Jim Crow-obsessed South and that great state of Indiana, once the home of the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan where 30% of the white male population donned the iconic white hoods and robes of the Rolls Royce of race baiting organizations to march 500,000 strong down Pennsylvania Avenue proudly brandishing banners proclaiming their brand of lily white masculine supremacy.
The Clinton campaign's happy coincidence was simplicity itself for the North Carolina and Indiana primaries fell on the very same date. This miraculous synchronicity provided the sacred crucible for the latest media-driven experiment in race-baiting. In gambling terms -- and that is precisely what the strategists were doing -- they bet the house on the Reverend Wright gambit and then rolled the proverbial dice...
first
first!
yea! it is still over again!
Thanks for letting us know, Sam.
Still
we wait for the republicans to show their hand and then we pounce.
GOP leaders warn of election disaster
Politico
Shellshocked House Republicans got warnings from leaders past and present Tuesday: Your party’s message isn’t good enough to prevent disaster in November, and neither is the NRCC’s money.
The double shot of bad news had one veteran Republican House member worrying aloud that the party’s electoral woes — brought into sharp focus by Woody Jenkins’ loss to Don Cazayoux in Louisiana on Saturday — have the House Republican Conference splitting apart in “everybody for himself” mode.
“There is an attitude that, ‘I better watch out for myself, because nobody else is going to do it,’” the member said. “There are all these different factions out there, everyone is sniping at each other, and we have no real plan. We have a lot of people fighting to be the captain of the lifeboat instead of everybody pulling together.”
...
And in a closed-door session at the Capitol, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told members that the NRCC doesn’t have enough cash to “save them” in November if they don’t raise enough money or run strong campaigns themselves.
I am not a number...
but my bar is OPEN!!!!
I dunno what to think, SJ
The CIA isn't claiming him, for intelligence safety reasons. But Russian intelligence has already outed him, his codename and contacts.
Plus they're reporting his death is related to the D.C. Madam's apparent suicide? WTF?
I can't find any mention of the Israelis or nukes, or even that Carnaby was chasing anyone.
* * * * *
I'm gonna have trouble sleeping; but I'm going to bed.
G'night all.
Hill says good bye
Her farewell speech tonight was amazing. The cheering and paid-for fans faking the celebratory balloons, fanfare and party mode while the erstwhile candidate fought back tears and said her farewells - too weird indeed. Hill needs a few hours to get some balance - i predict she will be out in the next few days to formalize what everyone knows.
if i did believe in a god - tonight might be one of those times.
Lea
Retired nuns barred from voting in Indiana
The Guardian UK
Borkowski said Sister Julie McGuire, one of several nuns on poll duty, wasn't pleased to turn away the nuns, some of whom were in their 80s and 90s and no longer had driver's licenses.
"Here's the supreme irony," Borkowski said. "This law was passed supposedly to prevent and deter voter fraud, even though there was no real record of serious voter fraud in Indiana. Here you have a bunch of nuns whose votes can't be accepted by a bunch of nuns ... who live with them in the polling place in their convent because they don't have an ID."
At least six other people also were relegated to filing provisional ballots at the polling place on the ground floor of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, said Amy Smessaert, spokeswoman for the convent........
Iran Rejects Nuclear Inspections Unless Israel Allows Them
GENEVA (AP) — An Iranian envoy said Monday his government will not submit to extensive nuclear inspections while Israel stays outside the global treaty to curb the spread of atomic weapons.
"The existing double standard shall not be tolerated anymore by non-nuclear-weapon states," Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh told a meeting of the 190 countries that have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Nuclear safeguards are far from universal, he said, adding that more than 30 countries are still without a comprehensive safeguard agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure full cooperation with that U.N. body.
"Israel, with huge nuclear weapons activities, has not concluded" such an agreement or submitted its facilities to the IAEA's safeguards, Soltanieh said.
Colombian Congress weakened by paramilitary scandal
BOGOTA, May 6 (Reuters) - Colombia's Congress is in crisis as scores of lawmakers are investigated for suspected collusion with right-wing death squads in a scandal creeping closer to conservative President Alvaro Uribe.
More than 60 of the country's 268 legislators are under investigation for suspected illegal dealings with drug-running paramilitaries organized as private militias in the 1980s to help landowners beat back Marxist guerrillas.
About 30 lawmakers are in prison awaiting trial and the accusations include using paramilitary thugs to intimidate voters into supporting their candidacies.
More investigations are expected, heightening worries that Congress is headed toward paralysis.
U.S. base is no longer welcome in Ecuador
Miami Herald
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa has vowed not to renew the base's contract beyond its November 2009 expiration. And politicians drafting a new constitution have proposed banning the base or any other foreign military presence in the country.
.....
Back in Quito, political analyst Simón Pachano cannot foresee a scenario in which the Manta base might be allowed to stay open.
Unlike his predecessors, Correa is enjoying unprecedented popularity. And his aggressive anti-American and anti-Colombian stance plays well in this nation accustomed to taking a back seat in regional politics.
In exchange for using the base free of charge for 10 years, the United States agreed to expand and update the airstrip, and cooperate with Ecuador on counter-narcotics initiatives.
The fact that the 1999 deal was never approved by Ecuador's full legislature -- only that body's International Affairs Committee -- has made it a political target, Pachano said.
As long as Diebold or E S & S are doing the counting...
You just can't trust the results. I believe Obama actually won New Hampshire and New Mexico. The Ohio and Pennsylvania results are suspect as well. It's the way the votes come in that indicate a problem. First, the totals come in rapidly. Then! In about two hours or less, the results stop. Now here comes the trickle, trickle. That means they are screwing with the vote. Students and African Americans are usually the primary targets.
We must continue to challenge the use of these machines. If you haven't seen the documentary Uncounted, please check it out.
http://www.hillaryis404.org/
http://www.hillaryis404.org/
eya Kev!
thanks for the link on Billary 404
Hey SJ 8-)
I am just popping in and out.
Options Dwindling for Clinton
NYT
In this case, a split was not a draw. Despite narrowly winning Indiana, while losing North Carolina, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did not fundamentally improve her chances of securing the Democratic presidential nomination. If anything, Mrs. Clinton’s hopes for overtaking Senator Barack Obama dwindled further on Tuesday night....
Beating Mr. Obama in Indiana, a state he had once been confident of winning, was an achievement for Mrs. Clinton. But it was hardly the kind of strong victory she posted in Pennsylvania and Ohio. And when paired with his comfortable victory in North Carolina — which Mr. Obama pointedly described in his victory speech as “a big state, a swing state” — it hardly seemed enough for Mrs. Clinton to convince so-called uncommitted superdelegates to rally around her candidacy.
Her showing in the two states did not permit Mrs. Clinton to cut into Mr. Obama’s lead in pledged delegates or his overall lead in the popular vote. Indeed, Mr. Obama may have widened his delegate lead over Mrs. Clinton, an outcome with mathematic and political resonance.
The result was so tight as to deprive her of the kind of clear-cut victory that would make it easy for her to fend off calls for her to drop out, raise money and campaign on into West Virginia in advance of a primary there next Tuesday where her campaign is confident of doing well.
In the last several weeks, Mrs. Clinton, seizing on the campaign’s new focus on the weakening economy, seemed to find new energy and a more populist voice. She ran hard on a proposal to suspend the federal gasoline tax, an idea that Mr. Obama scorned. As she battled away, Mr. Obama struggled to explain his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and his apparent inability to appeal to blue-collar voters. Polls suggested that Democrats were starting to develop doubts about the strength of his candidacy.
In short, Mrs. Clinton could not have asked for a better second chance to turn this campaign around and to make her central case to superdelegates: that Mr. Obama was a damaged general election candidate who would get swallowed up by the Republican Party. Yet she was unable on Tuesday to build her base of support substantially beyond the white, working-class voters who had sustained her for the last month. That will not be lost on the superdelegates, the elected Democrats and party leaders who will ultimately decide this fight....
BREAKING: Wesley Clark
BREAKING: Wesley Clark reportedly called Hillary tonight, urging her to drop out
We've just been told that General Wesley Clark, a strong Clinton supporter and fellow Arkansan, called Hillary tonight to tell her it's over.
In addition to our source, the king of the pundits, Mark Halperin, drops a tantalizing hint that something might be up with Clark:
"The biggest question: Will any of her supporters (including Wes Clark) say publicly or privately she should quit?"
We like General Clark here at AMERICAblog, and have a bit of a history with him. So we hope what we're hearing is true. But the general better watch it - this could be his most dangerous mission to date. When you take on the Clintons, the sniper fire is real.
it's still over Submitted by
it's still over
Submitted by SEDER on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 12:55am.
concise, funny
I like it.
Lake, Marion Counties
CNN's chart shows 2% of vote in both Lake (Gary) and Marion (Indianapolis) still not counted.
and so where the fuck do we go from here?
good morning yourll...shit is tiresome, not so good night for me
Submitted by Alice on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 8:57pm
its not the whole world its me, mother. wish i could have seen the nice ass bit, coz it would have been correct...and why would i get mad at that? being a fact!
gotta go show it to him if he can keep still for a minute, sorry i missed dat!
Are there archives of the shows?
I hate to keep doing this, but since I always used the Whiterose Society Rhodes stream to listen when Sam was sitting in for Randi before (because it's too inconvenient to listen live in that timeslot), I haven't adapted too well.
Is there some place I can hear the shows Sam and Marc are doing? Does AAR have podcasts of it, or is a Sammyfan posting them somewhere?
AC
More liberal media at The Sideshow
has anybody been following the admiral mullen story?
i heard it on malloy the other night. mullen, the chairman of the joint chief of staff was quoted as saying that the election this year represents a threat to the security of the united states.
whats intereesting is that i've googled different combinations of mullen and election and i can't find the source. seems like somebody or something is doing a good job of burying the story.
saw a sad story
on the news a little while ago
about these working families in Minn.
who are going without electricity because
they can't afford it
dammit can't somebody rig some kind of solar
thing up for these people
(and yes Minnesota does get sunshine)
people shouldn't have to live like this
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=4798937&page=1
Obama Shifts to General-Election Mode
WSJ
The Obama campaign appears poised to begin running its general election campaign after Tuesday night’s primaries seemed unlikely to change the math or the momentum in the Democratic nomination.
David Axelrod, the top Obama strategist, told reporters that Barack Obama would compete for the six remaining Democratic contests, where 217 delegates are at stake. But he said that the campaign would soon focus on the general election because likely Republican nominee John McCain had “basically run free for some time now because we’ve been consumed with this.” He added: “I don’t think we’re going to spend time solely in primary states.”
Pressed by reporters whether that meant the campaign would make stops in general election states over the next month, Axelrod said: “You could infer that from what I said.”
The mood aboard the campaign plane was cheerful on Tuesday night, even though the campaign didn’t yet know the final result of the Indiana vote. Campaign advisors said they didn’t expect to win Indiana, but that the numbers may have been in their favor.
“We’re down 39,000 votes,” Axelrod said. “There are somewhere between 120,000 and 185,000 [votes in Lake County]. If we got 60% of them we’d come pretty darn close.”
Axelrod declined to say whether he thought Clinton still had a viable path to the nomination, but he said the path had “certainly dimmed some tonight.”
“The fact that she lost… a large important state by a landslide and she’s struggling to hold in one where she was favored where this whole issue of white working class voters was front and center I think is pretty sobering,” he said.
The strategist also attributed a share of Clinton’s narrow lead in Indiana to Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos,” where the talk show host encouraged Republican listeners to vote for Clinton in the Democratic primary in order to prolong the nomination battle.
“If we come up short, they ought to call a press conference tomorrow and thank Rush Limbaugh for the victory,” he said. “Because there’s no doubt if they do win it’ll be by a margin so narrow that the Limbaugh project will have given them the margin.”
Axelrod also argued that the debate over a three month gas-tax holiday pushed by Clinton, which Obama had heavily criticized in recent days, may have backfired for the New York senator. “People were skeptical. I think this gas tax bit really worked for us,” he said.
One reporter pressed: Why didn’t it work?
The reply was blunt: “Because it was a stupid idea and we said so.”
saw a sad story
its more evidence that we are slipping into being a third world country. its time to nationalize and regulate energy for the good of us all.
here in ohio, industries which use enough energy to take care of whole towns are given a huge discount compared to the rate that individuals pay.
dammit can't somebody rig some..........
do what I do ..... stop my meter.
word from on high....tweet tweet
In a speech at Harvard's Institute of Politics on Monday, Chris Matthews admitted that MSNBC bosses were "basically pro-war during the war." The remark came in a larger discussion of top-down editorial control at the network — of which Matthews claimed there was none, citing the fact that many of his bosses supported Hillary Clinton while he has been very vocal for Obama.
His full statement, in response to a question whether MSNBC officially supports Obama (via Politico's Michael Calderone):
"Well, it's not official." (LAUGH) "Well, I don't think Joe Scarborough has. And I don't think Tucker Carlson did. And Keith does his thing. He does his thing--it's something and it's very successful. I do my thing. I don't think that's true. I think... my sense is that everybody that lives in New York is for Hillary. The people I work with--all my bosses--seem to be for Hillary. I just sense it. They don't actually say it, but there's no sense from the top I can tell you that it's pro-Obama.. by any means. That's not what I get. And it was basically pro-war during the war.. the bosses were. And I was up against that. And if there's anybody telling me to push Obama, I haven't heard it yet. And by the way, they're so fickle.... but there seems to be a New York thing about Hillary. Just the people from... it's like the Yankees and the Mets... it's their thing. You know? It's Hillary. You know? And I feel it. I find it. It's hard to figure sometimes. But I don't know who you are talking about. I know who you are talking about."
As revealed in the New York Times Magazine profile of Matthews by Mark Leibovich, Matthews idolizes NBC News Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert like an older brother:
Tim -- as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of "Meet the Press" -- is a particular obsession of Matthews's. Matthews craves Russert's approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous.
In her new book Right is Wrong, Arianna Huffington critiques the media for being too compliant with administration policy during the run-up to war, and she particularly lays into Russert, saying, among other things, that he helped pump up the terrorist panic:
Take Tim Russert, whose July 1, 2007, Meet the Press interview with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was about as priapic a display as you're ever likely to see outside of a porno film or the monkey cage at the zoo, with Russert desperately trying to get Chertoff to pump up the panic meter...You could almost hear the blood rushing to his loins--and the palpable sense of deflation when Chertoff refused to stroke his fantasy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/07/chris-matthews-admits-msn_n_100...
Bill Moyers is on
for the whole hour on Democracy Now...goodie
goodmorning..still sleepy
Morning all
Sorry if this is a repeat but it seems I can't post this morning. Is anyone else having problems with the blog?
It won't load or refresh well. Takes forever and then it loses some of the programming on it and I can see the text but can't post.
Mccain less than luke warm
As the battle over Indiana progressed between Sens Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton late Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, a set of depressing polls numbers were finalized for John McCain.
In the GOP primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, the basically uncontested Republican nominee did not gain more than 80 percent of the vote.
In Indiana, McCain earned the backing of 78 percent of Republican primary voters, with exited candidates Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney gaining 10 percent and five percent respectively. Congressman Ron Paul, who is still in the race, has received seven percent of the vote.
The numbers were even worse in North Carolina, where McCain won 74 percent of the vote, with Huckabee earning 12 percent, Paul earning seven percent, and four percent of Republican primary goers simply voting "no preference."
None of these totals, to be sure, will affect the Arizona Republican's almost certain path to the nomination. But it has been more than two months now since McCain became the presumptive GOP candidate, and in each state election since he achieved that measure he has continued to lose a relatively substantial chunk of Republican support. In Pennsylvania, for example, McCain won 73 percent of the vote, with Paul pulling in 16 and Huckabee 11.
The troubling figures, however, may be the popular vote totals - individuals who McCain will theoretically have to woo back into his good graces. In North Carolina more than 105,000 Republicans did not vote for McCain. And in Indiana, 85,000 voters - whether they were Republican, Democrat or Independent - cast their ballots for someone other than the Arizona Republican.
The totals reflect roughly 90+ percent of the totals reported in each state, and will likely change, but not by much.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/07/mccains-rough-night-overs_n_100...
morning toni
i was having real bad delays and timeouts with the blog last night right as the election returns started rolling in. what surprised me is that the number of users wasn't very high. this morning it seems back to normal.
Morning Toni
Its ok here...no problems...I quit my browser completely and then re open it and that sometimes works...
you know i am not one to gossip but,
my boyfriend joe did not have too much of a happy face this morning..that pains me
The scapegoating escalates
Iran seeking to keep Afghanistan unstable: US official
AFP
Published: Tuesday May 6, 2008
Propel This! - Submit to Propeller.com
Iran is seeking to keep Afghanistan weak and unstable, delivering arms to the Taliban whilst ostensibly supporting Kabul's government, a senior US state department official said in Paris Tuesday.
"They (Iran) interfere in a variety of different ways, perhaps not as violently as they do sometimes in Iraq," Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for south and central Asia, told reporters at a press conference.
"But what we see is Iranian interference politically, Iranian interference in terms of the money that they channel into the political process, Iranian interference in terms of playing off local officials against central government, trying to undermine the state in that way."
Boucher was speaking in Paris as part of preparations for a major international donors' conference for Afghanistan, due to take place in the French capital on June 12.
"In many ways they (Tehran) do support the work of the government, but they also work with the political opposition, they work with the local opposition," Boucher added.
"They have funnelled some weapons to the Taliban, they seem kind of working with everybody to be hedging their bets, or just looking... like they want weakness or instability in Afghanistan more than anything else."
Boucher told reporters that "several shipments" of weapons from Iran to the Taliban had been intercepted.
"I'm not sure they (Tehran) want to see the Taliban win, but I don't think they want the government to establish good control either. I think they are just trying to hedge their bets and keep everything fluid."
Boucher said that June's conference was a chance for countries to show their will to "create an Afghan government that can deliver to the people what the people want, which is safety, justice, economic opportunity, schools, health care."
France used last month's NATO summit in Bucharest to announce it would send a battalion of around 700 troops to Afghanistan, which Boucher said was a "significant contribution" to the military effort.
"The French are filling a very important gap, they are coming down in areas that are difficult," he said.
US-led forces removed the Taliban from power in Kabul in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001, but both US and NATO forces are still battling to contain an insurgency there seven years later.
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Iran_seeking_to_keep_Afghanistan_un_0506200...
joe did not have too much of a happy face
How could all those people be up and in suits and everything after being up so late...I am still in bed and tired....must be the money they make....
G'morning Toni
No problems with this site at the moment, but did have them on and off earlier. Mostly the page didn't completely load. Just saw a single column of plain text.
double post...sorry
my connection is freaking out
dan this? or no?
Mullen: No Warning to Democrats on Iraq
Pejman Yousefzadeh did a good job covering a report on ABC News that Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen issued a warning to the Democratic presidential candidates not to pull out of Iraq too fast. Mullen was quoted saying:
"I do worry about a rapid withdrawal. . . [that would] turn around the gains we have achieved and struggled to achieve and turn them around overnight."
http://www.redstate.com/stories/elections/2008/mullen_no_warning_to_demo...
and so now talk to me...way too many clips for me to read
up top
what the hell is going on?
Late night in Lake co.
Beats me.
Polls have been closed in Lake County for some 6 hours, but no results in Indiana's corner county, closely bordering Obama's homestate stronghold of Chicago and home to Gary. Tiny Union County has also failed to come up with any numbers just yet.
As of now, Indiana remains "too close to call", according to all the cable nets, with 92% of precincts (not necessarily votes, since Lake County is the second-most populace in the state) reporting. There is currently just under 20k votes reportedly between Clinton, who is currently leading, and Obama, out of more than 1.1 million "counted" so far.
For the record, Lake County uses a combination of the failed, unverifiable MicroVote Infinity DREs and paper-based MV-464's voting machines, according to Verified Voting's database of voting systems.
Union County, on the other hand, you needn't worry about, since our old friend Diebold runs the place with a combination of their hackable paper-ballot systems, and their unverifiable and hackable DRE (touch-screen) systems. But Union also has a tiny population of just more than 7k, whereas Lake has a population of just less than half a million.
Unfortunately, I don't know that I'll be able to follow this one through the night, so if I can't (or even if I can), I welcome you folks to tell the story in comments below as you are best able to figure out what seems to be going on there. Tonight, I'm guessing you can tell the story as well as (or better than) I can...
UPDATE 12:47pm ET: Results now coming in. The state could be a squeaker by a few thousand votes or less.
Let's see, with Indiana's own estimates of 43,000 voters who could be disenfranchised by their new Photo ID/voter suppression law, and less-conservative estimates suggesting several hundred thousand voters who could be robbed of their right to vote...Gosh, hope the final results in the Hoosier State don't come down to the question of a dozen or so 80 & 90 year-old disenfranchised nuns from South Bend...
http://bradblog.com/
Re: it's still over
This just in:
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Later. Got to fight the never ending battle for yard supremacy against the morning glories. Maybe I'll just plant white flags next year.
podcasts
if anyone isn't subscribed to aar but wants the podcasts of seder and marc this week, you can sign up for a 2 week trial membership, get the podcasts for free then cancel it..
In a nutshell from John Nichols
Split Result Helps Obama, But Leaves Race Undone
posted by John Nichols on 05/06/2008 @ 8:53pm
May 6, 2008
The race for the Democratic presidential nomination did not end Tuesday night.
A split result -- North Carolina solidly for Barack Obama, Indiana narrowly for Hillary Clinton -- has cheated the party of the defining moment many had hoped for.
But the two states have sent important signals.
For instance:
* Obama is much closer to the nomination. His delegate total was boosted by the combination of the big win in North Carolina and the very-nearly even result in Indiana. Also, the voting patterns suggest that, when all is said and done in June, the senator from Illinois will lead the popular vote. That denies Clinton an appeal she's hoped to have for super delegates.
* Obama does not appear to have been so badly harmed by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy as many pundits imagined would be the case. Almost half the voters in both Indiana and North Carolina said that the debate about the candidate's former pastor was an "important" factor in the contest. But the senator from Illinois essentially won the sort of places he has been winning and lost the sort of places he has been losing before the Wright controversy stirred up.
* Obama is still having trouble "closing the deal." His win in North Carolina was a comfortable one. But the loss in Indiana was agonizing. The senator needed to win a state where Clinton was presumed to be ahead. That meant he had to take Indiana. It didn't quite happen.
* Clinton did not win where she needed to. She sent husband Bill to North Carolina, hoping he could swing rural white Democrats in a southern state to his side. The former president spent much of the last week in small towns and cities. But Obama still secured more than a third of the white vote, which in combination with his strong African-American vote prevented Clinton from getting close in a state where she really needed to win.
* African-American support for Barack Obama is solidifying. Where Obama won 78 percent of the African-American vote when South Carolina voted in January. Today, in North Carolina he was well over 90 percent. In Indiana, Obama won an even higher percentage of the African-American vote.
* Obama still has a lot of work to do with white working-class voters. The risk to his candidacy has less to do with the nomination race than with the fall. In both North Carolina and Indiana, roughly half of Clinton backers indicated that they would not vote for Obama if he is the Democratic nominee in the fall. Most of the voters in that group told exit pollsters they would cast their ballots for Republican John McCain.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/318543/split_result_helps_obama_b...
oh so yourll dont wanna tell me what is going on?
just watch...i'll find out myself
loan shark
Hillary Clinton Loan Suspected, Campaign "Close To Broke"
Ben Smith of Politico reported Tuesday night that Hillary Clinton might have made another loan to her campaign:
I asked Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe just now whether Clinton had given or loaned her campaign more money in the run-up to North Carolina and Indiana.
"Might be. Might not be," McAuliffe said, adding that the campaign would release more fundraising details tomorrow.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/06/new-hillary-clinton-loan_n_1004...
get the podcasts for free then cancel it
meanie....haha
north carolina
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki-oMjmwiUA
The real important news....
Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Ass Groping
Posted May 6th 2008 5:15PM by TMZ Staff
A little song, a little dance, a little drizzle down your pants. That kinda sums up a blistering lawsuit filed by a former Weather Channel anchor against her colleague.
Hillary Andrews claims Bob Stokes tormented her with crude, sexual come-ons, including once allegedly asking her, "Will you lick my swizzle stick?" Andrews also claims Stokes followed her into the women's dressing room, quizzed her about her sexual relationships, and pleaded with her to say she found him attractive. Oh yeah, and then there's this... Stokes allegedly told her, "It tortures me when you wear those heels and skirt."
The Weather Channel: Click to watchAndrews took legal action against The Weather Channel, claiming it retaliated against her after she complained and then refused to take action against Stokes. Both have since been fired.
Thesmokinggun.com obtained a lawsuit filed by Andrews against Stokes. That case is pending. Our forecast....he's screwed.
http://www.tmz.com/2008/05/06/party-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-ass-groping/
They're not the same person
http://www.joetracey.com/052008/05022008.html
north carolina part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2MSQEQIDGk
morning
i should be leaving for work right now
________________________________
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.
-Thomas Jefferson
I love the headline and pictures on Huff Post
Obama vs McCain :)
I love the headline and pictures on Huff Post
see what im talking about? now i gotta go get it myself..but thats alright
bombama
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/07/obama-victorious-clinton_n_1005...
Hillary Clinton, who for seven weeks has crawled, kicked and bitten her way back into contention, suffered a blow on Tuesday, halting the momentum behind her bid for the nomination just when she had begun to regain credibility.
In the universe of political clichés, she is on life support, her oxygen choked off, her knees buckling, unable to stanch the bleeding, down for an eight count, on the ropes, praying for the bell to ring, desperate to get her wind back.
The results yesterday were a split decision, with Obama winning big in North Carolina and Clinton apparently carrying Indiana by a few percentage points. Clinton was widely viewed as needing a double-digit win in Indiana, and either a close loss or actual victory in North Carolina.
limpaw
Exit Polls: Limbaugh Effect Seems To Rear Its Head
Did Rush Limbaugh actually impact the Democratic primary?
The loud-mouthed radio talk show host has been encouraging Republicans to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton to continue the "chaos" in the Democratic race. And a sampling of some key exit poll information suggests he may, to a certain extent, be having an effect.
Thirty-six percent of primary voters said that Clinton does not share their values. And yet, among that total, one out of every five (20 percent) nevertheless voted for her in the Indiana election. Moreover, of the 10 percent of Hoosiers who said "neither candidate" shared their values, 75 percent cast their ballots for Clinton.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/06/exit-polls-limbaugh-effec_n_100...
Howard Dean talks about voter suppression
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&add...
the hell
WHITESVILLE: I’m working with the Obama campaign and I’m very white. And I’m white. Ever see toothpaste? You know the tube with toothpaste out? That’s sort of my color. … I was looking in the mirror yesterday after I looked up and I was like, oh, no, I have toothpaste all over my face but actually I just had face all over my face because my face is white, and just so everyone knows, I work at the Obama campaign and I’m white but my first name’s Honky.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/06/glenn-beck-brings-on-caller-honky-wh...
Haste Makes Waste Of My Underdeveloped Idea
Re: it's still over
Submitted by Cat Chew on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:24am.
This just in:
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead...
------
Rats. You beat me to the joke while I was busily attempting to create a "Generalissimo Election-o" tie-in.
Hillary talking with dlc about quitting
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&add...
email
Tonight's victory in Indiana was close, and a margin that narrow means just one thing: every single thing you did to help us win in Indiana helped make the difference.
Every call you made, every friend you spoke to about our campaign, every dollar you contributed made tonight's victory possible. And I couldn't be more thankful for your hard work.
Every time we've celebrated a victory, we've celebrated it together. And tonight is no exception. This victory is your victory, this campaign is your campaign, and your support has been the difference between winning and losing.
Thank you so much for making this campaign possible. Let's keep making history together.
Sincerely,
Hillary Rodham Clinton
http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/05/hillarys_subdued...
Submitted by mhappenow on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:53am
oh god you just had me on the floor...and here i thought it to be true...man yourll got jokes
((((wake the hell up))))----you slept enough
ran out of eggs
so I am eating cold meatloaf and broccali for breakfast...gak!
golly this woman wants to be president that bad?
The NY Time's Adam Nagourney writes about Hillary Clinton's dwindling chances and hopes for a final rescue after Tuesday night's vote tallies in North Carolina and Indiana.
Nagourney points out that the Clinton camp will ratchet up it's already aggressive attempts to have the results for Florida and Michigan - states both candidates didn't campaign in, but Clinton "won" - to be counted. HuffPost's Tom Edsall wrote Sunday about how the Clinton camp planned to carry out the "nuclear option" to get the Michigan and Florida votes counted.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/07/clinton-camp-to-step-up-e_n_100...
so I am eating cold meatloaf
poor thing...whats up Mich. talk to me here i am stuck on stupid again this morning...tell me Iris stories
dan this? or no?
no. mullen actually said that having an election puts us at risk because there will likely be a change in who's in charge. he expects iran and the terrorists to "test" us. within his reality, having bush in charge forever would be good.
Zogby Polling :Female Voters Deserting Hillary
Zogby polls in the past week show steadily declining support for Hillary among women. Blacks, and under 70s. moving to Obama driving the change.
Zogby phone polls in Indiana and North Carolina suggest that women are deserting Hillary.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_rob_kall_080506_zogby_polls_3a_h...
"nuclear option"
funny on ko last night Rachel was saying that Hillary is going to go on strong on the issue of Michigan and Florida...Keith said, "Rachel,this is the first time that I disagree with you!"...and then he said that he did agree with Pat Buchanan...another first...
It was funny...we will see what Hillary does next...Bill looked like he was going to pop a jugular last night...he was beet red and looked very upset...what will they do next...
could this be the day?
that we put the primary contest behind us and get it into gear showing how mccain would be so bad for the country.
on more than one news channel this morning i've heard that clinton has cancelled hear appearances and his huddling with her brain trust to decide what to do next.
ok...Iris
she has started babbling in a big way and that girl won't shut up! dadadadadadadadadadadadad interuppted by lots of giggles....we should all be so happy...
you know Happe i get tired of watching tv at night
grover and the girls are into it still so i sit and watch yourll play while i listen to music...and oo. boy a whole lot of funnyness goes on...why? do you know?
why? do you know?
I do know...it is called samsara...the human realm...another bardo in Buddhist cosmology.....it is to be expected but transformed ultimately into compassion...
he expects iran and the terrorists to "test" us
damn terrorists are powerful man...
transformed ultimately into compassion
compassion? whats that mean....have not seen that around here yet
dadadad
she has got to be her fathers baby..girly's tend to say dada first i dont know why
clinton has cancelled
get the fuck out for crying out loud. jeez...i need my bp's she is driving me crazy
pop a jugular last night
its called heart surgery right? hahahaha...sorry
what is this????? whats the silence????
i become very destructive when no one is looking...someone better start watching over me...thats all im saying
oh you are so lucky my boss is here
i cant do what i would really like to
dat dere
http://www.last.fm/music/Oscar+Brown+Jr./_/Dat+Dere
huffpo
Obama, Clinton's Delegate And Superdelegate Numbers After Indiana, North Carolina Primaries
WASHINGTON — Sen. Barack Obama won the most delegates in Tuesday's primaries, moving within 200 delegates of securing the Democratic nomination for president.
Obama won at least 94 delegates in the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, according to an analysis of election returns by The Associated Press. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won at least 75 delegates, with 18 still to be awarded.
Sixteen of the outstanding delegates were from North Carolina and two were from Indiana.
In the overall race for the nomination, Obama led with 1,840.5 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. Clinton had 1,684.
Obama was 184.5 delegates shy of the 2,025 needed to secure the Democratic nomination.
There are 217 delegates at stake in the final six contests. Also, about 270 superdelegates are yet to be claimed.
Superdelegates are the party and elected officials who will automatically attend the national convention and can support whomever they choose, regardless of what happens in the primaries and caucuses.
Obama is on pace to reach a majority of the pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses in two weeks, when Kentucky and Oregon vote. Obama had a 171-delegate lead among pledged delegates.
Obama has argued for months that superdelegates should support the candidate who wins the most pledged delegates. Clinton argues that superdelegates should exercise independent judgment.
Clinton leads in superdelegate endorsements, 270.5 to 256, though Obama has been chipping away at her lead since the Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5. Both candidates picked up a superdelegate endorsement Tuesday.
Nearly 800 superdelegates will attend the national convention. About 220 remain undecided and about 50 others will be named at state party conventions and meetings throughout the spring.
The AP tracks the delegate races by calculating the number of national convention delegates won by candidates in each presidential primary or caucus, based on state and national party rules, and by interviewing unpledged delegates to obtain their preferences.
Most primaries and some caucuses are binding, meaning delegates won by the candidates are pledged to support that candidate at the national conventions this summer.
Political parties in some states, however, use multistep procedures to award national delegates. Typically, such states use local caucuses to elect delegates to state or congressional district conventions, where national delegates are selected. In these states, the AP uses the results from local caucuses to calculate the number of national delegates each candidate will win, if the candidate's level of support at the caucus doesn't change.
very Nixonian
Lawyers for Guantanamo Inmates Accuse US of Eavesdropping
By William Glaberson
The New York Times
Wednesday 07 May 2008
One lawyer for Guantánamo detainees said he replaced his office telephone in Washington because of sounds that convinced him it had been bugged. Another lawyer who represents detainees said he sometimes had other lawyers call his corporate clients to foil any government eavesdroppers.
In interviews and a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo said they believed government agents had monitored their conversations. The assertions are the most specific to date by Guantánamo lawyers that officials may be violating legal principles that have generally kept government agents from eavesdropping on lawyers.
"I think they are listening to my telephone calls all the time," said John A. Chandler, a prominent lawyer in Atlanta and Army veteran who represents six Guantánamo detainees.
Several of the lawyers, including partners at large corporate law firms, said the concerns had changed the way they went about their work apart from Guantánamo cases. A lawyer in Chicago, H. Candace Gorman, said in an affidavit that she was no longer accepting new clients of any type because she could not assure them of confidentiality.
The new filing, by the Center for Constitutional Rights, came in a 2007 lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act in which Guantánamo lawyers are seeking records to determine whether they have been targets of surveillance.
The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday. But in a legal response in March, its lawyers said they could neither confirm nor deny that detainees' lawyers had been targets of such surveillance "because doing so would compromise the United States Intelligence Communities sources and methods."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050708L.shtml
Oops! Sorry, Crank Bait.
Haste Makes Waste Of My Underdeveloped Idea
Submitted by Crank Bait on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 8:51am.
If it's any consolation, that wasn't my intent and I have a notion that a creative version of that line will still be funny for a while to come.
Drat Chew
In case you missed it
C-Span will broadcast yesterdays Hearings (From DC to Guantanamo Bay with Phillipe Sands) today at 2:20pm. This was a great hearing that lays out all you need to know about what the future has in store. I found the tiny web cast fascinating. I can't recommend it enough. Grab your pop corn or a handle of vodka and get ready for some of the most amazing example of democracy coming back to life.
Guantanamo Bay and Interrogation Rules
Judiciary, Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties
Washington, District of Columbia (United States)
ID: 205193 - 05/06/2008 - 2:22
Nadler, Jerrold U.S. Representative, D-NY
The subcommittee met to discuss potential Bush administration witnesses in future hearing on detainee treatment and interrogation techniques at facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They voted to authorize a subpoena for Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff and former legal counsel, David S. Addington.
VIDEO LINK
Fernando :)
In case you missed it
Submitted by Fernando on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 10:03am.
I did miss it and regretted it. Didn't think about looking for a rebroadcast. Thanks much!
bushtard was just on cnbc
blamed all the worlds problems on those pesky democrats. says the people want the rethuglican's plan.
are we sure we can't impeach these evil morons?
funny close captioning
I was watching msnbc with the close captioning on yesterday and it was hillariously bad for a while. At one point it called Obama 'Senator O Bomb' and at another it said, 'chose to go to work to help people who had lost their johns in Chicago'
my case against Hillary being VP
Out of Baracks civility, Hillary is not vetted...there is still a whole lot of dirt on her that has not come out and the repubs will take care of that....it would be double nasty....Sibelius is not very known but well liked by the dlc types(same as Hillary) I think she could attract the racists that Hillary was pandering to. She seems very vice presidential to me(not in the Cheney sense)
kthc
it is hilarious to watch the close captioning.....since I am such a junkie, I have liberal radio on, msnbc on mute, and playing here on the blog...and I don't have ADHD so it is really confusing....
Cat Chew on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 10:10am.
You won't believe it. I have the audio of it posted in yesterday's morning thread.
mhappenow
that's exactly what I was doing. Probably pretty pathetic I guess~haha. Also I was holding a sleeping baby, but she's just the excuse to actually sit and watch for a while.
choices
begala makes an ass out of himself..Brazille takes him on
http://rawstory.com/rawreplay/?p=988
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who managed the campaign of Al Gore in the 2000 election, got into a heated back-and-forth with fellow talking heads on CNN amid discussions of Tuesday’s primary results.
Paul Begala, political consultant and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, began by saying, “Some of the commentary tonight kinda bothers me. If [Brazile’s] point is that there’s a new Democratic Party that somehow doesn’t need or want white working class people and Latinos, well count me out.
“We cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans,” Begala warned, which got an animated rise out of Brazile, yielding laughter and applause from those in CNN’s studio.
CNN host Campbell Brown chimed in, saying of Obama, “Why hasn’t he been able to [reach out to blue-collar white voters] yet?”
Responded Brazile, “Do you think that Barack Obama would be leading in the pledged votes, the delegate votes, the money, if it was simply because somehow or another black people … became the majority? Barack Obama has won the hearts and the minds of white voters as well as black and Hispanics.”
mr. 9/11
The announcement at Nasdaq in Times Square is meant to highlight Mr. Klitschko’s commitment to bringing U.S. businesses to Kiev, a goal that drove him to hire Giuliani Partners to root out corruption.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/07/giuliani-helping-former-boxer-run-fo...
kthc
how old is your baby...I am all about babies these days with my grandbaby Iris.....
Giuliani
is still alive...?.he just disappeared so fast.....
mhappenow
actually my baby turns 21 in a week. This one is a rental. Babysit a one year old beauty and my 3 year old granddaughter (who is also magnificent) until I figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Love the babies. They look into your eyes like they can see right into your center. When you introduce something like the itsy bitsy spider song to them, they look at you like you're brilliant. Having a hard time thinking about going out into the world where no-one will be that impressed with me :)
bushco
Nobody does compromise quite like the Bush administration.
If you're a regular reader of TPM, you're familiar with Hans von Spakovsky and in particular, Spakovsky's remarkable track record at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. It is because of that record -- one of ignoring, marginalizing, and intimidating career lawyers in order to institute restrictive voting laws all over the country, a pattern amounting to "institutional sabotage" as one former career attorney there put it -- that Senate Democrats (Barack Obama and Russ Feingold in particular) opposed his nomination to the Federal Election Commission.
Spakvosky was one of four nominees -- two Dems and two GOPers -- to the commission. The other three were uncontroversial. Senate Republicans insisted that all nominees be voted on together, and the Democrats objected: Spakovsky would have to get his own vote. The Republicans refused, and there things have stood for more than four months. Without the necessary number of commissioners, the FEC has essentially shut down.
It is a problem that has a relatively simple solution: if the White House were to submit another nominee, that nominee would more than likely be quickly confirmed without much trouble.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/05/todays_must_read_332.p...
funny close captioning
i wonder if they are using one of those voice recognition systems that you run into so often with auto attendant phone systems. either that or its been outsourced to india and the people doing the captioning don't understand the story so its real easy to make contextual errors.
they look at you like you're brilliant
hahahaha....my dad used to say babies are smarter than we are..they study you from day one and manipulate you there after
yeah fernando but it will conflict with the seder
at least part of the time, and the opening was not as riveting as the middle part and mostly the sands and the woman speeches (shoot I didn't catch her name I will have to rewatch she was very good and fearless)
hopefully c-span will have it available as vod at some point
I hear ya kthc
i am in love all over again.....
Finally
I've been trying to get on since 5 AM. I think it was a server problem. My browser finally didn't load. Turned off my computer and modum about 7 times this AM.
What a morning!
“Because it was a stupid idea and we said so.”
Ya think...?
Perhaps Americans aren't as gullible as Hillary thinks. Or maybe it's because the same damn idea was floated by the Republican candidate. My guess is that soured more than a few stomachs considering the past seven years of hell we've been through with a Republican at the helm.
Morning everyone. :)
Clinton Hangs on by Thread
The highly paid strategists of the Clinton campaign sharpened their pencils and carefully calculated their arcane political equations. Following a series of deft tactical maneuvers designed to manufacture a withering crisis, the mainstream media would subject Obama to another week on the defensive against the phantasmagorical sayings of Rev. Wright following his madcap spree of ill-advised press conferences manufactured to stimulate the undercurrents of racial intolerance still roiling just beneath the surface tension of America.
The Clintonian rationale for this round of "strategy" was at once stark and simple. The Reverend Wright machinations would be especially effective in the Jim Crow-obsessed South and that great state of Indiana, once the home of the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan where 30% of the white male population donned the iconic white hoods and robes of the Rolls Royce of race baiting organizations to march 500,000 strong down Pennsylvania Avenue proudly brandishing banners proclaiming their brand of lily white masculine supremacy.
The Clinton campaign's happy coincidence was simplicity itself for the North Carolina and Indiana primaries fell on the very same date. This miraculous synchronicity provided the sacred crucible for the latest media-driven experiment in race-baiting. In gambling terms -- and that is precisely what the strategists were doing -- they bet the house on the Reverend Wright gambit and then rolled the proverbial dice...