Crosspost Courtesy of  DailyKos user: Nicki6772

Warren was on Sean Hannity's radio show this afternoon and avoided all questions pertaining to who he was picking for President, but was more than happy to find ways to criticize Obama.  Before he ended his little appearance, he announced, that he had received a personal phone call from Georgian President Saakashvili.

I SAID WHAT?

Warren went on to tell Hannity that Saakashvili had called him Sunday to inform him that he had seen the Faith Forum Saturday night and it made him cry and that he appreciated everything Warren had done for him by mentioning the war and the poor Georgians.  According to Warren, Saakashvili mentioned that it is the great awaking of "The Bear" and that we cannot forget about the Georgians.

Warren then proceeded to go into a request to Sean Hannity that we find a way to help the Georgians and to not stop talking about them.  Hannity of course agreed to this request and went into his own dissertation about "The New Cold War".

Now I'm not a foreign policy expert by any means, but 2 questions came to mind after I heard this.

1.  Isn't Saakashvili a little busy dealing with an invasion?  I would assume he has better things to do than to sit around and watch CNN and watch a Religious guy like Warren ask our presidential candidates about matters of faith.

1.  If Saakashvili really had that much time on his hands in a war zone, what interest does he really have in actually calling Warren himself and thanking him personally for mentioning his country?

This is disturbing on all fronts.  Most of all, I think it is bogus.  So are our news media that hell bent on making this about the next coming of the "Great Bear" Russia and the Cold War? It really blows my mind to think that the media has to fabricate lies in order to conjure up scary images.

It makes me sick to think of the audiences these people have.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/beleaguered-president-gambler-who-risked-his-country-and-links-with-west-891500.html

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Liberals took the bait...again...

McCain's ad comparing Obama to two young hypersexualized and frivolous blonde girls (both who happen to be Republicans fyi) and attached to that is the ridiculously false claim about Obama taxing your electricity...yet the campaign, like the media, only referred to the Paris/Britney aspect of the ad.

Wonder why McCain & Friends play the "Race Card" Card now, considering Obama has for months tried to stoke a little vigilance as to any race baiting that may be in the works (or already is...for that matter)?

In the latest Obama-bashing meme that the media is running with this week especially... "arrogance", "presumptuousness", even "uppity" has been brought up (sadly, by the  news networks' token black journalists/pundits of course, only adding to the legitimacy of using the word "uppity" against Obama)  it's the perfect time for McCain to stoke race, such that any criticism of Obama's perceived arrogance or presumptuousness is coupled with negative thoughts about his race, and also the image of Obama and two hypersexualized blonde bimbos is disconcerting to a particular, yet large demographic of older white voters, and yes, even liberals, who have qualms about miscegenation (my neighbor's white grandmother in MA supported Malcolm X and MLK yet was personally disgusted with the notion of miscegenation). Whether the ad was made with the racial intent, the McCain campaign certainly knew that would be the accusation among liberals...and they took it hook, line, and sinker.

So now add the words to your new vocabulary: Swiftboat  and Willie Horton are grossly false and misleading personal and political attacks,  3AM phone call is a terror attack, and Presumptuous, Arrogant is now Uppity N*gro, and mentioning your non-white heritage is playing the race card.

Discussing Sen. Barack Obama's speech addressing race and controversial comments by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Pat Buchanan wrote in his syndicated column:

"Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American."... "no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans," ... "We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?"

i'm speechless....
why the hell is this guy on the air?

"Finally, Nintendo is branching out into political coverage. Here's an entertaining summary of the presidential race so far (with some predictions for the future) in just about a minute. CNN is so boring; this is news we can follow."

WATCH

In a presidential debate in the summer of 2007 in front of a black audience, Hillary Clinton addressed angrily the AIDS problem saying:

 "Let me put this in perspective...if HIV AIDS was the leading cause of death of white women..there would be an outrage, outcry in this country!!".

Now... If a black preacher, or even Obama, said that with that much anger and enthusiasm...why is it "militant", "racist", "ungrateful", "un-american" "anti-white", "over-hyped black grievance" which are the words I hear being used on the morning talk shows, radio, newspapers and blogs.

By the way, I was originally for Edwards and I am now equally for Clinton and Obama and what Clinton says is the truth and it is something to be angry about. John Edwards expressed the same rage throughout his campaign. But the reception is only acceptable to the majority of the white demographic of America only if it is said by a white person.

On related note:

Obama's Minister Committed "Treason" but When my Father Said the Same Thing He Was a Republican Hero
by  Frank Schaeffer

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.

Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father's sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our "stand" by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.

Consider a few passages from my father's immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies.

Here's Dad writing in his chapter on civil disobedience:

    If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force [against the US government]... then at a certain point force is justifiable.

And this:

    In the United States the materialistic, humanistic world view is being taught exclusively in most state schools... There is an obvious parallel between this and the situation in Russia [the USSR]. And we really must not be blind to the fact that indeed in the public schools in the United States all religious influence is as forcibly forbidden as in the Soviet Union....

Then this:

    There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate... A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion... It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates it's authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation...

Was any conservative political leader associated with Dad running for cover? Far from it. Dad was a frequent guest of the Kemps, had lunch with the Fords, stayed in the White House as their guest, he met with Reagan, helped Dr. C. Everett Koop become Surgeon General. (I went on the 700 Club several times to generate support for Koop).

Dad became a hero to the evangelical community and a leading political instigator. When Dad died in 1984 everyone from Reagan to Kemp to Billy Graham lamented his passing publicly as the loss of a great American. Not one Republican leader was ever asked to denounce my dad or distanced himself from Dad's statements.

Take Dad's words and put them in the mouth of Obama's preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet when we of the white Religious Right denounced America white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words "godly" and "prophetic" and a "call to repentance."

We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.

My dad's books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the "respectable" evangelical community and he's still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he'd take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler's Germany.

The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister's words, is staggering. They are the same people who argue for the right to "bear arms" as "insurance" to limit government power. They are the same people that (in the early 1980s roared and cheered when I called down damnation on America as "fallen away from God" at their national meetings where I was keynote speaker, including the annual meeting of the ultraconservative Southern Baptist convention, and the religious broadcasters that I addressed.

The far right Republicans are using the "scandal" of Obama's preacher to undermine the first black American candidate with a serious shot at the presidency. Funny thing is, the racist Far Right smear machine proves that Obama's minister had a valid point. There is plenty to yell about these days.

Is Obama some anti-American black separatist? That will certainly be the suspicion among most Americans, the uneducated white blue-collar voters as well as deep south whites. After flag-pin-gate, Muslim smears, Farrakahn smears, Michelle Obama's "proud" remarks, no hand on heart smear, his middle name... and just wait till they play that Wright sermon in a commercial right before the election. It will be Sista-Souljah times 10000000.

But if anyone actually took the time to read Obama's book they would think 'here is finally a president who deeply understands the problems and complexity concerning race and its relation to poverty. (Obama has even talked about rolling back affirmative action and supports class based affirmative action, and not race based affirmative action, something that MLK also supported) No leader should expect to lead our country into post-poverty or post-racial times if they don't have the proper understanding of the problems of race. I applaud Bush for denouncing the noose and denouncing using the word "lynching" lightly, and it was admirable him for turning attention to Africa and AIDS. But as Katrina came and left, there was a long window of opportunity to begin a social experiment to tackle and address the problem of race and poverty, yet the experiment of constructing a Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East would be the only priority for this administration, and the people of Katrina were left with FEMA and formaldehyde laced trailers.

Anyhow, before the media repeatedly starts AGAIN asking the stupid question, "wait a minute, well WHO is Barack Obama? and WHAT are his views" I would implore them to read his books and you'll see his views on race, and his views certainly do not reflect black grievance, like those of his pastor, but admiration in the fact that "people can change" as he said in the South Carolina CNN debate when asked, "Do you think Bill Clinton was our first black president?"

Read an excerpt from a NYT book review, including a beautiful passage from Obama's book:

The Audacity of Hope hews closely to formula. Each of its nine chapters—on broad, thematic subjects like politics, opportunity, faith, race, and family—begins with an anecdote that suggests the point he wants to make about the subject, then moves on to his ruminations about it, and ends with another anecdote meant to drive the point home. These can tend toward the homiletic (the chapter on faith ends with the sentence "I know that tucking in my daughters that night, I grasped a little bit of heaven"). Most unusually for an American politician, though, he has a sense of historical irony—and is willing to articulate it. After being sworn in to the Senate he listens to a stirring speech of welcome by Senator Robert Byrd, who warns of the "dangerous encroachment, year after year, of the Executive Branch on the Senate's precious independence." "Listening to Senator Byrd," he reflects:

" I felt with full force all the essential contradictions of me in this new place, with its marble busts, its arcane traditions, its memories and its ghosts. I pondered the fact that, according to his own autobiography, Senator Byrd had received his first taste of leadership in his early twenties, as a member of the Raleigh County Ku Klux Klan, an association that he had long disavowed, an error he attributed—no doubt correctly—to the time and place in which he'd been raised, but which continued to surface as an issue throughout his career. I thought about how he had joined other giants of the Senate, like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Richard Russell of Georgia, in Southern resistance to civil rights legislation.

I wondered if this would matter to the liberals who now lionized Senator Byrd for his principled opposition to the Iraq War resolution—the MoveOn.org crowd, the heirs of the political counterculture the senator had spent much of his career disdaining. I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life—like most of ours—has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that sense I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate,whose rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America's founding : the bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate's role as a guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution. Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code, was the same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed men that had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its genius—yet blind to the whip and the chain."

courtesy of Dana Stevens:
Today’s NYT cover story on Obama’s late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, contains one passage that gave me a sinking feeling:

In Hawaii she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the poor.

Somewhere around the words “peasant blacksmithing,” I found myself thinking, “This man can never be president. His mother was just too cool.” American presidential mothers don’t drift bohemianly around the globe, marrying and divorcing foreigners, working for Third World development banks and discussing “esoteric Indonesian woodworking techniques” with their daughters. They are not named Stanley. They’re Barbaras and Dorothys; they wear pearls and host charity events. At the most, a presidential mother might, like Bill Clinton’s mother Virginia, be a working-class Southern widow abused by a rotten second husband. But that image still fit into a familiar American narrative of bootstrap pluck (and allowed Bill to keep telling that story about threatening his wife-beating stepfather with a golf club). Stanley Ann doesn’t sound like someone who needed that kind of help.

Obviously, people don’t cast their votes based on the biography of a candidate’s parent. But they do care about his or her familial story. (Indeed, as Hillary’s campaign has shown, sometimes that story can be hard to escape.) And the huge swath of the electorate that believes in a much more traditional notion of family (including not only evangelicals but Hispanic and white working-class Democrats) would no doubt balk at the very details in this piece that made me hoot “Right on!” One friend of Ms. Soetoro’s, discussing her two divorces, muses,  “She always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly essential or important.” Another friend, an anthropologist, references a “Javanese belief” that if a couple is unhappy, “It’s just stupid to stay married.” Word up, sister—but I wonder if those beliefs won’t ring an alarm bell for family-values voters already wary of Obama’s complicated racial and cultural back story.

Elsewhere in the article (which is a font of killer quotes), Obama’s Kansas-born grandmother, Stanley Ann's mother, is cited as saying “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me.” That skeptical xenophobia sounds like a much closer match to the worldview of most Americans than does Stanley Ann Soetoro’s brand of brainy bohemian globetrotting.

i dont know what world ferraro lives in, but obviously she has shown no curiosity about any other candidate other than hillary. she's not only close-minded about race, but about the candidacies of anyone else who ran.

Part of the reason Obama is so exciting to so many people (perhaps this only applies to the educated vote he keeps getting) is because he is such a cerebral guy... and for once this country could have a president who would sincerely be interested in tackling complex problems domestic and abroad.

 The reason Obama has been endorsed by nearly every professor or faculty member at Harvard Law School where he was a student and University of Chicago Law School where he taught (see huffpost's fundrace) (and also surprisingly none to hillary) is the reason why most of the educated probably support him, as conservative David Brooks points out

Brooks on Russert about Obama

I'm still hoping Hillary wins though, Obama is going to get mauled by the GOP while they make it look like McCain is taking the high road. The people in this country are for the most part, too stupid, too prejudiced, too suspicious to vote for Barack Hussein Obama. Obama will end up like John Kerry, just another loser in the Democratic party, and probably unable to run again for the presidency even when he does accumulate as much experience as John Kerry had when he ran in 04.

Primary Lessons:
What do the results so far tell us about Clinton and Obama as general election candidates?
by Jeff Greenfield

It's the political equivalent of "tastes great!" vs. "less filling!" among light-beer lovers: the Clinton-Obama battle over who will be a better general-election candidate based on the primary results. The Clinton campaign says she'd be the better fall candidate because she's stronger with her party's core of white working- and middle-class voters in Democratic states. The Obama campaign argues that he'd be better in the fall because he can attract independents, bring new younger voters to the polls, and compete in traditionally red states.

Who's right? Neither side. Why? Because they are both arguing from the false assumption that primary contests can provide a guide to the fall campaign. Look back across recent political history and you'll be hard-pressed to find such a link. Some of the counterexamples are blatantly obvious: In 1988, the Rev. Jesse Jackson won Democratic primaries in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia. Did that reveal Jackson's potential strength in the South as a general-election candidate? Of course not; it demonstrated that legions of white Southerners had fled the party in those states, leaving blacks a powerful voting bloc in the primary but insufficient in numbers to carry the general election. Or look at what happened in 1980 in the Michigan Republican primary. On May 20—well after Ronald Reagan had effectively clinched the GOP nomination—Michigan Republicans voted for George H.W. Bush in a landslide, 57.5 percent to 31.8 percent. Proof that Reagan would be weak in that state? That fall, he beat President Jimmy Carter there by six and a half points, a bigger margin than homeboy Gerald Ford had racked up against Carter four years earlier. Today, when journalists and campaigns set out to find "Reagan Democrats," they head straight for Macomb County, Mich.* There was no sign of enthusiasm for Reagan in the Republican primary of 1980 because Reagan Democrats weren't voting in the primary.

I offer this blindingly obvious point to suggest why it is mostly a fool's errand to find autumn portents in winter and spring primaries. To be even more blindingly obvious, the great majority of voters do not participate in the primaries.

 As of today, some 27 million people have votes in Democratic primaries and caucuses (counting Florida, where all the candidates were on the ballot, but not Michigan, where only Clinton and Chris Dodd were). In the 2004 general election, more than 122 million votes were cast. Any extrapolation about voting blocs based on primary results has to confront that elemental difference. Moreover, exit poll results from primaries don't always tell us what we think they tell us. Consider the much-sought-after independent voter. Independents are permitted to participate in primaries and caucuses in such competitive states as Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Hampshire. But exit polls simply ask respondents to identify themselves, so a registered Democrat or Republican who considers herself an independent thinker might tell an exit pollster she's "independent." In addition, even those voters who don't formally register with a party often have strong leanings one way or the other; the number of genuine "swing" voters is comparatively small. In the case of the current battle, we're divining, for example, whether Obama can draw white voters based on those who have decided to vote in Democratic primaries. We don't really know how this historic contest between a woman and an African-American is playing with white voters who are not part of the primary process. Maybe race and gender matter a lot less than they would have a few decades ago; maybe such voters are sitting this round out and will flock to the white guy in the fall. We are unlikely to get a persuasive answer to this question until the fall. Nor do we have any real clue about whether Clinton's showing among white working-class voters would mean much of anything should she be the Democrat to confront John McCain … or whether a campaign focused on the economy as opposed to national security would pull such voters to either Democrat. Can we guess? Sure. Can the primaries offer us actionable intelligence? Highly unlikely.

This is not to say that there are no clues at all to be gleaned from the primaries. Michael Barone—who is to political numbers what Bill James is to baseball statistics—offers this take on last week's Ohio primary: "In southeast Ohio, settled originally by Virginians and still Southern-accented today, Clinton carried all-white counties with 70 percent to 80 percent of the vote—more than she was carrying nearly all-white counties in central Texas. That raises doubts that Obama could run well in these counties, which provided critical votes in Bill Clinton's wins in Ohio in the 1990s and Jimmy Carter's narrow win there in 1976." Those findings have to give Obama backers pause.

If you're looking for better news for Obama, the measurable surge of younger voters in the primaries and caucuses suggests that the decadeslong wait for "the youth vote"—a wait that makes Godot look like the most punctual of men—may be over. After splitting their votes almost evenly between Gore and Bush in 2000, the 18- to 29-year-old cohort—some 20.5 million of them, by my exit poll arithmetic—produced a nine-point edge for John Kerry, or a boost of 2 million-plus votes. Greater numbers and a bigger margin for Obama in the fall could be decisive.

There's also one historical example that is heartbreakingly intriguing. When he won the 1968 Indiana primary, Robert Kennedy had the vote of a large number of conservative white working-class voters. (In 1970, two ex-Kennedy aides wrote a book debunking that claim; in his new book on the '68 race, The Last Campaign, historian Thurston Clarke debunks the debunkers.) There is anecdotal and statistical evidence suggesting that a chunk of the RFK primary voters wound up supporting George Wallace's third-party bid that November, when Democrat Hubert Humphrey ran against Nixon. We will never know whether Robert Kennedy could have kept those voters from defecting to Wallace—or whether the huge turnout of Hispanic and black voters for RFK in California that June would have occurred again in November and turned the tide in his favor in what was back then a Republican-tilting state.

Finally, there is one clear and consistent scenario in which primary contests provide telling clues about the fall: when an incumbent president faces a meaningful challenge for re-nomination within his own party. No president in modern times has ever survived such a challenge to win in the fall. Lyndon Johnson abdicated in 1968; Gerald Ford fended off Ronald Reagan in 1976 but lost that fall; Jimmy Carter beat Ted Kennedy but was swept away by Ronald Reagan four years later; and even George H.W. Bush, embarrassed in New Hampshire by Pat Buchanan, though never seriously threatened by him, had to invest so much time shoring up his base that the episode helped lead to his defeat in 1992. But the main lesson is that in searching the primary terrain for general-election hints, tread very carefully. As a rule, what happens in the primaries stays in the primaries.

by emily yoffe: Deborah Tannen, a linguist who writes about the differences between men and women, had a piece in the Washington Post about the double standard Hillary Clinton is subjected to. She cites the fact that when the New York Times endorsed her (how sexist of them!), they noted she was "brilliant if at times harsh-sounding." What is unfair about this? John McCain regularly gets accused of having an out-of-control temper. I've seen his (male) colleagues quoted as wondering if he has the temperament to be president. There is constant speculation as to whether Obama is tough enough. And John Edwards got tagged as a phony pretty boy. Is Tannen saying you can only say Clinton is "brilliant" but it's sexist to mention that she can also be a human threshing machine? Tannen goes on cite references to Clinton's years as first lady as another put-down of her—instead people should spend more time talking about her work as a senator. Well, Clinton explicitly and implicitly makes references to her years in the White House as a way of assuring that she has the experience to be president. That's why this knock on her supposed involvement with the Northern Ireland peace process was so cutting. And Tannen says talking about Clinton's failure to reform health care as first lady is unfair because as a senator she has been able to pass worthy, incremental changes in health-care policy. Again, what is unfair about pointing out that when Clinton had the executive power and the mandate for wholesale reform, she botched it? Surely Tannen does not mean to imply that simply criticizing a woman's personality or record is off limits.

By Lionel Beehner
Thank God Samantha Power has resigned from the Obama campaign. Her style of honest, brash, off-the-cuff statement-making has no place in presidential politics. Political operatives should not say anything other than the talking points handed down from the campaigns' higher-ups. That is what we the viewers and voters want--not unscripted asides of honesty and humanness, certainly not what one of Obama's chief advisors thinks about Ohio. Voters seek canned statements and platitudes like Hillary's "fool-me-once-shame-on-me" line, not outside-of-the-box thinking from Harvard folks like Power. Why? Because these statements have been vetted, battle-tested, and shoved through a focus-group blender and thus must convey to voters like me what the candidates really think.

In an ideal world, advisers and flacks would just read press releases on the air but unfortunately television networks feel they need to mask their operations as news-gathering. Whatever. Thankfully, America is nearing a state of moral bliss when every pundit, politician, and political operative is so straight-jacketed, so guarded against gotcha-journalists with Scottish accents, that nobody would dare use offensive, incendiary terms like "pimping" or "monster" ever again. Phew! American voters are not stupid--naïve, easily offended, yes--but they realize when they are being sold something that is honest and unscripted (Wait, did I just call Americans naïve? Is that offensive?? Should I resign??? Shit!! Wait, was that offensive, too????)

Note to presidential advisors: Please tell it from the memo, not from the heart. We Americans are too frail and easily offended to handle unscripted, candid comments.

why the hell is the media giving a total pass on Karl Rove? on the Don Siegelman story?

Isnt there any way to get this off the ground? Mass emailing complaints to news sponsors? Congressmen, judges?

As far as I know, the only high level government official working on this is John Kerry from the FCC.

I mean Karl Rove is working for McCain now and is going to beat Obama the same way he beat John Kerry and Al Gore and Don Siegelman.

I mean...wouldn't it be better for Democrats to be keeping Karl Rove too busy to help McCain by pushing this story harder?

actually, al-qaida thinks its an insult for any American politician who is a Christian to be thought of as a muslim. Anyone who has interest in protecting Israel is an enemy of Al-Qaida. There was an MSNBC clip a while ago about the uproar over that Somali-elder garb Obama was pictured wearing. It wasnt just the US in an uproar, Al-Qaida basically said Obama was not worthy of being called a Muslim. I guess having al-Qaida hate you is a good thing? here's a report from a while back about al-qaida and obama:

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/02/28/713681.aspx excerpt:

"In fact, Kohlmann added, al-Qaeda supporters are so insistent about their hatred for Obama that they have gone as far as to portray him as an "Iranian agent" secretly sent to take over the United States and fight a war against Sunni Muslims."

in 2006 Jane Hamsher wrote in her blog:

What the hell is Tim Russert asking Barack Obama to express his opinion about Harry Belafonte for? Harry Belafonte said George Bush was the "greatest terrorist in the world" this week, but it was virtually identical to a comment he made two weeks ago in Chile. Russert has had two weeks to ask anybody on his show about it; why does he save this particular question for Obama? What sort of special expertise does Obama have about Harry Belafonte, a private citizen with no connection to the Democratic party, that none of Russert's other guests would have?

It's interesting to note that the only other time Russert questioned anyone about Harry Belafonte before, according to what Glenn Greenwald (via email) could find was when he asked Colin Powell.

enough with the litmust tests and heresy trials

The Part Krugman Leaves Out
by http://eugene.dailykos.com/

I'm guessing mine won't be the first diary hashing out Krugman's latest attack on Obama and it certainly won't be the last. Other diaries will hopefully offer the kind of point by point deconstruction that I provided back in December.

My goal here is different. It's to point out the importance of what Krugman leaves out - because as any good academic knows, what you leave out is just as important as what you put in.

It's my contention that Krugman's column is fatally flawed by its absence of two related topics: Hillary Clinton and political empowerment. To Krugman this campaign is all about who talks a progressive game. Ironically, the person who Krugman believes best spoke that language - Edwards - himself offered some very centrist things on  health care, for example (he supported a neoliberal solution and pooh-poohed single-payer).

But as we are left with two candidates - Edwards has been gone for over a month - it is reasonable to ask if Krugman's criticisms of Obama are sufficient to suggest Obama would be a bad nominee.

All in all, the Democrats are in a place few expected a year ago. The 2008 campaign, it seems, will be waged on the basis of personality, not political philosophy. If the magic works, all will be forgiven. But if it doesn’t, the recriminations could tear the party apart.

Krugman closes his column on this note, suggesting that Obama is a step in the wrong direction because he's not a progressive. Never mind that Krugman is flat wrong to charge Obama with using right-wing talking points on health care - mandated insurance is a fundamentally right-wing concept, after all - even if we agreed with Krugman re: Obama, what then? Are we to somehow believe that Hillary Clinton is running a campaign based on political philosophy and not personality?

Hillary's recent campaign rhetoric has focused on these oh-so-progressive matters:

• Who can be trusted to answer a phone in the middle of the night
• Who can get the biggest bump out of SNL
• Whether Obama really is Muslim
• Which states' votes don't count

Krugman is singling out Obama here but giving Hillary a pass. Hillary's campaign has never really emphasized progressive philosophy in any meaningful way. She has not leveled any systematic critique of the Bush/Republican philosophy of government. Instead she has frequently voted to enact that philosophy, most notably in the fall of 2002 when she endorsed Bush and the neocons' Iraq vision. Hillary's health care plan is more conservative now than it was 14 years ago, she spent years helping reinforce the notion that free trade agreements are good and useful, and she has embraced, rather than rejected, the role of lobbyists in governance.

Perhaps Obama is guilty of some or all of these charges. But why single him out in a column, Krugman? By not pointing out how unprogressive Hillary is on the issues, he is doing his readers a significant disservice.

Krugman's other blind spot is more fundamental. Like many economic populists, he is inattentive to the importance of small-d democratic activism in the effort to implement progressive policy. The 30 years of neoliberal economic policy that Krugman now wants us to reject were enabled by the demobilization of the American citizen. Since the 1970s Americans' access to power has been steadily limited. Their voice and their role have been belittled and ignored by the entire media and political establishment.

Democrats have been especially guilty of this - particularly the Clintons. They have routinely and repeatedly, as a core political philosophy (see Paul, we Obama supporters really do care about that stuff), sought to conduct a top-down politics in which voters and Americans merely ratify decisions as quietly and submissively as corporate shareholders. To the Clintons, our role has been to give them the votes they feel they deserve, and shut up and go quietly along in the meantime.

This strategy backfired dramatically in 1994, when alienated Democratic activists stayed home as Republicans won the House. In the aftermath, the Clintons chose to embrace Republican ideas - precisely the charge Krugman levels at Obama - instead of push back against them. The 1990s should have been golden years for Democrats with a popular president and a strong economy - instead they were the hardest times the party had seen in 70 years.

After the Clintons left office in 2001 Democratic activists were left alone, unsupported by the party structure the Clintons had left, to rebuild the party's fortunes in the face of the nation's most dire crisis in many decades. Instead of helping promote these bottom-up, progressive reforms Hillary tried to sabotage them - first by voting for a war whose main goal was the creation of a permanent Republican majority at home and second by, as Ari Berman explains in the newest issue of The Nation, undermining Howard Dean and his 50 state strategy to the point of trying to keep him out of the DNC chairman's position.

In the current race, Hillary is arguing that whole states are irrelevant. As hekebolos and thereisnospoon have described in great detail her campaign has monkeyed with the democratic process in Nevada. They are, according to some reports, trying the same in Texas. They refuse to support new primaries in either MI or FL, trying instead to seat delegates won in undemocratic contests. And Hillary and her subordinates have routinely implied that if the voters do not ratify her "right" to the nomination she will go around them and try and force the superdelegates to do it instead.

Ironically, Hillary's approach to political philosophy is very deeply corporate. It is an upper management exec telling the folks in the cubes to show up when they are told and do as they are told. Dissent is neither encouraged nor welcomed.

Obama, on the other hand, has made the mobilization of new voters and a new movement the core of his campaign. Krugman disdains this by not discussing it, but that only shows how little Krugman understands about how economic and policy change will happen. Unless Americans are mobilized to become politically active, unless they are brought into the system, welcomed with open arms, and encouraged to remain a part of the process, the kind of progressive philosophies and goals we seek will NEVER come about.

Krugman doesn't seem to grasp that means and ends must be harmonious. A top-down corporate approach to politics is not going to somehow produce progressive outcomes. But a progressive, small-d democratic approach to politics is FAR more likely to achieve this.

For - and I want to close on this point - economic democracy requires political democracy. For progressive ideas and goals to be articulated and realized, as many Americans as possible must become participants in the process. When they are shut out or silenced or deemed unimportant, they lose the power to control their own lives and destinies, and one side effect is, as we have seen, rampant inequality.

Obama's campaign is one of the most progressive in modern memory - certainly in my lifetime. I cannot think of anything that reinforces progressive philosophies more strongly than bringing empowerment to the masses. Obama's campaign has mobilized millions of Americans to become active participants in the governance of their nation. That WILL outlast Obama. Win or lose, whether Obama betrays us or not, he has already produced a progressive achievement that we have been waiting 40 years to see.