Former Chicago NOW President switches from Clinton to Obama
With a H/T to dkos diarist brainwrap, here's a couple very interesting video clips. In short, Lorna Brett Howard, a former president of the Chicago chapter of NOW, has taped a pretty devastating account of why she recently switched from supporting Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama.
Brainwrap summarizes the background on the video thus:
...[she] currently works for some unnamed major pro-choice organization in New York (thus she has heavy connections in both IL and NY, appropriately enough).
She says that she was supporting Hillary up through Iowa and New Hampshire; in Iowa she personally witnessed Hillary's people lying flat-out to young women about Obama's record on choice issues, telling them that Obama was "weak" on choice issues.
She says she worked closely with Obama in Illinois while he was a state Senator in the '90's, and knows for a fact that he had a 100% record with every pro-choice organization there is.
She then says that even after the Iowa incidents, she stuck with Hillary through New Hampshire--where she saw the flyer being passed around by the Hillary camp once again accusing Obama of being "weak" on choice; this was the final straw for her, so she switched over to supporting Obama.
She taped a second video ad describing "how Obama was the ONLY U.S. Senator to help out the pro-choice cause during the South Dakota abortion ban brouhaha".
The Moderate Voice highlighted a website called Watching America whose tagline is:
"Discover What the World Thinks About U.S. With Translated Foreign News Available NOWHERE Else In English"
Robin Koerner's post on The Moderate Voice reviews the world's fascination with Barack Obama and his symbolic importance.
The prospect of a black leader is engaging the world’s media for some very important reasons.
First, the selection of a leader from an ethnic minority is extremely progressive prima facie.
Second, it would be all the more dramatic following a period of extreme liberal retreat and toothlessness.
Third, the choice faced by America has a special poignancy and self-defining importance by virtue of the brutality and deep cultural importance of the still-raw history that defines the place of African-Americans in the United States.
Fourth - and this is the reason that might be less obvious from the media rooms of these States but may be the most interesting - every open country faces its own huge questions around the integration and enfranchisement of its minorities, and have their own cultural groups which could not easily be imagined as providing a leader: this huge choice for America could, in a way, propel the developed world’s bastion of conservatism, Bush’s United States, to a beacon of progressive societal choice, which would, by its existence alone, shine a new light on racial issues particular to countries very far away, both geographically and politically. And for that reason, whether explicitly stated or not, the foreign press watch Obama’s journey to the White House as closely as they’ve watched any.
The list of articles she points to come from Germany, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, Israel, Canada and the UK.
Found this a couple weeks back but forgot to post it. Here's a really thoughtful piece by a former Kerry staffer, Meredith Chaiken, about how difficult it's been to decide among the Democratic candidates this time around.
In 2003, I spent eight months in New Hampshire with the John Kerry campaign. New Hampshire cherishes its privileged voting status, so Granite Staters gleefully fill their calendars with kaffeeklatches and town hall meetings. They watch campaign ads - on purpose! And yet, well into December of that year, many voters still hadn't picked their man.
I couldn't fathom how people could be so saturated with political information and still not know how they were going to vote.
But now, even after the Iowa caucuses and with the New Hampshire primary just two days away, I find myself struggling to decide which Democratic candidate to support. Since I'm a D.C. resident, this has nearly no electoral significance. But since I'm a former campaign staffer and now a professional pollster, it has had an intense psychological impact. I'm tormented! How could this be? I've built my career on persuading others to support a certain candidate, and here I can't even convince myself. It's January in possibly the longest and most heavily covered campaign season in history. Why can't I make up my mind?
Meredith nailed it on the head in this assessment:
What I'm coming to realize is that the hard part isn't always learning about the candidates and their differences. It's deciding which differences - in terms of issues, character, experience - are most important to us in this particular moment.
-- Kid Oakland posted a really interesting diary about Barack Obama and and his approach/philosophy towards technology. I'm glad to see a presidential candidate thinking about this end of business and economics.
And speaking of cool technology, here's a flickr slideshow from mybarackobama.com
-- An article on Mahvin for those who make up Mahvin's secret fan club. Ok, so my Massachusetts accent sucks. It's really hard to imitate those ar sounds.
Russ Feingold demonstrated why he's one of my favorite senators again. And why I'm so proud to claim that I helped elect him to office the first and second times. He engages with the dailykos community on the legislation to amend the FISA act and responds directly to their comments in an informative update to his diary, It's Not Just About Immunity.
His points on the FISA bill and what will happen are worth reading.
I know I've mentioned this before but it still confounds me that Richard Cohen remains employed by the Washington Post despite demonstrating some of the sloppiest journalism around. BarbinMD has the specifics on where he went wrong.
Ignore the Oppression Olympics. Ultimately it matters little whether sexism or racism is a bigger challenge. Electing the best candidate for the job is far more important than superficial banter. We need not get distracted from the true purpose of an election, which is to select the person who can do the best job and be the best steward of our trust. So long as there are people, there will be inequality and oppression.
He's done it again. Discarding the bits of reality that don't agree with his perception. H/T to TPM.
In public, President Bush has been careful to reassure Israel and other allies that he still sees Iran as a threat, while not disavowing his administration's recent National Intelligence Estimate. That NIE, made public Dec. 3, embarrassed the administration by concluding that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003, which seemed to undermine years of bellicose rhetoric from Bush and other senior officials about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. "He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity.
This remark has three baleful consequences. First, it can't help but demoralize the intelligence community. NIEs are meant, ultimately, for only one reader, the president; and here's the president telling another world leader that he doesn't believe it because, well, he doesn't agree with it.
Second, it reinforces the widespread view that the president views intelligence strictly as a political tool: When it backs up his policies, it's as good as gold; when it doesn't, it's "just guessing." This result is that all intelligence is degraded and devalued, at home and abroad. Let's say that six months from now Bush publicizes an NIE concluding that Iran has resumed its nuclear-weapons program or that, say, North Korea is reprocessing more plutonium. Given that he pooh-poohed an NIE that rubbed against his own views, why should anyone take him seriously for embracing an NIE that confirms them?
Third, by telling Olmert that it's all right to ignore the NIE, Bush is in effect telling him that Israel should go ahead and behave as if its findings had never been published. Hirsh reports that, when Olmert was asked whether he felt reassured by Bush's words, he replied, "I am very happy."
National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a "walk in the park," according to an interview published in the New Yorker's print edition today.
Debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “will be a walk in the park compared to this,” McConnell said. “this is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”
The article, which profiles the 65-year-old former admiral appointed by President George W. Bush in January 2007 to oversee all of America's intelligence agencies, was not published on the New Yorker's Web site. (It can be read here in pdf).
McConnell is developing a Cyber-Security Policy, still in the draft stage, which will closely police Internet activity.
"Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search," author Lawrence Wright pens.
“Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation, he said," Wright adds. "Giorgio warned me, 'We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'"
A zero-sum game is one in which gains by one side come at the expense of the other. In other words -- McConnell's aide believes greater security can only come at privacy's expense.
The rest of the article does nothing to ease my concern.
-- Karen Tumulty at Time's Swampland wrote about JK's choice of Obama yesterday and I suspect she got it pretty close to right.
-- One more brick in the wall, one more bit of evidence about the inter-relationships of the Villagers inside the Beltway.
-- Hard to believe that I'd agree with anything posted on Powerline but I must agree with his perplexed post over this one.
-- Watch out for those 5 year oldterrorists! The Boing-boing post goes onto say: "You know, if you wanted to systematically discredit the idea of a Department of Homeland Security, if you wanted to make an utter mockery of aviation safety, you could not do a better job than this. local tv video link"
-- Ran across a mention of a June 2007 interview with John Kerry that's interesting in light of the campaign season now upon us. It's an interview of Kerry by the Center for Public Integrity concerning his views of campaign financing, including the 04 campaign.
-- Black Enterprise Endorses Obama for President - Founder, Chairman & Publisher Earl G. Graves states his case for supporting Senator Obama.
-- Jill Zuckman from The Swamp on how JK came to endorse Obama:
The meeting of the minds between Senators Barack Obama and John Kerry took place slowly over the course of the last year, resulting in today's endorsement.
According to a source close to Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee for president, the two senators began getting to know each other with a dinner back in March, several meetings in Kerry's Senate hideaway, and many talks on the phone about the issues of the day.
But the pivotal moment came when Kerry returned from a November trip to Africa. At that point, the senator from Massachusetts told aides what a difference it would make "to have a United States president who could talk to the whole world in a different way."
The men talked often in the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses, with Kerry committing to join Obama on the campaign trail at whatever time he and his advisers thought would be the best moment.
Her post also includes the transcript of JK's remarks as prepared for the speech he delivered in Charleston.
-- As far as being an activist and organizer is concerned I thought this background that came out yesterday was interesting.
Wikipedia:
In the 1930s, Alinsky organized the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago (made famous by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle on the horrific working conditions in the Union Stock Yards). He went on to found the Industrial Areas Foundation while organizing the Woodlawn neighborhood, which trained leftist organizers and assisted in the founding of community organizations around the country. In Rules for Radicals (his final work, published one year before his death), he addressed the 1960s generation of leftist radicals, outlining his views on organizing for mass power. The documentary, "The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy,"[1] claims that "Alinsky championed new ways to organize the poor and powerless that created a backyard revolution in cities across America." * * *
[2] Alinsky is often credited with laying the foundation for the grassroots political organizing that dominated the 1960s.[3] Later in his life he encouraged stockholders in public corporations to lend their votes to "proxies", who would vote at annual stockholders meetings in favor of social justice. While his grassroots style took hold in American activism, his call to stock holders to share their power with disenfranchised working poor only began to take hold in U.S. progressive circles in the 1990s, when shareholder actions were organized against American corporations.
and this
Alinsky was the subject of Hillary Rodham's senior honors thesis at Wellesley College, "There Is Only The Fight...": An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.[11] Rodham commented on Alinsky's "charm," but rejected grassroots community organizing as outdated. Once Hillary Rodham Clinton became First Lady of the United States, the thesis was suppressed by the White House for fear of being associated too closely with Alinsky's ideas.[12]
Alinsky also had a significant influence on Barack Obama, who is a United States Senator and candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.[11] Obama particularly used Alinsky's techniques while participating in Chicago community organizations in the 1980s.[13]
It appears to me that Obama and Clinton interpret Alinsky in opposite directions making this a fascinating topic.
I don't think it's about people power. I think it's about participation. And I think there's a very important distinction there that the netroots has been unable to engage.
"People power" is shorthand for participatory democracy--the 1960s theory of government that led to experiments like Jonestown. It's a failed political theory for the most part.
"Participation" (ironically), is shorthand for deliberative democracy--a constitution based theory of government that grew out of the argument between Jefferson and the more conservative participants at constitutional convention. It's our system.
What we want is to repair our deliberative democracy, not to reinvent our democracy. I think people are spinning our wheels in the idea of reinventing things through people-power, when what we want is for the system to work well.
This is one of the most basic distinctions in political theory. I think most netroots folks do not even realize that by voicing their quest for 'people power,' they inadvertently embrace the idea that our constitution based system is unfair--which they do not believe. That's why the Dean movement scared the hell out of people instead of making them excited--because they heard all this 'people power' talk and they thought of the Jacobins, the terror. That is so not what the netroots is about. We are about a healthy, functioning deliberative democracy. Institutions where citizens exchange ideas and feed them up through the system for more effective government. That's what we believe, that's what we work to repair everyday. The key element in that is a functioning free press, which has collapsed in the past ten years.
That's why the Obama campaign succeeds, but the Edwards campaign falters. Obama is the quintessential deliberative messenger. Edwards is the participatory message. Clinton is also deliberative, but in a broken way.
-- In the "learn something new every day" category, I ran across this comment.
...At least Bush Sr. realized that it's a hopeless job to try to occupy Iraq. He even wrote a Time Magazine article with Brent Scowcroft about it back in 1998 (since then scrubbed from their site) http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm
While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.
-- nyceve does it again with this diary, "I'm going naked". If you haven't seen her diaries before, they're well worth your time.
-- Gail Collins opens with a great paragraph in this NYT column:
Whatever your politics, people, you have to admit this is one great presidential race. What next? Fred Thompson takes Florida on a sympathy vote from retirees? (They like a leader who’s really, really rested.) John Edwards finds a new emotion for South Carolina? (Anger is so cold weather.) I don’t think anyone can top Mike Gravel’s speech to the New Hampshire high school students when he told them to avoid alcohol and stick with marijuana. But really, we’re ready for anything.
-- Dana does blogging... sort of. Dan Froomkin drew my attention to this:
From Dana Perino's press gaggle yesterday: "One note. As we leave for the Middle East trip today, we will begin posting periodic updates from the senior staff that's traveling with the President on a website -- on our website, whitehouse.gov. It will be called "Trip Notes from the Middle East." This is new to us. We encourage you to log on and to check back often to read some of the updates that the staff will be posting throughout the trip. So it will be just a little bit of a blog."
Q: "Blog?"
Perino: "A little bit like a blog, yes -- dare I say."
Well, Dana, nice try but not quite a blog.
-- Dan Froomkin also does a nice summary on the White House email situation in Email Watch.
-- And last but not least, Dan pointed out a good cartoon from Luckovich.
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. left, waves to the crowd after being introduced and endorsed by former Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., during a rally on the College of Charleston campus in Charleston, S.C., Thursday, Jan. 10, 2008. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
I like this picture of the two at work during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing for Gen. Petraeus on Sept. 11, 2007.
UPDATED: KerryVision should have has video capture of their speeches today up later.
UPDATE 2: Nice report from WaPo's The Trail blog on the event in Charleston.
If you haven't seen Obama's speech after the New Hampshire primary, give yourself a treat and watch.
Part of me wants to say can we just make Obama chief speech-maker regardless of who wins the nomination? That's treating his import too lightly but what a delight to hear someone who sets out his vision and brings us into it.
Jim Sleeper has identified part of the appeal of Obama's speech in his TPMCafe post:
The preacherly cadences in Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech last night in Nashua deepened his two greatest symbolic promises: Domestically, he makes being an American beautiful again because, in him, it makes achievable what is still incredible to many -- a 400-year-old hope that we can untangle the race knot we’ve tied ourselves in since 1607. “It’s not something he’s doing,” Dartmouth Professor Joseph Bafumi told the New York Times; “it’s something he’s being.”
Internationally, therefore, Obama reminds multitudes of what has fascinated them about America – not just its wealth and power, which are trashy and brutal even when irresistible, but a folksy universalism that disposes Americans to say “Hi” to anyone rather than “Heil” to a leader, to give the other person a fair shot, and, out of that kind of strength, to take a shot at the moon.
Our wealth and power often subvert what’s best in us. But because Obama knows human failings make that more complicated than either conservative moralism or leftist anti-capitalism alone could explain, his promise runs deeper than the poetry of campaigning.
[...]
Obama says “Yes we can,” arguing that the movement his campaign is building will sustain him as president against countervailing powers...His campaign confirms many Americans' yearning to believe again that, unlike that of almost any other nation in history, the national identity of the United States was founded not on myths of primordial kinship, of “blood and soil,” but on a more universal experiment that enjoins all Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” as Alexander Hamilton put it.
Yes We Can. Simple words for a candidate who brings the promise of so much more.
UPDATE: H/T to Populista for this excerpt of the speech transcript.
But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.
Yes we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.
Yes we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.
Yes we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.
Yes we can.
It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.
And so tomorrow, as we take this campaign South and West; as we learn that the struggles of the textile worker in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in America's story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea
-- Here's John Dickerson at Slate looking at two rallies, one for Obama, one for Clinton at the same High School gym on two successive days ... H/T to TPM
-- Diarist 'Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse' put up a remarkable diary, Telecom Immunity Gives Bush Immunity. It's lengthy but worth the time. It's nice when the legal types "peel the onion" in plain English.
My judicial clerkship with state supremes taught me that arguments are a little like onions: Sometimes you need to peel away the surface claims to uncover the real issues.
Bush argues that retroactive immunity is imperative to protect the telecoms from financial ruin from lawsuits and to avoid unfairly punishing patriotic telecoms which cooperated after receiving assurances of lawfulness. Neither of these grounds is presently an issue facing the telecoms. The law already immunizes telecoms and if financial ruin becomes an issue, there are remedies which have been used in the past which do not involve retroactive immunity. In fact, there is no political or legislative precedent for retroactive immunity under these circumstances.
If the telecoms do not actually need immunity at this time to address issues that presently do not exist, what is Bush's real motive for pushing retroactive immunity now? The answer lies in what may happen to Bush if the telecoms are not provided immunity now: The courts may review evidence showing that Bush acted illegally. Telecom immunity would provide grounds to dismiss the lawsuits to prevent the disclosure of this evidence. However, if the telecom immunity clause only provided immunity to telecoms, then Bush would not be protected from other forums --- like independent media, prosecutors and Congress --- that could investigate his domestic surveillance programs.
Coincidentally, the telecom immunity clause is structured to also provide retroactive immunity to Bush.
-- I disagreed with a post (actually the title of the post) that Booman put up last week but I have to say in all fairness that he's a little closer with this one:
-- I can't say I've monitored reports about the relationship between the media and the military all that closely but I ran across this article yesterday. I found Sec. Gates' comment in it quite interesting.
“The press is not the enemy,” Mr. Gates tells military audiences, including at the service academies, “and to treat it as such is self-defeating.”
Channeling. Mahablog does it again. BTW, Vegetable is also known as David Brooks. Looks like he eventually found his way to the right parking lot. At any rate, Mahablog sets him straight on his column today:
Because, dear Vegetable, it’s not about ideology.
For the past several years, “bipartisan” has meant “agreeing with Republicans,” with Republican defined as “an ideologically blinkered whackjob who takes marching orders from Richard Mellon Scaife and who would sell out the Constitution in an eyeblink for the sake of more power and some tax cuts.” And the effect on America — nay, the world — of this “bipartisanship” has been devastating.
Now bobbleheads like the Vegetable are trying to redefine “bipartisan” as a requirement that right-wing ideology must be honored and included in all policy decisions, even though a majority of the American people are rejecting it wholesale. And we must do this because, you know, it’s nice. It’s like when you were seven and your mother made you share your toys with Cousin Maggie even after she deliberately popped the heads off all your Ken dolls.
Brooks’s idea is that, out of some sense of etiquette, politics and policies coming out of Washington must honor some ideological mean. Obama’s idea is that government ought to be responding to what a majority of Americans want it to do.
To me, that’s always been the foundation of progressivism — government that genuinely responds to the will of We, the People. It’s not about loyalty to a menu of policies like cutting or raising taxes or growing or shrinking government. If We, the People, genuinely want to starve government of tax revenues so it can be drowned in a bathtub, fine. If the majority really want our domestic needs ignored for the sake of becoming an unstoppable imperialist might, then so be it.
[...]
But just as his appeal is not about ideology, it’s also not about policy. It’s about democracy that’s not in name only. As Digby wrote the other day,
When people say they want change it’s not because they are tired of “partisan bickering” (which basically consists of derisive Republican laughter.) They’re sick of a government that does exactly the opposite of what they want it to do.
The experience of the past several years is that Republicans expect to be congratulated for making government do the exact opposite of what you want it to do. Democrats may express regret for it, but government still does the exact opposite of what you want it to do... why do we have to put up with the wingnuts and their failed policies at all?
[...]
I suspect the Obama surge isn’t about Obama. I think it’s about long-growing, pent-up frustration with unresponsive government. Obama is becoming the rallying point for people who want real change, dammit, not promises and apologies.
Though I think the Obama surge has something to do with Obama, I think she's onto something there. People voted for change in November 2006. The message was not received very clearly in Washington, DC.
Just think of it as the people turning up the amplifier.
I've been thinking a lot about one of my friends the last few days. She's been an Obama supporter since the day she found out that he was thinking about running. I was with her when she got his autograph on her copy of his book at YearlyKos this summer and declared to everyone that we met afterwards her supreme happiness with life in general.
Well, Madame Defarge, I'm guessing that everyone around you since last Wednesday has been similarly greeted. And now that they're running out of ballots for the Democratic Primary in New Hampshire, I have the feeling that tomorrow we'll be scraping you off the bottom of the clouds in the sky.
Youtube blogger microspect has nailed the same actor being used twice in 2 different focus groups representing different views in polling for Fox News. Watch the video.
Don't think those are quite the words I'd use to describe it. And as for RedState's reaction to the Dem side of the primary, the main impact seems to be the addition of a photo atop their main column today showing the fiery crash of the Hindenburg with the text: Congrats Obama! So much for Hilary's inevitability
-- Charles Peters, the founder of the Washington Monthly, has an op-ed at the Washington Post:
People who complain that Barack Obama lacks experience must be unaware of his legislative achievements. One reason these accomplishments are unfamiliar is that the media have not devoted enough attention to Obama's bills and the effort required to pass them, ignoring impressive, hard evidence of his character and ability.
Since most of Obama's legislation was enacted in Illinois, most of the evidence is found there -- and it has been largely ignored by the media in a kind of Washington snobbery that assumes state legislatures are not to be taken seriously.
-- Kevin Drum adds his two cents about Obama's skill as a legislator. The update from Archpundit is interesting.
-- Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger report also comments on the Washington Monthly editor's op-ed about Obama's legislative skills, Archpundit's comment and adds in this link to an Obsidian Wings post by Hilzoy written over a year ago about Obama's achievements in the Senate.
Populism clearly is distressing to Bwana. How he longs for the days when well-bred aristocrats in powdered wigs and satin coats gathered in tastefully decorated drawing rooms to make decisions on behalf of the simple peasants.
It's amazing how close you can feel to people you've never met in person, people you've come to know through bits and bytes on a computer screen.
Major Andy Olmsted, one of the first 3 US soldiers killed in Iraq in 2008 and a blogger at Obsidian Wings, took the time to write a good-bye message to his blogging friends. Go read... after you locate the box of kleenex.
My deepest condolences to Major Olmsted's family and friends, his army buddies and his blogging community.
---
Update: Found this photo and a really nice article about Major Olmsted at the Rocky Mountain News blog.
Saudi Arabia's best-known blogger has been detained by the Saudi government. The Christian Science Monitor reports that "Farhan told The Washington Post and others in early December that an Interior Ministry official had warned him that he would be detained because of his online support for a group of men arrested in February and held without charge or trial."
Naturally his blog is written in Arabic but given the attention being drawn to his plight, his friends have developed a widget that translates some of his words into English for non-Arabic speakers to embed in their blogs.
Mark Halperin has posted a press pool report that recounts a scene in Iowa today where Barack Obama faced still more questions about his religion from voters who have no idea that he's a Christian:
He reached over the counter and shook hands with workers at the Subway sandwich shop.
Zanata Moore-El asked Obama if he was an atheist.
“I’m a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ,” Obama replied. “Don’t read e-mails.”
E-mails have circulated in recent weeks saying Obama is a Muslim or an atheist or took his oath of office on a Quran instead of a bible, none of which his true.
“I hated having to ask him that,” Moore-El said. “But I heard he was like an atheist. I don’t want a president who’s an atheist. I’m a firm believer in God. I just really wanted to make sure because I really wanted to vote for him and he has some good topics and everything.”
Just to hit this point again, this sort of stuff reminds us just how much is at stake -- and how much may be at stake again soon -- when we do things like demand that The Washington Post state firmly and unequivocally that rumors of Obama's Muslim past are false.
This could only get more pressing, not less. A recent poll found that more than 80% of Americans don't know that Obama is a Christian. If Obama becomes the Dem nominee you can bet that the rumors of his shadowy Muslim past will ratchet up a thousand fold. And if you don't think that this sort of thing can make a difference in a general election, you're kidding yourself.
As Greg Sargent noted "if one big news org's report aggressively call the rumors out as false, another report will follow suit, and another, and another, and so on. And just maybe we might end up with an electorate that's at least a tad informed on the question."
Here's a challenge to the Washington Post and the New York Times and the other influential news organizations of our country to step up to the plate and set the record straight in unequivocal terms.
-- NY Timesflubs up again... though they did try to clean up the act. How is it they can reduce the Obama victory to a 'win over racism'? I think Miss Laura got it right: "I'm not sure who that insults more, Obama, the people of Iowa, or the readers of the New York Times."
...According to estimates by CIRCLE (pdf) youth vote turnout at the caucus tripled tonight, rising from 4% to 11%. Within the Democratic caucus, over 46,000 young people participated, and young voters comprised 22% of all caucus-goers. According to entrance polls by CNN, 57% of those 17-29 year old caucus goers stood up to caucus for Barack Obama. Tonight, they drove his campaign to victory.
The numbers themselves were larger than expected, especially considering the early caucus date during winter break for most colleges. But no one who has been paying attention to young voters in the past four years should be surprised that young Iowans played such a significant role in tonight's caucus.
I have to admit a bit of sentimentality. I loved all the speeches tonight -- from Edwards', to Clintons', to Obama's. I'm proud of my party. I'm hopeful for the future.
In a week, I may get cynical again as a few lonesome Democrats, led by Chris Dodd, fight another impossible battle against a terrible FISA bill. We'll see Harry Reid, the rest of our party's leadership, and many Democrats with them sell out key progressive principles out of terror that Mr. 24% will say "boo!" They'll sell out our troops in Iraq, lard up on pork, and forget the promises that gave them their Congressional majorities in the first place. What do they care? Republicans are so pathetic, that even an ineffective Democratic Party will run roughshod over them.
Sigh. The cynicism will return.
But tonight, seeing what transpired in Iowa, I can't help but be hopeful for our party's long-term future. The youth vote is turning out big, and turning out for us. Independents have had enough of Republicans and are trending our way. The center is moving leftward for the first time in a generation.
This was never a short-term project. It's always been a long-term challenge. And we'll have many disappointments along the way. But tonight, I got a glimpse of the promised land, and it's a place I want to reach.
I'm so relieved. I've wanted him to do well but a part of me has been hesitant to jump in with both feet. I did so with John Kerry in 2004. It took me a long time to recover from the hurt of his defeat (which may not have been so much a defeat as a theft).
Now here we go again. But the US needs a change so desperately. We need to restore the rule of law in our country. We need to restore our government, our diplomacy, our economy, our care for the people of the United States of America.
That's a tall order.
That's what is needed though and whoever ends up as the Democratic nominee, Obama, Edwards or Clinton, I will not be unhappy. The Democratic candidate field is so impressive this year. And I do want to give a nod to Senators Dodd and Biden who added to the depth of the field though they've now withdrawn from the race.
Well, it's onto New Hampshire and then the rest of the primaries. And may all of us in the US be the real winners this time.
So, it was never about Kerry. And the question remains: Have we learned the lessons of 2004, or are we going to let fear and smear put another Swift Boat Liar-funded incompetent in the White House?
Whenever you see a John McCain or Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani TV ad, campaign sign or bumper sticker, just remember that money's coming from rich Republicans with a history of lies and deceit, and not 'the other side of the story'.
KV's video clip of testimony of Sam Fox answering Senator Kerry's question during his ambassadorial hearing in the Senate is particularly interesting.
-- George Orwell must be spinning in his grave. The TSA has now implemented another of the practices that Orwell predicted. Are you ready for facecrimes?
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners are learning to recognize a special set of forbidden facial expressions. If your face slips into one of these during a TSA inspection, you will be taken aside and given a more detailed screening...
Let me quote from George Orwell's, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Part 1, Chapter 5):
He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
I found this graph to say more about the US economy and the welfare of the average citizen than anything I've seen in a long time.
What's the basis for the figures? AfferentInput crunched the latest numbers income distribution from the CBO per this post which has a very straightforward explanation of what he did.
[H/T to Jamess at dkos for the original graph and his reference to Mike Caulfield at Blue Hampshire for his post which is also worth reading.]
Take another look at the Y-axis. That's -30 on the bottom.
My previous posts focused on change in share of income over time. Those posts showed that the highest 5% of income earners have greatly increased their share of total income, whereas the bottom 90% has actually decreased in share of income. That's a bit meta, given that it doesn't take into account overall increases in total income. I decided to create some new figures that just focus on income.
Some notes about what I did, first. I used the data that the CBO released last week. I used after-tax income; this is important because it is a more conservative assessment of income. If I used pre-tax income, the differences I show below would be even more exaggerated. In addition, given that some groups don't pay any federal income taxes, I felt it was probably better to use after-tax income so that we're comparing apples to apples. The data came from page 1C in their spreadsheet.
He goes onto give more detail about his analysis and then provides this chart which is equally interesting, IMO.
The fig below shows percent change in income since 1979 adjusted for inflation. As you can see, every group is making more money now than they did in 1979. Yet some groups are doing a little bit better than others.
This headline from Washington Technology, an IT Contractors news site, caught my eye: USAF wants to build Cyber Control System. What does that mean? The article describes it as "a command and control system that would support defensive and offensive operations in the event of an all-out attack on the country’s information infrastructure."
Cyber forces "must be capable of producing real-time analysis and developing courses of action in shorter periods of time in order to execute selected [courses of action] and assess the impacts of their actions…before any potential adversary has time to react," the document states.
Like traditional command and control systems, the Cyber Control System would generate various products, including tasking orders, battle damage assessments and incident reports.
The Air Force is in the process of building a Cyberspace Command under the jurisdiction of the 8th Air Force, with plans to formally establish it in 2008.
I'm sure others more expert than I will be wondering just what impact this will have on our civilian version and on things like a citizen's right to privacy which is already under such heavy assault.
Paging the EFF and whoever else would monitor something like this. How about Congress? Would that we had a Congress that actually did investigate and then shut down actions which are clearly against the peoples' will.
