Blue Spot

Got the following in my inbox yesterday from Justin Krebs of Drinking Liberally. Sounds like Justin is not very happy with either candidate.

Conventional wisdom says that Obama
caved on FISA & talked up faith-based programs
because he's appealing to "Independents."

Who knew independents oppose the Constitution?

Obama HAD to disavow Wes Clark's comments --
though Clark only questioned his experience as leader
& specifically honored his courage and will --
since "dishonoring" McCain would turn off independents.

Who knew independents are so ill-informed?

And McCain keeps saying he's a "maverick"
as he continues his "Straight Talk Express"
because these words appeal to independents.

Who knew independents liked slogans so much?!

If "independent" voters read only the spin,
& don't read the Constitution or the news,
maybe we shouldn't ask them to decide elections.

Or maybe "independent" really means something else.

And maybe "independent" candidates
who shy away from principled stands
aren't what we're looking for either.

It's time we take strong positions,
stop listening to the media's darling tales,
and Declare our Independence...from "Independents."

Celebrate the holiday in the most American way:
sharing an evening of spirited discussion
as you share a few pitchers of liberal libations
at your local progressive social club.

Labels: General Election 2008, McCain, Obama

After putting up with Rachel Maddow tag teaming with Eugene Robinson and Olbermann to fawn over Obama for over a year, it gives me great pleasure to see her get beat up by three conservatives here. I only hope there's more to come, but I only know from clips like these since I don't watch the network any longer.

Labels: Iraq War, Media bias, Obama

Sen. Obama holds a press conference from North Dakota to clarify his Iraq policy and his "refine" quote from earlier in the day. Politico's Roger Simon and the Chicago Tribune's Jim Warren discuss Obama's statement on Hardball.

Again, I think this is part of Obama's turn to the Right, or at least the middle. These little curves he's taking on this road can begin to take a toll on his image. It shouldn't take long for the term "wishy-washy" or "flip-flopper" comes into play again, like it did against Kerry in 2004.

Labels: Iraq War

I and many others tried to warn the Obamabots that he was just a typical politician and they wouldn't believe it. "No, he's different...he's going to change everything. Hillary is a political machine." Well, at least Hillary was upfront about her centrist positions.

Labels: General Election 2008, Obama

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - Powell meets with McCain and Obama « - Blogs from CNN.com

(CNN) — Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who remains a popular figure among Democrats and Republicans, recently sat down with both presidential candidates, CNN has confirmed.

The Hotline first reported the meeting earlier Tuesday.

According to an associate of Powell's, the former Bush administration member and onetime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had "pleasant, private conversations" recently with both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain. An Obama campaign source confirms the Illinois senator recently met with Powell. McCain's campaign has not returned a request for comment.

Watch: Powell says he's undecided

Powell has long praised Obama's candidacy and he told reporters recently in Vancouver he "would listen carefully to what both [candidates] have to say" before deciding whom to support.

Labels: endorsement, General Election 2008, McCain, Obama

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - New CNN Poll: Obama, McCain in a statistical dead heat « - Blogs from CNN.com

(CNN) — With the dust having finally settled after the prolonged Democratic presidential primary, a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll shows Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama locked in a statistical dead heat in the race for the White House.

With just over four months remaining until voters weigh in at the polls, the new survey out Tuesday indicates Obama holds a narrow 5-point advantage among registered voters nationwide over the Arizona senator, 50 percent to 45 percent. That represents little change from a similar poll one month ago, when the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee held a 46-43 percent edge over McCain.

CNN Polling Director Keating Holland notes Tuesday's survey confirms what a string of national polls released this month have shown: Obama holds a slight advantage over McCain, though not a big enough one to constitute a statistical lead.

"Every standard telephone poll taken in June has shown Obama ahead of McCain, with nearly all of them showing Obama's margin somewhere between three and six points," Holland said. "In most of them, that margin is not enough to give him a lead in a statistical sense, but it appears that June has been a good month for Obama."

But the new CNN/ORC polls shows the race gets even tighter when the two most prominent third-party presidential candidates are considered. In a four way match-up that includes independent candidate Ralph Nader and Libertarian candidate Bob Barr, Obama's lead over McCain dwindles to 3 percentage points, 46 percent to 43 percent. (Nader registers 6 percent while Barr gets 3 percent.)

Labels: General Election 2008, McCain, Obama, polls

McCain campaign gets greedy - War Room - Salon.com

With the assistance of a press corps willing to play along, the McCain campaign scored a hit Monday, feigning outrage and manufacturing a controversy out of Wesley Clark's questions on John McCain's presidential qualifications. It involved twisting the words of a four-star general a bit, and a pliant press corps willing to redefine the word "attack," but the McCain/GOP spin machine was in high dudgeon and it got precisely the result it was looking for.

Labels: General Election 2008, McCain, Media, Media bias, Obama supporters

US elections: Infighting doomed Clinton's campaign, biographer reports | World news | guardian.co.uk

A fuller reckoning of the extent of the infighting in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign began to emerge today -- just as Democrats were stepping up their efforts to unite around Barack Obama as the party's presidential candidate.

In the August edition of Vanity Fair, Gail Sheehy, a Clinton biographer, describes a candidate who deliberately neglected to set up clear lines of authority, opting instead for an organisation which was a "team of rivals".

The picture of discord emerges a day after Bill Clinton held his first extensive telephone conversation with Obama since his wife's defeat a month ago.

The discussion seen as an important and much-needed symbol of healing between the two camps. The Obama campaign is anxious to win over Hillary Clinton's supporters -- women, working-class white men, and Latinos -- especially in the swing states where she won the primaries and to unite the party before the coming contest against Republican John McCain.

A Clinton insider said the former president was committed to helping Obama win the election against McCain. The insider dismissed media reports of continued rancour between the former president and Obama.

Labels: Election 2008, Hillary

CNN discusses McCain setting up a Truth Squad and responding to remarks by Wesley Clark and other Obama surrogates.

Labels: General Election 2008, McCain, Obama, Obama supporters, Veterans, Wesley Clark

World Trade Center behind schedule, over budget | Reuters

NEW YORK, June 30 (Reuters) - Rebuilding at the World Trade Center, site of the Sept. 11 attacks, is behind schedule and over budget, and major problems mean new cost estimates and timetable must be drawn up, officials said on Monday.

Firm projections for the planned memorial, museum, five skyscrapers and transit hub now will be issued by the end of September, New York Gov. David Paterson said.

And it is too soon to say whether the Freedom Tower, which would replace the Twin Towers in the Manhattan skyline, will have to be scaled back, the site's owner said.

The centerpiece of the rebuilding effort, the Freedom Tower had been due for completion in 2011. At 1,776 feet (541 metres) it would be the tallest building in the United States.

Paterson spoke to reporters after the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns the site, issued a report he commissioned because he feared the projects would take longer and cost more than his predecessors predicted.

Only part of the memorial will be done by the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. That anniversary had been the previous deadline for unveiling the memorial featuring two reflecting pools marking the outlines of each of the Twin Towers.

However, developer Larry Silverstein said three adjacent skyscrapers on the 16-acre (6.5-hectare) site will be completed on time by 2012.

The project's $14 billion cost keeps rising as commodity prices soar and the 19 federal, state and city agencies that are all involved fail to solve logjams.

Labels: 9-11, Ground Zero, Local

Views of whites, Latinos toward Barack Obama analyzed | Top of the Ticket | Los Angeles Times

Mark Feierstein and Ana Iparraguirre write that Obama's relatively weak performance among Latinos in his primary battle with Hillary Clinton (who dominated among those voters) "has helped fan the idea that he has a Latino problem or that Hispanics are disinclined to vote for black candidates."

Not so, they contend. They note that national polls have shown that Obama "is running well ahead of John McCain among Hispanics, and significantly better than John Kerry did against George Bush in 2004."

That may be how it plays out ...

... in November's vote, but before then both Obama and McCain apparently have some repair work to do with Latino media outlets, including bloggers.

Labels: General Election 2008, Latino community, polls

The residents of Unity, NH gear up for the honeymoon.

Labels: General Election 2008, Hillary, Obama

Netroots feel jilted by Obama's FISA stand - Carrie Budoff Brown - Politico.com

When former Sen. John Edwards dropped out of the presidential race, the progressive Netroots took their affections to Barack Obama, defending him against attack from Hillary Rodham Clinton and others.

But with his support of a government surveillance bill that offers retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies — a bill that he vowed last year to filibuster — the honeymoon has ended.

Disappointed over his position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the online activists feel jilted and betrayed and have taken to questioning his progressive credentials. One prominent blogger, Atrios, has even given him the moniker “Wanker of the Day.”

“He broke faith,” said Matt Stoller, a political consultant and blogger at OpenLeft.com. “Obama pledged to filibuster, and he is part of that old politics, in this case, that he said he wasn’t. It will spur us to challenge him.”

The FISA debate marks the presumptive Democratic nominee’s first serious break from the liberal Netroots in the general election. He is still their candidate, but the FISA issue has reignited skepticism among major bloggers, who had largely pushed aside doubts about Obama when Edwards, their favored candidate, ended his bid in February.

Obama’s post-partisan persona hasn’t always meshed so well with the noisy and contentious Netroots, and his rise to prominence has come without their full-throated support. He told reporters in February that he doesn’t read blogs and has long been viewed as cool to the Netroots — a notion that the candidate’s new media director, Joe Rospars, disputed this week at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, saying Obama was a favorite of the readers of the major bloggers.

Either way, the Netroots eventually took Obama’s side against Clinton, and some came to view him as a champion of progressive causes.

His stance on the FISA bill, however, has brought Obama back down to earth, in part because the liberal blogosphere cares more about civil liberties than many of the other traditional issues that have long dominated the Democratic agenda. While the mainstream media fixated on Obama’s decision to opt out of the public financing system — and newspaper editorial boards eviscerated him — the Netroots commended Obama for showing political savvy. After all, the readers of liberal blogs are many of the small donors who gave Obama reason to reject public financing.

FISA, however, was different. Many of the most popular progressive blogs built their following by mining anger toward President Bush, the Iraq war and what bloggers view as his disregard of the Constitution and the civil liberties guaranteed by it. By granting immunity to telecom companies, civil courts will likely dismiss lawsuits that might unearth details about the administration’s activities, eliminating an opportunity to hold Bush accountable.

“It angers the blogosphere to its core,” said Jane Hamsher, founder of the popular blog Firedoglake.com. “We want to be able to know: What did you do? If we can get that information, we can make sure they don’t do that again. We can get the public engaged.”

Obama’s decision to support the bill with the immunity provision was not surprising, she said. Republicans frame critics of such security measures as soft on terrorism, and the presumptive Democratic nominee probably does not want it used against him.

“[A] lot of people tried to convince themselves that he was a progressive hero, and I think they were disappointed,” Hamsher said. “You can feel a real shift in the zeitgeist online.”

Still, the disillusionment goes only so far. The liberal blogosphere’s most recognizable name, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos, said Monday on MSNBC’s “Countdown With Keith Olbermann”: “Let’s be honest, it is either Obama or John McCain. So we really don’t have much of a choice.”

Labels: Netroots, Obama

The GOP made Obama do it

It was no surprise when Barack Obama flipped on public financing last week. When it suited his goals last year, he pledged, "If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." When it didn't suit his goals, he ditched the pledge. And get this: Apparently he did it because the Republicans made him do it.

Obama has raised an impressive $296 million to date - dwarfing John McCain's $122 million. He stands to raise a lot of money - certainly more than the $84 million he would have received from the federal presidential public financing system - for the nine weeks following the Democratic convention. So forget "change we can believe in."

I cannot get as indignant as some critics seem to be. After all, public financing never was about reforming politics. It always was about helping Democrats get into the White House - which is why so many alleged reformers have not only accepted Obama's flip-flop, but praised it. Even the goo-goo Center for Responsive Politics Web site featured an opinion piece that suggested that the $1.2 million per day of public financing "just might not be enough" for a presidential candidate.

In a video e-mailed to supporters last week, Obama floated the argument that his huge war chest was akin to public financing because of all the $5, $10 and $20 checks his team has cashed. But, as the New York Times reported, Obama already "has collected more money in contributions of $1,000 or more than even Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's once-vaunted team of bundlers of donations." This week, Obama is trolling for big checks from Clinton fat cats.

Team Obama set up fightthesmears.com ostensibly to fight misinformation. Site visitors are invited to send viral e-mail that charges, "Rush Limbaugh and his fellow right-wing attack dogs have been spreading baseless rumors about a nonexistent video tape showing Michelle Obama using a racial epithet." It was a vile, baseless rumor.

You could applaud Team Obama for setting the record straight, if it did not gloss over the starring role of Larry C. Johnson, identified simply as a "blogger," not a supporter of Hillary Clinton, as David Weigel reported in the American Prospect online. Instead, it targeted Limbaugh for saying "a tape exists of Michelle Obama using the word 'whitey' from the pulpit of Trinity United."

Thing is, Limbaugh stipulated, "There's a rumor that there's a tape" - two weeks after Johnson's first blog alleging that Republicans were hoarding a "whitey" tape. (Limbaugh should not have repeated the rumor, but he did so as many political editors and reporters were grappling over whether to report the unsubstantiated but widely trafficked Internet rumor, or just ignore it.)

Then, Obama pulled the race card. At a fundraiser - where else? - Obama told supporters that he had to turn down public financing so that he can raise enough money to fight GOP 527s. As the New York Times reported, he said, "They're going to try to make you afraid of me. 'He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?' "

Who does Obama think he is kidding? He has raised buckets of cash - but rather than be up front about opting out of public financing because of the math, he stooped to blaming other people for his decision to cash in. He also blamed the system and played the race card.

Labels: Campaign financing/contributions, General Election 2008, Obama, Race