<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I have seen 3 white people asked who they would vote for (in the last few days). They said, "my head says HC but heart says BO"
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Prize winning Editorial cartoon:
<img src='http://www.ibdeditorials.com/images/cartoons/toon011807.gif' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->"Yes we can". <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
A slogan that was xeroxed <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tongue.gif' /><!--endemo--> from Sammy Davis Jr's (famous Black artist) book
<img src='http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518J3VKY75L._OU01_AA240_SH20_.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
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Comment I read somewhere else 3-4 days ago from an IL resident called, I believe, "Mike in IL": "word on the street is" BO will not get reelected to his IL seat if he runs.
In MS, independent and Republicans are planning to cross vote in favor of HC. Till morning gap was 6% and by evening it was 3%. Blacks again will vote on race line.
How race based voting by Blacks will kill Democrats in WH. One snap shot
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->While most of the political world is focused on the Pennsylvania Primary scheduled for April 22 or the Democratsâ delegate dilemma, Mississippi is hosting a Primary of its own this coming Tuesday. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of the state shows Barack Obama leading Hillary Clinton by fourteen percentage points in the state. Itâs Obama 53% Clinton 39%.
Clinton leads among senior citizens but trails among younger voters. But, it is the racial divide that defines the campaign in MississippiâObama leads 80% to 12% among African-American voters while Clinton holds a 47% advantage among White voters.
Both candidates are viewed favorably by 69% of the stateâs Likely Primary Voters. But, Obama earns Very Favorable ratings from 50% while only 37% are that enthusiastic about Clinton.
Clinton receives favorable views from 72% of White voters and 66% of African-American voters. Fifty percent (50%) of White voters have a Very Favorable opinion of her while just 25% of African-American voters say the same.
Obama is viewed favorably by 92% of African-American voters and just 44% of White voters. Seventy-eight percent (78%) of African-American voters in Mississippi have a Very Favorable opinion of Obama. Just 19% of White voters share that view.
One measure of a deepening divide in the party is that just 56% of Obama voters have a favorable opinion of Clinton. Just 34% of Clinton voters have a favorable opinion of Obama.
<b>If Obama is nominated, just 47% of Clinton voters say they are even somewhat likely to vote for Obama in the general election against John McCain.
If Clinton is nominated, 65% of Obama voters say they are at least somewhat likely to vote for her against McCain.</b>
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I believe the state pays for and decides on whether to caucus or have a vote per person primary. It is really unfair and the caucus is subject to serious abuse, as we have seen first hand now.
I was at the VA Campaign office this morning and we called tons of Wyoming voters....every county has a different time and some voters have to drive really far to get to their location. A few Hillary supporters got to the caucus late and were not allowed in.....I spoke to one woman who was too intimidated to go...bottom line, its a process that favors the young and agressive people.
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Watch this every month, how it will change after democrat nominee
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->On the other side of the aisle, 157 Electoral Votes are projected as âSafely Republican,â 32 are projected as âLikely Republicanâ and 40 are projected as âLeans Republican".
Safely Democratic: California (55), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (21), Maine (4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (12), New York (31), Rhode Island (4), and Vermont (3).
Likely Democratic: Michigan (17), Minnesota (10), New Hampshire (4), New Jersey (15), Oregon (7), Pennsylvania (21), Washington(11) and Wisconsin (10).
Leans Democratic: Iowa (7), New Mexico (5), and Ohio (20).
Toss-Up: Colorado (9), Missouri (11), and Nevada (5).
Leans Republican: Florida (27), Virginia (13).
Likely Republican: Arkansas (6) and North Carolina (15).
Safely Republican: Alabama (9), Alaska (3), Arizona (10), Georgia (15), Idaho (4), Indiana (11), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (9), Mississippi (6), Montana (3), Nebraska (5), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (8), South Dakota (3), Tennessee (11), Texas (34), Utah (5), West Virginia (5) and Wyoming (3).
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03-10-2008, 02:23 AM (This post was last modified: 03-10-2008, 02:25 AM by Shambhu.)
FOX had "BO's terrorist connections" on Hannity's America last night. Normally dont watch Hannity, but watched this time. Some far-left group which had declared was on US in 60s (no muslim/KKK link, american group)--called the Weather Underground. Its leader was let off on a technicality, and he is now BO advisor or something.
Hannity also had something about BO church leader, who had visited Libya and says his church us "unabashedly black".
McLaughlin had 5 mins about Rezko's deals. They showed BO house etc. BO is in the news now. <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo--> Awwright!
03-10-2008, 03:11 PM (This post was last modified: 03-10-2008, 03:42 PM by Capt M Kumar.)
<!--emo&:argue--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/argue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='argue.gif' /><!--endemo--> Apart from delegate count in which missing Florida and Michigan are likely to be included, actual Prez election is decided by delegates math of electoral college and here is where, perhaps 2 stand so far:
HC: ?260
BO: ?190
And I think to win, all u require is ?270 electoral college delegates.
WASHINGTON: A Republican Congressman suggested, in an interview published on Saturday, that the election of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will mean a victory for Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamists.
<b>"I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then ... the Al-Qaeda, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this war on terror," Representative Steve King of Iowa told the Daily Reporter newspaper.</b>
The paper is published in Spencer, Iowa, which is King's home district.
King went on to say that even Obama's middle name, which is Hussein, will have a special meaning for radical Islamists.
"They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name," King continued.
"They will be dancing in the streets because of who his father was and because of his posture that says: 'Pull out of the Middle East and pull out of this conflict'."
<b>Obama, who never supported a US congressional resolution authorising the US invasion of Iraq, is favouring US troop withdrawal from the country.</b>
<!--emo&<_<--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/dry.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='dry.gif' /><!--endemo-->
« Barack Obama's 'No!' to VP slot mirrors another famous senator | Main
Key Clinton aide questions Obama's veep credentials
Barack Obama has some boning up to do, at least according to Hillary Clinton's chief spokesman, Howard Wolfson.
Even as Wolfson's boss, the presidential candidate, and her husband, the ex-president, have been doing their part to fuel speculation about a potential Clinton-Obama Democratic ticket (see here and here), the aide today -- making clear he was speaking for the campaign -- doused some cold water on the notion.
During a conference call with reporters, Wolfson said: âWe do not believe at this point that Sen. Obama has passed that key commander-in-chief testâ that Clinton would require for a running mate.
But the aide held out the prospect that Obama could buff up his resume and meet the threshold (whatever it is) between now and the party's national convention in Denver in late August.
Perhaps he has a reading list that he can provide Obama (who late last week sought to scotch the prospect that he would be willing to play second fiddle to Clinton).
More on Wolfson's comments can by found in this Chicago Tribune post.
--Don Frederick
March 10, 2008 in Aides, Democratic Politics, Presidential Campaign, Vice President | Permalink
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->US lawmaker says Al-Qaeda will celebrate if Obama wins <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Media (ABC) did polls in Iraq showing Barack Hussein and Hillary Clinton picture. People were able to identify Barack Hussein. So Congress man is right.
For Black, he is movement or Messiah and for Muslim he is Hussein, Arab brotherhood.
"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough appeared on "Real Time with Bill Maher" Friday and explained the culture of fear that permeates the news business during this election season.
<b>"There are all these minefields out there for Barack Obama that I think the press has been tiptoeing through," </b>Scarborough said. He continued, <b>"If you attack Hillary Clinton, we have found, there are organizations out there that will bombard your sponsors, that will call the president of your network and will say, 'Get that person off the air.' </b>Media people are living in fear."
France - le Journal du Dimanche - Original Article (French)
Although beaten by Hillary Clinton in the Texas primary, Barack Obama can still claim victory. The voting system in that state could offer him more delegates than the senator, although less of the popular vote. In this tight contest for nomination,which is tearing Democrats apart, Florida and Michigan, punished, are trying to regain their role in the convention.
Beaten but victorious. That is the Barack Obama paradox. He should have won more delegates than Hillary Clinton in Texas, but she won more of the popular vote in the primary that was held on Tuesday. The reason for this imbroglio has to do with the way Democrats vote in Texas. One of the most populous states in the country, Texas will send 228 delegates to the Democratic convention, from which the Democratic candidate will emerge. 193 of these are committed delegates. Of these, 126 are designated through the primaries and are awarded proportionally. Since Hillary Clinton obtained 51% of the votes, versus 48% for the senator from Illinois, she received 65 delegates, versus 61 to Obama.
The 67 remaining delegates are decided by caucus, those large meetings of voters where results are decided by raised hands. Now, according to the current count (at this time, it's not finished, since the tallying takes so long), Barack Obama obtained 55% of the vote, versus 45% for the Senator from New York. Enough to create a meaningful difference, and end the Texas primaries. "The difference in delegates for Clinton in the primary will be insignificant, maybe two delegates. Our difference in the caucuses will be 7 or more delegates," explained David Plouffee, Barack Obama's campaign manager, on MSNBC. This count was confirmed by the site greenpapers.com, according to which Obama had 98 delegates against 95 for Clinton.
CLINTON: THREE VICTORIES FOR (ALMOST) NOTHING
The advantage thus obtained by Obama is also explained by the way the Democratic party apportions delegates. Two factors are taken into account: the popular vote, and election results from the last presidential election. "Senator Clinton won in rural zones where the Republicans are very strong, so her districts will account for fewer delegates, and Obama won in urban areas, which are the most favorable to Democrats," explained Paul Burka, of the Texas Monthly. Here we see the traditional voting patterns, in that the middle class tends to prefer Obama, and workers and less successful voters lean towards Clinton. Clinton also spoke out against the methodology of the caucuses, where according to witnesses and observers quoted by the American media, unprecedented crowds gathered, and waiting lines went out into parking lots and the street. According to Clinton's team, a number of Obama supporters had illegally obtained the right to caucus, and used that right to swing the vote his way.
These accounts of challenges and misdeeds are exacerbated, of course, by the situation in this Democratic primary, where no candidate seems to be able to pull ahead, and may not be able to before the convention. The director of Obama's campaign figures that Clinton will not be able to overtake her rival. "Last night, a big window closed for her," he said on Wednesday. Rather severely, he minimized the victories of Clinton in Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island. He gauges that the advantage acquired by Clinton in those three states, which will bring a total of 421 delegates to the convention, will be less than the advantage Obama received in Idaho, a minor state where the winner received 15 delegates against three. If the results of the Texas caucuses confirm what is expected, Clinton will have won only eight delegates in total on March 4th. This is too small an advantage to take the race.
Political race-baiting works in America because racism is part of the cultural and historical furniture. In 1960, when Barack Obama's Kenyan father married Stanley Ann Dunham, a white woman who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, 22 states still had laws forbidding interracial marriages.
In 1967, an appropriate year since it was the "Summer of Love," the Supreme Court voided all "race hygiene" laws, still on the books in 16 states.
In 1988, Al Gore, running in the New York Democratic primary against Michael Dukakis, attacked the Massachusetts governor for supporting lax parole laws that a year earlier had permitted a convicted black murderer named Willie Horton to leave prison on a weekend pass. Horton used the opportunity to rape a woman.
Dukakis prevailed nonetheless and won the nomination. Then, in the fall, the Republican dirty tricksters began circulating photos of Horton, an identikit of every white's nightmare about what a black rapist kicking down the front door would look like.
The leaflets insinuated that Dukakis and Horton had been pretty much on a first-name basis. The race card was effective and was a significant factor in Dukakis's defeat by George Bush Sr. In 2000, George W. Bush defeated John McCain in the South Carolina primary with the insinuation that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. (McCain and his second wife, Cindy, had adopted a child from a home in India run by Mother Teresa.)
Here we are in 2008 and the race card has made its inevitable appearance. True to the Willie Horton model, on Feb. 25, someone in the Clinton campaign sent the Drudge website a photo of Obama in Kenya, wearing a turban and what looks like a bed sheet, though apparently it is a Somali ceremonial rig. Obama's team cried foul. Maggie Williams, now running Clinton's campaign, said Obama shouldn't be a wuss.
Already the Republicans are using the photo as part of what will be a long summer and fall of two-stepping around the race card. Step 1: get some roughhouser to fire off a slur, as did right-wing radio shock jock Bill Cunningham, sounding off ripely this week about "Barack Hussein Obama" as a hack, black politician in a speech introducing McCain. Step 2: piously denounce the slur, just as McCain did Cunningham's.
It happened again last Monday with a news release from the Tennessee Republican party, which announced that it "today joins a growing chorus of Americans concerned about the future of the nation of Israel, the only stable democracy in the Middle East, if Senator Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States." On Wednesday, the Republican National Committee duly reprimanded the Tennessee Republican party for its use of Obama's middle name and said it shouldn't happen again.
Your middle name is Hussein, and you run in a U.S. election in 2008? Of course you catch flak. But these are only the early salvos, as the RNC slime squad runs profile groups to help them figure out what it can get away with.
Already, right-wing columns are pillorying Obama's mother, an anthropology professor in Hawaii at the time of her death in the mid-1990s, as a fellow-travelling, crypto commie and lover of non-Caucasians.
Obama's wife, Michelle, is being portrayed as several hundred miles to the left of Malcolm X, in large part because she said recently that owing to the huge response to her husband's campaign for hope and change, "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country." Cindy McCain has taken to saying that she for one has always been proud of her country.
All the same, the race card is a tricky one to play. A fall faceoff between McCain and Obama will target the crucial independent voters, many of whom will be put off by race-baiting. Attitudes have changed, even since the Horton era.
A 2007 Gallup survey found more than three out of four Americans approve of marriages between whites and blacks. In 1994, less than half felt that way. Then again, a lot of mean things can be said about McCain. Obama can take the rhetorical high road, but he should have some mean stokers in the boiler room.
Alexander Cockburn is co-editor of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch.
During last Tuesdayâs primaries, Hillary Clinton won three out of four states: Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. Barack Obama only won in Vermont.
As a result, the gulf between Clinton and Obama was reduced from 160 to 77 delegate votes in the upcoming Democratic Party convention. At the present moment, Obama has the support of 1,434 delegates and Clinton 1,357. The next primary will be held in the state of Wyoming on March 8. However this state is too small to bring about a clear front runner into the Democratic race. A candidate for the Democratic nomination must wield 2,025 delegate votes.
The Republican camp is clearer in its results. John McCain has already ensured himself the votes of the majority of delegates in the Republican Party (that needs the minimum of 1,191 votes).
A new issue has arisen. The issue is that John McCain was born in Egypt. To run for the presidency of the US, one must be born in the United States, but both the father and mother of the senator were citizens of the United States. Therefore it is unlikely that the circumstances mentioned above will hinder McCain in any way.
Accepting a request to comment on further possibilities for the presidential candidates in the US, Pravda.ru has turned to the president of the Institute of Strategic Rankings and Analysis, professor of the Department of the Applied Political Sciences of the Higher School of Economics, professor MGIMO Alexander Konovalov.
Q: How would you rank the chances of the Democratic Party candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama after the end of the count of the last round of primaries?
A: Until the convention, before the end of the summer, it wonât be known. At the moment Clinton has strengthened her positions, but the strength is only relative. For a confident Democratic majority, they need the support of 2,025 convention delegates; the Democrats have a larger convention (sic) than the Republicans. Until the last set of primaries, they had 1,400 for Obama and 1,300 for Clinton; a difference of only 100. At the Hippodrome it was called ânose to noseâ.
After todayâs primaries, any sort of an advantage will go to Clinton. But is wonât be a deciding advantage; they arenât two with an extra 1,000, so the remaining primaries will hold an important role. Although she now has a momentum after a series of failures. Everything will be decided for the Democrats at their congress or âconventionâ, as they call it. There, out of the chosen delegates, there are those that have already chosen for whom they will vote, but there will also be the so called superdelegates: major party activists, invited for different reasons. They arenât selected by anyone, but they analyze whom the party wants to chose and what it thinks about this nomination. Regarding Clinton-Obama, I think that the party candidate will be chosen by these people. At the moment the probability looks more favorable for Clinton, although the probability is not very high.
The Republicans go about it differently. If the Democrats continue the intraparty fight until the end, then the Republicans have everything already positioned. McCain will be unanimously supported by the party leadership; heâs the accepted leader; today heâll be meeting with Bush, and it seems Bush will officially support him. As a result it seems that Republicans, who werenât taken seriously before because it was thought that Bushâs failed policies (especially the foreign policy) are making them âlosersâ, outsiders, now at the beginning of the race are destroying the odds of success that the Democrats held.
The Republicans have a chance to play on a level playing field and even win, even though Bush did everything to make sure that it didnât happen. Therefore anything can happen. And if I were asked who I thought would win, Iâd say McCain.
Q: There is some news coming from the press that McCain, as a candidate, may be hurt by the fact that he was not born in the US, but in Egypt. Is it true that this fact could be a hindrance to his campaign or is it simply gossip that is a part of all campaigns?
A: In principle Obama may have a bigger problem because he is a son of a Kenyan student and a white American woman. Then the Kenyan student left for Kenya and abandoned his girlfriend (sic) with little Obama. After that she married an Indonesian and they left for Indonesia for a prolonged period of time.
I donât remember how the Constitution stipulates this, but I do know that a child born into a military family becomes an American citizen. McCain has a âwinningâ biography. He spent five years as a POW in Vietnam; he was tortured; he spent five years in a hole. Actually, as he was tortured by the Vietnamese, he heard Russian speech in the next room. And in his words, these people periodically recommended to the Vietnamese how best to torture McCain.
Heâs twice married; his second wife is Miss Arizona. He has seven children; three of which are adopted. Therefore, I find it unlikely that with such an excellent resume, the fact that McCain was born in Egypt will play any role in the election.
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tongue.gif' /><!--endemo--> from Sammy Davis Jr's (famous Black artist) book
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo--> Awwright!