On Liberal Tirades Against Obama to Prop Up Edwards

Dennis Kucinich gave his Iowa supporters his preference for their second choice if he doesn't reach 15% of the caucus-goers. He chose Barack Obama, the candidate who doesn't have to apologize for supporting the Bush/Cheney assault on Iraq for oil.

"Progressives" like to forget that Edwards didn't just vote for the Iraq War; he co-sponsored it.

Environmentalists like to forget Edwards had a 32% rating from the League of Conservation Voters - Obama has 100%.

Living Wage supporters like to ignore that Obama is committed to raising the minimum wage with the cost of living, not leaving it out as a political football while workers’ literally go hungry if they don’t over-produce for investors in two jobs instead of only one.

Open Government supporters, Net Neutrality supporters and Corporate Media Monopoly opposers like to forget Obama's plan for technology opens the airwaves to communities, ends paid campaign ads thereby eliminating millions in campaign costs, and guarantees equal time to all candidates. It also makes all donations to all government officials and all earmarks traceable, online, for everyone to see. It also ensures net neutrality, but also will wire the most poor and rural areas cheaply or for free, to connect everyone.

Oh, and let's just all pretend we didn't notice when Obama promised to never sign a non-emergency bill without presenting it to viewers first, online and on C-SPAN (which streams live online so it’s not a gift to cable companies) with days to actually comment on the bill - and he's already set up to read and incorporate suggestions on his website, and he's done it.

I supported Dennis as 1st choice in 2004 for his anti-Iraq War stand, so did Alice Walker, I recall. I've supported Obama from the start this time, so has Alice Walker. So should any true Progressive Voter, from any party or Independent/Unaffiliated.

It's time to stop dividing because some of us have such a self-righteous but rather faulty view of America as a pack of racists who can't possibly recognize a great candidate because he's black. We’re better than that. Let's not even pretend we're still in the 80s or even 90s.

Progressives like to forget that Edwards, like Gore, Clinton I and want-to-be Clinton II, as well as Biden, Richardson, and Dodd, and Lieberman of Connecticut, were all DLC members, some very active, some former Chairs; none have renounced the most anti-progressive group among Democrats.

Progressives like to forget Obama's work for the poor, the unemployed, seniors, the working poor, the uninsured, the veterans, the single parents, the innocent on Illinois' Death Row, the thousands who, when not if they are race-profiled, will have it fully documented - by police themselves. They like to forget Obama is a constitutional law lecturer who registered 150,000 new, poor voters and defended their right to vote and be counted.

It's time we stop complaining and use some sense. Obama can and will win. Just use your head and your feet. America's ready to judge the man's record, character, advisers and supporters and say Yes! Are you?

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Obama addresses HillaryCare's forced mandates [VIDEO]

Barack Obama addresses an Iowa voter's healthcare question at length: "She [HRC] has a mandate. And John Edwards has a mandate. Where the only way to get 100% coverage is if you pass a law where government forces everybody to buy insurance." Barack shows why it's a "phony argument" to claim 15 million won't buy insurance because they are young and don't want to pay premiums. Obama shows his plan mandates insurance companies to cover youth until age 25 under their parents' health insurance, whether the youth are in college or not (right now, health insurance corporations drop youths 18-25 as soon as they graduate or drop/stop out of college!). As Obama says, and I agree, people don't refuse to buy health insurance because they are lazy or irresponsible and need to be forced to (with what penalties, Hillary and John?). People want health insurance, as good as the Senators get, only affordably and to get full coverage, pre-existing condition or not, job or not. Right now inflation is in the high-double digits on insurance premiums, you don't know what or if you'll be covered after you pay a fortune, and you can get dropped for using it - just like an auto insurance corporation manages claims! We are more than vehicles, I would hope we get better insurance prices and policies without the mandates put on vehicles. And, btw, have you bought Uninsured Motorist Liability Coverage for your vehicle lately, even with those mandatory laws and penalties? So, mandates with penalties don't guarantee 100% coverage either, do they?

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Why Paul Krugman is wrong about Barack Obama

A great 3-page article: While a respected figure in Democratic circles, Paul Krugman's recent attacks on Barack Obama are wrong on history, wrong on politics, and wrong on what the future holds for Obama's "big table" idea. Krugman, a John Edwards supporter, has been drawing historical parallels which are "facile and ahistorical" when scrutinized. (by ShemDaimwood). My note: I've got to say that yes, Krugman's wrong, Obama's right, and I'm glad a great rebuttal came out. But notice how different attacks from Edwards' supporters are from Clinton-supporters'. Edwards just isn't honest - his voting record in one senate term was more conservative than any other Dem candidates' - but Hillary's team is malicious in the extreme. I lost some respect for Krugman's honesty, but he certainly hasn't raised my ire and disgust like Clinton's surrogates, with their covert ethnic smears that remind me more of neo-con Willie Horton tactics than any Democrat I'd be associated with!

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Barack in Dead Heat with Clinton in Iowa

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are statistically tied in Iowa. Edwards is losing steam.

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Sen. Barack Obama: Right on Iraq, Right on Iran

Senator Obama has written an Op Ed against the Lieberman/Kyle Amendment, and it's brilliant. Despite Hillary's claims, her vote in 02 giving Bush authority for Iraq's invasion also applies to this terrible Amendment. He gives Edwards credit for opposing it and taking responsibility for his 02 vote (Edwards co-sponsored the Iraq War Resolution and defended it heartily and publicly for 18 months, really, but Obama's polite). He also quotes Biden's statement against the amendment granting Bush authority to attack Iran. Obama shows why he is truly the leader we need - foresight, not only in 2002, but now in 2007. Thank you for speaking out so eloquently against the Lieberman/Kyle Amendment, Senator and future President Obama!

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Clinton, Obama, Edwards tied in Iowa poll: report| U.S.| Reuters

Obama leads Clinton by 1% in Iowa, and he leads Edwards by 2%; a radical departure from polls before Obama's foreign policy statements and speech. Iowa's ready for a change. No wonder Hillary was on the attack - Obama's the frontrunner in Iowa!


Clinton, Obama, Edwards tied in Iowa poll: report

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Obama's poverty solutions contrast with Edwards'

Presents clear differences between Edwards and Obama in perceptions and solutions, as well as in their backgrounds, and contrasts the outcomes of both plans, favoring Obama's. Obama Says He, Too, Is a Poverty Fighter - washingtonpost.com Read more!

Obama unveils urban agenda. Speech excerpts.

This great blogger Sweet comes through once again! Here's a preview of Obama's Urban Agenda [excerpts], a truly great speech and real plan.

Lynn Sweet: Sweet blog special: Obama unveils urban agenda. Speech excerpts. Read more!

Hillary Inevitable? What Barack has in his favor.

This is a great post on MyDD. You'll find great videos as well as excellent reasons why Barack Obama is as likely to come out ahead in the primaries as Hillary Clinton. MyDD :: Hillary Inevitable? What Barack has in his favor.
All the videos are also posted on YouTube by lovingj, if you'd like to check them all out. I especially recommend the one with Obama paying tribute to Al Gore and speaking on global warming, but others are great as well. http://www.youtube.com/user/lovingj1


Hillary Inevitable? What Barack has in his favor.

Let me begin by saying this is not an attack the opposing candidate diary because the MyDD community gets more than its fair share of this type (i.e. Tod Bennett did an interesting diary on this topic called On Obama "Worshippers" Kool-Aid and Haircuts). I do not believe Hillary Clinton is inherently evil nor do I believe that John Edwards lacks genuine authenticity when it comes to his commitment to poverty. However, I think the blogosphere is premature to conclude that Hillary's nomination is inevitable based on this current early polling.

Hillary Clinton has been carrying a consistent 10 point lead over Barack Obama in the national polls. This trend, without a doubt, has cemented in most people's mind a certain amount of inevitability to Hillary Clinton's candidacy. But before anyone else in the Democratic party suggests short-circuiting the 2008 presidential nomination process and just handing the crown to Hillary Rodham Clinton, consider this: the Democratic party has rarely nominated its front runner in non-incumbent years. John Kennedy was not the frontrunner in 1960, it was former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson . . . or Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson . . . or Missouri Senator Stuart Symington . . . or Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey . . . which is why Kennedy had to campaign and win in all seven primaries that year to prove himself to the party elders.

In 1968, underdog Robert Kennedy would have surely wrested the nomination from the front runner, Vice President Humphrey, had he not been assassinated. And that's because the real frontrunner, incumbent President Lyndon Johnson, had been chased from the field by yet another underdog, Senator Gene McCarthy of Minnesota. In 1972, Senator Edmund Muskie and not the eventual nominee, Senator George McGovern, was the frontrunner. He fell to the peace candidate's grassroots brigade. McGovern also, for the first time, successfully used the Iowa caucuses to his advantage and developed important momentum, just as "Jimmy who?" Carter would do in 1976.

Only in 1984 did the frontrunner, Walter Mondale, win the nomination, after almost losing to the candidate of "new ideas," Senator Gary Hart. But four years later, in 1988, Michael Dukakis was certainly not the frontrunner when he won his party's nomination.

Senator Clinton knows from personal experience that her husband was not the frontrunner in 1992--New York Governor Mario Cuomo was. The next non-incumbent year, 2000, actually saw the frontrunner, Vice President Al Gore win the nomination. But this was, in many ways, the third nomination of Clinton, not the first for Gore. And we all remember in 2004 when Howard Dean emerged as the leader of the pack over a talented field that included Senators John Kerry, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman. Unbelievably, for all the hype Howard Dean recieved that year as frontrunner he still did not go on to win the nomination.

Times are good for Senator Clinton as far as polling is concern, however, she trails Senator Obama in every other measure of candidate interest. Obama dominates all the candidates in the field in terms of fundraising, crowd size, and overall excitement. Furthermore, he is proposing policies and changes in government that the American electorate has long been yearning for . . . a return to good government. Universal healthcare, global warming and even our current Iraq quagmire will not truly be solved until we first address the issue of the "smallness of our politics".

Obama is the only candidate to offer true ethics reform at the presidential level. Obama is the only candidate to propose a real agenda to reconcile the differences between religion and the democratic party. Obama is the only candidate with the judgment to oppose the war from day one. Therefore, I am confident that as Obama continues emphasizing these differences through his speeches and debates that this sense of inevitability will be as premature as Adlai Stevenson's expected win over John F. Kennedy was . . . just plain wrong. Read more!

ARE WE SICK? OVER 40,000 VIOLENT DEATHS IN U.S. PER YEAR

OK, here’s just one reason I’m tired of the focus on the huge, media-vulture events and our knee-jerk compulsive-obsessive responses to them. I’m as exasperated as most Americans with our lack of progress to end this stupid Occupation of Iraq, and the ongoing disaster in Afghanistan. The fact is, though, I would be immensely exasperated even if we didn’t have these occupations going on, even if we weren’t the biggest arms dealers usually to both sides of any conflict anywhere in the world.

On average every year since 9/11, about 20,000 young people from ages 10-34 die violently – they either commit suicide or are murdered.

We’re supposed to have a “terrorism” crisis, and it’s supposed to be coming from outside the US, with some “homegrown terror cells” too. We’re spending billions (let’s just forget “millions” as a large measure anymore, when we’re dealing with budget deficits in the trillions) to “prevent terrorism”. We’re spying on regular people’s web surfing habits, emails and phone calls because over 3,000 people were killed in a one-day attack.

Meanwhile, our young people, as young as age 10, are being murdered or committing suicide at the rate of 20,000 a year. These young people, people who could be (hopefully already haven’t been) our nieces, nephews, sons, daughters, young parents, grandchildren, cousins, brothers and sisters – all were not killed in a war. What’s wrong with this picture?

Well, we’re rightfully protesting the deaths of almost 4,000 soldiers now, along with the lifelong injuries of tens of thousands more. That’s been in four years. That’s about 1,000 soldiers a year – while 20,000 young people of about the same age as those soldiers (some much younger) are dieing right here in that same year.

Why don’t we care about these “domestic” deaths? Why don’t we demand, with equal vehemence, that our government deal with these deaths as a crisis? Twenty times as many people as soldiers in Iraq, some as young as 10, most between 15-34, die of violent causes every year. Another 9,000 or so people between 35-44 die violently, either by murder or suicide. That's almost 30,000 people between 10 and 44 years of age dieing violently in the US per year! Between the ages of 44-64, another 10,000 who haven’t been felled by cancer or heart disease or accidents are also murdered or commit suicide! In one year!

Inside our country, in one year over 27,000 people commit suicide; another 13,000 are killed. I'll bet you didn't know suicide kills more people than homicide, eh? You don't see a huge movement to arrest all those suicidal people and throw away the key [yet!] - your news only tells you that you must distrust your neighbor and expect to be murdered anytime, anywhere.

These 40,000+ violent deaths are from CDC statistics from 2004 – and as poverty spreads, despair and violence spread, and poverty has increased for millions of people in America. Expect higher numbers for 2005 and 2006.

So what do I want you to take from this? Well, keep it in perspective, please. While we’re being jerked around by our media and politicians to focus on things they control completely, we are letting these daily atrocities go, for the most part, unchallenged. These 40,000 murder/suicides per year are ripping at the very fabric of our existence. It’s as if we were being attacked by an outside enemy and mustering no defense whatsoever.

If it were an outsider killing this many in our country, even most of us who oppose empire-wars would join to defend ourselves against such a virulent attack. Why don’t we demand some national defense against this institutionalized (as in "routine", "ignored", "treated as normal") attack on our humanity?

Mental health PACs and interest groups aren’t in the news much (unless there’s a massacre!). They’ve never been busted for bribing legislators or singled out by those wonderful millionaires and actors who push the “liberal” agenda. Yet really, what’s more likely to impact our lives, our families, our homes? Are you or your loved ones more likely to die from global warming this year, or terrorism – or murder, or despair?

Take a look at the figures, and if life at home here in the US isn’t what it should be, let’s start demanding changes here, too, not just in our policies overseas. We won’t really value life any more elsewhere until we start valuing life (and not just fetuses) here. There are more demonstrations to protect fetuses than there are to stop the despair and violence within our own communities. It’s no coincidence that so many feel so helpless to change national and foreign policies when we live so tenuously right here.

We need mental health care for everyone that is fully paid for and available at many times the levels we have now. We need real mental health care, not pharmaceutical-industry-sponsored pill-pushing and “Ta-ta! See you when you need more!” We need to stop ignoring the despair that’s so close to home and so frightening to us all. We need to reach out to those who are close to the edge, not run from them – there’s nowhere to run; they’re in our communities, they are “us”.

Even in the presidential election endless season, only John Edwards stresses mental health for everyone, and Barack Obama wants improved mental health care for troops and veterans. None stress anything other than the methods and treatments that are obviously woefully inadequate. The 40,000 needless deaths will continue, year after year, while we wait for government and the media to even acknowledge it's a real problem they can help change.

As long as we have such easy access to weapons that easily kill others (and we always will so long as the US is the biggest arms dealer – by multiples! – in the world), we have to treat the epidemic of violence against others and ourselves as what it is – A CRISIS! Leaving millions of people in a state of poverty, anxiety and despair that could drive them to kill others and/or themselves is a stupid and cruel domestic policy.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/osp/charts.htm Read more!

Obama and the DLC

I recently managed to get on-air with the indomitable Mike Malloy on his NovaM Radio show (linked on left) - I think it was on 2/27/07, if you're able to access archives. Being the opinionated person I am, I had to interject my thoughts on the seemingly unwavering support out there for dear old Hillary Clinton, and the subtle but still-detectable derision that greets Barack Obama's candidacy.

My major point then and still is that I cannot support a DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) candidate for President. I couldn't "pull the lever" for Clinton's reelection, based on the tremendous disapointments of his first term and my increasing knowledge of the DLC (and, being on the West Coast, my vote doesn't count in any but the closest races, thus I'm free to vote for a further-left candidate to make a point - some consolation!). I'll work to help Obama if he doesn't sucuumb to the machinations of the Militarist Zionists (Christian, Jewish, and End of Days Believers in Islam as well) simply because he is NOT a DLC-Democrat. Read http://www.blackcommentator.com/46/46_cover.html for some insight into my conviction. From what I understand, Obama will be addressing the most powerful American-Israeli lobby in the U.S., AIPAC, very soon. I'll review that and report back, and if Obama repeats John Edwards' reassurances to Israel, I will promptly defect. I read that John Edwards, also a DLC member, has already gone to Israel to promise he won't deal with Hamas if elected President (see http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Politics/10435.htm).

In a nutshell, you can tell where the DLC wants to lead the Democratic Party [still] by looking at the records of Joseph Lieberman, the officially-uncrowned King of the DLC, and Hillary Clinton, the obvious Queen of the DLC, and examining the fundraising and policy-making sides of the DLC. Amother great article I found is the 4/4/05 "Centrist Democrats Warn Liberals" by Donald Lambro in the Washington Times (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8472.htm), quoted here, where he outlines what the DLC [again losing] strategy was for the 2006 election - note they wanted to downplay the war on Iraq:

Centrist Democrats warn liberals

By Donald Lambro

04/04/05 "Washington Times" - - The Democrats' postelection war about what they should stand for is heating up again, with centrists challenging liberals to "real fights" within the party about staking out a tougher position against terrorism.

In an attack on the party's dominant left wing, anti-war base, and a warning for new Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean "to do no harm," the centrist-leaning Democratic Leadership Council said it is "a delusion to think that if we just turned out our voters, we could win national elections."

Instead, the DLC called on the party to dramatically change its message to "recapture the muscular progressive internationalism of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy and convince voters that national security is our first priority."

"To win back the White House in 2008, our party must change. We must be willing to discard political strategies that may make us feel good but that keep falling short. We must finally reject the false choice between exciting our base and expanding our appeal, because unless we both motivate and persuade, we'll lose every time," said DLC founder Al From and President Bruce Reed in a new manifesto for their party.

Their criticism has been heard many times during the past two decades in their continuing battle against the party's liberal establishment. But this time, they say, it will take a divisive, all-out political civil war to scrub the anti-war orthodoxy out of the party's agenda.

"Shoring up our weakness will not come without real debate -- even real fights -- over national security and domestic priorities," they said in the DLC's Blueprint magazine.

The sooner these fights take place, the better, they said.

"We should not shy away from them. It's far less important that Democrats come together now than on Election Day. And we are far more likely to be together on Election Day if we battle out our differences now."

In an "open letter" to their party last month, 17 DLC members led by Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana said Democrats had "to make clear to the American people that winning the war on jihadist extremism will be the Democratic Party's first priority this year and every year until the danger recedes."

Although they acknowledged that for many anti-war Democrats "Iraq remains a difficult issue," they said, "It is essential that partisan enmity not obscure America's vital interest in helping the newly elected Iraqi government succeed."

But party liberals last week dismissed the DLC's advice as warmed-over Republicanism.

"I can't tell the difference between the positions the DLC puts forward and Republican policy," said Jack Blum, counsel for the liberal Americans for Democratic Action.

"I've read this before and I am not carried away by it. Nobody in the Democratic Party, and that most especially includes the liberals in the Americans for Democratic Action, opposes fighting the terrorists."

Copyright © 2005 News World Communications, Inc..

So now you know why, even with their slim majority, Democrats can't get a single progressive policy on the agenda in the Senate.

You'll note that in all this there is not a word about economic equality, social justice, civil rights, human rights, or even the recovery of our Constitutional rights, though the DLC platform was updated in 2005. Markets, globalisation, social conservatism, pandering to the fears of the middle class, continuing the failed policy of global racial/ethnic/religious profiling, feeding the military industrial complex and the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and dealing with environmental catastrophe through the market are their primary focus. Continuing the War on Terrorism, as ethereal and useless as the War on Drugs, is on the DLC agenda. Protecting the Homeland (Gestapo language if ever there was any), is on the DLC agenda.

Peace is nowhere on the DLC agenda. Confronting and resolving the re-segregation of America, the growing rift between rich and poor and the unsustainable and loan/credit-dependent living standards of the American middle class, never mind their vulnerability, or the worsening health and education available to most Americans (have they/we been deemed superfluous and dispensible?) - those issues are nowhere on the DLC agenda. National healthcare and fixing all the public schools so that everyone can have a quality education is not on the DLC agenda, but charter schools are.

The DLC is simply rooted in Dixiecrat foundations, and though there's nothing new about it, its reactionary head has risen again in the defeatist mentality of the Democratic so-called Leadership. We have at least two DLC members running for President of the United States [again]: Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Clinton's oh-so-radical election theme is "Saving the American Dream".

Barack Obama said, years before running for President was a thought (see http://www.blackcommentator.com/48/48_cover.html), that he would not join the DLC. Let's hope he holds to it.

Al Gore was DLC; if he decides to run again, will it be with the DLC's blessing or will they "talk him out of it" before he's forced to deal with their opposition publicly? Will John Edwards ever clearly and openly demand that the U.S. Poverty Guidelines be revamped just as the Minimum Wage had to be, so that a family of four in New York or California or any other high-priced area is not expected to survive without government assistance if they earn a pathetic $13,000 in an entire year? Or is his message of closing the gap between America's richest and poorest pure jury-manipulating-verbiage? I'll look into all the Democratic candidates closely as time goes on, and we'll see just where they stand, Truthseekers.

P.S. No shocker that Democratic Senator of Louisiana, Mary Landrieu, who has failed to get any help to her Black and poor and middle-class constituents in 18 months after Hurricane Katrina, is an illustrious founding member of the DLC. Read more!