cheezburger cheezburger cheezburger

cheezburger cheezburger cheezburger 6 July 2008

Posted by marisacat in 2008 Election, Abortion Rights, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, SCOTUS, Sex / Reproductive Health, WAR!.
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eat your cheezburger!

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama D-Ill., serves burgers to Alisha Cordell from Raleigh, N.C., during a lunch with supporters at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., Saturday, April 12, 2008. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Gimme gimme gimme … your vote! What’s the matter, sweetie? I served you a cheezburger! What more do you want? … and if you want more, see your pastor/father/husband first. Sweetie.

LOL…. Oh I never thought much of him. The speech at the 2004 convention bored me to tears… and the promoters in the party started pushing him, hard, pronto. It stank. It stinks now, worse.

I don’t care for white church goers.. why would I think better of the black church goers. Pentacostals, fundies, conservative/pro-life Catholics, others. Sorry, no. Holy Rollers all, in my book. They can jump off a steep high cliff. To the lions below.

I cannot wait for the 50 yard line sermon. Touch down for Jesus.

*****************

Once again with feeling: The Refrain: He taught what to whom???

From the last thread, moiv’s comment…

moiv

According to ABC, Obama is still clarifying his clarification — and he should have quit while he was ahead.

Obama told a Christian magazine, Relevant, that only women with a “serious physical issue” should be able to get an abortion post-viability.

As I wrote yesterday, that’s contrary to 35 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence on the issue, which has always demanded that abortion bans contain an exception to allow the procedure to protect a woman’s “mental health,” as well as her physical health. Only Justices Thomas and Scalia have expressed the view that a “mental health” exception is not required.

:::

In clarifying his remarks, Obama said this afternoon that he has “consistently” said health exceptions are required for laws banning or seriously restricting abortion. But he then goes on to try to carve out exceptions to the exceptions, and he ends up suggesting, again, he would support more limits on abortion than the law currently allows.

Speaking to reporters on his campaign plane, Obama said mental health exceptions—which are a real battleground issue in the abortion debate–can be “rigorously” limited to only those women with “serious clinical mental health diseases.” He said mental health exceptions are not intended permit abortions when a woman simply “doesn’t feel good.”

“It is not just a matter of feeling blue,” Obama said.

Here’s the problem with that, and why Obama’s remarks are so startling. Obama is trying to restrict abortions after 22 weeks to those women who have a serious disease or illness. But the law today also covers some women who are in “mental distress,” those women who would suffer emotional and psychological harm without an abortion.

This standard has long been understood to require less than “serious clinical mental health disease.” Women today don’t have to show they are suffering from a “serious clinical mental health disease” or “mental illness” before getting an abortion post-viability, as Obama now says is appropriate.

And for 35 years—since Roe v. Wade—they’ve never had to show that.

So Obama, it seems to me, still is backing away from what the law says—and backing away from a proposed federal law (of which he is a co-sponsor) that envisions a much broader definition of mental health than the one he laid out this week.

I think we need to review Pastor Obama’s notes for the daily class he seems to be trying to conduct.. He seems FUCKED UP. I know, inelegant, but you have to admit, direct.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

From his speech in 2007 to Planned Parenthood (transcript as delivered)

I have worked on these issues for decades now. I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional Law. Not simply as a case about privacy but as part of the broader struggle for women’s equality. Steve and Pam will tell you that we fought together in the Illinois State Senate against restrictive choice legislation—laws just like the federal abortion laws, the federal abortion bans that are cropping up. I’ve stood up for the freedom of choice in the United States Senate and I stand by my votes against the confirmation of Judge Roberts and Samuel Alito [Applause]

So, you know where I stand. But this more is than just about standing our ground. It must be about more than protecting the gains of the past. We’re at a crossroads right now in America—and we have to move this country forward. This election is not just about playing defense, it’s also about playing offense. It’s not just about defending what is, it’s about creating what might be in this country. And that’s what we’ve got to work together on.

There will always be people, many of goodwill, who do not share my view on the issue of choice. On this fundamental issue, I will not yield and Planned Parenthood will not yield. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t find common ground. Because we know that what’s at stake is more than whether or not a woman can choose an abortion.

Short version: I will not yield.

hmmm “It is not just a matter of feeling blue,” Obama said. That makes me laugh, it really does, as he rounds out one of several visits (more than any Dem contender in memory, according to Governor Schweikert) to MT, a whopping 3 EV, and says he will turn it blue. Alchemy, I guess… or, his holy hands? Perhaps he is not just a believer but believes himself to be a faith healer? He has seemed to approach saying this, that merely being bi-racial, he can heal us. I’d pay cold hard cash to hear the conversations between Axelrod and Mayor Daley (for whom Axelrod is a spokesman). I bet they laugh a lot.

I say, he and his ideas are OUT OF CONTROL.

Bloooooooooo ooo ooo, so blue, we are so blue… Daddy, daddy? What can we doooooooooo?

Some more from moiv’s ABC link:

That’s not what the law is today. The Court has said the Constitution prohibits states from banning post-viability abortions unless those laws contain a broad mental health exception—one that includes mental distress and severe emotional harm. Abortion rights groups have fought for decades to preserve these exceptions, and I’m awfully curious what they will think about limiting them to women with mental disease or mental illness. (A good question for Monday, when we’re all back in the office.)

Now maybe the law will change–now that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is no longer on the Supreme Court. On this issue, Obama seems to be suggesting it should.

Here’s his response:

“My only point is this-historically I have been a strong believer in a women’s right to choose with her doctor, her pastor and her family,” Obama said. “I have consistently been saying that you have to have a health exception on many significant restrictions or bans on abortions, including late-term abortions.

“In the past, there has been some fear on the part of people who–not only people who are anti-abortion, but people who may be in the middle–that that means that if a woman just doesn’t feel good then that is an exception. That’s never been the case. I don’t think that is how it has been interpreted.

“My only point is that in an area like partial birth abortion having a mental, having a health exception can be defined rigorously,” Obama continued.

“It can be defined through physical health. It can be defined by serious clinical mental health diseases. It is not just a matter of feeling blue. I don’t think that’s how pro-choice folks have interpreted it. I don’t think that’s how the courts have interpreted it and I think that’s important to emphasize and understand.”

We may be in “clarification” land for a long time. Along with Obama, our father, husband, brother and minister, pastor, rabbi. The imam too. Perhaps if we have a son over the age of majority, we need to ask him as well, if we may abort. It is so kind of Obama that, for now, he leaves in “doctor”. We are allowed to see a doctor.

I say, the parochial school boy (one of my nicknames for him) is RUNNING TO THE RIGHT. Forget the center.

Think I am wrong… ? Check out ema, an OB-GYN, at her site, The Well Timed Period. I landed on this from her a few weeks ago, while hunting for something else. I believe she accurately perceived that Obama is morally opposed to abortion (just an excuse to be authoritarian, imo) and believes we all should be. In some religiously infused public commons he envisions… (he is fucking nuts).

Is he positing a hypothetical argument, or is this his view? Feel secure enough with him to say? Feel secure at all? With him? His words?

“I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all…Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality.”

And she looked to this, as well (her bolding):

So let’s rededicate ourselves to a new kind of politics – a politics of conscience. Let’s come together – Protestant and Catholic, Muslim and Hindu and Jew, believer and non-believer alike. We’re not going to agree on everything, but we can disagree without being disagreeable. We can affirm our faith without endangering the separation of church and state, as long as we understand that when we’re in the public square, we have to speak in universal terms that everyone can understand. And if we can do that – if we can embrace a common destiny – then I believe we’ll not just help bring about a more hopeful day in America, we’ll not just be caring for our own souls, we’ll be doing God’s work here on Earth.

I think, in using a scrim of preacher-man verbiage, he is approaching McCain land. I have in the past said that McCain, the last few years, salutes the cross, a cross draped with the body parts of women. (You bet I am going to continue to beat up on the wannabe Christianist-in-Chief, as Sully so proudly calls him. You bet.)

MATTHEWS: It would be OK with you if some states said that a woman couldn’t have an abortion, even if her health was in danger?

MCCAIN: I think…

MATTHEWS: Because that’s what Nebraska did in that case.

MCCAIN: My position — my position is life of the mother, obviously.

MATTHEWS: Life, but how about health?

MCCAIN: Again, it depends on — you’d have to get down into health. I think it has to be right now on the basis of life of the mother. That’s my position.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: But even when a woman is told by her doctor…

(CROSSTALK)

MCCAIN: Rape, incest, or the life of the mother.

MATTHEWS: … that, if you deliver this baby, it’s going to do damage to you internally. It could be real damage.

MCCAIN: The life of the mother is the position that I hold. Now, I think you could have discussions about when that life is in danger, then when it isn’t, long-term effects, short term. What we worry about is that every doctor is saying — I’m talking about the pro-life position, which I hold — is every doctor is saying, — Go ahead and have an abortion because…–?

MATTHEWS: You don’t feel good.

MCCAIN: Yes. You don’t feel good.

MATTHEWS: You don’t feel good about having this baby.

^^^^^^^

If you are in need of a midnight giggle… here is one, from a Dkos diarist, blueness (never heard of him or her) elevated to the FP,

The site [Daily Kos] is very straight about itself: it is devoted to securing electoral victory for Democrats. By signing on to this site, we are all presumed to have agreed to serve as dog soldiers for Democrats; people who work against that purpose are not welcome here. There is of course room to roam here for lions: there are several among us now. But site history teaches that if ever a lion persists in presuming to act bigger than the site, euthanasia inevitably results. Similarly, a dog is at any time free to turn rabid, but such a dog will soon be put down.

Check out “act”, third line from the bottom, with your mouse.

It does remind me of DHinMI/Dana Houle (a man, against whom his ex-wife declined to obtain a TRO, fearing it would enrage him further, what does that tell you?), putting his bully’s imprimatur on the elevation of mcjoan to the FP, by saying in a thread, that she had had her distemper shots.

Also from blueness diary:

It is right to raise a ruckus about FISA. It is right to push Obama, push all Democrats, to do the right thing. It is right to express outrage if they do not. But if they do not, it is not right to set your hair on fire and run screaming from the Democratic Party.

Oh but I did. And who says that I may not? Pity poor blueness, a harnessed dog, somebody’s chained and starved chien de guerre.

**************************

Oh yes! Remember to vote, it’s your civic duty. This is a PSA.

Comments

1. marisacat - 6 July 2008: BTW, this cheerless essay on becoming Catholic and pro-life, is making the rounds of the conservative and RW sites. hmm.

Given my background, the Catholic idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we are opposed to its life-giving potential, was a revolutionary message. Being able to consider honestly when life begins, to open my heart and mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible for me until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.

All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I became officially, unapologetically pro-life. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering how normal people could do something like that, and I felt a chill rush through me as I thought: I know how they did it.
2. Heather-Rose Ryan - 6 July 2008: Ugh. Nasty piece of tripe, that Catholic article.

Here’s my response:

“I was lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: the enemy is not human. ”

And you, in this article, have done the same toward women. You show absolutely no respect for the acts of gestating a fetus and giving birth – giving new life to a human, something that only women can do. Since this is something that only women can do, the misogynist institution of Catholicism and other repressive religions IGNORE these acts – thereby completely erasing the role of the woman in the birth process. In their view, once a woman conceives, her role – and her ability to make decisions regarding it – ends. She becomes a subhuman non-entity, a mere Petri dish.

Most likely, this attitude compensates for the fact that the man has no role in the process after he donates the sperm. It is totally out of his hands (unless of course, he murders the pregnant woman, as happens all too often). I’m sure this has frustrated and enraged men for thousands of years.

Until anti-abortion advocates like yourself come to terms with the reality of biology, that is, that a fertilized ovum is not a human being in any sense of the phrase – and until you can figure out some way to gestate a fetus to term without the willing participation of a woman and her womb – you are merely living in a dream world, parroting senseless propaganda.

“As I researched issues like partial-birth abortion, I frequently became stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon witnessing the level of evil that normal people can support.”

Late-term abortion is almost always used in tragic cases of fetal abnormality or danger to the woman’s life. Would you like to explain why you think that medical professionals are “evil” for helping in these cases?

Are you really ready to say that the life of a fetus trumps the life of a grown woman?

It’s easy to say such things when you make the woman invisible and rob her of her humanity and her authority over her own body.
3. ms_xeno - 6 July 2008: To wu ming in the last thread:

I wish I had a blogroll to direct you to vis-a-vis Green discussions, but I don’t. Dissident voice is a good place for some of these discussions, depending on the thread. The national Green party has a discussion board but it seems pretty quiet at the moment.

Ballot Access News is a great place to keep up with the regional ups and downs of outsider parties in general. Likewise Third Party Watch. As for McKinney’s progress, her page isn’t updated all that frequently. Maybe that will change once the Green nominating procedure is over. In the meantime I keep up with her as best I can by using google and narrowing searches to “news” or “blogs” on a week by week basis.

California Greening might interest you, though their focus on electoral politics is almost entirely through the prism of environmental concerns. But the quality of the writing is good, to me.

There’s a lot of good reading out there, but the BBB’s aren’t going to hand to us, and many of their apologists specialize in sitting on their hands and whining that even a cursory search for alternative sources is too much work. And of course the apologists play the “you smell” game if one actually presents them with something. Ewww… you call that a REAL source ? Bring me another ! (whine) Ad nauseum, until we give up.

On the plus side, alternatives are seemingly too small and obscure right now to attract hordes of Elises and Danas and Armandos and similar wannabe shills, enforcers, profiteers and thugs. Might as well make the most of that for as long as it lasts.
4. ms_xeno - 6 July 2008: Oh, and I’m enjoying On the Wilder Side, lately as well. I just subscribed to their feed via LJ.

Speaking of LJ, I have sometimes shamelessly raided the blogroll at Dees ‘Dotes, as well. Dee is a UT Green.

I really do need to set up a blogroll one of these days.
5. marisacat - 6 July 2008: LOL

Ann Althouse on the aabortion flogflippering. But she is def in a different corner than am I.

I did laugh pretty hard when she read the Boston Globe article on all his friends up to their necks, lips, nostrils, eyebrows, in the Chicago Housing Authority scandals of the past 13 or so years… and complained that Hillary had not told her about it.

AA is a big Ob supporter…
6. ms_xeno - 6 July 2008: More dispatches from the Legion of Sensitive New-Age He-Man Revolutionaries.

I’ve never seen a better argument for abortion than these dual overhead clowns and their 185 RPM mouths. Hell, I’ve never seen a better argument for feminist separatism. God bless the free speech blogs. [salutes]
7. marisacat - 6 July 2008: 6

LOL he must have been so personally offended when he posted here. Happy now with the pathological DB and the drunk tank inhabitant F-titz.

They hve congealed…
8. marisacat - 6 July 2008: LOL This was a given:

OBAMA’S AWARD-WINNING RECORDINGS ARE NOW AMMO – Politico’s David Mark and Kenneth P. Vogel: ‘Barack Obama has proven a difficult target to hit-just ask Hillary Clinton. Opposition researchers, though, hope that they’ve found a weapon to wound Obama in his own voice as recorded for the Grammy Award-winning audio version of his 1995 memoir, ‘Dreams from My Father.’ While candidates often have their own words turned against them in attack ads, it’s one thing to see past statements in bloc text and something else entirely to hear the same words in the office-seeker’s own voice. ‘I think the audio version makes a much more immediate impact’ than the print version of his memoir, said conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who’s already played audio excerpts from the book on his syndicated radio show. ‘It turns out to be very jarring to many ears to hear Obama talking about his youthful adventures, his attitudes on race.’ ‘
9. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: wow, how did you find that gift subscription thing?!?!

That is TOO fucking funny.
10. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: Given my background, the Catholic idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect

Shouldn’t that actually be “revulsion and disdain”?
11. NYCO - 6 July 2008: While candidates often have their own words turned against them in attack ads, it’s one thing to see past statements in bloc text and something else entirely to hear the same words in the office-seeker’s own voice.

Kids, it may seem fun today to post pictures of your drunk self on MySpace and Facebook, but just wait until you’re up for that job you’ve always wanted and your prospective employer Googles you…
12. NYCO - 6 July 2008: Oh brother…

The Obama campaign plans to announce as soon as tomorrow that he will break with tradition and leave the convention hall in Denver to deliver his acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High, capacity 76,000+, home of the Denver Broncos.

Will there be mass games too?
13. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: It’s enough to bring a smile to this misanthrope’s face:

Americans’ unhappy birthday: ‘Too much wrong’

Even folks in the Optimist Club are having a tough time toeing an upbeat line these days. Eighteen members of the volunteer organization’s Gilbert, Ariz., chapter have gathered, a few days before this nation’s 232nd birthday, to focus on the positive: Their book drive for schoolchildren and an Independence Day project to place American flags along the streets of one neighborhood.

They beam through the Pledge of Allegiance, applaud each other’s good news – a house that recently sold despite Arizona’s down market, and one member’s valiant battle with cancer. “I didn’t die,” she says as the others cheer.

Jeeebus … that alone made me laugh. Surviving is just a fact, it’s not a reason for optimism. Didn’t her doctor give her the odds on long-term survival. They can vary widely depending on the cancer involved and the chemo/radiation regime used. I’ll be nice and not mention chemobrain and long-term potential for fatigue.

But then talk turns to the state of the Union, and the Optimists become decidedly bleak.

They use words such as “terrified,” “disgusted” and “scary” to describe what one calls “this mess” we Americans find ourselves in. Then comes the list of problems constituting the mess: a protracted war, $4-a-gallon gas, soaring food prices, uncertainty about jobs, an erratic stock market, a tougher housing market, and so on and so forth.

One member’s son is serving his second tour in Iraq. Another speaks of a daughter who’s lost her job in the mortgage industry and a son in construction whose salary was slashed. Still another mentions a friend who can barely afford gas.

Joanne Kontak, 60, an elementary school lunch aide inducted just this day as an Optimist, sums things up like this: “There’s just entirely too much wrong right now.”

Happy birthday, America? This year, we’re not so sure.

The nation’s psyche is battered and bruised, the sense of pessimism palpable. Young or old, Republican or Democrat, economically stable or struggling, Americans are questioning where they are and where they are going. And they wonder who or what might ride to their rescue.

How much do you want to bet most if not all of these yahoos are Republicans and frequent church goers?

In 1931, when the historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “The American Dream,” he wrote of “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

In 2008, using history as a yardstick, life actually is better and richer and fuller, with more opportunities than ever before.

“Objectively things are going real well,” says author Gregg Easterbrook, who discusses the disconnect in his book “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse.”

He ticks off supporting statistics: A relatively low unemployment rate, 5.5 percent in June. (Employers did, indeed, cut payrolls last month by 62,000 jobs, but consider the 10.1 rate of June 1983 or the 7.8 rate of June 1992.) Declining rates of violent crimes, property crimes and big-city murders. Declining rates of disease. Higher standards of living for the middle class and the working poor. And incomes that, for many, are rising above the rate of inflation.

What was that old saw about lies and statistics? How much tinkering have they done w/ the economic reporting numbers since Bush 1 and Clinton? “Unemployment” rates alone play all kinds of games to not count people who aren’t or can’t work. The last sentence alone is a lie, as inflation doesn’t count food and fuel, which are ravaging people budgets, and have been for some time.

Anyway, a long litany of peoples’ trouble, then a close with this:

Katy Neild, the Arizona Optimist whose son fights on in Iraq, understands that better than most. She worries about her child, and about the many other dilemmas confronting Americans.

“Did I cringe when I filled my car last week? Yes,” she says. “But 100 years from now, if I were still alive, would I really care that I paid $4 a gallon for gas? No. I care my grandbaby is safe and she’s well and she has a good place to live.

“Your joy can’t be about your circumstances.”

As she says this, the other Optimists nod in agreement. Then their president, Susan Kruse, begins reciting one of the 10 tenets of the “Optimist Creed,” and the others soon join in, their smiles returning.

“Forget the mistakes of the past,” they chime in unison, “and press on to the greater achievements of the future.”

In the end, that’s what the Optimists do. They get their troubles off their chests, debate possible solutions – and then move on to doing what they can to make some positive changes in their communities, and in their own lives.

A birthday lesson for all Americans, perhaps.

Forget the mistakes of the past?

Stupid, stupid Americans … how can you learn if you do that? Did you forget the first time you burned yourself after mother TOLD you not to touch the hot stove?

Morons.
14. marisacat - 6 July 2008: 12

The “50 yard sermon”…

meanwhile for weeks the convention is reported as plagued wtih lagging fundraising and all manner of problems.

Good luck to them all.
15. marisacat - 6 July 2008: 9

No idea the meaning of the “giftsub” notation. Just that I was an out of control lion or dog that needed to be euthanised.

I’d say that sort of response is hardly limited to Dkos nor to “blueness”, whoever that is. I’d say it is all thru the butterfly net sites.
16. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: 12

Maybe they can find a filthy, sinning woman to pillory in one of the endzones?
17. marisacat - 6 July 2008: If God, who used to be a US Senator, wills it:

He laid the blame with reporters.

“I’m surprised at how finely calibrated every single word was measured. I wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t said before, that I didn’t say a year ago or when I was a United States senator,” said Obama, who is still a senator from Illinois.

When Morgan Freeman comes over to greet Obama, the senator begins bowing down both hands in worship.

“This guy was president before I was,” says Obama, referring to Freeman’s turn in Deep Impact and, clearly, getting a little ahead of his own bio. Next, a nod to Bruce Almighty: “This guy was God before I was.” (Okay, more than a little ahead.) But Freeman is eating it up.

Leaning in, he tells the senator to win it. “I will,” Obama replies. “That’s why I’m running.”
18. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: 17

I just threw up in my mouth a little.
19. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: Obama cares more about big corporations than you and your Green values.
20. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: A proper sendoff to Jesse Helms.
21. marisacat - 6 July 2008: 11

Well i am having a good laugh.There is a section of his reading of his book where he mimics Wright’s sermonising, reading from the Wright sermon “Audacity of Hope”.

This could get entertaining.
22. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: Iraq Vet in Famous Press Photo Dies from Overdose
23. marisacat - 6 July 2008: That was a sad story. Especially as nothing will change. They, government, media, congress, merely spend time now building up Afghanistan as the Good War (silent that it was forgotten for years, forgotten for any number of reasons) so GWoT can go full bore. In whatever direction they wish.
24. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: 7 Things You Can’t Say in ‘08
25. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: Mitchell has been highlighting a lot of those stories. I’m sometimes avoid his blog to avoid seeing another one.
26. marisacat - 6 July 2008: Speaking of constantly pointing to the need to escalate the war in Afhganistan. Wapo today:

Had former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld deployed 60,000 troops in 2002 — rather than 5,000 — Afghanistan might have been pacified. Now it seems that a “surge” of troops, like that successfully applied to Iraq last year, might be needed to turn the tide of the war.

The problem is that large numbers of fresh troops are unavailable. The U.S. military currently lacks the reserves, and NATO nations can’t or won’t provide them. Germany, Britain and France have recently pledged more soldiers, but the numbers are relatively small.
27. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: Cockburn:

There was a time when Americans didn’t expect the evangelical sermonizing now required of a presidential candidate. As Gene Healy writes in the June issue of Reason, “The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise.” For Healy, the infantilism of these expectations congealed in the question a pony-tailed male social worker asked Clinton, Bush Sr. and Perot in 1992: “I ask the three of you, how can we, as symobolically the children of the future president, expect the three of you to meet our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it.”

Having defined himself as the candidate of change and inspirational hope, Obama’s been busy making it clear that when it comes to serious issues like the American Empire, change is parsed as running the planet with greater efficiency. A real candidate of change would announce that by the end of his first term America would have withdraw from at least half the roughly 1,000 overseas bases it occupies, quitting the rest at the end of eight years.

Wishful thinkers comfort themselves with the thought that deep in the undergrowth, biding his time, is the “real” Obama, a progressive, even radical fellow. They’re like Pascal, pondering his bet:

“If I saw no signs of a divinity, I would fix myself in denial. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator,I would repose peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny Him, and too little to assure me, I am in a pitiful state, and I would wish a hundred times that if a God sustains nature, It would reveal Him without ambiguity.”

There have plenty of articles recently, some in this site, with headlines such “Obama’s Lunge to the Right”. I find these odd. Never for one moment has Obama ever struck me as someone anchored, or even loosely moored to the left, or even displaying the slightest appetite for radical notions, aside from a few taglines tossed from the campaign bus. In economics and foreign policy he has swaddled himself with right-wing orthodoxy to a degree that trangresses on the grotesque. He released the list of his “senior working group on national security” the other day. Not since Jimmy Carter entered the White House and promptly chose Cyrus Vance as his secretary of state and Zbibniev Brzezinski as his national security adviser has there been so dreary a news rele ase.

–Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
–Senator David Boren, former Chairman of the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence
–Secretary of State Warren Christopher
–Greg Craig, former director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning
–Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig
–Representative Lee Hamilton, former Chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee
–Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder
–Dr. Tony Lake, former National Security Advisor
–Senator Sam Nunn, former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
–Secretary of Defense William Perry
–Dr. Susan Rice, former Assistant Secretary of State
–Representative Tim Roemer, 9/11 Commissioner
–Jim Steinberg, former Deputy National Security Advisor

Here’s a crew ripe marinated in orthodoxy, running the gamut of inspirational rhetoric from Madam Albright’s “We think the price is worth it” (killing half a million Iraqi kids through sanctions in Clintontime) to Dr Rice, now of the Brookings Institution and formerly in charge of the African desk at the State Department in the Clinton years.
28. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: Veterans Group Urges Support to ‘Finish the Job’

Sen. John McCain will get some battleground-state help this week from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, who appear in a television commercial aimed at convincing the public that the United States is winning in Iraq.

Produced by Vets for Freedom, an organization of veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ad will run in Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and on cable nationwide. The group, with about 20,000 members, will spend $1.5 million on what it calls the first of many spots during the next month.

“As an organization, we have four months here, a window of opportunity of heightened awareness,” said the group’s chairman, Pete Hegseth, himself an Iraq vet. “We think it’s crucial that the success our troops have made on the battlefield is relayed to the American public.”

The ad features eight veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and the mother of a soldier in Iraq. “We changed strategy in Iraq,” one of the soldiers says in the ad. “And the surge worked. Now that’s change we can believe in. We need to finish the job. … no matter who is president.”

Yeehaw … keep that killin’ goin’. Proud to be an ‘Murikan, etc.
29. marisacat - 6 July 2008: 27

Well I realise this would piss off the faithful for Obama, but should he succeed and achieve the WH, even without his surrounding himself with Clinton left overs, he would be judged by history as part of Clintonite legacy.

Realise this kills the faithful, but … it’s the truth.

And on top of everything word around today is that Podesta of Center for American Progress, is likely to be tapped as transition CoS.

LOL, heartily.
30. ms_xeno - 6 July 2008: Another savory tidbit from BAN:

Neither Obama Nor McCain Will Commit To A Debate In Louisiana

…Since the poll requirement for the New Orleans debate is 10%, whereas the Commission on Presidential Debates requirement is 15%, the New Orleans debate sponsors are marginally closer to an inclusive general election debate than the CPD. Nevertheless, their rhetoric is out of sync with their criteria. As most readers of this site already know, a debate which invited all candidates who could theoretically win the election would involve only six presidential candidates, almost surely Baldwin, Barr, McCain, McKinney, Nader and Obama. Thanks to Ross Dreyer for the link to the New Orleans debate organization. — 7/5/08

Almost invisible in the lower right hand corner of the debate sponsors’ page is a “contact us” link, where some of the BAN members have called for outsider candidate advocates to demand a space for other candidates.
31. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: Obama & the Black Church

Religion had not been a big part of Obama’s upbringing and his mother had looked at organized religions with what he called her anthropologist’s sympathy and detachment, even though she was also “the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known.” James Baldwin had been a fervent boy preacher, who became a secular intellectual. Obama had a sort of reverse Baldwin experience, coming forward to be baptized once he was persuaded that religious commitment did not require that he forgo his critical thinking. “The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss,’ an intriguer, an idealist,” Du Bois says in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), remembering his shock at the frenzy of the Negro revival in the backwoods South.

It is tempting to look at Obama as an inheritor of the integrationist legacy of King, and Wright as a legatee of Malcolm X’s black nationalism. The real conflict between Wright and Obama stems from their uses of King’s memory. Wright, at least in some of his statements, seems to see his ministry as a continuation of the radicalization King underwent after the profound disappointment of the white reaction to the Poor People’s campaign in Chicago and to the striking garbage workers in Memphis. But it was not in King’s politics to damn America himself, as much as he was concerned with the effect of racism on Americans. King maintained that the civil rights struggle was one of justice against injustice and he warned that it must not deteriorate into a racial struggle of black against white. Obama returns to the moment of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and wants to recapture the high moral ground of the summer of 1963, when many members of the white clergy turned away from the white nationalism of the conventional American church and marched with blacks in Washington and across the South.

The black church is central to the grassroots and even the secular civil rights movements, and secular leaders who had no interest in religion were nevertheless very much influenced by the black church’s emphasis on the redemptive power of suffering and what the American historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses has called the “social gospel of perfectionism that presumes change to be progressive, inevitable, and divinely inspired.”[4] This is the legacy Obama claims through his mother, just as through his father he lays claim to another American tradition, the opening to people from different national and ethnic backgrounds. Once again, Obama’s biography contains a reversal of expectation: he gets his connection to black American history through his white mother and his links to Americans born of foreign parents through his black father.

So much parsing of the message contained in the story of the Black Donkle Messiah. So little actual willingness to look at what he actually says and does.
32. NYCee - 6 July 2008: My bad… I posted this on a thread I had clicked to, thinking it was current. July 3rd … that’s not today, right?

So this is a little past due (first airing), but here it is again.

For those interested:

Nader/Cspan

He’s on Cspan1 tonight, interview, 6:30 and 9:30, ET.

Dont know how far back he was interviewed. If recently, he should be able to make a lot of sharp points re Obama’s glaring dereliction of progressive duty…. on quite a number of issues.

A string ~*~~**~~* unstrung.
33. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: Who is planning our next war?

To start a third war in the Middle East against a nation three times as large as Iraq, and leave it to a new president to fight, would be a daylight hijacking of the congressional war power and a criminally irresponsible act. For Congress alone has the power to authorize war.

Yet Israel is even today pushing Bush into a pre-emptive war with a naked threat to attack Iran itself should Bush refuse the cup.

In April, Israel held a five-day civil defense drill. In June, Israel sent 100 F-15s and F-16s, with refueling tankers and helicopters to pick up downed pilots, toward Greece in a simulated attack, a dress rehearsal for war. The planes flew 1,400 kilometers, the distance to Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came home from a June meeting with Bush to tell Israelis: “We reached agreement on the need to take care of the Iranian threat. … I left with a lot less question marks regarding the means, the timetable restrictions and American resoluteness. …

“George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on the matter before the end of his term. … The Iranian problem requires urgent attention, and I see no reason to delay this just because there will be a new president in the White House 7 1/2 months from now.”

If Bush is discussing war on Iran with Ehud Olmert, why is he not discussing it with Congress or the nation?

On June 6, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz threatened, “If Iran continues its nuclear weapons program, we will attack it.” The price of oil shot up 9 percent.

Is Israel bluffing – or planning to attack Iran if America balks?
34. Madman in the Marketplace - 6 July 2008: Eating American on the Fourth of July

On this Fourth of July, I will be eating hot dogs. While I was trying to fit in as an Indian immigrant child throughout the 1970’s, they represented the quintessential American food. I begged my mother to let me have them for dinner every night instead of chicken curry and rice. She nixed the hotdogs but sometimes allowed spaghetti and meatballs — straight from a can. Hotdogs were “invented” by German immigrants serving their traditional sausages in the hustling streets of the new world, and spaghetti, everyone knows, came from Italy. If I had been celebrating Independence Day 150 years ago, however, neither would have been on the menu. In those days, Germans and Italians weren’t considered Americans, or even white. When they fought over the most lucrative street corner for food vendors in the 1880’s, the press reported these incidents as “race riots.”
35. marisacat - 6 July 2008: Lenin’s Tomb on Afghanistan… yesss, we will hear much more of Afghanistan and Pakistan under ObamaRama:

Contractors such as DynCorp are making out as well, because their role is to destroy the opium farms (those belonging to the poor farmers, not the big local rulers who are effectively under Nato protection). Curiously, DynCorp never seem to succeed in reducing drugs production wherever they are despatched to do so, yet they continually get the contracts.

And as for Washington? The last thing they want is to get out. Both Democrats and Republicans are intent on increasing the commitment to Afghanistan, if necessary by scaling back the war in Iraq. They know they are in danger of losing the whole situation. Not only is the war in Afghanistan turning the population against the occupiers. In Pakistan, where the government is assaulting ‘Taliban strongholds’ with great ferocity, local populations are actually becoming more and not less supportive of the Talibs. The US is increasingly projecting its force across the border, and sabre-rattling against the Pakistani government (even Karzai is getting in on that act). The danger of a regional war is escalating in that “global Balkans” – as Brezinski, Obama’s foreign policy advisor, dubs the region – and the United States government is raising the stakes

How truly wealthy we are, to pitch war against war… to select our murderous desserts. Using Dyncorp as our paid dealer at the source of the river, we control 92% (last UN assessment i read, as of 2007) of the world’s opium.
36. bayprairie - 6 July 2008: Nobody knows, nobody cares if I’m lonesome.
Nobody cries, nobody sighs if I’m blue.
It seems that night after night
I sit alone and twiddle my thumbs.
But still I just keep right on hoping, keep the door open
But nobody comes.

Ain’t it a crime kisses of mine are just wasted?
Then summer starts, I’m thinking what’ll I do?
Like a play-thing on the shelf
I guess I’ll have to play by myself.
Cause nobody knows, nobody cares if I’m blue.
37. marisacat - 6 July 2008: blooo ooo oo

Obama cares. When you are just blue. Or bloooo.
38. moiv - 6 July 2008: 36

So nice that was, bay. I have Leon Redbone’s version, on his “Red to Blue” album. So fitting, these days.
39. bayprairie - 6 July 2008: 37 & 38
40. mattes - 6 July 2008: #33

Gideon Levy: Israel prefers bombing Iran to peace with Arab world

Now it seems we are going to try a third time against Iran. It may even be successful, but nothing lasts forever. It will end in catastrophe. From bombardment to bombardment, that is not the way for Israel to establish itself in the Middle East in the long term. But no one discusses the long term beyond tomorrow.

We could and should now discuss the chances, and especially the risks, of an attack on Iran. We usually hold such a discussion, if at all, under impossible conditions: either retrospectively, when it is too late, lacking information or after receiving disinformation. Those in on the secrets are also the ones to make the decision. But those in on secrets always lean in a belligerent direction; war is the only doctrine and craft they know. So it is very dangerous to depend solely on them.

We could and should now consider an attack on Iran, but not only by consulting our own security experts. We should, for example, also listen to the impressive and knowledgeable Hans Blix, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who had reasonable things to say in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth; things that are missing from our warped public discourse. Blix warned that if Israel acts against Iran the whole region will go up in flames, that Syria’s nuclear capabilities are primitive, that the attack on the reactor in Iraq was unnecessary, and above all, that the government in Iran can be made to give up the bomb, but not by force.

The Swedish diplomat believes that if the international community offers guarantees of Iran’s security and accepts it as a member in good standing as was done with North Korea, perhaps there will be no bomb. This has not been tried. The international community is making do with threats and sanctions that do not deter Iran, and the Israel Air Force is already conducting drills, it is believed, for the next dangerous adventure. The assumption that the window of opportunity is about to close because of the changing of the guard at the White House is distorted: Might not Barack Obama, if elected, talk to Iran and prevent it from developing the bomb without bombardment? Could anything be better?

But talking about an action against Iran is not our main problem. For or against bombardment, Israel never thinks in terms of beyond tomorrow. It acts like a person who puts buckets in a house with a leaky roof instead of thoroughly fixing the roof. So we bombard Iran, and even if it is successful and we do not have to pay a heavy price for it – a dubious scenario – what happens then? What will happen when Egypt wants a bomb? Will we bomb again? And Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Iraq? And perhaps Hezbollah has some “dirty bomb” or other? And will we “allow” Turkey to go nuclear? Will we bombard and bombard, and live forever by bombardment?

Israel can fix the holes in the roof only if it seriously tries to be accepted in the region. Such acceptance will be the only guarantee of its existence beyond the next bombardment. A real chance for this was created in the Arab peace initiative that Israel is ignoring in intolerable arrogance.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/999126.html
41. marisacat - 6 July 2008: hmmm Jan Crawford Greenberg has a third post up at ABC on ObamaRama/Abortion/Dem triangulation/Whatever else

Note the names. Backers of ObamaRama:

[I] came across a report last night that offers a good explanation. Written nearly a decade ago by Cynthia Dailard for the Guttmacher Institute, a leading think tank on abortion and reproductive health, the report details how pro-choice politicians have long sought to use the “mental health” exception as a way of seeking “common ground” with voters on the Right.

Back then, the proposals seemed cost-free — politicians could offer up a restriction, knowing that even if it passed, a Supreme Court composed of four liberals and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor would strike it down. Of course, much has changed since O’Connor retired three years ago: Today’s Supreme Court could well uphold these and many other restrictions.

In 1997, for example, then-Sen. Minority leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) proposed a then-clearly unconstitutional amendment to the so-called “partial birth” abortion ban that would have prohibited post-viability abortions for any woman with a mental health condition — no matter how severe.

Sen. Dick Durbin, (D-Ill.) offered an even more restrictive (and equally unconstitutional) proposal the following year—one that excluded women with mental health problems, but added the requirement that two doctors must approve the abortion before it could proceed.

So in some ways, Obama is carrying on a grand tradition of “sacrificing the mental health exception in order to appear reasonable in the context of the post-viability abortion debate,” as Dailard put it. It’s just a different time, with a different Supreme Court that could well not blink when faced with these restrictions today.

And there are, as the report makes clear, other consequences to opening this Pandora’s Box. Again, these may be consequences Obama wants, but there’s no question these proposals have had a broad effect on the abortion debate.

History shows that those proposals — offered and embraced by legislators who would call themselves “pro-choice” — have been seized by conservatives who oppose abortion. As Dailard wrote, the attacks on the mental health exception have had “significant repercussions beyond that significant issue, seriously reviving a legislative attack on abortion rights that largely has been dormant for two decades.”

After Daschle and Durbin’s efforts, leaders with the Center for Reproductive law and Policy issued a sharp retort, warning that they and other legislators were buying into the antiabortion movement’s “devaluation of women’s mental health.”::snip::

Where ever he is (and she puts up some choices) he’s holding hands with the pastors. LOL I got a look at the tired and flabby old men of the AME conference yesterday. Yeah so loaded iwth change.
42. marisacat - 6 July 2008: LOL Think Justin Raimondo is back on the ObamaRama bandwagon. No one understands Obama, I thnk that is the shorter version of this splutter.

If you loved the 110th, you’ll be fine wiht the 111th.
43. NYCee - 7 July 2008: You mean Justin aint singing this song?

Song for the Base:

Slip slidin away… Slip slidin away…

You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin away

(This ought to be played, incoming and outgoing, next time he speaks/preaches: slip slidin, flip floppin… either works. Funny, when I went to the lyrics, I found there’s a lot more to mine, with Obama in mind.)
44. marisacat - 7 July 2008: It really is laughable:

DNC’s Dean: “By bringing the last night of the Convention out to the people, we will be able to showcase Barack Obama’s positive, people-centered vision for our country in a big way.”
45. JJB - 7 July 2008: Yeeessshhh!

But site history teaches that if ever a lion persists in presuming to act bigger than the site, euthanasia inevitably results. Similarly, a dog is at any time free to turn rabid, but such a dog will soon be put down.

That sounds like something Goebbels or Himmler would have written. Although those two were at least smart enough to realize that a dog doesn’t “turn rabid” from choice, it does so because it’s suffering from a disease, one that has apparently infected a number of people over at Kossolini’s Orange Utopia.

As to the Optimists Club and their doctrine of forgetting, it’s echt American. Not for nothing did Gore Vidal label this country the United States of Amnesia. Those people should be sentenced to a stay in Kafka’s Penal Colony and have Santayana’s best-known dictum inscribed on their backs.

W/r/t this:

As Gene Healy writes in the June issue of Reason, “The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise.” For Healy, the infantilism of these expectations congealed in the question a pony-tailed male social worker asked Clinton, Bush Sr. and Perot in 1992: “I ask the three of you, how can we, as symobolically the children of the future president, expect the three of you to meet our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it.”

Having allowed the Presidency to be twisted into something like a monarchy along the lines of Imperial Germany’s, most Americans now seem to want it to become like that of Czarist Russia or pre-WWII Japan’s.
46. JJB - 7 July 2008: We’ve been at war in Afghanistan for almost 7 years now, and the situation is deteriorating rapidly:

A huge blast from a suicide car bomb at the gates of the Indian Embassy on Monday killed 41 people in the deadliest suicide car bombing since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 ousted the Taliban.

Among the victims of the attack, the first in seven years on a regional diplomatic mission in Afghanistan, were at least four Indian citizens: the Indian defense attaché, a political counselor and two other Indian officials. Six Afghan police officers were also killed. Many of the rest appeared to be civilians.

The fact that the Indian Embassy was attacked raised suspicions among Afghan officials that Pakistani operatives allied with the Taliban had used the bombing to pursue Pakistan’s decades-long power struggle with India.. . . There have been a number of attacks in Afghanistan in recent months notable for their increased sophistication and deadliness. Afghan and Western officials have said such attacks are signs of the growing strength of militants in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and the influence of Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists and even elements of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.

Suicide bombers attacked the five-star Serena Hotel in January and mounted a sophisticated assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai during a military parade in April, an attack that Afghan intelligence directly linked to the Inter-Services Intelligence.

BTW, that Sunday WaPo story MCat linked to in which it is suggested 60,000 US troops could have “pacified” Afghanistan way back when seems to me absurd. The Soviets had 100,000 troops stationed there throughout their occupation, and they couldn’t do it. I doubt if any army of any size could ever manage to subdue Afghanistan.
47. NYCee - 7 July 2008: “Only Justices Thomas and Scalia have expressed the view that a “mental health” exception is not required.”

And only those 2 plus Roberts and Alito have expressed the view that the death penalty should extend to child rapists.

There too, the diehard conservatives are joined by Obama. He wants to narrow the allowances for abortion and widen those for the death penalty.

Excuse me while I ironically imagine:

What if we lived under ObamaLaw and he “saved” a child from a not-mentally-deranged girl’s decision to abort, (She’s physically too fine, too. Bad girl, bad girl, whacha gonna do? You’re just a little late and a little too blue!) What if that child leads a miserable life and becomes deranged? (Strange as it may seem, Our Father Obama will not be there to see to his “saved” childrens’ needs.) What if that child grows into an adult who rapes a child? What if that adult then gets executed, again under ObamaLaw?

I already got the memo on “change we can believe in,” but what’s the motto on issues of life termination at the hand of Our Father Obama?

I need something simple that I can put on a bumper sticker.
48. NYCee - 7 July 2008: Simple yet snappy.
49. marisacat - 7 July 2008: well I think we are working out way to

Obama Saves

Obama is Jesus

Much more/othr than that is extraneous. I have been reading the lame defenses of him now for about two weeks. The ones for FISA/telcom immunity and “feeling blue” are pretty bad. Scott Lemieux (once, years ago, before he got all tangled up with TAPPED, very good on abortion, now just a party moutpiece from a vague center/left) went so far as to say it would be OK as long as it did not involve the old panels. People are utterly corrupt. They believe in nothing.

people should have to live iwht their jesus. I just don’t see much that he/ObamaJesus would not compromise, or his backers would nto compromise for him.

Again, he taught what to whom?
50. NYCee - 7 July 2008: I just don’t see much that he/ObamaJesus would not compromise, or his backers would nto compromise for him.

Well, the belief thing seems quite embedded in the self thing. Not in a healthy way…

(Oh gawd – Now some Obama mouth on Tweety is saying it’s fine if he comes back from Iraq and says he was wrong on the war in the first place!)
51. brinn - 7 July 2008: the thing I just do not, cannot, get about this whole “an abortion should not be granted if the woman “just doesn’t feel right” is that we have seen Susan Smith, Andrea Yeats (and many others throughout history, I’m sure, these two were just media’ed to death in recent memory…), Why in the fucking hell not abortion “on demand”?! Why the hell not “I really just don’t want to have this baby, can’t handle it right now, etc. etc. as a reason/excuse whatthefuckever?!

One would prefer cigarette burns, child rape, broken bones, abandonment, and on and on….

If a woman tells me she can’t handle it, who the fuck am I to argue?
52. brinn - 7 July 2008: PS

The cult of Obama sucks eggs.
53. NYCee - 7 July 2008: I too am getting incredibly sick of this man. The (latent) boy preacher comes of age, blooms… and gathers us all into his garden, makes us his flock? No thanks. I always disliked that penchant he has for the detached, heavenward gaze, just didn’t realize back then that he really was gazing at heaven! The arrogance, I did note. And he is THIN, and no, I don’t mean physically.

Went back to the last thread, the link to moiv comments/links, on the mental health bs.

So Obama and pastor (love that one!) will be judge and jury, denying a woman/girl a late term abortion for mental health… unless she’s proven ‘certifiable’? Oh yes, let’s do trust Obama to separate the mental health wheat from the chaff!
54. marisacat - 7 July 2008: ugh

I spent time looking back at Susan Smith’s life, and Andrea Yates too. Incredibly rocky lives. Constantly pushed by forces near them to illusions of “normalcy”

The whole thing, with both, was so sad.
55. marisacat - 7 July 2008: 53

Cannot remember where I read it, CTrib or Sun-Times or Chicago Reader… it also might be in the many extracts of his Dreams book that are around… but he took tapes of Wright sermons with him to Harvard and would practice preaching. IIRC he also addressed some sort of interfaith group there, drawing on … I guess some desire to sermonise.

I was very put off. And, sorry, his religious family that he dragged along with him and shoved at us, always turned me off.

I was sick of Jerry Brown’s lectures too, failed or “incomplete” seminarian.

Spare me.

Here tho is a laugh, apparently in the audio version of Dreams, he mimics Wright, reading from/performing his Audacity of Hope sermon.

I have no idea if that is part of what the R say they will use from his voice on tape, but hell, how unwise of him.
56. NYCee - 7 July 2008: As much as I did not want Hillary as nominee, I took pleasure in the SNL bit where the press got mocked for giving her the tough questions while they spoon fed him. The point was the media’s coddling/adoration of him and toughness toward her, which was true to a large extent as the primaries got moving. But what I got, beyond that, was what I saw in the debates – she had done her homework, much more than him. Or Edwards, who often seems to exude much more confidence in himself than in what he actually knows.

But, of course, with our press corps, they all manage okay, regardless, dont they?
57. marisacat - 7 July 2008: From The Page:

The Illinois Senator tells the Military Times that he’ll take into consideration what commanders on the ground think when figuring out his timetable for bringing the troops home.

“It strikes me that that’s something we can begin relatively soon after inauguration. If on the other hand you’ve got a deteriorating situation for some reason then that’s going to have to be taken into account.”

Politico: “Some of the most unambiguous language Obama has employed yet to indicate he’s retreating from his Democratic primary position on Iraq.”

*********

I wonder if he has removed “immediately” from the statement on Iraq at his site. LOL

Bit by bit I think we are headed for secret plan to end the war.
58. NYCee - 7 July 2008: #57

You are soooo negative, girl!

You see flips. That is so glass half empty.

I see change.

See?
59. marisacat - 7 July 2008: new post……………………

LINK

………………. …………
60. NYCee - 7 July 2008: Well here’s a good soul…

Another unabashedly pro-abortion diary. From a guy. Just simple and straight-out supportive.

I am pro-abortion