After Wright comes Emil Jones

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Sure - and in other news there was a piece today claiming that McCain is associated with numerous current and former corporate lobbyists.

If the idea here is that the general election will somehow be easier on Hillary, I think that's rather laughable.

All this "Ooh he can't take the criticism" stuff seems rather hysterical and removed from reality.

Just as Shakespeare wrote, "There goes Brutus, lean and hungry", Obama is an ambitious politician and it will be no surprise that he can take a load of critism.

The real question is , can the voters including his wavering fans take it?

If, indeed, the majority of his "fan base" are people who are that naiive about what he stands for. I'm not sure that they are.

A good percentage of his fans are "Independents'' and disillushioned Republicans...

And don't forget, they are the ones who elected GWB not once, but twice.

Sure - and they'll elect McCain before Hillary.

[HAL 9000 96]

Sure - and in other news there was a piece today claiming that McCain is associated with numerous current and former corporate lobbyists.

If the idea here is that the general election will somehow be easier on Hillary, I think that's rather laughable.

All this "Ooh he can't take the criticism" stuff seems rather hysterical and removed from reality.

Just as Shakespeare wrote, "There goes Brutus, lean and hungry", Obama is an ambitious politician and it will be no surprise that he can take a load of critism.

The real question is , can the voters including his wavering fans take it?

Well heck... enough voted for the current politician in office.

[AnewKINDofFEELIN 0]

A good percentage of his fans are "Independents'' and disillushioned Republicans...

Abd don't forget, they are the wons who elected GWB not once, but twice.

I sure wouldn't want to be one of the disillushioned wons you're talking about.

[metta 0]

" None of them is linked to Obama "

Enough said. Next?

Obama could not have reached where he is now, without multifarious links among whom some are patently nefarious...

But the voters are responsible for what Obama has reached where he is now. How can you say he could not have reached where he is now? Did he do anything against the law to win more popular votes, delegates, states than his opponent?

No, Emil Jones is responsible! LOL

Obama has often described Jones as a key political mentor whose patronage was crucial to his early success in a state long dominated by near-feudal party political machines. Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama's "godfather" and once said: "He feels like a son to me."

Like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken pastor of Obama's Chicago church, and like Tony Rezko, the millionaire fundraiser and former friend of Obama who is on trial for corruption, Jones is in danger of becoming a hindrance to his protégé's presidential ambitions.

[

/quote]

Edited March 24, 2008 by metta

[AnewKINDofFEELIN 0]

Sure - and in other news there was a piece today claiming that McCain is associated with numerous current and former corporate lobbyists.

If the idea here is that the general election will somehow be easier on Hillary, I think that's rather laughable.

All this "Ooh he can't take the criticism" stuff seems rather hysterical and removed from reality.

Just as Shakespeare wrote, "There goes Brutus, lean and hungry", Obama is an ambitious politician and it will be no surprise that he can take a load of critism.

The real question is , can the voters including his wavering fans take it?

If, indeed, the majority of his "fan base" are people who are that naiive about what he stands for. I'm not sure that they are.

A good percentage of his fans are "Independents'' and disillushioned Republicans...

And don't forget, they are the ones who elected GWB not once, but twice.

Sure - and they'll elect McCain before Hillary.

I rank them:

Obama

McCain

Hillary

I don't plan to vote for any of them, but I really can't see any situation in which I would vote for Hillary.

Maybe I could vote for her under sniper fire.......

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Sure - and in other news there was a piece today claiming that McCain is associated with numerous current and former corporate lobbyists.

If the idea here is that the general election will somehow be easier on Hillary, I think that's rather laughable.

All this "Ooh he can't take the criticism" stuff seems rather hysterical and removed from reality.

Just as Shakespeare wrote, "There goes Brutus, lean and hungry", Obama is an ambitious politician and it will be no surprise that he can take a load of critism.

The real question is , can the voters including his wavering fans take it?

If, indeed, the majority of his "fan base" are people who are that naiive about what he stands for. I'm not sure that they are.

A good percentage of his fans are "Independents'' and disillushioned Republicans...

And don't forget, they are the ones who elected GWB not once, but twice.

Sure - and they'll elect McCain before Hillary.

I rank them:

Obama

McCain

Hillary

I don't plan to vote for any of them, but I really can't see any situation in which I would vote for Hillary.

They're smearing Obama's campaign to turn him into some sort of fascist Manchurian candidate. The wife is still going to vote for him - but there's always been The Bradley Effect in regards to minority candidates (they poll significantly better than they do in the actual vote). I think we'll see that again here. In the end I think people will chicken out and go for the status quo with McCain. He'll probably end up being a one-termer because of his age.

[Ban Hammer 13,656]

I don't plan to vote for any of them, but I really can't see any situation in which I would vote for Hillary.

Maybe I could vote for her under sniper fire.......

her receiving or you receiving that sniper fire?

[HAL 9000 96]

Here's the article posted:

Long before Barack Obama launched his campaign for the White House, when he was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to a former Chicago sewers inspector who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

The exchange also sealed an intimate personal and political relationship that is likely to attract intense scrutiny amid the furore over Obama’s links to some of Chicago’s most controversial political and religious power brokers.

Obama has often described Jones as a key political mentor whose patronage was crucial to his early success in a state long dominated by near-feudal party political machines. Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”

Like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken pastor of Obama’s Chicago church, and like Tony Rezko, the millionaire fundraiser and former friend of Obama who is on trial for corruption, Jones is in danger of becoming a hindrance to his protégé’s presidential ambitions.

For almost a year Jones has used his position as leader of the state senate to block anticorruption legislation passed unanimously by the state’s lower house. He has also become embroiled in ethical controversies concerning his wife’s job and his stepson’s business.

None of them is linked to Obama, but the Democratic contender can ill afford another scandal related to his former Chicago allies. Despite his electrifying speech on race last week, the opinion polls make worrying reading for the senator and his aides. Hillary Clinton appears to be regaining lost ground and John McCain, the Arizona senator who has sewn up the Republican nomination, has edged ahead of his warring rivals.

When Obama stood before a row of American flags in Philadelphia on Tuesday, he faced the greatest challenge of his candidacy. His campaign was reeling from the potentially fatal fallout of Wright’s rabid videotaped sermons, in which the Chicago preacher exclaimed, “God damn America,” and said that the US government had invented Aids to infect black people.

Obama’s response was hailed as one of the bravest and most eloquent speeches on race delivered by an American politician. Even conservative commentators such as Charles Murray of National Review called it “flat-out brilliant”; Michael Gerson, former speechwriter to president George W Bush, called it “one of the finest political performances under pressure” since John F Kennedy addressed concerns about his Catholicism in 1960.

Other analysts, Democrat and Republican, took a different view of Obama’s refusal to turn his back on Wright – whom he portrayed as part of an embittered legacy of discrimination.

Some saw it as a potential gift both to Clinton, who has been surging in opinion polls since videos of Wright were posted on the internet, and to McCain, whose aides have begun to wonder whether Obama might prove an easier target than Clinton in November.

“Nothing could be more dangerous to Mr Obama’s aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday – for 20 years – in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable,” said Shelby Steele, a Stanford University historian and author of a book on Obama.

Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk-show foghorn, expressed the popular view more succinctly: “No country wants a president who is a member of a church with this kind of radicalism as its mainstream.”

The latest polls confirm that, for all the acclaim heaped on Obama’s speech by political insiders, voters seemed to be taking a sharp step back from the charismatic candidate who built his campaign on the promise of a break from “old politics”. One of Obama’s best-known slogans – and the title of his bestselling book – is “the audacity of hope”, a phrase that originally came from one of Wright’s sermons.

In Pennsylvania, the next big state to hold a primary, on April 22, Clinton has doubled her lead in the past two weeks and is now 26 points ahead. In North Carolina, which votes on May 6, Obama has been leading comfortably all year but is now only one point ahead. A national Gallup poll on Friday put Clinton ahead of Obama by two points for the first time since January.

Unfortunately for Democrats, their nomination battle seems to be helping McCain. The Republican rose to a eight-point lead over Obama and a 10-point lead over Clinton in Rasmussen tracking polls released on Friday.

Obama retains an almost insurmountable lead in the crucial count of convention delegates who will pick the Democratic nominee, and on Friday he picked up a useful endorsement from one of those delegates – Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, one of America’s leading Hispanic politicians. Richardson had been close to the Clintons and was regarded as a possible vice-presidential choice for Hillary. His first task will be to rally Hispanic voters in the hope of averting late primary losses that would damage Obama’s chances of picking up uncommitted party officials – the so-called superdelegates likely to decide the contest.

Other Democrats are worried that Obama may have given his Republican rivals the ammunition needed to undermine his campaign. McCain insists he will not engage in dirty tricks, and his aides distributed a memo last week warning Republicans to stay away from “overheated rhetoric and personal attacks”.

Yet Republican surrogates are drooling at the prospect of linking Obama to Wright’s rants.

They intend to ask why he has stopped wearing an American flag badge on his lapel, and why his wife, Michelle, said at a rally: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”

The Clinton camp is treading carefully, aware that overt attacks on Obama might alienate black voters. Yet the New York senator’s aides are quietly pleased by what they regard as an overdue scrutiny of Obama’s past. They believe he will come to be seen not as some Messiah but as an unusually gifted political hack who has made compromises with dodgy associates, just like most other American politicians.

That intensifying scrutiny may soon lead to Jones’s Illinois door, and to further uncomfortable insights into the unflattering political realities that accompanied Obama’s climb from obscurity.

At one point during Obama’s 2003 Senate campaign, Jones set out to woo two African-American politicians miffed by Obama’s presumption and ambition. One of them, Rickey “Hollywood” Hendon, a state senator, had scoffed that Obama was so ambitious he would run for “king of the world” if the position were vacant.

When Jones secured the two men’s support, Obama asked his mentor how he had pulled it off. “I made them an offer,” Jones said in mock-mafioso style. “And you don’t want to know.”

Jones is now at the centre of a long row over his attempt to block proposed laws cracking down on his state’s “pay-to-play” tradition – whereby companies hoping to win government contracts have to contribute to the campaign funds of officials.

Jones’s staff say he blocked the bill because he intends to produce something tougher. No proposals have appeared.

Cynthia Canary, an activist against corruption who is fighting to have the laws passed, says Obama had little choice as an Illinois politician but to deal with an ethically dubious regime. “You hold your nose and work through the system,” she said.

Yet she also thinks America is being done a disservice by those who portray Obama as somehow above the uglier wheeler-dealing of politics. “He’s a pragmatic politician, and in the end if you think that he’s superman, your heart is going to get broken.”

By that logic, GWBs alleged drug habit use and rampant alcoholism should have played a major factor in his electability... but id apparently did not.

The Bradley effect... more like Brownian motion in a test tube.

[SpiritAlight 1]

In the end, who cares?!

Will anything change?

Do I sound hopeless?

Actually, I am far from hope-less.

There is much shifting in people's consciousness right now, globally.

It is time to realize we cannot expect democracy to work in the way governments have it set up now.

It is fake.

People need to be in charge, not some false sense of some elected official that does nothing that the majority wants/asks.

Where is the accountability?

Where is a politician that does what they promise to do before getting elected?

Ha!

If we truly desire democracy, in the true sense of its meaning, then we will get it.

Have hope...yessssss.

See the new world as it can be.

Love, compassion, understanding.

What else is there?

What's important?

Flame way if you so wish.

It will not cut dull me. Bah!

[metta 0]

Sure - and in other news there was a piece today claiming that McCain is associated with numerous current and former corporate lobbyists.

If the idea here is that the general election will somehow be easier on Hillary, I think that's rather laughable.

All this "Ooh he can't take the criticism" stuff seems rather hysterical and removed from reality.

Just as Shakespeare wrote, "There goes Brutus, lean and hungry", Obama is an ambitious politician and it will be no surprise that he can take a load of critism.

The real question is , can the voters including his wavering fans take it?

If, indeed, the majority of his "fan base" are people who are that naiive about what he stands for. I'm not sure that they are.

A good percentage of his fans are "Independents'' and disillushioned Republicans...

And don't forget, they are the ones who elected GWB not once, but twice.

Sure - and they'll elect McCain before Hillary.

I rank them:

Obama

McCain

Hillary

I don't plan to vote for any of them, but I really can't see any situation in which I would vote for Hillary.

They're smearing Obama's campaign to turn him into some sort of fascist Manchurian candidate. The wife is still going to vote for him - but there's always been The Bradley Effect in regards to minority candidates (they poll significantly better than they do in the actual vote). I think we'll see that again here. In the end I think people will chicken out and go for the status quo with McCain. He'll probably end up being a one-termer because of his age.

I would'nt hasten to predict, just yet.

[AnewKINDofFEELIN 0]

I don't plan to vote for any of them, but I really can't see any situation in which I would vote for Hillary.

Maybe I could vote for her under sniper fire.......

her receiving or you receiving that sniper fire?

Me. Hillary has enough sniper fire to deal with. I heard that just last week her flight landed in Boise under heavy sniper fire.

[AnewKINDofFEELIN 0]

A good percentage of his fans are "Independents'' and disillushioned Republicans...

I believe those people are generally referred to as "swing voters." You know, the ones that tend to decide who wins and loses.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Sure - and in other news there was a piece today claiming that McCain is associated with numerous current and former corporate lobbyists.

If the idea here is that the general election will somehow be easier on Hillary, I think that's rather laughable.

All this "Ooh he can't take the criticism" stuff seems rather hysterical and removed from reality.

Just as Shakespeare wrote, "There goes Brutus, lean and hungry", Obama is an ambitious politician and it will be no surprise that he can take a load of critism.

The real question is , can the voters including his wavering fans take it?

If, indeed, the majority of his "fan base" are people who are that naiive about what he stands for. I'm not sure that they are.

A good percentage of his fans are "Independents'' and disillushioned Republicans...

And don't forget, they are the ones who elected GWB not once, but twice.

Sure - and they'll elect McCain before Hillary.

I rank them:

Obama

McCain

Hillary

I don't plan to vote for any of them, but I really can't see any situation in which I would vote for Hillary.

They're smearing Obama's campaign to turn him into some sort of fascist Manchurian candidate. The wife is still going to vote for him - but there's always been The Bradley Effect in regards to minority candidates (they poll significantly better than they do in the actual vote). I think we'll see that again here. In the end I think people will chicken out and go for the status quo with McCain. He'll probably end up being a one-termer because of his age.

I would'nt hasten to predict, just yet.

Why not? It wouldn't affect how I'd vote - if indeed I could vote. And it hasn't changed the wife's plans as far as I know.

But I think there's a reason why Obama is enjoying comparable/stronger voter support than Hillary - and IMO it has as much to do with her shortcomings as it does with his "talent". Or whatever you want to call it.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

I would'nt hasten to predict, just yet.

You've got to be kidding yourself if you still think Hillary has a chance of being the nominee without causing a shitstorm within the DNC. Does Bill Richardson's opinion also not count? Her goose is cooked and she'll only be doing the Party harm by staying in this race much longer. The numbers cannot by spun any other way.

[no name 1]

I rank them:

Obama

McCain

Hillary

I don't plan to vote for any of them, but I really can't see any situation in which I would vote for Hillary.

Then your rank is moot.

Edited March 24, 2008 by illumine