Isn’t that basically what it should all boil down to? I think so.
Archive for September, 2007
Rudy Giuliani is trying to make the case that he’s the Republican most likely to beat Sen. Clinton. Now, putting aside the fact that I think this is a foolhardy position for Giuliani to take (this is a guy who makes President Clinton’s personal foibles look downright quaint, heck, we all know Chelsea returns Bill and Hillary’s phone calls), Giuliani would in theory be the Republican best poised to win New York. That’s where he began setting himself up as the President of 9/11 and as a crime-buster. But in fact, Sen. Clinton in the last poll I saw crushes Giuliani in New York, and she was just re-elected there in a landslide. Furthermore, the numbers seem to say as the state’s former first lady, Sen. Clinton puts Arkansas on the table. Wouldn’t Giuliani be the worst-positioned candidate to fight Sen. Clinton in Arkansas?
In other words, maybe setting yourself up as the best candidate to inoculate your party against the other guy’s strengths (John Kerry) is not the best strategy for victory.
Republicans aren’t acting crazy enough this cycle, says the religious far right:
Alarmed at the chance that the Republican party might pick Rudolph Giuliani as its presidential nominee despite his support for abortion rights, a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate in an attempt to stop him.
The group making the threat, which came together Saturday in Salt Lake City during a break-away gathering during a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy, includes Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps the most influential of the group, as well as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie and dozens of other politically-oriented conservative Christians, participants said. Almost everyone present expressed support for a written resolution that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third party candidate.”
Of course, one man running for president is already perfect for this group of “Christian” fundamentalists: Alan Keyes.
It is a continuing blight on America and black Americans particularly that this absolute stain has Thurgood Marshall’s seat on our highest court.
So many campaigns in the last twenty years were supposed to be the ones that finally expressed the will of young people, except that when it comes time to do actual work and actual voting, the majority of the young fail time and time again. Last cycle it was the groundswell of support behind Howard Dean that never appeared at the polls in Iowa, and this cycle it looks like Sen. Barack Obama is on pace to get screwed by the youth vote that doesn’t show up.
The campaign’s challenge will be converting the excitement of Kizzie and other students into votes. Candidates who have charmed young voters in the past have largely failed when it came to mobilizing them. Interviews with two dozen students as they went back to school at three black colleges found support for Obama, but with summer breaks having ended only recently, the campaign’s fledgling student organizations do not match the enthusiasm.
About 18 students showed up for the first meeting of Students for Barack Obama at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta. The group’s volunteer coordinator Kevin Heard, 19, was disappointed with the showing.
“We have to get more people here,” he said. He joined the group, Heard said, because it offers an opportunity “to help a black man who is showing positive images of African American men. By helping someone as positive as he is, I’ll show America that I am positive, too.”
He and others in the group will head to South Carolina this weekend to knock on doors for the candidate.
More representative of the overall level of student activism is Troy Haynes, 21. A Clark Atlanta student who recently moved from New York, he has never cast a vote and is barely paying attention to the presidential race. He did sign onto a Students for Barack Obama group on Facebook, because he thinks that “Obama should show the whole world that a black man can run the United States.”
Has Haynes registered to vote? “Nah, not yet.”
I sense that a lot of people think signing up for an Obama Facebook group and plugging him on their MySpace page will be all it takes, but I feel that at the same time Clinton’s got older supporters actually doing stuff in the real world and that will actually translate to votes.
One of the phony soldiers that Rush Limbaugh hates so much speaks out with some pictures of other phony soldiers in Iraq.
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A young girl who was shown being sexually assaulted in a homemade videotape has been found, an investigator said Friday. “We found the victim. She’s safe,” Nye County sheriff’s Detective David Boruchowitz told The Associated Press.
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Just days after being offered the role of Wonder Woman in the 2009 summer tentpole comic book flick JLA (that’s Justice League of America for those who have been living in the closet since the sixties) Entertainment Weekly is reporting that Jessica Biel h
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Mailplane aims to provide the best of both worlds for users of the popular web-based email service Gmail, plus some clever new features that aren’t found anywhere else.
That’s the buzz right now.
Fundraising dropped off dramatically for the two leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, but Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama will still report raising in the neighborhood of $20 million each over this three month time period, sources close to both candidates tell CNN.
Clinton will show she has pulled in between $17-$20 million, while Obama will report he raised between $18-$19 million. Fundraising is historically slow in the third quarter, which covers the final two months of summer and the first month of fall. In the second quarter, Obama shattered fundraising records by reporting that he raised $32.5 million, $31 million of which he could use in his bid for the Democratic nomination. Clinton raised $27 million during this same time period, and all but $6 million of it could be used in the primary.
If somebody had told me a couple years ago that $40 million dollars for the top two Democratic contenders would be considered “dropped off” fundraising, I would have asked what you were smoking. Things have clearly changed - and many (like me) haven’t even given our $50 yet. I’m curious how this round of numbers will reflect the national race of Obama vs. Clinton, if she’s ahead of him this time. Maybe I’m calling it too early, but I think this is going to become a two-person race for real soon.
There’s not much more you need to add to that. Bush is giving the Democrats a gift by screwing the children, again.
I don’t agree with his vote, but apparently now Dennis Kucinich is not progressive enough and must be challenged in a primary. Because he voted against the bill because it was not liberal enough. Dennis Kucinich.
Yes, that Dennis Kucinich. If Dennis Kucinich ain’t pure enough for these liberal purity purges, these folks are going to end up with a really, really, really small Democratic party.
So early for shenanigans.
A close friend and major fundraiser of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has identified himself as the mystery financer of the proposed California initiative to apportion the state’s 55 electoral votes by congressional district instead of winner-take-all.
He is New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. He said he provided the $175,000 to initially finance the petition drive to get the measure on the June 2008 ballot. But as The Times’ Dan Morain revealed in an exclusive story on this website last night, the drive has foundered on internal disputes and lack of further financing.
The DNC has questions.
“Rudy Giuliani should come clean and explain his ties to this blatant Republican power grab.” said DNC Communications Director Karen Finney. “Voters deserve to know if Rudy Giuliani is involved in this dirty trick to steal the White House for the Republicans. Does Rudy support this Republican power grab? Is it part of his campaign plan?”
Michelle Malkin and the usual gang of idiots are trying to say John Edwards was racist for pointing out the fact - the fact - that current rates of incarceration for young black men are unsustainable and leading to a prison generation. Again, Sen. Edwards was right, on the money, addressing issues that are affecting black Americans. Unlike the Republicans, who couldn’t be bothered to show up at a debate in front of a black audience last night, lest they offend the racists in the base of the Republican party.
Captain Ridiculous strikes again.
Conservative Michael Medved writes a column explaining to us that slavery in America wasn’t that bad and that we need to just get over it and excise the idea that an entire race of people was held in bondage for hundreds of years in the land of the free.
I can’t figure out why there aren’t more black conservatives, what with scholarship like this.
The constitution does not say America is a Christian nation. John McCain does not know this.
One of the Republican frontrunners is apparently Grandpa Simpson. Granted, Grandpa Simpson is a funny character… but you wouldn’t want him to be leader of the free world, would you?
Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson said Thursday he was unaware that a federal judge had ruled last week that lethal injection procedures in his home state were unconstitutional.
Thompson also told reporters he was unaware that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed this week to consider a Kentucky case about whether lethal injection violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Thompson’s support for the death penalty was a major part of his campaign platform when he first ran for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee in 1994. Asked for his response to the recent Tennessee and Kentucky cases, Thompson responded, “I hadn’t heard that. I didn’t know.”
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It’s not the first time Thompson has been caught off-guard by questions on hot-button topics. In Florida earlier this month, Thompson seemed surprised when asked about oil drilling in the Everglades, a major issue in the state.
Thompson also gave no opinion when asked about efforts by President Bush and Congress to keep brain-damaged Terri Schiavo alive two years ago, saying he did not remember details of the case that stirred national debate.
(via)
There’s no way a candidate can essentially disarm himself like this during an election. Sure, in an ideal world this money thing is not an issue, but we don’t live in that world.
Former Sen. John Edwards Thursday said he will accept public financing for his presidential campaign, and challenged his chief rivals for the Democratic nomination, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, to follow his lead.
Edwards is the first top-tier Democratic presidential candidate to accept public financing.
“This is not about a money calculation,” Edwards told CNN senior political correspondent Candy Crowley on his way to an event in Durham, North Carolina. “This is about taking a stand, a principled stand, and I believe in public financing.”
That kind of decision leads me to believe that the train is just about to leave the station. For a Democrat to be president they must compete and possibly even exceed the amount of money the GOP will/can raise.
UPDATE: Sen. Edwards felt differently in February.
Democrat John Edwards on Monday joined New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in saying he will not use public money for the presidential primary campaign or, if he wins his party’s nomination, for the general election.
The move by the former North Carolina senator is the latest sign of trouble for the public campaign funding system, created after the Watergate scandal to set limits and disclosure rules on contributions to presidential campaigns.
Edwards said in an interview that he expects major candidates in both parties to raise unlimited private dollars rather than participate in the public system. He said he needs to do the same “to have the funds to be competitive.”
The results show that the online public takes its ad production responsibilities seriously, with many professional-looking spots. But while the quality was high, the quantity was not. For a contest open for more than two weeks, 129 submissions seems a small number — a reflection, perhaps, of the former Massachusetts governor’s relative obscurity among voters.
Imagine if a similar contest had been held for supporters of Rep. Ron Paul or Sen. Barack Obama, both of whom have consistently led their respective fields in the total number of YouTube views, MySpace friends and Facebook supporters, three ways of measuring online popularity. (Number of MySpace friends? Paul: 64,572. Romney: 30,520. Number of YouTube views? Paul: 4.2 million. Romney: 2.2 million.) But as Micah Sifry of TechPresident.com, which tracks how the candidates are campaigning online points out: “Look, it’s not easy to make an online video. Making an online video is far harder than writing a blog post.” Indeed. Still, Dan Manatt of PoliticsTV.com, which creates news and satirical online videos, counters: “If the contest response is an omen for the primaries, Romney should be worried. MoveOn.org’s ‘Bush in 30 seconds’ contest” — the liberal group asked members to create an anti-President Bush spot — “got 10 times more responses than Romney got. And that was in 2004, before Web video was even big.”
How about leading conservative host Rush Limbaugh, a man who has regularly interviewed the president, vice-president, and numerous other conservative Republican luminaries?
During the September 26 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh called service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq “phony soldiers.”
From the DCCC:
Chairman Chris Van Hollen Condemns Rush Limbaugh’s Outrageous Comment that Soldiers Who Support Withdrawing From Iraq Are “Phony Soldiers”
“Rush Limbaugh’s personal attack on our men and women in uniform is reprehensible. It minimizes the sacrifice our troops in Iraq and their families are making and has no place in the public discourse. Rush Limbaugh owes our military and their families an apology for his hurtful comments that minimize their service to our country.”
UPDATE:
Dems slam Limbaugh on the floor of the House.
Patrick Murphy (Iraq Vet): “Someone should tell chicken-hawk Rush Limbaugh that the only phonies are those who choose not to serve and then criticize those who do. I served proudly, so did two of my fellow paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne who spoke out and died just weeks ago. Generations of American veterans have worn the uniform with pride and we know it is no contradiction to serve your country and still disagree with the Bush-civilian leadership that mismanaged this war.”
There also denouncements from Rep. Frank Pallone and Jan Schakowsky.
DNC chairman Howard Dean denounces Rush Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” remark.
“Rush Limbaugh should immediately apologize to our brave men and women in uniform for undermining the sacrifices they make every day serving our country. Limbaugh’s comments were un-American, have no place in the public discourse, and show just how far he’ll go to defend President Bush’s failed policy in Iraq. America’s troops deserve better, and Limbaugh owes them an apology.”
Do companies like Verizon really think they own the radio waves? Do they not understand that, while it’s hard to take them away, they lease the radio spectrum from us, the people? Jesus, H. I’m not a corporate basher by any margin, but sometimes…
Did anybody watch it? The computer stuff was pretty preposterous, but I kind of liked the spy/action stuff enough to watch the second episode. This is also an excuse to post a picture of Yvonne Strahovski, who plays the spy femme fatale Sarah Walker.
How could you argue with these folks after they’ve laid out such a clear logic tree? If Hillary Clinton is elected president, we’re going to need universal healthcare just for all the sanitariums filled to capacity.
The guy has no money, no support, nothing. Yet, he keeps getting invited to these debates: why? He’s not a serious candidate, even Rep. Kucinich can show demonstrable support on a much higher level than Gravel. All Gravel does is throw crazy charges at the others, not substantive differences like Kucinich does, but just nutty stupid stuff. Get him out of there.
I feel compelled to post these because conservatives continue to push the idea that a) the Daily Show never makes fun of liberals/Democrats and b) conservatives can. Neither is true. I also want to point out for the liberals that the Daily Show is first and foremost a comedy show, and not designed to shill for any party. Like conservative attempts at humor that fail like Newsbusted, The 1/2 Hour News Hour, and Red Eye - when you put an agenda ahead of the funny, the funny will always always lose.
In this case it’s Jon Stewart making fun of Hillary Clinton’s laugh.
