As my friend in Texas told me, a large turnout will favor Obama. I believe that!
teenyboone wrote:Cycloptichorn wrote:
40,000 come out to see Obama in Austin.
40k.
Cycloptichorn
Your photo, says it all! Watching cspan, "The state of Black America"! :wink:
It's called "The State of the Black Union", but I applaud your effort.
You Say You Want a Revolution
Political worshippers of the new Messiah.
By Mark Steyn
These days, Obama worshippers file two kinds of columns. The first school is well represented by Ezra Klein, the elderly bobbysoxer of The American Prospect:
Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.
Er, okay, if you say so. I got a bit bored halfway through and switched over to the Golden Girls rerun. But to each his own. Still, it seems to me that Barack Obama is the triumph of flesh, color, and despair over word ?- that's to say, he offers an appealing embodiment of identity politics plus a ludicrously despairing vision of contemporary America (sample: "Trade deals like NAFTA ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart") that triumphs over anything so prosaic as a policy platform. Mrs. Clinton, the earthbound wonk, is reduced to fulminating that this race is about "speeches versus solutions." But a lot of Democrats seem to have concluded that Hillary's the problem, and Obama's speech is the solution.
On the other hand, if you're running for president not as an unexceptional first-term senator with a thin resume but as the new Messiah, the new Kennedy, the new Gandhi, the new Martin Luther King, you can't blame folks for leaping ahead to the next stage in the mythic narrative. Around the world, a second instant sub-genre has sprung up in which commentators speculate how long it will be before some deranged Christian-fundamentalist neo-Nazi gun-nut deprives America of its fleeting wisp of glory. Setting a new standard for fevered slavering Obama-assassination porn, Earl MacRae warned Canadians in the Ottawa Sun this week:
To be black and catapulting towards the presidency on charm, intellect, and popularity is unacceptable to the racist paranoid and scary in America the beautifulÂ… They do not want to hear that he is a better American than they are, these right-wing extremist fascists in the land of America who no doubt believe it's God's will Barack Obama not get to the White House, no method of deterrence out of bounds, in their zealotry to protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Mom's apple pie, and the cross of Jesus in every home.
And you can't protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers without a Trigger. By this point, Mr. MacRae wasn't so much warming to his theme as typing up his first draft for Miramax: "Barack Obama is waving his arms. The crowd is cheering. I see the image I don't want to see. I see the image that is the terrible sickness in the great republic. I see Barack Obama one minute smiling, the people crying his name. I see Barack Obama grab his chest and his eyes widen and his mouth opens and the crowd screams as Barack Obama, black candidate for the presidency of the United States of America, falls to the ground dead, an assassin's bullet inside him."
Er, okay. But would it help if I made you a nice cup of chamomile tea and you lie down in a darkened room for half an hour? Right now Obama's more at risk of being taken out by traces of polonium-210 left in his hotel by a Clinton operative than by Roy Rogers saddling up for Jesus. Every president is a target for assassination, though George W. Bush is unique in having been the subject of explicit murder fantasies by so many non-right-wing non-extremist impeccably reasonable artists (the British movie Death Of A President; the novella Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker) and even the occasional straightforward exhortation: "On November 2, the entire civilized world will be praying, praying Bush loses," wrote Charlie Brooker in London's Guardian in 2004. "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. ?- where are you now that we need you?"
Well, wherever they are, they're probably saying: "Why bring us into it? When ol' Lee Harvey decided it was time for JFK to get assassinated, he didn't sit around whining, ?'John Wilkes Booth, where are you now that I need you?' Get off your butt and do it yourself, you big Euro-ninny." Ah, but for the armchair insurgents of the western Left, the vicarious frisson is more than delicious enough. Anything else would interfere with dinner plans.
The Bush-assassination fantasies are concocted by his political opponents and at least arise from his acts ?- invading the world; slaughtering 14 million Iraqi civilians or whatever it's up to by now; shredding the constitution. By contrast, the Obama-assassination porn is written by his worshippers and testifies to one of the most palpable features of the senator's campaign ?- its faintly ersatz quality, its determination to appropriate Camelot and every other mythic narrative. A few days ago, a local news team went to shoot some film at the Houston campaign headquarters for Obama. Behind the desks of the perky gals answering the phones were posters of Che Guevara and Cuban flags. Needless to say, the news reporters were either indifferent to this curious veneration or too sensitive to mention it, and it was left to the right-wing extremist Roy Rogers fascists of the blogosphere to point it out.
Do Obama's volunteers even know who Che is? Apart from being a really cool guy on posters and T-shirts, like James Dean or Bart Simpson, I doubt it. They're pseudo-revolutionaries. Very few people in America want a real revolution: Life is great, this is a terrific country, with unparalleled economic opportunities. To be sure, it's a tougher break if you have the misfortune to be the victim of one of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs or a decrepit inner-city grade school with a higher per-student budget than the wealthiest parts of Switzerland. But even so, to be born a U.S. citizen is, as Cecil Rhodes once said of England, to win first prize in the lottery of life. Not even Obama supporters want real revolution: They're messy, your cities get torched, the economy collapses, much of your talent flees. Ask the many peoples around the world for whom revolution means not a lame-o Sixties poster above your desk but the carnage and horror of the day before yesterday.
Poor mean vengeful Hillary, heading for a one-way ticket on the oblivion express, has a point. Barack Obama is an elevator Muzak dinner-theater reduction of all the glibbest hand-me-down myths in liberal iconography ?- which is probably why he's a shoo-in. The problems facing America ?- unsustainable entitlements, broken borders, nuclearizing enemies ?- require tough solutions not gaseous Sesame Street platitudes. But, unlike the whose-turn-is-it? GOP, Mrs. Clinton's crowd generally picks the new kid on the block: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. I wonder if Hillary Rodham, Goldwater Girl of 1964, ever wishes she stuck with her original party.
Interesting piece by Mark Steyn. However I doubt that any of the Obama supporters here will acknowledge it as anything more than the reactionary manifestation of one of those who somehow still doesn't "get it".
Re: Many Blacks Worry About Obama's Safety
BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:AP: Published: February 22, 2008 2:20 PM ET
Many Blacks Worry About Obama's Safety
For many black Americans, it's a conversation they find hard to avoid, revisiting old fears in the light of bright new hopes.
They watch with wonder as Barack Obama moves ever closer to becoming America's first black president. And they ask themselves, their family, their friends: Is he at risk? Will he be safe?
There is, of course, no sure answer. But interviews with blacks across the country, prominent and otherwise, suggest that lingering worries are outweighed by enthusiasm and determination.
"You can't have lived through the civil rights movement and know something about the history of African-Americans in this country and not be a little concerned," said Edna Medford, a history professor at Washington's Howard University.
"But African-Americans are more concerned that Obama get the opportunity to do the best he can," she added. "And if he wins, most of us believe the country would do for him what it would do for any president, that he will be as well protected as any of them."
Clyde Barrett, 66, a longtime U.S. Labor Department employee now retired in Tampa, Fla., says he often hears expressions of concern for Obama's safety. One young acquaintance, Barrett said, declared he wouldn't even vote for Obama for fear of exposing him to more danger.
"To me that's a cop-out, where you can't take a stand and support someone because you fear for his safety," Barrett said. "I don't have any apprehension ... We've got to go ahead and persevere."
For many older blacks, the barometer for gauging hopes and fears is the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
But concern about Obama's safety transcends racial lines. He has white supporters who see him as an inspiring, youthful advocate of change in the mold of Robert F. Kennedy, and they are mindful of Kennedy's assassination just two months after King's.
Pam Hart, the principal of a multiracial elementary school in the Philadelphia suburb of Cheltenham, said she is struck by the contrast between some of the black students there, innocently excited about Obama's candidacy, and the more anxious perspective of older people who lived through the violence of the 1960s.
"My 70-year-old aunt?-every time I call her, she says she's really afraid Obama is going to be assassinated. She is so worried that history will repeat itself," said Hart, who is 40. "I understand why she's afraid, but I feel we live in a different world now."
Bruce Gordon, a New York-based business leader and former president of the NAACP, also feels the climate has changed dramatically?-as evidenced by the strong nationwide support that Obama is receiving from whites as well as blacks.
Gordon felt differently back in the mid-1990s, when Gen. Colin Powell was weighing a run for the presidency, and Powell's wife, Alma, was among those voicing concern about his safety.
"When Powell decided not to run, I said to myself, 'Good,' because I thought someone would kill him," Gordon recalled. "This time, I think that if, out of fear, we keep our most talented people from running for office, it will never happen.
"Yes, there's a risk, but I would never want it to be in the way," Gordon added. "In running, Barack Obama has to accept the fact that he faces a risk. And yes, we pray for him."
Obama received Secret Service protection last May?-the earliest ever for any presidential candidate. At the time, federal officials said they were not aware of any direct threats to Obama, but Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin?-who was among those recommending the Secret Service deployment?-acknowledged receiving information, some with racial overtones, that made him concerned for Obama's safety.
Obama's campaign, invited this week to comment on the concerns felt by many blacks, referred to a speech given by the candidate's wife, Michelle, to a mostly black audience in South Carolina last fall.
"I know people care about Barack and our family. I know people want to protect us and themselves from disappointment," she said, before urging people to cast fear aside.
"If you're willing to heed Coretta Scott King's words and not be afraid of the future ... there's no challenge we can't overcome," she said.
Obama himself, while acknowledging that his family and friends are concerned about his safety, has drawn a contrast with King.
"He didn't have Secret Service protection," Obama told TV host Tavis Smiley last fall. "I can't even comprehend the degree of courage that was required, and look what he did."
Sherry Miles, 45, of Madison Heights, Va., said she's had sobering talks about Obama's safety with her friends and her mother.
"People who want to bring drastic change bring a certain fear among those who don't want change," Miles said. "You look back at our history, and all of the people who tried to bring about change were killed or threatened."
Miles, who works for Virginia's Department of Mental Health, said she was troubled listening to a recent local radio show in which one female caller termed Obama "the devil" and falsely asserted that he was Muslim.
"It's ill-informed people like her who concern me," Miles said. "I'm very pleased that Obama is there, doing so well. But at the same time I'm fearful someone will try to hurt him."
Bryan Monroe, Chicago-based editorial director for Ebony magazine, said the risk faced by Obama "is in the back of people's minds," but that their worries are often superseded by excitement that he could win. Their No. 1 question, Monroe says, "is could this really happen in our lifetime?"
Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, a former executive director of the Black Leadership Forum, noted that political leaders of any race face risks in a society where mass shootings and other violence by aggrieved or deranged assailants is all too common.
It is troubling, she said, to acknowledge such dangers at the very moment when Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton are demonstrating the historic opportunities available to blacks and women.
"We cannot be crippled by fear. That's the overwhelming emotion in the African-American community," Scruggs-Leftwich said. "We have to do the American thing: We buckle up and keep going."
And of course we all know that Dallas has a perfect record when it comes to the safety of Presidents and candidates, dont they.
It was mainly a reply to this post -
http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=3110657&sid=23ee6c9498f7b689eaa7dfb6e61f5055#3110657
I'd read the Stein article a few days ago and remembered the "Right now Obama's more at risk of being taken out by traces of polonium-210 left in his hotel by a Clinton operative than by Roy Rogers saddling up for Jesus" line.
I gave up on the Obama cult a long time ago. They're lost forever.
Will the Messiah blow his nose in public, today?
Yikes!:
Quote:Barack Obama's late night rally here was a cross between a mob scene, a pep rally, a rock concert, and a Paris Hilton stakeout.
The Democratic front-runner appeared at the tiny new office of his campaign's Corpus Christi headquarters tonight to fire up the campaign troops in advance of a morning rally tomorrow. Packed far past capacity, they hardly needed firing up. Several people had to be taken by ambulance after fainting from heat while waiting for him to arrive. Staff, and even a few well-meaning members of the press, formed a distribution line for bottled water to keep casualties to a minimum.
The crowd's long wait was rewarded with a speech that clocked in under five minutes, although the adoring crowd didn't much seem to care. But the chaos really began when Obama ventured outside to greet the hoards of supporters who couldn't make it into the steamy former dance hall that housed the speech. A crowd-turned-paraparazzi, brandishing camera phones of all makes and models, mobbed the candidate as he ambled around behind the building, alarmed staff and Secret Servicemen in tow.
Popping flashbulbs were punctuated with hilariously adoring comments from screaming women. (Example: "Ohmigod Barack! You're my new screensaver!") He even gave an impromptu speech to encourage supporters to vote -- twice -- in the March 4th primary.
But the true Bono moment came as Obama reappeared for a brief moment before finally (to the relief of the Service and the press) climbing into the gray Suburban and calling it a night. He was speaking on his cell phone, and as the crowd began to chant and holler at the mere glimpse of the candidate, he held the phone aloft victoriously.
Whoever was listening on the other end might be convinced that Corpus Christi is Obama Country.
Or at least that Obama is a rock star.
[size=7]Some names and identifying details changed. Guess who?
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/[/size]
Oh, that was good, Soz...
Well, here we go. McCain is attacking him now, and Hillary is taking it up a notch or three today. I just heard her on CNN ripping Obama a new one over his attacks against her health plan. The gloves are off. It's go time. This week should be very interesting.
CINCINNATI (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton slammed rival Barack Obama on Saturday for campaign leaflets on her health-care plan that she called "blatantly false" and accused him of using Republican tactics in their contest for the Democratic U.S. presidential nomination.
"Shame on you, Barack Obama," Clinton said, speaking to reporters after a rally in Ohio, a state that is key to her struggling campaign.
Brandishing a copy of the leaflet, Clinton said the Obama campaign was spreading "false, misleading, discredited information" about her health-care plan.
"Senator Obama knows it is not true that my plan forces people to buy insurance even if they can't afford it," Clinton said. "It is blatantly false and yet he continues to spend millions of dollars perpetuating falsehoods. It is not hopeful. It is destructive, particularly for a Democrat to be discrediting universal health care."
"Let's have a real campaign. Enough with the speeches and big rallies and then using tactics that are right out of Karl Rove's play book," she said, referring to the Republican political strategist behind George W. Bush's winning presidential campaigns.
It's interesting to me that Hillary is suddenly so pissed about mailers that have been out for I dunno how long now... What, she just heard about 'em now?
It's all about her desperation; she knows she's losing.
What ever happened to "I'm proud to be sitting here with Senator Obama?"
Seems to me that the strongest part of the debate was her last speech, but it now seems like so much toilet paper.
georgeob1 wrote:Interesting piece by Mark Steyn. However I doubt that any of the Obama supporters here will acknowledge it as anything more than the reactionary manifestation of one of those who somehow still doesn't "get it".
No, just as a striking length of text to go on without any specifics, facts or substantive detail. It's all evocative adjectives, partisan swipes, unsubstantiated assertions and sweeping generalisations. Which is really quite ironic, considering that it's supposed to be all about how
Obama is lacking in substance. I guess you have no problem in purely rhetorical exercises as long as the red meat it provides is targeted at your part of the electorate.
Finn dAbuzz wrote:nimh wrote:Finn dAbuzz wrote:There's Something About that Grin ...
Liberal remorse.
By David Kahane
<snip>
?- David Kahane is a nom de cyber for a writer in Hollywood.
... and regular columnist for the National Review (thats where this piece was from).
Because there is noone as qualified to tell us what remorse or other sentiments liberals are experiencing right now than a NR columnist.
Of course he is. As if I was trying to hide the fact. This is how the print version copies.
In any case it doesn't seem as if Liberals have any problem telling us what conservatives think or feel.
I found it humerous. Perhaps you did not.I'm sure you're not suggesting that this thread should not be polluted with comments from the "other side."
Course not. Just that when it comes to Reading the Hearts and Minds of Liberals Today, the take of an anonymous columnist in the National Review is as much worth as TP.
Or, if you prefer, as much as the nth liberal on the Bush Supporters thread telling you what conservatives really feel, going on nothing but his own opinion and gut feeling. You obviously consider those takes worthless - no reason why the opposite would suddenly be valuable.
But sure, post whatever you want. Just dont blame us for rolling our eyes if it's stuff like this.
kickycan wrote:Well, here we go. McCain is attacking him now, and Hillary is taking it up a notch or three today. I just heard her on CNN ripping Obama a new one over his attacks against her health plan. The gloves are off. It's go time. This week should be very interesting.
CINCINNATI (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton slammed rival Barack Obama on Saturday for campaign leaflets on her health-care plan that she called "blatantly false" and accused him of using Republican tactics in their contest for the Democratic U.S. presidential nomination.
"Shame on you, Barack Obama," Clinton said, speaking to reporters after a rally in Ohio, a state that is key to her struggling campaign.
Brandishing a copy of the leaflet, Clinton said the Obama campaign was spreading "false, misleading, discredited information" about her health-care plan.
"Senator Obama knows it is not true that my plan forces people to buy insurance even if they can't afford it," Clinton said. "It is blatantly false and yet he continues to spend millions of dollars perpetuating falsehoods. It is not hopeful. It is destructive, particularly for a Democrat to be discrediting universal health care."
"Let's have a real campaign. Enough with the speeches and big rallies and then using tactics that are right out of Karl Rove's play book," she said, referring to the Republican political strategist behind George W. Bush's winning presidential campaigns.
I'm a bit befuddled about her complaints about the healthcare flyer. I haven't seen the actual flyer but the local news here reported that the issue was that the flyer mentioned that her health plan would include a mandate that everyone participate.
That
is what she's been saying all along and is the major distinction between their plans (which she has pointed out a few times herself). So where's the beef?
Is this a sign that she's at a point of desperation where her "vast right-wing conspiracy" ploy is all she has left?
spendius wrote:I never see any actual voting figures. Just who won and some percentages. How many voters are involved in these primaries?
Pretty much every major news website has a running tally of the votes. See
this one of MSNBC. Or on CNN,
start browsing here - that's the results for Alabama, but you can see the votes for other states using the dropdown menu. It works the same
here on ABC News: that page will give you the results for Missouri, but you can use the dropdown menu to see other states.
All results in actual voting figures, not just percentages.
I think it's the same complaint that was made here when the flier first came out (not sure how many pages back) that it's reminiscent of the Harry and Louise ads that came out in the 90s and that it is misleading in that it doesn't note that her plan does actually include measures to bring costs down. But the ad is factually accurate in that she doesn't have any provision in her plan for those who still can't afford it.
