OBAMA DAILY NEWS Friday March-07-2008

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

WELCOME TO THE OBAMA DAILY NEWS THREAD

Friday March-07-2008

Guess Who's On The Cover Of The Rolling Stones?

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[The_Casual_Observer]

1. "The Black Crowes"?

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

2. CNN Rolling Stone picks Obama

March 6, 2008

Rolling Stone picks Obama

– CNN's Jeff Simon

(CNN) – Rolling Stone has been endorsing candidates for president for 36 years, but never have they endorsed one during the primary season. Until now.

The magazine endorses Barack Obama for president in its upcoming issue, which hits newsstands on Friday. The cover features the Illinois senator, and the headline “Barack Obama: A New Hope.”

“Politicians with gifts like Obama's are so rare that it's imperative for each of us to do our part," Rolling Stone editors write.

The publication first endorsed a candidate for president in 1972 when they picked George McGovern, a democrat. Since then, the magazine has endorsed candidates Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry.

link

[ExtraGriz]

3. people still read rolling stones?

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

4. Rolling Stone Magazine's Endorsement of Barack Obama

Cover Story - Barack Obama's Machinery of Hope

Inside the grass-roots field operation of Barack Obama, who is transforming the way political campaigns are run
By TIM DICKINSONPosted Mar 20, 2008

An Endorsement: Barack Obama for President

PHOTO GALLERY
Barack Obama: A History in Photos

A look back at the life and career of the presidential hopeful, from early childhood to his emergence on the national stage.

[Critters2]

5. Someone's been drinking the kool-aid.

:puke:

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

6. Like Bush, Clinton Shaking Down Democracy

Like Bush, Clinton Shaking Down Democracy

Clinton Cribs from the Bush Florida Stolen Election in 2000

-- The BuzzFlash Editor's Blog
mark karlin on Thu, 03/06/2008

If you wanted to compare the playbook of the Clinton campaign since New Hampshire, you'd find the right precedent in the Bush v. Gore race, only Clinton would be channeling Bush, not Gore.

Let's look at the facts -- as our columnist P.M. Carpenter -- has pointed out today. By almost all media projections, Obama will finish the run of primaries ahead in the popular primary vote, ahead in pledged delegates, and ahead in the number of states won. In a democracy, we call this winning the election. And to boot, Obama has won by consistently bigger margins than Clinton, and has led McCain in most polls. (Obama will probably even end up beating Clinton in delegates awarded in the Texas primary, where she barely won the contest in the popular vote -- and allegedly with the help of dittoheads who Limbaugh told to vote for her because she would unify the Republican Party against her and be the weaker Dem candidate in the fall.)

But Clinton rules have a different set of standards, just like Bush did. They bring the heavy artillery representing the entrenched moneyed interests of the Republicrat status quo in D.C. to redefine democracy. It's no longer who wins the election; it's who bullies their way into mugging the process through threatened lawsuits, flip-flopping like a dying fish about DNC rules that the Clinton campaign originally agreed to, bullying superdelegates, and denying that the will of the people counts for anything.

So, the Clinton campaign today (and if Obama had lost 12 straight primaries, you can be sure the Clinton campaign would have "worked the refs" hard enough to have made him withdraw long ago) is doing what Bush did in 2000, shaking down democracy.
more at the link

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

7. Does Hillary Clinton Want John McCain Elected President?[/

Does Hillary Clinton Want John McCain Elected President?

(Brent Budowsky) March 6, 2008

It is obvious that Hillary Clinton cannot be nominated with a majority of elected delegates and equally obvious that she has embarked on a campaign of personal destruction as her last hope.
...

Hillary Clinton seeks to destroy her opponent to save her nomination, and will only succeed in destroying the party and her own reputation.

This is why I predict a surge of superdelegates to Obama. They understand her tactics, they understand the danger her tactics pose for the party. They do not want to overrule the verdict of the voters. They realize that a desperate personal-destruction campaign against the probable nominee could turn a possible landslide for Democrats into a major Republican triumph.

Could it be that the outcome Hillary Clinton fears the most is a Democratic landslide led by an inspiring two-term Democratic president who truly turns the page?

Could it be that a preferable outcome would be that she engages in a campaign of total personal destruction of her Democratic opponent, in the hope of electing a Republican who would be a one-term president because of considerable age, allowing Hillary to run in 2012?

There are serious people asking these questions behind the scenes. The more she continues her campaign of destruction, the more we will find Democrats, including myself, believing this “Hillary prefers McCain to Obama” scenario could be true.

full article at the link

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

8. "And if so, there’ll be a racial rift"

In a memo released yesterday morning, Clinton strategists Mark Penn and Harold Ickes argued that what matters isn’t the fact that Obama had won more votes or more pledged (read “elected”) delegates. What matters is that Clinton has won “core battleground states.”

And if so, there’ll be a racial rift

By Michael Graham Thursday, March 6, 2008

If you want to hear a politician squirm, ask a Massachusetts superdelegate what to do about the oncoming Clinton/Obama trainwreck.

Ask a Clinton superdelegate, and you may need to break out the smelling salts.

I had a series of fascinating conversations with local supers yesterday, asking them about what I call Barack Obama’s “one-delegate firewall.”

When the primary process is over, if Obama has even just one more pledged (read “elected”) delegate than Clinton, he absolutely will be the Democratic nominee. Because the Democratic Party in 2008 is never going to say to a viable black candidate, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I know you won the primary, but we’re giving the nomination to the white lady.”

Not gonna happen. Period.

full article at the link

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

9. Clinton's Charity not listed on Senate Disclosure Forms

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=4940886&mesg_id=4940886

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

10. HRC: 'I don't think there should be any do-over...Florida should be seated'

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=4936332&mesg_id=4936332

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

11. Democrats Try to End Impasse Over Delegates

Dean: “You can’t change the rule in the middle of the game,” he said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” program.

Democrats Try to End Impasse Over Delegates

By JOHN M. BRODER March 7, 2008

WASHINGTON — With the two Democratic presidential candidates in near-deadlock and battling for every delegate, party leaders and the rival campaigns started searching in earnest on Thursday for a way to seat barred delegations from Florida and Michigan. But they remained deeply divided over how to do so.

...But though the states, the party and the candidates have all suggested that they have no choice but to find a solution and that they are open to another round of voting, much remains to be settled. Among the issues are what kind of contests to hold, when to hold them, how to allocate the delegates and, critically, who picks up the multimillion-dollar tab in each state.

“I’ll leave it up to the Democratic National Committee to make a decision about how to resolve it,” Mr. Obama told ABC News on Thursday night. “But I certainly want to make sure that we’ve got Michigan and Florida delegates at the convention in some fashion.”

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party, said on Thursday that it was up to the states, not the national party, to come up with a solution. But Mr. Dean ruled out seating the delegations based on the voting in January.

...In Florida, Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat who supports Mrs. Clinton, and the state party chairwoman, Karen Thurman, who is neutral, said the national party or some other source should pay for any do-over. Both insisted that Florida’s delegates must be seated, even if that meant allocating the delegates according to the Jan. 29 results.

more at the link

Clinton surrogates set this thing into motion yet try to blame the DNC. Many states followed the rules, but prima donnas
Florida and Michigan believe they are above the rules.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

12. It's 3 a.m.--do you know where your campaign adviser is?

It's 3 a.m.--do you know where your campaign adviser is?

Posted by Jonathan Kulick March 07, 2008

I can get off my hobbyhorse, now that Susan Rice has made my point:

So neither one of them, and nor John McCain for that matter,
have had that 3 o’clock phone call that others have had. And I think we have to be honest about that.

This is, apparently, a talking point and not a slip-up:The next day...

Senator Clinton, Senator Obama and Senator McCain have never had to
answer the proverbial 3 a.m. phone call.
Only a commander in chief has shouldered that unique burden...

Update:Sage Stossel nails it:



article linked here

[Scurrilous]

13. Kick

:kick:

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

14. Dean Says DNC NOT Paying for Do Over

Clinton supporter Bill Nelson wants the DNC to pay for Florida's screwup. Howard Dean says no way, we need that money to win the Presidential reace. Its beginning to look like Hillary is trying to make sure that if she can't win, no one can.

Primary season heading to reruns?

By: BEN SMITH Politico March 6, 2008

A climactic showdown over counting the votes of Democrats in Florida and Michigan is fast descending into a round of haggling over who will pay to re-run those states' primaries.

The prospective new round of voting injects new uncertainty — and suspense — into the primary, adding two more major showdowns that could help Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton narrow the lead Sen. Barack Obama holds in pledged delegates. But the details of re-votes in those two states remain uncertain, as relatively weak political players spent the day calling on one another to take action. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean demanded that the state parties sort it out on their own. Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, in turn, called on Dean to take charge.

"I call on you to find a means — immediately — to bring the party and the Clinton and Obama campaigns together immediately in agreement on a plan to seat the Florida delegation," Nelson wrote Dean in an open letter, in which he suggested "a do-over election in early June, paid for by the DNC."

Dean flatly rejected the notion that the party would pony up.

"We can't afford to do that — that's not our problem," he said on CBS, expressing a willingness to allow the issue to proceed to a bitter procedural showdown in the party's credentials committee this summer.

"We need our money to win the presidential race."

more http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/8889.html">at the link

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

15. Go Already! Hillary Clinton, fratricidal maniac

"Clinton's Kamikaze Mission" (Jonathan Chait, The New Republic)

Go Already!

Hillary Clinton, fratricidal maniac

by Jonathan Chait The New Republic
Thursday, March 06, 2008

The morning after Tuesday's primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign released a memo titled "The Path to the Presidency." I eagerly dug into the paper, figuring it would explain how Clinton would obtain the Democratic nomination despite an enormous deficit in delegates. Instead, the memo offered a series of arguments as to why Clinton should run against John McCain--i.e., "Hillary is seen as the one who can get the job done"--but nothing about how she actually could. Is she planning a third-party run? Does she think Obama is going to die? The memo does not say.

The reason it doesn't say is that Clinton's path to the nomination is pretty repulsive. She isn't going to win at the polls. Barack Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates. That may not sound like a lot in a 4,000-delegate race, but it is. Clinton's Ohio win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to pull even with Obama. She isn't going to do much to dent, let alone eliminate, his lead.

That means, as we all have grown tired of hearing, that she would need to win with superdelegates. But, with most superdelegates already committed, Clinton would need to capture the remaining ones by a margin of better than two to one. And superdelegates are going to be extremely reluctant to overturn an elected delegate lead the size of Obama's. The only way to lessen that reluctance would be to destroy Obama's general election viability, so that superdelegates had no choice but to hand the nomination to her. Hence her flurry of attacks, her oddly qualified response as to whether Obama is a Muslim ("not as far as I know"), her repeated suggestions that John McCain is more qualified.

...Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that the results would not count toward delegate totals. Oh, and her campaign has periodically hinted that some of Obama's elected delegates might break off and support her. I don't think she'd be in a position to defeat Hitler's dog in November, let alone a popular war hero.

...more at the link

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

16. "GODHILLA"

Godhilla

Marty Peretz. The Spine 07.03.2008

So Samantha Power said what everyone knows to be true about the Missus: "You just look at her and think: ergh . . .
The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive," followed by
"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything."
You know I have my own qualms about Power, but here is an example of her forthrightness.
Hillary, her fragile emotion wounded by such a remark, trots out a coterie of Congressman to
denounce Power and demand that she withdraw from the Obama campaign, which she has now done.
The pissing match between the Obama and Clinton camps is not healthy, and will inevitably hurt the party’s
nominee come the convention in Denver. Jon Chait today calls Hillary a “fratricidal maniac.”
I call her a fratricidal monster.

Link:

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

17. "Does anyone want this nut answering the phone?"

On the Red Phone

Larry David Posted March 6, 2008

Here's an idea for an Obama ad: a montage of Clinton's Sybillish personalities that have surfaced during the campaign with a solemn voiceover at the end saying, "Does anyone want this nut answering the phone?"

How is it that she became the one who's perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call than the unflappable Obama? He, with the ice in his veins, who doesn't panic when he's losing or get too giddy when he's winning, who's as comfortable in his own skin as she's uncomfortable in hers. There have been times in this campaign when she seemed so unhinged that I worried she'd actually kill herself if she lost. Every day, she reminds me more and more of Adele H., who also had an obsession that drove her insane.

A few weeks ago, I started to feel sorry for her. Oh Christ, let her win already...Who cares...It's not worth it. There's not that much difference between them. She can have it. Anything to avoid watching her descend into madness. So I switched. I started rooting for her. It wasn't that hard. Compromise comes easy to me. I was on board.

And then I saw the ad.

I watched, transfixed, as she took the 3 a.m. call...and I was afraid...very afraid. Suddenly, I realized the last thing this country needs is that woman anywhere near a phone. I don't care if it's 3 a.m. or 10 p.m. or any other time. I don't want her talking to Putin, I don't want her talking to Kim Jong Il, I don't want her talking to my nephew. She needs a long rest. She needs to put on a sarong and some sun block and get away from things for a while, a nice beach somewhere -- somewhere far away, where there are...no phones.

Article linked here at HuffPo

[grantcart]

18. Another SD for Obama magic number now 461

DNC Rooker CA http://www.news10.net/display_story.aspx?storyid=38592

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

19. What Obama Needs: A Keystone Address

What Obama Needs: A Keystone Address

By Eugene Robinson Friday, March 7, 2008; Page A17

With arithmetic on his side, Barack Obama still should be heavily favored to win the Democratic presidential nomination. But Obama does have a problem: The world-class orator, attacked by opponents for being all talk and no walk, urgently needs to come up with a new speech.

...Obama's ability to inspire optimism and hope has been his most effective campaign tool. For some reason, though, he has been less successful in leading working-class whites to share his vision of a post-partisan America. I don't think the main reason is race. I think it's class.

Obama managed to escape the danger of being pigeonholed as a "black candidate" as opposed to a candidate who happens to be black. Now he has to avoid being pigeonholed as some kind of elitist smarty-pants. Republicans must already be dusting off the playbooks they used against Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.

Obama will have six long weeks to campaign in Pennsylvania, a state whose demographics are similar to Ohio's -- six weeks to find a way to speak to white, working-class, high school-educated voters about their anxieties and their aspirations. Winning there, even if it's not a mathematical requirement, could sew up the nomination and also reassure superdelegates about his ability to hold on to traditional Democratic constituencies in the fall campaign.

Obama has already demonstrated how much words do matter. Now he needs to find some new ones.

link

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

20. WHY THE CLINTONS WON'T RELEASE THEIR 2000-2006 TAX RETURNS! (must-see)

Clinton: Bought and Paid for By Saudi Arabia and China
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4952091

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

21. Breaking: Clinton-papers release blocked

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4952134

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

22. MOMENTUM SHIFTS BACK TO OBAMA, AS FINAL CALIFORNIA COUNT GIVES HIM 6-8 MORE DELEGATES!

go to this link below, kick and recommend please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4938460

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

23. Olbermann - "Clinton is Nuts" - recommended viewing

on the screen you see these phrases - hillarious: "McClinton", "Hillary Clintonian",
"Camp Pain 2008"

Keith asks what separates Hillary from Senator Liebermann.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/6/22261/01334/914/470968

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

24. Gary Hart: Breaking the Final Rule

Gary Hart: Breaking the Final Rule

As a veteran of red telephone ads and "where's the beef" cleverness, I am keenly aware that sharp elbows get thrown by those trailing in the fourth quarter (and sometimes even earlier).

"Politics ain't beanbag," is the old slogan.

But that does not mean that it must also be rule-or-ruin, me-first-and-only-me, my way or the highway. That is not politics. That is raw, unrestrained ambition for power that cannot accept the will of the voters.

[jefferson_dem]

25. Obama camp: 'different standard' for HRC

Hitting back, and good. No threads left in my bank for now but here's some details - -

Obama camp: 'different standard' for HRC
Posted: Friday, March 07, 2008 3:43 PM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under: 2008, Obama

From NBC’s Domenico Montanaro
The Obama campaign responded on Samantha Power’s resignation and said there “seems to be a different standard in the Clinton campaign” on personal attacks.

“She made the right decision,” Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe said of Power, a Pulitzer-prize winning author and Harvard professor who helped shape Obama’s foreign policy, before describing her as “a brilliant person.” But “we cannot condone those types of comments.”

He continued though to say that there “seems to be a different standard in the Clinton campaign.” He cited supporter Bob Johnson, who alluded to Obama’s drug use in South Carolina; Tom Buffenbarger, president of the machinists' union, who vitriolically trashed Obama in Ohio; and Tom Vilsack, who attacked Rudy Giuliani on the number of his marriages and the relationship with his children.

“It took them days to admit they were offensive comments,” Plouffe said of Johnson’s comments. And on Vilsack’s comments on Giuliani, there was “no action there,” Plouffe said. Clinton, Plouffe points out, never apologized for Buffenbarger’s remarks -- calling Obama “Janus, the two-faced Roman god of ancient times” and attacking his supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies” -- at an event she was at and later followed him on stage.

“Apparently there are different standards here as it relates to people outside the campaign,” he added.

On Obama's 16-month Iraq withdrawal plan, Power told BBC that it was a “best-case scenario,” that nothing firm could be decided in March 2008 without seeing the situation on the ground in Jan. 2009 and that "He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator." When asked about it, Plouffe defended Obama's plan and deflected by pointing to retired Gen. Jack Keane's comments on Clinton’s own intentions on withdrawing troops from Iraq.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/07/743856.aspx#comments

[Megahurtz]

26. Kick.

[grantcart]

27. A glimpse into the future for some of our friends at DU

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4955602