"So, has Obama garnered enough delegates to call it a win? No."
Obama has the majority of pledged delegates. He only needs 60 more to reach 2025 - the number needed for the nomination. Hillary needs 243.
"Has he literally thrashed her in the states to date? No."SC, he won by 30%. Utah, 18%. North Dakota, 24%. Minnesota, 34%. Kansas, 48%. Illinois, 32%. Idaho, 63%. Georgia, 35%. Dems Abroad, 34%. Colorado, 35%. Alaska, 50%. Virgin Islands, 82%. Washington, 37%. Nebraska, 36%. Louisiana, 21%. Virginia, 29%. Maryland, 25%. DC, 51%. Hawaii, 52%. Vermont, 20%. Wyoming, 23%. Mississippi, 24%. The average % that Clinton wins by is 15%, but the average that Obama wins by is 29%. He's won 33 out of 50 contests, so that % grows even more. He HAS thrashed her.
http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/results/votes/index.html
"Have all democrats voted yet? No. "There are three contests left, PR, Montana and South Dakota - about 86 delegates. Even if Hillary gets ALL of those delegates, she still WILLNOT have the majority of pledged delegates. In order for Hillary to win, she'd have to convince the superdelegates to vote against the will of the people.
"If he has not won, has she lost? No."It's her right to stay in the race and prolong her inevitable defeat, but that does not give her the right to try destroying the Democratic base and to insinuate that the FL/MI debacle is somehow Obama's fault.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/22/clinton-supporters-plan-t_n_103100.html
In the 1949 film, A Letter to Three Wives, three women receive letters from an unseen character telling them that she, their friend, Addie Ross, had run off with one of their husbands. Since the Joseph Mankiewicz film dropped two of the "Five Wives" of the original story on which it was based, I feel free to drop one wife more for the purposes of this post. The letter I write below is to Michelle Obama, and to Cindy Hensley McCain, and I'm not the kind of guy to run off with either of your husbands. No Addie Ross me. But one of you will discover what it is to be deeply disappointed and sadly surprised this year, when your beloved spouse loses the big one and disappoints your hopes for him, and yourself. Both of you are strong defenders of your husbands, while being women of accomplishment. But only one of you has come under attack of the main stream press, and that says something about America today that's worth exploring.
Dear Cindy and Michelle. If you don't mind we'll start with you Cindy, after all, you are accustomed to having pride of place at any gathering. Cindy, it is hard for me to find fault with a woman who devoted her early years to treatment of children with severe disabilities, one who founded the American Voluntary Medical team to provide MASH style care to disaster areas, and personally participated in fifty five of their missions, without a blonde hair, or a remark out of place. You are Mother Theresa in an Armani suit. You are undoubtedly kind and deeply charitable. And real lucky. For eight years you have been the chair of your late father's beer business Hensley & Co, earning for yourself some four hundred thousand dollars a year. Your good works go on and on from Operation Smile to CARE to an organization that removes land mines in Cambodia. And you have learned to smile your way through some abusive language that your salt of the earth husband has aimed at you - sober. Ah, Cindy, if that was all.
Twenty years ago Cindy, you became addicted to pain killers, a slave to Vicodin and Percocet after spinal surgeries, and some say to ease the emotional pain of being caught up in your husband's influence peddling corruption during the Keating Loan scandals, where you conveniently lost the records that might have more deeply incriminated your husband, and even yourself. Then you started stealing drugs from your own charitable medical facility. When that was discovered, an intervention took place and you escaped imprisonment when the Drug Enforcement Administration limited your punishment to a fine and forced you to take part in a "program.' Again, rehab to the rescue of the super-rich. In other words, your punishment was brought down to the level of attending traffic school after running a stop sign, a school run by Mickey the clown. Imagine your fate if you were not a billionairess, if you were instead a poor black woman, an addicted hospital nurse caught stealing drugs. Ten years in the slammer, your kids taken from you and placed in foster care. Some might say it was your second major act of theft, because while your husband was still married you became his girlfriend, leading to his divorce from the woman who had waited out his years of POW incarceration. But nobody batted an eye in your world of Desperate but Affluent Housewives. That's the way it is there. You were Cindy Hensley McCain, so instead of the big house you may be going to the White House. In recent years this domicile has been the home of others from the Bush crime family, so the way has been prepared for your arrival.
Listen up, Michelle, this is about you too. As the wife of Barack, the Democratic Candidate, you were quoted as saying "And let me tell you something: For the first time in my adult lifetime I am really proud of my country," and you, Cindy, piped up with "I am proud of my country. I don't know about you -- if you heard those words earlier - I am very proud of my country. " Then you, Cindy, went on to steal some recipes and claim them as your own on the Food Network, a small but significant symbol of recidivism, today it's pot-roast, tomorrow pot. Putting your life of grand and petty larceny aside - forgetting all recipes and husband jumping - you should be proud of your country. Born into billions, with something that approaches beauty (if beauty be defined as a middle aged Barbie) you have had the best that this country could offer in opportunities for the Town and Country life. And you were able to cap it off by playing Lady Bountiful to the unwashed, downtrodden millions, and still keep your appointment with your hairdresser. Cindy, you come from the world of charity balls and big check writing - one that gives the giver a sense of moral superiority but frowns on government programs which should rightfully provide dignity, work, educational opportunity, and health care to the many. You are the poster girl for a generosity which masks the essential selfishness of the Republican ethos. No, I don't disrespect generosity - but I do question its value when it is only palliative, when it fails to address the real problems that the poor face on a daily basis in our country and through the world.
Now to you, Michelle. The fact that you made it to Princeton as an African American, by dint of your hard work and smarts, and that you are a mouthy lawyer, a shoot from the lip kind of woman, does not endear you to the Cindy McCains of the world, and to a lot of Americans. That "let me tell you something" remark was true in all ways, but truth is often an affront to propriety. Why should any African American - no matter how fortunate in being educated by the best schools, take great pride in the history of a country that suffered slavery and Jim Crow for centuries? Until the rise of your husband no black man has been taken seriously as a leader of this country. And in saying what you did you meant to speak of progress and pride. But it came out all wrong and ready to be pounced upon by the O'Reilly-Limbaugh-Colter cabal, the guys and gals who take a truth and put it up before a carnival distorting mirror to mock it. But you have to be smart enough to know that every thought you have does not need to be expressed and that there are the Cindy McCains out there waiting to leap on your remarks as if they were a capsule of Vicodin, and cast doubt upon your love of country. Of course you can love your country and be critical of it. It's the only way to love a country. We all love our kids and we are critical of them, and they matter most in our lives. But you have to put a zipper on the lip on the way to the White House, or you will find that too many gentlemen prefer blondes.
Now who did Addie Ross run off with? Go see the movie - it's a fun film by a great filmmaker, a man who knew something about class in America. You see, class doesn't necessarily come attached to a billion dollars; sometimes it's linked to a sarcastic black woman who didn't run off with another woman's husband, didn't steal drugs, studied to attain dignified work, and knows what's real and what's just the foam from Hensley's beer.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sherman-yellen/a-letter-to-two-wives_b_103096.html
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (Reuters) - A senior adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Tuesday that he was stepping down to keep a commitment he made not to campaign against Democrat Barack Obama.
Mark McKinnon, who was in charge of the McCain campaign's advertising message, said he was still backing the Arizona senator, but that he was simply moving from active campaign participant to cheerleader.
"I'll still be around occasionally in my lucky hat," said McKinnon, who often wears a distinctive hat.
McKinnon, who was a key aide in President George W. Bush's two election victories, has expressed admiration for Obama and pledged not to campaign against the Democratic front-runner if he became the party's presidential nominee.
A McCain campaign official said McKinnon had notified the campaign of his decision to leave but declined further comment. The McCain campaign had been expecting McKinnon's move for some months and was not surprised at his decision.
Obama, an Illinois senator, remains locked in a battle with New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination and the right to face McCain in the November general election.
Projections showed him losing the Kentucky primary to Clinton on Tuesday, but he was favored to win the later Oregon contest. His showing on Tuesday was expected to give him a majority of the elected delegates to the party's nominating convention in August.
Neither of the Democratic candidates have enough elected delegates to win the nomination, leaving the race to be decided by so-called superdelegates -- party leaders and elected officials who can vote for the candidate of their choosing.
The Cox News Service reported that McKinnon told McCain last summer that he would not work for him in the general election if Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee, saying
"I just don't want to work against an Obama candidacy."
At the time, Obama and McCain each looked like long shots for nomination.
On Sunday, McKinnon told the news service that he will continue to support McCain.
"I will still show up from time to time (and) talk to the candidate still, but not about Obama."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080521/pl_nm/usa_politics_mccain_aide_dc
I just watched a family photo album video on YouTube and read a beautiful comment that I wanted to share.
Sehara
Whole World Love You Obama! You are our last hope and only hope. Whole world is watching elections and praying for you. You are leader that world is waiting for so long! It feels like in old times in my country when whole willage is contributing to send one boy in city. Everybody is helping and giving and proud of their boy who is oing to make it and represent them and never forget those people. We are sending you Obama to the world! America is proud.
http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=opjDZPp-JQc&fromurl=/watch%3Fv%3DopjDZPp-JQc%26feature%3Drelated
That's right. Obama had sex with my dog, and I have the video. You might ask, Why didn't this candidacy ending information come forward sooner? Well, it was a repressed memory, and all of the articles about GotchPol finally broke through my inner clouds to trigger this damning memory.
Obama supporters are certain to fight back, saying, "What's the big deal--Hillary and McCain had sex with dogs too." But my dog is a radical. Whenever the postman, who is a swing voter, comes by my house, Osama tries to bite him. Keep reading, there's much more to this story.
Obama tried to deal with my dog's radicalism by explaining that, in America, much of sex is impersonal, so his relationship with my dog won't count against him. He added, Nobody questions McCain's and Hillary's relationships with the dogs with whom they've been intimate. I tried to explain, Arguing the facts just makes you look defensive. You've got to dissect the logic of gotcha politics. To this day, he still hasn't been able to get my point. Some lawyer.
I also tried to tell him, "Hey, this is a lot worse that the Lewinsky scandal and it's certain to come out and destroy your future." He became effete, saying, "If you had gone to Columbia University and Harvard Law School and graduated with honor and then been a professor of constitutional law at one of the top five universities in the country as I have, you would realize that the voters that really count, the plain folks of rural America, could care less, because they also have strange relationships with animals. They're all farmers, aren't they." I began to be awed by his brilliance, especially the aura of it emanating from his resume.
The more he talked, the more entranced I became. The combination of his threats and his seductive words buried the memory of this liaison more completely than the burial of a bone by a blind dog who's lost his sense of smell. Maybe Obama's ability to persuade is why people fear him.
As the years wore on, I came of age, realizing that many politicians do try to screw anything that walks. Hillary tried to screw southern white voters, arguing that they, because they were against her and her husband, should be screwed. She also screwed people who need health care and can't afford it by screwing her Republican opponents--she excluded them with obvious disdain from the process of developing a plan, thus polarizing them, sort of how she wants to handle Iran, you know, being the "fighter" that she is. You have to admit, when it comes to screwing, Hillary has distinguished herself.
McCain screwed his first wife after her disfiguring accident. I wish I knew more about this so-called Maverick; his nickname gives him the aura of a mighty fine screwer, but the press is in love with him and doesn't realize what he's doing to them. That's how a lot of sex is, according to many women I've heard speak on the subject. It happens so quick and with such subtlety that they barely feel anything, except pissed off and demoralized. And Bush, well, he screwed just about everybody who wasn't super rich, grinning that oafish grin every step of the way. You have to admire someone who can screw unwilling people so thoroughly and enjoy doing it. Many people who voted for him say that they like him because he's so confident; he isn't plagued by doubts. Reporters once asked him if all the troubles with Iraq made it difficult to sleep, and he said that he slept like a baby, to which Colin Powel said, I sleep like a baby too; I wake up every two hours screaming. Who want's to be all worried and troubled like Powell. People want to be like Bush, not realizing that his conscience is the size of a small pea and that the Devil has reserved a particularly hot cubicle for him.
In the home of the brave and the land of the free, screwing truly is the most popular national pastime. If you don't agree, look how much screwing is happening during our presidential campaign. Every journalist worth his or her salt has picked Obama's bones clean as if he was a delicious chicken you just can't get enough of. Stephanopoulos, the Garrulous Greek, was especially famished. This man child, protege of Bill, screwed Obama as if he thought Obama was the hottest item on the planet. Of course, he had a great mentor, who managed in one sex act involving a blue dress to screw his wife, friends, employees, and the entire country. If I could, I'd give him an award for screwing the most people in the least amount of time and with the least amount of effort. He still claims that the orgasm was worth it, because it made him feel powerful. The truth is that we screw because we're powerless. Personal insight was never one of Bill's strong suits.
Because we're all so prolific, it seems a foregone conclusion that we'd all be assuming Obama's guilt without a shred of evidence that he actually did something wrong. Geez, there's not even any substantive charges, just that he was associated with somebody who actually did do something that would disqualify him. So the screwing he's getting isn't very satisfying. He's always able to talk his way out of our indictments against him. Again, that's what's so scary about him.
That's part of why I felt I had to bring out this damning information. The video? I recorded the event in question over an old Nixon tape, the one in which he talks with his staff about screwing McGovern. So it's a little garbled, and, to get the impression that Obama is having sex with Osama, you have to play it backwards.
I'm certain Obama supporters--you know how rabid they are--will argue that the shadowy images the tape contains are not Obama and Osama. That's how gotcha politics is. You just can't believe anybody. So in the end, voters vote for the guy they'd most likely want to have a beer or, the case of effete snobs, a latte with. Gotcha politics is like a virus on your computer. We can't seem to get rid of it, and it's destroying our hard drives, the substance in governance.
Oh, well. At least we've got screwing and getting screwed. And maybe someday, we'll all finally see through the guilt by association, the lack of even any charge of wrong doing, much less the complete lack of evidence that, for instance, Obama wants to blow up the Pentagon, establish an African colony in Illinois, or, god truly forbid, to empathicaly--empathy is so seductive--encourage the shitkickers of the world that they need to focus on what matters most to all of us rather than on their special issues and their sensitivities about them.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/4/19/10050/1984/474/498883
At a small closed-door fundraiser after Super Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton blamed what she called the "activist base" of the Democratic Party -- and MoveOn.org in particular -- for many of her electoral defeats, saying activists had "flooded" state caucuses and "intimidated" her supporters, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by The Huffington Post."Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] -- which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down," Clinton said to a meeting of donors. "We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn't even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it's primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don't agree with them. They know I don't agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me."
Senator Clinton's remarks depart radically from the traditional position of presidential candidates who in the past have celebrated high levels of turnout by party activists and partisans as a harbinger for their own party's success -- regardless of who is the eventual nominee -- in the general election showdown.
The comments also contradict Clinton's previous statements praising this year's elevated Democratic turnout in primaries and caucuses, and appear to blame her caucus defeats on newly energized grassroots voter groups that she has lauded in the past as "lively participants" in American democracy.
"You've been asking the tough questions," Clinton said in April of last year at a MoveOn-sponsored town hall event. "You've been refusing to back down when any of us who are in political leadership are not living up to the standards that we should set for ourselves... I think you have helped to change the face of American politics for the better... both online, and in the corridors of power."
Clinton's criticism followed MoveOn's endorsement of Obama in early February.
In a statement to The Huffington Post, MoveOn's Executive Director Eli Pariser reacted strongly to Clinton's remarks: "Senator Clinton has her facts wrong again. MoveOn never opposed the war in Afghanistan, and we set the record straight years ago when Karl Rove made the same claim. Senator Clinton's attack on our members is divisive at a time when Democrats will soon need to unify to beat Senator McCain. MoveOn is 3.2 million reliable voters and volunteers who are an important part of any winning Democratic coalition in November. They deserve better than to be dismissed using Republican talking points."
Howard Wolfson, communications director for the Clinton campaign, verified the authenticity of the audio. When asked if Clinton's statement suggested dismay over high Democratic turnout and elevated activist energy, Wolfson replied: "I'll let the statement stand as is." But he elaborated on Clinton's charge that these same party activists were engaged in acts of intimidation against her supporters: "There have been well documented instances of intimidation in the Nevada and the Texas caucuses, and it is a fact that while we have won 4 of the 5 largest primaries, where participation is greatest, Senator Obama has done better in caucuses than we have."
In fact, the Nevada caucuses occurred prior to MoveOn's endorsement of Obama, and when Clinton made her remarks, the Texas caucuses had yet to take place.
The disclosure of Clinton's remarks disparaging the prominence of party activists in the caucus process comes after she repeatedly suggested that Obama's electability had been compromised because he had allegedly offended other key Democratic constituencies.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/celeste-fremon/clinton-slams-democratic_b_97484.html
Catherine Donnelly shopped at Kmart, settled into her dorm room and soaked up the Gothic stone buildings where, over the next four years, she would grow into her own woman.
But her first day at Princeton held a surprise, too. And Donnelly knew it would mean confronting the past.
She walked into the historic Nassau Inn that evening and delivered the news to her mother, Alice Brown. "I was horrified," recalled Brown, who had driven her daughter up from New Orleans. Brown stormed down to the campus housing office and demanded Donnelly be moved to another room.
The reason: One of her roommates was black.
"I told them we weren't used to living with black people — Catherine is from the South," Brown said. "They probably thought I was crazy."
Today both Donnelly, an Atlanta attorney, and Brown, a retired schoolteacher living in the North Carolina mountains, look back at that time with regret. Like many Americans, they've built new perceptions of race on top of a foundation cracked by prejudices past — and present. Yet they rarely speak of the subject.
Barack Obama's run for president changed that. When the Democratic senator from Illinois invited more dialogue on race last month, Donnelly and Brown, both lifetime Republicans, were ready.
But their willingness to talk isn't a response to the candidate born to a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya. It's more about Obama's wife, Michelle.
She's that roommate from a quarter century ago.
Shock to the stereotype
The acceptance letter from the Ivy Leagues was really the culmination of two peoples' hard work. "My mother was thrilled," Donnelly jokes, that she got into Princeton.
Divorced and living paycheck to paycheck, Brown found a way to get her only child into New Orleans' elite Isidore Newman School: She taught 8th-grade science there. They were a mother-and-daughter team, then with the surname Rodrigue.
Donnelly, now 44, captained the basketball and volleyball teams. She was the homecoming queen. And she racked up science and math awards, often with the help of her mother.
But the "Three R's" weren't the only thing Donnelly learned from an early age. There was a fourth one. Her mother and grandmother filled her head with racist stereotypes, portraying African-Americans as prone to crime, uneducated and, at times, people to be feared.
Brown, 71, explains that she was raised to think that way. She recalls hearing her grandfather, a sheriff in the North Carolina mountains, brag about running black visitors out of the county before nightfall. And Brown's parents held on to the n-word like a family heirloom.
In fact, upon learning that her daughter had a black roommate at Princeton, Brown's first call was to her own mother. Her suggestion: yank Donnelly out of school.
Girl was likable, but black
The fourth-floor room had three beds, three desks and space for little else. The ceiling sloped in concert with the roof, creating a cramped perch atop the upper crust of American education.
Quick-witted and nearly 6 feet tall, Michelle Robinson had no problem filling the room, Donnelly recalls. The future Michelle Obama, from Chicago's Southside, would playfully tease the third roommate, who was white. Obama's long fingers still narrate stories in Donnelly's mind. "From the minute we met," she says, "I liked her."
Donnelly doesn't think Obama ever picked up on her mother's behind-the-scenes maneuvering. She remembers nothing but friendly words. Only now, looking back, does she see the wall between them.
Donnelly was surprised to find something familiar – segregation – alive and well on a prestigious campus in the Northeast. The university's private eating clubs, host to frat-style parties, were largely white. The social scene for many minority students, including Obama, revolved around an activity building called the Third World Center.
When Obama began hanging out with other black students on campus, Donnelly never thought to join them. "Here was a really smart black woman who I found charming, interesting and funny," Donnelly says with disappointment. "Just by virtue of having different color skin, we weren't going to be friends."
Other than confirming that Donnelly was her freshman roommate, Michelle Obama declined, through a campaign spokeswoman, to comment for this story. Her senior thesis, however, delved into the experience of black alumni at Princeton and provides some insight into her mind-set at the time.
In the introduction, Obama wrote that Princeton made her more aware of her "Blackness" than ever before. "No matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong," she wrote. "Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second."
Donnelly, meanwhile, was struggling with her own identity. She came out that first semester, chopped off her hair and partied with other lesbians on campus. Soon she, too, learned what it feels like to be part of the "other" group, to be seen as a student second.
Donnelly said she and Obama had established separate circles of friends by second semester. That's when another room – the one her mother had requested – opened up. By then, it just made sense to trade cramped quarters for roomier ones.
Donnelly doesn't remember having another meaningful exchange with Obama. She graduated with a psychology major in 1985 and forgot all about that tall roommate from Chicago.
'I was inspired .... I was envious'
More than two decades passed, and Donnelly, who normally doesn't care much for politics, found herself intrigued by one of the Democrats running for president. She was a little surprised to hear her mother liked Barack Obama, too. Brown had never voted for a Democrat. But she's a sucker for Harvard grads, especially eloquent ones.
"He thinks well," Brown said recently, though she and Donnelly are still undecided voters. "He seems to be a thoughtful person. He considers everything."
When Donnelly first saw Obama's wife on TV, she was struck by how tall and graceful she looked. Then she studied her more closely. Michelle Obama looked so familiar, down to those long fingers. Could that be Michelle Robinson?
A Google search gave Donnelly the answer. Obama was far more than a first-lady hopeful. She had gone to Harvard Law School, had been an associate dean at the University of Chicago and rose to vice president at the University of Chicago Hospitals. Like Donnelly, she was mother to two children.
"I was inspired," she says. "I was amazed. And I was envious of all she had accomplished."
Donnelly called her mother, who in turn phoned the friend who had traveled with her to Princeton all those years ago. The friends had stayed up that night calling everyone they knew with a connection to the university, hoping to get Catherine moved. "We thought this is so ironic," Brown says. "[Obama] could be the first lady, and here we wanted to get my child out of her influence."
Some empathy for lingering anger
As her 2- and 5-year-old boys play on the front porch, Donnelly flips through a photo album of her own childhood. Brown, in Atlanta for her monthly hair appointment, looks over her daughter's shoulder.
"There we are," Brown says, "at your graduation."
In the photo, Donnelly clutches a bouquet in front of her white dress, smiling next to her mother and her grandmother.
The story of race in America is one of generations: what's passed on, what isn't and the friction between the two.
When Brown heard about Barack Obama's former pastor — his angry rants against white America — she didn't like it. But she understood. "If I had been treated the same way blacks have been treated," she says, "I'd be resentful, too."
It was Donnelly, however, who understood Obama's response: "The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static."
Society changed, and Donnelly has seen her mother nudged along with it. Says Brown: "It's become politically incorrect to talk about black people in a negative way. It's like smoking."
Brown quit smoking in 1996. She's still working on the other.
Brown says she wouldn't mind if her child or grandchild roomed with a black person today. But she's far from colorblind. "Where I draw the line is interracial marriage," Brown says. "That I can't quite deal with."
She holds firm to the belief that African-Americans don't take enough responsibility. "Bill Cosby says the same thing," she says. "Get off your rear end and work hard and improve yourself."
Donnelly has more empathy. Her junior year psychology paper on affirmative action concluded that the effects of "covert, deep-rooted prejudice" are enduring. And she generally agrees with what Barack Obama said last month: "The disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to the inequities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of Jim Crow."
Living as a gay woman has made Donnelly far more aware of what it's like to be judged by a trait beyond your control. "Being gay is such a small part of who I am."
Now she wishes she had reached across racial lines at Princeton. "I don't think I ever set foot in the Third World Center," she says of the popular hangout for minority students. "It's like this mystical place."
Since then, Donnelly has worked and socialized with African-Americans. Yet she hasn't grown close to any of them. "I've just never had an opportunity," she says, "to have a good friend who was black."
"You did with Michelle," Brown snaps.
Donnelly rolls her eyes.
She believes the cycle of racism can be stopped.
Donnelly turns the pages in the photo album to a picture of an African-American boy standing next to her at school back in New Orleans. "He and a white guy and I would fashion ourselves after the Mod Squad," she says. "We liked to think of ourselves as a little club."
The friendship started in fifth or sixth grade. And Donnelly sees it as evidence that children have the right instincts.
Truth is, many paths to the future start with the past. Donnelly thought she'd left that Princeton dorm room for good. Then those long fingers from the campaign trail waved her back inside. At first, she saw only herself and two roommates.
Now she sees her children and Obama's children waking up in those beds, in a room with no barriers.
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/2008/04/12/roommate_0413.html
A caller to the Sam Seder just told him a story of how, last week, she went to see Barack Obama speak.
"It was a fundraiser. There was a group of Obama supporters outside with Obama for President signs. After his speech, he took questions. One woman said “a woman outside flagged me down and said that she is Irish, but recently became a US citizen specifically to vote for you. She has a son in Iraq, and she believes you will bring her boy back home to her. She asked me to ask you to wave at her when you leave.” He put his head down. He closed his eyes for a beat. When it was time for him to leave, the Secret Service men said “Senator, its time to get in the car.” He straightened his spine and said “No. I have a lady I need to talk to.” and then he went outside to find her. The secret service did go with him. A lot of us inside the event were close to tears. We were all “OMG he’s not getting in the car! OMG he’s going to find that Irish lady!”'
http://agonist.org/schecter/?p=8682#comment-38886
By Josh Hafenbrack Tallahassee Bureau
He's only 11, but South Florida's Jack Davis has accomplished a feat few can match: He'spoised to get a Florida law named after him.
The sixth-grader's cause: Making it easier for restaurants to donatetheir leftover food to homeless shelters and charities.
Jack, of Coconut Grove, started writing letters to lawmakers after afamily vacation last summer in Tennessee, where a hotel manager toldhim the leftovers at a breakfast buffet would be thrown away. Thehotel, the manager explained, couldn't risk a lawsuit if someone gotfood poisoning or had an allergic reaction.
Later, during a trip to his mother's native Peru, Jack saw a nationwith widespread poverty and came home determined to salvage leftoversheaded to the garbage bin.
"I volunteered for my school's outreach program, and we went toshelters and I saw what [food] they get," Jack said. "They're goodpeople, with families and kids. I wanted to improve their livingconditions."
Two Broward County legislators, Rep. Ari Porth and Sen. Nan Rich, tookup Jack's cause, and the "Jack Davis Florida Restaurant Lending aHelping Hand Act" sailed through the Legislature. After gettingunanimous approval from both chambers last week, the measure awaitsGov. Charlie Crist's signature.
The bill named in Jack's honor (SB276) expands Florida's GoodSamaritan food-donation law to provide a lawsuit exemption forrestaurants that donate their leftovers to charities and nonprofitorganizations.
Researchers say that about a quarter of the food produced in Americais thrown away - enough to feed 49 million people.
"Not all restaurants have a lot of leftovers, but for the ones thatdo, it was tough for them [to donate the food] because of the fear ofliability," said Jennifer Garner, communications director for theFlorida Restaurant and Lodging Association, which supported the bill.
Jack's legislative debut landed him a segment on ABC World News and a
trip to Los Angeles as a guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Back homein South Florida, he got a standing ovation at an assembly gathered inhis honor at Ransom Everglades School."It has been amazing," saidJack's mother, Yasmin.
"I told Jack: 'Chances are, nothing's going to happen. Concentrate onyour schoolwork and quit writing so many letters.' He proved mewrong."
Jack didn't stop at letters. He made a personal appeal at the Capitol,lobbying the governor and testifying at a House committee that wasdebating the bill. His mother said he was even careful to hide hispolitical leanings - he's a staunch Democrat and Barack Obamasupporter - lest he spoil his bill's chances in a Republican-ledLegislature.
"It's so exciting, to know that there are young people out there whoare interested and want to make a difference, want to make a changewhen they see something that's not right," said Rich, a WestonDemocrat. "He really pursued it."
Added Porth, D-Coral Springs: "I haven't ever been contacted by an 11-year-old about a bill before."
What's next for Jack? He said he's not sure if he wants to run forpublic office one day, but in classic politician's form, he's notruling anything out.
"I don't plan to, but who knows?" said Jack, who said he wants to bean attorney.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/la-bk-garrow6apr06,1,6058023.story
Preachers can say the darndest things, as perhaps you've heard. "God damn America," to take one recent controversial example, is pretty mild compared with other recorded pulpit snippets. Consider this denunciation of U.S. military behavior abroad: "[W]e are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world." Or, similarly, calling the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and condemning it for creating "concentration camps."It sounds like the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. decrying the Iraqi civilian death toll and the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, right? Sorry, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made those remarks in February 1968 and April 1967, attacking U.S. conduct in Vietnam.Indeed, here's a historian's question for YouTube warriors on all sides of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy. "Is Obama Wright?," as one video has been titled? A powerful return volley could be "Is Obama King?" -- which thousands of voters may be asking themselves. In fact, if all the relevant film footage of King's sermons were readily available for viewing, the most accurate and instructive title would be "Is King Wright?" Or, better yet, "Is Wright King?"These questions and comparisons came to mind as I read Jonathan Rieder's rich, thoughtful new book, "The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me." Published to coincide with the 40th anniversary of King's assassination in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, the book "is not biography, history, or theology," Rieder emphasizes. Instead, the Barnard College sociologist focuses on "King's language and the way he deployed it," as distinct from King's public activism or the substance of his beliefs. The result is an extended meditation on the deeper meanings of the civil rights leader's words and how he used them, featuring a mosaic of carefully chosen and closely analyzed quotations."The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me" is an extremely learned book, one that Rieder has been working on for almost two decades (and he thanks this writer for answering a number of queries over the years). But he is surprisingly reluctant to draw explicit or broad conclusions. Successive sections consider the language King used in private discussion (some of which was recorded thanks to the FBI's extensive bugging and wiretapping of King) with African American friends as well as his preaching to black congregations, his overtly political addresses at civil rights rallies and what Rieder calls King's "crossover" orations and writings aimed at predominantly white audiences.Uppermost in Rieder's treatment is his heartfelt desire to see King as a fundamentally universalist public voice rather than an essentially black voice. (King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, particularly its oft-quoted line elevating "the content of their character" above "the color of their skin," is the most famous example of King's universalism.) Rieder tempers this argument at times, as when he acknowledges that "the image of the universalistic King" is partial and incomplete, but he admits his discomfort with the highly influential interpretations of King by the Rev. James H. Cone -- a theological mentor to Wright -- and Keith D. Miller, scholars who (like this writer) have viewed King first and foremost as a product of the black Baptist Church world in which he grew up.Miller pioneered our understanding of the extent to which King, like many preachers, drew heavily from previous sermons composed by other ministers, many of whom were white, in his 1992 book on King, "Voice of Deliverance." Rieder acknowledges such work, and he notes the extent of King's word-for-word plagiarism throughout his graduate school course work, particularly in his unpublished doctoral dissertation.But Rieder is too scrupulous a scholar to minimize King's blackness, so again and again his analysis acknowledges truths about King that stand in considerable tension with Rieder's universalist thesis. "Blackness for King was in certain respects incidental and interim," the author claims. But he also writes that King "was much more emphatic and enthusiastic with black audiences," that "King tended to reserve self-disclosure for black audiences" and that he exhibited a "reluctance to reveal himself before whites." Further on, Rieder notes -- accurately -- that "the King who spoke in black spaces beyond white scrutiny was often a more ethnic figure than the orator familiar to the public imagination."Thus in his desire to reject what he calls "a romance of racial authenticity," one that says "the real King was the black King, and the black King was the one who talked black," Rieder falls victim to the thoroughness of his own scholarship. "[T]he things King tended to expunge from his talk in white venues were often significant," he admits, and that "sometimes diminished the power of the written and spoken words that King addressed to whites."King "switched in and out of idioms as he moved between black and white audiences," performing "an elaborate dance of empathy" that struck different grace notes with different groups. Yet "the substance of King's message varied less than the code, style, or voice in which it was articulated," Rieder rightly observes.Even the most self-consciously universalist public figures vary their speech. "There's no doubt that when I'm with a black audience, I slip into a slightly different dialect," Obama told New York magazine in 2006. That's especially true in a black church context, and Rieder notes how differently King spoke at Ebenezer Baptist Church -- the Atlanta church in which he grew up and to which he returned as co-pastor in 1960 -- than he did at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., where he pastored from 1954 to 1960. Dexter was a relatively staid, middle-class church, Ebenezer a "more responsive . . . congregation." Rieder believes that King's "prophetic voice" was "submerged during the Dexter years," and he suggests that "we should not underestimate the power of the Dexter environment to shape King's style."That insight aside, Rieder devotes little attention to tracing how "King's mood and tone evolved over the years." He acknowledges that while King's "undeniable changes over time . . . certainly deserve mention, my emphasis is on the continuities." He notes King's "deepening despondency," a physical, emotional and spiritual exhaustion in the final year of his life, but he doesn't explore how King's loss of hopefulness may have led to the angry, prophetic denunciations of the United States that some white audiences -- then and now -- might find as offensive as Wright's most notorious snippets.Yet anyone who takes the time to peruse "The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me" will have no doubt: The real Martin Luther King Jr. more often sounded like Jeremiah Wright than like Barack Obama. *David J. Garrow, a senior fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, is the author of "Bearing the Cross," a Pulitzer prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr.The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King Jr.Jonathan Rieder
By Lawrence Korb and Ian Moss
April 3, 2008
In 1961, a young African-American man, after hearing President John F. Kennedy's challenge to, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," gave up his student deferment, left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines.In 1963, this man, having completed his two years of service in the Marines, volunteered again to become a Navy corpsman. (They provide medical assistance to the Marines as well as to Navy personnel.)The man did so well in corpsman school that he was the valedictorian and became a cardiopulmonary technician. Not surprisingly, he was assigned to the Navy's premier medical facility, Bethesda Naval Hospital, as a member of the commander in chief's medical team, and helped care for President Lyndon B. Johnson after his 1966 surgery. For his service on the team, which he left in 1967, the White House awarded him three letters of commendation.What is even more remarkable is that this man entered the Marines and Navy not many years after the two branches began to become integrated.While this young man was serving six years on active duty, Vice President Dick Cheney, who was born the same year as the Marine/sailor, received five deferments, four for being an undergraduate and graduate student and one for being a prospective father. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both five years younger than the African-American youth, used their student deferments to stay in college until 1968. Both then avoided going on active duty through family connections.Who is the real patriot? The young man who interrupted his studies to serve his country for six years or our three political leaders who beat the system? Are the patriots the people who actually sacrifice something or those who merely talk about their love of the country?After leaving the service of his country, the young African-American finished his final year of college, entered the seminary, was ordained as a minister, and eventually became pastor of a large church in one of America's biggest cities.This man is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the retiring pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, who has been in the news for comments he made over the last three decades.Since these comments became public we have heard criticisms, condemnations, denouncements and rejections of his comments and him.We've seen on television, in a seemingly endless loop, sound bites of a select few of Rev. Wright's many sermons.Some of the Wright's comments are inexcusable and inappropriate and should be condemned, but in calling him "unpatriotic," let us not forget that this is a man who gave up six of the most productive years of his life to serve his country.How many of Wright's detractors, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly to name but a few, volunteered for service, and did so under the often tumultuous circumstances of a newly integrated armed forces and a society in the midst of a civil rights struggle? Not many.While words do count, so do actions.Let us not forget that, for whatever Rev. Wright may have said over the last 30 years, he has demonstrated his patriotism.Lawrence Korb and Ian Moss are, respectively, Navy and Marine Corps veterans. They work at The Center For American Progress. Korb served as assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped0404wrightapr03,0,2263127,print.story
The transcript from MSNBC's Keith Olbermann:
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment on the presidential campaign of the Junior Senator from New York. By way of necessary preface, President and Senator Clinton -- and the Senator's mother, and the Senator's brother -- were of immeasurable support to me at the moments when these very commentaries were the focus of the most surprise, the most uncertainty, and the most anger. My gratitude to them is abiding. Also, I am not here endorsing Senator Obama's nomination, nor suggesting it is inevitable. Thus I have fought with myself over whether or not to say anything. Senator, as it has reached its apex in their tone-deaf, arrogant, and insensitive reaction to the remarks of Geraldine Ferraro... your own advisors are slowly killing your chances to become President. Senator, their words, and your own, are now slowly killing the chances for any Democrat to become President. In your tepid response to this Ferraro disaster, you may sincerely think you are disenthralling an enchanted media, and righting an unfair advance bestowed on Senator Obama. You may think the matter has closed with Representative Ferraro's bitter, almost threatening resignation. But in fact, Senator, you are now campaigning, as if Barock Obama were the Democrat, and you… were the Republican. As Shakespeare wrote, Senator -- that way… madness… lies. You have missed a critical opportunity to do... what was right. No matter what Ms. Ferraro now claims, no one took her comments out of context. She had made them on at least three separate occasions, then twice more on television this morning. Just hours ago, on NBC Nightly News, she denied she had made the remarks in an interview -- only at a paid political speech. In fact, the first time she spoke them, was ten days before the California newspaper published them... not in a speech, but in a radio interview. On February 26th, quoting... "If Barack Obama were a white man, would we be talking about this, as a potential real problem for Hillary? If he were a woman of any color, would he be in this position that he's in? Absolutely not." The context was inescapable. Two minutes earlier, a member of Senator Clinton's Finance Committee, one of her "Hill-Raisers," had bemoaned the change in allegiance by Super-Delegate John Lewis from Clinton to Obama, and the endorsement of Obama by Senator Dodd. "I look at these guys doing it," she had said, "and I have to tell you, it's the guys sticking together." A minute after the "color" remarks, she was describing herself as having been chosen for the 1984 Democratic ticket, purely as a woman politician, purely to make history. She was, in turn, making a blind accusation of sexism -- and dismissing Senator Obama's candidacy as nothing more than an Equal Opportunity stunt. The next day she repeated her comments to a reporter from the newspaper in Torrance, California. "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." And when this despicable statement -- ugly in its overtones, laughable in its weak grip of facts, and moronic in the historical context -- when it floats outward from the Clinton Campaign like a poison cloud, what do the advisors have their candidate do? Do they have Senator Clinton herself compare the remark to Al Campanis talking on Nightline... on Jackie Robinson day... about how blacks lacked the necessities to become baseball executives, while she points out that Barock Obama has not gotten his 1600 delegates as part of some kind of Affirmative Action plan? Do they have Senator Clinton note that her own brief period in elected office, is as irrelevant to the issue of judgment as is Senator Obama's… …while she points out that FDR had served only six years as a governor and state Senator before he became President? Or that Teddy Roosevelt had four-and-a-half years before the White House? Or that Woodrow Wilson had two years and six weeks? Or Richard Nixon… fourteen... and Calvin Coolidge 25? Do these advisors have Senator Clinton invoke Samantha Power -- gone by sunrise after she used the word "monster" -- and have Senator Clinton say, "this is how I police my campaign and this is what I stand for," while she fires former Congresswoman Ferraro from any role the campaign? No. Somebody tells her that simply disagreeing with and rejecting the remarks is sufficient. And she should then call, "regrettable", words that should make any Democrat retch. And that she should then try to twist them, first into some pox-on-both-your-houses plea to 'stick to the issues,' and then to let her campaign manager try to bend them beyond all recognition, into Senator Obama's fault. And thus these advisers give Congresswoman Ferraro nearly a week in which to send Senator Clinton's campaign back into the vocabulary... of David Duke. "Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up. "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. "How's that?" How's that? Apart from sounding exactly like Rush Limbaugh attacking the black football quarterback Donovan McNabb? Apart from sounding exactly like what Ms. Ferraro said about another campaign, nearly twenty years ago? Quote: "President Reagan suggested Tuesday that people don't ask Jackson tough questions because of his race. And former representative Geraldine A. Ferraro (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that because of his "radical" views, "if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race." So... apart from sounding like insidious racism that is at least two decades old? Apart from rendering ridiculous, Senator Clinton's shell-game about choosing Obama as Vice President? Apart from this evening's resignation letter? "I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign. "The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you." Apart from all that? Well. It sounds as if those advisors want their campaign to be associated with those words, and the cheap… ignorant… vile… racism that underlies every syllable... And that Geraldine Ferraro has just gone free-lance. Senator Clinton: This is not a campaign strategy. This is a suicide pact. This week alone, your so-called strategists have declared that Senator Obama has not yet crossed the "commander-in-chief threshold"… But -- he might be your choice to be Vice President, even though a quarter of the previous sixteen Vice Presidents have become commander-in-chief during the greatest kind of crisis this nation can face: a mid-term succession. But you'd only pick him if he crosses that threshold by the time of the convention. But if he does cross that threshold by the time of the convention, he will only have done so sufficiently enough to become Vice President, not President. Senator, if the serpentine logic of your so-called advisors were not bad enough... Now, thanks to Geraldine Ferraro, and your campaign's initial refusal to break with her, and your new relationship with her -- now more disturbing still with her claim that she can now "speak for herself" about her vision of Senator Obama as some kind of embodiment of a quota... If you were to seek Obama as a Vice President, it would be, to Ms. Ferraro, some kind of social engineering gesture, some kind of racial make-good. Do you not see, Senator? To Senator Clinton's supporters, to her admirers, to her friends for whom she is first choice, and her friends for whom she is second choice, she is still letting herself be perceived as standing next to, and standing by, racial divisiveness and blindness… And worst yet, after what President Clinton said during the South Carolina primary, comparing the Obama and Jesse Jackson campaigns -- a disturbing, but only borderline remark... After what some in the black community have perceived as a racial undertone to the "3 A-M" ad... a disturbing -- but only borderline interpretation... And after that moment's hesitation in her own answer on 60 Minutes about Obama's religion -- a disturbing, but only borderline vagueness... After those precedents, there are those who see a pattern... false, or true. After those precedents, there are those who see an intent... false, or true. After those precedents, there are those who see the Clinton campaign's anything-but-benign neglect of this Ferraro catastrophe -- falsely or truly -- as a desire to hear the kind of casual prejudice which still haunts this society voiced... and to not distance the campaign from it. To not distance you from it, Senator! To not distance you... from that which you as a woman, and Senator Obama as an African-American, should both know and feel with the deepest of personal pain! Which you should both fight with all you have! Which you should both insure, has no place in this contest! This, Senator Clinton, is your campaign, and it is your name. Grab the reins back from whoever has led you to this precipice, before it is too late. Voluntarily or inadvertently, you are still awash in this filth. Your only reaction has been to disagree, reject, and to call it regrettable. Her only reaction has been to brand herself as the victim, resign from your committee, and insist she will continue to speak. Unless you say something definitive, Senator, the former Congresswoman is speaking with your approval. You must remedy this. And you must... reject... and denounce... Geraldine Ferraro. Good night, and good luck.
I read this on a forum and just had to share:
Think Deanna Favre! | Report to Admin
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/samgrahamfelsen/gGBQBG#comment-gGGLP8
The next time McCain talks about how "the surge is working" in reducing violence (ummm....to what? pre-2006 levels???), Obama should respond with this. How is the surge taking a toll on our soldiers?
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Every day, five U.S. soldiers try to kill themselves. Before the Iraq war began, that figure was less than one suicide attempt a day.
The dramatic increase is revealed in new U.S. Army figures, which show 2,100 soldiers tried to commit suicide in 2007.
"Suicide attempts are rising and have risen over the last five years," said Col. Elspeth Cameron-Ritchie, an Army psychiatrist.
Concern over the rate of suicide attempts prompted Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, to introduce legislation Thursday to improve the military's suicide-prevention programs.
"Our troops and their families are under unprecedented levels of stress due to the pace and frequency of more than five years of deployments," Webb said in a written statement.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, took to the Senate floor Thursday, urging more help for military members, especially for those returning from war.
"Our brave service members who face deployment after deployment without the rest, recovery and treatment they need are at the breaking point," Murray said.
She said Congress has given "hundreds of millions of dollars" to the military to improve its ability to provide mental health treatment, but said it will take more than money to resolve the problem.
"It takes leadership and it takes a change in the culture of war," she said. She said some soldiers had reported receiving nothing more than an 800 number to call for help.
"Many soldiers need a real person to talk to," she said. "And they need psychiatrists and they need psychologists."
According to Army statistics, the incidence of U.S. Army soldiers attempting suicide or inflicting injuries on themselves has skyrocketed in the nearly five years since the start of the Iraq war.
Last year's 2,100 attempted suicides -- an average of more than 5 per day -- compares with about 350 suicide attempts in 2002, the year before the war in Iraq began, according to the Army.
The figures also show the number of suicides by active-duty troops in 2007 may reach an all-time high when the statistics are finalized in March, Army officials said.
The Army lists 89 soldier deaths in 2007 as suicides and is investigating 32 more as possible suicides. Suicide rates already were up in 2006 with 102 deaths, compared with 87 in 2005.
Cameron-Ritchie, the Army psychiatrist, said suicide attempts are usually related to problems with intimate relationships, but they are also related to problems with work, finances and the law.
"The really tough area here is stigma. We know that soldiers don't want to go seek care. They're tough, they're strong, they don't want to go see a behavioral health-care provider," Cameron-Ritchie said.
Multiple deployments and long deployments appear to exact a toll on relationships, thereby boosting the number of suicide attempts, she said.
Traditionally, the suicide rate among military members has been lower than age- and gender-matched civilians. But in recent years the rate has crept up from 12 per 100,000 among the military to 17.5 per 100,000 in 2006, she said. That's still less than the civilian figure of about 20 per 100,000, she said.
The "typical" soldier who commits suicide is a member of an infantry unit who uses a firearm to carry out the act, according to the Army.
Post-traumatic stress disorder also may be a factor in suicide attempts, Cameron-Ritchie said, because it can result in broken relationships and often leads to drug and alcohol abuse.
"The real central issue is relationships. Relationships, relationships, relationships," said U.S. Army Chaplain Lt. Col. Ran Dolinger. "People look at PTSD, they look at length of deployments ... but it's that broken relationship that really makes the difference."
To reduce suicides, the Army said it is targeting soldiers who are or have been in Iraq for long periods and teaching them to notice signs that can lead to suicide.
That training came too late for Army Specialist Tim Bowman. The 23-year-old killed himself in 2005 after returning from Iraq.
"As my family was preparing for a 2005 Thanksgiving meal, our son Timothy was lying on the floor, slowly bleeding to death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound," said his father, Mike Bowman, in testimony to a House Veterans' Affairs committee hearing in December. "His war was now over."
He said veterans return home to find an "understaffed, under-funded, under-equipped" Veterans Affairs mental health system.
"Many just give up trying," he said.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/01/military.suicides/index.html
from: http://www.juancole.com/2008/02/barack-hussein-obama-omar-bradley.html
Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
At Cincinnati, Bill Cunningham, according to the LAT, who "introduced presidential candidate John McCain at a rally here today accused Barack Obama of sympathizing with 'world leaders who want to kill us' and invoked Obama's middle name -- three times calling him 'Barack Hussein Obama.' " John McCain repudiated Cunningham's low tactics and said that using the middle name like that three times was "inappropriate" and would never happen again at one of his rallies.I want to say something about Barack Hussein Obama's name. It is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of General Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic languages!Christian, Western heroes have often been bequeathed Middle Eastern names. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, the medieval Spanish hero, carried the name El Cid, from the Arabic al-Sayyid, "the lord."Barack and Hussein are Semitic words. Americans have been named with Semitic names since the founding of the Republic. Fourteen of our 43 presidents have had Semitic names (see below). And, American English contains many Arabic-derived words that we use every day and without which we would be much impoverished. America is a world civilization with a world heritage, something Cunninghamism will never understand.Barack is a Semitic word meaning "to bless" as a verb or "blessing" as a noun. In its Hebrew form, barak, it is found all through the Bible. It first occurs in Genesis 1:22: "And God blessed (ḇāreḵə ) them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth."Here is a list of how many times barak appears in each book of the Bible.Now let us take the name "Hussein." It is from the Semitic word, hasan, meaning "good" or "handsome." Husayn is the diminutive, affectionate form. Barack Obama's middle name is in honor of his grandfather, Hussein, a secular resident of Nairobi. Americans may think of Saddam Hussein when they hear the name, but that is like thinking of Stalin when you hear the name Joseph. There have been lots of Husseins in history, from the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, a hero who touched the historian Gibbon, to King Hussein of Jordan, one of America's most steadfast allies in the 20th century. The author of the beloved American novel, The Kite Runner, is Khaled Hosseini. But in Obama's case, it is just a reference to his grandfather.It is worth pointing out that John McCain's adopted daughter, Bridget, is originally from Bangladesh. Since Hussein is a very common name in Bangladesh, it is entirely possible that her birth father or grandfather was named Hussein. McCain certainly has Muslim relatives via adoption in his family. If Muslim relatives are a disqualification from high office in the United States, then McCain himself is in trouble. In fact, since Bridget is upset that George W. Bush doesn't like her "because she is black," and used her to stop the McCain campaign in South Carolina in 2000, you understand why McCain would be especially sensitive to race-baiting of Cunningham's sort. The question is how vigorously he will combat it; he hasn't been above Muslim-taunting in the campaign so far. (And, the McCains really should let Bridget know that she is Asian, not "black." The poor girl; Bush and Rove have done a number on her, and Cindy's confusion can't help.)The other thing to say about grandfathers named Hussein is that very large numbers of African-Americans probably have an ancestor ten or eleven generations ago with that name, in what is now Mali or Senegal or Nigeria. And, since so many thousands of Arab Muslims were made to convert to Catholicism in Spain after 1501, many Latinos have distant ancestors named Hussein, too. In fact, since there was a lot of Arab-Spanish intermarriage, and since there was subsequent Spanish intermarriage with other European Catholics, more European Americans are descended from a Hussein than they realize. The British royal family is quite forthright about the Arab line in their ancestry going back to Andalusia.Obama, being a cousin of Dick Cheney on one side and having relatives in Kenya on the other, is just more and more typical of the 21st century United States.So, anyway, Obama's first two names mean "Blessing, the Good." If we are lucky enough to get him for president, we can only hope that his names are prophetic for us.Which brings me to Omar Bradley. Omar is an alternative spelling of Umar, i.e. Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph of Sunni Islam. Presumably General Bradley was named for the poet Omar Khayyam, who bore the caliph's name. Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, in the "translation" of Edward FitzGerald, became enormously popular in Victorian America.Gen. Omar Bradley, who bore a Semitic, Muslim first name, and shared it with the second Caliph of Sunni Islam, was the hero of D-Day and Normandy, of the Battle of the Bulge and the Ruhr.Would Mr. Cunningham see Omar Bradley as un-American, as an enemy because of his name?What about other American heroes, such as Gen. George Joulwan, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander of Europe? "Joulwan" is an Arabic name. Or there is Gen. John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander. Abizaid is an Arabic name. Abi means Abu or "father of," and Zaid is a common Arab first name. Is Cunningham good enough to wipe their shoes? Is he going to call them traitors because they have Arabic names?What about Congressman Darrell Issa of California? ("`Isa" means Jesus in Arabic). Former cabinet secretary Donna Shalala? (Shalala means "waterfall" in Arabic). I won't go into all the great Americans with Arabic names in sports, entertainment and business, against whom Cunningham would apparently discriminate on that basis. Does he want to take citizenship away from Kareem Abdul Jabbar [meaning "noble the servant of the Mighty"] and Ahmad Jamal [meaning "the most praised, beauty"]? What about Rihanna ["sweet basil," "aromatic"]? Tony Shalhoub [i.e. Mr. Monk]?Let us take Benjamin Franklin. His first name is from the Hebrew Bin Yamin, the son of the Right (hand), or son of strength, or the son of the South (yamin or right has lots of connotations). The "Bin" means "son of," just as in modern colloquial Arabic. Bin Yamin Franklin is not a dishonorable name because of its Semitic root. By the way, there are lots of Muslims named Bin Yamin.As for an American president bearing a name derived from a Semitic language, that is hardly unprecedented.John Adams really only had Semitic names. His first name is from the Hebrew Yochanan, or gift of God, which became Johan and then John. (In German and in medieval English, "y" is represented by "j" but was originally pronounced "y".) Adams is from the biblical Adam, which also just means "human being." In Arabic, one way of saying "human being" is "Bani Adam," the children of men.Thomas Jefferson's first name is from the Aramaic Tuma, meaning "twin." Aramaic is a Semitic language spoken by Jesus, which is related to Hebrew and Arabic. In Arabic twin is tau'am, so you can see the similarity. James Madison, James Monroe and James Polk all had a Semitic first name, derived from the Hebrew Ya'aqov or Jacob, which is Ya`qub in Arabic. It became Iacobus in Latin, then was corrupted to Iacomus, and from there became James in English. Zachary Taylor's first name is from the Hebrew Zachariah, which means "the Lord has remembered."Abraham Lincoln, of course is, named for the patriarch Abraham, from the Semitic word for father, Ab, and the word for "multitude," raham,. Abu, "father of," is a common element in Arab names today.So, Mr. Cunningham, Barack Hussein Obama fits right in this list of presidents with Semitic names. In fact, we haven't had one for a while. We are due for another one.A blessed and good one.
I have not believed that Obama has an ounce of sympathy for a creep like Farrakhan. But Obama has now made me doubt this. If David Duke called John McCain a good man, would McCain hesitate to say he'd rather Duke opposed him? If this is how Obama wants to tackle this emotive issue, he needs to get real.
...Duke seems almost nonchalant about it. Self-described white nationalists like himself, he explained cordially, "don't see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton--or, for that matter, John McCain." Sure, Duke considers Obama "a racist individual," citing his Afrocentric Chicago church. But soon the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People was critiquing Obama as overhyped and insubstantial in terms you might hear from, say, Clinton strategist Mark Penn. ...[H]is mild tone is still a curious reaction to what white supremacists have long considered a sign of racial apocalypse. ..."I don't think Obama will be any more negative for the United States than Hillary or John McCain," explains Duke. "In fact," he added, "we probably have less preference for a European like a John McCain or a Hillary who has betrayed our interests, our heritage, our rights."Edward Sebesta, a Dallas-based expert on neo-Confederate groups, says that, in a match-up against Obama, McCain might wind up suffering the brunt of the hatred: "They really hate McCain," he says. "They're suffering from emotional exhaustion. They might not have the energy to be infuriated by two candidates at the same time." Amazingly, some commenters on racist websites are already debating the grim choice between Obama and McCain.
I'm not too familiar with the intricacies of campaign financing, but I think it's a bit odd that Hillary is charging her own campaign 1.26% on the 5 million she loaned herself.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23273781/
Anyway, here are the January figures for the campaigns:
Barack ObamaTotal receipts to date: (includes contributions for the primary and general elections, loans and transfers) $140.58 million, including $6.98 million for general election .Total contributions to date: $138.2 million.Total spending: $115.6 million.January 2008 contributions: $36 million, including $892,669 for the general election.January 2008 spending: $30.5 million.January 2008 transfers or loans: $0.Cash on hand: $24.9 million.Debt: $1.1 million.Top donor states this month: California: $5.5 million; New York: $3.03 million; Illinois: $1.87 million.Employees of Microsoft gave $37,988; employees of Goldman Sachs gave $37,963; employees of IBM gave $37,085.
Hillary ClintonTotal receipts to date: (includes contributions for the primary and general elections, loans and transfers) $138.05 million, including $20.49 million for the general election.Total contributions to date: $121 million.Total spending: $109 million.January 2008 contributions: $13.9 million, including $953,641 for the general election.January 2008 spending: $28.5 millionJanuary 2008 transfers or loans: $5 million.Cash on hand: $29.2 million.Debt: $7.6 million.Top donor states this month: New York: $2.09 million; California: $1.84 million; Florida: $911,498.Employees of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP gave $23,620; employees of DFC&W gave $23,000; employees of Ch2M Hill gave $16,400.
Wow! I've been watching the number of donors grow towards 500,000. The last time I really checked a few days ago, we were about 46,000 short of 500,000. Now I check today and there are 565,000+!!! Absolutely unbelievable!
Fired Up!
Ready To Go!
On the top of this website is a quote by Barack, "I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington...I'm asking you to believe in yours."
Well, Barack...I am starting to believe in my ability to make change. I've never before been involved in a campaign, but because of your message of hope & change, I voted in a primary for the first time, contributed money to campaign for the first time and after creating a profile on this site, I'm now organizing for the first time!
I asked the owner of LITM (Love Is The Message), a lounge in downtown Jersey City, if she would show the Texas debate on her big projection screen and she said Yes! Just that easy! I really hope we can get a good crowd.
Yes We Can!
