The quote below shows yet again why I am a supporter of Barack Obama. He will stand up for working americans and not allow corporations to rule this great country any more.
"I stand with the writers. The Guild's demand is a test of whether media corporations are going to give writers a fair share of the wealth their work creates or continue concentrating profits in the hands of their executives. I urge the producers to work with the writers so that everyone can get back to work."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLVG8cqn8HA
I do a small you-tube show called "Dose of Reality" and this is my episode on why I'm voting for Obama, including some footage I shot while he was speaking here in Portland, OR. I hope this helps spread the word.....
FYI my Dad's family lives in Iowa....so I'm of Iowan stock and I'm an Obama supporter!
By FRANK RICH Published: December 23, 2007
WE can only imagine what is going on inside John McCain’s head when he contemplates Mike Huckabee. It can’t be pretty. No presidential candidate in either party has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator, and yet in a wartime election he is being outpaced by a guy who has zero experience and is proud of it.
“I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy,” Mr. Huckabee joked to Don Imus, “but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.” So much for the gravitas points earned during a five-and-a-half year stay at the Hanoi Hilton.
But if Mr. McCain has so far resisted slapping down the upstart in his party, Bill Clinton has shown no such self-restraint about Barack Obama. Early this month the former president criticized the press for not sufficiently covering the candidates’ “record in public life” and thereby making “people think experience is irrelevant.” His pique boiled over on Charlie Rose’s show on Dec. 14, when he made his now-famous claim that the 2008 election will be a referendum on whether “no experience matters.” He insinuated that Mr. Obama was tantamount to “a gifted television commentator” and likened a potential Obama presidency to a roll of the dice.
Attention Bill Clinton: If that’s what this election is about, it’s already over. No matter how much Hillary Clinton, Mr. McCain or Rudy Giuliani brag about being tested and vetted, it’s not experience that will be decisive in determining the next president.
For many, Mr. McCain’s long record of experience may be a liability even greater than his party-bucking moderation on immigration and his bear hug of President Bush on Iraq. What his résumé mainly does is remind a youth-obsessed culture of his age. When Gallup asked voters in August to rate traits as desirable or not in the next president, the “undesirable” percentages for being a member of a racial or ethnic minority group (13), a woman (14), a Mormon (22) or having “strained relationships” with one’s children (45) all paled next to being age 70 or older (52). It’s not morning in America for Reaganesque elders in the political arena anymore.
For Mrs. Clinton, the failure of “experience” as a selling point was becoming apparent even as her husband continued to push it on Charlie Rose. Last week’s ABC News-Washington Post poll in Iowa found that she clobbers Mr. Obama on the question of who has the most experience — 49 percent to 8 percent. But to little end. That same survey had Mr. Obama ahead by 4 points over all because, as this year’s pervasive polling matchup has it, the electorate values change over experience.
The rabid hunger for change, it turns out, has made the very idea of experience as toxic as every other attribute of the Bush White House. The once-heralded notion of a C.E.O. presidency, overstocked with “tested” Washington and Fortune 500 executives like Cheney and Rumsfeld, is now in the toilet with Larry Craig. You couldn’t push the pendulum further in the other direction than by supporting a candidate like Mr. Huckabee, who is blatantly unprepared to be president and whose most impressive battle has been with his weight. In a Rasmussen poll in Florida, Mr. Huckabee even did well among foreign-policy-minded Republicans whose most important issue is Iraq.
But for Mrs. Clinton, the problem isn’t just that the Bush years have tarnished the notion that experience is a positive indicator of future performance. She has further devalued that sales pitch with her own inflated claims of what her experience has been. Ted Sorensen, the J.F.K. speechwriter now in the Obama camp, saw the backlash coming in a recent conversation I had with him after Mrs. Clinton had mocked Mr. Obama for counting his elementary-school years in Indonesia as an asset.
“Hillary should be careful about scoffing at other people’s experience,” Mr. Sorensen said. “It’s not as if the process of osmosis gives her presidential qualities by physical proximity.”
Whatever Mrs. Clinton’s experience as first lady or senator, what matters most in any case is not its sheer volume, that 35 years she keeps citing. It’s what she did or did not learn along the way that counts. That’s why one of the most revealing debate passages so far came in an exchange that earned much laughter but scant scrutiny this month in Des Moines.
This was the moment when Mr. Obama was asked how he could deliver a clean break from the past while relying on “so many Clinton advisers.” Mrs. Clinton jokingly called out, “I want to hear that,” prompting Mr. Obama to one-up her by responding, “Well, Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me, as well.”
Well, touché. But what was left unexamined beneath the levity was a revealing distinction between these two candidates. The questioner was right: Mr. Obama, like Mrs. Clinton, has indeed turned to former Clintonites for foreign-policy advice. But the Clinton players were not homogeneous, and who ended up with which ’08 candidate is instructive.
The principal foreign-policy Clinton alumni in Mr. Obama’s campaign include Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state, and Tony Lake, the former national security adviser and a prewar skeptic who said publicly in February 2003 that the Bush administration had not made the case that Saddam was an “imminent threat.” Ms. Rice, in an eloquent speech in November 2002, said that the Bush administration was “trying to change the subject to Iraq” from the war against Al Qaeda and warned that if it tried to fight both wars at once, “one, if not both, will suffer.” Her text now reads as a bookend to Mr. Obama’s senatorial campaign speech challenging the wisdom of the war only weeks earlier that same fall.
Mrs. Clinton’s current team was less prescient. Though it includes one of the earlier military critics of Bush policy, Gen. Wesley Clark, he is balanced by Gen. Jack Keane, an author of the Bush “surge.” The Clinton campaign’s foreign policy and national security director is a former Madeleine Albright aide, Lee Feinstein, who in November 2002 was gullible enough to say on CNBC that “we should take the president at his word, which is that he sees war as a last resort” — an argument anticipating the one Mrs. Clinton still uses to defend her vote on the Iraq war authorization.
In late April 2003, a week before “Mission Accomplished,” Mr. Feinstein could be found on CNN saying that he was “fairly confident” that W.M.D. would turn up in Iraq. Asked if the war would be a failure if no weapons were found, he said, “I don’t think that that’s a situation we’ll confront.” Forced to confront exactly that situation over the next year, he dug in deeper, co-writing an essay for Foreign Affairs (available on its Web site) arguing that “the biggest problem with the Bush pre-emption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.”
In a two-page handwritten letter in response to a recent column of mine criticizing Mrs. Clinton’s Senate votes on Iraq and Iran, Bill Clinton made a serious and impassioned defense of her foreign-policy record. On the subject of her support for the so-called Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran this fall, Mr. Clinton wrote: “If Senator Obama, for example, had really believed it was an indirect authorization to attack Iran, he would not have stayed away on the campaign trail, but would have come back to vote against it.” That’s a fair point — and a fair criticism of Mr. Obama as he continues to vilify this particular Hillary Clinton vote. If voting for Kyl-Lieberman was as grave a step toward war as Mr. Obama claims, there’s no excuse for his absence.
Mr. Clinton’s narrow defense of his wife’s Iraq vote in 2002 — it was not “a blanket authorization to go to war,” he wrote — doesn’t persuade me. But even if it did, her choice for foreign-policy director in 2008 makes me question her ability to profit from experience and make a clean break with the establishment thinking in both parties that enabled the Iraq fiasco. Judgment calls like this rather than failures of the press may answer her husband’s question as to why the public finds her experience “irrelevant.”
What Mrs. Clinton clearly has learned from her White House experience, as she reminds us, is to strike back at her critics. Unfortunately, she has assimilated those critics’ methods as well. Attacks on Mr. Obama’s record and views are fair game. But the steady personal attacks — the invocations of “cocaine” and “Hussein” and “madrassa” by surrogates — smell like the dirty tricks of the old Clinton haters. The Clinton-camp denials that these tactics have been “authorized” sound like Karl Rove’s denials of similar smear campaigns against John McCain in 2000.
If Mrs. Clinton is to win, she won’t do so by running on that kind of experience but by rising above it. Bill Clinton wouldn’t have shifted gears to refer to his wife constantly as a “change agent,” however implausibly, if his acute political sensors didn’t tell him that Americans are not just willing but eager to roll the dice.
Posted December 19, 2007 | 03:43 PM (EST)
From the very beginning -- back when our torture chambers still had that new torture chamber smell; and before our chief executive's incompetence exploded like an M80 inside the clenched-fist of the world -- George W. Bush has been an embarrassment.
We know his disgraceful deeds and policies. But it's his utter lack of quality; his unsubstantial presence; his marble-mouthed oratorical retardation; his inability to inspire greatness; and his empty-suit absence of intellectual curiosity which preordained him to be the worst President of the United States in modern history.
Admittedly, when it comes to the presidency, my personal level of idealism rests somewhere between Frank Capra and Aaron Sorkin. I'm a presidential geek. One of my life goals is to work in the White House for one week. My Dad's old office at the Treasury Department used to look out over the east lawn, and when I was a kid I used to imagine that one day the president would invite me and my Dad for a ride on Marine One.
But after seven years in this Dark Age, I've almost forgotten what it was like to have a real president occupying the White House: a president who, even if I disagreed with his policies and ideology, dignified the office with a stature that symbolized the awesomeness of America.
Emerson wrote, "Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, 'I pray you, let me never hear that man's name again.'"
We seem to experience this routine with almost every two-term president. But President Bush was never a hero in the first place and only grew more ridiculous with each subsequent crime against the Constitution, against human decency and against democracy itself. If there's any justice left in this nation, history will record that President Bush was an entirely inadequate tool; a bungling villain whose early popularity grew out of a traumatic and patriotic need to support the office regardless of who occupied it.
And when the flood waters literally rose up and washed away the disguise, the slack-jawed poseur was revealed -- the "bore" who had always been there, but who had been previously and cynically costumed in cowboy drag. Some of us recognized the charade from the beginning, but it required a second national tragedy, this time in New Orleans, to alert the media and the rest of America to his criminal incompetence.
American history is inextricably tied to the presidency. It's how we mentally assemble the chronology of our past. For going on eight years, we've endured a chief executive who never should have ascended to this post. Consequently, this decade has been an aberration; a time when Americans somehow championed an illegitimate, Orwellian hooplehead and, naturally, we suffered for our lack of vision. This is how most of the first decade of this century will be remembered.
Yet our generation is being offered another chance here -- an opportunity to set things straight and elect a president who not only illustrates the historical qualities of the office, but who also defines an energetic new approach.
The next president has to be Senator Barack Obama.
Senator Obama's intelligence, passion and quality of character can inspire us to recapture our own potential for greatness. And after all these years of darkness, there is no alternative other than to correct our trajectory with someone who can elevate our common goals -- the American Dream. For the American Dream to survive, this era demands a new president who will include all of us in the debate over our future, whether or not we agree on every issue.
And I'm proud to say that I don't agree with the senator on everything. But it doesn't matter because this campaign is about much more than individuals and their pet issues. This is about the reacquisition of an ideal -- of a benevolent greatness which has been stolen away from us.
I see in Senator Obama an historic character who fits within my persnickety and idealistic template for the presidency -- and this time around, it happens that my idealistic choice has a realistic chance to win. So this isn't necessarily an endorsement based on ideology, but an endorsement based on that which is required from an historical perspective.
The alternatives on either side of this campaign are ultimately redundant to what we have now.
On the Republican side, each frontrunner represents a rage-inducing aspect of the present Bush regime. The Romney Unit represents the Paris Hilton fiscal policy of the Bush administration; Giuliani is the unstable, crazy-ass hubristic gunslinger; and Mike Huckabee is the cross-bearing fundamentalist who floats in the same fantasy world as Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort.
On the Democratic side, John Edwards is a tough call because he has the right idea. But there was a thing with Edwards from 2004 that I can't seem to shake. And I've really, really tried. During one of the primary debates, Howard Dean stood up to answer a question. As was the campaign fashion at the time, Dean rolled up his sleeves. Then, behind him, I spotted John Edwards whose eyes suddenly widened at Dean's sleeve-rolling as if to say, Oh crap, I should roll up my sleeves now or else I won't be awesome like Howard. Then he quickly rolled up his sleeves. It was an awkwardly candid moment which revealed a lack of originality and, for my admittedly nitpicky tastes, a little too much of the staged illusion of it all. But most importantly, I imagined him exhibiting the same derivative behavior when voting with the president on Iraq.
Senator Clinton, meanwhile, is certainly more intelligent and centrist than President Bush, but there's a secretive, calculating DLC side to the senator which drifts too dangerously close to the universe of Dick Cheney than the fresh approach her husband, President Clinton, offered in 1992.
Speaking of which, President Clinton said this week that Senator Clinton would dispatch the first President Bush on a world tour in order to repair America's reputation abroad. First, 'the hell you say?! Second, wouldn't that be just like a Cheney -- to use a Bush as a political tool. Seriously, we can't have this. Not even as a speculative talking point. Not any more.
This is what we're desperately trying to escape, goddamn it. This is why it's imperative that Senator Obama win the nomination and ultimately the White House itself.
Naturally, the day might arrive when President Obama becomes Emerson's bore. One day, years from now, we'll likely be lamenting the traditional media's "Obama Fatigue" narrative. But, by that time, I think we'll be prepared for the next era in American history. Hopefully, after two terms and eight years, President Obama will hand over his legacy to his vice president. But for now he's the historical antidote to the darkness and division we've endured for too many years. He's our best hope to restore the national equilibrium and to fulfill both the expectation of greatness the presidency deserves and, thusly, the greatness of America.
And no. However awesome it'd be, I'm not saying these things in exchange for a flight aboard Marine One. I mean, I wouldn't turn it down, of course... but that's not why.
From Robert Reich's Blog:
I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the stridency and inaccuracy of charges in Iowa -- especially coming from my old friend. While I’m as hard-boiled as they come about what’s said in campaigns, I just don’t think Dems should stoop to this. First, HRC attacked O's plan for keep Social Security solvent. Social Security doesn’t need a whole lot to keep it going – it’s in far better shape than Medicare – but everyone who’s looked at it agrees it will need bolstering (I was a trustee of the Social Security Trust Fund ten years ago, and I can vouch for this). Obama wants to do it by lifting the cap on the percent of income subject to Social Security payroll taxes, which strikes me as sensible. That cap is now close to $98,000 (it’s indexed), and the result is highly regressive. (Bill Gates satisfies his yearly Social Security obligations a few minutes past midnight on January 1 every year.) The cap doesn’t have to be lifted all that much to keep Social Security solvent – maybe to $115,00. That’s a progressive solution to the problem. HRC wants to refer Social Security to a commission. That's avoiding the issue, and it's irresponsible: A commission will likely call either for raising the retirement age (that’s what Greenspan’s Social Security commission came up with in the 1980s) or increasing the payroll tax on all Americans. So when HRC charges that Obama’s plan would “raise taxes” and her plan wouldn’t, she’s simply not telling the truth . . . ."
Read the rest at: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/
A history lesson from Paul Loeb as published in the Seattle Times December 11, 2007.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2004064151_loeb11.html
I don't really care for polls, except election day, but it seems like they are moving to provide a positive voice in our campaign today.
( . . . . please forward to at least 1 of your groups or post as a bulletin on your MySpace - Thank You)
As a Union Representative from Iowa my work often takes me to Illinois. So I am proud to have known about Barack and been one of his first supporters from Iowa to sign Dick Durbin's petition to draft Barack to run. After that I was with my family among the thousands to gather in Springfield as he officially announced his candidacy. From there I have served on committees and have been an Iowa Precinct Captian as well and I never had a single doubt ..... until today. You see, today I heard for the first time in person, Michelle Obama speak. And as much as I think of Barack I was left wondering if perhaps I was not supporting the wrong Obama. What an incredible woman that delivered what I can honestly say was the single best stump speech I have EVER heard. Michelle later assured me that I had better stick to my original candidate because he was the only Obama I would get an opportunity to vote for any time soon. And Caucusing for Barack AND Michelle really will be an opportunity that I am looking forward to. What a magnificant first lady we'll have.
I just wanted to pass on this discount for Obama merchandise that you can use as well as share with your friends.
15% off at http://store.barackobama.com/ just by entering my name Mark Scholfield in the referred field as well as coupon code GFC.
Remember this is considered a campaign contribution and will be recorded as such, primary limit is $2,300.
Portland, Maine
Isaiah Oliver, a 24-year-old white social worker, grew up in this overwhelmingly white city and attended the predominantly white University of Richmond in Virginia. Ask him why he supports Barack Obama and he says it's because of the candidate's race.
"Because he's black it makes me want to believe that he will change things," says Mr. Oliver, leaving an Obama campaign rally here. "It feels like you are part of something that's starting to change American politics. It's the cool factor. He's a rock star."
As he campaigns across the country, Sen. Obama, the son of a black father and a white mother, is both revealing and tapping into a changed racial landscape, especially among younger whites. After decades of often bitter polarization and racial tension on issues ranging from the spread of civil rights to affirmative action, many whites say they are drawn to Sen. Obama precisely because they think his mixed-race background reflects America's increasingly diverse population and projects a more optimistic vision of the country's racial future.
Sen. Obama's candidacy, whether it succeeds or not, appears to mark a turning point in race and politics in America: It is prompting significant numbers of white Americans to consider voting for him not despite his racial background, but because of it.
"Obama is running an emancipating campaign," says Bob Tuke, who is white and is the former chairman of the Tennessee Democratic party. "He is emancipating white voters to vote for a black candidate."
To read on: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119466546698288951.html?mod=home_we_banner_left
![[Barack Obama]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/HC-GJ670_Obama_20070404185338.gif)
