Hillary’s Voice

34 Flag Officers and the Out Of Iraq Caucus Support Hillary Clinton (by SusanUnPC at No Quarter)
It is highly significant that both elected anti-war activists and 34 top flag officers support Hillary Clinton to be our next Commander in Chief.. From the caucus: “We support Hillary Clinton because she is the candidate with the stature, strength, and experience needed to end this war as quickly and responsibly as possible.” [Emphasis added.]
Click through to read the names and the full letter.

Survey USA Poll: Big Obama Losses In OH, KY, & MO (by andrewalker08 AT MyDD)
SurveyUSA is out with three polls today that shows the first signs of an Obama electoral defeat in November if he should become the Democratic nominee for the office of President of the United States.

 PPP Poll: Clinton Catches Obama in North Carolina (Political Wire )
The latest Public Policy Polling survey in North Carolina shows Sen. Barack Obama barely edging Sen. Hillary Clinton, 44% to 43%. Clinton actually leads among Democrats in the poll, 44% to 43%. But Obama has the overall lead based on a very strong performance with unaffiliated voters, with whom he has a 53% to 35% advantage. Key observation: “The rules for voting in the North Carolina primary probably work to Clinton’s advantage. Obama has done very well in states with open primaries because of his strong support from Republican and independent voters.”
Why do we want independents and Republicans, who will only push the Democratic leadership EVEN FURTHER TO THE RIGHT?

Democratic Party Says Revote in Michigan Meets Rules
March 19 (Bloomberg) — The Democratic National Committee said a proposal for a privately financed Democratic presidential primary in Michigan would meet party rules even as the plan for a revote faced numerous hurdles. Holding a new primary in early June — the latest date feasible — would require approval from the Michigan Legislature before the end of the week, when state lawmakers begin a two-week recess. In addition, Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are split over the proposal, with Obama resisting a revote and Clinton endorsing the idea.

CNN Jumps the Shark (by mnicholson0220 at MyDD)
[Wednesday] on “The Situation Room” CNN moved out of the realm of simple bias and into the realm of Rush Limbaugh… The topic was the MI revote and the fact that Hillary supports it, has claimed that not doing it would be an affront to the rights of MI voters, and has called on Obama to “do the right thing.” So … what was the content of the ensuing discussion by CNN commentators?  Hillary will do anything to win. Hillary is disingenuous (parroting a talking point Obama had given in his interview with Anderson Cooper earlier today). Hillary is engaging in “unseemly whining”.
Boy, that would never happen in the progressive blogosphere!  Oops, see below.

Hillary’s Secret Plan (by John Aravosis at AMERICAblog)
1. Destroy Obama so that the Superdelegates overthrow him and give her the nomination.2. Destroy Obama so that, even if he wins the nomination, he will be so severely damaged that he loses the election, and the day after the election the Clinton people say “see, we told you that you should have picked us,” and four years later, Hillary will be able to run again and get the nomination, if because of nothing else, because the party will feel sorry for “cheating” her out of of it this time.

If we lose the election in the fall, it will be all Hillary’s fault. It’s time for Howard Dean and the party leaders to step in and stop Hillary before she starts a civil war (and one is coming) and destroys our party.
Oh, sure.  Every bad thing in the universe is Hillary’s fault.  (It used to always be Bill’s fault—how quickly we forget.)  I have no idea whether the Clinton campaign played a part in the Rev. Wright controversy.  The information has been available for some time.  But can it seriously be your position, John, that it would have been better to wait until the general election for Americans to find out about Obama’s associations?  And by the way, your use of the term “civil war” is absolutely inexcusable.  It is one of the most inflammatory terms in this country, even almost 150 years after that conflict, and is little different from yelling fire in a crowded theater.

A Great Reckoning (by dcmediagirl at No Quarter)
[I]t was only a matter of time before Obama and his followers were forced to face the fact that all the hysteria, fainting and fairy dust in the world couldn’t conceal the fact that an untested, unvetted candidate would at some point have to face The Great Reckoning, an unpleasant inevitability that all serious political contenders have to endure.  And when that Great Reckoning comes, it’s best to be prepared, not forced out of the magical bubble to face the cruel world unarmed and unfocused… [I]t’s inevitable that now Obama is in trouble precisely because he and his supporters started to believe their own press releases and hype.

Obama: Wright controversy has ’shaken me up‘ (CNN Political Ticker)
(CNN) — Barack Obama told CNN Wednesday the recent uproar over his former pastor’s sermons has reminded him of the odds he faces in winning the White House. “In some ways this, this controversy has actually shaken me up a little bit and gotten me back into remembering that the odds of me getting elected have always been lower than … some of the other conventional candidates,” the Illinois senator told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an exclusive one-on-one interview. [Emphasis added.]

A Speech That Fell Short (by Michael Gerson, Council on Foreign Relations, writing at the Washington Post)
Barack Obama has run a campaign based on a simple premise: that words of unity and hope matter to America. Now he has been forced by his charismatic, angry pastor to argue that words of hatred and division don’t really matter as much as we thought… The problem with Obama’s argument is that Wright is … a political extremist, holding views that are shocking to many Americans… In Philadelphia, Obama attempted to explain Wright’s anger as typical of the civil rights generation, with its “memories of humiliation and doubt and fear.” But Wright has the opposite problem: He ignored the message of Martin Luther King Jr. and introduced a new generation to the politics of hatred… Barack Obama is not a man who hates — but he chose to walk with a man who does.

Buried in Eloquence, Obama Contradictions About Pastor (The Blotter, ABC News)
Buried in his eloquent, highly praised speech on America’s racial divide, Sen. Barack Obama contradicted more than a year of denials and spin from him and his staff about his knowledge of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial sermons.

Was Obama’s speech enough? (by Joan Walsh, Salon)
In his speech Obama tried to distance himself from Wright’s more outrageous remarks, while honoring and preserving the personal — and frankly political — strength he’s derived from his affiliation with the church and his spiritual mentor. It was a perilous move for Obama, and it’s not clear he succeeded. Describing Wright as “family,” Obama compared his incendiary views to the occasional racial insensitivity of his elderly white grandmother… It was an intriguing leap, but I didn’t buy it. I don’t think Obama’s elderly grandmother, who still lives in Hawaii and is reportedly too frail to travel, who was a product of her time and place and yet did her best to raise her half-black grandson, deserved to be compared to Wright, a public figure who’s built his career around a particularly divisive analysis of American racial politics. It is easily the most tin-eared thing I’ve ever heard Obama say.

Obama throws his own 85-year-old grandmother under the wheels of the BS Express (Steve Sailer’s iSteve Blog)
[L]et’s look at how Obama smeared his own elderly but very much alive grandmother, calling her: “a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” Well, no, according to Obama’s 1995 book, it is not at all true that she “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.” Instead, she once confessed her fear of one aggressive black beggar who didn’t pass by her but instead confronted her, demanded money, and then gave her — an intelligent, level-headed woman who had worked her way up to a mid-level corporate management position — good reason to believe he would have violently mugged her if her bus hadn’t pulled up.

The Obama Bargain (by Shelby Steele, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win”)
[W]hatever her motives, [Geraldine Ferraro] was right: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.”… Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, [Barack Obama] also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed — an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman. How to turn one’s blackness to advantage? The answer is that one “bargains.” Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society… This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage.
Bill Moyers interviewed Shelby Steele in January.  And just so you’ll know, Steele is also half black and half white.  He repeats what Geraldine Ferraro was condemned for saying, which was only what Obama himself has said—from a Chicago Tribune article that is posted on Obama’s website: “Obama acknowledges, with no small irony, that he benefits from his race. If he were white, he once bluntly noted, he would simply be one of nine freshmen senators, almost certainly without a multimillion-dollar book deal and a shred of celebrity. Or would he have been elected at all?”

Obama’s Multiracial Coalition and the Politics of Racial Reconciliation (by Bruce Dixon at the Black Agenda Report)
As the presidential campaign heats up, the precarious nature of Obama’s “multiracial coalition” along with the nature of the “racial reconciliation” his candidacy brings becomes more. Under the Obama
version of “racial reconciliation” the opinions commonly held by most of Black America are deemed “divisive” relics of the past. Black opinion, wherever it differs from that of white corporate media is
off the table. A shrewd and savvy politician, Obama is entitled to make these choices for himself, and for his own reasons. But should the voices of Black America be silenced and banished from the
national discourse because they do not serve the career plans or short term interests of the Obama campaign? Just what shots does Black America call in this reconciliation, and what benefits do
African Americans receive in this “multiracial coalition”?

For a Smart Man, Obama Sure Doesn’t Know a Lot of Things (by BDBlue at Corrente Wire, thanks to No Quarter)
Despite being the editor of the Harvard Law Review and a former law professor, he doesn’t know what “decriminalization” means… He didn’t know his nuclear energy bill didn’t pass. He didn’t know that the chair of his New Hampshire campaign was a lobbyist. Despite knowing Tony Rezko for almost 20 years, he had no idea he was a slum lord and influence peddler. And he can’t say for sure how much money Rezko raised for him. Despite going to Pastor Wright’s church for 20 years, he had no idea before last year that he had said so many inflammatory things. He didn’t always know that pushing the green button was a yes and not a no vote. He didn’t know he had once advocated for single payer healthcare. He didn’t know that his economic advisor had met with the Canadians and discussed NAFTA. He didn’t know he voted for Dick Cheney’s 2005 Energy Bill. He didn’t know what answers his campaign manager provided to questions on issues such as guns used to secure an important endorsement during his 1996 run. That’s a lot of things for such a smart man not to know. If I didn’t know any better, I might think he’d say anything to win.
Click through for links.

Levine weaves tawdry tale (Chicago Tribune)
The government’s star witness in the corruption trial of Antoin “Tony” Rezko took the stand Tuesday and in just 48 minutes laid out a stunning personal tale of bribery, treachery, rampant drug abuse and a precipitous fall from grace. In a brief but vivid prologue to what is expected to be days of testimony, one-time political insider Stuart Levine said he had illegally greased contracts to sell tires to the city’s Streets and Sanitation Department and supply school buses to the Chicago Board of Education and even health insurance to members of a postal workers union… Prosecutors say Levine and Rezko worked hand in hand to corrupt two state boards in a scheme to extort kickbacks from firms seeking government business or regulatory approval. Levine, a member of both panels, allegedly took direction from Rezko, a friend and fundraiser of Gov. Rod Blagojevich [and of Barack Obama].

Sharpton Keeping Support of Obama Quiet (Political Wire)
Al Sharpton is backing Sen. Barack Obama, “but he’s made the strategic decision to keep his support quiet,” according to the New York Daily News. Sharpton “boasted of talking to Obama ‘two or three times a week’ — and insisted the Democratic front-runner knows the rev is in his camp.”
He’s keeping it SO QUIET that he only told the Daily News.

Liberal groups set $400M spending target (Politico)
MoveOn.org aims to spend $30 million trying to elect a Democratic president and 60 Democratic senators, without — and, here’s the tricky part — sparking a backlash that hurts its intended beneficiaries. The controversial anti-war group is known for its hard-hitting ads. But its political action committee will “try and avoid [running] ads that put ammunition in the hands of our adversaries, so that they cannot twist those intentionally provocative questions into something that is a distraction from the debate,” MoveOn Political Director Ilyse Hogue told reporters Tuesday. “That is our commitment this election cycle.”

Here’s evidence that CNN’s Crowley may be working too hard
“I was so sleep deprived once that I found myself brushing my teeth with moisturizer,” Candy Crowley told a Flagler College audience. “It’s never-ending. But I can only last a while doing that. Eventually I hit a wall.” She also said that with so many avenues to “put our journalism — radio, TV, podcasts and blogs — what suffers is reporting. You almost don’t have time to figure [a story] out before you’re on the air with it. What we’re actually missing is substance or context.”
Sleep deprived.  So THAT’s the problem.  We’ve all been wondering.

Lots more really good stuff at MakeThemAccountable.com.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com