Hillary’s Voice

My View: I Do Not Believe Obama On The FISA Capitulation Bill (by Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft)
Yesterday, Barack Obama said: “…‘You’re not going to agree with me on 100 percent of what I think, but don’t assume that if I don’t agree with you on something that it must be because I’m doing that politically,’ he said. ‘I may just disagree with you.’” I do not believe Barack Obama. I will go further. I do not want to believe him. Because the alternative is worse. Because if Obama believes the BS he said about the FISA Capitulation bill, then he is not fit to be President. If Barack Obama really believes [what he says] about the FISA Capitulation bill, then he is as dangerous as George W. Bush.

Congressional Approval Hits New Low (Political Wire)
A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows just 9% of Americans believe Congress is doing a good or excellent job. That’s down from 11% in June and 15% at the beginning of 2008.
Why, oh why, are Congress’ ratings so low?  FISA is one thing, but Congress shows us over and over how the Bush administration tail wags the constitutional dog.  People know what’s going on.  They just can’t fool us all of the time.

Gallup: July leaders often lose in November (On Politics, USA Today)
Yet another reason why we try to always attach a warning “sign” to posts we do about campaign-related polls: Gallup writes that “July leader lost in 6 of last 9 competitive U.S. elections.” Yesterday’s Gallup “tracking” poll, by the way, gave Democrat Barack Obama a 47%-43% lead over Republican John McCain (margin of error: +/- 2 percentage points).

“Moving To The Middle” Garners Obama Zero Votes (by Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft)
What Bowers Said: “According to Rasmussen, that CW is mirrored by the shifting perceptions of the general public, who view Obama as less liberal than they did one month ago. . . . So, now that Obama is perceived as moving to the center, while McCain is still perceived as conservative, Obama’s poll numbers should improve, right? Wrong. According to the daily tracking poll from the same polling firm, Rasmussen, the campaign has not changed at all as a result of Obama being perceived as less liberal.”… So Obama has ceded important ground on issues and gotten no help at all (indeed, it likely will hurt him in the longer run) politically. Hell of a move there Obama campaign.

Both Campaigns Get the Summertime Blues (Project for Excellence in Journalism)
The dominant theme of the week’s election coverage revolved around the candidates’ problems—or perceived problems—and had both men on the defensive… [T]he broad theme of headaches for the two campaigns accounted for nearly 40% of the coverage.

CLARK/OBAMA/MCCAIN/THE PRESS: (by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler)
We liberals! Many of us have responded [to the Wesley Clark flap] by saying: But General Clark’s statement was true! And of course, that’s plainly the case: A three-year-old child—or a pet rabbit—could “ride in a fighter plane and get shot down.” That wouldn’t qualify either one for the White House—and getting shot down didn’t qualify McCain. But we could list a thousand statements about McCain or Obama which are perfectly “true,” though no one would dream of saying them… In short: In politics, the mere fact that a statement is “true” doesn’t mean it’s even dimly appropriate. When we offer “but it’s true” as our defense, we only show how limited our analytical skills remain, even after all these years of getting cut up in elections. In truth, our side hasn’t tried very hard to understand the laws of this game. (As it turns out, We don’t watch enough cable!) Many of our “career liberal” leaders have worked very hard, down through the years, to avoid such ruminations. Too much risk.

Chris Matthews Said WHAT? (by Taylor Marsh)
You just can’t make this stuff up. So when it flew out of Chris Matthews’ mouth yesterday on “Hardball,” I just about fell off the treadmill. Talking about Barack Obama with E.J. Dionne: “MATTHEWS: Let-??s not deify this guy in any area, because deification is a dangerous move in American politics…” Chris Matthews of leg tingling fame, not to mention Hillary bashing infamy, now wants to make sure we don’t deify Senator Obama?

Fiorina: ‘It may be Barack Obama who is running for Bush III.’ (Think Progress)
Last night on Bloomberg TV, McCain economic adviser Carly Fiorina repeated the laughable claim first offered by McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin that Sen. Barack Obama — not John McCain — would be a third Bush term. Fiorina said: “I think if you look at the record, it may be Barack Obama who is running for Bush III. But it certainly is not John McCain.”
Do not underestimate the efficacy of this kind of stuff.

Chancellor, Berlin Mayor Bicker over Obama Visit (Der Spiegel, Germany)
Barack Obama wants to hold a speech at the Brandenburg Gate when he comes to Berlin later this month. The city’s mayor wants to grant him his wish, but the German chancellor has misgivings. The warning from the Chancellery was clear: The Brandenburg Gate is the “most famous and history-rich location in Germany,” a Chancellery source said on Monday. In the past, it has only been used on very special occasions for addresses by politicians, and when, then only by elected American presidents. More clearly stated: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would be better off looking for another location in the German capital to hold a speech.

The Audacity of Arrogance (by Pat Racimora at No Quarter)

$30 Million For A Party? What Would Dr. King Say? (by Alegre)
A friend of mine just got back from a week of service in New Orleans, and she came home to the news that BHO is going to spend another $30 million on a bigger venue, when he’s already got a venue that holds over 20,000 booked and paid for.  She wondered just what some of the great thinkers - people BHO tries to compare himself to - would think of this extravagance in this time of great need… [W]ould Jesus want to spend $30 million to build an audience to give a speech?  Would Martin Luther King?  Would Gandhi? What about the Dali Lama?  Even George Bush would be less arrogant. Then it occurred to me - this big speech of BHO’s is supposed to fall on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in 1963 - I Have A Dream.  I couldn’t help but wonder what he would advise BHO re better uses of this extravagance - all this money being spent and for what?
Click through for some ideas on what good $30 million could do for some ordinary people.

Data Mining in Denver - There’s No Such Thing as a Free Ticket (by campskunk at Alegre’s Corner)
Lynn Sweet has an interesting tidbit in her story about the Obamapalooza - the Obama operation is hungry for data they can use to contact Colorado voters, and the easy way to get it is to repeat the procedure they used with the Oprah appearances- make people sign up for free tickets. “…Winfrey’s gigs were used as a data mining bonanza for the campaign.” Obama learned well from his corporate sponsors… it’s all about marketing and knowing more than you need to about the intended   customer. Me, I plan on staying out of the Obamadatabase, although I’m probably on the enemies list already.
Me, too, campskunk.

‘Ordinary people’ will have input on Dems’ platform (On Politics, USA Today)
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign just sent supporters this message from the candidate: Every four years, the Democratic Party assembles a platform that outlines the party’s position on a number of issues… “…For two weeks in July, people all across America will hold Platform Meetings in their own communities to discuss the issues and share their input. The outcome of these meetings will be reviewed by the Drafting Committee as it creates the final platform.”
HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.  HAAAA haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa.  If Howard cared what we think, HE WOULDN’T HAVE NEGATED THE WILL OF THE VOTERS TO HELP INSTALL BARACK OBAMA  AS THE “DEMOCRATIC” NOMINEE.

Howard’s Magical Listening Tour (by Alegre)
Wow… I guess we should be impressed that after all the theft, fraud, intimidation and Chicago Smack-down tactics, they’re willing to meet with us and hold a big ‘ol party at the Invesco Field.  Hmm, yeah… not buying it Howard.  Too little too late man.  You shoved this unqualified, unprepared novice down our throats and now you think a big open event at our convention and some listening tour will make up for it all? Two words… DREAM ON!

Why Wouldn’t That Stupid Bitch Quit? (by lambert)
Times: “Obama Donors Aren’t Rushing to Aid Clinton - A prominent donor to Senator Barack Obama recently sent an e-mail plea to other supporters, asking them — for the sake of Democratic unity — to write checks to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to help retire her $23 million in campaign debt. Some of the replies are unprintable, given the coarse language, the donor said.” Unprintable language about America’s first female presidential candidate from Obama supporters? Gosh, I’m shocked… “…Several Obama donors said in interviews that they were balking at Mr. Obama’s call for help because they believed Mrs. Clinton accumulated most of her debts after she had lost any mathematical chance [that tired old talking point] of winning the nomination and was hanging on only in hopes of an Obama collapse.” Or possibly winning the popular vote, which she did. Or maybe getting justice from the RBC on FL and MI, which she didn’t.

WE Have Hillary’s Back. BHO’s Fundraisers… not so much. (by Alegre)
I haven’t been able to confirm this with anyone official, but word on the street is that we erased half of Hillary’s debt with our fundraising drive on July 4th… Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that BHO’s big fundraisers have come up short of that - by a considerable amount as it turns out… If anyone’s going to release Hillary’s from her debt it’s us - not BHO’s folks.  Who knows, maybe they like seeing Hillary in the one-down position while they hammer out what happens in Denver.  If we can come up with one more day of fundraising like this - maybe two then it’ll free Hillary of her debt and she can negotiate with those jerks from a much stronger position.

Some Clinton Money Edges Toward McCain (Capital Eye)
Hillary Clinton’s endorsement of Barack Obama last month may not have been enough to win over some of her biggest donors. It seems Obama is struggling to gain favor with Clinton’s financial supporters, while Republican John McCain is having some luck with them. In May, when Obama seemed to have his party’s nomination in the bag, 115 donors who had given Clinton more than $1,000 donated at least that amount to Obama for the first time, according to CRP data cited in the Wall Street Journal. But an equal number also made their first big contributions to McCain that month.

Quote of the Day (Political Wire )
“I know you think you are, but you’re not. You are over-rated in your own mind. You will not play in the NBA.” — Sen. Barack Obama, quoted by ABC News, suggesting to a group of African-American students that they are better off staying in school than thinking they can play professional basketball.
No hope from the hope candidate, huh?

Obama says he’s not moving to the center (On Politics, USA Today)
A number of news organizations [reported Tuesday] on Democrat Barack Obama’s comments in Powder Springs, Ga. about “this whole notion that I am shifting to the center.” In his view, “The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me.”
Yes, exactly right.  And those of us who tried and tried to tell you all that he’s not a progressive and never has been were vilified unmercifully and run off many websites.  So here you are.  And here we are.  And here’s Bob Herbert, below.

Lurching With Abandon (by Bob Herbert, New York Times)
Barack Obama went out of his way to create the impression that he was a new kind of political leader — more honest, less cynical and less relentlessly calculating than most. You would be able to listen to him without worrying about what the meaning of “is” is. This is why so many of Senator Obama’s strongest supporters are uneasy, upset, dismayed and even angry at the candidate who is now emerging in the bright light of summer. One issue or another might not have made much difference. Tacking toward the center in a general election is as common as kissing babies in a campaign, and lord knows the Democrats need to expand their coalition. But Senator Obama is not just tacking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.

‘Progressives for Obama’ Fool Themselves (by Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report)
Barack Obama’s rush to disavow the “tag” of the “Left” should surprise no one. The only people who pretend that Obama is a “progressive” are a few Leftists, and Right-wingers that hate Leftists. “But the most important reason that ‘Progressives for Obama’ should have never existed is its utter lack of content.” Progressives have been playing “make-believe” with the Obama campaign, dubbing it both “progressive” and a “movement” when there is no movement or progressive content to the campaign. Some progressives are guilty of providing “a veneer of progressive credibility to a candidate who was nothing of the kind.

Obama Leaves Blue Women Seeing Red (by Marie Cocco)
[I] wonder why a candidate praised for his rhetorical gifts talks about women in the way that he does. During the primary campaign, he said Hillary Clinton launched political attacks on him “periodically, when she’s feeling down.” He called a Detroit reporter “sweetie” when she was trying to ask him about job creation. Now he has incorporated a myth created by the right — that women who seek late-term abortions should not be allowed to do so if they are “feeling blue” — into his own lexicon. And this is enough to make me see red.

Freedom Rider: Obama’s Iraq Fairy Tale (by Margaret Kimberley at the Black Agenda Report)
With his nomination assured, Barack Obama is showing the Left just what little regard he has for them. “Ever since Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race, he has laughed at his defenders and sneered that his now disappointed supporters were too stupid to read what he said or really listen to his lofty speeches.” Obama blames anti-war activists for failing to discern that he was never anti-war, after all. He is not, and has never been, in favor of a “hard and fast, arbitrary deadline for withdrawal” from Iraq. Obama’s “tearful, spurned followers had better grow up fast, end their asinine hero worship, and learn how to make political demands before singing the praises of a presidential candidate.”

The Audacity of Imperial Airbrushing: Barack Obama’s Whitewashed History of U.S. Foreign Policy and Why it Matters (by Paul Street at the Black Agenda Report)
The United States has a solution for avoiding discussion of the many crimes it has committed against weaker nations: denial. “It never happened,” say the Americans, when confronted with the facts. Barack Obama is as skilled in the denial arts as anyone, and so are his advisors. “In Obama’s world view, as in that of his Harvard friend and former foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, American crimes generally don’t exist. They didn’t happen.” Denial is serious business. “Candidate Obama’s foreign policy pronouncements have been loaded with promises of future criminality under an Obama administration.”

Four Myths of Obama’s Money Machine (by Andrew Romano at Stumper, Newsweek)
1. Obama Opted Out of Public Financing for Reasons of Principle Um, no… [W]ith his money machine up and running, he’ll certainly raise more than the $84.1 million he’d receive from taxpayers and have a better chance of winning the White House because of it. But it’s hardly principled.
2. Obama Gets All—or Even the Vast Majority—of His Money from Small Donors… In the primaries…, donations larger than $200 accounted for 55 percent of Obama’s haul, or about $150 million. Lawyers forked over $18 million of that total; the largest single contributor was Goldman Sachs.
3. The Share of Obama’s Money That Comes From Small Donors Is Completely Unprecedented… [W]hile Obama is definitely doing better with small donors than previous presidential candidates, it’s not by the *astronomical* margin you might have assumed.
4. Obama Won’t Receive Any Help From Outside Groups… Even though the Obama campaign has sought to maintain message control by discouraging its top fundraisers from giving to outside orgs—a directive that killed off a pair of Democratic-aligned soft-money groups…, there may be more 527s poised to assist the senator from Illinois than his rival from Arizona.

McCain, Obama court Latinos, promise immigration change
WASHINGTON — John McCain and Barack Obama told a major Hispanic organization Tuesday that they remain committed to passing comprehensive immigration legislation, despite its defeat in Congress and unpopularity with voters who prefer a heavier emphasis on border security. Their remarks to the League of United Latin Citizens came before the 79th convention of the 115,000-member Hispanic group, but the presumptive Republican and Democratic Party nominees, respectively, were reaching out to a broader group: the 9 million or more Latinos who are expected to vote in November.

Senator McCain Calls Social Security a “Disgrace:” Media Don’t Notice (by Dean Baker)
At a forum on Monday, after wrongly claiming that Social Security won’t be there when young workers retire, McCain went on to say: “‘Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace, and it’s got to be fixed.’” Of course present-day retirees have always been paid their benefits from the taxes paid by current workers. That has been true from Social Security’s inception. Some folks might have thought Senator McCain’s description of Social Security as a “disgrace” was worth a mention somewhere in the media, but the NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, and USA Today don’t seem to have noticed. It’s not like he said “bitter.”

Washington Post Editorializes on Front Page Against Social Security (by Dean Baker)
Actually, the article was fine, the problem was the headline “Candidates Diverge on How to Save Social Security.” Do the candidates diverge on their plans to “save” the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the Energy Department?  The Post doesn’t run front page headlines like this because they would not make any sense. Neither does this headline about a program that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects to be fully solvent until 2046 with no changes whatsoever. CBO projects that even after the date when the program can no longer pay full benefits it would always be able to pay larger real benefits than what current retirees receive. The Post’s editors don’t like Social Security and would like to see the program cut and/or privatized. They should try to keep their editorializing out of front page headlines.

Fiorina touts insurance plans that cover birth control, but forgets McCain opposes them. (Think Progress)
During a breakfast with reporters [Monday] hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, top McCain adviser Carly Fiorina talked up Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) preferred approach to health care by saying that “there are many health insurance plans that will cover Viagra but won’t cover birth-control medication“… But Fiorina neglects to mention that in 2003 McCain voted against an amendment that would have required insurance coverage of prescription birth control.

McCain jokes about ‘killing’ Iranians by getting them addicted to smoking. (Think Progress)
Last year, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) joked about bombing Iran to the theme of the Beach Boy’s “Barbara Ann.” McCain was widely criticized for the remark, but simply told critics to “lighten up and get a life.” The Washington Post notes that McCain tried joking about “killing” Iranians again today: “Responding to a question about a survey that shows increased exports to Iran, mainly from cigarettes, McCain said, ‘Maybe thats a way of killing them.’ He quickly caught himself, saying ‘I meant that as a joke’ as his wife, Cindy, poked him in the back.”

How McCain Is Skirting His Own Spending Caps (by Andrew Romano at Stumper, Newsweek)
When you combine McCain’s individual war chest with his party’s bankroll, it turns out the Republican nominee has about $90 million currently burning a hole in his pocket, while Obama and the DNC weigh in at a relatively paltry $47 million, or half as much. And even though McCain has agreed to an $84.1 spending limit by accepting public funds–a decision he likes to portray as a principled stand against the corrupting influence of money on politics–at least double that sum will be dropped on his behalf before Election Day thanks to loopholes in the law that allow outside groups to effectively skirt such limits with largely unregulated “soft money” contributions.

A Clintonian at Fox (The Caucus, New York Times)
Howard Wolfson, who was a top strategist for the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is going where some Democrats were unwilling to go during the early days of the election season: the Fox News Channel.

Ifill’s “out of the closet” remark edited out of PBS transcript
Gwen Ifill said on the June 20th “Washington Week in Review”: “Al Gore came out of the closet here and endorsed — we don’t know where he’s been exactly.” The show’s transcript only read: “Al Gore endorsed.” Ombud Michael Getler writes: “Now, altering a transcript to remove a controversial or embarrassing statement is a very bad and fundamental journalistic sin, and also professionally stupid because someone will always catch it. And someone did, in the person of [blogger Tony] Peyser.”

African-American Network to Cover Democratic Convention — But Not Republican
Given Barack Obama’s historic run for the Oval Office, African American-themed cable network TV One plans to break from its usual entertainment programming to provide extensive coverage of the Democratic National Convention in August. But John McCain shouldn’t expect the same treatment. The network doesn’t plan any coverage of the Republican Convention.

Lots more really good stuff at MakeThemAccountable.com.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com