Hillary’s Voice

Obama and German leader discuss war and economics (AP)
BERLIN - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as climate and energy issues at Germany’s chancellery Thursday, part of a tour aimed at lifting the first-term senator’s international standing.

Achtung!
My.BarackObama.com

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll Wednesday, July 23, 2008
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows Barack Obama attracting 45% of the vote while John McCain earns 42%. When “leaners” are included, it’s Obama 47% and McCain 45% (see recent daily results)… While Obama has been on an overseas tour, 45% of voters say the Democratic hopeful is too inexperienced to be President. That’s up four percentage points from a week ago.
Didn’t I say this trip would only draw attention to his inexperience?

Kass: You can’t deny that reporters generally favor Obama
“When reporters weren’t arguing about getting access to [Barack Obama’s] fact-finding-tour-campaign-commercial this week, they were tossing rose petals before him, so that his feet wouldn’t touch the ground,” writes John Kass [of the Chicago Tribune].

Obama Faking It (by Maggie Gallagher at Real Clear Politics)
Obama has a problem: What do you do when you’re a lightly accomplished one-term senator, a former state legislator from Illinois, a Harvard law graduate who has no substantive record of accomplishments, and you are running against a war hero whom polls show that Americans overwhelmingly view as far more fit to be commander in chief? Pose, of course… The left imagines they learned this from Ronald Reagan and the rise of the right: big strong guy, genial, looks good on camera — bingo!… God help us when the people who think like that actually run all three branches of our government. President Obama, if that’s our future, and his team of symbolic analysts will find out soon enough there are realities out there which none of his contrivances are going to be able to help him handle. More important, so will we.
Actually, Maggie, Obama’s campaign is patterned after that of George W. Bush, and we’ve just had eight years of the nightmare you foresee with Obama as president.  I fought against the Bush propaganda, and I fight, and will continue to fight, against the Obama propaganda.  At least I’m consistent.

Obama visits Jerusalem’s Western Wall
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made a surprise pre-dawn visit to Jerusalem’s Western Wall on Thursday, at the end of a trip aimed at showing his strong support for Israel. Obama, wearing a Jewish skullcap, placed a prayer he had written in the wall and bowed his head while a rabbi read a psalm calling for peace in the holy city. One worshipper chanted “Obama, Jerusalem is not for sale” and “Jerusalem is our land” as the Illinois senator stood at the wall, a relic of the ancient Jewish temple destroyed during Roman rule nearly 2,000 years ago. [Emphasis added.]
Gateway Pundit has the video.  Any Hebrew speakers out there?

Obama Heckled in Israel; Clarifies More Statements; Tells Netenyahu He’s Sleepy (by catfish at Alegre’s Corner)
From Jake Tapper, many posts from Obama’s visit. Looks like a grueling day and a half - he met with many leaders, bureaucrats, rabbis. Few, if any, rock star moments. And at his first stop he admitted he was tired!
Click through for a hilarious blow by blow.

David Gergen on the Maliki “Leak” (by SusanUnPC at No Quarter)
“…Barack Obama made the first mistake of his trip, in my judgment, in releasing a statement in which he said exactly what Maliki had said in those conversations. We have a long tradition in this country that we only have one president at a time. He’s the commander in chief and the negotiator in chief. I cannot remember a campaign which a rival seeking the presidency has been in a position negotiating a war that’s under way with another party outside the country.” – David Gergen, CNN’s AC 360, July 21, 2008
But you see, it’s all about winning.  It’s all about managing perceptions.  Protocol be damned.  The security of Iraqis be damned.  And by the way, Gergen is wrong about previous candidates for president not negotiating with foreign leaders prior to being elected.  The ones who have done it before this, that we know of, were Republicans—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Both of whom Gergen worked for.  Funny they should slip his mind.

Richard Nixon appears to have, before he was president, negotiated with Thieu of Vietnam to keep Thieu from the bargaining table before the 1968 election. It kept Hubert Humphrey from being able to declare U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam prior to the election, which he would have then most likely won in a landslide.
Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001, Verso)

Ronald Reagan is accused of having negotiated, before he was president, with Iranian terrorists holding U.S. embassy employees hostage.  Reagan promised to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the terrorists’ waiting until after Reagan’s inauguration to release the hostages.   It helped to make Jimmy Carter look even weaker than he already looked, and helped Reagan win the 1980 election.
Robert Parry, Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (1993, Sheridan Square Press)

Obama Backed By Many British Conservatives (Political Wire)
The Telegraph has more good news for Sen. Barack Obama before he gets to London: “Almost a third of Tory MPs willing to publicly express their preferences in the US presidential election are prepared to jettison their party’s historic links with the Republicans and back Obama.”
But is their support such good news for Obama SUPPORTERS?  You know, the ones who were fooled into thinking he’s some kind of liberal or something.

Today’s gotchas: Obama on ‘my time and choosing’… (On Politics, USA Today)
[I]n Israel, Obama was asked about whether he would still be willing to meet with leaders of Iran, North Korea and other such nations “without preconditions.” Obama first talked about whether he would be willing to meet with such leaders during the CNN/YouTube Democratic presidential debate one year ago today in South Carolina… Here’s how Obama responded to [Wednesday’s] question about that subject, according to a transcript produced by CQ Transcriptions LLC: “…I think that what I said in response was that I would, at my time and choosing, be willing to meet with any leader if I thought it would promote the national security interests of the United States of America…. But what I also said was that there is a difference between meeting without pre-conditions and meeting without preparation.” The key difference between what Obama said today and what he said a year ago, the McCain campaign maintains, is that a year ago he did not add the clause “at my time and choosing.” That is a caveat Obama spoke about in later discussions.
I don’t believe Obama mentioned anything about preparation, either, in the YouTube debate.  So I guess it depends on what the meaning of “pre-conditions” is.

Both Ways Barack: He’s No Flip-Flopper (by Uppity Woman at No Quarter)
Barack Obama is no flip-flopper. Flip-floppers only hold one position at a time. Obama holds both positions at the same time. Meet Barack and Barack [video].
This video is MTV’s first political ad.  A conservative group is trying to reach young people with its anti-Obama message.

Noted… (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
Yet another Obama lie: The signs of this man’s addiction to deceit are obvious and serious. Progressives are forgiving outright fabrications that they would have shamed George W. Bush. In Israel, Obama told his hosts to judge him by his “deeds,” which is a bit like judging a squid by its haircut. “‘Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon,’ he said.” Barack Obama is not on the Banking Committee.
Maybe he’s spent so little time in the Senate that he doesn’t know which committess he’s on.

“I think that the definition of success depends on how you look at it.” – Barack Obama, quoted by the Associated Press on July 22, 2008
Move over, Bushspeak—make way for Obamaspeak.

Obama on the Brink (by Robert Scheer at TruthDig)
Barack Obama is betraying his promise of change and is in danger of becoming just another political hack. Yes, just like former maverick John McCain, who has refashioned himself as a mindless rubber stamp for the most inane policies of the miserably failed Bush administration. Both candidates are embracing, rather than challenging, the fundamental irrationality of Bush’s “war on terror,” which substitutes hysteria for rational analysis in appraising the dangers the country faces… At a time when we desperately need a president to remind us we have nothing to fear but fear itself, we are increasingly being treated to a presidential campaign driven by fear.

THE NEXT NEW YORKER COVER (by Robert C. Koehler, Tribune Media Services, via email but soon to appear at CommonWonders.com)
I am forced to ask what’s going on at a magazine I have long admired: Staff writer [Hendrik] Hertzberg chastises angry liberals for indulging in principle-based Obama-bashing on the grounds that pragmatism rules in presidential politics; and at the same time, a Der Sturmer-style cover, which is meant to be a principled attack on the politics of fear, pulls up short of actually satirizing the perpetrators of that brand of politics… I picture a New Yorker cover that has come to its senses. On it, both John McCain and the newly hawkish Barack Obama — the guy who threatens to invade Pakistan — kneel in photo-op piety in the Church of Political Pragmatism as the TV cameras roll.

Obama is still an unknown quantity (by Gene Lyons)
As a young literary scholar of my acquaintance put it, “Satire can tell us things about the artist’s community that The New Yorker may not have intended. The cover lampoons the portrait of Obama as an Islamic militant, but it also illuminates some real misgivings about the many things we just don’t know about him behind his hope-y change-y façade. It gives us a glimpse of anxieties perhaps even felt by the over-eager media. Most people won’t believe the extremist portrait, but they’ll intuitively grasp the uneasiness behind it.” The real danger’s not that Obama is perceived as a secret agent, but that he is seen as an unknown quantity, too glib a shape-shifter to be trusted. Despite worshipful media coverage of his pilgrimage to the Middle East and Europe, that remains a strong possibility.
Vanity Fair tried to parody the parody, and failed miserably.  Its rendition of the McCains doesn’t convey the same feeling of smug self-satisfaction, or the “I’m so smart to have put one over on you” on the candidate’s face.  Click here to compare and contrast the two covers.

Obama’s legal team (by DCblogger at Corrente)
Cass Sunstein cautions against prosecuting criminal conduct from the current Administration. He thinks that Alito and Roberts are “minimalists.” Robert Bauer advocated pardoning Scooter Libby. I have a very bad feeling about this.

What “Egregious Crimes?” (by Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft)
[L]ost in the shuffle of Obama advisor Cass Sunstein’s statement about [prosecuting Bush administration members only for] egregious crimes is the fact that Sunstein actually does not believe that Bush Administration did anything wrong. As I discussed in 2005, Sunstein supported the Bush Administration claims on military tribunals and illegal wiretapping. Indeed, Sunstein endorsed the Bush Administration’s argument regarding the inherent authority of the President to disregard laws when acting as Commander in Chief… Sunstein now wishes us all to forget that he fully supported the Bush Administration’s lawlessness. He clearly wants to play a role in a potential Obama Administration.

Many economists see McCain better for stocks: poll
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. stock market would fare better in the first year after a victory by Republican presidential candidate John McCain than by his Democratic rival Barack Obama, according to a majority of economists at U.S. banks and research groups polled by Reuters.

McCain’s, Obama’s tax plans would hike debt, study says
WASHINGTON — John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s tax proposals would add trillions of dollars to the national debt, according to an authoritative analysis released Wednesday.

On immigration, McCain and Obama very much alike (McClatchy)
WASHINGTON — Like many voters who are concerned about immigration, Angelica Salis has warm feelings and nagging doubts about both John McCain and Barack Obama.

AP, via Bag News Notes

Obama’s Fundraising Comes Under Scrutiny (by Charles Lemos at No Quarter, from his blog, By The Fault
Two articles in the US media point to what I have long been saying about Obama’s duplicitous statements on where his money is coming from and it is not from “ordinary Americans”. It is from corporate interests and Washington lobbyists and yes PAC money. The only difference is that backhanded manner in which Obama collects his millions… Of the $20.3 million Obama’s joint fundraising committees amassed in June, 86%, or $17.6 million, came in chunks of $5,000 or more; 64% came in increments of $28,500 or more, campaign finance reports filed over the weekend show.

Frank Clark, head of Commonwealth Edison, which supplies electricity to Chicago, gave $2,300 to Obama early in the campaign and $28,500 last month to the Democratic White House Victory Fund.

John Rogers, founder of the Chicago investment house Ariel Capital, also gave the maximum to Obama’s presidential account, and $13,000 to Democratic White House Victory.

According to the campaign, Clark and Rogers are among Obama’s largest fundraisers, each having raised more than $200,000 from friends and associates.

Employees at Exelon, the parent company of Commonwealth Edison, have given more than $180,000.
Click through for much, much more.

BAA BAA BLAH (Gendergappers)
Today’s Democrats are yesterday’s Republicans: might makes right backed by money. The former staunch advocates of democracy in Liberal Talk always claimed that Democrats allowed free speech and allowed differences of opinion. [Now, we] are being removed from more and more so-called Democratic Blogs and Lists because any OPINION adverse to BO is forbidden… Nonetheless millions are speaking out against the Democratic leadership that purged the Party’s laws and values to assure BO of the nomination and freeze out Hillary and her 18 million from the nomination process.

This man is beneath us (by John: south of Melrose at Liberal Rapture)
Cannonfire is doing a masterful job of compiling all Obama Cultist Comments. Again I warn you if you click here - it is ghastly reading… Even after all this time I find it disorienting to think that these people are in the party I once called home… Obama is a poisonous figure in American life and his presence has unleashed rage and insanity on the Left. We must oppose this mob and and their dear leader… They are bigots dressed to look like liberals. The pungent whiff of totalitarianism surrounds them. Their way or the highway. The worst part: “their way” is malleable. “Their way” is whatever results in power.
As I’ve said before, they are no different from the Bushbots of 2000.

PUMAs stalking Obama (bBy Mark PrestonBy Mark Prestony Mark Preston, CNN)
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Party Unity My A–! Not exactly the slogan you want heading into your presidential nominating convention, but one that is being repeated online and in neighborhood bars by a group of disenchanted Democrats, who have dubbed themselves PUMAs. Why are they angry? It all depends on whom you ask. Some of the PUMAs accuse Democratic leaders of rigging the primaries to favor Sen. Barack Obama, while others feel that he is not qualified to be the party nominee, let alone competent enough to lead the country… Should the Obama campaign be worried about the PUMAs? A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll showed that more than four in 10 Democrats still preferred Clinton as the nominee. [Emphasis added.]
Not only that, Clinton still does better against McCain than Obama.

If we’re PUMAs, then Obamaphiles are… (by sm77 at The Confluence)

CHEATahs!

(Insert British narrotor voice): “The Obama CHEATah is a malignant predator on Democracy. Like its predeccesor, the DITTOHEAD and Republicans 2000-2008, the CHEATah cheats and steals votes in order to win elections. They also are experts in creating false narratives to hide the flaws of their incompetent, inexperienced and ineligible candidate. CHEATahs roam the blogosphere, DNC and mainstream media… Why is everyone who has an opinion on PUMA thinking that it’s just a “girl thing” or because our feelings are “hurt that our candidate did not win?” Why aren’t journalists and opinion makers … talking about the DNC and RBC violation of fair reflection as the main reason why REAL Democrats won’t unite under the Precious’ mantle?  THEY CHEATED!!!!

Thursday: Those Meddling Kids (by riverdaughter at The Confluence)
Now, I like the publicity, but the DNC is going to want to squash us like a bug… My point is, they have done a lot already to get us to shut up, sit down and go away but we seem to be holding out.  So, they will have to send in the SWAT team to take a wrecking ball and split us into factions. Hmmm, how do we get around that one?   Think, think, think.  I know!  Let’s first keep the mission simple.  If there is no mission creep, there won’t be a lot to argue about.  So, as our goal, let’s get Hillary;s name nominated at the convention in Denver.  Let’s not look beyond Denver for the time being.  Simple goal, And let’s try to keep our egos in check…

Now, Conflucians, the $%&@’s about to hit the fan.  Find a buddy, hold hands, stay together and look both ways before crossing the street.  We will be ok if we stick together.

Welcome to “Brainwave Analysis”–Where Brainwaves are “Taken, Analyzed, Cleaned-up, Processed” and the Metrics are “Extracted” (Coming to a Future Political Campaign Near You?) (by GRL at InsightAnalytical)
Tuesday (July 22) I was out early and happened to tune in to NPR’s “Morning Edition.”  I came in on the middle of an interview about something called “neurofocus”… The segment was actually about a company named NeuroFocus, Inc. (”Brainwave Analysis for Audience Engagement”) which is gathering data about how people respond to messaging in a new way which is problematical downright SCARY… NeuroFocus is hooking people up to electrodes to track their responses to advertising and telelvision programs…

Now let’s jump … to political campaigns.  Can you imagine if a “perfected” version of this technology is adapted to political surveys or if it is eventually used by a political candidate like Obama, who already is being helped by an enabling media and large numbers of uniformed, fanatic supporters? Can you imagine “correct” responses being inserted into survey participants? Horrible thought, isn’t it?  As bad as things are with polling and manipulation, things could be getting a whole lot worse…

Reflecting On Values Promotes Love, Acceptance
ScienceDaily (July 23, 2008) — No one enjoys being told that their behavior is harmful to themselves or others. In fact, most people respond defensively when confronted with evidence that their behavior is irrational, irresponsible, or unhealthy. Fortunately, research has shown that just a few minutes of writing about an important value can reduce defensiveness. In a new experiment, [researchers] suggest that … writing about important values doesn’t reduce defensiveness by boosting the self [as was though previously]; instead, it enables people to transcend the self by focusing on people or things they care about beyond themselves. In two experiments, they found that writing about important values makes people feel loving and connected, and that these other-directed feelings account for reduced defensiveness.
In other words, we don’t need to be tricked into acting in certain ways.  There is also scientific evidence that people can be persuaded to make political judgments rationally, rather than emotionally, simply by being reminded to think rather than emote. (The Ideological Animal: “Simply reminding us to use our heads, it turns out, can be enough to make us do it.”)  Which method of persuasion would YOU rather be associated with, this one, or the manipulative one described in the just prior excerpt, of which Obama chief strategist David Axelrod is a master practitioner?

No Slime or Goo on Tap for DNC Protesters (by Jeralyn at TalkLeft)
The City and County of Denver and the ACLU have reached a partial agreement with respect to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Colorado seeking details of security purchases made by police for the Democratic National Convention. Denver has now provided details of the $18.2 million spent to date and those planning on protesting can rest a little easier: The city also announced today that none of the equipment purchases include nonlethal weapons that discharge “slime” or “goo” to immobilize persons or vehicles or that use microwaves or sonic waves to induce pain or discomfort in targets.

Olympic Deal Sealed: Obama Makes $5 Million Buy
WASHINGTON (AdAge.com) — It’s official. Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign will be among the TV sponsors of NBC Universal’s Olympics coverage. In the first significant network-TV buy of any presidential candidate in at least 16 years, the Obama campaign has taken a $5 million package of Olympics spots that includes network TV as well as cable ads.

McCain credits Bush for $10 drop in oil prices (On Politics, USA Today)
President Bush’s decision to lift a federal embargo on offshore oil drilling is one reason oil prices have fallen $10 a barrel in the past couple weeks, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said [Wednesday].
It wasn’t Bush’s fault that the price went up, but he gets credit for the price coming down?

CBS violates its own Standards and Practice by altering transcript and video of McCain interview (John Amato at Crooks and Liars)
CBS news had a huge scoop Tuesday night on John McCain, because he falsely claimed that the surge was responsible for the “Sunni Awakening in Anbar.” That is FALSE. The Sunnis changed positions before the surge was ever discussed so—McCain once again makes a major mistake on the one issue his campaign is running on—The Iraq war. However, CBS probably violated its own rules (Standards and Practice) by altering the video of Katie Couric’s interview with McCain that left out his major blunder on this issue and then broadcast it on our airwaves. CBS should not paste together separate answers from different questions to make it appear like an answer was fluid. It was completely taken out of context. I understand that a fair amount of editing has to be done, but what they did failed to meet the legitimacy test.
Fair enough, John, but neither should the New York Times have turned down John McCain’s oped answer to Obama’s Iraq War memo.  If they believed that some of the statements in McCain’s piece were false, they could have said so.  In fact, it would have been the perfect opportunity to rebut the editorial before it was published elsewhere without conditions (see below).  But I fail to see how they can blatantly demand that a candidate say what they want him to say.  Especially when you consider the part the NYT played in getting the Iraq War started.

Washington Times joins conservative media in publishing McCain’s error-filled op-ed. (Think Progress)
Following the lead of many other conservative outlets, the Washington Times today published Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) error-filled op-ed that the New York Times recently rejected. In an editor’s note, the Washington Times explains its decision: “EDITOR’S NOTE: The New York Times declined to run this op-ed. The New York Post ran a shorter version. We are running the op-ed in its entirety, as has the Drudge Report and some other media.” Indeed, many of the “other media” who have published the op-ed are conservative outlets, including foxnews.com and Rupert Murdoch’s The New York Post.

Joe Scarborough: Olbermann “too stupid to be on TV” for running McCain’s Anbar gaffe (by SilentPatriot at Crooks and Liars)
While reporting on McCain’s Anbar gaffe, the “Morning Joe” squad not only fails to acknowledge how serious and unprofessional it was for CBS to selectively edit the gaffe out of the interview, they completely buy into the McCain campaign’s damage control spin. And as if it that weren’t bad enough, Joe Scarborough makes it a point to go out of his way and call the arm-waving host that ran with the story (an obvious allusion to his colleague Keith Olbermann) “ignorant” and “too stupid to be on TV.”
Click through to watch the video.

Lots more really good stuff at MakeThemAccountable.com.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com