My favorite was this one:

I have to admit the first is better for a general audience.

Yep

It came as a revelation to hear that Obama, who I thought was plotting to become president, has been shrewedly maneuvering to lead the pom squad at McCain’s inauguration. But there was something else that struck me as strange about Clinton’s reaction: Obama was not the first of the two Democrats to say something nice about the Arizona senator. He was the second.

A few weeks ago, campaigning in Texas, Clinton sounded downright glowing about McCain. Referring to those 3 a.m. phone calls at the White House, she said, “I think you’ll be able to imagine many things Sen. McCain will be able to say. He’s never been the president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Sen. Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002.”

Let’s review. Clinton criticized Obama for ranking McCain No. 3 in a four-person assessment, ahead of Bush. But Clinton herself put McCain No. 2—or maybe even in a tie for No. 1—in her evaluation of the three candidates.

She thinks McCain is better than Obama and McCain is no better than Bush. Which can mean only one thing: Bush is better than Obama!

Of course that’s probably not what she actually believes.

But it’s a tribute to her talent for bold deceit and bizarre logic that she can attack Obama for doing something that she herself had done so recently, and more fervently.

Obama cannot role out a 50 State Strategy for the General Election. That said, this is a good first step:

CHICAGO, IL—Senator Barack Obama’s campaign today announced the kickoff of Vote for Change, an unprecedented 50-state voter registration and mobilization drive. The campaign will work with grassroots volunteers and partner with local organizations to register new voters and boost engagement in our Democratic process. The program will launch on May 10 with dozens of events around the country.  

“If we’re going to push back on the special interests and finally solve the challenges we face, we’re going to need everyone to get involved,” said Senator Obama. “Over the next six months, Vote for Change is going to bring new participants into the process, adding scores of new voices to this critical dialogue about our future. I started my career as a community organizer, and I worked to register voters in communities where hope was all but lost. I’ve seen what can happen when Americans re-engage and take ownership in the process.”  

 “We’ve already seen amazing new enthusiasm and involvement over the course of this campaign, and now we’re taking that excitement to the next level in all 50 states,” said deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand. “We’ve seen too many elections where turnout was less than 50 percent. At this critical time in our history, we know we can do better—this year and beyond.”  

The campaign has launched a web site to help people get involved no matter where they live:  http://my.barackobama.com/voteforchange. The site has information about 83 Vote for Change registration kick-off events on May 10, and also allows visitors from all 50 states to fill out a mail-in voter registration form, volunteer to register others to votes, and invite others to take part in the program.  

The campaign’s recent voter registration drives have registered more than 200,000 new Democrats in Pennsylvania, more than 165,000 new Democrats in North Carolina, and more than 150,000 new Democrats in Indiana. Those numbers just scratch the surface of what’s possible. 

This primary election is about another repeat every Democratic election since 1980 or a 50 State Strategy that improves our state and local parties as well.  Finding those voters we’ve ignored for too long with have both immediate benefits and benefits for years to come.

South Carolina Preacher:

JONESVILLE, S.C. — The sign in front of a small church in a small town is causing a big controversy in Jonesville, S.C.

Pastor Roger Byrd said that he just wanted to get people thinking. So last Thursday, he put a new message on the sign at the Jonesville Church of God.It reads: “Obama, Osama, hmm, are they brothers?”
Byrd said that the message wasn’t meant to be racial or political.

“It’s simply to cause people to realize and to see what possibly could happen if we were to get someone in there that does not believe in Jesus Christ,” he said.

When asked if he believes that Barack Obama is Muslim, Byrd said, “I don’t know. See it asks a question: Are they brothers? In other words, is he Muslim ? I don’t know. He says he’s not. I hope he’s not. But I don’t know. And it’s just something to try to stir people’s minds. It was never intended to hurt feelings or to offend anybody.”

Obama has said repeatedly during his campaign that he is a Christian and attends Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.Despite some criticism, Byrd says that the message will stay on the sign. He took the issue before his congregation Sunday night, and they decided unanimously to keep it.

Byrd also said he doesn’t want it to look like controversy forced him to take the sign down.

Steve Rauschenberger now in the WSJ:

 ”Barack was one of the smartest people I ever worked with, but he was more interested in moving up,” says Republican Steven Rauschenberger, who served with Mr. Obama in the state senate. “I never thought he was very engaged in the state senate, because he didn’t think that much of it.”

Steve Rauschenberger then (S-T September 6, 2003)

He has suggested to Obama that they split from the pack and debate Lincoln/Douglas-style, across Illinois.

The most qualified candidate of both parties by legislative experience running for the U.S. Senate nomination is a Republican, Steve Rauschenberger, the first freshman and youngest senator to be named chairman of Senate Appropriations back when the GOP was in control. Now the 47-year-old Elgin legislator has taken a daring tack. He has suggested to state Sen. Barack Obama (D-Chicago), whom he regards as the most formidable of the eight major Democratic contenders, that they split from the pack (Rauschenberger faces six Republicans) and debate–just the two of them–Lincoln/Douglas-style, across Illinois.

Obama, an eloquent African American who was president of the Harvard Law Review, is considering it, and if he accepts, the Senate race would be suddenly lifted out of sound bytes and 20-second TV spots. This much is clear: If some day Illinois could be represented in the Senate by both Rauschenberger and Obama, it would come closest to the golden era when brilliant opposites, Everett Dirksen and Paul Douglas, jointly served.

Some of the dimmer lights in the blogosphere aren’t quite understanding the concept of oversampling for subgroups as NBC/WSJ did for the African-American sample in their latest poll.

It’s fairly simple. There is a general sample of 700 respondents with 11% African-American and 75% White respondents. Looking at their subsamples, there are 520 white respondents which is approximately 75% of the whole sample. If you read what the WSJ and Chuck Todd say is that they added 100 African-American respondents to the crosstabs–or the breakdowns by race. This means that in the general sample there are 77 African-Americans and in the smaller African-American sample there are 177 African Americans.

Before trying to discredit the poll or acting all outraged, do the math. All one needs is a basic understanding of percentages.

Furthermore, Taylor Marsh is very upset that the poll includes Republicans.  I kid you not. She might read the poll results with questions from the article she linked to and notice that it only includes Democrats and likely Democratic primary voters if they identify themselves that way. But shiiiiiiiiittttt, we’d hate to read the damn thing and know something about what we are talking about.

It hurts you too:

As expected, one of the two major Democratic candidates saw a downturn in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, but it’s not the candidate that you think. Hillary Clinton is sporting the lowest personal ratings of the campaign. Moreover, her 37 percent positive rating is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.

Here’s one of the most basic rules of campaigning.  Negative campaigning hurts your opponent, but it also hurts you.  Your hope is that it hurts your opponent more, but there is one big problem for some candidates. If your unfavorability is already higher, your unfavorability might drop enough so the other candidate still stays on top.  I e-mailed this to a friend probably a month ago in saying how she couldn’t go too negative. Of course, she can go that negative, it’s just not going to help her win.

Congratulations Clinton camp–you screwed yourselves and the party.

For those ranting about new polling showing Obama falling in some states, both are falling and will continue to fall as long as this crap continues.

What’s stunning to me is that as many of us have spent time trying to point out that a big portion of the right wing noise machine is not credible and shouldn’t set the agenda after watching the Clinton’s get cut up by it for 8 years, Clinton is now embracing those sources as reasonable sources to work though:

Phil Singer cites the American Spectator 

Hillary dumps on Wright in front of….Richard Mellon Scaiffe 

Next she’ll go watermelon hunting with Dan Burton.

Hillaryis44 compares Reverend Wright to Tawana Brawley.

That’s special.

According to Taylor Marsh, it’s horrible to talk about lynching on Easter.

Because a day that celebrates the resurrection of Christ who was put to death by bleeding him to death with the giant stakes driven through his hands and feet is a day that shouldn’t include any talk about persecution.

Until the last couple of years, which now finds me meditating on Easter Sunday, I never in my entire life have heard anyone mention “lynching” on Easter Sunday. I’ve spent a few Easters inside a Baptist church as well.

Yeah, because lynching is so seldom mentioned in sermons at black churches.  I know people are pretty clueless about black churches—okay African-Americans in general, but this is perhaps the stupidest fucking complaint ever.

It strikes me that Easter is a perfect day to talk about lynching if one thinks that Jesus was sacrificed for our sins.

Of course, Marsh and most disappointingly Jerome Armstrong continue the claim that Wright was anti-American.

Despite the years of criticism of the mainstream media, they fall into the trap of accepting sound bites over context.   When one listens to the comments in context, one finds Wright is not Anti-American, he is anti-Bush and anti-Conservative. I thought Jerome and Taylor were of similar mind.  And Wright argues that violence begets violence in context.  That is certainly a message one should hear in their Church.

It should be now with the Clinton Campaign fundraisers threatening Nancy Pelosi that they will withhold donations to the DCCC if she doesn’t change her view on the SuperDelegates.

It’s not theoretical whether the Clintons will burn down the party if Clinton doesn’t get the nomination, her supporters just said they would destroy the party if she doesn’t get the nomination.

The Party is not the Clintons and that they and their supporters confuse the party’s and their interests as being the same is exactly the reason they must be defeated.

God doesn’t change, nations do…

Jeremiah Wright’s sermon on 9-11 with the full context:

Violence begets violence.

One can argue over the policy, but it’s hardly as radical as it has been painted.

A Trinity United Church of Christ member starts a new blog about the church. Take a visit

Picking out Ferraro’s comment, but it’s made by many:

Ferraro also said she could not understand why Obama had called out his own white grandmother for using racial stereotypes that had made him cringe.

“I could not believe that,” she said. “That’s my mother’s generation.”

Because the best strategy is to politely ignore racism?  That’s worked well, hasn’t it.

WTF?

She joins ranks with a bunch of conservative morons that John Cole nicely gathers so I don’t have to.

My Grandfather, Tom Handlin, is the single greatest person I’ve ever met. He was a farmer, brought up by friends of the family after his father abandoned 11 other kids and his mother.  He was measured and thoughtful and had one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever run across unless he was fighting with a boar who wasn’t cooperating.

And you know what? He was a racist.  Not a KKK racist, but a racist who thought blacks weren’t as good as whites.  I loved that man.

I’m not throwing him under the bus by saying he was a racist. I’m acknowledging that humans are complex and not caricatures.

He’d insist on it.

Because she just cannot shut up:

Former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro said today that she objected to the comparison Sen. Barack Obama drew between her and his former pastor in his speech on race relations Tuesday.

In the speech, Obama sought to place the inflammatory remarks of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a broader context, in part by placing them on a continuum with Ferraro’s recent remark to the Daily Breeze that Obama is “lucky” to be black.

“To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable,” Ferraro said today. “He gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred.”

Ferraro, the only woman to ever run on a major party presidential ticket, sparked a controversy when she told the Breeze that “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.”

=================

Ferraro said she had “no clue” why Obama would include her in his speech, and said Obama’s association with Wright raises serious questions about his judgment.

“What this man is doing is he is spewing that stuff out to young people, and to younger people than Obama, and putting it in their heads that it’s OK to say `Goddamn America’ and it’s OK to beat up on white people,” she said. “You don’t preach that from the pulpit.”

Ferraro also said she could not understand why Obama had called out his own white grandmother for using racial stereotypes that had made him cringe.

“I could not believe that,” she said. “That’s my mother’s generation.”

I know, who could ever think women of that generation might just harbor a couple racist thoughts?  I mean my grandparents were terribly progressive when it came to race…. And my parents…</snark>

The thing is Ferraro leaves one of the biggest tells in her response:

 putting it in their heads that it’s OK to say `Goddamn America’ and it’s OK to beat up on white people,” she said. “You don’t preach that from the pulpit.”

One wonders where Wright said it was OK to beat up on white people since he’s long been an advocate of non-violence and even in the ‘hate’ filled sermon, there were no calls to violence.  But Ferraro heard that it was OK to beat up white people.

Fascinating.

The common theme is that somehow Wright was spewing racism. He wasn’t though and no one can point to a racist statement from the video clips. They are divisive in the notion that racism is worse than misogyny, but that’s not racist.

Pointing out the United States has a long history of racism, bigotry, and oppression of black people isn’t racism.   Saying God Damns America for its sins with racism isn’t racism.  Calling the United States of America the United States of the KKK is definitely divisive, but not racism.

He said some dumb things in his statements about AIDS, but that isn’t racism. It’s factually wrong.

No where does Wright suggest that whites are inferior to blacks or anything of the sort.  He says that whites have mistreated blacks in the United States.  That is true.  And most of his examples are true.

Even if someone makes a wrong statement when accusing someone of racism, that isn’t racism.  It might be stupid, it might be unethical, and it might be wrong, but it’s not racism.

And saying that it isn’t God Bless America, but God Damn America isn’t telling people it’s okay to say Goddamn America, it’s saying that the United States is a nation with sin on its hands and, in fact, the original sin of the United States has long been called racism and slavery.  The euphemism of the South was that it was a peculiar institution suggesting it was benign.  That is our original sin.

The problem with the clips of the sermon is that like many sermons, all the negative doesn’t tell us much about the whole meaning of the sermon.   With original sin also comes redemption and that is also what Wright preached for decades.

De Tocqueville wrote of the effects of slavery in the 19th Century:

The legislation of the Southern states with regard to slaves presents at the present day such unparalleled atrocities as suffice to show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted, and to betray the desperate position of the community in which that legislation has been promulgated. The Americans of this portion of the Union have not, indeed, augmented the hardships of slavery; on the contrary, they have bettered the physical condition of the slaves. The only means by which the ancients maintained slavery were fetters and death; the Americans of the South of the Union have discovered more intellectual securities for the duration of their power. They have employed their despotism and their violence against the human mind. In antiquity precautions were taken to prevent the slave from breaking his chains; at the present day measures are adopted to deprive him even of the desire for freedom. 

The ancients kept the bodies of their slaves in bondage, but placed no restraint upon the mind and no check upon education; and they acted consistently with their established principle, since a natural termination of slavery then existed, and one day or other the slave might be set free and become the equal of his master. But the Americans of the South, who do not admit that the Negroes can ever be commingled with themselves, have forbidden them, under severe penalties, to be taught to read or write; and as they will not raise them to their own level, they sink them as nearly as possible to that of the brutes.

A French aristocrat from the 19th century would, in the same essay, predict the problem of freeing slaves in the American South to a degree current historians could only aspire to describe.

The practical effect of that system is what produces a very angry Jeremiah Wright who says God damns America for its sins towards our black citizens.  Anyone who honestly is Christian and thinks about this seriously should understand the context in which Wright speaks.  It’s not that America should be damned, but that without redemption, we are all damned.

Wright is not arguing for black superiority.  He is arguing for black equality and the redemption that comes with such equality.  It’s uncomfortable to hear, but it is not racism.  It is a clear-eyed look at an imperfect nation and its sins.