Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson have a scathing discussion about the crush that most of the news media has on Barack Obama. It's funny and it's dead on accurate.
CNN reports
that Barack Obama has won the Guam caucuses today by only seven votes. Not seven points, seven votes. Guam voters were so excited to be a part of the democratic nominating contest that they turned out in record numbers.
Sen. Barack Obama won Guam's Democratic presidential caucuses Saturday by just seven votes, according to a Guam election official.
With all 21 precincts reporting, Obama finished with 2,264 votes, or 50.1 percent. Sen. Hillary Clinton got 2,257 votes, or 49.9 percent.
The presidential candidates were battling for Guam's four pledged delegate votes. Eight delegates will be elected, each with half a vote at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, this summer.
*****
Cathleen Moore-Linn stood in line for more than an hour outside the old police precinct in Dededo, Guam's most populated village. Despite the 90-degree tropical heat and a lack of air conditioning at the polling site, she said, "Nobody left. A lot of manamko' [elderly people] came out to vote. And people were filling out the forms to join the Democrat Party."
At villages in the southern end of the island, which is far less populated, election committee member Nancy Weare says the voting is running smoothly. "There's a constant flow of traffic and good voter turnout."
Guam will bestow four delegates to the candidates: two to Hillary and two to Obama, so it is a tie vote-wise and delegate-wise. This is an excellent showing for Hillary Clinton; many predicted an Obama win here.
After a mild rejection of Reverend Wrights' comments yesterday at an impromptu press conference, Barack Obama has now held a full formal press conference today to try to do damage control over his former pastor's recent speeches. Obama threw Wright under the campaign bus, then backed up and rolled over him a few times, just to be sure.
But isn't this all too little, too late? To say that this is not the man Obama knew for twenty years is ridiculous. Wright's act is a very polished, perfected one that he's been preaching for years. How could Obama not know what Wright was all about, when the rest of America knew after seeing his sermons?
Here's the video of the press conference:
After his big speech on race -- in which he said he could no more disown his pastor than he could disown the black community or his white grandmother -- Barack Obama may be regretting his words. Because Jeremiah Wright has decided to speak out -- and it's not pretty.
Wright is on some kind of Tour of Racial Divisiveness, speaking to churches, Bill Moyers, the NAACP and the National Press Association. Wright and Obama have repeatedly said that Wright's hate-filled video rants were taken out of context, that we should listen to the entire speeches. We did, and frankly they're even worse than the video clips.
Here's some fun highlights: Wright mocked the accents of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson (you know, the guy that got the Civil Rights Act passed), he reiterated his claim that the U.S. created AIDS to exterminate people of color, that the U.S. is the same as Al-Qaeda, that Louis Farrakhan is one of the greatest people of the 20th and 21st centuries, that black people and white people have different brains, that black people have better rhythm than white people (complete with clapping examples!), that Obama only criticized Wright's speeches because it polled well and he wanted to get elected, and that American deserved to be hit on 9/11 because of our own terrorist acts (the chickens have come home to roost!).
Yes, it was full-bore, hate-filled, vile nonsense. The full transcript Wright's speech to the press corps is here.
Rev. Jeremiah Wright was interviewed by Bill Moyers: the interview will air on PBS on Friday night at 9:00 p.m. ET. Snippets of the interview have leaked out and they aren't pretty. This is the very last thing the Obama campaign needs, heading into an Indiana primary. Chris Matthews of MSNBC calls Jeremiah Wright "Barack Obama's Iraq."
And here's Obama's victory speech from last night, which no one listened to because of Fitchgate. So who are the three dimwits wearing Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirts standing behind Obama? And how did they get past his advance team?
Hillary Clinton did it: she won and won big in Pennsylvania. With 91% of the vote counted, she is winning by ten points: 55-45. We'll have to wait to see what the final count is, but any way you slice it it's a huge victory for her. Her campaign reports that they raised $500,000 in one hour after the polls closed.
Hillary's victory speech was one of her best speeches of the campaign. She was very inclusive, very inspirational and not too long. She talked about a World War II veteran who was a Medal of Honor winner who handed her a photograph of himself at the ceremony. He had autographed it to her saying "To Hillary Clinton, don't stop fighting." It was a personal moment she shared and it worked. I like her "I'll fight for you" refrain. Voters like a fighter. We live in a tough world and we need someone who won't quit when the going gets tough.
President Bush has reached
a new milestone. He has just polled the lowest of any American president in the 70 year history of Gallup polling. His approval rating is now 28%.
In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt.
The previous record of 67% was reached by Harry Truman in January 1952, when the United States was enmeshed in the Korean War.
Bush's rating has worsened amid "collapsing optimism about the economy," says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies presidential approval. Record gas prices and a wave of home foreclosures have fueled voter angst.
Bush also holds the record for the other extreme: the highest approval rating of any president in Gallup's history. In September 2001, in the days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush's approval spiked to 90%. In another record, the percentage of Americans who say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake reached a new high, 63%, in the latest poll.
Assessments of Bush's presidency are harsh. By 69%-27%, those polled say Bush's tenure in general has been a failure, not a success.
This is a milestone no president wants to reach. It is interesting that it was actually the Republican primary debates which introduced to the average voter the concept that the Iraq War (with its associated borrowing of billions from China to finance it) being a major drag on our economy. All the candidates eventually talked about the dangers of borrowing to finance a war, but really it was those Republican debates that got the concept discussed in the mainstream media.
Now unhappiness with the economy, the high gas prices and the Iraq War are all bundled together in consumers' minds, leading Bush to the worst approval ratings of his career.
The sound you hear is Hell freezing over: Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton are appearing in ad together to urge Americans to unite on the issue of climate change. It's part of a series of ads put together by Al Gore. It's a funny -- and extremely effective -- ad.
The BBC reports on the Hillary Clinton fundraiser in New York in which ticket holders got a special concert from Sir Elton John. Hillary said "What I want you to know is I'm still standing, and I believe this country is worth fighting for." Sir Elton was a little more harsh on the way Hillary has been treated by many U.S. pundits and news anchors, saying "I'm amazed by the misogynistic attitudes of some of the people in this country. And I say to hell with them...I love you Hillary, I'll be there for you." The concert, which was called "Elton and Hillary: One Night Only", raised $2.5 million for Hillary's campaign. Here's the BBC clip:
Here's a great video about the unbelievable and very sexist media bias against Hillary Clinton. The opening features a greatest hits of news anchors and pundits who look like braying jackasses as they spew their venomous nonsense which portrays Senator Clinton as some kind of demonic, psychotic figure, a "nagging wife" or even : "an ex-wife outside the Probate Court." (He means Family Court, but none of these bozos lets facts influence what they say on TV).
Contrasted against the bombastic poseur known as Keith Olbermann in full rant mode is a scene from Good Night and Good Luck in which Edward R. Murrow talks about the power of television and journalism to teach. Then we see Hillary as a real person, in the many and varied roles that she -- like most modern women -- lives every day. It's worth watching the whole thing.
Saturday Night Live: The Clintons Talk Tax Returns
Saturday Night Live had a very funny opening skit where Bill and Hillary Clinton talk about their tax returns and make fun of the press for all the hysteria over information that has been mostly public for years, such as the amount they made from book deals and speaking engagements. Take a look:
Majority of Americans Unhappy With Direction of Country
This is some bad news for any politician in office now: 81% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. That's a lot of unhappy Americans.
Americans are more dissatisfied with the country's direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.
In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track," up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.
Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.
A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.
The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low point only in the months and years after an economic downturn, not at the beginning of one. Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape.
Only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992, when the recession that began in the summer of 1990 had already been over for more than a year. In the latest poll, two in three people said they believed the economy was in recession today.
The unhappiness presents clear risks for Republicans in this year's elections, given the continued unpopularity of President Bush. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they approved of the job he was doing, a number that has barely changed since last summer. But Democrats, who have controlled the House and Senate since last year, also face the risk that unhappy voters will punish Congressional incumbents.
The Bush administration has wasted so much of taxpayers' money by borrowing billions from the Chinese to finance a disastrous war that the economic picture is looking quite grim. And what always happens when an administration swings too far right (in this case towards the idealistic, nonsensical neocon philosophy, certainly not towards fiscal conservatism)? Why, we swing back too far the other way. That's just human nature.
A survey of Barack Obama's statements on the economy are pretty disturbing. He has said he wants to double the capital gains rate and raise the FICA taxes that are so burdensome to small businesses and to wage earners. And that's just the beginning of what is starting to sound like the socialist economic playbook. As we head into a recession and jobs continue their flight overseas, the idea of raising taxes is irresponsible. Obama also wants to reinstate the death tax, which otherwise will expire at the end of 2010.
Obama claims that he will only raise taxes on the "rich" -- but he has had wildly varying definitions of what "rich" is. In one speech he talked about about families who make over $75,000. Tell a family with one $75,000 income and two children in New York that they are "rich". They'll think you are crazy. In another one of his word blizzards, he mentioned the sum of $200,000. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama has complained about how financially stretched they are -- and the Obamas made $991,296.00 in 2006. Are they "rich"?
Hillary Clinton has said she opposes raising employment taxes, and that she will freeze death taxes at their 2009 levels, which is a lot better than Obama's plan (death taxes are eliminated in 2010 and go back to the absurdly high 2002 rate in 2011 because the tax cuts were never made permanent). Death taxes are disastrous for family-owned businesses and small businesses. Hillary will roll back the part of the Bush tax cuts that give incentives for outsourcing American jobs overseas, which is a good thing. She will institute tax breaks for companies who create jobs in America, which is an excellent plan that addresses the biggest problem for the middle and working class: getting and keeping a job with a good salary and benefits.
She will also roll back the tax cuts for families who make over $250,000 a year, which is better than Barack's plan, but still not a good idea.
As far as John McCain goes, who knows what he would do economically? He has said that he really doesn't understand the economy. He voted against the Bush tax cuts and now he says he supports them. This is a man who has drawn a government paycheck all of his life. He's never had to meet a payroll, withhold government taxes or raise funding. When asked what he would do, he used to answer "I'll be advised by Jack Kemp." Ok, great. So when is Jack Kemp going to talk about McCain's fiscal plans? One bright spot here is that McCain has made up with Mitt Romney. At least Mitt knows something about meeting a payroll and how burdensome taxes hurt small businesses, which are the backbone of the economy.
Lou Dobbs Talks Media Bias Against Hillary Clinton
Lou Dobbs addresses the extreme negative bias against Hillary Clinton that the mainstream media has shown and the absurdity of the calls for her to drop out of the race before all the Democratic voters have had their say. He also discusses the fact that neither candidate can win the nomination mathematically, that the superdelegates will decide.
As for the possible disregarding of the votes of the Michigan and Florida delegates: "There is nothing more unfair than not to have those votes counted in Michigan and Florida. And if this nomination is decided with superdelegates without recognizing, counting and enfranchising those voters in Michigan and Florida, that's when we'll hear that it was unfair."
Barack Obama appeared on The View and had to suffer through having Barbara Walters tell him he was sexy. Jay Leno pointed out that -- like most male guests on that show -- he seemed a bit uncomfortable with all the attention. Jay pointed out that he was constantly rearranging his clothing. It's pretty funny: here's the video.
Women supporters of Hillary Clinton are quite angry
at the ludicrous, partisan calls from some Obama supporters for Hillary to drop out of the race.
Amid mounting calls from top Democrats for Clinton to step aside and clear the path for rival Barack Obama, strategists are warning of damage to the party's chances in November if women - who make up the majority of Democratic voters nationwide, but especially the older, white working-class women who've long formed the former first lady's base - sense a mostly male party establishment is unfairly muscling Clinton out of the race.
"Women will indeed be upset if it appears people are trying to push Hillary Clinton out of the way," said Carol Fowler, the South Carolina Democratic Party chair who is backing Obama. "If you are going to ask her to withdraw, you'd better be making a strong case for it - both to the candidate and the public."
Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy last week became the first leading Democrat to openly call on Clinton to abandon her bid and back Obama, a sentiment shared by many activists worried that a drawn-out nominating contest only bolsters Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain.
*****
Campaigning across the state Saturday, Clinton was greeted by large, heavily female crowds that shouted "You go, sister!" and "We've got your back!" in support of her pioneering candidacy. Indiana votes May 6.
Marie Wilson, president of the White House Project that trains women to run for office, noted that women typically have rallied around Clinton when she's appeared most vulnerable - from the revelations of her husband's dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky to January's New Hampshire primary after the bruising loss to Obama in Iowa.
"Women have always been asked to step aside if it was somehow for the greater good. In this case, Clinton, and a lot of her female supporters, clearly feel that she would make the better president and that it would not be for the greater good for her to step aside," Wilson said.
To ask Hillary Clinton to step down when she is about to win a major primary in Pennsylvania is absolutely ludicrous. It's all blustering to try to psych her and her supporters out. Well, it's not working. All it's doing is infuriating women voters who have had it up to here with the sycophantic, Obama-bedazzled press and Obama's obnoxious supporters.
I find myself in the strange position of knowing exactly how Vice president Dick Cheney felt when he so famously blasted. Senator Leahy on the Senate floor after Leahy said something particularly irritating. At the time Cheney's aide called it a "frank exchange of views." In retrospect it was just Leahy shooting off his big mouth, as usual. If Leahy keeps this nonsense up, he'll be on the receiving end of some
"frank exchanges of views" -- from his female constituents.
John McCain has released his first general election ad. It's a great ad which focuses on McCain's character and his love for America. It does mention tax relief, however as a headline that reads "McCain Promises Middle Class Tax Relief". McCain is also shown as a clearly scared but very brave young prisoner of war, being asked to give his rank and serial number. It's a gut punch to voters, reminding them of what he has been through in his life.
The tagline is a doozy: "John McCain: the American president that Americans have been waiting for." It's a riff on Obama's "we're the ones we've been waiting for." It also takes a subtle swipe at Obama and his wife on patriotism. The problem here is that no one doubts John McCain's patriotism. Voters aren't sure that he knows what he's doing on the economy, which is why his choice of running mate will be very important.
Overall, it's a very effective ad.
Al Gore will appear on 60 Minutes this Sunday for an interview with Lesley Stahl. Gore says that those that don't believe that global warming is man-made are like people who believe the Earth is flat.
Top Democratic donors who support Hillary Clinton have written a letter to Nancy Pelosi taking her to task for her recent, ill-advised comments about superdelegates not "overturning the will of the voters." Speaker Pelosi should stay neutral and above the fray before there is a nominee, but she's clearly favoring Obama -- which is pretty ironic considering that it was Hillary Clinton who won Pelosi's home state of California. Here's an excerpt from the letter:
Several states and millions of Democratic voters have not yet had a chance to cast their votes.
We respect those voters and believe that they, like the voters in the states that have already participated, have a right to be heard. None of us should make declarative statements that diminish the importance of their voices and their votes. We are writing to say we believe your remarks on ABC News This Week on March 16th did just that.
During your appearance, you suggested super-delegates have an obligation to support the candidate who leads in the pledged delegate count as of June 3rd, whether that lead be by 500 delegates or 2. This is an untenable position that runs counter to the party's intent in establishing super-delegates in 1984 as well as your own comments recorded in The Hill ten days earlier:
"I believe super-delegates have to use their own judgment and there will be many equities that they have to weigh when they make the decision. Their own belief and who they think will be the best president, who they think can win, how their own region voted, and their own responsibility."
The entire reason for the existence of the superdelegates is to pick a nominee if no one reaches the magic number that guarantees the nomination. Superdelegates can vote for whoever they want, exercising their independent judgment. If superdelegates have to follow their own state's voters, then Pelosi, Kerry, Kennedy and Richardson will all have to declare for Clinton.
The people who wrote this letter are really, really big donors who the Democratic party relies upon. All they are asking is that Pelosi keep her mouth shut, quit trying to short-circuit the process and let the primary season play itself out. Or else they might close their wallets in the fall.
In an interview today, Hillary Clinton was asked
what she would do if her pastor made the kind of remarks that Obama's former pastor Wright had made.
"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."...
The Clinton campaign has refrained from getting involved in the controversy, but Clinton herself, responding to a question, denounced what she said was "hate speech."
"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus (who was fired from his radio and television shows after making racially insensitive remarks), saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that," Clinton said. "I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."
Her response was very measured, and appropriate. It also cuts to the essential point that was lost during Senator Obama's word blizzard of a speech in which he talked and talked and talked, but never gave a good explanation as to why he would let his little girls grow up in a church where the pastor preached hate speech.
Reverend Wright's statements can't be explained away to mainstream voters with platitudes. Wright spews vile, disgusting, racist Anti-Americanism propaganda and is a conspiracy nut, to boot. He actually "preaches" that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to exterminate black people. And Obama thinks somehow it's sufficient simply to say that he "disagrees" with that statement. It's not.
President Bush made a new friend over Easter Weekend as the White House hosted official White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn.
Children age seven and under participated in the official White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn. For all family members, there was live entertainment from the pop-rock band the Jonas Brothers, Mickey Mouse, and several other stage performers. There was also activities to highlight this year's educational theme, "Ocean Conservation," including marine life painting with the artist Wyland.
Special guest readers included sportscaster and former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, children's book authors Ms. Nancy Tafuri and Ms. Rosemary Wells, and Kyle Massey, star of the hit television show "Cory in the House." The Cat in the Hat, Tweety Bird, Charlie Brown, Clifford the Big Red Dog, the official White House Easter Bunnies, and many other strolling characters entertained children on the South Lawn.
Some of our great former presidents also attended the Easter Egg Roll in muppet-like form including Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
