Transcript:The Democratic Debate in Cleveland

The following is a transcript of the Democratic presidential debate on MSNBC in Cleveland, Ohio, as provided by the Federal News Service and CQ Transcriptions via The Associated Press

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/politics/26text-debate.html?fta=y

Obama should be proud to be named Hussein/by Juan Cole

WLW radio Wingnut Bill Cunningham has always appealed to the basest, most prejudiced and ignorant members of the talk radio audience. It doesn’t take much exposure to Cunningham’s vitriolic rants to get clear that, unless you fall into one of the above categories, what’s the point of even listening to him? Like his fellow Wingnut, Rush L, babbling Bill has been looking for ways to disparage Barak Obama. It is one thing to do as many bloggers , myself included, have done, which is to try to shed light into the corners of Obama’s POLITICS that the Mains Stream Media is steadfastly ignoring. It is quite another to engage in using racism as a form of criticism.

Now we have bit of a tempest in a teapot over Cunningham’s lame attempt to make racist use of prejudice against people with Arabic or semitic names to smear Obama because of his middle name. Hussein.

I don’t know if the author of the post below, Juan Cole, is a linguist by trade, but he literally lashes Cunningham to the bone with his take on the melting pot that is America and, how it is that Hussein is in fact a name that fits right into that stew of immigrants.

The attacks on Barack Obama’s middle name have begun, but the likely
Democratic nominee joins a long line of famous Americans with Semitic
names, from Benjamin Franklin to Omar Bradley.

Obama should be proud to be named Hussein

Feb. 29, 2008 |

By Juan Cole

In Cincinnati, Bill Cunningham, according to the Los angeles
Times,<http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-mccain27feb27,1,6349050.story?
introducing presidential candidate John McCain at a rally Tuesday,
“ridiculed Democratic contender Barack Obama for his intention to meet
with ‘world leaders who want to kill us’ and pointedly referred to the
Illinois senator as ‘Barack Hussein Obama.’” John McCain<http://dir.salon.com/topics/john_mccain/> repudiated Cunningham’s
low tactics and said that using the middle name like that three times
was “inappropriate” and would never happen again at one of his rallies.

I want to say something about Barack Hussein
Obama<http://dir.salon.com/topics/barack_obama/>’s name. It is a name to
be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a
heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of Gen.
Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating
that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and
debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic
languages!

Automated Killer Robots ‘Threat to Humanity’: Expert

Published on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 by Agence France Presse

Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.

“They pose a threat to humanity,” said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain’s Royal United Services Institute.

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world — from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones — can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

There are more than 4,000 US military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours.

Mike Peter’s Editorial Cartoon Nails Nader

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early/Video link

Funny, scary/frightening view of the future [past] of voting…Video satire from

THE ONION

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks?utm_source=embedded_video

Hillary Clinton Campaign Connection to Drudge Report Detailed by International Herald Tribune (NYT) in October of 2007

Submitted by mark karlin on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 7:04pm. EditorBlogTHE BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG

An International Herald Tribune story of October 22, 2007, covers the irony of the Clinton campaign feeding stories to the Drudge Report as part of its strategy. (It was a repost from the New York Times, which owns the IHT.)

And the Clinton campaign wasn’t hiding their new found interest in using Drudge to get attention for stories. They had [and may still have] a designated “liaison” according to the International Herald Tribune:

Barak Obama’s Lobbyist Money/the Quest for an Eyes WIDE Open Voting Experience Continues

Continuing the quest for an eyes wide open voting experience…the following is an Excellent dissertation on the connection between St Obama and the world of real money…

Vote, but do so fully informed about the product we are being sold.

Obama’s Lobbyist Money

HILLARY CLINTON & MONSANTO:THE MIAMI VALLEY CONNECTION

With this re-post I continue my equal opportunity Presidential race cynicism…this go round with Ms Clinton. Offered, dear reader, with the aim of providing toothpicks [to prop eyelids WIDE open] and clothespins [ olfactory prevention use] for the primary next week. Ok. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Either one is an improvement over John McCain.

How much of an improvement is another matter altogether.

No one reading here should go into the voting booth next week thinking that you are voting for a progressive candidate. . Please. No more naivety. That’s So over.

A Second Letter to Hillary Clinton on Her Ties to Monsanto

Poor Ohio

By LINN COHEN-COLE

Dear Hillary,

This is my second letter to you. I am writing again because I feel badly for you that you seem not understand what is wrong.

You are going into Ohio soon. The issue is that you don’t travel alone.

Your and Bill’s history with Monsanto is going with you.

Your campaign strategist, Mark Penn, goes as well, putting Monsanto by your side.

What does Ohio have to do with you and Monsanto?

Did you know that dairy farmers there had the battle of their lives to prevent the banning of rBGH labels on their dairy products?
Let me put that into plain English.

Monsanto tried (and may try again) to make sure dairy farmers in Ohio, and across the country–have no “real” freedom of speech. What simple thing are Ohio farmers denied saying? “We don’t put GE crap in our cows.”

Dairy farmers want to tell that truth, consumers want it. You’d think that’d be simple. Yet, farmers - the only ones telling the public the truth - are doing so in the absence of governmental help and, in fact, up against it, as it favors Monsanto.

Is John McCain a Liar? By Robert Parry

Is John McCain a Liar?

By Robert Parry
February 23, 2008

In journalism, it’s a safe bet that if you write a story with the suggestion that a prominent male politician is bedding an attractive female lobbyist, whatever other point you hoped to make will be overlooked.

That appears to have been the case with the New York Times article on Feb. 21, which led with suspicions held by some McCain staffers that the Arizona senator had gotten too cozy with lobbyist Vicky Iseman. The Times story then veered off into a historical examination of McCain’s over-confidence about his own moral rectitude.

Yet, despite the Times’ best efforts to explore this complicated history of McCain as both ethics sinner and ethics reformer, the public and pundits never got much past the sex angle, an insinuation that McCain, 71, and Iseman, 40, both adamantly denied.

Thus, McCain succeeded in deflecting the story’s more significant question: Is McCain’s reputation as a straight-talking politician a sham?

Put differently, is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee – like Colin Powell – a media darling whose reputation for honesty is largely undeserved? The question is not an insignificant one.

Never Mind the Sex, It’s the Lobbying Connection That’s At Issue With McCain…

The activist wing of the film making community is producing some incredible on point videos and Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films organization has one that is both on time and on point. See it in the context of the flap being generated by the NY Times article alleging improprieties by John McCain on a personal level with a female lobbyist. While the MSM focuses on innuendos about possible sexual “misconduct” it ignores the larger question of the lobbyist McCain is ACTUALLY “SLEEPING” WITH!

There are 59 current or former lobbyists on McCain’s payroll...