Burned out by the Clinton-Obama primary battle ? I have to admit to feeling more than a bit fatigued, and I think of myself as a political junkie, type AAA. Regular readers will note an absence of posts over the last few weeks, mostly due to the above mentioned campaign fatigue,
I am just as suspicious of Barack Obama’s connections to the power elite as I am Ms Clinton, and have re-posted several well written articles regarding those connections on this blog. However, as time wear on , Ms Clinton’s rhetoric, and that of her husband, has grown increasingly shrill, and most regrettably, seemingly coming out of a Karl Rove Republican playbook. Maybe individually the remarks can be parsed and explained, but the low road, once taken, is hard to get off of.You can only bring up “white voters”, parrot bogus gas tax relief schemes [in agreement with McCain...] and imply entitlement so many times before the veneer of respectability wears off. If he wins, I sincerely hope Obama does not give into sharing his presidency with the Clinton’s…
One of the most obstinate and tenacious defenders of Clinton has been one Lanny Davis, who, armed with more “facts” than any three other interviewees, ardently believes that Clinton can make no mistakes . Nothing she says could possibly be interpreted as anything but righteous She is the perfect, entitled Democratic party nominee.
My opinion of this pugnacious and rude huckster….very low.
The article posted below is somewhat long and detailed, but it clearly lays out the fallacies in Davis’s wishful fantasies.
Lanny Davis, annotated:
Here are two important neutral principles that should guide the Democratic National Committee’s Rules Committee when it meets May 31 to decide whether to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations — and, if so, how to allocate them between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
One principle is based in law, the second in pragmatic politics. Both principles result in the same solution: in some rough approximation, honoring the results expressed by almost 600,000 Michigan Democrats and more than 1.7 million Florida Democrats, who turned out in record numbers though they were told their votes didn’t count, were not responsible for the rules violations, and don’t want to be disenfranchised.
Record numbers? Not in Michigan. According to the Michigan Bureau of Elections, the record for participation in a Democratic Presidential Primary came in 1972, when 1,588,073 Michigan Democrats cast ballots. That is nearly one million more ballots than were cast this year. (On the other hand, had Michigan held an “official” primary, and had the voters had behaved approximately as they did in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio, about 2,000,000 voters would have cast ballots, easily breaking the record).
The legal principle supporting that solution is pretty simple. In U.S. contract law, the party breaching a contract usually has the right to “cure” the violation during the term of the contract. But if the other party stands in the way of that cure, the breaching party cannot be further sanctioned — and certainly, as a matter of fairness, the party preventing the cure should not stand to benefit.
If the breach in question is Michigan’s decision to advance the date of its primary beyond what the DNC permitted, it would seem that the parties to that dispute are (i) the Michigan Democratic Party (MDP), and (ii) the DNC. Therefore, if the MDP sought to cure the breach (that is, hold a do-over election), the principle that Davis articulates would suggest that the “breaching party” — a.k.a. the MDP — could not be further sanctioned.
It is unclear, however, what any of this has to do with the Clinton and Obama campaigns. At best it is an argument for seating Michigan’s delegates. It isn’t an argument about how to seat them. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in 1, BARAK OBAMA, Democratic Party, HILLARY CLINTON, MSM/Main Stream Media, PRESIDENTIAL RACE | No Comments »
Posted by leftofdayton on April 12, 2008
These are excerpts of remarks delivered April 9 at the Conference on a New New Deal in Washington, sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
Let me offer a simple set of propositions.
1. Conservatism has failed—and conservatives, while they cannot admit it, understand that. You’ve heard this before, but it is important to repeat it. The failure is not simply that of clueless George. Conservatism failed not because the Bush administration was incompetent, although incompetence has been its hallmark. It failed not because Bush and the DeLay Congress were corrupt, although corruption has been pervasive. Conservatism failed because it is wrong. Wrong about the world. Wrong about the economy. Wrong about the society.
Its imperial and military fantasies led directly to Iraq, surely the worst foreign policy debacle since Vietnam. Its market fundamentalism generated Gilded Age inequality, a Depression-era financial crisis, stagnant wages and rising insecurity, and left America the world’s largest debtor, dependent on the kindness of strangers. Their celebration of deregulation and scorn for government ended up poisoning our kids, with uninspected toxic toys and diseased lunch-room foods. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Democratic Party, PRESIDENTIAL RACE, US Government | 1 Comment »
Posted by leftofdayton on April 8, 2008
Part I
Part II
The conservative worldview has succeeded so wildly — and is still holding such tenacious sway over the ways Americans approach their current stack of problems — because the conservatives started out 30 years ago with a focused plan that put promoting their model of reality at the center of every other action. Over the past two posts, I’ve been mining the specific strategies that early planners like Paul Weyrich used to advance the conservative worldview, in the hope that we might gain some insight that will help us engage them directly on this deepest, most important territory.
Progressives will not be able to implement their vision of the future until we’re able to supplant the conservative worldview with our own. We won’t win until we take control of the discourse, offer Americans new ways to make meaning and evaluate and prioritize events, and get them to abandon conservative assumptions about how reality works.
I’d like to thank Bruce Wilson at Talk2Action again for turning me onto Eric Huebeck’s 2001 document that summarized, updated, and refocused the original Weyrich strategies. In this final piece, we’ll look some of the specific ways the conservatives structured their campaign to take their worldview to the streets, and ultimately replaced long-held democratic assumptions about government, economics, and society with the deadly and wrong-headed assumptions that now drive the thinking of the entire nation. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Democratic Party, Montgomery County Democratic Party, POLITICAL ANALYSIS, Political Corruption, Republican Party, freedom of speech | No Comments »
Posted by leftofdayton on March 27, 2008
The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and President Bill Clinton at a prayer breakfast at the White House in September 1998.
During one of the most difficult periods in the presidency of Bill Clinton, he addressed a group of clerics at an annual prayer breakfast in September 1998 just as the Starr report outlining his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky was about to be published.
Among those in attendance, was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., who is seen shaking hands with Mr. Clinton in a photograph provided today by the Obama campaign. Mr. Wright’s relationship with Senator Barack Obama, as his longtime pastor, has been the subject of considerable controversy in recent days because of incendiary excerpts of sermons Mr. Wright gave at their church, Trinity United Church of Christ, in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in BARAK OBAMA, Democratic Party, HILLARY CLINTON, Religion issues, U S Senate | No Comments »
Posted by leftofdayton on March 18, 2008
Dayton:
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown gave a rousing endorsement of the efforts of workers at the Dayton Daily News in their struggle to gain ratification of a Union contract with the Cox empire after a 21 year struggle for recognition.
Speaking to a noontime gathering of local Union representatives, including Wes Wells from the AFL-CIO, DDN employees, local elected officials Mark Owens and Nan Whaley and community activists from the Miami Valley Full Employment Council, Brown cited the union movement as a major force in creating a better life for millions of workers.
Utilizing his patented canary in a coal mine analogy, Brown talked about how miners would take one of the birds into the mine shaft and, if it got sick or died, they knew it was time to get out. “Journalists”, he said, “play that role in a democracy” alerting the citizenry to dangerous action by the governing class.
Noting that his spouse, Connie Schultz, is a member of the Newspaper Guild at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Brown spoke to that importance of journalists in protecting democracy and freedom by bringing transparency to government actions. “We need journalists to provide that check and balance between government and citizen,” he said.
Brown is a co-sponsor of the The Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800, S. 1041), supported by a in Congress, which would level the playing field for workers and employers and help rebuild America’s middle class. It would restore workers’ freedom to choose a union by:
- Establishing stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first-contract negotiations.
- Providing mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes.
- Allowing employees to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation
The Bill has passed the House of Representatives, but sponsors were unable to beat back Republican led filibustering in the Senate.
2nd and 3rd Ohio District Democratic candidates Virginia Wolfsun and Jane Mitakides made short speeches endorsing the Guild’s efforts and promising to be part of a” larger, more Democratic majority” after respectively beating “Mean Jean” Schmidt and “No Taxes for the Rich” Mike Turner in the fall elections.
Dayton Newspaper Guild president Lou Greco spoke on behalf of the the local guild, detailing the history of the fight with the Cox empire for Union recognition. “The owners should know“, he said, “we are not going to go away. 75% of eligible workers in the bargaining unit have indicated support for the Guild, and we will prevail in the end!”
Following the speeches, the group, about 75 people strong , took to the street with hand held signs in front of the DDN headquarters on South Main for a spirited moving picket line. Calling on the Cox company to negotiate now, sign the contract, demanding health care benefits for part time workers, the picketers marched back and forth for about 20 minutes, enduring a light drizzle of rain for their efforts.
Brown is scheduled to be the keynote speaker tonight at the Montgomery County Democratic Party’s Frolic for Funds at the Dayton Convention Center.
Posted in Dayton Daily News, Democratic Party, MSM/Main Stream Media, News Media, Newspaper Reporter, SHERROD BROWN | No Comments »
Posted by leftofdayton on March 16, 2008
In viewing the “race” for president this year I have been astounded by the lack of depth in the coverage given by our so called free press, the “main stream Media”.Reading for content in the local rag, the Dayton Dumb News, is a five minute blitz, leaving the reader to wonder, “where’s the Beef”?
As an equal opportunity Presidential race cynic my focus has been on countering the mythology of “free and open elections” by looking for and posting and reposting articles that define the CLASS nature of the “selection” process.
To think that we are choosing from anyone outside the ruling cabal in Washington, regardless of the smoke and mirrors and the hifalutin rhetoric, is to ignore the underlying forces that actually shape and direct the “process of democracy” in the US of A.
By Pam Martens
Source: CounterPunch
Pam Martens’s ZSpace Page
Wall Street, known variously as a barren wasteland for diversity or the last plantation in America, has defied courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for decades in its failure to hire blacks as stockbrokers. Now it’s marshalling its money machine to elect a black man to the highest office in the land. Why isn’t the press curious about this?
Walk into any of the largest Wall Street brokerage firms today and you’ll see a self-portrait of upper management racism and sexism: women sitting at secretarial desks outside fancy offices occupied by predominantly white males. According to the EEOC as well as the recent racial discrimination class actions filed against UBS and Merrill Lynch, blacks make up between 1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of stockbrokers - and this after 30 years of litigation, settlements and empty promises to do better by the largest Wall Street firms.
The first clue to an entrenched white male bastion seeking a black male occupant in the oval office (having placed only five blacks in the U.S. Senate in the last two centuries) appeared this month on a chart at the Center for Responsive Politics website. It was a list of the 20 top contributors to the Barack Obama campaign, and it looked like one of those comprehension tests where you match up things that go together and eliminate those that don’t. Of the 20 top contributors, I eliminated six that didn’t compute. I was now looking at a sight only slightly less frightening to democracy than a Diebold voting machine. It was a Wall Street cartel of financial firms, their registered lobbyists, ! and go-to law firms that have a death grip on our federal government.
Why is the “yes, we can” candidate in bed with this cartel? How can we, the people, make change if Obama’s money backers block our ability to be heard? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in BARAK OBAMA, Democratic Party, MSM/Main Stream Media, PRESIDENTIAL RACE, Political Corruption, Racism | No Comments »
Posted by leftofdayton on March 14, 2008
This is Part II of a series on the strategies used by the conservatives to promote their worldview, and the lessons progressives can learn from them to promote our own. Part I is here.
As we saw in the previous post, the entire conservative movement was organized around the single goal of changing the country’s dominant worldview, weaning it away from liberal assumptions about how the world works, and teaching Americans to assign meaning to the world using conservative values instead. They firmly (and rightly) believed that that once the rest of the country evaluated and prioritized reality the same way they did, the rest of the conservative political, economic, and social agenda could be implemented with strong popular support, and no meaningful resistance.
But the early architects of this plan, including Paul Weyrich, also realized that having strong ideas wasn’t enough. To succeed, they would also have to master the arts of persuasion.
“Ideas do not immediately have consequences,” wrote Eric Huebeck in his 2001 update of Weyrich’s long-followed plan. “They do not have an impact in direct proportion to the truth they contain. They have an impact only insofar as adherents of those ideas are willing to take measures to propagate those ideas.”
Or, as a more cynical conservative once put it: You gotta catapult the propaganda.
This may seem like heresy to liberals. We like to believe that the progressive worldview is so patently superior that intelligent people will readily see the logic of it, and then sensibly adopt it as the best way to think and live. If people resist it, it’s only because they don’t completely understand it (yet). Fixing that is simply a matter of education: we just need explain our vision more clearly. Our own resolute faith in the power of reason convinces us that reasonable people will be reasonably persuaded by reasonable discussion of reasonable ideas.
It’s time to consider the reasonable possibility that we may be wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Blue Dog Democrats, Democratic Party, POLITICAL ANALYSIS, Republican Party | No Comments »
From “Head of State“
http://headofstate.blogspot.com/2008/04/why-clinton-embellishes.html
“Sunday, April 06, 2008
We have three examples from recent days of Clinton’s modifications of the truth.
Why do they matter? One might say that many politicians are prone to factual distortions.
What is of particular importance is not only that Clinton distorts the truth, but when she does–and why.
Clinton, as many who know her well and have studied her life closely have indicated, from Dee Dee Myers to Carl Bernstein, has a fundamental difficulty in revealing herself. She is seen by even those who are closest to her as perpetually standing behind a guise, ever prepared for the attack, a characteristic regarded as at times poignant, and at other times Nixonian in its manifestations.
We know from biographies of Clinton, including Bernstein’s astute and perceptive “A Woman in Charge” that Clinton’s suffered from a harsh and judgmental father, and that this relationship had a deep and significant shaping influence.
On the one hand, it prepared her (indeed, over-prepared her) for quick response, for an all-too-ready response to attack. Yet it also created, beneath the increasingly agile guises and forms of protection, a more fundamental experience of self–that despite the greatest efforts, the most agile displays, of never being quite good enough to measure up to his judgment. This left her, as it leaves many in such circumstances, with a rueful admiration of and attachment to a seeming strength and sureness that she could never have; and underneath the formidably developed masks of intellect and defensive pretense, a fundamental fear of, in her true self, uncovered, falling short. Many have noted this quality in Clinton, and have drawn it back to this familial source.
As a consequence, beneath the feigned hardness, the feigned casualness, and beneath the years of powerfully developed yet defensively driven skills, there is a tragic, deep and, for a President, highly consequential flaw–one that is most likely to be relevant in those “3 a.m. moments” that she has so readily and repeatedly invoked.
One cannot respond with balance and wisdom from a guise. One’s own judgment is critically affected by what one feels they must display (and truly cannot), and by what they believe that they must hide.
From such a position, the “other”–be it a colleague, opponent, or one’s view of the “public” at large, is critically distorted. The other is not regarded as a fellow equal, with whom we are shouldering difficult tasks together, in order to determine a better future, but a threatening judge, to be managed and feared; whose response must be calculated to be met with the proper guise–one which must be quickly changed–or covered–if there is a danger that, beneath the mask, one will be found out.
What Clinton shares with other talented, tragic figures is a mistrust of humanity’s judgment, and, as a result, an inability to meet them with the full, uncovered gaze of a developed and accepted self. The truth, within such an uncertain experience of self and the judgment of others, is often felt to be not enough.
This is what Obama, in this revolutionary moment, to a greater extent, has. This is what people are connecting with. And, in 3 a.m. moments, this is what we need.
Cite:
Head of State