Greenwald continues to drive the point home that Barack Obama's policy to assassinate US citizens he believes to be threats is the sort of distopian nonsense "liberals" used to, um, care about.
As always with this topic, it's worthwhile to recap the worldview of many Democrats (including Barack Obama) on such matters:
Asked if the stimulus bill was too small, [White House press secretary Robert] Gibbs says: "I think it makes sense to step back just for a second. ... Nobody had, in January of 2009, a sufficient grasp of ... what we were facing." He adds that any stimulus was "unlikely to fill" the hole the financial meltdown created.
"What the Recovery Act did was prevent us from sliding even into a deeper recession with greater economic contraction, with greater job loss than we have experienced because of it," he says.
I came across this moving story at beginnertriathlete.com, "So proud of my wife."
Poster "pga mike," whose profile says he's a professional triathlete, has a huge reason to be proud. Here's his wife Laura, comforting a triathlete from an earlier wave who is having a very hard time, has turned around, and is ready to quit her attempt to become an Iron Girl.
(The picture seems to be from this past weekend's AFLAC Iron Girl Columbia Triathlon in Columbia, MD.)
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Was this actually happening? Did a woman decide to quit the triathlon within minutes of her race? What happened to her? Did she somehow get injured during the swim? Had someone kicked her in the head and given her a concussion? I knew that could have been a real possibility. I had so many questions about what I was seeing and I was very curious about what was going on. Wait! There's my friend Laura and she is talking to her. Maybe they know each other. Maybe Laura will turn around and yell for a medic...but she's not. They are just talking. Okay, Laura must know her because now she is giving the woman a hug. Number 858 looks petrified! I really wish I could hear what was being said. Oh, wait, there she goes. She has started swimming again. WHAT JUST HAPPENED????
For the remainder of the race I was perplexed. I knew I had to find Laura as soon as she crossed the finish line to calm my curiosity, but unfortunately I never saw her.
That evening I sat down on my computer and typed a note to Laura asking her about the situation and the story she told me brought tears to my eyes. You see, Laura didn't know this woman at all. Number 858 had started her swim and then decided she couldn't do it and started heading back to the start line to quit the race. Laura stopped her and gently reminded her that she had trained hard for this race and today she was going to become an IRON GIRL! Laura then proceeded to give her a big hug and briefly talked about the different strokes she could do to get to the finish. She pointed out the closest kayak which was there for safety and she encouraged the girl to just go do it! Number 858 turned around and began swimming freestyle. Of course, everyone that heard this story was interested in whether she had completed the race or not and, sure enough, she completed the race that day (in pretty good time) and became an IRON GIRL!
The context is that the Columbia Tri is a "sprint," or short triathlon with a 0.62mi swim, 17.5mi bike leg, and a 3.4mi Run. It's the length new triathletes race, and the one where a lot of people face tougher challenges than they've ever faced in competition. An open water swim is mentally tough for most newbies, and even veterans will freak out if something goes wrong, like they have an inner ear problem and lose their balance.
Iron Girl (she's one now!!!) 858 overcame an tough, amazing challenge, and like a lot of regular people I've see overcome adversity in a triathlon, I can't find the words to say how impressed I am. I'm a lot more impressed with them, than I am with those of us who breeze through or even earn a spot on the podium.
Who is more heroic, Laura, "pga mike's" wife, for setting aside her own concerns and caring about athlete 858, or Iron Girl 858 for facing and overcoming an incredible challenge? I can't say. They both give us an example to aspire to.
I'm sure I'm not the only guy who looked in the dictionary and found that I'm a feminist (as are, nearly by definition, most Hillary people) because I believe in gender equality under the law. Maybe future nominee Palin doesn't own a dictionary, or have Internet access with whatever phone she uses to tweet.
(And yeah, yeah, our side isn't that much better. Palin seems to be in a race to the bottom with her competition).
Like during the '08 Dem Primary, pro-Obama institutional bias is still absurd, so absurd that from the outside looking in, FauxNews finds itself reporting straight news. Crazy. When the GOP is directly invested in a story, Fox is a point-of-view outlet - otherwise, it can have a sort of bemused clinical detachment. When SNL was making fun of the NBC networks' crush on Obama, FoxNews seemed gleeful at being the only network to be able to report the straight story.
Fox and Friends anchor Alisyn Camerota grabbed the caucus story and did an truly impressive job with the arc, from Iowa to Denver to the Change Commission smokescreen.
Here's the final segment from this series, Will Bower talking about the Kabuki theater masking Dem Party corruption:
As Ms. Sanford says, pledged delegates in TN are required by law to cast votes as pledged on the first two ballots, to respect the 22,000 voters they each represent.
The reason this is so significant is that after the party inevitably seated Michigan and Florida, even after vote fabrication at the RBC meeting, the gap in pledged delegates was only 17, with neither candidate having enough votes for the nomination.
That's why Obama and the party tried to lock things up by depriving Hillary voters of a floor vote: it was risky to allow the convention delegates to vote as required by party rules and state laws. That "17" had to be hidden from view at all costs because it illuminated the illegitimacy and opacity of Obama's "win." His inevitability was nothing more than a Potemkin Village facade, but a facade the media was happy to prop up. We knew the media was all in for this when there was zero skepticism when the party wasn't counting Florida, and wouldn't facilitate a second legal vote. It was always an illusion that Florida (and Michigan) voters would not count, and the media played its role to perfection.
Media bias and torrents of campaign contributions are not the friends of voters, and not good for what we'd like our democracy to be.
As I've mentioned over the past two years, a huge unreported part of what happened to Hillary's voters in '08 happened at the convention, which was, for Team Obama, the ultimate caucus. Votes? 22,000 per delegate? Steal 'em!
Two VERY impressive members of Hillary's 300 are going to be on Fox and Friends at about 8:40 EDT tomorrow morning telling what happened in their delegations.
In our Internet poll, conducted by Synovate-eNation, Clinton was the overwhelming choice to take on and beat Obama across every demographic when compared to four other prominent Democrats, including former Vice President Al Gore. She did very well among the poor, those aged 55-64, families with children, minorities, and the unemployed.
"Very well" with the base of the party, just like '08. Like most surveys, class doesn't seem to bubble to the top, but the working class and the poor vote overwhelmingly for traditional FDR Dems, given the chance.
That's, IM-not-so-HO why the Obama wing latched onto caucuses: they finally found the one way to nullify working class votes. They wouldn't stand a chance if every vote were by ballot, protected by law, and they'd gnash their teeth to stubs as we kept nominating people like FDR, Truman, LBJ, Clinton, Gore and Hillary.
I was on this morning refuting Obama campaign representative Steve Hildebrand.
It's hard to tell how much he knows from these clips, but by his body language and misdirection, it's probably a lot. It's only a matter of time before a Hildebrand finds it in his or her best interest to spill the beans.
Update:
Here's Harold Ickes talking about the RBC highjacking the Michigan election:
... got picked up at 3:30, went to LA, sat in a small dark room for a few minutes....
I was pretty happy at laying out the high points for Alisyn Camerota. She's quite a bit sharper than most journalists I know. Talking earlier this week, she understood what can be a very complicated story, and was able to easily understand the high points on her own.
And a new CNN/Opinion Research Poll has just revealed that even today Americans like that other Democrat more and dislike that other Democrat less than they do the incumbent Democratic president.
That other Democrat is, of course, Hillary Clinton, who fought and scratched her way mightily but unsuccessfully through those bitter, belligerent Democratic primaries and caucuses of 2008. The former first lady and current secretary of State professes no intra-mural interest in challenging her White House boss, as she must as long as she's an administration team member.
The published CNN article focused on an Obama matchup with Sarah Palin. But within the data were Favorable/Unfavorable ratings for numerous prominent politicians of both parties. Here are the surprising new poll numbers for Clinton:
61% now think favorably of the former senator and only 35% unfavorably, both numbers improved from the 56% and 40% she had during the Democratic National Convention in late August of 2008.
An early 2012 political button
It is, on one level, an impressive turnaround for the once polarizing political figure.
And on another level it's a comment on the polarity of the political climate presided over by someone who promised to bring people together and change Washington's harsh partisan tone, another postponed campaign vow like eliminating Guantanamo and "Don't Ask-Don't Tell."
By comparison, in the same CNN poll, 57% of Americans now think favorably of Obama, down from 78% just before his inauguration; and 41% now think unfavorably of him, more than twice his unfavorable rating of early 2009.
Unlimited dumping looks to have made environmentalists at the cesspool go so far past PUMA, they can't see PUMA with without squinting.
In a baffling reversal on yet another environmental issue, the Obama administration has decided to defend in court a Bush-era regulation that allows unlimited dumping fo hard rock mining waste on public land, in Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management holdings.
Screen names will be changed, activists will shake their little fists.
It's good, I suppose, that easily mislead "progressives," are souring on their corporate candidate, but they have a way to go before they realize all this going to China stuff would never have happened if we were the majority opposition, or better yet, had we elected a Democrat.
We have to keep pointing this out for people with willfully short memories: we knew the Movement of One would wreck the party and wrote countless posts about it; the result of what was purely impulsive vanity will be that we not only lost a Dem presidency, we'll lose the ability to have a majority opposition.
A new CNN / Opinion Research Poll out this afternoon of 953 registered voters nationally finds Obama tied at 47% with any Republican candidate. Gee, if only Wendell Willkie was still around.
The same poll also finds a clear majority of Americans now believe that Obama is a one-term president.
Other than that things are looking great for the 14-month-old Democrat administration, which is still celebrating Sunday's passage of a massive healtcare bill that most Americans don't seem to like.
And confronts crucial midterm elections come November when the White House party historically loses an average of 16 House seats.
These polls are pretty silly, as the LAT's tone implies, but still...
"The truth is this is a Republican idea," said Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association. She said she first heard the concept of the "individual mandate" in a Miami speech in the early 1990s by Sen. John McCain, a conservative Republican from Arizona, to counter the "Hillarycare" the Clintons were proposing.
McCain did not embrace the concept during his 2008 election campaign, but other leading Republicans did, including Tommy Thompson, secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush.
Seeking to deradicalize the idea during a symposium in Orlando in September 2008, Thompson said, "Just like people are required to have car insurance, they could be required to have health insurance."
Among the other Republicans who had embraced the idea was Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts crafted a huge reform by requiring almost all citizens to have coverage.
"Some of my libertarian friends balk at what looks like an individual mandate," Romney wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2006. "But remember, someone has to pay for the health care that must, by law, be provided: Either the individual pays or the taxpayers pay. A free ride on government is not libertarian."
Now that they got their way, they're suing, calling Obamacare, an, "unprecedented encroachment on the liberty of individuals."
Yes, we're back! We were part of the freebie legacy SoapBlox system, and we got deleted during a system upgrade. We were the last, or one of the last, SoapBlox lite sites, no longer compatible with current server software. The gnomes were unable to reload the old site, so we're transitioning to a full ($) SoapBlox account. All the old dairies and comments are supposed to be around somewhere, but the front page settings and graphics got ditched.
We have a lot of balls in the air, but in the next few days we'll get back to normal, as a major Clinton Wing discussion forum.
For now, please be patient if things don't work right for a while.
For anyone older or savvier than the median Obama voter, this was as sure as the sun will rise. So much for transcending ideology:
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors right-wing extremist activity, finds "that an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) - a 244% jump" from 2008.
There's a lot of commentary about how conservatives are hamstrung when talking about race, or issues that touch on race at all - immediately, they're accused of racism. But I think that militia/right-wing extremism presents a comparable rhetorical problem for the left. Pointing out that militia activity or conspiracy-mongering is on the rise is, as we saw last year, seen a slander on Americans who criticize the government, an attempt by liberals to rule all of that out of bounds.
The fringe right is nuts and fantasizes about civil war, and in style of thinking, isn't that far off of the conservative mainstream, such as it is. The paradox about militia activity and right wing discontent is that it is diffused when the left is tough, not namby pamby. That's why, when the the Contract With On America was flying high, militia associate Timothy McVeigh struck OKC, and the militia movement grew like roadside weeds after a summer rain. When Clinton dug in and out-maneuvered the right in subsequent political battles, the right was humilated, lost traction, piped down, and saw less than 30% public approval in the impeachment era. The partisan conflicts of the late '90s were a good thing.
Obama's leadership-free style, and Dem Congressional impotence, is dangerous and will result in more right wing terrorism than if our side acted like it had a spine.
Reason #371 why the O'fanbots don't have enough sense to choose an adequate leader.
One other point on the public option: This has been a complete and utter failure of White House leadership. They need to give this effort their support, or they need to kill it by publicly stating their opposition. But they can't simply wait for someone else to make the decision for them, which has been their strategy until now.
* just to be clear, my definition of "going PUMA," is leveling self-evident criticism similar to, or stronger than what the prematurely right 18,000,000 did two years ago. The point, of course, is that new media opinion makers are late to the mainstream, just like corporate media was on FL 2000, conventional terrorism, WMD, OH 2004, 2008 bias....
And just like in corporate media, the Ezras are only taken seriously if they're wrong on the major issues.
"Always aim high, work hard, and care deeply about what you believe in. When you stumble, keep faith. When you?re knocked down, get right back up. And NEVER listen to anyone who says you can't or shouldn't go on."
Hillary Clinton - June 7, 2008
