Letters to the Editor
Alan Lloyd
Published Letters: 294 Editor's Choice: 63
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I was a 14 year old kid on the West Side of Chicago...
[Read the article: Appreciating Obama's win in South Carolina]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was up late one night, watching some forgettable movie. It was early in the summer of 1968, and the year had already been badly bruised in my idealistic young eyes by the assassination of Dr. King in Memphis. Not to mention the trauma of seeing my city in flames in the terrible aftermath.
The movie stopped mattering forever when the local news shop broke the story of the shooting of Robert Kennedy and his subsequent death.
I was two election cycles from being able to vote for a President, and the candidate I'd have voted for if I could had just been killed.
Never since then have I felt as inspired. Never since then have I seen a candidate who had actual "street time" face-to-face with workaday Americans.
Until now.
Barack Obama went from Harvard Law to the South Side of Chicago and got into the lives of people the Clintons would only ever look at from their limousine windows.
Do I agree with him on everything? Probably not. Will I be an uncritical supporter of his every move? Most likely not. Will he at times disappoint me once he is President? Almost certainly.
What matters is this: What I see in Sen. Obama is someone who appeals to the better nature of people. In no other candidate running on either side of the fence do I see this. It's been 40 years and I'm glad I can see it again in someone.
And frankly, I'm tired of defending the Clintons. I don't want those days back again. They are running on bringing back the past, Sen. Obama is running on taking us forward into a better future. My vote is his.
And I know other people who, like me, may very well not vote for a presidential candidate at all if Sen. Clinton is at the top of the ticket. I'll go to the polls, in order to defeat Norman "Quimby" Coleman, to be sure, and to give my Representative an even higher vote count than she's ever had before. I'll just probably leave the top of the ticket blank.
There's some of that idealistic 14 year old kid remaining, even 40 years on...
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Heard on CNN this morning
[Read the article: Egypt's Gaza nightmare]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I heard on CNN this morning that the number of rockets going from Gaza into southern Israel had dropped significantly.
I'm not really trying to equate correlation and causation here, still, isn't it at least worth a closer look? Might it not be that if the Gaza Palestinians had something even incrementally closer to what most of us consider a "normal life" the number of "incidents" would drop somewhat?
I offer a suggestion: Watch the openness of the border, and note the number of rockets, and see if that number increases when the border is closed, as it will very likely be at some point. Then take from that observation the possible conclusion that opening Gaza to the outside had a positive effect and act accordingly.
Another, even more "blue-sky" suggestion: The best way to turn off the intifada might well be for every adult Palestinian to have both a full-time and a part-time job. (Real jobs, that is.) I suspect the number of "incidents" then would be significantly lessened.
Discuss.
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Headlines, and their "whys".
[Read the article: Obama and the Kennedy legend]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is, after all, a private citizen. She is the daughter of an assassinated President, quite well accomplished in her own right, and still, a private citizen.
Edward Kennedy is the second-longest-serving Democratic Senator in US history.
Both endorsements matter, and the endorsement of such a Senator (in fact, of any Senator) can, in this and most cases, reasonably be expected to garner more headlines. That's the way of the news business.
And in the end, each of them has one vote to cast in their respective primary elections.
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Her way or the highway?
[Read the article: Clinton's primary night gambit]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I get the impression Sen. Clinton hopes that if the nomination she (erroneously) believes she rightfully deserves does not come to her, that the Dems lose in November. To accomplish this, she will, as she has, encourage her surrogates and supporters to trash Sen. Obama to the point where he would arrive at the general election damaged enough to lose. If she didn't want to approach things this way, all it would require is a simple directive from her to stop it.
Say what you will about Sen. Obama, he has not descended, and will not descend, to the trailer-park level of politics the Clintons have employed.
I further suspect that in the event of an Obama nomination, the Clinton camp will (vocally) withhold their active support in the general, preferring to watch the Republicans take the White House again, so she can try in 2012 as the Dems' "white knight" after four more years of Republican malfeasance.
It is not a stretch to believe this. And America deserves better than someone who believes the Presidency is hers by some perverse right of succession.
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@ logicalresponse
[Read the article: Clinton's primary night gambit]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A report out of Hillary Clinton's campaign says that Obama ran an ad in Florida. Has anyone seen a follow up on that?
When you run national ads, as he has done, one of the consequences is that they will play in places where they would not if it had been a local buy.
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Definition of a band manager:
[Read the article: U2's crazy manager wants to go after tech firms]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Someone who can't understand why a bunch of musicians are getting 85% of his money.