Letters to the Editor
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Lesbians Have Good Taste
She's my princess too.
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an ugly race issue...
came not from Clinton, but Post columnist Eugene Robinson.
He is really hell-bent are sliming Clinton for his comments on Jesse Jackson. But look what he said a in the summer of 2007.
ROBINSON (7/31/07): [I]sn't Obama at least a bit concerned that black voters might succumb to a kind of historical fatalism about how race works in America?
"What I see is a lot of press fascination with a black candidate who does not yet have 100 percent of the African American vote," Obama said yesterday in a telephone interview. "It's fascinating to me that people would expect that somehow I would be getting unanimous black support at this stage of the campaign, when probably only about 50 percent of black voters know much about me at all."
Obama pointed out that "black folks have known the Clintons for a long time." He also noted that when he ran for the U.S. Senate, his poll numbers among African Americans started low but later went stratospheric as voters got to know him.
Still, the Obama campaign recognizes the importance of South Carolina as the first primary state with a substantial African American electorate. A win there could resonate in other states where the black vote will be a key factor in the Democratic primary. A bad loss in South Carolina would resonate, too—not in a good way, from Obama's point of view.
Tell me this is not guilty of the very thing he criticize Clinton for.
CONCULSION: EUGENE ROBINSON was playing the race card and his criticism of Clinton is very hollow and hypocritical.
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Maybe We Should Have A Presidential
Allowing only female candidates to run. And allow only lesbians to vote. See how that turns out. Eject men totally from the process one time. America and the world couldn't turn out any worse. In fact it would have to improve.
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Lesbians for Clinton, Obama's a drug-dealer?
WTF, people? We're a step away from "didn't she kill Vince Foster?" and "He's a muslim terrorist mole!"
I'm a strong Obama supporter, but Walsh's piece was fine, as a discussion of recent California politics. Salon is not a news site - it is a site for opinion about the news. I don't care that Walsh tilts so heavily toward Clinton, as there are other writers who clearly tilt toward Obama (as they should!).
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Can Hillary really be trusted with the lives of medical marijuana patients?
I look at Salon and I honestly wonder.
Joan Walsh obviously follows the old Clinton-era philosophy that ignorance, prejudice and censorship are good things when it comes to cannabis.
That's why Salon wouldn't cover that huge breakthrough scientists made when they discovered that the active ingredients in marijuana suppress the gene that teaches breast cancer cells how to metastasize.
Do we want a government that is capable of digesting that research and making use of it to save lives?
Or do we want a government that censors this information and acts as if it never happened?
I fear that under Clinton, the whole government be just like Salon -- no cannabis science need apply, thank you.
I don't share Joan's philosophy that ignorance and prejudice and censorship can lead a society forward.
When ignorance and prejudice triumph, then death will climb on their backs and have a party.
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Spin, conscious and otherwise...
I often wonder to what extent Americans are influenced by spin. Consider the issue of Hillary's sinking poll numbers. How many people believed that Clinton actually had a 30 point lead over Obama? and if she did, what on earth did they think it meant? I'm not saying that the pollsters got it wrong (although that's always possible), but how hard can poll numbers be that early on and how valid are they as a point of departure?
I also wonder why we seem not only to spin the news and the numbers but also, consciously or not, seem to tinker with the way we spin them. For example, tomorrow if we wake up to find that Clinton has won Californina, we'll probably read something along the lines of "Clinton managed to 'eke out' a 7% point lead over her opponent, Barak Obama, in a state in which she had previously held a 30 point lead." Frankly, my impression is that most elections with a winning edge of 5% are usually trumpeted as "landslides" and "blow outs" by the MSM. So what's going on?
Part of the problem has to do with an attempt by the news media to "entertain" us, but surely part of it is driven by the tendency of the press to parrot back and eventually incorporate the views of rival political camps into an ongoing conversational schema. The 24 hour news cycle certainly aggravates this pernicious tendency, and it's not just evidenced in terms of campaign reporting. Consider the coverage of the White House, where you have Candy Crowley and friends receiving breakfast second hand from Dana Perino every morning, day in and day out, after which a grateful nation receives a third hand spew of the usual Bush lies.
You saw this in the lead up to the Nevada caucuses when the MSM were spreading the Obama talking point that as a result of the endorsement of the Culinary Workers union Obama certainly would scoop up the better part of the Latino union vote. If the MSM had only done its homework, if they had only checked things out, if they had only asked Latino voters how they intended to vote and why, they might have uncovered the fact that Clinton's support was pretty much unassailable (even in the face of what appears to have been strong pressure/or intimidation on the part of the union). Instead the MSM seemed to take the Obama camp at its word. I don't think you can account for this sort of thing by blaming politics. It arises from laziness.
Oddly, my impression is that the Obama camp seems to receive the "reporting" of the MSM as evidence of the validity of what they have been saying, when in fact, it is simply a re-cycled Obama talking point. Obama will certainly get some of the Latino vote in the West, but the idea that Latinos will march behind the existing coalition of Obama constituencies, is far fetched.
When I listen to my Latino friends in California and New Mexico I frequently hear them referencing both their numbers and what they perceive as their growing base of political power. I often hear things like "Man, there were a lot of brown faces in that crowd." It is a kind of dawning recognition of the understated power of "la raza." My sense is that Latinos are drawn to Clinton for two reasons. The Clintons were building a base in the Latino community before this election cycle started. In a sense, Latinos seem to be more interested in who they "see" in their communities than what they "hear" from someone else who drops by to make a speech, but even on the level of rhetoric, Latinos seem to be less swayed by soaring speeches importuning them to join the Obama campaign to effect "change" than with the plodding recitation of just exactly what Clinton will do for them and theirs when she is President.
I'll probably not watch the early coverage of Super Tuesday this evening. As a Clinton supporter, I find that my enjoyment when she wins is usually diminished by the overall tone with which those same wins are discussed in the MSM. So I'll probably wait until early tomorrow morning to see how things played out. I may even be wrong about how the MSM will cover Super Tuesday this evening. That would be certainly nice.
Finally, to Obama supporters, I want to assure you that while you may not be sure at this point whether you will vote for Clinton if she wins, I will vote for Obama if she loses.