I am the "anonymous" immediately above. Or below, depending on which way you are threading.

Thought I'd add that when you have wanted Noam Chomsky to be president since you teethed, everything in the real world is a little bit relative. Cheers.

Hillary has 47% of the public that won't- that mean will not, anonymous pusillanimous- vote for her. So, though I will rejoice at the departure of Bushit and Dick, having Warmonger John take his place will make foreign policy- and I didn't think it possible-worse. Domestically and intellectually he'd be a quantum jump, but he's a belligerent jerk. It's not that I do not have admiration for ms Clinton and some of the things she's done (and endured), it's that I think McLame will beat her like a bass drum. I wish that weren't true. Then, at the convention they could have a ceremonial coin flip. She has more baggage than Paris Hilton going to Europe.

"Hillary has 47% of the public that won't- that mean will not, anonymous pusillanimous- vote for her."

Maybe. That's a belief. Beliefs are not facts. Please don't quote POLLS. You know better. Shifting sands.

Nobody knows.

It's gonna go the way it's gonna go, Tom. I voted Obama in part because I think you MIGHT be right. But there are a lot of unknowns there.

Hillary's dirt is already pretty old news, you know? Not much more muck to rake. Obama? Who knows?

If Hillary runs? As I said, there are a lot more cards to be played before this is said and done. I'm sure not going to eat my fooking Kumbaya until Big Bad John takes charge. I don't think he can. And that's also a tentative, hopeful belief, not a fact. Best way to serve that hope is to promote it. Seems to me.

I'm well aware of HRC's position, and thank you for pointing out that it was Bill Clinton and not Hillary who brought into effect these policies. I guess when HRC plays up her "35 years of experience," she is implicitly taking credit for her share of the entire Clinton era. Either the experience as first lady counts or it doesn't. If it does, then she has to accept the good with the bad. And the last Clinton administration threw the gay community under a bus whenever it suited them. Like the African-American community, we're apparently an insignificant minority that can be taken for granted since we'll always swing Democrat no matter what.

The difference between Clinton's and Obama's stances on the major gay issues is negligible. But let me tell you something about HRC since she's been on the campaign trail that infuriated me, and two things about Obama that impressed me. First, the HRC thing. A few months ago, the outgoing JCS chairman, Marine general Peter Pace, made a public statement that he was against gays serving in the military because homosexuality is immoral. All the Democratic presidential candidates were asked whether they agreed with Peter Pace. Only John Edwards quickly and unequivocally answered "No," he disagrees that homosexuality is immoral. Obama spent a day avoiding the question and then finally answered "no," albeit through a spokesperson. That pissed me off, and for several months afterwards I was trending Edwards. But Clinton was the one that made me just LIVID. You know what she did? She waited until Sen. John Warner denounced the remarks, and then said, "I join my Republican colleague Senator Warner in disagreeing with General Pace's remarks." I mean, after everything the gay community has done for the Clintons (and I know gay people who gave their campaign money in lieu of buying a car or re-doing their kitchen), she can't even answer a question like *that* without grabbing a nearby Republican for political cover??

Obama had a couple more missteps with the gay community, like reaching out to that "ex-gay" evangelical singer, and again, for a long while I wrote both of them off as candidates. But in the meantime, my partner and I jawboned a friend of ours who had gone to school with Obama, and it became apparent to me over time that Obama simply hadn't had enough experience dealing with the gay community and that these missteps arose from a simple lack of awareness as to why we would find certain things offensive. Well, I guess our friend eventually had words with him. Next thing I know, he's going on the freakin' Christian Broadcasting Network explaining how his Christian beliefs lead him naturally to the conclusion that he should support civil unions, because how Christian is it to prevent someone from visiting a sick loved one in the hospital?

Whoa! It's one thing to state support for civil unions when Melissa Etheridge is the one doing the questioning. It's completely another to journey into the belly of the beast and actually say something positive about gays when no gays were around. So that impressed me. And yet I was still a fence-sitter.

Then came Martin Luther King day. On MLK day, Obama spoke at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, a large, predominantly African-American church in the DC metro area. Now, bear in mind that this was at a time where perhaps Obama could be relatively confident in getting the African-American vote; however, I still wouldn't say he had that vote "sewn up." Also, bear in mind that, these days, there are few people leading a more tortured spiritual existence than Black gay evangelicals; their whole community is the church, and in so many of these churches they are treated to the most vile, Fred-Phelps-level attacks on their sexual orientation on almost a weekly basis. These are the types of people that Dubya was able to peel off in 2004 by launching his attack on same-sex marriage.

So, in the course of this 20-minute speech in THE African-American evangelical church on THE day, Obama suddenly makes the gratuitous comment that "we have left our gay brothers and sisters out in the cold." No one put him up to that! No one had posed a question about gays, and no one in the predominantly white wealthy gay community that tends to channel gay dollars to political campaigns would have put him up to that. He just seemed to recognize that this was something worth saying, so he said it. I could only think, WOW. And I can assure you, there are many in the gay community who feel the same way.

Look these up. I'm sure they're on YouTube.