Letters to the Editor
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Brack has won
Brack has won anyway. As the first and possibly only non-mainstream candidate in a long time. Hillary shows the nature of politics whereas the Bomba shows the nature of hope. Hey, vote the future. Brack's an idea. He can win in a landslide.
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You Might Be Repetitious
brevity is the soul of wit
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Gen Y Crushes Obama (in a good way)
Agreed, save the 'epic battle' drama for the stage. Just found this from a survey of 18 - 30 year olds on a mobile community site that had their members vote on who will win tomorrow:
"Obama will win Pennsylvania in the state’s primary tomorrow by a 55% to 45% margin. The real time data was queried directly from our database and aggregated at a macro level to ensure the privacy of each community member. Members also voted on which candidate was more ‘out of touch’ and which candidate was ‘more honest.’ Interestingly, Obama was considered more out of touch at 53:47 yet only slightly more honest than Clinton at 51:49."
Details at www.hiloa.com. Hilarious.
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Are we still supposed to pretend
Hillary Clinton knows what she's doing? Someone in her campaign surely doesn't. With her latest ad, appropriately titled "Kitchen," she appropriates the crises of presidents who actually had to deal with major challenges. Yes, someone did face oil crises and Pearl Harbor. But it wasn't Hillary Clinton. If I wanted to convince you to buy my stock, could I just show you a picture of Donald Trump? Bizarre. I suspect her campaign team is in some disarray and that is why the messages are so muddled.
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Dear Pennsylvania voters,
Is all this election stuff wearing you out? Do you long to get back to watching episodes of "Lost" and talking about Hurley's love life? Do you prefer it when Bruce Springsteen sings instead of talking about his endorsement for Obama?
You can do something. Vote Obama. Sure, Hillary Clinton has her plusses. That's fine. But Obama is likely to win the election whether or not he takes Pennsylvania. Why prolong things? Vote Obama and let's get this shit over now!
Because let's face it: Hurley deserves romance with Libby.
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walkin' long the low road and what did i see?
The main difference between the end of the Pennsylvania campaign and the beginning was how nasty it got along the way. Clinton's final ad features images of Pearl Harbor, the stock market crash, the 1970s oil embargo, Osama bin Laden and Hurricane Katrina. A voiceover says, "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Who do you think has what it takes?"
Clinton aides declared in a conference call Monday that the commercial wasn't negative; it merely made the case that Hillary, not Obama, is most qualified to be president. Her campaign's phone calls to voters also accused Obama of lying about his position on gun rights.
Obama wasn't sticking to the high road, as he previously sought to do. "She is a hardworking public servant, but Senator Clinton does not understand the need to fundamentally change how Washington works," he said Monday night in McKeesport. "We can't have lobbyists and special interests setting the agenda in Washington." His campaign was running ads implying Clinton was using "fear and calculation to divide us" and making its own harsh phone calls to prospective supporters.
This writer describes Clinton's fearmongering political ad.
This writer reports that Clinton's camp lied to voters by telephone.
Then, this writer crafts a paragraph with the following topic sentence: "Obama wasn't sticking to the high road, as he previously sought to do."
And the facts that this interpretation of Obama was based on:
1) Obama claims Clinton doesn't understand the need to fundamentally change washington, that we can't have lobbyists and special interests setting the agenda in washington
Now, this is an attack on Clinton, and her worldview/philosophy, as a candidate, but reformers always run against the status quo, and I don't know that I'd call it the low road...
2) Obama accuses Clinton of using "fear and calculation to divide us" (presumably to her advantage).
This isn't really debatable, is it? Is Obama not to mention or decry these tactics?
3) his campaign was "making its own harsh phone calls to prospective supporters."
Were they harsh in the sense that callers lied to voters, or that they said unflattering things about Clinton in attempts to persuade them to vote for Obama?
And if they weren't lies but simply unflattering things, was their harshness due to the fact they unfair/sensational, or were they what neutral observers would agree were fair political arguments to make?
Given the naure of the first two, I'm not inclined to assume that "harsh" = low road here either.
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Pointing out Hillary's negatives is not "taking the low road"
Negative campaigning is that kind of "gotcha" crap and fearmongering that we see so often in campaigns. A negative commercial would go something like this:
Hillary Clinton-- PUPPY KILLER. What do we really know about Hillary Clinton? In 2002 she voted for a bill to eliminate PUPPIES!
when in (non)fact, the (imaginary) bill was to encourage spaying and neutering of pets.
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I don't know why Salon isn't embarrassed by their coverage of this election.
They should be. As already pointed out, Obama hardly deviated from the high road by mentioning Hillary's weaknesses. Another, slanted, biased article. Embarrassing.
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Have things changed that much in Pennsylvania?
30 years ago, when I used to visit Central and Western Pennsylvania, you couldn't park your car for half an hour without having some incredibly nasty racist propaganda stuck to your windshield when you came out. Maybe things have changed a lot, haven't been there in quite a while, but there was at least a highly vocal minority of people who hated blacks back then, maybe even a silent majority.
That's what you are forgetting (intentionally, I'm sure) cytherea. Obama is black. That's why he hasn't been able to put this thing away. That's what's "wrong" with him. He's a black man running for President in a country with an adult population that isn't nearly as color blind as we want people to think. Gen Y will be the difference in this election.
Does Hillary have a single proposed policy that both makes sense and can be funded? Her plans for the Middle East are sheer lunacy - the best outcome we could hope for is that they simply wouldn't work and gas prices would triple while Israel died. Her answer to every economic issue includes the unspoken promise that we are going to start printing money, because runaway inflation is what everybody needs.
Hillary rides the coat tails of "the greatest economic expansion in history", but conveniently leaves a few things out. Like the fact that for 8 glorious years we had a truly adversarial relationship between the Legislative and Executive, making her husband the near figurehead the President is supposed to be. The transition of the stock market from a tool for establishing the value of public companies to an open auction, leading to crazy stock prices that were no small part of that expansion. And the death of American manufacturing. Saying this was an economic expansion is like saying that you have increased you net worth by selling everything you own at a bankruptcy auction.
And even so, people still seem to forget that Hillary was only the First Lady. She deserves none of the credit and none of the blame for anything that went on during that administration, any more than Jackie O. could say she put a man on the moon. She isn't any more qualified than Obama. She hasn't done anything more than he has in government or politics. She isn't more experienced in anything other than the fucking circus that a presidential campaign has become.
None of the candidates are who I would have chosen to lead us out of this situation. But of the 3, Obama is the only one who isn't completely full of shit. The polls show that an awful lot of people agree with me.