Letters to the Editor
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The Photo Says It All...Barack & Two Famous Losers
Joan Walsh, you sure know how to edit a tendentious magazine.
But the subliminal attempt to equate HRC to Harry Truman makes me want to puke. She is the antithesis-incarnate of Truman: blunt, sometimes vulgar, damn-the-torpedoes Truth (Harry) vs. scheming, mendacious, self-serving Lies (Hillary.)
In fact, it is McCain who comes closest to wearing the Truman mantle, policy differences notwithstanding.
If HRC has any historical legacy, as Truman certainly does, hers will be Hillary=Lies; in contrast, Harry=Truth.
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Amen, Bern!
Stop putting women in boxes.
I keep reading the easy generalizations, and I don't think they're evidence based.
white
58
Obama voter
Loads of diverse female friends who support him, too.
I wonder what would change if Salon became a progressive and optimistic, empowering and energizing voice, rather than so sour?
It would be so wonderful if Salon led.
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O'Hehir is missing the 800 pound gorilla this time...
The right-wing media, which nearly borders on Fascism, is wholly owned by corporations, literally, 100%.
We don't have a major national daily newspaper or TV channel that devotes itself to labor issues, a news channel that focuses not on stocks "business news", or celebrity news, but directed toward working people. There are hundreds of issues the major media don't report, not the least of which is the criminal behavior of employees of the Bush Administration. Outside of Glenn Greenwald, Mother Jones, the Nation, Against the Current, Z Magazine, and some other, small left-wing American journals, virtually nothing of importance to working people gets published. Every now and then there are a few exceptions that surprise me, but for the most part, nothing.
It is indeed a vast, intellectual wasteland out there.
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Barack Obama Is Born to Lead Us Out of the Wilderness of Incompetence
Mr. O'Hehir worries that Obama will drive away white women. Women are smart. They will easily choose the competent Obama over the hot-tempered and insolvent McCain. Recall that our debt is now $9.4 Trillion and McCain likes Bush's economic policies.
Most folks see Barack Obama as a practicing Christian in style and in substance. He is a good husband to his wife and a good father to his two girls. He says "being a good father is my most important job". Devoted parents know what he means.
Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor 1993-1997, formally endorsed Obama on April 19th. The UC Berkeley Professor preferred Obama over Hillary Clinton in seven policy areas. The seven are:
1. His plans for reforming Social Security have a better chance of succeeding.
2. His plans for reforming health care also have a better chance for success.
3. His approaches to the housing crisis are sounder than hers.
4. His approaches to the failures of our financial markets are sounder.
5. His ideas for improving our public schools and confronting the problems of poverty and inequality are more coherent and compelling.
6. He has put forward the more enlightened foreign policy.
7. He has the more thoughtful plan for controlling global warming.
Mr. Reich knows the Clintons well and their relationship dates back to their law school days at Yale.
Therefore, people of all ages, all church affiliations, all sexes, can see a competent person in Mr. Obama. Barack Obama learns from the past and will not repeat the mistakes of past Democrats running for the presidency.
The Iraq War has gone on longer than World War II. We are a mostly Christian nation occupying a muslim nation that is located in the very cradle of Islam. Our primary ally, England, has trimmed its force in Iraq drastically. Other allies see our occupation in Iraq as fanning the flames of world-wide terrorism. We have lost our reputation and our treasure in Iraq. We have mistreated and mislead our troops there. McCain will lose big in this election on this issue of endless war.
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You are wrong only until you are right
This is why election season feels like an interminable in-between place, where euphoric Possibility endlessly shoulder-grapples with its logier elder, History.
Thank you for an excellent exploration of my nightmares.
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My Lord, Dems fretting when facing Jowls McNugget?
Did anyone watch ol' Jowls today? Either dem will destroy jowls in a debate. Jowls' flip flopping makes Kerry look like a two ton piece of granite. I'm waiting for someone to ask him about his stance on abortion.
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No laughing matter
@LeCastor
And some people think Obama actually represents change...
Well, they're good for a chuckle."
There will certainly be no chuckling if Kyl-Liberman, rate-freezing Clinton gets the nomination.
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I wasn't alive yet, so I asked my mom
about the McGovern thing awhile back, after I read a piece of analysis which posited that Hillary is going after Obama so tenaciously because she believes that he's another McGovern, and we all know how that turned out.
I said, "Mom, is Barack Obama another McGovern?"
She said, "No, I don't think so," but looked pensive while she said it. Some time passed. Then she said, "McGovern was kinda stink of fail."
Straight from the hippie radical's mouth. In kitty pidgin. Works for me.
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no laughing matter
I meant, of course, Kyl-Lieberman.
And, for some more good news:
'Vast right-wing conspiracy' leader's paper backs Clinton--here's the link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080420/ap_on_el_pr/clinton_endorsement
Yeah, Scaife is now backing Hillary, as if you didn't know she was a Republican ho all along. Pertinent comments from the article:
Clinton met with the Tribune-Review's editorial board, including Scaife, last month. Afterward, Scaife wrote an editorial titled "Hillary, Reassessed," declaring how impressed he had been by the former first lady.
"Her meeting and her remarks during it changed my mind about her," Scaife wrote.
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And here's why THIS is BS
The current US political cycle started around 1975. A backlash against civil rights, birth control, and related issues allowed some Americans to be manipulated by their prejudices. The existence or recent memory of the Soviet Union allowed sensible policies that work smoothly, not just in "Europe" or "Japan", but in freakin' Canada and Australia, to be falsely characterized as "socialist", and laissez-faire insanity that's elimination was required for the creation of modern capitalist economies to be advanced as a "respectable" position by "think tanks". No-one really believed in laissez-faire, of course, it was just an excuse for crony capitalism. And yes, for 30 years, all of this did indeed keep the Republicans in relative power.
Now here's the situation. Thirty years of insanity, with a fevered burst of special mania since 2001, have put the US on the brink. Almost all international prestige is gone. The economy is bad and could get much worse with ease. A war far more useless than even Vietnam has weakened the nation both economically and militarily in ways that could not have been imagined by the worst pessimist. The natural environment is in far worse shape than it ever was, despite some superficial progress in the years just before the current cycle broke.
It's conceivable that McCain could have a one term presidency similar to that of Herbert Hoover. But the rest of the world isn't spinning into a crazy war that will save the US by virtue of its relative lesser involvement this time, so failure to apply the brakes for another four years may lead to a collapse quite a bit more permanent than that of the 1930's. Even one McCain term is likely to be a disaster that, quite frankly, reverses the relative position of the US, with regard to wealth, prestige, and quality of life, with nations like Brazil, Mexico, and Russia, and for a long time to come. The objective reasons for this are that McCain won't stop the bleeding in Iraq, may block the "Bush tax cuts" from expiring, won't address health care in a way even as meaningful as a Democrat will, and may well start new "neocon" wars.
One party prescribes poison, and the other party, at a minimum, proposes to administer the poison more slowly, and possibly to do something more than that.
The US could afford to reject Dukakis for George H. W. Bush, because we hadn't polluted, bombed, and borrowed ourselves into the mess we're in now, yet.
This one is the big one. The Democrats have an excellent candidate this time. They have to win. Yes, they have to win against a propoganda media, within a population that is easily swayed by irrational fears and prejudices to vote itself out of house and home. But the race is close. This is not a time for illogical pessimism, it is a time to fight.