It's no wonder you D's keep drop-kicking national elections. Telling us how a Rep from some district of 2,500 people in CT won is pointless. Reps and Senators are not Commanders in Chief. It's a completely different electoral paradigm. The sooner you guys get that through your head the better.

No post on Hot Off the Topic since the 11th. The kind of work he does could involve sudden extended absences, no? Hopefully that is what this is.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/SenatorObama-PleaseVoteAgainstFISA

let's see just how blatantly he can ignore his base.....

This Author is quite a "left wing nutjob", to borrow a term from left wing writers about conservatives.

He misses the obvious:

Liberals move to the Center because that is where conservative principles exist, and that is where the majority of Americans tend to place their beliefs.

Obama, during the campaign, will move to the Center because he is not a particularly principled person, and he wants to win the election.

Greenwald, good Liberal lawyer, used a thousand words to say just that.

No offense, but your writing below clearly demonstrates what is wrong with the Democratic Party today. Your blatant arrogance and Elitism is typical of Liberals, and is characteristic of your class-based viewpoint of society.

Allie Mann wrote:

"I'd love to see Obama run as a progressive, but we are not a liberal country and a good part of the electorate is not very bright."

Not very bright indeed...

I don't know if a president can pardon a corporation, as opposed to an individual. But aside from that, since the premise for absolving the telecoms of civil liability is that they were only doing what the government encouraged them to, don't they have a strong, maybe impregnable, entrapment defense? If that's true, they are effectively immune from criminal prosecution, no matter how clever Olberman may think Obama is being about hiding the criminal prosecution ball until after the election.

I'm seriously rethinking my earlier conclusion that Obama was the most likely candidate to turn the executive branch upside down and shake it to see what falls out of the crevices. The sudden appearance of the damned flag pin on his lapel was and is very worrisome, and things aren't looking any better on real, substantive issues, either. I may just sit this one out for the first time since 1960. God this is depressing.

I'm just going to drop in a few quotes from Hersh's piece about Iran to be judged in light of the Democratic capitulation on FISA.

"The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”"

"Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s."

"As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing."

"“The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not—“but now it’s a shade of mush.”

Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with Congress.

This is the administration to which the Democrats are willing to vest even more spying power and to, in effect, absolve through retroactive immunity. I wonder, why do people always see them as weak?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all

BTW, it's a great article and has some interesting backstory on Admiral Fallon's "retirement".

No offense, but your writing below clearly demonstrates what is wrong with the Democratic Party today. Your blatant arrogance and Elitism is typical of Liberals, and is characteristic of your class-based viewpoint of society.

Allie Mann wrote:

"I'd love to see Obama run as a progressive, but we are not a liberal country and a good part of the electorate is not very bright."

Not very bright indeed...

-- Historybuff1

Gordon, you wrote...

Ummm, so buff... you would posit that most of the US polpulation is above average?

Gordon...

Nope - but I wouldn't 'posit' that most of the US population is below average, either. Classifying people as 'bright' vs 'not bright' is silly. I have seen 'bright people' fail miserably and 'not-so-bright' people succeed brilliantly. Pure intelligence is not the only determinant for effectiveness, happiness, or success. This elitist argument seems to originate from Academic circles, where they confuse knowledge with wisdom.

Given his ties to big corporations like Exelon, oil company executives, and Goldman-Sachs, maybe he isn't moving to the center but returning to it after a brief, dishonest move to the left of center. Read the November 2006 Harpers article called:

Barack Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington machine

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/11/0081275

The debasement of a word that used to mean something continues to amaze. Historybuff describes the abandonment of the 4th amendment as a movement toward 'conservative principles'. Surely the most conservative principle is strict construction of the constitution? Throwing away the constitution and the rule of law is radical. Radical right, sure, but it's not conservative in any way.

But none if makes much sense. Obama has always been either in the center or a bit to the right of it, and Clinton has always been a bit farther to the right than that. But CW says that anyone to the left of Atila the Hun or Dick Cheney must be a flaming liberal.

Maybe we need to get some of those poll results and compare them to the candidates' actual positions (and actual voting history). But that would be too reality-based, I guess.