How's that.

I've suggested that there be such a thread for each sides where those can discuss and debate issues free and clear of attacks from the Hillary crowd.

Sure... arguing can be fun sometimes but it isn't fun when Hillary supporters are so blind that they cannot objectively look at any issue and refuse to see the truth when it hits them square between the eyes. To be fair, I'm sure they say the same about us and that's alright by me.

So... thanks CO for mentioning the suggestion again... and welcome to all who support Hillary. I wish we could truly make the thread (or better yet a whole topic section) private.

Well, I'm going to see if anyone bothers to post.

If not... well, we'll know that everyone prefers to argue.

Guess I'm one of the few that would enjoy a respite from the hostility.

I see you there TROU !!!

Welcome... since you are now officially an Obama supporter !!!

I can usually tell by the topic, nevermind the poster, if it's going to be an anti Hillary or an anti Obama post. You know what I do? I don't read them, anymore. It actually works!

Nah Nah!

Clinton camp argues Obama is falling
Email|Link|Comments (0) Posted by Foon Rhee, deputy national political editor March 20, 2008 11:09 AM While not specifically mentioning the contretemps involving Barack Obama's former pastor, Hillary Clinton's campaign is already pressing the case that the polls are showing its impact -- and raising questions about what that will do to Obama's electability in November.

Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist, issued a memo this morning that argues that polls are starting to show a shift her way.

"The more that the voters learn about Barack Obama, the more his ability to beat John McCain is declining compared to Hillary," Penn posits in the memo. "For a long time we have explained that poll numbers for a candidate who has not yet been vetted or tested are not firm numbers, and we are beginning to see that clearly."

The memo cites several polls -- nationwide and in key upcoming states -- that show Clinton leading Obama and Clinton faring better against presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.

"Ultimately, this Democratic nominating process is meant to select the candidate who will: a) be the best president – the best commander-in-chief, steward of the economy, and exercise leadership; defeat John McCain; and c) promote and defend core Democratic principles such as universal health care. On all three fronts, Hillary is the best choice for the Democratic Party," Penn writes.

But no polls have come out yet measuring the impact of Obama's much-praised speech on race Tuesday in which he condemned the inflammatory remarks of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., but sought to place them in a larger context of America's racial history and challenges.

I think it will take some weeks for this to all play out... until the mainstream coverage of it dies away... and the speech has time to be absorbed... and people have digested it all. Then we'll see how much damage has been done.... and how much recovery Obama can make.

Count me present. And I like the company .. I am not surprised at all to see TRoU here. He may well be among the wisest of us all.

The ripping apart has to stop . Or we can all get ready for the McCain Inauguration. If this forum is indicative of the wisdom of the electorate.

God save me from the self righteous and the blind.

CO...

You may wish to read another thread... TROU and I found common ground... at least tentatively.

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...showtopic=89312

Count me in

The polls are already on the upswing

Hillary took her best shot, and she failed. End of story.

If anyone disrupts this thread, start another one

We should have sideways threads

We can put # posts in titles

So that way only the first posts continue the story and we get our points across

Any polls to post yet Graham ?

Is this for Clinton supporters or Obama supporters?

Rasmussen (who is conservative and for McCain) is very slick

He has in print updated the #s for it

But in his graph he left it bare after the 18th (two days ago) when Hillary was only down by one

Now she is down by 3 so he got a rise each day

And is rising back to his largest point of 8 about a week or two ago

But remember, Hillary had led Obama by 20 points and she never once got over 50 even the last few days

So her bounce is losing its air

You both may be 100% correct. My one reservation is hitting the electorate with both contentious issues on the same ticket. I'm not as certain that is feasible.

Giving the RR both to go after could be fatal.

But .. what other options are left ?

I do know I'd hate to be Obama in a Clinton Presidency. A VP being worth as much as a pitcher of warm spit would be overstatement in that scenario. And he could well find that soul destroying. I am not sure anyone has the right to wish that on him.

What I find infinitely sad is that they could have accomplished so much, with a Democratic Congress and Clinton as Majority Leader. Health care could have become a reality. And world opinion would have shifted in a millisecond.

Gore !!!

But other than that unlikely prospect, I believe that it may be the only way to bring the party together and keep Dems excited enough to drive turnout in the general.

Anyone ideas ? Anyone ?

Silly man... don't you know watching or participating in a lynching is so much more inspiring ?

These guys should really be attending the meetings where the Clinton campaign reps are trying to convince the PTB and the Supers that this is a killer for Obama.

The press has been reporting this is what's going on today. They have to move fast .. before the after speech polls are published. I'm beginning to think Karl Rove should take lessons from Clinton. He isn't even in her league.

Yeah... I'm sure it's a mad scramble to try to make a point before the polls start to rebound for Obama. They are bound to bounce and the bounce may be more than expected.






I'm beginning to think that HC may have a few adversaries among the PTB.

Perception is most of the game

Bush got America to think he won in 2000 and did all he could to keep that illusion

If Obama keeps the Popular vote, HIllary has nothing left

Bush in 2000 was ready to claim a fraud vote had he won the popular and Gore won the electoral too

Soundbytes is what has killed the country
Used to be you made your own mind up by watching
the 24.7.365 has destroyed everyting

Because WE are told what we saw was not so

And look how both Bush and Hillary manipulated the press

All Hillary had to do was whine the press is unfair and in a second, it went 100percnet anti-Obama

Sweet...

I just wanted to raise my hand for role call!


Also......I love the waaaaave, Peg!

Count me in! This is so much more civil. I was ready to quit checking the forum at all since it was getting so out of hand and threads were disappearing. I really like my candidate and am so proud of his brilliant speech. Maybe if some of these people actually listened to the whole thing they might start thinking about it. It was "deep" and many are just not ready for that (so trained in 20 second sound bytes). A real speech with depth. We could actually have a leader, a real leader. After all these years we deserve this. It will be a whole new world to work together and step out of our comfort zones to love our neighbors.

I'm posting this here so it is not upsetting to others. I do hope some will read it at least.

IMO it adds some badly needed perspective.


March 20, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama and Race

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Barack Obama this week gave the best political speech since John Kennedy talked about his Catholicism in Houston in 1960, and it derived power from something most unusual in modern politics: an acknowledgment of complexity, nuance and legitimate grievances on many sides. It was not a sound bite, but a symphony.

But the furor over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s inflammatory sermons shows that Mr. Obama erred in an earlier speech — the 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention that catapulted him to fame.

In that speech, Mr. Obama declared that “there is not a black America and a white America... . There’s the United States of America.” That’s a beautiful aspiration, and we’re making progress toward it. But this last week has underscored that we’re not nearly there yet.

The outrage over sermons by Mr. Wright demonstrates how desperately we as a nation need the dialogue about race that Mr. Obama tried to start with his speech on Tuesday.

Many well-meaning Americans perceive Mr. Wright as fundamentally a hate-monger who preaches antagonism toward whites. But those who know his church say that is an unrecognizable caricature: He is a complex figure and sometimes a reckless speaker, but one of his central messages is not anti-white hostility but black self-reliance.

“The big thing for Wright is hope,” said Martin Marty, one of America’s foremost theologians, who has known the Rev. Wright for 35 years and attended many of his services. “You hear ‘hope, hope, hope.’ Lots of ordinary people are there, and they’re there not to blast the whites. They’re there to get hope.”

Professor Marty said that as a white person, he sticks out in the largely black congregation but is always greeted with warmth and hospitality. “It’s not anti-white,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who’s white who walks out of there not feeling affirmed.”

Mr. Wright has indeed made some outrageous statements. But he should be judged as well by his actions — including a vigorous effort to address poverty, ill health, injustice and AIDS in his ministry. Mr. Wright has been frightfully wrong on many topics, but he was right on poverty, civil rights and compassion for AIDS victims.

What should draw much more scrutiny in this campaign than any pastor’s sermons is the candidates’ positions on education, health care and poverty — and their ability to put those policies in place. Cutting off health care benefits for low-income children strikes me as much more offensive than any inflammatory sermon.

Many white Americans seem concerned that Mr. Obama, who seems so reasonable, should enjoy the company of Mr. Wright, who seems so militant, angry and threatening. To whites, for example, it has been shocking to hear Mr. Wright suggest that the AIDS virus was released as a deliberate government plot to kill black people.

That may be an absurd view in white circles, but a 1990 survey found that 30 percent of African-Americans believed this was at least plausible.

“That’s a real standard belief,” noted Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a political scientist at Princeton (and former member of Trinity church, when she lived in Chicago). “One of the things fascinating to me watching these responses to Jeremiah Wright is that white Americans find his beliefs so fringe or so extreme. When if you’ve spent time in black communities, they are not shared by everyone, but they are pretty common beliefs.”

Occasionally, we’ve had glimpses of this gulf between white and black America. Right after the O.J. Simpson murder trial, a CBS News poll found that 6 out of 10 whites thought that the jury had reached the wrong verdict, while 9 out of 10 blacks believed it had decided correctly. Many African-Americans even believe that the crack cocaine epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States government to destroy black neighborhoods.

Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black perspectives.

What’s happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck.

All of this demonstrates that a national dialogue on race is painful, awkward and essential. And that dialogue needs to focus not on clips from old sermons by Mr. Wright but on far more urgent challenges — for example, that about half of black males do not graduate from high school with their class.

Then maybe we can achieve our goal of getting, finally, to the point where there is “not a black America and not a white America... . There’s the United States of America.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/opinion/...amp;oref=slogin

I thought it was a brilliant speech too. Some would criticize it no matter what he said, but I'd venture to say that anyone would be hard pressed to do it better. It is a difficult issue and many don't acknowledge that... and given the sensitivity to the race issue it would be hard to please everyone.

The thing that most people don't get, or don't want to get is that Obama is uniquely aware of race issues by his own bi-racial experience. I've not seen or heard anything to suggest that he holds any animus toward any group. No matter what he was exposed to it is clear that he didn't accept it.

There is no way to "win" on an issue like this as there will always be those who would never be satisfied no matter what he said or did. I think he did as good a job that anyone could have. Most importantly, I believe he was honest.

Great post CO.

You know, what I find ironic is that Obama's message of hope may have been born in the sermons of Wright.... whose words are now being used to tear Obama down.

It is clear that Obama absorbed the positive of Wright's messages...and not the negative.

Did you see in the midst of the hostile threads

Rev. Wright appeared at the White House in 1998 with Bill Clinton and Hillary the weekend after monika, one of the preachers who was hired to make sure Bill's sorry ass was saved and to show he didn't have to quit

Imagine the hypocricy of that...

He was good enough to be in Bill's inner circle at the White House

Amazing the hypcricy

Sure is.

I wonder what the Clintonites would say to diss this. I just wonder.

Obama should run that picture 24/7/365

and it should remind people of Bill's Monika moments too

Hypocrites

In the White House...one would think that should be worse

No wonder Hillary tried to hide these papers

They will show us things for weeks and weeks and weeks

And I wonder what was redacted from those papers...we need to know

sounds like an ad for athletic wear. Obama's supporters

I'm also not posting this elsewhere because I know it will be perceived as hate speech but ..

We were watching Olbermann 's 10 PM show. He got a bulletin passed to him during the telecast identifying the lower level supervisor who was in charge of the consular contractors who were fired and who didn't pass it up the chain. She has since retired. She was appointed an Ambassador to Uruguay ( I think he said) by President Bill Clinton. Also the dates of the snooping according to Angela Mitchell relate exactly to right after he won Iowa, after he won Wisconsin and Virginia, and then last Friday. May be nothing of course but it is a strange coincidence.

Interesting.

I don't believe in coincidences...

I do hope they investigate this thoroughly.

I put up a post and so did Lenal

Hillary not only needs to resign, she should be brought up on charges, impeached and jailed for these dirty tricks

Hillary and Poppy 41, same ole' same ole'

The Clinton's won't talk themselves out of this one

As soon as I read CO's post about the timing of the passport breach, your comment above was the precise statement that came into my mind. No coincidence -- just a cause and effect. Hopefully the truth will unfold to determine who was what.

This is bigger than Watergate

This can bring the last 28 years down

And give us real change

The smoking gun

ALERT

NON OBAMA SUPPORTER LURKING
NON OBAMA SUPPORTER LURKING
NON OBAMA SUPPORTER LURKING

DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER

The State Dept snoopers were contract workers. That means they were not regular government employees. I wonder if they even knew the rules about looking up famous people's names in the passport system. Thats the problem with contract workers, they work for the contractor not the Government. There is not much anyone can do to them. Perhaps their contract was expireing and it did not matter to them that they were fired.

It has been proven to be a Clinton appointee that was behind it
One he had as an ambassador

This will be bigger than Watergate

Then the Clinton person should have looked up the stuff himself.

I don't know about Watergate, but this reminds me more of the Nixon enemies list. On the otherhand, this should come as no surprise. The incident is also reminiscent of the Clinton Travel office firings; and the Clinton review of 800 FBI files during Bill's tenure.

Don't get carried away with this . Even Olbermann said it might not be significant.


Why would it be three different individuals if this was the case? That's not being too cautious if it was sinister in intent.

Her not passing it up the chain as should have been done with the first two instances may be intentional but that could be nothing more than covering her ass.

Normal procedure is for the IG to investigate and her not passing it up the chain forestalled that . The IG wasn't told till yesterday.

All I am saying is wait for more concrete information before jumping to conclusions.

The strange part is that it was a leak from the WH to the Washington Times that triggered all of this yesterday.

A voice of reason.

I'm not jumping to conclusions either... but will say it looks suspicious.

Waiting and watching.

As it now appears this is not just Obama it may be just a case of incompetence. I posted elsewhere.. now they are saying Clinton's was breeched in 2007 and McCain's has been breeched as well.

I'd say there are some serious security issues and somebody needs to be raked across the coals for this...

Oh, I forgot... this is all OK now... Bush said so.



BTW - I started a new thread that raises some questions... but amazingly, hardly anyone is responding. Hmmmmm... wonder why ?

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...showtopic=89370

I think what is significant is the incompetence of the State Department.

Why do we have so many contractor employees of the State Department?

Why can't we have full time staff who know how to use the computer systems?

Has Bush outsourced the whole f^@$ing government to contractors...

Yes... it's a part of Bush's Friends and Family outsourcing plan.

Did you miss the Exeuctive Order that Bush recently signed that outsourses the job of POTUS and contracts with Bush for the next 20 years...

Are you trying to give Graham a heart attack ?

I will never understand if I live to be 200 how I could have been so blind. I'm considered a fairly intelligent woman and a better than average judge of people.

Boy !! is that assessment ever out of whack!

I always knew there was latent insidious racism in a lot of people, and not just in the US. But in Canada as well despite the fact we are a multicultural nation and profess to be proud of that fact.. I thought , and really believed that was confined to the yahoos and rednecks. And by rednecks I am NOT referring to only those in the US but entering this forum these days and seeing some of the thread headers makes me feel ill.

The sooner we oldsters are gone off this planet the better it will be I think. It will be in the best interests of mankind. This next generation shows signs of being far better human beings.

And now the next example ... Bill Clinton was just shown on TV a minute ago, as I was typing this, saying "if this next election is between McCain and Hillary it will be between two people who both love their country ... without all this other stuff !!" Said before a group of veterans.

Nice... Real nice. I may throw up.

He really said that? Now this seems a lot more outrageous than a candidate knowing a preacher who said some outrageous things, or referring to a "typical White person" (though I admit that to be a relatively foolish choice of words).

Where are the righteously indignant!

Or will we hear how context just happens to be important in this case?