loquitur, I am still holding out hope that you have not been frequenting the right wing's <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Mighty+Wurlitzer%22&btnG=Google+Search&aq=-1&oq=%22">"Mighty Wurlitzer"</a> kool-ade stand...

yer right, EVERYONE has "baggage":
Have you ever noticed loquitur....that white people are not asked about every obnoxious thing other white people have said and done? Why do you think that there is such a double standard practiced by those who get to ask the questions? How does the practice shape your POV?

Obama's baggage is that his name is on the USA PATRIOT and Terrorism Prevention Reauthorization (3/2/06). Who the fuck cares about some random preacher? Jesus Christ, it's the blowjob and a cigar all over again...
... are we all really this stupid?

If I recall, Obama initially voted against the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2006 and only voted for the final version after he fought to include several provisions (restrictions on FBI use of national security letters and roving wiretaps) that were in a bill he cosponsored a year earlier, the Security and Freedom and Enhancement (SAFE) Act of 2005.

The Patriot Act is far from perfect, but it was going to pass by a large margin. I would suggest that Obama's provisions at least made it marginally better.

Yes, he did vote on the revised version, but it was still a horrible attack on freedoms (just slightly less than the 2005 version, clearly authored by Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rummy on a Jager bender). Wether it was slated to win or not, wouldn't it be the responsibility of a free thinking, intelligent man like Barak appears to be to vote against it?

will...there is a reason why we have had only one president go directly from the Senate to the White House in the last 100+ years...JFK.

Voting in the Senate is much more nuanced than say if you were a former governor who either signs a bill or vetos it.

Feingold's stance on the Patriot Act may have been more noble, but Obama's accomplished more.....it made a very bad bill slightly less bad.

Would you have prefered the version without the amendments Obama (and other Dems) forced into the bill?
There are two schools of thought....

* tale what you believe is the high ground and claim a moral victory....or
* take a more pragmatic approach and make the most out of a bad situation and accomplish something tangible

Personally, I think that while the first option is more ideologically pure, in some cases, the second option is more responsible.

Should Oprah lose her TV show because she goes to a church the <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Mighty+Wurlitzer%22&btnG=Google+Search&aq=-1&oq=%22">"Mighty Wurlitzer"</a> has under attack? She does fall under FCC regulatory oversight....

Why is Obama's opponent so adored by the media?

With his background, why does the media revere McCain instead of tarring him as ?????

No doubt, Obama is a politician. Though I do think it's disingenuous to say he's not any different besides his eloquence and charisma. He does seem much more willing to consider all sides of an issue than your typical US politician. And I could be wrong, but I don't know of many major national politicians, let alone presidential candidates, who can say they once taught constitutional law at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country.

Professor Obama was a listener, students say

Host, Hillary is Obama's opponent for the time being. We're all hoping she'll pull out before the convention, so as not to screw up the Dem ticket for the White House any more than she already has.

But again, I don't think there are any McCain supporters on TFP. Maybe like one; two, tops. You'd be better off shooting down Hillary here and maybe Obama. Besides, I think McCain is incredibly corrupt and quite possibly is still suffering the effects of his imprisonment and torture. I don't need convincing.

Is baggage still baggage when everybody carries it? Because Clinton and McCain both voted YES on the PATRIOT re-auth too, and without the effort to improve it that Obama showed.

By the way--Obama will be holding a rally here in my home town (about five minutes away from where I live) on Wednesday. I'm going to go stand in line for tickets later this morning. Assuming I get in, loquitur, I'll let you know if I faint on first sight of my idol! ;)

It took me much time to find on Obama's site that he is coming to Greensboro on 3/26. For most events, "tickets" can be ordered online, and they are free. Registration is required on the site's "events" page:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/myevents_login

I know his campaign considers Obama to be a "shoe in" victor for the nomination fight, but the ticketing and registration requirements remind me of another recent political campaign's policies. Why would Obama want to also have such a regimented image?

Well, space is finite in the venue he'll be in, and I imagine with security concerns, they want to do what they can to control attendance. I'm not holding this against him--it's being managed by the local Democratic Committee.

I'm not finding anywhere on his site to order tickets. Did you actually see that for this event?

He's a victim of his own popularity, but the SS admitted that they didn't screen for weapons, at least once, at an Obama venue last month. I want his campaign to be a breath of fresh are, compared to the regimented screening at the Bush/cheney 2004 campaign rallies....and I know you want the same.

In portland, or, tickets could be ordered online, but they went quickly.
http://or.barackobama.com/portland

If you're planning to go to this, I think this is your only option for tickets, and it might be that you have a better chance to actually get them, with this distribution arrangement:
http://nc.barackobama.com/greensboro

Yes, absolutely. The mindset of "lesser of all evils" has people thinking the person who made the least mistakes deserves the oval office, but a mistake is a mistake.

In 2004 I worked security at several events for Kerry Edwards in Oregon. Usually at Pioneer Square in down town Portland. And usually checking press passes. I volunteered for the Dems that year partly out of guilt for voting for GWB in 2000 and mainly in an attempt to stop/change the direction I felt the country was headed.

I was surprised at the lack of realistic security. I almost always worked the press entrance with at least one other person, sometimes two. Not once did that other person have any law enforcement back ground. We were briefed by SS to allow only print, radio and TV press, no web based press allowed. I turned away several individuals that had home made press passes exclaiming their affiliation with what was likely their own blog. I have serious reason to suspect my co-volunteers let everyone through. So, basically if you wanted to get close to Kerry or Edwards head to your local Kinkos.

I got an e-mail a couple weeks ago asking if I'd be willing to help out for Obama's visit last week. I updated my e-mail with them, but never explained I no longer live in Oregon. Kind of made me wish I was still in Oregon, would have liked to have been there.

On a side note- I notice Obama filled the old Memorial Coliseum, which holds about 10K. Kerry and Edwards filled the Pioneer Square which holds a few hundred (maybe a thousand?) I wonder if Obama could have filled the Rose Garden? It can hold 25K+.

will...I would suggest that making a pragmatic decision does not make a person a "lesser of evils."

I saw the movie "Exorcist: the Beginning" a few weeks ago. It's not a bad movie, fairly decent actually. Part of the origin story for the main character, a Priest who has had serious problems with his faith, is during his service to the church during the time when the SS was in it's height of power in Germany. A particularly sick soldier takes the priest outside in front of his church to see a group of people ranging from children to elder, all jewish. "Shoot one of them." After much shouting and threatening, he decides the prudent choice—the only choice—is to shoot the older people in order to save the young. It was a pragmatic choice, but it also made him a murderer. He had to compromise on his morals in order to make such a pragmatic choice, a choice that ultimately still left innocent people victimized by his actions. He was being bipartisan with monsters. You don't compromise with monsters.

A presidential man should not compromise with enemies of his people.

In war, there are enemies.

In public policy, there are adversaries.

A good politician and political leader can recognize the difference and act accordingly.

I am struggling to decide if it would have been a better choice to attempt to shoot the "sick soldier", or myself, if I were the priest in the situation you described, or just to refuse to take the gun, and leave the choice of who to shoot, to the "sick soldier".....

I don't consider the Bush Administration an adversary to the common good, but an enemy. I can't see how anyone could look on Bush and not see someone who actively works against freedom and peace and think "I could compromise with such a man".

Host, in taking the gun the priest became the tool of the sick soldier. I likely would have given my life fighting the soldier, on the small chance someone could have escaped. The idea that one can work for the monster but to dull his effect on his victims simply makes you a lesser monster.

I know it isn't relevant for the sake of this discussion, but in Exorcist: The Beginning, the priest doesn't actually shoot anyone. The Nazi makes him choose the ones that the soldier will kill or else he will just wantonly shoot away.

What is relevant is the underlying message throughout the movie. That the priest did not, in fact, become party to the Nazis evil because of his compromise but suffered because he let that compromise strip him of his faith. Actually, it was his very rigid ideology (i.e., A good God wouldn't allow this kind of evil to exist) that caused him to lose faith and led to suffering. The idea that a 'presidential' individual doesn't compromise with the enemies is ludicrous. First it begs the question, how are these enemies and what defines them as such? Second, the idea that these enemies are completely & entirely wrong/at-fault is egocentric nonsense. There is always room to compromise, even with our enemies. Certainly there are individual issues that shouldn't be compromised, but people/nations are not simply issue-vessels and there is always room to compromise with them.

Either way, if the issue is the significance of Barak's vote on the Reauthorization Act then I say it is significant to the campaign, as run, but not to me. I don't want a president whose willing to cast a losing vote that won't matter one way or another for ethical reasons when he/she could have cast the opposite vote after bartering for even a slightly better bargain that serves his constituents (assumedly people with similar ethical thinking). So as things went down here, I find something I like about Barak. However, his campaign is being run on a very ideological message and that sort of compromise can be damning to such a message. So ironically something I find reassuring about Barak may end up hurting him with his actual base. Then again I suppose it's not all that ironic considering my well-known support of Clinton.

Yes, but that doesn't illustrate my point in the least. Call it creative reinterpretation for the sake of illustration.
And why was his faith compromised? Two reasons:
1) Anger that god would allow such a thing and
2) Anger at himself for participating.
A compromise in which freedoms provided in the Bill of Rights are lost is not something a good leader or even a good person would be willing to do. The idea that somehow it's okay because he got to add his asterisk is ludicrous. His name appears on a document that allows abuse of power. It's not more complex than that.
I'm not making vague references, though. The document in full is available online. In 2003, Barak Obama specifically said that he would support a repeal of the Patriot Act, and then in 2006 he voted to extend it because they allowed him to make very minor changes. The document he signed still takes away liberties.

Look at how he's formulated strategies about other things, such as Iraq, and you see a man unwilling to compromise his values and the safety and rights of the people. He supports withdrawal from Iraq, which is not a compromise at all, but in fact is a move that is beneficial to all Americans (except a few dozen really rich ones) and that is not a compromise with the madmen that would continue the war indefinitely. That's the kind of leadership it takes to be president, and putting his Iraq policy next to his Patriot Act policy shows one thing: inconsistency.

willravel, please watch this short clip, especially Sen. Feingold's comments near the end.... I was not impressed with his impartiality, or his denials, and he was the one who pointed out that he serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee. If he is the best we have, the most open minded, I think that we are screwed....

Links to back up the things the man in the video said to Sen. Feingold:

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=103028

The one Israeli killed at the WTC was a passenger on a hikjacked airliner:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/mem...try/page9.html

The US State Dept. worked OT to debunk "slander" against Israel....why?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...le+Search&aq=f

A NOTE TO THOSE SYMPATHETIC TO FEINGOLD's REACTION IN THE VIDEO? WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST AN AMERICANcentric, examination of the facts?

How could Feingold serve on the SSCI and claim that the presenter's information was new to him? It certainly wasn't "new" to the State Dept. !

Is Feingold representing Israel in the US Senate, or the people of the US state of Wisconsin? Forgive, me, I couldn't tell, for sure....sheesh, another politician I thought I could support, and now, I am not so certain....

A NOTE TO THOSE SYMPATHETIC TO FEINGOLD's REACTION IN THE VIDEO? WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST AN AMERICANcentric, examination of the facts?

I'm sorry, but I fail to see how that bears directly on Obama supporting the Patriot Act and whether it's the right compromise or the wrong compromise.

I dont seen Obama's positions or actions in the Senate as capitulation or compromise.

When in the Senate, particularly in the minority party (at the time), the best one can do is attempt to minimize the damager of legislation that will pass regardless of your position.

As president, I would not expect him to act in the same manner. The situation will be complete reversed; he would set the agenda.

What appeals to me is both Obama's policies and issue positions and his commitment to try to build consensus to bring the country closer together.

I would expect him to act as a pragmatic progressive, with his positions as his foundation, but demonstrating flexibility in moving his agenda forward in order to bring those in the center (and even right center) on board.

IMO, that would make a far better leader than one who attempts to govern as a rigid ideologue.

An ideologue on the left will not succeed anymore than an ideologue on the right.

I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying. Had Obama concentrated on Senate Democrats voting the renew of the Patriot Act down instead of working to make minor changes in it, they may have actually been able to tie it up until the midterms, which were like 7 months out.

You gotta know when to hold em and know when to fold em.

So instead of working to contain the inevitable damage, he should have taken a massive gamble on what was then the vastly unlikely possibility of a Democratic majority after mid-terms, and stuck his neck out to hold the thing up? Remember--it wasn't until a couple months before mid-terms that it even looked like the GOP might be hurting. At that point they were decreasing in popularity, but even that didn't seem like it could stop the machine.

Democrats have never been good at legislative obstruction; that's a Republican game. To have expected Obama to have been the lone Senator to do that from the left side of the aisle is asking a lot, especially from the benefit of several years' hindsight. At the time, there would have been no way of knowing that's what should have been done--the PATRIOT renewal looked like just another turn of the Republican steamroller's wheel.

I look at Obama's response compared to the relative glee with which McCain and even Clinton voted to renew PATRIOT, and I can't help but think my money's on the right horse.

Yeah, what he said:thumbsup:

Looking back at TFP posts in 2006, most of us lefties were perfectly aware of just how bad the Patriot Act was and were against it's renewal. We all groaned when so many Democrats cowardly crossed the isle and signed away our liberties. It's possible that was why the Democrats only got the 51/49 majority instead of a 60/40 split.

If someone with balls had gone on record and said, "We can't win against enemies of freedom by becoming enemies of freedom" or some other clever lines over and over and over, using the GOP strategy of "repeat until it's true", there was a good chance giving the unheard majority a champion could have had a real shot at stopping the loss of liberties juggernaut. This isn't hindsight, either, as we were all complaining about this at the time.

When I read your and DCs posts, they strike me as, with all due respect, defeatist. Defeatist rhetoric infected the Democratic party back in 2001, and it's long since been time to purge it.

Read Obama's floor statement:
IMO, its not defeatist; its a recognition of the reality of how our public policy debate works in Congress.

My point was that the one senator who consistently voted against both patriot acts, and there is only one....appeared in the video that I linked, to be doing an imitation of an AIPAC lobbyist, in front of constituents, on video.

I guess the entire senate is so compromised, indoctrinated, lost when it comes to who they are supposed to represent, what to support, and why, that the situation makes Obama look like one if the better ones, even though he voted to support pat. act II.....

Oh, okay. Assuming this is the case, then, it makes sense not to vote for someone from Congress. Maybe the House (Kucinich/Paul)? I dunno, I like Obama but that decision concerns me a great deal.

Kucinich is the only one I could comfortably support. Paul would let Wall Street mug us worse than Bush's admin. does, and he wants to let private business do their own EPA enforcement....

dc_dux, what do those of us who think that Obama's first sentence:
...when he said it, and now...was a consequence of the same "Op' that Bush seems to be failing with, now, over his threats concerning permanent elimination of FISA laws. Just the fact that Obama bought into that tired Bush line of fear mongering propaganda and said "We all agreed that we needed"...

...they didn't "agree", they were either pandering or clueless. because the majority were ahead of them....no longer buying the "we will control you" through fear argument coming from Bush and Cheney. It was only still working to influence Obama and the rest of congress, but not the majority of voters,

not after early five years of the same message that got us bogged down in Iraq....for nothing....

Thats why we havent voted for a member of Congress (Senate or House) for 100 years...we (the electorate) prefer benign governors (Carter, Reagan, Clinton , Bush) who were never in the position of having to vote on controversial national issues.

This year, there is no choice. We will elect a sitting member of Congress. I know which one I want in the White House.

host..I dont believe that Obama (and others) acted in a manner that was clueless or pandering.

Where I would agree is the extent to which Bush/Cheney (and Repub Congress) have politicized the "threat" for ideological purposes.

Kucinich is obviously the better of the two. It's a shame that no one is interested in being led by someone who hasn't compromised.


DC, I'm not arguing to get people not to vote for Obama. I'm not insane. My point, simply, is that arguing over something as utterly inane as what one's pastor says in the heat of sermon instead of actual important issues is basically what's wrong with our government: the people are damn easy to control. If Bush wants us talking about "the gays" instead of the war or the disappearance of the middle class, it seems that even liberals take the bait. Bush (or the people pulling his strings) know that there is only so much people can discuss at once. It's bullshit like Reverend Wright that gets people away from what should be discussed.

On this we agree. :thumbsup:

I don't want to freak you out, but we agree most of the time. Most of the stuff we disagree on is simply interparty politics and how the Democratic party can fix itself. As a green (read: hippy), I know that short of a cataclysmic disaster or revolution my party won't ever make a difference. That being said, I have to do what I can to fix the lesser of the two evils: the Dems.

Yeah, I remember. Don't get me wrong--it's a travesty, and it never should have been made law to begin with, and I do wish we had a candidate who could say they were against ALL of the Bush incursions on our freedom. But given we've got what we've got, for my money Obama's a damn-sight better than anybody else. He's not even a lesser of evils. He's perhaps a somewhat bruised apple in a basket of rotten fruit.

Yeah, I know. And I wish it had been politically feasible for somebody to do that. I like to think that had it been, Obama would have been the one to do it. But I can't say I know that.

I don't think I know what you mean by defeatist. I think we're going to win.

Rat: Again, I'm voting for Obama and TPing the house of everyone who doesn't. That's not what I'm saying, though. Actually, using your analogy, I'm simply pointing out Obama's bruises. This thread is called Obamania, after all.

Boy oh boy, Christopher Hitchens unloaded on Obama today. Also on McCain. Wow is his pen acid. Some samples:andand

To be quite frank, Chris Hitchens doesn't know shit about politics. He still, in 2008, believes that there were WMDs in Iraq. In my book all he gets credit for is being an atheist, and he even manages to screw that up from time to time.

Along those lines... It really is a shame that politicians have to pander to religion at all, regardless of their beliefs. What should be a private matter, separate from any decision the electorate makes becomes a check box on a list of mandatory attributes for anyone considering public office.

An atheist or an agnostic would never be able to get elected president without playing the game and getting some religious "street cred".

When Clinton or Obama says something, there is throrough fact checking and scrutiny from the press:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/us...cs&oref=slogin

The press coverage of McCain, however, is a deliberate free pass from the press. They explain away or minimize any signifigance relating to his frequent gaffes, so he doesn't have to do it himself, and then, they move on....forget about it....

...and
Is Mccain's campaign paying these pathetic assholes who claim that they are "journalists", to shill for the candidate?