Sam Stein at HuffPo asks, "What's in the water in anti-Obama Tennessee?" He observes that both Democrats and Republicans have been more vicious in spreading e-mail smears and attacking Obama than the rest of the nation:
The Republican Party of Tennessee has, on several occasions, trotted out lines of criticism against Obama that put them further down that road than even Karl Rove - the vaunted campaign attack alchemist - has been willing to go. The state's GOP released a press release in late February, accusing the Democratic nominee of being anti-Israel, linking him to Louis Farrakhan, and featuring a photo of the Senator in African garb for good measure.Nearly two months later, the party began circulating a video of Michelle Obama saying that she was proud of her country for the first time in her adult life, followed by a montage of Tennesseans discussing the essence of their patriotism (including, conspicuously, a guy at a pool table with a rack of guns behind him).
I'm headed down to Tennessee later this week to visit family. I'm looking forward to the food and fireworks, but maybe I should take a few bottles of water with me.
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If this isn't a compelling case for civil unions or same-sex marriage, I don't know what is: A Miami hospital is being sued for refusing to allow a woman to visit her partner of 18 years who suffered a stroke while on vacation. Here's the kicker. The couple had four children, who were also denied visitation rights.
From the Sun Sentinel:
The case raises questions about the way hospitals deal with same-sex or unmarried partners of patients, which has led to controversy in the past. Hospital industry officials say they are constrained by patient privacy laws that can restrict giving visiting access and medical information to nonrelatives, a stance that some patient advocates have branded as discriminatory.Pond, 39, was pronounced dead of a brain aneurysm about 18 hours after being admitted to Jackson's Ryder Trauma Center. Langbehn said she was allowed in to see her partner only for about five minutes, as a priest gave Pond the last rites.
"I never thought almost 20 years of love and family could be disregarded in an instant," said Langbehn, a social worker who lives with her children in Lacey, Wash.
At a Miami news conference, Langbehn, 39, broke down when she recalled the eight hours she and her three adopted children — now ages 11, 12 and 14 — sat in a hospital waiting room with little knowledge of Pond's condition. "As I sat there wracking my brain, I would go outside and scream into the Miami night," she said. "I felt like a failure for not being there holding her hand."
Further proof, for those who need it, that same-sex marriage and "family values" are not mutually exclusive.
Posted by Elyas Bakhtiari | Permalink
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Congress must have an entire staff dedicated to the sole purpose of drafting strongly-worded condemnations of Iran. Just last fall they passed a resolution condemning Iran and declaring the Islamic Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group, a resolution condemning Iran for persecuting labor rights activists, and a national defense bill that declared Iran an eventual nuclear threat, just a few months after the National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
And Congress is back at it, as if they just won't be satisfied until we add a third war in the Middle East (perhaps they're hoping to save money by just combining the three into one big regional war). Meet H.CON.RES.362, the latest strongly-worded resolution targeting the Iranian regime. It currently has 208 sponsors, coming from both parties.
The text of the bill at least acknowledges the NIE and the fact that Iran suspended its weapons program, but then it quickly moves past that with some hypothetical language ("Iran could have enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon as soon as late 2009") and concludes with the following action points. Congress:
(1) declares that preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, through all appropriate economic, political, and diplomatic means, is vital to the national security interests of the United States and must be dealt with urgently;(2) urges the President, in the strongest of terms, to immediately use his existing authority to impose sanctions on--
(A) the Central Bank of Iran and any other Iranian bank engaged in proliferation activities or the support of terrorist groups;
(B) international banks which continue to conduct financial transactions with proscribed Iranian banks;
(C) energy companies that have invested $20,000,000 or more in the Iranian petroleum or natural gas sector in any given year since the enactment of the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996; and
(D) all companies which continue to do business with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps;
(3) demands that the President initiate an international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities by, inter alia, prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran's nuclear program; and
(4) urges the President to lead a sustained, serious, and forceful effort at regional diplomacy to support the legitimate governments in the region against Iranian efforts to destabilize them, to reassure our friends and allies that the United States supports them in their resistance to Iranian efforts at hegemony, and to make clear to the Government of Iran that the United States will protect America's vital national security interests in the Middle East.
A similar bill in the Senate includes a final stipulation that the legislation "asserts that nothing in this resolution shall be construed to authorize the use of force against Iran."
Well, that's a relief. I guess Congress favors the poke-Iran-with-a-big-stick-until-we-can-say-they-started-it strategy.
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The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has released Part II of its U.S. religious landscape survey. The first part was released in February, and the big finding was that fewer Americans were "inheriting" religion from their parents and had become a little more fluid in their belief systems.
The latest results showed a similar trend: The majority of Americans believe there are multiple ways to interpret religious teachings, and most even believe that no single religion holds an exclusive franchise on truth.
Still, the United States remains a very religious nation. Ninety-two percent of Americans say the believe in a God or universal spirit of some kind (though I suspect including "universal spirit" in the question captured a lot of people who are fairly non-religious but spiritual). For comparison: About 12%-15% of the world's population is considered non-religious, and in England polls have put the number of non-believers as high as 40%.
UPDATE: An interesting parallel in the news today: James Dobson is attacking Barack Obama over comments made about various interpretations of the Bible. Dobson is pulling up statements Obama made in 2006 about the United States no longer being a Christian-only nation (which the survey results support), among other things.
"Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?" Obama said.
Dobson is a fundamentalist with a fairly rigid interpretation of Christianity and is accusing Obama of "dragging Biblical understanding through the gutter." But the Pew survey results suggest that most Americans share Obama's point of view here. This attack may play well with the Focus on the Family audience (and that may be the only group Dobson is trying to reach), but it probably won't be effective with the general public.
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I'm apparently related to Barack Obama. At least, according to a distant relative who recently brought a genealogy study to a family reunion. I didn't see the specifics, but if you go back far enough (six generations, to his great great great grandparents) Obama's family on his mother's side hails from the same areas of Tennessee and Kentucky where my family (on my mother's side) is from.
Who knows, maybe we can convince our new-found cousin to host the next reunion on the lawn of the White House? But there's also a downside: This may mean I'm also somehow related to Dick Cheney.
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Of course it does. By any objective measure, anyone earning $250,000 annually is earning more than the vast majority of the world. Only around 3% of American households (we're talking combined incomes) reported that much income in 2006, and that salary would put you in the top 0.001% richest people in the world.
But last week YahooFinance ran a touching story about a couple earning $300,000 a year who "feel the same pressures squeezing Americans up and down the income ladder," like rising gas prices, healthcare costs, and their $3,000 a month mortgage. People just don't recognize that "$250,000 stretches a lot further in the South or the Midwest than in Manhattan or Silicon Valley" these days.
Not that those earning $250,000+ aren't dealing with rising costs, but the point of the article was to portray people in that income bracket as average, middle-class Americans on the verge of being victimized by Obama's tax increases. His plan calls for tax cuts for those earning under $250,000 and increases for those making above that, and the plan is going to be spun as an overall increase.
But take a look at the actual effects of the tax plans McCain and Obama are proposing. The chart below comes from the Tax Policy Center, which is run by the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. Incomes in the first four quintiles will rise substantially more under an Obama administration, whereas those in the last quintile will do better under McCain (and the most substantial difference is for the top 1%).
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Now that Obama has clinched the nomination, more media outlets are predicting the "swiftboating" of Michelle Obama that I warned about last month.
The LA Times declared "Michelle Obama in the hot seat too" today, and Maureen Dowd's NY Times column was titled, "Mincing Up Michelle."
Attacks on Michelle were also discussed on WSJ and LA Times blogs and on several cable news shows.
It's a mistake to go after her, in my opinion. She may have made a couple of high-profile gaffes early on, but she's incredibly talented and sharp, and any direct attacks on her are likely to backfire as she becomes more well-known to the American people. That won't stop certain groups from trying, though.
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A new poll from Public Agenda suggests yes, at least when it comes to his argument that we should engage Iran diplomatically. That the number of people who prefer diplomacy has jumped 10 points (and military options have dropped slightly) just since last fall makes me think the shift is due to Obama's direct influence, rather than a natural change in public opinion.
What's striking is if you combine the two military options, threatening and taking action, you still only have 12% support. If John McCain is going to go after Obama for his willingness to engage enemy nations, he's going to come across as an advocate for military intervention, and the public clearly isn't in his corner. His alternative is to make a more nuanced attack on Obama's willingness to negotiate without preconditions, but that's a tougher argument to make in a political climate that doesn't handle nuance very well. The discussion will naturally shift back to Bush-style militiarism versus Obamian diplomacy. Advantage: Obama.
Can you imagine John Kerry or even Hillary Clinton defending an arguably liberal position related to national security like this, and actually winning the argument? For years Democrats have let Republicans paint them into a corner on national security issues out of a fear of appearing weak, and they've lost.
That's why I think Obama should completely ignore hawkishness when selecting a running mate. Many will argue that he needs someone with national security credentials to counter McCain's military service. But that's playing the game on Republican terms. The majority of Americans want out of Iraq, and the majority prefer diplomacy to deal with Iran. The hawks in the Republican party don't control the debate anymore.
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Now that Obama has the nomination locked up, people are starting to take a look back at the past few months to figure out how he pulled off one of the biggest upsets in modern political history. The Clintons were thought to have the most formidable political machine in the country, and 17 months ago Obama started with nothing.
How'd he do it? For one, he out organized her. Clinton staffed her campaign with loyalists who bought into the idea of her inevitability. (Remember the media narrative last year? Even Republicans were ready to declare Hillary the next president). While Obama's team mapped out every delegate, built a monster grassroots network, and broke online fund raising records, the Clinton team failed to plan beyond Super Tuesday and had a poor grasp of the primary rules. So instead of playing to the rules, they were forced to constantly redefine them.
But that's not ultimately why Obama pulled this off. She had a chance to win this election in 2002. Even if he had run a flawless campaign and she had committed many of the same errors, if Hillary Clinton had voted against the authorization to use force in Iraq, Obama would not be in the position he's in today. He probably wouldn't have entered the race. She might not have stopped the war with her vote, but as the Senate's biggest celebrity at the time, her leadership would have made a world of difference.
Not only did she vote for the war, but she refused to apologize for the vote or acknowledge the error during her campaign. “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast a vote [to authorize the war] or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” she told voters for New Hampshire. For a lot of voters, including myself, that was the most important thing. Even if you give her the benefit of the doubt on her claim that she was misled into war by faulty intelligence (even though she supposedly didn't read the National Intelligence Estimate before voting), her failure to acknowledge that it was a mistake is tough to look past.
She could have prevented this, but like other Democratic senators who later became contenders for the presidency (John Kerry, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden), she made a mistake that we're still paying for five years later. Did their presidential aspirations influence these senators to vote for what seemed to be a popular war at the time? The cynic in me says yes, but that's just speculation. At best, they allowed the administration to play the classic Democrats-are-weak-on-national-security card and failed to show backbone or leadership.
As Matthew Yglesias and Atrios have pointed out today, the influence of Clinton's 2002 vote is being lost in the analyses of her campaign. It's not surprising that pundits and journalists are still caught up in the horse race politics of the last few months, but the influence of the war in this outcome should not be overlooked or forgotten.
This time we will not be forced to choose between a Republican who supported the war and a Democrat who supported, and then changed his/her mind. Every Democrat who initially supported the war and has since sought the presidency has lost. That's a message to Hillary Clinton that maybe apologizing for a mistake isn't always a bad thing. And it's a message to the party known for its spinelessness that it's time to finally grow a spine and stop making decisions based on emasculating taunts from Republican.
And if/when Obama is elected in November, it ultimately won't be because McCain is older than dirt, or because his speeches are about as entertaining as a root canal, or because of the candidates' respective debate performances and gaffes. It'll be because of the war.
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An African American is now the Democratic party's nominee for the presidency of the United States. We've all been so caught up in the day-to-day politics of the last few months that it may take a while for that to sink in, but this day is nothing short of historic.
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