*official* 2008 us election thread

[Daaaaave]

Originally posted by Kizzak:

As for my beef with Obama, it seems he does very little actual leading or action. He tends to follow others, make measured statements to try to appeal to as many people as possible (essentially the Democratic version of Walnuts without the crazy). I don't know, he just comes off as another one of those candidates that doesn't seem to be for anything but winning and against the other guy winning.

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">If President Bush vetoes an Iraq war spending bill as promised, Congress quickly will provide the money without the withdrawal timeline the White House objects to because no lawmaker "wants to play chicken with our troops," Sen. Barack Obama said Sunday.

"We need to recognize, because Judge Alito will be confirmed, that, if we're going to oppose a nominee, that we've got to persuade the American people that, in fact, their values are at stake," Mr. Obama said.

"There is an over-reliance on the part of Democrats for procedural maneuvers," he told ABC's This Week.

etc etc </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

well, your first example is an incomplete 7 word sentence taken completely out of any context and placed in a different setup fashioned by the ap reporter who filed the story. how about a full transcript for that statement?

as for the second example, I agree 100% with what he said.

[bflaff]

Originally posted by Daaaaave:

no sure what your beef with obama is but tbh <STRIKE>you're a crap enough poster that</STRIKE> I cba to find out.

I couldn't even be arsed to write even that much, so thanks for saving me the trouble. I'll hedge on the crapness of the poster and agree with the rest.

If anyone even bothers to go to this thing and heckle, they'll only be appearing to be a college Republican tool (not that College Republicans are necessarily all tools, but the ones who lamely heckle certainly would be) and who would want to wade into a crowd of thousands and play that role? Seems like a bad idea on multiple levels.

[Daaaaave]

"hey obama...I find your lack of a concise and all-encompassing platform to rid our society of all it's ills to be a serious detriment to your quality in a candidate."

"hey obama...after spending 2 whole years as the junior senator of your state, why haven't you ended the war yet?"

oh how the crowd will laugh.

[Gordon Comstock]

OMG HE'S TEH BLACK

[Kizzak]

I can guarantee you there will be quite a few, especially since it's an open air event in the middle of GT.

College Republicans have some woman that wants to be the next Coulter, so they'll be there.

I wouldn't actually heckle if I went, that was primarily a poor joke. I'd still probably get bored half way through and watch the Republicans' distraction attempts.

As for that first quote: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-04-01-obama_N.htm?csp=34

In the end, it's down to your personal views as to how you view each candidates' statements and your idealization of a candidate.

Short list of actual things I can complain about (as opposed to just comments that may mean different things to different people): Obama voted for the Mexico fence, lobbied Bush to maintain foreign ethanol tariffs, voted for the class-action 'reform' bill, said nothing post 04 election about Iraq until Murtha said something, and endorsed Lieberman against Lamont.

We'll see over the next year, but I just have this gut feeling that he's just a Hoynes, and we'd be stuck with a Peyton Cabot Harrison III as the justice he'd nominate.

If he proves me wrong - I'll happily admit how much of a tool I am, but I just don't see him leading a charge on anything of importance.

[Daaaaave]

yes, I saw the "wants to play chicken with our troops" snippet the first time.

now google me what he said immediately before and after this fragment.

[bflaff]

Originally posted by Kizzak:

and endorsed Lieberman against Lamont.

In the primary, not the general election, IIRC.

[Kizzak]

You aren't going to find much beyond that quote because it was an AP interview, he did a follow-up interview to 'clear up' his comments after the liberal blogs broke out in rage:

http://unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Obama+deni...94-b2a3-62ba80dcbeae

Of course, that's just about as bad because he's basically accepted the Republican perspective that it's the Democrats' fault if the troops aren't funded, and so he's proposing watered down 'alternatives'.

If you know that the other side is willing to accept the frame of your argument while reducing their arguments against your position, what are you going to do?

Want to see what happens?

Walnuts on Wednesday in response to the Feingold-Reid Bill:

I hope Democrats in Congress will heed the advice of one of their leading candidates for President, Senator Obama, and immediately pass a new bill to provide support to our troops in Iraq without substituting their partisan interests for those of our troops and our country.

http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/04/three_candidate_1.html

So yeah, you can thank Obama's fear of alienating anyone for setting the Republicans up with ammunition and providing cover for republicans in states that are generally more pro-withdrawal.

Also, if at any point Obama felt he was misquoted, I heard there was this great invention of Al Gore's that Obama has a presence on that could be used to clarify his message.

[Daaaaave]

and as most of those liberal blogs have finally discovered after all that rending of garments and beating of breasts is that the plan is to authorize funds for three months, then make the president come back and ask for more. tying this millstone around his neck as well as the whole party.

since virtually no one except kucinich is speaking out about cutting off funding anyway, this is just another case of obama having the nuts to speak while everyone else says no comment and a bunch of amateur blogger pundits showing off why no one listens to them.

and all of this is assuming that sentiment was obama's intent within that sentence fragment which no one bothered to adequately source in the first place.

and kudos for the suggestion that obama stop his campaign and instead dedicate his time to combating lazy journalism. that's certainly a much more worthy target than making a reporter file a story that isn't cut and pasted together.

[Daaaaave]

Originally posted by Kizzak:

I ... want to be the next Coulter.

I ... was ... a poor joke.

weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

[Jason the Yank]

The latest Rasmussen Reports national survey of the presidential race shows Democratic Senator Barack Obama now leading GOP Senator John McCain 48% to 42%.

The two candidates were tied 44% to 44% a month ago and in February.

McCain continues to out-poll Obama among males and whites. But Senator Obama, fresh from a surprisingly successful quarter of fundraising, enjoys a more dramatic advantage among women (53% to 37%) and especially blacks (70% to 21%) and other minorities. And Obama dominates 51% to 35% among unaffiliated voters--especially bad news for the GOP candidate given the declining number of voters calling themselves Republican.

In November, McCain had an eight-point lead, besting Obama 47% to 39%. But Senator McCain's campaign has been hindered by his staunch support of the unpopular war in

Iraq, Rudy Giuliani's ascendancy as the leading GOP contender.

The current poll also shows Senator Obama leading former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney 52% to 37%, not a big change for either candidate. Romney has yet to reach 40% support when matched against any candidate but New York Senator Hillary Clinton.

Obama is viewed favorably by 59%, McCain by 55%, Romney by 22%. Obama's rating is now the highest favorability of any Presidential hopeful--the first time anybody other than former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has topped the list (see summary of favorables for all Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates).

In the Democratic primary match-ups, Barack Obama now trails Hillary Clinton by just five points. As Obama put it on a recent "Late Show With David Letterman," he's not running for second place. He jocularly hinted if they were both on the same ticket, it would be Hillary Clinton in the VP slot.

In the GOP primary, Giuliani remains on top followed by McCain and former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson.

Other polls shows Obama even with Giuliani and leading every other Republican candidate including Thompson, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, Senator Sam Brownback and Senator Chuck Hagel.

McCain trails Edwards, is even with Clinton, and leads New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, Senator Chris Dodd, and Senator Joe Biden.

This national telephone survey of 800 Likely Voters was conducted by Rasmussen Reports April 9-10, 2007. The margin of sampling error for the survey is +/- 4 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

Rasmussen Reports is an electronic publishing firm specializing in the collection, publication, and distribution of public opinion polling information.

[Jason the Yank]

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Former Senator Fred Thompson, who has yet to announce his candidacy, is ahead of a slumping John McCain, and Barack Obama is closing in on Hillary Clinton, according to the latest Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll of Americans' 2008 presidential preferences.

The Iraq war dominates voters' concerns to the detriment of Republicans, the April 5-9 poll suggests. A plurality of voters wants the Democrats to take the presidency next year, and most Republicans say they want their party's nominee to move the country in a different direction than President George W. Bush.

In head-to-head general-election match-ups, the poll shows Obama, an Illinois senator, is the strongest Democrat, beating all Republicans, and Senator Clinton, of New York, appears to be the weakest. Among the leading Republicans, excluding Thompson, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani runs best and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney runs worst.

``Republicans are starting out in a net negative'' and ``the Iraq war is playing a large part,'' says Susan Pinkus, the Los Angeles Times polling director.

In the Republican field, 29 percent of voters prefer Giuliani while McCain, an Arizona senator who once led the pack, slips to 12 percent, behind Thompson, who is preferred by 15 percent and said last month that he is considering a run for the presidency. Thompson, 64, disclosed yesterday that he has been treated for indolent lymphoma, a slow-growing form of the cancer, and the disease is in remission.

`No Illness'

``I have had no illness from it, or even any symptoms,'' Thompson, an actor and former Tennessee senator who has a long- running role in the NBC television series ``Law and Order,'' wrote in a posting on the Web site Redstate.com.

Thompson's instant popularity suggests he has filled a void in the Republican field and his potential candidacy takes from all of the Republican candidates, the poll finds. He does especially well with self-described religious Republicans; 21 percent of those voters favor Thompson, compared with 17 percent for Giuliani, 62, and 10 percent for McCain, 70.

During his eight years in the Senate, Thompson was never identified with religious conservative causes.

Poll respondent Thomas Tobolski, a 61-year-old Republican computer analyst from South Bend, Indiana, says he likes Thompson because he wants more choices. ``I'm looking for somebody who's a little more in the conservative vein,'' he says.

Giuliani Leads Republicans

Giuliani remains far ahead when he is matched in a three-way race against McCain and Romney, defeating McCain by 23 points and Romney by 28 points. The poll includes 1,246 registered voters, among them 557 Democratic primary voters and 437 Republican primary voters. The survey has a 4 percentage-point margin of error for Democrats and a 5-point margin for Republicans.

McCain, who over the past year has consistently supported Bush and the administration's Iraq policies, has had a substantial decline in support and trails in fundraising.

The poll was taken before McCain made a speech yesterday on the war that tightened his association with Bush's war policy. McCain reiterated his support for putting more troops into the conflict and said he would hold to his stance even if it cost him his bid for the White House. McCain recently returned from his fifth visit to Iraq and cited several areas of progress in an opinion article this month in the Washington Post.

The poll shows that McCain's support for Bush, 60, and the war hasn't worked so far with Republicans. Twice as many Republicans who believe the president's war plan is helping Iraq support Giuliani over McCain. Republican voters who say they want the next president to continue Bush's policies -- about a third of the party -- overwhelmingly prefer Giuliani or Thompson, with McCain a distant fourth.

Age Factor

McCain, who will be 72 in 2008, may have another problem. Fourteen percent of all voters say they couldn't vote for a candidate who is that age, even if they agree on most issues.

For candidates of both parties, age is a greater impediment to the nomination than other personal factors, including Romney's Mormon religion, Giuliani's three marriages, Clinton's gender, and race for Obama, who is African-American.

Romney, 60, who raised more money than any other Republican in the first quarter, is in single digits, with just 8 percent of Republican voters saying they would support him. Eleven percent of all voters say they couldn't vote for a Mormon.

Democratic Match-Ups

On the Democratic side, Clinton, at 33 percent, is 10 points ahead of Obama. A Gallup poll last week showed a much larger lead. Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards and former Vice President Al Gore trail at 14 and 13 percent, respectively. All other Democratic hopefuls barely register. When the list is narrowed to Clinton, Obama and Edwards, the gap between the candidates stays about the same, with Clinton beating Obama, 42 percent to 32 percent.

In a three-way race, Clinton, 59, has an advantage over Obama, 45, both with blacks, who prefer her 50 percent to 41 percent, and women, who choose her by a 15-point margin.

Still, Obama is proving competitive with Clinton, and the poll shows he fares better among young voters. He also has a strong following in the Midwest, where he is behind Clinton by just 4 points.

``The main thing is his charisma and his ability to relate to people my age,'' says poll respondent Brian Kirn, an 18-year- old high school student in St. Louis. ``He just gives me a general feeling he's someone I could trust with the country.''

Anti-War Base

The anti-Iraq war base in the Democratic Party also offers opportunity for Obama and Edwards, who were quicker than Clinton to call for a timetable for withdrawal. Among the 37 percent of Democrats who say a timetable will help U.S. troops, Clinton only holds a narrow lead over Obama, with Edwards a solid third. Among Democrats who think a timetable hurts troops -- more than a third -- Clinton has a sizeable lead over both.

Edwards, 53, is targeting more traditional Democratic groups, including unions, with a populist message on worker rights, health care and other issues. Still, he gets more support from Democrats who consider themselves moderates than from those who say they are liberals, by 20 percent to 10 percent.

Gore, 59, who was the Democratic nominee in 2000 and has said he doesn't plan to run next year, is about even with Edwards, at 13 percent.

In head-to-head match-ups, the Democratic candidates generally do better, except against Giuliani, whose lead over Clinton and Edwards is within the poll's margin of error.

Clinton is 6 points behind Giuliani, and Obama narrowly leads Giuliani by 4 points. Obama is also ahead of McCain by 8 points and Romney by 19 points, compared with Clinton's 3-point lead over McCain and 7-point advantage over Romney.

When it comes to the issues, most Democratic voters, 63 percent, say the Iraq war is the most important topic they want the candidates to address, with health care and economic growth far behind.

Among Republicans, 37 percent say the war is the most important issue, while 28 percent choose economic growth and 13 percent pick tougher laws on illegal immigration.

[bflaff]

Originally posted by bflaff:

No one apparently has asked Sampson about the reportedly widespread practice of using non-government e-mail addresses to conduct government business, which can be construed by most cynics as an obvious attempt to get around the provision that government documents have to be available for archive. In at least one case (Jack Abramoff) we know he tried to keep his communications off official White House channels, because he was specifically trying to keep them out of official records. If he was doing it, it stands to reason that's why everyone else is using gwb43.com and all those other RNC accounts to discuss their business.

If the Dems ever get proper access to those communications, this will be ugly. Like tapes in the Oval Office ugly.

Looks like the fired prosecutors story is heating up again, now that Gonzales is fast approaching his date with destiny on the 17th. The Dems are now going after those RNC e-mails, which the White House cretinously claims have been lost.

Fortunately, the internets are not magic to everyone, and Patrick Leahy has called BS:

Leahy says Bush aides lied about e-mails

By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - President Bush's aides are lying about White House e-mails sent on a Republican account that might have been lost, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record) said Thursday, vowing to subpoena those documents if the administration fails to cough them up.

"They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.

"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said there is no effort to purposely keep the e-mails under wraps, and that the counsel's office is doing everything it can to recover any that were lost.

"The purpose of our review is to make every reasonable effort to recover potentially lost e-mails, and that is why we've been in contact with forensic experts," he said.

Senate Democrats continued to toughen their stance against the White House over the firings of eight prosecutors over the winter.

After his speech, Leahy's committee approved — but did not issue — new subpoenas to compel the administration to produce documents and testimony about the firings.

Democrats say the firings might have been improper, but that probe yielded a weightier question: Whether White House officials such as political adviser Karl Rove are purposely conducting sensitive official presidential business via non-governmental accounts to evade a law requiring preservation — and eventual disclosure — of presidential records.

The White House issued an emphatic "No" to those questions during a conference call with reporters Wednesday, saying the Republican National Committee accounts were used to comply with the Hatch Act, which bars political work using official resources or on government time.

But White House spokesman Scott Stanzel acknowledged that 22 White House aides have e-mail accounts sponsored by the RNC and that e-mails they sent may have been lost.

Stanzel said the White House was trying to recover the e-mails and could not rule out that some may have involved the firings.The administration also is drafting new guidelines for aides on how to comply with the law.

Leahy was not buying that.

"E-mails don't get lost," Leahy insisted. "These are just e-mails they don't want to bring forward."

The revelation about the e-mails escalates a standoff between the Democrat-controlled Congress and the White House over the prosecutor firings. The subpoenas come a few days before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is to appear before Leahy's committee Tuesday to fight for his job.

Leahy's panel approved new subpoenas that would compel the Bush administration to surrender hundreds of new documents and force two officials — Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General William Moschella and White House political aide Scott Jennings — to reveal their roles in the firings. The panel delayed for a week a vote on whether to authorize a subpoena for Rove's deputy, Sara Taylor.

Leahy has not issued any subpoenas, but permission by his committee Thursday would give him authority to require testimony from all eight of the fired U.S. attorneys and several White House and Justice Department officials named in e-mails made public as having had roles in the firings. The White House has refused to make officials such as Rove available to testify under oath.

Ha Ha. Even this Hatch Act excuse is damning. If the involved parties were using RNC accounts to discuss firing prosecutors because of the HA's provision against using government resources to do political work... um then isn't that highly suggestive that the firings were done for political reasons? Is that really what they want to be telling people?

The truth must be even more damaging if they're willing to give this kind of concession when they're still lying.

Btw, what are the chances that any TV News organization will even discuss the technical plausibility that e-mails could be lost for good with an actual internets expert? I'm sure Kate O'Byrne is willing to give a definitive answer, but I hope that we can go to actual experts instead. (Note: in case that isn't clear, I have not seen KO'B offering up expert testimony. I'm just saying that cable news usually just lets partisan pundits mouth off about any old topic, even when it is clearly outside their expertise. The constitutionality of Gore v. Bush? Jesse Jackson, tell us what you think.)

[Daaaaave]

I HATE kate o'beirne

[Gordon Comstock]

I LOVE Barack Obama

PRESIDENT OBAMA FTW

[Jason the Yank]

Young Jords in the throes of Obamania.

[bflaff]

McCain would get smoked by an inanimate carbon rod right now, so now big deal that Obama is topping him in polls, although it's nice to see that African Americans are gravitating to Obama. Maybe the Selma speech helped.

The nightmare scenario still that a 'March surprise' pops up and kills the person who has been nominated in February. Each side is giving the other wayyyy too much time to do opposition research.

[Gordon Comstock]

Originally posted by Jason the Yank:

Young Jords in the throes of Obamania.

no.

don't call him that.

OBAMA OBAMA OBAMA

[bflaff]

Originally posted by Daaaaave:

I HATE kate o'beirne

Dammit, I knew I spelled that wrong.

[Daaaaave]

Originally posted by bflaff:

McCain would get smoked by an inanimate carbon rod right now, so now big deal that Obama is topping him in polls, although it's nice to see that African Americans are gravitating to Obama. Maybe the Selma speech helped.

The nightmare scenario still that a 'March surprise' pops up and kills the person who has been nominated in February. Each side is giving the other wayyyy too much time to do opposition research.

well, tbh, watching those moderates continue to bleed from his poll numbers just twists the knife even further. remember that, as the poll states, as recently as november-december he was the gop front runner and still held very strong moderate/independent numbers against all challengers in both parties.

[Daaaaave]

Originally posted by bflaff:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Daaaaave:

I HATE kate o'beirne

Dammit, I knew I spelled that wrong. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

you know it was her husband that was the guy who was handing out those loyalty tests to the cpa employees, right?

[Kizzak]

Wonder if any other state will join the pseudo-guarantee Maryland gave to dropping the electoral college.

That being that Maryland's electoral college will go the winner of the popular vote so long as enough other states (270 electoral votes worth) agree to the same terms.

[bflaff]

This is so pathetic it makes me ill. From today's NYTimes:

In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud

By ERIC LIPTON and IAN URBINA

Published: April 12, 2007

WASHINGTON, April 11 — Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.

In Miami, an assistant United States attorney said many cases there involved what were apparently mistakes by immigrants, not fraud.

In Wisconsin, where prosecutors have lost almost twice as many cases as they won, charges were brought against voters who filled out more than one registration form and felons seemingly unaware that they were barred from voting.

One ex-convict was so unfamiliar with the rules that he provided his prison-issued identification card, stamped “Offender,†when he registered just before voting.

A handful of convictions involved people who voted twice. More than 30 were linked to small vote-buying schemes in which candidates generally in sheriff’s or judge’s races paid voters for their support.

A federal panel, the Election Assistance Commission, reported last year that the pervasiveness of fraud was debatable. That conclusion played down findings of the consultants who said there was little evidence of it across the country, according to a review of the original report by The New York Times that was reported on Wednesday.

Mistakes and lapses in enforcing voting and registration rules routinely occur in elections, allowing thousands of ineligible voters to go to the polls. But the federal cases provide little evidence of widespread, organized fraud, prosecutors and election law experts said.

“There was nothing that we uncovered that suggested some sort of concerted effort to tilt the election,†Richard G. Frohling, an assistant United States attorney in Milwaukee, said.

Richard L. Hasen, an expert in election law at the Loyola Law School, agreed, saying: “If they found a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a Congressional election or a statewide election, that would be significant. But what we see is isolated, small-scale activities that often have not shown any kind of criminal intent.â€

For some convicted people, the consequences have been significant. Kimberly Prude, 43, has been jailed in Milwaukee for more than a year after being convicted of voting while on probation, an offense that she attributes to confusion over eligibility.

In Pakistan, Usman Ali is trying to rebuild his life after being deported from Florida, his legal home of more than a decade, for improperly filling out a voter-registration card while renewing his driver’s license.

In Alaska, Rogelio Mejorada-Lopez, a Mexican who legally lives in the United States, may soon face a similar fate, because he voted even though he was not eligible.

The push to prosecute voter fraud figured in the removals last year of at least two United States attorneys whom Republican politicians or party officials had criticized for failing to pursue cases.

The campaign has roiled the Justice Department in other ways, as career lawyers clashed with a political appointee over protecting voters’ rights, and several specialists in election law were installed as top prosecutors.

Department officials defend their record. “The Department of Justice is not attempting to make a statement about the scale of the problem,†a spokesman, Bryan Sierra, said. “But we are obligated to investigate allegations when they come to our attention and prosecute when appropriate.â€

Officials at the department say that the volume of complaints has not increased since 2002, but that it is pursuing them more aggressively.

Previously, charges were generally brought just against conspiracies to corrupt the election process, not against individual offenders, Craig Donsanto, head of the elections crimes branch, told a panel investigating voter fraud last year. For deterrence, Mr. Donsanto said, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales authorized prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against individuals.

Some of those cases have baffled federal judges.

“I find this whole prosecution mysterious,†Judge Diane P. Wood of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, said at a hearing in Ms. Prude’s case. “I don’t know whether the Eastern District of Wisconsin goes after every felon who accidentally votes. It is not like she voted five times. She cast one vote.â€

The Justice Department stand is backed by Republican Party and White House officials, including Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser. The White House has acknowledged that he relayed Republican complaints to President Bush and the Justice Department that some prosecutors were not attacking voter fraud vigorously. In speeches, Mr. Rove often mentions fraud accusations and warns of tainted elections.

Voter fraud is a highly polarized issue, with Republicans asserting frequent abuses and Democrats contending that the problem has been greatly exaggerated to promote voter identification laws that could inhibit the turnout by poor voters.

The New Priority

The fraud rallying cry became a clamor in the Florida recount after the 2000 presidential election. Conservative watchdog groups, already concerned that the so-called Motor Voter Law in 1993 had so eased voter registration that it threatened the integrity of the election system, said thousands of fraudulent votes had been cast.

Similar accusations of compromised elections were voiced by Republican lawmakers elsewhere.

The call to arms reverberated in the Justice Department, where John Ashcroft, a former Missouri senator, was just starting as attorney general.

Combating voter fraud, Mr. Ashcroft announced, would be high on his agenda. But in taking up the fight, he promised that he would also be vigilant in attacking discriminatory practices that made it harder for minorities to vote.

“American voters should neither be disenfranchised nor defrauded,†he said at a news conference in March 2001.

Enlisted to help lead the effort was Hans A. von Spakovsky, a lawyer and Republican volunteer in the Florida recount. As a Republican election official in Atlanta, Mr. Spakovsky had pushed for stricter voter identification laws. Democrats say those laws disproportionately affect the poor because they often mandate government-issued photo IDs or driver’s licenses that require fees.

At the Justice Department, Mr. Spakovsky helped oversee the voting rights unit. In 2003, when the Texas Congressional redistricting spearheaded by the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, was sent to the Justice Department for approval, the career staff members unanimously said it discriminated against African-American and Latino voters.

Mr. Spakovsky overruled the staff, said Joseph Rich, a former lawyer in the office. Mr. Spakovsky did the same thing when they recommended the rejection of a voter identification law in Georgia considered harmful to black voters. Mr. Rich said. Federal courts later struck down the two laws.

Former lawyers in the office said Mr. Spakovsky’s decisions seemed to have a partisan flavor unlike those in previous Republican and Democratic administrations. Mr. Spakovsky declined to comment.

“I understand you can never sweep politics completely away,†said Mark A. Posner, who had worked in the civil and voting rights unit from 1980 until 2003. “But it was much more explicit, pronounced and consciously done in this administration.â€

At the same time, the department encouraged United States attorneys to bring charges in voter fraud cases, not a priority in prior administrations. The prosecutors attended training seminars, were required to meet regularly with state or local officials to identify possible cases and were expected to follow up accusations aggressively.

The Republican National Committee and its state organizations supported the push, repeatedly calling for a crackdown. In what would become a pattern, Republican officials and lawmakers in a number of states, including Florida, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington, made accusations of widespread abuse, often involving thousands of votes.

In swing states, including Ohio and Wisconsin, party leaders conducted inquiries to find people who may have voted improperly and prodded officials to act on their findings.

But the party officials and lawmakers were often disappointed. The accusations led to relatively few cases, and a significant number resulted in acquittals.

The Path to Jail

One of those officials was Rick Graber, former chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party.

“It is a system that invites fraud,†Mr. Graber told reporters in August 2005 outside the house of a Milwaukeean he said had voted twice. “It’s a system that needs to be fixed.â€

Along with an effort to identify so-called double voters, the party had also performed a computer crosscheck of voting records from 2004 with a list of felons, turning up several hundred possible violators. The assertions of fraud were turned over to the United States attorney’s office for investigation.

Ms. Prude’s path to jail began after she attended a Democratic rally in Milwaukee featuring the Rev. Al Sharpton in late 2004. Along with hundreds of others, she marched to City Hall and registered to vote. Soon after, she sent in an absentee ballot.

Four years earlier, though, Ms. Prude had been convicted of trying to cash a counterfeit county government check worth $1,254. She was placed on six years’ probation.

Ms. Prude said she believed that she was permitted to vote because she was not in jail or on parole, she testified in court. Told by her probation officer that she could not vote, she said she immediately called City Hall to rescind her vote, a step she was told was not necessary.

“I made a big mistake, like I said, and I truly apologize for it,†Ms. Prude said during her trial in 2005. That vote, though, resulted in a felony conviction and sent her to jail for violating probation.

Of the hundreds of people initially suspected of violations in Milwaukee, 14 — most black, poor, Democratic and first-time voters — ever faced federal charges. United States Attorney Steven M. Biskupic would say only that there was insufficient evidence to bring other cases.

No residents of the house where Mr. Graber made his assertion were charged. Even the 14 proved frustrating for the Justice Department. It won five cases in court.

The evidence that some felons knew they that could not vote consisted simply of a form outlining 20 or more rules that they were given when put on probation and signs at local government offices, testimony shows.

The Wisconsin prosecutors lost every case on double voting. Cynthia C. Alicea, 25, was accused of multiple voting in 2004 because officials found two registration cards in her name. She and others were acquitted after explaining that they had filed a second card and voted just once after a clerk said they had filled out the first card incorrectly.

In other states, some of those charged blamed confusion for their actions. Registration forms almost always require a statement affirming citizenship.

Mr. Ali, 68, who had owned a jewelry store in Tallahassee, got into trouble after a clerk at the motor vehicles office had him complete a registration form that he quickly filled out in line, unaware that it was reserved just for United States citizens.

Even though he never voted, he was deported after living legally in this country for more than 10 years because of his misdemeanor federal criminal conviction.

“We’re foreigners here,†Mr. Ali said in a telephone interview from Lahore, Pakistan, where he lives with his daughter and wife, both United States citizens.

In Alaska, Rogelio Mejorada-Lopez, who manages a gasoline station, had received a voter registration form in the mail. Because he had applied for citizenship, he thought it was permissible to vote, his lawyer said. Now, he may be deported to Mexico after 16 years in the United States. “What I want is for them to leave me alone,†he said in an interview.

Federal prosecutors in Kansas and Missouri successfully prosecuted four people for multiple voting. Several claimed residency in each state and voted twice.

United States attorney’s offices in four other states did turn up instances of fraudulent voting in mostly rural areas. They were in the hard-to-extinguish tradition of vote buying, where local politicians offered $5 to $100 for individuals’ support.

Unease Over New Guidelines

Aside from those cases, nearly all the remaining 26 convictions from 2002 to and 2005 — the Justice Department will not release details about 2006 cases except to say they had 30 more convictions— were won against individuals acting independently, voter records and court documents show.

Previous guidelines had barred federal prosecutions of “isolated acts of individual wrongdoing†that were not part of schemes to corrupt elections. In most cases, prosecutors also had to prove an intent to commit fraud, not just an improper action.

That standard made some federal prosecutors uneasy about proceeding with charges, including David C. Iglesias, who was the United States attorney in New Mexico, and John McKay, the United States attorney in Seattle.

Although both found instances of improper registration or voting, they declined to bring charges, drawing criticism from prominent Republicans in their states. In Mr. Iglesias’s case, the complaints went to Mr. Bush. Both prosecutors were among those removed in December.

In the last year, the Justice Department has installed top prosecutors who may not be so reticent. In four states, the department has named interim or permanent prosecutors who have worked on election cases at Justice Department headquarters or for the Republican Party.

Bradley J. Schlozman has finished a year as interim United States attorney in Missouri, where he filed charges against four people accused of creating fake registration forms for nonexistent people. The forms could likely never be used in voting. The four worked for a left-leaning group, Acorn, and reportedly faked registration cards to justify their wages. The cases were similar to one that Mr. Iglesias had declined to prosecute, saying he saw no intent to influence the outcome of an election.

“The decision to file those indictments was reviewed by Washington,†a spokesman for Mr. Schlozman, Don Ledford, said. “They gave us the go-ahead.â€

Sabrina Pacifici and Barclay Walsh contributed research.

[Jason the Yank]

The unraveling continues.

WASHINGTON - (AP) World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged Thursday that he erred in helping a close female friend get transferred to a high-paying job, and said he was sorry.

His apology didn't ease concerns among the bank's staff association, which wants him to resign.

The growing controversy has overshadowed major development meetings this weekend and is raising fresh questions about whether Wolfowitz will stay on the job.

At issue are the generous compensation and pay raises of a bank employee, Shaha Riza, who has dated Wolfowitz. She was given an assignment at the State Department in September 2005, shortly after he became bank president.

"In hindsight I wish I had trusted my original instincts and kept myself out of the negotiations," Wolfowitz said. "I made a mistake, for which I am sorry."

The World Bank Group Staff Association is demanding that Wolfowitz step down.

"The president must acknowledge that his conduct has compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the World Bank Group and has destroyed the staff's trust in his leadership," the association said Thursday. "He must act honorably and resign."

Wolfowitz said he met Thursday morning with the World Bank's board and that members were looking into the matter. He declined to discuss what actions, if any, the board could take.

"I proposed to the board that they establish some mechanism to judge whether the agreement reached was a reasonable outcome," he said, referring to Riza's transfer. "I will accept any remedies they propose."

Wolfowitz dodged a question about whether he would resign over the flap. "I cannot speculate on what the board is going to decide," he said.

A World Bank spokeswoman would not comment on what range of options the board could consider or when it would finish its deliberations.

Timothy Adams, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for international affairs, declined to say whether or not the United States — the bank's largest shareholder — continues to support Wolfowitz's presidency. Adams said the prudent course of action was to let the board handle the matter. "There is a mechanism in place," he said.

As to Wolfowitz's apology, Adams said: "I appreciated the words he put forward."

The Government Accountability Project, a watchdog group, estimated Riza's salary at $193,590 as a result of the job transfer and pay raises. The group says she was paid by the World Bank and remains on the bank's payroll. The World Bank would not comment on Riza's compensation, citing confidentiality concerns.

"I take full responsibility for the details," of the job transfer, Wolfowitz said. "I did not attempt to hide my actions nor make anyone else responsible," he said.

The job change was made, he said, to avoid a conflict of interest when he took his post at the World Bank, where Riza already worked.

World Bank rules bar employees from supervising anyone with whom they had a personal relationship.

"I took the issue to the Ethics Committee and after extensive discussions ... the committee's advice was to promote and relocate Ms. Shaha Riza," Wolfowitz said.

"I made a good faith effort to implement my understanding of that advice," he explained.

Riza worked as a communications adviser in the bank's Middle East Department before she was detailed to the job at the State Department.

The State Department says Riza left in September 2006 and now works for Foundation for the Future, an international organization that gets some money from the department.

The World Bank's stated mission is to fight poverty and improve the living standards of people in developing countries. It lends about $20 billion a year for various projects.

Wolfowitz — who took the bank's helm on June 1, 2005 — asked for "some understanding" of his position in the controversy.

"Not only was this a painful personal dilemma, but I also had to deal with it when I was new to this institution, and I was trying to navigate uncharted waters," he said.

President Bush appointed Wolfowitz, a main architect of the Iraq war when he served as deputy defense secretary. His appointment was greeted with protests by international aid and other groups, and some worried he might use the bank to help America's allies and punish its enemies.

When asked about those fears on Thursday, Wolfowitz said: "We're not playing favorites with anybody."

[bflaff]

Originally posted by Jason the Yank:

The unraveling continues.

I assume the World Bank's board understands the need to squirrel your mistress away in a high paying job to keep her happy, so this might not progress beyond the embarrassing revelations stage. Hey, we've all been there, Paulie!

I give him credit, though. He's rich and powerful, and isn't using that to chase cheerleaders, college interns, or some other form of disposable hottie. Witness.

[Daaaaave]

Via Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times:

"I asked Obama on Thursday to explain his comments [in a recent AP interview].

"What I said was it was unlikely we could generate the votes to override a veto. And I said that I don't believe any Democrat wants to play chicken with the troops, put them in a situation where they don't have the equipment they need to come home safely. That does not mean that our only alternative is to send a carte blanche to the president."

Obama said there are "options that we are looking at now" if there were a veto -- shortening the time frame for funding, for example -- that would keep "this administration on a shorter leash.""

and again, during the MoveOn.org debate

"Now, I recognize that President Bush has indicated that he is going to veto a timetable that is attached to any supplemental, and my belief is that we’re gonna have to continue to ratchet up the pressure and re-present to him legislation that contains some constraints on his actions and has some mechanism whereby we can start getting combat troops out. The withdrawal has to begin soon. It’s time to end this war. It’s time to refocus our efforts on the wider struggle against terror, and it’s time for us to work much more aggressively diplomatically both inside Iraq and regionally if we’re gonna see the kind of stability in Iraq that all of us hope for."

[Jason the Yank]

Whatever happened to invoking the War Powers Act?

[bflaff]

The answer to the question 'What will it take to fire Karl Rove?' is that there is no answer. Here's his version of 'Mistakes were made.'

Lawyer: Rove didn't mean to delete email

By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Karl Rove's lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush's chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored computer system.

The attorney said Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law.

The issue arose because the White House and Republican National Committee have said they may have lost e-mails from Rove and other administration officials. Democratically chaired congressional committees want those e-mails for their probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors.

"His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived," Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove's e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove's laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush's re-election campaign, he added.

"There's never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record," Luskin said.

Any e-mails Rove deleted were the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly, Luskin said. He said Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail.

On Thursday, one Democratic committee chairman said his understanding was that the RNC believed Rove might have been deleting his e-mails and in 2005 took action to preserve them in accordance with the law and pending legal action.

The mystery of the missing e-mails is just one part of a furor over the firings of eight federal prosecutors that has threatened Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' job and thrown his Justice Department into turmoil.

For now, Bush is standing by his longtime friend from Texas, who has spent weeks huddled in his fifth-floor conference room at the Justice Department preparing to tell his story to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

New documents released Friday by the Justice Department may shed additional light, but their release prompted Gonzales' one-time chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to postpone a closed-door interview with congressional investigators.

One newly released document was being touted by Democrats as evidence that the prosecutors' conservative credentials were important to the Justice Department.

One Justice Department spreadsheet on the qualifications of the sitting federal prosecutors shows that along with prosecution experience, political experience and judicial experience, the U.S. attorneys were judged on whether they were members of the conservative Federalist Society.

The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, founded by conservative law students, now claims 35,000 members, including prominent members of the Bush administration, the federal judiciary and Congress.

Among those prosecutors noted for being members: Rachel Paulose, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota whose office suffered a revolt this month when three lawyers resigned their management posts. Paulose earlier had served as a top Justice Department counsel and special assistant to Gonzales.

One of the eight prosecutors who were fired, Kevin Ryan of San Francisco, also was a member of the conservative group, according to the document.

The missing e-mails posed some of the weightiest questions of a sprawling political and legal conflict between the Bush administration and Democrats in Congress.

Democrats are questioning whether any White House officials purposely sent e-mails about official business on the RNC server — then deleted them, in violation of the law — to avoid scrutiny.

White House officials said the administration is making an aggressive effort to recover anything that was lost. "We have no indications that there was improper intent when using these RNC e-mails," spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Luskin said Rove didn't know that deleting e-mails from his RNC inbox also deleted them from the RNC's server. That system was changed in 2005.

Such a configuration is uncommon and makes recovering e-mails "immeasurably harder," said retired FBI computer crimes specialist Joseph Dooley.

"It happens on occasion but usually you're not deleting things off the server," Dooley said. "That's highly unusual."

Rove voluntarily allowed investigators in the Plame case to review his laptop and copy the entire hard drive, from which investigators could have recovered even deleted e-mails, Luskin said.

As the investigation was winding down, Luskin said, prosecutors came to his office and reviewed all the documents — including e-mails — he had collected to be sure both sides had a complete set.

Luskin said if Fitzgerald believed any e-mails were destroyed, he would have called. Fitzgerald's office declined comment.

A lawyer for the RNC told congressional investigators that the RNC may be able to recover some of those e-mails sent from August 2004 on. That's when the RNC put a hold on an automatic purge policy.

The RNC lawyer, Rob Kelner, also said that the Republican committee has none of Rove's e-mails on its server prior to 2005, possibly because Rove deleted them, according to House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif.

Sometime in 2005, the RNC took action solely to prevent Rove from deleting his e-mails on that server. One reason for specifying Rove, Waxman said, appears to have been pending legal action against him.

Some 50 past and current White House aides had the RNC accounts, according to the administration, to conduct political business.

Separately, Perino said millions of White House e-mails could have been accidentally lost when staffers' accounts were converted over to Microsoft Outlook from Lotus Notes during the first couple of years of the administration.

"I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost," the spokeswoman said.

___

Associated Press writers Matt Apuzzo and Pete Yost contributed to this report.

Ha Ha. He thought he was hitting the 'Archive -- save for Democrats' button all along, when in fact it was the Delete button. Ooops, his bad.

[Daaaaave]

jason whitlock hits it completely out of the park

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.

I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.

But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.

But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

[bflaff]

Big 'word' to that. Apart from the fact that I can't recall ever hearing the phrase 'nappy headed' in a rap song, point well made.

It is worth quoting the brilliant Philip Roth novel, "The Human Stain," which begins with this epitaph:

OEDIPUS: What is the rite of purification? How shall it be done?

CREON: By banishing a man, or expiation of blood by blood...

"Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism -- which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country -- was succeeded by c*cksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony."

Banishing Imus and thinking you've solved the problem isn't doing anything.

Spike Lee, btw, was way ahead of the curve with "Bamboozled".

[Puedlfor]

eh, wasn't Dave Chappelle's whole schtick satirizing that kind of humor? I thought the reason Chappelle walked away from his show was because he saw people taking the joke literally.

I really can't stand Jason Whitlock, he's trying to fill the shoes of Ralph Wiley with about a tenth of the ability.

[Gordon Comstock]

Jason Whitlock not being a douche.

never thought I'd see the day.

[Daaaaave]

I still, honestly and trying to be as neutrally as possible, can't even start to fathom how "nappy headed hos" gets imus fired but calling edwards a "******" is business as usual for coulter.

[Daaaaave]

Originally posted by Andy Jordan:

Jason Whitlock not being a douche.

never thought I'd see the day.

whitlock was right. espn is clownshoes and scoop jackson is playing a modern day version of a minstrel show for them.

[Gordon Comstock]

Originally posted by Daaaaave:

I still, honestly and trying to be as neutrally as possible, can't even start to fathom how "nappy headed hos" gets imus fired but calling edwards a "******" is business as usual for coulter.

because black people hate gays iirc.

[bflaff]

Originally posted by Puedlfor:

eh, wasn't Dave Chappelle's whole schtick satirizing that kind of humor? I thought the reason Chappelle walked away from his show was because he saw people taking the joke literally.

That was my understanding too.

[Daaaaave]

I like Chappelle, but I get the feeling he knew that most people weren't in on the inside joke of skewering the lazy black comics who still play the "black people dance like this/white people dance like this" routines and he finally couldn't look himself in the mirror anymore.

[Gordon Comstock]

I think it was the stress of the creative process, frankly.

the little bits of S3 that Comedy Central spliced together were very disappointing. I want to think that he realized he couldn't keep it up, and quit as a result.

[bflaff]

Does anyone know what Condoleezza Rice does with her time? It seems like the answer is 'nothing', which explains why she has the time and inclination to weigh in on the Imus stoning:

Condoleezza Rice: I'm glad Imus was fired

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday that radio host Don Imus' comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team were "disgusting" and she was pleased he was fired.

Imus called the women players "nappy-headed hos" -- racist, sexist remarks that resulted in a barrage of protests and ultimately in the outspoken host losing his CBS Radio show, which was also televised.

"I'm very glad that there was, in fact, a consequence. I think that this kind of coarse language doesn't belong anywhere in reasonable dialogue between reasonable people," Rice said in an interview with syndicated radio show host Michael Medved.

Rice, the first black female U.S. Secretary of State and a former college professor, said the young women Imus targeted were fine athletes trying their best.

"It gets ruined by this disgusting -- and I'll use the word 'disgusting' -- comment which doesn't belong in any polite company and certainly doesn't belong on any radio station that I would listen to," she added.

Asked how she handled racist, sexist comments directed her way, Rice laughed and replied: "I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself. And I really don't care because, you know, I'm a mature woman."

[Jason the Yank]

Originally posted by Daaaaave:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Andy Jordan:

Jason Whitlock not being a douche.

never thought I'd see the day.

whitlock was right. espn is clownshoes and scoop jackson is playing a modern day version of a minstrel show for them. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

tbf, Whitlock has lambasted present-day black culture before.

[Puedlfor]

Rice is just grateful she has something to weigh in on that 70% of America won't disagree with.

[Kizzak]

Obama adviser buying into the "Democrats hate America" bit?

"We're going to hear something very unusual on the left, which is a genuine pride in what America can be again," she told me. "It's a bigger story about failing states. It's not a regional story. It's more freedom from fear and freedom from war."

http://community.sigames.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8191933985/m/5202075792/p/8

The likely assumption is that she didn't quite intend to imply that the left has no real pride in America, but still a for all these flubs.

fwiw about the 'clarifications' given by Obama, they still amount to the same public statements that he is willing to cede points to Bush as a result of his need to be the 'Great Compromiser'. The problem is, someone like Bush has no intention of coming to a compromise, and will keep chipping away at any attempts so long as people like Obama embrace the Republican frame that funding Iraq = supporting the troops.

Remind me why Obama isn't on the frontlines supporting the Reid-Feingold bill (S. 1077) that you've already got 9 others on: Boxer, Dodd, Harkin, Kennedy, Kerry, Leahy, Reid, Sanders, Whitehouse.

In case you didn't notice, included in that list is one senator running for the nomination, and two freshmen senator with less time in the senate than Obama. There's no reason for him to be ducking it as the alleged 'anti-Iraq' nominee.

[bflaff]

Originally posted by Kizzak:

Obama adviser buying into the "Democrats hate America" bit?

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">"We're going to hear something very unusual on the left, which is a genuine pride in what America can be again," she told me. "It's a bigger story about failing states. It's not a regional story. It's more freedom from fear and freedom from war."

</div></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think what this advisor is conveying, which seems obvious, is that Obama's upcoming foreign policy speech, which this person is referring to, will offer something that the Left hasn't heard in a while: a political speech which doesn't simply slam Bush and the Republicans, and instead offers a positive vision for what can be accomplished post-Bush. The 'genuine' pride is coming from Obama, not referring to the Left. She's saying he has a genuine pride for what American can be again, which is not something (according to this person) that other candidates are offering. And 'very unusual' seems to be referring to the other Dem candidates and politicians, as in 'it's unusual for them to talk like this these days'. The advisor is telling the Left 'Watch out, we've got something good cooked up for you' not 'Listen up, you damn haters.'

This reeks of the 'I'll temporarily flunk reading comprehension in order to pretend that my opponent has made a gaffe' strategy. Tempest, meet teapot.

The fact that lots of the kos people are frothing over this suggests a fearsome future: that this campaign may wind up being dominated, as usual, by the loudest idiots.

[bflaff]

Oh, and it's worth mentioning that the people who deliberately misread that quote and suggested that it portrayed Lefties as America haters just legitimated having Hannity et al do the same. Wp, guys. Wp.

[bflaff]

Originally posted by bflaff:

The fact that lots of the kos people are frothing over this suggests a fearsome future: that this campaign may wind up being dominated, as usual, by the loudest idiots.

Seriously, it's depressing. Read the comments on this story at kos and it's 600 people arguing about how the woman that made these comments probably was (or wasn't, depending on who you support) speaking officially for Obama, how Obama needs to put a tighter leash on his people, etc., etc. The fact that the words were offensive was taken as a given. uts gun in mouth, pulls trigger:

[bflaff]

Originally posted by bflaff:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by bflaff:

The fact that lots of the kos people are frothing over this suggests a fearsome future: that this campaign may wind up being dominated, as usual, by the loudest idiots.

Seriously, it's depressing. Read the comments on this story at kos and it's 600 people arguing about how the woman that made these comments probably was (or wasn't, depending on who you support) speaking officially for Obama, how Obama needs to put a tighter leash on his people, etc., etc. The fact that the words were offensive was taken as a given. : puts gun in mouth, pulls trigger: </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

Since that smiley is so terrible, I have to defend my self and say that the : : was supposed to be 'puts gun in mouth...' I guess I just learned that : and P together does something stupid.

[Gordon Comstock]

Obama will win.

[Kizzak]

The speech today was pretty much exactly the same thing every other speech he has given, some highlights:

He called for inclusion and unification.. to accomplish his goals.

He complained about pettiness in political maneuvers from everyone else.

He implied that the administration was corrupt because it spent too long in Washington - his line of reasoning was that people didn't mind his lack of experience in Washington because it meant he was less of a beltway tool unlike the last 6 years, despite the whole Bush not actually having been a part of Washington pre-election either.

Energy suggestions:

Installing insulation in every building in every major city, and giving the work to either the young who can't get jobs or ex-cons.

Requiring all vehicles to be 40 mpg or better

The funniest part was when it was utterly clear his speech-writers had no idea what the crowd was he was speaking to (segments about unions).

Oh yes, there was a standard hold hands and pray for about 7 minutes with plenty of AAAAAAMENs from Lowery before Obama came out.

His crescendo in the end was trying to make his 'movement' a natural linear successor to: American Revolution, Abolition Movement, Suffrage, Progressives (mainly unions), and the Civil Rights Movement.

The problem was his change was promising a 'New Politics', not exactly worthy to be on the level of any of them even if it were true - which I would seriously question based on his attempt to score points off of trying to show the difference between himself and Bush at every point. He even tried to get into the Walter Reed mess by suggesting that Bush was intentionally stuffing veterans in substandard hospitals and there were scores of homeless veterans living in dumpsters.

It would be nice if he at least had some significant policy that differed from other candidates or forced them to co-opt his, universal healthcare? seen it. Out of Iraq? Where's the Reid-Feingold co-sponsorship.

I wouldn't be surprised if Obama wins as he's got the momentum, I just see him mainly as another Reagan in that he makes people feel good about themselves without actually having to do or take a position on anything. The speech was all style and no real substance, which was part of the reason I was laughing when his tagline was to 'turn the page' to usher in a new political era.

Hopefully there will be a transcript put out so you guys won't just assume it's my perception that is coloring it as you are free to do at the moment.

[Kizzak]

Originally posted by bflaff:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Kizzak:

Obama adviser buying into the "Democrats hate America" bit?

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">"We're going to hear something very unusual on the left, which is a genuine pride in what America can be again," she told me. "It's a bigger story about failing states. It's not a regional story. It's more freedom from fear and freedom from war."

</div></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think what this advisor is conveying, which seems obvious, is that Obama's upcoming foreign policy speech, which this person is referring to, will offer something that the Left hasn't heard in a while: a political speech which doesn't simply slam Bush and the Republicans, and instead offers a positive vision for what can be accomplished post-Bush. The 'genuine' pride is coming from Obama, not referring to the Left. She's saying he has a genuine pride for what American can be again, which is not something (according to this person) that other candidates are offering. And 'very unusual' seems to be referring to the other Dem candidates and politicians, as in 'it's unusual for them to talk like this these days'. The advisor is telling the Left 'Watch out, we've got something good cooked up for you' not 'Listen up, you damn haters.'

</div></BLOCKQUOTE>

I'm trying to gauge whether you agree with the advisor's position or not, would that be a yes that you also buy into the Bush frame that the rest of the Left has no ideas?

[Gordon Comstock]

policy-based campaigns this early in the game are doomed to failure imo.