Barack Obama Elected President!

[Ryan]

Because of the awesomeness of this rant, I figured it should be embedded.

I present to you...Keith Olbermann's "Special Comments" 5-23-08

[DevotedToAMC]

Wow he looks really pissed tonight

[Roman]

Thanks for this.

I just don't know. If she comesout and says to Obama himself that she used poor wording.......I just don't know.

I do know this........after he made those "Bitter" comments, she jumped on that and rode it like a stallion.

Obama's head man gave her the benifit of the doubt.

A Tale Of Two Candidates.

[Jess]

Yeah she did, but I think we can all agree that it's not good to throw read meat to those who think about assassinations.

He does. It still doesn't match the ass-kicking he gave to Bush last week. Man, he ripped him a big painful [!@#$%^&*].

I'm not saying this to sound pompous, but only to make a point. Her husband wrapped up the primary in California in June. However, all of his major opponents had quit or suspended their campaigns when it was obvious they could not win. The only opponent left was Jerry Brown and Clinton's nomination was a given. Brown did take his fight to the convention. Primaries also were not a big deal in 1968. I don't think RFK had even won a primary prior to California. It was the 1968 convention, I believe, that lead to the creation of the current primary system. Hubert Humphrey was nominated president that year and had not even run in a primary. I think if they had used primaries Muskey would have been the nominee.

[Wales2004]

I think I read that the primaries didn't even start as early as these had and that they started around March. Anyway Obama said he didn't think she meant anything by it. Maybe she learned something from it.

[Roman]

We'll see this week.

[DevotedToAMC]

That is good to hear. He seems to be reasonable when people read something into her comments that may or may not be there...I don't think she meant any harm with what she said

[Roman]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, May 24 -- Sen. Barack Obama told a Puerto Rican radio station Saturday that he takes Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at her word when she said she meant no harm by invoking Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in speaking about the current Democratic presidential race.

"I have learned that, when you are campaigning for as many months as Senator Clinton and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make, and I think that is what happened here," Obama (D-Ill.) told Radio Isla in his first public comments about the remark. "Senator Clinton says that she did not intend any offense by it, and I will take her at her word on that."

Clinton (D-N.Y.) told a South Dakota newspaper Friday that history pointed to primary results changing course in the summer, citing her husband's campaign in 1992 and the 1968 race, when, she said, "we all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California." The statement ignited a firestorm, particularly in light of lingering concerns about Obama's safety on the campaign trail. Her aides said she meant only to refer to examples of primary season running into June.

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Later, she said the Kennedys had been on her mind since Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's brain tumor was reported. She expressed regret if her comment "was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that."

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This shows that, unlike HRC, Obama can be above the fray. Because.......I remember when he made those poorly-worded "Bitter" comments, she called him elitist and said he was out of touch with real americans.

Shows who really has class in this subject.

[DevotedToAMC]

I agree with what he said. That stuff just happens.

I think they both have class. She apologized as did he over the bitter comments. She chose to respond to his, as did he respond to hers by suggesting it was not offensive to him and he felt it was not intended to be degrading.

[Roman]

Is Hillary Clinton the victim of a Vast Misogynist Conspiracy? Have her efforts to breach the ultimate glass ceiling in the world's labour market been destroyed - as in the end we're told all women's efforts inevitably are destroyed - by a lethal combination of sneering chauvinism and locker-room clubbiness?

To the cynics this US presidential election was always going to be a race to the bottom between racism and sexism. As the Democratic party continues to writhe through the final agonies of Senator Clinton's collapsing ambitions, her people think they know the real winner. They are muttering angrily that she is the most high-profile victim yet of sexual discrimination in the workplace. A favourite theme among them now is that Mrs Clinton is a kind of sacrificial figure: the woman who so obviously should have won the presidency but was denied by woman-hatred, the one whose efforts were not enough to conquer the legions of male bigots but whose sacrifice has made it possible for future women to scale the mountaintop. Henceforth, as it were, all generations shall call her blessed.

Before ascribing this sentiment to a particularly powerful case of sore loser syndrome, we ought to acknowledge that it surely has a little merit. There are things that are said all the time about Mrs Clinton's manner, her speaking style, assumptions that are made about her motivations, even the vocabulary in which she is described, that are, shall we say, certainly gender-specific. The cultural allusions played out with tired regularity to describe her campaigning style conjure the worst female images that lurk in the darkest corners of the male brain. She's Lady Macbeth and The White Queen and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction rolled into one.

And yet, are we truly expected to believe this is why Democratic voters have rejected her? I've no doubt that there are still some men who physically recoil at the thought of a woman in a powerful job but do people really think that there were not other - good - reasons for denying Senator Clinton her prize?

In the end the beauty of the “We only lost because people are sexist/racist/homophobic/stupid” argument is that it can't really be rebutted. The only way to deal with it is to explain patiently and with great understanding that there were valid reasons why millions of intelligent, thoughtful and tolerant Americans decided to run a million miles from the idea that this woman - this woman - should become the most powerful person on the planet.

The principal reason voters give for not liking Senator Clinton is that they don't trust her, that they sense that someone who would do or say anything to get elected is not someone who should be entrusted with the presidency. If anything has been demonstrated in the two long years in which she has been actively campaigning for the presidency, it is how right they are.

As she ratchets up her final efforts to wrest the nomination from Barack Obama's grasp, she has finally cut herself free from the frayed moorings that connected her campaign with honesty and reality. This week, as Senator Obama moved closer to securing a majority of delegates needed for the Democratic nomination, she was insisting with more urgency than ever that the votes cast in Michigan and Florida must be counted.

These states, you'll recall, broke the Democratic Party's rules and went ahead with their primaries earlier than they were supposed to. As a result the Democratic Party - not the Republicans, or the Supreme Court or the Bush Administration - decided to disqualify those states from the process. In Michigan, Senator Obama was not even on the ballot papers, yet now Senator Clinton not only insists those votes must count towards the final vote totals, but says it would be a terrible denial of Americans' civil rights if they did not.

She compared her effort to overturn the decision not only to Al Gore's controversial defeat in Florida in a disputed recount in 2000, but to the victims of tyranny throughout history - from enslaved blacks in pre-Civil War America to the cheated voters in the election in March in Zimbabwe.

This is, truly, disturbing. It matters not whether it is a man or a woman saying it. It is not only hyperbolic and cynical. It is inflammatory nonsense. But it is at least of a piece with her increasingly desperate struggle.

Mrs Clinton has received much credit for the fighting posture she has adopted of late. She has found her voice, it is said, as she fights to win votes in the remaining primary states among predominantly low-income, white voters. Yet what is this voice? It is a voice that explicitly appeals to white working-class solidarity and implicitly suggests that people outside that demographic cannot be president. It plays on the worst populist instincts of Americans, issuing threats to obliterate Iran and attacking the Chinese for poisoning Americans with toxic toys.

To see how completely Senator Clinton has changed in the course of her campaign, we have only to consider how the Democratic race was viewed two years ago as it got under way. Back then, when Mr Obama's campaign was merely a twinkle in his own eye, the question on Democrats' lips was: who could possibly beat Hillary? The assumption was that Senator Clinton would be the candidate of the elite, liberal, progressive types and African-Americans who in the end, as it turned out, flocked to Mr Obama.

Her problem, it was assumed back then, was that she would not be able to appeal to the white working class with its more conservative instincts and values. And so the discussion about potential rivals revolved around candidates who might appeal to those voters - Mark Warner, the former Governor of Virginia, John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina. Instead, Senator Obama became her main rival and outflanked her on the Left and outranked her among the progressives. So with barely a change of step, she pivoted and turned herself into the candidate of the hardworking ordinary Americans.

Now, there is much talk that if Mrs Clinton cannot be president she must be Mr Obama's vice-presidential nominee. But in her most recent speeches and actions she has surely demonstrated how dangerously unfit she would be. It would not be sexism or chauvinism but the clear-headed decision of a wise statesman, if Senator Obama brought this particular woman's presidential hopes to an unmourned end.

[DevotedToAMC]

Not in my opinion. There are plenty of men voting for her this election

[Roman]

Florida-Michigan monkey wrench

By Jules Witcover

Tribune Media Services

Article Last Updated: 05/23/2008 08:24:23 PM MDT

WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton's big primary victory in Kentucky gave her bragging rights there but brought her no closer to the Democratic presidential nomination. So she is turning to her last hope - trying to validate the votes she won in Florida and Michigan back in January.

The former first lady was back in the Sunshine State Wednesday in her strained effort to have the party ground rules rewritten that she previously had embraced for the primaries there and in Michigan.

Those rules by the Democratic National Committee sanctioned only four states - Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina - to hold delegate-electing contests in January. Any other states that did so, the DNC ruled, would lose their elected delegates to the national convention in Denver.

In advance, the traditional kickoff states in the process, Iowa and New Hampshire, extracted pledges from most of the Democratic candidates, including Clinton and Obama, not to campaign in Michigan and Florida. They didn't, but Clinton left her name on the ballot in Michigan and held a rally in Florida on the night of the primary.

In Michigan, Clinton, with her name on the ballot, won 328,151 votes or 55 percent of the total, to 237,761 votes or 40 percent for an "uncommitted" slate in the Jan. 15 primary. Obama's name did not appear there.

In Florida on Jan. 19, where all the candidates' names were on

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the ballot, Clinton got 857, 208 votes, or 50 percent, to 569,041 or 33 percent for Obama; 248,604 or 14 percent for John Edwards; and the remaining 3 percent split among Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich and Christopher Dodd.

So far the DNC has stuck to its word that the 156 delegates that Michigan would have been entitled to, and the 210 for Florida, would not be seated regardless of the votes cast in the unsanctioned primaries. Efforts in both states to hold new primaries have failed, as have attempts by the Clinton camp to negotiate on any allocation of delegates.

Instead, the rules and bylaws committee of the DNC is to hold a special meeting on May 31 to consider what to do, with Hillary Clinton arguing that the voters of the two states should not be "disenfranchised."

Campaigning in Kentucky, she argued not only that their votes should count and the delegates be seated in Denver, but that the popular votes she garnered in Michigan and Florida had already put her ahead of Obama in the national count. This questionable claim is central to her last-ditch pitch to the unelected and officially unpledged convention superdelegates that she would be the stronger Democratic candidate against John McCain in November.

Clinton is citing her primary victories in the largest states with electoral votes, including California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and Michigan, hoping the party's officeholders and other officials, given a privileged voice in the nomination decision, will turn to her.

But there has been little evidence to date that this argument has been carrying much weight with the superdelegates. As Obama has been steadily adding to his total of pledged delegates, this week in Oregon and Kentucky, the pool of superdelegates also has been moving his way, even in the face of Clinton's late string of impressive primary victories.

Her contention now that the popular vote nationally should be a game-changer is similar to the lament in 2000 of supporters of Al Gore in noting that he won more than half a million popular votes than George W. Bush. In that historic vote, the electoral-vote count remained decisive, just as the delegate count will in the end be all that matters this year.

Party leaders may be concerned now that ill will between the Clinton and Obama camps could cost the Democrats the White House. But they would have a great deal more to worry about if the superdelegates were to override the votes of millions of Americans cast in the primaries and caucuses across the country.

Hillary Clinton certainly makes a strong case for continuing her campaign until all the voters in all the remaining primaries have their say. But reneging on the Michigan and Florida deal to which she had already acquiesced is another matter.

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JULES WITCOVER's latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, "Very Strange Bedfellows," has just been published by Public Affairs Press.

[DevotedToAMC]

Well next Saturday is the big day with the meeting with the rules committee of the DNC. We will see what they decide next Saturday

[Roman]

Following Sen. Hillary Clinton's statement that presidential nominating contests have historically lasted late into the calendar year, citing the June 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as one example, an observer said the comment probably dooms any chance that she would be picked for the number two position by frontrunner Sen. Barack Obama.

"This probably means the end of her campaign," said David Mark, senior editor of Politico.com, on The Early Show. "She was already treading on pretty thin ice. To raise the specter of a tragic event like an assassination, this probably ends any vice presidential hopes she had."

Clinton was quick to apologize for the statement, saying Friday, "I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation - and in particular the Kennedy family - was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever."

However, Mark doesn’t believe the retraction will work.

"She trying to walk this back as furiously, as quickly as she possibly can," he said. "But yes, the damage is essentially done. There's no way of taking it back. It's right there in black and white, on videotape. And whatever she meant, it will be taken a certain way."

What does this mean for talk of the "dream ticket," which has been building in part as a means to allow a graceful and perhaps productive way to end the standoff between the two presidential hopefuls?

Mark believed the chances of an Obama-Clinton pairing were slim before her comments on Friday. "I don't think he particularly gains much from having her on the ticket," he said. "I don't think he particularly needs her. Yes, half the Democratic Party is with her, but most Democrats are not going to go over and vote for John McCain" if their candidate doesn't get the nomination.

Read Mo

[DevotedToAMC]

This David Mark is a moron. Obama said that he feels she did not intend to be offensive towards anyone. If he was pissed about it, he would have easily chastized Hillary for the comments but he did not. That action shows she is not out of the running for the VP slot and certainly not out for the presidential nomination.

Perhaps this Mark idiot should read some more articles as follow up on the story so he does not come off like a fool.