Ten really obnoxious quotes from supporters of Clinton & Obama

Ten really obnoxious quotes from supporters of Clinton & Obama

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. ... God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme." ... "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye." ... "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost." ... "We started the AIDS virus ... as a means of genocide against people of color." --Barack Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in various sermons

To read all of the "obnoxious quotes" from the Democratic primary, please click here.

Wulsin, Schmidt set for rematch

My cousin Vic is running for the U.S. Congress in Ohio's Second District. (Actually, she's my ex's cousin but I have always felt close to her.)

From CityBeat
Key indicators... might favor Wulsin in this fall's matchup.

Wulsin got 14,074 more votes than Schmidt March 4. And 23,807 more people cast votes in the Democratic race than in the GOP one — signs that don't bode well for Schmidt in November.

"Jean Schmidt has voted against the interests of this district time and again," Wulsin said. "From health care for children to veterans issues, student loans and more, Jean Schmidt has stood with President Bush. The voters want a representative who will listen to them, and that's what I'll do."

To read about her on her website, please click here.

Talk of the Town: Native Son

March 31, 2008
by George Packer

The first time that Barack Obama met the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., at Trinity United Church of Christ, on the South Side of Chicago, in the late nineteen-eighties, the young community organizer tried to make a point about the growing importance of class division in America. As Obama described the exchange in his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Wright wasn’t having any of it: “These miseducated brothers, like that sociologist at the University of Chicago, talking about ‘the declining significance of race.’ Now, what country is he living in?” The deluded black scholar in question was William Julius Wilson, whose 1978 book of that title analyzed the economic forces affecting black Americans and advocated universal remedies over race-specific ones. Wright, a proponent of black liberation theology, dismissed every remark about class from Obama with a categorical racial answer, and Obama allowed the topic to drop. As we all now know, he also joined Wright’s church.

To read the entire "Talk of the Town" piece from The New Yorker magazine, please click here.

The author George Packer was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo, West Africa in the 1980s.

A McCain Moment: Do You Want Four More Years of This?

Arianna Huffington 3/26/2008
If our polarized country can agree on one thing, it’s that the greatest danger facing America over the next decade will not be Islamic extremism and instability in the Middle East, but rather Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. That’s just “common knowledge,” right?

So it only makes sense that the media have focused nonstop on this looming threat while paying scant attention to the fact that the presumptive Republican nominee for president apparently doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on in the Middle East.

To read the entire piece from the Huffington blog, please click here.

The Long Defeat

March 25, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

By DAVID BROOKS
Hillary Clinton may not realize it yet, but she’s just endured one of the worst weeks of her campaign.

First, Barack Obama weathered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright affair without serious damage to his nomination prospects. Obama still holds a tiny lead among Democrats nationally in the Gallup tracking poll, just as he did before this whole affair blew up.

Second, Obama’s lawyers successfully prevented re-votes in Florida and Michigan. That means it would be virtually impossible for Clinton to take a lead in either elected delegates or total primary votes.

Third, as Noam Scheiber of The New Republic has reported, most superdelegates have accepted Nancy Pelosi’s judgment that the winner of the elected delegates should get the nomination. Instead of lining up behind Clinton, they’re drifting away. Her lead among them has shrunk by about 60 in the past month, according to Avi Zenilman of Politico.com.

To read the op ed piece in The New York Times, please click here.

Mr. Obama’s Profile in Courage

March 19, 2008
Editorial

There are moments — increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns — when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with.

Inaugural addresses by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind, as does John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion, with its enduring vision of the separation between church and state. Senator Barack Obama, who has not faced such tests of character this year, faced one on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better

To read the entire editorial from The New York Times, please click here.

This is posting #300!!

The Taxi as a Ticket to the American Dream

By Marc Fisher
Sunday, March 23, 2008; C01

For now, in the Silver Spring development of Dumont Oaks, there are more D.C. cabs -- dozens of them -- parked along the streets than there are "For Sale" signs on houses going through foreclosure.

Hiwot Haileselassie wants to keep it that way. She and her husband work as architects in Rockville, but they credit their professional careers and success in this country to Washington's unique cab system. Only by driving a D.C. cab could her husband make the money and carve out the time that allowed both of them to go to school and climb the ladder in a new land, says the Ethiopian immigrant.

To read the entire Washington Post piece, please click here.

For American Indians, a Chance to Tell Their Own Story

March 12, 2008

By ROBIN POGREBIN
It isn’t often that curators will bless a museum exhibition before it opens.

But the people behind the “Our Peoples” show at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian are not your usual curators. They are American Indians, enlisted by the museum to help plan the ongoing exhibition, which focuses on the last 500 years of native history.

To read the entire story in the New York Times, please click here.