Does anyone out there remember the times when "Liberal" was not a dirty word? After a generation of "Conservative" dominance, I would be glad to see what a Liberal could do to make a better world.

Careful, I think "liberal" is a curse word.

Ted Kennedy is a disappointment, in addition to being a liberal. He has chosen to endorse the most unqualified person to apply for the position since the Republicans gave us George W. Bush. But assuredly, it does offer the prospects of change, from bad to worse.

Does anyone really care who Ted Kennedy endorses? He has his own skeletons and would not be one of the outstanding Americans I'd want in my corner. Rest easily, Hillary.

"What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."" - John F. Kennedy, Acceptance of the New York Liberal Party Nomination, September 14, 1960

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/35_kennedy/psources/ps_nyliberal.html

We are "progressives", not liberal.

You read the comments of a woman who is either incredibly stupid, or just wanting to vote for a woman no matter what she is or does. She has no idea that elections are about voting for the best person for the job.

I voted for Senator Patty Murray, Senator Maria Cantwell, and Governor Christine Gregoire because they were the better candidates against their male counterparts, not because they were women. The author doesn't even have a clue about what is going on, but only that one candidate is a woman and the other is not.

The author in her commentary forgets that Hillary also refused to yield documents to the FBI, shredded documents, had to return stolen items from the White House when she left, sat on the board of directors of Walmart, and turned a thousand dollars into almost 100,000 in five months in commodity trading under the guidance of a person representing Tyson chickens which was strongly regulated by the State of Arkansas. Although Hillary did "Nothing illegal", her mentors had to pay almost 300,000 in fines for their regularities in her guidance. If that is the kind of wonderful "experience" that the author is advocating, I think we have seen enough.

Why anyone could justify the kind of sleazy politicking and lying done by the Clintons simply because one is a woman is beyond me. How anyone would choose anyone like Hillary and Bill over a decent, highly intelligent, idealistic, capable leader is mysterious and can only be explained by her feminism.

after eight years of bush and 16 years of republican control of congress i sugest that it would be easy to turn the word "conservative" into an epithet. repeat after me,"iraq, fema, economy, conservative."

Sharon Ash, you are afraid of the Black man. White women are afraid of the sexual power of the Black man.

Troy: I am a psychology major. I am afraid of you. And, try to focus on something other than a penis, like say for example, the fact our country is in the worst shape financially it has been in many years and we have a mound of serious problems facing our country and who takes over as president, really needs to be highly qualified.

Correction: Nelson, a conservative Senator from Nebraska. (Not Oklahoma).

Sharon Ash
Isn't it regressive to go from having degrees in Sociology and Psychology (as you claimed in an earlier post)to being a psychology major?
Oh, I get it. This is another attempt at one-up-man-ship.
Did you succeed?

Mary Momgret: Glad to see you are back and focusing on the issues as usual, it is a minor in sociology.

"Troy: I am a psychology major. I am afraid of you. And, try to focus on something other than a penis, like say for example, the fact our country is in the worst shape financially it has been in many years and we have a mound of serious problems facing our country and who takes over as president, really needs to be highly qualified."

There are people that actually buy this? Nice message of "joy", Sharon Ash. I wonder who you will vote for if it's Obama versus the Republicans? Is McCain more qualified? What about ex-CEO Romney? He seems to have a good resume that you can feel comfortable with given "our financial crises".
And "skeletons in the closet"? Come on now, you can't be that naive. Oh, sorry, this IS America . . .start paying attention and you'll really know what the issues are. "Skeletons in the closet" . . .geez!!!!

Sharon, stop picking on the Black man. As a Socio-Psycho major you should understand Donald G. Mathews where he refers to the days of slavery, and white fears of superlative black powers in the sexual realm. "The whites' belief that blacks' sexuality was far greater than their own and that the license of such libidinous creatures had to be controlled." [ Religion in the Old South, p 71 ]
And the fear of black superiority goes back deep into our nation's past. Let's take a glance into the Lynch Era. Writing in 1903 in the journal Medicine, Dr. William Lee Howard claimed that the physio-logical problem behind the rapes of defenceless white women by Negroes included "the large size of the Negro's penis" and the fact that Negroes lacked "the sensitiveness of the terminal fibers which exist in the Caucasian." [quoted by Randall Kennedy, p190) The Black man has suffered for years from White Women's paranoia on this subject, which is the underlying cause of much White Women's prejudice against the Black man. This is one reason why White women do not hire the Black man if they have to work after hours with them.

Every time some one speaks of experience, I recall how experienced Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al are. Bush was the experienced Governor of a great state.
The Constitution defines very limited qualifications, as I recall, for the Presidency. Namely, age and place of birth.
Could the Founders have been trying to include the opportunity for fresh perspectives in the leadership of this country?
Did they suspect career politicians, whose principle loyalty is to their party, may not necessarily be close enough to the masses to reflect their will? Or their best interests?
Do you really expect innovation from a party hack, without an original idea or solution?
Despite having been told every election, that education, for example, would improve, has it ever?
I recognize from reading some of these posts that "experience" has become a code word. The real meaning is Blacks need not apply.
I remember seeing an interview with George McGovern. he said that in all the years he was in the Senate passing laws regarding small businesses and taxation, he'd not had a clue. He learned how disconnected the legislation was from the real world was when he retired and tried to run a small hotel. He was a good human being with a lot of "experience"
I hardily agree with all the Posters who say this election is crucial.
There will be 3 possible Supreme Court appointments, imagine what will happen if the appointments are of conservative ideology. Yeah Sharon, I don't like Clarence Thomas, either. Let's not even broach Scalia's ilk.
It is time to evaluate the impact of Supply Side economics to determine if Wall Street and Main Street benefit equally from these policies. What do YOU think?
Is growth sustainable or desirable, if millions of tons of manufactured crap ends up in landfills, waterways, and human tissue?
I would like a return to clean water and wholesome food. Fresh air would also be nice.
I want to know that a trip to the doctor or dentist, isn't the most expensive thing I'll ever do. Also that profits are not the only motivation in health care policies.
Time to discuss why we have 2.5 million people in jail. More than all those "evil doer" countries and our sterling allies put together.
I would like to know those who we make war on are really enemies and not merely hostile because we are trying to undermine their governments or steal their resources.
Has anyone ever asked you if you wanted to be an Empire? If you would willingly sacrifice your sons and daughters to conquest? Do you think Mit Romney's sons are going "over there"?
I want to return to the feeling that this country is a wonderful work in progress.
Obama inspires me, there are some qualities of leadership that are inherent in an individual. he has them.
I haven't been this hopeful since Robert Kennedy announced his campaign

They call him: "Casshh me if you can" Mo money, yo!

The unfair and unbalanced judgement of Sen Obama:

http://socialistworker.org/2007-1/617/617_05_Obama.shtml

In his campaigns for state senate and his failed bid against U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, Obama hit picket lines and pressed the flesh. When he announced a presidential exploratory committee last month, the television news programs repeatedly showed him at a 2002 antiwar rally in Chicago--with commentators declaring that his opposition to the invasion inoculated him from the political bacillus of the Iraq catastrophe.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
AT FIRST glance, Obama may seem to be one of the so-called "good Democrats." But Obama is more Bill Clinton than Cynthia McKinney--an operator with his sights set on the "real politick" of the Democratic Party establishment, who has increasingly jettisoned whatever progressive ideas he may have once held.

As Chicago-based Palestinian rights activist Ali Abunimah recently recalled of Obama, "he was often very progressive about Israel-Palestine" as a state senator, even attending fundraisers in the Palestinian community. But as Abunimah concluded, "it all went out the window when he started his climb up the greasy pole."

That "greasy pole" is the only way to the top of the Democratic Party--and what's true about Obama on Palestine is true about Obama on Iraq and on immigrant and workers' rights.

Carl Davidson, a former Vietnam War protest leader who helped organize the 2002 rally Obama so famously spoke at, says that after the protest and the 2003 invasion, Obama's position on the war began to morph.

"After he visited Iraq when the war was on, he turned," Davidson wrote recently. "Now we had to set aside whether it was right or wrong to invade, now we had to find the 'smart' path to victory, not Bush's 'dumb' path...[I]n dealing with Iran, we had to leave on the table bombing their nuclear sites. For this, a lot of the local antiwar activists started calling him 'Barack O'bomb 'em.'

"He wasn't listening much to us anymore, but to folks much higher up in the [Democratic Leadership Council] orbit. He had bigger plans."

In 2004, those "bigger plans" became a reality for Obama when the Republican opposition in his campaign for the U.S. Senate imploded in a series of scandals.

With his charm and broad "appeal"--traditionally conservative white Illinois voters supported him in large numbers, along with urban voters in the city--candidate Obama was selected to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC). But Obama's convention speech--with lots of neat sound bites, but little content or concrete proposals--should have been a warning to progressives and the liberal "base."

The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)--which was formed in the mid-1980s by socially conservative and economically neoliberal Democrats to "reclaim" the party from "special interests" (unions, oppressed minorities, immigrants, women and so on)--had already put Obama on their list of the top 100 Democratic Party leaders to watch.

As senator, he quickly signaled his pro-business stance by voting for "tort reform"--legislation limiting the liability of corporations in class-action lawsuits.

Obama also formed one of the largest and most powerful political action committees in the Senate, raking in $3.8 million by the summer of 2006 and dolling out hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to Democratic candidates.

"It is also startling to see how quickly Obama's senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington," journalist Ken Silverstein wrote in Harper's magazine last fall in an article entitled, "Barack Obama Inc." "He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
OBAMA HAS become a "master triangulator," in Abunimah's words, figuring out how to reflect the aspirations of an economically wounded and war-weary electorate, while at the same time staying within the bounds of "acceptable" Washington politics. Nowhere has this been clearer than on the question of the Iraq war and U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.

Days before his 2004 DNC speech, Obama remarked to the press that there was, in fact, little difference between his position on the war and George W. Bush's--except how best to "execute" the policy.

Obama occasionally said things that seemed to give voice to a more radical position on the war--arguing, for example, that it was "time to give Iraqis their country back." But evidently, the time to give Iraqis their country back has come and gone.

Obama echoes the prevailing sentiment among mainstream Democrats that we need to bring the troops home--but on ever more vague timetables and constraining "conditions."

So Obama calls for a "phased redeployment" on a "timetable that would begin in four to six months." But even at the end point of this "redeployment," the war would not end, because U.S. troops would continue to occupy "American enclaves like the Green Zone," and perhaps some troops would be sent "over the horizon" to the Kurdish territories in northern Iraq.

While the U.S. has, in Obama's view, made mistakes in Iraq, the fault lies not with Bush or U.S. imperialism, but Iraqis themselves. "The days of asking, urging and waiting for [Iraqis] to take control of their own country are coming to an end," Obama said after Bush's January speech announcing his surge plan. "No more coddling, no more equivocation."

This is nothing less than the logic of colonial racism: Iraqis are themselves to blame for the horrors caused by the occupation.

Beyond Iraq, Obama has made his fidelity to U.S. empire very clear. He has repeatedly called for sufficient military strength to deal with "rogue nations like North Korea and Iran" or the "challenges presented by potential rivals like China."

He may position himself two steps to the left of his main opposition in the Democratic Party--or, in general elections, his Republican rivals--but never beyond the corporate-dictated confines of official politics.

Like Bill Clinton, Obama is a smooth politician. When the Black Commentator Web magazine editors asked Obama about being on the DLC's top 100 list, he asked the DLC to remove his name. When he was asked if he would sponsor legislation to repeal NAFTA, he promptly said yes--although he has yet to deliver.

He promised to oppose building a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico unless it was accompanied by a "path to legalization" and "a guest-worker program"--but then he voted for a border wall anyway shortly before last year's congressional election.

In late January, Obama announced his proposal to have all Americans covered by health insurance within six years--that is, the end of what he hopes will be his first presidential term. But this is the vote-getting promise made by candidate Bill Clinton in 1992--on which Clinton and a then-Democratic Congress failed to deliver.

Obama presents himself more or less as a liberal--but in terms of what is acceptable in today's "war on terror" and neoliberal "Washington consensus."

If Obama today is a cipher of doublespeak and triangulation, we can be sure that a President Obama would be a safe bet for the ruling elite and U.S. empire. And a losing bet for the rest of us.

Unelectable that's what he is?

http://www.liberalrapture.com/

What Obama, the DNC, and the compliant, brain dead media has done in trashing Clinton all year is reactionary. It is the opposite of progressive. 50% of the population has been degraded and insulted as a matter of course. As if it is normal. As if it is part and parcel of the Democratic Party's values. This year we HAD a chance in the Democratic Party to choose someone other than a white male and base that choice on merit. The DNC did not (though the people did ). The DNC has gamed the system to award the nomination to an unqualified minority candidate - thereby proving all the conservatives right. They gave Obama a hand out not a hand up.

Like her or not, support her or not, Hillary Clinton is qualified for the job of President. The "community organizer" from Chicago is not. (Now every time I see an Obamite defending his resume and using "community organizer" as a qualifier for President my eyes roll back in my head automatically. It's a Pavlovian response. I can't seem to help it. As far as I can tell - and I've looked - he organized some voter registration drives under the umbrella of a church. I help serve meals to the youth group at my church. Can I be President next?)

Clinton's qualifications never come up in the media. Why is this? I suspect that it would then force an airing of Obama's. His rump resume would then be seen for what it is: smoke, mirrors, and speeches. What does come up daily is her gender. Usually covertly. References to "tears" and "every man's first wife". This is terror on the part of "news" men. Pure terror. What Olbermann and the rest are reacting to is their own fear of castration. You see, it isn't that woman can't have some jobs once reserved for men - we have moved past that - it's that a woman can't have THAT job. If a woman gets THAT job then all the mediocre men who got promotions over more qualified women are on notice. The jig, as they say, will be up.

What Clinton represents by her presence is much more valuable to true progressives than what BHO represents. The reason is simple. She's more qualified than him. I could not write that sentence if Colin Powell was running against Clinton. Obama represents the worst failings of late 20th century liberalism: the invitation to view anyone who could show up and be a minority as "qualified." (Obama is the least qualified serious Presidential candidate in our history - yes, including Lincoln.) This is the opposite of what was intended by affirmative action which was an attempt to right the ship in the face of inbred anti-minority bias. It was not meant to elevate those with thin resumes to jobs that they would not have gotten otherwise.

There are thousands of reason to vote for someone other than Obama in the fall. Electoral nullification is one. Juries do it. I won't vote for him for reasons that go to his character. But if women and men across the country vote for McCain to let the media elites know that what they've done will not stand - I will not be upset or surprised.

Time to control the body politic before irreparable damages?

Again Sen Obama shows interest in selling to private corporations for example no more NASA, does Sen Obama withold the knowledege that:

A lot of the space equipment used by NASA was invented by Black scientists, yet when Mailer wrote that ignorant book about the moonshot, Fire On The Moon, he said that Blacks were jealous of this White achievement.

The formula for sending a shuttle into space and bringing it back was devised by a Black woman scientist.

Or maybe Sen Obama, just does not care, or did not have this historic fact in his trivia gps, as he has recently proven he lacks information in those bits of history?

Why Sen Obama is your real reason to consider closing NASA?

ted kennedy killed a woman and lied about it, he should have died