Al the Shoe Salesman...gets a tax cut

Let McCain continue to obsess about Joe the Hedge Fund Manager --- I mean, Plumber. We've got Al the Shoe Salesman (oh, and me, the music teacher; my husband, the letter carrier; my neighbor, THE PLUMBER; and my brother, the attorney).

Helping to unravel the financial crisis: McCain at the helm?

Let's hope not.

McCain was a central player in the last big government bailout: the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 80s. Here's some coverage of that issue from a paper in McCain's own Arizona.

Above, a picture of McCain celebrating his birthday with Charles Keating.

Repeat this phrase like a mantra: KEATING FIVE. Not only will it help congress guard against pitfalls in the process of unravelling our current financial crisis --- it will remind voters that it would be exceedingly difficult for McCain to help us through our current troubles when he is at the very center of the mindset which got us here (reckless deregulation).

compute your Obama tax cut

Here's a fun site that allows you to compute how much your tax cut would be under the Obama administration, and how much more a McCain administration would tax you.

Unless, of course, you're in that top 1% of earners --- folks in that group should be prepared to see higher taxation levels by Obama than by McCain (or perhaps they leave their internet browsing to their butlers. Damned if I know).

Obama: the economists' choice

66% of economists, in a recent poll, will be casting their vote for Obama.

Perhaps those economists are more mindful than the average bear about the facts of our economic history, as broken down by political party. (Graphic: The Liscio Report).

let the back-pedaling begin

When Karl Rove says "you've gone too far", you can most likely take that to the bank.

This one needs no explanation

Please spread the word. Click on the image to enlarge it, or for an even bigger version, go to WashingtonPost.com.

Keepin' It Real

Please, Mr. Ickes...could you go on a vacation now?

Is it true about Barack Obama?

Iraq wrap-up

another of McCain's Reverend supporters

You've probably heard about Rev. Hagee, but have you heard about Rev. Parsley?



UPDATE, 5/22/08: ABC news seems to be picking up on this story, finally.

UPDATE, 5/23/08: Rev. Hagee speaks! McCain has distanced himself from the Rev. and Hagee thinks that's for the best...

Rev. Parsley now finds himself out in the cold, as well...

young veterans for Obama

from MTV.com:

• MTV
• Music Videos
• MTV Shows
• Entertainment News

Please keep the focus on Obama's leadership on veterans' issues overall. His policies far outpace Sen. McCain's. Sam Graham-Feldstein's blog entry on MYBO lays out many of the details.

countering Clinton's "Southern Strategy"

From Time Magazine:

“Barack Obama had not been in politics for long when he got his tail whipped by a veteran Chicago Congressman in his own backyard in the 2000 US Congressional race. Obama couldn't win any of the black vote. The only ward he won was the White, Working-class Irish Catholic ward: a conservative community of cops, firefighters and schoolteachers. He took three-quarters of this vote.”

In addition, over 14 million WHITE people have voted for Obama. Why are the media trying to make this into a racial fight when it is not? Because Hillary said so? He won Iowa, one of the whitest states in the union!

File under "Card, comma, Race"

New levels of snark, dished up by Paul Begala on Tuesday night! Donna Brazile sets him straight...



From The NY Times column "The Caucus":

As if the divisions between race and gender in the Democratic Party hadn’t been further exposed through Tuesday night’s exit polls — and by a very heated exchange on CNN between Donna Brazile and Paul Begala — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s interview with USA Today on Wednesday is further mining those tense depths.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in the interview, citing an article by The Associated Press.

It “found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Audio of the interview is here:



While she said her remarks weren’t meant to be divisive, they’re already whipping around the Internet. “These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that,” she said in the interview. (Hint, hint, message to the superdelegates still undeclared.)

In Indiana alone, six in 10 white voters went for Mrs. Clinton, where she narrowly won the primary.

Bill Burton, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, told the newspaper that Mr. Obama had made inroads in Tuesday’s contests. And he added that her comments “are not true and frankly disappointing.”

On Tuesday night, we mentioned the dustup between two Democratic pundits, Ms. Brazile and Mr. Begala, who engaged in a prime-time debate about the coalitions being built by Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Begala, a Clinton supporter, said the party could not win in November with just “eggheads and African-Americans,” that the party could not ignore white middle-class voters. Ms. Brazile, who said she was not “undecided but undeclared” when it came to her choice for a candidate, shot back that Mr. Begala’s notions were dividing the party. (And that she’d chugged down many a beer with Joe and Jane “six-pack” in an effort to woo white voters.)

We’re revisiting their spirited exchange to demonstrate how divided party loyalists are right now.

UPDATE, 5/12/08:

Peggy Noonan's recent column in the Wall Street Journal centers on the Begala/Brazile dustup. An excerpt:

In case you didn't get what was behind that exchange, Mrs. Clinton spent this week making it clear. In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? "Even Richard Nixon didn't say white," an Obama supporter said, "even with the Southern strategy."

If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.

To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

"She has unleashed the gates of hell," a longtime party leader told me. "She's saying, 'He's not one of us.'"

She is trying to take Obama down in a new way, but also within a new context. In the past he was just the competitor. She could say, "All's fair." But now he's the competitor who is going to be the nominee of his party. And she is still trying to do him in. And the party is watching.

Again: amazing.

Who can save the situation? The superdelegates.

You know them. They're the ones hiding under the rock, behind the boulder, and at the bar.

They are terrified, most of them. They want the problem to go away. They want it handled, but they don't want to do it. They don't want to tell Hillary to stop, because they would likely pay a price for it, and not just with her.

They are afraid of looking as if they're jumping on a train that's speeding down the tracks and is about to roll over the damsel in distress.

Which is how Hillary -- and her supporters -- will paint it. Even though she's no damsel, and she causes distress.

Sit back, relax...

...get ready to RUMBLE!

This Newsweek article sums up the mood in the Obama camp.

An excerpt:

There are no screamers on Team Obama; one senior Obama aide says he's heard him yell only twice in four years. Obama was explicit from the beginning: there was to be "no drama," he told his aides. "I don't want elbowing or finger-pointing. We're going to rise or fall together." Obama wanted steady, calm, focused leadership; he wanted to keep out the grandstanders and make sure the quiet dissenters spoke up. A good formula for running a campaign—or a presidency.

It worked against Hillary Clinton, whose own campaign has been rent by squabbling aides and turf battles. While Clinton veered between playing Queen Elizabeth I and Norma Rae, Obama and his team chugged along with a superior 50-state campaign strategy, racking up the delegates. If the candidate seemed weary and peevish or a little slow to respond at times, he never lost his cool. But the real test is yet to come. The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities. The 2008 race may turn on which party will win the lower- and middle-class whites in industrial and border states—the Democrats' base from the New Deal to the 1960s, but "Reagan Democrats" in most presidential elections since then. It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as "the other"—as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters.

Obama says he's ready for the onslaught. "Yes, we know what's coming," he told a cheering crowd as he won the North Carolina primary last week. "We've seen it already … the attempts to play on our fears and exploit our differences to turn us against each other for pure political gain—to slice and dice this country into Red States and Blue States; blue-collar and white-collar; white, black, brown."

Interesting delegate/superdelegate calculator

VERY illustrative...from the NY Times.

Real Clear Politics has this to say about the calculator:

Determining the degree to which Clinton can close the pledged delegate gap in the remaining primaries might lead the average Clinton supporter to be fairly skeptical of her chances at the nomination. The new New York Times Delegate Calculator (rereleased Monday) puts this in even greater perspective. It factors in the percentage of remaining super delegates Clinton would need to win assuming she receives a certain percentage of the remaining pledged delegates.

What does it reveal?

If Clinton were to win a generous 57 percent of the pledged delegates in the remaining states, she would still need 63 percent of the undecided super delegates remaining to win the nomination. Clinton won 53.7% of the pledged delegates from her Pennsylvania victory and 52.4% of the pledged delegates from her Ohio victory.

A more revealing way to put it would be that Obama could manage only 43% of the pledged delegates in the remaining primaries and still need only 38% of the undecided super delegates to back him.

Based on recent super delegate trends even after Obama’s most recent struggles, such a wave of Clinton support among super delegates appears to be quite a daunting task.

Olbermann on McClinton's pandering "Hail Mary pass" gas tax holiday plan

Here's a Newsweek article explaining why the gas tax "holiday" simply will not work...

UPDATE, 5/3/08:

Calitics.com estimates job losses of 20,000 or more in California alone if a gas tax holiday is implemented. Road workers are on payrolls, Sen. Clinton...and they can't just go out and make a few college speeches to make up the difference, like your hubby can.

Meanwhile, 200 economists have stood up against Sen. Clinton's gas plan. Not that she's listening.

UPDATE, 5/5/08:

Here's a new ad Obama is running on the gas tax issue:



FLIP the SCRIPT: The Bill Clinton Library is the beneficiary of a $10 million donation from the Saudis. Does that boost Sen. Clinton's credibility on energy policy?

Of course not. Which is why she's going on the attack against Obama instead. Here's her latest ad from Indiana:



Here's video of Barack on yesterday's Meet the Press. The differences between his policy and Sen. Clinton's couldn't be much clearer.



PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!

Sen. Clinton is against the closing of an Indiana factory...

...which her husband's actions helped to close.

Gosh, it's complicated being Sen. Clinton!

ABC news goes into a little more detail here, and also in this video (below) from a recent episode of World News Tonight.



Please read and Digg this article! Please write letters to the editor on this topic, particularly in Indiana!

CBS poll: support for Obama rebounding

Excerpt from a CBS.com article:

Democrat Barack Obama appears to have rebounded from some of the damage caused by the controversy surrounding his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, according to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll.

On one key measure, Obama has seen a big reversal since his denunciation of Wright’s remarks on Tuesday. He now leads presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in the hypothetical fall contest by eleven points, 51 percent to 40 percent. That compares to a tied match-up in a CBS News/New York Times poll that was released last Wednesday.

Indiana and North Carolina: closing arguments

Great NYT article

Bob Herbert has written a wonderful article on the Rev. Wright echo chamber which the mainstream media has become of late. Please read the article...

then Buzz it Up on Yahoo (if you have a yahoo email address)!