Center For Politics and Culture in Massachusetts
The movement is gaining steam, so we announce again…
Riders are responsible for their own food, lodging and transportation. We anticipate these expenses to total $80-$100, so we recommend riders raise these funds separately from the fundraising minimum.
A car will be provided to transport tents and other equipment, including a bicycle repair kit, food, water and emergency supplies.
Check out this development from Huffington. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a more complete understanding of McCain’s history in the Senate. It’s not a smear campaign if it’s true. Voters deserve to know one way or the other.
There are many reasons to like Ralph Nader, 74. He has spent a lifetime advocating for consumer rights and fighting corporate excess. He established Public Citizen in Washington, DC to promote an agenda of protecting consumers from unfair predatory business practices and making the case for social and economic justice on an international level. He has been unrelenting in his insistence that business leaders must be held to a higher standard in our society. He fought the automobile industry with vim and enthusiasm, and won a lawsuit against GM for their overzealous and illegal surveillance of his activities. And he used the spotlight to argue forcefully for a broader and more open multi-party democracy.
What you will not find on any list of Nader’s likable qualities is his stubborn, short-sighted and pointless bids for the presidency. Far from helping his cause, he has mobilized the American mainstream to think of greens as a sanctimonious band of trust-fund liberals who neither understand nor much care for the everyday needs of working people. On top of that, his baffling ambition for high office – funded by Republicans – resulted in the election of George W. Bush in 2000.
Nader is probably going to run for president again. If he does, he will likely garner even fewer votes than he did in 2004, when most Democrats with green leanings learned their lesson from 2000 (though it wasn’t enough). But the case against his bid, in an election that could again come down to a few thousand votes in Ohio, Florida or Virginia, remains overwhelmingly strong.
He will sound the alarm again, saying the two political parties are two sides of the same coin. That couldn’t be further from the truth this year, but he may just fool enough people to put another Republican in the Oval Office.
Update: Nader is in for his 5th attempt at the White House
When Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid began to lose in earnest after Super Tuesday and her rival, Barack Obama, started to build a small lead among pledged delegates, the dynamic of animosity between the two shifted. He began to talk like a president and chose to focus his criticisms on John McCain, most notably his willingness to stay in Iraq for a hundred years. She in turn hurled small insults that landed at Obama’s feet, and he, smiling like a champion, walked away unscathed. She came across as panicked, and eager to get in front of him waving her arms and pleading with voters to “get real.” Support wasn’t so much slipping away from her as it was swelling behind him. It was a symbolic turning point.
Her supporters saw Obama as less a viable presidential candidate and more a stupid passing fad. She was the hard-working girl who dressed right and followed the rules, and she was getting upstaged by the easy-going new kid who everyone wanted to be friends with. And he was threatening to spoil the whole damn show. Even the principal and teachers had started to get sucked in – some even switched their allegiances. But it wasn’t his to take. She deserved it more. It was unfair.
To Hillary’s followers, “Obama-mania” echoed “Beatlemania:” a swooning crowd of political teenagers with a major crush, getting excited because the tunes he sang were easy and appealed to our whimsy, and sometimes screaming so loudly they couldn’t even hear the music. He made people feel good. But politics was about more than four chords repeated in slightly different order: it was about complex interludes and mature cantatas and sublime overtures. He was Paul McCartney, smiling and waving and playing a couple of pretty notes on the guitar. She was Brahms, forceful and precise. She was original. He may not have stolen the race outright, but he didn’t win on his merit or hard-core political street creds. He won on his electability.
But rules are funny things in politics, and they made Clinton’s plea to “get real” about this election seem like a weird attempt to dissuade voters from falling for some electoral hat trick. Get real? Isn’t the reality of politics – and one of its core struggles – that winning is what matters most? Being right, working hard, remembering names, accomplishing policy objectives: these are all very nice, but they all follow something more important: winning. Bill Clinton wrote the book on this reality, and his 1992 campaign showed a ferocity absent among Democratic candidates for president since President Johnson, who bullied himself into every elected office he held. Obama pressed this point in the CNN debate on February 21, calling into question her insinuation that his supporters were somehow “delusional.”
The reality is that she arrived late to the theme party of change. And when she did arrive, the guests were already mingling around the host, a tall, lanky and handsome fellow with a quick wit and easy smile. He didn’t out-spend her or out-work her. Her campaign was smart, if at times cumbersome, and she appealed to voters in a way that, under any other circumstances, would have wrapped up the nomination quickly. No, he out-charmed her, and no grand strategy could have prevented that. Her supporters are right: it’s not really fair. But it doesn’t matter now, because it’s over.
Jack Cafferty hit the nail on the head during Wednesday’s Cafferty File. I was hoping this clip would end up on youtube – it hasn’t, so here’s the text.
“Last night while celebrating his victory in Wisconsin, McCain could have chosen to use the free air time he was given on all three cable news networks for advancing some of his ideas of how he thinks he can make the country better.”
“But instead, he chose to call Barack Obama names, referring to the Democrat’s call for change as “eloquent but empty.” This is school yard stuff and you’d think a 71-year-old member of the United States Senate would know better. The reason Obama has captured the imagination of the people in this country is because he has a long list of ideas on how to improve things. And in case you haven’t noticed, we could use a little improvement around here.”
“Barack Obama was expected to draw a crowd of 20,000 people to a campaign event in Dallas, Texas, today. I wonder how many people showed up at McCain’s last appearance.”
“Partisanship, name calling and gridlock are turning people’s stomachs. Barack Obama has arrived on the scene like a breath of fresh air and if John McCain doesn’t understand the significance of that, he has no more chance of becoming president than I do.”
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Analysis - February 21, 2008
Barack Obama’s response in the CNN Debate in Austin to a question about plagiarism was clear and on point. He said, “This is where we start getting into silly season in politics, and I think people start getting discouraged about it.” In response, Hillary Clinton accused Obama of proposing not change you can believe in but “change you can Xerox.”
This was an odd comment, and a little surprising coming from Clinton. From a strategic standpoint, attacking Obama for being unoriginal is a bit of a non-starter. For one, he’s patently bright. He has written two decent books, has a pretty wonkish understanding of policy issues and was editor of the Harvard Law Review. Second, calling him on a technicality – not citing his sources – sounds like the smart girl in high school getting upset that her rival didn’t follow every rule. Obama is still a whiz-kid, whether he references correctly or not. And in this case, he admitted his mistake.
But this is part of a larger problem for Clinton. She needs to win big in Texas and Ohio in order to even stay in this race – probably by over 60%. A new poll puts the two dead even in Texas. While she knows she needs to go on the offensive in order to stay alive, she also needs to find a way to get at him that voters perceive to be fair. The problem is that attacking the nice guy makes the attacker look weak, not strong.
She now faces several mediocre options. She can stay on the offensive and hope that John McCain’s mini-scandal over whiffs of infidelity with a lobbyist ends by Monday. She can continue to emphasize her hard-core economic and job growth plan to counter the massive shift of union support toward Obama. And she can keep cozying up to the white working class suburban folks in the hope that they will perceive Obama as the candidate of the rich. But what she is unlikely to accomplish, in all of this, is a big turnaround.
Clearly Obama has captured the best hopes and energies of the Democratic Party. He has also converted many disillusioned Republicans who want to be on the right side of history, for once. His fundraising efforts remain unrivaled and his supporters are amped. He has run an incredible campaign on the strength of his character, his intelligence and his charisma. Where Obama’s campaign is about moving on, Clinton’s campaign is more about moving back – to 2000, when Bush got the job in a judicial decision many people to this day consider wrong.
The Democrats have apparently chosen a winner.
The New York Times has written an excellent condemnation of a San Francisco judge’s decision to shut down wikileaks, a site that has published 1.2 million documents from various classified, secret or otherwise unconventional sources.
Here’s where you can go to find this information untouched:
Take that, freedom-haters.
This is certain to be overturned on appeal. Also: way to go, judge! Unless this guy (a Bush appointee) is a secret freedom lover and foresaw the consequences of censoring this site, he inadvertently created a massive amount of FREE ADVERTISING for the site’s mirrors around the world.
Serbian protesters have broken into the US Embassy in Belgrade, apparently unaware that the US had nothing to do with Kosovo expressing its preference for independence. No telling how this might unfold, but for now the band of thugs are intent on destroying all American symbolism they can find, except, of course, the clothes on their backs. And their shoes. And soft drinks. And food and music.
Update Via CNN: A Senior State Department official confirms that a burned body was found inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Belgrade.
After seven years of intense – and intensifying – disappointment with President Bush, it’s hard not to wonder if two years from now, when President Obama is delivering some eloquent call to action to confront our challenges with courage and faith, we won’t miss our President’s brutal cowboy jingoism. From CNN:
“The purpose of this is not to add military bases,” Bush said. “I know there’s rumors in Ghana — ‘all Bush is coming to do is try to convince you to put a big military base here.’ That’s baloney. Or as we say in Texas, that’s bull.”
On second thought, no, we won’t miss him. This isn’t funny. The only thing more awkward than remembering he’s still our president is the nervous, hope-killing feeling we get when we peer into our souls and wonder how he possibly could have been elected to a second term.
It’s a little late for a legacy in Africa. All that’s left for our flatlining president is to go quietly into the night.
McCain denies sexual relationship with lobbyist.
John McCain’s relationship with Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, has drawn renewed scrutiny now that he has all but won the Republican presidential nomination. Apparently his senate staff began to notice she was visiting unusually often and intervened to protect their boss. McCain and Ms. Iseman have denied any sexual involvement, but hints of impropriety remain.
McCain’s much touted status as a hard-fighting reformer is challenged in a report today from the New York Times:
