NightBlogger

by: Alegre
Tue Jul 15, 2008 at 16:52:28 PM EDT
There are unconfirmed reports, based on phone banking efforts to reach out to Super Ds, that eight previously Obama SDs expressed that, given the opportunity, they would vote for Hillary at the convention. I heard about an interview Will Bower of PUMA did recently, where he said delegates are starting to say they’ll vote for Hillary in Denver if the DNC did the right thing and ran an open and fair convention. That means a roll call vote with Hillary’s name put into nomination, and on the ballot. More

Chris Dolmetsch
(Bloomberg)
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said it would be “the worst mistake” for Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president, to pick Hillary Clinton as his running mate, according to the Guardian.

Carter cited opinion polls showing that half of U.S. voters have a negative view of Clinton, and said choosing the former first lady as vice-presidential candidate would be the “worst mistake that could be made,” the U.K.-based Guardian reported.

Carter formally endorsed Obama for president yesterday, the Guardian said. Carter made the comments in an interview with the newspaper’s weekend magazine that will be published June 7 and was conducted before Obama clinched enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination.

Carter said Obama should pick someone who can compensate for “potential defects,” such as his “youthfulness” and lack of experience in international and military affairs, the Guardian said. The former president said he prefers former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, the newspaper reported.

(CNN) — Former President Bill Clinton said that Democrats were more likely to lose in November if his wife Hillary Clinton is not the party’s presidential nominee, and suggested some people were trying to “cover this up” and “push and pressure and bully” superdelegates to make up their minds prematurely.

“I can’t believe it. It is just frantic the way they are trying to push and pressure and bully all these superdelegates to come out,” he said at a South Dakota campaign stop Sunday, in remarks first reported by ABC News. “’Oh, this is so terrible: The people they want her. Oh, this is so terrible: She is winning the general election, and he is not. Oh my goodness, we have to cover this up.’”

The former president added that his wife had not been given the respect she deserved as a legitimate presidential candidate. “She is winning the general election today and he is not, according to all the evidence,” he said. “And I have never seen anything like it. I have never seen a candidate treated so disrespectfully just for running.” More

MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone Magazine
Hillary Clinton is dead, at long last; it took one last excruciating election night, with CNN’s John King doing his spastic Minority Report routine over a video map of Indiana, to finally do away with her. When it was over, when the last votes were counted in Lake County and the mathematical reality sank in, everyone in the world understood that Hillary was cooked except, perhaps, Hillary herself — and that gesticulating asshole with the boxing gloves who appears behind her at seemingly every victory speech.

Even Hillary’s closest friends and supporters started popping out of the woodwork with sad looks on their faces, pleading with HRC to cut the shit already and bow out before this thing gets really embarrassing. Former Clinton pompom carrier Dianne Feinstein even came out with an ominous comment about needing to call Hillary to find out “what the strategy is.” As in, What the fuck are you doing? People are starting to stare! Read more

Jonathan Martin
Politico
Hillary Clinton today cited the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during the 1968 presidential campaign to explain why she was remaining in the race despite long odds. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,” Clinton told the editorial board of a South Dakota newspaper. ” I don’t understand it,” Clinton added, alluding to the calls for her to quit.

Clinton made the statement after pointing out that her husband didn’t lock up the nomination until June of 1992, trying to point out that, by past history, it’s not late in the campaign. But Barack Obama received Secret Service protection one year ago this month, the earliest ever in presidential history, after reports of threats. Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement: “Sen. Clinton’s statement before the Argus Leader editorial board was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign.” Read more

Video: Jesse Ventura brawls with Mike Reagan on Larry King.
Jesse Ventura: “Mike Reagan, you’re a chickenhawk!”

Photo Jon Dissed
BRENDAN FARRINGTON/AP
chron.com
In an interview with The Associated Press, Clinton said she is willing to take her fight to seat Florida and Michigan delegates to the convention if the two states want to go that far. Asked whether she would support the states if they appeal an unfavorable rules committee decision to the convention floor, the former first lady replied: “Yes I will. I will, because I feel very strongly about this.”

“I will consult with Floridians and the voters in Michigan because it’s really their voices that are being ignored and their votes that are being discounted, and I’ll support whatever the elected officials and the voters in those two states want to do.” Taking her battle to the convention would fly in the face of an increasing number of party leaders who say the contest needs to be wrapped up shortly after the last primary on June 3 to prepare adequately for the fall election. Read more

Linn Cohen-Cole
Celsias

Dear Hillary,

By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, older woman, white, liberal. I was even in a dorm with you in college. I have pulled for you for years. But something this past summer fundamentally changed my responsibility to my children and grandchildren.

You have connections to Monsanto through the Rose Law Firm where you worked and through Bill who hired Monsanto people for central food-related roles. Your Orwellian-named “Rural Americans for Hillary” was planned withTroutman Sanders, Monsanto’s lobbyists.

Genetic engineering and industrialized food and animal production all come together at the Rose Law Firm, which represents the world’s largest GE corporation (Monsanto), GE’s most controversial project (DP&L’s - now Monsanto’s - terminator genes) [here], the world’s largest meat producer (Tyson), the world’s largest retailer and a dominant food retailer (Wal-Mart).

Read more

Photo marcn

Raw Story
While campaigning in Fayetteville, W.Va., Bill Clinton argued with an audience member over claims made by Hillary Clinton that she improved health care during his administration.

“Wait, wait, wait a minute ma’am,” he said in response to a claim his wife didn’t fight for healthcare during his Administration. “You’re wrong. You’re wrong. I can’t believe you’re saying this. There are millions of pages of documents.”

The audience cheered Clinton’s reply. See Video

Photo veni

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that 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.”

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

Photo courtesy of azrainman
Pepe Escobar

Hillary won in Pennsylvania propped up essentially by old (second only to Florida) Catholic (40% of the vote) women (almost 60% of the vote). Blue-collar white men - “bitter” or not - also helped. Pennsylvania - even more rural than Ohio - is a state where the majority of voters (55%) have not even finished high school. What the throng outside Hillary’s victory rally made clear is what’s being confirmed by most polls. At least one in four Hillary voters are that stubborn; they will never vote for Obama if he clinches the nomination. Not only happy to use all the tricks in the Karl Rove slash and burn political playbook, thus committing a potential disaster inside the Democratic Party, Hillary had to extend her slash and burn approach to the Middle East.
Read more

Photo courtesy of azrainman
Counterpunch

For the Democratic Party it was the worst possible result. If Hillary Clinton had won by 20 points, which was her lead in Pennsylvania around the time the Rev Jeremiah Wright’s sermon jumped from Youtube to cable news, then there would have a case for arguing that yes, Obama had taken too much damage from Wright, from his ill-considered remarks about small-town bitterness at a California fundraiser and his tenuous ties to a former leader of the Weather Underground. One of Hillary Clinton’s big achievements has been to seriously, maybe fatally, wound Obama among her own supporters.
Read more

Humorous and entertaining account of the battle between Clinton and Obama.

Photo Randy Son Of Robert

CNN.com–Listening to the punditry today, you would think folks who revel in the comedy of Larry the Cable Guy or Katt Williams really would have a shot at the White House.

It’s totally absurd.

So, Sen. Barack Obama is all of a sudden an elitist because he went to Columbia and Harvard? And Sen. Hillary Clinton is an elitist because she went to Yale? Do you actually think Sen. John McCain isn’t an elitist? He went to an exclusive college — the Naval Academy, and that is one of the hardest places to get into. Bottom line: The narrative about our presidential candidates being just regular folks is a tired myth that gets repeated each and every day. And their efforts to show that they are “just like us” are really pathetic. Read more