March 04, 2008
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton turned the Democrat race for the White House upside down with her victories in both of the big jewels in yesterday's primaries, Texas and Ohio.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defeated Senator Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday, ending a string of defeats and allowing her to soldier on in a Democratic presidential nomination race that now seems unlikely to end any time soon.Mrs. Clinton also won Rhode Island, while Mr. Obama won in Vermont. But the results mean that Mrs. Clinton won the two states she most needed to keep her candidacy alive.
Her victory in Texas was razor thin and came only after most Americans had gone to bed. But by winning decisively in Ohio earlier in the evening, Mrs. Clinton was able to deliver a televised victory speech in time for the late-night news. And the result there allowed her to cast Tuesday as the beginning of a comeback even though she stood a good chance of gaining no ground against Mr. Obama in the hunt for delegates.
“No candidate in recent history — Democratic or Republican — has won the White House without winning the Ohio primary,” Mrs. Clinton, of New York, said at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “We all know that if we want a Democratic president, we need a Democratic nominee who can win Democratic states just like Ohio.”
On the Republican side, Senator John McCain swept to victory in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Vermont and claimed his partyÂ’s nomination, capping a remarkable comeback in his second bid for the presidency.
Mr. McCainÂ’s main remaining rival, Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, announced he was dropping out minutes after the polls closed and pledged his cooperation to Mr. McCain. Aides to Mr. McCain said he would head Wednesday morning to Washington to go to the White House and accept the endorsement of President Bush, his one-time foe, and begin gathering his party around him.
Let's be clear about what this means -- Barack Obama just saw his cake walk to the nomination ended. Hillary CLinton now has a very realistic possibility of surviving all the way through to the Democrat convention, which is quite likely to be brokered. There is absolutely no telling what that will mean -- however, I'd have to say the institutional support the Clintons have makes it more likely that she will win the nomination through the decisions of the super delegates.
Expect increasingly bitter rhetoric from both Obama and Clinton over teh next few weeks -- and expect the eventual nominee to emerge from the process bloodied and an easier target for John McCain and the Republicans.
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March 02, 2008
The two programs, for older Americans and low-income people, cost $627 billion last year and accounted for 23 percent of all federal spending. With no change in existing law, the Congressional Budget Office says, that cost will double in 10 years and the programs will account for more than 30 percent of the budget.Economists and health policy experts say the federal health programs are unsustainable in their current form, because they are growing much faster than the economy or the revenues used to finance them. The Medicare program is especially endangered; its hospital insurance trust fund is expected to run out of money in 11 years.
But the need for cutbacks is not a popular theme for political candidates wooing voters who want more care at a lower cost.
The Democrats do not say, in any detail, how they would slow the growth of Medicare and Medicaid or what they think about the main policy options: rationing care, raising taxes, cutting payments to providers or requiring beneficiaries to pay more.
So, Hillary and Barack, what are you going to do to Grandma and Great-Uncle Sid? Provide them less care? Make them pay more of their fixed incomes for medical treatment? Raise everyone's directly taxes to pay for them? Cut payments to medical providers so that the rest of us pay a hidden tax in terms of increased fees when we see a doctor? And how will you prevent these same pitfalls from entering into your universal health care schemes, bringing us higher costs or rationed medical care?
After all, the American people deserve to know before you sell us a bill of goods.
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Steinem raised McCain’s Vietnam imprisonment as she sought to highlight an alleged gender-based media bias against Clinton.“Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight years. [The media would ask], ‘What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?’” Steinem said, to laughter from the audience.
McCain was, in fact, a prisoner of war for around five-and-a-half years, during which time he was tortured repeatedly. Referring to his time in captivity, Steinem said with bewilderment, “I mean, hello? This is supposed to be a qualification to be president? I don’t think so.”
Let's set aside the fact that this malignant old bitch is wrong about the reaction of the media -- when we have had female POWs they have been treated with respect and adulation and their sacrifices have been honored.
And that this wrinkled old crone and her audience would find the respect given Senator McCain and the 5 1/2 years of torture he endured bewildering and funny (note the laughter) is indicative of how far in to the depths of anti-Americanism the Democrats have sunk. She certainly is not worthy of breathing the same air as John McCain.
But then again, why should we be surprised. She was one of those out on the front lines of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s, calling heroes like John McCain baby-killers and murderers. She is more supportive of America's jihadi enemies today than she is of the US, and she has more sympathy for the jihadis getting fat at Gitmo than she ever had for Americans starved and tortured by our nation's enemies. And she is a supporter of Hillary Clinton. -- one who indicates that she could be quite happy with Barack Obama because they are at least 90% the same on the issues.
The Clinton campaign has made a weak attempt to distance itself from Steinem's comments. The Obama campaign has remained shamefully silent. Those of us who love America and respect her men and women in uniform will remember this incident.
More at HolyCoast, Nick Ragone, Forum Politics, Shoe-Fly Pie, American Princess, Paxalles.
UPDATE: HotAir has more -- including Wes Clark's denigration of McCain's military service, in which he places time as First Lady ahead of time as a military officer in terms of preparation to lead the nation.
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D, 
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Tony Rezko was obviously in trouble. He was a defendant in at least a dozen lawsuits, federal investigators in Chicago were poking around, and his name was in newspaper articles about corruption and fraud.None of that stopped Mr. Rezko, a politically connected developer, and Senator Barack Obama from completing real estate deals a few years ago that resulted in the Obamas obtaining their dream house and the Rezkos buying an empty lot next door.
Nearly three years later, fallout from Mr. ObamaÂ’s relationship with Mr. Rezko, who raised more than $150,000 for Mr. ObamaÂ’s campaigns, continue to dog Mr. Obama on the presidential campaign trail. That distraction promises to linger as Mr. Rezko goes on trial on corruption charges starting Monday.
Mr. Obama, a Democrat, is not part of the case against Mr. Rezko, who is accused of shaking down companies seeking business with the State of Illinois. Mr. Obama has conceded that it was a mistake to bring Mr. Rezko into his personal real estate dealings, although he has insisted that there was nothing unusual about the developerÂ’s decision to buy a sought-after lot in an upscale neighborhood.
But a review of court records, including new details of Mr. RezkoÂ’s finances that emerged recently, show that the lot purchase occurred as he was being pursued by creditors seeking more than $10 million, deepening the mystery of why he would plunge into a real estate investment whose biggest beneficiary appears to have been Mr. Obama.
As Mr. Obama and Mr. Rezko were completing the property purchases in June 2005, Mr. Rezko was fighting to keep lenders and investors at bay over defaulted loans and failing business ventures. But he side-stepped that financial dragnet by arranging for the land to be bought in his wifeÂ’s name, making it the only property she owned by herself, according to land records.
As a result, when the Obamas bought part of the land from Mrs. Rezko seven months later to widen their yard, the money they paid was beyond the reach of Mr. RezkoÂ’s creditors, including one conducting a court-ordered hunt for his assets to recover a $3.5 million debt.
Politics of change? Yeah -- keeping a nice chunk of change in the hands of a corrupt crony and out of the hands of those he defrauded.
But this is Barack Obama -- he's young, he's hip, he's cute, and he's Democrat. We dare not look too closely at this deal between him and a corrupt businessman -- especially because we don't know what skeletons will come tumbling out of the closets back in Chicago, where corruption is the oil that keeps the Democrat machine rolling.
And so while the Daley Administration running Chicago and the Blagojevich Administration running Illinois are tarred by their associations with Rezko, we are somehow expected to believe that Barack Obama is the only politician who somehow remained above the sleaze, despite this sweetheart deal and the long association between the two.
All it requires is that one suspend rational thought until November.
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Southbelt-Ellington Leader
February 24, 2008
PublisherÂ’s Opinion
ItÂ’s probably not necessary to remind our readers that election day is right around the corner, and everyone should vote.
There is plenty of information available to encourage you to vote for specific candidates. The Leader is not going to endorse candidates at this point.
But there is one candidate in a race, the congressional race for the 22nd District, for whom we are going to urge people not to vote for. That candidate is Pete Olson.
In May of 2007, he quit his job in Washington, D.C.
He left his $700,000 home to buy a house in Fort Bend for approximately $185,000 in August of 2007. At that time, he reported his mailing address as his home in Virginia.
When he filed with the Republican Party in December to run for the local congressional seat, he was asked how long he lived in the state, county and district.
Olson reported he lived in the state, county and district for four months.
Olson thinks he can use the big bucks he is getting from lobbyists to buy our congressional seat.
In his third campaign filing period, he reported receiving $175,000; with 90 percent of his funds coming from out of the state of Texas, most of it from well-known lobbyists.
He avoided his fellow opponents in the one televised debate, telling Channel 13, he was declining attending the event.
LetÂ’s see, home base really in Virginia; living in Texas for a few months out of the last couple of decades and most of his campaign money being donated from out of state.
Seems clear to me.
If elected, when his constituents want something for the district, they are going to have to get behind the long line of out-of state lobbyists.
He canÂ’t have, in such a short time, learned what he needs to know about representing this community.
Sorry, Mr. Olson, you must earn our vote, not buy it with out-of-state dollars from big lobbyists.
– Marie Flickinger
Well said, Marie. The problem with Olson is that his roots in the district are incredibly attenuated, and his position in the race is owed to those from outside of the area -- and the state -- who are financing his race. We deserve better.
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March 01, 2008
Obama then got the answer just as colossally wrong.
Playing on anxieties about national security, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has produced a “red phone moment” advertisement that suggests she would be better able to respond to a crisis than Senator Barack Obama.“It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep,” says a narrator as threatening music surges over dark black-and-white images.
There’s a world crisis and the White House phone is ringing. “Your vote will decide who answers that call,” the narrator says. “Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military — someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.”
It ends with a photo of Mrs. Clinton wearing glasses and picking up the phone.
Mr. Obama, responding to the ad during a stop in Houston, said it raised “a perfectly legitimate question.”
But let's be honest here -- the presidential candidate who is best qualified to pick up that phone is not Hillary Clinton. It is Senator John McCain, whose experience in and knowledge of the United States military is head and shoulders superior to that of either Democrat.
McCain knows, from personal experience, the cost of an incorrect decision to use -- or not use -- military force in defense of the United States. Neither of the Democrats has such experience. Neither of them has children currently serving in the US military.
McCain knows those world leaders, too -- and has greater experience with and greater respect from those leaders. After all, he has been in a policymaking role for decades, not making good-will visits and hosting state dinners as First Lady or voting present in a state legislature.
Who do I want picking up that phone at 3 a.m.? Who should any American want taking that call?
A neophyte politician -- long on rhetorical skills but short on qualifications?
A woman who loathes the military and who is seeking high public office the old-fashioned way -- using her husband's coattails to obscure her own lack of accomplishments?
Or a bona fide military hero from a family that has served the nation in the United States military with distinction for generations?
The answer should be obvious -- and I respectfully question the wisdom of anyone who disagrees.
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