Patricia: As Americans we have moved so far from the moral inner compass I remember as a child, thanks to a confluence of influences that have affected our culture at-large and corporate media driven — we CAN have a narcissistic President actually think and openly state giving up golf is a “sacrifice” while young Americans are dying for a war they/we were lied to get into. Liberals have been too complacent over the years since the Reagan/Bush ascendancy — waking up like Rip van Winkle — to an entire toxic panaroma of really un-American zeitgeist and more fascist than Democratic. We made too many tradeoffs and accomodations to the “Right” to be fair. 2008 will be different. The Clintons themselves and their DLC/Lieberman wing are an accomodation, middle of the road and ultimately dangerous destablization of how our system is supposed to work with checks and balances from different perspectives. The Founding Fathers weren’t accomodating. The centrist Democrats are really Republican-lite — and, consequently, we no longer have more than ONE perspective running our Government and affecting/infecting all media/business/education/healthcare, abusively. Clinton Inc.’s attraction in the 90s were they WERE an accomodation, moving the needle on the compass to the “Right.” HRC’s vote FOR WAR and “obliterate” language re yet another Nation NOT threatening Americans — clearly indicates Americans need to be vocal in moving the needle back to the real center — even if we are ALL swift-boated for doing so. The Clintons represent ACCOMODATION and COMPROMISE of everything Americans hold dear. They and their neocon friends are the flipside of the Bushes in every way.

God Bless Peggy Noonan!!! A national treasure — like Bill Moyers on the opposite side of the cultural spectrum. TRUE PATRIOTS of honest insight and love of America! http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121088369408596389.html Pity Party - Peggy Noonan www.wsj.com Pity Party May 16, 2008 Big picture, May 2008: The Democrats aren’t the ones falling apart, the Republicans are. The Democrats can see daylight ahead. For all their fractious fighting, they’re finally resolving their central drama. Hillary Clinton will leave, and Barack Obama will deliver a stirring acceptance speech. Then hand-to-hand in the general, where they see their guy triumphing. You see it when you talk to them: They’re busy being born. The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They’re frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party. The headline Wednesday on Drudge, from Politico, said, “Republicans Stunned by Loss in Mississippi.” It was about the eight-point drubbing the Democrat gave the Republican in the special House election. My first thought was: You have to be stupid to be stunned by that. Second thought: Most party leaders in Washington are stupid – detached, played out, stuck in the wisdom they learned when they were coming up, in ‘78 or ‘82 or ‘94. Whatever they learned then, they think pertains now. In politics especially, the first lesson sticks. For Richard Nixon, everything came back to Alger Hiss. They are also – Hill leaders, lobbyists, party speakers – successful, well-connected, busy and rich. They never guessed, back in ‘86, how government would pay off! They didn’t know they’d stay! They came to make a difference and wound up with their butts in the butter. But affluence detaches, and in time skews thinking. It gives you the illusion you’re safe, and that everyone else is. A party can lose its gut this way. Many are ambivalent, deep inside, about the decisions made the past seven years in the White House. But they’ve publicly supported it so long they think they … support it. They get confused. Late at night they toss and turn in the antique mahogany sleigh bed in the carpeted house in McLean and try to remember what it is they really do think, and what those thoughts imply. And those are the bright ones. The rest are in Perpetual 1980: We have the country, the troops will rally in the fall. “This was a real wakeup call for us,” someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. “We can’t let the Democrats take our issues.” And those issues would be? “We can’t let them pretend to be conservatives,” he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day. The Bush White House, faced with the series of losses from 2005 through ‘08, has long claimed the problem is Republicans on the Hill and running for office. They have scandals, bad personalities, don’t stand for anything. That’s why Republicans are losing: because they’re losers. All true enough! But this week a House Republican said publicly what many say privately, that there is another truth. “Members and pundits … fail to understand the deep seated antipathy toward the president, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures,” said Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia in a 20-page memo to House GOP leaders. The party, Mr. Davis told me, is “an airplane flying right into a mountain.” Analyses of its predicament reflect an “investment in the Bush presidency,” but “the public has just moved so far past that.” “Our leaders go up to the second floor of the White House and they get a case of White House-itis.” Mr. Bush has left the party at a disadvantage in terms of communications: “He can’t articulate. The only asset we have now is the big microphone, and he swallowed it.” The party, said Mr. Davis, must admit its predicament, act independently of the White House, and force Democrats to define themselves. “They should have some ownership for what’s going on. They control the budget. They pay no price… . Obama has all happy talk, but it’s from 30,000 feet. Energy, immigration, what is he gonna do?” * * * Could the party pivot from the president? I spoke this week to Clarke Reed of Mississippi, one of the great architects of resurgent Republicanism in the South. When he started out, in the 1950s, there were no Republicans in his state. The solid south was solidly Democratic, and Sen. James O. Eastland was thumping the breast pocket of his suit, vowing that civil rights legislation would never leave it. “We’re going to build a two-party system in the south,” Mr. Reed said. He helped create “the illusion of Southern power” as a friend put it, with the creation of the Southern Republican Chairman’s Association. “If you build it they will come.” They did. There are always “lots of excuses,” Mr. Reed said of the special-election loss. Poor candidate, local factors. “Having said all that,” he continued, “let’s just face it: It’s not a good time.” He meant to be a Republican. “They brought Cheney in, and that was a mistake.” He cited “a disenchantment with the generic Republican label, which we always thought was the Good Housekeeping seal.” What’s behind it? “American people just won’t take a long war. Just – name me a war, even in a pro-military state like this. It’s overall disappointment. It’s national. No leadership, adrift. Things haven’t worked.” The future lies in rebuilding locally, not being “distracted” by Washington. Is the Republican solid South over? “Yeah. Oh yeah.” He said, “I eat lunch every day at Buck’s Cafe. Obama’s picture is all over the wall.” How to come back? “The basic old conservative principles haven’t changed. We got distracted by Washington, we got distracted from having good county organizations.” Should the party attempt to break with Mr. Bush? Mr. Reed said he supports the president. And then he said, simply, “We’re past that.” We’re past that time. Mr. Reed said he was “short-term pessimistic, long-term optimistic.” He has seen a lot of history. “After Goldwater in ‘64 we said, ‘Let’s get practical.’ So we got ol’ Dick. We got through Watergate. Been through a lot. We’ve had success a long time.” Throughout the interview this was a Reed refrain: “We got through that.” We got through Watergate and Vietnam and changes large and small. He was holding high the flag, but his refrain implicitly compared the current moment to disaster. What happens to the Republicans in 2008 will likely be dictated by what didn’t happen in 2005, and ‘06, and ‘07. The moment when the party could have broken, on principle, with the administration – over the thinking behind and the carrying out of the war, over immigration, spending and the size of government – has passed. What two years ago would have been honorable and wise will now look craven. They’re stuck. Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party’s fortunes from the president’s. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn’t be left with a ruined “brand,” as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership. This is and will be the great challenge for John McCain: The Democratic argument, now being market tested by Obama Inc., that a McCain victory will yield nothing more or less than George Bush’s third term. That is going to be powerful, and it is going to get out the vote. And not for Republicans.

I was struck that Barack Obama’s speech today was interpreted as an “…HYSTERICAL DIATRIBE.” Fascinating. I have heard virtually every speech given by Barack, but NEVER have I heard/seen him be “HYSTERICAL.” I RANT and Barack is HYSTERICAL. Got it! And, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh do what…exactly??? Fascinating.

I am so very upset. Has anyone seen the CNN May 16, 2008, report that Mike Huckabee referred to … gosh I can’t even say it. Go to http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/ to read the very brief article about Huckabee’s talk in front of the rifle association. Here on this site people wish for violence in this election; now a “respected” presidential candidate speaks of it as if it is a joke … Lordy. I can’t bear it.

Huckabee should be banned from the airwaves, and I say this as a First Amendment stalwart. So much for his folksy persona. He’s insidious. His remark is veiled racism and beyond contempt. Implicit in his remark is the kind of disingenuous reason racists give for not voting for Barack; they say they don’t want him in harm’s way. Yet their words contribute to an atmosphere of violence.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/16/huckabee-talks-about-some_n_102… Huckabee Talks About Someone Aiming A Gun At Obama During NRA Speech (VIDEO) ABC | May 16, 2008 04:17 PM ***UPDATE*** Roughly five hours after making comments about someone aiming a gun at Obama during an NRA speech, Huckabee issued the following statement: During my speech at the N.R.A., a loud noise backstage, that sounded like a chair falling, distracted the crowd and interrupted my speech. I made an off hand remark that was in no way intended to offend or disparage Sen. Obama. I apologize that my comments were offensive. That was never my intention.” ABC News’ Kevin Chupka Reports: Former GOP hopeful and Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is back in the news this week, making a splash when he took a hit at Senator Barack Obama during the annual National Rifle Association meeting. Huckabee made an off-color joke during his speech in Louisville, Kentucky, when a loud bang was heard off-stage. “That was Barack Obama,” Huckabee quipped, “He Just tripped off a chair. He was getting ready to speak. Somebody aimed a gun at him and he…he dove for the floor.”

David Gergen - CNN’s Anderson Cooper - 10:21 ET “Even if Huckabee didn’t mean offense…to joke about guns and Barack Obama is the SINGLE MOST TASTELESS THING anyone can do during this Election cycle…

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f7a4a380-c4a4-4f84-b653-f252e8… What Went Wrong? The exclusive story of Hillary’s fall, as told by the high-level advisors, staffers, fundraisers, and on-the-ground organizers who lived it. Michelle Cottle, The New Republic Published: Friday, May 16, 2008 Endings are rarely as joyous as beginnings—and in the case of a long, wearing, and ultimately disappointing campaign, they can be downright brutal. But they also have the potential to be educational, for participants and gawkers alike. So it is that we asked (begged, really) a range of Hillarylanders for their up-close and personal lists of “What Went Wrong?” Not everyone wanted to play. Many stubbornly pointed out that their candidate is not yet dead. But, on the condition of total anonymity, a fairly broad enough cross-section of her staff responded—more than a dozen members all told, from high-level advisors to grunt-level assistants, from money men to on-the-ground organizers. Many answers fell into a handful of broad themes we’ve been hearing for months now. (She shouldn’t have run as an incumbent. She should have paid more attention to caucus states. She should have kept Bill chained in the basement at Whitehaven with a case of cheese curls and a stack of dirty movies.) Others had a distinct score-settling flavor. One respondent sent in a list of Top 25 screw ups, the first three being: 1. Patti 2. Solis 3. Doyle While from another corner came another list, reading: 1. Mark Penn 2. Mark Penn 3. Mark Penn But whether personal or clinical, new or familiar, the critiques are all the more striking for having come directly from those neck-deep in the action. So, here it is, an elegy for Hillary ‘08, written by some of those who have worked tirelessly to keep it alive. PROBLEMS AT THE OUTSET “Bottom line: I just don’t think she was hungry enough for it in the beginning. It wasn’t really until the ten-in-a-row loss that she started doing stuff like Saturday Night Live and Jon Stewart. In the beginning, it was hard to get her to do those things. Early in the campaign, she spent much more time in the Senate than the campaign would have liked. It took the threat of a real loss to get her hungry enough for it. But time was lost. If you ask the Iowa folks, I’m sure they would tell you she wasn’t there enough.” “Clearly [Obama] was a phenomenon. He was tapping something really different than anyone had ever seen before. … Months and months before Iowa, he was getting record crowds. I just think they should have really gone after him back in the summer and in the fall. I know it would have been a difficult decision to make back then. She’s the leader of the party, the standard bearer, the big dog. Everyone thinks she’s gonna win and walk away with it. Why go picking on Barack Obama? But that’s just something the campaign should have done sooner.” “We didn’t lay a serious glove on him until the fall. We tried to a little bit, but we weren’t successful. We did silly stuff, like talk about David Geffen. It wasn’t the substantive contrast we needed to make.” “Devastating vulnerabilities such as Obama’s associations with Wright and Ayers were not unearthed by the campaign’s vaunted research team in time to be fully taken advantage of—despite being readily available in the public domain.” “Running as an incumbent, as the inevitable candidate, was probably our biggest mistake, particularly in a time when the country is really hungry for change.” “We ran a frontrunner campaign in a party that punishes frontrunners. There was no attention to history: Ed Muskie—knocked off; threat to Mondale; etc. The best thing that could have happened is falling behind in the polls to Obama and then a shake-up ala Gore 2000—maybe even a move out of D.C. like he did it.” “Not learning from the mistakes of Kerry and Gore, the campaign was based in the D.C. area, rooting its perspective in the fishbowl and echo chamber nature of the capital. And [the campaign] was overstaffed with hired guns with no real allegiance to HRC; she was the safest and easiest bet, no sacrifice necessary.” “There was not any plan in place from beginning to end on how to win the nomination. It was, ‘Win Iowa.’ There was not the experience level, and, frankly, the management ability, to create a whole plan to get to the magical delegate number. That to me is the number one thing. It’s starting from that point that every subsequent decision resulted. The decision to spend x amount in Iowa versus be prepared for February 5 and beyond. Or how much money to spend in South Carolina—where it was highly unlikely we were going to win—versus the decision not to fund certain other states. … It was not as simple as, ‘Oh, that’s a caucus state, we’re not going to play there.’ That suggests a more serious thought process. It suggests a meeting where we went through all that.” “Harold Ickes’s encyclopedic understanding of the proportional delegate system was never operationalized into a field plan. The campaign inexplicably wrote off many states entirely, allowing Obama to create the lead of 100+ delegates that he has today. Most notably, we claimed the race would be over by February 5, but didn’t devote any resources to the smaller states that day and in the weeks that followed, allowing Obama to easily run up margins and delegate counts on the cheap—the delegate margin he will win by.” PROBLEMS WITH THE PERSONNEL “Hillary assembled a team thin on presidential campaign experience that confused discipline with insularity; they didn’t know what they didn’t know and were too arrogant to ask at a time early enough in the process when it could have made a difference, effectively shutting out even some long-time Hillaryland loyalists. Her innermost circle of [Patti Solis] Doyle, [Mark] Penn, [Mandy] Grunwald, [Neera] Tanden and [Howard] Wolfson formed a Board of Directors with no single Chairman or CEO; nobody was truly in charge, nobody held truly accountable.” “[Original campaign manager] Patti and [her deputy] Mike [Henry] sat up there in their offices and no one knew what they did all day. Patti’s a nice person who was put in a job way over head. She was out of her element. Mike Henry was hired because he was the flavor of day, the catch everyone wanted. I’m sure he was really great, but presidential politics require a unique skill set and knowledge.” “[Policy Director] Tanden and [Communications Director] Wolfson, the HQ’s most senior department heads, had no real presidential campaign experience, and no primary experience whatsoever. Notoriously bad managers, they filled key posts with newcomers loyal to them but unknown to and unfamiliar with the candidate, her style, her history, her preferences.” “Probably our second biggest mistake was much more operational: Making our chief strategist our one and only pollster. It is impossible to disagree and have a counter view on message when the person creating the message is also the person testing the message.” “We would just cringe. Ugh. Such an out-of-touch corporate run kind of campaign—exactly what you’d expect from Mark Penn. He did fine during his time in the Clinton White House. But running a campaign to capture the nomination in a change environment is something he had never done. Just look at what he did for Joe Lieberman!” “She never embraced the mantle from the beginning of being a different kind of candidate. Why did the campaign not do that? Because Mark Penn wanted to do it a different way. Read his book. He thought that you have a list of policy prescriptions. Voters are into that, and that’s how you win. This came at the expense of—and it’s a decision he really pushed for—saying to folks, ‘Yes, she’s a pretty inspiring figure herself.’ … There’s no reason why she’s not a change agent also. But once the CW is set, it just doesn’t change.” “There were so many consultants, instead of full-time staff who would have spent their entire time focusing on this. I love some of these people, but it just seems ridiculous. Cheryl Mills spends time doing NYU stuff. Mark Penn, Mandy Grunwald, Minyon Moore, and so on. There were too many people that had too much else going on on the side.” “[Bill’s] behavior that started off in Iowa, carried on in New Hampshire, and culminated in South Carolina really was the beginning of the end. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he just kind of imploded. I think, if I had to look back on it, it became more about him than about her. It really was destructive overall.” PROBLEMS WITH EXECUTION “There were more themes in this campaign than anything I’ve ever seen.” “Our message in fact was working very well through September. What we failed to do is pivot when we needed to. We stuck on the same thing. … We didn’t say, ‘OK, everybody gets that she can do this job.’ We never pivoted to what kind of change she could bring. We repackaged the old message and sent it back out. Instead of ‘Ready on Day One,’ we changed to ‘Solutions.’ It was a very IBM approach.” “Keeping the same team in place [after New Hampshire] meant that pre-Iowa planning and strategic errors continued nearly unabated, were not corrected. … Too much damage had been done by the time Maggie Williams took the helm.” “There were a number of people who advised the Clinton campaign back in the spring of ‘07 that this could easily become a longer battle—a war of attrition. She needed to build a broad base of supporters beyond the virtually limitless number of Clinton friends and supporters who they counted on to not only max out, but to use their not inconsiderable Rolodexes to help her. That would have been fine if this thing had ended Super Tuesday. It didn’t, and she ran out of money.” “There was financial mismanagement bordering on fraud. A candidate who raised more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the years had to pump in millions more of her own money to stave off bankruptcy.” “If you have no cash because you totally mismanaged the budget, you have no money to go up on TV; you’re getting crushed on TV and in direct mail because Obama has so much more money—that is a huge problem. Who was looking at the money? The financial situation was a disaster. That’s the reason [Howard] Paster had to come in and clean shit up.” PROBLEMS WITH THE CANDIDATE “I don’t think anybody in America doesn’t think she can do the job. What they’re dying for is to know a little bit more about her. And we were unable to present that side of her.” “If you look at this campaign as a 15- or 16-month gambit, the public turning point was the Philadelphia debate. Her non-answer on the driver’s license issue. Again, it spoke to the character issue: The sense that she will say anything and do anything to get elected. It drove the Obama narrative of her home.” “Her dense and wonky speaking style was compounded by her speechwriting team’s reporting to Policy Director Tanden rather than Communications Director Wolfson.” “The Senator is as loyal as she is smart. And I think that removing Patti is where those two things came into conflict. She knew the right thing to do. At same time, she was very loyal to Patti, who had been very loyal to her.” PROBLEMS IN IOWA “We placed a huge financial bet on Iowa and raised its importance by sending senior staff there. And because we didn’t plan for a national campaign, we couldn’t point to an operation that could withstand an Iowa blow the way Obama could after New Hampshire.” “It was obvious talking to people on the ground there that they simply did not get the Iowa caucus from a field perspective. That’s where the thing was lost. They didn’t have a good idea of the horse-trading that makes caucuses work for you.” “Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald dismissed the possibility of youth turning out heavily in Iowa for Obama, saying on the record after the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, ‘They don’t look like caucus-goers.’” “Penn was preoccupied with the national polls. We were up in the national polls, but Iowa was always a challenging thing for us. Early, early on, our internals showed us a significant number of points behind. … In Iowa, Penn consistently would show polls that were of the eight-way. That was basically meaningless because it wasn’t going to be an eight-way race. The candidates that were the second-tier candidates were not going to reach the threshold [of 15%]. The real race was the three-way. But he always focused on the eight-way when we’d start going over the numbers in Iowa. It was frustrating to the state staff and other people as well. It just showed a lack of understanding and a disconnect.” PROBLEMS WITH THE PRESS “The way we handled you guys was a mistake on our part. What we’re hearing is that we truly treated people badly and weren’t accessible enough or open enough. We had bad relationships with reporters, and it probably bit us on the ass.” “We ran a press operation that lost all credibility with the press through endless and pointless memos like, ‘Where’s the Bounce?’ and polling memos that cherry-picked only positive polls when we were up and ignored polling when we were down.” “Even among Clinton spokespeople long known for their heavy-handed ways, Phil Singer stood out for his all-too-common and accepted profanity-laced tirades and abusive behavior—both at colleagues and the media, who were all too happy to direct his comeuppance toward Hillary at a time she needed them most.” AND, FINALLY… “Her people spent all of 2008 making lists blaming each other (but never themselves) rather than lists of solutions.” Michelle Cottle is a senior editor of The New Republic. Copyright © 2007 The New Republic. All rights reserved.

BTW: You’ve been HAD. 1) Eleanor just fyi the Redwood is the California state tree even though it grows in many parts of the world it originated in a 450 strip up CA/Oregon coast. And even though California is more assoc around the world with a wide variety of palms, only California and Washington palms are indigenous. So could have said ‘with that Queen palm” sticking out of your eye, ie another very tall tree, but not as tall as redwoods. That’s some kind of CLUE of something? My, you are dumb. 2) Obama, doesn’t use paid bloggers. He doesn’t need to. He has one of the biggest, most energized and growing ‘armies” of volunteers in the world. However, there are a raft of folks who hate Clinton’s guts. One example, this “No Hillary in 2008” group started in 2004 the second she spoke of a possible run: http://www.nohillary2008.org/ So, yeah, there are a lot of people who pay/paid to get rid of Clinton. They use HER tactics against her. She’s the female Rove. Grab a clue. 3) I don’t know who “Princess” is…searched all over the site. And NO Alias….wowowow is NOT more popular than Youtube. Even a 7 year old knows that. Obviously, Youtube has a much broader based demographic where one video can get 8 million hits. WoW can only dream of reaching those numbers and is not close to getting the numbers of the Obama Girl video alone. And no, little sweeties, you aren’t going to get a magic button to delete anything your little heart desires because controversy creates longer stays on the site and wow needs those. Nice try. 4) Ever hear of setting the fox in the middle of the pigeons? I just hijacked your link. What was the discussion about? Oh that’s right, Hillary VP. Now all the links I embedded will live on Google forever on this thread so GOP hired guns will have a lot of ready research. Monsanto big one. You just got “Giuliani-ed” suckers. McCain’s next. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekSxxlj6rGE