Many people i talk to are worried that Obama won't be able to handle the onslaught of the rethugs in the general ... this is a ridiculous reason to vote for Hillary. Obama has the potential to inspire the left and center while marginalizing the demoralized right ... especially if mccain is the nominee.
We know what the race will look like if Hillary is the nominee, we've all been down that road.
Vote for Obama now, if it doesn't work out, you can vote for Hillary later!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am actually starting to feel a sense of optimism about this race.  Last night we watched a video of the Obama speech in Denver, and it was electrifying.

We don't vote until the 12th though.

I'll be forwarding this to my friends in Super-Tuesday states.

John Mccain Called his wife WHAT??

Great job, BooMan!!

"If you look for the social economic motive, you will not have to wait for history to tell you what was propaganda and what was truth." - George Seldes

I got my parents to change from Hillary to Obama, so this Tuesday there'll be 4 of us caucusing for Obama in Colorado!!

lest we forget, Dick Morris shows his heart with an important reminder:

A NO TO CLINTON'S SLIME

It's about time.

[.]For more than 30 years, no one has been able to stop Bill and Hillary Clinton from routinely acting on their shared base instinct to annihilate anyone who gets in their way, in whatever way it takes, however long it takes, whatever it costs - and then to enjoy watching their targets suffer.[.]

After successfully employing their slash-and-burn tactics for years, they've come to truly believe that their reprehensible politics are justified, even necessary.

Remember Hillary's glee when she announced that the "fun part" of the campaign was about to begin - her attacks on her fellow Democrats? She was serious.

In Washington, Arkansas and recently in South Carolina, the Clintons have used whatever slimy tactics they felt they needed - ruining reputations, invading the privacy of their targets by dispatching private detectives to comb their records, lying about their opponents, blackmailing and threatening women who dared to say "yes" (or even "no") to Bill.

Remember how the Clintonites released Linda Tripp's confidential employment files to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker after Clinton hit man Harold Ickes met with Tripp's boss? Years later, the Defense Department settled a lawsuit with Tripp for over $600,000 for invading her privacy.

Then there were the stories branding Monica Lewinsky as a "stalker" trying to hurt the president[.]

RAISE THE STAKES

So now Super Tuesday is a contest between those who are mired in racial division and those who are willing to transcend it.

The Clintons were banking on a silent invocation of racial division stemming from a massive Obama win in South Carolina among black voters and a last place finish among whites. Their hopes were that whites would note the racial split in South Carolina and react by voting for Clinton.

But this racial divisiveness can only take place in the dark, out of sight. With the glare of Obama's idealism shining on the dialogue, conscience comes into play and the American electorate may overcome the divisiveness of the Clintons.

Will Obama's move trump the Clinton strategy? A lot hangs in the balance. Ultimately, the choice will say more about our soul as a nation than about the candidates in this election.

Either way, Obama has made the Super Tuesday vote more about who we are than who the candidates running for president are.

(emphasis added)

Well, "You can't vote for war and disown the results"

A very sound set of arguments, which I will share with my undecided friends (my vote for Obama is already cast. I'm runnning a polling place on Tuesday, so I voted early). While I don't consider Obama my ideal, I do think he is the best option left for the country.

An Endorsement of the Movement Barack Obama Leads

By Tom Hayden

With the California primary ten days away, it's time to decide. And for me, it's not been  easy.

My paramount concern is to prevent a Republican victory in November. Even though it seems to be a Democratic year. no one can say which Democratic can defeat. say. John McCain, the full-throated advocate of "winning" the Iraq war.  At stake are many issues beyond Iraq, not least the appointment of the next generation of federal judges.

I will vote without hesitation for the Democratic nominee, if only to stop to the neo-conservative usurpation of power which began in Florida in 2000.

One must choose a candidate based on the issues for which they stand, the spirit they invoke, and the people they are able to mobilize.

As for issues, the differences between Obama and Clinton on Iraq are difficult to pin down. Obama was against the Iraq war five years ago, and favors a more rapid pullout of combat troops than Clinton. But both would replace combat troops with an American counterinsurgency force of tens of thousands, potentially turning Iraq into Central America in the 1970s. Obama seems more supportive of diplomacy than Clinton, but he supports military intervention in Pakistan's tribal areas. Edwards favors a more rapid pullout from Iraq, but is unlikely to prevail.

On Iraq, the anti-war movement has helped turn a public majority against the war, a historic achievement. But the movement alone lacks much capacity to forge anything beyond the slogan of "bring the troops home." Our most achievable goal is a strong voter mandate for peace in November, the election of more Congressional Democrats, and spreading public awareness of the dangers of  counterinsurgency.  The election of a Democratic president is a necessary condition for ending the war, but sadly not a sufficient one.

So the choice remains.

I do not like the Hillary haters in our midst. As president, her court appointees alone would represent a relief from the present rigging of the courts and marginal improvements for working people. On Iraq, I believe she could be pushed to withdraw. She is a centrist, and it will be up to social movements to alter the center.

Nor do I like the role being played by President Bill Clinton, who is telling lies about Iraq and Obama that are unbecoming a former president.

Neither do I  agree with Gloria Steinem's divisive claim that the gender barrier is greater than the racial one. Who wants to measure slavery against the Inquisition? In the case at hand, who among us would argue that the barriers against Hillary Clinton are greater than those facing Barack Obama?  What is compelling is that most black women support Obama.  

I respect John Edwards' campaign and the role he has played in driving the Democratic Party towards a progressive agenda. At this point, however, I cannot foresee a primary he will win.

That leaves Barack Obama. I have been devastated by too many tragedies and betrayals over the past 40 years to ever again deposit so much hope in any single individual, no matter how charismatic or brilliant. But today I see across the generational divide the spirit, excitement, energy and creativity of a new generation bidding to displace the old ways. Obama's moment is their moment, and I pray that they succeed without the sufferings and betrayals my generation went through. There really is no comparison between the Obama generation and those who would come to power with Hillary Clinton, and I suspect she knows it. The people she would take into her administration may have been reformers and idealists in their youth, but they seem to seek now a return to their establishment positions of power. They are the sorts of people young Hillary Clinton herself would have scorned at Wellesley. If history is any guide, the new "best and brightest" of the Obama generation will unleash a new cycle of activism, reform and fresh thinking before they follow pragmatism to its dead end.  

Many ordinary Americans will take a transformative step down the long road to the Rainbow Covenant if Obama wins. For at least a brief moment, people around the world - from the shantytowns to the sweatshops, even to the restless rich of the Sixties generation - will look up from the treadmills of their shrunken lives to the possibilities of what life still might be. Environmental justice and global economic hope would dawn as possibilities.

Is Barack the one we have been waiting for? Or is it the other way around? Are we the people we have been waiting for? Barack Obama is giving voice and space to an awakening beyond his wildest expectations, a social force that may lead him far beyond his modest policy agend. Such movements in the past led the Kennedys and Franklin Roosevelt to achievements they never contemplated. [As Gandhi once said of India's liberation movement, "There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader."]

We are in a precious moment where caution must yield to courage. It is better to fail at the quest for greatness than to accept our planet's future as only a reliving of the past.

So I endorse the movement that Barack Obama has inspired and will support his candidacy in the inevitable storms ahead.

Thanks BooMan.  But I still don't like either of them.

Oh, there you are, Perry. -Phineas -SLB-

Here here!

there is no such thing as history. there are only historians.

Good breakdown of the issues.  

What pushed me over to Obama finally a few weeks ago was a combination of foreign policy and his amazing talent that we can hopefully tap for the benefit of our country.  I truly hope he can be a transformative president in the best sense of the word.

But here I'll only talk substance.  I have been disappointed in Obama's lack of leadership on the war while in the Senate.  But I have greater concerns about Hillary. My foreign policy concerns are a combination of your reasons #2 and #3 plus something else.  I started thinking about the team of foreign policy advisors that each is relying on. I read about them in an Ari Berman analysis in The Nation that was published about the time of the Iowa caucuses.  

I agree with a lot of what Chris Hayes said about Obama in his endorsement, but this is the part that puts me firmly in the Obama camp:

But while domestic policy will ultimately be determined through a complicated and fraught interplay with legislators, foreign policy is where the President's agenda is implemented more or less unfettered. It's here where distinctions in worldview matter most--and where Obama compares most favorably to Clinton. The war is the most obvious and powerful distinction between the two: Hillary Clinton voted for and supported the most disastrous American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and Barack Obama (at a time when it was deeply courageous to do so) spoke out against it. In this campaign, their proposals are relatively similar, but in rhetoric and posture Clinton has played hawk to Obama's dove, attacking from the right on everything from the use of first-strike nuclear weapons to negotiating with Iran's president. Her hawkishness relative to Obama's is mirrored in her circle of advisers. As my colleague Ari Berman has reported in these pages, it's a circle dominated by people who believed and believe that waging pre-emptive war on Iraq was the right thing to do. Obama's circle is made up overwhelmingly of people who thought the Iraq War was a mistake.

I'm voting for Obama on Tuesday.

A few very good videos (many cute ones, too) can be seen HERE.

Although my absentee ballot for the CA primary has already been mailed and marked for Obama. It was not an easy decision to vote for him.

I am absolutely certain (cynically so I suppose) that Obama will shaft the very groups that would have been instrumental in his success. The youth, individual donors, progressives, African-Americans and netroots.

In comparison between Hillary & Barack I am convinced that Hillary will govern with more progressive policies than Barack and achieve more towards universal health care, energy independence and fiscal prudence. She will also push back hard against the right wing attack machine knowing they will be out in force to get her. Barack, IMO, after he gets elected will be convinced that his "post-partisan" message is what caused his success. We all know what that means - embracing conservative positions and pleasing the village elders. Every time the Dems have talked about being bi-partisan they caved into right wing frames. Note, that the village and their media are big supporters of Barack!

So why did I vote for Barack? The thought of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton-Bush was too unbearable. Having said that I know I will likely regret my vote as Barack becomes a village shill.

It will be interesting to see how the netroots deals with that????

chris hayes has an excellent essay re: "why obama?"

a few snippets:

The Choice

...According to polling data as well as my conversations with friends and colleagues, progressives are evenly split or undecided between the two. This is, to me, somewhat astonishing (about which more in a moment), but it also means that at a time when other subgroups within the Democratic coalition are leaning heavily toward one candidate or the other, progressives are at a moment of maximum leverage.
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The question then becomes this: which of the two Democratic candidates is more likely to bring to fruition a new progressive majority? I believe, passionately and deeply, if occasionally waveringly, that it's Barack Obama.
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...A President cannot build a movement, but he can be its messenger, as was Reagan. Part of what tantalizes and frustrates about Obama is that he seems to have the potential to be such a messenger and yet shies away from speaking in ideological terms. When he invokes union organizers facing Pinkerton thugs to give us our forty-hour week, or says we are bound to one another as "our brother's keeper...our sister's keeper," he is articulating the deepest progressive values: solidarity and community and collective action. But he places more rhetorical emphasis on a politics of "unity" that, read uncharitably, seems to fetishize bipartisanship as an end in itself and reinforce lame and deceptive myths that the parties are equally responsible for the "bickering" and "divisiveness" in Washington. It appears sometimes that his diagnosis of what's wrong with politics is the way it is conducted rather than for whom.
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Whoever is elected in November, progressives will probably find themselves feeling frustrated. Ultimately though, the future judgments and actions of the candidates are unknowable, obscured behind time's cloak. Who knew that the Bill Clinton of 1992 who campaigned with Nelson Mandela would later threaten to sanction South Africa when it passed a law allowing the production of low-cost generic AIDS drugs for its suffering population--or that the George W. Bush of 2000, an amiable "centrist" whose thin foreign-policy views shaded toward isolationism, would go on to become a self-justifying, delusional and messianic instrument of global war? In this sense, Bill Clinton is right: voting for and electing Barack Obama is a "roll of a dice." All elections are. But the candidacy of Barack Obama represents by far the left's best chance to, in Buchanan's immortal phrasing, take back the bigger half of the country. It's a chance we can't pass up.

the nation

recommended reading

off to enjoy the afternoon and some football.

no pick...l just want to see a good game, not another super blow-out.

later

lTMF'sA

the revolution will not be televised...

Another big endorsement, Maria Shriver shows up this morning and endorses Obama.