Assuming Barack Obama actually gets the nomination (we cannot rule out Clinton somehow nabbing it at the brokered convention), I think there are perhaps three politicians who could possibly add to his ticket going into the general election:

John Edwards - His populist talk and devotion to working class issues, combined with his skills as an attorney, make him an ideal vice presidential candidate. He managed to sell himself as one in 2004, and although he didn't get enough footing to remain in contention for the nomination this year he still has a base of supporters who could help bridge the divide between Obama's followers and Clinton's. But this is unlikely, because Edwards is an economic populist, and corporate Democrat Obama blew it big time when he tried to finagle an endorsement only to end up angering Donna Edwards by attacking her husband's health care plan.

Thanks to Sarah Lane at EENR for supplying the links in this entry.

When the Supreme (Kangaroo) Court upheld an unconstitutional poll tax last week that was passed in the form of a voter suppression law in Indiana, some people (like Injustice Antonin Scalia) were quick to dismiss the horrendous effects. But as that state held its primary yesterday, reports about voters being turned away because they did not have the poll tax began coming out.

Twelve elderly nuns—NUNS, for crying out loud—were told they could not vote because they didn't have the required state or federal ID card. They are all in their eighties and nineties. Vietnam and Gulf War I veteran Russell Baughman was denied his right to vote, because his identification wasn't considered good enough.

I've been trying, in my humble way, to help jump-start a renewed Progressive Party presence. But a question that is often asked of me is why not just join the Green Party. I could go into a long and detailed explanation, but the short of it is that I don't think they're very organized and some of their campaigning methods rub me the wrong way. (For the record, the reason I don't say much about the Libertarian and Socialist Parties is because I don't know enough about their organizational structure or their methods of campaigning to make an informed assessment.)

First, my distaste for the Green Party's methods in campaigning. As reported by CBS News, they accepted money and assistance in 2006 from then-senator Rick Santorum of the Republican Party in order to get on the ballot. The state's high court threw candidate Carl Romanelli off the ballot citing insufficient signatures, but the story exposed an even deeper rot within the Greens' political machine in Pennsylvania: the willingness to be compromised just to try to stick it to the Democrats, whom Greens consider little or no better than the GOP.

I take Obama to task on a lot of issues, but it wouldn't be fair if I didn't acknowledge that he does take some good positions in this campaign. An example is illustrated in yesterday's column by the New York Times' Paul Krugman, which states:

The impression that Mr. McCain’s tax talk is all about pandering is reinforced by his proposal for a summer gas tax holiday — a measure that would, in fact, do little to help consumers, although it would boost oil industry profits.

Last night MSNBC (including Keith Olbermann) was all over Jeremiah Wright for going on a book tour and — gasp! — daring to criticize Barack Obama. Reading today's hate-fueled rant on the web site, you'd think he had done something wrong. Why? Why shouldn't the man who was publicly tossed overboard by his former parishioner return the favor?

Reading Kevin Alexander Gray's assessment of the speech in which the Democratic candidate for president distanced himself from the man who presided over his marriage and baptized his children, I couldn't help but conclude that Wright had been thrown under the proverbial speeding bus by Obama — who apparently decided long ago to adopt Bill Cosby's out-of-touch, blame-the-victim rhetoric (an observation echoed by Adolph Reed, Jr., in the May issue of The Progressive).

Thanks go out to Linda Milazzo for posting these.

http://www.youtube.com/v/hbmXekebQ5M

http://www.youtube.com/v/gL2O5s2dGak

The videos linked to above are of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, effectively admitting on Larry King's program that she is chummy with a mass murderer and dictator. That is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, dissing the mother of a soldier killed in her friend's war of choice, because she has "a day job."

And what job is that, exactly? Aiding and abetting tyrants -- war criminals -- as they continue to torture, wage illegal war, spy on us, and collapse our economy. And that's not even half of the list of crimes committed by the shrub-gargoyle regime.

Cross-posted from my blog at Campaign for America's Future.

Today I wrap up my series on Progressives and Liberals, Movements and Political Parties. In the first entry of the series, I explained what I think distinguishes progressives from modern American liberals, and the distinction to be made between a movement and the political party (or parties) through which it acts. In the second, I went into some detail on short and long term strategies, how we can use strategic campaigning to influence more Democratic candidates to run leftward, progressive campaigns.

Everyone's talking about Hillary Clinton's win in Pennsylvania yesterday over rival Barack Obama. Ten whole percentage points: may I make whoopee in my pants, now? It's still not enough to help the senator supposedly representing New York catch up to the one supposedly representing Illinois in terms of pledged delegates.

Clinton's broke, trailing her Democratic rival by a small but undeniable margin, and now reduced to threatening to nuke Iran in the event it uses its non-existent nuclear weapons to attack Israel (let me reiterate: Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, a finding held by all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies—so the fact that Clinton and Obama keep acting as though the opposite is true means neither of them has a fucking clue on anything, and why we're supposed to trust their judgment when they can't even call bullshit on the lies being shat out by the Bush-Cheney regime is beyond my comprehension). Meanwhile, John McCain gets to have the media give him another round of reportorial oral sex for his "decency" in choosing not to run a dirty ad against Obama.

Cross-posted from my blog at Campaign for America's Future.

In my previous entry I laid out the differences between liberals and progressives, movements and political parties. For those of you who haven't time to read through it, a brief recap: Liberals believe in socio-economic justice, whereas progressives believe the same thing but also in taking it to the next step—using government as a powerful tool with which to achieve it by making Big Business behave. The Progressive Movement, much like movement conservatism, has a definite set of goals, and the Progressive Party is the political force through which we can reach them.

Cross-posted from my blog at Campaign for America's Future.

Lately I've been getting an increasing recurrence of the same questions: what is the difference between liberals and progressives, and what is the difference between the Progressive Movement and the Progressive Party? The answers to these questions are important, for as we inch ever closer to the general election in November and as primary battles across the country reach their conclusion the future of our country and our world shall be determined by them—and by how swiftly we figure them out.

The first question I shall tackle is, what is the difference between a liberal and a progressive? For that I'll quote the Huffington Post's David Sirota, who explains it far more eloquently than I can:

Shirley Golub is running against Nancy Pelosi in the California-8th June primary. She has produced a radio ad calling the Speaker of the House of Representatives what she is: a coward.

Let's help her get this ad on the air. Go to the following web site:

http://www.shirley08.com/donations_radio.php

And donate what you can. Pelosi has been a disaster as Speaker. She has been among the biggest obstacles to impeachment, has allowed funding for the occupation of Iraq to continue unfettered, and failed to enforce Congressional subpoena power. The coward needs to go, lest her cowardice and complicity in the crimes of the Bush regime further drag down the Democratic Party.

If you've read my posts you know I'm no fan of Barack Obama, and that I have a distinct tendency to display copious amounts of Righteous Indignation. There's a reason for that, but there is always a danger in creating outrage fatigue, so today I'm going to try to help put it all into perspective.

Yes, there is indeed a method in my ranting. If you read down to the end of my entry about Obama's purge of anti-war delegates in California, the answer lies there.

Fortunately, this latest outrage by the Obama campaign has a somewhat happy ending; all of the delegates purged from California's bloc seem to have been reinstated.

Reading this MyDD analysis of Obama's rhetorical flub about rural Pennsylvania voters, which would be 100% excellent if not for the writer's insane devotion to ignoring the apostrophe whenever trying to condense 'it is' -- which is a shame because otherwise the piece seems well written (for that it's earned a mere 99% for its grammatical apathy), I couldn't help but feel that the senator supposedly representing Illinois is facing a bit of Karmic justice.

People have a right to be angry that their religion and their values have been manipulated time and again to cover for a corrupt and inefficient Republican party. They also have a right to be angry that when a politician actually acknowledges that people are being played, McCain completely ignores the context of the statement itself and goes for the easy attack. Its much easier to brand someone "elitist" and walk away without addressing the actual issues they brought up. Since yesterday "elitist" seems to have become the new insult du jour. Why address the meat of the issue when you can shellac a questionable persona on someone, regardless of its truth, and just discount the individual along with their words entirely out of hand?

Stop me if you've heard this one. Yesterday MyDD reported that the Obama campaign had wiped over nine hundred delegates in California from its list of chosen representatives for the national convention in August. Ostensibly, this was done to ensure only Obama loyalists would represent the senator from Illinois at the Democratic National Convention. No big deal, right? After all, Hillary Clinton's campaign did a similar purge.

The problem is this: while Clinton trimmed only fifty or so delegates, down from an initial 950, Obama wiped roughly half of 1,700. Furthermore, whereas Clinton appears to have carefully screened the delegates to be excluded, Obama's purge list appeared random -- activists with solid credentials and who worked tirelessly to campaign for their candidate were eliminated, while those who did little or nothing got to stay on the list to go to Denver.

According to MSNBC, McCain has erased Obama's ten point lead over him. If the senator from Illinois doesn't start running like a Democrat, and stop acting like a fucking Republican, he's going to find himself making one hell of a concession speech come November. And that shall be bad in far more ways than one.

If you're at all familiar with Michael Fox (the columnist, not the actor), and you're trying to decide if the current economic crisis is a recession or a full blown depression, he certainly makes it hard to be optimistic. Back in November, Mr. Fox reported that the New Depression had already begun. In February, he reported that it had entered Phase Two, and that it had gone global.

Deniers may or may not have paid Mr. Fox much attention, if any at all. But now news of just how bad our current economic crisis really is is starting to bleed into the rest of the Blogosphere. Salon.com's Andrew Leonard writes:

One of the reasons the Bush-Cheney regime was able to lie so effectively to the American public in selling its case for invading Iraq was the appearance of legitimacy that came from foreign intelligence agencies. Five years after the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States of America (with a coalition of coerced and bribed allies that eventually fell apart as the occupation went sour), the truth of how German intelligence officials helped fabricate the case for war is being told -- but not in America.

Der Spiegel reports.

It is little more than a makeshift collage, but it contains a horror show of images meant to distort Islam. Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders has launched his long-awaited video screed criticizing the Koran. Criticism is mounting.

And rightly so. The video, a highly offensive sack of bile, opens with a passage from the Quran (the Muslim bible) immediately followed by footage of the September 11, 2001 attacks on America. The exercise in deception and outright anti-Muslim bigotry deteriorates from there.

In a recent EENR entry I posted about Paul Krugman's blog entry regarding the real reason regulators have failed to reign in the excesses of Wall Street. Essentially, the failure was deliberate -- an effort to systematically remove any and all regulation. I guess causing one Great Depression wasn't enough to wake up the laissez-faire jerks into realizing that the days of unrestricted greed should have remained dead and buried; they've been working like hell to create another while making their money, and they appear to have succeeded.

Leave it to Paul Krugman to tell the hard truth about what needs to be done in this financial crisis.

[T]he important thing is to bail out the system, not the people who got us into this mess. That means cleaning out the shareholders in failed institutions, making bondholders take a haircut, and canceling the stock options of executives who got rich playing heads I win, tails you lose.

Not that the Fed shall listen, mind you; Ben Bernanke, like Alan Greenspan before him, cares about the laissez-faire swindlers who caused the latest financial meltdown. Factoring in the taxpayers only counts for bailing out the criminals, not bailing out the system the crooks abused in order to flush the economy down the toilet.

The U.S. House of Representatives today refused to grant telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for assisting dictator George W. Bush in his illegal spying.

I interrupt this report for a brief rant: I really wish Reuters and other news agencies would cease using the word 'defy' and its derivatives when reporting about stories such as this. Congress is the legislative body, and the branches of government are supposed to be co-equal. Congress cannot, according to the Constitution, defy the executive branch because it is not subservient to it.

I now return to the story at hand.

Crossed-posted at EENR.

While the corporate punditry is distracted by the flap over Geraldine Ferraro's comments about Barack Obama and the sex scandal plaguing soon-to-be-former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, the battle over FISA continues as U.S. dictator George W. Bush threatens to veto a House bill over the issue of retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that helped him break the law. According to Reuters:

You've just got to feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. She just can't seem to do anything right in this campaign. It's not just her underestimation of the Clinton Rules, under which anything she says or does -- no matter how innocent or mundane -- is transformed into some conniving attack formed from evil intentions (just look at the false hype over the "dark" ad). It's that things like this happen.

One of the actors in the Hillary Clinton ad was shocked to see herself, especially because she's a fierce supporter of Barack Obama.

Looks like Moulitsas still can't let go of the paranoid "Clinton darkened Obama in her ad" conspiracy theory.

Look, I dislike Hillary Clinton as much as any true Progressive, but this has got to stop. There are plenty of things the senator says and does in this campaign that are worthy of criticism, but engaging in this sort of unsubstantiated speculation and attack really only hurts two things: Obama's campaign, and Left Blogsylvania.

It hurts Obama's campaign because it makes his followers and, by association, the candidate himself, look like they're hiding behind his race. Similarly, it hurts Left Blogsylvania because it makes us look like a bunch of delusional kooks who probably haven't been laid in ages (if ever) and from whom candidates can't distance themselves fast enough. Substantive posts like this one end up being ignored or marginalized, because of the association with what is perceived to be a group of utter loons.

Yesterday I posted about how Barack Obama's record does not match his campaign rhetoric, or the misperceptions of far too many of his followers. Today I'm going to explain how we can hold his feet to the proverbial fire, should he win the Democratic nomination and go on to become president.

BlackAgendaReport.com describes how Obama's constituents got him to do his job as a state senator in Illinois. BAR Managing Editoir Bruce Dixon writes:

While researching a story on the Democratic Leadership Council for the internet magazine Black Commentator in April and May of 2003, I ran across the DLC's “100 to Watch” list for 2003, in which Barack Obama was prominently featured as one of the DLC's favorite “rising stars”. This was ominous news because the DLC was and still is the right wing's Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party.