What a maverick that John Sidney McLobbyPants is. Why, he’s so defiant that he surrounds himself with lobbyists, some with ties to Myanmar, no matter what anyone thinks! Now, that’s what I call mavericky!

From NBC/NJ’s Carrie Dann
NBC NEWS has confirmed that another McCain aide, Doug Davenport, has resigned because of his lobbying ties to the Myanmar government’s military junta.

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.

“To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it . . . An evil unchecked is the prelude to genocide.”
- Dr. Mordechai: The Ezekiel Option -

There are over 70 million human beings living in Iran, 17.5 million of whom are under the age of fifteen. Hillary Clinton vowed to attack Iran and “totally obliterate” the majority of the Persian race in a furnace of primordial fire should the Iranian government attack Israel with nuclear weapons, which they do not now possess or are likely to for some time—if ever.

Hillary’s “final solution” to the Persian problem bests Adolf Hitler by a magnitude of ten.

— from Dissident Voice

May 9. I read tonight a brief article by Philip Giraldi posted on the American Conservative website: "War with Iran Might Be Closer than You Think."

"There is considerable speculation," writes the former CIA officer, "and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods [Revolutionary Guards]-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran."

— from TomDispatch

Already climate change -- in the form of a changing pattern of global rainfall -- seems to be affecting the planet in significant ways. Take the massive, almost decade-long drought in Australia's wheat-growing heartland, which has been a significant factor in sending flour prices, and so bread prices, soaring globally, leading to desperation and food riots across the planet.

I've done no survey. There are probably a heck of a lot more candidates out there who haven't contacted me or I haven't happened to run across. But I have put together a list, thus far, of 111 candidates for Congress, the Senate, or the White House who support impeaching Bush and Cheney. Here's the list, organized by office and by state / district.

Most of the candidates on the list are Democrats, either incumbents or challengers. Others are Green, Libertarian, Independent, and even Republican.

The list includes three candidates for the White House who are generally considered hopeless but whose campaigns are pushing positions supported by most of the people who obediently deem them hopeless.

Nation poised to return as world power, thanks to oil prices and a new dynamic duo

Back in Soviet days, Kremlin leadership changes used to be marked by a new pecking order of dumpy Communist apparatchiks in awful suits glowering from atop Lenin's tomb as tanks and cheesy floats rolled through Red Square.

No more. Roll over Brezhnev and Tchaikovsky. Last February, Russia's new leaders, 55-year old Vladimir Putin and 42-year old Dmitry Medvedev, showcased their new duumvirate by confidently strolling from the Kremlin across Red Square to attend a Deep Purple rock concert of all things. Forget Swan Lake. Decked out in hip black leather jackets and tailored jeans, they symbolized the new, youthful, self-assured Russia.

A recent National Geographic survey ranked the environmental impact of consumer habits and lifestyles in 14 countries.

The U.S. ranked last.

People in Brazil, India, China, Mexico, Hungary, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, Australia, Spain, Japan, France, and Canada were judged to be more environmentally responsible than Americans. Yes, you read that right. India. China. Mexico. Et cetera. All more proactively concerned than we are about saving this planet for our children and our grandchildren.

But this should come as no surprise. Whether we can blame it on ignorance, apathy, arrogance, or just laziness depends on the person, but I see it every day. Americans talk about global warming and they sound concerned. But that's as far as it goes. Talk is cheap. And so they continue to be part of the problem.

With the mainstream media’s steady firepower being directed basically in one direction, one would think that the big story of this presidential campaign season revolve around statements made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago and how they politically impact on Barack Obama.

How essentially silent this same media has been concerning the statements of Reverend John Hagee of San Antonio. The only recent definitive study I have seen done on Hagee came from Hagee’s fellow Texan Lou Dubose in the excellent political journal he edits and writes for, The Washington Spectator.

Here is how the mainstream media has handled the Hagee matter when it has focused on it at all. There were two infamous statements that were discussed.

Dear Hillary,

I like to watch TV. I love Barack Obama’s campaign ads, and I can’t wait to see more of them! I understand he has millions with which to buy them. I’m becoming addicted to this guy! What should I do? I think I’m in love.

Signed,

Mama for Obama

Dear Mama:

“I want you to know how grateful I am for your support and how much you have sustained me throughout this campaign,” she said. “But it has been a joy. Now I know that may be hard to believe, but if you just take the advice that I give to my own mother, and that is: Just turn off the television.”

We are now in the FOURTH consecutive financial bubble, all contrived to sustain the international investor class - to the detriment of the general public. The latest bubble will cause much worse destruction than any of the previous ones. And it's already out of control...

Lacking its once powerful manufacturing-based economy, the United States has come to depend on one financial “bubble” after another to keep its economy afloat. Unfortunately, each successive bubble aids fewer people and costs more in the end to clean up once it’s popped. The dot.com bubble was followed by the Enron bubble, then the housing bubble, and now the commodities bubble. Each of these has caused progressively more damage to the value of the dollar and a disproportionate harm to the middle class.

It's Mother's Day in 2008 and somewhere a woman is about to be murdered for witchcraft. Just this week a crowd of 20 people in India gathered to beat a 75-year-old woman for being a witch. A judicial inquiry found that 150 women had been tortured for witchcraft in three Indian provinces since the first of the year, despite the passage of a new law meant to protect them.

Reports of witchcraft are common in Africa these days. There's this recent case of an 18-year-old girl who says that she was sent by her grandmother to steal a newborn baby and given magical powers to accomplish the task. (Stories like this are frequently reported as fact in African newspapers.) Panicked reports of kidnapping and murder for body parts are frequent in Tanzania and nearby countries. And readers of a Ghanian tabloid were given this information, presented drily as fact:

I’ve copied and pasted, unedited, inspiring words from an inspired comment I saw today. The Commenter is referring to this post.

I just wanted to say thank you for your article on senator barack obama who is truly a american who stands for change for and from all americans and people in unity. I have listened to him and have responded by becoming a motivational speaker and advocate supporter for the homeless and struggling families. I have found it to be very Important to speak to as many of our youth as possible in a way that will help them feel structure, worth, and know there is a sincere possibility that someone cares. I am a single mother of three and a grandmother of three I live on a fixed income, worked since the age of 13 and I am now 50. I will forever live by the truth of what senator obama said ” all children are our children” and when we learn to stop judging children or their parents we It will forever be a change we can believe in. The inspirational truth of senator obama’s message is a heart and mind choice that will determine action.

As an Obama supporter this primary season has been like enduring a year-long root canal, without Novocain.

It's been painful. It's been like watching two bullies harass, belittle, lie and push your kid around everyday at school, and not being able to do a thing about it except to try to reassure yourself that, in the end your kid will emerge a better and stronger person because of it.

Or not.

After all, the same kind of sleazy, low-brow, thuggish politics is exactly the kind of politics that got George W. Bush elected, twice. So maybe "my kid" will come out of it a better and stronger person, AND lose.

In one of the most incendiary columns ever written, "Race And The Presidential Election," Bill O'Reilly sets the race-bait bar to record-breaking...depths. Short of saying that Barack Obama wants to sleep with your pearly-white daughter, O'Reilly uses just about every button meant to alarm his white fans to the fact that Barack Obama is BLACK and that just his running for, let alone becoming, president, could set off race-laced fireworks.

While there's no question, as he did on his TV Factor Friday night, Bill will say it's not race-baiting if you're just reporting the facts (despite the brilliant Prof. Dr. Marc Lamont Hill's protestations), here are just a few comments from Bill's column...

Take 1 Minute to End the Killing:

Congress Members have received thousands of phone calls, and some of them are committing to voting no on Iraq funding. The vote won't happen until next week, so keep the calls coming: Call your Congress Member now at 202-224-3121 and tell them to vote No on the war funding.

More Detail:

Pelosi does not have the votes to pass the Rule, a procedural vote that must pass prior to votes on each of the three amendments (1. war money, 2. a nonbinding "timeline goal," re-banning of torture and permanent bases, redundantly banning a Bush-Maliki treaty without consent of Senate or both houses of Congress, and forcing Iraqis to pay for the reconstruction, 3. other spending including military spending and veterans spending).

Last weekend's 30th annual Athens Human Rights Festival was a milestone that will leave fond memories in the minds of festival volunteers and audiences. Dedicated to the memory of Eve Carson, the young Athens woman who achieved so much in her brief life before she died at the age of 22, the festival was once again a reunion for the family of humankind.

Top-notch local musicians and soapbox orators enlivened downtown during rights rites that rated raves from event organizers and festivalgoers alike. The sweet-voiced children of the Athens Montessori Singers were once again loved by crowds. A youthful group of girls called the Maybes brought cheers with a lilting rendition of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind."

As part of her continuing campaign for the 2012 nomination and her campaign to elect John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton is closing her sad campaign acting like a right-wing Republican with the latest and most offensive example of race-card attacks.

Possibly because she is tired and letting her guard down, possibly out of sheer desperation combined with blind ambition, Hillary Clinton openly talks about "white people." Bill Clinton speaks to white audiences about "voters like you." Paul Begala says Democrats can't win with only intellectuals and African-Americans. Paul Krugman graces The New York Times with his wisdom about the white vote.

In all the coverage of the subprime mortgage mess, there has been a key element missing: the sales pitch.

This is where the rubber meets the road, where the actual swindle goes down, where the trap snaps shut and the sucker is held fast till he can be skinned alive. It is the Glengarry Glen Ross moment.

We must understand these moments when we listen to the head hogs — Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, Citicorp, AIG and the other giant loan sharks — as they whine that the whole disaster is all the fault of deadbeat borrowers who should have known better.

And these moments are all committed to paper somewhere, except I don’t know how to get my hands on it. So I’m asking for help. Does anybody out there know somebody who was or is involved with a subprime mortgage outfit?

Rush Limbaugh has befuddled the mainstream media with his Operation Chaos and he is (as heard on the opening of his program for Friday May 9, 2008) having more fun than a wealthy cowboy on a Saturday night in a Nevada brothel.

Rush explained his game plan to the bamboozled media by saying that he wants complete and utter chaos for the Democrat Party. Rush fed them the information that el Rushbo wants the Democrats to have consternation reign supreme until the Democratic National Convention in August.

Journalists, who envy Rush's earning power and influence, have jumped to the assumption that he meant exactly what he said. If Rush wants utter chaos did it ever occur to them that he might not mean exactly what he says?

— from TomDispatch

These days, the price of oil seems ever on the rise. A barrel of crude broke another barrier Wednesday -- $123 -- on international markets, and the talk is now of the sort of "superspike" in pricing (only yesterday unimaginable) that might break the $200 a barrel ceiling "within two years." And that would be without a full-scale American air assault on Iran, after which all bets would be off.

Considering that, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, oil was still in the $20 a barrel price range, this is no small measure of what the Bush administration years have really accomplished. Today, it's hard even to remember not 9/11, but 11/9 -- November 9, 1989 -- the day that the Berlin Wall fell, signaling that, soon enough, after its seventy-odd year life, that Reaganesque Evil Empire, the Soviet Union, was heading for the door. In 1991, it disappeared from the face of the Earth without a whimper. Until almost the last moment, top officials in Washington assumed it would go on forever; and, when it was gone, most of them couldn't, at first, believe it. Soon enough, however, the event was hailed as the greatest of American triumphs -- "victory" not just in the Cold War, but at a level never before seen. Finally, for the first time in history, there was but a single superpower on the planet.

Mikhail Gorbachev is not a frivolous man. He was the Soviet leader who introduced the conceptual breakthrough of "mutual security" to Soviet-American relations, as well as the man who did more than any other individual to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. In my opinion, he ranks as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century (something I was able to tell him personally, when we talked in St. Petersburg, Russia in May 2006).

So, when Mr. Gorbachev says, "Every US president has to have a war," and "I sometimes have the feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world," - as was reported by the Telegraph.co.uk on May 7, 2008 -- I take him seriously. More to the point, Gorbachev's assertions probably elicited widespread agreement, not only in Russia, but also across Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

It's over. Maybe Hillary doesn't know it yet. Almost assuredly Bill doesn't. But it's over.

And, no, I don't just mean the Democratic presidential nomination process. I mean the whole shootin' match. Obama is the nominee and Obama is the forty-fourth president of the United States. You heard it here first.

Sure, it's possible for this thing to derail, not least because of an October Surprise abroad engineered by Dick Cheney to keep himself out of jail. But, short of that, fughedaboudit! And even that most despicable of classic political ploys may not work anymore. If anything, the Reverend Wright episode has demonstrated that the historically immature American electorate night just be angry and desperate enough not to be distracted this time by the latest Willie Horton ad or gay marriage spectacle. There are powerful signs that the old black magic doesn't work anymore.

The results in Tuesday's twin primaries--Barack Obama by 14 percent in North Carolina and Hillary Clinton by 2 percent in Indiana--confirmed that Clinton is finished as a contender. Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate for president this fall.

Clinton, the private-schooled, Wellesley and Yale-educated millionaire lawyer from Chicago, first tried to present herself as a White House veteran, and then, in recent weeks, as a NASCAR mom on Food Stamps, and in Pennsylvania resorted to cheap race-baiting and red-baiting in an effort to derail her opponent, has failed. Barack Obama, another private-schooled Harvard and Yale-educated lawyer, but one who actually did have to work his way up the economic ladder, won decisively in North Carolina, even drawing a significant number of working-class white voters in a state where white voters have not traditionally voted for candidates with dark skin.

Obama's electibility reflects his likelihood of winning. The chance of victory hinges on key states.

I've said Obama is unelectable. Yet no one can say definitively that Obama would do worse than Hillary against McCain. Polls over McCain vs. Hillary, McCain vs. Obama are brought out by one candidate's side to denounce the other. The media is blitzed with polls, predictions, and punditry. Those in one camp are receptive to information positive for their candidate and negative for the other. The same holds true for those in the opposing candidate's camp.

I do hope the majority of this nation, who do hold a set of largely progressive values in common, can overcome the squabbling of two politicians and focus on the larger issue, which is beating John McCain in the fall. Compromise is invaluable tool in politics, and the idea that progressives would abandon each other if their candidate isn't nominated is utterly childish.