Rather than a thread for each states 2008 caucus, one thread.
Tip O’ the Hat to JD(Who says I’m a Republican?)Smith.
The next one is the Nevada Primary on 19 January.
Why is there so much of a big deal about these primaries in other states? I thought that whoever wins the New Hapshire one wins the presidency. And why is New Hampshire so important, anyway?
Pardon me for my ignorance of American politics. It’s a long time since I watched West Wing.
Yeah, what he says, and will someone please tell me the difference between a caucus and a primary? I asked in the other thread, but everyone was too busy arguing to notice.
[quote=“TainanCowboy”]Rather than a thread for each states 2008 caucus, one thread.
Tip O’ the Hat to JD(Who says I’m a Republican?)Smith.
The next one is the Nevada Primary on 19 January.[/quote]
What about Michigan on the 15th? Sure, Edwards and Obama won’t be in it, but that was their choice. Could be interesting to see how Hillary fares against “uncommitted”.
I’m not too sure either but it seems that in the caucus, people gather together and discuss things before they vote and in the primary, it is a secret ballot like the general election. Hope that helps.
A primary is an election with a secret ballot. A caucus involves getting together with your neighbours and publicly stating who you’ll support. It’s more of a townhall meeting with arguments and cajoling.
Anyone see this?
[quote]“We’re going to make sure this state gets on the move again,” Mr. Romney said. “I care about Michigan. For me, it’s personal. It’s personal for me because it’s where I was born and raised.”
Earlier in the day, after hearing from a voter who recalled his father, Mr. Romney choked up momentarily, according to a pool reporter who was present. “He was a great man, and I miss him dearly,” Mr. Romney said.[/quote]
Is there anything that Romney won’t try to win votes? If he thought this was the ‘year of the woman’ he’d be out in a dress calling himself Mitchelle.
[quote=“JMcNeill”]What about Michigan on the 15th? Sure, Edwards and Obama won’t be in it, but that was their choice. Could be interesting to see how Hillary fares against “uncommitted”.[/quote]JMcNeil -
I do apologize. I glanced too quickly thru the list.
boston.com/news/politics/2008/primaries/
Michigan on the 15th it is!
Thanks!
[quote]Why is there so much of a big deal about these primaries in other states? I thought that whoever wins the New Hapshire one wins the presidency. And why is New Hampshire so important, anyway?
Pardon me for my ignorance of American politics. It’s a long time since I watched West Wing.[/quote]
The only special things about Iowa and NH is they are more determined to have their primaries first than other states, and are willing to move theirs up to maintain that. The reward is that they get a little extra influence over the process.
In some years a candidate takes Iowa and NH, and everyone jumps on board and it’s just about over. This year is different because in both parties Iowa and NH have split, so there aren’t clear frontrunners. That means that later primaries will matter more.
[quote=“TainanCowboy”]Rather than a thread for each states 2008 caucus, one thread.
Tip O’ the Hat to JD(Who says I’m a Republican?)Smith.
The next one is the Nevada Primary on 19 January.[/quote]
I believe that’s a caucus not a primary. Big difference 
Should have pmed me. 
As I have politics coming out of my ears about now. I say flip a coin and be done with it. I have reality shows and Nip/Tuck to watch.
“I think Bush can do no wrong but I think I’m going to vote for Hillary Clinton this time because she’ll continue George Bush’s policies in the Middle East and because . . . (fill in the blanks with random musings).”
Or,
“If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee I may have to vote for John McCain because Hillary won’t really change things like she says she will . . . (and John McCain will? 
).”
Or,
“Ron Paul is a nutjob but I’m not going to say why or support his right to make his own case because . . . (your guess is as good as mine).”
Am I hearing these thought processes correctly or am I just not getting it somehow? In my defense I have repeatedly asked for clarifications of the above positions when they’ve been proffered but have received nothing significantly explanatory or different in response.
In short, is the American electorate – judging by these representative decision-making thought processes – really as dumb (“How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?” – Daily Mirror, November 2004) as they say it is?
We had a whole thread on Ron Paul which mentioned various possible examples of nuttiness on his part are discussed.
Not that it matters anymore. :raspberry:
It’s like the lady said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
Woman Who Made Clinton Cry Votes Obama
[quote]The woman whose empathetic question — “how do you do it?” — sparked uncharacteristic emotion Monday from Sen. Hillary Clinton ended up voting for Sen. Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary.
Marianne Pernold Young, 64, a freelance photographer from Portsmouth, N.H., told ABC News that while she was moved by Clinton’s emotional moment, she was turned off by how quickly the New York senator regained her “political posture.”
“I went to see Hillary. I was undecided and I was moved by her response to me,” Pernold Young said in a telephone interview with ABC News. “We saw 10 seconds of Hillary, the caring woman.”
“But then when she turned away from me, I noticed that she stiffened up and took on that political posture again,” she said. “And the woman that I noticed for 10 seconds was gone.”
Monday, Pernold Young went to Cafe Espresso in Portsmouth, N.H., where Clinton was taking questions from a group of about 16 undecided, mostly female voters.
Standing in the back, she asked Clinton a question that appeared to take the senator by surprise.
“My question is very personal, how do you do it?” Pernold Young asked, mentioning that Clinton’s hair and appearance always looking perfectly coifed. “How do you, how do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?”…
Immediately after the event, Pernold Young told ABC News she felt a connection with Clinton.
“She allowed herself to feel,” Pernold Young said at the time. " I was surprised and I said, 'wow there’s someone there…
But in the end, she said it was Obama’s message of hope and change that won her vote.
“I went to see Obama on Friday and he moved me to tears, I was in awe,” she said in a telephone interview with ABC News. “I’m 64 years old and nobody does that to me.”[/quote]
[quote=“Screaming Jesus”]We had a whole thread on Ron Paul which mentioned various possible examples of nuttiness on his part are discussed.
Not that it matters anymore. :raspberry:[/quote]
How well I know. That’s the thread where I kept asking why exactly he was being accused of being a nut. Not that it matters anymore, indeed.
Long story short: it is not a British colony anymore. That and something with Indians (or Negros, I forgot most of it, really).
I’ve noted previously that some folks derive their political opinions from the scrupulous research and vocal utterances of wise sages…such as Bill Maher.
Well it seems that Professor/Doctor/Talking Head Maher as come about with some thoughts on what has come to be known as…The Tears of Hilary!…enjoy.
Bill Maher Mercilessly Slams Hillary’s Crying Game (updated w/video)
Link directly to video Maher on "The Tears of Hilary!
Piss off Hilary! at your peril!
Target: OBAMA
[quote]Dirt begins to fly at Obama
War opens with hints about ‘suspect’ backers
Barack Obama arrives at a political rally in Charleston, South Carolina
WHEN Hillary Clinton warned that Barack Obama had not been thoroughly “vetted”, as she has been, she was hinting darkly at trouble to come over her rival’s radical pastor and shady patron in Chicago, the Illinois senator’s home town.
Clinton is convinced that her opponent will be eviscerated by the Republican attack machine should he win the Democratic presidential nomination. That, at any rate, is her camp’s excuse for doing everything it can to discredit him behind the scenes. The battle to tear down Obama and his claim to represent “hope” has begun.
His momentous victory in Iowa and his humbling in New Hampshire have launched a war of attrition between the two camps.
At enormous rallies, Obama’s new slogan, “Yes, we can”, is rekindling the fervour of his supporters in defiance of Clinton’s accusation that he peddles false hopes.
The same determined message was whispered by slaves and abolitionists and was proclaimed by Martin Luther King, who “took us to a mountaintop”, Obama said to cheers in the formerly segregated city of Charleston, South Carolina, last week.
There, in a boost for his campaign, Obama was introduced by John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate. Kerry vowed that Democrats would never again allow themselves to be “swiftboated”, a reference to the Vietnam war veterans who impugned his war record. But for Obama it has already begun.
“Swiftboating” has become a metaphor for attacking a candidate’s strengths head-on, instead of their weaknesses. In Obama’s case, it means calling into question his multilayered racial and religious background and his reputation for scrupulous integrity. The smear that Obama is secretly a Muslim, or too close for comfort to that religion, has already taken hold among some voters.
“We have to peel back his identity,” said one elderly white voter in South Carolina, a state Obama must win on January 26. “Did you know his middle name is Hussein? He is a Muslim and was raised in an Islamic school.”
In fact, Obama was not brought up to follow any religion, although his African grandfather and Indonesian stepfather were Muslim. He became a Christian as a community organiser in Chicago and in the late 1980s joined the Trinity United Church of Christ, an African-American mega-church with an 8,000-strong congregation.
The same southern voter, who did not wish to be named, then threw another piece of Obama’s biography into the frame. “I looked at his church’s website. It said it was ‘unashamedly black’. They don’t want any whites there. I wouldn’t feel real comfortable if I tried to worship there.”
The unorthodox pastor of Trinity church is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who is refusing all interviews. He married Barack and Michelle Obama and baptised their two daughters. He is already attracting attention on right-wing websites for describing the September 11 attacks as a “wake-up call” to America for ignoring the concerns of “people of colour”, and for claiming that Americans “believe in white supremacy and black inferiority . . . more than we believe in God”.
Wright travelled to meet Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, in the 1980s with Louis Farrakhan, the black supremacist leader of the Nation of Islam, and subscribes to the “Black Values System”, which preaches self-reliance but claims “middle-classness” is ensnaring blacks.
“When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit Colonel Gadaffi with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell,” Wright once said.
The other potential threat to Obama comes from the indictment of one of his leading donors, Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a Syrian-born property developer in Chicago, who is accused of extortion.
Rezko has been indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald - the prosecutor who brought down the White House official Lewis “Scooter” Libby and the press magnate Conrad Black - for seeking millions of dollars in kickbacks from companies bidding for state business in Illinois. He is due to appear in court on February 24.
On the day the Obamas bought a new home in Chicago for $1.6m in 2005, Rezko’s wife purchased an adjoining piece of land, giving the senator’s family more privacy and a larger expanse of green than they had paid for. Obama later paid $104,000 for a strip of the land, even though it was known that Rezko was under investigation.
Obama has admitted that the deal was “bone-headed” and has given $37,000 of political donations by Rezko to charity.
The website www.hillaryis44.com, widely viewed as an unofficial arm of the Clinton war room, has taken up the scandal with gusto and is offering a Rezko for Dummies guide on its site. “Imagine this,” it crows. “A Chicago politician wants things he can’t afford. Wifey likes expensive things and wants a big mansion to live in.”
Whether Wright’s sayings or Rezko’s indictment can seriously damage Obama’s appeal to primary voters remains to be seen. Clinton has been through so many ethical scandals and has been attacked so many times by what she called a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Obama’s controversial connections may appear inconsequential.
If the polls are to be believed, Obama is leading Clinton in South Carolina by 13 points. But their findings in New Hampshire were so hopelessly flawed that Obama’s supporters will not make the mistake of savouring victory in advance of the voters’ verdict again.
Bill and Hillary Clinton have worked hard to retain the affection and loyalty of black southerners. However, the former president’s suggestions that Obama is not all he is cracked up to be have caused some offence. Carrie Dennison, a retired union organiser in Charleston, said: “I have nothing against Bill Clinton. I went to his inauguration, but I don’t like what he’s been saying about Barack Obama. It’s underhand.
“Hillary Clinton thinks she is more experienced, but she’s had 35 years of what? All I know about her is that she was the wife of the president.”
Kenneth Richardson, 63, an African-American who works in the insurance industry, believes that Obama has the “divine spark” of greatness, while Clinton is more pedestrian. He doubts, however, that this alone can deliver victory.
In a remarkable book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win, Shelby Steele, a conservative intellectual who like Obama had a white mother and black father, writes that Obama’s iconic status as an inspirational African-American also represents his biggest weakness.
Steele argues that Obama offers white voters a chance to free themselves from white guilt, but if he becomes too specific about policy or shows flashes of anger about injustice, they recoil. Obama looks “messianic” set against “the shame of America’s racial past”.
If you are an icon, he writes, “you have thoughts to touch everyone’s base, thoughts that recognise and flatter everyone. But you have few visible convictions”.
Anything that helps Clinton to bring Obama down to earth serves her purpose.
Kenya’s wonderboy:
They are thousands of miles away, but Barack Obama has no more loyal supporters than his humble Kenyan family, writes Jon Swain in Nairobi.
In the village of Kogelo, Obama is known as the “Kenyan wonderboy in the US”. Though he was narrowly defeated by Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, his grandmother Sarah Obama, 85, is still hopeful. “Don’t lose heart. Keep on trying, is what I will tell him if I speak to him,” she said.
Obama’s father was a goatherd who won a scholarship to university in Hawaii. There he met Obama’s mother. He deserted the family when Obama was two and returned to Kenya but died in a car crash in 1982.
Obama has visited Kogelo several times. In 2006 he gave a powerful speech warning Kenyan university students of the dangers of corruption and tribal politics.
Times OnLine[/quote]
“I ain’t noways tired…”…Hilary! patronizing a Black church.
From the Illinois Review:
But Obama’s choice is all the moretroubling–he did not grow up with this church, he chose it.
backyardconservative.blogspot.co … -hope.html
A good website to gain 'at-a-glance- political background on all the parties is Real Clear Politics.com
Here are todays political contender polls:
Election 2008 National Head-to-Head Polls
Also the Democratic Nomination polls
And the Republican Nomination polls