I've had enough of this guy too:

Sources have told WRAL News that they expect former U.S. Sen. John Edwards to admit that he is the father of his former mistress' 18-month-old daughter.

Edwards, a two-time Democratic presidential candidate, confessed last August to having an affair with Rielle Hunter, who served as a videographer on Edwards' 2008 campaign. He has denied fathering her daughter, saying his relationship with Hunter ended before the child was conceived.

The name of the girl's father isn't disclosed on her birth certificate.

Andrew Young, a long-time Edwards aide, initially claimed to be the father of Hunter's child, but he is reportedly writing a book in which he will claim Edwards is the father.

A federal grand jury is investigating whether Edwards' campaign funds were illegally paid to Hunter to keep quiet about the affair.

Hunter spent nine hours last Thursday at the federal courthouse in Raleigh, where the grand jury was meeting. She brought her daughter, Frances, with her.

Young was at the federal courthouse in July when the grand jury was meeting.

Sources said Edwards' public admission could come before the end of the criminal investigation.

Let's lance this boil once and for all and then let John Edwards disappear into private life. For good. Enough already with this.

Labels: bad taste, boy did I ever get this one wrong, hypocrisy, John Edwards, miserable failure, sleaze

I know, I know...the John Edwards debacle was and is stunning, heart wrenching, and life changing, and now its back in the headlines in all its glory! Edwards announced today that there is a federal investigation going on into his campaign funds (.... to determine if certain funds disbursed to the company of the woman that he had an affair with were legally transferred, or if there was some nefarious plot to shut her up and keep her in grand style ...with their maybe love child...) over the sum of...um...$114,000, give or take.

Look maybe you can keep your baby's mama in a nice trailer park for that amount, but it seems to me that this might perhaps be production money, as she was the videographer on the campaign trail, and anyone who has had to shoot for hours and then spend hours editing down footage for public consumption will know that an amount like that is chump change. Did he pay her to go away? Did he buy her jewels and furs? Who knows and who cares?



His career is ruined for now, and it seems to me that it serves a whole portion of others in the political and business spectrum to have his voice shut down because of what his message was and is. So, yeah, hes an idiot narcissist who imploded, and he's lucky that, from the outside anyway, his family has survived....If you've read my previous posts on this subject, you'll know that it interests me little to hear speculation about the details of this stupidity, and if he misused 100 grand of campaign funds, I'm sure that there have been worse crimes committed...oh, like the Clinton's real estate bamboozle and Bill Clinton's flirtation with the young Monica Lewinsky. I'm sure that never, ever happens in the halls of power....right? What kind of time and money are we willing to waste because of the hint of a sex scandal?

Which brings me to Joe Lieberman, our favorite Jr. Senator here in Connecticut. Today in the local Stamford Advocate, we were treated to a large piece on the news of Edward's probe, and then a page or two back and in a small box, was the news that Joe himself is also under investigation for misuse of campaign funds. This is a story that is not being covered by much of the media, except for snippets in our local papers here in Connecticut, and only by the Connecticut blogs such as My Left Nutmeg, which has been great all through the nightmare that has been Connecticut politics for more years than even Bush was the national nightmare. The New Haven Register had this story about Lieberman, as if his misuse of funds was just a blip that a small fine would take care of; a civil penalty of $50,000.



The Register also had the same article on Edwards that was published in the Advocate, (but which the Advocate hasn't, as of this time, put on line; nor have they put up the Lieberman story.) The Edwards article talks about his buried career and how he is finished, the turmoil of his marriage and any other projections that the writer could come up with because, heaven knows there isn't much in the way of facts there; not the gay in the bathroom stall/affair with a male page sort of deliciousness brought to us by the now defunct republican majority; now THOSE were facts!

Still, the article makes the Edwards situation sound like he took pallets of cash to another country that we had invaded illegally and just lost it with no explanation....oh yeah, that's the former President of the United States, who we can hardly muster the balls to investigate on charges of real war crimes, much less the money misspent, lost, given out with no explanation, and pocketed in conflicts of interest such as Halliburton/Blackwater & it's subsidiaries/Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld/Tamiflu/Aspartame.

Look, I'm not an apologist for Edwards. I'm as disappointed as anyone who was a true believer in his message, and who was mortified to find that he didnt get out of the race, and continued to wield his delegates, knowing that this was likely to come out. But here's the deal, Edwards is not in office, nor has he been nominated to any cabinet post. He is old, tragic news, in a very interesting election cycle, who will likely have his second act as they all do in show business.

Joe Lieberman, on the other hand, is still actively jumping parties out there and holding his chairmanships on some pretty important committees, (Homeland Security and Government Affairs to name but two.) He is a sitting senator and as much as his crony's have forgiven him for his insane campaign to get back into that seat, the people of Connecticut largely have not.

Why this isn't a bigger story isn't much of a mystery to me, because I was there and saw the tactics of the Lieberman campaign first hand. I worked for Ned Lamont during every free moment I had and manned a contentious poll on election day. The Lieberman investigation was about a whopping $387,000 that was given out improperly, and much of it was to stage a ground war here, when he hadn't planned much campaign presence at all because he was so sure that he would win! When faced with a real lack of volunteers, the campaign hired ground teams to disrupt Lamont's events and basically make a nuisance of themselves. They plastered much of downtown Stamford with Joe signage, which was illegal, they ran through the streets of anyplace that Lamont was appearing and jostled in front of TV cameras with signs that they, themselves didn't understand, and they menaced even old folks and parents with babies in carriages with their aggressive actions.

At a Lamont speech in Greenwich I asked some of the kids, (they were all black for that event and it made the white Joe T-shirts pulled over baggy clothes stand out all the more, as if a crowd of black kids on Greenwich Avenue weren't enough in that stogy old-money town!) if they knew what Joe stood for, and they said no, that a guy in a van offered them $60 per day to wear the t-shirt and support Joe. Later when someone I know asked again, the amount had been raised to $100 per day. A kid said that he didn't know who Joe was or what he stood for but that it was just a job and he was following orders. At the time I was down in what is the inner city of Stamford quite a bit for some personal reasons, and on the cul de sac circle of the cluster housing that now replaces part of the old projects, a white Joe van would drive up and kids would go up to the van looking for work.

At the time the army recruiting offices were active in just such neighborhoods because these were the kids likely to go for the bonus money to go to Iraq for an indeterminate amount of time. Was it right for Joe, who supported the war and had no answers on how we were going to handle the military in Iraq or when they came home, to have children working for him against their own interest? Was it right to pay the on the ground volunteers in a political campaign who don't know what they are representing? I told a few of them that he was pro war and they shrugged, like teens do, and said that they didn't care because it was a job. I felt like that white van circling the entryway to the neighborhood that held all the poor in this city separate from the very rich and thr quickly dwindling middle-class, was preying on these kids, and that they should have been as against the law as any predator enticing kids with cash or candy.

Joe was a strong Bush supporter and allowed himself to be used as a representative for the democratic party implying that some of us were pro Bush and pro war. In reality, Joe was in a world of his own and the only pro war people around were those who were afraid of the terra, and who bought the victory line against the facts presented by experts. That was not what the people of Connecticut wanted, and as our representative we let Joe know that in the primary when we chose Ned Lamont to be our candidate. Joe wouldn't take that laying down and he jumped parties to run as an independent, thus getting elected on the Republican vote and the votes of those who had known him for years here and who either weren't paying attention or who thought that he would come to his senses.

Those kids didn't understand that on key issues Joe was not for them and that they were actually working against their own interests. But that was another Rovian tactic that seemed to work well when used in many different cases. Many of them were very young and in no position to represent one candidate over another, but cash talks, and when a small amount wasn't enough the ante was upped.

Well, we would soon come to find that the way the campaign was paying out for these services was incorrect and illegal. But for Joe, who is still seated on his committees and who was welcomed back with open arms and a standing-O by his coworkers in the senate, even after he lied to his supposed constituents, dumped his party, and let us know in no uncertain terms that he knew better than we did what was best for our state, this was a non-starter. The rules don't apply to guys like Joe; that's the old Bushism that was not only shot down, but smeared into a paste and is now being washed down the same sinkhole that it slithered out of so many years ago; before Reagan, before Nixon...back, back, back to the barons of power who set the stage for the wealthy to maintain their prominence by creating a permanent underclass to fight our wars and tend our lawns, middle-class be damned!

Joe Lieberman has been sheltered by the media of this state and the country for no reason at all. He has been allowed to conduct the business of paying his fine in relative privacy, and in light of other investigations that are getting bold print treatment, he has been favored as always, by a system that protects its own. The end is near for Herr Lieberman and his little Hadassah, so they can return to the country club in Westport where he has been seen airing his furry little body in the pool. He can write his book and take a nice cushy job like Hadassah has. He has certainly represented the interests of big business and war in his years in office enough to deserve something with a corner office and a seven figure salary.

Meanwhile, is it really worth the small civil fine to persue this matter with Edwards? It depends on how serious the powers that be, in whats left of the old guard of the federal government, want him silenced for the long term. However long, it wont be forever, because regardless of bad personal choices, which are just that, personal, the message of the two Americas still rings true, and as much as a watered down Obama will try to address the poverty issue, he is not a bulldog on this issue like Edwards is. So, we will see what happens, and just when you think that hes gone for good, like our friend Elliot Spitzer (who in polling today was overwhelmingly preferred over Patterson as Governor of NY...in fact they want him back!) the second act will arrive.

c/p RIP Coco

Labels: campaign financing, federal probes, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, lies

...like a supporter who was completely bamboozled.

Oh, Lynn tried to tell me. She told me he was a phony, but I wouldn't listen. After six years of George W. Bush I didn't want the DLC lean-as-far-right-as-you-can posturing of Hillary Clinton or the toe-in-the-water caution of Barack Obama. I wanted a full-throated progressive populist, and in John Edwards I got one. Sure, there was that aw-shucks grin and the honeyed voice that always makes me think "PHONY!", and there was always that thought in the back of my mind. But he said all the right things, and I needed to believe, and there he was with his FIRST wife who not only looked every year of her age but had recurrent breast cancer to boot, and HE STAYED WITH HER, which---

And then of course we found out what was really going on.

"You can't tell what a person is like by seeing them on TV." I know this. I've told other people that, usually in the context of Oprah Winfrey, who people think they adore, but who knows, she may be a complete harridan in real life. But what about when a person like Elizabeth Edwards STANDS UP ON THE STAIR LANDING IN YOUR OWN HOUSE and says, in person, emphatically, to your face that these are the things John stands for and he's just what we need WHEN SHE KNOWS WHAT'S ACTUALLY GOING ON? It's one thing to be bamboozled by a TV image. But when you host a fundraiser for the man and his wife is in attendance and gives you no hint of what's actually going on, whatever Spidey-sense that's tingling is going to shut up really quickly.

This is what I've never understood about Elizabeth Edwards in this whole mess. I understand not wanting to leave, to forgive for a mistake. I especially understand when there are young children and a dire illness involved. But how she could go out there on the campaign trail and lie through her teeth for him and be so convincing doing it?

And now it seems it was worse than we knew:

The two-time Democratic presidential candidate acknowledged Sunday that investigators are assessing how he spent his campaign funds -- a subject that could carry his extramarital affair from the tabloids to the courtroom. Edwards' political action committee paid more than $100,000 for video production to the firm of the woman with whom Edwards had an affair.

The former North Carolina senator said in a carefully worded statement that he is cooperating.

''I am confident that no funds from my campaign were used improperly,'' Edwards said in the statement. ''However, I know that it is the role of government to ensure that this is true. We have made available to the United States both the people and the information necessary to help them get the issue resolved efficiently and in a timely matter.''

While Edwards focused his comment on campaign funds, he also had a range of other fundraising organizations -- including two nonprofits and a poverty center at his alma mater -- that have come under scrutiny.

Chief among them was the PAC that paid Rielle Hunter's company for several months in 2006 for Web videos that documented Edwards' travels and advocacy in the months leading up to his 2008 presidential campaign. The committee also paid her firm an additional $14,086.50 on April 1, 2007.

Edwards acknowledged the affair with Hunter last year, months after dropping his presidential bid.

At the time of the 2007 payment, the PAC only had $7,932.95 in cash on hand, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. That day, according to the records, Edwards' presidential campaign paid the PAC $14,034.61 for what is listed as a ''furniture purchase.''

Willfully converting money from a political action committee for personal use is a federal crime.

I hope it was a REALLY GOOD fuck, Johnny -- and that it was worth it.

Labels: assholes, John Edwards, scumbaggery

While the punditocracy are touting the importance of the poor, put-upon, persecuted white male, the white guy the pundits mocked out of the race had some fun on The Colbert Report.

Introducing......EdWørds:



(h/t: C&L)

Labels: 2008 election, comedy, John Edwards, Stephen Colbert

According to Reuters, After giving the keynote speech at CTIA, the wireless industry showcase (that I wish I was at,) John Edwards was asked in a small Q&A session if he would accept the VP slot for either candidate....He said No.
Apparently he also declined to endorse one candidate or the other, but I would've guessed that!
Oh well...Onwards and ...upwards....

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: John Edwards

John Edwards may be out of the presidential race, but he is not going to sit down and he is not going to shut up.

In fact, he's out there educating Americans (and hopefully the members of Congress who have aided and abetted George W. Bush's Perpetual War Without Point in Iraq that you simply cannot spend trillions of dollars on a war after you've cut taxes for your wealthy friends without the rest of the economy (and the middle class) paying a terrible price:

A coalition announced Monday and called Iraq Campaign 2008 seeks to tie anxiety over the faltering economy to anxiety over the duration of the war. Part of its agenda is targeting what it calls "obstructionist" members of Congress—Democrats as well as Republicans—that don’t seek a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. The campaign has an attention-getting front-man: former presidential candidate John Edwards. The effort, however, is not without problems—not least of which is the conundrum of whether antiwar activism turns out to be counterproductive to ending a war.

People don’t understand why we’re spending $500 billion and counting in Iraq," Edwards said in a Monday conference call, "when at the same time we’ve got 40-plus million Americans with no health care coverage, 37 million-plus living in poverty. It doesn’t make sense to them."

The effort is the brainchild of a group of liberal organizations: MoveOn.org, the Service Employees International Union, the VoteVets progressive veterans network, USAction and the Center for American Progress.

Countering both wars will require a variety of offensives. On Mar. 19, the fifth anniversary of the invasion, USAction, says executive director Jeff Blum, will mobilize thousands of protesters "from Bangor to Los Angeles" for candlelight vigils. Legislatively, the coalition has two priorities through the election: pressing Congress not to fund the war without tying money to a date for withdrawal and preventing President George W. Bush from signing a long-term security agreement with the Iraqi government, as he intends to do by the summer.

Politically, the effort is to be even sharper. "If they don’t act," Berger said, referring to Congress, "we will make it clear that they will have opposition, and we will take them out." She did not elaborate, and a spokeswoman for Iraq Campaign 2008 did not return a call today for comment.

MoveOn’s Eli Pariser said the coalition will target four Republican senators in particular who have "stood up against the interests of voters": Susan Collins of Maine; Norm Coleman of Minnesota; John Sununu of New Hampshire; and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Political analysts consider the first three to be among the Senate’s most vulnerable GOP incumbents. McConnell has an approval rating of 52 percent, which, if not actually poor, is a somewhat surprising choice, considering his 24 years in the chamber and ascendancy to the body’s most visible Republican. The coalition is still deciding which House districts to target.

Finally, the coalition will launch a field network it calls Operation Democracy. The multimillion-dollar effort will fund "door to door" campaigns—"people will talk to their neighbors about the moral, strategic and economic folly of Bush’s war in Iraq," Blum said.

The costs of the war have been far higher than the Bush administration forecast. White House Economic Adviser Larry Lindsay was forced to resign after publicly pegging the Iraq war’s price tag at $100 billion to $200 billion. In February 2003, a then-deputy defense secretary told a House panel that Iraq "could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." The prediction was less than prescient. In September, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war could cost up to $2 trillion. Thursday, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz will testify to the congressional Joint Economic Committee that the war will cost $3 trillion, building off research for a forthcoming book.

Independent economists have found a connection between the war and the performance of the U.S. economy. Last May, the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that "after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of higher defense spending turns negative around the sixth year." That sixth year begins Mar. 19. The economists found harmful impacts on inflation and interest rates, annual truck and car sales, and the housing market, as well as job losses in construction and manufacturing. "Manufacturing is projected to lose 44,200 [jobs] after five years," the study found, while the construction sector would have a net gain of 8,500 jobs during the same time frame, but "it is projected to lose 144,200 after ten years."

Meanwhile, Mr. We'll Be In Iraq For 100 Years has an economic plan to just make things worse: more corporate tax cuts. Because everyone knows that when you give really really really really rich corporations even more money, they are so generous that they won't use it to stuff the pockets of their CEOs and other senior executives, and they'll stop sending all the high-paying jobs overseas. After all, isn't that the result of the Bush tax cuts of the last seven years that have gotten us into this mess?

Maybe in the Candyland of Gumdrops and Lollipops in which the Republican brain resides. Good thing we have people out there like John Edwards who still live in the real world.

(h/t: Melissa)

Labels: John Edwards

The media love affair with John Edwards, now that he's left the race, is just a bit nauseating. It sort of reminds me of that time in high school, when the kid everyone picked on hung himself, or died of anorexia, or had a breakdown and had to be hospitalized -- and suddenly everyone felt really badly how they treated him.

Well, John Edwards hasn't died, thank goodness, but his candidacy for the presidency has, and now all of a sudden, the very same media that was obsessed with his haircut and his bigass house and his trial lawyer work, is now lauding him as the guy who built the Democratic agenda that now the candidate of THEIR choosing will carry to the November election.

Of course by the time the general election campaigns rolls around, that agenda, which in no way involves enhancement of the power of the very giant multinational corporations that own the media outlets in this country, is going to be so soundly trashed by the same talking heads lauding John Edwards now, that the American sheeple will follow their marching orders and elect another warmongering, greed-fostering Republican. But for now, the media have finally -- now that it's too late -- found John Edwards.

Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic (at CBS News):

As anybody who attended his town meetings could attest, he may have been the most effective campaigner of all - capable of establishing an instant connection with audiences, then sweeping them up with a moving, coherent story about what was wrong with America and how he proposed to fix it. Edwards was also, I would argue, a more versatile campaigner than his rivals. He was terrific working the grassroots, much like Obama, but also excelled in the debates, just as Clinton has. As his advisers were constantly reminding reporters - most memorably, through this priceless video - focus groups frequently named Edwards the overwhelming "winner" in those televised exchanges. Alas, a media preoccupied with the Clinton-Obama rivalry rarely seemed to notice.

Still, if Edwards wants to blame somebody for his defeat, he shouldn't look at the media. He should look at himself. And I mean that in the best sense possible. Edwards' biggest problem may have been that he was too compelling - so compelling that his rivals effectively adopted his agenda. From the beginning, Edwards was positioning himself as the champion of Americans struggling to get ahead financially. And rather than simply offer populist rhetoric, he backed it with a serious, comprehensive set of policies.

Faux Noise:

Edwards may no longer hold a place on the presidential ballot, but his populism, often expressed with great zeal, has impacted the presidential race in innumerable ways, some of which have yet to be realized.

At the heart of Edwards’ message was the need to speak out for the poor and disenfranchised—those people whom the Senator often referred to as “the real underdogs in this election.” He was the first to propose a universal health care plan—ensuring coverage for all Americans—and the first among the Democratic candidates to make poverty and global warming a key focus of his campaign.

For Edwards, the need to combat these problems was a “moral test,” and he referred to such issues as “the causes of my life.”

Not without fault, Edwards was sometimes criticized for his changing positions on the Iraq war and for oversimplifying the problem of lobbyists. Yet he was honest in admitting that his initial support of funding the war “was a mistake.”

Upon leaving an event in Springfield, Missouri, on Monday, that drew over 1,000 Edwards supporters, a high-school English teacher related his message to a line from Shakespeare she had recently taught her 12th grade class.

“To thine ownself be true,” she said, quoting a famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Edwards inspires because he’s pushed issues not always politically popular. And for that he deserves credit.”

Mona Gable of the Obama-supporting Huffington Post:

It must have been a tortured decision for Edwards, is all I can say. The crippling loss in South Carolina. Then the calls to Obama and Hillary.

And now it's over, his five-year quest for the presidency. "It's time for me to step aside so that history can blaze its path," Edwards told a small crowd in New Orleans, as Elizabeth Edwards and their three children stood beside him.

What I can't really say is this: why his campaign never took off. Why, despite his insistent message about the plight of the poor and the middle-class, his landmark health-care plan, his vow to end the war in Iraq, his railing against corporate greed, he couldn't generate much heat. Was the national giddiness over a first black or a first woman president too much to overcome for a white guy from the South? Was it the obsessive narrative about the $400 hair cut, the sprawling mansion and the hedge fund that did him in? Was there too much John Kerry baggage? Or maybe--and this comes from the ever-delightful Chris Matthews--Edwards was just too "glamorous"?

Whatever the reasons, the media can finally return to what it longed to do all along with the Democrats: focus on Obama and Hillary in their increasingly nasty battle for the nomination.

It's going to be a long, long season.

Both did pledge to Edwards to continue to carry his message of poverty and fight the good fight. I wouldn't hold my breath. It's hard to imagine either candidate stopping to talk to homeless people camped near a bridge, as Edwards did in New Orleans on his way to give his speech. Or picking up a hammer to go off and build houses for Habitat for Humanity, which Edwards and his family did right after his poignant speech.

In a campaign that was often too short on substance and too much about glitz, I will miss his voice.

Gail Collins, the New York Times:

Farewell to John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani. Guess which one is planning to devote his life to helping the poor? No fair looking it up.

Joel Topcik, Broadcasting & Cable:

From the moment a politician announces his or her candidacy—at a hometown VFW hall or, maybe, in front of an aircraft carrier (as John Kerry did in 2004)—finding the right backdrop that’ll play on TV is huge.

John Edwards offered a new twist on the technique yesterday when he chose to announce his decision to drop out of the presidential race in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward neighborhood—the very place he announced his candidacy more than a year earlier.

Back then, the scene looked more than a little contrived, bordering on exploitative, with the former senator, clad in jeans and a too-crisp work shirt, standing amid the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina a year and a half earlier.

But there was a kind of poetry in his return to the scene yesterday. Wearing virtually the same costume, standing before a backdrop that showed signs of progress, Edwards brought his anti-poverty Two Americas campaign theme full circle—as if he were simply going back to the work of building "One America," one neighborhood at a time.

And then there's Paul Krugman, who never fell into the "haircuts/house/hedgefund" meme, and always "got it" as to what Edwards was trying to do and puts it in political context:

...Mr. Edwards, far more than is usual in modern politics, ran a campaign based on ideas. And even as his personal quest for the White House faltered, his ideas triumphed: both candidates left standing are, to a large extent, running on the platform Mr. Edwards built.

To understand the extent of the Edwards effect, you have to think about what might have been.

At the beginning of 2007, it seemed likely that the Democratic nominee would run a cautious campaign, without strong, distinctive policy ideas. That, after all, is what John Kerry did in 2004.

If 2008 is different, it will be largely thanks to Mr. Edwards. He made a habit of introducing bold policy proposals — and they were met with such enthusiasm among Democrats that his rivals were more or less forced to follow suit.

It’s hard, in particular, to overstate the importance of the Edwards health care plan, introduced in February.

Before the Edwards plan was unveiled, advocates of universal health care had difficulty getting traction, in part because they were divided over how to get there. Some advocated a single-payer system — a k a Medicare for all — but this was dismissed as politically infeasible. Some advocated reform based on private insurers, but single-payer advocates, aware of the vast inefficiency of the private insurance system, recoiled at the prospect.

With no consensus about how to pursue health reform, and vivid memories of the failure of 1993-1994, Democratic politicians avoided the subject, treating universal care as a vague dream for the distant future.

But the Edwards plan squared the circle, giving people the choice of staying with private insurers, while also giving everyone the option of buying into government-offered, Medicare-type plans — a form of public-private competition that Mr. Edwards made clear might lead to a single-payer system over time. And he also broke the taboo against calling for tax increases to pay for reform.

Suddenly, universal health care became a possible dream for the next administration. In the months that followed, the rival campaigns moved to assure the party’s base that it was a dream they shared, by emulating the Edwards plan. And there’s little question that if the next president really does achieve major health reform, it will transform the political landscape.

Similar if less dramatic examples of leadership followed on other key issues. For example, Mr. Edwards led the way last March by proposing a serious plan for responding to climate change, and at this point both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are offering far stronger measures to limit emissions of greenhouse gases than anyone would have expected to see on the table not long ago.

Unfortunately for Mr. Edwards, the willingness of his rivals to emulate his policy proposals made it hard for him to differentiate himself as a candidate; meanwhile, those rivals had far larger financial resources and received vastly more media attention. Even The Times’s own public editor chided the paper for giving Mr. Edwards so little coverage.

And I think that's what's so painful for those of us who supported this guy. It's not the kind of near-cultish admiration that was such an integral part of the Howard Dean movement in 2004 and which seems to be part of Barack Obama's supporters this year. It's more of a cautious sense that while we may have wondered if we were being played by a very smart and charismatic lawyer, at least there was a candidate who had taken the time to hammer out very detailed, and more importantly, workable progressive policy positions. But the Ghost of 1970's Identity Politics just won't go away, and with the media poised to do its masters' bidding and push the argument in a direction that favors a Republican victory, sideshows like the New York chapter of NOW blasting Ted Kennedy for "betraying women" by endorsing Barack Obama, and the "Hillary Cried Her Way to a Win in New Hampshire" meme, and the media's breathless wait for Barack Obama to lose his cool so they can paint him as the Angry Black Man, what chance does a white guy from the south have, even if he IS offering the most progressive alternative?

I remember exactly where I was when I heard that former Virginia governor Mark Warner announced that he would not seek the presidency. It was October 2006, I was at a Virginia Welcome Center on I-95 on my way home from North Carolina, and the television sets that dotted the cavernous room were all set to CNN, which was breathlessly broadcasting Warner's news conference. The speculation at that time was that without Warner, the Democratic party's best hope for victory in 2008 was now dashed, because he was widely believed to be the Cautious Centrist White Guy from the South that the punditocracy believed was necessary to win the presidency against the than-anticipated raving liberal candidacy of Hillary Clinton. The irony that it is the cautious and centrist Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who are the last two standing, with the Southern White Guy having run the progressive campaign, which just demonstrates even further that the media's agenda is about corporate power alone. That Obama and Clinton add the dimension of identity politics to the stew is just a ratings bonus.

Labels: 2008 election, identity politics, John Edwards

After plowing through page after page of tantrums on the Edwards blog and cultish bashing of heathens from true believers of all three of the until yesterday major Democratic candidates, I was going to write a post called "The Netroots: Why We Suck", citing such behavior as the reason our leaders don't give a flying fuck what we think.

I didn't, because the post I did last night came out instead.

But Jim Booth at Scholars and Rogues eviscerates with a very sharp knife the kind of bullshit identity politics at play in the Clinton/Obama race of a kind best evidenced by New York NOW's screeching that Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama is somehow a betrayal of women:

What Edwards is really doing is paying the price for being a white guy at the time of historic (and mostly just) back lash against the “aristocracy of white guys” that has been the target of the concerted efforts of “liberals” who aren’t liberal at all. What these “liberals” (too often media pundits) are are ideologues who proclaim that someone would make a better (read “more media interest worthy”) Presidential candidate simply because that person is a) a woman or b) an African-American. Justice is one thing - ideology is another - this is ideology at its most reeking…. Yes, I hear your scornful retorts: “These are the times that try [white] men’s souls…” yadda, yadda….

I don’t say this to discredit Hillary or Obama, both of whom have real merit. I say this because the drive to push forward a woman or black candidate is (I fear) a media creation that allows the media then to control the narrative of the Democratic campaign - and the election. And the Democratic Party, which plays the sucker to every narrative the media creates for it, is playing the sucker again.

John Edwards has addressed overtly and directly real issues plaguing our country at this historical moment - the shift toward a class system that the “Repugnacans” have engineered - and their systematic removal of any realistic opportunity for those in the rapidly developing underclass to better themselves. Edwards, like me, Sam Smith, and many others across this country, has been able to work hard, gain success, and rise to a position of both (in a relative sense) wealth and power because of the past social and economic policies of the Democratic Party. I don’t begrudge him any of his success the way the entitled scions of the Right do - to do so would be to repudiate my own life. What I find most repellent in The Left’s rejection of JE is its own smug self-righteousness that it is doing so for the “correct” reasons.

Not so. The Left is rejecting Edwards because he reminds too many of us in the Left® of what WE came from - how we scrambled and worked and took advantage of opportunities made available by FDR, HST, JFK, and LBJ. It’s easier to glom onto the myth of Hillary as a deserving member of her gender or Obama as a deserving member of his race (despicably patronizing behavior masquerading as visionary open-mindedness) than to stand up and say “offering opportunities for people to better themselves has been and should always be a basic tenet of the Democratic Party.” That would mean supporting Edwards - who espouses these positions - and rejecting the more fashionable idea of supporting Hillary or Obama because they represent a “historic opportunity.”

[snip]

I’m reminded of the way Sam Smith and I have often laughingly scoffed that the only Marxists left are those wearing tweed in tony offices in universities. The closest they ever get to the “revolution” is the occasional Cuban cigar obtained from a Canadian friend. Those of us who’ve benefited from the Democratic Party’s social and economic policies that allowed us to get educations and move up the economic and social ladder are like tweedy Marxists. We’re interested in opportunity as an intellectual abstract.

Go read the whole thing here.

One of the funnier recurring characters on Morning Sedition was Tom Johnson's "Pendejo the Revolutionary" -- a hapless, rather sniveling guy who fancied himself to be some kind of neo-Che Guevara, coming up with organization names like Progressive Underground Destabilization League (PUDL) and Tactical Elite And Battle Action Group (TEABAG) and Battalion of Aggressive Liberal-Loving Seditionists (BALLS) and the People's Underground Threat Alliance (PUTA).

Jim is absolutely right: it may very well be that in trying so desperately to be "transformational", to be revolutionary like poor Pendejo, we may very well find ourselves under another four years of incompetent, crooked, wasteful, Republican rule while we sit petting our shih-tzu Stompers, who cannot be left alone, wondering what went wrong.

(h/t)

UPDATE: The aforementioned Sam Smith weighs in here.

Labels: bloggers, John Edwards

I heard this morning about John Edwards' withdrawal from the presidential nomination race while in the car on the way to work, which is why I haven't written on it yet. Well, that and the fact that every time I think about it I get all blubbery and want to wait until I don't sound like one of the overgrown babies posting over at the Edwards blog who are planning to throw a tantrum, scream a lot, then hold their breath till their faces turn blue.

It isn't that I didn't know it was coming; I just didn't want it to happen this soon; didn't want to have to face the choice of voting for the woman who is unrepentant about voting for the war in Iraq and equally unrepentant about giving George W. Bush a free pass to go to war with Iran via Kyl/Lieberman; and a man who's a great orator or speeches that may be written for him, but who phumphers when put on the spot, a certainly transformational candidate who just seems a bit too idealistic to be able to survive once the wingnut hate machine really gets ratcheted up.

Just once in my life, I'd like to be able to cast an enthusiastic vote in a general election. Time after time after time, I've seen the candidates I've supported in the primary races -- smart, capable candidates who see further than next week and think about things other than amassing power -- fall by the wayside because the party hacks will do whatever is necessary -- even lose -- to retain their control over the process. Whether it was Gary Hart in 1984, or Paul Tsongas in 1992, or Howard Dean in 2004, or John Edwards this year, these capable candidates are always shoved out of the way by those who toe the party line, who wait their turn, and dare I say it -- know their place.

When you look at some of the Democratic nominees over the last few decades -- Walter Mondale...Michael Dukakis....John Kerry...you wonder if the Democrats even want to win. It took a dirty skunk like Bill Clinton to finally beat the Republicans at their own game -- and even then he had to fight them (and much of his own party) for eight years just to stay in office. Then in 2000 we watched as Al Gore refused to demand a statewide recount in Florida, and in 2004 we watched as John Kerry joined up with Dick Gephardt to tag-team Howard Dean in Iowa, only to see Kerry take his $14 million in leftover campaign cash and go home before the Ohio vote count was even finalized.

After the tag-teaming of Howard Dean in 2004, I was so depressed and so disgusted and disillusioned with the system that it was all I could do to get out of bed and go to work the next day. I promised myself I would never, ever put myself through that again. It isn't as though I'm not used to disappointment; I am, after all, a Mets fan (though please don't get me started on this Santana trade; does the name "Bret Saberhagen" mean anything to these people?). And yes, there was this disconnect between John Edwards' voting record and the progressive populist agenda he ran on this year.

But while Hillary and Bill Clinton are embodying everything people hate about the baby boomers, with their "Me, me, me" campaign, and Barack Obama has seemed to either not get or refuse to acknowledge the ugliness that has permeated politics, while at the same time seeming to lack the toughness he'll need to get anything accomplished, I felt that a guy who'd made millions of dollars fighting big corporations on behalf of families like the Lakeys was worth supporting. Supporting Hillary Clinton was out of the question because of her hawkishness and her insistence at Yearly Kos last summer that corporate lobbyists are people too, and Obama's tendency to want to reach across the aisle seemed more like dipping his hand into a swamp full of crocodiles.

This isn't the first time the media have set the agenda and selected the candidates for us. It was the media who decided that a dry drunk like George W. Bush should be president because he was a guy you'd want to drink beer with (despite the fact that he's by all accounts a pretty mean drunk). It was the media who turned down the crowd noise at Howard Dean's post-Iowa rally in 2004 so that he sounded like a raving madman. Diane Sawyer later 'fessed up on Good Morning America, but who saw it? And the damage was done. Then it was the media who decided that the allegations of the Swift Boat Liars for Bullshit, allegations they pulled out of their asses, deserved equal time to, say, the truth. It was the media who decided that John Kerry "looked French". Kerry didn't do himself any favors by being the least telegenic candidate in recorded history, but the media aided and abetted in the smear campaign against him. And this year, the media painted John Edwards as a lightweight and a hypocrite, focusing on his haircuts and the size of his house, because he represented a threat to the power of their corporate masters, and because the Black Guy and the Woman made a far more interesting story than just another Southern white guy.

And now that he is gone from the race, after (according to Jonathan Alter on Countdown tonight) becoming frustrated with the fact that even winning EVERY SINGLE DEBATE wasn't enough to garner any attention. And of course in leaving, he finally gets the attention from the media. As if feeling contrition, the nightly news reports spoke of Edwards' departure in hushed tones of admiration, as if it were Mother Theresa herself who had just left the presidential race. Now that he is gone, they've decided maybe he wasn't so bad after all.

But if you're thinking that the talking heads of the media have learned anything, guess again. For Tweety is tweeting his "John McCain is a maverick" meme and insisting that some of John Edwards' voters may go over to McCain, despite the fact that John McCain has done nothing but suck up to George W. Bush for the last seven years. Assuming that McCain continues to prevail, the corporate media will get their candidate on the Republican side. And if the Republican race is over before the Democratic one, Barack Obama had better be prepared. Because these people who are the public face of Viacom and General Electric and Disney Corp. and News Corp. want Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain, and as John Edwards knows full well, they will tear down anyone who gets in the way of the candidates most likely to do their bidding.

And so the nation is a more dismal place tonight. James Lowe goes back to West Virginia, where no one who doesn't already know about him will know that he was unable to speak for 50 years because he had no health insurance until a doctor agreed to waive the fee to repair his cleft palate. The Sarkisyan family will go back to California to mourn their daughter, knowing that the most ardent advocate for universal health care is no longer running for president. The many people who worked tirelessly to fight back the tide that has run against John Edwards will also go home. The offices will be shuttered, the stickers removed from the windows.

And out here in the Super Tuesday states, the Edwards bumper stickers will go into the box with the Howard Dean buttons and the Gary Hart '84 buttons -- relics of days when we were able to delude ourselves for a little while that the game wasn't entirely rigged. And we will decide where we go from here. We'll choose, and we'll go through the drill of voting, knowing full well that it ultimately doesn't mean jack shit; that the corporations always win.

A few months ago, Marc Maron did an amazing rant while subbing for Randi Rhodes that I posted about a month ago about how America manufactures nothing but need and appetite; that instead of "Land of the Free", our motto should be "America: All You Can Eat." But I think he's mistaken. For America's motto is really "America: Show Me The Money."

Labels: 2008 election, Democrats, John Edwards

Sam Seder will be covering for Randi Rhodes on Air America Radio on Monday, January 28th...The Maron V. Seder Vodcast will be broadcast on live Tuesday, January 29th, and there is a possibility of a live Sammy Cam session to chat our way through the State of the Union Speech...or a possible Young Turk-a-thon (not my favorite thing, but desperate times call for desperate measures!) All this and more at Sam's Blog. Check back often for updates on all the stuff that's going on! He's busy!

So, CNN is advertising a special report, after the debate on Thursday, that is being billed as SANJAY GUPTA Reportsssss...Health Care in America: Broken Government!
Anyone with Medicare or Medicaid knows that the government healthcare programs work very well. They are probably the least broken parts of this screwed up country...Though one big problem with them is that when people like Rudy Giulliani are cutting the budgets of their fiefdoms, a good way of cutting bottom line services that should be immovable is by making social programs more difficult to find, fill out forms for, provide proper documentation for, and re-cert over and over, until people just leave the fief for a kinder and gentler state where one can sleep outside more comfortably, or a place that is more friendly to the poor. If you can get on them, the government programs are the most accepted, by law (and Medicaid needs some work in that area,) and pay providers pretty fairly. They operate with tiny overheads, compared to private insurance companies, and run rather smoothly, considering that they are part of the government bureaucracy.

I'm trying to find the commercial on CNN's website about Sanjay and his Gupta reportage, but since its not up yet, I'd like to suggest a rephrasing of that tag line. How about Broken Insurance Industry, (or how about,

This is what you get from outsourcing, you idiots!!

) Because I know from the commercial, its all about horrible medical crisis' that could have been prevented if only the Government wasn't Broken!Whats broken here is that we cant all get on Medicare and pay what we can. Its just that simple and will provide jobs, even as the insurance industry loses jobs.
This is not the first time that Gupta has used an inflammatory tag line and made sweeping generalizations about medical issues that he is not really qualified to speak to. He is an MD, not a political scholar. And its questionable how smart of an MD he is too. But, I'm all ears, Sanjay...have at it!

The difference between me and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is one of having faith in human nature and hope that the American system and/or the American people are strong enough, at this point in history, to fall behind an idealistic young candidate and go through with what will be necessary to turn this ship around before it hits ground. I keep imagining the moment that, in the midst of a terra alert, we put McCain or Romney into office just to be "safe." Hey, Its happened before! Don't rule it out!

I don't know what rosy colored glasses the Kennedy's look through to maintain their hope in the face of tragedy, and as political insiders who have seen their share of the gruesome details, but its sort of heartening and lovely in a way...and a little unreal. I also think that it has something to do with being raised in an extended family of public servants who are steeped in being able to promote change. They are told this from the moment they hit the ground running, and they have the support, even in trauma and dysfunction, of their extended family and religion to keep going. They also are from money; not that they all have riches beyond compare, because there are so many of them, but operating from a platform of upper classiness, they are educated and prepped for a life of great privilege, and a life of service to balance it. Religion has something to do with it too. They are Catholics, and it seems that having a higher reason behind what the aim is, helps with all those questions of why.
A coy Obama as much as admitted that Teddy Kennedy is on board as well. Breaking News: Tomorrow comes the endorsement.
Do they know the real think when they see it just because they are Kennedy's? Because everything about Obama seems to rely more on the feeling that he gives people than actual substance. I'd like to see more substance and less positioning.

Granted, I would be the virtual Woody Allen neurotic New Yorker to any Kennedy hope filled spiel about this young candidate being of the flesh and the body of the father. It must be nice to feel like you've found the reincarnation of hope, but I'm not quite there yet, to be honest, I'm doubtful about the whole thing. America does not have a very good track record at successfully letting hopeful leaders make their way into office. Surely, if Barak Obama is going to be brave enough to throw himself out there, I'm willing to listen, but it took me four years and an in person meeting to make me start to think that John Edwards really means what he says, and I have some very concrete reasons why I like him.

Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's reasoning about Obama had less to do with the specifics of what Obama might do, than with things that people have told her about how he reminds them of her father. See, she doesn't really remember her father, but I'm sure that she knows everything he ever did, and the concrete reasoning behind it all, so why this wishy-washy endorsement? It sounds to me like " He moves the American people and makes them feel good.." and people say that he reminds them of my father, so lets trust him to try to dig us out of the worst hole we've been in, maybe ever?

Whoever gets the job is bound to look bad pretty quickly if not right away. There is just too much to clean up, and even the most experienced politician is gonna have to get their hands really dirty, offending alot of people along the way, meanwhile trying to fix the diplomatic mess that they are going to be left with. I think that whoever is the winner of this contest is going to end up with the short end of the stick, and the war is going to be his/her's, thanks to the democratic majority's inability to get itself to act, even in the interest of getting some information on the record to protect the next president.

I've been a little shocked at the reaction of a few people in the blogosphere to Edwards not dropping out of the race when he didn't win South Carolina.
I see no reason for him to drop out, and in fact, I urge him to stay in...I sent him money, and will send more after the 1st of the month. I guess that the best thing about this race has been the discourse. Some of it has been insane and some of it has been upsetting, but mostly, it's been good to see everyone allowed to talk out loud about whats been going on for these years in what seemed like a virtual gulag, as the terra alerts went from yellow to red, and we were told the best way to duct tape ourselves into a room in case of attack. Remember all that? Some woman around here actually killed herself and her kid because she sealed them into a room too tightly at a time when they had to use a generator or heater or something.

Remember not being able to buy duct tape because that asshole director of homeland security, Tom Ridge, said that all Americans should have these things...and survival food...doesn't it seem like a fucking dream? How did they successfully carry out all of the lies? How is it that they wont have to pay somehow? And isn't it crazy that any of these fools wants the job at all?

Yeah, you have to be pretty sure of yourself to think that you might be able to fix this mess up...even with a full staff of advisers, I cant imagine that anyone wouldn't have some trepidation. And I guess that I don't feel like Obama has the experience to run the entire country ...but I'd prefer to take a chance with him than to go with what I know will be business as usual with Billary. One way or another, we're bound to take a bit of a dip before we start to rebound. The dip might last what seems like a long time in our short sightedness, but historically it will be a blip. It's what we deserve for getting too lazy to pay attention and vote, and the turnout speaks loudly to the fact that its going to be a long time before people become that complacent again.

Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times today about the dangers of a Hillary Clinton general election. He pretty much warned that while Hillary may consider herself vetted, Bill has not been vetted on whats happened since he left the White House. Apparently there is much there to make hay of, and if Hillary is running against McCain, a swift boating or even an attack grounded in fact could land us with a President McCain. The sudden heavy use of Bill Clinton to pull Hillary's numbers up could have a devastating effect on this country if he has not been squeaky clean over the last 8 years. Surely there is a danger in just the perception of going back to the same old water carrying that was a huge part of how we got here.

For the Republicans, that means not just a double dose of the one steroid, Clinton hatred, that might yet restore their party’s unity but also two fat targets. Mrs. Clinton repeatedly talks of how she’s been “vetted” and that “there are no surprises” left to be mined by her opponents. On the “Today” show Friday, she joked that the Republican attacks “are just so old.” So far. Now that Mr. Clinton is ubiquitous, not only is his past back on the table but his post-presidency must be vetted as well. To get a taste of what surprises may be in store, you need merely revisit the Bill Clinton questions that Hillary Clinton has avoided to date.

Rich seems to think that Obama is a contender...more than Hillary is anyway. When he writes like this it is usually because he knows something, and the only way to figure it out is to try to catch him on the TV machine, as he no doubt will be appearing here and there this week, (or so I hope.) What seems clear is that polls at Real Clear Politics already show Hillary running neck and neck with McCain in the general. They also project the rest of the democratic field the same with McCain. I don't know about you, but I'm not gonna make it through another tight race in which we have questionable vote counting. Make no mistake, the aim of this thing as to be to win, and we can only hope that the Republican nominee isn't old John McCain, because he seems to have some legs in this thing. Where are the fundies when you need 'em?

Labels: Barack Obama, Frank Rich, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards

Congratulations to Barak Obama on his South Carolina Win...Still waiting to see who comes in second. I don't know when or if American voters might choke at uncertainty mixed with racism, but if they're gonna start to have second thoughts, I hope that its before the general election.
I guess that Bill Clinton didn't win much of anything until later in the primary season, so its impossible to guess what will happen as this thing goes on. As far as I'm concerned, with Edwards, its all about the message, and hopefully he will have a good long time to talk about these very important issues. Its early to pick a winner in this, but as much as I hear that people hate Hillary, I'm also hearing some trepidation that Obama might not have the experience that is is necessary for this time of war. If we get any kind of terra surprise, we might see a result that we didn't bargain for. I hope to god that any of our candidates who moves towards the front of the pack is ready to react and act like they know what they're doing and they're gonna kick some terra-ist ass !

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: John Edwards, Obama, primaries

Mark yesterday on your calendars, folks, because on the observance of the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the first viable woman candidate and the first African-American candidate for the presidency handed the office to the Republicans....again.

Frankly, I'm sick of the pair of them already.

I want to lock them in a room where they can bicker to their heart's content and let us get on with nominating a candidate who isn't providing his/her same-party opponent with video material for attack ads; one who has shown he can fight back against attacks and who doesn't come across like a narcissist; who gives the impression that this election is about US, not himself or herself.

If this wasn't some nice red meat that the media can use to make the eventual nominee look as unappealing as possible, thus furthering their corporate owners' goal of perpetuating Republican power, it would represent a possible breakthrough opportunity for John Edwards. But of course that can't be allowed to happen. It can't happen because media ownership will never allow the talking heads that are beamed into our living rooms, the ones idiotically obsessing about the horse race instead of what each of these candidates would actually do, to permit John Edwards, who represents a threat to their power and access to the corridors of Washington, to gain any traction.

We seem to have forgotten as we sit and watch, appalled, while Hillary Clinton engages in her scorched-earth campaign, is that this is why the Clintons were successful against the worst Republican onslaught of mud and feces in our lifetime: They fight dirty. They know how to fight dirty, they have no qualms about fighting dirty, and they're going to fight dirty. We loved it when we liked them. Now, with the public face of Clinton politics being the less appealing Hillary instead of the charismatic Bill, and now that it's directed against a candidate who's more transformational than Hillary Clinton is, and now that it's taking the form of a powerful white couple directing it against a black guy who's on their own team, it doesn't seem as much of a strength.

But here's the problem revealed by last night's debate: Barack Obama repeats over and over again that Americans are tired of this kind of divisive politics. And I'm sure that in his ideal world (as in ours), campaigns would be fought on issues and on real, substantive differences. But if he's going to complain about the tone of the Clinton campaign, what on earth is he going to do when the Republicans get hold of him? Obama's desire to run a different kind of campaign is a laudable one. But in Hillary Clinton, he's running against a candidate who plays for keeps. And she's just the warm-up. If he thinks that Hillary Clinton is being unfair and misrepresenting him, he isn't going to know what hit him when the Republicans try to turn him into a al-Qaeda mole trying to infiltrate our government.

Does anyone honestly believe that this kind of bickering is what Democrats want to hear as they decide for whom they want to vote?



And why on earth is the third guy not being taken seriously as a candidate? He's attractive, he's funny, he's smart as a whip, he keeps the focus on the American people, not about himself. He lets what he says and what he wants to do speak for itself. And in this context, with the "top two" trying to destroy each other, he's like a cool drink of water on a hot day. The way this contest is going, there's only one way to get this campaign back on the issues, and that's to get out from under the identity politics of race and gender. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama seem able to do that. Whether it's Clinton or Obama or their supporters doing it is immaterial. There are more important things we have to worry about than which identity group is going to take the White House.

Americans want someone who's running for this office for THEM -- for Americans -- not for themselves. Last night both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave the distinct impression that it's all about THEM, not about US. I don't believe that Obama is the narcissist that Hillary Clinton is, but if he isn't, it's time for him to show us.

Haven't we had enough of narcissism in the White House? Can we please stop letting Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer and Joe Scarborough and Brian Williams and Tim Russert decide who should be the nominee, and actually listen to what these people are saying?

On Saturday, Martin Luther King III met with John Edwards at the King Center in Atlanta. On Sunday Edwards received this note:

…I appreciate that on the major issues of health care, the environment, and the economy, you have framed the issues for what they are - a struggle for justice. And, you have almost single-handedly made poverty an issue in this election.

You know as well as anyone that the 37 million people living in poverty have no voice in our system. They don’t have lobbyists in Washington and they don’t get to go to lunch with members of Congress. Speaking up for them is not politically convenient. But, it is the right thing to do.

I am disturbed by how little attention the topic of economic justice has received during this campaign. I want to challenge all candidates to follow your lead, and speak up loudly and forcefully on the issue of economic justice in America.[..]

I believe that now, more than ever, we need a leader who wakes up every morning with the knowledge of that injustice in the forefront of their minds, and who knows that when we commit ourselves to a cause as a nation, we can make major strides in our own lifetimes. My father was not driven by an illusory vision of a perfect society. He was driven by the certain knowledge that when people of good faith and strong principles commit to making things better, we can change hearts, we can change minds, and we can change lives.

So, I urge you: keep going. Ignore the pundits, who think this is a horserace, not a fight for justice. My dad was a fighter. As a friend and a believer in my father’s words that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, I say to you: keep going. Keep fighting. My father would be proud.

Consider this: While the "transformative" candidate was taking Hillary Clinton's bait, the son of the man we honored yesterday was telling the southern white guy to keep fighting.

Senator Obama, I'm looking for a backup candidate should John Edwards prove unable to counteract the deck that's so stacked against him. You're the logical choice. Please stop giving me reasons to decide to just stay home.

(In case you missed it, and watching train wrecks isn't your cup of tea, Jeff Fecke liveblogged it, for which he has earned our eternal thanks.)

(h/t)

Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, democratic debate, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards

Labels: John Edwards

If you're supporting John Edwards, or even if you're leaning towards supporting him or are unsure; if you're troubled by Barack Obama's continued insistence on using right-wing framing to sell his candidacy (the latest being to praise Ronald Reagan for bamboozling working people in 49 states to vote for an anti-union, anti-middle-class elitist in 1980); or even if you don't like the fact that Timmeh and Brian and Katie and Charlie and Morning Joe and Tweety are trying to turn the Democratic contest into a steel-cage match betweeen the woman and the black guy (where are the "two Jews and a cripple" (sic), consider donating to John Edwards today.

If your friends and family who don't eat, sleep, and breathe politics the way you do don't know that Edwards is in the race, or if they think that he's a fringe candidate like Mike Gravel, perhaps this is why:





On the Republican side,

I've made no secret that I'm supporting John Edwards in the primary race. Some of the Obamaniacs who spam the diaries at Le Grand Orange trying to squelch all criticism of their candidate, have called for Edwards to leave the race in the name of party unity. I say fuck that. The primaries are the only place (and this year, even New Jersey has a voice) where you can vote for the candidate you want. I haven't wanted to turn B@B into an Edwards campaign blog, because his campaign already has an excellent one. But Edwards' campaign wants to send a message by raising $7 million in one day -- today.

So if you've been thinking you really should donate, today is the day, and now is the time. Click the image above or here.

Labels: 2008 election, John Edwards

Hard to believe that at one time the Iowa Caucus was the kickoff to the presidential campaign, isn't it? It seems as if the campaign has been going on ever since John Kerry took his $14 million in leftover campaign cash in November 2004 and went home before the vote count was even certified.

There isn't much to say about the Republicans, other than the near-historic collapse of Mitt Romney, who spent a mint of money in Iowa and lost to Elmer Gantry. There's a certain "chickens, home, roost, etc." feeling I have about Huckabee's win; that he is the Frankenstein monster created by the Republican Party's embrace of the most lunatic fringe of the religious right for so many years. The party hackocracy has always been able to keep the flat-earthers in the fold by giving lip service to their values and then virtually ignoring them in the arena of actual policy. In Huckabee, they have Their Guy -- a guy who talks life where blastocysts are concerned, but brags about how many people he killed as governor; a guy who says wives should submit to their husbands and then frees a rapist because his victim was distantly related by marriage to Bill Clinton; and a guy who thinks the earth was created in six days just as it is today by a Big Alpha Male in the Sky. The few mainstream Republicans left are appalled at this, but they have no one to blame but themselves. They put up with this for years; now they have reaped their just rewards.

On the Democratic side, all I can think of is that ModFab is one happy guy this morning, and if he weren't such a good and generous soul, he'd be perfectly within his rights to be smug as hell. Apparently we were at the wake when Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were running things at MSNBC, and I wasn't about to watch Brian Williams and Pumpkinhead, so instead we alternated between Air America's coverage (which included the intelligent and learned David Bender trying mightily to cut into Mark Green's obvious spinning for Hillary Clinton and The Odious Lionel being far better than he is on his own show) and the Sammy Cam.

This was a HUGE win for Obama, one in which he was the choice of half of voters under 45 and 57% of those aged 17-29. Despite the perception among everyone born after 1964 that the baby boom generation has a sense of entitlement to all the marbles in perpetuity, any progressive boomer with half a brain knows that even if the candidate you supported didn't win (and mine didn't), that first-time caucusgoers showed up in droves and voted for a candidate that gives them hope for the future is great, great news. The political process has become so cynical, and the processes of government have become so debased, that the sound repudiation of the corporatist Hillary Clinton by young voters last night is wonderful to behold, and the enthusiasm of those young Iowa voters who caucused for the first time last night and those from out-of-state who went to Iowa to spend their Christmas break going door-to-door to stump for Obama is something that should be nurtured and encouraged to carry over into other states and into years to come.

In February of last year, Bill Maher asked John Edwards, "Since your competition is Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, mainly, do you think it's unfair baggage that you're a white man?". It was a joke, of course, but for all that Edwards has been channelling Paul Wellstone this year, and for all that before all this started, the Democrats were touting Mark Warner as the Great Southern White Hope for 2008, there does seem to be a strong desire this year to do a soft-storm of the Bastille and move away from anything that smacks, however remotely, of the Washington cesspool of the last seven years. And despite his message, the fact remains that John Edwards is still a Southern White Guy, and no matter what he runs on, you can't tell in five seconds of television imagery that he DOES represent something different.

Watching Edwards speech last night (which at one point veered dangerously close to Howard Dean's misrepresented rally from 2004 with its litany of states), his studied avoidance of words like "victory", and his (from what I could see) framing of the night's results as a resounding message of change, I had the sense that before this is all over, one way or another, Edwards and Obama are going to be able to do business. Whether it's a one-two punch one way or the other; or some other kind of good cop/bad cop relationship, my sense was less that Edwards is believing he's going to win this thing, and more one that he's bound and determined to continue the message right through February 5 and possibly beyond. For John Edwards, this is less about an Edwards presidency than it is about putting an end to the corporate control of the United States Government, and that ultimately he's not going to care how it gets done as long as it does.

Ezra Klein, who despite looking twelve years old on television is rapidly becoming one of the smartest political analysts around, has this to say:

Barack Obama won tonight, but, in a sense, John Edwards' campaign also triumphed. The progressivism of the race, the focus on ideas, the courage of the Democrats -- all were products of his early example. He began the campaign by talking about poverty, announced his candidacy in the mud of New Orleans, set the agenda with the first universal health care bill, and closed Iowa speaking of the uninsured. This is Barack Obama's victory, and it's richly deserved. But Edwards, running as a full-throated populist, set the agenda and finished second, ahead of the Clinton juggernaut. He said his role was to speak for the voiceless. He now barrels towards New Hampshire with ever more volume. And while his shot at the nomination is long at best, his candidacy, even if it fails, will have been far more successful than most.

This is not to say that he's out of this thing; that he squeaked by ahead of Hillary Clinton, who has far more money and far more media coverage, shouldn't be underestimated. Even Time regards his second-place finish as a boost:

John Edwards went into the Iowa caucuses last night a fighter and he emerges from them as scrappy as ever. In other words, don't assume, because he lost to Barack Obama, that Edwards is down for the count. After all, as his campaign advisers are quick to point out, by finishing second Edwards's David can claim victory over at least one Goliath. "The person hurt in all this is Hillary Clinton," Joe Trippi, an Edwards senior advisor, told TIME minutes after his candidate claimed the silver medal in Des Moines. "The former president of the United States flew all around this state and so did she. They outspent us three-to-one at least. And we beat her."

[snip]

All that's now left to decide, said Jonathan Prince, Edwards' top strategist, is what kind of change the country wants. "Are we going to have a philosophical version of change, or are we going to have a fight to bring about the change we really need?" Prince asked in a rhetorical flourish meant to contrast philosophical change (Obama) with the real thing (Edwards). Edwards' populist message has focused on stamping out the power of corporate greed in Washington, and he argues that Obama's Kumbaya inclusiveness cannot get that job done. "Asking lobbyists to simply give up their power by asking them? In whose world? Not in the real world. That is a complete and total fantasy, it'll never happen," Edwards told a crowd in Ames Tuesday.

I suspect we're going to see younger journalists sounding the death knell of baby boomer politics in Hillary Clinton's third place finish. But I think that it says far more about how wrong the punditocracy is that suddenly Hillary Clinton, after fifteen years in which they regarded her as the yokel from the hicks who wasn't fit to eat off of Nancy Reagan's dishes, became the shoo-in, the anointed nominee, by virtue of having been in Washington for a decade and a half; and that they were 100% wrong all along.

Even if Obama isn't your first choice, there IS something terribly exciting -- and hopeful -- about the fact that a black man named "Barack Hussein Obama" was the first choice of a predominantly white population in a flyover state in a post-9/11 world. Even the fact that Mike Huckabee, as much of a willfully ignorant, theocratic moron as he is (and arguably the Mirror Universe version of Bill Clinton, a theory for which Lower Manhattanite makes a compelling case), won on the Republican side is a hopeful sign that perhaps we are getting past the reptilian-brain mindset that too many Americans have had over the past six years; one fed by the media and right-wing politicians, that Killer Muslims are Coming To Get Us™ and that this fear should occupy our every waking moment. I'm not saying that there aren't very real dangers in the world, but it's clear by now that the Bush/Cheney/Giuliani methodology of attack first and ask questions later is one that no longer resonates with the American public, no matter how many right-wing talk radio hosts and TV talking heads try to perpetuate it. I'm not saying that Huckabee's win is a good thing; I'm with tristero in that I think that in a group of utterly batshit crazy Republicans, he may be the most dangerous of all. But his victory in Iowa, I think, is less about evangelicals in that state and more about the fact that "Vote for me or die at terrorists' hands" isn't resonating the way it used to be.

I'm still not sold on Obama being tough enough to fight effectively back if he's the nominee and the Republicans start painting him as a Muslim spy who's also a cocaine addict. I still think he's frighteningly naïve about the reality of today's Republican Party, whose goal is not just to crush the opposition, but crush it, mangle its corpse, then have sex with it, then cook it and eat it with fava beans and a nice chianti for dinner. I still think that he vastly overestimates the feasibility of consensus with greedy corporate executives who are loath to see their taxpayer-funded gravy train derailed. And I'm troubled by his use of right-wing framing on issues from Social Security to trial lawyers. There is a kind of incipient Joe Liebermanism in him that troubles me.

I've heard some Obama supporters say that I needn't worry, that this is just how he sheathes the sword before applying the death blow, and I suppose we can always hope. But while hope may be enough for young voters who haven't lived through the assassination of their generations' heroes (and I hope they never have to) and watching their hopes of what America can be dashed time and time again; you can't blame the rest of us for saying "I'm from New Jersey....show me."

However, I AM willing to be shown.

Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards

Thank you for writing an article about John and Elizabeth Edwards that mentions neither haircuts nor houses nor hedge funds. Thank you for writing an article that doesn't even allude to the kind of foul rumors that those afraid of having a president who might represent people other than the most monied interests have spread. Thank you for recognizing that there are still people for whom politics is a calling, a way to make a difference on a large scale, rather than a way to stuff one's pockets or aggrandize one's ego.

John Edwards has received precious little coverage like this, and rarely been covered with this little skepticism.



This is one of those times when I wish I'd been able to put away more money when I was young and could afford to retire. I'd be in Iowa right now.

Labels: John Edwards

So John Edwards is put at a disadvantage as a result of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto today because he's "a lightweight" on foreign policy, eh?

Not so fast, Joe Scarborough:

Edwards spoke in Waukon this afternoon about having calls in to Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf. Then, at his second event in Decorah, he told Iowans that he got his call returned.

“He called me,” Edwards said, “because I told the ambassador I’d like to speak to him. I met him a few years ago, which I think I told you earlier, and we had a conversation in which I urged him to continue the democratization process. He told me, he gave me his assurances that he intended to do that, and we also spoke about having international independent investigators allowed into the country for transparency purposes, for credibility purposes, and we spoke briefly about the elections.”

Edwards is the only candidate to have said publicly that he received a call from Musharraf today. Edwards did not join in the fight between rivals Clinton and Obama over which candidate has the best foreign policy advisers, and asked what this conversation does for his own foreign policy credibility, Edwards referred back to the complexity of the issue.

“I think that the most important thing is to understand what’s actually happening within Pakistan, the complex nature of the problems there, and to be visionary about what America needs to be doing,” he told reporters.

While Rudy Giuliani is out there running yet more ads on which he climbs once again on top of the pile of 9/11 corpses and says that only he will kill enough Muslims to satisfy the bloodlust of the Republican base, and Hillary and Obama are playing "Mine's bigger" on foreign policy, old Johnny the Tortoise is on the phone with Musharraf. As Marc Ambinder says in the Atlantic: "That's one heck of a talking point."

The RadioIowa blog has an MP3 of Edwards talking about the situation in Pakistan.

Even the National Review Online is rendered speechless that the guy they thought was just a pretty face was the go-to guy on the Democratic side today.

More from Cliff Schecter at Brave New Films, at MyDD, and at Le Grand Orange,

Labels: Benezir Bhutto, diplomacy, John Edwards, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf

You know it's coming. But pointing out the damage to very real people that is being done by health insurance companies isn't exploitation, it's underscoring the facts.

I don't expect the family of Nataline Sarkisyan to go stumping for John Edwards, but their plight has served to underscore Edwards' point that you cannot "negotiate" with companies that will allow a seventeen-year-old to die rather than pay for a procedure that could save her life:

John Edwards tonight cited the case of a 17-year-old California girl who died after her insurance company refused coverage on a liver transplant to save her life as a call to action to change the current system of healthcare in America.

Nataline Sarkysian died last night at UCLA Medical Center after complications arose from a bone marrow transplant to treat her leukemia. Her insurance provider, CIGNA Healthcare, first denied the potentially lifesaving transplant, but relented after a loud public protest and outrage. By that time, though, Sarkysian passed away before the procedure could be performed.

"Are you telling me that we're gonna sit at a table and negotiate with those people?" asked a visibly angered Edwards, challenging the health care companies. "We're gonna take their power away and we're not gonna have this kind of problem again."

Edwards also told the audience of about a hundred people at the Score Pavillion in Nevada, Iowa, that it will take a fighter (i.e. him) - and not a negotiator (ii.e. Obama) - to take on large insurance companies like CIGNA.

"Anybody who thinks that we don't have a fight in front of us is living in Never-Never Land," he said.

The Sarkisyans are going to sue CIGNA, as well they should. It's too bad Mark Geragos is their attorney, because my impression of him is that he's more interested in the cameras than in his clients. Because if there were ever a case that was made for John Edwards, it's this one.

UPDATE: Richard Blair weighs in at All Spin Zone.

Labels: health care, John Edwards

I don't think so:

Labels: John Edwards

Most of you probably know what I'm talking about, but I won't dignify it by linking to anything. But isn't it funny how every time John Edwards starts to gain traction, one of these maggots crawls out from under a rock making claims?

UPDATE: Sorry, wingnuts (and Ann Althouse). You're wrong again. Better luck next time. But you know, you might just consider that perhaps shit doesn't always stick to the wall anymore.

Labels: 2008 election, John Edwards, utter horseshit