Barack Obama was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show the other day, telling Ellen he might not be able to dance better than his wife, but he was pretty sure he could out dance John McCain. After watching this video, I’d call it a tie. Though I have to admit, I’m not sure Obama has an answer to that move where McCain bounces across the floor on his back (via RyanColesy).
The picture above of Elsheba Khan appeared in the New Yorker. It’s the picture that former Secretary of State Colin Powell invoked in this stirring endorsement of Barack Obama:
I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that he is a Muslim and might have an association with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America. continue reading » »
Can it really be less than two months since the New York Times told the world how political strategist Steve Schmidt had transformed the McCain campaign into “an elbows-out, risk-taking, disciplined machine”? At the time, I remember having a visceral reaction to its description of Schmidt’s “brillilance.”
It bothered me that McCain’s surge in the polls was being credited to Schmidt’s attacking style and his penchant for hard-hitting, negative campaigning. What would you expect from a Karl Rove protege? Were Swift Boat politics going to be validated once again?
Now, with McCain’s campaign in a stuttering, discombobulated, mob-powered free fall, I wonder if Schmidt is still wearing the genius tag? If he gets credit for McCain pulling the race even over the summer, then does he get the blame for the looming electoral-college rout on the horizon? continue reading » »
Old Ed Pulver is surely long dead by now. The fact is, he wasn’t doing so well when I met him, which was 20 years ago when I was a junior at the University of Florida. He walked into my college newsroom one afternoon in his grungy, stained clothes and announced that he wanted to talk to a reporter. That was me.
Ed, who I’m guessing was in his 70s at the time, had a problem. The city was going to tear down his house. More of a shack, really. It was what they called a nuisance property. No electricity. Garbage strewn about the yard; broken windows, busted boards, peeling paint. It didn’t smell too good, either.
But it kept the rain off his head and it kept him off the street. It was home, and Ed wasn’t sure what he was going to do if the city tore it down. Ed was alone. No family. No friends. No place to go after his house was gone. continue reading » »
This was no Battle in Seattle. No Combat in the Capitol. Not even a dust up in D.C. Despite a lot of Internet chatter, the planned late night march aimed at waking up the delegates to the International Monetary Fund looked like a bust by the time I left about 2 a.m. Of course, all hell might have broken loose afterwards but with the district po-po out in force, the small band of protesters would have been badly outnumbered.
The few dozen activists who gathered at DuPont Circle at 1 a.m. were outnumbered by the police a good three to one. The traffic circle around the park was lined with police cars and the area around the fountain was ringed with police motorcycles. There were also at least 20 bike cops at the ready. continue reading » »
It’s a Saturday and I don’t feel like doing any heavy lifting. Instead, I’m hoping I can make a point with the three video clips below.
The first is a piece by the American News Project that explains how Big Oil has borrowed a page out Big Tobacco’s playbook — use junk science and slick marketing to stir doubt and uncertainty about real, credible scientific research. continue reading » »
Change.org launched its redesigned Web site this week. I never spent too much time on their old site, so I can’t really compare the before and after. However, what I’ve seen of the after is pretty encouraging.
I’m not quite sure how many more social networks I can maintain without suffering serious overload but I’m going to give this one a tryout period.
Again, I can’t really remember what the old site was like because I had only logged onto it a couple times but I don’t recall it being content driven. That has changed with the redesign, which revolves around several staff blogs, each focused on a pressing social (progressive) issue, such as human rights, fair trade and stopping global warming, among others.
Will becoming a content provider, while providing a social network for progressive activists and a fundraising tool for nonprofits be a successful mix? It’s not a new concept but I think the difference here may be in the execution. continue reading » »
For me, the crystal-clear difference between Barack Obama and John McCain came down to one moment in Tuesday night’s debate — when Tom Brokaw asked the candidates to rank their priorities between health care, energy and reform of the social security and medicare systems.
McCain played it down the middle, saying all three issues were equally important and that he could work on all three at the same time. It was a safe, if meaningless, answer. Or rather, it was a non answer since the question was to rank priorities, not eliminate them.
Obama didn’t hesitate. He named energy his number one priority. continue reading » »
Keith Olberman at his best. He goes to town on Palin. Does Sara Palin really want to go there? Does she really want to throw stones when it comes to someone’s association with seditionists and religious nut jobbers? She’s got a domestic terrorist and witch doctor of her own in her closet, as Olberman so sarcastically points out.
Now it gets exciting. Sources in John McCain’s camp spent the last several days telling reporters that the campaign was about to go hard negative against Barack Obama on the character issue. It was the best way, they said, to move the national discussion off of the economy.
And true to their word, VP candidate Sara Palin came out firing over the weekend, repeatedly bringing up Obama’s association with radical anti-war activst Bill Ayers, while talking about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr with NYT columnist Bill Kristol, despite earlier pronouncements from McCain that Wright was “off limits.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the mud pit. Obama’s camp let loose with its toughest offensive of the campaign — launching what they’re calling “Keating Economics,” an effort to remind voters of McCain’s ties to convicted S&L swindler Charles Keating. continue reading » »
