Democrats

Baratunde Thurston, Some Rights Reserved

Baratunde has been going to Philadelphia almost every weekend for the past weeks. So yesterday, thinking what I am going to do with the kids this week --they are in Spring Break. I decided to rent a car and drive down to Philadelphia to help out the Obama campaign any way we can and in the process, be a part of history.

I'll post later today updates and definitely come back here after 10pm when we'll have the chatroom open while waiting for the results.

C'ya later!

About 10 minutes past 1:00pm but the post is but nevertheless:

The formal act of endorsing a candidate is generally (and properly)limited to editorial pages and elected officials whose constituents might be influenced by their choice. The rest of us shouldn't assume anyone cares. My avoidance of offering a formal endorsement until now has also been affected by the pull of old friendships and my reluctance as a teacher and commentator to be openly partisan. But my conscience won't let me be silent any longer.

I believe that Barack Obama should be elected President of the United States.

Go read the whole thing NOW.

Previously : Robert Reich didn't expect to support Obama but now he is.

Robert Shales is right on the money when he says, To this observer, ABC's coverage seemed slanted against Obama. Memeorandum exploded in posts from irate liberals and journalists who saw nothing but a thinly vieled hatchet job against the front-runner of the Democratic Party.

Close to fifteen thousand people have sounded off at the ABC News post about the debate (which, by the way, they changed from "Clinton, Obama find brotherly love at Philly Debate" to "Philly Fight Night : Democrats Spar over Electability").

I suggest you add to the comments over there as well as give a ring to their offices :

Call 818-460-7477
Press 2,
Press 1

Then you can press one of these two choices :

967 (News wth Charles Gibson) or
199 (other news)

As I wrote at the chat last night, it's as if ABC News wanted to outfox FOX News. It was an incredibly embarrassing scene to watch.

Not only that, George Stephanopoulos should not have been one of the moderators. As the former speech writer of Bill Clinton and still a Clintonista, if you are going to have someone so biased, then you ought to create balance. Which is why I shall forever refer to him as "Clinton's Boy".

Reports of the Clintons' dirty politics tactics are mounting every day and it now involves not only officials within the White House but the Prime Minister of Canada as well.

Read and weep from The Globe and Mail :

Reporters were locked up there all day, examining the federal budget until they were allowed to leave once it was tabled in the House of Commons at 4 p.m.

Since the budget contained little in the way of headline-grabbing surprises, some were left with enough free time to gather around a large-screen TV to watch the latest hockey news on NHL trade deadline day.

Mr. Brodie wandered over to speak to Finance Department officials and chatted amiably with journalists — who appreciated this rare moment of direct access to the top official in Mr. Harper's notoriously tight-lipped government.

The former university professor found himself in a room with CTV employees where he was quickly surrounded by a gaggle of reporters while other journalists were within earshot of other colleagues.

At the end of an extended conversation, Mr. Brodie was asked about remarks aimed by the Democratic candidates at Ohio's anti-NAFTA voters that carried serious economic implications for Canada.

Since 75 per cent of Canadian exports go to the U.S., Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton's musings about reopening the North American free-trade pact had caused some concern.

Mr. Brodie downplayed those concerns.

"Quite a few people heard it," said one source in the room.

"He said someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and told us not to worry."

Government officials did not deny the conversation took place.

They said that Mr. Brodie sought to allay concerns about the impact of Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton's assertion that they would re-negotiate NAFTA if elected. But they did say that Mr. Brodie had no recollection of discussing any specific candidate — either Ms. Clinton or Mr. Obama.

CTV News President Robert Hurst said he would not discuss his journalists' sources.

But others said the content of Mr. Brodie's remarks was passed on to CTV's Washington bureau and their White House correspondent set out the next day to pursue the story on Ms. Clinton's apparent hypocrisy on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Although CTV correspondent Tom Clark mentioned Ms. Clinton in passing, the focus of his story was on assurances from the Obama camp.

To say that Canadian government has been embarrassed is to say the least. Whomever leaked this conversation to CTV did it knowing they could use it to hurt Senator Obama. The diplomatic repercussions of this are not only unprecedented. The Canadian government believes it's illegal.

Originally Posted on Citizen Orange

I was excited to find out over the weekend that David Neiwart, through his own blog and a cross-post on Firedoglake linked to me and others in the pro-migrant blogosphere in the last post of his three-part series on immigration:

The blogosphere can have a role in this change as well. There is a wealth of blogs out there dealing with immigration and Latino issues on a regular basis, and many of them feature not just important perspectives that need to be part of the conversation, but compelling and powerful writing as well.

A sampling: Migra Matters, Latina Lista, Matt Ortega,Immigration Prof Blog, The Silence of our Friends, Citizen Orange, The Unapologetic Mexican ... well, the list is long, and this one is certainly incomplete. But you get the idea. [ Source :David Neiwart]

I encourage you to use my blogroll on the right to complete that list, but now that he's finished his series I thought I'd use it as an opportunity to insert my own commentary, and hopefully build or hone on what was a massive and ambitious undertaking for Neiwart. Neiwart wrote three posts. One introducing his series, a second debunking a lot of the anti-migrant myths that exist, and a third with proposals about how to move forward.

While the first two posts were informative, I'm going to spend my time on Dave's third post, "Immigration: Looking Forward". This post is the second major migrant manifesto to emerge out of the blogosphere, coming after Duke's post that garnered a front-page spot on Daily Kos. In his post, Neiwart outlines what a "liberal program for comprehensive immigration reform" would contain:

I just posted this at TechPresident :

If one blog post can point to a core demographics "way of thinking", then one could say that the outburst of discussion in the mommy blogosphere created by mommyblogger, The Queen of Spain, may indicate that Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio will see a huge voting shift away from the former First Lady and current Senator of New York.

Why? The post I am going to quote after the jump may well be a quantifiable reflection of how white suburban mothers, Hillary Clinton's core constituency, are starting to move away from her to embrace Barack Obama.

Go read the whole thing.

The title of this post is a comment I found at MetaFilter. It's so perfect at describing the congressional haggling and backroom political smackdowns I've been privvy to in online and offline discussions about the current congressional session, that I just had to have it.

It was a comment that perfectly described Barney Frank's "thoughtful compromise" on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). That bill would have prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation AND gender identity; making it not only a crime to dismiss a worker for being a lesbian but also for firing a woman for looking like man (or vice versa).

People in the GLBT community are up in arms because, and rightly so, Barney Frank, (the second openly gay congressman to serve in this country) has gone out of his way to say that it is important for this bill to pass without transgender protection. And he has done so with the help of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization that had promised to make a better effort at focusing more on the issues affecting the transgender communities they purport to serve.

The unfortunate reality of this trans-exclusionary ENDA legislation is that it will not only deny equal rights to a minority within an already minority community, but it will have a larger and more punitive effect on anybody who does not conform to any definition of "heteronormalcy" their employer may want to impose. Meaning that it may bring a much welcomed loophole for employers dying to get rid of butch looking women or fey looking men in their payrolls.

The refrain from both Barney and the HRC is that leaving the "T" out of GLBT is anyhow for the greater good.

Which brings me to Hillary Clinton and her throwing of documented and legal resident children and pregnant women under the Democrats political bus.

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