Howard's 50-state strategy is being implemented tactically by Barack and Al and other agents of CHANGE and HOPE

Great speech!  As David Corn of Mother Jones just said *Al Gore is a reminder of what could have been...*  True that.  Let's hope Americans get it right this time.

GObama!

I'm crying inside for what could have been.

If you listened closely and watched facial and body language, it wasn't a joyous ringing endorsement. And there was very little about BO in it. And he mentioned BO and a four year term in one sentence but that may be pushing it a bit. It slid by quickly..something about after 8 years of bush we need 4 years of BO.

But the facial and body language didn't lie. He kept calling BO "young." LOL

That must have been a hard speech but it had to be done.

Thank you, AL. I hope you got something huge out of it.

Interesting how we see and hear speeches differently.

What surprised me was that the networks cut off BO just as he was getting up to reply.  I didn't like that.

Obama said, when talking about Cheney not being on the ballot in November, that he does not intend on going on any family hunting parties with him.

LMAO that was priceless

I don't know why this repeating stuff happens.  Sorry.  :-(

...my state is disfunctional, leaning red, and I bought a pin someone blogged the other day -- they are shaped like the states and say Obama -- anyway, as soon as I get the pin I plan to wear it absolutely everywhere except to class till November -- but right next to it I plan to wear the little American flag pin I inherited -- hopefully this will dispel any notions any of my fellow rednecks may be entertaining that Barack is unpatriotic -- I hope they get the point :~).

Howard Dean is on there. You can comment too.

Some jerk was calling us the "clown faction".

Now it disappeared. Was that in violation of something or just buggy software?

It certainly wasn't offensive. Looking at Bush is more offensive.

I saw that Susan already reported on the CDP meeting last weekend, but iI wanted to add some of my own observances & thoughts.

Howard's speech was pretty well received. As usual, they, Howard & Art Torres, were late. Then the lights went out making it difficult to shoot proper photos. Then the speech:

1. Unity. He asked us to respect(?) the losing side & welcome them in...

2. CA's done well so far in its organizing endeavors. Don't travel to a different state for political action. Stay at home & increase the Dems in our own legislature & defeat the anti-gay, redistricting, & parental notification propositions.

3. Nation wide push for the "Neighborhood Leader" program. Howard stated that he thinks this is how we establish a strong & lasting party that wins in November & beyond.

*applause, & he left.

The progressive caucus meeting:

Lots of pontificating &, according to some, yelling on behalf of the leadership on the issues of unity, progress, etc. Gavin Newsom, mayor of SF, came in to speak. He touted the marriages to start today. On this point, i applaud him. He's clearly running for governor. He's a lot more personable than my impressions from the media, but when he launched into his gov bit, he turned sour to me.

Later Friday night there was a "ROUNDTABLE" fo the DNC candidates. it was a loud room way beyond max capacity & some guy kept yelling "move left!!!" The candidates were all handing out pounds of needing to be recycled materials & saying nothing in a thousand words. I felt honored the Bob Mulholland pushed a deriding joke my way & turned his back on me. He knows i dislike his DLC goonish behaviors.

Saturday was all about party people whooping us up & then training for the "Neighborhood Leader" program. Typical party stuff. John Garamendi, Lt. Governor, who is also running for governor, spoke in the morning. He's a good guy. I could work for him. Point in bringing him up is that he said the words "universal single payer." Gavin used the same words at the progressive caucus.

Sunday: we voted for the new DNC delegates. There was this line that stretched down the hallway to the voting room. All along the way were the candidates & their supporters. It was loud, confrontational, & completely uncomfortable. I really dislike a lot of the candidates for their conduct at this point. We had a slate of progressives, but at the end of it, the incumbents largely won. None of our grassroots progressives got a slot.

Then we voted on endorsements for various propositions, etc. There were some fights, but we largely voted progressive.

I went home.

Winning & losing is part of this game. No matter our passion & energy, we don't always win. In fact we're, at my count, about 50-50.

Time to pick yourself up, plant a foot, & move forward. There are no other options. We don't lose because we lose an election. We lose when we give up.

Go California!!!!

The real prize package starts in November:  Votes carefully counted show close and not so close victories.  The fantastic celebrations, then the sober morning after determination to set right all that has been ripped to shreds by the besotten fools.  The challenge IS the prize.  Our fledgling organizations are filling and combining, leading to the time and place where our world operates bottom up..where a great notion from the roots can improve and flower as it becomes a mainstream value. Mutual benevolence, tempered with common sense, can maybe bring this damaged world to a place we can not yet imagine.

One more registration, another door knocked, another conversation,the heartfelt invitation to join.   It goes forever,with great urgency

Older daughter leaving the nest tomorrow at 6.  Off to Iowa to remediate mold.  Employer promises 4 months minimum, with sixty hour weeks.  Great opportunity for her to grow with an established, reputable company.   Her fabulous bread, enchilada, and dessert-making skills will be sorely missed by dad..

Report: U.S. Gave Green Light For Taliban Prison Attack

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, June 16, 2008

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Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
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Naomi Klein's Latest Column

Obama’s Chicago Boys
by Naomi Klein, June 13, 2008

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”

Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart’s most prominent defenders, anointing the company a “progressive success story.” On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged, “I won’t shop there.” For Furman, however, it’s Wal-Mart’s critics who are the real threat: the “efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits” are creating “collateral damage” that is “way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing ‘Kum-Ba-Ya’ in the interests of progressive harmony.”

Obama’s love of markets and his desire for “change” are not inherently incompatible. “The market has gotten out of balance,” he says, and it most certainly has. Many trace this profound imbalance back to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counter-revolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago economics department. And here there are more problems, because Obama—who taught law at the University of Chicago for a decade—is thoroughly embedded in the mindset known as the Chicago School.

He chose as his chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist on the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right. Goolsbee, unlike his more Friedmanite colleagues, sees inequality as a problem. His primary solution, however, is more education—a line you can also get from Alan Greenspan. In their hometown, Goolsbee has been eager to link Obama to the Chicago School. “If you look at his platform, at his advisers, at his temperament, the guy’s got a healthy respect for markets,” he told Chicago magazine. “It’s in the ethos of the , which is something different from saying he is laissez-faire.”

Another of Obama’s Chicago fans is 39-year-old billionaire Kenneth Griffin, CEO of the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. Griffin, who gave the maximum allowable donation to Obama, is something of a poster boy for an unbalanced economy. He got married at Versailles and had the after-party at Marie Antoinette’s vacation spot (Cirque du Soleil performed)—and he is one of the staunchest opponents of closing the hedge fund tax loophole. While Obama talks about toughening trade rules with China, Griffin has been bending the few barriers that do exist. Despite sanctions prohibiting the sale of police equipment to China, Citadel has been pouring money into controversial China-based security companies that are putting the local population under unprecedented levels of surveillance.

Now is the time to worry about Obama’s Chicago Boys and their commitment to fending off serious attempts at regulation. It was in the two and a half months between winning the 1992 election and being sworn into office that Bill Clinton did a U-turn on the economy. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization. Rubin told PBS, “President Clinton actually made the decision before he stepped into the Oval Office, during the transition, on what was a dramatic change in economic policy.”

Furman, a leading disciple of Rubin, was chosen to head the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, the think tank Rubin helped found to argue for reforming, rather than abandoning, the free trade agenda. Add to that Goolsbee’s February meeting with Canadian consulate officials, who left with the distinct impression that they had been instructed not to take Obama’s anti-NAFTA campaigning seriously, and there is every reason for concern about a replay of 1993.

The irony is that there is absolutely no reason for this backsliding. The movement launched by Friedman, introduced by Ronald Reagan and entrenched under Clinton, faces a profound legitimacy crisis around the world. Nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Chicago itself. In mid-May, when university president Robert Zimmer announced the creation of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute, an economic research center devoted to continuing and augmenting the Friedman legacy, a controversy erupted. More than 100 faculty members signed a letter of protest. “The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive,” the letter states. “Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world’s population.”

When Friedman died in 2006, such bold critiques of his legacy were largely absent. The adoring memorials spoke only of grand achievement, with one of the more prominent appreciations appearing in the New York Times—written by Austan Goolsbee. Yet now, just two years later, Friedman’s name is seen as a liability even at his own alma mater. So why has Obama chosen this moment, when all illusions of a consensus have dropped away, to go Chicago retro?

The news is not all bad. Furman claims he will be drawing on the expertise of two Keynesian economists: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute and James Galbraith, son of Friedman’s nemesis John Kenneth Galbraith. Our “current economic crisis,” Obama recently said, did not come from nowhere. It is “the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long.”

True enough. But before Obama can purge Washington of the scourge of Friedmanism, he has some ideological housecleaning of his own to do.

This column was first published in The Nation.

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I still have huge concerns because of his Oman vote and break with the Democrats. The other issues is I don't see one woman named and this is pattern in his hiring and advisement staff. He should call Bill Moyers. He could get a list of the best policy people in the nation.  If Obama moves to the corps he is going to lose his base. Never before in my lifetime have people wanted economic (and social) populism like today. Strategic blunders abound, imho.

New thread - back to the sofa for me

New thread - back to the sofa for me