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Much as I love Obama's style, I wish I saw more female power on his side. I don't see his wife on TV that much. And where on earth is Oprah? Hillary will play the "sex card" for all its worth. Hello Oprah???
What a rare pleasure to actually ADMIRE a politician!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/who-is-maggie-williams_b_85909.html
Define Is?
And now his second Grammy, beating out another Clinton.
GooooooooooooObama, 2008!!
http://www.counterpunch.org/cole02082008.html
Weekend Edition
February 8 / 10, 2008
An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton from Another Wellesley College Alumna
Hillary, Will You Renounce Your Ties to Monsanto?
By LINN COHEN-COLE
Dear Hillary,
By polling logic, I should be your supporter -- Democrat, woman, white, liberal. But this past summer I saw a News Hour show on farmers committing suicide in Maharastra, India, which affected me deeply. I started learning what was happening to farmers and to food and how the Clintons are connected.
The News Hour piece said Monsanto, a US agricultural corporation, hired Bollywood actors to sell illiterate farmers Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds, promising they'd get rich from big yields. The expensive seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto's) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers had immense debt and couldn't collect seeds to try again because Monsanto seeds are "patented" as "intellectual property").
"Genetic Engineering is often justified as a human technology, one that feeds more people with better food. Nothing could be further from the truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic engineering is to increase sales of chemicals and bio-engineered products to dependent farmers."
David Ehrenfield: Professor of Biology, Rutgers University.
Monsanto has a $10 million budget and 75 person staff to prosecute farmers.
Since the late 1990s (as industrial agriculture took hold in India),166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left the land (P. Sainath, The Hindu). Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia, South America, Central America and here, have all protested Monsanto and genetic engineering.
What does this have to do with you?
Your Orwellian-named "Rural Americans for Hillary" were Monsanto's lobbyists. My greater concern, though, is you former-employer, Rose Law Firm, representing Monsanto, world's largest GE (GE - genetic engineering) corporation; Tyson, world's largest meat producer; Walmart, the world's largest retailer. Rose is home to Industrial FOOD.
Rose's cozy connections: Jon Jacoby, senior at the Stephens Group - one of the largest shareholders of Tyson, Walmart, DP&L; - is C.O.B. of DP&L;, arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens' Stephens Group staked Walton, financed Tyson. Monsanto bought DP&L.; Walmart's board invited you on, Tyson executive helped you do $100,000 trade just before Bill' governorship, Jackson Stephens backed Bill for Governor, then President (donating $100,000).
Monsanto made Agent Orange, PCBs, nuclear weapons components, pesticides, and with that diverse background in death, are now "doing" food.
Bill in office:
USDA immediately significantly weakened chicken waste/contamination standards, easing Tyson's poultry-factory expansion.
1. Monsanto people were put in charge of food, ...
2. FDA okayed Monsanto's rBGH (bovine growth hormone), first GE-product ever approved.
3. Despite bovine illness/death, FDA didn't recall or warn.
4. When dairymen labeled milk "rBGH-free," USDA threatened confiscation.
5. Organic food was the last way around unknown danger. FDA tried to close that escape with new "organic" standards, to include: genetic engineering of plants/animals, food irradiation , sewage sludge fertilizer.
USDA backed down from public response 20 times greater than to anything before American food:
Oils: Indian sheep died eating from Bt cotton fields. Our children eat Bt cottonseed oil in peanut butter, cookies.
Grains: 49 per cent of corn acreage planted in Bt corn in 2007. A French study indicates it causes kidney and liver toxicity. . Monsanto controls US's two main crops, soy (90% GMO, 90% of traits "belong" to Monsanto) and corn, the largest crop (60% GMO, nearly 100% Monsanto "owned" traits).
Meat: Steroids bulk athletes, Monsanto steroids fatten animals, our fattening children eat steroid-laced meats. FDA allowed "known TSE-positive (Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy Mad Cow Disease) material to be used in pet food, pig, chicken and fish feed." Monsanto's GE-hormone increases risk sick cows are entering US food chain
Poultry: USDA weakened waste/contamination standards. Waste from transnational poultry industry is now implicated as the source of bird flu. The poultry industry is using the crisis to push out small farmers.
Milk: Scientific studies indicate Monsanto's rBGH increases risks of breast cancer by up to seven-fold, increases colon, prostate cancers risks. Canada, 29 European nations, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa ban U.S. rBGH dairy products. Bill's USFDA put no restrictions, warning labels, or any labels.
Control out of control.
Monsanto's Terminator genes make plants sterile after one season, posing apocalyptic risk of breaking out into nature. GE breakouts have contaminated maize and weeds, already.
Monsanto, meat-packers, and the USDA are pushing NAIS (National Animal Identification System), a corporate database tracking small farmers' livestock.
Monsanto pushing state laws taking control from farmers, communities, over GE planting.
Cattle living in filth, 12,000-year-old seed loss, poultry industry implicated in bird flu, Mad Cow disease, bee colony collapse, poisoned soil, depleted water, Superweed), lawsuits against farmers, loss of family farms throughout the world, ... farmers committing suicide. Industrial agriculture.
Bees and farmers, dead canaries in that mine.
Your proposed "Department of Food Safety" centralizes control over food into whose hands? Tough talk on labeling "foreign" food but Bill degraded US food and prevented minimally sane labeling. You never objected.
Monsanto uses child labor in India.
You take Monsanto donations. Blacks, our poorest group, have to eat Monsanto's steroid/hormone/antibiotic-filled GE food. You take Monsanto donations.
Who are you protecting? National Black Farmers Association, boycotting Monsanto? Babies drinking rBGH milk? Women fearing breast cancer? Despairing farmers? Suffering animals? Children fed kidney-and-liver-toxic Bt-corn?
Or Monsanto?
I am a person before I am a woman. Your gender is irrelevant. Given deadly threats to my grandchildren's future by your corporate connections (Edwards was right), I don't believe your talk of "caring" about Blacks/women/children/health/farmers/food.
I will vote for someone committed to small farmers - our ONLY real food safety. Your friends, though, are the heart of an international industrial agricultural nightmare.
Linn Cohen-Cole
Atlanta
Disclaimer. I am not a scientist. I have read for months on this subject, and am including only a tiny portion of the horrifying things I have learned. I am expressing my opinion as person and may be wrong. Perhaps things are swell out there and rBGH is fabulous and TSE-laced feed is great, and genetic engineering is the best thing since manna. But I am scared for my family and I have not only a right to say so but an obligation to do so. I am angry that Monsanto was allowed the influence it had and has done the things it definitely seems to have. I am disgusted by industrialization of every tender and beautiful part of our world and hope, for all our children's sake, we are not too late to pull back.
I was worried about Maine because of the demographics. But he pulled it out anyways. By a large margin at that (last time I checked it was 18%).
Does anyone have the exit polls? I would have to think that Obama did well amongst white women (Hillary's strongest group).
Go Obama '08!
So with that preface, it looks like that Edwards dropping out had a very positive effect on Obama in Maine. Clinton seemed to retain her core of about 40%, while Obama picked up 20 points. I wouldn't be surprised if the difference is attributable to Edwards (although there are a host of other factors of course).
And in response to babyming, another white Jew for Obama here.
And as to exit polls, Maine is 98% white. I think it's safe to say that Obama likely got around 57% of the white vote in Maine. And seeing as how women usually outnumber men in the Democratic Party like 55-45, we can also extrapolate that he must have done well there too (assuming that turnout was in line with general party demographics).
One note of caution about the above analysis: Maine's caucus system is semi-open. No Republicans can participate, but independents are allowed to participate if they enroll as a Democrat at the caucus site. So that may have altered the demographics (my guess would be that it skewed it slightly more male, but that's just a guess).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2008/02/10/VI2008021001313.html?sid=ST2008021002814
The porn actresses and/or "models" Maher dates are hardly representative of most black women and does not mean he is not a condescending racist just the same. After all, hasn't Bill Clinton dated a few black women too?
Big deal...
His attacks on religion and religious people are too much. He has stupid preconceptions about black people - e.g., Chris Rock was explaining how his last movie was based on a french film he liked, and Bill was all shocked like why would a black guy like french films. His ridiculous comment about how he knew blacks would come around to voting for Obama because they always come home to their own - and as proof he cited the OJ Simpson case. He also made a comment about why would guys care about the abortion issue because they don't get abortions.
Look, I still enjoy his show mostly - but I think he's the classic example of the limousine liberal.
Actually, there are a number of Sudanese immigrants living in Maine. Probably a thousand or more. I don't know why in the hell they are there in the most inhospitable climate to somebody from warm Sudan, but they are there.
- non-jewish white guy from New England
So let's give credit where credit is due; Edward's supporters, the johnny-come-lately-fair-weather friends that they are, are welcome aboard but I take as much offense to them claiming credit for Obama's success as I did to Hillary's IMPLICATION that it was really Lyndon Johnson that got civil rights done, a myopic, prejudiced assertion that Johnson himself adamantly dispelled in his State of the Union Address.
We need to lauch a campaign to have Pat BIGOT Buchanan REMOVED from MSNBC. His comments about Latinos and Blacks are WAY worse than anything Dave Schuster said about Chelsey. Pat needs to go. I am sick of him !
He's always on Morning Joe spewing his bigotted bullshet about Barack Obama and "Black Voters" and trying to push this lie about Latinos hating Black people. I am sick of it! We need to act!
I understand and appreciate your frustration. But, respectfully, I've never been a fan of censorship. The best way to defeat people like that is to face them head on and expose them in their own public forum - beat them on their home court.
To me, censorship avoids confrontation. It's like asking big brother to "make the bad man stop being so mean to me!" It ignores the power that we have to challenge these comments on equal footing and speak up for ourselves - rather than ask a greater power to silence our enemies for us.
Hillary's camp is trying to use MSNBC as a lightening rod for sympathy votes. It's consistent with her victimology and feeds into yet another one of her vast conspiracies (right wing conspiracy, media conspiracy). It's very Bush-like . . . in fact it's the mirror opposite of the Bush approach (left wing conspiracy, liberal media bias). Clinton, like Bush, uses paranoia and false outrage to silence her critics. For example, they wanted a crusade against MSNBC for Shuster's (admittedly inappropriate) comment about Chelsea Clinton. They kept the story alive even though MSNBC suspended him indefinitely and apologized at least FOUR times on air. There comes a point where a justified offense turns into a "kiss the ring" power trip.
Obama is kicking butt despite the ignorant things that have been said (both from the left and right). I take solace in the fact that Obama makes Buchanan, and other critics like him, look dumber and dumber every time he WINS! There will be nothing sweeter than watching the Buchanans of the world squirm once Obama takes his oath of office as PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! I'd rather stay focused on that.
Sorry for the rant. But I really dislike censorship. lol!
Go Obama!
http://reachblack.blogspot.com/
You're so right. Pat Buchanan is a racist jerk and Chris Matthews & Joe Scarborough know it as well. He almost becomes defiant when speaking that Hillary is going to win this nomination.
It is eating Pat Buchanan alive that a black man might become President of the United States!
He can't live with that! F%%% him!
It's time to call MSNBC on this crap! I've had it with Pat Buchanan
i love that image. but i have no doubt NBC chose it just to plant the idea in (white) folks' minds that it is only the black folk who are voting for obama.
that is what i fear most about the general election if obama wins the nomination: that it will turn into black against white, fueled by fuckheads like pat buchanan.
i initially had some reservations about obama because i was not confident that he had enough fight in him to beat back these republican bastards who have ruined our country.
and then it occurred to me that, as a black man, he is not allowed to show ANY anger, bitterness, resentment. he is walking a thin line here in that he must be perceived as NOT jesse and NOT al in order to avoid being painted as a throwback to the 60s and the civil rights fight.
i just finished The Audacity of Hope and i am more convinced that he's got the fight, that he absolutely gets it and that he can go all the way.
still not happy with the health care issue. not happy that he went campaigning with donnie mcclurkin. oh well. i don't have to have a perfect candidate, but i want one who recognizes that i'm alive in the us of a.
by the way, white, not jewish, red state. obama's my guy. i was heartened by the fact that my bible thumpin' baptist country girl mother-in-law cast her primary vote for edwards, because he was her candidate all along, but her next choice was obama.
the audacity of hope.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gwqEneBKUs
so many things going for barack, but being opposed to the war from the beginning will probably win more converts than anything.
And in that area of Maine (I live arcoss the bridge from Arrowsic) there is probably 5 black people including me. lol