Barry!

The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), which has supported Hillary Clinton throughout her political career, has endorsed Barack Obama for the presidency. An announcement is expected today.

An AP report, posted on a blog on the Obama site, says “NARAL’s political committee board was about evenly divided among Clinton and Obama supporters and that the decision to endorse was hard fought. Ultimately, the board voted unanimously Friday to support the Illinois senator.”

NARAL is the country’s leading abortion rights advocate.

The read of the day is a Washington Post story, Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause. Finally, the mainstream media is taking a serious, long look at the undercurrents in some places.

Reporter Kevin Merida writes about racism in Kokomo and Muncie IN, from vandalism at an Obama office to unabashed bigotry. He spoke with a 20-year old white Obama supporter who was campaigning in a Wal-Mart parking lot:

“The first person I encountered was like, ‘I’ll never vote for a black person,…People just weren’t receptive.”

He also tells the story of retiree Victoria Switzer, who was working the phone bank one night:

One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!”

Vile, vile stuff and inexcusable in the 21st Century. When will America grow up and move on?

In another town, in West Virginia, an AP reporter spoke to voters who, after hearing it in their own words, leave me shaking my head.

A slip on the campaign trail in West Virginia has renewed speculation Hillary Clinton is about to drop out of the race.

A reporter for The Telegraph, a British broadsheet, was with Clinton when she referred to the next president as a man:

“All the kitchen table issues that everybody talks to me about are ones that the next president can actually do something about, if he actually cares about it.” Realising her faux pas, she added: “More likely if she cares about it!”

The West Virginia primary is tomorrow. Barack Obama made his only appearance there today.

He — HE — now leads in superdelegates and her campaign has quietly backed off its claim that she could win the nomination if those naughty Florida and Michigan delegates were counted.

Bill O’Reilly, the resident blowhard at Murdoch’s Fox News, the darling of the Limbaugh/Drudge-following right, has, as one of my grandmothers would have put it, airs above his station.

O’Reilly pretends to be objective when he is anything but. Worse, he pretends to be a journalist when, in fact, many of us remember his tabloid TV days. He was younger, thinner and probably not as rich but he was already a blowhard. As this clip from Inside Edition shows us, he has quite a temper and vocabulary, his favorite word beginniing with F.

He might like to pretend his station is 59th and Lex, but we know it’s closer to 23rd and Seventh. Before gentrification.

Thanks to College Humor for rescuing this after it was taken down elsewhere.
Related: the O’Reilly photo in Political lolz.

posted with vodpod

The First Read blog of NBC News/MSNBC says Barack Obama has overtaken Hillary Clinton in the tally of superdelegates. According to NBC’s count, Obama has 277 to Clinton’s 276.5.

He picked up two more superdelegates today and it was the second, Dolly Strazar of Hawaii, who put him in the lead. The NBC tally also shows him leading Clinton among regular delegates by more than 160.

The Associated Press count, which is calculated differently, gave Obama the lead over the weekend.

Barack Obama has picked up the support of five more superdelegates, including US Representative Donald Payne. Payne is a member of the Congressinal Black Caucus and had been a Clinton supporter.

In addition, the American Federation of Government Employees, with 600,000 members, has endorsed Obama.

Clinton has picked up one superdelegate; current figures show Obama with 268 to Clinton’s 271.5.

For many weeks, Hillary Clinton has tried to justify staying in the race by pointing out that her husband didn’t wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. She said it again today.

But it’s Clintonesque parsing her husband can be proud of; it depends on what the definition of wrap up is.

SPIN: She told reporters today in Shepherdstown, W VA, “I still think it’s early. Remember that in June of 1992, that’s when Bill really wrapped up the nomination—the middle of June, after the California primary.”

FACT: He effectively became the nominee about three months earlier. On March 20, 1992, The Washington Post reported that Clinton “effectively locked up the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday when former Massachusetts Gov. Paul Tsongas suspended his campaign.”

Tsongas, you might recall, won the New Hampshire primary. Clinton came in second, prompting him to declare himself the comback kid.

An old Paul Simon song begins, Why don’t we stop fooling ourselves? The game is over, over, over.

How many times, in how many ways, will Hillary Clinton have to hear that before she believes it?

This report from CBS News sums up the situation.

FROM FOODPLUSPOLITICS.COM: It’s not just the beginning of the end of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it’s the end of the beginning of Barack Obama’s campaign, moving to a new phase that stops all thoughts of Hillary’s inevitability.

The End of the Beginning

We haven’t heard much from Caroline Kennedy since she endorsed Barack Obama before Super Tuesday. Today, email bearing her name was sent to supporters urging participation in a new organizing operation. Sounds ideal for young adults who can volunteer during the summer.

Here’s the email, edited for redundancy:

Friend –

My father called on Americans to ask what they could do for their country.

Those who answered his call built a movement that transformed our country and brought out the best in our national character.

Barack Obama has followed in that tradition — dedicating himself to public service as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago and then as a state and U.S. Senator.

Now, Barack is calling on a new generation of leaders to get involved and help transform this country.

The Obama Organizing Fellowship is designed not just to help win this election, but to strengthen our democracy by training dedicated volunteers in communities across the country.

Answer the call. Ask what you can do — for this movement, for our democracy, and for this country.

Apply to be an Obama Organizing Fellow today.

Fellows will participate in an intensive and rewarding training program focused on the basic organizing principles at the heart of Barack’s campaign.

Then, in June, they will be assigned to a community where they will receive a minimum of six weeks of real world organizing experience that will have a concrete impact on this election.

The application deadline is Thursday, May 15th.

Thank you,
Caroline Kennedy

P.S. — If you cannot make the commitment required to be an Obama Organizing Fellow, I hope you will pass this message along to someone you know who might be interested.

Joe Andrew, a superdelegate and former head of the Democatic National Committee (DNC) has endorsed Barack Obama, reversing the endorsement he gave to Hillary Clinton the day she announced her candidacy. He plans to urge other superdelegates to do the same.

“This has got to come to an end,” he told reporters in Indianapolis, just five days before the critical Indiana primary. “A vote to continue this process is a vote that assists John McCain…The ship is taking on water…We need to patch these holes.”

Andrew was appointed head of the DNC in 1999 by then-president Bill Clinton and was party head during the “hanging chad” election in 2000.

This is the clip from today’s news conference (see Obama Denounces Wright). There is a heavy load on this video right now, so some buffering might occur.

Barack Obama has just denounced his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who yesterday asserted, among other things, that an attack on his inflammatory sermons is an attack on the black church itself.

“At a certain point if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally and then he questions whether or not you believe it then that’s enough.”

At a North Carolina news conference Obama said, “The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago,” adding that he was outraged by Wright’s remarks and saddened by the spectacle surrounding them.

Obama saved his strongest language for Wright’s other assertions:

“I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia explaining that he’s done enormous good. … But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS. … There are no excuses. They offended me. They rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced.”

See it and hear it: Video - Obama Denounces Wright

You know an ad is over the top when it prompts a New York Times editorial  called A Shameful, Ugly Ad:

Manipulative. Shameful. Race-baiting. Those are the only words to describe a new television ad from the Republican Party running in North Carolina that attacks Senator Barack Obama as “too extreme” for the state.

John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, has condemned the ad and demanded North Carolina Republican leaders pull it off the air, which they have not done. In fact, their website has been soliciting donations to keep it on the air.

The ad is built around the racist “God damn America” rhetoric of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but as The Times points out:

But that’s not what this ad is about. The assertion that Mr. Obama is “just too extreme for North Carolina” is a clear bid to stir bigotry in a Southern state. The ad’s claim that its target is actually two Democratic gubernatorial candidates who endorsed Mr. Obama is ludicrous.

The editorial also says, “Unless Mr. McCain quickly gets control of his party, we fear there will be worse to come.”

So. Do. We. 

A poll by the South Bend Tribune and WSBT-TV finds Barack Obama leading Hillary Clinton 48% to 47% among likely voters in the May 6 primary. The margin of error is plus or minus 5 percentage points, making it a statistical tie. Five per cent are undecided or backing someone else.

Another poll, by the Indianapolis Star, shows Obama leading Clinton 41% to 38%, but that difference is also within the margin of error — 4.2% — making it a virtual tie.

Always fun to play with: The “plus or minus” aspect of the margin of error. Say, for example, in the first poll, Obama’s polled number is 5 percentage points too low and Clinton’s too high. That would make the figures 53% to 42%, highly unlikely but fun.