By BARRY MASSEY, The Associated Press
NM Gov. Bill Richardson Endorsing ObamaSANTA FE, N.M. -- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the nation's only Hispanic governor, is endorsing Sen. Barack Obama for president, calling him a "once-in-a- lifetime leader" who can unite the nation and restore America's international leadership.
Richardson, who dropped out of the Democratic race in January, is to appear with Obama on Friday at a campaign event in Portland, Ore., The Associated Press has learned.
The governor's endorsement comes as Obama leads among delegates selected at primaries and caucuses but with national public opinion polling showing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton pulling ahead of him amid controversy over statements by his former pastor. Read the full story here
Rev. Wright, a true patriot and a powerful minister of the gospel, was invited to the White House twice.
Rev Wright (behind the pole) during the surgery of President Lyndon B. Johnson .
For more information about the minister selected the #2 most powerful preacher by Ebony visit http://truthabouttrinity.blogspot.com/
Since the reports claim Bill in Monica got it on in the bathroom and hallway, she wouldn't be considered a bed buddy. This is an old story, with the same old Clinton's. While people are trying to figure out Obama's connection with a minister or his African family, Bill Clinton is wheeling and dealing with all kinds of folks. Wonder what Bill has to deliver for $20 million dollars.
Does anyone realize that the reason the Republicans are voting for Clinton is because she's not electable. Too much baggage.
Here an F.O.B., There an F.O.B.
Even so, Bill Clinton seems to recognize that some of his relationships could become politically problematic. Aides to the former president recently told reporters Clinton would move to sever his business ties with billionaire Ron Burkle. An entrepreneur with a playboy reputation, Burkle signed up Clinton as a senior adviser to the Yucaipa Cos., Burkle's private investment firm. The arrangement included stakes in Yucaipa partnerships. Little was known about Clinton's profits from this arrangement until last week, when The Wall Street Journal reported that the former president was expected to reap about $20 million when the company bought back his shares. Clinton's spokesman tells NEWSWEEK the amount of his compensation has not yet been determined.
One possible issue that might have affected Clinton's decision to reconsider his business relationship with Burkle: the financier's ties to the Arab emirate of Dubai. One of Clinton's partners in a Yucaipa fund is the Dubai Investment Group, a company closely linked to Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Dubai's ruler. Clinton and Maktoum have a warm relationship, and the sheik, along with other Middle Eastern leaders, was a major contributor to Clinton's presidential library.
Bill's Dubai connection is potentially problematic for Hillary. Two years ago, the New York senator denounced the Bush administration when it failed to block a deal that would have handed over operations of six major U.S. ports to Dubai Ports World, a firm owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates. (The company eventually withdrew its bid.) This month, Hillary criticized oil-rich foreign governments that use "huge pools of money" to buy up stakes in major U.S. financial institutions. That's a good applause line—but a tough one to deliver with a straight face while her husband has a business partnership with a similar foreign fund. Mark Saylor, a U.S. spokesman for Dubai, tells NEWSWEEK that neither Dubai nor Maktoum would comment on their dealings with Bill Clinton. Read the full Newsweek story
by Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation - There's a reason Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.
You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as "The "Fellowship," also known as The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.
Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," but that term applies far more aptly to Clinton's "Family," which is organized into "cells"--their term--and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia. In 2002, Sharlet joined The Family's home for young men, forswearing sex, drugs and alcohol, and participating in endless discussions of Jesus and power. He wasn't undercover; he used his own name and admitted to being a writer. But he wasn't completely out of danger either. When he went outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he was followed. He still gets calls from Family associates asking him to meet them in diners--alone. Read the full story here
Duh....In a year when even Republicans weren't supporting Republicans, the Democrats had a clear ride to the White House. However, after the negative antics of the Clinton campaign and the focus on race, the Democrats don't stand a chance in 2008. McCain is looking and acting like a leader while Hillary and Barack duke it out on the street corner. What a waste of a historic moment.
For all of the young people and new voters, don't let this stop you from going to the polls. Even if you don't select a presidential candidate, make sure to put the people into office that have your interests in mind. A lot of those superdelegates that could have stepped up and put an end to this mess before there was no coming back are elected officials. Some of them need to find another profession. They blew this election. Keep that in mind when you go to the polls this year, and during the mid-term election.
Young people have the power to change this foolishness in DC. BE THE CHANGE!A poll released Thursday suggests Arizona Sen. John McCain has moved ahead of both Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House.
It also reports that McCain is ahead of Clinton, by a 51 to 41 percent margin.
A poll released Thursday suggests Arizona Sen. John McCain has moved ahead of both Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House.
The Rasmussen Reports, an independent polling organization, reports McCain leads Obama 49 to 42 percent. It also reports that McCain is ahead of Clinton, by a 51 to 41 percent margin. Read the full article here
Mrs. Clinton's schedule is quite revealing. Seems Bill didn't even give Hillary the respect to wait until she left home to have his sexcapades. Lord only knows what Billy boy will be up to if the Clinton's get back in the White House. This is actually disgusting behavior for a president.
As for Mrs. 3 AM, Ready on Day One, looks like the most she'll be ready for is running a high-level day care center. Her statements about her experience go beyond spin. Heck, based on these reports, it was a gross exaggeration or a three letter word no one wants to utter.
Hillary Clinton 'in White House' as Bill Clinton committed adultery with Monica LewinskyHillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day of her husband’s fateful assignation with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been inside the building when it occurred, according to records of her daily schedule as First Lady released yesterday.
....The former First Lady’s schedule for February 28, 1997, the day that Ms Lewinsky’s blue dress became stained in an encounter with Mr Clinton, shows that his wife held several meetings in the White House that morning, and spent the night there.
Mr Clinton’s encounter with Ms Lewinsky took place in an Oval Office bathroom in the early evening. Read the full story here Hillary Clinton papers sink experience claims By Toby Harnden TelegraphHillary Clinton's boasts that she gained major foreign policy experience as First Lady have been undermined after 11,046 pages of her White House schedules provided scant evidence to back up her claims.
…her visits to Northern Ireland indicate that she went little beyond the traditional role of a president's wife attending social events, meeting women's groups and greeting children.
Despite Mrs Clinton's claim last week that she was "instrumental" in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, the schedules do not record her attending a single policy meeting in the province.
In Belfast, she gave an address to the Vital Voices women's conference, spent 30 minutes at a reception at the City Hall and visited the PlayBoard children's project.
Her schedule records that she and Cherie Blair, the then Prime Minister's wife, were to "proceed to the children's play area, where children are creating playground models".
They were then to "proceed down the path where they are joined by 25 children with balloons" and go "to the top of the hill and release the balloons".
...In Bosnia, she was introduced by an eight-year-old Bosnian girl and a class of 13 year olds before a roundtable session that included the Bosnian president Ejup Ganic and American diplomats.Read the full story here Hillary Was in White House on 'Stained Blue Dress' Day Schedules Reviewed by ABC Show Hillary May Have Been in the White House When the Fateful Act Was Committed
In December 2000, when both of Hillary Clinton's brothers were involved in trying to broker pardon arrangements for associates, several days of documents show only a long list of "private meetings" at the White House.
Between Dec. 1 and 22, Clinton had a total of 25 "private meetings" before the day on which a first round of pardons was announced by her husband. Read more here 11,000 Long-Awaited Pages of Clinton’s Schedules as First Lady Are Released John M. BroderThe documents offer no support for her assertions on the campaign trail that she helped negotiate the Irish peace accords or facilitated the flow of refugees in the Balkans, but neither do they disprove them. There is no evidence to back up her assertion that she helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act, the first legislation Mr. Clinton signed as president in February 1993.
They provide no insight into her role in appointments to key administration posts or in courting donors for her political campaigns or her husband’s, nor in how she coped with revelations in 1998 of her husband’s sexual betrayal with a young White House intern. Read the story here Hillary Clinton missed key presidential moments Daniel Nasaw, The Guardian · Papers cast doubt on claim of first-hand experience
· First lady was often far from scene of negotiations
But documents from her first lady office threaten to undermine her claim to have played a major role in Clinton's foreign policy decisions.
For instance, Clinton has said she helped negotiate the April 1998 Good Friday agreement between warring factions in Northern Ireland. But while Catholic and Protestant figures hashed out details of a power-sharing agreement in Belfast Clinton was at the National Press Club in Washington at a "Hats on Bella" party honouring Bella Abzug, a congresswoman from New York who had recently died. While President Clinton phoned major participants in the peace talks she met with Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and joined a farewell party for Democratic worker Karen Finney. The day the agreement was inked she met with Philippine first lady Amelita Ramos.
When Nato launched air strikes against Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country's onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo Clinton toured Egyptian ruins, including King Tut's tomb and the temple of Hatshepsut. She dined at the Temple of Luxor, and stayed overnight at the Sofitel Winter Palace Hotel there. Read the story here Lewinsky and the First Lady By The Associated Press Hillary Rodham Clinton was in the White House on at least seven days when her husband had sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, according to the first lady's calendars released Wednesday. A look at her schedule on days when Lewinsky said she had sexual encounters with Bill Clinton:
Dates of Bill Clinton's encounters with Monica Lewinsky: Nov. 15, 1995, Nov. 17, 1995, Jan. 7, 1996, Feb. 4, 1996, March 31, 1996, and March 29, 1997 Other dates:
Dec. 31, 1995: Lewinsky said she and the president had a sexual encounter early that afternoon in a study down the hall from the Oval Office. Sometime afterward, the president, first lady and their daughter, Chelsea, flew to Hilton Head, S.C., to spend New Year's Eve with hundreds of friends during their annual getaway at an intellectual family retreat known as Renaissance Weekend.
Jan. 21, 1996: Lewinsky and the president had an afternoon sexual encounter in the hallway by the private study next to the Oval Office, Lewinsky said later.
April 7, 1996, Easter Sunday. Mrs. Clinton had no public schedule. Lewinsky said that, at the president's suggestion, she performed oral sex while he was on the telephone in his office.
Feb. 28, 1997: The schedule shows Mrs. Clinton was in the White House at least part of the day, when President Clinton and Lewinsky had oral sex near the Oval Office, leaving stains on her dress. Read all the dates here
I am trying to stay on the high road but exactly when are we going to challenge ALL of the candidates on ALL issues? We got an opportunity to hear from Obama on race. Now I want to hear where Hillary Clinton and John McCain stand.
They don't have to respond to individual personalities but I want to know exactly what is thier understanding of the situation. Where are they coming from and above all what are their faith orientations. We now know that Obama is a devout Christian. We know something about his church and the work of the church. It would be instructive to compare the works of all three churches.
March 18, 2008. The historic speech begins:
"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”
On Rev. Wright:
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
"The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through — a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American. On RaceI chose to run for president at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together -- unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction -- towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well. On Trinity United Church of Christ In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:
People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild. The Bottom LineI would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election. Next Page">Full address here
This has to be one of the greatest speech since the Martin Luther King, Jr. "I Have A Dream" speech and under extreme pressure. The man went beyond the bar and hit a home run.
On April 4th we will observe the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and in many respects African Americans have wondered in the wilderness. We have made progress and we have many leaders but could anyone name the top three items on the Black agenda? Beyond the global issues war, economy, health care, what are the specific unique concerns of Black America? Leadership is critical to cultivating and maintaining unity. In this hour of crisis we are beginning to look to Barack Obama.
He is intimately aware of our problems and he has demonstrated the qualities that activate our faith. It has been said that the single most important contribution that biblical faith can make to human existence is the capacity to transcend given reality. We expect this in church but it is extraordinary in a politician.
Only a couple of hours have passed and across the board Blacks are embracing the message. Jesse Jackson put the speech in perspective for FOX. They seem to have had difficulty grasping the full significance of the moment. In the spirit of reconciliation it is encouraging to know that they had the wisdom to bring Rev. Jackson in to interpret. It is good that we are all reminded of the Jackson campaign within this context. Perhaps we can avoid mistakes of the past if we take a little risk. It is hard to understand how anyone could see this speech and not be moved in a profound way to self examination.
The bar has been set so high for Obama that I can't sit still waiting for him to take the stage. I'm nervous going back and forth from CNN to FOX and assessing each comment. There seems to be an audio problem, my mind pauses on sabotage but I have to believe it is nothing but God. We need time to get ourselves together for this. We have time to call everyone and make sure they are tuned in. Mark Lamont Hill is on point trying to explain the Black church vernacular and Melissa Harris-Lacewell is really driving the points home. She is so articulate, informed, and clear. The examples she selects are instructive. They have found a shared space and both are representing us well. Politically astute, young, gifted, and Black.
Here he is I have to watch...
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