Archive for the ‘Hillary Clinton’ Category

WomenAgainstSarahPalin.blogspot.com

October 8, 2008 in Campaign 2008, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Politics, Sarah Palin, Threat to America

“Alaska Women Reject Palin”

September 20, 2008 in Barack Obama, Campaign 2008, Gov. Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Politics, Sarah Palin, Threat to America, Vice Presidents

In Alaska at the weekend, a Welcome Home rally for Mrs Palin was dwarfed by a demonstration organised by Alaska Women Reject Palin, which was held on the lawn of a downtown Anchorage library. [From The Independent – U.K.]

14 09 2008

I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. Hooo. It was an experience. About a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up to hear her speak at the new Dena’ina Convention Center in downtown Anchorage.


After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. It was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage. Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men. I had no idea what to expect.

The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.


So, as I jettisoned myself from the jaws of the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ crowd and toward the mystery rally at the library, I felt a bit apprehensive. I’d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies. Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing good. A real statement will have been made.  I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.
It’s a good thing I wasn’t tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody’s trunk. When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep! I could hardly find a place to park. I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.


Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.


Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high.

So, if you’ve been doing the math…  Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s rally that got all the national media coverage! So take heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery.  Feel free to spread the pictures around (links are appreciated) to anyone who needs to know that Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans.  The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to say.

Gloria Steinem on Sarah Palin

September 19, 2008 in Barack Obama, Campaign 2008, Gloria Steinem, Gov. Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John McCain, Politics, Republicans, Sarah Palin

September 4, 2008

Here’s the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing — the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party — are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women — and to many men too — who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the ‘white-male-only’ sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won’t work. This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton’s candidacy stood for — and that Barack Obama’s still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, ‘Somebody stole my shoes, so I’ll amputate my legs.’

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can’t do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn’t say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden’s 37 years’ experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn’t know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, ‘I still can’t answer that question until someone answers for me: ‘What is it exactly that the VP does every day?’ When asked about Iraq, she said, ‘I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq.’

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she’s won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain’s campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn’t know it’s about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Alaska has the lowest high school graduation rate of any state in the union. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate’s views on ‘God, guns and gays’ ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let’s be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can’t tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin’s value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women’s wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves ‘abstinence-only’ programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers’ millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn’t spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don’t doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn’t just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn’t just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn’t just echo McCain’s pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child. So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, ‘women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership,’ so he may be voting for Palin’s husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest. Republicans may learn they can’t appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women. And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can’t be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.

Brian Schweitzer of Montana Steals the Show at the DNC

August 27, 2008 in Barack Obama, Brian Schweitzer, Campaign 2008, Democratic National Convention, Government, Hillary Clinton, Patriotism, Politics

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if “one of us” became a politician and had the opportunity to speak to the country – watch this. He’s Brian Schweitzer of Montana – a rancher who just happens to be the Governor. He’s slow to start – but it’s worth watching until the end. For us…….this was the REAL keynote speech!

Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment – Hillary Clinton

May 24, 2008 in Campaign 2008, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Keith Olbermann, Politics, Unbelievable

2008 SelectSmart.com Presidential Candidate Selector

October 10, 2007 in Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Campaign 2008, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, Fred Thompson, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards, John McCain, Mike Hucakbee, Mitt Romney, Politics, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, Tom Tancredo

This is terrific! Go to SelectSmart.com and see how the candidates fit with what’s important to YOU.

***It’s been brought to our attention that this site sends out  SPAM e-mails. Here’s the trick to avoid that – after you’ve made all of your suggestions, a screen comes up and asks for your e-mail. DON’T FILL IT IN. There is a link at the very top of the page to move you to the results page. Once there, don’t fill out the section that says “E-mail Results.” 

This is just a fun questionnaire – we all came up with a 100% match with a “theoretical candidate.” The next closest match was 60%! Not so great, we think!!

Are You Getting the Feeling That Your Vote Doesn’t Matter Here? – “Bush Smooths the Way For President Hillary”

October 8, 2007 in Campaign 2008, Cronie-ism, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Threat to America

BUSH administration officials are paving the way for a smooth transition to a possible Democratic presidency as Hillary Clinton consolidates her position as the overwhelming favourite to win her party’s nomination for the 2008 election.

Clinton has powered her way to the top of the Democratic pack, establishing a 33-point lead in one poll last week over Barack Obama, her nearest rival.

She raised $7m more than Obama in the last quarter and attracted more individual contri-butors than the Illinois senator, proving her popularity with grassroots Democrats.

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Clinton has been sidestepping calls to pull US troops out of Iraq if she wins, sticking to a broader promise to begin a phased withdrawal. In a recent television interview, the New York senator refused to state that all US combat troops would leave Iraq by the end of her first term in office. She voted in the Senate last month to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organisation.

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Peggy Noonan, President Reagan’s former speechwriter, said the Clintons had the Democratic party in a trance. She wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “The Bushes are wired into the Republican money-line system; the Clintons are wired into the Democratic money-line system. For two generations now they have had the same dynamics in play . . . Is this good for our democracy, this air of inevitability?”

Read the entire article at Times UK

The Democrats who enable Bush

October 6, 2007 in Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Campaign 2008, Congress, Cronie-ism, Democrats, Dennis Kucinich, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, Politics, The War, This Administration, Threat to America, Troop Withdrawal

We have stated before that we are no happier with the Democrats than we are with the Republicans and Mr. Bush. We are glad to see we are in such good company – Helen Thomas is one of our heroes!

By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership and the party’s leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy.

Those Democrats seem to have forgotten that the American people want U.S. troops out of Iraq, especially since Bush still cannot give a credible reason for attacking Iraq after nearly five years of war.

Last week at a debate in Hanover, N.H., the leading Democratic presidential candidates sang from the same songbook: Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illinois and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards refused to promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, at the end of the first term of their hypothetical presidencies. Can you believe it?

When the question was put to Clinton, she reverted to her usual cautious equivocation, saying: “It is very difficult to know what we’re going to be inheriting.”

Obama dodged, too: “I think it would be irresponsible” to say what he would do as president.

Edwards, on whom hopes were riding to show some independence, replied to the question: “I cannot make that commitment.”

They have left the voters little choice with those answers.

Some supporters were outraged at the obfuscation by the Democratic front-runners.

On the other hand, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., are more definitive in their calls for quick troop withdrawals.

But Biden wants to break up Iraq into three provinces along religious and ethnic lines. In other words, Balkanize Iraq.

To have major Democratic backing to stay the course in Iraq added up to good news for Bush.

Now comes a surprising Clinton fan.

President Bush told Bill Sammon — Washington Examiner correspondent and author of a new book titled “The Evangelical President” — that Clinton will beat Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination because she is a “formidable candidate” and better known.

Sammon says Bush revealed that he has been sending messages to Clinton to urge her to “maintain some political wiggle room in your campaign rhetoric about Iraq.”

The author said Bush contends that whoever inherits the White House will be faced with a potential vacuum in Iraq and “will begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy.”

Bush ought to know about campaign rhetoric. Remember how he ridiculed “nation building” in the 2000 presidential campaign? Now he claims he is trying to spread democracy throughout the Middle East.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is another Democratic leader who has empowered Bush’s war.

Pelosi removed a provision from the most recent war-funding bill that would have required Bush to seek the permission of Congress before launching any attack on Iran. Her spokesman gave the lame excuse that she didn’t like the wording of the provision. More likely, she bowed to political pressure.

Is it any wonder the Democrats are faring lower than the president in a Washington Post ABC approval poll? Bush came in at 33 percent and Congress at 29 percent.

Members of Congress seem to have forgotten their constitutional prerogative to declare war; World War II was the last time Congress formally declared war.

Presidents have found other ways to make end runs around the law, mainly by obtaining congressional authorization “to do whatever is necessary” in a crisis involving use of the military. That’s the way we got into the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

So what are the leading Democratic White House hopefuls offering? It seems nothing but more war. So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2007 Hearst Newspapers. On Nov. 3 Thomas will be the guest speaker at the ACLU of Washington’s Bill of Rights Celebration Dinner; for details, contact aclu-wa.org.

We Have a 2 Party System – Are You At All Worried About a 2 FAMILY System?

September 28, 2007 in Bill Clinton, Cronie-ism, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Power, Threat to America

Hillary and Bill Clinton Show Muscle as Cover Boy Bill Gets a Negative Story Dumped

September 27, 2007 in Bill Clinton, Campaign 2008, Executive Privilege, Hillary Clinton, Media, Politics, Power

It seems that Hillary is acting very presidential already! And now we get a glimpse of how Bill would handle his future roll as First Gentleman.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign forced a magazine to drop a negative story about her by threatening to cut off the publication’s access to the former President Bill Clinton, it emerged yesterday.

The ruthless response to GQ magazine, and its decision to bow to the ultimatum, reflects the enormous leverage Mr Clinton brings to his wife’s White House bid at a time when her quest for the Democratic nomination appears more formidable than ever.

The magazine, which is due to have Mr Clinton on its cover for its December issue, was told that the former President would no longer cooperate unless it pulled an article it was about to publish detailing infighting and tensions within Mrs Clinton’s campaign.

Despite protests at the magazine, the article was duly sidelined, according to a respected US political website. In an e-mail statement to The Times, Jim Nelson, the Editor of GQ, said: “I don’t really get into the inner workings of the magazine, but I can tell you that, yes, we did kill a Hillary piece. We kill pieces all the time for a variety of reasons.” He refused to elaborate.

The move by the Clinton campaign provides a graphic example of the be-hind-the-scenes hardball tactics it employs in keeping the New York senator’s relentlessly disciplined presidential bid on track and on message, and the power that she and her husband have in shaping how her White House bid is perceived.

On Sunday Mrs Clinton pulled off the rare feat of appearing on all five Sunday-morning political talk shows, a privilege the networks are unlikely to afford her rivals. Her lead in the national Democratic polls over her nearest rival, Barack Obama, is so big – almost 20 per cent – that pundits are now asking not if she can win the nomination, but if she can be stopped.

President Bush also thinks that she will win the nomination, it emerged yesterday, and has even indicated in private that he believes she will succeed him. White House aides, on Mr Bush’s instructions, have been privately briefing her – and other Democrat candidates – about Iraq in case she wins the election next November. They have been urging her not to commit to an immediate withdrawal if she takes office in January 2009, because Mr Bush wants his successor – Democrat or Republican – to continue prosecuting the war after he leaves the Oval Office.

Although Mr Bush often says that he will not handicap elections, he told the author of a new biography about him that Mrs Clinton has “got a great national presence, and this is becoming a national primary”. In an off-the-record session with broadcast journalists just over a week ago, Mr Bush, according to those in the room, gave the impression that he thought she would win the presidency and that he had been thinking about how to turn Iraq over to her.

Mrs Clinton’s lead in national polls, and similarly big leads over Mr Obama in the early primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, means that the contest in the first nominating state of Iowa has become crucial.

With Mrs Clinton succeeding in making her nomination look almost inevitable, her rivals are expected to be more aggressive and critical in a Democratic debate tomorrow night in New Hampshire, aware that time is running out to derail her.

From The Times UK Online

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