She couldn't wreck the party if she tried. Her supporters? That's another story. They could follow through with their threat and vote for McCain.

She doesn't need to bow out. If she wants to throw a percentage of her millions away, who am I to say she shouldn't. There's always the convention.

This wrecking the party nonsense is what needs to stop.

Anybody that threatens to vote for McCain isn't a Democrat anyway. It's just disinformation coming from Republican concern trolls.
.
Good times for Smiley! :-D

Hillary Will Drop Out by June 15

so maybe my opinion doesn't count (but I am not a Republican either).

Obama will beat McCain. By a landslide. He needs someone with policy experience for VP. Al Gore or Bill Richardson.

The Clintons lost. She gets to go back to a damn good job as a NY senator.

Bill's intellect/ego won't allow him to play a minor role, so he can do talk shows, lectures and write books.

(If I were Obama I would be very afraid to have a Clinton as VP.)

I did inhale.

No, no, no. With the Rezco (spelling?) trial nearing its conclusion and some serious sentencing bargaining coming up the door must be left open to an alternative at the convention. If the defendant decides to drop the dime on Obama (whether true or not) and if Obama, protesting his innocence (whether true or not) refuses to bow out, the party needs a way, if circumstances require, to more or less gracefully find another candidate.

The candidates might actually treat Oregon as if it mattered. Ballots were mailed last week, so we've got about two weeks to vote.

This business of an extended voting period (Oregon has vote-by-mail; mark-sense ballots are kept on file, so there's no issues with a "paper ballot")must frustrate campaigners to no end--no "final push" possible--the pressure has to be maintained for the whole two weeks, making campaigning very expensive here.

There's a strange commercial running on TV by the Gordon Smith (aka "the weasel") senatorial campaign. His opponent in the primary is no particular threat, so he's spending his bucks smearing the two Democratic contenders for his seat.

My personal take on Smith is that he voted for the war. He didn't even give the courtesy of a reply to my question about how he intended to pay for it. He's history in my book.

May 07, 2008
Categories: Leadership, Politico

Clyburn says Clinton shouldn't get out

When asked this morning by Joe Scarborough whether it was time for Hillary Clinton to get out of the race, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) said “absolutely not.” Clyburn wouldn’t relent to the cajoling of Scarborough and his TV co-host Mika Brzezinski to publicly proclaim what many suspect is Clyburn's personal preference for Barack Obama. Instead, he argued on MSNBC that it was good for the party’s message and its continuity to have both candidates still out there “discussing the Democratic agenda.”

P.J O'Rourke: 'Politics won't allow for the truth.'

hillary's the next president. it's long been in the bag, a done deal in my humble opining. the question, or trick rather, is how to pull it off without being so obviously corrupt that it pisses off the fence-riding yeehaws. gee, at this point, the show's just about to begin. pull out? she can't, even if for some bizarre personal reason she actually wanted to. it's almost like she's contracted and has to run this thing through. i figger mccain's accepted by the TPTB as perfect for his role, and obama too, totally screwed as he is by it all, tho. for ten years or more or so tho...

s'all baloney, an elephant and donkey show.

the real campaign is above and beyond all that crap, but that's taboo territory in most parts, right up there with 9/11, the kennedy assassination, simple economics, and entheogenics. the pregnant possibilities of the net are like any others in this brief and pivotal time, too openended, and way too proactively demanding, to do anything with but ignore. there's a show to be watched, dammit.

hear the falling hush from the strongest voices as curtain time approaches.

...the gov pages going down, the numbers missing, the increasing inversion of transparency and privacy between gov and us peoples who should be running the facility... opensource code software facilitation of our own administering is what we could be doing but nah... that's 9/11 stuff...

http://www.socialtext.net/codev2/index.cgi?sovereignty

As a descriptive matter, then, cyberspace is not yet dominated (or even broadly populated) by citizen-sovereignties. The sovereignties we see so far are all merchant-sovereignties. And this is even more clearly true with the Internet. To the extent sites are sovereign, they are merchant-sovereigns. Our relationship to them is the same as our relationship to McDonald ’s.

This change came about not through some political decision but as a result of a changing economic and social reality. Our sense of being members of a national community increased until, at a certain stage, it became impossible to deny our national citizenship. A war produced that recognition. The Fourteenth Amendment wrote it into the Constitution; economic and social intercourse made it completely real. And as this change took hold, the claim that issues like slavery were local became absurd.

The very same process is happening to us now, internationally, and cyberspace is making an important contribution. It has been slowly gaining momentum, of course, since the end of World War II, but the Internet has wildly accelerated the pace. Ordinary citizens are connected internationally and can make international transactions as never before. The presence of a community that is beyond any individual state is increasingly undeniable.

As this international community develops in cyberspace, its citizens will find it increasingly difficult to stand neutral in this international space. Just as a principled sort of citizen in 1791 might have said that slavery in Virginia was irrelevant to a citizen in Maine, so in 1991 the control of speech in Singapore may have been irrelevant to a citizen of the United States. But just as the claim about slavery ’s local relevance became implausible in the course of the nineteenth century, the claim about speech on the Net will become equally implausible in the 21 st century. Cyberspace is an international community; there are constitutional questions for it to answer; and we cannot simply stand back from this international space and say that these questions are local issues.

At least, we could not say that once we effectively invaded this international space with the Internet of 1995. We put into the world an architecture that facilitated extraordinarily free speech and extraordinary privacy; that enabled secure communications through a protocol that permitted encryption; and that encouraged free communications through a protocol that resisted censorship. That was the speech architecture that the Net gave the world —that we gave the world.

Crowd Control

http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/84060/

http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/writings.html

http://technewsreview.com.au/article.php?article=548

etc

leave it to the damned anarchists to spoil everything tho... an obama supporter to boot.

Undo

is_it_time_for_a_new_constitut_1.html

ignoring the obvious

http://www.kucinichtv.com/

Dennis Kucinich, a Democratic Presidential candidate and current Congressional Representative for Ohio's 10th district, is launching a New Constitutional Convention Initiative this evening (Wednesday, November 14th), at 9pm EST. Kucinich will be holding a national town hall meeting at kucinichtv.com, featuring live streaming video and audio.

http://www.sweetliberty.org/concon.htm

i know, i know, there's a show to watch and i should siddown, shuddup, and eat my popcorn. (what? no popcorn?)

AP, By David Espo, May 7

WASHINGTON — Apart from George McGovern, a plainspoken man who knows something about losing elections, not a single Democrat of national stature publicly urged Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday to end her campaign for the White House.

They didn't have to.

There was no shortage of other ways to signal, suggest, insinuate or instigate the same thing. And certainly no need to apply unseemly pressure to a historic political figure, a woman who has run a grueling race, won millions of votes and drawn uncounted numbers of new Democratic voters to the polls.

Instead, many Democrats instead preferred to say softly what the party's 1972 presidential nominee said for all to hear. Barack Obama has won the nomination "by any practical test," McGovern said.

"Hillary, of course, will make the decision as to if and when she ends her campaign," he added. "But I hope that she reaches that decision soon so that we can concentrate on a unified party capable of winning the White House next November."

i dozed off around 7 PM Central and awoke around 9:30 to go to my friends house and watch the Daily Show. (about to do the same). I ran right out and didn't check the TV.

Caught Hilldog giving her 'concession' speech on the radio. The tone was very much "this is over, we're done." To a striking degree I could just feel it.

I think that she will play out her final episode without going negative now. They can't resist it, they have to stay in. But now finally the pressure from the power structure is such that they can't fuck with obama w/o damaging themselves. Didn't really expect that, but i bet that's the story arc unless she abruptly runs outta moola next week.

(altho i guess it's all deficit spending in Hilldog's camp now anyway...)

--
Hongpong.com

No amount of suggestions from party elders and campaign supporters is going to talk as loud as money. She's already in debt over $20 million. If the cash doesn't roll in quickly this week, she's facing yet more loans from the Clinton personal fortune, or she has to fold up shop. This is a couple that started out poor, made a good living in the White House, and struck it rich afterwards. They'll not want to jeopardize what they've built up so far, so my guess is in the next few weeks she winds things down. She's only holding off and giving the appearance of campaigning to raise as much possible now to whittle down the debt.

Besides, psychologically it is a lot easier to say to yourself "I ran out of money" than "I failed".

But Obama could probably slam the door on Clinton by funding open caucuses in MI and FL through the campaign. It does leave him open to charges of pandering, and it would be pandering, but that's what elections seem to be about anyway.

I still don't understand all this talk about how a protracted primary campaign is bad for the democrats. They're raising tons of money (spending it too, but still) and getting massive amounts of free press. As compared to John McCain, who hasn't gotten a big headline in months. It seems like a specious argument, put forward cynically by a lazy media and the paranoid partisans of both candidates' campaigns.

However, how bad would it be if this tore the party apart? Most of us here seem to be decidedly left of 'moderate,' which is to say that the Democratic Party hasn't given a fuck about progressive values since Gene McCarthy. Neither Hillary's DLC retreads nor Obama's 'post-partisanship,' both quite corporate-friendly, are going to bring that back. Neither one has said anything about reducing the class warfare that's caused corporate profits to increase as real wages stagnate over the last 40 years. Neither one is going to seriously rein in coal or oil to reduce our carbon footprint. Neither one is going to end the war. And nobody who would do these things is allowed to rise very far in the party - it'll be a long time before Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, or Jim Webb even gets a Senate leadership position. Tear the party apart? Kick the bums out, it's about frikkin' time. But it's not going to happen this time around, we're just going to get more of the same corporate bullshit. Y'all got my hopes up, though.

Hillary gets the news ....

Don't Expect Clinton to Quit Before Superdelegates Decide

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 9, 2008; A04

How will the Democratic nomination battle end?

At a time when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton faces ever longer odds in her quest to deny Sen. Barack Obama the nomination, that question has become increasingly important to the candidates and the party. Will it end happily or unhappily? Will the loser go graciously or bitterly? Will the Democrats end up united or divided?

Clinton has vowed to stay in "until there is a nominee," but even with six primaries left on the calendar, the party is beginning to coalesce around Obama.

Still, from Clinton's campaign, there is no talk of bringing the race to an end anytime soon. From her vantage point, she has in recent weeks won Ohio as well as the popular vote in Texas, Pennsylvania and Indiana. Obama won Mississippi and North Carolina. She has won critical battleground states and, in her view, is holding the constituencies vital to Democratic hopes of winning in November. Why not stay in until the end?

She also believes that the competition with Obama has produced record turnout, a surge of new registrants for the Democratic Party and a cadre of now-seasoned organizers who will be paying dividends for years to Democratic congressional and gubernatorial candidates. Her advisers are realists, but some genuinely think it is still possible to win -- not probable by any means but not out of the question.

Party strategists sketch out at least three scenarios for a possible end to the Clinton campaign. ...

Link

Bloomberg, By Catherine Dodge & Julianna Goldman, May 11

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama won endorsements from five superdelegates yesterday, erasing rival Hillary Clinton's long-held lead in backing from party officials and lawmakers.

Obama now leads Clinton in the popular vote and the number of pledged delegates and superdelegates who will decide the nominee at the party's convention in August.

Clinton has seen her superdelegate advantage steadily erode since the nominating contests began Jan. 3, when Obama won the Iowa caucus. At that time, Clinton had more than twice as many superdelegates as Obama. With Obama's latest endorsements, he has 276 superdelegates to Clinton's 274.5, according to a Bloomberg tally based on lists and public statements from both campaigns.

``It's a crucial psychological milestone,'' said Anthony Corrado, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who specializes in elections. ``From the very beginning, Senator Clinton has held the superdelegate lead and it had been widely expected that would be her ace in the hole.''