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Sen. Hillary Clinton is telling Democrats that they shouldn’t let their hearts run away with their heads by embracing the lightly experienced Sen. Barack Obama for President. She says she is the battle-tested one who can best carry the Democratic banner.
“Some of us are ready and some of us are not,” she said in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Jan. 7 as tears welled in her eyes. “Some of us know what we will do on day one and some of us haven't thought it through enough."
We came up several thousand dollars short of our year-end goal of $50,000, but the fundraiser was our most successful ever, thanks to you, our readers.
Besides the many generous donations, we received a number of kind comments in response to our question, “Are We Worth It?” A selection of those comments appears below:
What’s left out of a movie about history often interests only a few experts in the field. However, the recent release of one that chronicles the successful sub rosa American effort to bleed the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s may prove to be an exception.
“Charlie Wilson’s War,” which stars Tom Hanks, tells the story of a hard-drinking, womanizing Texas congressman who nudged Congress and the Reagan administration to give more arms, especially high-tech Stinger missiles, to shoot down Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
But the movie distorts or leaves out a number of crucial details.
As America focuses on the start of the U.S. presidential election process, another election half a world away offers important insights into the nature of democracy and the shortcomings of George W. Bush’s democracy promotion in other countries.
In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, citizens go to the polls today for the first time since the widely celebrated Rose Revolution of 2003. Then, Georgia was hailed by Western governments as a beacon of democracy in a region beset by authoritarianism.
The vaunted Clinton machine is sure to rev up its operations to salvage Hillary Clinton’s political future – and the Bush Family’s Republican Establishment likely will settle on an acceptable GOP representative to protect the status quo, possibly John McCain.
But the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3 dealt a stunning blow to the Bush-Clinton duopoly, with Sen. Barack Obama thrashing Sen. Clinton on the Democratic side and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee trouncing former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who had the backing of some elements of the Bush Family.
You read it here before Iowa and New Hampshire: The pundits will proclaim 2008 The Year Of The Political Independent that will advantage Barack Obama and John McCain, and disadvantage Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney.
First, what I advocate; then, my predictions.
The great realignment is at hand, and it is anti-Washington, anti-establishment and anti-Bush, with the potential outcome of the next FDR- and JFK-style eras —a progressive centrist alliance between progressive Democrats and political independents electing a reformist president and Congress.
Read on.Hillary Clinton’s campaign is signaling that a second Clinton presidency will follow the look-to-the-future, don’t-worry-about-accountability approach toward Republican wrongdoing that marked Bill Clinton’s years in office.
That was the significance of former President Clinton’s remarkable Dec. 17 comment that his wife’s first act in the White House would be to send Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush on an around-the-world mission to repair America’s damaged image.
Benazir Bhutto was no angel, but she was a believer in democracy who gave her life for her country, retuning to Pakistan knowing she would probably give her life for her country.
By contrast, Democrats in Washington have a life crisis, consult an army of pollsters, and have trouble taking clear leadership stands on war and peace because members of a Congress with record unpopularity might lose another point or two in the polls.
The chaos spreading across nuclear-armed Pakistan after the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is part of the price for the Bush administration’s duplicity about al-Qaeda’s priorities, including the old canard that the terrorist group regards Iraq as the “central front” in its global war against the West.
Through repetition of this claim – often accompanied by George W. Bush’s home-spun advice about the need to listen to what the enemy says – millions of Americans believe that Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders consider Iraq the key battlefield.
“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater. ... Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later....”
These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German).
Like millions of Americans, we’ll be traveling some before Christmas, so we’ll probably not be posting as many stories as usual. But we are leaving up on the home page the stories from the past six or seven weeks for you to review while making an assessment of whether we’re worth it.
That’s because you – our readers – are the ones who will decide whether we can continue as a source of independent news. Either we make it with your financial support – through donations and book sales – or we don’t.
There’s been talk all this week about that stunning report from former Senator George Mitchell revealing that Major League Baseball players, including some of the sport’s biggest stars, have been using steroids for years.
The findings prompted my fellow journalist and friend Dick Starkey to recall an important insight into America by the eminent social critic, Jacques Barzun. A Frenchman by birth, now 100 years old and living in Texas, Barzun, like his illustrious ancestor Alexis de Tocqueville, has been a canny interpreter of the American character.
Editor’s Note: To understand Mike Huckabee’s surprising rise to the top of the Republican presidential field, it’s worth looking back two years to December 2005 when the right-wing media manufactured an alarming tale about how secularists and non-Christians were waging a “War on Christmas.”
Huckabee – in his unthreatening, easy-going style – has managed to tap into that now widely perceived view among white Christian conservatives that they are somehow facing persecution at the hands of Jews, Muslims and atheists.
What do you get when you mix a cocaine-snorting playboy Congressman, the sixth richest woman in Texas, and a blue-collar CIA officer with a huge chip on his shoulder? Why, the largest covert operation in history, and a hilarious, award-nominated film about it.
“Charlie Wilson’s War” has been billed as a political satire or comedy. While the film ripples throughout with truly hilarious moments, it is based on the true and very serious story of the largest covert operation in history.
When senior Democrats, such as House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, explain why impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney is off the table, they cite their fears of hostility from the American news media.
On Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” on Dec. 20, Conyers said the U.S. news media has become such a problem that any Democratic attempt to hold the President and Vice President accountable might end up achieving the opposite result.
Even as Hillary Clinton’s operatives were dropping hints that Republicans would exploit Barack Obama’s youthful drug use, some Clinton insiders privately worried about her own vulnerability because the Bush administration possesses detailed knowledge of her movements – and her husband’s – over the past seven years.
Because of Sen. Clinton’s unique status as the first former First Lady to run for President – and because her husband was succeeded by a Republican – she is the first candidate to have both her and her spouse be subject to regular, long-term surveillance by an Executive Branch agency controlled by the opposing political party.
In unprecedented congressional testimony, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann recently refused to say it would be illegal for American POWs to be tortured through waterboarding by our enemies.
He couldn’t because a policy claimed to be legal when committed by our government would be equally legal when committed by our enemies against our troops and POWs.
The pundits on CNN’s “Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” were unanimous: Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins was a great guy and his hiring as national chairman for Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign gave it a solid jolt of credibility.
But Blitzer’s panel of journalists on Dec. 14 didn’t seem to either know or care that Rollins has withheld evidence since 1991 about the identity of a top Filipino politician who admitted delivering an illegal $10 million cash payment to Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign from Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
