Gallup: Obama recaptures edge over Clinton

Gallup reports: Barack Obama has quickly made up the deficit he faced with Hillary Clinton earlier this week, with the latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update on Democratic presidential nomination preferences showing 48% of Democratic voters favoring Obama and 45% Clinton.

Obama fell behind Clinton on March 14 and stayed there until today. "Obama's campaign clearly suffered in recent days from negative press, mostly centering around his association with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright," wrote Gallup analyst Jeff Jones. "But Obama has now edged back ahead of Clinton due to a strong showing for him in Friday night's polling, perhaps in response to the endorsement he received from well-respected New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson."

The Gallup tracking poll is based on interviews with 1,264 Democratic or Democrat-leaning voters March 19-21. Its margin of error is +/-3 percentage points.

A tracking poll by Rasmussen Reports has shown a different trajectory. In that poll, Obama clung to leads of 1 to 5 percentage points all week and fell behind Clinton for the first time today, 46%-44%. Rasmussen calculations are based on four nights of polling, compared to Gallup's three.

As always, we remind you that these are snapshots and do not tell us what will happen in elections.

Update at 1:45 p.m. ET: As Mark reported Wednesday, Clinton strategist Mark Penn argued that Clinton's 7-point lead in the Gallup poll that day suggested voters were experiencing "buyer's remorse" over Obama.

For more on the Richardson endorsement, see our posts here and here. For more on the Wright controversy, click here.

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Crunch Time: John Edwards Needs To Step Up For Barack

I'm glad Richardson is endorsing Obama. It would have been nice if he had done it before Texas. Was the Obama campaign so confident back then that they wouldn't guarantee the job Richardson was asking for? The fact that the endorsement is coming now tends to confirm my gut feeling about the current situation.

I am very nervous. The polls are beginning to show the impact of the Rev Wright sound bites. They will be endlessly recycled. "God damn America" -- that's pretty much all it will take in western Pennsylvania and beyond, in the absence of some heavyweight offset.

Obama's speech on race was extraordinary -- but it took more than 15 minutes to deliver. Will that match the Wright sound bites over the long haul? I fear not.

Hence Big Dog Bill's latest foray into the gutter of innuendo. How bracing, he tells us, a Hillary/McCain face-off would be -- given that these are two candidates who love their country. Such slime. You want to take a shower after you watch him.

John Edwards heard that Obama speech on race. He's smart enough and real enough to understand the depth of promise it represented. He can talk to white working class voters in western Pennsylvania and beyond. Bill Richardson's endorsement is nice -- but John Edwards could turn the tide.

Ask Elizabeth for advice on this one, John. Time to step up. History is knocking on your door.

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HALPERIN’S TAKE: Painful Things Hillary Clinton Knows — Or Should Know

1. She can’t win the nomination without overturning the will of the elected delegates, which will alienate many Democrats.

2. She can’t win the nomination without a bloody convention battle — after which, even if she won, history and many Democrats would cast her as a villain.

3. Catching up in the popular vote is not out of the question — but without re-votes in Florida and Michigan it will be almost as impossible as catching up in elected delegates.

4. Nancy Pelosi and other leading members of Congress don’t think she can win and want her to give up. Same with superdelegate-to-the-stars Donna Brazile.

5. Obama’s skilled, close-knit staff can do things like silently kill re-votes in Florida and Michigan and not pay a political price.

6. Many of her supporters — and even some of her staffers — would be relieved (and even delighted) if she quit the race; none of his supporters or staff feel that way. Some think she just might throw in the towel in June if it appears efforts to fight on would hurt Obama’s general election chances.

7. The Rev. Wright story notwithstanding, the media still wants Obama to be the nominee — and that has an impact every day.

8. Obama might not be able to talk that well about the new global economy, but she (and McCain) can’t either.

9. Many of the remaining prominent superdelegates want to be for Obama and she (and Harold Ickes) are just barely keeping them from making public commitments to him.

10. She can’t publicly say more than 2% of all the things she would like to say about race, electability, beating McCain and experience.

11. If she somehow found a way to win the nomination, she would have to offer Obama the veep slot, and she doesn’t want to do that.

12. This is a change election, and Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton can never truly be change.

13. Obama is having fun most days, and she isn’t.

14. Even though her campaign staff is having more fun than it has for a long time, there’s hardly anyone there who, given half a chance, wouldn’t slit Mark Penn’s throat — and such internal dissension won’t help her in the home stretch.

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Story behind the story: The Clinton myth

One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning.

Her own campaign acknowledges there is no way that she will finish ahead in pledged delegates. That means the only way she wins is if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency.

Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.

People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.

As it happens, many people inside Clinton’s campaign live right here on Earth. One important Clinton adviser estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives.

In other words: The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe.

The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics.

Journalists have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

One reason is fear of embarrassment. In its zeal to avoid predictive reporting of the sort that embarrassed journalists in New Hampshire, the media — including Politico — have tended to avoid zeroing in on the tough math Clinton faces.

Avoiding predictions based on polls even before voters cast their ballots is wise policy. But that's not the same as drawing sober and well-grounded conclusions about the current state of a race after millions of voters have registered their preferences.

The antidote to last winter's flawed predictions is not to promote a misleading narrative based on the desired but unlikely story line of one candidate.

There are other forces also working to preserve the notion of a contest that is still up for grabs.

One important, if subliminal, reason is self-interest. Reporters and editors love a close race — it’s more fun and it’s good for business.

The media are also enamored of the almost mystical ability of the Clintons to work their way out of tight jams, as they have done for 16 years at the national level. That explains why some reporters are inclined to believe the Clinton campaign when it talks about how she’s going to win on the third ballot at the Democratic National Convention in August.

That’s certainly possible — and, to be clear, we’d love to see the race last that long — but it’s folly to write about this as if it is likely.

It’s also hard to overstate the role the talented Clinton camp plays in shaping the campaign narrative, first by subtly lowering the bar for the performance necessary to remain in the race, and then by keeping the focus on Obama’s relationships with a political fixer and a controversial pastor in Illinois.

But even some of Clinton’s own advisers now concede that she cannot win unless Obama is hit by a political meteor. Something that merely undermines him won't be enough. It would have to be some development that essentially disqualifies him.

Simple number-crunching has shown the long odds against Clinton for some time.

In the latest Associated Press delegate count, Obama leads with 1,406 pledged delegates to Clinton’s 1,249. Obama’s lead is likely to grow, as it did with county conventions last weekend in Iowa, as later rounds of delegates are apportioned from caucuses he has already won.

The Democratic Party has 794 superdelegates, the party insiders who get to vote on the nomination in addition to the delegates chosen by voters. According to Politico's latest tally, Clinton has 250 and Obama has 212. That means 261 are uncommitted, and 71 have yet to be named.

An analysis by Politico's Avi Zenilman shows that Clinton’s lead in superdelegates has shrunk by about 60 in the past month. And it found Clinton is roughly tied among House members, senators and governors — the party’s most powerful elite.

Clinton had not announced a new superdelegate commitment since the March 4 primaries, until the drought was broken recently by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) and West Virginia committeeman Pat Maroney.

Clintonistas continue to talk tough. Phil Singer, the Clinton campaign’s deputy communications director, told reporters on a conference call Friday that the Obama campaign “is in hot water” and is “seeing the ground shift away from them.”

Mark Penn, the campaign’s chief strategist, maintained that it’s still “a hard-fought race between two potential nominees” and that other factors could come into play at the convention besides the latest delegate tally — “the popular vote, who will have won more delegates from primaries [as opposed to caucuses], who will be the stronger candidate against McCain.”

But let’s assume a best-case scenario for Clinton, one where she wins every remaining contest with 60 percent of the vote (an unlikely outcome since she has hit that level in only three states so far — her home state of New York, Rhode Island and Arkansas).

Even then, she would still be behind Obama in delegates.

There are 566 pledged delegates up for grabs in upcoming contests. Those delegates come from Pennsylvania (158), Guam (4) North Carolina (115), Indiana (72), West Virginia (28), Kentucky (51), Oregon (52), Puerto Rico (55), Montana (16) and South Dakota (15).

If Clinton won 60 percent of those delegates, she would get 340 delegates to Obama's 226. Under that scenario — and without revotes in Michigan and Florida — Obama would still lead in delegates by 1,632 to 1,589.

The only remote possibility of a win in delegates would come if revotes were held in Florida and Michigan — which, again, would take a political miracle. If Clinton won 60 percent of the delegates in both states, she would win 188 delegates and Obama would win 125. Clinton would then lead among pledged delegates, 1,777 to 1,757.

The other elephant in the room for Clinton is that Obama is almost certain to win North Carolina, with its high percentage of African-American voters, and also is seen as extremely strong in Oregon.

Harold Ickes, an icon of the Democratic Party who is Clinton’s chief delegate strategist, points out that every previous forecast about this race has been faulty.

Asked about the Obama campaign’s contention that it’s mathematically impossible for Clinton to win, Ickes replied: “They can’t count. At the end of it, even by the Obama campaign’s prediction, neither candidate will have enough delegates to be nominated.”

This is true, as a matter of math. But even the Clinton campaign’s own best-case scenario has her finishing behind Obama when all the nominating contests are over.

“She will be close to him but certainly not equal to him in pledged delegates,” a Clinton adviser said. “When you add the superdelegates on top of it, I’ll think she’ll still be behind him somewhat in total delegates — but very, very close.”

The total gap is likely to be 75 to 110, the adviser said.

That means Clinton would need either some of those pledged delegates to switch their support — which technically they can do, though it would be unlikely — or for the white-dominated group of superdelegates to join forces with her to topple Obama.

To foster doubt about Obama, Clinton supporters are using a whisper and pressure campaign to make an 11th-hour argument to party insiders that he would be a weak candidate in November despite his superior standing at the moment.

“All she has left is the electability argument,” a Democratic official said. "It’s all wrapped around: Is there something that makes him ultimately unelectable?”

But the audience for that argument, the superdelegates, will not easily overturn the will of the party’s voters. And in fact, a number of heavyweight Democrats are looking at the landscape and laying the groundwork to dissuade Clinton from trying to overturn the will of the party rank and file.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has not endorsed either candidate, appears to be among them. She told Bloomberg Television that superdelegates should "respect for what has been said by the people.” And she told ABC’s “This Week” that it would be “harmful to the Democratic Party” if superdelegates overturn the outcome of elections.

A Democratic strategist said that given the unlikelihood of prevailing any other way, Clinton now must “scare” superdelegates “who basically just want to win.”

The strategist said Clinton aides are now relying heavily on the controversy over Obama’s retiring minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to sow new seeds of doubt.

“This issue is the first thing that’s come along that I think is potentially fatal to his electability argument,” the strategist said.

“They’re looking ahead and saying: Is it possible this thing is just going to drip, drip, drip, drip — more video? Where does that leave us if he’s our presumptive nominee and he’s limping into the convention and the Republicans are just read to go on him, double-barreled?”

The strategist also said Clinton’s agents are making more subtle pitches.

“I’ve heard people start to say: Have you looked at the vote in Ohio really carefully? See how that breaks down for him. What does that portend?” said the strategist. “Then they point to Pennsylvania: In electorally important battleground states, if he is essentially only carrying heavy African-American turnout in high-performing African-American districts and the Starbucks-sipping, Volvo-driving liberal elite, how does he carry a state like Pennsylvania?”

Her advisers say privately that the nominee will be clear by the end of June. At the same time, they recognize that the nominee probably is clear already.

What has to irk Clintons’ aides is that they felt she might finally have him on the ropes, bruised badly by the Wright fight and wobbly in polls. But the bell rang long ago in the minds of too many voters.

Avi Zenilman contributed to this report.

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Mayhem At Fox News: Anchor Walks Off Set, Wallace Rails Network For "Obama-Bashing"

Fox News' very own anchors are speaking out — and walking off — over what they perceive to be "Obama-bashing" on their network.

This morning on "Fox and Friends," Brian Kilmeade walked off the set after a dispute with his co-hosts Gretchen Carlson (she who celebrates deadly floods) and Steve Doocy over Obama's comment that his grandmother is a "typical white person." Kilmeade argued that the remark needed to be taken in context and eventually got so fed up with his co-hosts that he walked off set.

Later, "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace came on the show and railed against "Fox and Friends" for what he called "Obama-bashing."

Watch both clips below (refresh your page if they don't load properly):

Brian Kilmeade walks off set over Obama dispute:

Chris Wallace rails against "Fox and Friends" for Obama-bashing



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FOX Lies!! Barack Obama Pastor Wright

Beyond America’s Original Sin

There are things you come to believe and things you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I bear my measure of shame.

As a child, experience is wordless but no less powerful for that. How vast, how shimmering, was Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, with all that glistening white skin spread across the golden sand!

The scrawny blacks were elsewhere, swimming off the rocks in a filthy harbor, and I watched from my grandfather’s house and I wondered.

Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside that harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.

The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.

A “For Sale” sign was up on what had been the family house. I inquired if I might visit and received a surly rebuff. But not before I glimpsed the mountain behind where my father hiked and where I feared the snakes among the thorn bushes.

Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.

Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.

Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman.

A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery was indeed America’s “original sin.” Of course, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” lives on in forms of African-American humiliation and anger that smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.

Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S. equivalent of that filthy African harbor.

It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.

I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?

Yes. It. Can.

The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.

Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.

The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”

But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Like countless others, I came to America because possibility is broader here than in Europe’s narrower confines. Perhaps it’s my African “original sin,” but when Obama says he “will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” I feel fear slipping away, like a shadow receding before the still riveting idea that “out of many we are truly one.”

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NM Gov. Bill Richardson Endorsing Obama

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — 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.

Richardson has been relentlessly wooed by Obama and Clinton for his endorsement. As a Democratic superdelegate, the governor plays a part in the tight race for nominating votes and could bring other superdelegates to Obama's side. He also has been mentioned as a potential running mate for either candidate.

No primaries are scheduled until Pennsylvania's on April 22, a gap in time Obama hopes to use for such announcements to assert that he is the front-runner for the nomination.

"I believe he is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime leader that can bring our nation together and restore America's moral leadership in the world," Richardson said in a statement obtained by the AP. "As a presidential candidate, I know full well Sen. Obama's unique moral ability to inspire the American people to confront our urgent challenges at home and abroad in a spirit of bipartisanship and reconciliation."

Richardson's endorsement also could help Obama pick up support among Hispanics, who are the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority.

Clinton has been the favorite of Hispanics in primaries and caucuses, according to exit polls. She won the New Mexico caucus in early February with a nearly 2-to-1 advantage among Hispanics.

Richardson backed Obama despite his ties to Clinton and her husband, the former president. He served as ambassador to the U.N. and as secretary of the Energy Department during the Clinton administration. Last month, Richardson and former President Clinton watched the Super Bowl together at the governor's residence in Santa Fe.

Richardson praised Hillary Clinton as a "distinguished leader with vast experience." But the governor said Obama "will be a historic and great president, who can bring us the change we so desperately need by bringing us together as a nation here at home and with our allies abroad."

Richardson was a roving diplomatic troubleshooter when he was a congressman from New Mexico, negotiating the release of U.S. hostages in several countries and meeting with a rogue's gallery of U.S. adversaries, including Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro.

"There is no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama has the judgment and courage we need in a commander in chief when our nation's security is on the line. He showed this judgment by opposing the Iraq war from the start, and he has show it during this campaign by standing up for a new era in American leadership internationally," Richardson said.

Obama said he was "deeply honored" to have Richardson's support.

"Whether it's fighting to end the Iraq war or stop the genocide in Darfur or prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists, Gov. Richardson has been a powerful voice on issues of global security, peace and justice, earning five Nobel Peace Prize nominations," Obama said in a statement.

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CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC & Fox News LIED about pastor Jeremiah Wright. See 9/11 sermon in context

This entry was posted on March 21, 2008 at 2:12 am and is filed under pastor jeremiah wright. Tagged: 2008, 9/11, abc, barack obama, cbs, context, election, fox news, jeremiah wright, lied, lies, lou dobbs, media, msnbc, nbc, pastor, remarks, rev., truth, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Is This President F*cking Crazy?! Or Is He Finally Being Truthful?

"War critics can no longer credibly argue that we are losing in Iraq, so now they argue the war costs too much." President Bush March 19, 2008

Read that again. He's saying it today, the fifth anniversary of a war that in his own words means we were losing four out of those five years.

"War critics can no longer credibly argue that we are losing in Iraq..."

He now admits that those who questioned what he and his cronies had been touting for at least the first four years - that things in Iraq were going swimmingly - were right. Those who talk show Lords of Loud had called Defeatocrats and underminers of the military were, in fact, "credible."

WE WERE LOSING.

The President says so...now

For those who, like Bill O'Reilly, who ask for proof that the President had lied, now have it. From his own mouth.

For the first four years, he was LYING.

If the president is not lying now and my math is right, that means he lied for 80% of the war.

What would you call a person who lies about something 80% of the time?

But even if he is telling the truth now, it's a truth that is nauseatingly offensive.

"No one would argue that this war has not come at a high cost in lives and treasure, but those costs are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies in Iraq."

Mr. President...Are you saying your wholesale mismanagement of this war makes all the lives and treasures lost still "necessary"?

What a colossal insult to those soldiers and families whose losses were "necessary;" to those countless Iraqi civilians who lost lives and livelihood.

You may not be crazy, but you are cold beyond words. Beyond your own words.

March 19th means different things to different people. To those looking forward to Spring vacation, March 19 is the last day of the winter. To Hungarians, March 19 is the day that German forces occupied Hungary. To hotels and gamblers anonymous, March 19 is the day wagering was legalized in Nevada. To me, March 19 is my lovely wife's birthday. And being the true Philly guy, to celebrate, my thirteen year old son and I will be going to the Wachovia Center to catch Allen Iverson's first return to the Philadelphia in a visitor's jersey.

And, to some, it means we've been in Iraq for five years.

Five years and nearly 40,000 wounded (Pentagon #s) Americans.
Five years and nearly 90,000 Iraqi civilian deaths (Pentagon #s).
Five years and nearly 5,000,000 (35%) Iraqi children are orphans.
Five years and nearly 4,000,000 Iraq refugees.

The most difficult number to grasp is that on March 19th at a cost of $3,000,000,000,000 (the Bush Administration said it would run about $50,000,000....Hey, what's six zeros?) to find 0 weapons of mass destruction (Pentagon #s) and 0 Iraq and Al Quaeda connections (Pentagon #s), we have suffered nearly 4,000 American soldiers' deaths. Not numbers. Men and women.

And on this March 19th, our compassionate conservative president says that it was all necessary.

Later, after his speech, President Bush will dine and sleep well.

Tonight, will you be able to keep your food down?

Will you be able to sleep?

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Seven out of 10 Iraqis want foreign forces to leave: poll

LONDON (AFP) - More than two-thirds of Iraqis believe US-led coalition forces should leave, according to a poll conducted for British television ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion.

The ORB/Channel 4 News survey suggested that 70 percent thought multinational forces should withdraw.

Yet some 40 percent of the 4,000 people surveyed said they wanted the United States to play a bigger role in rebuilding Iraq and 36 percent wanted more British involvement.

Overall, the wide-ranging poll painted a mixed picture of Iraqi attitudes, contrasting their bleak daily existence with a surprisingly positive attitude about the future.

It threw up stark statistics on the human cost of war, which began on March 20, 2003, its effect on infrastructure and daily life, plus the bloody sectarian violence that erupted in the aftermath of the invasion.

A quarter of those surveyed said they had lost a family member to murder. In Baghdad, that figure rose to nearly half (45 percent).

Some 81 percent had suffered power cuts and 43 percent had experienced drinking water shortages. In the last month, more than a quarter (28 percent) had been short of food.

Opinions varied on progress towards democracy.

Less than a quarter (23 percent) thought military action would prove to have been in Iraq's long-term interests but 55 percent were optimistic about the future -- although 48 percent of the minority Sunni were not.

Some 45 percent said they were satisfied with the pace of change, compared with 40 percent who were not; and just over two-thirds (68 percent) predicted Iraq would "one day be peaceful and normal."

Four out of five people said their own area was already trouble-free.

• ORB and its local partner IIACSS interviewed 4,000 Iraqis in person between February 24 and March 5.

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Bush Defeated The Tree - Lewis Black

Many voting for Clinton to boost GOP

For a party that loves to hate the Clintons, Republican voters have cast an awful lot of ballots lately for Senator Hillary Clinton: About 100,000 GOP loyalists voted for her in Ohio, 119,000 in Texas, and about 38,000 in Mississippi, exit polls show.

A sudden change of heart? Hardly.

Since Senator John McCain effectively sewed up the GOP nomination last month, Republicans have begun participating in Democratic primaries specifically to vote for Clinton, a tactic that some voters and local Republican activists think will help their party in November. With every delegate important in the tight Democratic race, this trend could help shape the outcome if it continues in the remaining Democratic primaries open to all voters.

Spurred by conservative talk radio, GOP voters who say they would never back Clinton in a general election are voting for her now for strategic reasons: Some want to prolong her bitter nomination battle with Barack Obama, others believe she would be easier to beat than Obama in the fall, or they simply want to register objections to Obama.

"It's as simple as, I don't think McCain can beat Obama if Obama is the Democratic choice," said Kyle Britt, 49, a Republican-leaning independent from Huntsville, Texas, who voted for Clinton in the March 4 primary. "I do believe Hillary can mobilize enough [anti-Clinton] people to keep her out of office."

Britt, who works in financial services, said he is certain he will vote for McCain in November.

About 1,100 miles north, in Granville, Ohio, Ben Rader, a 66-year-old retired entrepreneur, said he voted for Clinton in Ohio's primary to further confuse the Democratic race. "I'm pretty much tired of the Clintons, and to see her squirm for three or four months with Obama beating her up, it's great, it's wonderful," he said. "It broke my heart, but I had to."

Local Republican activists say stories like these abound in Texas, Ohio, and Mississippi, the three states where the recent surge in Republicans voting for Clinton was evident.

Until Texas and Ohio voted on March 4, Obama was receiving far more support than Clinton from GOP voters, many of whom have said in interviews that they were willing to buck their party because they like the Illinois senator. In eight Democratic contests in January and February where detailed exit polling data were available on Republicans, Obama received, on average, about 57 percent of voters who identified themselves as Republicans. Clinton received, on average, a quarter of the Republican votes cast in those races.

But as February gave way to March, the dynamics shifted in both parties' contests: McCain ran away with the Republican race, and Obama, after posting 10 straight victories following Super Tuesday, was poised to run away with the Democratic race. That is when Republicans swung into action.

Conservative radio giant Rush Limbaugh said on Fox News on Feb. 29 that he was urging conservatives to cross over and vote for Clinton, their bête noire nonpareil, "if they can stomach it."

"I want our party to win. I want the Democrats to lose," Limbaugh said. "They're in the midst of tearing themselves apart right now. It is fascinating to watch. And it's all going to stop if Hillary loses."

He added, "I know it's a difficult thing to do to vote for a Clinton, but it will sustain this soap opera, and it's something I think we need."

Limbaugh's exhortations seemed to work. In Ohio and Texas on March 4, Republicans comprised 9 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, more than twice the average GOP share of the turnout in the earlier contests where exit polling was conducted. Clinton ran about even with Obama among Republicans in both states, a far more favorable showing among GOP voters than in the early races.

Walter Wilkerson, who has chaired the Republican Party in Montgomery County, Texas, since 1964, said many local conservatives chose to vote for Clinton for strategic reasons.

"These people felt that Clinton would be maybe the easier opponent in the fall," he said. "That remains to be seen."

Wilkerson added, "We have not experienced any crossover of this magnitude since I can remember."

In the Mississippi primary last Tuesday, Republicans made up 12 percent of voters who took a Democratic ballot - their biggest proportion in any state yet - and they went for Clinton over Obama by a 3-to-1 margin.

John Taylor, the GOP chairman in Madison County, said he toured various precincts and witnessed Republican voters taking Democratic ballots to vote for Clinton.

"Some people there that I recognized voting said, 'Hey, I'm going to vote in this primary this year, right now. But don't worry, in November I'll be back,' " Taylor said. "They were going to do some damage if they could."

Another popular conservative radio host, Laura Ingraham, who had also encouraged voters to cast ballots for Clinton, crowed about her apparent success the day after Ohio and Texas voted.

"Without a doubt, Rush, and to a lesser extent me, had some effect on the Republican turnout," Ingraham told Fox News. "When you look at those exit polls, it is really quite striking."

Some political blogs have suggested that the influx of Clinton-voting Republicans prevented Obama from winning delegates he otherwise would have, by inflating Clinton's totals both statewide and in certain congressional districts. A writer for the liberal blog Daily Kos estimated that Obama could have netted an additional five delegates from Mississippi.

It is also possible, though perhaps unlikely, that enough strategically minded Republicans voted for Clinton in Texas to give her a crucial primary victory there: Clinton received roughly 119,000 GOP votes in Texas, according to exit polls, and she beat Obama by about 101,000 votes.

Not everyone casting ballots for Clinton did so primarily to sink her, however. Brent Henslee, 33, a Republican who works at a radio station in Waco, Texas, wanted to keep Clinton in the race to expose more about Obama, whom he sees as more "fluff than substance."

"I'm not buying into all the Obama-mania, is the main reason I did it," he said. "A lot of these people don't know a thing about this guy and they're crazy about him. And I thought that maybe keeping Hillary alive will just shed some more light on the guy."

Of the nine remaining major contests, four - Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Oregon, and South Dakota - have "closed" primaries, which means only Democrats can participate.

If Republicans and conservative independents continue their tactical voting, it may be more likely in Indiana, Montana, and Puerto Rico, which allow anyone to vote, and possibly in North Carolina and West Virginia, which open their primaries to Democrats and independent voters.

"If you are a Republican you could pull a Democrat ballot and vote for the Democrat presidential candidate you think will stand the least chance of beating McCain in the fall general election," the assistant editor of the Greene County Daily World, in southwestern Indiana, wrote in a blog post earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Clinton, despite trailing Obama in delegates, is projecting confidence about her chances as the nomination race careens toward the April 22 Pennsylvania primary. The morning after her big wins in Ohio and Texas, she was asked on Fox News whether she had a message for Limbaugh.

"Be careful what you wish for, Rush," she said with a grin.

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.

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FCC insider: This place is hell; silent protest planned

A Federal Communications Commission employee called me on Friday and said that this Tuesday, the third anniversary of Kevin Martin's tenure as Chair of the FCC, at least some staff will arrive at work dressed in black. A "silent but expressive protest" is what they're calling the move. What for? I asked. "Because this place is hell," came the reply.

Some background: Last week Ars Technica published my story about how John Dingell's House Energy and Commerce Committee has demanded detailed FCC records related to over a dozen super-sensitive FCC issues and policies. We're talking e-mails, personnel records, letters of inquiry, meeting minutes, the works.

Shortly after the piece appeared that I got this e-mail: "In regard to Dingell's latest investigatory letter sent to the FCC March 12," it began, "just heard from some old colleagues at the FCC that they are all happily working on meeting the requests in this letter. And that the FCC staff are all going to be wearing black on Tuesday, March 18, as a sign of protest on the third anniversary of Martin being Chairman."

I was skeptical, and wrote back asking if this e-mailer could provide me with the name of at least one of these staffers. Soon I got a name and some contact info. I did some background work and requested an interview. The individual in question called two hours later. I asked some pretty detailed questions of this person, who requested anonymity. After our conversation, I came away convinced that this is on the level.

A super-politicized environment

It appears that a critical mass of FCC grunts are sick of what they experience as a super-politicized work life in which just about anything that they want to do has to get the go-ahead from the top, that being Kevin Martin. "Nothing happens in the Commission without the approval of the Chairman's office," my source told me. "It is incredible. We have become so political."

Do you have any sense of the logic of these directives from the Chair? I asked. "Nope," came the reply. "It seems as random as he got up this morning and ate his breakfast and just decided to do it."

Why are FCC employees upset about this? Not because they disagree with Kevin Martin's perspective on this or that FCC issue, but because, according to my source, he and his top subordinates demand that staff skip proper procedures and leapfrog various rules, even Congressional mandated rules, on a day-to-day level.

"In the past I may or may not have agreed with the outcome, but at least the proper procedures were followed. Now they tell us 'what are the media reform groups going to do: file a class action lawsuit? Just do it.' But ethically I have to sleep at night. It's not the decision, it's how the decision is reached. The situation has become arbitrary and capricious."

We talked about some specific examples. My source doesn't want them published for fear that agency top brass will trace this interview to them. But I've run into possible Kevin Martin-style micro-management in the past. Last summer I attended an FCC Consumer Advisory Council meeting on the DTV transition. Shortly afterwards I got a tip that the FCC had told members of the council not to talk to the press, but to route the query directly to the FCC. It came from a very credible person, so I called the Commission.

Someone called me back and said my source had got it all wrong. The directive was about helping the public with the logistics of filing comments with the FCC. "It wasn't in the context of having no discussions with the press," I was told. 'Yeah, right,' I thought at the time.

The most formidable whistle blower I've encountered is former FCC attorney and now law professor Adam Candeub. Two years ago Candeub straight out told the press that a report arguing that locally owned TV stations broadcast more local news "was stopped in its tracks because it was not the way the agency wanted to go." The study's conclusions obviously implied that retaining some of the FCC's media ownership caps might help those local TV stations survive.

When the FCC's Inspector General released a report exonerating the agency of meddling with the report, I interviewed Candeub, who called the audit "skewed." "Chairman Martin should be engaged in creating safeguards and processes to allow objective media research to flourish at the FCC," Candeub told me. "I worry that he's just too much of a partisan figure to be serious about such an endeavor." Now Congress wants the Commission to hand over all documents related to that audit in less than two weeks.

It's funny. Call me innocent and naive, but whenever I listen or watch Kevin Martin talk, he seems like a really nice guy. Soft-spoken, a little geeky and nervous, sometimes he speaks his words so quietly and fast that he stumbles over them. Compared to his sometimes swaggering predecessor Michael Powell, Martin comes off as self-effacing and modest.

But that's not how my dressed-in-black source sees him. "I am not a disgruntled employee," I was told. "I love my job. But this situation has become unbearable. We will not play this game. I have to sleep at night."

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Fed takes boldest action since the Depression to rescue US mortgage industry

The US Federal Reserve has taken the boldest action since the 1930s, accepting $200bn of housing debt as collateral to prevent an implosion of the mortgage finance industry and head off a full-blown economic crisis.

The Fed's in a desperate race with spectre of collapse

Gold hits $1,000 on flight from papet currencies

Read more by Ambrose Evans Pritchard

The Bank of England, the key European central banks, and the Bank of Canada all joined in a co-ordinated move with a mix of policies to halt the dowward spiral in the credit markets, expanding on the "shock and awe" tactics used late last year.

Emergency action was co-ordinated by Ben Bernanke [right], Donald Kohn [top], and Mark Carney after problems emerged

The Fed's dramatic step came after an emergency conference call by governors on Monday night. It followed the melt-down of the US chartered agencies -- Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other lenders -- which together guarantee 60pc of the entire US home loan market. Fannie Mae's share price fell 19pc in panic trading on Monday after Barron's magazine said it may need a rescue package.

"The agency crisis was a Tsunami event," said Tim Bond, global strategist at Barclays Capital.

"The market was starting to question the solvency of bodies that stand at the top of the credit pile. These agencies together wrap or insure $6 trillion of mortgages. They cannot be allowed to fail because it would cause a financial disaster. The fact that this sector has blown up has caught everybody's attention in Washington," he said.

Anna Schwartz blames Fed for sub-prime crisis

Great Depression drives Bernanke's rescue

FTSE 100 falls as economic fears escalate

The Fed action set off a powerful relief rally, lifting the Dow Jones index over 340 points in early trading. Both US and European equities have been hovering on key support lines in recent days, threatening to break down through 18-month lows in a second, brutal leg to the bear market.

Stress indicators across almost all parts of the global credit system fell from extreme levels on the Fed news. The CDX and iTraxx Europe indexes that serve as a default barometer for corporate bonds retreated from record highs, although it is too early to judge whether the latest action will start to thaw the credit freeze. The stock market rally after the last central bank intervention in December fizzled out after just one day.

"This is not going to be enough," said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas.

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"The Fed is doing absolutely the right thing by soaking up mortgage debt that nobody else wants. This will have an impact on spreads, but we're seeing the deflation of a major bubble. The Fed is still going to have to cut interest rates by 75 basis points next week," he said.

It is a ground-breaking move for the Fed to accept mortgage collateral, even if the debt is theoretically 'AAA-grade' debt. The Fed is constrained by Article 13 of the Federal Reserve Act from buying mortgage bonds outright, but it can achieve a similar effect by letting banks roll over collateral indefinitely. The European Central Bank is already doing this, shielding Dutch, Spanish, German, and some British banks from the full impact of the credit crunch.

The Fed is to create a new facility that allows banks to swap their mortgage bonds for US Treasuries. It is a well-targeted "sterilized" move to avoid adding fuel to inflationary fire. It follows the Fed's separate pledge last Friday to add up to $200bn in liquidity.

The Bank of England also announced that it was widening the range of elligible collateral as it offers £10bn of three-month loans, saying pressures in the money markets "have recently increased again." The ECB and the Swiss have boosted swap agreements with the Fed to provide $30bn and $6bn respectively in dollar liquidity to their own lenders.

Bernard Connolly, global strategist at Banque AIG, said the Fed action may help calm the markets for now, but it cannot solve the root problem of eroded of bank capital.

"There is the risk of a very damaging credit contraction. We face the most serious global crisis since the Great Depression. But this time at least the North American central banks are doing their best to stop it spreading to the real economy," he said.

The emergency actions appear to have been co-ordinated by the Fed's top two figures, Ben Bernanke and Donald Kohn, working closely with the Bank of Canada's Mark Carney. "We should be thankful that we have people in charge who appreciate the gravity of the situation," said Mr Connolly.

The travails at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- once rock-solid institutions -- had combined in a deadly cocktail with a fresh wave of panic over the solvency of the investment banks with heavy exposure to sub-prime debt.

Bear Stearns was forced to deny reports that it was running out of capital and may seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The spreads measuring default risk on its debt rocketed from 246 to 792 on Monday.

Mr Bond said the mortgage agencies may ultimately need to be nationalized. Fannie Mae has already seen its stock price drop 70pc since October at a cost of $50bn in market value, even though it has an implicit federal guarantee. "There is going to have to be a very big bail-out," he said.

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White House: Hard drives tossed

By Pete Yost, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON — Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.

The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.

"When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction," the White House said in a sworn declaration filed with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola.

It has been the goal of a White House Office of Administration "refresh program" to replace one-third of its workstations every year in the Executive Office of the President, according to the declaration.

Some, but not necessarily all, of the data on old hard drives is moved to new computer hard drives, the declaration added.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: President | Executive Office | White House Office of Administration | Facciola

In proposing an e-mail recovery plan Tuesday, Facciola expressed concern that a large volume of electronic messages may be missing from White House computer servers, as two private groups that are suing the White House allege.

Facciola proposed the drastic approach of going to individual workstations of White House computer users after the White House disclosed in January that it recycled its computer backup tapes before October 2003. Recycling — taping over existing data — raises the possibility that any missing e-mails may not be recoverable.

At a House committee hearing last month, a computer expert who previously worked at the White House called the e-mail system "primitive" and said it was set up in a way that created a high risk that data would be lost from White House servers where it was being archived.

Under pressure to provide details about its computer system, the White House told the congressional committee that it never completed work that began in 2003 on a planned records management and e-mail archiving system. The White House canceled the project in late 2006 and says it is still working on a new version.

In the absence of a permanent archiving system, the White House has been archiving e-mails on White House servers since early in the administration.

The White House says it does not know if any e-mails are missing, but is looking into the matter.

It would be costly and time-consuming for the White House to institute an e-mail retrieval program that entails pulling data off each individual workstation, the court papers filed Friday state.

Original here

The Origin of Obama's Pastor Problem

In Philadelphia Obama called for blacks and whites to move beyond the "racial stalemate"

Long before the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright became instant hits on YouTube and talk-show fodder for the cable news channels, Barack Obama knew he had a preacher problem. On the eve of launching his campaign for the White House in February 2007, Obama abruptly withdrew an invitation to Wright to deliver the invocation at his announcement speech in Springfield, Ill. Wright had been Obama's pastor for nearly 20 years. He had brought Obama into the church, helped him find his faith in God, officiated at Obama's wedding and baptized both his children. But Wright had also said a lot of incendiary things from his pulpit about America over the years, things that would be awkward to explain away for a politician hoping to unite the country and become the first African-American President of the United States.

For a year, Obama didn't have to explain his relationship with Wright; he didn't even have to deliver a speech outlining his views on race relations. After all, one of the animating forces behind Obama's campaign was the notion that he, and we, had somehow transcended the old racial divisions in America, that he wasn't "the black candidate" for President but a presidential candidate whose race was only part of his much broader appeal. Then on March 13, video clips emerged of Wright in earlier sermons, shouting "God damn America!" and calling 9/11 a case of "America's chickens ... coming home to roost." It became a story that threatened to capsize Obama's front-running campaign with the speed of a Wall Street bankruptcy. Obama issued a statement denouncing Wright's comments but soon realized he had to do more. And so he ordered his staff to make arrangements for him to give the speech — the speech he'd been turning over in his mind for much of his adult life. "There wasn't a discussion," says spokesman Robert Gibbs. "He made a decision." Obama went home to Chicago that night, and after his wife and two daughters were asleep, he started composing.

The speech he delivered at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia was an artfully reasoned treatise on race and rancor in America, the most memorable speech delivered by any candidate in this campaign and one that has earned Obama comparisons to Lincoln, Kennedy and King. But that doesn't mean it will succeed in its more prosaic mission of appealing to voters who have their doubts about Obama and his preacher. It left unanswered a crucial question: What attracted Obama to Wright in the first place?

The Preacher and the Pol
When Obama joined Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988, the Afrocentric church and its pastor held particular appeal to a 27-year-old son of an African father he barely knew and a white mother from Kansas. Obama was searching for an identity and a community, and he found both at Trinity. And he found a spiritual guide in Wright.

Much of white America is unfamiliar with the milieu of the black church. When clips from Wright's sermons began circulating, many whites heard divisive, angry, unpatriotic pronouncements on race, class and country. Many blacks, on the other hand, heard something more familiar: righteous anger about oppression and deliberate hyperbole in laying blame, which are common in sermons delivered in black churches every Sunday. The Rev. Terri Owens, dean of students at the University of Chicago Divinity School, says the black church tradition has its roots in the era of slavery, when African Americans held services under trees, far from their white masters. "Churches have always been the place where black people could speak freely," she says. "They were the only institutions they could own and run by themselves."

In his books, Obama says he might not have become a Christian — his mother was a skeptical secularist and his absent father an atheist — if not for the special character of the black church. "Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation," he writes in The Audacity of Hope. It also matched his intellectual curiosity. "Perhaps it was out of this ... grounding of faith in struggle that the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts."

That desire for a more challenging faith helps explain the appeal of Trinity, despite its potential for controversy. The church, which has ministered to poor South Side families and Oprah Winfrey alike, isn't fringe, but neither is it a likely home for someone plotting a political career in Chicago. "If you're black and you're trying to get ahead in politics, you're not going to join Trinity," says Dwight Hopkins, a Trinity member who is also a professor at U. of C.'s Divinity School. "Not because it's radical — it isn't radical in its context. But it would be safer to join a North Side ecumenical church — the sort of place where people are quiet. They stand up, sit down, listen and leave."

As Obama's political career blossomed, he could have quietly left Trinity for one of those more staid black churches, but he chose to stay. In his speech, he said he disagreed with Wright strongly, and yet he didn't leave the church (or even criticize his pastor until Wright's sermons became a campaign issue). He didn't explain why he stayed, but by trying to show black and white resentment as the backdrop for Wright's comments, Obama suggested that his response to controversy isn't to walk out of the room but to try to understand what's fueling the fire. He also drew a distinction between political advice and spiritual guidance, arguing that many Americans know what it's like to disagree with something their pastor or priest or rabbi says.

By asking voters to understand the context of Wright's anger, though, Obama is counting on voters to accept nuance in an arena that almost always rewards simplicity over complexity. Politicians tend to offer deliberately banal choices: Either we move forward or we fall backward, either we let the economy falter or we help it grow, either we succumb to our enemies or we defeat them — the choice is up to you, America! Obama's formulation was different. Explicitly asking Americans to grapple with racial divisions and then transcend them — that's a bolder, riskier request.

After he delivered his speech, Obama found his wife Michelle backstage. She was weeping. He shared a quiet, emotional moment with her. Then Obama was all business again. "What's next?" he asked, as if anyone knew the answer.

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Will Rush Limbaugh Be Indicted for Voter Fraud?

As Ohio election officials investigate illegal crossover voting in the 2008 primary, questions arise on Limbaugh's role.

As the board of election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where Cleveland is located, launches an investigation into illegal crossover voting in the state's 2008 presidential primary, a big open question remains unanswered: Will county officials go after the ringleaders of apparently illegal electioneering where thousands of Republican voters swore -- under penalty of law -- allegiance to the Democratic Party in order to vote for Hillary Clinton?

In case you missed it, Rush Limbaugh, the nation's top-rated talk radio host, was urging Republicans in Texas and Ohio to skip their party's primary on March 4 and instead cast a vote for Hillary Clinton in order to prolong the fight between her and Barack Obama. And that Tuesday, as media in both states reported, thousands of Republicans did just what Limbaugh and others had suggested -- they changed parties to vote for Clinton.

"I want Hillary to stay in this, Laura," Limbaugh told Laura Ingraham on Feb. 29, near the start of his Hillary crusade. "This is too good a soap opera. We need Barack Obama bloodied up politically, and it's obvious that the Republicans are not going to do it and don't have the stomach for it, as you probably know."

And on Wednesday, the day after the Ohio primary, Fox News asked Clinton if she owed Limbaugh a thank you. "Be careful what you wish for, Rush," she replied. Later that day, Limbaugh played the Fox tape on his show and said, "How do you interpret this, folks? She could have said thank you. She could have said thank you! In fact, I was expecting in her victory speech last night to be thanked.

"I helped give Mrs. Clinton the biggest and happiest moment and night of the campaign season so far, maybe her life, and she tells me, "Be careful what you wish for, Rush"? Why, that sounds like a threat, does it not? I've got a Democrat presidential candidate threatening your host. Why, I am stunned! After all I did ..."

While this all makes for great talk radio and sounds like fun, there is one catch: What Limbaugh encouraged Republican voters to do in Ohio was a fifth-degree felony in that state, punishable with a $2,500 fine and six to 12 months in jail. That is because in order to change party affiliation in Ohio, voters have to fill out a form swearing allegiance to that party's principles "under penalty of election falsification."

On Thursday, March 20, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the "Cuyahoga County Board of Election has launched an investigation that could lead to criminal charges against voters who maliciously switched parties for the March 4 presidential primary." According to the report, "One voter scribbled the following addendum to his pledge as a new Democrat: "For one day only."

"Such an admission amounts to voter fraud," the report continued, attributing that conclusion to BOE member Sandy McNair, a Democrat. The report said the four-member board -- two Democrats and two Republicans -- had yet to vote on whether it would issue subpoenas, although Ohio's secretary of state, Democrat Jennifer Brunner, is empowered to cast tie-breaking votes when the BOE is deadlocked.

In 2008, 2.22 million Ohioans voted in the Democratic primary, compared to 1.27 million in 2000, according to unofficial results released by Brunner's office. In contrast, 1.01 million Ohioans voted in the 2008 Republican primary, compared to nearly 918,000 people in 2004.

Both Ohio's secretary of state and attorney general, both Democrats, were reluctant to embrace the prospect of voter fraud prosecutions.

"Secretary of State Brunner has not been contacted by anyone regarding the prosecution of alleged improper crossover voting," Brunner spokesman Jeff Ortega said. "Prosecution of such activities is the exclusive domain of the county prosecutor or the Ohio attorney general."

"We will not make a blanket statement that we would never pursue a case such as that, but it would be our position that a case such as that would be very hard to prosecute," said Ted Hart, spokesman for Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, who added that a senior attorney in his office said it would be difficult to ascertain voters' motives on particular days. "The county prosecutor would have the first right of refusal."

But Michael Slater of Project Vote, a nonpartisan group that designs voter registration drives for low-income people, said GOP meddling in the Ohio Democratic Primary was a clear-cut example of fraudulent voting, which is how Republicans have defined the issue in recent years, as GOP advocates have urged state legislatures and Congress to adopt anti-fraud measures such as tougher voter ID laws.

"Here we have a real instance of spurring people on to engage in illegal election activities with a real intent to affect the outcome," Slater said. "That is voter fraud. People were encouraged to break the law. They had to declare allegiance to a political party and sign a document under penalty of perjury. Intent is what matters in voter fraud."

For years, Republicans have literally made a federal case of voter fraud. The Bush Justice Department fired U.S. attorneys who would not prosecute cases of people who GOP politicos believed were impersonating voters to help Democratic candidates.

Voting rights groups such as ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which registers millions of low-income people in presidential election years, have been prosecuted by U.S. attorneys for voter fraud -- even after ACORN followed the law and alerted the FBI about mistakes made by its volunteers.

After 2004, Republican-controlled legislatures in Florida and Ohio passed laws, now overturned, curtailing voter registration drives under the guise of fighting voter fraud. Meanwhile, numerous states have passed new and tougher voter I.D. laws, all aimed at stopping people who purportedly were impersonating voters.

"I think this is Rush and others inspiring people to commit voter fraud," Slater said. "They should be brought under investigation."

AlterNet is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed by its writers are their own.

Original here

"So?"

Original here

Cuyahoga County Board of Elections begins investigation of primary crossover voters

Joe Guillen

Plain Dealer Reporter

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has launched an investigation that could lead to criminal charges against voters who maliciously switched parties for the March 4 presidential primary.

Elections workers will look for evidence that voters lied when they signed affidavits pledging allegiance to their new party. And at least one board member, Sandy McNair, a Democrat, wants the county prosecutor to review the findings.

But it remained unclear Wednesday whether the four-member board will agree to pursue prosecution. A 2-2 vote would mean that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, would have to break the tie.

The investigation comes 10 days after The Plain Dealer reported that more than 16,000 Cuyahoga County Republicans changed parties before voting March 4.

After the election, some local Republicans admitted they changed parties only to influence which Democrat would face presumed Republican nominee John McCain in November. One voter scribbled the following addendum to his pledge as a new Democrat: "For one day only."

Such an admission amounts to voter fraud, said McNair, who pushed for the investigation.

"I'm looking for evidence," McNair said. "I'm not interested in a witch hunt. But I am interested in holding people accountable, whether they're Democrat or Republican."

Lying on the signed statement is a fifth-degree felony, punishable by six to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine.

Board members expect a report on the county's crossover voters on March 31. The board has the power to issue subpoenas, forcing voters to testify about their intent on election day, McNair said.

Board Chairman Jeff Hastings said the board would have to vote on whether to issue subpoenas.

McNair and the board's other Democrat, Inajo Davis Chappell, both favor issuing subpoenas. The board's two Republicans, however, weren't yet on board with the idea.

Board member Rob Frost, who also serves as the county GOP chairman, had urged Republicans not to change parties for malicious reasons. On Wednesday, he said he hopes the findings from an investigation will be used to prevent similar problems in future elections.

"I haven't seen anything that gives rise, in my mind, to a criminal investigation," Frost said.

Hastings said the investigation's results on March 31 will determine his preferred course of action.

Patrick Gallaway, Brunner's spokesman, said the board hasn't contacted her about prosecuting crossover voters.

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Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig Bets 'Wikipedia' Approach Will Transform Congress

Stanford law professor Larry Lessig plans to use collaborative software to change Congress.
Courtesy Larry Lessig

A prominent Stanford law professor on Thursday launched an ambitious project that aims to use collaborative software to harness the extraordinary levels of pent-up political energy and dissatisfaction that voters have shown over the past two years with their members of congress.

The Change Congress project's first mission is to diminish the influence of money in the legislative body by influencing the outcome of the 2008 election campaigns of 67 members of congress which are up for grabs. As the Change Congress project founder Larry Lessig noted in the project's launch Thursday afternoon, there haven't been so many seats open up for challenge in more than a decade.

Lessig, known for his decade-long role in trying to loosen the entertainment industry's vise-like grip on popular culture by shaping copyright law, is betting that the energy and dissatisfaction exhibited by voters against the status-quo in Washington DC, and the emergence of collaborative software that enables vast numbers of geographically-dispersed citizens to become politically active on their own schedule, will enable a new kind of transparency and accountability in political campaigns.

"The problem we face is ... the problem of crony capitalism using money to capture government," he said on Monday during the launch of his project in Washington, DC. "The challenge is whether in fact we can change this. The political experts tell you that it can't be done, that process always win over substance."

Lessig and Joe Trippi hope that their project will bring the beginnings of this change by getting voters to challenge their members of congress to commit to Change Congress' four pledges. The project will rely on engaged voters to record and map both the responses by, and the positions of candidates who are running for open seats. The idea is to make what seems like an abstract idea visually tangible through a Google mash-up.

The professor wants legislators to promise to do four things which he says will reduce the influence of money on policymaking: To promise not to accept money from lobbyists and political action committees; support public financing of elections; commit to passing legislation to permanently ban the funneling of money to their districts' projects of questionable worth; and to commit to "compel transparency in the functioning of congress."

Candidates can signal their intentions to take any one or all of the pledges by filling out a form at the organization's web site, which then formulates code that provides a graphic that the candidates can then place on their election campaign web sites.

The Change Congress project hopes that citizens will track congressional candidates' positions on these issues by reporting on them at the web site. The project will then map these results onto a Google map. Writing in The Huffington Post this morning, Lessig explained:

... once this wiki-army has tracked the positions of all Members of Congress, we will display a map of reform, circa 2008: Each Congressional district will be colored in either (1) dark red, or dark blue, reflecting Republicans or Democrats who have taken a pledge, (2) light red or light blue, tracking Republicans and Democrats who have not taken our pledge, but who have signaled support for planks in the Change-Congress platform, or (3) for those not taking the pledge and not signaling support for a platform of reform, varying shades of sludge, representing the percentage of the Member's campaign contributions that come from PACs or lobbyists.

...

What this map will reveal, we believe, is something that not many now actually realize: That the support for fundamental reform is broad and deep. That recognition in turn will encourage more to see both the need for reform and the opportunity that this election gives us to achieve it. Apathy is driven by the feeling that nothing can be done. This Change Congress map will demonstrate that in fact, something substantial can be done. Now.

Lessig says that the project will, down the road, model itself on Emily's List in that it will recruit contributors to finance candidates who make reforming congress a central part of their campaign.

When the Democrats re-took congress in 2006, they won on a platform built by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's mantra of being against the Republicans' culture of corruption.

Yet the Democratic-led congress' current job approval rating is in the low twenties. This apparent dissatisfaction suggests that a large body of people might be ready and interested in volunteering for the Change Congress project.

So far, senator Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic nomination for president has surged on this theme of bringing change to Washington, DC. The Illinois senator's seemingly magical combination of inspirational rhetoric, off-line community-organization strategies, combined with the smart design of online social networking tools have fostered high levels of engagement.

The question facing the Change Congress campaign is whether Lessig and his colleagues at the Sunlight Foundation can motivate a bi-partisan electorate to become similarly engaged without -- at first at least -- the funds and advertising budget that's powering the Obama campaign.

In an interview, Lessig says that for now, he's going to focus on motivating people to volunteer their time to research members of congress' positions on transparency, accountability and public financing of campaigns.

"If you give them a big vision, and talk about all the good things that will come out of it, then I think a lot of people will be willing to do the wiki work [at home] in their pajamas," he says. "The hard thing is getting them to go to rallies and getting them to call their congressman."

Lessig says that his goal is to raise $500,000 to fund the project for the year by May 1. He hopes to hire a couple of staffers in the San Francisco bay area and an executive director.

The project has bipartisan appeal -- Republicans took over congress in 1994 with similar promises of sweeping change. As National Journal has thoroughly documented, many of those promises were not fulfilled.

This time, it could be different -- now that an engaged electorate has software and an open reporting system to hold their members' feet to the fire.

Update: In answer to the reader below's question on what happens if a member of congress takes a pledge and doesn't follow through, Lessig says that he anticipates that each district will have voters who will monitor their members' activities and report on them.

"If you violate the pledge, you've created a huge opportunity for people to attack you," he says.

Original here

Bush Hands Out Jobs. Overseas

So, Bush's Defense Department gives a massive tanker contract to Northrop Grumman and the European firm EADS. In doing so, it shunned Boeing, which bid on the contract.

This action is perverse on so many levels, it's hard to know where to begin.

In handing out the contract—worth between $40 billion to $100 billion—for the construction of Air Force refueling tankers, the Bush administration claimed that 25,000 jobs would be created in Alabama and other southern states.

That assertion obscures several key points: Far more jobs—44,000—would have been created had Boeing received the contract, with more than 300 suppliers in 40 states benefiting, according to Boeing. At Boeing plants, those jobs would be highly paid and the workers would be members of unions. The 25,000 jobs Bush claims the contract creates involve far lower-paying jobs assembling parts made overseas. And they're not union jobs.

Since he's taken office, many of Bush's attacks on unions have been overt. But far more insidious are moves like this one, that surreptiously undermine the fundamental premise of the union movement: People who work should earn wages that support themselves and their families.

And look who was instrumental to pushing through this un-American deal: the senator from Arizona, John McCain. Time magazine reports McCain wrote letters and pushed the Pentagon to change the bidding process so that EADS's government subsidies could not be considered when deciding to whom to award the contract. This placed Boeing, which receives no subsidies, at a clear disadvantage and conflicts with U.S. trade policy.

Defense expenditures are supposed to comply with federal Buy American law provisions, which require purchasing certain products from American companies when possible. But this administration has granted more waivers of the Buy American provisions than any administration in history.

Time also reveals that two current advisers to McCain worked on the deal for Northrop and EADS as lobbyists. They gave up their lobbying jobs when they came to work for McCain’s campaign, but a third lobbyist, former Rep. Tom Loeffler (R-Texas), lobbied for EADS while serving as McCain’s national finance chairman. OpenSecrets reports that McCain received $28,000 in contributions from EADS’s American employees, including CEO Ralph Crosby, Senior VP Sam Adcock and lobbyists representing EADS.

In Seattle, where much of the work for Boeing takes place, workers are outraged. Says Garth Fluart, member of Machinists (IAM) Local 751:

I do not understand why American work in a time of a recession is getting sent overseas. It doesn't make any sense at all to me, my family, my friends that are overseas fighting a war right now in Iraq. And for them to say this is going to be a good thing for jobs in Alabama. Are you kidding me?

Fluart and other members of Local 751 start each union meeting in South Seattle by pledging allegiance to the flag.

Along with the Machinists, members of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) also work at Boeing. Says IFPTE President Gregory Junemann:

By turning our backs on American workers, we have certainly missed a prime opportunity to reinvest American taxpayer dollars in our own workforce. Our tax dollars are still at work, but in this circumstance, they are working to the benefit of foreign workers, not U.S. workers.

IAM and IFPTE combined represent 55,000 workers at Boeing.

Boeing would have performed much of the tanker work in Everett, Wash., and Wichita, Kan., and used Pratt & Whitney engines built in Connecticut.

Richard Spevak, a member of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace/IFPTE Local 2001 (SPEEA) in Wichita, speaks for many working people when he says:

I’m so mad I could spit. As an American taxpayer and worker, this is the most blatantly stupid thing our government has done. I feel truly betrayed by the U.S. government.

SPEEA members played a big role in designing the Boeing tanker.

Boeing plans to formally challenge the decision. The company said it will ask the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to review the contract award.

UAW Vice President Jimmy Settles, who directs the union’s Aerospace Department, points out that neither EADS nor Northrop Grumman has ever built a tanker with a refueling boom. Boeing, on the other hand, has been building refueling tankers for the U.S. military for more than 75 years.

So once again, the Bush administration has taken a major action based not on facts, but on extremist ideology.

The AFL-CIO Executive Council is calling on Congress to defund the contract, as well as conduct a full investigation into the circumstances under which the contract was awarded to a foreign contractor. The Executive Council also urges all the presidential candidates to condemn the contract and call for it to be overturned. We also have an action here, where you can send a message to your representatives in Congress, urging them to overturn this decision.

Original here