Last night we went to the Obama volunteer organizing meeting here in State College, PA. And everything you have heard is true. I wish I had pictures, but words will have to do.

My husband just called from the paper. Mike Joseph, the CDT political reporter, has a story today. Obama is coming to Penn State. Sunday. He's scheduled to speak at 1:30. The gates open at 11:30. I'll be there early.  

Sorry for the short diary, but just wanted to let anyone and everyone in Central PA know he was coming here. I think it is important to be there and make it huge! He's going to be speaking on the Old Main Lawn, which is outside.

I was reading our local paper, the Centre Daily Times, online. The CDT is in State College, PA, home of Penn State and an island of purple in the sea of red that is the middle of Pennsylvania. The article was a short one on the opening of the local Clinton headquarters here. It was a good, well written little story which compared the opening with that of the local Obama headquarters two nights ago.

The CDT, part of the McClatchy chain, has a comments section and so I started reading those and then came across one that really startled me.

Read it on the jump and tell me what to make of it.

How many of us have or had a beloved and admired grandparent or great aunt or uncle or even parent who was loving, generous, compassionate, and occasionally used racial and/or ethnic slurs or stereotypes? How is it throwing them "under the bus" to acknowledge that they were a product of their times?

When Obama talked about his grandmother's words hurting him, how is that "throwing her under a bus"?  Especially when it was the truth?

I have seen it in my own family....

It has come to my attention that a lot of Obama supporters aren't reading my diary at the top of the REC list because they assume that it is an attack. There have even been a few that have posted comments telling me to get a clue without obviously reading anything.

Please read it.

The diary fairly exhaustive review comparing the bills introduced by Clinton and by Obama for a single year, 2007, which demonstrates that Obama every bit as effective as Clinton in the Senate. It further shows, at least to me, that he is more visionary and a better leader. I posted my research as a diary here so that everyone supporting Obama could use the information to refute the "meme" that he is inexperienced, a lightweight, all talk and no action. I think it is fair to both candidates. But it is clear that without the hype, Obama is the superior choice.

Please feel free to repost the original diary anywhere you think it would help. Please direct people to the diary who have questions or doubts. This is too important to slide into oblivion. Remember please that this is just looking at one year to compare them, and not an exhaustive review of his entire career.

The next President is going to have some MAJOR challenges.
I refuse to buy into the hype, on either side, but especially on that of Obama.  However the "empty rhetoric" v. "history of accomplishments" arguments have prompted me to check it out on my own, not relying on any candidate's website, book, or worst of all supporters' diaries, like this one.

I went to the Library of Congress Website. The FACTS of what each did in the Senate last year sure surprised me. I'm sure they will surprise you, too. Whether you love or hate Hillary, you will be surprised. Whether you think Obama is the second coming of JFK or an inexperienced lightweight, you will surprised.  Go check out the Library of Congress Website. After spending some time there, it will be clear that there is really only one candidate would is ready to be the next president, even better than Gore. If you don't want to spend an hour or two doing research, then I'll tell you what I discovered on the jump.

Swiss Billionaire, Nicholas Hayek, announced yesterday that he chose George Clooney to sit the board of his new energy company, rather than Al Gore.

The company, which will develop environmentally friendly techniques for car motors, batteries and other devices, is aimed at reducing CO2-emissions in energy consumption, Hayek said in an interview with daily Berner Zeitung.

Now Clooney is a very good choice, but Al Gore would seem to the more logical selection, except for this:

"First I hesitated between Al Gore and Clooney," said Hayek. But he didn't chose Al Gore because it was still unclear whether he was running for presidency of the United States and therefore might have accepted the post as a mere public relations exercise, Hayek told the newspaper

And what about Hillary? On the jump.

Before all of those who have firmly committed to candidate jump on me for reading more into this than is there, let me be clear about where I stand. I will vote for whoever our nominee is. I have my second and third choices. But I firmly believe that Al Gore would be the best president at this time in our history. He may or may not run. He may or may not win. But he would be the best President right now. He has been against the war in Iraq from the start. He would bring the troops home now. He is in favor of single payer health care for all. And he would make the climate crisis priority one, as it should be.

And he has a blog. And he writes it himself. So that's where I looked to see if I could glean any insight into what he might be thinking. And look at what I found. Oh, you'll have to do the jump for that one.

How many current presidential candidates are raising millions of dollars to pay for advertising campaigns and flyers and marketing developed by political media consultants? That would be all of them. How many people hate political ads? That would be all of them.

How many current or potential presidential candidates were invited to speak to 1,200 who attended the 97th  annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers?  That would be one, AL GORE.

Yesterday, Gore posted three short videos on Current.com. Some viewing these seem to think that these are just not good enough for prime time and mean there is no way he is running. Today, according to the NYTimes, Gore was in Phoenix addressing "the largest gathering ever of an influential trade organization" on marketing. Things that make me go Hmmm?

My Friends,

We are causing our neighbors on the right much psychological pain. Almost unbearable pain. The emails Brandon of VoteVets.org and BrokenSkull have received and shared with us are dramatic evidence of the severe Cognitive Dissonance the truth about the war is causing them.

We who are not so emotionally or psychologically afflicted must find a way to neutralize this dissonance, to take away the pain, so that these suffering souls can more easily accept the truth, mend their ways, apologize for being horrible pigs, and get on with their lives. And maybe some of them will even vote for a Democrat next year.

Please come with me for more

I’ve been here since practically the beginning. Well since May 2003 anyway. And I just want to say to all the diarists warning that we must stop “the circular firing squad” and “stop eating our own”, calm down. It isn’t that bad. In fact it’s fine. It's all part of being politically active.

Things are so much nicer around here than "back the good old days." Trusted Users give donuts to trolls and they vanish. Back in my day we didn’t have donuts. We had to give the trolls recipes instead. Back in my day everybody hated John Kerry and someone was always sticking a fork in him. And in Lieberman, too. Every Dean gaffe or Wesley staffing change brought out the  worst in everyone. And few people had anything nice to say about John Edwards, the son of a mill worker.

But you know what, it didn’t make any difference at all in the end. We all came here for news and information and ideas. By the time the convention rolled around everyone was a big John Kerry fan. Huge Fan. Loved the man. And we found out how powerful we really are.

How does this happen? Mom explains on the jump.

Dear Mr. Gore,

I would like to invite you to come to the corner of Sierra Dr. and Cornwall Rd. in State College, Pennsylvania, any weekday morning at about 8:15.

Every morning all of the moms and dads on the block walk down to the corner to put our kids on the bus. We are mostly in our 40s,  mostly Catholic, comfortably middle class parents. Politically we are Democrats, Independents, and hard-core Republicans. Some of us have family members in the military. Some of us have kids with special needs.

Read the rest to get to the good stuff

A while back I got a phone call from Al Franken's senate campaign for a donation. I get at least three phone calls a day from candidates or committees looking for money. Thank God for caller ID. Typically I give via ActBlue.com to candidates I read about here or to local candidates. But heck, I thought, Al Franken is running against Norm Coleman, so I took the call.

More coming up

Remember the old days when the Dean campaign would bring out the bat? Anytime they attacked Howard Dean, we would just laugh and bring out the bat and raise a shit load of money. Money is the only thing people like Carville understand. Plus a bat is a nice way to say "Thanks Gov. Dean. Job well done!"

So click over to the Thank you Dr. Dean bat, and kick in a few dollars. The number of contributors is way more important now than the amount we raise. This is a way to show Carville, Rahm and the rest that we have Dean's back. Just a warning shot over the bow. I really wish we could all celebrate and congratulate each other and be one big happy family. Maybe a bat will make Carville shut up.

So give a buck or two or five to say thanks to Dr. Dean and to let Carville and the rest know where we stand.

I was writing my letter to ABC and all the honchos there, and it occured to me that this kind of manipulation of the facts and exploitation of people's grief and fear is very similar to what Hitler did during his rise to power. Is this the beginning of American's Nuremburg Rallies?

I am also increasingly worried but also deeply offended by this administrations attempts to label me and my felllow Democrats as some kind of Nazi appeasers.

So I looked up Nuremburg Rallies on Google. Guess what I found.

Just checked opensecrets.org. Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple and the largest shareholder of Disney -- which owns ABC, gave $26,700 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on June 29, 2006. I would guess that Mr. Jobs has a HUGE interest in winning back the House this November and would be willing to help us out is stopping the broadcast of the anti-Democratic Propaganda piece, The Path to 9/11.

This diary has all the contact info for Jobs.

If you contact him, please be nice, since he's definitely on the good side. All he needs is a little education maybe, about why this thing is so bad.

Everywhere I look I see references to stories about George Allen's use of the racial slur "macaca" or "macaque" in the Washington Post or CNN or somewhere, but when I check the source, the by-line is almost always Larry O'Dell, AP Richmond Virginia. Larry O'Dell is the Associated Press writer who is writing the breaking stories.

If we want to get to the source of what appears to be the MSM's soft treatment of this slur, buying into -- or at least not questioning -- Allen's lies and excuses, we need to contact AP in Virginia. I'll post the contact info below. You can make a difference in how the MSM reports this story by informing this guy, if you do it right.

We've won the war on terror, according to an article by James Fallows in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, based on interviews with sixty terrorism experts. They told Fallows that basically we've broken al-Qaeda as an effective terrorist organization. But by continuing to engage in a "Global War on Terror," we are actually hurting only ourselves, while strengthening what remains of al-Qaeda and encouraging start-up wannbe groups around the world. We must stop now and dramatically change how we characterize adn react to these groups. The biggest danger now in perpetuating this "War" is to ourselves.

The article is very long and only available online with a paid subscription, so I'll do my best to summarize Fallows' analysis below without quoting too much. I have posted a .pdf of the entire article here if you want to read the whole thing -- all 15 pages, and I strongly encourage everyone to do so. After reading this article, I can begin to see how the entire national conversation about Bush's "War on Terror" can be turned against him. My summary with extensive quotes and a few of my own thoughts below.