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out for the count .....

out for the count .....

Hillary Clinton has vowed to fight on in the contest to be the Democrats' presidential candidate, comparing herself to the film character Rocky. 

Speaking in Philadelphia, where the film Rocky was set, she said: "When it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit." 

Some senior Democrats have called for Mrs Clinton to quit the race. Rival Barack Obama has dismissed that idea. 

Meanwhile, likely Republican nominee John McCain is visiting Virginia. 

Clinton Will Fight 'Like Rocky'

fighting dirty for the greater good...

Democrats getting jittery about the alienating effects of the endless soap opera they call their campaign should buck up. These “hand-wringers,” as the Hillary strategist Harold Ickes calls them, are not seeing the larger picture.

Hillary is cruelly misunderstood, and she deserves more credit for her benevolence. Not only does she have a lot in common with Rocky, as she said Tuesday in Philadelphia, but she has a lot in common with another famous character — the Marschallin in Strauss’s bittersweet comic opera “Der Rosenkavalier.”

The Marschallin is a princess married to a Viennese field marshal who has a liaison dangereuse with a younger man, Count Octavian. Though she’s worried about her fleeting youth and the fickleness of men, she instructs the young man on the ways of love and then gracefully sets him free, allowing him to find happiness with young Sophie as a soaring waltz plays.

Whether or not she wins, Hillary has already given noble service as a sophisticated political tutor for Obama, providing her younger colleague with much-needed seasoning. Who else was going to toughen him up? Howard Dean? John Edwards? Dennis Kucinich?

the plot thickens...

Obama Calls Small-Town Pennsylvanians 'Bitter'

Wahington Post
By Perry Bacon Jr.
Sen. Hillary Clinton criticized Sen. Barack Obama for a comment the Illinois senator made at a fundraiser in San Francisco earlier this week in which he referred to voters in Pennsylvania as "bitter."

"Well, that's not my experience," Clinton told a crowd of several hundred at Drexel University. "As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient who are optimistic, who are positive ... they're working hard every day for a better future for themselves and their children. Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them, they need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them."

Obama, in remarks first reported on the Huffington Post today (with audio), said "you go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them."

"And they feel through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not," he added. "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

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Obama is the Sanjiah of political candidates.

He looks pretty good, sounds pretty good & has been HYPED to the Max by MSNBC/ NBC and CBS --- because the owners of those TV networks (GE & Westinghouse) plan to build 29 new nuclear power plants IF Obama is elected. (Obama voted FOR the Cheney Energy Bill & says he is pro-nuclear).

Same networks that slam & smear the Clintons everyday - all day long - because Clinton did not vote for the Cheney Energy Bill; says her Energy Plan does not include nuclear and if nuclear is going to be considered in the future it must be CHEAPER and they must solve the problem of disposing of the NUKE WASTE.

Posted by: elme | April 11, 2008 7:30 PM

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Voting on the Cheney Energy Bill:

Below is a couple of links to the way people voted in the Cheney Energy Bill... It makes interesting reading:

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open question


washington post

Democrat vote for and against the Cheney Energy Bill...

Yes Daniel Akaka, Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Jeff Bingaman, Robert Byrd, Maria Cantwell, Kent Conrad, Mark Dayton, Byron Dorgan, Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Daniel Inouye, Tim Johnson, Herb Kohl, Mary Landrieu, Carl Levin, Joseph Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, Barbara Mikulski, Ben Nelson, Barack Obama, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Kenneth Salazar, Debbie Stabenow

No Joseph Biden, Barbara Boxer, Thomas Carper, Hillary Clinton, Jon Corzine, Christopher Dodd, Russell Feingold, Dianne Feinstein, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Frank Lautenberg, Patrick Leahy, Patty Murray, Bill Nelson, Jack Reed, Harry Reid, Paul Sarbanes, Chuck Schumer, Ron Wyden

republicans 49 yes

No: Lincoln Chafee, Judd Gregg, Jon Kyl, Mel Martinez, John McCain, John Sununu

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The plot thickens... And the media is at the Nukular master control panel...

still bleeding but fighting...

Mrs. Clinton faces major challenges going forward: her campaign is essentially out of money, with unpaid bills piling up, and she faces growing frustration among some Democratic officials who would prefer her to end her campaign in recognition of Mr. Obama’s lead in the overall popular vote of the primaries and caucuses so far, as well as his continuing edge toward amassing the 2,025 delegates needed to secure the nomination.

With nearly 90 percent of the electoral precincts reporting, Mrs. Clinton had 55 percent of the vote to Mr. Obama’s 45 percent.

bruises...

April 25, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Self-Inflicted Confusion
By PAUL KRUGMAN

After Barack Obama’s defeat in Pennsylvania, David Axelrod, his campaign manager, brushed it off: “Nothing has changed tonight in the basic physics of this race.”

He may well be right — but what a comedown. A few months ago the Obama campaign was talking about transcendence. Now it’s talking about math. “Yes we can” has become “No she can’t.”

This wasn’t the way things were supposed to play out.

Mr. Obama was supposed to be a transformational figure, with an almost magical ability to transcend partisan differences and unify the nation. Once voters got to know him — and once he had eliminated Hillary Clinton’s initial financial and organizational advantage — he was supposed to sweep easily to the nomination, then march on to a huge victory in November.

Well, now he has an overwhelming money advantage and the support of much of the Democratic establishment — yet he still can’t seem to win over large blocs of Democratic voters, especially among the white working class.

As a result, he keeps losing big states. And general election polls suggest that he might well lose to John McCain.

What’s gone wrong?

According to many Obama supporters, it’s all Hillary’s fault. If she hadn’t launched all those vile, negative attacks on their hero — if she had just gone away — his aura would be intact, and his mission of unifying America still on track.

But how negative has the Clinton campaign been, really? Yes, it ran an ad that included Osama bin Laden in a montage of crisis images that also included the Great Depression and Hurricane Katrina. To listen to some pundits, you’d think that ad was practically the same as the famous G.O.P. ad accusing Max Cleland of being weak on national security.

It wasn’t. The attacks from the Clinton campaign have been badminton compared with the hardball Republicans will play this fall. If the relatively mild rough and tumble of the Democratic fight has been enough to knock Mr. Obama off his pedestal, what hope did he ever have of staying on it through the general election?

Let me offer an alternative suggestion: maybe his transformational campaign isn’t winning over working-class voters because transformation isn’t what they’re looking for.

From the beginning, I wondered what Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (waiting for to do what, exactly?) would mean to families troubled by lagging wages, insecure jobs and fear of losing health coverage. The answer, from Ohio and Pennsylvania, seems pretty clear: not much. Mrs. Clinton has been able to stay in the race, against heavy odds, largely because her no-nonsense style, her obvious interest in the wonkish details of policy, resonate with many voters in a way that Mr. Obama’s eloquence does not.