As for the Clintons' bid for a third term in office to extend their dynasty like the Bush dynasty -Americans should remember Bill Clinton was no great reformer & dropped the ball on the ' Rwanda Genocide ' and continued with the brutal sanctions on Iraq which led to the Unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Civilians & did not rein in Israel or end the Death Penalty in the US or reform the judiciary and end the racist policies which lead to a disproportionate number of African-Americans being arrested and incarcerated And he continued with the insane War on Drugs and did not push for legalization of Marijuana for instance -yet he is treated as if he had been the new FDR well it ain't true my friends he was just another "political animal" - so check out this article from TruthOut.ORG for instance as a reality check:
Obama vs. Billary By Scott Galindez t r u t h o u t
Thursday 24 January 2008
The race for the Democratic Party nomination for president has increasingly become a three-way race. The problem for John Edwards is he is no longer the third person in the race, Bill Clinton is.
... I am also puzzled as to why poor people think Bill Clinton was good for them. Clinton's domestic agenda was first announced as a gigantic jobs-creation program coupled with a determined effort to guarantee health care for all. The truth is, his focus on eliminating the budget deficit meant he did very little for the poor and working people in America. While he was much better than Reagan or Bush, there was definitely room for improvement.
Clinton's small gestures toward social democracy did not come close to what was needed in a nation where one-fourth of the children lived in poverty; where homeless people lived on the streets in every major city; where women could not look for work for lack of child care; where the air, the water were deteriorating dangerously.
More than being merely inadequate to the needs of America's millions of truly disadvantaged citizens, the Clinton administration actually attacked the disproportionately non-white poor in numerous interrelated ways. Clinton signed a punitive welfare reform bill that ended the federal government's guarantee of financial help to impoverished families with dependent children. He also scored points with conservatives by taking welfare benefits away from legal as well as illegal immigrants.
Meanwhile, Clinton increased economic insecurity in poor and working-class American communities by signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA destroyed tens of thousands of American industrial jobs by tearing down long-established regulatory barriers to the movement of corporate capital and commodities across the US-Mexican border.
Clinton claimed "the era of big government is over."
O.K., Bill Clinton is not running for president, but since so many seem to be voting for him and not Hillary, I thought I'd remind them NAFTA and welfare reform were on his watch.
And from AlterNet we get this article on the mean spirited Clintons Campaign:
Bill Clinton's Old Politics: Demeaning and Disingenuous, Robert Reich's Blog January 25, 2008.
Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign.
I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it.
And here's another sobering and unsettling article about how the leading three Democratic candidates and their stand on Capital Punishment. Most of the worlds governments have taken a stand against capital punishment as being immoral and having no real merit in terms of deterrence. Yet the U.S.is still in favor of this barbaric form of punishment. Odd especially since the U.S. declares itself as a a Christian Nation and therefore on the side of the angels and righteousness . But it is also a nation that believes in Law and Order which trumps any ethical and moral qualms some liberal types may have . But what can one expect from a country that thinks it is necessary and a good thing to use " torture " and "renditions" and to suspend "Habeas Corpus ". Even Bill Clinton was not against giving people lethal injections or frying them while still alive with a million volts or so.
Give Them Death: Three Leading Democratic Candidates Support Capital Punishment By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. January 25, 2008.
Opposing the death penalty used to distinguish Democrats from Republicans. Now, across party lines, death is just another day at the office.
Politicians like to see moral challenges when it's convenient. The candidates have labeled the war in Iraq, global warming and the economy "moral challenges" before various audiences in the past few months. But there's one topic the leading Dems systematically exclude from their morality crusade, one that begged to be addressed before an African-American audience in a Southern state: the death penalty.
It's not news that African-Americans are disproportionately represented on death row. While 12 percent of the country is African-American, more than 40 percent of the country's death row population is black -- and although blacks and whites are murder victims in nearly equal numbers, 80 percent of the prisoners executed since the death penalty was reinstated were convicted for murders in which the victim was white. Study upon study in states across the country have discovered racial bias at every stage of the death penalty process, including one that found that the more "stereotypically black" a defendant is perceived to be, the more likely that person is to be sentenced to death. Add to that the fact that over 20 percent of black defendants who have been executed were convicted by all-white juries, and the racial reality of the death penalty becomes impossible to ignore.
Still, not one leading Democrat is about to make criminal justice reform -- let alone the death penalty -- central to his or her platform.
Clinton, Obama and Edwards all support capital punishment. It's a position you'd be hard pressed to find on their websites, and they might not be bragging about it the way they might have in, say, 2000. Or 1996. Or 1992, the year their party's pro-death penalty stance was codified in its official party platform and then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton made a campaign trail detour to Arkansas, where he presided over the execution of mentally damaged prisoner Ricky Ray Rector. Nevertheless, all three hold on to their pro-death penalty stance, as have virtually all leading Democrats running for office in the past 20 years.
UPDATE 10:00 pm Jan. 26
Why Some Feminists Aren’t Supporting Hillary Clinton,by Biodun , Firedoglake January 25, 2008.
She remains highly suspect to her cohort: middle- and upper-middle-class educated and professional white women over 40 years old.
Rebecca Traister gives her own reason why she's not supporting her:
Unlike its sister gem, "I'm not a feminist, but ..." (an utterance that nearly always gives away the fact that its speaker is in fact a feminist), the Hillary disavowal, in my case, has been true: I really am not a Hillary Clinton supporter. A feminist by trade, I have wished that I could get behind Clinton, a woman I admired when she first arrived in the White House 15 years ago. But there has been nothing in her steady, ineluctable move to the center that I could embrace; I understood why she did it, but it cost her my support.
And Frances Kissling states her own reason:
The sad fact is that Clinton has felt compelled to run as a stereotypical male. In her own mind it is only a certain kind of man who is qualified to be president and she will be that man: tough on everything from war, flag burning, kids' access to video games, illegal immigrants and Palestinians. She has missed the opportunity to talk about what it really means for women to be equal in this country. She has shown no interest in using her extensive international experience to push for more women in party leadership, state legislatures and even the Senate. A woman candidate who considered her gender a strength (as opposed to something she needed to overcome) would announce a series of measures specifically designed to ensure that women's needs and rights were at the forefront of her agenda.
In 30 Ways of Looking at Hillary, a recently published anthology in which thirty well-known women writers reflect on the candidate, Susan Morrison (who edited the book) says:
As I talked with women about their reactions to Hillary, some themes came up again and again. Many women were divided within themselves as to how they feel about her, and I noticed a familiar circle of guilt: these women believe they should support Hillary as a matter of solidarity. But, because they expect her to be different from (that is, better than) the average male politician, she invariably disappoints them; then they feel guilty about their ambivalence. Some feel competitive with her. Having wearily resigned themselves to the idea that "having it all" is too much to hope for, they view Hillary as a rebuke: how did she manage to pull it off--or, at least, to appear to pull it off? Other women say they want to like her but are disturbed by the anti-feminist message inherent in the idea of the first woman president getting to the White House on her husband's coattails.
also see for another reality check on race and gender affecting voting :
Election08 News Flash: Caucasian is a "Race"; Male is a Gender, by Joshua Holland, AlterNet January 26, 2008.
Folks need to get a grip.
Earlier in the week...Fox News analyst Dick Morris warned: "if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton." So, in Morris' view, blacks are "bloc-voting." But according to a poll released this week by MSNBC and McClatchy Newspapers, 25 percent of SC blacks are supporting Clinton -- about 40 percent less support than she gets nationwide -- while just ten percent of white South Carolina Dems say they'll vote for Obama -- fully 70 percent less than his nationwide support. So, who's "bloc-voting" according to race? Are we supposed to believe that the 90% of South Carolina whites who won't vote for the negro are really just unimpressed with his message of hope? You can, but I'm not buying.
And what about gender? Whites may be "bloc-voting" against Obama, but it's a good bet that white men are not breaking the same way as white women. John Edwards, with 13 percent support across the country, is leading among South Carolina whites with 40 percent in the MSNBC/McClatchy poll -- triple his nationwide numbers. White is a race, male is a gender, but Dick Morris and the rest of the punditocracy seem unperturbed by the possibility that those silly, emotional white guys are casting their votes for Edwards based on nothing more than group identity. That's because, unconsciously at least, most people think of white folks as the default humans, while people of color belong to a "race"; male is the standard model, and only women belong to a gender.
Let's also consider the biological determinism inherent in the conventional wisdom about race and gender. I'm a white guy who's supported Edwards based on the policies he's proposed. But I wouldn't be disappointed to see either Hillary or Obama get the nomination, despite the fact that I consider both to be centrist tinkerers who are very unlikely to bring about the kind of change I want to see. Why am I OK with the idea of my preferred candidate coming up short? Because I think it would be a significant step for the country to have a black man or a woman elected to the nation's highest office. In other words, I'm a white male who is positively influenced by the gender and ethnicity of the two leading Dems -- but people like me don't make it into any of the analyses because the assumption is that identity politics fall along clean lines.
There are other problems with the narrative. First, it ignores how close Clinton and Obama are on the issues. If it weren't for the fact that it's tough to draw meaningful distinctions between the two candidates' proposals -- with a few exceptions -- race and gender wouldn't be so prominent in this primary fight. Clinton and Obama are so similar in their ideology and legislative approach that everyone's looking at something else -- something aside from their positions on the issues -- to determine a favorite. Race and gender are certainly more legitimate reasons to pick a candidate than whether one would like to have a beer with him or her or any of a dozen other brainless criteria that voters use all-too-often to choose "their guy" (or gal).
and so it goes,
GORD.
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