This video from the USA is called John McCain vs. John McCain.
From British weekly The Observer:
Barack Obama inflicted shattering defeats on Hillary Clinton tonight in Washington state and Nebraska, beating her by a margin of two to one.
He was also won Louisiana, though by a narrower margin.
Although votes were still being counted, the projected gap between Obama and Clinton was large enough for US television companies to call all three contests in his favour.
To complete his night, he also picked up a win in a caucus in the US Virgin Islands.
In the Republican race, there was embarrassment for John McCain only days after declaring himself to be the Republican nominee. He suffered an overwhelming defeat in Kansas at the hands of Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, and was involved in a race too close to call in Louisiana.
Obama’s victories tip the balance in his favour in the battle to rack up delegates, who will choose the Democratic nominee at the party convention in August.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Posted by: “DJ. Nash” vintageries@yahoo.com
Sun Feb 10, 2008 6:40 pm (PST)
Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War
By FRANK RICH
Published: February 10, 2008
WHAT if a presidential candidate held what she billed
as “the largest, most interactive town hall in
political history” on national television, and no one
noticed?
The New York Times
Frank Rich
The untold story in the run-up to Super Tuesday was
Hillary Clinton’s elaborate live prime-time special
the night before the vote. Presiding from a studio in
New York, the candidate took questions from audiences
in 21 other cities. She had plugged the event four
days earlier in the last gasp of her debate with
Barack Obama and paid a small fortune for it: an hour
of time on the Hallmark Channel plus satellite TV
hookups for the assemblies of supporters stretching
from coast to coast.
The same news media that constantly revisited the
Oprah-Caroline-Maria rally in California ignored
“Voices Across America: A National Town Hall.” The
Clinton campaign would no doubt attribute this to
press bias, but it scrupulously designed the event to
avoid making news. Like the scripted “Ask President
Bush” sessions during the 2004 campaign, this town
hall seemed to unfold in Stepford. The anodyne
questions (“What else would you do to help take care
of our veterans?”) merely cued up laundry lists of
talking points. Some in attendance appeared to trance
out.
But I’m glad I watched every minute, right up until
Mrs. Clinton was abruptly cut off in midsentence so
Hallmark could resume its previously scheduled
programming (a movie promising “A Season for
Miracles,” aptly enough). However boring, this show
was a dramatic encapsulation of how a once-invincible
candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by
poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a
synthetic product leeched of most human qualities.
What’s more, it offered a naked preview of how nastily
the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral
damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to
come.
For a campaign that began with tightly monitored Web
“chats” and then planted questions at its earlier
town-hall meetings, a Bush-style pseudo-event like the
Hallmark special is nothing new, of course. What’s
remarkable is that instead of learning from these
mistakes, Mrs. Clinton’s handlers keep doubling down.
Less than two weeks ago she was airlifted into her
own, less effective version of “Mission Accomplished.”
Instead of declaring faux victory in Iraq, she starred
in a made-for-television rally declaring faux victory
in a Florida primary that was held in defiance of
party rules, involved no campaigning and awarded no
delegates. As Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said, it was
“the Potemkin village of victory celebrations.”
The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio
set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the
good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the
point was to generate donations or excitement, the
effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking
on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an
online incarnation of the event in addition to “who
knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows,
indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We
Can” Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist
will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging
roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the
Obama campaign: zero.)
Two days after her town-hall extravaganza, Mrs.
Clinton revealed the $5 million loan she had made to
her own campaign to survive a month in which the Obama
operation had raised $32 million to her $13.5 million.
That poignant confession led to a spike in
contributions that Mr. Obama also topped. Though
Tuesday was largely a draw in popular votes and
delegates, every other indicator, from the candidates’
real and virtual crowds to hard cash, points to a
steadily widening Obama-Clinton gap. The Clinton
campaign might be an imploding Potemkin village itself
were it not for the fungible profits from Bill
Clinton’s murky post-presidency business deals. (The
Clintons, unlike Mr. Obama, have not released their
income-tax returns.)
The campaign’s other most potent form of currency
remains its thick deck of race cards. This was all too
apparent in the Hallmark show. In its carefully
calibrated cross section of geographically and
demographically diverse cast members — young, old, one
gay man, one vet, two union members —
African-Americans were reduced to also-rans. One black
woman, the former TV correspondent Carole Simpson, was
given the servile role of the meeting’s nominal
moderator, Ed McMahon to Mrs. Clinton’s top banana.
Scattered black faces could be seen in the audience.
But in the entire televised hour, there was not a
single African-American questioner, whether to toss a
softball or ask about the Clintons’ own recent
misadventures in racial politics.
The Clinton camp does not leave such matters to
chance. This decision was a cold, political
cost-benefit calculus. In October, seven months after
the two candidates’ dueling church perorations in
Selma, USA Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr.
Obama among African-American Democrats by a margin of
62 percent to 34 percent. But once black voters met
Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill
Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped
caring about what African-Americans thought. In an
effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was
ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton
strategist, Mark Penn, among others), “the black
candidate” (as Clinton strategists told the Associated
Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton
himself).
The result? Black America has largely deserted the
Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs.
Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote. The
campaign saw this coming and so saw no percentage in
bestowing precious minutes of prime-time television on
African-American queries.
That time went instead to the Hispanic population that
was still in play in Super Tuesday’s voting in the
West. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles had a
cameo, and one of the satellite meetings was held in
the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s smart politics,
especially since Mr. Obama has been behind the curve
in wooing this constituency.
But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks
on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial
back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by
the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against
each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic
voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or
affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton
then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a
debate that her pollster was “making a historical
statement.”
It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or
otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that,
given that it branded Hispanics, a group as
heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As
the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los
Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in
that city won in heavily Latino districts; black
mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the
1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received
more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real
point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow
misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez
concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central
selling points, that he can build bridges and unite
Americans of all types.”
If that was the intent, it didn’t work. Mrs. Clinton
did pile up her expected large margin among Latino
voters in California. But her tight grip on that
electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only
26 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month,
did better than that in every state on Tuesday,
reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53 percent in
Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign’s attempt
to drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing
the race card has backfired. His white vote tally
rises every week. Though Mrs. Clinton won California
by almost 10 percentage points, among whites she beat
Mr. Obama by only 3 points.
The question now is how much more racial friction the
Clinton campaign will gin up if its Hispanic support
starts to erode in Texas, whose March 4 vote it sees
as its latest firewall. Clearly it will stop at
little. That’s why you now hear Clinton operatives
talk ever more brazenly about trying to reverse party
rulings so that they can hijack 366 ghost delegates
from Florida and the other rogue primary, Michigan,
where Mr. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. So much for
Mrs. Clinton’s assurance on New Hampshire Public Radio
last fall that it didn’t matter if she alone kept her
name on the Michigan ballot because the vote “is not
going to count for anything.”
Last month, two eminent African-American historians
who have served in government, Mary Frances Berry (in
the Carter and Clinton years) and Roger Wilkins (in
the Johnson administration), wrote Howard Dean, the
Democrats’ chairman, to warn him of the perils of that
credentials fight. Last week, Mr. Dean became
sufficiently alarmed to propose brokering an
“arrangement” if a clear-cut victory by one candidate
hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does
anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a
Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding
three decades of mutual affection with black America
to win a primary?
A race-tinged brawl at the convention, some nine weeks
before Election Day, will not be a Hallmark moment. As
Mr. Wilkins reiterated to me last week, it will be a
flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968, a
suicide for the party no matter which victor ends up
holding the rancid spoils.
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John McCain argues forcefully for immediate withdrawal of our troops
Posted by: “bigraccoon” bigraccoon@earthlink.net
Mon Feb 11, 2008 8:27 pm (PST)
John McCain argues forcefully for immediate withdrawal of our troops… from Haiti.
Yes, he says all the things then that he says are treason now. But that’s just because he’s a worn-out, befuddled nut:
PS — Think it’s just a fluke? Watch him do the same on Somalia:
Can You Say Flip Floping On The Double Talk Express
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