Now Gallup's tracking poll tightens a tad to a three-point margin for Obama.  The average will drop below four points -- and that's about half what it was only a few weeks ago.

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but when Don Imus said the same thing about the Rutgers women's basketball team, Obama was calling for his firing.  

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So, if you make a tacky remark when you are raising money for him, it's ok, and you get a slap on the wrist, but if you say something equally as tacky on TV, you should be fired?

So those of us who read and knew were hardly surprised when the housing market crunch caused a global credit crunch and the now well over $100/barrel oil caused fuel prices to skyrocket.  And these predicted/predictable phenomena will have predictable consequences as well.

So why do people scream and yell in outrage when something completely foreseeable happens?  Like, heck, people and government policy makers.  You were told.  You were warned.  You had every opportunity to try to minimize the effects on you and your city/state/country.  Why all the yelling now?  What good will it do?

He said:  "There are those of us ahead of the curve.  Then there are those who are behind the curve - but they are louder.".

Here's a snip from the WaPo today:

The Human Life Amendment, also known as the personhood amendment, says the words "person" or "persons" in the state constitution should "include any human being from the moment of fertilization." If voters agreed, legal experts say, it would give fertilized eggs the same legal rights and protections to which people are entitled.

The ballot initiative is funded by Colorado for Equal Rights, a grass-roots antiabortion organization. Its purpose, initiative sponsor Kristi Burton said, is to lay a legal and legislative basis for protecting the unborn. Its passage would also open the door to modifying other laws for the same purpose, she said.

As to what laws could then be modified, Burton would not elaborate. "We try not to focus on some of the issues that will be taken care of later on," she said, repeatedly saying that the amendment is not aimed at outlawing abortion.

But that is the objective, according to one of the measure's biggest supporters, Colorado Right to Life. "The goal is to restore legal protection to preborn babies from the moment they are conceived, which is the only way we're going to stop abortion," said Leslie Hanks, vice president of the group.

Obama's relations with some of his black colleagues from Chicago were dreadful from the beginning. On March 13, 1997, Obama introduced one of his first pieces of legislation, a modest bill to make a directory of community-college graduates available to local employers. There was a response from Rickey Hendon, a state senator from the West Side of Chicago who had been close to Alice Palmer. After Obama explained his bill, Hendon, who has dabbled in film and television work, earning him the nickname Hollywood, rose to ask a question, and the following exchange occurred:

HENDON: Senator, could you correctly pronounce your name for me? I'm having a little trouble with it.
OBAMA: Obama.
HENDON: Is that Irish?
OBAMA: It will be when I run countywide.
HENDON: That was a good joke, but this bill's still going to die. This directory, would that have those 1-800 sex line numbers in this directory?
OBAMA: I apologize. I wasn't paying Senator Hendon any attention.
HENDON: Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn't pay it much attention either. My question was: Are the 1-800 sex line numbers going to be in this directory?
OBAMA: Not--not--basically this idea comes out of the South Side community colleges. I don't know what you're doing on the West Side community colleges. But we probably won't be including that in our directory for the students.
HENDON: . . . Let me just say this, and to the bill: I seem to remember a very lovely Senator by the name of Palmer--much easier to pronounce than Obama--and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don't have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And--and you don't even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did. . . . I'm missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that makes absolutely no sense. I . . . I definitely urge a No vote. Whatever your name is.

Although the exchange was part of a longstanding tradition of hazing new legislators, the tensions between Hendon and Obama were real.

A pair of hour-long documentaries about Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama will air on CNN five days before the network kicks off its coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions.

Correspondent John King fronts the McCain documentary, and Suzanne Malveaux Obama's.

"There is so much you don't know about these two extraordinary men, and we aim to fill in the gaps," said CNN/U.S. president Jon Klein in the release.

I cannot, for a second, believe that CNN will be 'fair and balanced' in the coverage of the two candidates and conventions. Forget MSNBC. CNN has flown under the radar as MS(NBC)-Lite with their pro-Obama slant.

Even Saturday Night Live focused in on their Obama-bias during a Primary debate they moderated.

Even though there are a few notable Conservative anchors and correspondents on the network (John Roberts, Ed Henry, John King and his new wife, Dana Bash), a whole host of others (i.e. Anderson Cooper, Campbell Brown and so-called commentators like Jack Cafferty, Gloria Borger, Jamal Simmons) were all Obama-sympathizers and complicit in the horrible and unfair coverage of the Primary and Hillary Clinton.

In the day, I always watched for the first warm Friday in April on the campus at Madison.  That's when apartheid mattered again.  No protests below 50 degrees, and not much below 60 degrees -- in terms of Wisconsin weather, no matter the climatological or political temperature in South Africa.

  I've never felt he carries much feeling about specific issues.  Maybe caring mainly about the theory of how things can be done is good enough if he wants what Dems and 'reasonable' and less-selfish people want.  Lately that has been harder to figure out.

A lobbyist with close ties to the White House is offering access to key figures in George W Bush's administration in return for six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush's presidency.

Is McCain a maverick, moderate or mystery?

"WASHINGTON -- He goes right, he cuts left, he darts up the middle.
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Catching John McCain flat-footed in a single spot on the political gridiron is a little like tackling Barry Sanders: It'd be a lot easier if you had any idea where he was going to be.

But at a time when self-styled progressives and conservative politicians often seem to follow each other in packs, McCain -- the presumptive Republican presidential nominee -- has proven over decades in Congress to be his own man, untethered to the wishes of party activists and unwilling to be bullied into the rank and file on every issue, for better or for worse.

Labels such as liberal, moderate and even conservative seem to fall short when one tries to pigeonhole the Arizona senator, but his earned reputation for being a maverick could be key when it comes to winning or losing, especially in battleground states like Michigan, where an independent streak isn't a negative.

Certainly, McCain leans to the right on most issues and is a faithful Republican hard-liner much of the time. According to data compiled by the Arizona Republic, he has seldom helped sway a close vote against his party in the last decade.

But as Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and the Democrats attempt to depict him as no more than a continuation of the unpopular Bush administration, McCain's record -- on campaign finance, global warming, even the Iraq war, where he actually was more of a hawk than President George W. Bush in calling for more troops to stabilize the country -- clearly suggest otherwise.

tnr blog

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton called it "tasteless and offensive" and, according to Jake Tapper at ABC, another high-profile Obama supporter called it "as offensive a caricature as any magazine could publish."

This is something that comes up around here periodically too, and this article raised some questions for me.

The major reason to oppose this vote for Obama supporters and the party regulars, (aside from the possibility Clinton might win and thus really throw things into turmoil) is that if she didn't win, the whole process would only serve to further energize the anger and disaffection of her supporters and give over convention time and space to more venting of that.

But in this article, a Clinton supporter is quoted as saying she only wants a "fair' and 'meaningful' vote.

Which got me thinking:

Is it really possible for there to be a ballot at the convention that could ever be seen as 'fair' and 'meaningful' to those Clinton supporters who are still very angry and outraged? I mean, if such a ballot still earned Obama the nomination instead of Clinton.

It seems like anything else--even the concession that there be a roll call vote just won't cut the mustard in terms of satisfying them.