With the US Presidential Election now complete, I suspect that I will turn my attention to the issues that remain near and dear to my heart that over the past two months were suddenly shunted for lack of time. I am not quite sure how many polls I covered but it was well over 200. My only regret really is that I didn’t create BTF until April 15th and so failed to cover the first part of the primaries.

I am going to leave the categories intact for a little while but by early next year I suspect that I will cull them back to better reflect coverage on the blog. I am not particularly well-suited to covering domestic politics such as health care reform. Frankly, it’s just not my thing. My interests and strengths are more in the international realm and in history and economics but I also have a keen interest in energy issues though here I am more in avid learner category. I suspect that these will largely be my interests and topics going forward. And I will continue to put forward posts on income inequality, the rights of women and environmental issues as warranted.

I did cull the blogroll removing most of the PUMA sites. To be honest, most had been removed long ago when I became uncomfortable with the level of discourse on those sites. I’ll think about adding the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and Talk Left should they regain their former sanity. Correntewire I will not add, due to their fondness of expletives. Otherwise, it is a fine site. I am open to suggestions on the US blogroll.

And I do welcome contributions keeping within the spirit and approach of BTF. Currently, there are two other contributors.

It is also possible and somewhat likely that I will explore a life outside the United States come 2009. I have been in San Francisco since 1997 and it’s time to consider a short jaunt abroad again. Since first coming to the Bay Area in 1981, I have left and come back four times. A fifth departure might be good for my soul. I was not thrilled to see Proposition 8 pass in California. It has weighed heavily on my smile these past few days.

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I have been sick all week with a dreaded Summer cold but lucky for me, I have been under the faithful care of Bear-Bear, my little black Pomeranian. He is quite the character. The above is his favourite video, he’ll sit in on my lap and just watch the parade of his fellow pom poms go past on the computer screen. When it’s over, he dig into my chest and beg that it be replayed. With Bear-Bear, all is doubled. We go for walk-walks out in the Castro where he ignores all the other woof-woofs but he helps me snare the boy-boys who just think he is all too precious, which he is. He loves his bacon-bacon the most (Purina Bacon Begging Strips) but he is also quite fond of his chicken-chicken everything else that is not bacon-bacon. He loves to play “king of the Charles” a game we play where he jumps on me and then has me scratch his back. When I am ill, he stays particularly close to me and this week was no exception.

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Sitemeter, which monitors the traffic on this blog, is performing a migration of servers this weekend. If you are using Internet Explorer, then you will not able to view this blog using Internet Explorer. With luck the problem will be resolved by Monday. The blog can still be viewed normally using Safari or Firefox web browsers. I actually pay $6.95 a month for the service so we will see how this goes.

When blogging from home I use my partner’s PC and Internet Explorer, but in my office I use my Macs. Given this disruption of service and coupled with the fact that I now have a dreaded summer cold, I expect my blogging to be relatively light over the weekend. With luck, I will pick up my normal activities come Monday.

Thanks!

Charles

So much for the man with the midas touch, Obama’s campaign seems to reaching its financial limits. Via Time magazine on The Half Billion Dollar Man:

Is Barack Obama worth $500 million? The Democratic Party is betting he’ll help bring in about that much — if not more. As the public face of the party, Obama is responsible for both his own campaign’s fund-raising and for that of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — a combined estimated goal of $450 million. He has also pledged to help Hillary Clinton with her reported $20-million debt to various vendors, and congressional Democrats are hoping that Obama’s financial coattails will be tens of millions of dollars long for their own electoral purposes.

These are staggering sums for someone who was still paying off his student loans three years ago. But the freshman Illinois Senator shattered so many records in the primaries — raising nearly $300 million in 16 months — that he has become a victim of his own success in the general-election expectations game. The public has become numb to his staggering sums, as have his donors, a danger for a campaign seeking to make folks feel involved. After all, how much of a difference can an extra $25 make in a pool of half a billion?

Donors, especially on the Democratic side, may be getting a little burned out. More than $1.04 billion was raised during the primaries for the 24 presidential aspirants from both parties. Of that, $651.2 million went to Democratic candidates and $390.4 million went to Republicans. Sensing donor fatigue, Obama’s e-mail appeals have slowed to about one a week, versus several a week at the height of the primaries. But Obama needs to keep up the pace: essentially, he must repeat his primary feat, add more than 50% and do it in a quarter of the time. “It’s a huge task that we’ve got,” said one top Obama donor. “I wouldn’t define it as concern, but there’s a realization of the enormity of what we are trying to accomplish, and everybody is intensely focused on the task at hand.”

(more…)

Perhaps they are just out of the loop, the Chicago loop, that is. What could you have expected when he moved operational control of the DNC from Washington DC to Chicago? And if you think it will get better, it won’t. You keeping on seeing what you want to see in Barack Obama and not what is really there. Obama can change his policies with the wind, he can’t change who he is, at least not without a lot of therapy.

I have long argued that Obama is the political reincarnation of Richard Nixon. Sure their politics are different, but their personnas are not. Richard Nixon was a control freak, so is Barack Obama. Nixon would do whatever it took to win lying and pandering his way into office, Barack is no different. Nixon broke into a psychiatrist’s office to get dirt on his opponent’s, while innuendo that likely emanated from within the Obama campaign undid the candidacies of Blair Hull (domestic abuse allegations) and Jack Ryan (sexual impropriety allegations). Nixon was a narcissist, Obama is hardly any less of one. I see a very different Obama. I see one who threw four people off a ballot so he could run unopposed. I see someone who played the race card over and over again. I see someone who has been nothing but duplicitous. I see soemone who tells the American public that his campaign takes no money from lobbyists and then rakes in millions from lobbying firms via the back door. His political 180s are nothing new. I have said this before there is no there there in Barack Obama. He has no core convictions other than his own political welfare.

Via Politico

After a brief bout of Obamamania, some Capitol Hill Democrats have begun to complain privately that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is insular, uncooperative and inattentive to their hopes for a broad Democratic victory in November.

“They think they know what’s right and everyone else is wrong on everything,” groused one senior Senate Democratic aide. “They are kind of insufferable at this point.”

Among the grievances described by Democratic leadership insiders:

• Until a mailing that went out in the past few days, Obama had done little fundraising for Democratic candidates since signing off on e-mailed fundraising appeals for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee immediately after securing the Democratic nomination.

• Obama has sometimes appeared in members’ districts with no advance notice to lawmakers, resulting in lost opportunities for those Democrats to score points by appearing alongside their party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

• The Obama campaign has not, until very recently, coordinated a daily message with congressional Democrats, leaving Democratic members in the lurch when they’re asked to comment on the constant back and forth between Obama and John McCain — as they were when Obama said earlier this month that he would “continue to refine” his Iraq policies after meeting with commanders on the ground there.

• Coordination between the Obama campaign and the House and Senate leadership is so weak that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — who will chair the Democrats’ convention in August — didn’t know of Obama’s decision to move his final-night acceptance speech from the Pepsi Center to Invesco Field until the campaign announced it on a conference call with reporters.

(more…)

Thank heavens. From the San Jose Mercury News

NASCAR’s BAM Racing team has presented Barack Obama’s presidential campaign with a potential sponsorship deal in the Sprint Cup series later this year, but it doesn’t look like an Obama car will be burning rubber on the track anytime soon.

BAM team spokesman Rhett Vandiver told The Associated Press on Friday that the team made a sponsorship proposal to the Democratic presidential hopeful’s campaign, and has made similar proposals to the campaign of Republican John McCain and at least one third-party candidate.

Late Friday, the Obama campaign said there would be no sponsorship.

“The Obama campaign will not be sponsoring a car in the Sprint Cup series, though we will continue to look for ways to reach out to voters and convey Senator Obama’s message of change.” said Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman.

It was a silly idea. Now drop the rallies overseas. A speech to a forum or a chamber of commerce, fine. Act appropriately.

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What a dufus. Senator Clinton run from this man. We’ll pay off your debt. But run as far as you can from this man.

Jonathan Martin on Politico notes the following:

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may have presented a unified image last night in New York, but tensions between supporters of the two candidates continue to simmer.

For many Obama backers, it’s a tough pill to swallow to help retire the debt Clinton incurred largely to stay in the race and pound away at the eventual nominee after it became clear he would win.

For true-blue Obama loyalists, therefore, any request for money these days is being closely examined.

To this end, when Ed Chandler, a Chicago venture capitalist and Obama donor, sent out an e-mail last week promoting an intimate dinner with the nominee for high-dollar donors he made clear to specify where the dollars were going.

“NONE OF THE MONEY RAISED WILL GO TO PAY OFF HILLARY CLINTON’S DEBTS,” Chandler wrote to potential givers in an e-mail obtained by Politico. “While you may have heard that Sen. Obama has asked people to make a separate donation to the Clinton campaign for that purpose, neither the law, nor the ethic of this campaign, will allow for any transfer of funds from Obama For America to Clinton.”

Money raised beyond the individual limits, Chandler notes, will instead go to the DNC.

Is there a point as why we should raise money for Obama?

The story on Barack getting carried away (with himself) from United Press International:

Democratic U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama almost forgot to ask donors to help relieve former rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign debt at a fundraiser.

The former rivals agreed on a plan to help one another, in which Obama would urge donors to help relieve about $10 million of Clinton’s campaign debt while Clinton would help raise funds for the Illinois senator’s presidential bid, CNN reported.

Obama nearly forgot his half of the agreement at a joint New York fundraiser Wednesday when he walked off the stage without mentioning Clinton’s need for help, the report said.

“Hold on a second guys, I was getting all carried away. I’ve got one more thing that is important to do,” Obama said when he reappeared a few minutes after his exit. “Senator Clinton still has some debt. And I could have had some debt if I hadn’t won so I know the drill.”

Obama went on to urge donors to help Clinton as “part of the process of making sure that we are unified moving forward.”

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A video by BoyThreeOne.

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Talk about being supercilious. He is not even the nominee yet and he’s talking about redecorating the White House:

“You have all these mementos of Abraham Lincoln, but you have this flat-screen TV in there,” Obama told the crowd at the outdoor event.

“I thought to myself, ‘Now, who stays in the Lincoln Bedroom and watches [ESPN's] ‘Sports Center’? You’ve got your clicker. . . . That didn’t seem to me to be appropriate. So I might take out the TV, I don’t know.

“You should read when you’re in the Lincoln Bedroom! Reread the Gettysburg Address. Don’t watch TV.”

He himself might reread Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Or perhaps, Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address:

What is the frame of government under which we live?

The answer must be: “The Constitution of the United States.” That Constitution consists of the original, framed in 1787, (and under which the present government first went into operation,) and twelve subsequently framed amendments, the first ten of which were framed in 1789.

Pity that your vote on FISA destroys the Fourth Amendment.

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From the New York Times

Two days ago, Senator Barack Obama said he had not been clear enough in explaining his Iraq policy. Today, there was a different rationale.

The confusion was not his fault, Mr. Obama said, but rather the media’s for seizing on three words he uttered in Fargo, N.D., when he suggested he would be open to “refine my policies” on Iraq.
“I was surprised by how finely calibrated every single word was measured,” he said, speaking to reporters as he flew here from Montana.

Mr. Obama touched off a stir on Thursday when he said he would consult American military commanders in Iraq before saying whether he would continue to pursue a proposed timetable of withdrawing combat troops within 16 months of taking office. A few hours later, he took the rare step of calling a second news conference to reiterate his commitment to end the war.

“I was a little puzzled by the frenzy that I set off by what I thought was a pretty innocuous statement,” he said, speaking on Saturday about the episode for the first time. “I am absolutely committed to ending the war.”

When asked whether his Iraq views would be difficult to explain to voters, Mr Obama said: “What’s important is to understand the difference between strategy and tactics. The tactics of how we ensure our troops are safe as we pull out, how we execute the withdrawal, those are things that are all based on facts and conditions. I am not somebody – unlike George Bush – who is willing to ignore facts on the basis of my preconceived notions.”

So did he misspeak on Thursday when he said he would gather additional information in Iraq and “continue to refine my policies?”

No, he said, he did not.

“I wasn’t saying anything that I hadn’t said before,” Mr. Obama said.

As he spoke here, a dozen or more reporters furiously took notes and recorded his words. Aides later conceded that Mr. Obama knows the office he seeks – the Oval Office – comes with a job description of calibrating and measuring every single word.

Again, he lacks experience and his language is imprecise so Obama ends up having to backtrack. We’re backtracking with Barack all Summer and Fall, do you really want four years of this? I don’t. I am tired of it already.

Interesting though, how his relationship with the media is changing. And of course, I can help but recall Joe Biden’s thoughts from just one year one ago:

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy … I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

He doesn’t think, though, that Obama can win the presidency because he is “a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate. … I don’t recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan or a tactic.”

Ah, the wisdom of Joe Biden, refreshing ain’t it?

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