Hillary Clinton unleashed to counter ‘pitbull in lipstick’ Sarah Palin

"It seems only yesterday that Hillary Clinton was battling against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. But when she hits the campaign trail in Florida tomorrow Clinton’s target will be Sarah Palin, a new threat to her ambition to be the first woman elected to the White House."

Hillary Plays a Risky 'Gender Card'

"Instead of an inspiring campaign between two trail-blazing politicians, the race could degenerate into a spasm of “identity politics” in which two groups – women and blacks – compete over who has been more unfairly repressed."

Hillary Clinton cries but vote goes to Barack Obama

"THE woman credited with moving Hillary Clinton to tears - believed to have helped win her the New Hampshire primary - voted for Barack Obama in the end."

Jewish favorites fall in Iowa

"The two presidential candidates deemed most favorable by Jewish voters were roundly defeated in the opening round of the 2008 presidential contest. U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) finished third in the Iowa Caucuses on Jan. 3 after an intensely fought campaign, while former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani finished sixth on the Republican side, earning less than 4 percent of the vote."

Good, I hope this is a sign of things to come...

Hillary's heated response in NH

Hillary, the ultimate Zionists controlled Establishment Candidate (on the democratic side) claims she is the real agent for change. What a joke...

Steely Clinton attacks Obama as new vote showdown looms

US Democratic presidential candidate New York Senator Hillary Clinton talks during a campaign stop at Merrimack Valley High School, on January 5, in Penacook, New Hampshire. Coming off a third place finish in the Iowa caucus Hillary Clinton is looking to rebound in the New Hampshire 08 January primary. (AFP/GettyImages/Joe Raedle)

"Hillary Clinton launched a searing attack on surging rival Barack Obama, as polls showed he could inflict a second body blow to her White House hopes in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary."

Racial Undercurrent Is Seen in Clinton Campaign

"It has unfolded mostly under the radar. But an important development in the 2008 Democratic battle may be the building backlash among African Americans over comments from associates of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that could be construed as jabs at Sen. Barack Obama's race."

When the rubber hits the road, it always come down to race in America.

Huckaboom and Hillabust

"Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is teetering on the brink, no matter what the meaningless national horserace numbers say. The notion that she has a post-Iowa “firewall” in New Hampshire is a fantasy, and she is in danger of losing all four early contests, including Nevada and South Carolina – probably to Sen. Barack Obama, who is now, in momentum terms, the Democratic frontrunner."

Have the wheels come off of Hillary's bandwagon?

"Barack Obama has come from behind to turn the Democratic presidential race in New Hampshire into a toss-up, according to a new Monitor opinion poll. The results - which show Obama with a one-point edge over Hillary Clinton - mirror other polls released this week, indicating that Clinton's once-imposing lead has evaporated in the run-up to New Hampshire's Jan. 8 primary."

Why Hillary won't win

"The flaw at the heart of Hillary Clinton's campaign to be US president: poll after poll shows that many voters don't like her or trust her."

Hillary’s Defense Dough

"The defense sector as a whole gave Hillary $122,988 this quarter, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, compared with Romney’s $82,975, Giuliani’s $58,400, and Obama’s $57,990. Only Chris Dodd, who has a major General Dynamics submarine project in Groton, Connecticut, fared better than Hillary, with $168,900."

Hillary's poster buckles under pressure of unfavorable poll

"Penn mischaracterized this latest online Zogby poll as our first interactive survey ever – a bizarre contention, since we have been developing and perfecting our Internet polling methodology for nearly a decade (Zogby Intreractive Methodology), and since Penn’s company has been quietly requesting the results of such polls from Zogby for years."

Rudy or Hillary: Pick Your Poison

"Americans are unable to connect their dissatisfaction with the current political leadership with their choice of new leaders. All polls show that Hillary Clinton is far in the lead for the Democratic presidential nomination and Rudy Giuliani is far in the lead for the Republican nomination These are the only two candidates guaranteed to be worse than Bush/Cheney."

A bitch for president

The rise of Clinton as the first female frontrunner proves the word remains as incendiary as ever.

Buffeted by critics, Clinton hits rough patch

by Steve Holland, Reuters - Nov 8, 2007

Buffeted by attacks from her rivals and accused of political double-talk, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has hit a rough patch on the road to her party's nomination.

She remains firmly in the lead and there is no indication that her advantage nationally is in serious jeopardy, but a less-than-sharp debate performance last week has given hope to her Democratic opponents and energized Republicans.

In Iowa, polls show Clinton is basically in a dead heat, holding a narrow lead over Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. A big lead in New Hampshire has weakened a bit.

Iowa on January 3 holds the first of the state-by-state battles to choose the Democratic and Republican candidates who will vie for the U.S. presidential election on November 4, 2008. A win in Iowa can generate momentum for the next state contest in New Hampshire, and beyond.

The state is so important that her campaign sent out her husband, popular former President Bill Clinton, to try to bolster her position, with stops in western Iowa on Thursday.

Many Iowa voters are undecided on whom to support. A key issue for some is whether Clinton has too much baggage from her years in the Clinton White House, during which Republicans labeled her as a liberal out of touch with mainstream America and a polarizing figure.

Mike Fredericks, 55, a Cedar Rapids firefighter, went to a Clinton event in Newton, Iowa, the other day. He said he thought Clinton would be an effective president, but that he is supporting Obama because he would be more of a uniter.

"I think the biggest concern would be the possible divisiveness if she is elected. I think she'd have a hard time convincing her detractors that she could do a good job," Fredericks said.

Lisa Howe, 49, of Adel, said she had some worries about Clinton's electability.

"I think she's articulate. I think she's strong. I think it remains to be seen if she can win the presidential race. She has to overcome a legacy that is both positive and negative, and like it or not, there are some people who are going to question the viability of a woman candidate," Howe said.

STAYING ABOVE THE FRAY

Clinton had what she has admitted was not her best week last week when she was repeatedly attacked by Edwards and Obama at the Philadelphia debate.

Her equivocating answer to a question about whether she supported plans by New York state to allow illegal immigrants to have drivers licenses has prompted lingering criticism from Obama and Edwards. Republicans are using it as a new line of attack on their old foe.

On the stump, Clinton tries to remain above the fray. In Newton, she talked about ways to create jobs through better environmental practices and offered a vignette about what it was like growing up in Illinois.

Her father, she said, did not like to waste energy, turning down the heat at night and insisting she pile on the blankets if she got cold.

"If you look at how much electricity we waste in the home today, it's shocking," she said. "We have not taken the simple steps to conserve like our parents and grandparents did."

A USA Today/Gallup poll found much of America still warm to Clinton. It said she is backed by 50 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, compared with 22 percent for Obama and 15 percent for Edwards.

She still holds a 20-point lead over her nearest competitor in the race for the Democratic nomination, but she would face a dead heat against Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

But she still has vulnerabilities. Polls find she has an unfavorability ratings of 45 percent or more, higher than that of any other contender.

Democratic strategist Doug Schoen, who worked in the Clinton White House but is unaligned in the presidential campaign, said he believed Clinton was bound to face a "moment of truth," and he thinks she will be able to weather the storm.

"She got so far ahead that any time she hits a little turbulence she would slip a little. And she may have slipped a bit. But she is so far ahead that I don't think the fundamental dynamic to the race has changed," Schoen said.

John Edwards Takes on the War Party

But is it too little, too late?

Yet another "Establishment Presidental Candidate " starting to sound like Ron Paul.

by Justin Raimondo - Nov 7, 2007

The Democratic presidential primary has been a real yawner, and I say that with a high degree of disappointment. After all, one never expected that the most vocal, visible, and credible antiwar voice to be raised this election season would come from the mouth of a Republican – a nine-term congressman from Texas, no less – who has ignited what appears to be a GOP version of the Eugene McCarthy movement during the Vietnam War era. Obama appears to be drowning in the sweet sauce of his own bromides, and none of the others has really ignited the supposedly antiwar Democratic base. Until this point, John Edwards has been a disappointment, with his flat-out refusal to say that he'd get us out of Iraq by the end of his term in office. However, if only to jazz up this snoozer of a race – and perhaps even revive interest in his faltering campaign – Edwards has decided to take on the War Party. In a recent speech at the University of Iowa, he used the "n"-word. No, not that word, silly, this one:

"George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the neocon warmongers used 9/11 to start a war with Iraq and now they're trying to use Iraq to start a war with Iran. And we have to stop them."

Wow! Where do I sign up?

Edwards seems to understand what Obama doesn't want to know: that politics is all about Good Guys versus Bad Guys, and you can't have one without the other.

Who started this war? Who lied us into it? Who wants to escalate it and extend it to Iran? People know, by now, the answers to these questions, and they are up for hearing some real, down-home outrage directed at the Bad Guys, otherwise known as the neoconservatives.

After all, it's no secret who was plumbing for war for a solid decade and beating the drums ever louder after 9/11. This war didn't come about spontaneously; it wasn't an act of God or nature, like Hurricane Katrina. It was planned, hoped for, wished for, and carried out by a very definite – and relatively small – group of men and women who had (and have) the ear not only of the president but of the major Washington power players, with the nexus of their network centered in the vice president's office.

Naming the enemy is the first act of a war, and politics, as we all know, is merely war without the bloodshed (though not always). Edwards has not only named them, but he gives us a capsule history of the great evil they have wrought:

"To understand exactly what the administration is trying to do with Iran, we need to go back to the beginning of the Bush administration and look at how they took us to war with Iraq.

"In the spring of 2002, the nation was struggling to recover from the devastating terrorist attacks of 9/11. At the same time, a group of Bush administration neoconservatives, like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, were strategizing for ways to start a war with Iraq. And suddenly, instead of reacting to 9/11 by working to protect America from terrorists, they saw a political opportunity to promote their right-wing ideological agenda and demonize anyone who disagreed with them."

Okay, so Edwards doesn't really understand what a neocon is: he's a politician, after all, not a political scientist. Of course Cheney isn't a "neocon" – in the same way a dog is not a flea. Cheney has neocons, however, just like man's best friend is often beset by similar pests. The relationship is parasitic – or maybe symbiotic.

However, you get the general idea: Edwards has correctly diagnosed the problem – the neocons – and charted their path of destruction as they diverted us away from our legitimate goal of fighting the perpetrators of 9/11, then used that tragedy to fuel their own crusade to turn Iraq into either a Jeffersonian republic or a parking lot – with the latter clearly winning out. And Edwards has certainly got the ideology of neoconservatism down:

"Here's what you have to know about these neocons – they think might makes right, every time. They believe in domination, not debate. They think America should use our military power to impose our will wherever and whenever we want. They use a sledgehammer when we should use a scalpel.

"And here's what you need to know about George Bush's foreign policy – it's written by these neocons, lock, stock, and barrel."

He uses the "n"-word a total of seven times in this short speech, inevitably coupling it with another important descriptive term – "radical," as in:

"So after 9/11, instead of focusing on the terrorist threat, George Bush started promoting a radical new neoconservative doctrine he called, quote, 'preventive war' – which would soon become part of his argument for war in Iraq."

Edwards clearly understands the urgency of his antiwar appeal: his clarion call to stop the war in Iraq before it spreads to Iran demonstrates that he knows what are the implications of the status quo – which he correctly identifies with Hillary Clinton. Unlike Obama, he calls Clinton out not only on Iraq but on the question of war with Iran:

"Senator Clinton wants to keep combat troops in Iraq to perform combat missions in Iraq. She will extend the war. I will end the war. Only in Washington would anybody believe that you can end the war and continue combat. On a matter as serious as Iraq, we need honesty and real answers – not more double-talk."

Finally, someone in the Democratic dog fight is saying what needs to be said: very clever of him to tie Hillary in with the neocons. It remains for me to point out rave reviews for her coming from Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, Fred Barnes, and Rich Lowry, not to mention the largesse coming her way from the military-industrial complex. And of course the core of her support among the Democratic Party establishment is the "centrist" Democratic Leadership Council, which served as the launching pad for Bill's White House bid. The DLC is home to the last of the Scoop Jackson Democrats – i.e., neocons who never made the transition to GOP politics, but instead stayed in the party long after it had been supposedly McGovernized, emerging, like moles blinking in the sunlight, after 9/11.

I have nothing in common with Edwards' domestic politics, which seem like more of the same old "progressive" laundry list of big government projects that we can neither afford nor would desire even if we weren't bankrupt, but that is neither here nor there. What matters in this election is the foreign policy stance of a candidate, and Edwards is saying all the right things: he has pledged to "completely withdraw all combat troops within 9 to 10 months" of taking office. You can't ask for much more than that.

If you're a Democrat, and you consider yourself antiwar, it's clear who your candidate has got to be. However, Edwards is staking out a principled position quite late in the game, and I have to say that it's not just a matter of high principle with him, although he clearly does believe what he's saying. In naming the neocons as the source of the problem – as the Bad Guys in the narrative he's selling – Edwards seems to be imitating another come-from-behind candidate whose success in terms of "buzz" (and fundraising) he would do well to replicate. Of course, I'm talking about Ron Paul – the first candidate to pin the blame for this disastrous war where it rightly belongs, and go after the neocons by name.

Oh well, it's the sincerest form of flattery, and libertarians can take it as a compliment. Now if only some of the other Democrats would learn from Ron, take off the kid gloves, and start throwing some real punches…

Obama raps Hillary for playing the gender card

Democratic presidential candidates Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) (L) and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) take part in a political debate at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 30, 2007.

Reuters - Nov 2, 2007

Democrat Barack Obama, the only black candidate for president, accused rival Hillary Clinton on Friday of hiding behind her gender after she was pummeled in a debate with six male candidates.

"I am assuming and I hope that Sen. Clinton wants to be treated like everybody else," the Illinois senator said in an interview with NBC's "Today Show."

"When we had a debate back in Iowa awhile back, we spent I think the first 15 minutes of the debate hitting me on various foreign policy issues. And I didn't come out and say: 'Look, I'm being hit on because I look different from the rest of the folks on the stage'," he said.

"I assumed it was because there were real policy differences there, and I think that has to be the attitude that all of us take. We're not running for the president of the city council. We're running for the presidency of the United States."

He was speaking a day after New York Sen. Clinton -- the only woman running for president -- urged women voters to rally behind her against "the boys club of presidential politics."

Obama and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who are both trailing Clinton in polls by a wide margin, attacked the former first lady's honesty, leadership and ability to win the November 2008 election in a Tuesday night debate.

Obama noted on Friday that Clinton is widely viewed as a tough figure in national politics.

"So it doesn't make sense for her, after having run that way for eight months, the first time that people start challenging her point of view, that suddenly she backs off and says: 'Don't pick on me'," he said.

"That is not obviously how we would expect her to operate if she were president."

Bush 41 Backs Away From Clinton

George H.W. Bush on FOX News Sunday’s “American Leaders” series with Chris Wallace.

“Well, look, if she’s the nominee, I obviously will be for her opponent. I thought a few weeks ago that she was almost a ‘gimme’, as we say in golf, for the nomination. I’m not sure I feel that way now. Well, there seems to be more kind of internal — in her own party there seems to be more willingness to take her on and to argue about stuff. But she’s a formidable opponent and she’s done very well, in my view. Now would I be for her? No.”

“I’m not sure that — you know, again, I want to be on record as just saying I don’t necessarily believe Hillary is going to win the primary, to say nothing of the general election. But the American people have a way of sorting these things out. And they go to caucuses or go to the primaries and just work, grind your way up the — to whatever lies ahead, and that’s what’s happened. There hasn’t been any anointing in the process.”

'Invade and Bomb With Hillary and Rahm'

Why war with Iran is likely

by Justin Raimondo - Nov 2, 2007

They're ginning up another war, and the target is Iran. While the propaganda campaign started shortly after we invaded Iraq, with Rummy and the President ratcheting up the warlike rhetoric early on, the accusations and threats against Iran have lately taken on a new urgency. Whereas in the early Rumsfeld era we mainly restricted ourselves to warning Tehran against meddling in our newly-acquired province, these days we are blaming the mullahs for our failure to stabilize the country: Iraq won't stay conquered, dammit, and it must be the Iranians' fault – that's the narrative the War Party is pushing to rationalize the ongoing disaster, while simultaneously making the case for opening up a new front.

And an increasing number of Americans are falling for it. A new Zogby poll says 52 percent of the American people favor attacking Iran to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons. A recent Pew survey similarly indicates that war hysteria is on the rise, with 82 percent convinced that a nuclear-armed Iran would pass off nukes to terrorists, and two-thirds believing Iran is likely to attack the US. The yearlong hate-fest directed at Tehran is clearly paying off.

I can't say I'm surprised. After all, as of this past summer, 41 percent of the American people still believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for planning, financing, and/or carrying out the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Gee, I wonder how they got that impression….

The neocons are giving us the same song-and-dance that preceded our last glorious Middle Eastern "victory" – as administration spokesmen conjure the Halloweenish specter of mad-mullahs-with-nukes, the "evidence" is being doctored, massaged, and otherwise manipulated to fit the War Party's stipulations. Get ready for another massive "intelligence failure" and cries of "But everybody thought they had ‘weapons of mass destruction'!"

Yet, one has to ask: how many times are we going to fall for this guff?

To begin with, there is no chance Iran will have a nuclear weapon in anything short of 5 to 10 years: a few thousand centrifuges, while it sounds impressive, is not the equivalent of a nuke factory. It would take many more thousands to enrich uranium to weapons-grade quality, and Iran hasn't got the technical capability to construct and maintain such a large-scale operation, as pointed out by as Peter Beaumont, foreign-affairs editor of The Observer.

Secondly, even if Iran did one day join its neighbors Israel and Pakistan in the nuclear club, there is every reason to believe that "we have the power to deter" them, as General Abizaid put it: "Let's face it, we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we've lived with a nuclear China, and we're living with (other) nuclear powers as well."

The real fear, however, is that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a threat to the continental United States by passing off the technology to a terrorist group, such as al-Qaeda. It doesn't matter that this is the most unlikely scenario of them all: no nuclear power would ever give a non-state actor access to such technology for fear of the fallout, quite literally. With al-Qaeda in possession of nuclear weapons, the likelihood that they would attack Iran, or someplace nearby, is quite high – far more plausible a scenario than the dim prospect of somehow smuggling a nuke into the US, or delivering it by some other means. Yet no matter how far-fetched the possibility, even such a slim chance conjures a nighmarish fear, and that, in turn, is not quite rational.

This fear of nukes, and of another 9/11, was the clincher in the run-up to the last war. These two themes were so skillfully interwoven, and evoked, that, in spite of the prolonged debunking of the alleged Saddam-Osama connection, the myth persists to this day.

In fact, it worked so well the last time around that the War Party, in preparing for it's next act, is engaged in a vast recycling project, revamping some pretty familiar lies, half-truths, and cherry-picked bits of "intelligence," albeit with a new twist. Think of the time, energy, and money they'll be saving: they don't need new propaganda, all they have to do is haul out the old stuff, insert Iran in place of Iraq, and replace Saddam Hussein with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth, and his real-world equivalents are getting awfully good at it: why, just look at those poll numbers.

How do we account for the sudden rise of a new war hysteria, this time directed against Iran? While the administration has turned up the volume of its anti-Iranian rhetoric, and the mass media has duly – and largely uncritically – reported it, this is only part of the reason for the ominous uptick. The core reason is that we're entering the political season, and none of the presidential candidates presented to us as "major" will take war with Iran off the table: indeed, the Republicans – with one exception – seem to be competing with each other to see who can take the most ferociously provocative stance. When it comes to Iran, the Democrats are almost as bad – and, in the case of the putative frontrunner, perhaps even worse. As Bill Safire put it on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, in the context of discussing Hillary's possible picks for the VP slot,

"What about Rahm Emanuel, the most powerful voice in the House of Representatives that agrees with Hillary Clinton on foreign affairs. He's a hawk. And although he's a rootin' tootin' liberal on domestic affairs, he is a hawk on foreign affairs. I was at the—a roast for him for Epilepsy Association, and Hillary Clinton was there, and I said, quite frankly, here you have the hawkish side of the Democratic Party. If they get together, the bumper sticker will read ‘Invade and bomb with Hillary and Rahm.'"

As the issues are increasingly framed in terms of presidential politics, there is little vocal opposition to the rush to war with Iran, even in the supposedly "antiwar" Democratic party. Many of the same people who think George W. Bush is a war criminal who lied us into invading Iraq will nonetheless dutifully pull the lever for Hillary, who has criticized the president for being soft on the mullahs. Having already given her moral and political sanction for attacking Iran by voting for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution – which, even in the slightly watered-down version passed by the Senate, provides enough cover for the Bush administration, or its successor, to claim the authority to take military action – Hillary Clinton will inherit and continue the neocons' wars, and will be no less committed to "victory."

Americans see their leading politicians "debating," but none of them are opposing war with Iran: indeed, they all seem to be going along with it, with a few exceptions – and these exceptions, precisely because they aren't going along to get along, are invariably dismissed by the pundits as "minor" or "fringe" candidates, who cannot under any circumstances be taken seriously. The majority of Americans now want a definite deadline for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, and yet not a single "major" candidate for president proposes such a course. What's more, if he or she did, they would be immediately relegated to second or third-tier status, even as their campaign fundraising dried up for reasons convincingly explained by Wesley Clark.

Beating the drums for war, the Israel lobby is pulling out all the stops, and this time they are out in the open about it. The fear that the Lobby would be too visible in promoting Israel's interests motivated them to keep a relatively low profile during the run-up to war with Iraq, but it isn't holding them back now. AIPAC, for one, is openly leading the charge for war, and, as the overwhelming vote in favor of Kyl-Lieberman indicates, they are doing a bang-up job of it. The Democrats are terrified of the Lobby: the loss of all that New York money, which is essential for Hillary's victory, would be a disaster for them. Not that there is much danger of Hillary forgetting her good friends in the military-industrial complex, who have donated more to her than to all the others combined. She, after all, has a lot to prove: can a woman be a tough commander-in-chief? Faced with a "choice" between someone who is bound to over-compensate in the direction of unreasonable belligerence, and … Rudy Giuliani – well, all I can say is, ain't "democracy" wonderful?

Public opinion is shaped, in part, by the political discourse, and when it comes to foreign policy, rather than debating, the two parties are singing a duet. As the Iraq war widens into a burgeoning conflict with Iran, and not a single major political figure rises to oppose it, we are stumbling into an even bigger quagmire than the one in which we are presently immersed. Gen. Abizaid says that we'll be in Iraq for the next 50 years: if we go to war with Iran, make that a century or so.

Following Hillary’s Money

by Justin Raimondo - Oct 18, 2007

Follow the money, as the old saying goes:

“The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Mrs Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street’s favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama.”

The military-industrial complex is clearly betting on the Democrats, who, for the first time, are beating out the GOP in raising money from the war profiteers. What’s more, they’ve clearly settled on Hillary as their horse in this race, and here’s the numbers:

“So far, Mrs Clinton has received $52,600 in contributions from individual arms industry employees. That is more than half the sum given to all Democrats and 60 per cent of the total going to Republican candidates. Election fundraising laws ban individuals from donating more than $4,600 but contributions are often ‘bundled’ to obtain influence over a candidate.”

Yes, but, as she put it recently — I believe it was at the dailykos conference — lobbyists are people, too. They need to be represented — and Hillary will certainly do that.

End the war? Withdraw from Iraq? Re-evaluate American foreign policy?

Not on your life.