Clinton bows out and delivers promise to strongly back, and to throw ‘full support’ to Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton as expected today ended her bid for the White House and formally endorsed Barack Obama during a speech Saturday at the National Building Museum in Washington.

She was unequivocal in her praise for Obama, and the speech is being seen by pundits as a way to heal rifts in the party after a hard-fought battle.

Last night Senators Obama and Clinton Meet in Washington DC privately (see video below):

Her departure from the presidential race today does mark the end of the longest and most important thread of the Clinton story.

In a letter on her Web site, Mrs. Clinton expressed her support for Mr. Obama in this way: “Over the course of the last 16 months, I have been privileged and touched to witness the incredible dedication and sacrifice of so many people working for our campaign. Every minute you put into helping us win, every dollar you gave to keep up the fight meant more to me than I can ever possibly tell you.”

Mrs. Clinton continued, saying: I “extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy. This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans.” …[MORE]

[Hillary Clinton's Concession Speech]

[Obama -- Thank You Hillary!]

Message From Howard Dean - DNC Chairman | Make A Contribution

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Popularity: 20% [?]

With hundreds of White Women screaming murder, the Democratic Party Rules Committee today dealt a severe blow to Hillary “Napoleon” Clinton.

Hillary wanted the whole nine yards of Michigan and another nine of Florida, irrespective of the DNC rules that were set up very clearly and agreed upon by both campaigns before the beginning of the primaries.

In other words, she wants to steal this nomination by hook or crook — including inciting White Women by invoking baseless charges of “Sexism” by the Obama campaign, and by race-baiting.

It has not and will not work Ma. Clinton!

The rulings (by vote) by the DNC today prompted Hillary’s chief delegate Harold Ickes to angrily state: “There’s been a lot of talk about party unity–let’s all come together, and put our arms around each other,” said Ickes, who is also a member of the Rules Committee that approved the deal. “I submit to you ladies and gentlemen, hijacking four delegates … is not a good way to start down the path of party unity,” adding that Clinton had instructed him to reserve her right to appeal the matter to the Democrats’ credentials committee, at the party’s convention in August.

Obama picked up a total of 32 delegates in Michigan, including super delegates who have already committed, and 36 in Florida, for a total of 2,052. Hillary Clinton correspondingly picked up 38 in Michigan and 56.5 in Florida, for a total of 1,877.5.

To Hillary I say:

It’s Over ……PERIOD!!

The party of Clinton is now Obama’s party, whether you like it or not!

You and Bill are nothing but crooks who think that the presidency of The United States is an entitlement, and even a thoroughbred black man like Obama has no business grabbing “what belongs to you.” [see Michael Pfleger video below]

Hillary…..I hope to live to see a woman become the president of The United States someday — that woman will NOT be you. You are nothing but a THUG, in the mode of the “vicious Hyenas” who call themselves Republicans a.k.a ReTHUGlicans.

Go home Hillary — and bake cookies and have tea with Bill, for that’s a sure way of keeping tabs on his “philandering self.”

The FAT LADY has sung!

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Meanwhile, Sen. Barack Obama has quit his controversial congregation, Trinity United Church of Christ, in Chicago, campaign spokesman Bill Burton said Saturday.

Inflammatory sermons by the church’s longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., forced Obama to initially defend – then denounce – his former spiritual mentor.

Then this week, Obama had to distance himself from another minister preaching at Trinity, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, who last Sunday made comments that seemed to accuse Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) of acting “entitled” because she is white…[MORE]

Rev. Michael Pfleger Mocks Hillary Clinton

Halleluhya Rev!

REFERENCES:

1. The FIX — Michigan: A Done Deal But Bitterness Lingers
2. The D.N.C. Deliberates
3. Obama Quits His Church

Popularity: 21% [?]

By Harold Meyerson

Clinton’s Two-State Two-Step: Making Florida and Michigan’s delegates a cause for democracy and feminism makes a mockery of both.

Columnist - Harold Meyerson
On Saturday, when the Rules Committee of the Democratic National Committee meets to determine the fate of Florida and Michigan’s delegations to this summer’s convention, it will have some company. A group of Hillary Clinton supporters has announced it will demonstrate outside.

That Clinton has impassioned supporters, many of whom link her candidacy to the feminist cause, hardly qualifies as news.

And it’s certainly true that along the campaign trail Clinton has encountered some outrageously sexist treatment, just as Barack Obama has been on the receiving end of bigoted treatment. (Obama has even been subjected to anti-Muslim bigotry despite the fact that he’s not Muslim.) But somehow, a number of Clinton supporters have come to identify the seating of Michigan and Florida not merely with Clinton’s prospects but with the causes of democracy and feminism — an equation that makes a mockery of democracy and feminism.

Clinton herself is largely responsible for this absurdity. Over the past couple of weeks, she has equated the seating of the two delegations with African Americans’ struggle for suffrage in the Jim Crow South, and with the efforts of the democratic forces in Zimbabwe to get a fair count of the votes in their presidential election.

Somehow, I doubt that the activists opposing Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe would appreciate this equation.

But the Clintonistas who have called Saturday’s demonstration make it sound as if they’ll be marching in Selma in support of a universal right to vote. The DNC, says one of their Web sites, “must honor our core democratic principles and enfranchise the people of Michigan and Florida.”

Had Florida and Michigan conducted their primaries the way the other 48 states conducted their own primaries and caucuses — that is, in accord with the very clear calendar laid down by the DNC well before the primaries began — then Clinton’s marchers would be utterly justified in their claims. But when the two states flouted those rules by moving their primaries outside the prescribed time frame, the DNC, which gave neither state a waiver to do so, decreed that their primaries would not count and enjoined all presidential candidates from campaigning in those states. Obama and John Edwards complied with the DNC’s dictates by removing their names from the Michigan ballot. Clinton did not.

Seating Michigan in full would mean the party validates the kind of one-candidate election (well, 1.03, to give Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd and Mike Gravel, who also remained on the ballot, their due) that is more common in autocracies than democracies. It would mean rewarding the one serious candidate who didn’t remove her name from the ballot when all her rivals, in deference to the national party rules, did just that.

What’s particularly outrageous is that the Clinton campaign supported the calendar, and the sanctions against Michigan and Florida, until Clinton won those states and needed to have their delegations seated.

Last August, when the DNC Rules Committee voted to strip Florida (and Michigan, if it persisted in clinging to its date) of its delegates, the Clinton delegates on the committee backed those sanctions. All 12 Clinton supporters on the committee supported the penalties. (The only member of the committee to vote against them was an Obama supporter from Florida.) Harold Ickes, a committee member, leading Clinton strategist and acknowledged master of the political game, said, “This committee feels very strongly that the rules ought to be enforced.” Patty Solis Doyle, then Clinton’s campaign manager, further affirmed the decision. “We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process,” she said, referring to the four states that the committee authorized to hold the first contests. “And we believe the DNC’s rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role. Thus, we will be signing the pledge to adhere to the DNC-approved nominating calendar.”

Not a single Clinton campaign official or DNC Rules Committee member, much less the candidate herself, said at the time that the sanctions imposed on Florida or Michigan were in any way a patriarchal plot or an affront to democratic values. The threat that these rules posed to our fundamental beliefs was discovered only ex post facto — the facto in question being Clinton’s current need to seat the delegations whose seatings she had opposed when she thought she’d cruise to the nomination.

Clinton’s supporters have every right to demonstrate on Saturday, of course. But their larger cause is neither democracy nor feminism; it’s situational ethics.

To insist otherwise is to degrade democracy and turn feminism into the last refuge of scoundrels.

Popularity: 24% [?]

In desperation, Hillary Clinton is now explicitly referring to her appeal to “Hard-Working Americans, White Americans,” adding that she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Clinton’s blunt remarks about race came a day after primaries in Indiana and North Carolina dealt symbolic and mathematical blows to her White House ambitions.

Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, notes quite correctly that at the end of the day her primary support doesn’t prove she’s more electable. Either Democrat will get “the vast majority” of the other’s primary election votes in a general election, he said, adding that Clinton’s comment was a “poorly worded” variation on the way analysts have been “slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms.” …..[more]

I construe Hillary’s comments as a suggestion that “blacks are lazy,”….a racial stereotype I expect to come from a ReTHUGlican and not a Democrat.

“Her statement seems to exclude African-Americans from being hard-working,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist and CNN contributor, aligned to the Obama campaign, who is black. “Also, there are a lot of white Americans for Barack Obama. So it’s misleading and it’s not true,” said Mr. Simmons.

Mr. Simmons added:

“There is a very particular feeling that this couple(Bill and Hillary Clinton), that African-Americans had such regard for and trust in, has been at best dismissive towards Barack Obama and in many ways has used race and differentness as a weapon against him.”

Senator Diane Feinstein, a Clinton backer, has also indicated she wanted to hear “what Clinton’s strategy is,” adding: “The race is reaching a point now where there are negative dividends from it in terms of strife within the party.”

“Duck Hunting” Ma. Clinton however, appears unmoved by the “sniper-fire,” telling cheering supporters yesterday, in Charleston, West Virginia that the state’s primary next Tuesday, which she is expected to win, was “a test for me and a test for Senator Obama.”

I also find it odd that Latino voters who have been supporting her in large numbers are not included in the “Hard Working White” coalition….and what about blacks? Won’t she need the most consistently loyal Democratic party voting block, if she becomes the nominee?

The “Bitch of Chappaqua, New York” is in full Kamikaze (suicide) Mode….The “Hill” has become so selfish she doesn’t mind destroying the Democratic Party,…. and the “bitching and moaning” does not bode well for future female candidates.

LOL!

This woman is running amok, and if the DNC does not quickly “reject and denounce,” her — she will drive such a monumental wedge between the voters so much so that it will be next to impossible to unite the party for the general election.

Al Gore, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and other big-wigs of the Democratic party need to step in and get this witch out of the race, before her “toxic waste” does extreme damage to the party…..and to Bill’s already “Lewinsky-Stained” legacy.

On the other hand, if she decides to ’surrender’ within the next week or two, it will a ‘joy’ to watch Hillary stumping enthusiastically for Obama in the general election — essentially denying her current charge(s); that Obama is elitist and out of touch with middle-America.

Can’t wait for that… LOL!

Popularity: 37% [?]

McCAIN’S ORIGINAL ‘100 YEAR’ TOWN-HALL PROCLAMATION

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Popularity: 24% [?]