Political Cartoon By: Gary Varvel

Popularity: 18% [?]

Hillary Clinton to make major speech on Tuesday

It seems this is the end of the road for Ma. Clinton.

Reports internet-wide indicate that as of Monday, Clinton campaign staffers are being urged by the campaign’s finance department to turn in their outstanding expense receipts by the end of the week, an indication that the campaign wants to get its affairs in order and to initiate an end to the 15 month duel with Obama.

The campaign is in debt to the tune of about $11 million.

Some other reports indicate the opposite: ABC News’ Kate Snow and Eloise Harper report that Clinton spokesperson Mo Elleithee came to the back of the press plane as Clinton flew from Rapid City to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and said: “I think its pretty clear that she is not conceding.” “I think its pretty clear that she is staying in this race. She is going, in the coming days, to be aggressively courting uncommitted superdelegates aggressively courting unpledged delegates, making the case to them that she is a candidate best ready to take on John McCain.”

When asked directly when Clinton will step aside, Elietthee told the reporters, “as she has said dozens and dozens of times she is in this race until we have a nominee…Until there is a nominee she is going to try to win support.” ….[MORE]

Meanwhile Obama told reporters that he spoke by phone with Clinton on Sunday, and that he congratulated her on winning Puerto Rico and apologized for the controversial remarks made by Father Michael Pfleger while speaking at his former church.

“I emphasized to her what an extraordinary race that she’s run and said that there aren’t too many people who understand exactly how hard she’s been working. I’m one of ‘em because she and I have been on this same journey together, and told her that once the dust settled I was looking forward to meeting with her at a time and place of her choosing. We’ve still got two more contests to go and I’m sure that there will be further conversations after Tuesday,” said Obama. ….[MORE]

On Tuesday night Obama will deliver a speech in in St. Paul, Minnesota — the site of the Republican National Convention that will nominate Arizona Sen. McCain in September.

“Minnesota is an important battleground state,” said Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “The McCain campaign has made it clear they will compete there aggressively. We will too.”

Meanwhile “Slick Willy” is still in Attack-Mode: Bill Clinton exploded in response to this article “The Comeback Id,” by Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair.

He called the author “sleazy,” “dishonest,” “slimy” and a “scumbag!”

Finally, Ted Kennedy had what what his doctors termed a “successful” surgery to remove “most” of the cancerous tumor in his brain. The ‘Liberal Lion‘ suffered a seizure at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass. about two weeks ago, and was rushed by helicopter to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where doctors diagnosed brain cancer.

Good Luck Ted!

     P/S: OBAMA - CLINTON TICKET 2008?

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You may have heard of Rev. John Hagee, the McCain supporter who said God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its homosexual “sins.” Well now meet Rev. Rod Parsley, the televangelist megachurch pastor from Ohio who hates Islam. According to David Corn of Mother Jones, Parsley has called on Christians to wage war against Islam, which he considers to be a “false religion.” In the past, Parsley has also railed against the separation of church and state, homosexuals, and abortion rights, comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis….[more]

A look at Jeremiah Wright, Geraldine Ferraro and John Hagee, who have been associated with the campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain respectively. Only Hagee is still an adivsor.

Video(s) Courtesy: BraveNew Films

Popularity: 28% [?]

By: Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu

Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights advocate — Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu

When we were struggling in South Africa against the vicious racist policies of apartheid, it was exhilarating to proclaim to our people that our God was encountered first not in the peaceful quiet of a sanctuary. No, our God was out there in the rough and tumble of the politics of the day. Our God revealed Himself in the utterly vulgar world of setting a fractious rabble of slaves free. Our God was/is the great liberator God of the Exodus – the paradigmatic event that helped to define God as the God who is never unbiased, but is always biased in favor of the oppressed, the marginalized, the down and outs.

This God in Jesus Christ continued to demonstrate this bias – Jesus companied not with the high and mighty, Archbishops, Presidents, and such like, but with the scum of society, prostitutes, sinners, the despised. This was the God who had an extraordinary identification with the little people – inasmuch as you have done this(clothed the naked,fed the hungry,etc.) staggeringly you have done it as to God. Wow. Our God did not give good advice from a safe distance. No, our God entered the fiery furnace to be there as Immanuel, God with us in our anguish and agony. Our God was not deaf, but heard our cries, was not blind but saw our suffering and would as of old come down to deliver us from our bondage too, so that we would enjoy the glorious liberty of the children of God.

Jeremiah Wright has said really no more than this which falls squarely in the ambit of black theology, black religion to answer the anguished questions of black people suffering under the brutality of white racism. It ultimately seeks reconciliation, but you cannot be reconciled with one who has his boot on your neck to keep you in the gutter. To be reconciled you must stand up right to look the other in the eye.

Black theology and religion seek the liberation of all, oppressor and oppressed, black and white together – as we accomplished it in South Africa for freedom is indivisible. Whites won’t be truly free until blacks are free. Listen to Condeleeza Rice in the Washington Times. Obama is a person of courageous integrity. He could have ingratiated himself to white Americans by repudiating his pastor completely. He did nothing of the sort. That speaks volumes for the man. America will not find peace with itself until you really deal with your history. You need something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help you come to terms with your past.

Another Jeremiah, the prophet of old shocked his compatriots when Jerusalem was being besieged by the Chaldeans. He urged his compatriots to desert and join the enemy. What price patriotism.

About The Author: Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu was awarded the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the cause of racial justice in South Africa. He served as the first black African archbishop of Cape Town from 1986 to 1996.

Prior to this role as spiritual leader of the Anglican Church in South Africa, Tutu served as General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches from 1978 to 1985. It was in this position that he became an international voice for the anti-apartheid movement and received the Nobel Prize.

In 1995, South African President Nelson Mandela appointed Archbishop Tutu Chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the body set up to investigate human rights violations under that country’s apartheid governments from 1960 to 1994. Tutu retired from in 1996 and was given the honorary title of Archbishop Emeritus.

Since then, Archbishop Tutu served as a visiting professor and scholar at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. He has received numerous awards and has authored two books, No Future Without Forgiveness and God has a Dream.

Tutu continues to write, lecture, and travel the world as an advocate of human rights and social justice. He is currently involved with a number of non-profit organizations working for peace and equality, meeting the needs of disadvantaged children and fighting HIV/AIDS.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Writes: BOB HERBERT

Race is like pornography in the United States — the dirty stories and dirty pictures that everyone professes to hate but no one can resist. But I suspect that even porn addicts get their fill sometimes.

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

Most of the electorate understands that the U.S. is in sorry shape, which is why more than 80 percent of poll respondents say we’re on the wrong track. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has nothing to do with any of that. The idea that his nonsense may shape the outcome of this election is both tragic and absurd…[more]

REFERENCES:

Editorial Reviews: Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

From Publishers Weekly: In this provocative, scattershot jeremiad, cultural historian Berman (The Twilight of American Culture) likens America to ancient Rome on the brink. On the geopolitical plane, he contends, the United States is a belligerent, overstretched empire, saddled with huge deficits and a hollowed-out economy, vulnerable to terrorist blowback and, worse, collapse if foreign creditors finally pull the plug.

The rot is cultural and spiritual, too: Americans are cold, alienated shopaholics immured in suburban anomie, each encased in a private bubble of iTunes and media noise and indifferent to the public good. Culprits include globalization, technology and, more fundamentally, the individualism and commercialism that is the bedrock of American identity. Because American civilization is a “package deal,” the author considers it impervious to piecemeal reform and, given Americans’ ingrained “stupidity” and willful blindness, unsalvageable.

Berman’s attempts to tie every American dysfunction to an all-encompassing sickness of soul overreaches, leading him to lump together serious issues like poverty and the Abu Ghraib outrages with trivialities like annoying cell phone yakkers or the “freedom fries” phenomenon, which he bemoans as “symbolic of an emptiness at the core.” Often stimulating and insightful in its particulars, his indictment, like the jingoism it abhors, is too sweeping and essentialist to fully capture American reality.

From Booklist: A despairing analyst of contemporary America, Berman continues criticism begun in The Twilight of American Culture (2000). One character crystallizing Berman’s thoughts is President George W. Bush, under whom, according to Berman, the U.S. is incipiently, if not actually, suffering a “presidential dictatorship,” a “de facto Christian theocratic plutocracy.” In that vein, Berman undertakes a wide-ranging condemnation of American economic and foreign policy of the past 50 years, which he believes has propelled America into disastrous decline.

That Berman inveighs against free markets and thinks the cold war was partly a dynamic of the Soviet Union acting defensively infuses this work with a solidly leftist viewpoint. In Berman’s vigorous arrangement of evidence, current events are propelling us upon an irreversibly downward trajectory toward a societal situation resembling the Dark Ages. However, Berman offers no positive ideas to reverse this perceived free fall, making his tome more of an alarm than a solution.– Gilbert Taylor

More Reviews

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