Aka Obama's Sour Apples to Apples, Part Four

Between late February and mid-April, voters in nine states that should/could be "Democratic" in the 2008 Presidential Election were exposed to a considerable amount of negative informative concerning both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The negative information had little impact on how Hillary Clinton was regarded when compared to John McCain.  But it has had a major impact on their perception of Barack Obama, and on the perception of the relative merits of Obama and McCain.

Overall, the worst that can be said about Clinton is the negative press attention has resulted in more previously undecided voters in certain demographic categories expressing a preference for McCain rather than for Clinton.   But Obama is not merely losing "undecided" voters in most demographic categories because of negative media coverage, a significant percentage of voters who had supported Obama over McCain have switched their preferences.

I would like to point folks to "Blue Girl, Red State's" post on the food we eat, which discusses the change in the food we eat during an era of big and bigger business and globalization.

The Jungle

Basically, we're heading back to food from the turn of last century and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

The meat supply, once safe and reliable and much healthier than it is now, has seen multiple recalls in the last few months, and when the largest recall in history was issued in February after it was revealed that a meatpacking company in California was processing downer cows for distribution to the school lunch program, there was a minor uproar, but it died down, and likely very few people made any changes. That recall was just the latest.

Tasers kill.  They kill needlessly.  We are told they are non-lethal, but they often kill.  And worse, cops often resort to them in situations when any sort of force is inappropriate, much less lethal force.

What can citizens do to get rid of tasers?  And which candidate seems most responsive to actually protecting citizens civil liberties? Here's a story of a man tased three times, and killed.  And his crime?  Too incapacitated by an illness to leave his car.

Goodyear worker in Kansas dies after tasering by police

By Kate Randall -- 4 April 2008

Friends and co-workers of an employee at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant in Topeka, Kansas, were horrified when the man died after being tasered three times by police last Saturday night.

Juan Cole, Tom Engelhardt, and Fred Kaplan have all written about the defeat of the Iraqi government's recent offensive against the Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army.

Thinking that it would drop kick me back into noveling action, I thought that I would step into the Book in a Month challenge set forward by Victoria Lynn Schmidt.

So off I went and joined the Yahoo e-group connected to the book (VBIAMClub), which seems to have garnered quite a number of members. While the current challenge is running from 15 March to 15 April, there appear to be any number of different challenges going on simultaneously. Or at least a couple seem to be couple different challenges going on...or starting.

There's a story that has been aired on CNN recently, and is discussed here at Glenn Sacks' blog.  A girl is dying of brain cancer in Nebraska and she wishes to see her father.  Dad was jailed in a Federal Prison on a non-violent drug charge.  He is due to be released in a year.

Jason and the Yaeger family have appealed many times to the warden for a 30-day supervised release, which could be allowed under "extraordinary circumstances." However, the family says these appeals have been denied, and the prison tells them the circumstances are not "extraordinary."

Glenn provides contact information for the Governor of Nebraska as well as Nebraska's Senators, House Representatives, and the child's state representatives.  And I urge people to contact them.

I think so.  And I'm disgusted.

Over in the main part of the page, there has been some discussion about some of the interesting "post-partisan" positions Obama and his surrogates and praisers have taken in the last couple days.  The more I hear, the more I smell the stench of Obama's Senate mentor, Joe Lieberman.

On Tuesday March 4 voters in Brattleboro, VT will vote on a non-binding resolution calling for the following:

"Shall the Selectboard instruct the Town Attorney to draft indictments against President Bush and Vice President Cheney for crimes against our Constitution, and publish said indictment for consideration by other municipalities? And shall it be the law of the Town of Brattleboro that the Brattleboro Police, pursuant to the above-mentioned indictments, arrest and detain George Bush and Richard Cheney in Brattleboro if they are not duly impeached, and extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them."

According to the organizers the resolution a largely symbolic gesture. One organizer wrote, "it was born simply out of the devastating realization that our Constitution and entire system of government were -- and still are -- under assault, and that such extraordinary circumstances sometimes call for extraordinary measures." Now organizers claim the initiative now has real legal teeth. How legal is it?

Read below the fold.

The Senate recently passed a bill recently that would have restricted the CIA to using those interrogation methods listed in the Army Field Manual. In other words, it would bar the CIA from employing so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as waterboarding.  Of course President Bush is planning to veto this legislation.  

The demise of the Clinton campaign was sewn just after the 2004 election, when pollster Mark Penn sought to explain the Bush victory among so-called "values voters."

He found that uptight parents were less concerned with abortion than the idea of their kids watching "Sex in  the City," "pumped into their homes" which they'd never seen, and was then only on cable, and playing "violent videogames."

The next year, Senator Clinton held a press conference with Joe Lieberman and Republican Senators Santorum and Brownback, threatening the game industry with legal restrictiopns if they didn't "clean up their act."

Clinton allies introduced State Laws, with press releases claiming "86% of 16 year old boys play 'these' games."

Last night, German TV did an investigative piece asking the question:  who makes Blackwater's guns?  The program, from SWR's "Report Mainz" (which in the past has also done some nice work on US mistreatment of captives) laid out in some detail how the firm of Heckler & Koch (local, to the station) was Blackwater's strategic partner and gunmaker of choice.  

Let there be no doubt about it:  HK makes excellent weapons.  Doubtless this report struck a couple nerves, and not just in the management suites.  For a long time in the Cold War and thereafter pretty much every German soldier - conscripts now watching this in their living rooms - was issued a rifle that came from HK's production lines.  Most German cops' sidearms are from HK.  And then there are the government contracts going forward.

I've taken the time to translate the text of the story, and provide the video and text links.  Please watch and read.  And, nice catch to TPM and HuffPo for picking up this story.

CNN Politics.com is reporting that a new poll suggests the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination between Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois is a statistical dead heat in Texas. Really?

More below the fold.