Yes Stephen..Susan Collins would be fine. For that matter, so would Barbara Boxer, (she’s my Senator, and a dynamic one at that) or Barbara Lee..another dynamic woman who has pushed a progressive agenda since before it became known as such, and also the only Congressional Rep to vote against the war on Iraq.

And that’s just the beginning.

Which is also what continues to annoy me about this whole persona about “Hillary” being the one to “open doors” for women!

For crying out loud...it’s like totally disregarding the women who have been in these trenches for years now, and making all sorts of progress!!

Since when did Hillary Clinton (ALONE) become the ‘doorwoman’ to America’s female population? We haven’t been waiting around for her or anybody else to ‘open any doors’ seeing as how we’re perfectly capable of WALKING THROUGH THEM UNDER OUR OWN STEAM!
(I dunno, call it renewable female energy or something).

So, if the door is THERE, (even if it’s locked) and we need to get through it in order to get some work done, then that’s what we’re gonna do!

So yes. Susan Collins is fine with me, and that WOULD throw a monkey wrench into the system..including the neo-cons and neo-libs. They wouldn’t know whether to shit or blow their noses.

It’s like the friend who came to dinner. Charming and pleasant, she appreciates your generosity.

So she eats and drinks and says thank you and asks where should she sleep!

Breakfast comes and goes and another dinner and another breakfast and another dinner and another breakfast and the pleasantness becomes slightly irritating.

At first it’s harmless, then amusing then annoying and finally you just have to say ... enough!

Go home Lady!

Absolutely! Folks send a message off to his website!
Just say NO!

How about Harriet Christian?  There’s some gumption.

I agree with cyrena that he would do better to “search out another woman;” and I still feel that, if he wants to throw a monkey wrench into the entire system (which may well appear to his base), he should invite Susan Collins (as a Republican with the gumption to say “enough” to Bush) to be his running mate!

According to a member of the Clinton “inner circle” just interviewed on BBC World Service Television (whose name I missed), she will decide what she wants to decide when she wants to decide it; but, right now, she is not saying anything.

~"But after all’s said and done, the one thing I HOPE and PRAY this DOESN’T mean is an Obama/Clinton ticket!~”

Louise..I am HOPING and PRAYING the same thing, and getting more and more nervous by the minute. Based on everything I keep reading, this is EXACTLY her plan.

So, here’s what this boils down to: Barack Obama is now faced with probably the most important decision of his presidency, and he’s not even on the clock yet.

He’s going to have to tell her NO!

Now he may have to search out another woman to run on the ticket with him, and there are enough to choose from, so that is doable.

But, he has to tell Hillary and now - NO! NO! NO!

She will of course have already threatened him with the full fervor of the hatred that she’s spent the past year stirring up. (which is why he needs to select a suitable VP right away).

But, he’ll have to resist it, and not give in to the extortion. This is a major test, because of course he would assume that this might be the best way to reunite the support of the entire party.

But, that won’t happen. It’s too late for that. The hard-core block behind Hillary will continue to be resentful, and Hillary herself would be just as polarizing as VP as she has been as a candidate, and as we’ve always known she would be as a president, because she’s like a poison that cannot be survived.

This jibes with the same threats that CBS reported from a ‘senior aide’.

Needless-to-say, this would totally undermine the entire platform of Obama’s candidacy. If we wanted the old stuff that has brought about the decline that we are now in, there would have been no reason for him to run.

We want change from the destructive power of the Corporate State, (which is only a form of Totalitarianism) and that is exactly what Hillary is. That’s why HE won the nomination, and NOT HER!

This woman is too much. Like the worst kind of disease that seems to be resistant to any anti-biotic or other treatment. She will extort him/us, by demanding that unless he put her on the ticket, she will use her band of zealots to destroy his chances in November.

I sure would like to have a talk with Sen. Obama right about now, but I don’t know him personally. So, if anybody can get word to him…tell him this.

JUST SAY NO!

We’ve got ya covered Barack. JUST SAY NO!

NBC is reporting that Hillary told a NY congresswoman that she is interested in being Obama’s VP.

cyrena, I cannot resist adding as a footnote that Davy Crockett (who has his own reputation with regard to our Native Americans) represented Tennessee in the House of Representatives under Jackson’s Administration (as we all learned from Walt Disney)!

Thanks for the post Stephen. Thinking back to that election of 1824, I learned last year, (as part of a course on Law and Racism - as racism is embodied quite vigorously in the language of the Constitution) that Andrew Jackson ran on a platform as the “Indian Killer.” In short, he promised the constituency that he would wipe them all out.

I’m with you on the ‘faith-based’ stuff.

Meantime, I posted this on the other thread about the ‘17 million votes’ that Hillary claims.

And yes...my own frustrations are very apparent here. Maybe the terror has just worn me down.

****************

Ok so, this just in, which may reference Greg Bacon’s earlier post. Be advised however, that this is MSM, and that the ‘source’ is, as always…anonymous..

~“(CBS/AP) Hillary Rodham Clinton will admit Tuesday night that Barack Obama has the delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, campaign officials said.

A senior Clinton campaign official confirms to CBS News that Clinton will “acknowledge but not concede” the race tonight. The official says “she has no plans to concede the race tonight.”

The Clinton campaign has released a statement saying “Senator Clinton will not concede the nomination this evening.” Campaign Chairman Terry McAuliffe told CNN this morning that Obama “doesn’t have the numbers today, and until someone has the numbers the race goes on."~

(continues)

~“The advisers said Clinton has made a strategic decision to not formally end her campaign, giving her leverage to negotiate with Obama on various matters including a possible vice presidential nomination for her. She also wants to press him on issues he should focus on in the fall, such as health care.””~

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/03/politics/mai n4148295.shtml

The part of this that references this as a ‘strategic decision’ to gain leverage to ‘negotiate’ with Obama sounds far more like some sort of a THREAT to me, typical of what has come from her.

And, she’s also dreaming and maintaining the bullying arrogance, if this is indeed true, because Barack Obama may not have the ‘numbers’ right now..as of this moment, but he will have them after the votes are counted in the last two contests happening now, as we speak/write.

Meantime, I am so damn sick and tired of being threatened by these people – from the Dick Bush monarchy to this never ending Clinton Monarchy, I am sick and tired of them threatening us/me.

That’s exactly what she’s been doing. “Negotiate” my ass! She’s threatening him that if he doesn’t accept her as the VP on his ticket, she will keep her crazy ass zealots supporters stirred up enough to cause him to lose in November. That’s what she’s set up over the past 6 or 8 months, and now she’s using it to EXTORT him/us and calling it ‘leverage’.

The article goes on to make a big flippin’ deal about some major disagreement in their health plans, because that’s the only thing she ever had to bring to the voters anyway. But there is essentially NO DIFFERENCE in their health plans, and Hillary damn well knows it, even though she’s tried to make a big ass deal out of the minor difference of whether or not it can be MANDATED for all, when she knows damn well that she has NO mechanism by which to FORCE every American to purchase her insurance coverage.

And, that is the ONLY difference!

Samantha Powers was SOOO on the mark. This woman is a monster!

Of course there is nothing particularly new about “a campaign of terror.” It has been stock-in-trade in our political system for quite some time.  We can still remember what the Republicans did with Willie Horton, and I am sure we can find plenty of examples as we dig further back in history.  Furthermore, this is far from an American phenomenon.  Unless I am mistaken, it was a pre-Thatcher Conservative Party in the UK that ran on the slogan, “If you want a [N-word] for a neighbour, vote Labour!”

In terms of our own historical origins, I was glad to see that one of the talks scheduled on Book TV (still the best alternative to MSM “news") this past weekend was given by Edward Larson on his book A MAGNIFICENT CATASTROPHE:  THE TUMULTUOUS ELECTION OF 1800, AMERICA’S FIRST PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN.  However, this election turned out to be modest compared to the one in 1824, which had five candidates (as opposed to the four in 1800).  In this election NO candidate had a majority of either electoral or popular votes; and Andrew Jackson, who had the plurality, was beaten through some horse-trading between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay (putting an end to what historians now call the “Era of Good Feelings")!

Personally, I do not think that “good feelings” ever last very long.  The real lesson of history is that the American electorate (not to mention those in the United Kingdom or, for that matter, Nepal) is a contentious lot; and we should leave the uniting-not-dividing cant to those who choose faith to shield them from not just terror but reality itself.  After all, even the “characters” in Plato’s dialogs had some pretty contentious personalities:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/02/self-fu lfilling-prophecy.html

As I have previously written on my own blog, what matters is not that our social system unites us but that it is robust or resilient enough to sustain our natural inclinations to divide:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/01/shock-o f-recognition.html

Thus, while I agree that we can’t “expect reason and sanity to prevail,” we should still be able to expect the “social system as a whole” to cohere (unlike the “center” of Yeats’ “second coming").  From that point of view, faith-based thinking has probably been the greatest threat to our resilience; and it may well be the threat of greatest concern to all sectors of the rest of the world, regardless of political or economic status.  Thus, I take some comfort in the rejection of faith-based positions that have come from both Democrats and Republicans.  For what it is worth, I also am inclined to see Obama as the best guarantor for the resilience of our social system; but who knows if I shall still feel this way at the end of the two Conventions?

Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough, though I have to admit that I can’t shake a certain measure of dread from the anticipation. Common sense dictates that this would signal the end, but common sense has never been forthcoming from Clinton’s campaign. Instead, it’s been a campaign of terror, the kind that results from any orchestrated instability or chaos visited upon a population or an individual…that same terror of not knowing what you will be greeted with when you get home, or to wherever it is that you’re going.

Louise referenced an example of this several months ago, in talking about the children of emotional unstable parents. They can’t focus or concentrate in school, or develop healthy relationships because of the uncertainty at home. Maybe they’ll get home and be greeted with hugs and kisses and terms of endearment, or maybe they’ll be abused with insane accusations and anger for imagined slights that have NOTHING to do with the child, or maybe they’ll be totally ignored and neglected. The poor kid never knows what to expect from one day to the next.

Well, that’s the SAME thing we’ve gotten from Hillary Clinton and the fervent zealotry that she has sparked among so many. At this point, I don’t trust it, because we can’t. We can’t expect reason or sanity to prevail, because it hasn’t yet.

Meantime, I’m with Aegrus in saying that I will remember this period as one of the most vehemently contentious periods of political instability in my own time. But in the wider view, I also have to acknowledge that this has been building for far, far longer than just this campaign season. It began at least as far back as The Coup of 2000, (if not before) and it’s simply gained momentum over the past 8 years; a sign of a society in major distress. I could cite other examples of this horror, and maybe someday I will get time to do that in a more organized fashion. In fact, somebody(ies) are going to have to bring this to a truth and reconciliation effort at some point, so that we can hopefully heal and get on with our recovery. The good news is that other societies HAVE survived and recovered, so we can at least look to that for some hope.

Meantime, I’ll go pay checkers with my bill paying operation.

I, honestly, could not care less if she drops out or not. Whatever she does will be fine by me, but she’s going to have to “significantly help Obama” by whipping her supporters into shape.

Forever I will remember the raging emotions of this campaign season. Sometimes I wonder how long it will be to see the kind of vehemence we’ve seen lately for a candidate.

My thoughts exactly, relief then oh no, what does THIS mean?

Maybe she’s going to offer to let him be her running mate if he’ll pay off her debts!

And that independent thing makes me think ... a Clinton/Lieberman ticket? Oh my!

Gosh I hope we are wrong and this reporter is right.

And those candidates who are getting hurt by their support for Hillary? Who’da thunk? Just goes to show negative campaigning doesn’t work for dems!

But after all’s said and done, the one thing I HOPE and PRAY this DOESN’T mean is an Obama/Clinton ticket!

That’s good to hear (sort of). At least the “share holders” will have a say, even if it turns out to be a token gesture.

How did you come upon this knowledge?

thanks!

Hillary prepares to take a bite out of some humble pie. 

Politics is great, one moment your an errant SOB and the next, your on your knees.

George, that is…

We’ll never give up.  Dr. Funkenstein is the kind of change we need.  You know George will be up and ready to go at 3am.

Clinton ‘08 Standin’ on the Verge of Gettin it On

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29620

If she gives a good enough speech at AIPAC (tomorrow?), she might get invited to help Tzipi Livni!

He can’t use money already donated to pay her campaign debts.  He can (and almost certainly will) ask his supporters (particularly the big spending ones) to help her out.

Oh my! When I first started reading, I thought..FINALLY, she’s gonna stop the torture!!

But then I read this:

• “He told the participants that Clinton wants to “significantly” help Obama, but he did not go so far as saying that she will announce withdrawal—that is the prerogative of the candidate.”

She wants to ‘significantly’ HELP him???  The only way she could do that would be if she and hubby agreed to take a YEAR LONG cruise around the world, and promise not to have ANY CONTACT with anyone in this country the entire time. (5 years would be better, 10 would be best)

But, my euphoria was short lived. I zipped through a few of the comments on the huffpo article, and there are a few suggesting that she’s not calling any meeting to announce her withdrawal, but rather to announce that she will continue the fight to the convention. (yeah, they were dreaming…denial like that is hard to overcome..might even be permanent)

And then another one said that according to a Hillary aide, she was going to announce that she was going to run as an Independent. OK…sounds like another delusional person.

STILL…this is Hillary…there is no telling WHAT she’ll do, and that ‘threat’ she’s made to ‘significantly’ help Obama, makes me very, very, nervous. Just last week she was talking assassination. Or was that the week before?

An Obama staffer i spent Saturday with certifying people to register voters told me that the feeling in Obama’s camp is that Hillary would be out by Friday.

i, however, remain dubious.

Whether Obama will use the donations of his supporters to pay off the debt Hillary accumulated while she played picador to Obama’s bull remains to be seen.