With the Democratic Party now under the leadership of Senator Barack Obama, federal lobbyist dollars are no longer welcome. Here's my email today from Howard Dean:

After seeing John McCain finally rejecting the endorsement of Rev. John Hagee because of anti-Semitic statements made by Hagee, I was rather surprised to learn that Rev. Hagee delivered a keynote address at the 2007 Annual Conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

That AIPAC would feature as a keynote speaker someone whose endorsement would have to be publicly rejected by a Republican Presidential candidate because of his anti-Semitism says a lot about where things stand with AIPAC, and the pro-Israel cause in general. Even more interesting are some of the things that he said, the essence of which were repeated almost verbatim by our own President speaking at the Knesset earlier this month. Excerpts from his address after the jump:

Link to Hagee's Address to AIPAC

Lost in all of the recent hand-wringing about Obama and the white working-class vote is the concern expressed earlier on in the primaries about Obama and the Latino vote. For the most part, Obama has been losing Latinos by around 30 points throughout the primaries. The questions is whether or not this will be significant in November.

In the wake of Tuesday's primaries, Hillary's slim chance of winning the nomination hinge on her being able to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations pursuant to the "beauty contest" primaries that were held in January. It's always been a specious argument, but in the world of Clintonian politics, anything's possible so long as it benefits them, to hell with the rest of the Democratic Party.

Or maybe his campaign staff and speech writers. I watched his speech last night in North Carolina on C-SPAN hoping for a sign that he was going to address the recent issues with his ex-pastor, etc. No, this is not a "concern troll" -- feel free to check my diary history. I've been blogging (and volunteering) for Barack since the beginning of the primaries. Unlike many others, however, I thought that the Philadelphia speech was Barack's first major mistake of the campaign. IMHO, the issue with Wright has never been about race, it's about patriotism. So I was encouraged when he began his stump speech response to the Wright issue by referencing the issue of patriotism.

Even though I am a stalwart Obama supporter, I believe that the Reverend Wright issue does in fact represent a fundamental threat to his campaign. Yes, it's a "distraction" from the "issues," but let's be real here folks; the American people do not elect Presidents based on issues. If that were the case we would have had nothing but Democratic Presidents from FDR until the present. They vote based on personality, or to put it in a better light -- leadership, character and integrity.

If we remind ourselves of the Rovian school of politics, you take your opponents greatest strengths, and by hook or by crook, you turn them into weaknesses. Thus, the textbook example would be the "Swift-boating" of John Kerry, who I think we can all agree won the Democratic nomination because of his record of military service and was then turned into a traitor.

If we can summarize Obama's greatest strengths, it has to be his unique ability to bring people together across racial, political and other divides, his "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" sort of image as a non-politician politician who has not yet sold his soul to the ways of politics, and his judgment. Reverend Wright is a living, breathing fundamental threat to all of those claims . . .

An anecdote from the trenches...

Cross-posted at The Pragmatic Progressive Democrat

In my day job, I work as an environmental and transportation advocate for low-income people in Los Angeles. Recently, I was fairly stunned by a meeting I attended organized by local environmental groups to discuss the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP). The "bottom line" in the LTRP can be found at page 53, wherein it is stated that if all goes as planned, L.A. will spend tens of billions of dollars on transportation improvements over the next twenty-plus years, only to see surface transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions in L.A. County will rise from 72,670 metric tons per day as of 2004 to 98,900 metric tons per day in 2030. According to the MTA's own numbers, that total represents a less than 1% reduction as against what would would happen if we did absolutely nothing.

This is a message to my fellow Obama supporters here at DailyKos and elsewhere: please stop it with the accusations of racism, race-baiting, and latent racism.

Notwithstanding all media spin to the contrary, I don't think this is a particularly good time to launch a long-needed "conversation about race" in America. We don't need to point out the racism displayed by Larry Johnson, or Lou Dobbs, or Geraldine Ferraro, or any other potential critic of Obama. We don't need to "finally address" the centuries of injustice done to black people, or brown people, or anyone else. We don't need to make sure that every American acknowledges and transcends their own latent racist tendencies. No, I don't believe that we need to do any of that.

We do need to elect Barack Obama President of the United States of America.

OK, I'm no bonddad or Jerome a Paris, but I've spent a number of years working as a lawyer in the general area of housing finance, so I believe that I understand a bit about what's going on with the recent federal actions. And I don't like it. Hundreds of billions of our tax dollars have been put at risk by the recent actions of the Federal Reserve Bank under Ben Bernanke's leadership, and nobody seems to care how the decision is justified.

Part of the reason, I believe, that nobody is challenging this giant theft of our national treasury is that very few people aside from those who directly benefit from it actually understand it. So in the interest of doing my small part to spread the word, here's my take on it...

Crossposted at The Pragmatic Progressive Democrat

It's not a rhetorical question. I'm as strong of an Obama supporter as there is out there. I donated on the day he announced and encouraged everybody I knew to do the same. I was a congressional district-level team leader responsible for organizing around 40 precinct captains in his California primary campaign. If you look at my diary history, you'll see that I've been blogging for him here and elsewhere since the Fall.

But for whatever reason, I just don't get the hoopla over this particular speech. It may be because I'm too deep into it all to see "the forest for the trees". I've read almost everything Obama has ever written and listened to all of his major speeches. I've even seen him "behind closed doors" so to speak, at one particular event last summer.

. . . can we talk about Chelsea and her hedge fund job? I've wracked my brain trying to understand this one. Her father's an ex-President (Democratic) and now heads a global foundation. Her mother's a sitting United States Senator from the State of New York. She twenty-seven years old. She went to Stanford and Oxford. She does not need any money. She could literally write her own ticket to do anything on the planet that she wants. The United Nations. Philanthropy. Politics. Anything.

And she decides to become an analyst for a Wall Street hedge fund? Avenue Capital Group. From their website: "Avenue Capital Group is a global investment firm focusing on the preservation and growth of capital."

I'm poor and I wouldn't take that job. Why in the hell would she? I hate to say it, but to me is says something about the parents.

Like the rest of you I'm freakin' boiling over these latest comments from Hillary on her and McCain having "crossed the threshold" to be Commander-in-Chief, as against Obama who supposedly has not. I honestly don't know what she's talking about.

If prior military service is the requirement, then she and Barack both fail compared to McCain. I can't imagine that she's making the ridiculous argument that this threshold occurs sometime between a Senator's fourth and eighth year of service, that her eight years and McCain's 28 years of service are in one category, and Obama's four in a completely differenct one.

Could she be talking about her years as First Lady? Did she have any direct involvement with the military in that role? From what I understand, she didn't even have a military security clearance, and she is not credited with any particular initiative in the military arena.

After watching Obama's exchange with McCain the last couple of days over Al Qaeda in Iraq, and the one between John Stoltz of Vote Vets and Ericka Anderson of HumanEvents.com (excerpts of which are at the top of the rec list right now), I'm not sure "our side" is doing as well as we think we are. I think we could do better on this question, and here's why:

I know I'm violating Daily Kos policy here, but last night, Senator Clinton has finally and officially crossed the line with me. I will not ever cast a ballot for her. Thankfully, the good voters of this nation and the Democratic Party appear poised to see to it that I won't have to face that ugly choice. Her attempted "gotcha" on Obama with respect to Minister Louis Farrakahn represents so much that is so wrong with this woman on so many different levels, that I just could not vote for under any circumstances.

I found this little tidbit from a March 2007 article in the New Republic that included the following words from Obama, reflecting on his days as a community organizer more than two decades ago:

The article, by the way, is one of the best explanations of Obama's background and political philosophy that I've yet seen.

I just finished a round of phone calls to Wisconsin for Obama. I was pretty involved in the California campaign, and I'm not sure how they generate the online "call from home" lists, but almost everyone I talked to was UNDECIDED!!! Actually finding and talking to an undecided voter was a rare treat in California. And they were relatively open to a persuasive pitch. A solid win in Wisconsin would make a big difference for the Obama campaign right now, going into March 4. Let's hit those phones folks!!!

Obama's Online Phone Bank

Maybe I'm biased, and believe me, this is not to suggest anything other than a continued and even escalated full-throttle push for us Obama supporters all the way to the finish. But watching the returns from the Potomac Primaries and the speeches by Obama, McCain and Clinton, I'm thinking that we may be at the "tipping point" in this campaign. I just don't see a path to the nomination for Hillary, and, given that, I suspect that much of her support will wither away in fairly rapid and dramatic fashion. Barring some major, unforseen event, Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Here's why:

I'm a volunteer with the Obama campaign. Today, I wore two somewhat related "hats." First, I was a precinct specialist in the 33rd congressional district, responsible for providing support for about 40 precinct captains in my local community. Second, I was an election protection attorney responsible for monitoring my local poll locations. I have some experience in the latter role, having supervised poll workers as part of my job duties during the 2000 elections and as an election protection volunteer in Nevada for the Democratic Party in 2004.

Partially by luck, and maybe also by virtue of my previous experiences, I ended up right in the middle of this unbelievably inane and entirely avoidable example of widespread voter disenfranchisement. The story after the jump . . .