Jack & Jill Politics

Thanks for posting this. 75,000 strong, Wow!

anon,

It is the right thing to do.

He will have to face the facts, proof that the surge is succeeding, that we are winning. I prefer this happen sooner than later.

What will happen to his position, his promise, to immediately withdraw from Iraq?

What will happen to his anti-war base, should he acknowledge progress?

What will happen to independent swing voters who want to leave Iraq, but not in defeat, should he try to downplay the success of our
military?

BTW what’s the definition of success in Iraq right now? It keeps changing. If they don’t want to leave as “losers” (too late imo) then they need to come up with that definition and leave.

Barack isn’t yielding to GOP pressure to go to Iraq. But you can spin it that way if it makes you feel good.

If I were him, though, I wouldn’t go into a war zone till after he’s elected in November.

In another cave to the right wing bloggers and Rush Limbaugh who have been pounding him, Obama is trying to nuance his way out of his former statements on meeting unilaterally with American enemies.

So egregious is his backpedaling, even the New York Times is willing to point it out:

This week, Mr. Obama said that he was still considering meeting with Iranian leaders, though he would not necessarily guarantee a direct meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

“There is no reason why we would necessarily meet with Ahmadinejad before we know that he is actually in power,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “He is not the most powerful person in Iran.”

But, let’s go back to his original statement before he decided to cave to Rush and the bloggers:

The caveats belie the simple answer Mr. Obama gave during a debate last summer, when the issue was first raised in a major public forum. Without hesitation or qualification, Mr. Obama said he would hold direct talks with America’s enemies, drawing strong and immediate criticism from his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

“Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?” asked Stephen Sixta, a video producer who submitted the question for the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

“Mr. Obama, the first candidate to respond, answered, “I would.”

Several aides immediately thought it was a mistake and sought to dial back his answer. But on a conference call the morning after the debate, Mr. Obama told his advisers that he had meant what he said and thought the answer crystallized how he differed from his rivals.”

Obama only means what he says until he doesn’t.

And if he’ll cave like that to the right, how fast will he cave to China and Iran?

Here’s a collection of Obama T-Shirts – A new shirt added everyday!

d,

Your link is not working.

Read this article on CNN this morning – written by an interracial couple on why Americans can’t “get over” race…

They don’t seem to offer any answers though – more context. Which is useful, I suppose.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/29/cohens.race.politics/index.html

fyi CNN, MSNBC & Cspan are covering the meeting on Saturday re the Rules Committee

“She Voted for The War.”

Repeat, Rinse and Spit…

Foreclosure Nation: Squatters or Pioneers?
News: Take Back the Land installs homeless families in foreclosed Miami-Dade County properties. Here’s what the neighbors think.

By Tristram Korten

May/June 2008 Issue
Mamyrah Prosper steps gingerly over ankle-high grass strewn with plastic bags and empty soda bottles in the yard of a vacant redbrick house in Miami’s Liberty City. She peers through a gap in a boarded-up window. “It looks in good shape,” she says. “I mean, the walls aren’t falling down. This is definitely one of our stronger options.”

Prosper means that if the place checks out, she and her colleagues from Take Back the Land, a local group that advocates for affordable housing, will break in, change the locks, paint and clean, innovate a way to connect water and electricity, and then move a homeless family into the house. The criminal laws they’ll violate in the process range from trespassing to breaking and entering (even burglary, if the police get ambitious), which requires the organization to keep a pro bono lawyer on standby.

“We call it ‘liberating the housing,’” says Take Back the Land’s cofounder Max Rameau, a compact Haitian American who’s earned a reputation in Miami for creative activism. In 2006, Take Back received widespread attention when it took over a vacant city lot and erected a shantytown for the homeless that thrived for six months—that is, until a resident’s candle burned down the encampment. Rameau’s latest, and even more legally dubious, campaign targets homes shuttered by foreclosure.

In Greater Miami, there’s no shortage of those. Last year, Miami-Dade County recorded 26,391 foreclosures, a nearly threefold increase from 2006, and the pace has only quickened since then. Meanwhile, public housing is in crisis; at least four people are in line for each of the 10,000 available units, and the local housing agency—spectacularly corrupt, even by Miami standards—was taken over by the federal government last year.

Communities nationwide have seen a deluge of properties left vacant by foreclosures, but housing advocates say they’ve yet to witness anything like Rameau’s coordinated squatting campaign. “That’s the first I’ve heard of that kind of direct action,” says Linda Couch, deputy director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Low Income Housing Coalition. “It’s incredibly frustrating for housing advocates knowing that there are so many vacant houses amid so many people on the brink of homelessness.”

Rameau says Take Back’s campaign has two objectives: “One is to actually house people. The other is to bring attention to the contradictions in housing policy. The problem is that doing one precludes the other.” Drawing too much attention to Take Back’s efforts, he explains, would also get the attention of law enforcement. So Rameau’s organization has placed only two homeless families in foreclosed homes since the campaign began in October; the first was Cassandra and Jason, a couple in their late 20s, and their two small children. They’d been living in a van before Rameau moved them into a one-story stucco home in Liberty City. When I visited them in February, Cassandra, who works as a street vendor selling jewelry and incense, ushered me into the living room, furnished with two chairs, a moving trunk, and a small television. Bedsheets covered the windows, and the walls had just been painted saffron.

As far as the neighbors are concerned, the current tenants—squatters though they are—are a vast improvement over the crack den the vacant house had become. One neighbor even loaned the family electricity via an extension cord until a mysterious man sympathetic to Take Back’s cause turned on power at the house. “I didn’t ask any questions,” Cassandra says. The new living situation, temporary as it might be, affords her and Jason the time to save up to rent a new apartment, she said. “This just takes the stress off.”

According to the Miami-Dade County Housing Agency, squatters, if discovered, will be promptly removed from the premises and potentially prosecuted. So far, though, Take Back’s foreclosure-squatting pioneers have avoided detection. Despite the dicey legality, Rameau says there are 14 families like Cassandra’s on his waiting list. “We counsel them that they could be arrested if caught,” he says. “But things are so desperate, they are willing to risk it.”

I updated the Wiki last night. We’re up to 50 incidents.

If you believe I forgot any, please drop them in here.

ClintonAttacksObamaWiki Incident Page

RALPH PETERS: “To date, not one ‘mainstream media’ journalist has pressed the leading advocates of unconditional surrender to describe in detail what might happen after we ‘bring the troops home now.’ There’s plenty of unchallenged sloganeering, but no serious debate. This selective political softball and pep-rally journalism serves neither our country nor our political process well.”

Not sure if you all saw this but talkingpointsmemo is hiring.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/197366.php

TPM Media is announcing a job opening for a news editor working in our New York City office. The news editor has primary responsibility for running and updating the news section on the front page of Talking Points Memo (TPM), working closely with the site’s managing editor. Key responsibilities include staying on top of breaking news, finding current news items, working with our reporters to find which TPM stories to feature, writing headlines and story descriptions, as well as selecting news photos and video to complement our front page news coverage. Applicants must be inveterate news and politics junkies and be able to work in a fast paced news environment every day. Their job is to make sure our front page is always on top of everything and putting everything in front of our readers’ eyes from a witty, TPM perspective.

If you’re interested please send a resume, two clips and a letter describing your interest and qualifications for the job to talk (at) talkingpointsmemo.com with the subject line “TPM News Editor Job”.

This is a full-time, entry-level position, with health care. Salary is negotiable.

Venessa,

I really miss Gordon Parks.

Thanks for the photo

Father Michael Pfleger

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0508/Mocking_Hillary_at_Trinity.html

truthseeker,

it was the wrong time for Father Mike to say this…should have said it earlier..Obama is done with Clinton…he needs to come up with something to say against McCain.

Laura Ingrahm adopted a Guatemalan child.

While I’m all for adoption…um…cultural sensitivity training anyone?