The Tuzla pilot who flew Hillary Clinton into Tuzla speaks out:
Obama gains nine delegates in Texas Caucuses:
With more than 56 percent of the results tallied from today’s 284 Democratic district conventions across Texas, Sen. Barack Obama currently is projected to earn a 38-29 pledged delegate win in the Texas caucuses, exactly as projected on the day after the March 4th precinct caucuses. The nine delegate margin in the caucuses means Obama will gain a net margin of five pledged delegates from Texas because Senator Clinton narrowly won the Texas primary by only four delegates, 65-61.
"Despite the Clinton campaign’s widespread attempts to prevent many Texans from participating in their district convention, the voters of Texas confirmed Senator Obama’s important delegate win in the Lone Star State," said Obama spokesman Josh Earnest. "Today’s record-shattering turnout sends a clear message that the American people are ready for change in Washington and new leadership in the White House that will stand up for working families."
Iraqi forces are defecting en masse to Sadr's Army:
"Some of our soldiers have refused to fight the Mehdi Army and have instead handed their vehicles and weapons to them," he said, looking disgusted. "Now we are having to check every Iraqi army patrol that passes through to ensure they are genuine soldiers."
The scene on the other side of the battlefield proved his suspicions right. Dug in behind a wall was a squad of Mehdi Army fighters, the Shia militiamen Lt Abbas and 15,000 other Iraqi soldiers have been sent to quell.
Sure enough, one was driving an American-issue Iraqi army Humvee - one of seven, said the squad's leader, Haji Ali, handed to them by sympathisers within the Iraqi army.
"We shall fight them until the last drop of our blood," he snarled, clutching a Glock pistol of the kind issued to Iraqi police. "We will force them to respect the Mehdi Army."
Nancy Pelosi says the fight will be over in June.
Pelosi, D-San Francisco, addressed the opening night of the state Democratic convention. After her speech, the first woman to be Speaker of the House was mobbed by autograph-seekers. While signing autographs, she answered two reporters' questions, including if she thought the uncommitted Democratic superdelegates, who will likely be the deciding factor in the nomination fight, should make their preference known by July. "It will be much sooner, right after the public has voted," Pelosi said. Superdelegate Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member, also expects that the nominee will be decided well before the party's August convention in Denver. "People ought to just relax," Mulholland said. "Whoever is ahead by 50 delegates or so, you'll see the super delegates move that direction. It'll just happen naturally." Mulholland has not committed to either Clinton or Obama. In her speech, Pelosi told state Democratic activists that they cannot let the hotly contested primary between Clinton and Obama affect their efforts in the November election against Republican John McCain. "We have two great candidates for the President of the United States. At the end of the day our target, our eye on the prize, must be November," Pelosi said. "We must unite after this primary is over. I hope that will be before too long." The convention lasts through Sunday. Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to address the convention on Sunday morning.
The screws are tightening on Hillary Clinton. A few days ago, Howard Dean said that it would be over in July.
Bush ally Maliki is losing the battle for Basra:
Mr Maliki's confident prediction that he would crush the Mehdi Army is turning out to be a dangerous gamble that is fast eroding his authority. It is damaging to President Bush, who had claimed the US "surge" had brought about a turning point in America's five-year-old war to pacify Iraq. Mr Bush had praised the offensive as showing that the Iraqi security forces, trained and supported by the US, could at last stand and fight on their own. So far, the gun battles in Baghdad and the Shia south of Iraq are providing evidence that exactly the opposite is true.
About 40 policemen handed over their weapons to the Mehdi Army in Sadr City. "We can't fight our brothers in the Iraqi Mehdi Army," one said. In another incident, a dozen police were shown on television handing over their guns and ammunition to Sheikh Salman al-Feraiji, Mr Sadr's chief representative in Sadr City.
The Iraqi interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani, yesterday urged police commandos to show "strength and courage" in the fight against Shia militiamen in Basra, but referred to "problems", which he said would be addressed after the battle.
US aircraft were also active in Baghdad but the US military only admitted to an air attack in the Khadamiyah district, where 10 were killed. The US said they were militants, though the area is not a Mehdi stronghold.
Mr Sadr told al-Jazeera TV yesterday that Arab leaders meeting in Damascus should support the "resistance" to US occupation. The leader of the most powerful political movement in Iraq draws his support from the Shia poor, while his rival, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), is supported by Shia clerics, merchants and property owners. The Sadrists-SIIC rivalry is behind the timing of Mr Maliki's Basra assault. Though he said it was aimed at all militias and illegal armed movements, the attack has only been against the Mehdi Army and not against the Fadhila party and the SIIC, which both control parts of the city. The SIIC is now the main support behind Mr Maliki.
Obama draws 1,200 to Johnstown, PA:
"We’ve got to send a message to Washington that says, ‘enough is enough,’ " Obama said.
The Illinois senator, just 46 years old, said he is running for president because of "the fierce urgency of now" – a line from Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous "I Have A Dream" speech.
And he declared his independence from "special interests" and lobbyists, saying they are "part of what’s wrong with Washington."
Dith Pran, a New York Times photojournalist who documented the killing fields in Cambodia, has died.
Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.
He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.
Mr. Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in newspaper articles and in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled "The Death and Life of Dith Pran." (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie "The Killing Fields."The film, directed by Roland Joffé, portrayed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news.
Dith saved Schanberg's life from being killed by Pol Pot's soldiers; he spent the next four years in fear of his own life and living on a teaspoon of rice a day. He documented the conditions of the Pol Pot regime, where millions of people were relocated to the country to take part in a gruesome social experiment where the country was converted to an agricultural country. The well-educated were shot and killed; millions of people lost their lives during this sad time. Some people were fed to alligators by Pol Pot's thugs. To survive, people had to eat insects, rats, and even the corpses of victims.
This is what Iraq may be coming to in the coming years. For us to stay would only prop up a failing government and would only make the situation work. There is no easy answer to this, but it is clear that this fight is no longer any of our business. It is for the Iraqi people and their neighbors to solve their own problems. It did not take a Shock and Awe campaign to remove Pol Pot -- even their one-time ally Vietnam had seen enough of the killings and acted on their own to remove Pol Pot in 1979. Now, Vietnam is a friendly country to us, and Cambodia is as stable as it can be after that horrific time.
North Korea fired a volley of missiles off of South Korea's coast:
The worst-case scenario is that North Korea may rev up tensions to the level of bloodshed if conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak follows through on his avowed refusal to provide aid for the North unless Pyongyang comes up with some meaningful gestures of its own.
For starters, Lee wants to hold back on humanitarian aid until North Korea returns some of the 500 or so South Koreans held in the North, most of them fishermen whose boats have strayed into North Korean waters, but also some prisoners left over from the Korean War.
Then, before coming up with the enormous assistance promised last year in the six-nation agreements on North Korea's nuclear program, Lee says he wants to be sure the North has disabled and dismantled the whole program.
As of now, the entire process of inter-Korean reconciliation seems to be on hold, if not in reverse, though a presidential spokesman did say the government sees the missile-firing as "merely a part of ordinary military training".
This is threatening to derail what had been one of the few accomplishments of the Bush administration -- getting the North Koreans to agree to dismantle their nuclear program. And this shows how the complete lack of engagement in the process by Bush is leading to chaos and instability around the world. We saw this happening with the Israel/Palestine struggle as well. There is no reason to believe that John McCain would do anything different.
On the other hand, Barack Obama would have an active level of engagement with the North Koreans and our other enemies such as Venezuela, Syria, and Iran. He would talk to their leaders in person so that everyone is on the same page and we don't have these kinds of incidents. For there to be active peacemaking around the world, there must be active engagement as well as constant communication. Lack of engagement and lack of communication will lead to agreements being derailed or canceled, or even worse, more wars.
Booman says that the GOP is becoming more and more of a regional party:
I don't want to pick on the South, but one of the reasons that the Republicans are in so much trouble in the Interior West is that the GOP became a culturally southern party during the Bush years. This is one way of putting it:
As [conservative radio talk-show host, Jon] Caldara put it: "Colorado is, in fact, the test tube of how to export liberal expansion to the Western states." A moderately conservative state has been turned Blue, Caldara says, because of "the absolute demolishing of what the Right stood for, how the Republican Party turned into something it was never meant to be and went away from Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan ideas."
When Jon Caldara says 'Goldwater-Reagan ideas' he means 'libertarian' ideas. Democrats killed themselves out West by doing things like creating a federal 55-mile per hour speed limit. The GOP gave the advantage back by obsessing over people's sexual preferences and looting the treasury. By no means do the Democrats have any kind of dominance in the region. In fact, they are still struggling to compete in Wyoming and Idaho, and have no strength in Utah. But the Democrats have a real chance to turn New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado blue in the presidential race (provided they do not nominate Clinton).
To be fair to Hillary, there would be a tradeoff -- we would be able to make inroads into the South, in places like Arkansas, Florida, and Tennessee. But so would Obama, in places like Virgina, Texas, and North Carolina. But what is clear is that the Republican Party is turning more and more into a regional party, with its sole strength in the South and a few hardcore Mormon states in the West. The libertarian West, which turned on the Democrats over the 55 mph speed limit, is now turning on the Republicans over such things as the Patriot Act, FISA, Schavio, and other such intrusions into peoples' lives.
This is why Obama would be a much more electable candidate than Hillary -- he won handily in the West, meaning that he is much more popular than Clinton there. He is leading in places like New Mexico and Colorado and Nevada, where Hillary Clinton is trailing. And the South is a tradeoff as I pointed out above.
Neale Donald Walsch talks about how you are not your own body. And this applies to the campaign perfectly. Out of the three people we have left, there are two, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, who are in it for themselves. John McCain's messsage is for us to vote for him; he is more American than the other candidates and he is a war hero. Hillary Clinton says to vote for her because she is in it to win.
The difference is that Barack Obama has created something that is much larger than himself. He has created a movement of people who are committed to progressive political change because he understands that change must come from the bottom up, not necessarily the other way around. If Hillary Clinton had simply run on her husband's record of creating a record number of jobs in this country, his standing up to the radical right, and his record of foreign policy accomplishments, then she would have won in a walk. But that is not what she did. She thought that this fight would be over by Super Tuesday and that she would be anointed the next President of the US. But the more people took a look at her, the more people felt that she was in it for herself.
Just take a look at how she and Bill threw the Black community under the bus over the months leading to the primaries. That is not the mark of a progressive leader -- that is the mark of an opportunist. The calculation was that the Clintons were going to win anyway, that they would solidify their support by defining Obama as the Black candidate, and that the Black community would have to vote for them in November because they would have no other choice. This sort of oozing contempt of the Black community is the hallmark of the DLC, which aims to take the left's votes for granted while trying to court the center.
By doing that, Hillary Clinton assumed that the world revolved around them. But Obama trumped that by building a movement that would outlast him. It doesn't matter who the messenger is -- whether it be Markos or Obama or Howard Dean or Ted Kennedy. The idea of a progressive political movement that would compete in all 50 states did not originate with Obama; however, he is the one who put Dean's vision into action. One cannot do that if it is about me -- it has to be about you or us. We can't wait for Barack Obama to get elected President; we must create progressive political change within our own communities.
This is not about ideology -- the views of this community are probably very similar to those of Ralph Nader's. And Nader's and Obama's views are probably very similar. But in actuality, Ralph Nader has more in common with Hillary Clinton or John McCain despite being closer to Obama on the issues. Why? He is in it for himself rather than for the movement as a whole. He actively undermined Gore's chances to win in Florida. He ran against John Kerry even though prominent supporters like Michael Moore begged him not to. He enlisted Republican operatives to get him on the ballot rather than try and create his own grassroots movement. He engaged in blatant hypocrisy by creating cheap labor conditions for his employees rather than treating them with the same standards that he demanded of others. He did a lot of good for the progressive movement in the 1970's and 1980's, but he also did a lot of harm as well, as people were turned off by his hypocrisy. Companies like Costco are a lot more beneficial to the Progressive political movement than Nader is because they actually model the kinds of standards that other businesses follow.