New Jill Long-Thompson ad

Put Indiana Back on Track!

OurDems.org working for both Barack and Hillary

A request from our friend Roger McNett:

You might want to put a special link to OurDems that will let your readers/viewers know that we are working with both campaigns to get information out to those wanting to help. Anything they may want to know to get started and keep up is on those pages.


Obama's page is: http://ourdems.org/obama

Clinton's page is: http://ourdems.org/clinton

Yea, I am helping both candidates. Oh what fun it is. . . .

Grand Opening for Fort Wayne Obama office

The official Barack Obama campaign office will be opening this Saturday at 10 A.M. in Fort Wayne. The location is at 124 Columbia Street, on The Landing. Supporters will meet and launch a voter registration effort in Fort Wayne. WE NEED YOU NOW! Please help us register thousands before Indiana's April 7th voter registration deadline.

For more information, contact Sofia at sof49er@hotmail.com.

Public Rally for High Speed Rail

From "friend of the blog" Dr.Wright:

You may be aware of my interest in bringing high speed rail to Fort Wayne. Tomorrow night, you will all have a chance to learn more about the subject. There will be a public rally at Indiana Tech, in the Andorfer Commons (1600 E. Washington Blvd.) from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM. There will be speakers and a film showing what has been done with the TGV, France's high speed rail.

The more people who come, the more it will show legislators that the people of Fort Wayne and surrounding area want this valuable service. The first step is to get state legislators to support a study to move rail plans along in 2009.

Advantages of high speed rail: It approaches the speed of airflight, when one figures in travel from distant airports to city centers. It is almost never stopped for weather (airflight certainly is). It will provide an excellent alternative to air travel as airports are approaching capacity in the US. It is even safer than air travel (which is pretty safe itself). It uses far less fuel, per passenger mile, than air travel, which will help reduce dependence on foreign oil and reduce global warming pollutants. It has languished with almost no government subsidy, that more inefficient forms of travel have always had (roads, airports). Other countries have seen it's advantages, and invest significant amounts of tax dollars, the only way a rail systems thrives. It would also bring much needed business and livelihood into Fort Wayne's Downtown.

Come, learn about and support bringing high speed rail to Fort Wayne!

Phillip Wright, MD
Medical Director
Physicians Health Plan

Send Mike Pence Home!

An important message from Barry Welsh:

Obama visits Plainfield

From Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times:

Speaking in a gym at Plainfield High School, making his first visit to Indiana of his presidential campaign in advance of the May primary here, Obama said “everybody, you know, senses there has been this shift.”

This comes as Obama is trying to distance himself from Wright, whose controversial sermons—on videotape—threaten Obama’s presidential quest. Obama talked about Wright in his stump speech as a man of fiery rhetoric—but one who talked to him about Jesus.” Obama's reference to Kennedy is about a speech he made in this state after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Click HERE for the rest of the story.

A short video of the crowd at the rally


And another report, this one from the Indianapolis Star.

Obama spoke for about 20 minutes, then answered questions from the audience for another 45 minutes on everything from whether he would change No Child Left Behind -- he would -- to saving Social Security. On that, he proposed raising the cap on payroll taxes. Right now, people pay payroll taxes only on their first $97,000 in income. That means, he said, that 94 percent of folks pay on every dime they make, while billionaire Warren Buffett pays only on a tiny fraction of his income.

If elected, he said, he would focus immediately on three things: Bringing the troops home in a responsible manner; universal health care reform that continues private insurance but helps people afford it; and a new energy policy. Do those things, he said, and other programs such as improving education become doable; fail, and the nation would be bankrupt.

People reacted with a disappointed "aah" when Obama finally said his time was up. But he promised to be back to campaign aggressively in Indiana.

SNL Spoofs Hillary's "3 AM" ad

This one's for Charlotte:

Two weeks after their "bitch is the new black" skit, and just one week after Hillary Clinton's surprise appearance on the show, SNL is at it again: this time, opening the show with a spoof of Hillary's 3AM ad. The sketch, seen below, depicts a 3AM phone call between Senator Clinton and a very inexperienced President Obama, who calls Hillary in the middle of the night for advice on what to do about Iran and how to fix the heating in the White House.

Clinton Cribs from the Bush Florida Stolen Election in 2000

The following is a complete article from Mark Karlin -Editor and Publisher - Buzzflash.com. I felt it worthy of sharing. . .

March 6, 2008

If you wanted to compare the playbook of the Clinton campaign since New Hampshire, you'd find the right precedent in the Bush v. Gore race, only Clinton would be channeling Bush, not Gore.

Let's look at the facts -- as our columnist P.M. Carpenter -- has pointed out today. By almost all media projections, Obama will finish the run of primaries ahead in the popular primary vote, ahead in pledged delegates, and ahead in the number of states won. In a democracy, we call this winning the election. And to boot, Obama has won by consistently bigger margins than Clinton, and has led McCain in most polls. (Obama will probably even end up beating Clinton in delegates awarded in the Texas primary, where she barely won the contest in the popular vote -- and allegedly with the help of dittoheads who Limbaugh told to vote for her because she would unify the Republican Party against her and be the weaker Dem candidate in the fall.)

But Clinton rules have a different set of standards, just like Bush did. They bring the heavy artillery representing the entrenched moneyed interests of the Republicrat status quo in D.C. to redefine democracy. It's no longer who wins the election; it's who bullies their way into mugging the process through threatened lawsuits, flip-flopping like a dying fish about DNC rules that the Clinton campaign originally agreed to, bullying superdelegates, and denying that the will of the people counts for anything.

So, the Clinton campaign today (and if Obama had lost 12 straight primaries, you can be sure the Clinton campaign would have "worked the refs" hard enough to have made him withdraw long ago) is doing what Bush did in 2000, shaking down democracy.

As P.M. Carpenter notes, not only is this against our Constitutional foundations and everything we progressives have fought for since the election was stolen from Al Gore in 2000, her specious arguments are grounded in, well, "fantasy." She claims she won the big states, which certainly hurts the feelings of the residents of states like Virginia where Obama won by wide margins and showed that he might be able to pull a new electoral vote rich state into the Democratic column come November.

As Carpenter points out -- even if you forgive the Clinton campaign for trying to overturn the will of the people, which is like absolving Bush of stealing the 2000 contest -- her "big state" theory doesn't hold water. Obama will win the big states she won (with Texas being a stretch for either of them in November, and Ohio being up for grabs for either of them). All Clinton did was win the loyal economically needy vote of the base Democrats who are going to vote Democratic no matter what. Clinton has shown virtually no reach outside of a fixed and defined core of traditional Dem voters (who are loyal to Hillary, even though she has done virtually nothing for them, despite all her packaged rhetoric of "results." The reality is Clinton has no economic record to speak of or foreign policy record other than supporting Bush's War and cluster bombs. She is a series of evolving "slogans.") Obama has shown that he can draw in independents and Republicans, which will be vital in a race against McCain, and may pull in one or two red states, which he has pretty much swept as compared to Clinton. All Clinton has done is win in almost all Blue States, while showing that the ceiling of her support is very low in a general election.

Meanwhile, not content to rob the majority vote, Clinton is elevating John McCain as a more worthy candidate to protect America than Obama. That is not just larceny, it is a betrayal of the most reprehensible sort. In essence, Clinton has, like a child who can't have his/her rattle, indicated that if she doesn't heist the nomination, she will ensure that Obama loses so that she can run again in 2012.

Now, all the women out there for whom Hillary is a symbol (and Clinton has said that women project onto her what they want to see in her), she is only a symbol. She is not a progressive. She is a DLC "triangulator" who has actually "solved" very few problems, sold out poor women and their children in the "welfare reform" act of 1996, passed very little significant legislation, has virtually no foreign policy experience, and values playing the "I'm tougher than the boys are" card, when she's not playing the gender card.

If you want a progressive candidate for president, look to someone like my Congresswoman, Jan Schakowsky, who opposed the Iraq War and knew what was coming when Clinton chose political expediency. (Schakowsky is also a progressive on almost every major issue where it counts, whereas Clinton is a politically calculating centrist who changes positions to meet the needs of her campaign). As P.M. Carpenter notes, there are potential progressive female political candidates who also are strong Feminists in practice -- not just word -- but Hillary Clinton is not one of them.

Electing a symbol may make many women feel better, just as electing George W. Bush made many people of good faith believe that they were really electing a man of God, but what they got was a man of war. There are a large number of women in politics who are not just symbols, but actually have a record of feminism, progressivism, results, and, most importantly, a respect for the will of the people and a desire to beat the Republicans, not just promote their own political interests. Hillary Clinton, we repeat, is not one of them.

BuzzFlash came of age during the emotionally exhausting and demoralizing robbery of democracy in 2000.

Hillary Clinton is planning to perform a similar heist of the nomination of the Democratic Party or destroy the chances for Barack Obama to win in the fall in the process.

It will be like 2000 all over again -- and democracy will suffer once again, but this time at the hands of a putative Democrat who is playing us like a fiddle.