US Election Coverage 2008

[Icadon]

Hao Ma-Republicans wa MA sio traditional Repubs. We huoni sasa hivi wanavyomwandama Romney. They change some of their positions to win votes. Romney used to be Pro-Choice and now is Pro-Life....ever wondered why? Huwezi kushinda MA kwa ku-campaign kama traditional Republican kama vile huwezi kushinda GA/AL/MS/LA nk. ukiwa Democrat na kwa ku-campaign kutumia traditional Democratic values...pro-welfare, pro-choice, etc...Hivi umewahi kusikia Southern Democrats...unamkumbuka then Governor/ Senator Zell Miller?

Kuhusu Obama...wewe subiri a-lock hiyo nomination halafu uone. It will get ugly and yes, racial too. Mark my words, white America is not ready for that.

GOP mwaka jana wote walikuwa wanajiandaa kushindana na Hilary baada ya Iowa wanaanza kuswitch gear.

 

[The Truth]

How come Obama's speeches lack substance? It's always "I want change", "I am going to change politics", "Change, change, change...ad infinitum". This plus his past is why I believe this man not capable. If you also look at his rallies, it's usually White women who go crazy over him. This reminds me of what Nyerere said which is along the lines "if you like candidate's face go drink tea with him". Africans on the other hand see Obama as a messiah who will single handedly lift them out of misery which could not be further from the truth.

 

[Jasusi]

Ndugu Ukweli,
Substance gani unayotafuta babaangu? Sikiliza kwanza ile hotuba yake wakati wa convention ya wademocrat 2004, halafu usikilize mahojiano yake katika vipindi vya waandishi wa habari, kama bado unatafuta substance basi shikamana na Kichaka

 

[Capitol Hill]

Truth here the answer:

Even Conservative Media Chorus Sings Obama's Praises
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2008; Page C01

Barack Obama, now the media's odds-on favorite to win the White House, is drawing effusive praise from the chattering classes. "You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this. . . . This is a huge moment," one commentator wrote.
An unreconstructed liberal? An African American hungering for a racial breakthrough? No, it was David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, and he's got plenty of company on the right.
The media overall are being swept up by a wave of Obamamania, in which normally hard-bitten journalists watch the orator in action and come away dazzled by his gifts. A New York Times piece Saturday compared the Illinois senator to JFK and Martin Luther King in the same paragraph. A Newsweek cover story out yesterday gushed that Obama, "tall and handsome and blessed with a weighty baritone, knows how to bring along a crowd while seeming to stay slightly above it." The journalistic scrutiny usually visited on instant front-runners has been replaced by something akin to a standing ovation.
What's more, the applause extends even to pundits on the right, many of whom routinely denigrate Democratic politicians and yet are strikingly warm toward Obama. There is gratitude, to be sure, that he seems poised to knock off their longtime bete noire, Hillary Clinton -- especially if he wins today's New Hampshire primary -- but also admiration for his inclusive approach to politics and for his sheer talent.
"Who's not proud of this kid?" says Amanda Carpenter, national political reporter for the conservative site Townhall.com. "He has a story people feel good about."
In the wake of Obama's remarks about unity on the night of his Iowa caucus victory Thursday, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and self-described conservative, called it "one of the most remarkable speeches I've ever seen."
Bill Bennett, the conservative author, said on CNN that it was a "remarkable breakthrough" for "Barack Hussein Obama, a black man," to win in a "rural, white farming state." Rush Limbaugh added his voice on the radio, saying that Obama and Mike Huckabee, the Republican winner in Iowa, "had really uplifting, inspirational speeches."
The Weekly Standard called Obama "the classiest candidate on the Democratic side." Peggy Noonan, the former Ronald Reagan speechwriter, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Obama had won "with a classy campaign, an unruffled manner, and an appeal on the stump that said every day, through the lines: Look at who I am and see me, the change that you desire is right here, move on with me and we will bring it forward together."
What explains these cross-party kudos?
"There's clearly a matter of heart going on here," Bennett says after his morning radio show. "He's a cool guy, a handsome guy, has a fabulous voice. A leading Democratic candidate, a black man in America, and he does not talk about race, does not play the race card. It appeals to the better angels of all our natures."
Scarborough dismisses the notion that some conservatives are talking up Obama in the belief that he would be a weak general-election opponent. "I get e-mails from Republicans, who've never voted for a Democrat before, saying they were tearing up during his Iowa speech," he says from New Hampshire. "I don't think they're being calculated and cynical. This is so damn great for America."
The story line -- "a biracial kid with an absentee father whose improbable path carried him from Hawaii to Indonesia to Chicago to Washington," as Newsweek put it -- has a movie-of-the-week quality for news outlets. The New York Post's headline screamer yesterday, over a picture of Clinton, was "PANIC." By contrast, the Boston Herald's front page blared: "BARACK STAR."
Few liberal columnists are shedding tears over the difficulties of Clinton, who has no natural cheering section in the press. And African American writers -- The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson wrote that Obama's speech gave him "goose bumps" -- are understandably excited.
Not all conservatives have hitched a ride on the Barackwagon. "There's a lot about the Obama movement I find offensive," says National Review Editor Rich Lowry, who predicted two months ago that his campaign was going "nowhere." "There's a messianism -- 'I embody change' -- that if a Christian conservative was saying those things, people would be scared."
But even as a "self-absorbed" Obama spouts "airy cliches," Lowry says, he found himself standing on tiptoe at a recent Obama speech. "It's really something magical," he says. "You're almost not an American if you don't feel stirred by what his victory would represent symbolically. Here's a guy who 50 years ago couldn't have gone in certain restrooms and motels."
Obama's conciliatory tone may also be a factor. He speaks of transcending red and blue states with a coalition that includes Republicans and independents, while Clinton, who has been hammered by the right since her husband's 1992 campaign, boasts about battling the "Republican attack machine."
Some major conservative voices have paid only fleeting attention to Obama -- Fox's Bill O'Reilly says he "ran an excellent campaign in Iowa" and is "very charismatic" -- because they are more engaged in relishing Clinton's defeat. The Standard's cover story this week, with a shot of Bill and Hillary, is "The Fall of the House of Clinton." But that means Obama has been spared, at least for now, the kind of frontal assault that might otherwise greet a surging liberal Democrat.
For some conservative commentators, Obama, 46, embodies the turning of a different kind of page, as the candidate himself has argued. In an Atlantic cover story last month, right-leaning blogger Andrew Sullivan called Obama's candidacy "a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America -- finally -- past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the baby boom generation that has long engulfed all of us."
Even Huckabee, in ABC's Republican debate Saturday, acknowledged: "We have to recognize that what Senator Obama has done is touch at the core of something Americans want. . . . He has excited a lot of voters in this country. Let's pay respect for that."
Many journalists have a personal fondness for John McCain, who holds a narrow lead in the polls for New Hampshire's Republican primary, based on his round-the-clock accessibility going back to their rides on the Straight Talk Express in 1999 and 2000. Obama has few such relationships with national reporters, who are more in the role of passive observers of a stellar performer.
Politico columnist Roger Simon, in New Hampshire last weekend, contrasted "a compelling, almost mesmerizing, speech" by Obama, who offered few specifics, with an event in which "Clinton talked about issue after issue in almost mind-numbing detail" while part of the audience filtered out.
If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, the conservative media are not likely to urge his election by acclamation. There will be plenty of emphasis on his liberal positions and, in an echo of Clinton's criticism, his lack of national experience.
"This is a guy probably to the left of Hillary," Bennett says.
"Do I think he's right on the issues? No," Carpenter says. "But there's a perception you can work with him."
Lowry sees Obama as an elusive target: "No one's really got anything on him because he hasn't really done anything yet. He doesn't have any battle scars. You can blast Obama for what I'd consider an outrageous left-wing statement and it just doesn't get conservatives charged up the way blasting Hillary does."

Source—Washington Post, January 8, 2008

 

[Jasusi]

Capitol Hill,
Thank you. And as Perry Mason used to say: "I rest my case."

 

[Icadon]

Mark Penn atapona baada ya leo?
(6:32 p.m. ET)

Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman told FOX News Tuesday that the New York senator plans to soon bring in "a lot more top-level advisers," even as former Bill Clinton advisers Paul Begala and James Carville earlier denied reports that they are on tap.

Clinton aasirishwa na media
Video


GOP Concerns and worries

 

[MzalendoHalisi]

Jamani Wangugu,

Vipi matokeo huko? Je mama kapigwa tena chini this time?

 

[YNIM]

kwenye polling station moja Hilly kapewa, "he he ho ho status quo is gotta go." By saa mbili hivi EST tutakuwa na matokeo ya awali.

 

[Game Theory]

Truth,
defend this as well

RON PAUL: MARTIN LUTHER KING WAS GAY PEDOPHILE

This Ron Paul newsletter shit has just blown up.
Dude's been publishing these things for 20 years...
And the worst of that shit just hit the fan.

Published today (Jan 8, 2008) in the New Republic, an expose of Ron Paul.

[/SIZE]

"I am Colin Powell,
and I approve this post."​

THE NEW REPUBLIC
Angry White Man
The bigoted past of Ron Paul.
by James Kirchick
Tuesday, January 08, 2008

FULL ARTICLE: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397-a3c7-4720-ac15-4532a7da84ca

[...]

Most voters had never heard of Paul before he launched his quixotic bid for the Republican nomination. But ... long before he was the darling of antiwar activists on the left and right, Paul was in the newsletter business. In the age before blogs, newsletters occupied a prominent place in right-wing political discourse. With the pages of mainstream political magazines typically off-limits to their views (National Review editor William F. Buckley having famously denounced the John Birch Society), hardline conservatives resorted to putting out their own, less glossy publications. These were often paranoid and rambling--dominated by talk of international banking conspiracies, the Trilateral Commission's plans for world government, and warnings about coming Armageddon--but some of them had wide and devoted audiences. And a few of the most prominent bore the name of Ron Paul.

Paul's newsletters have carried different titles over the years--Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report--but they generally seem to have been published on a monthly basis since at least 1978. (Paul, an OB-GYN and former U.S. Army surgeon, was first elected to Congress in 1976.) During some periods, the newsletters were published by the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, a non-profit Paul founded in 1976; at other times, they were published by Ron Paul & Associates, a now-defunct entity in which Paul owned a minority stake, according to his campaign spokesman. The Freedom Report claimed to have over 100,000 readers in 1984. At one point, Ron Paul & Associates also put out a monthly publication called The Ron Paul Investment Letter.

[...]

Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first-person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

[...]

Paul's alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began," read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda." It also denounced "the media" for believing that "America's number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks." To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were "the only people to act like real Americans," it explained, "mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England."

This "Special Issue on Racial Terrorism" was hardly the first time one of Paul's publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.'" Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo." "This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s," the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter's author--presumably Paul--wrote, "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming." That same year, a newsletter described the aftermath of a basketball game in which "blacks poured into the streets of Chicago in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot." The newsletter inveighed against liberals who "want to keep white America from taking action against black crime and welfare," adding, "Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems."

Such views on race also inflected the newsletters' commentary on foreign affairs. South Africa's transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a "destruction of civilization" that was "the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara"; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending "South African Holocaust."

Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul's newsletters, which attacked the civil rights leader frequently, often to justify opposition to the federal holiday named after him. ("What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!" one newsletter complained in 1990. "We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.") In the early 1990s, a newsletter attacked the "X-Rated Martin Luther King" as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours," "seduced underage girls and boys," and "made a pass at" fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" were better alternatives. The same year, King was described as "a comsymp, if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration."

While bashing King, the newsletters had kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. In a passage titled "The Duke's Victory," a newsletter celebrated Duke's 44 percent showing in the 1990 Louisiana Republican Senate primary. "Duke lost the election," it said, "but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment." In 1991, a newsletter asked, "Is David Duke's new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?" The conclusion was that "our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom." Duke is now returning the favor, telling me that, while he will not formally endorse any candidate, he has made information about Ron Paul available on his website.

Like blacks, gays earn plenty of animus in Paul's newsletters....

The newsletters were particularly obsessed with AIDS, "a politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence of the homosexual lobby," and used it as a rhetorical club to beat gay people in general. In 1990, one newsletter approvingly quoted "a well-known Libertarian editor" as saying, "The ACT-UP slogan, on stickers plastered all over Manhattan, is 'Silence = Death.' But shouldn't it be 'Sodomy = Death'?" Readers were warned to avoid blood transfusions because gays were trying to "poison the blood supply." "Am I the only one sick of hearing about the 'rights' of AIDS carriers?" a newsletter asked in 1990...

[...]

Paul's newsletters didn't just contain bigotry. They also contained paranoia--specifically, the brand of anti-government paranoia that festered among right-wing militia groups during the 1980s and '90s. Indeed, the newsletters seemed to hint that armed revolution against the federal government would be justified. In January 1995, three months before right-wing militants bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a newsletter listed "Ten Militia Commandments," describing "the 1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty" as "one of the most encouraging developments in America."

[...]

When I asked Jesse Benton, Paul's campaign spokesman, about the newsletters, he said that, over the years, Paul had granted "various levels of approval" to what appeared in his publications--ranging from "no approval" to instances where he "actually wrote it himself." After I read Benton some of the more offensive passages, he said, "A lot of [the newsletters] he did not see. Most of the incendiary stuff, no." He added that he was surprised to hear about the insults hurled at Martin Luther King, because "Ron thinks Martin Luther King is a hero."

In other words, Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically--or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point--over the course of decades--he would have done something about it.

[...]

Ron Paul is not going to be president. But, as his campaign has gathered steam, he has found himself increasingly permitted inside the boundaries of respectable debate. He sat for an extensive interview with Tim Russert recently. He has raised almost $20 million in just three months, much of it online. And he received nearly three times as many votes as erstwhile front-runner Rudy Giuliani in last week's Iowa caucus. All the while he has generally been portrayed by the media as principled and serious, while garnering praise for being a "straight-talker."

From his newsletters a different picture of Paul emerges--that of someone who is either himself deeply embittered or, for a long time, allowed others to write bitterly on his behalf. His adversaries are often described in harsh terms: Barbara Jordan is called "Barbara Morondon," Eleanor Holmes Norton is a "black pinko," Donna Shalala is a "short lesbian," Ron Brown is a "racial victimologist," and Roberta Achtenberg, the first openly gay public official confirmed by the United States Senate, is a "far-left, normal-hating lesbian activist." Maybe such outbursts mean Ron Paul really is a straight-talker. Or maybe they just mean he is a man filled with hate.

Aint that a bitch?

This honky is done as far as I'm concerned...
[/COLOR]​

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397-a3c7-4720-ac15-4532a7da84ca

 

[Game Theory]

game bwana, kwa kwenda nje ya topiki hujambo mkuu!! haya ulishafika huko ujaluoni, so what? rubbish!

Gor biro jayadha

 

[Chuma]

http://youdecide08.foxnews.com/2008/01/08/obama-mccain-win-first-ballots-in-dixville-notch-nh/

obama aongoza New Hampshire's

 

[BAK]

Haya kaeni mkao wa kula na kunywa kabla ya CNN hawajaanza kutuwekea matokeo rasmi ya ushindi mkubwa wa Obama. Sijui Mama atabwaga manyanga au ataendelea kusuasua, lakini shughuli bado nzito kwa Obama.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x5JqZNYpRQ[/media]

 

[Susuviri]

Niliona kwenye TV na sasa nimepata kimaandishi hii quote kweli akina Clinton wamepanic!!!🙄

Six weeks ago, Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared headed for the party's nomination. Now the New York senator and her husband are trying to keep Obama's train from rolling to the nomination. Former President Clinton sniffed that his campaign is a "fairy tale."

Bill Clinton kaanza kubishana na waandishi wakongwe kama akina Lou Dobbs!
Kazi kwelikweli!
GO OBAMA GO!

 

[Icadon]

10% ya precincts zimeshaingia inaonyesha mama ana 37% Obama 36% lakini sasa hivi polling zote zimefungwa so in few minutes tutajua
Exit poll zinampa Obama ushindi

 

[BAK]

Bill akiamua kwenda negative atajivunjia hadhi yake kubwa aliyokuwa nayo US na hata dunia nzima, afanye kampeni ya nguvu lakini kumshambulia Obama haitawasaidia.

 

[Susuviri]

IN my view, Bill kwenda on the attack imeonyesha uchu wa madaraka wa hubby and wife team, it is going to hurt Hillary's chances.

 

[Icadon]

McCain naona kachukua NH

 

[The Truth]

Truth,
defend this as well

RON PAUL: MARTIN LUTHER KING WAS GAY PEDOPHILE



http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397-a3c7-4720-ac15-4532a7da84ca

More allegations and no evidence to back them up. Ron Paul calls Martin Luther King his hero. Why would he do that after calling him a gay pedophile as your article alleges? Makes no sense plus Ron Paul is against racism. I encourage everyone to visit (http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/) to learn what Ron Paul stands for.

 

[The Truth]

The Clinton camp claims it has a bombshell on Obama. I wonder what could it be. Few possibilities come to mind.

1) Obama dealt drugs at some point in his youth. He has already admitted to using drugs.

2) He is cheating on his wife and has kids outside his marriage.

3) He belongs to a radical (Black Panther type) group that hates White people.

4) He has accepted bribery.

5) He fabricated his academic record.

Hillary Clinton's camp said it would expose Obama and I can't wait to see that.

 

[Ogah]

Inaonekana mama anachukua pale NH