If he had any shot of gaining in the polls, speaking the truth blew it.
It's a shame he's polling at 11% in the state in which he's been putting all his eggs.Jon Huntsman made one thing abundantly clear after a campaign stop in Portsmouth on Friday – he has no doubt that Barack Obama was born in America."The president was born in the United States – end of conversation," Huntsman said.
I got home from running some errands this morning to be able to catch most of President Obama's New Hampshire town hall meeting, which was luckily more respectful than the loud noises most other politicians were experiencing with their own town hall meetings. This of course prompted naysayers to claim that it was obvious this was a staged event and not really a town hall, but I digress.
Within a few minutes of the initial report of this gun-toting protester, MSNBC's David Shuster had updated news: the man's name was William Kostric. And he was already booked on the 5pm hour of Hardball with Chris Matthews. What. The. Fuck?
My guess is that Matthews was angered by someone stupid enough to bring a gun to a public event with the President and wanted to take him to task. Further, I would have hoped that Matthews would try to figure out where this man came from and research his background. After all, he already had his name. But never let it be said that Matthews fails to disappoint. Mr. Kostric held his own against an irate Matthews until Matthews calmed down. Of the two people on the screen, Matthews was the one that seemed unhinged.
Within an hour after the interview, Joan Walsh wrote a post on her blog at Salon with details of William Kostric. This is why Joan Walsh is a journalist and Chris Matthews is not.
...Kostric insisted his intentions were peaceful, and that he's not affiliated with Birther groups.But at least one of those statements doesn't seem to be true. A right-wing activist named "William Kostric," who's left a lot of footprints around the Web, is listed as a "team member" of the Arizona chapter of We the People, the far-right group best known for joining a lawsuit challenging Obama's right to be president based on his not being a U.S. citizen. Kostric told MSNBC he recently moved from Arizona to New Hampshire. (Kostric did not reply to Salon's e-mail request for an interview.)And on his MySpace page (h/t Lavender Newswire), Kostric also lists as one of his heroes Robert Schultz, the anti-tax activist and We the People founder who spent a ton of his own money on ads promoting the Birther movement....Kostric's MySpace profile also lists among his heroes Randy Weaver, the white supremacist and right-wing activist who survived the Ruby Ridge confrontation with federal agents, along with Ayn Rand's John Galt, Thomas Jefferson, libertarian/GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul and William Wallace, the Scottish resistance leader portrayed in Mel Gibson's "Braveheart."The profile also includes, as one of Kostric's "Top 12 friends," the Free State Movement, a group organizing libertarians to move to New Hampshire and expand on the state's "Live Free or Die" credo, and ultimately secede from the union. A "William Kostric" also signed two pledges at PledgeBank, a site that lets people organize around various causes. Kostric's two pledges include: "move to New Hampshire by 12/31/2008 where I will work to bring about a society in which government’s maximum role is protecting life, liberty, and property" -- the credo of Free State Movement members -- and "refuse to accept a national ID card," a cause among many far-right libertarians.
Dennis Kucinich has requested a recount of the New Hampshire primary ballots due to the “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.” It seems that every district with electronic voting machines were won by Senator Clinton, while every hand counted, "paper trail" district went to Senator Obama.
BradBlog has more information as well as a warning to Dennis Kucinich:We would also caution Kucinich and his team to closely inspect the chain of custody for the ballots in question, and what has happened to them, and the vulnerable op-scan memory cards, since the election two days ago, during the period that concern has been widely expressed about the seemingly anomalous results of Tuesday's election. It's important that the chain of custody be both secure, fully logged, and transparent.
Nancy Tobi of New Hampshire for Democracy, a Granite State election integrity watchdog group, previously noted her concerns in earlier discussions about the possibility of hand counting the state's op-scan primary ballots.
"We have no control over the ballot chain of custody and we have learned the pain from the 2004 Nader recount, in which only 11 districts were counted, chosen by a highly questionable person, and then nothing showed up," she wrote recently. "Now all we hear is how the Nader recount validated the machines. A candidate asking for a recount may well be a tool used to 'prove' everything was okay and then that candidate will be further discredited," she warned.
(Updated below)
Just a couple of quick observations before I hit the sack.
- Calling the state for Clinton with a 5000ish vote lead and 30% of the precincts still not in is a little close for my taste.
- I'm a little tired of the dramatics from all the pundits. "Incredible comeback" some were calling it. They were shocked when Obama won Iowa and now they're shocked when Clinton wins in NH? Calm down, people. It's a long haul. I get the excitement, but they were acting as if Dennis Kucinich had won the freakin' thing.
- While on MSNBC, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post hinted that race might have been a minor issue in NH. He compared the polls/outcome to that of Tom Bradley running for Governor of California in 1982.
- Now I'm going to sound sexist, misogynistic, and every other term you can use for men-hating women (...and I don't. I love women. I have all their albums) but I believe the difference in the polls on Monday and the outcome on Tuesday was the non-stop coverage of Hillary Clinton's emotional display. As Rachel Maddow noted on her radio show tonight, Hillary's emotional display was the lead story on all three networks. Even I felt empathy for Clinton. Again, I'm not saying it was a bad thing (for Jeebus' sake Mitt Romney choked up on Meet the Press while listening to his own rhetoric, and where was the coverage?), but I believe that seeing Clinton's "vulnerability" and seeing her human side tugged at the heartstrings of women voters, most of whom voted for Hillary.
- One thing's for sure: this is going to be a very exciting few months politically.
UPDATE (1/9 6:45am): Maureen Dowd goes where no male columnist dare... and echos a couple of points I've made in previous posts.
Dowd: Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?
...with chants of "Hey-Hey! Ho-Ho! Status quo has got to go!" and refuse to shake her hand.
Sam Seder is great. Why won't they give him a daily spot on Air America?
How stupid is Mark Penn? Less than two days after Obama's Iowa win and predictions that the results would catapult him in New Hampshire, the Clinton campaign senior advisor and strategist issued a memo on Clinton's own website and picked up by Time Magazine's blog asking "Where's the Bounce?" This is after only two polls had been published at the time.
In it he says, "New Hampshire voters are fiercely independent. They will make their own decisions about who to support."
Well here is Penn's answer:
Looks like the "fiercely independent" voters of New Hampshire have chosen. And it ain't Clinton. It may be already too late, but my prediction is that the only bounce the Clinton campaign will see is Mark Penn getting bounced on his ass out the door.Why Clinton Will Not Win The Nomination
I still haven't had a chance to watch the debates from last Saturday night, except for the few video clips being posted here and there. Most of them seem to focus on Clinton's "attack" on Obama. And again, while I haven't seen the full clip in context of the debate, it's interesting to note the varied comments on the blogs and different articles.
Armadillo Joe over at Expatriate Thoughts brought to my attention an article in the Guardian by Niall Stanage who opines that the anger shown by Clinton could be her undoing.
The former First Lady, never likely to be mistaken for a shrinking violet, mounted the most aggressive assault yet by one credible Democratic candidate on another...
...Obama won Iowa in large part because of an astonishing turnout - almost double the previous record number of caucus-goers showed up, and a disproportionate number of them were young people. If he can inspire anything like similar numbers to go to the polls in New Hampshire and in later primaries, the Democratic nomination is his for the taking.
So maybe it's no surprise that Clinton seeks to dampen hopes, deride vision and mock idealism. Who knows: the scorched earth approach might even work for her, enabling her to grind her way to the nomination.
But what a dismal victory it would be.
At a more subtle level, Clinton and her aides have begun referring with mantra-like repetitiveness to the need for candidates to be properly "vetted". The term, used so frequently, seems calculated to suggest that there is some awful secret in Obama's past that would incinerate Democrats' hopes of taking back the White House if he were to become the party's nominee.Clinton's anger is not the reason for the maelstrom she's in after Iowa with little chance of recovery due to the short time period between Iowa and New Hampshire. It's why she is angry that is the telling factor.
"I think America's ready for a woman president . . . just not that woman. Being married to somebody doesn't make you good at their job. I've been with my wife 10 years now. If she got up here right now, y'all wouldn't laugh. At all. You get on a plane tomorrow, you want the pilot's wife flying you?"It's simplistic, but you get the point. I'm sure the time Clinton served as First Lady was a learning experience. But did she have access to top secret documents? Was she privy to matters of national security? If Hillary wants to run on experience, fine. Your experience in the Senate will do quite nicely. But for all intents and purposes, Bill Clinton was President of the United States, not Hillary Clinton.
This was on C & L, but I had to comment on it.
The 9/11 bloodsucker came in a dismal 6th place last night in the Iowa Caucuses. Let me repeat that: 6th place with a measly 4%. He's already using his fearmonger trump card with the latest ad campaign in Florida and New Hampshire.
He's not going anywhere soon enough, and I know it's still early (i.e. Howard Dean in Iowa 2004) but does he even have a shot anymore?
Steve Benen at C & L tries to cut through the candidates spin on the Iowa results and this one just cracked me up: Rudy Giuliani — What Giuliani fans are saying: 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! What Giuliani critics are saying: “Frontrunners” don’t come in a humiliating sixth place, with one-third the support of a libertarian gadfly, in a state where he was once in the lead.
I believe Benen is right. It's not like Mr. 9/11 came in 2nd place with 25% like Romney did. He didn't even make a showing. And Rudy fans will say he stopped campaigning in Iowa to concentrate on Florida and New Hampshire. That's all well and good if you look at it through Rudy-colored glasses.
Who’s right? Take a wild guess.
Chances are that the constiuents in Iowa, when meeting Giuliani face to face, saw through his weak, one message platform and didn't like what they saw, heard or smelled. That's the one thing in these early states that doesn't happen anywhere else. It's not like you can sit in the same living room with these candidates three months before their respective conventions and try to make an informed decision by meeting them personally. Rudy is not a likable character and being in the same room with him reveals that.
Also, the fact remains that he had the lead in Iowa. The lead! Rudy was polling at 30% a few months ago. But then he actually went to Iowa. If you didn't click on the link above, take a look at this chart:
Put on your goggles and grab your skis, Rudy, because that purple line is you and it's going straight downhill! New Hampshire is in four days and there probably isn't enough bounce in the Giuliani campaign to make a decent showing even if Rudy had ten pounds of SuperBalls® surgically implanted in his ass.
I may be wrong, but it's my opinion.
Rudy Ghouliani goes for the fear jugular with his new ad, complete with videos of explosions, riots, Osama bin Laden and middle eastern music in the background. This asshole is shameless.
Yes, you read the title right.
John Deady, Co-Chair of Veterans for Rudy tells us why Ghouliani is the only capable person for the job of President: "...we need to keep the [Muslims'] feet to the fire and keep pressing these people ‘til we defeat them or chase them back to their caves, or in other words, get rid of them."
Click on portrait for a complete list of President Obama's Executive Orders, Presidential Memoranda and Proclamations
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