Campaign News for the Day
Side note: the first post to this blog using blog software was five years ago to this day. Not my first blog post ever, though–that was August 5th, 2002, just shy of a year before I started nonstop blogging, and I was coding the pages by hand then. Reading it, can you tell I was upset about something?
Obama has now led in the Gallup tracking poll for 15 days, the longest stretch he’s maintained to date (Obama has held an unnaturally steady 49% for five days). Previously, he had held the lead for 17 days in the latter part of February, but Hillary had jumped a point ahead on one day and tied him for the lead on another day, breaking the stretch. During Obama’s February lead, he was ahead of Hillary an average of 3.7% per day; in Obama’s latest stretch, he has led Hillary by an average of 4.6%, including a 10% lead where Obama sat at 52% (on March 29th), his highest lead in the race so far, a number Hillary herself enjoyed for only one day in her campaign (on February 5th) before Obama started seriously challenging her nationally.
MoveOn.org has compiled a top-ten list of facts everyone should know about John McCain:
10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don’t):1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.
2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”
3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.
4. McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”
5. The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.
6. He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.
7. Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”
8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.
9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”
10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0–yes, zero–from the League of Conservation Voters last year.
Obama on Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science:
Q: York County was recently in the news for a lawsuit involving the teaching of intelligent design [in Dover, PA]. What’s your attitude regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools?A: “I’m a Christian, and I believe in parents being able to provide children with religious instruction without interference from the state. But I also believe our schools are there to teach worldly knowledge and science. I believe in evolution, and I believe there’s a difference between science and faith. That doesn’t make faith any less important than science. It just means they’re two different things. And I think it’s a mistake to try to cloud the teaching of science with theories that frankly don’t hold up to scientific inquiry.”
Well said.
Finally, some black clergymen gather and discuss Obama and the Wright controversy. Some interesting stuff in there. The first quote:
Rev. Earl Blackwell of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Coatesville: Just speaking personally, the controversy with Wright was created by the media. You can take excerpts from my sermons, and I would be considered a Rev. Wright. But when you listen to the whole content of his sermons, he was speaking directly to the prejudiced, racist, biased community of our nation. And what he was saying, in fact, was generally the truth. The thing is we need to start facing is the reality of situations rather than running from them … What is also significant is that the media would pick that as some way to degrade or make a negative about Obama, and he wasn’t even there, sitting in the congregation. He’s never endorsed his pastor to be his spokesman. For the media to pick and nick, that only encourages me even more to push and prod forward with the support of Sen. Obama.
Read the rest.