Obama Video Says it All

Are you the same or have you changed?

Gotta Love Obama (Sometimes)

Obama Disappoints Me

I wish I'd written this cogent piece on why Ralph Nader's campaign is relevant in 2008. Obama's support for the FISA legislation now pending in the Senate has pushed me over the edge of suspicion regarding his "true" positions on crucial issues. Just how corporate is he going to slide? How far to the right does his campaign feel he needs to move in order to win the election?

I think, as Gregory Kefaury suggests, that Obama ought to take a good long look at Nader's positions on such issues as health care, corporate crime, the war, NAFTA, Israel and Palestine, the environment, and so on. Mr. Nader is right on the money on each of these issues and Obama is way off the mark on too many of them. His heart may be in the right place, but the reality of election politics may very well be corrupting Obama in front of our very eyes.

Chris Hedges also has an excellent piece on Truthdig on the same subject.

R.I.P. R.F.K.

I'm imagining a world in which Bobby Kennedy was not murdered 40 years ago today. He would have almost certainly defeated Richard Nixon in 1968. How that would have changed the course of our nation's history!

How much devastation and tragedy might have been avoided? How many fewer lives would have been lost in Vietnam? The riots at the '68 convention would not have happened. The civil rights movement would no doubt have moved along much more quickly; perhaps we would have already had women and people of color in the White House. No Watergate, no Ronald Reagan, no Iran-Contra, no Gulf Wars...

Same old story: some wacko easily acquires a gun and singlehandedly sets the political agenda for decades to come.

For me, the hope engendered by the Obama campaign brings with it a sobering fear.

Brilliant Mr. Fish cartoon

MLK: Forty Years Later

How much progress have we made in the U.S. when the leading progressive presidential candidate has to dis-associate himself from the truth? Chicago, Senator Obama's residence, is still a highly segregated, racially polarized city. 2008 still finds this city and this country with huge income and standard of living gaps between the middle class and the poor (let alone the gaping maw that exists between the wealthy and those living in poverty).

Woe to the jingoists who put patriotism ahead of justice. We can't be so smugly proud of our "progress" when present conditions demonstrate a lasting inequality in income, housing, education, etc. Too bad Mr. Obama can't tell the truth - that his pastor is right on almost all counts. Now, that would truly honor the spirit of Dr. King.