There are elections in America now. Along came a black citizen of Kenyan African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia. His name is Obama. All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency. But we were taken by surprise when our African Kenyan brother, who is an American national, made statements that shocked all his supporters in the Arab world, in Africa, and in the Islamic world. We hope that this is merely an elections “clearance sale,” as they say in Egypt – in other words, merely an elections lie. As you know, this is the farce of elections – a person lies and lies to people, just so that they will vote for him, and afterwards, when they say to him: :”You promised this and that,” he says: “No, this was just elections propaganda.” This is the farce of democracy for you. He says: “This was propaganda, and you thought I was being serious. I was fooling you to get your votes.”
It's not an endorsement from Bill Ayers but it's nice.
Considering that McCain's last desperate strategy is to appease the likes of bsams and launch into smears against Obama, the kind that bsams embraces, it's sure refreshing to see that Obama is already ahead of the game and has a response ready.
i was expecting the McCain smears to start around Monday but I'm told they started running ads trying to link Obama with Ayers, yesterday.
Personally i think that given the fact that the economy is front and center right now in peoples minds, the attempt to try to shift the conversation to superfluous smears that have NOTHING to do with the day to day concerns of Americans, is going to backfire on McCain. I'm guessing it's going to be seen as a last ditch attempt to distract people from what's going on in the economy and will look unbecoming of a guy running on his personal "honor".
George Will made an excellent point this morning on ABC's THIS WEEK. Americans are about to get a mailing that is going to do wonders for Obama's campaign. They're going to be getting their quarterly statements from their 401ks and their pension plans. And it ain't going to be pretty. John McCain wants to change the subject away from the economy. He wants to pull the plug on the number one discussion, the number one issue of importance to every American, because he doesn't know much about economics. And Sarah Palin? Yeah. Imagine Sarah Palin being in charge of your 401k.
POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds. This is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, doubletalk, deception and lies presented as metaphorical truths are the order of the day.
So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging.
He engages in doubletalk when, on free trade and Iraq, he tells the yokels one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois Senate as proof of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he doesn't take money from lobbyists.
He presents a lie as metaphorical truth when he says it was the 1965 bloody Sunday attacks on peaceful civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama, that inspired his parents to marry. (They had been married for years already.)
All of this is unappealing, but also unexceptional. What makes it different is that there's not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.
Obama, far more than the others, is the "judge me by what I say and not what I do" candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.
The disparity between Obama's rhetoric of transcendence and his conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics is a leitmotiv of his political career. In New York, politicians (Al Sharpton excepted) are usually forced to pay at least passing tribute to universal principles and the ideal of clean government.
But Chicago, until recently a city of Lithuanians, blacks and Poles governed by Irishmen on the patronage model of the Italian Christian Democrats, is the city of political and cultural tribalism.
Blacks adapted to the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics that accompanied it. Historically, one of the ironies of Chicago politics is that the clean-government candidates have been the most racist, while those most open to black aspirations have been the most corrupt. When the young Jesse Jackson received his first audience with then mayor Richard Daley Sr - impervious to the universalism of the civil rights movement in its glory - offered him a job as a toll-taker. Jackson thought the offer demeaning but in time adapted.
In Chicago, racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics. It hasn't always worked for Chicago, which, under the pressure of increasing taxes to pay for bloated government, is losing its middle class. But it has served the city's political class admirably.
For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described: "We've had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit's (the mob's) jewellery-heist ring. And we've had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley ... That's the Chicago way."
At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.
Why, you may ask, did the operators of Chicago's political machine support Obama? Part of the answer was given long ago by the then boss of Chicago, Jake Arvey.
When asked why he made Adlai Stevenson - a man, as with Obama, more famous for speeches than for accomplishments - his party's gubernatorial candidate in 1948, Arvey is said to have replied that he needed to "perfume the ticket".
Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones's district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: "Some call it pork; I call it steak."
Obama repaid the generosity. When he had a chance to back clean Democratic candidates for president of the Cook County board of supervisors and Illinois governor, he stayed with the allies of the Outfit. The gubernatorial candidate he backed, Rod Blagojevich, is under federal investigation, in part because of his relationship with Tony Rezko, the man who helped Obama buy his house.
The Chicago way has delivered politically for Obama even this year. Ninety per cent of his popular-vote lead over Hillary Clinton comes from Illinois, and two-thirds of that 90 per cent comes just from Cook County.
Some of this advantage came from the efforts of Obama's political ally, the flame-throwing reverend James Meeks, a political force in his own right. Meeks, who mocks black moderates as "niggers", is an Illinois state senator, the pastor of a mega-church and a strong supporter of Jackson's powerful political operation, which has put its vote-pulling muscle squarely behind the Obama campaign. It was only with Obama's remark about bitter, white, working-class, small-town voters that we saw his difficulties appealing beyond the machine's reach. He won his US Senate race in 2004 not only because his opponents self-destructed but also because of the machine's ability to deliver votes.
In Pennsylvania, he has lacked such assistance and the campaigning has not gone nearly so well. First, Obama pretended to be a tenpin bowler and scored a 37. Then, appearing before a supposedly closed San Francisco audience, he complained that small-town Pennsylvanians "cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations". This is the man who belongs to a church built on bitterness, rancour and conspiratorial fear. During the Wright affair, Obama not only repeatedly lied about what he knew and when but violated the spirit of the civil rights movement in its mid-1960s glory.
When, as a young man, I was on the periphery of the movement, there was an unwritten rule that if people told racist jokes or speakers engaged in defamatory rhetoric, you needed to register your immediate disapproval by confronting the speaker or ostentatiously walking out.
Wright's "black theology" is essentially a Christianised version of Malcolm X's ideology of hate.
But for 20 years, Obama, who had planned to run for mayor of Chicago, kept silent about the close, if at times competitive, relationship between Wright, whose 8000-member mega-church gave him his political base, and Farrakhan. His ambition overrode his moral integrity.
As part of his "black value system", Wright attacked whites for their "middle classism", materialism, and "greed in a world of need". Obama sounded similar notes in his recent address at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, in which he laid the blame for the sub-prime mortgage crisis on those who had "embraced an ethic of greed, corner cutting and inside dealing".
But that's exactly what Obama did in buying his luxurious house. Given the choice of purchasing a less expensive home or getting into bed with his fundraiser-cum-slumlord-cum-fixer Rezko, Obama chose the latter. Then again, the oppressed of Trinity United Church of Christ are building Wright a $US1.6 million ($1.7million), 960sqm home complete with four-car garage, whirlpool and butler's pantry. This house, which backs on to a golf course, is to sit in Tinley Park, a gated community in southwest Chicago that is 93 per cent white.
The Obamas' charitable giving is consistent with Wright's talking Left while living Right. Obama and his wife are quite well off. They had an estimated income of $US1.2 million from 2000 to 2004. But the man who preaches compassion and mutuality gave all of 1 per cent of that income to charity during those years. Most of that went to Wright's church.
There is a similar chasm when it comes to Obama's claim to post-partisanship. His achievements in reaching out to moderate voters are largely proleptic. But words are not deeds and, although Obama has few concrete achievements to his name, his voting record hardly suggests an ability to rise above Left v Right.
In the Illinois Senate, he made a specialty of voting present, but after his first two years in the US Senate, National Journal's analysis of rollcall votes found that he was more liberal than 86 per cent of his colleagues. His voting record has only moved further Left since then. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action gives him a 97.5 per cent rating, while National Journal ranks him the most liberal member of the Senate. By comparison, Clinton, who occasionally votes with the Republicans, ranks 16th.
Obama is such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party's majority leader, Harry Reid.
Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial politics. The day after his surprise loss in New Hampshire, and in anticipation of the South Carolina primary, with its heavily black electorate, South Side congressman Jesse Jackson Jr - Obama's national co-chairman - appeared on MSNBC to argue, in a prepared statement, that Clinton's teary moment on the campaign trail reflected her deep-seated racism.
"Those tears," said Jackson, "have to be analysed ... They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina, where 45 per cent of African-Americans will participate in the Democratic contest ... We saw tears in response to her appearance, so that her appearance brought her to tears, but not hurricane Katrina, not other issues."
In other words, whites who are at odds with, or who haven't delivered for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.
Liberals love Obama's talk of taking on powerful financial interests. But here , too, he is rather slippery. In his Cooper Union speech, he denounced in no uncertain terms the "special interests" of people on Wall Street (who are well represented among his campaign donors).
He, of course, had an opportunity to push for repealing the privileged tax treatment of private equity firms when that question was before Charles Grassley's Senate subcommittee - but he simply made a pro-forma statement in favour of doing so and disappeared.
Nationally, as in Chicago, Obama the self-styled reformer never crosses swords with any of his putative foes. To pick another example, he has attacked "predatory" sub-prime lenders while taking roughly $US1.3 million in contributions from companies in that line of business.
Obama is the internationalist opposed to free trade. He is the friend of race-baiters who thinks Don Imus deserved to be fired. He is the proponent of courage in the face of powerful interests who lacked the courage to break with Wright (until Wednesday). He is the man who would lead our efforts against terrorism yet was friendly with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant 1960s terrorist. He is the post-racialist supporter of affirmative action. He is the enemy of Big Oil who takes money from executives at Exxon-Mobil, Shell and British Petroleum.
Obama has, in a sense, represented a new version of the invisible man, a candidate whose colour obscures his failings.
But so far, the wild discrepancy between Obama's words and his deeds, and between his enormous ambitions and his minimal accomplishments, doesn't seem to have fazed his core supporters, who apparently suffer from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. Like cultists who rededicate themselves when the cult's prophecies have been falsified, his fans redouble their delusions in the face of his obvious hypocrisy.
That is because Obama, in the imagination of many of his fans in the public and the press, is both a deduction from what was - the failures of the Bush administration and the scandals of the Clintons - and an expression of what should be.
The ideal, the aspiration, is so rhetorically appealing that it has been assumed to be true. They remind one of Woodrow Wilson's answer when asked if his plan for a League of Nations was practicable: "If it won't work, it must be made to work."
Chicago [url=Obama grant being probed]Sun-Times[/url]:
A $100,000 state grant for a botanic garden in Englewood that then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign volunteer is now under investigation by the Illinois attorney general amid new questions, prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports, about whether the money might have been misspent.
The garden was never built. And now state records obtained by the Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.
Smith wrote another $20,000 in grant-related checks to K.D. Contractors, a construction company that his wife, Karen D. Smith, created five months after work on the garden was supposed to have begun, records show. K.D. is no longer in business.
What's the big deal? It's just a little public corruption. It isn't like he tried to get a crooked cop who tasered a kid off the street or anything.
Politico: Obama to pre-empt McCain assault by launching ads calling McCain 'erratic'
Ooooohhhhh.... maverick temper gonna go boom!
Quote:
Branding his opponent as “erratic in a crisis,” Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is preempting plans by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to portray him as having sinister connections to controversial Chicagoans.
Obama officials call it political jujitsu – turning the attacks back on the attacker.
McCain officials had said early in the weekend that they plan to begin advertising after Tuesday’s debate that will tie Obama to convicted money launderer Tony Rezko and former Weathermen radical William Ayers.
But Obama isn’t waiting to respond. His campaign is going up Monday on national cable stations with a scathing ad saying: “Three quarters of a million jobs lost this year. Our financial system in turmoil. And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy. No wonder his campaign wants to change the subject.
“Turn the page on the financial crisis by launching dishonorable, dishonest ‘assaults’ against Barack Obama. Struggling families can't turn the page on this economy, and we can't afford another president who is this out of touch.”
Then Obama says: “I'm Barack Obama and I approved this message.” .....
“We think the McCain campaign made a huge error by telling the press that their strategy was to distract from the most important issue facing voters,” a senior Obama official said. “Every attack going forward will be easy to characterize for what it is – an attempt to distract from the Bush-McCain economic record."
This is rather brilliant by Obama. Every time McCain launches a negative ad, a negative attack, that has nothing to do with the economy, Obama can then see "see, I told you so - the man has no interest in talking about the economic crisis." This is going to be fun.
How exactly does pointing out Obama's involvement with ACORN qualify McCain as not having an interest in the economy's downturn? Considering they're the ones who motivated the rise in approval of sub-prime mortgages, according to the social status of people who needed them, I'd say the matter of Obama's associations are highly significant in regards to his economic credibility.
American Author of Anti-Obama Book Detained in Kenya Tuesday, October 07, 2008
NAIROBI, Kenya — The American author of a book critical of Barack Obama is being detained in Kenya while his immigration status is checked, a senior immigration official said Tuesday.
Jerome Corsi, who wrote "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," was being held at immigration headquarters in Nairobi after police picked him up from his hotel Tuesday, said Carlos Maluta, a senior immigration official in charge of investigations.
"We still haven't decided what to do with him," Maluta told The Associated Press.
He said Corsi did not have a temporary work permit needed to conduct business in Kenya.
Obama is wildly popular in Kenya. His father, whom he barely knew, was a Kenyan economist.
Corsi's book claims the Illinois senator is a dangerous, radical candidate for president and includes innuendoes and false rumors — that he was raised a Muslim, attended a radical, black church and is secretly seething with "black rage."
Obama is a Christian who attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and his campaign picks apart the book's claims on the Obama campaign's rumor-fighting Web site, FightTheSmears.com.
According to a press release announcing Corsi's visit, he arrived last week at the invitation of Christian missionaries concerned about the rise of Islam. Corsi was planning to file daily dispatches all week, the statement said.
Obama's Kenyan uncle, Said Obama, said he was unaware of Corsi's detention.
I have long noticed Obama's black rage. It is more evident in his scum cunt wife Michelle but he has shown it too. I suspect if McCain kicks his ass tonight at the debate we will be seeing it more.
I know whomod likes to say it is a race thing and we are fearful of a black president but I can assure you if this was J C Watts running or Michael Steele or Colin Powell I and everyone else would not be saying these things.
Oh and just in case you didn't know this already whomod. Blacks hate hispanics.
American Author of Anti-Obama Book Detained in Kenya Tuesday, October 07, 2008
NAIROBI, Kenya — The American author of a book critical of Barack Obama is being detained in Kenya while his immigration status is checked, a senior immigration official said Tuesday.
Jerome Corsi, who wrote "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," was being held at immigration headquarters in Nairobi after police picked him up from his hotel Tuesday, said Carlos Maluta, a senior immigration official in charge of investigations.
"We still haven't decided what to do with him," Maluta told The Associated Press.
He said Corsi did not have a temporary work permit needed to conduct business in Kenya.
Obama is wildly popular in Kenya. His father, whom he barely knew, was a Kenyan economist.
Corsi's book claims the Illinois senator is a dangerous, radical candidate for president and includes innuendoes and false rumors — that he was raised a Muslim, attended a radical, black church and is secretly seething with "black rage."
Obama is a Christian who attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and his campaign picks apart the book's claims on the Obama campaign's rumor-fighting Web site, FightTheSmears.com.
According to a press release announcing Corsi's visit, he arrived last week at the invitation of Christian missionaries concerned about the rise of Islam. Corsi was planning to file daily dispatches all week, the statement said.
Obama's Kenyan uncle, Said Obama, said he was unaware of Corsi's detention.
Federal prosecutors moved Monday to delay indefinitely the sentencing of convicted fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, sending their strongest hint yet that he is ready to spill his political secrets.
The filing asks for a postponement while prosecutors and defense attorneys "engage in discussions that could affect their sentencing postures."
Speculation has simmered for weeks that the key fundraiser for Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Sen. Barack Obama was whispering what he knows about corruption in Illinois government to federal prosecutors in hopes of getting a lighter sentence.
Honestly. It's sort of sad when the best you have against Obama is some guy that used to be a domestic terrorist almost a half century ago that later went legit and became a college professor and sat on a charity board with Obama discussing ...um charity work and on the other side you have some guy who helped the Obama's buy a house who also happened to be involved in unsavory business practices on the side that really have absolutely NOTHING to do with Barack Obama buying a house.
All this crap that the right keeps peddling doesn't get any traction because the media already looked at it and pretty much unanimously, (well except for the usual suspects on the far right) concluded there was no there, there.
I think you were hiding two years ago and not posting here but I had no problem condemning Republicans or Democrats who were in bed with Abramoff.
Maybe this is nothing but you must admit that, if a Republican had a criminal financier assisting him in purchasing a home (or in the case of AK Senator Ted Stevens, remodeling one), especially in this time of rampant white collar corruption, you'd be at least wondering if there was a quid pro quo.
which year was it that the Dems were supposed take something like 12 seats in the Senate and like 20 or 30 in the House and they ended up losing seats in both even though the polls showed them winning easily......was it 2004 or 2006?
I remember pissing in my pants laughing watching Terry McCauliffe try and spin his way out of that one.
The non-partisan National Journal scores senators each year on the totality of their economic, defense and foreign policy votes to rate how “liberal” they are.
Sen. Barack Obama has the highest score of all of the 100 senators. 1
Joe Biden is the eighth-highest scorer.
To put it in perspective, both Obama and Biden scored far higher than the only self-described Socialist in the Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who had the 12th- highest score. 2
On practically every issue, Obama and Biden have political objectives that are radical and repugnant to most Americans.
Obama voted against a bill that would permit juries to consider the death penalty for gang members who murder to advance the gang’s interest. 3
Both Obama and Biden have voted against making English our official language. 4
At a campaign event in Georgia, Obama told the crowd that “instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.” 5
Many people think some gun control is appropriate, but Obama believes in total gun control: He doesn’t think you should own a gun at all.
When a questionnaire from the Independent Voters of Illinois asked Obama if he would “ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns,” he responded “yes.”
Obama told John Lott Jr., a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, “I don’t believe that people should be able to own guns.” 6
As to same-sex marriages, Biden said during the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate: “Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.
“We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do.” 7
And Obama published a letter on his Web site earlier this year, stating: “I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) — a position I have held since before arriving in the U.S. Senate.
“While some say we should repeal only part of the law, I believe we should get rid of that statute altogether.
“Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does. I have also called for us to repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ and I have worked to improve the Uniting American Families Act so we can afford same-sex couples the same rights and obligations as married couples in our immigration system.” 8
Sen. Obama’s repeal of DOMA would strip away the states’ ability to choose whether or not to recognize same-sex marriage ceremonies held in another state.
His repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would take away the military’s ability to consider the impact a person’s homosexual status or activities has on their military service.
And his last suggestion would grant even a temporary immigrant in the U.S. the ability to bring in their homosexual partner under the “Family Unity Program.” 9
When he was in the Illinois State Senate, Obama voted against the “Induced Infant Liability Act” requiring medical care for babies who survive an abortion. The bill came up twice in the Judiciary Committee on which he served. CBS News reported Obama voted “present” in 2001 and “no” in 2002. 10
Why would Obama not allow abortion survivors to be given medical attention?
This is what he said during the Illinois State Senate debate in March 2001: “It would essentially bar abortions because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child and if this was a child then this would be an anti-abortion statute.” 11
If only they knew, the vast majority of Americans would consider Obama and Biden far too radical for their tastes.
that "non partisan" National Journal ranking is a joke. Funny how the most liberal" Senator always happens to be the guy running for President on the Democratic side.
The methodology used to determine that has already been scrutinized and come under ridicule.
The more interesting question, though, is, Does this “most liberal” ranking actually mean anything? And the answer, once you look at the National Journal’s methodology, is not really. I say this only because I got an email from Dave Meyer, a researcher here in DC, who is one of the many usually-unnamed people who toil behind the scenes in Washington brokering in information. Here is what Meyer wrote:
Quote:
I actually browsed through the scorecard National Journal used to determine the ranking. There are precisely two scored votes where Obama took the liberal position and Clinton took the conservative. The first was Joe Lieberman's S.Amdt. 30 to S.Amdt. 3 to S.1 The Amendment was "To establish a Senate Office of Public Integrity." Here's the roll call of the 27-71 vote. Joining Obama on the "liberal" side -- meaning the side in support of Joe Lieberman's amendment -- were Republicans Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe Chuck Grassley, and John McCain.
The second was Jeff Bingaman's S.Amdt. 1267 to S.Amdt.1150 to S.1348, the Immigration Reform bill. The Amendment was "To remove the requirement that Y-1 nonimmigrant visa holders leave the United States before they are able to renew their visa." Here's the roll call of the 41-57 vote (60 votes needed to pass, so it failed by 19). Joining Obama on the "liberal' side were Richard Shelby, Chuck Hagel, and Tom Coburn.
So there you have it. Obama is more liberal than Clinton because he voted with John McCain, the most likely Republican nominee, and Tom Coburn, one of the Senate's most conservative members. Ain’t political rankings a wonderful thing.
They claim that Obama and Clinton only differed on 10 votes, but somehow Obama comes in first and Clinton is #16. Fuzzy math, I tell ya. In fact, looking at the voting chart the NJ uses to draw their conclusions, it's obvious that there are a few senators who are clearly more liberal than Obama. In fact every Democratic Senator has a more liberal voting record than Obama, except Baucus, Biden, Pryor, Dodd (due to absenses on crucial votes), Landrieu and Ben Nelson -- but since when do right wing journalists let those pesky facts get in the way?
Let us not forget that in 2004, they claimed that...you guessed it, John Kerry and John Edwards were the most liberal senators. What a coincidence!
