Do we have the second American civil war? Will some states want to secede from the Unitedness of it all? Will Bush hang in there for an extended second term 'in the national interest'? Will Mugabe ask for asylum?

Add to these nice concerns the impact of the recession-which-isnt-really-here-yet but will bite in the fall and the inevitable global tensions of a turbulent Beijing Olympics and you'd reckon on the message for 2009 being a right royal state of disunion. Get into gold or cash. Soonest. . . read more

So why does Hillary persist? Because she hasn't abandoned her aspiration for the White House. Not in 2008, but for 2012. Here's the perverse logic at work. If Obama defeats McCain in November, it will take an act of treachery beyond anything even the Clintons have ever conjured from their grimoire of political demonology for Hillary to challenge him in 2012. She will be 69 in 2016, almost ready to move into one of the Beverly Nursing Homes, owned by a company she once represented as a corporate lawyer, aggressively protecting the bottom line against such extravagances as healthy meals, clean sheets and proper medical care for the elderly.

Hillary Clinton is the prisoner of an unimpeachable mathematics. So she makes the most of a remorseless situation by doing what the Clintons do best: commit political fratricide. Quite literally, in this case, by knocking off a brother. In order to realize her vaulting ambition, Hillary must mortally wound Obama as candidate in the fall race against John McCain so that she can run against McCain in 2012. [More] . . read more

When I say your whiteness is showing this is what I mean: You claim that your opposition to Obama is an act of gender solidarity, in that women (and their male allies) need to stand up for women in the face of the sexist mistreatment of Clinton by the press. On this latter point - the one about the importance of standing up to the media for its often venal misogyny - you couldn't be more correct. As the father of two young girls who will have to contend with the poison of patriarchy all their lives, or at least until such time as that system of oppression is eradicated, I will be the first to join the boycott of, or demonstration on, whatever media outlet you choose to make that point.

But on the first part of the above equation - the part where you insist voting against Obama is about gender solidarity - you are, for lack of a better way to put it, completely full of crap. And what's worse is that at some level I suspect you know it. Voting against Senator Obama is not about gender solidarity. It is an act of white racial bonding, and it is grotesque. [More] . . read more

Senator John McCain is a poster boy for the pathologies of the military brat. Born in the Panama Canal Zone, he attended twenty schools in his nomadic childhood. "The place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi," is how he shuts up critics of his carpetbagging, but he is making their point: Senator McCain's loyalty is not to any particular American place but rather to a bureaucratic institution (the military) and an abstraction (the American Empire)...

The Democrats are no more connected to particular places than is McCain. Hillary Clinton's rootlessness became a national joke in her 2000 U.S. Senate campaign to represent New York, a state in which she had never lived. Wearing a Yankees cap was about as far as she went to assert her ersatz New Yorkness. Barack Obama, lauded as the "world candidate," was born in Hawaii, a state that is only in the union because of its military significance. Raised also in Indonesia and at various times resident in Los Angeles, New York City, and finally Chicago, Obama is a "cosmopolitan"...

Why does this matter? What's wrong with electing competent but rootless people to public office? Because just as one cannot love the "human race" before one loves particular human beings, neither can one love "the world" unless he first achieves a deep understanding of his own little piece of that world. [More] . . read more

That is a question Muslims, many of whom are Obamaniacs, are asking. What if Obama was a Muslim? Would it make his message less hopeful? Will it make his personality less charming? Will it make his candidacy less viable?... Rumors often stick, which is why rumor mongering persists. Rumors are particularly lethal when they are easy to remember (Obama's middle name is Hussein thus it is easy to insinuate his alleged Muslim links) and they exploit emotive stereotypes (Muslims are out to destroy America). Simply dispelling the rumor without addressing the stereotype that makes such rumors stick is like treating the symptom without isolating the cause...

Obama needs to not only continue assuring people that he is not a Muslim but also challenge the collective conscience to not let their fears undo the progress we have been making towards racial and religious tolerance. His ultimate legacy will not only be judged by becoming the first person of color to be elected President but more importantly what he does after he is elected. Obama's vision of 'One America' needs to be more than mere rhetoric. [More] . . read more

Said ambitious, wealthy white woman worked as an attorney right out of college and quickly became a partner in one of Arkansas' most prestigious (at the time) law firms. She has a net worth of over $109 million - all garnered in the last eight years. Before that she claimed to be some $7 million in debt due to legal bills. Her family net worth is over 100 times that of the "elitist" she scorns.

Sen. Barack Obama received his appellation from Sen. Hillary Clinton after he made the point that many of America's white, permanent poor, working underclass are bitter about their economic circumstances and have a culture heavy on guns and religion. Hell, yes, they're bitter. Good paying manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared from the American heartland -­ most lost due to one-sided, corporate-friendly trade deals instituted on Bill Clinton's watch. Most of the jobs have gone to the very countries where Bill Clinton has made many of those $109 millions pulling strings. Rarely a day goes by without another revelation of Bill Clinton taking big money from some of the worst anti-labor human rights offenders out there. [More] . . read more

Clinton’s tactics amount to trying to enhance her claims of owning a house by burning it down. Clinton’s increasingly mean-spirited assaults on Obama provide more fodder for Republican Party attacks than foundation for elevating the long-term credibility for her candidacy.

Dizzying duplicity reeks from Clinton’s campaign with the insulting carping on Obama’s alleged connection with Minister Louis Farrakhan and Obama’s association with the retiring pastor of his church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Despite Farrakhan never explicitly endorsing Obama, Clinton baited and the corporate media bought contentions that Obama is despicable for receiving electoral support from the Muslim minister. Farrakhan did praise Obama during a major speech in February but in offering praise of Obama’s place in history, Farrakhan pointedly told his audience he was not telling anyone who to vote for. [More] . . read more

Now the primary campaign heads off to Indiana and North Carolina amid a steady downpour of news stories about the mathematical impossibility of Hillary Clinton outstripping Barack Obama in either the delegate count or the popular vote. But math isn’t the issue here. Mrs Clinton is set to stay in the race until the roll call at the Democratic convention in Denver on August 27 conclusively settles the issue.

Not since Isaac Newton sought to decode the Ancient Testament or since Ronald Reagan redefined the properties of a meal fit for children to eat, has anyone defied science as absurdly as Mrs Clinton in her efforts to show that if you count things her way she’s in the lead. She is in the direct lineage of Joseph Stalin who said it’s not a matter of who does the voting, but who does the counting. [More] . . read more

Both are now in poor political shape, with contradictory strategies for rehabbing their fortunes. The president is saddled with an approval rating bumping along in the 20s. Each day he is served another platter of contemptuous stories about “the worst presidency of modern times”, the lack of any enduring “legacy”, the approaching Democratic landslide that will put the Republicans in the wilderness for at least two terms...

The White House made no serious attempt to upend Obama’s trip to Iraq or excessively ridicule the harmonies from the Democratic candidate and Iraqi prime minister Maliki on schedules for U.S. withdrawal. Indeed noises that could be construed as acceptance of an accelerated schedule emanated from the White House... As final testimony to the huge disaster for the McCain campaign of Obama’s trip to Iraq, the floundering Republican candidate managed to shoehorn himself into talk about a rate of withdrawal from Iraq a good deal brisker than the 100 years of occupation he was talking about, or even the 2013 deadline he subsequently settled on. [More] . . read more

What do Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain have to say about our current reality of financial crisis and recession, and the generation-long stagnation in average living standards that has preceded the crisis of the moment? There aren't significant distinctions between Obama and Clinton in terms of their campaign platforms, while both Democratic contenders share huge differences with McCain. But the most important question is not where these candidates stand during the campaign; it's what they would actually do while in office. And this is more a matter of political power - which social groups can exert pressure within a new administration - than of economic philosophy...

A new Democratic administration may well offer possibilities for a dramatic shift in U.S. economic policy, even if some of the same old Bill Clinton crowd is brought back in as advisors. But if such a major policy shift does occur, it will not be primarily because a Democrat-either Hillary Clinton or Obama-will be sitting in the White House. It will rather be because the people who put one of them there will have gathered sufficient political strength to make them stick to their campaign promises. [More] . . read more