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"I know Senator Obama's beloved mother and grandparents would've been thrilled to watch the child they raised ascend the steps of the Capitol and take his oath to uphold the Constitution of the greatest nation on the face of the earth."

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McCain: America is the greatest force for good in the history of the world. My friends, we have gone to all four corners of the Earth and shed American blood in defense, usually, of somebody else's freedom and our own.

Obama: Sen. McCain and I do agree, this is the greatest nation on earth. We are a force of good in the world. But there has never been a nation in the history of the world that saw its economy decline and maintained its military superiority.

And the strains that have been placed on our alliances around the world and the respect that's been diminished over the last eight years has constrained us being able to act on something like the genocide in Darfur, because we don't have the resources or the allies to do everything that we should be doing.

That's going to change when I'm president. . .

We cannot allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. It would be a game-changer in the region. Not only would it threaten Israel, our strongest ally in the region and one of our strongest allies in the world, but it would also create a possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists.

And so it's unacceptable. And I will do everything that's required to prevent it.

And we will never take military options off the table. And it is important that we don't provide veto power to the United Nations or anyone else in acting in our interests. . . We've got to try to have talks, understanding that we're not taking military options off the table.

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'Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on earth.'

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a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

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[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Wilf Day ]

It also seems to me that in this time of economic downturn in the American economy Obama will have no desire to cut back on the military industrial complex because that is perhaps the largest single part of their domestic economy.

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Originally posted by Wilf Day:
Well, I'm not sure how the other 95.4% of the world feel about a new dawn of American military superiority. I guess we are supposed to cheer.

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Wasn't this how the Frankenstein was conjured up in the first place, by a group of peasants who were riled up with stories of being downtrodden by callous leaders who were indifferent to their suffering? Something or another about taxation without representation I believe it was. Since they insist on leading us around around without our asking, the thought of creating our own monster in response would seem the appropriate reaction, if the Chinese didn't already hold the patent for it's construction.

[ 05 November 2008: Message edited by: Slumberjack ]

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
Sorry Slumberjack but I must disagree with your reading of the first American civil war. The Boston merchants incited the mobs not the other way around.

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Heroically, [Obama] represents a significant extension of the scope of American democracy. His election reminds us that the United States really is the universal society on this planet and reconfirms America’s identity as a truly (if not yet perfectly) multiracial, multi-ethnic, multicultural nation. Bravo!

The United States is the first major country founded under the ideals of the Enlightenment, committed to the secular values of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” America is a land of opportunity and individual achievement; its civic faith in progress, education, science, humanism, and democratic values is well justified.

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The United States really IS a multi-ethnic country. They've made significant social progress over the years.

Even as they drown in the anger of platoons of pissed-off voters, Republican operatives are swiping ballots with both hands.

Ground zero is Georgia. It's here where the sick little vulture named Saxby Chambliss won the US Senate seat six years ago by calling his Democratic opponent, a guy who'd lost three limbs in Vietnam, a friend of Osama bin Laden.

There's no way in hell that Chambliss can slime his way back into the Senate in the face of over half a million newly registered voters (Black and young - 69% for Obama) without jacking them out of their votes. That's what the Republicans are up to. Right now. As we speak.

Over 50,000 the new voters in Georgia have been blocked from voting by using a nasty little new law, the Help America Vote Act signed by George Bush. (Bush is helping us vote - look out!)

I just got this from Christina Rush in the Peach Pit state:
"They really have stolen my vote and I don't know what to do about it at this late stage. I just found out 2 days ago that I do not exist on the voters rolls in Georgia. I have disappeared. After calling 866-OUR VOTE and the Secretary of State (for GA), it has been determined that the last vote I was accounted for was the 1996 General Election. That's awfully strange to me, considering that I voted in the recent Primaries and that last two General Elections (2000 and 2004)."

"Everyone is 'very sorry' this is happening, but no one can tell what I can do to make my vote count for THIS election. The only advice I've been given is to fill out a new voters registration form and I'll be eligible for any future elections, just not THIS one."

"So, what can I do except tell anyone and everyone who will listen?"

And no one is going to listen to you or the other 50,000 dumped voters in Georgia.

But here's the good news: it won't save them. The GOP is toast. Paint the White House black and blue and Congress the same hue.

But the steal in Senate races may allow the GOP to savage, obstruct, sabotage President Obama's ability to repair the damage of eight years of looting by the unelected junta of the Bush regime. They begin with the theft of the Georgia Senate seat, now heading into a run-off.

* * *

I've been studying the purge of voters and the blockade of new registrants all year with my co-investigator, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Here's what we know is happening: While Obama is brushing his tux for his Inaugural, several million votes are getting disappeared. We're awaiting the count on provisional ballots, those bouncing baloney ballots they give to the purge, The raw data is ill-making. We predicted a six-million vote heist and we're looking grimly accurate. Visit our site, www.GregPalast.com, to get the full report as the numbers come in - the totals of the UNcounted you won't see on the CNN website.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
With skeptics like these, who needs cheerleaders?

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With skeptics like these, who needs cheerleaders?

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Reading the works of sceptics over the last decade or more, I've noticed a general reluctance to wade into politics in fears of appearing partizan.

Along with a good many others, I think leading sceptics in the States hid themselves away at critical times during the Bush administration.

I think in the years to come, sceptics will look upon this time with something less than pride, and will have to recognize that when it came time they could have provided real, practicle value to their country, they ran away.

Like anything else, politics is open to sceptical analysis. And we'd all be better off for it if sceptics would wade into this arena.

As far as being cheerleaders, people all over American and the world are projecting their own hopes on Obama. Including sceptics who should know better.

It's okay to be a little giddy for a few days, but people in the States better realize that they better find ways to force Obama to do the things Obama says he wants to do, and that attracted them to his candidacy.

For those who expect a more progressive government, they better not be sitting back and just expecting it to happen.

[ 06 November 2008: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

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Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time. My friends on the left write to me that they feel something akin to "redemption" or that "the country has been returned to us" or that "we finally have one of us in the White House." Of course, like them, I discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous relief. And the thought of Obama, a thoughtful and progressive black candidate, shifts the historical ground, and we feel that cataclysm as it produces a new terrain. But let us try to think carefully about the shifted terrain, although we cannot fully know its contours at this time. The election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes ("we are all united") or that we propose ("he is one of us"), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times. There have always been good reasons not to embrace "national unity" as an ideal, and to nurse suspicions toward absolute and seamless identification with any political leader. After all, fascism relied in part on that seamless identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this same effort to organize political affect when, for instance, Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, "I love each and every one of you."(...)

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From the same thinker, in Libération:

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L’élection prodigieuse
Judith Butler Philosophe, féministe américaine.

Je ne suis pas sûre de pouvoir adresser mes réflexions «à Obama», mais il me paraît significatif que nous soyons invités à nous adresser à lui comme si nous le connaissions personnellement. C’est peut-être là une des caractéristiques d’un responsable charismatique : les électeurs ont l’impression de le connaître personnellement et ils ont envie d’être connus de lui. (...)

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[ 06 November 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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Obama won 43 percent of the white vote.

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But somehow this becomes good news:

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Obama won 95 percent of the black vote, 67 percent of the Hispanic vote and 62 percent of the Asian vote, according to exit poll data published on The New York Times' Web site. The performance of Democratic presidential candidates in the past seven elections reveals the multi-ethnic strength of Obama's win: Only Clinton (1996) and Michael Dukakis (1988) fared better with Hispanic voters. No other candidate has done better than Obama did in attracting black and Asian voters (the data for Asians only goes back to 1992).

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"O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain; For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! ..."

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It's tempting to be swept up in the emotion. It was only 50 years ago that black people were being regularly lynched to the glee of terrorist mobs. Folks like my grandfather — one of the lucky ones — endured the humiliation of having fellow Navy men look for his "monkey tail" in the shower.

In what other nation has a member of a historically-oppressed minority risen to the highest elected office in the land?

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Gee, I dunno, why not give Nelson Mandela a call to find out?

"Asimbonanga
Asimbonang' uMandela thina
Laph'ekhona
Laph'ehleli khona"

[ 08 November 2008: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]