April 2008 Archives

You will be impressed by these 2 teenagers - making videos for Hillary that were full of content and serious and better quality than videos made by adults... They were motivated to make the video because all their colleagues were Obama supporters (ooh such rebels) and instead of your "typical bad teenager story," this is about politically conscious and astute teens. Positive Youth Development... 2 teens - Morgan and Alicia, juniors in high school, 1 guy, 1 gal Muncie, IN Part 1: Part 2: and 1 therapist, that made this video, Robin she said the media is trying to make Hillary look clinically insane, and as a therapist she says obviously Hillary is not and that Hillary is a complex person - mother, wife, leader. The wonder woman! (last part is my thought...)

From the AFL-CIO Presidential Forum on MSNBC in August 2007.

Question about workers’ pensions begins at the 2 minute mark.

Chelsea talks about Hillary Clinton's policies:
Green cars to prevent Global warming
student loans, financial aid, Pell grant, graduate school loans
Green vehicular bond for auto manufacturers e.g. in Detroit to give incentives for increased gas mileage

HIllary challenges Obama to 2 Oregon debates, 1 for rural Oregonian issues
and how she will work on
taking care of our national guard/veterans
achieve universal health care
deal with the forest
create new jobs

The running total for popular vote

From her Senate website

| Funding VA Health Care | Wounded Heroes | Retirement & Disability Benefits

We're starting a giant blog - "Why I support Hillary..."

Thanks to working families, HIllary won the Pennsylvania primary by double digits!

America needs a president who fights for our children. Hillary has spent her lifetime as an effective advocate for parents and children, getting things done and passed.

From her volunteer work in law school, to her first job out of law school at the Children's Defense Fund to her time as First Lady of Arkansas and of the United States to her service in the Senate, helping children has been at the center of Hillary's public life.

In the White House, Hillary will continue her lifelong work to create a world where every child is cherished, loved, and able to fulfill his or her potential.

Some of the issues she has fought for and will make a priority as president are:

• Attracting and supporting more outstanding teachers and principals, and paying them like the professionals they are.
• Reforming the No Child Left Behind Act. This law represented a promise -- more resources for schools in exchange for more accountability -- and that promise has not been kept.
• Giving new parents support and training to promote healthy development for their children.
• Increasing access to high-quality early education and helping to create Early Head Start.
• Passing legislation to provide respite care for caregivers of elderly and disabled Americans.
• Helping to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act to enable new parents to take time off without losing their jobs, and expanding it to make it available to more parents and to provide for longer leave.
• Advocating for adoption and for abused and neglected children -- as First Lady, Hillary pushed legislation that more than doubled adoptions out of foster care.
• Promoting programs, like Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters, that provide new parents with support and guidance in caring for their children. As First Lady of Arkansas, she helped bring HIPPY to the U.S.
• Protecting children against violence and sexual content in the media and studying the impact of electronic media on children's cognitive, social, and physical development.
• Providing meaningful support to households, called "kinship care" families, where grandparents and other relatives are raising children.

This post comes from Dolores Huerta, the co-founder and First Vice President Emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO (UFW). I discovered it on the Women for Hillary page of HillaryClinton.com.

When I look to the strength of our country, I look to the mothers who built homes and raised families, and to the working women who were and are this nation’s lifeline. All during my childhood, it was my mother who kept our family going. She worked two jobs as a cook to support our family through the Great Depression and through her hard work bought her own business, two hotels that she would run herself.

In families all across America, mothers like my own are working hard everyday just to make sure their children have food on the table. My mother taught me to hold my head high and to work for a better future, but mothers and daughters alike have to work harder than their husbands or brothers just to make the same amount.

April 22, Equal Pay Day, marks the day when women’s pay will finally catch up to men’s from the year before - earning 77 cents to ever dollar made by a man, it takes us an extra four months to earn what they would have made in a year. Almost a century after women earned the right to vote, we live in a world where we afford only 77 cents on the dollar worth of rent, health care, education, and opportunity for our children and families. Our children deserve better; they deserve a change.

Throughout her life, Hillary has refused to wait for change to come. She has pushed for change with the full weight of her body and soul and she has done so all over the world, from Arkansas to China to Washington, D.C. She’s fought for equal pay, a living wage, health care for our children, and security for our families.

Any mother knows that these are all issues we face together, and we need a president who will help us answer the call for change, who will help us to make the world better, and who won’t shy away from the hard fight. Hillary is that leader, and I know she’ll stand with us.

If you go to the Women for Hillary site, check out the nifty wage gap calculator near the top right of the page.

How has Hillary Clinton’s legislative record in the Senate affected the middle class? Here are Hillary’s grades from The Middle Class.org for her time in the U.S. Senate:

• 2007: A+
• 2005: A
• 2004: B
• 2003: A

And here are Barack Obama’s grades for his entire U.S. Senate career:

• 2007: A+
• 2005: C

I even question Barack’s A+ grade for 2007. Barack did NOT vote on the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007. He was missing in action. The Middle Class.org chose not to penalize him for this.

Excerpts from The Obama Campaign: Consent of, or Contempt for, the People by Joseph C. Wilson. Posted April 16, 2008, on the Huffington Post.

Senator Obama’s ill-conceived remarks likening small town Americans to embittered guns-and-God bigots have triggered a justifiable furor. Not only are the remarks insulting, but also factually incorrect.

As it happens, at the same event in San Francisco, Senator Obama made other remarks, equally startling, insulting our Foreign Service, Intelligence Officers, members of Congress who provide oversight, and friendly governments. Like his comments about small town Americans, Obama demonstrated a cavalier disregard for Americans who every day get up determined to make this a better country, whether running the general store in a small town, or representing our national security interests in a foreign country.

This is what Obama said:

“Experience in Washington in not knowledge of the world. This I know. When Senator Clinton brags, ‘I’ve met leaders from 80 countries,’ I know what those trips are like. I’ve been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There’s a group of children who do a native dance. You meet with the C.I.A. station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that with the assistance of USAID has started something. And then you go.”

Obama’s arrogance and contempt for career professionals in the national security community is palpable.

…

Senator Obama should know better. After all, in his professional capacity as Chairman of the Senate subcommittee responsible for Europe and NATO, he was in charge of ensuring Congressional oversight of the administration’s efforts to generate greater NATO support for operations in Afghanistan. The fact that, by his own admission, he was too busy running for president to convene a single meeting of that subcommittee, should not absolve him of responsibility for acquiring at least some understanding of and respect for the work of career professionals who dedicate their lives to the service of their country.

…

Trashing Congress, small town Americans, and career national security professionals, while befriending Jeremiah Wright and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers may be a winning electoral strategy. Who knows? Time will tell. But I suspect that many small town Americans are as offended as my professional colleagues and I by this display of contempt from one who seeks our consent to govern.

4.27.08 Desperately Seeking Street Cred

By MAUREEN DOWD

Hillary grows more and more glowy as Obama grows more and more wan.

It used to be that he was incandescent and she was merely inveterate. Now she's bristling with life force, and he looks like he wants to run away somewhere for three months by himself and smoke.

Hillary is not getting much sleep or exercise, and doesn't, like the ascetic Obama, abstain from junk food and coffee and get up at dawn to work out on the road. She's still a long shot and she's 14 years older than her rival.

Yet she's the one who is more energetic and focused and beaming, and he's the one who seems uneven and gauzy, often fatigued and unable to disguise being fed up with the slog. Even his speeches don't have the same pizazz.

As a basketball player, he should know he's in overtime in his race with Hillary -- and overtime is not the period to indulge in whining.

Iraq: Clinton and Obama on Iraq and their votes from factcheck.org

His lies are just as important as Hillary's and here is why. UNLIKE Hillary, he continues to try and pursuade Americans that he is above the Politics of the past,  but continues to bash her at every opportunity. You tell me if any of these lies is any less than Hillary's. 
"Just Embellished Words: Senator Obama's Record of Exaggerations & Misstatements

Obama claimed credit for nuclear leak legislation that never passed.

FactCheck.org: 'Selective, embellished and out-of-context quotes from newspapers pump up Obama's health plan.' 

Obama was forced to revise his assertion that lobbyists 'won't work in my White House.' 

ABC News: 'Obama...seemed to exaggerate the legislative progress he made' on ethics reform. 

Obama drastically overstated Kansas tornado deaths during campaign appearance. 

Sen. Obama said 'I passed a law that put Illinois on a path to universal coverage,' but Obama health care legislation merely set up a task force.

LA Times: Fellow organizers say Sen. Obama took too much credit for his community organizing efforts. 

Chicago Tribune: Obama's assertion that nobody had indications Rezko was engaging in wrongdoing 'strains credulity.

4.16.08 Gallup reported that the “bitter” remarks had no effect on Hillary’s support. However, if you look at the graphs, you’ll see a different picture. Although not statistically significant, it is a trend. and I believe, had Gallup polled enough people they would have had the power to detect this difference. Shame on Gallup for not doing a good enough aka large enough poll to detect these differences. (The margin of error was 6% points and even greater in the subgroups)

Hillary gained 3% support in those earning $24,000/year or less.

HIllary gained 2% in those who say religion is an important part of their lives.

In the Huffington Post, Greg Mitchell blogs about the "embarrassing" performance of the ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous. Rather than asking questions about relevant issues such as the housing crisis, health care, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they focused largely on recent and past gaffes committed by the candidates. Read the full post here.

At tonight's debate, Hillary spoke of her working class roots and why many may have found Barack's "bitter" comments offensive:

I am the granddaughter of a factory worker from Scranton who went to work in the Scranton lace mills when he was 11 years old, worked his entire life there, mostly six-day weeks.

He was also very active in the Court Street Methodist Church. And he raised three sons and was very proud that he sent all of them to college.

I don't believe that my grandfather or my father, or the many people whom I have had the privilege of knowing and meeting across Pennsylvania over many years, cling to religion when Washington is not listening to them. I think that is a fundamental, sort of, misunderstanding of the role of religion and faith in times that are good and times that are bad.

...

Now, that doesn't mean that people are not frustrated with the government. We have every reason to be frustrated, particularly with this administration.

But I can see why people would be taken aback and offended by the remarks. And I think what's important is that we all listen to one another and we respect one another and we understand the different decisions that people make in life, because we're a stronger country because of that.

And certainly the weeks that I have spent criss-crossing Pennsylvania, from Erie to Lancaster County, and meeting a lot of wonderful people, says to me that despite whatever frustration anyone has with our government, people are resilient, they are positive, and they're ready for leadership again that will summon them to something greater than themselves, and that we will deliver on that if given a chance.

She also expressed her thoughts about Barack's former pastor, and why Barack's choice to stay in Wright's church is relevant:

what's important here is what we each stand for and what our records are and what we have done over the course of our lives to try to improve the circumstances of those who deserve to live up to their own potential, to make the decisions that are right for them and their families. And I think year after year for now 35 years, I have a proven record of results.

And what I'm taking into this campaign is my passion for empowering people, for giving people the feeling that they can make a better future for themselves. And I think it's important that that starts from a base of respect and connection in order to be able to get people to follow you and believe that you will lead them in the better direction.

...

one's choice of church and pastor is rooted in what one believes is what you're seeking in church and what kind of, you know, fellowship you find in church. But I have to say that, you know, for Pastor Wright to have given his first sermon after 9/11 and to have blamed the United States for the attack, which happened in my city of New York, would have been intolerable for me. And therefore I would have not been able to stay in the church, and maybe it's, you know, just, again, a personal reflection that regardless of whatever good is going on -- and I have no reason to doubt that a lot of good things were happening in that church -- you get to choose your pastor. You don't choose your family, but you get to choose your pastor. And when asked a direct question, I said I would not have stayed in the church....

clearly what we've got to figure out is how we're going to bring people together in a way that overcomes the anger, overcomes the divisiveness and whatever bitterness there may be out there.

It is clear that, as leaders, we have a choice who we associate with and who we apparently give some kind of seal of approval to.

The following "movie trailer" was created by a talented 19-year old student filmmaker. We find it a fitting introduction for our new "Working Families for Hillary" blog. Enjoy!