SOURCE: Daily Kos Blogger and Friend Icebergslim

see extended for more

Jim Hightower, populist from Texas, used to be an elected official in the state and now publishes a monthly newsletter, "The Hightower Lowdown". If any of you are interested in subscribing...let me know and I will send you the 411 on how to subscribe. He writes extensively about Obama in this month's newsletter and I am putting a small article from it here.

Obama slip-sliding away? 

MIXED EMOTIONS ARE WHAT YOU EXPERIENCE when you see your 16-year-old daughter come home from the prom with a Gideon Bible under her arm.

You get mixed emotions watching Barack Obama. While he clearly has progressive instincts and a phenomimal potential to be this century's FDR, he sometimes shows up carrying the Holy Bible of Corporatized Politics-As-Usual under his arm.

Look at his flip-flop on the domestic spying bill. It gives legal immunity to the telecom giants that helped George W spy on millions of us Americans. Obama had pledged this spring to go all out to defeat this-but then caved in and supported it (in fairness, he did fight to strip telecom immunity from the larger bill, but he knew that this would be a losing effort).

This is part of the Obama package-a man who, on occasion, will try to drift from progressive positions, crafting legalistic compromisese that fuzz the issue and fudge his own stand. Obama is not a pure progressive. Get used to that. If he is in the White House, progressives themselves will constantly have to challenge him, pushing him to be more FDRish, less Clintonesque.

The good news is that people are already onto this. When he reneged on his telcom pledge, the progressive netroots nation that has so strongly backed Obama exploded all over him, using his own website to rip him for breaking faith and to organize opposition to his switch. They didn't stop him this time, but they did sting him, making clear that they felt betrayed, could not just be ignored, and are expecting better.

To achieve progressive policies, democracy demands that the people themselves be noisy, feisty, and confrontational. That was true in FDR's time-and it's no less true in ours.

I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington...I'm asking you to believe in yours.-Barack Obama

See You In A Few Hours. This Vampiress Beauty Must Rest . Until Then .....

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) attends a ceremony in the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem July 23, 2008. Obama began a visit to Jerusalem on Wednesday pledging staunch support for Israel and saying that if elected, he would work to reinvigorate the Middle East peace process.

REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun (JERUSALEM) US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN 2008

(moreinextended)

(BTW, if you want a preview of our Denver coverage, check out our Netroots Nation 2008 Coverage).

(I'm Surprisd That I'm The One Who's Posting This First)

SOURCE: Hilary Clinton @ Huffington Post

The Bush administration is up to its old tricks again, quietly putting ideology before science and women's health. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is poised to put in place new barriers to accessing common forms of contraception like birth control pills, emergency contraception and IUDs by labeling them "abortion." These proposed regulations set to be released next week will allow healthcare providers to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it. We can't let them get away with this underhanded move to undermine women's health and that's why I am sounding the alarm.

(see extended)

Source: Huffington Post

Obama arrives at the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Monday for a meeting with the prime minister and other officials

Obama with Prime Minister Maliki

Obama with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani

Obama leaves the office of the prime minister

Obama with U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, and Senator Chuck Hagel

Barack Obama 255

153 Solid     102 Leaning

John McCain 163

90 Solid     73 Leaning

Toss Up 120

120 Toss Up

(270 Electoral Votes Needed To Win)

((( Barack Obama 322    John McCain 216 )))

RIVAL SUPPORTERS ALWAYS HAD THEIR FOCUS ON THE WRONG POLLS. THAT'S WHY THEY LOST. 

WHILE THEY WERE ALL LOOKING AT "BIG STATES", WE WERE LOOKING AT DELEGATES.

AND NOW. WHILE THEY ARE LOOKING AT NATIONAL POLLS. WE ARE LOOKING AT ELECTORIAL VOTES.

IS IT ANY WONDER WHY WE WON ?

I personally love to read my news on the internet. When I post I try to link my source whenever possible.

Thought it would be helful, for me at least, to share some of our sources.  I know I would love to have some good sources and reads added to my repitoure.

Here's a few sources I like and are good reads:

 http://www.jedreport.com/

Polling...has all the latest polls and poll averages:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls/

Love the PBS site for history:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/

I belive it would help us all if we shared some of our sources...it would help me.

A few things about Lieberman our 'Independent Democrat'. Saw him this morning on Fox and he said he would speak at the GOP Convention in support of McCain but would not speak out against Obama.

Wondering what people thought.

1. Do you think it would hurt or help McCain if Lieberman was McCains VP?

2. Do think it is appropriate that the Dem caucus boots Lieberman if speaks at the GOP Convention?

I hope we win enough Dem Senate seats to boot his arse and still hold a majority.

You know me and photos. I can't get enough.

SOURCE: Huffington Post

In this photo released Saturday, July 19, 2008, by the the U.S. Army, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., poses with SPC Lakeisha Willingham, 311th Sustainment Command (Expeditionary), after a shoot-around game of basketball at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, Friday, July 18, 2008, during a Congressional Delegation visit.

In this photo released Saturday, July 19, 2008, by the the U.S. Army, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shakes hands with service members at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, Friday, July 18, 2008, during a Congressional Delegation visit.

(Oh yeah. There's More In Extended)

Geopolitics must be faced and dealt with as this writer points out....

Thursday, 07.17.08 How Geopolitics Intrudes 

The Coming Anarchy February 1994 Robert Kaplan assesses how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet. The Politics of Global Warming 6 June 2006 Clive Crook asserts that working out what is going to happen to the climate from now on is the hard part. Issues like climate change and sustainability were a major theme in this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, which concluded in early July. Aspen sang this year with pleas for the next president to make climate change --and the protection of dwindling resources -- the centerpiece of his foreign policy, thus fusing in a very concrete way America's national interest with that of the wider world. There was clearly a yearning for a new, more elevated brand of American patriotism that co-opted these global issues as national security interests - which indeed they are. Americans have always been a people of the frontier, and just as civil rights constituted a new frontier of enlightened patriotism in the 1960s, tackling environmental challenges looks like the new frontier of this and future decades. The facts presented were compelling, from falling water levels in the Great Lakes to rising sea levels world-wide that could kill and make homeless tens of millions of people in Bangladesh alone. It became obvious, listening to the briefings and panel discussions that we are on the verge of more cataclysmic events like the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 -- event that will reshape public perceptions of foreign policy. We inhabit an increasingly crowded world with extremely fragile infrastructures subject to the slightest shifts in climatic and seismic patterns. As I wrote in my 1994 Atlantic article, The Coming Anarchy, the natural environment will be the national security focus of the 21st century. But there is, nevertheless, a problem: the more mundane, less uplifting, narrower issues of geopolitics that will inevitably intrude. To relegate geopolitics to the background threatens to provoke other sorts of cataclysms that will permanently distract the new president from these newer concerns. Only by effectively handling Iraq and Afghanistan, the wider war on terrorism and the rising military power of China can a new president build up the political capital to lead the world on climate change and sustainability. Obviously, the two sets of issues are not mutually exclusive. The new president can and will focus on both at the same time. In the early months of his administration he will seek to consolidate and build upon the gains in Iraq over the past 18 months, even as he tackles global warming in a serious way, thus reversing the neglect of the Bush Administration. But a president cannot simply ditch geopolitics for post-national politics. He must make a serious adjustment to the policies of George W. Bush, not renounce them altogether. And my worry at Aspen was that while there were some excellent, dutiful panels on traditional national security concerns, especially on nuclear weapons, the audience's heart lay elsewhere. Tellingly, the dramatic rescue of three American military contractors from a five-and-a-half-year-long captivity in the Colombian jungles, as prisoners of the narco-terrorist group, FARC, elicited little or no chatter among the conference participants - even though the rescue in and of itself dealt a major strategic blow to the anti-American left throughout South America. As excellent and jam-packed with substance as the conference was, there was an element of narcissism among at least a few participants, who wanted to embrace issues like global warming to the exclusion of all else. A new president will not have that luxury. Only if he furiously concentrates on traditional, 19th century balance-of-power politics and gets that right will the path be clear for him to embrace the ultimately more critical issues raised at Aspen.

— Robert D. Kaplan