I got it to work, kinda, now if I could only figure out how to get everything to the right of the page.

I don't care if it's Senator Obama or Senator Clinton. I don't care about crashing the gate, I don't care about my vote not counting. I just don't care.

If you check my posts at DailyKos and elsewhere, you know I'm a single-issue voter, really. Two, really - but no one's going to fix the deficit that's going to destroy us in 30 years XD - but one that I can vote on, that I can almost feel within my grasp.

And that is the Iraq War. I don't care about African-American rights before the Iraq War. I don't care about Women's Rights before the Iraq War.

I don't care about the 5,000 people who will lose their homes tomorrow or the 150,000 people who sleep under a bridge, who served already, before the Iraq War.

Nothing comes before the Iraq War for me.

500,000+ Civilians Have died.
4,000 of our brothers and sisters have died.
An entire generation of Arabs and Muslims have lost their fathers, their mothers and their siblings and will forever hold us responsible for what will likely go down in history as the first truly great atrocity of the 21st Century, 9/11 be damned.

3,000 people doesn't compare to an entire nation that doesn't even exist anymore.

And your rights, my rights, her rights, his rights just don't mean jack-diddly to me when someone won't even have the misfortune - the misfortune of being oppressed because they're six feet under.

500,000+ people are dead. And here we sit, arguing over food over our tables which are blessed nightly; over what piece of the pie we're going to get, when someone half way across the world won't be getting any pie; over whether or not one candidate bombs a country with more passion or intelligence....

If I woke up poor tomorrow, living under a bridge, I'd have more than they. And that's all it takes to know I'll vote for the Democratic Candidate this November.

I wish I could rec it multiple times, but sadly I can only give 1 rec/diary.

not to mention, if a GOP President occurs, he WILL pardon Bush and Cheney. We need a Dem to investigate those bastards and indite them when they are gone, not let them get away with it like Richard Nixon did.

F$#@%!!

$78,010?? oh hell no.

But what if I think our guy just does not have what it takes and I trust the other guy to actually get the job done? This is not some grudge I developed. This is a feeling I have had since the beginning despite the fact I said in 2004 our guy would make a run. This is a feeling that this guy has yet to respond to.

i have the same feeling but what can i do if hillary loses. you dont trust "O" but you dont trust Mc. Its the lesser of two evils. it sucks especially since its so close between the candidates. but when somebody loses someone else has to be the winner. and thats what it comes down to.

Great post!

Amen.

I voted for Edwards in my State's Primary. I will vote for the Democrat in November.

It must ABSOLUTELY gall both Clinton and Obama to see some of their 'supporters' threatening to vote for McCain. You can damn well bet your last dollar that NEITHER of them support that ridiculous action....especially if done in their names! They will be shocked and dismayed and disgusted to have any of their 'supporters' vote for the Republican in November.

I guarantee that whoever gets the nod, the other will IMMEDIATELY throw their support behind the nominee/winner (along with Edwards and Gore and all other true Democrats). They will also ask their supporters to join them in doing so. Why? Because THEY ARE DEMOCRATS!

It will either be Hillary supporting Obama or Obama supporting Hillary come November. Anyone who truly supports either candidate here and now will stick with them in November and vote Democratic.

To say otherwise is asinine. At best.

Let's all come together and repeat after me...

"we have two awesome candidates"
"we have two awesome candidates"

one more time, with feeling

"we have two awesome candidates"

Stop the infighting and focus on getting a democrat, whichever one of the two remaining awesome candidates it might be, elected this Fall.

I never really believed that many Democrats would vote for McCain, or sit out, or vote Nader, or write-in someone.  Most of the people advocating that are now gone from mydd.  True Democrats can look past the superficial differences between Clinton and Obama and see they agree on virtually all the major issues.  They disagree strongly with McCain on all the major issues.

Every presidential election has candidates who don't make it to the general.  There will always be some bitterness, some hurt, and some feelings that the best candidate lost the primary.  But true progressives would never help the Republican just to stick it to the Dem nominee.

Great diary.

Thank you for the graphic reminder of why we are here.

http://ivaw.org/

or an organization I belong to
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/

every day...every way...Stop McCain..

We've been suffering the Bush "administration" now for seven long years and counting. I can't wait to pull the lever for a Democrat to finally draw a line under the last years. It mystifies me how someone can call themselves a Democrat and not be filled to the gills with the exact same sentiment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con tent/article/2008/04/01/AR2008040102213. html?hpid=topnews

...but this is a better thread.

___

Are you guys ready? Let's roll.

--Todd Beamer, passenger of United Flight 93, American Hero

I'm tired.  So tired.  I've been blogging here for a couple of weeks now, and I get discouraged at all the infighting and recrimination between Clinton supporters and Obama supporters.  When I went on vacation for a few days last week, however, I didn't see any of that from people.  

There were folks that were Clinton supporters and were suspicious of Obama, there were Obama supporters who were angry with what they saw as Clinton's dirty tricks, but all of them realize that we're at a critical juncture, and we can't allow ourselves to get distracted from the real goal.

The reason I quote Todd Beamer, one of the people aboard United 93 who pushed away the terror of impending death and saved countless others by not remaining a sheep, not remaining silent and pliant, is because, although our situation does not match the gravity of that for which his immortal words were spoken, we are nonetheless in a situation where we have a lot of opportunity to do good for something greater than ourselves.

George Bush was supposed to be a custodian president.  Given the reins of a flush economy, he could have just served out a term or two with relatively little flourish.  He was already intending to go into Iraq, but the case would've been a hard sell to even a Republican congress had 9/11 not fallen into his lap as the perfect lever to con us into a brutal and unnecessary war.

Because of this, we have spent nearly $508 billion in the Iraq misadventure and lost the lives of 4011 American soldiers and nearly 1.2 million Iraqis.  Thousands if not millions more people are facing life with limited mobility or dexterity or mental capacity due to heinous wounds suffered in the line of duty.  145 of our soldiers have taken their own lives rather than continue with their demons.

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

When I was in junior high, a bully, pumped on steroids, sucker punched me and knocked my glasses down the hall.  I got up and grabbed the nearest person that could've been the bully and took him down, only realizing my mistake after I'd already hurt them.  To my credit, I backed off when I realized my mistake.  George Bush would have beaten that innocent bystander to death while the real culprit walked off with a smirk on his face.

Why am I telling you these things?  Is it a long and tasteless April Fool's joke?  No.  I'm telling you these things because John McCain wants to further tarnish the sacrifice of Todd Beamer and his compatriots.  He would turn his eye to Iran, another country that was not behind 9/11, and extend the cycle of war for another generation.  He still does not see the difference between Sunni and Shia, or understand the 1400-year-old rift in religious dynasty that has split the middle east into countless wars.

Should we still be embroiled in Iraq when this happens, John McCain, who so bravely fought in one long war with a draft, may turn to Selective Service to supplement our already-cracking military.  There has been some reporting that the machinery for instituting the draft was spooled up in 2005.  An international coalition in this fool's errand seems unlikely at best; this might be the only way such a war would be possible.

John McCain cares little for the economy.  He and his family and his friends have done fine under the Bush economic policies of borrow-and-spend.  Why would he need to change?  Bush saw no need to take up the American people on our offer of service and sacrifice after 9/11, instead telling us to go on vacation, to go to the mall.  There is no "wartime economy," just an economy where more and more power gets siphoned off to corporate interests as plunderers try to make off with as much loot as they can before someone rational gets back into office and realizes that maybe, just maybe, putting the lobbyists in control of government policy regulation might result in problems down the road... and our home owners now suffer forclosures at thousands per day. Our gas prices reach greater levels than ever before. It costs more just to feed families because the cost of freight has gone up.  

All this is okay with John McCain.  Somebody else will have a look at it.  Lobbyists have been pretty good to him, despite their differences.  They even serve on his campaign, they can't be that bad, right?  The free market will sort everything out, anyway.  But at what cost to normal Americans like you and me?

John McCain is a hero himself, but he dishonors the sacrifices of Todd Beamer, of his fellows on United 93, of the firefighters that ran into collapsing skyscrapers just to save another life, of our soldiers that have given their lives or their limbs in the service of both an unjust war in Iraq and a nigh-forgotten just war in Afghanistan.  These men and women are heroes, too.  

John McCain and those like him starve the government when it suits their purposes, just to see how long they can go before fixing a bridge, in hopes that it won't collapse before someone else is in office.  The real heroes risked their lives to save a busload of children.

John McCain and those like him support a disaster institution that still has not provided a proper reckoning or repair of the worst natural disaster to strike our shores in decades.  The real heroes were those who went out to save people from the roofs of houses, and those who opened their own houses to refugees.

John McCain and those like him support new Supreme Court Justices with comparative records as thin as their commitment to the honest and neutral interpretation of the law.  Just one more extreme conservative justice to replace 88-year-old Justice Stevens, and women will start losing control over their own bodies and methods we deem as torture (as John McCain did once) or infiltration of our rights to privacy will become perfectly fine.  The real heroes were the members of the Justice Department who refused to politicize their jobs, and lost them as a result.

Many think that John McCain is somehow different from George Bush, that he is a maverick... but those days are long behind him.  Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

John McCain once could have been a great president, but he stared into the abyss too long.  He became the monster he fought when he quietly stood by and let Karl Rove and George W. Bush smear his adopted daughter Bridget, only 8 years old at the time.  He went back to these people for help.  He is owned by them.

His lesson is our lesson.  We cannot remain divided.  For years we have fought the Republicans.  Some of the most successful Democrats have won by emulating them.  We must be wary of losing our soul the way John McCain has.  

We get one shot at this every four years.  Our choices might end up not being perfect, might not be everyone's ideal, but we owe it to all the heroes that came before us not to let their sacrifices be squandered for personal gain of a cabal of wealthy men suckling from Haliburton, Airbus, or the Carlyle Group.  

Don't be a sheep.  Don't let neocons tell us what to think about our candidates.  Don't let fear win.  We need to stop John McCain, and we need as much help as we can get.

Not only beat me to it, but executed it in a way that I would have never come close to. Awesome post

is that our elections have frequently been bogus, and over run by republicans.

Our media is nothing more than the propaganda machine of the wealthy.

A candidate who became the nominee because of unethical tactics will not get my vote.  Ever.

Sorry, Obambi.  Go fuck yoursef.

i think you're posting this diary on the wrong website.

Great positive diary!  Rec'd!

Just one more justice will flip Roe vs. Wade and you can bet McCain (who has ALWAYS been pro-life) will appoint a justice to overturn it.

America, listen up!  JOHN MCCAIN WILL OVERTURN ROE vs. WADE

Fantastic diary!  Pictures really do say a million words.  This is one of the most important elections in our lifetime.  For about a week, I was in a "I'll never vote for Clinton" mindset.  I feel guilty about it now.  I will vote for whoever wins the nomination because what we need now is a Democrat.  Period.

If those things are more important, then Obama needs to start campaigning actively for Florida and Michigan's delegates to counted as currently apportioned. Because without that action on his part, then no one is going to take seriously that he's interested in making the world a better place.

Obama and his supporters have spent a lot of this campaign engaging in both racist and misogynist rhetoric. To tell the recipients of that thuggery that they must look the other way because other things are more important misses the point that Obama isn't entitled to anyone's vote because of mistakes Bush made. If he wants me to vote FOR him, then he has to earn that and he's at a deficit right now, very similar to the one that Republican candidates traditionally hold in my esteem.

Obama made the mess in the Democratic party. He can clean it up. If he does, he can win. If he doesn't, he'll lose. It's that simple. But you don't get to demand the people who he has repeatedly insulted do his work for him.

But all of that is trumped by the fact that posters on blogs supporting Hillary have hurt my feelings.  Sorry.

This is a very inaccurate and misleading diary. Obama's position on Iraq is the same as McCain's, according to Obama's advisors. McCain is not a problem when it comes to global warming. There are some differences when it comes to domestic issues but McCain or Hillary are far superior when it comes to national security and foreign relations.

The reasons not to support Obama are myriad. The reasons to support McCain over Obama are many. If it comes down to Obama, millions of Democrats, about a third of the party, will either stay home, write in Hillary or vote for McCain. Whatever they do, McCain will win.

Hillary is the only choice if you want to have a Democrat in the White House on January 20, 2009. Obama is the biggest mistake since Dukakis. Nominate Barack and you shoot yourself in both feet, put them in your mouth, and roll downhill.

They could/need hear this message too.

with the nomination so close, both candidates are going to have the leverage to get something out of whoever wins.  If Obama wins, maybe Hillary will push him to bring in some aspects of her health care plan or force him to support her as Majority Leader or Sec. of State.  If Obama wins, he could demand Hillary change her message, play more to the Democratic base (apologize for the war perhaps?), and help insure his candidacy in 4-8 years.

No candidate is going to be going home empty handed.

If you vote for Mccain,your a republican.You dont care what happens to our country.I willl vote for either Clinton or Obama.Anyone else?

I appreciate the message of your diary, and the way you chose to convey that message.

If Obama is our party's nominee, this is going to be difficult for me.  I believe that we each have an obligation to vote our conscience.  And, at this point, I just feel like I've come to far in this process, and learned too much about the man, to consider voting for him.  It was a mistake I already made once, in my state's primary.

But, how could I vote for a perpetual war in good conscience, you might ask?

Well, I probably can't.  But I am mature enough to understand that I am voting for perpetual war if I elect any of these three candidates.

Remember, for example, that Barack Obama's chief foreign policy adviser is none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who helped create Al Qeada in the first place, from a certain point of view (see: "Afghan Trap", during the Carter administration).  I know that other advisers to the Obama campaign parted ways with Clinton precisely because they did not think he was trigger-happy enough (for example, Rice).  Having surrounded himself with the most hawkish Democrats in the party, I've no doubt that his foreign policy will not be all that dissimilar from any of our other Presidents'.  I can see that his speeches are completely inconsistent with his staffing decisions (much like Dubya's message of 'compassionate conservatism' sounded nice, but should have been disproven by the folks he hired and associated with).

Given that America is going to keep acting like a schoolyard bully for a few more decades, all I ask is that we please have someone competent for a change.  The aftermath of Katrina was a national disgrace; a total embarassment, and something for which I cannot help but feel a share of guilt, even though it had nothing to do with me directly.  But it happened here, in America.  I hang my head with shame, thinking about what we've learned about the infiltration and subjugation of DoJ by Al Gonzo.  Our economy falling apart, and for reasons that have been discussed and predicted before Bush's second term began.

I go through these things in my mind and I just think: I want to elect someone competent.