Clinton looks to Rhode Island

Experience does matter. If we based the choice on the candidate's record and experience, Hillary Clinton is the best candidate to be the Democratic Nominee for President.

A good commercial.... I hope it works for her sake!
Barack is on a roll!!!

Hillary. It's her turn! Why even bother with this whole inconvenient nomination thing?

HILLARY, YOU'RE A GREAT PERSON, A GREAT LEADER TO LEAD OUR COUNTRY.

GREAT ADS AND PLEASE ALSO LOOK AT hillaryspeaksforme.com, GREAT VIDEOS FROM ALL AGES ESPECIALLY THE YOUTH, AMATEURS BUT BRILLIANT MINDS!

I have heard alot about your GREAT WORKS...It's good know lots of women are very involved in bringing about major differences in each of our lives.

As a woman, I would lile to share with you how I am pleased to see a Woman running for President. I am of middle age and a single mother of three who strives very hard to meet ends. I was so pleased to see Senator Clinton giving me HOPE and always be a PROUD AMERICAN. I live in California and with Hillary winning here in our state, we need to make sure she gets all the votes of the texans!

It hurts me the most are the pundits, media, reporters, networks who are not giving her respect a person must get, not to mention she is a woman. These people are trying to pin her down as if she is a criminal.

Just lately, Senator Clinton's rival came up with smears via email and flyers about her health care plan and NAFTA, ad what surprised me was these came out right after their last debate..where's the civilness, sincerity of her rivalwhich from the start is a big question mark to me!...The debate made Senator Clinton stood up on the issues as always and showed how incere, passionate she is giving her rival that hand shake but that gentle, honest gesture from Hillary was smeared by her rival the following day ! Her rival has its way to really make Hillary not human but in fact he is not because his patriotism and his wife's comment of only now at her adult life she is proud to be an american!.WHY STAY IN AMERICA FOR YEARS?..and where his inernet donations are coming from...a lot of issues many does not know because he is well-protected by the Media!

It's about time to show our power, let we rally for her and let we sit a woman in the white house, HILLARY!

I was stunned reading these articles and want to share with you! (please share to others too, thks.)

Obama once visited ’60s radicals
By: Ben Smith
Feb 22, 2008 01:09 AM EST
Former radical activist Bernardine Dohrn and her companion William Ayers leave court in Chicago on Jan. 14, 1981. Dohrn received a $1,500 fine and three years probation for her role in the ‘Days of Rage’ disturbance in Chicago in 1969.
In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.
Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.
“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”
Obama and Palmer “were both there,” he said.
Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home — part of a campaign courtship — reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.
Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.
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But Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides.
In one sense, Obama’s journey toward the cultural and political center is not unusual among national politicians. But its velocity is.
Politicians of an earlier generation had their own relationships with figures now far to their left. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, interned at a radical San Francisco law firm while in law school.
On the other side of the political spectrum, many in the generation before hers shifted dramatically on civil rights. John McCain voted against creating a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and later called that a mistake.
The relationship with Ayers gives context to his recent past in Hyde Park politics. It’s milieu in which a former violent radical was a stalwart of the local scene, not especially controversial.
It’s also a scene whose liberal ideological features — while taken for granted by the Chicago press corps that knows Obama best — provides a jarring contrast with Obama’s current, anti-ideological stance. This contrast between past and present — not least the Ayers connection — is virtually certain to be a subject Republican operatives will warm to if Obama is the Democratic nominee.
The tension between the present and recent Chicago past is also evident in some of his positions on major national issues. Many national politicians, including Clinton, have moved toward the center over time. But Obama’s transitions are still quite fresh.
A questionnaire from his 1996 campaign indicated more blanket opposition to the death penalty, and support of abortion rights, than he currently espouses. He spoke in support of single-payer health care as recently as 2003.
Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life.
They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.
Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.
But — unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members.
Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members’ robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed.
“I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough,” Ayers told the New York Times in 2001.
And their rehabilitation in establishment circles, even in Hyde Park, has its limits.
Though he is a respected figure in liberal educational circles, Ayers wrote recently about how in 2006 he was informed he was persona non grata at a progressive educators’ conference in the summer of 2006.
“We cannot risk a simplistic and dubious association between progressive education and the violent aspects of your past,” he quoted the conference organizers, whom he described as friends, as writing to him.
But the couple has been embraced, by and large, in the liberal circles dominating Hyde Park politics.
“Bill Ayers is one of my heroes in life,” said Sam Ackerman, a longtime local activist. “I knew Tony Rezko, and he ain’t no Rezko.”
But others in Hyde Park, whose intellectual and political life revolves around the University of Chicago, view the couple with ambivalence.
“I feel very uncomfortable with their past, but neither of them is thought of as horrible types now — so far as most of us know, they are legitimate members of the community,” said Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor who has known Obama since the early 1990s and supports his campaign.
“Not only is Obama the opposite pole from radicals like Ayers and Dohrn at least as one point were, he’s not a conventional left liberal by any means,” he said.
Others are less inclined to even consider forgiveness.
“Ayers was a terrorist. Bernardine Dohrn was a terrorist. Ayers has never offered one word of apology — he glories in it, thinks it’s terrific. And that to me is not what I would call acceptable or mainstream behavior,” said Dan Polsby, a former law professor at Northwestern who is now dean of George Mason University Law School. “If Obama takes a different view on that — well, OK, that’s data about Obama.”
On Thursday, Ayers spoke at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he refused to answer questions from Politico about his relationship with Obama.
Dohrn did not respond to a message left at her office.
Obama’s campaign dismisses the notion that his relationship with Ayers should be seen through the lens of the latter’s violent past, or his present lack of regret for the bombings.
“Sen. Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence,” said Obama’s press secretary, Bill Burton. “But he was an 8-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost 40 years ago is ridiculous.”
He described Ayers as “a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a former aide to Mayor Richard J. Daley,” referring to printed reports that he had “advised” Daley on school reform.
As Bloomberg News reported recently, Obama and Ayers have crossed paths repeatedly in the last decade. In 1997, Obama cited Ayers’ critique of the juvenile justice system in a Chicago Tribune article on what prominent Chicagoans were reading. He and Ayers served together on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago for three years starting in 1999. In 2001, Ayers also gave $200 to Obama’s state Senate reelection campaign.
Many details of the 1995 meeting are shrouded by time and by Obama’s and Ayers’ refusals to discuss it.
The exact date is not known, but it was in the second half of 1995, before Palmer’s decision — late in her losing congressional primary against Jesse Jackson Jr. — to jump back into the special election for her state Senate seat. (Her decision produced a rift between her and Obama, who was able to get her thrown off the ballot on technical grounds.)
“That’s too long ago — that’s ancient history,” Palmer said, when asked of the meeting.
Dr. Young and another guest, Maria Warren, described it similarly: as an introduction to Hyde Park liberals of the handpicked successor to Palmer, a well-regarded figure on the left.
“When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,” Warren wrote on her blog in 2005. “They were launching him — introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”
Contacted by e-mail, Warren declined to describe the meeting further and later blogged of her concern that Republicans would use accounts of the event for “left-baiting.”
Young described the gathering as a matter of “due diligence” for Palmer to introduce her chosen successor to constituents. “Many of us knew him already,” he said.
They, like others in his old Chicago world, now consider him a bit too “conservative” for their liking, as Warren wrote recently.
Ackerman, the Hyde Park activist, complained of his votes for continued funding for the Iraq war.
“A lot of people were very angry when he voted to fund the war,” he said. “But any candidate running for president is going to strive for broader appeal and move more to the center — I don’t believe that Barack has departed from his basic principles.”
Dr. Young said, however, that he isn’t supporting either of the leading presidential candidates because he is a single-issue voter, and the issue is single-payer health care.
He said he was disappointed that Obama is “equivocating” on his support for single-payer health care, after saying in the past that he supported it. But he said Obama’s style — “cautious, deliberate, defensive” — was also familiar from the senator’s Hyde Park days.

Stringer Andrew Lipkowitz contributed to this story.

Michelle Obama thesis was on racial divide
By: Jeffrey Ressner
Feb 22, 2008 04:20 PM EST
Updated: February 23, 2008 09:51 AM EST
Michelle Obama’s senior year thesis at Princeton University, obtained from the campaign by Politico, shows a document written by a young woman grappling with a society in which a black Princeton alumnus might only be allowed to remain “on the periphery.” Read the full thesis here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before,” the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. “I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”
The thesis, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community” and written under her maiden name, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, in 1985, has been the subject of much conjecture on the blogosphere and elsewhere in recent weeks, as it has been “temporarily withdrawn” from Princeton’s library until after this year’s presidential election in November. Some of the material has been written about previously, however, including a story last year in the Newark Star Ledger.
Obama writes that the path she chose by attending Princeton would likely lead to her “further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.”
During a presidential contest in which the term “transparency” has been frequently bandied about, candidates have buried a number of potentially revealing documents and papers. In Hillary Rodham Clinton’s case, there’s been a clamoring for tax records, White House memos and other material the candidate’s team has chosen to keep from release. The 96-page Princeton thesis, restricted from release by the school’s Mudd Library, has also been the subject of recent scrutiny.
Earlier this week, commentator Jonah Goldberg remarked on National Review Online, “A reader in the know informs me that Michelle Obama’s thesis … is unavailable until Nov. 5, 2008, at the Princeton library. I wonder why.”
“Why a restricted thesis?” asked blogger-pastor Louis Lapides on his site Thinking Outside the Blog. “Is the concern based on what’s in the thesis? Will Michelle Obama appear to be too black for white America or not black enough for black America?”
Attempts to retrieve the document through Princeton proved unsuccessful, with school librarians having been pestered so much for access to the thesis that they have resorted to reading from a script when callers inquire about it. Media officers at the prestigious university were similarly unhelpful, claiming it is “not unusual” for a thesis to be restricted and refusing to discuss “the academic work of alumni.”
The Obama campaign, however, quickly responded to a request for the thesis by Politico. The thesis offers several fascinating insights into the mind of Michelle Obama, who has been a passionate advocate of her husband’s presidential aspirations and who has made several controvesial statements, including this week’s remark, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” That comment has fueled debate on countless blogs, radio talk shows and cable news for days on end, causing her to explain the statement in greater detail The 1985 thesis provides a trove of Michelle Obama’s thoughts as a young woman, with many of the paper’s statements describing the student’s world as seen through a race-based prism.
“In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community,” the Princeton student wrote, “I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture.” Other thesis statements specifically pointed to what was seen by the future Mrs. Obama as racially insensitive practices in a university system populated with mostly Caucasian educators and students: “Predominately white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.”
To illustrate the latter statement, she pointed out that Princeton (at the time) had only five black tenured professors on its faculty, and its “Afro-American studies” program “is one of the smallest and most understaffed departments in the university.” In addition, she said only one major university-recognized group on campus was “designed specifically for the intellectual and social interests of blacks and other third world students.” (Her findings also stressed that Princeton was “infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League universities.”)
Perhaps one of the most germane subjects approached in the thesis is a section in which she conveyed views about political relations between black and white communities. She quotes the work of sociologists James Conyers and Walter Wallace, who discussed “integration of black official(s) into various aspects of politics” and notes “problems which face these black officials who must persuade the white community that they are above issues of race and that they are representing all people and not just black people,” as opposed to creating “two separate social structures.”
To research her thesis, the future Mrs. Obama sent an 18-question survey to a sampling of 400 black Princeton graduates, requesting the respondents define the amount of time and “comfort” level spent interacting with blacks and whites before they attended the school, as well as during and after their University years. Other questions dealt with their individual religious beliefs, living arrangements, careers, role models, economic status, and thoughts about lower class blacks. In addition, those surveyed were asked to choose whether they were more in line with a “separationist and/or pluralist” viewpoint or an “integrationist and/or assimilationist” ideology.
Just under 90 alums responded to the questionnaires (for a response rate of approximately 22 percent) and the conclusions were not what she expected. “I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility.”

HILLARY, YOU'RE A GREAT PERSON, A GREAT LEADER TO LEAD OUR COUNTRY.

MORE ARTICLES F ABOUT ON HILLARY THAT SHE IS REALLY TESTED,WITH A GOLDEN HEART!

February 24, 2008
Read More: Hillary Clinton

Clinton's client

Newsday's Glenn Thrush has that rarest of things: A new chapter to the Hillary's biography, and one that cuts sharply against a central part of her image: That she's spent her whole career fighting for children:

[T]here is a little-known episode Clinton doesn't mention in her standard campaign speech in which those two principles collided. In 1975, a 27-year-old Hillary Rodham, acting as a court-appointed attorney, attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old girl in mounting an aggressive defense for an indigent client accused of rape in Arkansas - using her child development background to help the defendant.

[snip]

[Clinton's] account leaves out a significant aspect of her defense strategy - attempting to impugn the credibility of the victim, according to aNewsday examination of court and investigative files and interviews with witnesses, law enforcement officials and the victim.

Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader's honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out "older men" like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed "Hillary D. Rodham" in compact cursive.

Clinton's aides point out, accurately, that she was bound to present her indigent client the best defense available, which she did: He was able to plead down to a much lesser offense.

But read the whole story. Thrush reconstructs the crime, Clinton's role as a legal "bulldog," and her defense through court and police documents, and interviews a range of parties, including the alleged victim.

It's really an astonishingly good piece of reporting.

By Ben Smith 04:24 PM
Politico.com

Hello Rhode Island!

You nice folks are going to hear a lot of garbage from anti-Obama people. I urge you to ignore it all because most of it is either lies or has been clarified over and over again. I challenge you all to consider that it is the Clinton's (not Barack Obama) that have been chummy with the Bush family. Hillary can babble all day long about how she is against George W. Bush's policies, but I don't buy it for one minute. Also, Bill's presidency is not necessarily a reflection of Hillary. Bill was more easy going than Hillary. Hillary's personality is more like George W. Bush than Bill Clinton. There is only one candidate that will be able to get things done quickly and efficiently in Washington and that candidate is Barack Obama. Why do I say that? Because Barack is young, and with his youth also comes the energy and eagerness to accomplish great things for all Americans. I always compare Barack to John F. Kennedy because they both have so much in common. Kennedy was young when he ran, Barack is young and is running. Kennedy had new ideas, Batrack has new ideas. Kennedy was charismatic and his speeches were powerful. Barack - ditto. The nice people of your state deserve a person like John F Kennedy to represent you in Washington, so why not support Barack Obama? Another reason why Barack could get things done quickly and efficiently in Washington is because he listens attentively to other people's ideas in order to create the best possible solution for a problem (which is why some republicans are supporting him). If we pass up the opportunity to support this man we may never see another candidate like this for a long, long, time. For more information about Barack, go to the following website: http://www.barackobama.com/index.php

A Vote For Obama Is A Vote For Positive Change