McCain, Clinton, Obama and the gas tax

John McCain proposed a temporary repeal of the 18 cent per gallon federal gas tax over the summer, when gasoline demand peaks.  The idea is that it would give consumers some relief from high gas prices at a time when prices tend to peak.  Hillary Clinton jumped on board, but realising that taxes on gasoline [...]

Huckabee defends Wright

Mick Huckabee has come out in defense of Obama on Wright, and somewhat in defense of Wright himself.
[Obama] made the point, and I think it’s a valid one, that you can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can’t. Whether it’s me, whether it’s Obama…anybody else. [...]

Obama’s speech

Sally Quinn on MSNBC called Obama’s speech “the most important speech on race since Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech” (although she prefaced it with “this might be hyperbole but…” One of the best bits, for me, was this
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no [...]

Jeremiah Wright and the Prophet Jeremiah

Henry Neufeld has an interesting post comparing Jeremiah Wright with the Prophet Jeremiah.
The role of a prophet is to speak truth to power.   Devilstower at dKos also looks at Wright’s words in the context of the words of Jesus.

Manufactured crises

Pastor Dan writes
The fact is, America has postponed a necessary conversation on race for at least forty years. Jeremiah Wright makes white (and not a few black) people uncomfortable because he reminds them that America is not as morally pure as it would like to imagine itself as being. Nor is it as post-racial. Injustice, [...]

Obama on Wright

Statements by the pastor of Barack Obama’s church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, have ignited a bit of a firestorm, especially at TPM. It really didn’t strike me as comparable with McCain’s endorsements from Hagee and Parsley - McCain, after all, sought and welcomed the endorsements from that pair. Obama, on the other hand, is [...]

$55 million?!

The Obama campaign reports that it raised $55 million in February.
That’s just a mind-boggling amount of money.

Texas

Truly beautiful, especially the stadium shot.

H/T dKos

Political must-reads

Josh Marshall talks about McCain’s repeated problems with the truth, and some of the issues he may have with getting out of public financing for the Republican primary campaign.  (Paul Kiel has a more detailed analysis).
Barbara O’Brien looks at several articles that analyse the challenges of being a woman/being black in a US presidential campaign, [...]

Not just inspiring - Organised!

Markos posted this email from one of his readers at dKos:
I wanted to relate what i saw in cleveland today, because i’m sure reporters miss this type of thing.
went to see michelle at cleveland state u…a great place for an event considering bo’s [Barack Obama's] demographic. i ’sign in’ to become a volunteer to see [...]