Before NC, Obama grabs hearty meal

Speaking of Unions......

Clinton Decries China's Acquisition of Indiana Company--Ignoring Her Husband's Role in the Sale:
By JAKE TAPPER
Apr. 30, 2008

"As she campaigns throughout Indiana, Sen. Hillary Clinton has been talking quite a bit about Magnequench, a Valparaiso, Ind., factory that moved to China".

"We've got to elect a president next January who's going to remember Magnequench," Clinton told voters in Valparaiso on April 12.

"It seems, however, that when it comes to Magnequench there's quite a bit that Clinton has conveniently forgotten".

"We went to Valparaiso," Clinton told voters in Princeton, Ind., last night, "where there used to be a plant called Magnequench that made the magnets that helped to guide the precision-guided missiles, the so-called smart bombs. You've seen those  they take off, they go down the chimney, they were incredibly sophisticated and these magnets, you know  not the kind you put on the refrigerator, like we all do  but these really sophisticated magnets were instrumental making that happen."

"Clinton continued, saying, "Well, a Chinese company bought Magnequench and then they decided that they were going to move the whole company from Indiana to China. Now the president of the United States has the authority to veto that kind of a move, but Senator [Evan] Bayh begged the Bush administration not to export it  it was going to lose jobs but it was also going to lose the know-how, the technical sophistication that created those magnets. President Bush and his administration wouldn't, basically wouldn't even give Evan Bayh the time of day. Those jobs left, and along with them went the savvy to make the magnets."

"What Clinton doesn't tell voters is that Magnequench was originally sold to Chinese interests during her husband's administration, which okayed the move despite concerns about national security and eventual job loss. Experts say the Chinese acquired the "technical sophistication" that created the magnets long before George W. Bush took office."

"Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind,, Clinton's top surrogate in the state, often joins her on the stump in bashing the president for allowing Magnequench to move abroad. What Bayh doesn't tell voters these days is that he has blamed the company's moving on a 1995 decision made by Clinton's husband's administration."

Full Story here:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4757257&page=1

I think it'd be interesting to add up the amount of news coverage of what Senator Obama eats, what Senator Obama does or does not wear on his jacket, and what Senator Obama's pastor once said, and compare that to the news stories about the Bush family ties to Osama bin Laden. Or John McCain's ties to known white supremacists.

Senator Obama is going to surprise a lot of the pundits, tomorrow, in Indiana. He is going to win that primary and go on to North Carolina and with that primary too. He is the best one for the nomination. He is honest, fair-minded and he is a practicing Democrat, not a wanna-be, like Senators Clinton and Lieberman !!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, BRING THEM HOME, ALIVE. NOW.

Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate

By MIKE McINTIRE NYTIMES

When residents in Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause.

Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”

“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.

A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.

Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate.

“Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, and we could see it weakening with each successive draft,” said Joe Cosgrove, a park district director in Will County, Ill., where low-level radioactive runoff had turned up in groundwater. “The teeth were just taken out of it.”

The history of the bill shows Mr. Obama navigating a home-state controversy that pitted two important constituencies against each other and tested his skills as a legislative infighter. On one side were neighbors of several nuclear plants upset that low-level radioactive leaks had gone unreported for years; on the other was Exelon, the country’s largest nuclear plant operator and one of Mr. Obama’s largest sources of campaign money.

Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fund-raisers.

Another Obama donor, John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon, is also chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry’s lobbying group, based in Washington. Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any other presidential candidate.

In addition, Mr. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, has worked as a consultant to Exelon. A spokeswoman for Exelon said Mr. Axelrod’s company had helped an Exelon subsidiary, Commonwealth Edison, with communications strategy periodically since 2002, but had no involvement in the leak controversy or other nuclear issues.

The Obama campaign said in written responses to questions that Mr. Obama “never discussed this issue or this bill” with Mr. Axelrod. The campaign acknowledged that Exelon executives had met with Mr. Obama’s staff about the bill, as had concerned residents, environmentalists and regulators. It said the revisions resulted not from any influence by Exelon, but as a necessary response to a legislative roadblock put up by Republicans, who controlled the Senate at the time.

“If Senator Obama had listened to industry demands, he wouldn’t have repeatedly criticized Exelon in the press, introduced the bill and then fought for months to get action on it,” the campaign said. “Since he has over a decade of legislative experience, Senator Obama knows that it’s very difficult to pass a perfect bill.”

Asked why Mr. Obama had cited it as an accomplishment while campaigning for president, the campaign noted that after the senator introduced his bill, nuclear plants started making such reports on a voluntary basis. The campaign did not directly address the question of why Mr. Obama had told Iowa voters that the legislation had passed.

Nuclear safety advocates are divided on whether Mr. Obama’s efforts yielded any lasting benefits. David A. Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists agreed that “it took the introduction of the bill in the first place to get a reaction from the industry.”

“But of course because it is all voluntary,” Mr. Lochbaum said, “who’s to say where things will be a few years from now?”

Others say that turning the whole matter over to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as Mr. Obama’s revised bill would have done, played into the hands of the nuclear power industry, which they say has little to fear from the regulators. Mr. Obama seemed to share those concerns when he told a New Hampshire newspaper last year that the commission “is a moribund agency that needs to be revamped and has become a captive of the industry it regulates.”

Paul Gunter, an activist based in Maryland who assisted neighbors of the Exelon plants, said he was “disappointed in Senator Obama’s lack of follow-through,” which he said weakened the original bill. “The new legislation falls short” by failing to provide for mandatory reporting, said Mr. Gunter, whose group, Beyond Nuclear, opposes nuclear energy.

The episode that prompted Mr. Obama’s legislation began on Dec. 1, 2005, when Exelon issued a news release saying it had discovered tritium, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear power, in monitoring wells at its Braidwood plant, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago. A few days later, tritium was detected in a drinking water well at a home near the plant, although the levels did not exceed federal safety standards.

At least as disturbing for local residents was the revelation that Exelon believed the tritium came from millions of gallons of water that had leaked from the plant years earlier but went unreported at the time. Under nuclear commission rules, plants are required to tell state and local authorities only about radioactive discharges that rise to the level of an emergency.

On March 1, Mr. Obama introduced a bill known as the Nuclear Release Notice Act of 2006. It stated flatly that nuclear plants “shall immediately” notify federal, state and local officials of any accidental release of radioactive material that exceeded “allowable limits for normal operation.”

To flag systematic problems, it would also have required reporting of repeated accidental leaks that fell below those limits. Illinois’ senior senator, Richard J. Durbin, a fellow Democrat, was a co-sponsor, and three other senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, later signed on. But Mr. Obama remained its primary champion.

In public statements, Mr. Obama dismissed the nuclear lobby’s arguments that the tritium leaks posed no health threat.

“This legislation is not about whether tritium is safe, or at what concentration or level it poses a threat,” he said. “This legislation is about ensuring that nearby residents know whether they may have been exposed to any level of radiation generated at a nuclear power plant as a result of an unplanned, accidental or unintentional incident.”

Almost immediately, the nuclear power industry and federal regulators raised objections to the bill.

The Nuclear Energy Institute jumped out in front by announcing its voluntary initiative for plant operators to report even small leaks. An Exelon representative told an industry newsletter, Inside N.R.C., that Exelon was “working with Senator Obama’s office to address some technical issues that will allow us to support the legislation.”

Last week, an Exelon spokesman, Craig Nesbit, said the company sought, among other things, new language to specify what types of leaks should be reported, and assurance that enforcement authority remained with the nuclear commission and not state or local governments.

“We were looking for technical clarity,” Mr. Nesbit said.

Meanwhile, the nuclear commission told Mr. Obama’s staff that the bill would have forced the unnecessary disclosure of leaks that were not serious. “Unplanned releases below the level of an emergency present a substantially smaller risk to the public,” the agency said in a memorandum to senators, which ticked off about a half-dozen specific concerns about the bill.

Senate correspondence shows that the environment committee chairman at the time, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma who is a strong supporter of industry in battles over energy and environmental legislation, agreed with many of those points and held up the bill. Mr. Obama pushed back, at one point temporarily blocking approval of President Bush’s nominee to the nuclear commission, Dale E. Klein, who met with Mr. Obama to discuss the leaks.

But eventually, Mr. Obama agreed to rewrite the bill, and when the environment committee approved it in September 2006, he and his co-sponsors hailed it as a victory.

In interviews over the past two weeks, Obama aides insisted that the revisions did not substantively alter the bill. In fact, it was left drastically different.

In place of the straightforward reporting requirements was new language giving the nuclear commission two years to come up with its own regulations. The bill said that the commission “shall consider” — not require — immediate public notification, and also take into account the findings of a task force it set up to study the tritium leaks.

By then, the task force had already concluded that “existing reporting requirements for abnormal spills and leaks are at a level that is risk-informed and appropriate.”

The rewritten bill also contained the new wording sought by Exelon making it clear that state and local authorities would have no regulatory oversight of nuclear power plants.

In interviews last week, representatives of Exelon and the nuclear commission said they were satisfied with the revised bill. The Nuclear Energy Institute said it no longer opposed it but wanted additional changes.

The revised bill was never taken up in the full Senate, where partisan parliamentary maneuvering resulted in a number of bills being shelved before the 2006 session ended.

Still, the legislation has come in handy on the campaign trail. Last May, in response to questions about his ties to Exelon, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to a Nevada newspaper citing the bill as evidence that he stands up to powerful interests.

“When I learned that radioactive tritium had leaked out of an Exelon nuclear plant in Illinois,” he wrote, “I led an effort in the Senate to require utilities to notify the public of any unplanned release of radioactive substances.”

Last October, Mr. Obama reintroduced the bill, in its rewritten form.

on Saturday, Big Brown,(barack obama) the inexperienced favorite to win the kentucky derby galloped to victory. the only female horse (hillary clinton) in the race came in 2nd place and collspsed with two broken ankles (indiana and north carolina).... an omen?

Hillary Clinton's supporters uniformly revere her supposed grasp of diverse complex policy issues, but the past few days have shown that Hillary's approach to policy is FUNDAMENTALLY DISHONEST:

Earlier this week Hillary joined John McCain in supporting a summer repeal of the gas tax, this news was followed by uniform ridicule within the economics community because the price of gas would rise to offset any tax cut: consumers wouldn't get a break at the pump and the "cut" would go to the oil companies.

(WaPo)

Some examples, Paul Krugman:

"John McCain has a really bad idea on gasoline, Hillary Clinton is emulating him (but with a twist that makes her plan pointless rather than evil), and Barack Obama, to his credit, says no."

And Brad DeLong:

"In my inbox right now, from a highly-respected public finance economist:

'In the long and sad annals of truly bad ideas, it is unusual for one to receive bipartisan support at such high levels right in the middle of a campaign as this one has...'

Why oh why can't we have less dishonest presidential candidates?"

And finally via Greg Mankiw this comment:

"Yesterday I was on the NewsHour to talk about the gas tax holiday. I asked if there was another guest and the producer said, "We tried, but we couldn't find anyone to argue the other side (that the gas tax holiday made sense."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hillary was asked on This Week the Sunday shows about her phony (pandering) gas tax policy, and what did she do? Pretend that she's pushing a good policy and then try to confuse viewers with a smoke screen of additional "policies:"

Hillary weakly claimed that her "plan" was different from McCain, she'd have the oil companies pay the tax. Krugman says this makes her Plan simply "pointless," rather than "evil," as consumers wouldn't see a break and the gas would still be taxed.

When asked if she could name one economist that supported her plan... well, Hillary went on to other plans, and yet other plans, attempting escape in an elaborate policy flim flam dance.

Hillary's economics adviser Gene Sperling performed similarly on CNN.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The take home lesson for me was that in addition to shamelessly pandering to the electorate, and despite her "policy wonk" image, Hillary has no core intellectual integrity regarding policy. She can't admit that her gas tax repeal plan is bad policy (in fact she intends to introduce it as a Bill in the Senate), she'll lie about the policy rather than address the truth, and she'll use her supposed understanding of government policy to distract and mislead the public.

Hillary's war with reality in these primaries would continue in the White House and good policy would be secondary... we already know what that is like.

This race is already OVER, all Obama has to do is run out the clock on Billary Clinton.

Yes, Loki: I believe what occurred in the Kentucky Derby is a good omen - for Obama.

Obama is finished. Maybe that was his farewell breakfast in this race...His credibility is lost and his patriotism is being questioned all over the Internet..Wright has overshadowed his right to be President of our great Country. We need a leader for all. Not a person that sat thru 20 yrs being taught A THEOLOGY IN BLACK LIBERATION...He should drop out and save face....

Hey Don Fitz!.....Once again...Support our Troops!!! NEVER vote for a DemocRAT!!!!!!!!

Now we need to spend two weeks debating the nuances of this picture;
Is he eating like an elitist, or is he posing like Joe Six Pack? What's on his plate? Any hint of Rev. Wright's influence here?
God save us from this 'process'.

All three canidates need to support a freeze on the gas tax coupled with a freeze on the oil companies' ability to recover paying the gas taxes through hiking the price of oil. Since the oil companies have made record profits since the advent of the Bush administration, paying the gas taxes for the next four months will not even make a dent in their profits. Freeze the price of oil for four months along with the gas tax. Which candidate will play that card?

Not a person that sat thru 20 yrs being taught A THEOLOGY IN BLACK LIBERATION...He should drop out and save face....

Posted by: kaye m. | May 5, 2008 3:46 PM

I hate to admit this at this late date in the race. I too, as a white guy, have to admit......I have been a decendent of the very same people who felt slavery was OK. Not only that...These same white folk felt that way for over 200 years. These very same white folk continued their discrimination for blacks after they were freed in January 1 1863. It continued a 100 years till the civil rights movements of the 60s that things improved SOMEWHAT. So tell me Kaye m....why should I listen to one word from a race that for over 300...300...300 years, felt that they were superior or could OWN a person of another race?

Barack Obama is a good guy and I just pray that people will look at how he's conducted himself and his campaign. As he often says, he's not a perfect vessel, but he certainly has shown good character in the face of some very trying cirumstances!
God bless America and God bless Barack Obama for president.

Oh god here we go again.. bla bla bla

Look people.. there are no honest politicians!! Get over all of your high heel soap boxes about Hillary's honesty and vote responsibly. Not based on color. Not based on gender. Not based on who lies more - because its obvious all threee of them lie.. vote for the one whose lies are less meaningful. We have no other choices!

I vote for the broad in the pants suit over the McManiac and RFK wannabe!

Wow!!!! Obama eats breakfast!!!

No wonder dozens--yes, that many-- of people read the Swamp, the newspaper of record for Obama's eating habits and other earth shattering Obama information.

Well, I guess he realized pretending to eat the sausage in PA didn't go over so well--particularly when he dodged a question about Hamas after deciding AT THE LAST MINUTE that maybe a trip with Jimmuh Cartuh might be a bad idea.
Look--he doesn't have his sea legs yet.
I'm not saying he won't, but he sure hitched his little tricycle to the bad kids in the school yard to go faster than he was able to.
This is painful to watch.
And it seems kinda dangerous, too.

ElliotNC: Why don't you just write a BOOK?????

In the midst of all the hubub tomorrow, I'm sure Hillary's (IF SHE GOES THROUGH WITH IT) attempt to get the gas tax "holiday" through the Senate will be pushed to the back of the news ...but I can't WAIT to see how well received it will be ...she's REALLY going to be made to look like a FOOL!!!

I was just in Evansville knocking on doors -- some of the nicest undecided voters I've ever met. If I'd thought about those breakfasts, I'm sure I would have stayed the whole weekend -- Indiana breakfasts are always worth the time...

Last minute thoughts --

Obama is elitist? Ha ha, not at all. Obama tries to be fair to the poor and working class. He is in love with the American dream. Hillary turned her nose at anyone who tried to donate less than $2k until she mismanaged her war chest! McCain discarded his old wife so he could marry into a ton of money.

Obama's an angry ranting black churchman? No -- actually, he has the opposite nature -- he is hard to ruffle. He just doesn't "get worked up over a lot of things". Meanwhile, McCain and Hillary are famous for their temper tantrums.

Hillary is a better bet for democratic issues? Not if you look at her record -- she says a lot, but she never gets anything done. Her actual legislative record is pathetic. Obama's record is much better. McCain's ability to get things passed is, of course, very good. But it might be better for the country if a Republican were not quite so effective at getting his way, since he would just be fattening the fat cats and deploying our troops badly.

Barack Obama can't win white votes? What? Who are all those people giving him $250M to campaign? Why do most professors and teachers give their money to Obama -- are these all black people? Obama won Hawaii, and there are no black people in Hawaii. Obama won Kansas and Iowa and Virginia and Washington State. Hmm...

Obama gives good speeches? Yeah, and isn't it nice to be proud of a candidate for once who is well-educated and can think and speak carefully? It is SO hard to watch HRC's bad-acting and bobble-headed rambling, her unending unplanned sentences that go on and on and on, and make no real point. Is she talented and knowledgeable? Yes and yes. Is she a leader? Is she capable of working with Congress? Is she one of the better women the country can put forward as its first woman President? Is she capable of telling the truth? No, no, no, no.

Obama is the right choice. We have to vote responsibly this time. The greatest generation has this one last chance to redeem itself on race, and this country really needs its help to more forward, to get past the nasty Sixties battles, and to choose the clearly better candidate who is so obviously in the image of people like Madison, Jefferson, and Lincoln. This country deserves better than Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Barack Obama is clearly an exceptional leader and an outstanding person, a once-in-a-lifetime candidate.

Once in a Lifetime is right. Those over 40 will never see a candidate this good again. I cannot fathom that folks are not voting because of fears raised by a LIAR. Its going to take some FAITH, but thats worth reaching and grabbing for.