First some are up in arms that Obama is now wearing a flag pin. For the record he has never said he won’t wear one, but that for some people wearing one “became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism.” With him wearing one now he gives the GOP a little less ammunition to try to use against him.

Now FISA is in the spotlight once again, and Obama’s reluctant support for the new bill has been criticized by many as a complete reversal of his earlier stance, so much so that Obama wrote a blog post stating his position. If he is elected only time will tell if he ensures that the executive does not follow the same path that the Bush admin has done over the past 7+ years.

The latest bit is on Iraq. His recent comments that “original position” on withdrawal has always been that “we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable.” And that “when I go to Iraq . . . I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies” has been taken by some as a complete reversal. On the contrary he has always said that he wants an stable Iraq but not at the cost of American lives and that we have to have a safe withdrawal of one to two brigades a month.

So we shall see what the future holds. There are plenty of Obama followers that are watching closely, including myself, that will hold his feet to the fire when necessary.

On May 22, she had repeated some comments that went largely unnoticed in March of 2008 about one of the reasons she is staying in the race. Nearly verbatim this is her most recent comments:

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,”

Yep, she has invoked (again) the spectre of an assassination against Obama. She since says that her comments are merely saying that since her Husband won the 92 nomination in June and Bobby’s assassination in June, both being in California, are just a milestone that “campaigns last this long” is just a poorly worded smoke screen. This is all similar to the repeated attempts to discredit Obama on numerous grounds, but this one is a particularly epic blunder. Superdelegates will not look kindly to these comments as someone who is ready to lead a nation, but a person desperate to win.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Hillary Clinton has really poisoned this year’s Democratic nomination. She had this smug sense of entitlement to win the nomination, packed her election team with cronies that mimics Bushs’ cronyism, and just rode the “wave in inevitability”. But she did not anticipate the surge of Obama support and neither did her team. After Super Tuesday, and a winning streak that any professional sports team should be envious of, her chances to win by the delegate count became almost non-existent and signs of desperation began to surface. The goal posts continue to move, pledged delegates became segregated into “primary delegates” and “caucus delegates”, and we kept on getting reminded that all delegates did not have to adhere to the public will.

Now, some real reasoning has surfaced on why she is still in, a reasoning that disgusting to bring up, and even more disgusting that she has not outright apologized about it. Our sick state of politics has bread this “everything to win” mentality that Hillary has thoroughly embraced, while Obama has stayed above the fray time and time again when the mud wrestling commenced.

Hillary has proven to the world she is not fit to lead, she cannot inspire a nation to rise out of the mess that eight years of Bush, and 30+ years of dogmatic rule has brought to us. And now with the continued desperation of her comments to attempt to convince people that she is entitled to the Democratic nomination, she has essentially sealed her fate as a person ruined by politics and unable to transform herself beyond that dogma that has spoiled our political landscape.

For the first 45-50 minutes all the questions were fielded towards Obama and they were formatted in such a way that made you wonder if your cable box accidentally went to FOX News. During this moderator versus candidate format, George and Charlie constantly interrupted Obama, repeated questions over and over, and threw softballs towards Hillary. And in what appears to be even more bias, the audience camera pan hit Chelsea Clinton no less than seven times, but no Obama surrogates were focused upon.In the end it looked like a live swiftboating was in progress. While Obama did his best to fend off the onslaught, including some cheap jabs by Hillary, he was a bit taken back from the onslaught. He still stood tall and came off as unscathed as one could.
There was some relevant news from the debate. It seems that Hillary wouldn’t mind going into a full-bore war against any aggressor of Israel (or other countries). She also blew one of her Superdelegate talking points that Obama could not win against Obama as she stated “yes, yes, yes he can win”. Obama also clearly stated that he felt the 2nd amendment was an individual right.

ABC performed a terrible disservice to the people of Pennsylvania and America. With tactics that would make the RNC blush, they plunged into tabloid innuendo and old stories. There was very little talk on policy so for those undecided voters who cared about policy issues they will have to rely on websites and stump speeches to help them form their final opinion. One thing is for certain this debate was quite possibly the worst televised debate ever.