Readers not on the campaign mailing lists: there are two ways you can win a free trip to the convention, accommodations included.

From the Obama campaign:

If you make a donation in any amount before midnight on July 31st, you could be selected to travel to Denver for the final two days of the convention -- including the huge event at the open-air stadium on the final night.

Ten supporters will be selected from all over the country, and each will be able to bring one guest. We'll provide airfare, accommodations, and two days of convention activities -- including a private meeting with Barack before his historic speech....

https://donate.barackobama.com/...

Michelle Cottle, a senior editor of The New Republic, today reports What went wrong, as told by more than a dozen anonymous members of the campaign. This was the post-mortem:

IOWA

"If you ask the Iowa folks, I'm sure they would tell you she wasn't there enough...."

"It was obvious talking to people on the ground there that they simply did not get the Iowa caucus from a field perspective. That's where the thing was lost. They didn't have a good idea of the horse-trading that makes caucuses work for you."

"Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald dismissed the possibility of youth turning out heavily in Iowa for Obama, saying on the record after the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, 'They don't look like caucus-goers.'"

"Clearly [Obama] was a phenomenon. He was tapping something really different than anyone had ever seen before. ....We didn't lay a serious glove on him until the fall. We tried to a little bit, but we weren't successful."

Today David Kroning has an interesting diary which explains Hillary's unrelenting pursuit of the presidency as an addiction.  This led me to recall Lincoln's explanation that when a man is bitten by "the presidential bug" there is no shaking it.  I couldn't find the exact Lincoln quote, but I did find this one by Harold Ickes, who served in FDR's cabinet:

When a man has been bitten by the presidential bug, he begins to suffer from a terrible disease that is only cured by embalming fluid.

Ickes' quote is in a book by historian Henry Franklin Graff, who says with reference to Grant and TR among others:

Retired presidents, despite the variety of their pursuits, have shown that exercising power leaves an addiction that appears to be irreversible.

Juan Cole today has a roundup of American names with Semitic roots, like Barack Hussein Obama, General Omar Nelson Bradley, and Benjamin Franklin.  Cole warns that denigrating Obama's name "is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic languages!" He points out that fourteen of our 42 presidents have had Semitic names, such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln. Other notables on the list include General John Abizaid, Congressman Darrell Issa and former cabinet secretary Donna Shalala.  

First, the meaning of Barack:

Barack is a Semitic word meaning "to bless" as a verb or "blessing" as a noun. It is found all through the Bible. It first occurs in Genesis 1:22: "And God blessed (barak) them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth."

A group in California called the Courage Campaign has been informing people about the tens of thousands of votes not counted in Los Angeles County on February 5.  These were Decline-to-State voters who wanted to vote in the Democratic primary, or possibly the American Independent Party primary.  On their ballot they had to bubble which party they were voting in, and then vote for the candidate.  Apparently 94,500 people missed the first bubble and just voted for their candidate.  Here's what the Courage Campaign wrote last week:

One of the few California newspapers to endorse John Edwards, today the Fresno BEE advises: Obama now best choice for Dems.  The endorsement praises Obama's "unifying style of leadership, his "integrity and persuasive skills to address the nation's many challenges," and his "moderate views" on guest workers and greenhouse gas regulations, both issues important to the Central Valley.

In Bill and Hill's Dangerous Game, Nicholas von Hoffman writes in the Nation (on-line) about the Clintons' attacks on Obama. Unlike most commentators, he does not accuse them of trying to reduce Obama to "the black candidate."  Instead, he focuses on their effort to diminish Obama and disillusion his supporters.  As usual, von Hoffman does not mince words:

In the last couple of days Barack Obama has found out what Paula Jones must have felt like after being worked over by the Clinton organization....

Yesterday, Juan Cole analyzed Martin Luther King's profound views on peace and their relevance to our current situation.  Cole supports King's view that ultimately "destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends."  He quotes this from the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize:
 

More recently I have come to see the need for the method of nonviolence in international relations.
   Although I was not yet convinced of its efficacy in conflicts between nations, I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system.
   But now I believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good.
   If we assume that mankind has a right to survive then we must find an alternative to war and destruction.

Pilgrimage to Nonviolence in Strength to Love, 1958

An article in McClatchy newspapers yesterday and today appears under different headlines. On the home page it is: Bush's ordinary life hardly the norm in Baghdad. The Sacramento BEE says: "In divided Baghdad, fear rules,"  and the Fresno CA Bee, where I saw the article today, writes: "Many in Baghdad say they live in endless fear."  The article begins with this quote:

"Today, most of Baghdad's neighborhoods are being patrolled by coalition and Iraqi forces who live among the people they protect. Many schools and markets are reopening. Citizens are coming forward with vital intelligence. Sectarian killings are down. And ordinary life is beginning to return."
-- George W. Bush, 9/13/07

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune today, decades of research have shown that conservatives tend to be "more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences."  New research shows that there may be a difference in brain function, or as the front-page headline in my local paper says, "Political ideologies may be hard-wired" into the human brain.

By monitoring electrical activity in one part of the cortex, scientists at UCLA and NYU have found that when a change in behavior is needed, the brains of self-styled conservatives have fewer neurons firing in that part than are observed in liberals' brains.

If you didn't watch Bill Moyers' program Friday night, you can still see it on-line or read the transcript.  One of the highlights was Mickey Edwards, a former congressman (R-Oklahoma) for sixteen years, who vigorously criticized Bush.  Calling himself a conservative, Mickey Edwards sounded very much like an outraged member of Daily Kos. Bush does not "get" what a president should do, he said, nor does he recognize his limited role as the head of merely one branch of the government.  Here is some of the transcript, slightly edited, of Edwards' discussion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with Moyers and Anthony Romero of the ACLU.

Recent research reported in Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach   (Washington Post 9/4) explains why many Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 and most of the  hijackers were Iraqi.  In spite of contradictory evidence, it is difficult for people to change a belief because ANY mention of the issue can reinforce the idea that it is true.  To quote the article:

While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

While researching his new book Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, Robert Parry says he was surprised to find how many times Gore was "tragically prescient."

Gore, whose admirers sometimes call him "the Goracle," comes across more as a Cassandra, warning the nation of looming disasters and finding himself either ignored or mocked by the dominant politicians and media pundits.

Time and again – from Campaign 2000 to the post-9/11 "war on terror" to the invasion of Iraq to Bush’s expansion of presidential powers – Gore pointed to grave dangers when nearly all other national political leaders and media bigwigs were either running with the herd or keeping silent.

Juan Cole is at a conference and hopes bloggers will counter the Bush propaganda about troop deaths.  See his comments here for more details:

I saw on CNN this smarmy Bush administration official come and and say that US troop deaths had fallen because of the surge, which is why we should support it. Just read the following chart bottom to top and compare 2006 month by month to 2007. US troop deaths haven't fallen. They are way up....

Here are the US troop deaths via Icasualties.org.

8-2007 77     8-2006 65
7-2007 79     7-2006 43
6-2007 101    6-2006 61
5-2007 126    5-2006 69
4-2007 104    4-2006 76
3-2007 81     3-2006 31
2-2007 81     2-2006 55
1-2007 83     1-2006 62

I mean, how brain dead do the Bushies think we are, peddling this horse manure that US troop deaths have fallen?.... (the summer 2007 numbers are much greater than those for summer 2006; that isn't progress.) And why does our corporate media keep repeating this Goebbels-like propaganda? Do we really live in an Orwellian state?

Today, the Fresno, CA BEE, a McClatchy paper which serves a heavily Republican area of California, has a blistering editorial about Gonzales.

The resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should be celebrated by all who believe in the rule of law....

Gonzales leaves a terrible legacy.... He has worked to expand presidential powers, undermining our system of checks and balances. He has advocated surveillance without warrants. Perhaps most egregious, he has countenanced the manipulation of U.S. elections.

"One tainted export from China can't be avoided in North America -- air", says a July 20 report in the Wall Street Journal.  Huge plumes of dust originating in China and Mongolia cross the Pacific Ocean and bring with them sulfates, smog, industrial fumes, carbon grit and nitrates. These "rivers of polluted air" affect the climate in different ways.  300 miles wide and six miles deep, they can have both a warming and cooling effect: soot in the plumes absorbs solar heat and warms the planet, but cooling sulfate particles block more than 10% of the sunlight over the Pacific.  

I have always thought the World Bank does more harm than good, especially with its funding of huge dams, but despite the great protests which occasionally catch the attention of the media I have paid little attention to the details.  Now my indifference has been jolted by an article in the Independent/UK by Johann Hari The Real Scandal at the World Bank: The Bank is Killing Thousands of the Poorest People in the World.  I’ve learned of the campaign to make the Bank’s bonds as untouchable as investments in apartheid-era South Africa. Says a leader in the campaign, Dennis Brutus, who was once imprisoned with Nelson Mandela: "I lived to see the death of political apartheid.  Now I want to live to see the end of global financial apartheid."  The Bank is beginning to worry about its AAA bond rating since several U.S. unions and the cities of San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and Boulder have sold their World Bank bonds.  

A diplomat who resigned in protest just before the Iraq invasion, John Brown has written The Cho in the White House. (The article is attached to one by Tom Engelhardt: Brown, The Virginia Tech Massacre in Global Context.) From his perspective as a diplomat accustomed to seeing the U.S. through foreign eyes, Brown says:

When I first saw psychopathic mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui's photographs of himself savagely pointing a gun at the camera, I was reminded not only of the violent images in our popular culture, but also of George W. Bush and his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of the thrust of his whole foreign policy....I see several reasons why, for non-Americans, a mad student and our commander-in-chief could appear to be two sides of the same all-American coin.