Is he poised to go all the way?
Barack Obama soundly rival Hillary Clinton in the Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C. in the primaries on Tuesday night. Look at the percentages.
Even after Obama gains ground in today’s contests in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., he will have only a slight lead in delegates. After that, what do Democrats have to hope for?
The salvation of the Democratic system has previously been the propensity for voters to unite around a winner early. John Kerry’s total victory was all but guaranteed after he won the
New Hampshire primary in 2004.
This time, the Democratic race has come down to just two candidates, either of whom could win. It is going into the late states, no matter what. It is an undemocratic game in which the voters are mathematically incapable of picking the winner without the help of unelected party elders.
If the pattern holds, Obama's February record will be 23 or 24 wins (depending on New Mexico) to 8 or 9 wins for Clinton.
Obama's post-Super Tuesday stats could well be 10-0. And his claim of national support is now epic in scope.
"(The) cynics can no longer say our hope is false," Obama said in Madison on Tuesday night. "We have won east and west, north and south, and across the great heartland of this country we love."
Clinton still holds out hope for a turnaround on March 4 in Ohio and Texas. But her campaign is going to have a tougher time convincing donors to cough up the money to compete in those multi-media market states with the win-loss ratio she is toting up in the longest month of what has turned out to be a hard, hard winter for the former front-runner.
130,000 soldiers will remain in Iraq.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he supports a "pause" in the withdrawal of surge troops from Iraq. The withdrawal would have reduced U.S. forces in that country to 100,000 troops; now it appears that 130,000 troops will remain.
Will the "pause" help the U.S. consolidate its gains in Iraq? Can the military handle the continuing strain on its resources?
The United States plans to hand Anbar Province over to the Iraqis next month if nothing catastrophic erupts between now and then. The Marines will stick around a while longer, though, and complete their crucial last mission -- training the Iraqi Police to replace them.
The local police force would collapse in short order without American financial and logistics support. What they need more than anything else, though, is an infusion of moderate politics. Fallujah is in the heartland of the Sunni Triangle. The city was ferociously Baathist during the rule of Saddam Hussein. It is surly and reactionary even today. Even by Iraqi standards. Even after vanquishing the insurgency. Fallujans may never be transformed into Jeffersonian liberal democrats, but young men from New York, California, and Texas are taking the Iraqis by the hand and gently repairing their political culture.
When Bush's commander on the ground, General David Petraeus, insists that reducing US troops strength in Iraq below 130,000 could indeed jeopardize whatever chances remain of snatching "victory" from defeat there, Gates, who had previously favored reducing US troops in Iraq to as few as 100,000 by the end of this year, is forced to defer.
On the other hand, there's the deep blue sea in the rapidly growing conviction among top military officers and the national security establishment in general that US ground forces are already dangerously overstretched and that retaining as many as 130,000 troops in Iraq is simply not sustainable for any appreciable length of time.
Lincoln still inspires and enrages.
One year before the bicentennial of his birth, Abraham Lincoln continues to inspire adulation and scorn. A seemingly endless stream of books assessing and reassessing Lincoln's presidency and legacy appear every year. This year is no exception.
For some, Lincoln will always be the Great Emancipator, a visionary and a statesman who fulfilled the promise of the American founding at great sacrifice. Yet for others, he was a racist who cared nothing about slavery and nearly destroyed the Constitution to preserve a union that the South wanted no part of.
How should Americans honor Lincoln today? How should we celebrate his birthday?
As a politician and as president, Lincoln was a profound student of the Constitution and constitutional history. Perhaps most important, Lincoln was America's indispensable teacher of the moral ground of political freedom at the exact moment when the country was on the threshold of abandoning what he called its "ancient faith" that all men are created equal.
There is an old legal maxim that in time of war the laws are silent: Inter arma silent leges. But the crucial issue is the extent to which the nation is threatened. In the case of Abraham Lincoln, the survival of the United States hung in the balance. A president will be forgiven by his contemporaries, though not necessarily by later generations, for acting outside the law when that is the case. As more than one Supreme Court justice has said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. When national survival is not threatened, however, it is essential for a chief executive to resist an unwarranted enlargement of his powers.
Maria Elena Betancur, originally from Columbia, helps organize voters in her New York neighborhood.
More fuel for the immigration debate: The Pew Research Center says immigration will drive the population of the United States sharply upward between now and 2050 -- and will push whites into a minority.
What do these changes mean for our future? What will it mean for our politics?
The transformation of the United States into a country like Canada or Belgium would not necessarily be the end of the world; it would, however, be the end of the America we have known for more than three centuries. Americans should not let that change happen unless they are convinced that this new nation would be a better one.
Such a transformation would not only revolutionize the United States, but it would also have serious consequences for Hispanics, who will be in the United States but not of it.
Democrats, meanwhile, can hardly believe their luck. They predict that a swell of Hispanic support could even tip Arizona their way — and that the party's chances grow stronger with every mile of border fence pledged by the Republicans. "We've seen this movie before," says Simon Rosenberg, president of the Democratic think tank NDN. "It's Pete Wilson. Here was a Republican governor of California in the 1990s who lashed out at immigrants and made a state that had produced Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan irrevocably blue, because of the huge demographic tide that went against the party."
Sports fans won't be the only ones watching the world's athletes in Beijing this summer.
Human rights advocates won't be celebrating the summer Olympics in Beijing. China censors the press, cracks down on dissent, and supports genocidal regimes. But the Olympics is supposed to be about setting aside differences, not "wallowing" in politics. Besides, an effort to boycott the Beijing games never got anywhere. Now British Olympic officials are requiring athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China's abusive behavior or face being banned from Beijing. Have Western governments lost their nerve? Should Human rights issues affect whether countries participate in the Olympic games? Is it too late to confront China on its human rights record
From this moment on, I will not write about the Beijing Olympics unless the subject at hand is censorship and repression in China. And -- unless the Chinese government changes its policies -- when the Olympics do come, I will not blog about them at all. I will take the opportunity to write as often as I can about the lack of Freedom of Speech on the Chinese Internet and on the suppression of bloggers and journalists in that country.
Let us lay to rest the argument that we should dispel politics from the Olympics. Politics underlie host governments' motivations, with China nothing less than the norm. If we allow the international community simply to accept the Beijing Games as the Chinese present it, we will concede a great, undeserving misperception. For, the true realization of "One World, One Dream" means the promotion of the human condition -- whether Chinese, Burmese, Sudanese, or American. And, in this event, China falls short of even the bronze medal.
