SodaHead - Annie's Questions

Does it seem like alot of good people are either leaving Sodahead or really scaling back because of bad behavior by others?

2008-08-04T22:38:12Z

Does it seem like alot of good people are either leaving Sodahead or really scaling back because of bad behavior by others?

35 answers, +11 raves

I've had 3 friends drop out this week.

Yes.	51% (18 answers)
Undecided	40% (14 answers)
No.	9% (3 answers)

Obama supporters-current and former. Do you feel sorry you voted for him in the primaries. Have we screwed up in pushing Barack Obama to the nomination?

2008-07-03T15:20:07Z

Obama supporters-current and former. Do you feel sorry you voted for him in the primaries. Have we screwed up in pushing Barack Obama to the nomination?

38 answers, +13 raves

I voted for him in the primary despite doubts I had. Let's be honest. I thought it would be a major breakthrough to have a black President. And I, like to many others, thought that Hillary Clinton represented old politics while Sen. Obama really was different. It's clear to me now that I was wrong. He is a compelling, almost hypnotic, speaker. He is perhaps brilliant. But he is not different and he certainly does not represent change. In fact he's more old-style politicis than I ever dreamed. Once I really started digging I was horrified to find how I had been seduced by a myth. I'm interested in seeing if there are others out there like me who have changed their minds about him or are now doubting him. For those of you who never supported him, I'd like to know why. Thanks for participating.

None of the above	47% (18 answers)
I have no doubts	24% (9 answers)
I cannot vote for him now	21% (8 answers)
Yes I do doubt him but I'll still vote for him	5% (2 answers)
Undecided	3% (1 answers)
I don't know what to do	0% (0 answers)

Obama and his perception in other countries-in this case the United Kingdom. What do you think?

2008-07-03T15:11:17Z

Obama and his perception in other countries-in this case the United Kingdom. What do you think?

13 answers, +5 raves

July 3, 2008 The First Post skip to nav What happened to the man of change? Barack Obama’s stance on Israel exposes his agenda for change as a sham, says Alexander Cockburn On June 3 Barack Obama claimed the greatest prize the Democratic Party can offer, namely his nomination as its candidate for the presidency. The very next day the salesman of 'change' raced from Minnesota back to Washington and publicly abased himself at the feet of an organisation whose prime mission is to ensure that change unpalatable to the state of Israel will never be pressed by the United States government. The terms of Obama's surrender before the American Israel Public Committee exploded like rhetorical cluster bombs across the Middle East. To Israel and its Arab neighbours it surely signalled that, whoever moves into the White House next January, there will be no swerve from Bush's role as guarantor of Israeli intransigence. Before he began his drive to the nomination Obama took good care to get the support of influential American Jews in Chicago like the Crown family, associated with the aerospace firm, General Dynamics. Worried about rumours fanned by the Clinton campaign that he was still a secret Muslim, Obama insisted that before the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania, a state with a politically significant Jewish vote, his campaign start a Hebrew-language blog in Israel. So Obama came to this year's AIPAC conference determined to dispel all remaining doubts that he's a Friend of Israel. "We will also use all elements of American power to pressure Iran," he assured AIPAC. "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon... Everything and I mean everything." He swore he wouldn't talk to the elected representatives of the Palestinians, Hamas. To thunderous applause he declared, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." As Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli writer expostulated furiously in the wake of this last sentence, "Along comes Obama and retrieves from the junkyard the outworn slogan ‘I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon... Everything’ 'Undivided Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel for all Eternity'. Since Camp David, all Israeli governments have understood that this mantra constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to any peace process. It has disappeared - quietly, almost secretly - from the arsenal of official slogans. "No Palestinian, no Arab, no Muslim will make peace with Israel if the Haram-al-Sharif compound (also called the Temple Mount), one of the three holiest places of Islam and the most outstanding symbol of Palestinian nationalism, is not transferred to Palestinian sovereignty. That is one of the core issues of the conflict. On that very issue, the Camp David conference of 2000 broke up." Obama's foreign policy advisors were tearing their hair out and the next day his campaign issued a clarification. "Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties" as part of "an agreement that they both can live with". All the same, Jerusalem in Obama's eyes must be the capital of Israel. Although Obama's statements at AIPAC got Obama’s most egregious talent is the ability to allay suspicion among the powerful that he could rock the boat wide coverage across the Middle East, what was obvious here in the US was the utter absence of comment in the mainstream press. It was evidently taken as a given, unworthy of editorial remark, that a man who might very well be the next president was de-activating the policy of 'change' precisely where it is most needed at the behest of the men the popular TV comedian Jon Stewart edgily derided as "the elders of Zion". Obama's most egregious talent is the ability to adapt his rhetoric with ominous speed, to allay any suspicion among the powerful that he could rock the boat in a way they might not care for. Earlier in the campaign he was criticised for not wearing the American flag as a lapel pin. At the AIPAC event he wore a double lapel pin, with both the US and Israeli flags. Is there a 'real Obama' waiting to emerge, once the messy business of pleasing the voters is over? Not really. The making of the 'real' Obama is an ongoing project, and the AIPAC speech an important marker in the evolution of 'change' into immobility. FIRST POSTED JUNE 13, 2008

They see that he's not what he seemed to many at first.	77% (10 answers)
None of the above	23% (3 answers)
They're just against him like everyone else. They don't want a black man as president.	0% (0 answers)
Undecided	0% (0 answers)

The Ever-Changing Barack Obama: Even Core Supporters are Starting to Wonder. What do you think?

2008-07-03T15:04:01Z

The Ever-Changing Barack Obama: Even Core Supporters are Starting to Wonder. What do you think?

32 answers, +13 raves

First, it was the stuff during the primaries-things that started to nag away at people, even people who supported him, like myself. It was little things that started to steamroll: Wright, Rezko, NAFTA, some of the things his wife and others said about a variety of issues. At first, it was all his "associates". Now though it's his own stance on many issues that are changing. As he moves to try to dig in to John McCain's base, what else will he sell out. And-the question is, at least for me-how is he any different than any other politician we've seen? Please-if you don't read anything else this political season, read the following. Also-before you cry "neocon", Glenn Greenwald has written books critical of the Bush Administration. Glenn Greenwald Wednesday July 2, 2008 12:31 EDT Obama advisor Greg Craig: Adding insult to injury (updated below - Update II) In today's New York Times, James Risen -- who won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing Bush's illegal NSA spying program -- has an article reporting on Obama supporters who are criticizing Obama for his FISA reversal and who are attempting to defeat the bill which Obama supports. The article quotes Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas and myself and features the very innovative effort by Obama supporters to use his campaign's social networking tools to urge Obama to oppose the FISA bill (more on that campaign here). For his article, Risen spoke with Obama adviser Greg Craig, a partner at the Washington law firm Williams & Connolly, and this is what Craig told Risen: Greg Craig, a Washington lawyer who advises the Obama campaign, said Tuesday in an interview that Mr. Obama had decided to support the compromise FISA legislation only after concluding it was the best deal possible. "This was a deliberative process, and not something that was shooting from the hip," Mr. Craig said. "Obviously, there was an element of what’s possible here. But he concluded that with FISA expiring, that it was better to get a compromise than letting the law expire." Craig's statement is flat-out false. FISA -- enacted in 1978 and amended many times to accommodate modern communications technology -- has no expiration date. The Protect America Act, which Congress enacted last August to legalize warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, had a 6-month sunset provision and thus already expired back in February, restoring FISA as the governing law. Thus, if Congress does nothing now, FISA will continue indefinitely to govern the Government's power to spy on the communications of Americans. It doesn't expire. What Craig said in defense of Obama is just wrong. I emailed Craig this morning about his comments (here) and when I received no reply, I called him, left a message, and he called me this afternoon. After I read him his quote, explained that FISA won't expire, and pointed out that his comment in the NYT therefore made no sense, Craig paused for awhile and then said that he meant that the "warrants under FISA would expire in August," and Obama supported the FISA "compromise" to prevent that from happening. When I asked Craig if he was referring to the surveillance orders authorized by the Protect America Act that allow the Government to spy with no individual warrants (which have a one-year duration and do expire in August), Craig said that this is what he meant, and that Obama wanted to avoid having those surveillance orders expire. While that last version at least generally comports with reality, it makes no sense whatsoever as an explanation for Obama's FISA position. Back in August, when he was seeking the Democratic nomination, Obama voted against the Protect America Act. Therefore, had Obama had his way, there never would have been any PAA in the first place, and therefore, there never would have been any PAA orders possible. Having voted against the PAA last August, how can Obama now claim that he considers it important that the PAA orders not expire? How can he be eager to avoid the expiration of surveillance orders which he opposed authorizing in the first place? I asked Craig that question several times and received completely incoherent replies, after which he started insisting that he already answered me and had nothing else to add (he then changed the subject to talk about the "improvements" the current bill achieves over the Rockefeller Senate bill). The fact is that there is no answer. In the past, Obama has opposed the type of warrantless eavesdropping which those PAA orders authorize. He's repeatedly said that the FISA court works and there's no need to authorize eavesdropping without individual warrants. None of that can be reconciled with his current claim that he supports this FISA "compromise" because National Security requires that those PAA orders not expire and that there be massive changes to FISA. It's just as simple as that. It's bad enough that Obama is supporting a new warrantless eavesdropping scheme. They should just candidly admit that he changed his position rather than feeding incoherent and insultingly false rationalizations to the public -- whereby they throw around the terms "National Security" and "balance" enough times and hope that nobody notices or cares that what they're saying makes no sense. One of the strengths of the Obama campaign has been a willingness to have adult discussions about complex political issues, assume a fair amount of rationality and intelligence on the part of the voting public, and avoid manipulative, obfuscating sloganeering like this. It's just adding insult to injury to resort to nonsensical justifications of the type Craig put into the New York Times today. Just to get a flavor for how fundamental a reversal is Obama's FISA position, here is what Obama said back in February when accepting Chris Dodd's endorsement: We know it's time to time to restore our Constitution and the rule of law. This is an issue that was at the heart of Senator Dodd's candidacy, and I share his passion for restoring the balance between the security we demand and the civil liberties that we cherish. The American people must be able to trust that their president values principle over politics, and justice over unchecked power. I've been proud to stand with Senator Dodd in his fight against retroactive immunity for the telecommunications industry. Secrecy and special interests must not trump accountability. We must show our citizens -- and set an example to the world -- that laws cannot be ignored when it is inconvenient. Because in America –- no one is above the law. Here is what he said back in January: Ever since 9/11, this Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. The FISA court works. The separation of power works. We can trace, track down and take out terrorists while ensuring that our actions are subject to vigorous oversight, and do not undermine the very laws and freedom that we are fighting to defend. No one should get a free pass to violate the basic civil liberties of the American people -- not the President of the United States, and not the telecommunications companies that fell in line with his warrantless surveillance program. We have to make clear the lines that cannot be crossed. . . . A grassroots movement of Americans has pushed this issue to the forefront. You have come together across this country. You have called upon our leaders to adhere to the Constitution. You have sent a message to the halls of power that the American people will not permit the abuse of power -- and demanded that we reclaim our core values by restoring the rule of law. It's time for Washington to hear your voices, and to act. I share your commitment to this cause, and will stand with you in the fights to come. And obviously, his vow last October to "support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies" can't be reconciled with his vow to "support" such a bill now. The issue is not -- as one extremely confused Obama-cheering blogger put it -- that Obama has done "something contrary to what conventional wisdom as dictated by a small coterie of prominent bloggers agrees with," nor is it -- as an equally confused, Obama-cheering Ed Kilgore put it -- that Obama is "stray[ing] from Democratic Party orthodoxy or from strict down-the-line partisanship" by "expressing heretical thoughts on FISA" (incidentally, it's amazing how the rule of law, the Fourth Amendment and accountability for Bush lawbreaking have now -- in service of defending Obama -- all been instantaneously reduced to nothing more than quirky, self-absorbed, petty blogger "dictates," and Obama's disregarding of those core political values is a bold demonstration that he won't be held hostage to anyone's narrow partisan demands). The issue is that Obama has repeatedly, over the course of the last year, made emphatic commitments and clear statements about his own core political values that are completely irreconcilable with his support for the FISA bill. It's possible to recognize that someone is just a "politician" and still trust that they're essentially telling you the truth about what they think and what they'll do. One hard-core Obama supporter explains that here. As I said, it's bad enough that this is being done. Eventually, the sting of what Obama and Democrats generally have done will diminish somewhat for many people. But for those who have sat by watching the Bush administration and its followers exploit complexities over spying issues in order to issue one false claim after the next to justify Bush's lawbreaking, having the Obama campaign issue factually false and/or incoherent explanations to justify Obama's conduct only makes matters worse, not better.

I never supported him. This confirms what I've thought of him all along.	72% (23 answers)
I still support him no matter what he does because he's a Democrat (or he's better than McCain)	13% (4 answers)
None of the above	9% (3 answers)
I can't support him anymore after this recent behavior	6% (2 answers)
I'm really starting to wonder about him and if I should support him	0% (0 answers)
Undecided	0% (0 answers)

What do you do for a living?

2008-06-26T04:09:57Z

What do you do for a living?

72 answers, +19 raves

My job is	71% (51 answers)
I don't work, I...	19% (14 answers)
None of the above	10% (7 answers)
Undecided	0% (0 answers)
All of the above	0% (0 answers)