The sheep continue to multiply. What a silly bunch.

LOL

Rae

Jesus God, this thing is huge. How much can Obama raise (primary and general) before this is all said and done? $400 million? Half a billion?

Rae! Love seeing you around. You can call us sheep all you want, but the fact is, I think a lot of people are supporting Obama because of what he's accomplished, who he is, and what he stands for. Stuff like this:

-- Graduated first black president of Harvard Law Review having won trust and support of conservative members.

-- Passed over 600 high-money law firm offers to work for civil rights practice at fractional pay.

-- Added health insurance for 20,000 children, welfare reforms, earned-income tax credits, and increased minimum wage in Illinois.

-- Reformed death-penalty cases, requiring that interrogations be video-recorded. Passed Illinois Senate 58-0. Signed into law by Illinois governor who first opposed Obama’s bill. Obama succeeded by building consensus with conservative opposition.

-- Opposed Iraq war publicly, long before invasion. Accurately depicted it as of undetermined length, undetermined cost, undetermined objective, with a great likelihood of civil war breaking out.

-- Expanded program to locate and dismantle stray Russian WMD with Republican Senator Lugar.

-- Passed major ethics and lobbying reform bill with Russ Feingold, insisting upon tougher restrictions around gifts, meals, etc. And extended the interval preventing exiting congress members from moving directly into lobbyist positions.

-- Toured Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, and Palestinian territories, telling Palestinian Authority Abbas that US would never recognize Hamas leaders until they renounced mission to attack Israel.

-- Cosponsored Secure Orderly Immigration Act by John McCain. Passes Senate 62-36. Makes undocumented persons who have been here 5+ years only allowed to stay and apply for citizenship if they pay back-taxes, learn English, and have no criminal record.

-- Communicated frankly to Michigan automaker executives of need to increase fuel-efficiency standards by at least 3% per year.

-- Many aisle-crossing bi-partisan solutions throughout 10 years of senate experience (8 state, 2 federal).

-- 100% approval rating from the League of Conservation Voters, Planned Parenthood. National Education Association gives him an “A” on their most recent scorecard.

-- In Illinois State Senate sponsored 780 bills, 280 were signed into law.

-- In first year as US Senator, held 39 town-hall meetings throughout his state, sponsored 152 bills and resolutions, and cosponsored 427 more.

-- Designated US Senate point person on ethics by Speaker Harry Reid.

(fyi, this list was totally stolen from another poster on this site)

Great news, that. My wife and I just sent another donation, just to push the train a tiny bit further on down the track.

900,000 donors for him, and a handful of wealthy ones putting together 527s to keep her campaign alive.

Obama would be a damn fool to give this up for public financing. He needs to take the hit on the semi-pledge and steamroll Walnuts all the way to the election.

As an aside, it looks like people are FINALLY starting to wonder what all these accomplishments we keep hearing about from Hillary. Not a minute too soon.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-hanft/the-curious-myth-of-hilla_b_87613.html

Yeah, I may be biased, but I'd understand if he backed out of the public financing pledge.

Must it be pointed out that the first act a leader must take is to convince others to follow him? That's just about the first thing I was taught as a Navy (and, later, Army) NCO.

"Inspire. Its original meaning was to 'breathe or blow upon or into.' The word was derived from the Latin spiritus, which means 'breath, courage, vigor, the soul' as well as from the Ecclesiastical Latin spirare, meaning 'to blow, breathe.' How apt! When you think of how leaders inspire, it is as if they are 'blowing life into' their people to give courage and vigor to their souls...Hope is the outcome of inspiration.

"Hope is not something you wish for; it must be earned through example and courage. It emerges from a unity of spirit and purpose. Sun Tzu, the ancient military strategist, addressed the need for a commander and his army to be one with the Tao,/i>. As he explained in the Art of War, 'Tao is what causes the people to have ths same purpose as their superior. Thus they can die with him, live with him and not deceive him.' The reason for such unity was a shared set of values. It was the commander's responsibility to earn the respect of his soldiers so that they would follow him into battle if war were necessary."

-From Great Motivation Secrets of Great Leaders by John Baldoni

http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/ob.../18247/?page=1

"The money men: Jeremy Bernard and Rufus Gifford are lovers and business partners. They are also the fund-raisers who keep the Barack Obama presidential campaign alive and competitive."
...

So he's got about 90% of black vote and now maybe 90% of the gay vote, and a huge chunck of the youth vote (who don't know any better).

No wonder he's been doing well.

And of course the sheep will see the crowd and continue to line up at the back and none of the little sheep behind the front line will see that they are all about to go over the cliff!

Rae
Bahhhh!

Yet another sheep here!!!

Thing is, Obama's Internet fundraising is really another form of public financing. Something tells me that most of this money is coming from people like me, giving $25-50/month. Makes sense if you think of the number of donors, multiply it by $50, you get nearly $50 million.

Most importantly, Obama's proving to manage a formidable, incredibly run campaign. I don't feel that a penny of my investment is being wasted. It's been said before but, taking campaign management as a guide, Obama's far better prepared from Day One.

What is one of the core principles of the Fiscal Conservative Republicans; it is that the Federal Government should stay out of collecting and redistributing money from people.
John McCain has started to preach that as a part of his born again tax cuts for the rich conversion.

Isn't it a bit ironic, that the same John McCain is now demanding that Senator Obama join him in forsaking small private campaign funding in order to take IRS collected taxpayers' money.

Shall we call it the John McCain Federal Campaign Earmark Policy!

Wow, texas is going nuts. In travis county 8,000 people voted today on the first day of early voting already. In 04 only 16,000 voted early in total. They are expecting a huge, huge turnout in texas. Video is on the yahoo election page. Wow!!!!!!!

Go obama!!!!

Rae: It's time to get some help.

Mocking a political candidate is one thing, but being so mentally, personally and emotionally disturbed is troubling. Your acute hatred outstrips any reason, even the reason that the candidate you support is loosing.

It's sad you find gratification in such smear;

Assuming that they had 400K donors last year and 500K new donors this year (mark hit around 7am this morning) they got an additional 20K since this morning. Yesterday around this time their counter said they had 460K since Jan 1 so they got 60,000 new donors within the last 24 hours!
I have never seen anything like it.

Granted for those of us with trust funds, there is a little bit of gamesmanship involved in this and this campaign is a master at milking that with the counters and goals but I wouldn't be giving up my lattes to participate if Obama didn't give me something to want to give them up for.

I actually have a Black Gay Friend here in New York- and he's as great guy, we often go for a latte at Star Bucks.

I'm not kidding: I called him just now- apparently he voted for Hillary in the primary- but still he is a great guy.

sounds to me like a good reason to reject public financing.

Obama's money is coming from people in small donations. He doesn't take PAC money or lobby money and thats good enough for me.

It seems, if McCain wants to push the issue (and i'm sure he will because there is NO WAY he can keep pace with Obama's fundraising) this is the line i would take.

ONE MILLION DONORS. The Vast majority of them in small increments. It's hard to "buy" influence in Washington for $25, especially if a million other people have donated too. This, in my opinion, IS public financing.

I do believe that money is bad for the system. But that seems to be when there is a lot of money coming from a very few sources. With Obama, the opposite is true, in that you have small amounts of money coming from lots of different sources. It's hard to see how that could corrupt or buy influence.

Hit send by accident -- With needing 100K donors to reach the 1,000,000 mark...the extra 20,000 that they got since 7am means they are 1/5 of the way there in 1/2 day. At this rate they will have reached the Mil mark by Tuesday at the latest.

*shakes head in amazement*

New rule, in honor of John and 527-Hill: I'll donate $500 to Obama everytime we bomb Pakistan.

Almost 907,000 now.

Approx. half of this number is just since Super Tuesday. They are 1st time donations. As others have mentioned, yesterday around this time the number was around 460,850. That is a huge 24 hour jump.

Approx 1,000 new donations while I typed last post!

How about they create an agreement that is better than public financing. Put the donations cap at $500 per individual, and eliminate the use of PACs and outside groups. For some reason, I think that McCain (the self proclaimed hero of the taxpayer) would rather rely on the good people's taxes to fund his campaign.

Another live counter! So exciting. I love these things. Not quite as much fun as the money counter last time, though.

I've been tracking this since Super Tuesday with an estimate of $75 per new donor - my current estimate for February that figures in their last public numbers - $7.5M around Feb 6th is $36.3M (only 29 days) with an upside closer to $46M. They'll probably hit 1,000,000 donors before February 26th at the current pace - it'll be a big news item to hit the airwaves before March 4th.

It's also possible the February donations will reach as high as $50M which would be unbelievable - and coincidentally the money raised in Jan/Feb would then equal the $85M Fed Funding target for the General Election. That would be an interesting footnote.

Only $36 million? I honestly was expect his campaign to hit somewhere in the ball park of at least $40 million. His donations always seem to spike whenever he wins or loses and seeing as he's won 10 contests now, I would have expected his campaign to be raking several millions for each of those victories.

Anyways, its nice to see that presidential candidates are finally able to enthuse enough people to donate and finance their campaigns with small amounts of dollars, instead of relaying on the mega rich, corporate fat cats and the top 5% of this country.

I think the Hitler comment was so outrageous I couldn't get serious, but some how suggesting that a Black majority or a Gay majority would be negatives for a campaign- seem like Alabama right wing talking points.

No offense to Alabama BTW- I went to Auburn for a semester and if you pay attention you'll find many good people living in silence.

I think for Rae and the Hillaryis44ers there's this horrible problem because since Hillary is objectively god's gift to women and she's the bestest ever and her victories are our victories and when someone puts her down they are putting us down there's no reason for anyone to vote against her. So there has to be conspiracies, and Hitler, and kool-aid, and magic juju, because it cannot be possible that someone has looked rationally at their deity and decided that they want to vote for someone else? Because that would be, in a way, rejecting them. So, instead, you have to pathologize and insult, because otherwise you have to come to terms with the fact that someone might not think Hillary is a goddess of awesomeness, and apparently that's too much to bear.

Plus, homos! Evil, rich homos!

I don't understand why people are getting so worked up about Obama raising money from average people who donate small amounts. People have been going on and on for years about getting rid of big money in presidential campaigns and when someone comes along and is able to raise small money...suddenly its horrible!! If Hillary or McCain could tap into small money, I would say good for them also. Its about time that democracy means the common people, not the oligarchy of America.

kash79 wrote: I think the Hitler comment was so outrageous I couldn't get serious, but some how suggesting that a Black majority or a Gay majority would be negatives for a campaign- seem like Alabama right wing talking points.

Okay, this is really an outrageous jump. Did I say it was a negative thing? Its clearly an advantage.

No one can criticize Obama for fear of being accused of playing a race card. The press and every one is tip toing around him because of it. Things that had nothing to do with race was being cried "racists!" This is disgusting.

This article link I posted was about the huge amts. of money being raised by some gay businessmen, Obama supporters who have big connections and can tap a LOT of money for him.

So now we can't mention who the big money raisers are or we're gay bashing too?

So let me get the rules right:

1) We can't mention anything regarding race or that could possibly be interpreted as racist and its up to us to figure that out ahead of time;
and
2) We can't mention anything about his gay support because that's automatically a bad thing.

Do I have the rules straight? Uh, excuse me Do I have the rules right?

And you call yourselves "democrats". You're acting more like hypocrats if you ask me.

Rae

Keep reaching for the stars, Rae.

You're making less sense today, and, frankly, I thought that was impossible.

Calling US "sheep" ???? ... you're the ones taking the ****ing

"Rae - guessing by your responses and "analysis", I am guessing you are either:

A 65+ year old woman, or
Someone with less than a highschool education.

Because those are the only two groups Hillary's still holding on to these days."

Wait -- you're forgetting the anti-plaigarists and the ones who start salivating every time she says the word "solutions"!

New rumor: Barack Obama supporters are thinking of asking Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream (you know, those two guys in Vermont who publicly announced their endorsement of Barack this past week?) to come out with a new flavor: Yes, Pecan!

I love it.

I can just picture the commercial: "I'm Barack Obama, and I approved this ice cream."

Probably because he never got a chance to campaign there. He was criss crossing the country hitting 20 other states.

Within 24 hours after winning Wisconsin, the Obama campaign brought in a whopping 60,000 NEW donors and they now stand at over 932,000! This is truly a grassroots movement as we have never seen before in this country.

PS - on the Gay voters for Hillary, HRC controls HRC - thus the 63%. Get it?