His song “Politics As Usual” delivers devastating tongue-lashing to New York Senator Hillary Clinton, Republican nominee for President John MCCain, and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson. Some lyrics below:

Well give Luda a special pardon if I’m ever in the slammer. Better yet put him in office, make me your vice president. Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant.

Paint the White House black and I’m sure that’s got ‘em terrified. McCain don’t belong in any chair unless he’s paralyzed
Yeah I said it cause Bush is mentally handicapped. Ball up all of his speeches and I throw ‘em like candy wrap
’cause what you talking I hear nothing even relevant and you the worst of all 43 presidents.

WOW that was Harsh!!!

A spokesperson for the Democratic presidential nominee has issued a statement rebuking the Ludacris track.

“As Barack Obama has said many, many times in the past, rap lyrics today too often perpetuate misogyny, materialism, and degrading images that he doesn’t want his daughters or any children exposed to….This song is not only outrageously offensive to Senator Clinton, Reverend Jackson, Senator MCCain and President Bush, it is offensive to all of us who are trying to raise our children with the values we hold dear. While Ludacris is a talented individual, he should be ashamed of these lyrics.”

I’ve got to say, she’s a pretty good speaker in her own right. Completely separated from her husband, I could still very easily picture her as a successful politician. She stammered over some lines, but she really knows how to invest in her words. There was nothing phony or plastic about the way in which she told her story. It felt almost conversational at times. She wasn’t just addressing a faceless crowd, she was addressing each individual in that crowd. The speech itself displayed the intelligence and savvy we’ve come to expect from this campaign. Tying the women’s suffrage movement with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and borrowing Senator Clinton’s line about the glass ceiling with “18 million cracks” in it was an elegant and beautiful way to reach out and salve the wounds of those supporters still feeling the sting of a bitter primary battle.

(And how cute was it when little Sasha said an unscripted hello to the Girardeaus family?)

Despite Michelle Obama’s impressive performance, the real hero of the night to me was Ted Kennedy who as the greatest symbol of the old vanguard of the party, passed the torch on to the next generation. The Kennedys have represented the very best of our party for forty years now, and Senator Kennedy has done a marvelous job at carrying on the legacy of his brothers with the idealism and respect that they deserved. And I must say I more than a little happy to see him ready for one last fight. As he made clear in his speech, Kennedy is deadly serious about passing a health care bill, calling it “the cause of my life.” There is a measure of sadness in this in as much as it is the last hurrah for America’s first family, but as legacies go, universal health care would be a towering achievement. There is no way any Democrat could ever adequately thank the Massachusetts Senator for his lifetime of public service.

God bless you, Ted Kennedy. God bless you.

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. . . We're a country that fights wars and uses military force in far more places and for far broader reasons than any other country in the world, by far. . .

That's why it's so amazing to watch Condoleezza Rice, more or less without contradiction, say things like this:

Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used whenever it wishes to deliver a message and that's its military power. That's not the way to deal in the 21st century.

How the military came to call in air strikes on a civilian gathering still remains unclear. Two parliamentarians, Mr. Safi and Maulavi Gul Ahmad, who is from the area, said the villagers blamed tribal enemies for giving the military false intelligence.

“According to the villagers their enemies give false report to Americans that foreign fighters were gathering in the village,” Mr. Safi said.

Having said that, lately I've been noticing a more and more frequent trend: retards voting for Obama for all the wrong reasons. Yes, John McCain does look like a little bit of a baby when he complains of the celebrity treatment that Obama's been getting, but you have to admit that there's a certain degree of validity to what he's saying. I feel like it's become hip to be pro-Obama, and I can't shake the feeling that a lot of people in November will be voting for him not because of his political positions but because of his rockstar status. Enough people to make a difference between winning and losing? That I don't know, I think it'd be interesting to find out though.

I don't know what exactly it is about Obama that's making him so popular. Skin color, age, looks, charisma? Maybe a combination of them all? Maybe he just got lucky, he became cool somehow and once you become cool it's very hard to become uncool. What I do know for sure is that I'd rather have McCain win because informed people simply voted for a general ideology I don't tend to agree with, than have Obama win because “omgz he's teh shits!”

Thoughts?

How Barack Obama learned to love Israel

The senator, his pastor and the Israel lobby

What Obama missed in the Middle East

And in his own words, here is what Obama says on Palestine (though as he terms it on his website: “On Israel”):

Ensure a Strong U.S.-Israel Partnership: Barack Obama strongly supports the U.S.-Israel relationship, believes that our first and incontrovertible commitment in the Middle East must be to the security of Israel, America’s strongest ally in the Middle East. Obama supports this closeness, stating that that the United States would never distance itself from Israel.

Support Israel’s Right to Self Defense: During the July 2006 Lebanon war, Barack Obama stood up strongly for Israel’s right to defend itself from Hezbollah raids and rocket attacks, cosponsoring a Senate resolution against Iran and Syria’s involvement in the war, and insisting that Israel should not be pressured into a ceasefire that did not deal with the threat of Hezbollah missiles. He believes strongly in Israel’s right to protect its citizens.

Support Foreign Assistance to Israel: Barack Obama has consistently supported foreign assistance to Israel. He defends and supports the annual foreign aid package that involves both military and economic assistance to Israel and has advocated increased foreign aid budgets to ensure that these funding priorities are met. He has called for continuing U.S. cooperation with Israel in the development of missile defense systems.

It is more of the same. As with his recent visit to Palestine (occupied 48 and 67 territories), Obama is clearly only interested in the “security” of Israeli colonists, not of Palestinians. Palestinians clearly have no right to defend themselves against Israeli state terrorism, but Israelis will continue to receive generous aid packages under an Obama administration to inflict the terrorism on Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, and maybe even Iranians. I don’t see how any Palestinian in their right mind could read such a policy statement and think that Obama will mean change with respect to their conditions. Instead, it will continue to worsen. It is not just Palestine that is the issue. It’s also the way he is unwilling to take on comments about his middle name–Islamophobic references that are racist. Why can’t he just say, “I am Christian, but what would be so wrong if I were Muslim?” Or what of the way in which the people of Kenya seem to be elated about one of their own possibly inhabiting the White House and yet he’s never said a word about Kenya–even when it was spiraling into violence several months ago? Don’t get me wrong: I don’t support John McCain at all (for me it’s a tough choice between Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney), but I much prefer someone who is honest–you know where they stand and it’s clear. Unlike Obama who seemed to be genuinely invested in Palestinian human rights and then turned his back on a community that had befriended him. Oh, and if anyone has any doubts remaining, I encourage you to listen to Obama’s Vice Presidential candidate, Joe Biden, speaking about his love for Zion:

All this and American Zionists still are not sure what they think of Obama. Or so it seems.

In any case, with respect to Palestine I suspect that either McCain or Obama will bring more of the same. The settlements will not only remain, they will increase as they have been increasing since the nightmare that is Oslo. Peace Now released a report, cited on IMEMC today,(alternately you could read the New York Times report on this) with these horrifying statistics:

According to the report, Israel is accelerating the construction process in several West Bank settlements, including isolated ones, in order to create geographical contiguity between them and to encircle the Palestinian cities and villages.

Peace Now added that the number of tenders for settlement construction had increased by 550% in 2008. In simple figures, Israel built 65 units in 2007 comparing to 417 in 2008.

Of course, it is not just the illegal settlements either. It is also the routine, nightly invasions of kidnapping that the Israeli Terrorist Forces (ITF) use to lay siege to Palestinian refugee camps, cities, and villages. Last night it was Bethlehem and Jenin. It is also the raiding of and continual theft of Palestinian NGOs, private homes, and land. In the past couple of weeks they have been targeting Muslim charities–charities that have specific knowledge about the ways in which the Zionist state is working to undermine Al Aqsa in Al Quds. It is also home demolitions. In other words, creating “facts on the ground” to use the phrase in common parlance here.

It doesn’t matter if it is Obama, McCain, or Rice coming here to try to feign as if they are going to bring “peace” to Palestine or to Afghanistan or to Iraq (and let me just add here: whatever it is you think you hear Obama saying about American troops pulling out–I promise you that those some odd 16 American military bases, the Green Zone, and the mercenaries will not be part of the pull out bargain). Rice weakly tried to suggest that settlements were not conducive to “peace,” but American officials have said it before. I’m sure they will say it again. But they will never do anything about it. And that is why the stranglehold here in the West Bank continues every day.

As far as I know there have only been two groups protesting her visit to Palestine: PFLP released a statement and a grassroots group working for a one-state solution. Both made it clear that Rice is not welcome in Palestine.

What is welcome in Palestine is ACTION that can lead to real change here in people’s lives. There are a couple of pieces of things to do that came to my attention in the last 24 hours. The first is a report on Gaza from Amnesty International, one that, of course, refutes every word that came out of that lunatic’s mouth on Al Jazeera the other night. The second is a petition that people are being asked to sign to open up the Rafah crossing to end this siege on the open-air prison that is Gaza. It’s not much. It’s not nearly enough. I don’t know at this point what would be enough.