Delicious Irony?

So... close to my house is one of the old fashioned A&W Drive Ins where you park your car and order from there. They have great burgers and root beer and it is a favorite destination of my family during the summer.

Here in Wisconsin we've been bombarded with snow. It's been over 70 inches at the time of this writing and winter doesn't look ready to go away just yet. On February 18th we got a ton of rain to go with the snow which only weighed the snow down more. The weight crushed the overhang of the restaurant and destroyed it.

Now I'm sure the owner's insurance will help him out here (after all Republicans totally love and trust those good guys at Big Insurance) but the funny part is that February 19th was the Wisconsin Primary and as it turned out the A&W owner was a staunch Republican who supported Mike Huckabee and decided to use his business to advertise this fact.

Unfortunately for him and Huckabee, February 18th and 19th didn't go too well.

MSNBC: Rain Causes Flooding Across Southeast Wisconsin (A&W Mentioned)

Washington Post: Obama, McCain Roll to Wins in Wisconsin (Ouch! 55%-37%)

Obama it is...

Okay so I am late to the party but I am now finally openly supporting Barack Obama.

He was not my first choice. My personal choice would have been a run by Al Gore. He chose to stay on the sidelines. Then after months and months of deliberation I finally decided on Edwards. I have to admit I liked Edwards message but as Russ Feingold put it so succinctly it was actually Feingold's platform and Edwards hadn't proven he would deliver on it.

Still the message had hope.

Now I liked Obama's speeches but his stances are far more conservative than mine and I have to admit that after working for Gore and Kerry I am in a position where giving Republicans any built in advantages with their all white-all male base scares me a little. I wrote extensively about my displeasure over Democratic candidates on this blog especially in the wake of Edwards' exit from the primary.

My fear and I think this is legitimate considering the last two Presidential elections, is that the Republican media will use Race ("The nation wasn't ready for a black president") or Gender ("The nation wasn't ready for a female/another Clinton as President") as a way to explain it when the GOP tries to use their voting machine maker ties to steal the White House.

To me personally I could give a fuck. I just want a candidate that is close to my views. Black, White, Latino, Asian, Gay, Male, Female... I could care less. Their views is what makes my mind up for me.

By successfully spinning it they are able to take the anger out of Americans and prevent any sort of real revolt against the system and corrupt players involved.

Al Gore won in 2000. But instead of cover the corruption that Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and the Supreme Court partook in to steal that election they played Gore's loss as legitimate and said it was his cardboard personality that cost him the race.

John Kerry won in 2004, but instead of covering how Ken Blackwell in Ohio purposely prevented votes in black and Democratic communities thanks to voter roll purges or allocation of voting machines, not to mention did not cover blatant voting machine number switches that were covered by local media, they were able to paint Kerry as a weak flip flopper who lost because of an ongoing war in spite of his superior military record and Bush's AWOL status from his military duty.

My fear is they'll steal it again. Think I'm paranoid? Do some fucking research. Who owns the majority of the mainstream media? Republicans and GOP connected companies. Who owns and manufacturers voting machines? Companies like Diebold (whose owner publicly declared that his machines would deliver Ohio for Bush in 2004... and they did by no surprise) or ES&S (owned partially by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

So it took me awhile to come around. If Obama was more liberal I'd have been on board to begin with. I love his speeches. I can see why people see him in the same light as a Bobby Kennedy. I still wish he'd actually be more liberal in his positions and wish he'd disavow his association with anti-gay preachers whom he campaigned with in South Carolina.

But nobody's perfect. And in the campaign world you take who is closest to your views. Hillary Clinton and the Clintons as a whole may be hated by Republicans but they helped Bush dig the mass grave for the poor in advance and he chose to do the executions.

-NAFTA
-Media Consolidation
-Welfare Reform
-Don't Ask, Don't Tell
-DOMA

Five major reasons I will never vote for another Clinton by choice again. If she's the nominee, it will not be by choice that I vote for her. Anything is better than another Republican President.

Something happened tonight though. Obama carried Red States. While he probably won't win those in November he can make them closer than in years past. Hillary won states that would go Democratic anyway, well aside from Oklahoma and Tennessee. Arkansas is definitely in play (although Huckabee could swing that to the GOP if he's McCain's running mate).

I discount Tennessee though as racism because they had a pretty terrific centrist DLC Democrat in Harold Ford and when the Republican candidate Corker ran racist ads pretending to have him sleep with a white woman (as if that's an issue) they ate it up and voted for Corker. Ford is not my guy, he's way too right-leaning for me. For Tennessee, he was perfect and had a big name. But he lost because Tennesseeans are still racist. Well in my opinion anyway.

Obama showed he can put some of these red states in play. If he can, we own this race. To me that would put my fears to rest.

And finally I can wholeheartedly support Obama. I just needed confirmation to help me overcome this fear.

Now let's go win the rest of these primary states.

-Rp