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Clinton supporter Cisneros rips Texas caucus system

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DeepModem Mom Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-02-08 10:21 AM
Original message
Clinton supporter Cisneros rips Texas caucus system
CNN: March 1, 2008
Clinton supporter rips Texas caucus system

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (CNN) – Former HUD secretary and Hillary Clinton supporter Henry Cisneros excoriated Texas’ arcane electoral process as “a great burden on voters” and said that losing the delegate count on Tuesday because of the state caucuses would be “exceedingly unfair.”

Cisneros was speaking to a group of Clinton volunteers who had gathered on Saturday morning at Fox Tech High School to train for Tuesday evening’s state caucuses, which follow a day of primary voting. One-third of the state’s pledged delegates are allocated through the caucuses, while the rest are determined by the day's primary vote. Clinton herself rallied the troops after Cisneros, formerly a mayor of San Antonio, spoke.

“This is not the ideal way,” he told an audience made up of Clinton volunteers from 20 or so area counties. “Ideally it would just be a straight out vote, and that would determine who gets the delegates, but they created this intricate system in Texas, which frankly is a great burden on voters.”

Cisneros said a scenario in which Clinton wins the primary vote, but loses the evening caucuses, would be “exceedingly unfair” and warned against being “outpowered” by Barack Obama precinct teams, who have overwhelmed their Clinton counterparts in earlier caucus-based contests, outcomes he described as “tragic.”

As volunteers leafed through instructions on recruiting 25-member precinct teams, Cisneros told them, “we cannot throw away our hard work and our win by not being there at the caucuses.”

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/01/clinton-supporter-rips-texas-caucus-system/
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Avalux Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-02-08 10:27 AM
Response to Original message
1. Um....Henry.....you loser.......
His speaking out about our process at this point is beyond rediculous. Henry Cisneros is a native San Antonian; born and raised politician. He enjoyed great success until a situation similar to Bill Clinton's forced him to resign from political office. Bad scene here in San Antonio.

Here's my point though. This system has been in place since 1973. Henry certainly had ample opportunity to work towards changing it
over the past 35 years and didn't. He didn't speak out when his friend Bill Clinton reaped the benefits of our caucus system in 2000.

Feigning outrage at this point is nothing more than political maneuvering. It's clear Henry's loyalty lies with one particular candidate instead of the Texas Democratic Party, which is where it should be.
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ChairmanAgnostic Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-02-08 10:30 AM
Response to Reply #1
2. 35 yrs of experience for no change. Sounds damn familiar.
maybe he ripped that off from some prior campaign, like a Red Phone scare tactic?
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Avalux Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-02-08 10:33 AM
Response to Reply #2
5. Yeah. I've been watching Henry for years.
He had a a lot of promise but ended up embroiled in one scandal after another. I Don't think much of him and don't trust anything he says.
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ChairmanAgnostic Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-02-08 12:20 PM
Response to Reply #5
7. it happens to a lot of good people.
I've lost count how many promising pols in Illinois were touched by the dark side and end up indicted.
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GodlessBiker Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-02-08 10:30 AM
Response to Original message
3. So, why haven't you complained about this months and months ago?
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Avalux Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-02-08 10:31 AM
Response to Reply #3
4. See my post - years and years ago. n/t
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mike_c Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-02-08 10:45 AM
Response to Original message
6. the time to protest the system's unfairness is BEFORE you agree to participate...
Edited on Sun Mar-02-08 10:45 AM by mike_c
...in it, methinks. Senator Clinton and her supporters are expressing some sour grapes, it seems.
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MarthaTurner Donating Member (3 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-04-08 10:55 AM
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8. A Must Read For Hillary.
Look at the horrible crap that this Obama website is saying about Mrs. Clinton. She should be made aware of this as soon as possible before the entire campaign falls off the cliff because of the rotten lies on this blog called www.matrix-evolutions.com. It starts with:

We endorse Barack Obama as the next president of the United States.
This is the most important election America will ever have, possibly the last if Obama is not elected.

The Revolutionary Party derives its politics from the equation for evolution we have imprinted on the flag. This function, which underpins our thinking, has been accepted by science for the last eighty years and we trust in it as well as true religious believers trust in God. Mathematics doesn’t lie. An analysis based on the equation indicates that the so-called war on terror will inexorably ratchet up to world war, a genuinely terrifying thought given a world heavily armed with nuclear weapons. For that reason we support Barack Obama as the only real anti-war candidate.

Hillary? In our opinion, she is the more all round competent candidate and has been upended by Obama to a great degree because he is trim and youthfully enthusiastic. But before Hillary came Bill, which should cause us to stop and think.

The value of our mathematics based analysis lies in its ability to objectively distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys. The technical aspects of the analysis make it slow reading for those without a science background, so we will give its conclusions first here and save the detailed reasoning for later.

Put simply, the Clintons are what is known in the political science textbooks as populists, those who achieve political success by playing to the people, to their needs and pains and wants. But there is a difference between patter and delivery. We are all familiar with artificial soda. The Clintons are like an artificial banana split, very likable, but with no real food value.

Recall President Clinton and his first lady. Then America’s favorite political couple sang a song of health care delivery, but delivered rather on prison construction and on the number of police put on the streets. The Pew Report that came out the end of February said that one American in a hundred is locked up in a prison or jail. To put this into better perspective, the report said that America has 7 million people in jail or otherwise under the control of the penal system. This is 16 times more per capita than the communist People’s Republic of China, where, we are told, there is no freedom or human rights. Clinton legislature took America to the highest prison population in the world, a statistic historically associated with police states like Stalinist Russia and apartheid South Africa. This is not to say that America is a police state, of course, for if it were you’d have heard about it on the evening news.

Also notably absent in the media is another creation of the Clintons, the near million homeless people that wander the streets of Sacramento and Las Vegas and our other big cities. This sharp upsurge in homelessness came about inarguably as a result of Clinton legislature that ended LBJ’s war on poverty by terminating effective social protections for out of work people, something many more will become more familiar with as the stock market collapses from the cost of the war and the recession takes hold in full force.

What the Clintons did with prisons and police and welfare protection and NAFTA and failed to do with health care very much pleased the moneyed class and the conservatives. Our technical analysis objectively shows the Republican social and fiscal conservatives to be bad guys because their relationship to the working class and middle class is basically that of master to servant. This fact is also muted by populist politicians like the Clintons whose tax returns, were they to be made public, would show that they are members in good standing of the moneyed class too.

This deep secret of class control and abuse is also kept under wraps by the media, whose personalities are hired and controlled by the moneyed class. Other than the few raisins stirred into in the poison muffin of TV to make it seem fair, media people who don’t keep the secret of class control and the unhappiness of most of us that derives from it don’t last long on their jobs or are not hired to begin with.

The ones who do make the cut endlessly spout the lies of the so-called American Dream in one form or another. The power of the media to control people’s thoughts and actions in conformity with American ideology is difficult to assess for people who get their information primarily from the media, which is most people. This power of media to control thinking was dramatically illustrated towards the end of WWII in Germany just before the fall of Berlin as the Allied and Russian troops converged on the city. Most Germans even in those final moments still believed Hitler’s media propaganda that they were still winning the war.

In our own times, hidden by the media from public sight are facts about life readily observable even by doing something as simple as riding public transportation. Here the observer notes that the common people are unhappy, fear and personal failure showing clearly on their faces and in their behaviors. This effect of control and abuse in the workplace and at school is not made clear from TV where all the media personalities act through their endlessly smiling and bubbly days to show to the audience that America really is a happy place, the steady stream of mass murders in schools, workplaces and malls not able to be kept out of the news notwithstanding.

And much as the ugly facts of our present existence are air brushed out in the media, so also is the future we realistically face. Not made clear is that the dollar is fast becoming as worthless as the paper it is printed on to keep the war going. Or that the stock market and the housing market will soon halve their value giving those who have been spared homelessness and jail to date a taste of these hells on earth firsthand. The Clintons will not care because they are a part of the apparatus that brought us to where we are at in America today.

Hillary should be given credit for being an ambitious and a profoundly adept social climber and a very talented actress, our American Evita. We have no problem applauding her for her personal successes. But she is never going to go against the wishes of the money class that created her and Bill and supported these two as their adorable political puppets. She will not stop this war.

Yes, she says she will, despite her voting for the war. And, of course, there are those of you that think that Hillary would never lie to us. But Bill said he would never lie to us, too. And he said it so well that I yet don’t believe he lied to us about Monica. Monica who? She never existed. That is how good an actor Bill is. And this suggests that his mate is no less of a self-serving liar.

Of course, transgressions are relative. Yes, the flag pin wearing conservatives are more disgusting than the Clintons. Who of us is not totally revulsed by the smell of a public rest room emanating from the Bible squeezing, boy hustling conservative senator from Idaho caught with his pants down? Nobody has caught Bill at something that viscerally gross yet. Still, what character is there in a first family when the head of the most powerful nation on earth sticks a penile object, not even his own, up some college kid’s vagina? If the Clinton presidency were a movie, they would not be playing the Star Spangled Banner in the background during that particular scene.

And to be completely and totally unkind – and very logical -- doesn’t it make you wonder about the guy’s wife? Really, does any intelligent female over the age of 22 think that Hillary actually felt bad about Bill and Monica? Judging from observables, our educated guess is that is Hillary is lesbian, a married one, not that unusual in modern America. If Hillary was mad about anything with Monica, it was that she didn’t get a shot at her too. Watch one of her girlfriends surfacing soon to clarify Hillary’s preference as to penile object.

The smiling Clintons are so phony and odd in this area that one would not be surprised to find that the unconfident Chelsea Clinton developed as such as a result of some form of child abuse. Chelsea does not look happy. Neglect by the Clintons is hardly to be overlooked as this ambitious pair had better things to pay attention to in their furious political rise to the top than their daughter. And sexual abuse is not to be totally ruled out either given Bill’s sexual tastes.

The best bet to end the war and end our American style police state is to vote for Barack Obama. Not for Hillary, who is sufficiently self-serving and devious that one would not be surprised to see her team up with Huckabee on a national reconciliation ticket to satisfy her political ambition. Hopefully Obama will not be removed by the ruling class by assassination or some such stratagem. But if so, and we dearly hope not, the Revolutionary Party is ready to offer a sensible replacement candidate. If enough people get in touch to say they are interested, I did run for President in 2000 as a write-in candidate and would consider it again. But only in the event that Obama is derailed by the conservatives, which we very much fear because these people would do anything to retain power…

Please quick tell somebody on Hillary’s campaign staff what is going on with these trashy Obama sites.

Martha Turner
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aquart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-05-08 02:41 AM
Response to Original message
9. Well, it is a weird little system.
Basically, caucuses are structured so that the most convinced Moonie will be able to override merely rational caucus goers.

But having BOTH a primary AND caucuses? STRANGE.
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