Hi Friends: This blog is only periodically active. However, I write nearly every day on two other blogs: http://stevemaloneygop.blogspot.com and http://draftpalin2012.blogspot.com. I hope you'll visit both. The material below was sent out today to my e-mail list, and it mentions both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. Again, thanks to those of you who keep coming back here.

Artemis March is a excellent writer with great insight into the "Obama Phenomenon." She's been a staunch defender of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, although I admit her defense of the latter sounds much more plausible to me than her defense of the former. That aside, her pieces on the campaign and post-election period (in places like NoQuarter and The New Agenda) are very worth reading. She truly understands Obama's appeal -- and it scares her to death. She's worth googling. Her insights also contain the core of a strategy for defeating Obama in 2012 when, yes my friends, he will be running for re-election. :"The dog ate my birth certificate."

"Those caught up in his [Obama's] rhetoric feel like they are part of the "we," and that they are going to be part of something big and wonderful together. Others of us get an unsettling sense that even when he says "we," it's all about him, quite singular. We don't sense individuals in a crowd relating to him (as we do, for example, when Hillary Clinton speaks), but a fused entity lost in him. He is not offering to serve them or fight on their behalf. He is proclaiming that they can become part of him. Many of us get an eerie chill because this is the kind of messianic promise made by cult leaders, not politicians. She says:

"And that's just the beginning of the diametrically opposed reactions to Obama that have deeply divided feminists, progressives, and Democrats, and pitted friends, family members, co-workers, neighbors, networks, interest group members and officials, former political allies, as well as demographic groups against one another. One of the things that keeps us so divided is that his devotees and even many of his converts seem to know so little about him yet consistently reject information that does not fit with their trusting view of him. Many pour out unprecedented-for "progressives"-nastiness, misinformation, and hatred to demean Hillary Clinton and then Sarah Palin, and to intimidate and even threaten those who don't agree with them. Their bullying has dominated campuses, caucuses, and the convention as well as the blogosphere and media. "Truth squads" aim to silence anything but unqualified admiration.

"http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/11/16/anatomy-of-a-divider-part-1a-why-obama-cannot-unify/ [This piece and the related one are very worth reading]