The TimesOnline says the right wing is set to attack Barack Obama s the ultimate "liberal socialist" in the mold of George McGovern.

LEADING Republicans believe they can trounce Barack Obama in the presidential election by tarring him as a shady Chicago socialist. They are increasingly confident that his campaign could collapse by the time their attack machine has finished with him.

Sample attack:

Obama has the voting record of a “hard-left” socialist, according to [Grover]Norquist, from his time in the Illinois state legislature to the US Senate. He was recently judged by the nonpartisan National Journal to have the most liberal voting record in 2007 of any senator.

“It will be easy to portray him as even harder-left than Hillary,” said Norquist. “Hillary could lose the election, but Obama could collapse. People already know Hillary and she is not popular, but the disadvantage for Obama is that Republicans can teach people who don’t know him who he is.”

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As Congress haggles over a new FISA bill and President Bush has threatened a veto, here comes a new terror alert.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security sent a bulletin Friday to state and local law enforcement authorities advising them to watch for potential retaliatory strikes by Hezbollah, one day after the Lebanese militia group vowed to avenge the death of a top commander by attacking Israeli and Jewish targets around the world.

Even though the bulletin says it's unlikely Hezbollah would attack in the U.S., the FBI told the 18,000 state and law enforcement agency recipients of its bulletin:

...it was intensifying its domestic intelligence-gathering efforts to identify any potential Hezbollah threats in the United States in the aftermath of Tuesday's car-bomb assassination of Imad Mughniyah in Syria.

The targets of the new activities:[More...]

Rhode Island holds its primary March 4. It's another state with an open primary, meaning Independents can vote in the Democratic contest.

This may not bode well for Hillary Clinton, even though recent polls have her ahead of Barack Obama in the state (poll results here (pdf)) and the Clintons are very popular in the state. There's been a surge in voter registrations..

About 6,800 of the voters who registered in the last four months are Democrats, 1,900 are Republicans and 12,000 are independents, who can vote in either party's primary.

The new voters this year are also young voters. About 20,000 are between the ages of 18 and 29, the Journal reported.

Rhode Island has 21 delegates. Hillary will campaign there Feb. 24. It's true that Independents and young voters tend to favor Obama. But, this statement by an Obama organizer at Brown University is just silly:

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By Big Tent Democrat

The floor is yours. Go Gators!

This is an Open Thread.

By Big Tent Democrat

Even the Media gets that there is a problem here:

Earlier this month, speaking at Tulane University, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, said this about the attacks coming his way from Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY:

"You challenge the status quo and suddenly the claws come out," Obama said.

The CLAWS come out? Really?

Then yesterday Obama told reporters who had asked about Clinton's latest attack ad, "I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she's feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal." . . .

Jake Tapper of ABC notes that even NBC reporters noticed the problem:

The bad news is voting machines malfunctioned in Harlem and many Obama votes didn't get counted. The good news: It's being rectified.

The tip-off: Several Harlem precincts recorded 0 votes for Obama.

That anomaly was not unique. In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district.

Neither campaign nor experts attribute the errors to anything but human error and the way the ballots were laid out.

Wisconsin's Democratic primary, open to Independents, is Tuesday. Hillary Clinton is now campaigning in the state. Here's her schedule:

• 02/16: Join Hillary at the Brat Stop
• 02/17: Join Hillary "Solutions for America" Town Hall in De Pere
• 02/17: "Solutions for America" Rally in Madison with Hillary

Both Hillary and Obama will attend and speak at the Founders Day Gala tonight at 6pm CT in Milwaukee.

Here's the exit polling (pdf) from the 2004 Wisconsin primary between John Kerry and John Edwards. NAFTA was a big issue.

The latest polling by Research 2000 has Obama ahead, but within the margin of error. [More...]

By Big Tent Democrat

When an A-List progressive blogger can write that Chris Matthews is right in his sexism and misogyny, via digby, then something is rotten in the Denmark that is the progressive blogs.

Jamison Foser explains why:

Matthews lashed out at the Clinton campaign, saying that Clinton should "get rid of the kneecappers that work for her," referring to her communications staff who go "after the press." Matthews added, "The kneecapping hasn't worked. Her press relations are lousy. ... If all you do is intimidate and punish and claim you'll get even relentlessly, people of all kinds of politicians -- and in all fairness, the press -- human reaction to intimidation is screw you."

For the record, Matthews' overt hostility toward Hillary Clinton cannot honestly be described as a reaction to how her presidential campaign has treated the press: More than six years ago, Matthews said of Clinton, "I hate her. I hate her. All that she stands for." More to the point, Matthews' apparent blaming of the Clinton campaign for his own sexism is the clearest indication yet that he doesn't "get it" and that MSNBC doesn't care that he doesn't get it.

(Emphasis supplied.) And a lot of A-List male bloggers do not get it. Do not hold your breath waiting for any of them to comment on this . We have a malign acceptance of sexism, and it extends well beyond the Media.

U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Brimmer in Wyoming has overturned a state death sentence and ordered a new trial for inmate James Harlow who was convicted of murdering a prison guard in 1997. Among the myriad of reasons:

In a 230-page ruling, Brimmer stated that Harlow was denied a fair trial in state court because conflicts between his original lawyer, Keith Goody, and the former state public defender Sylvia Hackl. The judge said that Goody was made to fear he would be fired for doing his job and insisting on more resources to defend Harlow.

[More...]

Two men in Mississippi, wrongfully convicted of murdering a child, have been released from prison after a decade, thanks to the work of the Innocence Project and local lawyers.

The cause of these wrongful convictions: fraudulent evidence. Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project says:

"You have a local forensic dentist who fabricated evidence in both these cases to get two innocent men convicted."

Here's more from the Innocence Project on the clearing and release of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks.

Update: Radley Balko at Reason has an update on Mississippi's woeful forensics system.

Harris County, Texas (Houston) has the highest execution rate in Texas. If it were a state, it would have the the second highest execution rate in the nation.

Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal resigned amidst a personal conduct scandal yesterday. Bye, Bye Chuck.

As TChris wrote here last month:

There are many good reasons to believe that Chuck Rosenthal should not be the district attorney in Harris County, Texas ... or anywhere else. He leads the nation in his aggressive use of the death penalty and refused to change that stance in the face of evidence that the Houston crime lab was falsifying data. When a grand jury asked Rosenthal to recuse himself from the investigation of that scandal on the ground that he was up to his neck in it, he declined. He defended his office's reliance on false testimony to support a conviction although he had the good grace to apologize for one of the many wrongful convictions for which his office is responsible.

Voters like Rosenthal because of his image as a "tough prosecutor" -- they apparently think it's more important to look tough than to be right, or fair. It may not be Rosenthal's official actions, but his racist emails, that finally bring him down.

There's also his incredibly racist e-mails: [More...]

By Big Tent Democrat

I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she's feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal.

- Barack Obama, February 15, 2008

In a campaign marked by news coverage unrelenting in its sexism and misogyny, especially from NBC, the last thing we can afford is sexism from the frontrunning candidate. Barack Obama needs to apologize for this remark.

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