SCRANTON - Barack Obama’s holding another town hall meeting, this time in Scranton at the Dunmore Community Recreation Center.
Caught this as soon as I logged onto the Internet, from CNN.com:
A key Hillary Clinton supporter appeared to be a bit off message during a recent interview with a Canadian radio station.
“If I had to make a prediction right now, I’d say Barack Obama is going to be the next president,” Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said in a Canadian public radio interview this weekend. “I will be stunned if he’s not the next president of the United States.”
Obama just referenced the 3 a.m. phone call, again, connecting it John McCain’s and Hillary Clinton’s vote in 2002 to authorize the Iraq invasion. This time, he’s saying: “Of the three remaining candidates, who has the judgment to know this would be a bad decision.”
4:29 p.m. Hmmmm … Factcheck.org looked into Obama’s claim in a new television ad about not accepting campaign contributions from the oil companies. The found it “misleading.”
Obama has accepted more than $213,000 from individuals who work for companies in the oil and gas industry and their spouses.
Two of Obama’s bundlers are top executives at oil companies and are listed on his Web site as raising between $50,000 and $100,000 for the presidential hopeful.
4:40 p.m.Obama, right after saying there are disenchanted Republicans who are mad at Bush for intervening in Iraq and for boosting the national debt to $9 trillion, said Democrats needed to change, too. He said they need to be more open and practical and less dogmatic.
On health care, Obama said if a Republican came to him with an idea that can cover everyone and cost less than Obama’s plan, he’d welcome them to the table.
“I’d be willing to give them a listen,” he said. “I’m not wedded to a particular way of doing it.”
4:56 p.m. Obama on immigration: We will not send the 12 million illegals home.
He says inorder to do that, it would require us to use all our law enforcement officials who would otherwise pursue murderers, robbers and so forth. His argument is logistically and financially, this is impractical and such proposed solutions are thrown out there strictly for political purposes.
His plan would be to force illegals to pay a fine, pay back taxes, learn English and go to the back of the line to earn citizenship. Standing ovation for that one.
5:05 p.m. In Pennsylvania polls, Obama’s performed better than Clinton than with voters on the issue of Iraq. And I’ve noticed during question-and-answer sessions with these crowds during the last three days, he’s consistently taken answers on infrastructure, federal funding cuts, immigration, foreign aid back to the Iraq issue. Why? Because he’s trying to drive home the point that a war costing $10 billion a month and forcing the United States to borrow from other countries like China and Mexico is pinching funding for other problems.
