Obama Gives Back All Money from Lobbyists

In an effort to change the system, Obama does the unthinkable:

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign has returned more than $50,000 in political contributions after discovering the donors were lobbyists.

Obama, who has pledged to change the ways of Washington, has repeatedly said he will not accept money from lobbyists or from special interest political action committees.

"I am concerned about the role of lobbyists and campaign donations generally in our politics," Obama told The Associated Press while campaigning in Florence, S.C. "That's part of the reason I don't take PAC money and I'm not taking federal lobbyist money in this campaign."

Tommy Thompson Declares Candidacy

Tommy Thompson today made official his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination.

Who is Tommy Thompson? The Washington Post offers this:

Thompson billed himself as a "reliable conservative, one who puts principles into practice." The former four-term governor of Wisconsin and ex-secretary of Health and Human Services in President Bush's administration pledged to apply his experience to help "get America and our party back on track."

But so wait. Who is Tommy Thompson?

Well, up to about three weeks ago, he was the chair of the VeriChip Corporation--a company he took HUGE, HUGE sums of money from during his stint as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

So I guess the better question is what is VeriChip and what is Tommy Thompson's relation to it?

In a nutshell, VeriChip is a company that evolved from those RFID chips they implanted into dogs so their owners could find them when they got lost. They extended this to its logical conclusion--let's put them in people! Obviously. Their tagline is "RFID for people!" You know, as if there is nothing wrong with this. Alright.

So this will be literally the first and only presidential candidate in American history to have a piece of corporate spyware embedded in his body.

Anyway the point is that this man has a lot of invested interest in the implantable microchip. He has it in his own body. He has 150,000 shares in the company. As a rational human being (and seeing as though his platform is health care reform), do you wonder what will happen in regards to these stupid little chips? Does it take a considerably strong imagination to conceive of mandatory injections--for the sake of, oh, I don't know, health record information? Sounds innocuous, right?

But think about it. You have HIV. You have cancer. Your employer gets hold of one of these RFID readers and knows your entire medical history.

But what if we put in criminal records in the chip? Educational records? Political party? A lot of shit can be stored on an RFID chip.

Grumble, grumble, of course, but I find Thompson's private investments to be considerably troubling given the amount of political influence a president would hold over the American people. It's worth thinking about.

Obama Calls for Post-Boomer Politics

On the generational divide between Obama and Clinton candidacies and the dispute of politics:

Mr. Obama says he recognizes that the flashpoints of the 60s — war, racism, inequality, the relations between the sexes — still animate American politics and society and remain largely unresolved. And he acknowledges, as a child of a white Kansan mother and black Kenyan father, that his own prominence and prospects would have been impossible without the struggles of those who marched in Selma and Washington. But he argues that America faces new challenges that require a new political paradigm.

...

Modern presidential campaigns are essentially character tests, and for 20 years or longer the cultural and political divides of the 60s served as presumed signposts to a candidate’s character. Did he protest the war, trip to Hendrix, march in solidarity with women? Or enroll in R.O.T.C., rush a fraternity, join a church? As a young man, Mr. Obama did not have to make many of those choices, and he now has an opportunity to define himself on his own terms and not be instantly caricatured based on personal decisions he made four decades ago. (He has, of course, acknowledged some marijuana and cocaine use in his youth; that does not seem to have dimmed his prospects.)

“Where you were on these issues really told people who you were,” said Chris Lehane, a former Clinton White House official who is now a political consultant in California. “But 2008 will represent a hinge moment in generational politics, not just because of the prominence of a post-boomer candidate but because this will be the first cycle when a whole new range of issues as big, if not bigger, than the big issues that defined the boomers will be front and center: Iraq, the war on terror, global warming, energy, technology and globalization.”