I watched several of the news shows today - notably the Chris Matthews Show, ABC Sunday Morning, and Face the Nation. I could have caught some of Meet the Press, but does in anyone in their right minds think that the CIA Director is going to come on national TV and say anything near the truth? Geez. Why waste your time, and we didn't.

Of course, the big discussion is about how the Dems are going to resolve the presidential nomination process. One thing that everyone was agreed upon is that Sen. Clinton is going to stay in the race until the end of the primaries - Puerto Rico. I guess that will be true, unless Sen. Obama wins Pennsylvania. If that happens, then Sen. Clinton will feel a lot of political pressure to concede and I think she will. Other than that, although I have endorsed Obama on this site, I think Clinton still has a chance to win, and therefore she has a right to stay in.

If Sen. Clinton wins all of the remaining primaries by large margins, she would be in a position to argue that Sen. Obama has been damaged too badly by the Rev. Wright sermons and his failure to have left that congregation in protest long ago that his viability has been seriously compromised, and that she should be considered as a serious alternative. A lot of the pundits and most of my friends tell me that isn't going to happen. While I do have the audacity to hope that our country has evolved to the point where there is enough understanding about the racial divide in the country to reject the mainstream media soundbite pounding brainwashing that they do by playing the same few second snippets of Wright's firey preaching over and over and over and over again, deep down inside I have my doubts, and wonder if Obama isn't mortally wounded politically. Afterall, when AIPAC gets after a political candidate, especially an African-American one, that they perceive as an "enemy" they have tremendous resources and little regard for nuance in beliefs. It's search and destroy - just look at what they have done to Cynthia McKinney.

Speaking of Cynthia McKinney, I found one discussion on the McLaughlin Group on Friday evening to be totally wrong. It was a discussion about Ralph Nader's run. McLaughlin and the others said that Nader would be best poised to pick up support from disenfranchised voters if it is perceived that Sen. Obama got robbed of the nomination. Personally, I believe that Cynthia McKinney, the presumtive Green Party nominee for president inr many of the major states stands most ready to benefit from such a scenario. I believe that the Democratic leaders that are now starting to pat Sen. Clinton on the back and tell her, "great effort, but time to move on," are worried about. If African-Americans start to leave the Dems in any kind of significant numbers, they will have a hard time taking the presidency. That's just the facts. McLaughlin and his group's failure to even acknowledge the McKinney candidacy when it is in fact relevant to the discussion shows the impact of the major corporate money even on PBS. (yeah, and let's admit it, AIPAC's influence also.)

But one wild card in the future that the mainstream media has been silent on but I have been thinking about is the scenario of when Rev. Wright finally addresses, publicly, all of the criticism of a few snippets of statements played ad naseum on national media while ignoring the 99.9% of the rest of his career where he has been able to build one of the strongest churches in the Second City. He gets no credit for that? Oh, this man is much more powerful than we realize. I have very close contacts that live in the neighborhood of that church, and they tell me that Oprah is a member of that church. Has that been reported? NO! Why not? Selective character assassination? Figure it out for yourself.

But, when I think about it, I think, Rev. Wright is probably spending a lot of time thinking, praying, meditating, whatever you call it. He is going to, sometime soon, I am willing to bet, set up a public appearance, where his safety can be pretty well protected, and he is going to present a speech to respond to all of this. Of course he loves Sen. Obama and his family - he has watched them grow up and Obama become this international powerhouse. I predict that he is going to craft a speech that is going to turn this country up side down, and I think it will be in a positive way overall. He will get media like he never dreamed. When Warhol said "15 minutes of fame" he didn't envision the kind of worldwide press that this event will garner. Wright will have a worldwide forum, which will put his words in international context, and that is a context that the Republicans don't want to deal with. It's because they have ruined our national reputation in the international context. This international context will make it extremely difficult for the Republicans to make this a serious campaign issue without making our international standing even worse - something that most citizens don't want to happen in the related international context of ever absurdly increasing oil prices, an absurdly low dollar, and an every increasing call for taking money from social and infrastructure programs and putting into our military to "protect" us from these increasing "threats." (we already spend so much more on military than the rest of the world combined that it is beyond absurd.)

I predict that this will happen before the Pennsylvania primary. Who knows. I could be totally wrong, but if I was them that's what I'd be planning. A person only gets a setup for the kind of media that Wright would get once in a lifetime. He should take advantage of it.

One last moment of interest in the shows this morning. George Will at one point during the ABC roundtable said that CEO's from companies that get government bailouts should be limited in their salary to that of a G 15 Civil Service rating, which he said was less than $200K a year. Former labor secretary Robert Reich, and columnist Paul Krugman all laughed and said they agreed. Wow! That was a moment to remember.

I made my prediction in May that Obama would get the nomination for the Dems. I was ridiculed by my buddies and political associates pretty good over that prediction. I'm still not ready to claim victory. But it does seem that the momentum is in his court. But race issues are deep and unpredictable. I hope that the young people who don't want this kind of racially divided country and world will turn out in big numbers in Pennsylvania and end it. If Obama wins Pennsylvania, it's over. It could happen, but not without a lot of people working together.