From MoveOn.org’s townhall forum on climate change…

…on carbon auctions…

…on comparison to other candidates…

…on liquid coal…

When was the last time you heard of a Republican campaign office being burglarized? Exactly.

Obama’s operation in Davenport, Iowa, was hit two nights ago, and by some fairly literate thieves: “Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, says that two laptop computers and some campaign literature were taken.”

Memo to future GOP “plumbing” squads: if you’re looking to simulate a routine break-in by hapless local criminals, leave the literature behind. Just a word to the wise.

Barack explains how he came to a decision to oppose the Iraq War in 2002 during a sit-down with the Des Moines Register editorial board on Monday, June 18…

Even Bill Clinton can’t halt the Obama show
Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom
… will carry Bill and Hillary Clinton in one direction across the state, venue of the all-important first primary caucuses, while Barack Obama, …

Bill Clinton was undoubtedly the master of what Americans call "retail politics" - typified by campaigning in Iowa - during the television age. But this is now the internet age and Mr Obama is already the hero of the YouTube generation that gets its news and organises much of its social activities via the internet. As of yesterday, the Illinois senator had 97,954 "friends" registered on the networking site Facebook, nearly five times as many as Mrs Clinton.

Among many Democrats, there is the gnawing fear that Hillary Clinton remains too divisive and shrill a figure to be elected president. Polls, moreover, show a pervasive dissatisfaction, bordering on disgust, with all politicians in Washington, where Mrs Clinton has been for the past decade and a half.

Mr Obama, who has the rare, uncanny knack of being almost impossible to dislike, has been in the American capital for barely two years. His campaign manager speaks of an "enthusiasm gap" that he enjoys over Mrs Clinton.

Americans are cynical about politicians, deeply fearful about the future and bracing themselves for defeat in Iraq. In these strange times, the "experience gap" the Clintons are highlighting as they tour Iowa this week may work in Mr Obama’s favour, if the yearning for something truly different trumps deference and respect for a proven track record.

Obama kicks off Fourth of July tour
DesMoinesRegister.com - Des Moines,IA,USA
Fifteen minutes was all it took to persuade Sylvia Mills-Echols to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. …

Fifteen minutes was all it took to persuade Sylvia Mills-Echols to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, started his Fourth of July tour through Iowa on Tuesday by standing on a vintage pickup truck festooned with flag bunting on the playground of Hawthorne Elementary School in Keokuk.

A crowd of about 300 people cheered during Obama’s short speech, which focused on uniting Americans behind the goals of withdrawing troops from Iraq, providing universal health care and improving education funding.

"I wasn’t a supporter until today," said Mills-Echols, 54, a teacher from Keokuk.

Obama’s Newcomer Appeal Helps Capture Hearts of Internet Donors
Bloomberg - USA
This year, Barack Obama is picking up where Howard Dean and John McCain left off. Illinois’s Democratic senator raised $10.3 million online in the last …

Obama has raised more online than some of his rivals, such as New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and Senators Christopher Dodd and Joseph Biden, have raised from all sources combined.

While neither McCain nor Dean, Obama’s predecessors as online favorites, won their parties’ nominations, rapid changes in technology make comparisons between elections difficult, Corrado said. The rise of social-networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook gives Obama access to more organizing and mobilization tools than McCain and Dean had.

"The campaign is now very conscious of starting to translate that support into votes,'’ Corrado said.

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Since January 2007, the Barack the House Link Party has compiled news items that highlight the many reasons why Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the United States.

And it doubles as a resource for people working to ensure that accurate and positive information about Barack gets out to the public. If you’re interested in helping out with this effort, please consider joining the Obama Rapid Response group on my.barackobama.com.

The news: Barack Obama’s campaign raised around $32.5 million dollars last quarter. In so doing, they managed not only to best the Clinton campaign by four or five million dollars total, and not only to best the Clintons in primary dollars for the second quarter running.

The Obama campaign also managed to shatter their own stunning individual-donor numbers from the first quarter: Obama received donations from over 100,000 Americans last time out, but this time that number spiked to around 158,000.

Which makes for a total just shy of 260,000 individual donors so far, with six months to go until the first primary. And 90% of those donors can be resolicited, all but ensuring a very stable source of grassroots funding into the forseeable future.

Not too shabby when you consider that Obama is competing head to head with both Clintons and the fundraising network they built over nearly 40 years in politics.

And it’s worth asking: why are so many Americans giving so much to this relatively unknown Senator from Illinois? Yes, he’s a gifted orator; yes, he has a demonstrated ability to inspire audiences, voters.

And yes, he’s picked some key issues as his focus over the last two years: stopping voter harrassment and ensuring equal access to the ballot; Iraq redeployment legislation that Russ Feingold endorsed over anything put forward by the other top-tier Democrats.

But there’s clearly more at work here than that.

And I honestly believe that something more boils down to message. It’s not simply that Obama is Not Hillary, but that his message thus far has been nearly the reverse of hers.

Both Clintons have hammered a single point home: that Hillary has endured every sort of attack, and proven her ability to respond. As Bill Clinton says again and again and again in his fundraising letters, “You know Hillary will never let a swift boat-style attack go unanswered.”

Hillary herself tells audiences, “Bill and I beat the Republican machine before, and we can beat it again.”

And sure, everyone on the Left remembers John Kerry and the missed opportunities of 2004. And everyone remembers the trench warfare of the ‘90s.

But that’s the point: a majority of us remember those days, and don’t want to go back.

When you listen to Bill and Hillary, you realize that these are two people who were deeply, deeply affected — which is to say traumatized, scarred — by their punishment at the hands of a vengeful Republican Congress.

Can you imagine Laura Bush being forced to go to Capitol Hill to testify? Not likely.

And Hillary and Bill Clinton fought back, and in the process of saving their own political skins, they saved us from the worst of what used to be quaintly called the Contract on America. But that warfare took its toll.

And that, more than anything, strikes me as a red flag in the Clinton campaign. In addition to embracing Bill Clinton’s legacy, the go-go 90’s and all that comes with it, the campaign has made a conscious decision to polarize the race early as a way of firing up the Democratic base.

When you get down to it, there’s something unreasoned and not altogether pleasant in the approach. Like a Hatfield reading nasty things off a teleprompter about the McCoys: after a while, it begins to say every bit as much about the Hatfields as it does about their blood enemies.

Now, you can make the argument — and certainly more than a few have this cycle — that Obama’s message of conciliation is substance-free, or patently hypocritical, or even disturbingly naïve.

When the Clinton camp vows that Hillary won’t be Swiftboated, the reference to Kerry is more or less explicit, but the implicit reference is to Obama, and current questions about his ability to handle the rough-and-tumble.

And those questions will need to be answered.

But given the choice between a candidate who predicts all-out war — and sells herself and her husband as partisan Terminators — and a candidate who imagines not peace but something more like détente, hundreds of thousands of donating Democrats and Independents are choosing to imagine too.