Check out this video of Barack rallying a crowd of over 22,000 people at Penn State University yesterday!




If you attend Penn State or live in State College, head down to our office at 224 South Allen Street to volunteer!  If you live elsewhere in Pennsylvania, find your local office here.

AP - Democratic Sen. Barack Obama has seized on a key feature of voters' economic concerns — rising fuel prices — and is casting himself as the candidate who could bring about energy independence because he is not beholden to energy companies.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama has seized on a key feature of voters' economic concerns — rising fuel prices — and is casting himself as the candidate who could bring about energy independence because he is not beholden to energy companies.

On the eve of the Washington State County caucuses, to which I am a Clinton delegate, I am spending more time thinking about whom will be Senator Obama's VP nominee, rather than how Hillary can pull a rabbit out of the hat. The Obama v.

Day four of the "Road to Change" kicked off this morning with a town hall meeting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  The crowd of more than 2,000 people was, as always, fired up and ready to ask Barack many questions about his plans and policies.

One resident asked Barack how he would take power away from drug companies, and provide funding for substance abuse prevention and mental health programs.  Barack said:

The insurance companies are some of the biggest players in Washington.  That's why it's so important to not have them finance your campaigns.  They've come to dominate the system so much that our healthcare system is not working for the American people.

If you have health insurance now, your biggest problem is rising costs.  In addition, many Americans don't even have health insurance.  My healthcare plan will be available to all Americans, including the self-employed and small businesses, to buy affordable health coverage that is similar to the plan available to Members of Congress.  There will be affordable premiums, co-pays and deductibles, and no American will be turned away from any insurance plan because of illness or pre-existing conditions.  The more prevention we emphasize, the more long term savings we will get in the health care system.

I'm a strong supporter of mental health parity in our healthcare system.  To me that falls in the category of prevention, and it's good for society as a whole.  If you talk to police officers, especially in urban areas, they would tell you that instead of preventing crime, a lot of their time is spent dealing with social services that could have been prevented if we had invested in prevention and treatment.

 

Another person asked Barack about the Patriot Act and protecting civil liberties.  He said:

Most of the damages to civil liberties were not done by the Patriot Act, they were done by Executive Orders under President Bush.  When I'm President, I will call in my Attorney General to look over all the Executive Orders that were issued and I will overturn ones that take away our civil liberties.

...There are some parts of the second Patriot Act that are good. Before the Patriot Act, you couldn't wiretap phones that weren't land-based.  However, this prevented us from being able to wiretap terrorists' phones because people who are engaging in terrorism are not going to use land-based phones.

I taught Constitutional Law for 10 years.  I take the Constitution very seriously and will continue to do so as President.

After the event, I spoke to Mary and William who live here in Lancaster.



William, a retired truck driver and member of the Teamsters union, thought that Barack's answers were "right on target" and really liked what Barack had to say about the economy and education.  He likes how Barack wants to focus on problems with public education and invest more money in public schools.

Mary, who originally supported Senator Clinton, recently switched her support to Senator Obama because she believes that "he will be better able to unify the country."  Mary really liked how Barack explained his policies and plans in ways that were easy for folks to understand.  She said, "he doesn't talk down to people, and he makes it simple so that even children can understand how he's going to address our problems."

Stay tuned for more coverage of the "Road to Change!" 

 

CQPolitics.com - It didn't have the prominence of its presidential primary election earlier this month, but Texas Democrats this past weekend continued their complex and drawn-out process of apportioning national convention delegates to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The deadline to become one of the donors eligible for the upcoming "Dinner with Barack" is tonight at 11:59 p.m. EST. But even more importantly, tonight is the last chance for you to make an impact before the end of the first financial quarter.

If you donate before midnight tonight, your donation will be part of our March financial report to the FEC. This will be the final report before the next series of primaries, and the results will be sized up and interpreted by everyone trying to gauge the strength of our campaign.

As Barack himself explained in an email that went out this morning: 

There's one thing we already know about the March fundraising results: Senator Clinton and Senator McCain have raised a significant portion of their money from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs.

We've never done that, and we never will.

Instead, we will continue to rely on more than a million individual donors who support this campaign by giving only what they can afford.

Change does not come from the top down -- it comes from the bottom up.

So rather than having expensive fundraising dinners to take contributions from Washington lobbyists, I'm hosting a different kind of dinner. If you are chosen from among the donors who give before midnight tonight, I'll get to hear your personal story and ideas about how we can solve America's biggest problems together.

... The pundits are slowly realizing something about our political process that we've known from the beginning: people matter.

In unprecedented numbers, ordinary people are volunteering and donating to this campaign. They're taking true ownership in a way that has never happened before.

When we started this campaign over a year ago, the pundits and the political insiders didn't think it was possible to mobilize ordinary people to reject conventional thinking and fight for real change.

We have a chance to prove them wrong.

Too many political fundraisers are hosted by Washington lobbyists and filled with representatives of special interests.

But our campaign is different.

Our funding comes from a movement of more than one million supporters like you giving whatever they can afford.

 Donate before 11:59 p.m. EDT tonight, and you could join Barack for dinner:   

 

"Clinton state Chairman Garry Mauro conceded that Obama is likely to have a 37-30 advantage in the at-large delegates, which would give Obama a total lead of three pledged delegates over Clinton."

But last week that all seemed to change. Rather than inaccurately portraying the race as a virtual tie, a horserace likely to produce a photo-finish in Denver, the media has begun to confront the harder truth that the Clinton campaign is over.

CQPolitics.com - As she endorsed Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's presidential bid Monday morning, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar rebuked fellow Democrats who are pressuring New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to cede the party's nomination.