This page is in chronological order,
beginning in January 2007 and ending January 19th, 2009.
Change
Did you know that Obama finishes EVERY campaign speech with "we will change
America ... and we will change the WORLD" ...
The
Phantom
The real Obama
does not exist. We learned that from his book. The man
is a talking identity crisis -- a stew of sentimental politics --
inspired vignettes and platitudes that he reads from a teleprompter.
However, his wife, the Reverends, Rezko and the terrorists, Ayers and Dohrn, are
real.
Here We Go
Obama
says he is taking a first step toward running for president next
year.
"I will be filing papers today to create a presidential exploratory
committee," the Illinois Democrat said, adding that he will announce his
final decision February 10 from his hometown of Chicago.
Obama’s
announcement also included this gem: "I know that I haven’t spent a
lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been there long
enough to know that the ways of Washington must change."
Even Jesse Jackson was asking, "What did he say?"
I Am Not A Muslim
The Obama Exploratory Committee released the following
statement, "To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was
not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United
Church of Christ in Chicago.
This statement is
amended by the campaign on March 14th, to say, "Obama
was never a practicing Muslim."
Is it clear yet? Maybe not, because the official Obama 08
website currently contains this statement: "Obama Has Never Been A Muslim."
This demonstrates the fundamental problem with Obama, his
dissimulation. One just doesn't know what to believe.
To Dr. Danielle Allen and the
Washington Post -- Obama started
the Muslim rumor.
I Am
The One
On February 10th, 2007, Obama,
standing in front of a cheering crowd, formally
announces he is a candidate for the Office of the
President of the United States of America.
Obama told the crowd he would tackle problems like poor schools,
economic hardships and oil dependence. He also implored the crowd
to demand that there be "universal health care in America by the end of
the president's first term."
He called the Iraq war a "tragic mistake" and said, "It's time to admit
that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement
that lies at the heart of someone else's civil war. That's why I
have a plan that will bring our combat troops home by March of 2008.
In his speech, he lauds what he called the
founding fathers' "genius" in creating a system of government that can
be changed.
Please notice, the change Obama speaks of is changing the
system of government.
So, when you hear Obama speak of change, remember what he is speaking
about -- changing the system of government!
I Am Not
Prime Minister John Howard of Australia
blasts Obama, saying his policy of withdrawing troops from Iraq
will destabilize the entire Middle East.
"I think he's wrong. I think that will just encourage those who
want to completely destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a
victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory."
"If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March
2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for
Obama but also for the Democrats."
I'm
Wasted
Obama
says that the lives of more than 3,000
American soldiers killed in Iraq had been "wasted." (video)
Within a day, Obama
apologizes for saying troops' lives were "wasted."
Lemme Bum
One Of Those
Maureen Dowd writes that
Barack Obama looked as if he needed a smoke and he needed it bad.
So there he was, trying to meet the deep, inexhaustible needs of both
Iowa activists and the global press behemoth on his first swing across
the state, while giving up cigarettes.
He was a tad testy.
"I’ve been chewing Nicorette all day long," he told reporters at a press
conference in Ames on Sunday.
The question begs asking, how much of a striver can he be if he's also a smoker?
Loose
Ends
Obama
begins the process of cleaning up his loose ends by
paying $400 in parking tickets to
Cambridge and $71 in excise taxes to Somerville for fines and taxes
incurred while he was living in Massachusetts and attending Harvard Law School during the early 1980's.
Obama’s operatives paid 17 outstanding tickets in Cambridge for a
vehicle with Illinois plates.
Demonstrating how Democratic politicians help each other, the two cities
wave the penalties and fees on the 17 year old tax bill, which I can
tell you from personal experience, are considerable.
Oops!
Obama is put on the defensive over
stock purchases from companies whose
investors included his political donors.
"Present"
Obama, asked if homosexuality was
immoral, in the wake of comments by Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman
General Peter Pace, sidestepped the question. After pressure from
gay groups, Obama issued a statement stating he
did not agree with Pace "that
homosexuality is immoral."
He's A Socialist
An
analysis of "lifetime voting records,"
shows Obama as the most liberal Democrat in Congress, with a score of
84.3 after two full years in the Senate. The most liberal score possible
was 99.
The study, released in March by the National Journal, a respected
inside-the-Beltway research report, places Obama even in front of Dennis
Kucinich, with a lifetime score of 79.4.
But... Show
Me The Money
Obama's campaign
announces that they raked in $25
million for his presidential bid in the first three months of 2007,
placing him on a par with front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton and
dashing her image as the party's inevitable nominee.
And the link is to al Jazeera, that will continue to report Obama's
campaign in great and sympathetic detail.
Halleluja!
During his first public Tampa campaign
appearance, Obama
says, "The sun is shining on me,
that's what's going on."
"At each and every juncture in American history, ordinary folks said,
'We don't care about the world as it is, we imagine the world as it
might be. We want to write a new chapter,'" Obama told the crowd. "That
is the moment that we are in right now."
Pure Alinsky
'We don't care about the world as it is, we imagine
the world
as it might be. We want to write
a new chapter,'" Obama told the crowd. "That is the moment that we
are in right now."
A Really Bad Idea
Obama shows his affinity for more socialism by
endorsing "comparable worth," a truly bad idea.
In case you don't know what comparable worth is, it's an idea concocted
by feminists in the 1970s or early 1980s. They said that jobs typically
held by women pay less than jobs typically held by men.
To eliminate this inequity, somebody–the courts, maybe, or some
administrative agency, presumably with appeals to the courts–should
decide what those jobs were really worth, based on some sort of
convoluted criteria. So that it could be possible to prove that
secretaries were of comparable worth to truck drivers and should be paid
the same wages.
Comparable worth would subject the private-sector economy to the
equivalent of the federal civil service system. Bureaucrats would have
to classify every job, with their classifications subject to
administrative and judicial review.
Wright Surfaces
The New York Times has a report on its front page about Obama's strained relationship with his pastor, also known as his
"spiritual mentor." The Times does tend to downplay some of the
harsher statements that Pastor Wright has made about Israel, Wright's
support for Louis Farrakhan; trips to Libya and more.
The Times does tend to downplay some of the
harsher statements that Pastor Wright has made about Israel, Wright's
support for Louis Farrakhan; trips to Libya and more.
Pastor Wright is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan, and in 1984
traveled with him to visit Col. Muammar al-Gadaffi, an archenemy of
Israel and America and a firm supporter of terror groups.
Wright has also been a severe critic of Israel. In his own words:
"The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost
40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business
community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit
the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to
wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which
the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism."
Run, Run, Run
Obama
receives
Secret Service protection -- earliest ever. Aside from former
first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama is the only presidential
candidate with Secret Service protection.
The code name used for Obama by his Secret Service detail is "Renegade."
He was given his choice of several names starting with R, and that's the
one he picked.
10,000?
Obama, caught up in the fervor of a campaign speech
Tuesday, drastically
overstated the Kansas tornadoes death toll, saying 10,000 had died.
The death toll was 12.
"In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten
thousand people died -- an entire town destroyed," the Democratic
presidential candidate said in a speech to 500 people packed into a
sweltering Richmond art studio for a fundraiser.
His
excuse for this blunder was, "There are going to be times when I get
tired," he said. "There are going to be times when I get weary. There
are going to be times when I make mistakes."
Obama is the youngest candidate running and he "was tired."
How would he respond to a terror attack if he tires so easily?
Big Iron
Obama spent the better part of his remarks criticizing U. S.
automakers for not building more hybrid vehicles like Toyota and Honda.
Well, we're glad to see Obama's shifting the blame from the consumer to
the automakers. That must explain why the Illinois Senator and
Presidential candidate owns a HEMI-powered
V8 Chrysler 300C.
Obviously it's Chrysler's fault Obama
bought a big 5.7-liter engine from them -- he just didn't have a choice.
Flak
John McCain responded to Obama's recent remarks in tough enough, if
predictable, language:
"While Senator Obama's two years in the U.S. Senate certainly entitle
him to vote against funding our troops, my service and experience
combined with conversations with military leaders on the ground in Iraq
lead me to believe that we must give this new strategy a chance to
succeed because the consequences of failure would be catastrophic to our
nation's security."
But, McCain being McCain, he can't help himself and goes the next step
in the statement's kicker:
"By the way, Senator Obama, it's a 'flak' jacket, not a 'flack' jacket."
Which is McCain's way of saying, "there is only one of us in this argument who has ever
worn the uniform." (my words)
And if you still don't get it, a McCain aide blows away the anthill
with, well, a rocket.
"Obama wouldn't know the difference between an RPG and a bong."
Universal Remote
Seeking to add heft to his presidential bid,
Democrat Barack Obama is offering a sweeping plan that would require
every American to have
health coverage and calls on government, businesses and consumers to
share the costs of the program.
Show Me The Money
Presidential candidate Barack Obama
will give $16,500 in contributions linked to indicted donors to
charity, part of the Democrat's effort to distance himself from a friend
and fundraiser.
The donations came from two Chicago businessmen who worked with indicted
entrepreneur Antoin "Tony" Rezko, Obama's friend since his Harvard days
and financial beard in the purchase of Obama's home and property.
Rezko has pleaded not guilty to charges that he shook down investment
firms that wanted to do business with the state of Illinois. Obama
last year gave charities $11,500 to clear his campaign fund of donations
that had come directly from Rezko.
A Dumb Mistake
Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama, on Monday (6/19/2007),
said his campaign made a "dumb mistake" when it circulated a memo
criticizing rival Hillary Rodham Clinton's financial ties to India.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Obama
disavowed
the memo which carried the headline -- "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)
--
and referred to Bill and Hillary Clintons' investments in India; her
fundraising among Indian-Americans; and the former president's $300,000
in speech fees from Cisco, a company that has moved U.S. jobs to India.
"It was a dumb mistake on our campaign's part and I made it clear to my
staff in no uncertain terms that it was a mistake," Obama told the AP in
a brief interview in which he referred to the memo as "unnecessarily
caustic."
The Back Stabbers
Despite often-lofty rhetoric that he plans to bring
the nation a ''new kind of politics,'' Sen. Barack Obama has surrounded
himself with operatives skilled in the old-school art of the political
back stab. Yet when Obama was criticized this week for opposition
research memos critical of Sen.
Hillary Clinton's ties to India and
Indian-Americans, he was
quick to blame his staff. /snip/ It was at least the
third time since February the Illinois Democrat has blamed his staff for
a glitch.
Division
Sen. Barack Obama told a church convention Saturday that some
right-wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized
religious beliefs in an effort to sow division.
"Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us
together and faith started being used to drive us apart," the Democratic
presidential candidate said in a 30-minute speech before the national
meeting of the United Church of Christ.
To say that Barack Obama is not ready for prime time understates the
case. He isn't ready for a 3:00 a.m. infomercial. The latest from
Obama: "Obama:
Shift Troops to Fight al-Qaida":
"We cannot win a war against the terrorists if we're on the wrong
battlefield," Obama said. "America must urgently begin deploying
from Iraq and take the fight more effectively to the enemy's home by
destroying al-Qaida's leadership along the Afghan-Pakistan border,
eliminating their command and control networks and disrupting their
funding."
Our military commanders have repeatedly stated that the number one foe
they are fighting in Iraq is al Qaeda. Al Qaeda's leadership has
declared Iraq the main front in their war against civilization.
Zawahiri has urged radical Muslims to "hurry to Iraq." Bin Laden
has declared Baghdad "the capital of the Caliphate." Iraq is the
one place on earth where al Qaeda has chosen to risk its prestige on an
effort to engage our forces, exhaust our patience, and drive us from the
field.
John Wixted offers a more detailed, and excellent, rebuttal to Obama
here.
Sex Ed
On July 18th, ABC News' Teddy Davis and Lindsey Ellerson
report that Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Planned Parenthood
that sex education for kindergarteners is "the right thing to
do."
Can't teach homosexuality too soon -- gotta get 'em while they're
young (video at link).
Solutions
His "solutions"
will sound familiar to those who listened to Lyndon Johnson's poverty
gurus and their fellow travelers under Jimmy Carter who promised massive
government assistance:
"When I'm President, I will raise the minimum wage and make it a
living wage by making sure that it rises every time the cost of living
does. I'll start letting our unions do what they do best again –
organize our workers and lift up our middle-class. And I'll finally make
sure every American has affordable health care that stays with you no
matter what happens by passing my plan to provide universal coverage and
cut the cost of health care by up to $2500 per family."
"The philosophy behind the project is simple – if poverty is a disease
that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and
violence; failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat
those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community. And
we have to focus on what actually works."
It was federal government policies and programs that caused most of the
problems of the inner city today. The fact that Obama wants to try more
of the same only shows that absolute dearth of ideas emanating from the
left regarding urban policy. They just can't help themselves. And Obama
can no longer disguise his far left policies by advocating them using
soothing, non-threatening rhetoric.
If it walks like a Socialist, talks like a Socialist and spends like
a Socialist, it must be ...
Not Good Enough
Obama says, "the United States cannot use its military to solve
humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq
isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there," even though he
admits, "it's likely there would be increased bloodshed if U.S. forces
left Iraq."
Screw 'em, just like the Southeast Asians -- way to go Obama -- the
dhimmicrats never change their defeatist ways.
La Raza
Obama is in South Florida
to
address the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the nation's largest
Hispanic so-called civil rights group.
La Raza is Spanish for "the race," although NCLR claims it means
"community" on their website. La Raza
supports legislation such as the Civil Liberties Restoration Act,
which would roll back policies adopted after Sept. 11 designed to
protect national security. It supports the "DREAM Act," which
would mandate states to offer in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens
-- thus providing them with benefits not available to U.S. citizens from
other states.
The group opposes the "Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal
Act of 2003" and the "Homeland Security Enhancement Act" would give
state and local police officers the authority to enforce federal
immigration laws.
"While the safety and security of our communities and our country are of
the utmost importance, new policies that would allow local police
departments to enforce federal civil immigration law will hinder
terrorist and other criminal investigations, and have a serious negative
impact on Latino communities," La Raza explains.
The group also supports legislation to ensure illegal immigrants'
ability to obtain driver's licenses.
La Raza continues to lobby the Senate for virtual open borders and
amnesty for illegal aliens.
La Raza's motto is, "Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada,"
which translates to ""For The Race everything. Outside The Race,
nothing."
The La Raza movement
teaches
that Colorado, California, Arizona, Texas, Utah, New Mexico, Oregon and
parts of Washington State make up an area known as "Aztlan" -- a
fictional ancestral homeland of the Aztecs before Europeans arrived in
North America. As such, it belongs to the followers of MEChA.
These are all areas America should surrender to "La Raza" once enough
immigrants, legal or illegal, enter to claim a majority, as in Los
Angeles. The current borders of the United States will simply be
extinguished.
This plan is what is referred to as the "Reconquista" or the re-conquest, of
the western United States.
But it won't end with territorial occupation and secession. The
final plan for the La Raza movement includes the ethnic cleansing of
Americans of European, African, and Asian descent from "Aztlan."
No surprise here -- a Marxist addressing Marxists.
I'll Meet With The Worst
At Monday night’s Democratic debate in Charleston, SC. A
questioner, speaking via debate sponsor YouTube, asked whether, in the
spirit of “bold leadership,” the candidates would “meet separately,
without precondition, during the first year of your
administration…with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and
North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries.”
Obama had a ready answer.
With those words, Obama seemed to commit himself to talks with Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong Il
-- separately, without precondition.
Sen. Barack Obama’s closest political adviser, David Axelrod, wants you
to know that Obama did not say what he appeared to say. "He said that he
would be willing to talk," Axelrod explained.
Sen. Joseph Biden, who has emerged as the clear-eyed antiwar realist in
the Democratic race, told National Review Online that the idea of a
president meeting with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, and others was "naďve."
"World leaders should not meet with other world leaders unless they know
what the agenda is, so you don’t end up being used."
This guy truly is a babe in the woods and his advisor, David
Axelrod, is a bold-faced liar.
Superior Judgement
At a closed-door, off-the-record
meeting
with media mavens and corporate titans at the Time Warner Center in
Manhattan Tuesday evening, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the freshman
senator who just three years ago was an Illinois state senator, said he
had better judgment about foreign policy than any presidential candidate
in either party.
"One thing I'm very confident about is my judgment in foreign policy is,
I believe, better than any other candidate in this race, Republican or
Democrat."
Obama clarified his remarks by saying, "What I was drawing on was a set
of experiences that come from a life of living overseas, having family
overseas, being able to see the world through the eyes of people outside
our borders."
So, what qualifies Obama to be Commander in Chief, in a time of war,
is the fact that he lived as a Muslim in a Muslim country and all his
relatives overseas are Muslims.
Now, doesn't that give you a warm feeling?
Threatens An Ally
Following up on the above absurd statement, Obama
said, in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, that he would send troops into
Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, an attempt to show strength when his
chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.
The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf
that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country
and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan will
risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in
U.S. military aid.
Hello? Hello?! Is this Pockiston?
"Let me make this clear, there are terrorists holed up in those
mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to
strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had
a chance to take out an al-Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005 (of course
he neglects to mention Bill Clinton' refusal to accept bin Laden from
the Sudan in 1998). If we have actionable intelligence about
high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we
will."
You got that, Obama condemns the Bush Administration for invading an
enemy country, Iraq, but suggests we should invade an ally in the fight
against terrorists.
This guy proves once again that he is a complete idiot and shouldn't be
let anywhere near the White House.
Did you carefully look at the telephone?
Profound Mistake
Obama proves he's definitely not ready for prime time
with the following
statement, "I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use
nuclear weapons in any circumstance."
When asked whether his answer also applied to the possible use of
tactical nuclear weapons, he said it did.
Most Knowledgeable
Obama, who majored in political science with a specialization in
international relations at Columbia University, has repeatedly claimed
to be the most knowledgeable Democratic candidate in the area of foreign
affairs.
On the 7th, during the Democrat Party presidential debates, Obama was
asked if he would scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
as president.
His
response was that he would, "immediately call the president of
Mexico (and) the president of Canada" to discuss the issue.
Of course, Canada has no "president," but a Prime Minister.
This gaffe further shows Obama's unfamiliarity with foreign nations --
even our next door neighbor -- proving his unsuitability to lead our
country during an era where foreign policy will be of prime importance.
Obama must have been smoking pot the day they discussed Canada
at Columbia.
Gay Moments
Obama, calling a televised forum focusing on
gay
rights, "a historic moment ... for America," argued for civil unions for
gays.
Obama said he wanted to tap into the "core decency" of Americans to
fight discrimination against gays and lesbians, and argued that civil
unions for same-sex couples wouldn't be a "lesser thing" than marriage.
Brian Graden, LOGO president, said, "We already won because the
candidates are here."
LOGO, the lesbian & gay channel, is owned by MTV Networks.
Obama's church, the United Church of Christ, has supported gay
marriage since 2005. Obama is on board.
Obama's Vision
Obama, sharing
his vision of America as welfare state with the annual meeting of
the National Council of La Raza, compared last year's massive
immigration rallies, led by Hispanics, to the civil-rights marches of
African-Americans in the 1960's.
To the Harvard-trained lawyer, the illegal immigrants are just
"undocumented immigrants" who just haven't had a chance to get the
paperwork done.
It certainly is new for someone, campaigning for our nation's highest
office, to see representation of the millions who are here illegally, as
part of those responsibilities.
Can it be that Obama thinks he is running for secretary-general of
the United Nations and not president of the United States?
Killing Civilians
Appearing before about 800 people in Nashua, NH, Obama,
when asked whether he would move U.S. troops out of Iraq to better fight
terrorism elsewhere, he brought up Afghanistan
and said,
"We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough
troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing
civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there."
Someone ought to tell this fool that the Taliban and al-Qaeda ARE
CIVILIANS.
Is Obama suggesting we shouldn't KILL the ENEMY?
Show Me The Money
A man who has long been dogged by charges that the bank his family owns
helped finance a Chicago crime figure host a Windy City fund-raiser
tonight for Sen. Barack Obama.
Alexi Giannoulias, who became Illinois state treasurer last year
after Obama vouched for him, has pledged to raise $100,000 for the
senator's Oval Office bid.
Before he promised to raise funds for Obama, Giannoulias bankrolled
Michael "Jaws" Giorango, a Chicagoan twice convicted of bookmaking and
promoting prostitution.
Giannoulias is so tainted by reputed mob links that several top Illinois
Dems, including the state's speaker of the House and party chairman,
refused to endorse him even after he won the Democratic nomination with
Obama's help.
Giannoulias was the bank's vice president and chief loan officer for
most of the more than $15 million in loans.
Goofy Notions
Obama spent September rattling off a laundry list of goofy notions he
would implement as president.
On
the 12th, Obama committed his latest gaffe by describing ethnic
cleansing as a positive thing, saying, "We've seen a very modest
reduction of violence in Baghdad, partly because entire neighborhoods
have essentially been ethnically cleansed. Those are all positive
things, but we are now back at the levels of violence we were 18 months
ago."
On the
16th, Obama recommended a 12.4 percent Social Security tax hike on
"the rich" -- those who make more than $97,000 per year. The tax
would be paid by employees and half would be paid by employers.
On
the 17th,
Obama, Hillary and Bill Richardson attended the Steak Fry of Sen. Tom
Harkin (D-Iowa) in Indianola, IA, where Obama disrespected the National
Anthem.
Ethnic cleansing is good, tax the rich, collaborate with
despots, relax the drug laws and do the crotch salute.
Richardson and Clinton have their hands on their heart, but not Obama
who plays with his crotch. Does he perhaps believe that, like
wearing the flag pin, the hand on the heart isn't "true patriotism"
or is that the Muslim salute?
Obama's reluctance to salute the flag may be more sinister.
A Muslim's allegiance is to Allah, he cannot accept the American
Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes
the Bible to be corrupt and when we declare "one
nation under God," the Christian's God is loving and kind, while Allah
is NEVER referred to as heavenly father, nor is he ever called love in
The Quran's 99 excellent names.
Why else does he stand there like a foreigner?
You tell me.
September
On Tuesday, September 18th, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, on a tour of South
Carolina to register new voters, sharply
criticized presidential hopeful and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for
"acting like he’s white."
On
the 24th, despite the controversy that President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York City has triggered, Obama still vowed to
meet with rogue leaders if he is elected.
On
the 27th, Obama's Campaign moved quickly to dampen expectations
raised by Michelle Obama, who said that her husband had to win Iowa.
On
the 28th, Obama said that, as president, he would relax drug
sentencing laws and address vast racial inequities in the justice system
as part of his crime policy.
On
the 29th, Obama said his public service experience trumps that of
rival Hillary Rodham Clinton's, and he tried to use her husband's words
to make his point.
Free Money
Obama
urged Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign the
Dream Act, a bill that would make illegal immigrant students who
graduate from high school eligible for college aid.
Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar measure last year.
The legislation would make sure "more students can see that a college
education isn't a faraway dream," Obama said.
Obama wants free money and educationfor illegals.
Foot In Mouth
Obama, once again, puts his foot in his mouth.
A supporter asked the '08 presidential hopeful if Obama would consider
taking "the wind out of Hillary’s sails" by asking Nobel prize winner
former Vice President Al Gore to be his running mate before the
primaries.
Obama's response was priceless: "I can promise you that as
president I will have him involved in our administration in a very
senior capacity in his role," Obama responded that, "having won the
Nobel Peach Prize and an Oscar that being Vice President again would be
probably a step down for him."
Got that? The Nobel Peach Prize -- just Wow!
And Al Gore has never won an Oscar.
The Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth" was won by the film's
director,
Davis Guggenheim,and its producers.
Marx Brothers
Obama made
this startling comment, "We've got to make
sure that people who have more money help the people who have less
money."
Obama agrees with Karl Marx on income redistribution.
Cheap Shot
On
November 3rd, Obama took a cheap shot at the Administration, saying,
"For the first time in a long time, the name George Bush will not appear
on the ballot," he told the crowd of about 500 people at Converse
College in Spartanburg.
"The name Dick Cheney, my cousin, will not appear on the ballot," Obama
said. "We had been trying to hide that cousin thing for a long time. Everybody's got a black sheep in the family. A crazy uncle in the
attic."
Like his real relatives in Africa are something to
write home about.
Crotch Salute
On
the 7th, Obama complained about an Internet photo that showed the
Democratic presidential candidate didn't hold his hand over his heart
during the Pledge of Allegiance. The Time photo and accompanying
text never claimed any such thing (see Sep 17, above).
Obama said the photo was taken during the singing of the National
Anthem, not the Pledge of Allegiance, which was exactly what Time.com
reported.
However, that is a distinction without a difference because the tradition is to place
the hand over the heart for the Anthem as well as for the Pledge.
The United States Code, Title 36, Chapter 10, Sec. 171, states that
"during rendition of the National Anthem, when the flag is displayed, all
present except those in uniform should stand at attention facing the
flag with the right hand over the heart."
One must ask, Is Obama simply following
this advice
from "Ask the Imam?"
Question: Could we sing national anthem and say
the plegde of allegience to the secular state while the flag is being
raised up?
Answer: As Muslims, our pledge of allegiance is only to Allah and His
Rasul (Sallallaahu Alayhi Wasallam). However, as Muslims in a non-Muslim
state, we are obliged to follow the laws of the country which are not
contrary to Shari’ah.
The allegiance of pledge by singing the national anthem of a secular
state which has many un-Islamic laws, for example, legalising
homosexuality, lesbianism, pornography, etc. is not permissible.
And Allah Taăla Knows Best.
Was salaam
Mufti Ebrahim Desai
Question: Should I stand up for the national
anthem? Should I stand up when a judge enters the court and everyone is
ordered to stand up?
Answer: 1. No.
2. It is not necessary to stand up, you should not do so.
and Allah Ta’ala Knows Best
Mufti Ebrahim Desai
Show Me The Money
Barack Obama "has been the most aggressive of
presidential candidates in using his leadership
PAC-money to help the campaigns of state and local
candidates in the early voting states of Iowa, New
Hampshire and South Carolina. "More than one-third
of his leadership PAC money is being used this way,"
Alex Knott
reported.
"Some of the recipients of Hopefund's
largess are state and local politicians
who have recently endorsed Obama's
presidential bid," John Solomon reported
November 26, 2007, in the Washington
Post.
"The bulk of donations
from Obama's PAC to
state and local
candidates this year
went to Iowa, New
Hampshire and South
Carolina. In
addition, there were
more than $60,000 in
donations to national
candidates in those same
states, including $9,000
for Rep. Paul W. Hodes,
the first member of
Congress from New
Hampshire to endorse
Obama earlier this year.
"In
addition
to
donating
to
individuals,
Hopefund
donated
to
several
key
Democratic
groups
in the
battleground
states,
including
$30,000
each to
the Iowa
House
Truman
Fund and
the Iowa
Senate
Majority
Fund and
$15,000
to New
Hampshire's
Friends
of a
Democratic
Senate,"
Solomon
reported.
Hopefund
Inc.
also
made two
$5,000
contributions
to the
New
Hampshire
Democratic
Party:
on July
26,
2007,
and
September
27,
2007.
Pothead
Obama
told a group high school students that when he
was their age he was hardly a model student, experimenting with illegal
drugs and drinking alcohol.
"You know, I made some bad decisions that I've actually written about.
You know, got into drinking. I experimented with drugs," he said.
"There was a whole stretch of time that I didn't really apply myself a
lot. It wasn't until I got out of high school and went to college
that I started realizing, 'Man, I wasted a lot of time."'
"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final
fatal role of the young would be black man," Obama wrote. Mostly
he smoked marijuana and drank alcohol, Obama wrote, but occasionally he
would snort cocaine when he could afford it.
Five or six years of drugging and drinking is some experiment and he
still doesn't have the personal will to stop smoking tobacco.
And, he clearly conveyed the message -- Hey, it's OK to do drugs while
your in high school and college. You can straighten out later.
No Fear
Obama
said a president should be unafraid to meet
with the tyrannical leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North
Korea during his first year in office and provide them with political
and economic incentives. He also said he would restore the
nation's moral authority by ending torture, closing Guantanamo Bay's
military prison and helping fight global poverty and AIDS. (video
here)
Responding to criticism of Obama's lack of experience, Bill Clinton's
former national security adviser Tony Lake said ,"His life experiences
of living abroad (as a Muslim an a Muslim country) when he was young,
traveling by bus in Kenya, have given him a real grasp of the troubles
around the world."
Yo, Obama, you idiot, we don't torture anybody and where you gonna put
those fanatics in Gitmo?
Hey, how about in that house the Rezko's put you and Michelle into?
Fighting global poverty and AIDS = billions into the empty pit called
Africa.
False Claims
Speaking at a rally in Harlem, Obama said, I don't want to wake
up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black
men in prison than in college."
Obama has repeated this false claim to predominantly African American
audiences, even after The Washington Post pointed out the mistake to his
campaign. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 106,000 African
American men ages 18 to 24 were in federal or state prisons at the end
of 2005. An additional 87,000 were temporarily held in local jails in
mid-2006. According to 2005 census data, 530,000 African American men in
this age group were in college.
Black male college students outnumber black male prisoners even if the
age group is expanded to 30 or 35. The Obama campaign has not responded
to several requests for statistical data to support the senator's
remarks, and it has not explained a similar claim that he made to an
NAACP audience on July 12.
I Have It
Obama
says, "I have the kind of experience the
country needs right now."
But, Bill Clinton says, "I mean, when is the last time we elected a
president based on one year of service in the Senate before he started
running?"
Remember that -- one year of national experience. Prior to
that, Obama was a less than impressive back-bencher in the Illinois
State Senate.
I Win!
Obama wins his first of many election contests with a win in the Iowa Democratic caucus with about 37.5% of the vote.
Taxes Are Good
Obama appeared on "American Morning."
Fresh off his second place finish in the New Hampshire Democratic
primary, he
told host John Roberts high taxes were in the best interest of the
American economy.
Obama's Ebonics
Why isn't Barack Obama's speech, which
he touts
on his presidential website, being used as exhibit A, not only for using
words that reach out to his community, but also as an example of how
he's using race whenever he can and when it suits his needs and benefits
his candidacy?
As the South Carolina primary campaign built to a climax, Obama
addressed a largely African-American audience in Sumter.
In this video,
Obama drops his eloquent Harvard accent, and says, "They're trying
to bamboozle you. It's the same old okie-dokie. -- Y'all
know about okie dokie, right? -- They try to bamboozle you. -- Hoodwink
ya. Try to hoodwink ya. Alright. -- I'm having too much fun
here. ... "
This speech had been borrowed from one of Obama's heroes, Malcolm X, who
said, "You've been hoodwinked. You've been had. You've been took.
You've been led astray, led amok. You’ve been bamboozled."
It is strange that a candidate, who belongs to an "Afrocentric" church,
that bestows awards on Louis Farrakhan, would borrow from Malcolm X, who
was a spokesman for the Nation of Islam, right before complaining
about e-mails claiming he is Muslim.
Truth Squad
Hot on the heels of Barack Obama’s rout of Hillary Clinton in Saturday’s
South Carolina primary, the Obama campaign
announced today it’s forming a “truth squad” of California
supporters who’ll refute what they say are mistruths spread by Clinton’s
campaign.
California Truth Squad members include House Education & Labor Committee
Chairman George Miller, D-Martinez, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, Rep.
Linda Sanchez, D-Lakewood; Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose; Rep. Adam
Schiff, D-Burbank; Assembly Majority Floor Leader Karen Bass, D-Los
Angeles; state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-East Los Angeles;
San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris; and LA Federation of
Labor Executive Secretary/Treasurer Maria Elena Durazo.
Believe!
Obey!
Obama sent out an
email (with the disrespectful subject line "My response to Bush")
after the State of the Union speech. It contained the following
statements:
"Next year, when it will be the job of someone new to report on the
state of our union, the entire nation can have a president they believe
in."
"And with your help in the coming days and weeks, that's the kind of
president I will be."
Obama should be advised that State of the Union addresses aren't given
by newly inaugurated presidents.
Therefore, contrary to this promise, Obama's first prospective State of
the Union would not be "next year," but would be in 2010.
Driver's License For Illegals
In California, in order to garner support from Hispanics, Obama
announces his support for granting driver's licenses to illegal
immigrants.
"Barack Obama has not backed down" on driver's licenses for illegal
immigrants, said Federico Peńa, a former Clinton administration Cabinet
member and Denver mayor now supporting Obama. "I think when the
Latino community hears Barack's position on such an important and
controversial issue, they'll understand that his heart and his intellect
is with Latino community."
Most Liberal
The National Journal identifies Barack Obama, D-Ill., as
the most liberal
senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote
ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to
the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the
16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate.
Muslim Summit
Obama
said he would hold a summit with Muslim countries if
he is elected president. "Once I'm elected, I want to organize a
summit in the Muslim world," he told the French magazine Paris Match,
"with all the heads of state, to have an honest discussion about ways to
bridge the gap that grows every day between Muslims and the West,"
adding he would "listen to their concerns."
Obama
added, "I want to have direct talks with countries like Iran and
Syria because I don't believe we can stabilize the region unless not
just our friends but also our enemies are involved in these
discussions."
The Illinois senator added that to repair the image of the United States
in the world, he would "put an end to the war in Iraq."
"Occupying the country has put the odds against us with the world,"
Obama said.
Higher Taxes
Obama
said he would pay for his proposed new programs, including mandatory
health insurance, by imposing higher taxes on "the wealthy" and raising
the tax on Social Security wages. He added, "What we have had
right now is a situation where we've cut taxes for people who don't need
them."
According to recent Gallup data, "The wealthiest 1 percent of the
population earn 19 percent of the income, but pay 37 percent of the
income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab.
Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent -- those below the median income level
-- now earn 13 percent of the income but pay just 3 percent of the
taxes.
Farrakhan
Obama employed and continues to employ
Farrakhan acolytes in high positions on his
campaign and office staffs.
Among those are Cynthia K. Miller, treasurer of his U. S. senate
campaign. There’s also Jennifer Mason, who is Obama’s Director of
Contituent Services in his U. S. Senate office and in charge of
selecting his interns. Shakir Muhammad held an important role in
Obama’s state senate campaign.
Barack Is My Homeboy
The
cult-like status of Obama is a function of a personality that simply
resonates with anyone who meets him: buckets of charisma and charm.
And aware of managing expectations, not only for his campaign but what
might be beyond, he constantly refers to the challenges ahead.
"We can do this," he told ecstatic supporters on Tuesday night.
"It will not be easy. It will require struggle and sacrifice.
There will setbacks and we will make mistakes."
But then Obama, in the next sentence, in attempt to appeal to more
voters out there, didn't even mention the Democratic Party but instead
his "movement," saying: "I want to speak directly to all those Americans
who have yet to join this movement but still hunger for change: we need
you. We need you to stand with us, and work with us, and help us
prove that together, ordinary people can still do extraordinary things".
Well known political journalist Joe Klein of Time magazine, who was
traveling on the campaign plane this week with Obama, too, wrote of a
nagging concern about this kind of rhetoric of inspiration over
substance, noting "there was something just a wee bit creepy about the
mass messiahnism."
As Klein notes, this is "not just maddeningly vague but also
disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to
inspire.
"Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause -- other than an
amorphous desire for change -- the message is becoming dangerously
self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how
wonderful the Obama campaign is."
I hear that too in the voices of Obama's staff constantly, themselves
referring to this "cult of Obama".
The Messiah
While on the subject of "Obama as messiah" -- just take a look at this
website:
"... a light will shine through that window, a
beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany
... and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote
for Obama" - Barack Obama Lebanon, New Hampshire.
January 7, 2008
Messianic Hysteria
Consider these numbers on recent
Google searches using only Obama's name plus one other word:
A number of internet postings indicate that a great many see Obama in
not only political terms, but also wrapped in the untarnished cloak of
some vague spiritual-awakening.
Cuba, Si! Yanqee, No!
The Obama Campaign Office in Houston, TX,
is
decorated with the flag of Cuba, this hemisphere's longest-lived
totalitarian communist dictatorship, with psychotic Marxist thug
Che
Guevara's image superimposed:
It's particularly ironic that this is a campaign
volunteer office of a candidate standing for office in a free election,
and it's decorated with the flag of a nation that hasn't had a free
election in three generations.
Global Poverty Act
Sen. Barack Obama, giving America a preview of his
priorities, is rejoicing over the Senate committee passage of a plan
that could end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars in an attempt to
reduce poverty in other nations.
The nice-sounding bill, called the "Global
Poverty Act," sponsored by Obama, is up for a Senate vote on
Thursday and could result in the imposition of a $845 billion global tax
on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal
religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient
to the dictates of the United Nations.
In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits
nations to banning “small arms and light weapons” and ratifying a series
of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the
Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological
Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the
Child.
The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as "the indispensable
common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to
realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and
development."
The U.N.'s "Millennium Project," says that the U.N. plan to force the
U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of its GNP in increased foreign aid spending
would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a
13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development
conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is
expected to meet the "Millennium Development Goals," this amounts to
$845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money is through a
global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.
Will somebody tell this idiot that it's not the job of the United States
to cut global poverty by taxing its citizens and giving those monies to
the corrupt United Nations.
Welfare doesn't work in America and its sure not going to work anywhere
else.
It's just more billions and trillions down the toilet.
Global Poverty Act
Sen. Barack Obama, giving America a preview of his
priorities, is rejoicing over the Senate committee passage of a plan
that could end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars in an attempt to
reduce poverty in other nations.
The nice-sounding bill, called the "Global
Poverty Act," sponsored by Obama, is up for a Senate vote on
Thursday and could result in the imposition of a $845 billion global tax
on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal
religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient
to the dictates of the United Nations.
The U.N.'s "Millennium Project," says that the U.N. plan to force the
U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of its GNP in increased foreign aid spending
would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a
13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development
conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is
expected to meet the "Millennium Development Goals," this amounts to
$845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money is through a
global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.
Zbigniew
Two weeks after Obama names
Zbigniew Brzezinski as his Chief Foreign Policy Advisor, Brzezinski
arrives in Damascus,
Syria, to begin talks with the terrorists and political assassins of the
Assad regime.
The visit was not coordinated with America's embassy and will not be
covered by the press, although Syrian press accounts said the delegation
would visit Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad; vice president, Farouq
al-Sharaa, and foreign minister, Walid Mouallem.
Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) commented, "I remember thinking, 'Why are we
listening to him?' (Brzezinski) He was the national security
adviser for Jimmy Carter 30 years ago. He proceeded to talk to us
about Iran, and I said, 'Let me see, didn't the ayatollahs come to
power, didn't we have this problem when you were in the White House?'"
Brzezinski was also the
great promoter
of Islamic fundamentalism, which he celebrated as the greatest bulwark
against Soviet Russian communism. Using the Islamic
fundamentalists, Brzezinski hoped to make the entire region between the
southern border of the USSR and the Indian Ocean into an "arc of
crisis," from which fundamentalist subversion would radiate into Soviet
territory, first and foremost into the five Soviet republics of central
Asia, Azerbaijan, etc. It was in the service of this Islamic
fundamentalist card that Brzezinski first helped overthrow the Shah of
Iran, and then insisted that the replacement could be no one else than
Ayatollah Khomeini.
Lobbyists
Obama has repeatedly
said he would fight lobbyists, even as they provide him with $10
million.
Obama received $9,819,390 from lawyers and lobbyists. McCain $2,980,037.
Democrats in fact received 3 times the money from lawyers and lobbyists
this election cycle than Republicans.
These numbers are easily obtainable online from
Open Secrets.
The campaign staff basically took the Howard Dean plan and did a global
Acrobat change, substituting "Obama" for "Dean" and "Barack Obama" for
"Howard Dean" -- it's the same old liberal promise to make the United
States a socialized society, just like the Europeans, they so admire.
There is one glaring omission -- not a word on Defense.
Swoonings
No less than six of Obama's recent rallies, fans have
reportedly
fainted. Those incidents were caught on video or audio.
In each, Obama -- who never even thinks to put down the microphone or
ask a campaign aide to take care of the matter -- narrates to the crowd
as medical volunteers show up to minister to the stricken. In two
of the videos, he picks up a bottle of water and offers it to the poor,
overcome admirers.
I don't mean to suggest that all this is staged. I'm saying it
straight out: It's staged. Obama is supposedly Mr. Authentic --
the man who naturally radiates charisma and magnetic charm. His
pheromones are so powerful they strike unwitting audience members into a
stupor. He's the Beatles. He's Elvis. More than
anything, he's the new JFK, a young, vibrant leader who will lead
America into a bright new future.
Riiiiight.
Obama is inauthentic. His creepily similar responses to the
fainting incidents are too identical to be spontaneous. The rash
of swooning, star-struck supporters at Obama's speeches smacks of
insincerity. Instead of offering his fainting followers water, he
ought to be offering them Kool-Aid.
Flip- Flops
The Washington Post
published Obama's top Flip-Flops.
1. Special interests -- In January, the Obama campaign described
union contributions to the campaigns of Clinton and John Edwards as
"special interest" money. Obama changed his tune as he began
gathering his own union endorsements. He now refers respectfully
to unions as the representatives of "working people" and says he is
"thrilled" by their support.
2. Public financing -- Obama replied "yes" in September 2007 when
asked if he would agree to public financing of the presidential election
if his GOP opponent did the same. Obama has now attached several
conditions to such an agreement, including regulating spending by
outside groups. His spokesman says the candidate never committed
himself on the matter.
3. The Cuba embargo -- In January 2004, Obama said it was time
"to end the embargo with Cuba" because it had "utterly failed in the
effort to overthrow Castro." Speaking to a Cuban American audience
in Miami in August 2007, he said he would not "take off the embargo" as
president because it is "an important inducement for change."
4. Illegal immigration -- In a March 2004 questionnaire, Obama
was asked if the government should "crack down on businesses that hire
illegal immigrants." He replied "Oppose." In a Jan. 31,
2008, televised debate, he said that "we do have to crack down on those
employers that are taking advantage of the situation."
5. Decriminalization of marijuana -- While running for the U.S.
Senate in January 2004, Obama told Illinois college students that he
supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use. In the
Oct. 30, 2007, presidential debate, he joined other Democratic
candidates in opposing the decriminalization of marijuana.
Obamamania
Toward the end of February, critics began to quietly
voice their fear that Obama and his campaign have deliberately
adopted the tone and tactics of an evangelical preacher, whipping up "Obamamania"
at the expense of more serious discussion of policy and government.
There is "something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism"
deployed by the black senator and his supporters, observed Joe Klein,
the veteran political commentator the first to latch on to the political
potency of Bill Clinton, then an obscure Arkansas governor, early in the
1992 White House campaign.
"The message is becoming dangerously self-referential," he wrote in Time
magazine. "The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful
the Obama campaign is."
At the campaign's "Camp Obama" -- a training program run ahead of
primaries in key states -- volunteers are schooled to avoid talking to
voters about policy, and instead tell of how they "came" to Obama, just
as born-again Christians talk about "coming to Jesus."
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote: "Obama's people are so
taken with their messiah that soon they'll be selling flowers at
airports and arranging mass weddings."
Rorshach
Obama is a
Rorshach test: liberals see in him whatever they like. They
are free to assign to him whatever belief they hold most dear because he
has no record, no substance to limit their fantasies. He enables
bratty child armies of baby boomers to place their political wishes
beneath their pillows and dream of a 'post partisan' future, whatever
that means.
There's nothing new about Barack Obama. He's the latest in a long line
of foppish flim-flam men who offer verbal enchantment to the voters in
order to achieve power.
Muslim Sensitivity
The Obama Campaign showed its "Muslim sensitivity"
by condemning the Clinton Campaign for allegedly releasing a photo of
Obama dressed as a Somali elder (see: Obama and Africa) and referring to
Obama by his middle name.
Obama dressed himself as a Somali elder. Obama walked around
dressed like a Somali elder. Obama posed for the picture dressed
like a Somali elder. What is his campaign whining about?
And, why is the campaign crying foul for anyone using Obama's middle
name? Are they ashamed of it or are they concerned that it reminds
people of the fact that Obama was a Muslim.
Obamamania
There are those who
suggest that Obamamania has become something of a cult. Of
course it is a cult, manifesting what writer James Wolcott refers to as
"salvational fervor" and "pure euphoria."
Listen to what the Anointed One said in South Carolina, which he alludes
to as tent revivals: "At some point in the evening, a light is going to
shine down and you will have an epiphany and you'll say, 'I have to vote
for Barack!'" Something insidious is happening beneath this
rapture.
NAFTA
The Obama campaign
told Canadian Television (CTV) that no message was passed to the
Canadian government suggesting that Obama does not mean what he says
about opting out of NAFTA if it is not renegotiated. (Video)
However, the Obama camp did not respond to repeated questions from CTV
on reports that a conversation on this matter was held between Obama’s
senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, and the Canadian Consulate
General in Chicago.
Earlier Thursday, the Obama campaign insisted that no conversations have
taken place with any of its senior ranks and representatives of the
Canadian government on the NAFTA issue. On Thursday night, CTV spoke
with Goolsbee, but he refused to say whether he had such a conversation
with the Canadian government office in Chicago. He also said he has been
told to direct any questions to the campaign headquarters.
CTV didn’t stop there. They announced that their sources, at "the
highest levels of the Canadian government," reconfirmed the story to CTV
and one of their primary sources provided a timeline of the discussion
to CTV.
Penny The
Predator
Billionaire business mogul Penny Pritzker
was named the national finance chairman of Obama’s 2008 presidential
campaign.
Someone should ask Obama about Pritzker -- the same Penny Pritzker that
headed
Superior Bank, which shut down in 2002.
One reason Obama might not want to talk about the role of financially
irresponsible bank board members in creating the subprime mortgage
foreclossure financial disaster is that Pritzker, is a former chairman
of the board of the failed Superior Bank S&L that engaged in
irresponsible subprime mortgage lending during the 1990s, many to
minorities. And this woman is running the finance campaign for
Obama. Does Obama have no shame? He is such a hypocrite!
Pritzker was into subprime lending before it became all the rage
starting in around 2000. Prtizker's chairmanship was to
concentrate on subprimelending, principally on home mortgages, but for a
while in subprime auto lending, too, after the Pritzkers' bank acquired
its wholesale mortgage organization division, Alliance Funding, in
December 1992.
Back then they called it "predatory lending."
And Obama claims he is against these kinds of banks. Ha! It
is all smoke and mirrors. It is all talk. The people that
are financially raping Americans and robbing them of the American dream
with these predatory loans, are the same kind of people running Obama's
campaign.
National
Intelligence Estimate
Obama
criticized Clinton expressly for failing to read the classified
National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons capabilities, a report
available at the time of her October 2002 vote authorizing the Iraq war.
He said that Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a fellow Democrat from neighboring
West Virginia, had read the intelligence estimate as a member of the
Senate Intelligence Committee and after a brief pause said the
then-chairman had voted against the war resolution.
However, Rockefeller was not the chair at the time and voted in favor of
the war authorization. Sen. Bob Graham of Florida was the intelligence
committee chair in 2002 and voted against the resolution. Obama did not
mention Graham’s name in the passage.
"She didn’t read the National Intelligence Estimates. Jay Rockefeller
read it. But she didn’t read it. (And after a 13-second pause) I don’t
know what all that experience got her because I have enough experience
to know that if you have a National Intelligence Estimate and the
chairman of the national…umm…Senate Intelligence Committee says you
should read this, this is why I’m voting against the war, that you
should probably read it. I don’t know how much experience you need for
that."
Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer said in a statement to FOX News,
"Sen. Obama is so desperate to divert attention from his limited
national security experience that he’s not just misleading voters about
Sen. Clinton, he’s also misleading voters about his own supporters. That
is not change you can believe in."
Same-Sex Unions
Obama
told a crowd at Hocking College in Nelsonville, Ohio, that he
believes the Sermon on the Mount justifies his support for legal
recognition of same-sex unions. He also told the crowd that his
position in favor of legalized abortion does not make him "less
Christian."
"I don't think it [a same-sex union] should be called marriage, but I
think that it is a legal right that they should have that is recognized
by the state," said Obama. "If people find that controversial then
I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in
my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans,"
in which Paul's Epistle to the Romans condemns homosexual acts as
unnatural and sinful.
Obama's mention of the Sermon on the Mount in justifying legal
recognition of same-sex unions may have been a reference to the Golden
Rule: "Do to others what you would have them do to you." Or it may
have been a reference to another famous line: "Do not judge, or you too
will be judged."
Gaffes
Obama made yet
another gaffe
while criticizing Hillary Clinton, and of course, she is trying to slam
the future Democrat nominee with it:
Obama said that Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a fellow Democrat from neighboring
West Virginia, had read the intelligence estimate as a member of the
Senate Intelligence Committee and after a brief pause said the
then-chairman had voted against the war resolution.
However, Rockefeller was not the chair at the time and voted in favor of
the war authorization. Sen. Bob Graham of Florida was the
intelligence committee chair in 2002 and voted against the resolution.
Obama did not mention Graham’s name in the passage.
His exact words are, "She didn’t read the National Intelligence
Estimates. Jay Rockefeller read it. But she didn’t read it.
I don’t know what all that experience got her because I have enough
experience to know that if you have a National Intelligence Estimate and
the chairman of the national, um, Senate Intelligence Committee says you
should read this, this is why I’m voting against the war, that you
should probably read it. I don’t know how much experience you need
for that."
Show Me The
Money
According to Obama, he rejects campaign funding from
"lobbyists," "Political Action Committees" and "bundlers" who bundle
individual contributions into blind block contributions.
But according to
FactCheck, he does accept "bundled" contributions from "lobbyist
groups" as well as individual campaign contributions from the spouses of
well-known Washington lobbyists. He also receives tons of
"bundled" funds from labor unions and Democrat 527 organizations.
When pressed on the issue, (on rare occasion), he admits "Money is the
original sin in politics and I am not sinless" and states "Lobbyist
influence comes from access, not money." In short, Obama is funded
by the same lobbyists and special interest groups as all other
Democrats. He's just slicker about covering the money trail.
Anti- Oil
According to Obama and CAF, who gives him a 100% rating, indicating a
strong position for energy independence, Obama will solve the problem of
dependence on foreign oil and skyrocketing gas prices.
But according to
OnTheIssues, Obama voted to defund U.S. domestic oil exploration,
voted to ban U.S. drilling in ANWR and block all efforts to increase
U.S. refining capacity, voted to force Americans to reduce their oil
consumption by 40% by 2025 instead of the 5% supported by the balance of
congress, voted to force Detroit to build more hybrids, voted to burn
more ethanol (food) and factor the Global Warming Scam into all national
energy policies. Obama takes the most liberal position in congress
on energy and keeps the U.S. dependent upon foreign oil as a result.
Affirmative Action
Obama claims to oppose all forms of racism, including "racial profiling"
(aka criminal and terror profiling).
But he has a
strong record of supporting affirmative action, which provides
special advantage to specific citizens over all other citizens, strictly
on the basis of race. He also supports treating drug dealing as a
"minimum wage problem" and not a criminal activity, based on drug
trafficking being prevalent in black communities.
National Security
Obama claims strength in Foreign Policy, National Security and the
advancement of Democracy around the globe.
But he opens his campaign rhetoric with
this statement, "When I am this party's nominee, my opponent will
not be able to say that I voted for the war in Iraq," a post 9/11
foreign policy initiative supported overwhelmingly by both parties in
both houses of congress as a vital matter of both national security and
the advancement of democracy in parts of the world important to
America's strategic interests.
Further, he "didn't vote for war in Iraq" because he was not a member of
Congress when that vote took place, nor did he have access to the
intelligence reports over twelve years beginning in 1991, that caused
the vast majority of Congress and his opponent Hillary Clinton, to
support deposing the Hussein regime and liberate, not invade, the Iraqi
people.
Retreat And
Defeat
Obama's
first promise of change comes in the form of a call for retreat and
defeat in Iraq, which every international expert can tell you will
destabilize Iraq's current progress towards secure democratic reform, an
idea Obama claims to hold dear, but won't support.
He wants to bring our troops home immediately, but in defeat, not
victory.
He wants to launch a new era of dialogue and cooperation with the worlds
most brutal and committed enemies of the west in North Korea, Iran, and
China, with folks like Chavez and Castro. He says that "China is
our competitor, not our enemy," even as Chinese spies are being brought
to justice for infiltrating the most secret of U.S. national security
agencies.
But he wants a U.S. Military enforced "no fly zone" in Africa, where the
ancestors of his father live in tyranny, oppressed by African war lords
and corrupt African politicians, not American slave traders.
He talks about a more secure and sovereign America as he pushes to erase
U.S. borders, legalize illegal migration -- including with full voting
rights for illegals, and calls for "increased tax-payer investment in
our relationship with Mexico" while asking for "$50B annually to
strengthen weak states at risk of collapse," not American states, third
world dictatorships.
Bully Bully
Obama
said that America, under his Presidency, will stop being a "bully."
(Video)
He also
said an Obama presidency would work to regain the trust of Muslims
worldwide with Washington-led aid programs in Muslim countries.
Undecideds
Rep. Lacy Clay (D-MO), Sen. Barack Obama’s Missouri co-chairman and
pledged Obama super-delegate, said Obama will gain the support of 50
undecided Democratic super-delegates later this week, according to the
Columbia Missourian.
Said Clay: “She (Sen. Clinton) will not make up those numbers.
This race is over.”
Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw first reported yesterday that Obama
had about 50 secretly committed superdelegates. However, The
Hotline quotes an unnamed Obama campaign aide who says the report is
"wrong."
Punning Out
Obama
assures us that "Nobody is proposing we leave (Iraq) precipitously."
But actually, somebody is proposing that -- and that somebody is Barack
Obama.
In January 2007, for example, he outlined a plan to begin "redeployment
of U.S. forces no later than May 1, 2007" and "remove all combat
brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008." Today, he vows to
"immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq."
That is the very definition of precipitous.
Hedging a bit, Obama recently explained that "If al Qaeda is forming a
base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the
American homeland and our interests abroad."
McCain couldn't resist pointing out the obvious: "Al Qaeda is in Iraq.
And that's why we're fighting in Iraq."
Even as Obama vows to cede the battlefield in Iraq, where the Iraqi
government is fighting alongside Americans against the jihadists, he
proposes bombing the jihadists in Pakistan -- over the objection of the
Pakistani government. "If we have actionable intelligence about
high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we
will," he has warned.
There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, the Bush administration
has attacked targets in Pakistan -- with and without the permission of
the AWOL Musharraf. But Obama's anti-terror strategy seems to be
premised on the notion that the United States can't fight jihadists in
Iraq and Pakistan.
In truth, the United States can and must fight the enemy wherever it is
-- the Sahara and the Horn of Africa, Iraq and Iran, Afghanistan and
Pakistan, the list goes on. It's all the same war!
However, there's more -- and less -- to Obama's foreign policy than
pulling out of Iraq and pummeling Pakistan.
Obama, who reminds us that his grandfather served in "Patton's army and
marched across Europe" and helped shut down Hitler's death camps, says
it is not America's job to prevent genocide -- n Iraq or elsewhere,
apparently.
The AP reported it this way in July 2007: "Presidential hopeful Barack
Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve
humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq
isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there."
His defense of this position sounds surprisingly, jarringly, similar to
that of isolationists on the far fringes, who always justify
non-intervention somewhere by pointing out that America has not
intervened everywhere.
But the problems with Obama's fusion foreign policy don't end there.
When a questioner during the CNN-YouTube debate asked whether as
president Obama would be willing to meet with the leaders of Iran,
Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea, his answer was unequivocal.
"It is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them," he intoned.
Worse, as the New York Times reported last November, Obama made it clear
"that he planned to talk to Iran without preconditions."
Without preconditions? The mullahs wouldn't have to stop funding
and fomenting the guerilla war that is killing American troops in Iraq,
or come clean with the IAEA on their subterranean nuclear program, or
stop arming Hamas with rockets that terrorize and kill Israeli
civilians?
Sgt. Schultz Defense
The question was raised, "Did Barack Obama use indicted
campaign fund-raiser Tony Rezko as a
conduit to get jobs for people in Gov. Blagojevich's
administration?"
The question arises from a list of 39 people Rezko's lawyers said in a
court filing he urged Blagojevich to give state jobs.
Among those on the list were two people who appear to have Obama links
and a third who's now an Obama presidential campaign staffer.
But did the names come from Obama? His campaign staff's short answer:
Don't know -- but it's possible.
"We do not know how decisions were made to fill specific state
positions, and we have no records of any individual recommendations we
were asked to make or made," says Obama spokesman Bill Burton. "But we
do know that Tony Rezko, among others, was helping to gather names for
the positions coming open with a new administration, and, if it is
established any names came through our office, we would have no reason
to doubt it."
Nadhmi Auchi
The
question of Obama's Iraqi Oil for Food connection was raised when
U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve jailed Obama supporter, Tony Rezko,
saying he had disobeyed her order to keep her posted on his financial
status. Among other things, he failed to tell her about a $3.5
million loan from London-based Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi -- a loan
that was later forgiven in exchange for shares in a prime slice of
Chicago real estate. Rezko gave $700,000 of the money to his wife
and used the rest to pay legal bills and funnel cash to various
supporters."
Funds from Auchi's loan may have also helped finance a complex series of
transactions between Rezko and Obama involving the 2005 purchase of
Obama's Chicago mansion and Rezko's purchase of an adjoining landlocked
parcel.
The Times of London reports: "A company related to Mr. Auchi, who has a
conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr. Obama's
bagman Antoin ‘Tony' Rezko on May, 23 2005. Mr. Auchi says the
loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5
million.
"Three weeks later, Mr. Obama bought a house on the city's South Side
while Mr Rezko's wife bought the garden plot next door from the same
seller on the same day, June 15. Mr. Obama says he never used Mrs.
Rezko's still-empty lot, which could only be accessed through his
property. But he admits he paid his gardener to mow the lawn."
The sudden emergence of Auchi into this story indicates Rezko's deals
may include a money trail leading back to dead Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein. Auchi's Saddam links trace back to a failed 1959
assassination attempt on the life of then-Iraqi-prime-minister Abdul
Karim Qasim.
Auchi's General Mediterranean Holdings company was also the largest
private shareholder in Banque Nationale de Paris which later merged with
Paribas to become BNP Paribas. At Saddam's insistence, billions of
dollars of Oil for Food transactions passed through BNP from its 1995
inception until 2001.
The Auchi-Obama links go beyond the mansion deal. The Times of
London (February 1) reports uncovering, "state documents in Illinois
recording that Fintrade Services, a Panamanian company, lent money to
(an) Obama fundraiser in May 2005. Fintrade's directors include
Ibtisam Auchi, the name of Mr. Auchi's wife."
Obama has refused to sit down at length with the Chicago reporters who
have worked this story for years. But as reporter, Dana Milbank,
has pointed out, "The questioning...has only just begun." With
old-time Chicago corruption now going international-and Presidential --
finding those answers is more urgent than ever.
Telecom Immunity
In an
interview with National Journal magazine, an intelligence adviser to
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign broke with his candidate’s position
opposing retroactive legal protection for telecommunications companies
being sued for cooperating with a dubious U.S. government domestic
surveillance program.
"I do believe strongly that [telecoms] should be granted that immunity,"
former CIA official John Brennan told National Journal reporter Shane
Harris in the interview. "They were told to [cooperate] by the
appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context."
Power Is Out
Obama senior advisor
Samantha Power paid for her "monster" dig by resigning Sunday, but
Hillary Clinton's campaign seized on potentially more damaging remarks
suggesting Barack Obama might renege on his pledge to pull U.S. troops
from Iraq promptly.
Even before the Harvard professor and Obama's chief outside foreign
policy adviser stepped down, the Clinton camp was gleefully circulating
another interview where Power called Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan
"the best-case scenario."
"[Obama] will, of course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as a
presidential candidate or a U.S. senator," Power told the BBC in what
the Clinton campaign flagged as eyebrow-raising remarks.
"He will rely upon a plan -- an operational plan -- that he pulls
together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he
doesn't have daily access now, as a result of not being the President,"
she said. -- (Video)
Obama has been backing off post-partisan rhetoric on education, looking
more like a stick-in-the-mud Democratic regular on schools and less like
the reformer who supported test-based accountability and performance pay
for teachers. The Chicagoan had bucked teachers' unions and other
stodgy liberals, supporting charter schools in Illinois and mentorship
programs in Washington.
But a campaign-hardened Obama is sounding more like a traditional lefty,
waffling when the issues get tough and even employing an advisor who has
worked to kill the avant-garde Teach for America (which subverts
certification standards cherished by unions).
Ferraro Gagged
On the same day, former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, who
is stepping down from Hillary Clinton’s finance team after telling a
California newspaper that Barack Obama has been aided politically by his
race,
said Wednesday evening that the remarks were nothing more than a
"statement of fact."
"Somebody must have seen this (article) and said, 'Wow, this is really
something -- we go after Ferraro, we go after Clinton,'" Ferraro said in
an interview Wednesday night on FOX News' "Hannity & Colmes."
"They made this a divisive issue, not me."
Former Maryland Lieutenant Gov. Michael Steele, who is black, said that
Ferraro’s comments are true, and the fact she can’t speak them "goes to
the heart and ugliness of racism." He said Obama's candidacy is
not diminished by her words, but an oversensitivity is harming debate in
America.
That Obama won 92% of the black vote in Mississippi adds credence to
Ferraro's and Steele's allegations.
Show Me The Money
BARACK OBAMA (D-IL) -- Top Contributors -- and look who leads the list!
Did you know universities contributed to political campaigns? I
didn't.
1 University of Chicago $156,054
2 Kirkland & Ellis $143,138
3 Henry Crown & Co $79,500
4 Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal $74,950
5 Northwestern University $72,930
6 Exelon Corp $71,850
7 Sidley, Austin et al $71,432
8 Mayer Brown $69,960
9 Jenner & Block $62,710
10 Soros Fund Management $61,605
11 Goldman Sachs $61,500
12 Clifford Law Offices $59,550
13 Simmons Cooper LLC $58,500
14 Tejas Securities $57,250
15 JP Morgan Chase & Co $56,600
16 Ariel Capital Management $55,650
17 Skadden, Arps et al $54,071
18 Winston & Strawn $52,450
19 Piper Rudnick LLP $45,600
20 Holland Capital Management $43,350
The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from
the organization's PAC, its individual members or employees or owners,
and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals
include subsidiaries and affiliates.
I guess "special interests" only include oil companies, not lawyers and
investment bankers -- and I certainly would identify George Soros as a
"very special interest."
Wright's Rants
Jake Tapper
reports, that according to a New York Times
story from a year ago, the Obama campaign disinvited Wright from
delivering a public invocation at Obama's candidacy announcement.
"Fifteen minutes before Shabbos I get a call from Barack," Wright told
the Times. "One of his members had talked him into uninviting me."
In a phone call with Wright, Obama cited a
Rolling Stone story, "The Radical Roots of Barack Obama," (the name
of which has curiously been changed on the RS website) and told him,
according to Wright, "You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what
we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public."
That story included the following passage: "The Trinity United Church of
Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago, is at once vast
and unprepossessing, a big structure a couple of blocks from the
projects, in the long open sore of a ghetto on the city's far South
Side. The church is a leftover vision from the Sixties of what a
black nationalist future might look like. There's the testifying
fervor of the black church, the Afrocentric Bible readings, even the odd
dashiki. And there is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a sprawling,
profane bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution,
with his own radio shows and guest preaching gigs across the country.
Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously
declares that he will recite 10 essential facts about the United States.
'Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in
college,' he intones. 'Fact number two: Racism is how this country
was founded and how this country is still run!' There is thumping
applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John
Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. 'We are deeply involved
in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of
professional KILLERS. ... We believe in white supremacy and black
inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. ... We
conducted radiation experiments on our own people. ... We care
nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!" The crowd
whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: 'And. And.
And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS S***!'"
This was more than a year ago.
So ... what did Obama know then and what did he just all of a sudden
learn?
"All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are
ones that I vehemently condemn." -- Barack Obama
This seems to be the General Rule of Obama -- if it's going to damage
him, he condemns it! And rejects and denounces. Vehemently!
The Rule would seem to apply to all past and future controversial
statements -- his campaign could get that sentence printed up on little
laminated cards and hand them out to reporters, or include them after
the statements of all Obama surrogates, like those fine-print 'void
where prohibited' waivers.
"Condemned if controversial."
Favorable Unfavorable
Obama's favorable-unfavorable is 46 to 51, its all time low,
demonstrating no ability yet to stanch the bleeding. No wonder
they trotted out Bill Richardson with his Fu Man Chu beard.
But here is the
real evidence of what has happened with white voters:
Arkansas: McCain leads Clinton 50-43. McCain leads Obama by 59-30.
Kentucky: McCain leads Clinton 53-43. He destroys Obama 64-28.
Lower middle income whites have deserted Obama. In one Pennsylvania
poll, Clinton now leads Obama by 26. She has now taken the lead
from him in North Carolina. Rasmussen national numbers: Clinton
46, Obama 44.
Head to head general: McCain 49, Obama 41; McCain 49, Clinton 43.
The Polls
New
InsiderAdvantage Poll indicates Obama’s speech meets unsympathetic
ears with Americans.
The pollsters screened poll respondents to find those who were aware
that Obama’s pastor was in the news. A startling 82% knew about
Obama’s speech, and about the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah
Wright.
Of those who knew about the controversy and the speech, we asked,
"Taking all this into account, are you more or less likely to support
Obama for president?"
Less likely (52%)
More likely (19%)
About the same (27%)
No opinion (2%)
The poll was conducted March 19 among 1,051 Americans. After
filtering out those not aware of Rev. Wright and Obama’s speech about
him, the sample is 807, for a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2%.
The data have been weighted for age, race, gender and partisan
affiliation.
Only one out of 50 poll respondents had no opinion.
The poll displays no numbers flattering to Obama. Most startling
is that blacks by 56% to 31% said the speech made them less likely to
vote for him.
Democrats disapproved 48% to 28%, which looks sobering for Obama on
first glance, but might portend otherwise.
The disturbing numbers for Obama are the independent voters. By
56% to 13%, they said they’re less likely to vote for him because of the
speech.
And there's no surprise here -- Democratic whites were more sympathetic
with the speech’s message than black ones.
McPeak
The
interview of Tony McPeak in the Oregonian has turned into a bigger
headache for Barack Obama than first thought. Obama’s Chief
Military Adviser told the newspaper in a 2003 interview that the US
should keep troops in Iraq for "a century … if we do [the war] right,"
echoing exactly the same sentiments that Obama has ridiculed as "a
hundred years of war" when John McCain made them. Now Obama has to
explain why the former Air Force Chief of Staff blames the Jews for the
Iraq war:
In an interview with The Oregonion about five years ago, McPeak argued
that the influence exerted by American Jews is responsible for the lack
of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. According to
the general the problem was New York and Miami.
"We have a large vote here in favor of Israel. And no politician
wants to run against it," he said. In the same interview, McPeak spoke of
his personal experience with Israel.
"I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel, worked at one time very closely
with the Israeli Air Force as a junior officer," he said, "but that’s
maybe the more cosmopolitan, liberal version of the Israeli population."
McPeak also charged that Jews and Christian Zionists manipulated
American foreign policy in Iraq. "Let’s say that one of your
abiding concerns is the security of Israel as opposed to a purely
American self-interest, then it would make sense to build a dozen or so
bases in Iraq," he said.
McPeak’s formulation uses a little more subtlety than most of the
Jewish-cabal conspiracy theorists, but the thrust is the same.
Jews and "Christian Zionists" operate from a concern for the interests
of Israel over America. It’s not that protecting the region’s only
democracy and our strongest ally somehow doesn’t fall within our own
interests, but that this group of Americans act against our national
interests to manipulate American policy at the expense of our country.
Basically, Jews and Christian Zionists are traitors, according to McPeak.
How can Obama explain this away? Will this be yet another "crazy
uncle" whose views on Israel Obama will disavow while not repudiating
McPeak? The last one, Jeremiah Wright, included anti-Israel rants
in newsletter from the church that Obama has attended for 20 years and
to which Obama has contributed tens of thousands of dollars. The
animus towards Israel among Obama advisers has begun to form a distinct
pattern, one that shrugs and wan, partial denials cannot hide.
And it’s not just the animus towards Israel that Obama has to explain,
either. Why does Obama associate with people who indulge in
conspiracy theories to explain reality? Wright believes that the
government created HIV to commit a genocide; his replacement believes
that the CIA created crack cocaine to destroy African-American
communities; and now his military adviser believes that Jews and
Christian Zionists conspire to undermine America. Is this the kind
of Cabinet we can expect to see in an Obama presidency?
Total Withdrawal Day
Today Was Obama's Total Withdrawal of Combat Troops Day.
Perfunction remembers that back in January 2007, Barack Obama
wanted today to be the last day U.S. combat troops were in Iraq.
The legislation commences redeployment of U.S. forces no later than May
1, 2007 with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March
31, 2008,
Think Iraq would be in better shape if the surge had never happened?
Think U.S. national security would be in better shape if there had been
no surge?
Think Moqtada al-Sadr would be in better shape if the surge had never
happened?
Perhaps MoveOn.org's fundraising would be in worse shape if they had
never had a chance to run the "General Betray-Us" ad.
Texas Falls
Obama
has won the overall delegate race in Texas thanks to a strong
showing in Democratic county conventions this past weekend.
Obama picked up seven of nine outstanding delegates, giving him a total
of 99 Texas delegates to the party's national convention this summer.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the other two, giving her a total of 94
Texas delegates, according to an analysis of returns by The Associated
Press.
Texas Democrats held both a presidential primary and caucus. Clinton
narrowly won the popular vote in the state's primary March 4, earning
her 65 national convention delegates to Obama's 61.
Smokin!
Obama
just told MSNBC's Chris Matthews on a special "Hardball" college
tour edition on Wednesday that "I fell off the wagon a couple of times"
when it comes to smoking.
Obama told the students at West Chester University in Pennsylvania --
with an April 22 primary against Hillary Clinton -- that after lapsing
he "was able to get back on" the wagon right away.
Obama says he quit smoking when he starting running for president last year, a
condition laid down by wife Michelle.
"I fell off the wagon a couple times during the course of it, and then
was able to get back on. But it is a struggle like everything
else. And I think that it is important to just keep in mind, I
have a nine-year-old daughter and a six-year-old daughter," Obama said.
"And I want to give them away in their weddings and I want to see my
grand kids, and I want to set a good example for all these young people
here, and I want to make sure as president of the United States,
everybody knows that I'm going to try to stay healthy."
"I need you guys to stay healthy, too, because we need to bring our
health care costs down," Obama said.
Withdraw?
Maybe!
A key adviser to Senator Obama’s campaign is
recommending in a confidential paper that America keep between
60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq as of late 2010, a plan at odds with
the public pledge of the Illinois senator to withdraw combat forces from
Iraq within 16 months of taking office.
The paper, obtained by The New York Sun, was written by Colin Kahl for
the center-left Center for a New American Security. In "Stay on
Success: A Policy of Conditional Engagement," Mr. Kahl writes that
through negotiations with the Iraqi government "the U.S. should aim to
transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000–80,000
forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be
the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground)."
Mr. Kahl is the day-to-day coordinator of the Obama campaign’s working
group on Iraq. A shorter and less detailed version of this paper
appeared on the center’s Web site as a policy brief.
Show Me The Money
"The hottest ticket in San Francisco this weekend may well be the
$2,300-a-head reception for Democratic hopeful Barack Obama at the
Pacific Heights mansion of billionaire couple Ann and Gordon Getty."
Ah, that Getty home -- it could only be the legendary one in the heart
of
Billionaires Row.
The mansion, seen here in wedding-cake colors, may not
look overly impressive at street level, but it sits on the crest of a
ridge overlooking the bay; the estate actually cascades down the
hillside behind, out of sight from the front façade.
While inside this magnificent structure, receiving the adulation of the
Swells, Obama says the following:
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of
small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and
nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton
administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive
administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna
regenerate and they have not."
"And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or
religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their
frustrations."
By the next Friday, these words reach the
public -- and all hell breaks loose -- see above.
Systematic Corruption
Excerpt of legal letter from Ryan, Phillips, Utrecht & MacKinnon to the
Nevada State Democratic Party:
This
letter (.pdf) is not intended as a response to the Obama campaign’s
letter. However, in the interest of a complete record, and in
contrast to the alleged minor procedural problems noted by the Obama
campaign, the Committee wishes to bring to your attention information we
have received evidencing a premeditated and predesigned plan by the
Obama campaign to engage in systematic corruption of the Party’s caucus
procedures. Compounding this blatant distortion of the caucus
rules was an egregious effort by the Obama campaign to manipulate the
voter registration process in its own favor, thereby disenfranchising
countless voters. Finally, the Committee has received a vast
number of reliable reports of voter suppression and intimidation by the
Obama campaign or its allies.
...Caucus chairs obviously supporting Obama:
o Deliberately miscounted votes to favor Senator Obama.
o Deliberately counted unregistered persons as Obama votes.
o Deliberately counted young children as Obama votes.
...Many Clinton supporters were threatened with employment termination
or other discipline if they caucused for Senator Clinton.
...On the whole, these reports show a troubling effort by the Obama
campaign and its allies and supporters to advance their own campaign at
the expense of the right of all Nevada Democrats to participate in the
democratic process in a free, fair and open manner.
Anti- Semitism
April 6th -- Here's another piece of anti-Semitism brought to you by Barackobama.com,
the official Web site of Barack Obama's campaign that should serve as a
red-flag to Jewish voters.
Israelis fighting Israeli Apartheid By Tony Wicher -- Oct 11th, 2007 at
12:31 pm EDT
But what’s clear enough is that for the past 40 years, there has been
only one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and
that state has been Israel. And Israel has been an apartheid
state: Like South Africa, it’s a democracy ruled by law for one group of
people, and a military-colonial regime for another. Those who
complain about it the use of "apartheid" to describe Israeli policies
are either in deep denial, or else argue, as many liberals do, that the
term is not helpful because it is provocative or "demonizes" the
Israelis. This, too, though, is an evasion: The purpose of using the
term is precisely to draw attention to the fact that Israel is routinely
engaged in practices long deemed abhorrent by the international
community, but because of Israel’s claim to represent the Jewish people
and because of our history of suffering, this reality is simply
overlooked, excused, or ignored. So, yes, using the word
"apartheid" to describe what Israel is doing in the West Bank is meant
to make people feel uncomfortable over what Israel is doing, and to
recognize that condoning it is the moral equivalent of condoning
apartheid. Clearly, that’s why Israeli human rights advocates
routinely use the term.
The last two outrages are on a website that is under the direct
control of Obama.
Booooooooo!
The legislative
district caucus for Seattle’s 43rd District was held at Lincoln High
School in Wallingford today.
The gymnasium was overflowing with precinct delegates who had been
elected at their precinct caucuses on Feb. 9 -- and with what seemed to
be an even larger number of wannabe alternate delegates. Of the
67, 53 delegates pledged for Obama and 14 for Clinton.
When someone suggested doing the Pledge of Allegiance, there were groans
and boos at the mere mention of doing the pledge.
Then, when the district chair put the idea of doing the Pledge of
Allegiance up to a vote, it was overwhelmingly voted down. One
might more accurately say the idea of pledging allegiance to the flag
(of which there was only one in the room, by the way, on some delegate’s
hat) was shouted down.
Violation!
Barack Obama's presidential campaign
violated
city Department of Education regulations when it made a video at a Bronx
high school classroom starring students, an official said.
The campaign violated the chancellor's regulations against filming in
school buildings for political or promotional purposes, education
department spokeswoman Margie Feinberg said. The video was forwarded as
an e-mail attachment to potential donors.
Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the campaign did not know about the
regulations.
"The intention was to share a story that inspired Sen. Obama and one we
hoped would inspire others," Psaki said. "We regret any difficulty this
positive project caused the school."
The 13-minute video was shot on March 18 at the Bronx High School for
Performance and Stagecraft.
Jackson Shafer, a 25-year-old teacher at the school, said he contacted
the Obama campaign after his students decided to write their own version
of the Illinois senator's "Yes we can" speech.
He said he was surprised when the Obama campaign responded with a
request to film the students.
"This was not about helping them fill their coffers," he said, adding
that he did not know that the video would be used alongside a pitch for
donations.
The school's principal, Mark Sweeting, said that he knew that the video
shoot violated the chancellor's regulations. But he defended it as an
educational benefit to his students.
"The bottom line is I have a senior Hispanic student that is now
interested in politics. I have a male African-American student... that
is now in tune with what a superdelegate is," he said. "That to me is
outstanding."
The Department of Education is considering disciplinary action against
the school's administration, Feinberg said.
Timetable
Obama said that the United States should
set a timetable to pull its troops out of Iraq to pressure leaders
there to establish peace.
"Increased pressure in a measured way, in my mind ... includes a
timetable for withdrawal. Nobody's asking for a precipitous
withdrawal, but I do think that it has to be a measured but increased
pressure," Obama told Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in
Iraq.
Obama telling this great general how to run a
war -- now, that's funny!
Diplomatic Surge
Obama
called for a
"diplomatic surge" including talks with US foe Iran, to
help stabilize the situation in Iraq.
"We should be talking to them as well," Obama told the top US General in
Iraq David Petraeus and US ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker.
"I do not believe we are going to be able to stabilize the situation
without that" said Obama
He used his question period during the crucial Senate hearing to restate
his initial opposition to the war in Iraq, which Clinton voted to
authorize.
"We all have the greatest interest in seeing a successful resolution to
Iraq," Obama told Petraeus and Crocker.
"I continue to believe that the original decision to go into Iraq was a
massive strategic blunder, that the two problems you pointed out,
Al-Qaeda in Iraq and increased Iranian influence in the region are a
direct result of that original decision.
"That's not a decision you gentlemen made. I will not lay it at your
feet. You are cleaning up the mess afterwards."
Nostradamus
Scholars for the Smithsonian Institute have reported
new
interpretations of Nostradamus prophecies that may relate to Barack
Obama, the Illinois senator vying to become the next US president.
The Institute which holds some very rare Nostradamus manuscripts,
believes that some of the quatrains written by the 16th century
soothsayer are very close to describing the fight for the White House
that is happening now.
Professor Eugene Randell, Deputy Director of the Smithsonian Institution
Archives, said that it is well known that some of the quatrains are open
to interpretation. However, what he has translated from the
previously unreleased manuscript will certainly "ruffle a few feathers".
243 The great empire will be torn from limb,
The all-powerful one for more than four hundred years:
Great power given to the dark one from slaves come,
The Aryana will not be satisfied thereby.
Nostradamus' previously unreleased quatrains are a heavily guarded
secret and the scholars have broken with tradition to reveal a few
tidbits in the Smithsonian's monthly circular.
Weird Ideas
If you go to the most
expensive private school in Hawaii and then move on to Columbia
University and Harvard Law School, you may not understand normal
Americans. Their beliefs are so alien to your leftwing viewpoint that
you have to seek some psychological explanation for what seem to be
weird ideas.
They can’t really believe in the right to bear arms.
They can’t really believe in traditional marriage.
They can’t really believe in their faith in God.
They can’t really want to enforce the law on immigration.
Therefore, they must be "bitter" and "frustrated."
This is the closest Senator Obama has come to openly sharing his wife’s
view that "America is a mean country." Not since Governor Dukakis
have we seen anyone so out of touch with normal Americans. It
makes perfect sense that it was in a fundraiser in San Francisco that he
would have shared the views he has so carefully kept hidden for the
entire campaign.
Bush Crimes
Obama would
ask his AG to "immediately review" potential of crimes in Bush White
House should he be elected in November.
An Obama administration would seek to prosecute officials of a former
Bush administration on the revelations that they greenlighted torture,
or for other potential crimes that took place in the White House.
Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney
General and his deputies to "immediately review the information that's
already there" and determine if an inquiry is warranted.
As a reader noticed, Obama was sporting the much-debated flag pin on his
lapel for his speech to veterans today.
UPDATE: The pin was given to Obama by a disabled vet at the event.
Why do I think the acquisition story sounds like a
tall tale?
The Myth Of New Politics
Barack Obama has spent most of the last 15 months conjuring up a
myth, a facade of "New
Politics" to explain why voters should support someone with only
three years of experience in national politics for President.
This myth involves having hope that someone unencumbered by a long
history of engaging special interests in Washington DC would bring a
fresh look to policy and governance.
The Last Debate
The last
Democratic debate has finally concluded, and perhaps the last
chances of ending the primaries early. Thanks to a surprisingly
tenacious set of questions for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton from ABC
moderaters Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous, Barack Obama got
exposed over and over again as an empty suit, while Hillary cleaned his
clock.
ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, a co-host of Wednesday night’s
Democratic debate, quizzed presidential candidate Barack Obama about his
relationship with William Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground, a
radical group that conspired to bomb buildings such as the Pentagon in
the 1970s.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But first, a follow up on this issue, general
theme of patriotism in your relationships. A gentleman named
William Ayers, he was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s.
They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He’s
never apologized for that. And in fact, on 9/11, he was quoted in
the New York Times, saying, "I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we
didn’t do enough." An early organizing meeting for your state
senate campaign was held at his house and your campaign has said you
were "friendly." How could a man running for the presidency of the
United States possibly have anything to do with, or have anything but
disdain for a man who did what he has done to this country? Can
you explain that relationship for the voters and explain to
Democrats why it won’t be a problem?
Oddly, Obama went on to compare a man who was involved in bombings
that killed people to his colleague, Republican Senator Tom Coburn from
Oklahoma, who once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death
penalty to those who carried out abortions.
BARACK OBAMA: The fact is that I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of
the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who
during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the
death penalty to those who carried out abortions.
Obama, however, never did figure out the First Rule of Holes. Once
again, he described religion as a refuge people use when government
doesn’t work -- a fatal misreading of religious faith in America.
He not only came up with bad answers, he looked lost and tentative
throughout the entire period.
Hillary didn’t let him off the hook, either, not when it came to
Crackerquiddick or on the Wright Stuff. Noting that "you choose
your pastor, not your family," Hillary once again pounded Obama for not
doing anything about Wright when he had the chance. She also
jumped at the chance to note that former Weather Underground terrorist
William Ayers was more than just a "neighbor," as Obama described him.
Hillary pointed out that Obama and Ayers worked on a foundation together
for years, even after 9/11, even after Ayers said publicly that he
didn’t regret his terrorism.
By the time Gibson got around to the issues, Obama looked lost and
upset. It got worse when Gibson asked about capital-gains tax
rates, which Obama has pledged to raise. When Gibson repeatedly
pointed out that decreasing the rates actually increased the revenues,
Obama simply couldn’t come up with an answer, stammering while trying to
change the subject.
Obama got destroyed in this exchange. If superdelegates had begun
to reconsider their support of Obama after Crackerquiddick, they’re
speed-dialing Hillary after watching Gibson dismember Obama on national
TV tonight.
He never did explain his relationship to Ayers.
Media Bias
Debate outrage
provesmedia bias -- in favor of Obama
Politico reporters John Harris and Jim VandeHei review the outrage from
offended journalists over the ABC debate this week with a particularly
jaundiced eye. They claim it proves exactly what they have themselves
experienced in their work — starry-eyed reporters who wind up having to
be "de-toxed" from their crushes on Barack Obama:
In fact, the balance of political questions (15) to policy questions
(13) was more substantive than other debates this year that prompted no
deluge of protests. The difference is that this time there were more
hard questions for Obama than for Clinton.
Moreover, those questions about Jeremiah Wright, about Obama’s
association with 1960s radical William Ayers, about apparent
contradictions between his past and present views on proven wedge issues
like gun control, were entirely in-bounds. If anything they were overdue
for a front-runner and likely nominee.
If Obama was covered like Clinton is, one feels certain the media focus
would not have been on the questions, but on a candidate performance
that at times seemed tinny, impatient, and uncertain.
The difference seems clear: Many journalists are not merely observers
but participants in the Obama phenomenon.
Journalistic Malpractice
If Obama
was
covered like Clinton is, one feels certain the media focus would not
have been on the questions, but on a candidate performance that at times
seemed tinny, impatient and uncertain.
The difference seems clear: Many journalists are not merely
observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon.
"We're in the midst of a presidential campaign which is really getting
rotten -- down and dirty between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,"
Helen Thomas
said.
"The Democratic candidates -- Obama has the edge, he's a rock star.
He's galvanized the youth vote of this country, but I have yet to see
what he has done to take the highest office in the land. He is no
Martin Luther King and his campaign, like all others, is backed by
people with deep pockets."
"Hell yes, he sure has," Thomas said, after being asked if Obama had
been given a free ride by the media.
"I think more people, a lot of people are afraid of being called racists
by opposing Obama. And I'm not saying he hasn't been a very
eloquent orator. He's won a lot of people over."
Polls
Gallup Poll
Daily tracking shows that Hillary Clinton now receives 46% of the
support of Democrats nationally, compared to 45% for Barack Obama,
marking the first time Obama has not led in Gallup’s daily tracking
since March 18-20.
A Bloody Nose
Obama
will not debate Hillary any longer. And the reasons are pretty
clear after last Wednesday’s debacle in Pennsylvania. Obama simply
doesn’t fare well when forced to defend himself extemporaneously.
He gets almost incoherent, and not just on the supposed "distraction"
questions, but also on policy. His answers on capital-gains tax
increases had Hillary smiling and the rest of the nation wondering if he
had bothered to study the issue at all.
After last Wednesday, it looks like a retreat. Obama got a bloody
nose, and suddenly he doesn’t want to appear on national TV, even up
against a cupcake like Katie Couric. The strategy may be sound,
but only if one has no confidence in Obama’s ability to stand up to
tough questioning. In fact, his withdrawal from the debate appears
to be an admission of exactly that.
It’s like a championship boxer refusing to spar so that his pretty face
doesn’t get messed up. Then he expects to step in to the ring and
go toe to toe with the real deal and win.
Obama’s campaign strategy now mirrors his cut and run tactics on the war
in Iraq.
John Adams noted during the Boston Massacre trial that "Facts are
stubborn things." And it appears that, for the moment, the facts
have caught up with Obama here in Massachusetts.
How else to explain the amazing, astounding and unthinkable results of
the latest SurveyUSA presidential poll: Republican John McCain is tied
with Barack Obama in the Bay State.
The last Republican to win Massachusetts? Ronald Reagan. The
last Republican before that? Dwight Eisenhower. Even George
McGovern managed to carry Massachusetts in 1972, the one Democratic
holdout in Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide.
Replace "McGovern" with "MoveOn.org" and you’ve seized the essence of
the Obama candidacy. He’s the most liberal U.S. senator,
advocating tax increases on the "wealthy" and enjoying the support of
Gov. Deval Patrick, Sen. Ted Kennedy, The Boston Globe-Democrat and
every 9/11 conspiracy kook in the People’s Republic of Cambridge.
He’s got all the players in Massachusetts behind him except the ones who
actually vote.
Holly Robichaud, the "Lone Republican" of Boston Herald fame, blames
Gov. Patrick for Obama’s woes. "We’ve already elected one
inexperienced candidate running on a vague platform of hope in
Massachusetts, and it’s not working out. This is a classic example
of 'Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.'"
Not a bad theory, given that SurveyUSA also found only four in 10
residents approve of the job Gov. Patrick is doing.
Media
In a blink of an eye, the media has jumped ship from the
Obama campaign and become a crucial Clinton ally, pressing just the
message -- that Obama is a likely loser in the general election -- that
Hillary and her allies have been promoting for the past six weeks.
The new tenor of
media coverage is visible almost everywhere, from Politico, Time and
The New Republic to The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Attitudes
Obama understands that the
real threat to his candidacy is less Hillary Clinton and John McCain
than his own character and cultural attitudes. He came out of
nowhere with his autobiography already written, then saw it embellished
daily by the hagiographic coverage and kid-gloves questioning of a
supine press. (Which is why those "Saturday Night Live" parodies
were so devastatingly effective.)
Then came the three amigos: Tony Rezko, the indicted fixer; Jeremiah
Wright, the racist reverend; William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist.
And then Obama's own anthropological observation that "bitter"
working-class whites cling to guns and religion because they
misapprehend their real class interests.
In the now-famous Pennsylvania debate, Obama had extreme difficulty
answering questions about these associations and attitudes. The
difficulty is understandable. Some of the contradictions are
inexplicable. How does one explain campaigning throughout 2007 on
a platform of transcending racial divisions, while in that same year
contributing $26,000 to a church whose pastor incites race hatred?
What is Obama to do? Dismiss all such questions about his
associations and attitudes as "distractions." And then count on
his acolytes in the media to wage jihad against those who have the
temerity to raise these questions. As if the character and
beliefs of a man who would be president are less important than the
"issues." As if some political indecency was committed when
Obama was prevented from going through his latest -- 21st and likely
last -- primary debate without being asked about Wright or Ayers or the
tribal habits of gun-toting, God-loving Pennsylvanians.
Marxist Blogger
In the same week the Obama campaign quietly removed from its
official website a page managed by a fundraiser tied to the Islamic
terrorist group Hamas, its
official blogger has come under attack as a "hardcore Marxist" for
hanging a Communist Party flag in his Harvard campus apartment and
publishing in a self-professed 'revolutionary Marxist' journal.
Nearly half of Democrats (48 percent) think Hillary Clinton has a better
chance of beating John McCain in November -- 10 percentage points higher
than the 38 percent who think Barack Obama can win, according to a FOX
News poll released Wednesday. This represents a significant shift
from March, when Democrats said Obama was the candidate more likely to
beat McCain.
Polls
As May began, the
results of a statewide survey indicate a dramatic shift of
support from Obama in favor of Hillary Clinton in the Indiana Democratic
presidential primary.
The survey, conducted by Indianapolis-based TeleResearch Corp. and
released exclusively to 6News, showed Clinton with a 10-point lead over
Obama -- 48 percent to 38 percent -- with 14 percent of respondents
undecided. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3
percent.
The telephone poll of 943 randomly selected likely Democratic primary
voters was conducted from April 25 through April 29.
What is particularly striking in the results is the declining support
for Obama in favor of Clinton over successive days in which respondents
were questioned.
On the first day of the survey, Clinton held a 2 percent lead -- 45
percent to 43 percent, despite a 20-point lead for Obama among male
respondents. Each day, more respondents supported Clinton.
By the last day of polling, Clinton took 4 percent lead among men -- 45
percent to 41 percent -- representing a staggering 24-point swing.
Surgically Excised
It's time to disown Granny, if Obama's famous Philadelphia "race"
speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just
believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest
pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A
New York Times columnist said it "should be required reading in
classrooms across the country."
These equivalences having been revealed as the cheap rhetorical tricks
they always were. Obama has now decided that the man he simply
could not banish because he had become part of Obama himself is,
mirabile dictu, surgically excised.
At a news conference in North Carolina, Obama explained why he finally
decided to do the deed. Apparently, Wright's latest comments --
Obama cited three in particular -- were so shockingly "divisive and
destructive" that he had to renounce the man, not just the words.
What were Obama's three citations? Wright's claim that AIDS was
invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide; his praise of Louis
Farrakhan as a great man; and his blaming Sept. 11 on American
"terrorism."
But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages
that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven
weeks ago. Obama decided to cut off Wright not because Wright's
words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing
that changed was the venue in which Wright chose to display them -- live
on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice
destroyed Obama's Philadelphia pretense that this "endless loop" of
sermon excerpts being shown on "television sets and YouTube" had been
taken out of context.
Obama's Philadelphia oration was an exercise in contextualization.
In one particularly egregious play on white guilt, Obama had the
audacity to suggest that whites should be ashamed that they were ever
surprised by Wright's remarks: "The fact that so many people are
surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply
reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American
life occurs on Sunday morning."
Obama's newest attempt to save himself after Wright's latest poisonous
performance is now declared the new final word on the subject.
Therefore, any future ads linking Obama and Wright are preemptively
declared out of bounds, illegitimate, indeed "race-baiting" (a New York
Times editorial, April 30).
On what grounds? This 20-year association with Wright calls into
question everything about Obama: his truthfulness in his serially
adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in
choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now
realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred (like
Obama); and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the
bringer of a "new politics," rising above the old Washington ways of
expediency. It's hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient
than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club
instead of the pulpit, could no longer be "contextualized" as something
whites could not understand and only Obama could explain in all its
complexity.
Turns out the Wright show was not that complex after all. Everyone
understands it now, even Obama.
Distractions
Yesterday, a
Time magazine a columnist declared that issues of "character" were a
"distraction" in the Presidential race. Obama actually said the
same thing in his North Carolina press conference, that the Reverend
Wright affair has been a "distraction."
It's what liberals usually say when their own character comes under
public scrutiny?
What a heap of pure poppycock!
Character is the primary issue in every Presidential election.
John Adams' words on the matter:
The people "have a right, an indisputable, inalienable, indefeasible,
divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge -- I mean
of the character and conduct of their rulers."
We, the people, now have indisputable evidence that Barack Obama lacks
the integrity of character to be President.
Polls
A Rasmussen Reports national telephone
survey found that just 30% of the nation’s Likely Voters believe
Barack Obama denounced his former Pastor, Jeremiah Wright, because he
was outraged.
Most --58% -- say he denounced the Pastor for political convenience.
Only 33 percent believe Obama was surprised by Wright's statements at
the National Press Club, while 52 percent say he was not surprised. Some
26 percent say it's very likely that Obama "shares some of Pastor
Wright's controversial views about the United States" and 56 percent say
it's somewhat likely he does.
Only 7 percent of voters and 12 percent of black voters say they share
those views.
The survey was conducted on Wednesday and Thursday night. Obama
made his statements about Wright on Tuesday.
Maoists
Bill Ayers, who has been identified as an
Obama "adviser," has long held what the left once knew, broadly, as
"maoist" politics -- a view of the world that was opposed to Russian
style bureaucratic communism from above, instead advocates of this
approach supported sending revolutionary cadre to "swim among the masses
like fish in the sea."
There are other ex-SDS types around the Obama campaign as well,
including Marilyn Katz, a public relations professional, who was head of
security for the SDS during the disaster in the streets of Chicago in
1968. She is close (politically) to Carl Davidson, a former vice
president of SDS and longtime Fidelista, who is webmaster for a group
called Progressives for Obama, that is headlined by other former 60s
radicals like Tom Hayden and the Maoist Bill Fletcher. Davidson
and Katz were key organizers of the 2002 anti-war demonstration where
Obama made public his opposition to the Iraq war that has been so
critical to his successful presidential campaign. Davidson
apparently moved into the Maoist movements of the 70's after the
disintegration of SDS.
Black Voters Understand
May 5th -- Obama has been
avoiding stops in black communities in his quest to become the first
black major party nominee for the U.S. presidency.
Isaac Onah, a political science professor at the University of North
Carolina, told the Boston Globe that black voters appear to understand
Obama's campaign strategy. They also understand why Obama had to
repudiate his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Onah said.
Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's standing has been
significantly damaged by the controversy over his former pastor,
according to USA Today/Gallup poll published on Monday.
The poll showed Hillary Clinton leading Obama 51 percent to 44 percent
nationally among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters, in
contrast to a CBS News/New York Times survey released on Sunday that had
Obama leading Clinton by 12 points.
Zero
John McCain
dismissed Democratic rival Barack Obama as having zero national
security experience.
"Senator Obama wants to sit down with an Iranian leader who is dedicated
to wiping Israel off the map -- his words," Mr. McCain told reporters on
his campaign bus in North Carolina, where he was making a campaign stop
and attending fundraisers. "I don't think we should give him that
kind of prestige. Senator Obama obviously has no national security
experience, and therefore that's reflected in his judgment on a number
of those issues."
Polls
Exit polls now being
reported show Barack Obama way behind Hillary Clinton among working
class voters in Indiana and North Carolina.
("Working class" being defined in this poll as "whites with no college
degree.")
"This is offensive, and I think it’s disappointing," Obama told
Wolf Blitzer,
when asked his thoughts about McCain’s comments that the terrorist
organization Hamas wants Obama to be president. "Because John
McCain always says 'I am not going to run that kind of politics,' and to
engage in that kind of smear is unfortunate, particularly because my
policy toward Hamas has been no different than his."
"I’ve said it’s a terrorist organization and we should not negotiate
with them unless they recognize Israel, renounce violence, and unless
they are willing to abide by previous accords between the Palestinians
and the Israelis. So for him to toss out comments like that I
think is an example of him losing his bearings as he pursues this
nomination. We don’t need name calling in this debate."
Too
bad for Senator Obama that McCain’s comment is 100% true. Then
again, truth never has exactly been Obama’s strong point, has it?
Barack obama is whining and saying that John McCain is smearing him
because McCain said, "a spokesperson from Hamas said they wanted Sen.
Obama. … It’s indicative of how some of our enemies view America.
I guarantee you they’re not going to endorse me."
It always amuses me how politicians accuse others of "smearing"
them when the simple truth is stated.
News for Obama and Obama supporters…when the truth is told, it isn’t a
smear, that is when someone lies and since a Hamas top adviser, Ahmed
Yousef, told WABC radio, "We don’t mind–actually we like Mr. Obama.
We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John
Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change
America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not
with domination and arrogance," John McCain’s comment is not only the
truth, it is spot on.
Bottom line here is that John McCain told the truth and will continue to
do so and Barack Obama doesn’t like the truth being stated in this
regards.
Tough.
57 States
Yesterday Barack Obama said that John McCain was "losing his
bearings," a remark that McCain's campaign, perhaps protesting too much,
took as a reference to his age.
In fact, though, it is Obama, not McCain, who keeps having senior
moments. In particular, Obama is
weirdly unable to remember how many states there are in the Union.
It seems that Obama wants to be president of all 60 states -- the
"57" he visited, the "one left to go" and "Alaska and Hawaii" -- where
his staff won't let him go.
Can't blame public education this time.
Perhaps Obama is just remembering how the states went from his grammar
school days and was thinking of the
Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents the 57
Islamic states.
In celebration of his having traveled to an impressive 57 states in his
bid for the Presidency (and to finally put to rest the notion that he
abhors patriotic accessories), Barack Obama's campaign has introduced a
custom line of American flag lapel pins.
Get yours today and show your support for the least senile candidate in
the race!
Nomination Assured
Barack Obama "has
enough super-delegates to win Democratic nomination."
Barack Obama believes he has already secured the private support of
enough super-delegates to beat Hillary Clinton in the race for the
Democratic White House nomination.
The obligatory photo. The last
time he wore one was at a rally in Pennsylvania when a disabled vet put
him on the spot by handing one to him. Congrats, Barry: The issue you
manufactured is now of sufficient interest to the media that this idiocy
actually qualifies as newsworthy.
Hamstrung
Terry McAuliffe, campaign chairman for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
(D-N.Y.), said Tuesday that the former first lady is hamstrung by a
biased media.
"Clearly it has been a biased media, no question about it," McAuliffe
said on Fox News. When asked how much of the mainstream media is
"in the tank" for Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), who leads Clinton in the
race for the Democratic nomination, McAuliffe estimated that about 90
percent of the media favor Obama.
"It is what it is. We’re not complaining," he stated. "We
have to deal with the hand we’re dealt with."
McAuliffe added that "every independent study has said that this is the
most biased coverage they’ve ever seen in a presidential campaign."
Alec Rawls
observes that the two most widely recognized symbols of Islam are the crescent and the sword. Kind of amusing that Barack Hussein Obama’s campaign logo can be seen to feature both a crescent and a curved Islamic scimitar:
The crescent shape in Obama’s logo has the round part on top, just like a traditional crescent shaped mihrab (the Mecca direction indicator around which every mosque is built). The animation shows the two most famous mihrabs in the world: the mihrab from the Great Mosque in Cordoba, and the Prophet’s mihrab in Medina.
The lighter vertical column in the center-bottom of the logo, presumably meant to indicate reflected light, even conveys the full vertical shape of a traditional mihrab. The scimitar in the animation is from the flag of the Bosnian regiment of the Nazi SS.
If Obama himself had come up with this crescent logo, one might suspect Islamic intent, given his Islamic heritage. But the logo was not designed by Obama. It was designed by a Chicago based branding firm named Sender, which claims credit
for coming up with: "a white sunrise against a blue sky, over a
landscape implied by red and white stripes."
Obama definitely deserves to be made fun of for having a fairly obvious crescent shape in his logo, given his efforts to convince the public that he is not Muslim. This is already an uphill climb, when both his grandmother and his cousin are telling documented lies about their religion, claiming to be Christian in one venue while professing themselves Muslim in another. Lying about being Christian: it’s an Obama family tradition!
Still, there is no indication that the crescent and scimitar shapes in Obama’s logo are intended to convey any Islamic meaning. A genuine coincidence apparently.
Sweetie?
Obama patronizingly blew off a female reporter during a Michigan
campaign stop by referring to her with the dismissive, "sweetie"
-- and after he blew her off -- he never did answer her question.
And this isn't
the first time Obama has used the familiar term of endearment,
causing some to ask, is Obama being dismissive to the point of being
sexist or was he trying for a little machismo in front of the male
workers at the Sterling, Michigan auto manufacturing plant.
By the way, "sweetie’s" name is Peggy Agar. She is a professional
journalist from WXYZ, Channel 7, Sterling Heights, Michigan.
And you won't hear a peep from a single feminist about this either --
just imagine if George Bush had dismissed a reporter as "sweetie" with a
wave of the hand?
Fox's Fault
Obama
blames Fox News for likely loss in Kentucky.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, facing a likely defeat
in next Tuesday's primary election, won't travel to Kentucky before the
voting.
He also blamed Fox News for disseminating "rumors" about him and said
that that and e-mails filled with misinformation that have been
"systematically" dispersed have hurt him in Kentucky.
We're The Fugawie?
South Dakotans, Tom Daschle and George McGovern,
lavished all sorts of praise on Obama, according to reporters
present.
As the large, enthusiastic crowd of some 7,000 supporters roared and
waved "We can do it" signs and Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" blared,
Obama bounded onto stage, grabbed the microphone and said, "Thank you,
Sioux City!"
Trouble is, Obama was in Sioux Falls.
Unpresidential
Mark Steyn
mocks the Ninny Pity Party for crying about President Bush's speech
to Israel's Knesset.
Senator Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was
mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition
of the new State of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.
Nevertheless, Barack Obama decided that the President’s speech was
really about him, and he didn’t care for it. He didn’t put it
quite as bluntly as he did with the Reverend Wright, but the message was
the same: "That’s enough. That’s a show of disrespect to me."
And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee’s weirdly petty
narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and company piled on to
deplore Bush’s outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously
unacceptable, and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.
Honestly, What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here’s what the
president said: "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the
terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade
them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish
delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an
American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler,
all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call
this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been
repeatedly discredited by history."
It says something for Democrat touchiness, that the minute a guy makes a
generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and
dictators, they assume: Hey, they’re talking about me.
Whiner
Just what office is Barack Obama running for? Commander in
Chief? Or perhaps Keeper of the Constant Whine? Or maybe
Lord High Commissioner of the Bitch?
To Obama, it’s always something. Bush challenges his foreign
policy positions and he whines about a "political attack" rather than
responding. McCain rightly points out that Obama has absolutely
zero foreign policy experience (except that advanced course in foreign
relations he took when he was 8 years old and living in Indonesia -- or
whatever Obama’s claim to superior experience is this week) and the
candidate weeps like an 11 year old girl, complaining about McCain using
the "old politics" to diss him.
Now Obama is whining about not being able to win in Kentucky on Tuesday.
First, he blames Fox News. Then he fingers an email campaign in
the state against him. Finally, he lamely explains that he just
doesn’t have the time to sit down face to face with the good folks from
Kentucky and work his magic spell on them.
The more he whines the more
the press bends over backwards to cover for him. He makes a
statement about there being 57 states and gets a pass. McCain
confuses Shias and Sunnis and he’s a senile old man. Obama calls a
reporter "sweetie' -- on two separate occasions -- and its no big deal
-- apology accepted -- end of story. When McCain apologizes for
anything, it’s never enough.
Whenever Obama is criticized, the press immediately jumps to his defense
with cries of "unfairness" and dirty politics.
You Can't Say That
From Rush: With Obama we started out, we couldn't talk about
his big ears 'cause that made him nervous. We've gone from that to this:
Not only can we not mention his ears...
We can't talk about his mother.
We can't talk about his father.
We can't talk about his grandmother unless he does, and brings her up as
a "typical white person."
We can't talk about his wife,
can't talk about his preacher,
can't talk about his terrorist friends,
can't talk about his voting record,
can't talk about his religion.
We can't talk about appeasement.
We can't talk about color; we can't talk about lack of color.
We can't talk about race.
We can't talk about bombers and mobsters who are his friends.
We can't talk about schooling.
We can't talk about his name, "Hussein."
We can't talk about his lack of experience.
Can't talk about his income.
Can't talk about his flag pin.
This started out we can't call him a liberal.
It started out we just couldn't talk about his ears.
Now we can't say anything about him.
Shirley, You Jest
Barack Obama has been selected as one of the "25 Fittest Guys In
America."
In a wonderful example of media suck-up, the
June/July issue of
Men's Fitness magazine includes Obama with elite athletes, such as an
Olympic boxer, an Ironman triathalete, three mixed martial artists and
several professional sports stars in its annual list of "25 Fittest Men
in America." From the article:
"It takes a certain stamina to endure months of 16-hour days in pursuit
of the land’s highest office. Obama is not the first politician
dedicated to fitness, but the Illinois senator starts every day with a
morning work-out, whether it’s machines at the hotel gym or a brisk
45-minute run. He’s also quit smoking. Obama can be excused for enjoying
the occasional state-fair corn dog because he mostly stays away from
fatty foods."
"He’s wiry-looking but actually pretty strong."
Distractions
The Obama campaign is seeking to preemptively declare what they
unilaterally have decided -- with the implicit assistance of the media
-- are the permissible
rules for engagement
of their gaffe-prone candidate?
There are three basic components to the Obama "Distraction" Defense:
1. The ordinary meaning of words spoken by the candidate, his
supporters, surrogates and wife (especially his wife) are always to be
placed in a larger "context" or dismissed as incidents of "misspeaking."
2. Obama’s lack of significant experience is not to be held
against him, but rather, we are to assess his qualifications based on
his superior judgment.
3. Troublesome voluntary associations with nefarious, noxious and
infamous characters are to be dismissed as trivial and unimportant.
Gaffes
All it takes is one gaffe to taint a Republican for life. The
political establishment never let Dan Quayle live down his fateful
misspelling of "potatoe." The New York Times distorted and
misreported the first President Bush’s questions about new scanner
technology at a grocers’ convention to brand him permanently as out of
touch.
But what about Barack Obama? The guy’s a perpetual gaffe machine.
Let us count the ways, large and small, that his tongue has betrayed him
throughout the campaign.
Michelle
Malkin has an extensive list of Obama's gaffs,
here.
Decemberists
From CNN to the New York Times, the media hyped Barack Obama's Portland,
Oregon rally on Sunday, some comparing him to a rock star.
Unmentioned in national reporting was the fact that Obama was
preceded by a rare, 45-minute free concert by the rockers,
The Decemberists. How
odd that the mainstream media didn't tell us that a few of the 75,000 in
attendance might have come for the music?
Obama in Oregon -- 75,000
Now it is revealed that the hugely popular indie rock band typically
opens their concerts with the Soviet National Anthem. The
name Decemberists is a reference to the Decembrist Revoltof
1825 against the Russian monarchy.
And did the Obama rally begin with the Soviet National Anthem? The
concert went for 45 minutes and was widely pitched on Facebook etc.
But did the band trim their act to make it Obama-appropriate?
There's nothing wrong with a candidate using celebrity power to draw a
crowd, but the media have a responsibility to report their presence.
By ignoring the free concert, the Times and other outlets made it appear
that 75,000 people were drawn only by Obama's charisma.
Gaffes
Obama's
Gaffes Start To Pile Up. Sounds like a headline from this
week's newspapers, right? Nope, it's from the Chicago Sun-Times
over a year ago, March 28, 2007. One of the most glaring gaffes
mentioned is his claim that "because of what happened in Selma, Alabama,
because some folks are willing to march across a bridge, [his parents]
got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born."
The famous "Bloody Sunday" march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma,
Alabama took place on March 7, 1965. Obama's parents "got
together" around November, 1960 as he was born August 4, 1961.
Bear in mind that he made that claim in Selma to an audience
commemorating the Selma march, the date of which was clear to everyone.
So Obama has been gaffe-ridden for some time. Another beauty
occurred on May 8, 2007: In a campaign speech, he said 10,000 people had
died in a tornado that hit Greensburg, Kansas a few days earlier.
The death toll was 12.
In the past few weeks, however, the O-gaffes have been proliferating.
On April 28 in Wilmington, North Carolina, he thought the month was
"March" and that it was "nine months to November."
On May 13 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, he claimed the war in Iraq was
responsible for a shortage of interpreters in Afghanistan: "We only have
a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then it is harder
for us to use them in Afghanistan." Iraqis speak Arabic or
Kurdish. Afghans don't, speaking Pushtu, Dari, and various tribal
languages.
On May 16 in a press conference, he claimed, "When Kennedy met
Khrushchev, we were on the brink of nuclear war." The two met in
Vienna in June, 1961. The Cuba Missile Crisis, which Obama claimed
was resolved by the meeting, was in October 1962.
On May 18 in an interview to the Lexington (Ky) Herald-Leader, he said:
"I'm not very well known" in Kentucky compared to Hillary because of her
husband and "her coming from a nearby state of Arkansas." Illinois
-- the state he's a senator of -- borders Kentucky; Arkansas does not
(Tennessee is in between).
The champion O-gaffe was committed on May 9 in Beaverton, Oregon.
You have to see it to believe he actually said that during his campaign,
"I have now been to 57 states with one left to go and my staff won't let
me go to Hawaii and Alaska."
No matter how exhausted from campaigning you are, you don't make a
mistake like that under any normal circumstances. Saying there are
57 states (the way he phrased it, actually 60 -- is such an egregiously
stupid error that it is evidence of brain malfunction.
A neuroscientist with years of research into drug abuse and brain
chemistry tells To The Point that the behavior exhibited by Obama is
consistent with the use of either amphetamines or cocaine.
"His campaign's almost impossibly high level of activity, mental and
physical, unrelenting day after day for month upon month is incredibly
hard to maintain," he says. "The temptation to maintain it
psycho-pharmacologically is great, especially for someone with a history
of drug use. The drugs of choice would be amphetamines or cocaine,
which can cause amazing mistakes, errors of incredible stupidity."
Obviously none if you're a Republican -- remember Dan Quale and potatoe?
But Barack Obama can pretty much say anything and the media brushes it
off.
Aren't double standards wonderful?
SUNRISE, Fla. -- At first, it seemed as if Barack Obama might
just be speaking figuratively, as is his wont sometimes. "How's
it going, Sunshine? Thank you. Thank you. Thank
you. Thank you everybody. It's good to be in Sunshine!"
Obama declared on taking the stage this afternoon for a rally at the
BankAtlantic Arena in Broward County, Fla., just west of Ft. Lauderdale.
But then he said it again, and again -- "When we are unified Sunshine,
nobody can stop us!" -- and it became clear: Obama thought he was in
Sunshine, Fla. But he was not. He was in Sunrise, Florida.
At four different points during the speech, Obama referred to the town
as "Sunshine," as opposed to "Sunrise."
Amazingly, the crowd of 16,000 played along and no one corrected him.
Slow Boating
The Washington Post
cries "Swift Boating" in this article and reports:
"The following, and many other implausible accusations were offered by a
group of conservatives yesterday -- including a living relic from the
House Committee on Un-American Activities -- in a Capitol Hill basement.
The charges ranged from the absurd to the merely questionable, but
anybody who watched the Swift Boat campaign of 2004 make John Kerry look
like a war criminal knows that's not the point."
1. That he was mentored in high school by a member of the
Soviet-controlled Communist Party.
His name was Frank Marshall Davis. Davis
was a drinking
companion of Obama's grandfather, Stanley. Obama, himself, writes of his long and
close relationship with Davis in "Dreams," although Obama only
identifies him as "Frank."
2. That he launched his Illinois state Senate campaign in the home
of a terrorist and a killer.
Well, he did! In 1995, during Obama’s
first run, the unrepentant terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn hosted a "Get to Know
the Candidate, Obama" at their home.
3. That while serving as a state senator, he was a member of a
socialist front group.
During first run for the Illinois State Senate,
Obama received the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)
for the Illinois state senate seat. Obama, himself, was an
associate of the Chicago branch of the DSA.
4. That his affiliations are so dodgy that he would have trouble
getting a government security clearance.
As an ex-member of the US Army, Military
Intelligence, Counter Intelligence, and charged with conducting personal
background investigations (BI's) for security clearances, I can tell you that every red flag in
the book would go off if Obama was ever subjected to a BI.
5. That there is reason to doubt his "loyalty to the United
States."
I guess the Post believes there is ABSOLUTELY
no reason to doubt his loyalty -- none -- zero -- zilch.
And, there's a bunch of other allegations in
this article that the Post discounts -- all of them HAVE BEEN DOCUMENTED
in other forums.
According to the leftists in the media, Barack
is without sin, as is appropriate for any messiah.
Gaffes
Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama made
another gaffe on the campaign trail Friday when he suggested at a
luncheon hosted by the Cuban American National Foundation that
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez came to power while George W. Bush was
in the White House.
Chavez was first elected president in 1998, and reelected in 2000, both
occurring while Bill Clinton was serving his second term.
Confusing Sunrise, the Florida city he was speaking in on Friday, for
someplace called "Sunshine" -- four times -- as well as identifying
the wrong president in the White House when Hugo Chavez took over
Venezuela, Barack Obama talked about seeing dead people in the audience
during a Memorial Day speech in Las Cruces, New Mexico. (video)
"On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen
heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today --
our sense of patriotism is particularly strong."
Tee-hee! -- This guy's seeing dead people, and folks are worried
about McCain developing Alzheimer's?
To be sure, none of this will harm Obama's campaign, because outside of
the rightosphere, conservative talk radio, and Fox News, nobody will
report this.
It must be nice for a presidential candidate to be able to say whatever
he wants with complete protection from the media, so much so that dead
Soviet premiers must be rolling over in their graves wondering why they
didn't have it this good.
Update (5/27) -- More media hanky-panky -- In a report on "CNN’s
Election Center," correspondent Joe Johns used that Obama sound bite in
a piece on the candidate’s "polling problem on patriotism -- but snipped
out the part where Obama seemed to be seeing ghosts.
Sensitivity
During Wednesday's, "The O'Reilly Factor," Dennis Miller
described Barack Obama's sensitivity to any criticism:
"I don’t even notice the color of his skin. I do notice the thinness of
it, though."
Hate Speech
Here are
screen shots of pages that the Obama campaign had to delete from its
official web site (My.BarackObama.com) because they contained testimonials,
endorsements and hate-speech from communists, socialists and other
anti-American and anti-Semitic organizations and individuals.
This stuff has been up there for months -- no surprise -- since
Obama's official blogger,
Sam Graham-Felsen, has spent time in France participating in labor
riots, has written for a socialist magazine, hung a communist flag in
his home, and was a fan of Marx while at Harvard.
Axelrod
And just look at who is on a fundraising committee for the racist
Fr. Pleger's church.
MoveOn.org founder David Axelrod helped Obama win his U.S.
Senate seat in 2004 and currently serves as strategist and media adviser
to Obama’s presidential campaign. He is Obama's Karl Rove.
White Women
According to a
new
report by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, half
of Democratic, white women now have a negative perception of Obama.
Forty-nine percent of white women view Obama unfavorably, while only 43
percent hold a favorable opinion. In February, 36 percent of these
women viewed Obama unfavorably, while 56 percent had a positive
perception of the likely Democratic nominee.
Over the same period, Democratic white women’s negative view of Obama
increased from 21 percent to 35 percent, while their positive view
decreased from 72 percent to 60 percent -- roughly the same rate as
white women overall.
Like Jimmah
TIME Magazine
notes the similarities between Jimmy Carter and Obama:
Of the two likely nominees this year, Obama is closest to Carter in
background and policy leanings. The parallels between his campaign
so far and the one Carter ran in 1976 are striking. Like Carter,
Obama had little national experience when he started to run.
Neither was given much chance of winning the nomination. Instead
of running on a detailed platform, Carter told crowds that what
Washington needed was "a government as good as its people" -- just as
Obama promises "change we can believe in."
And like Carter, an Obama administration will
fail in confronting Iranian aggression.
People Lie
Billings, Montana -- The wife of Democratic presidential candidate
Barack Obama
told a few hundred supporters gathered at the Billings Hotel and
Convention Center, "The way this campaign has been run is the way we
need to be forever," Obama said. "Don't trust bloggers or someone
else's opinion, because people lie."
Michelle doesn't identify which people she
accuses of lying -- maybe she means the campaign's media adviser and
strategist, David Axelrod.
David Axelrod lies about Obama’s pre-surge position (01:32
Postscript -- From the Washington
Post,
June 1st -- There's been a relative lull in news coverage and debate
about Iraq in recent weeks -- which is odd, because May could turn out
to have been one of the most important months of the war.
While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts
have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have
gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the
sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias
that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to
Iran.
At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a
long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda.
So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S.
Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said
that the terrorists have "never been closer to defeat than they are
now."
Obama, who has zilch in the experience
department, has been running on his "superior judgment" instead.
This video proves that Obama's judgment in military affairs is as bad as
his judgment of the people surrounding him (Wright, Pfleger, Meeks,
Ayers, Dohrn and his media adviser, Axelrod, the founder of MoveOn.org).
The Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the
tradition of George McGovern, albeit without McGovern’s military and
political record.
The Democratic party is about to nominate a far-left candidate in the
tradition of Michael Dukakis, albeit without Dukakis’s executive
experience as governor.
The Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the
tradition of John Kerry, albeit without Kerry’s record of years of
service in the Senate.
The Democratic party is about to nominate an unvetted candidate in the
tradition of Jimmy Carter, albeit without Jimmy Carter’s religious
integrity.
Wow!
Last night Barack Obama broke all records for
campaign promises, with one of the most over the top
self-aggrandizing statements ever uttered by a presidential candidate.
"I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to
look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began
to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was
the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet
began to heal."
"... when the rise of the oceans began to slow
and our planet began to heal" -- does this guy really believe the
bullsh!t coming out of his mouth? -- if he does, he's insane!
Messiah
The San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Morford, buys into the
Obamamessiah mania by
writing:
"Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind
you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare
kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new
foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually
help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and
connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.
These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are
philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not
just to reason or emotion, but to the soul."
Sen. Biden: ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "You were asked is he
ready. You said 'I think he can be ready, but right now I don't
believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself
to on-the-job training.'" (ABC's "This Week," 8/19/07)
Sen. Biden: "Having talking points on foreign policy doesn't get
you there." ("Biden Lashes Out At Obama," ABC News' "Political
Radar" Blog, blogs.abcnews.com, 8/2/07)
Sen. Dodd: "Over the past several days. ... Senator Obama's
assertions about foreign and military affairs have been, frankly,
confusing and confused. He has made threats he should not make and
made unwise categorical statements about military options." (Anne
E. Kornblut, "Obama Again Stirs Up Rivals With Statement On Use Of
Nukes," The Washington Post's "The Trail" Blog
Sen. Clinton: "Senator McCain will bring a time of experience to
the campaign. I will bring a lifetime of experience and Senator
Obama will bring a speech he gave in 2002." (CNN's "Newsroom,"
3/8/08)
Sen. Dodd: "If you're making a mistake today, you ought to stand
up and say so. It was a mistake in my view to suggest somehow that
going in unilaterally here, into Pakistan, was somehow in our interest.
That, I think, is dangerous. And I don't retreat from that at
all." (Sen. Chris Dodd, MSNBC AFL-CIO Presidential Candidates
Forum, Chicago, IL, 8/7/07)
Former Gov. Tom Vilsack: "I must say that after reading and
reviewing Senator Obama's comments, I have found them to be
condescending and disappointing and they reflect in my view a very
flawed reading and understanding of people who live in small towns in
Pennsylvania and across the United States. Press Release, 4/12/08
Gaffes
The affirmative action candidate on the hustings -- this guy is clueless
(00:40)
Gaffes
The faker makes his 4,087th gaffe of the campaign -- "breathalyzer" (00:30)
Obama, the youngest of all the candidates, has
repeatedly used the excuse of fatigue or being tired to explain away his gaffes.
What is this guy going to do when he needs to do a three or four-dayer because
of a national emergency -- take naps or snort coke?
The "old man" McCain has more energy that this putz and will absolutely clean
his clock in a town hall debate format -- not only does Obama not know
what he is talking about without his "Cliffs Notes" -- he can't even fake it
well -- Obama is an embarrassment.
I Googled -- Obama tired fatigue (no quotes) --
Google returned 97,900 results. Just take a look at the first page
or two. He has repeatedly used this excuse for his gaffes. If he
really tires as easy as it appears, Obama has some kind of health problem.
Website
Obama's official website is loaded with communists, socialist, jihadists
and anti-Americans of all stripes. You really won't believe this
stuff. Click image to see who is supporting Obama and what they
have to say in support of his candidacy.
Minions
Obama and his minions have been beating the "McCain would be Bush's
third term" drum for weeks now.
Yesterday, John McCain answered this foolishness with the following
comment:
"Senator Obama says that I’m running for Bush’s third term. It
seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second."
The Birth Certificate
Most of the blogs and news sites that I visited this AM are
buzzing over the reluctance of the Obama Campaign to release a copy
of Obama's birth certificate.
The St. Petersburg Times, a generally dhimmicratic organ, asked for the
birth certificate and reported the result of their inquiry -- "We tried
to obtain a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, but his campaign would
not release it and the state of Hawaii does not make such records
public."
Of course, this obfuscation only heightens speculation that something
nefarious if going on -- again? --still?
Judgment
The Obamamessiah has bee touting his judgment as his biggest asset.
Here are some examples of his superior judgment:
The Rev Jeremiah "God damn America"
Wright -- mentor
The Rev. Michael "Vanilla Ice" Pfleger
-- spiritual advisor
Rev. James "We don't have mayors, we have slave
masters" Meeks -- spiritual counsel
William "unrepentent terrorist" Ayers
and his wife, Bernadine "the bomb-thrower"
Dohrn -- employer and friend
Frank "OK, I'm a communist -- it doesn't make
me a bad person" Marshall Davis -- mentor
Tony "convicted swindler and fixer"
Rezko -- friend and business associate
Now, one of Obama's hand-picked members of his vice presidential
search committee, James Johnson,
has had to quit after a newspaper reported that he may have received
$7 million in preferential mortgage terms from Countrywide Financial Corp.
Johnson, the former chairman of Fannie Mae, received special deals on
mortgages from Angelo Mozilo, the chief executive officer of
Countrywide, the biggest U.S. home lender, the Wall Street Journal
reported on June 7.
The newspaper reported this
morning that Johnson "was the beneficiary of accounting in which Fannie
Mae’s earnings were manipulated so that executives could earn larger
bonuses. The accounting manipulation for 1998 resulted in the
maximum payouts to Fannie Mae’s senior executives -- $1.9 million in
Johnson’s case -- when the company’s performance that year would have
otherwise resulted in no bonuses at all."
Obama defended his superior judgment by saying, "I am not vetting my VP
search committee for their mortgages,'' during a news conference in St.
Louis, and defended his campaign's ties to Johnson, an unpaid adviser,
saying it wasn't realistic to think aides would be doing extensive
checks on everyone connected with his campaign --
LOL, I'll say -- his campaign is loaded with Marxists and other assorted
left-wingers!
Johnson's role at Fannie Mae, where he was chairman from 1991-99, has
also come under scrutiny. The Washington Post reported today that
executives of the Washington-based company were concerned in 2004 that a
consulting arrangement they had with Johnson would be publicized in
confirmation hearings.
Another of Obama's hand-picked member of the committee, former Deputy
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, has also come under fire.
The
criticism Thursday centered on Obama adviser Eric H. Holder Jr., who
is scrutinizing candidates to be the Democratic presumptive presidential
nominee’s running mate. As deputy attorney general under President
Clinton, Mr. Holder reviewed the last-minute pardon of fugitive
financier Marc Rich.
Charged with 51 counts of fraud, tax evasion and illegally trading with
Iran, Mr. Rich fled to Switzerland in 1983 but won a pardon from Mr.
Clinton in 2001. The decision prompted a congressional
investigation because Mr. Rich’s wife was a major Democratic donor and
prosecutors said they were never consulted.
Indicted by then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Rich failed to
return to the U.S. following the indictment and was on the FBI’s Most
Wanted list for several years. Mr. Holder had given a “neutral,
leaning towards favorable” opinion of the pardon that led directly to
the pardoning of Mr. Rich on Mr. Clinton’s last day in office.
That leaves Carolyn Kennedy -- a nice lady -- but she has absolutely no
business picking vice presidents.
"One of the most important decision I can make" (01:10)
My favorite line is this: "These aren't folks who are working for
me" -- well, Obama, who are they working for -- George Soros?
If you're looking for a man with superior judgment -- the Obamamessiah
is your man -- /sarcasm off/
Post Turtle
While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old Texas rancher,
whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck
up a conversation with the old man.
Eventually the topic got around to Obama and his bid to be our
President.
The old rancher said, 'Well, ya know, Obama is a 'post
turtle'."
Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him, "what's a 'post
turtle'? The old rancher replied, "When you're driving down a
country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on
top, that's a 'post turtle'."
The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued
to explain.
"You know he didn't get up there by himself, he doesn't belong up there,
he doesn't know what to do while he is up there, and you just wonder
what kind of a dumb ass put him up there!."
Town-Hall Debates
Obama continues to run away from John McCain and his invitation to
10 town-hall debates.
Without his teleprompter and/or his 3 X 5 cards, Obama is gaffe-prone
and subject to going brain dead during his speaking engagements (see
videos below -- 6/7/08).
Obama's handlers know that McCain would eat his lunch in an open,
voter-driven format.
The more intimate
town-hall format would allow real interaction with voters and would
be more revealing than formal televised debates where Obama's toadies in
the press would control the event and the questions.
The Obama camp hardly seems courageous. They only want their
candidate to participate in a free-form debate on July 4th, when most
people will be on vacation and taking a well-earned respite from
politics?
It seems that hope and change do not bring testicular fortitude.
Why not just do it at 2 am and have it televised on C-SPAN 3, or ESPN 2?
As an avid supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic
primaries, Debra Bartoshevich is not alone in her frustration over
Clinton's defeat.
She’s not alone in refusing to support Barack Obama, and she’s not
entirely alone in saying she’ll vote this fall for Republican John
McCain instead.
But what makes her unusual is that she holds these views as an elected
delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer.
"I’m sure people are going to be upset with me," said Bartoshevich, a
41-year-old emergency room nurse from Waterford in Racine County, and
convention delegate pledged to Clinton.
No Muslims
In separate incidents, two Muslim women, at Barack Obama’s rally in
Detroit Monday, were barred
from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent
the women’s headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television
with the candidate.
The first incident began when the volunteer asked Aref’s friend Ali
Koussan and two other friends, Aref’s brother Sharif and another young
lawyer, Brandon Edward Miller, whether they would like to sit behind the
stage.
The volunteer "explained to me that because of the political climate and
what’s going on in the world and what’s going on with Muslim Americans
it’s not good for her to be seen on TV or associated with Obama."
There was second event of discrimination.
Shimaa Abdelfadeel’s story was different. She’d waited on line
outside the Joe Louis Arena for three hours in the sun, and was walking
through the giant hall when a volunteer approached two of her non-Muslim
friends, a few steps ahead of her, and asked if they’d like to sit in
"special seating" at the back of the stage, said one friend, Brittany
Marino, who like Abdelfadeel is a recent University of Michigan graduate
who works for the university.
When they said they were with Abdelfadeel, the volunteer told them their
friend would have to take the headscarf off or stay out of the special
section, Marino said. They declined the seats.
The irony of it all is just so rich!
Obama is trying to kill the "He’s a Muslim" meme. The visual of
him with Muslim women is bad for his campaign.
UPDATE: One of the hijab-encrusted,
rejected whiners, Hebba Aref, was an official of the Muslim Students
Association (MSA), in charge of proselytizing. The Chicago Tribune
identified the MSA as part of the American manifestation of the Sunni
terrorist group, Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimeen -- The Muslim Brotherhood.
Aref served on the executive board of the University of
Michigan-Dearborn's MSA, which demanded and obtained tax-funded Muslim
foot baths at that university.
Aref was not just any officer of the U-M Dearborn Muslim group.
She was in charge of Dawa, or proselytizing, from 2000 to 2003 at the
school. Yup, she was the chief "Conversion to Islam" officer at
one of the most pan-Islamist college campuses in the country.
Shimaa Abdelfadeel, the other woman allegedly excluded by the Obama
campaign, was chair of SAFE, a University of Michigan-Ann Arbor group
that hosted the 2002 Divestment Conference against Israel at which
"Annihilate the Jews!" was chanted and Islamic Jihad founder Sami
Al-Arian was keynote speaker. She's the author of vehement
anti-Israel vitriol and propaganda.
Great Seal Of Obama
The "Great Seal of Obama" debuted on Obama's podium Friday, sporting iconography
used in the U.S. presidential seal, the blue background, the eagle
clutching arrows on left and olive branch on right, but with symbolic
differences. Instead of the Latin 'E pluribus unum' (Out of many,
one), Obama's says 'Vero Possumus', rough Latin for 'Yes, we can.'
Instead of 'Seal of the President of the United States', Obama's Web
site address is listed. And instead of a shield, Obama's eagle
wears his 'O' campaign logo.
The Law: 18 USC Sec. 713 ...
(a) Whoever knowingly displays any printed or other likeness of the
great seal of the United States, or of the seals of the President or the
Vice President of the United States, or the seal of the United States
Senate, or the seal of the United States House of Representatives, or
the seal of the United States Congress, or any facsimile thereof, in, or
in connection with, any advertisement, poster, circular, book, pamphlet,
or other publication, public meeting, play, motion picture, telecast, or
other production, or on any building, monument, or stationery, for the
purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a
false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the
United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof,
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months,
or both.
(b) Whoever, except as authorized under regulations promulgated by the
President and published in the Federal Register, knowingly manufactures,
reproduces, sells, or purchases for resale, either separately or
appended to any article manufactured or sold, any likeness of the seals
of the President or Vice President, or any substantial part thereof,
except for manufacture or sale of the article for the official use of
the Government of the United States, shall be fined under this title or
imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
This is just small Change -- wait until you see
the Change he has planned for the country, when he and the loony left
Congress implements American socialism.
Update: Like the man says, he insists on the suppression of
ego; he just didn’t realize it might come off as egotistical to debut
his very own presidential seal until his friends and allies in the media
politely informed him of it. And so under the bus it goes,
assuming there’s any room left under there with Wright, Pfleger, Rezko
and who knows who else crowded in.
COLB
Obama's birth certificate has become
an issue on the Internet.
Before the Obama campaign starts whining about this issue being an unfair
"distraction," remember, John McCain underwent intense scrutiny of his citizenship
status because of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone, leading the Senate
to declare him a natural-born citizen in April.
At one point, PolitiFact.com,
operated by the St. Petersburg Times, tried
to
obtain a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, but his campaign would
not release it and the state of Hawaii does not make such records
public. On June 12, 2008, the Obama campaign finally e-mailed a
copy of the senator's birth certificate to PolitiFact.
At the same time, the Obama Campaign
released a copy of Obama's birth certificate to Markos Moulitsas
Zúniga, operator of the Daily Kos, as noted on this site on June 12th.
Now there is a
copy on the official Obama Campaign website, under the page title,
"The truth about Barack's birth certificate."
The document that is currently making the rounds is a "Certification Of
Live Birth" or COLB. It is NOT a "Birth Certificate."
The Hawaii State Department of Health (HSDH) confirms the following:
1. Certified copies of birth are NEVER sent electronically. Copies
can be requested by qualified individuals in person, by mail, or on
line; and the Vital Records (VR) office will MAIL the Certification of
Live Birth within 4 to 6 weeks.
2. Certifications of Live Birth will ALWAYS include an embossed seal and
a stamped signature.
3. The Vital Records office will NEVER black out the certification
number.
The following observations and questions can be seen on many sites:
1. Obama's "Certification Of
Live Birth" and a "Certification
Of Live Birth" for Patricia Decosta are printed on the same form,
identified in the lower left corner as, "OHSM 1.1 (Rev. 11/01) LASER."
This document identification means that this form was revised and
approved in November, 2001 for use with laser printers, and would have
been produced by the HSDH VR office after November 2001. However,
if they are the same revision of the document, would they have such a
vastly different border hatching? Would the revision numbers on
the bottom of the certificates look different?
Please note: Both certificates come up in
half-size format -- clicking them will expand the certificates to
original size.
2. In the lower left section, Obama’s document contains the legend "Date
Filed By Registrar." Decosta's certificate contains the legend,
"Date Accepted By State Registrar." If they were both produced on
the same document revision, why is the language different?
3. Decosta’s "Certificate No.," in the upper right region, is not
altered. Obama’s is blacked out with a clean-edged block.
When was this done, by whom, and why would a birth certificate number be
a secret? Again, this is never done by the HSDH. Also, note
that the words: "ANY ALTERATIONS INVALIDATE THIS CERTIFICATE" --
blacking out the number invalidates Obama's document.
4. Decosta’s shows an embossed seal in the lower center region; Obama’s
has no embossed seal. Again, HSDH says certifications never leave
the office without one.
5. Decosta’s shows a stamp with signature in the lower left region;
Obama’s does not. Again, a violation of HSDH standard procedure.
6. Obama’s "father’s race" is shown as "African." There is no such
race and many have found this odd, given that it’s not descriptive for
race -- hell, John Kerry's wife is "African" and she's as white as snow.
According to HSDH VR, the certificate should use the descriptive,
"Black."
7. Decosta's certificate appears to show in the lower center region a
faint date, such as the kind produced by a standard ink-pad stamp
purchased in any office supply store. Obama's does not. Maybe this
is supposed to be the date that the certification was approved, or
mailed?
8. The font on Decosta’s is much bolder than that on Obama’s.
9. Decosta’s reveals fold marks, which you’d expect from a mailed
document; Obama’s shows no signs of being mailed, or otherwise handled, as if it was
never printed but transmitted electronically (and if that’s the case, how was the certificate number
blacked out?).
10. In order for a document to be a certified document, from a court or
any government office, it would have an official seal, of some type, and
also a stamped legend stating that the copy was a "true copy" of the
original document of record and was ALWAYS signed by a records official
.
Looking at the Decosta document, this legend is clearly seen to the
lower left of the seal. The Obama document does not have this legend. Therefore, it is probably not a "certified document."
Since Obama is running for the presidency, proof of birth could fall
under the Freedom of Information Act, because Hawaii had only been a
state for two years and verifying the location and date of his birth is
important to the Constitutional requirements of eligibility.
The birth history and ancestry of the person taking this office should
be crystal clear. In fact, Obama's is NOT crystal clear. Everything we know,
or think we know about Obama is based entirely on his autobiographic
fable.
There may be nothing here. On the other hand . . .
Update: You can download a blank
Hawaiian birth certificate template on photo bucket and fill it in.
If you look at the template on photo bucket it’s blank except for
two entries. Hour of Birth: 7:24 pm and OAJU.
Isn’t it a coincidence that Obama was born at 7:24 pm the
same time that’s on the blank form?
Another Update:
Obama stonewalls on uncertified birth certificate, official
doubts mount.
Killer Update:
Proof
positive that Photoshop was used on the BC image posted in the
Daily Kos.
Latest Update: This guy is
taking it seriously. He's going after the State of Hawaii
to release the original birth certificate and he makes some really,
really good arguments.
Even Later Update: *Breaking* Techdude Finds Original
Text on Alleged Obama Birth Certificate. The "smoking
gun" that will be conclusive in proving that the Certificate
of Live Birth (COLB) proffered by Barack Obama on his official
campaign website is fake.
Manchurian Candidate
Have you noticed a change in Barack Obama’s campaign? Instead
of avoiding controversies over values, religion and race, he seems to
welcome them and wade into the debates with an increasing enthusiasm.
Characterizing how the Republicans will attack him, he predicted that
they would criticize his "funny name" and add "and by the way, did you
notice that he’s black?"
Obama used to go out of his way to avoid this kind of reference, but now
he brings it on. Deliberately.
Why?
Obama and the conservative right are mutually trying to keep the debate
about his candidacy on the existential level -- is he the hope for
America’s future or a Manchurian Candidate, a kind of sleeper agent sent
to destroy our democracy? That debate, which pits Obama’s rhetoric
against the Rev. Wright’s rants, is a contest that could go on all day,
and Obama would win it. It is simply a bridge too far to believe
that Obama is that evil and that invidious.
But the more the debate covers such fundamental questions, the more it
ignores the details -- details which could bring Obama down.
Quite simply, Obama would rather address his religious views and his
optimism about America and his embrace of diversity than talk about his
plans to raise taxes, let gasoline prices soar and socialize healthcare.
Obama is an
introspective candidate, and perhaps the best analyst of his own
political style. "I serve as a blank screen," he wrote in "The
Audacity of Hope," "on which people of vastly different political
stripes project their own views."
That's just what America needs in these perilous times, a "blank
screen."
Ahmadinejad is going to like that when he negotiates with Obama.
First, Obama wants no preconditions, and second, he is a "blank screen"
upon which Ahmadinejad can project his own views.
Beckwith Responds
Beckwith responds to The Washington Post.
The first thing I have to say about "An
Attack That Came Out of the Ether," published by The Washington Post
on June 28th, is that at NO time was I ever contacted by this woman,
Danielle Allen, from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS). I spoke to two male Post reporters, who spoke to
me over the phone for a period of months. The first contact was in
the fall of 2007. They told me they were trying to track down the
source of emails they considered negative to the Obamamessiah.
Allen, who is an Obama
shill from Chicago and who has
contributed $2,750 to Obama (going back to 2004), obsesses about the "Muslim" Obama stories, but steers clear of
Obama's relationships with communists, Marxists, socialists, terrorists,
racist reverends
and convicted swindlers. The trick she attempts to use is to knock
down one or two or three items so the other four thousand don't count.
The following notice appears on my website's "About"
page: "I don't write this stuff -- I cherry-pick it and publish it here
-- every attempt is made to provide attribution and/or links to the
original source -- if you don't like the writer's viewpoint -- send them
an email -- not me. If the reader finds content that is
incorrect,I will correct or delete it upon the submission of
two links to an independent source with more accurate information."
And I mean just that and I do just that. I want The Obama File to
be able to withstand the type of attack that Allen attempts in this
article.
I was quoted as saying, "If 20 percent of what's on my Web site is true,
this guy is a clear and present danger," the report left out out the
entire statement.
I told her reporters that I believed that The Obama File content was
better than 95% accurate, but that If 20 percent of what's on my Web
site is true, this guy is a clear and present danger. I still
believe that.
Allen writes, "There was 'Beckwith,' whom she pegged as a veteran from
Boston, old enough to vote for John F. Kennedy, in uniform by 1964 (I
got out in '64), and
host of a Web site that devotes considerable space to an 'Obama file'
that says the senator is 'by birth, blood and training, a Muslim.'"
That statement is true. Just ask Obama's sister Maya. In an
interview with the New York Times, published on April 30th, 2007,
Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s younger half sister, told the Times, "My whole
family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim."
I assume Maya thinks of her brother, Obama, as a member of her family?
Even if Maya didn't make such a statement. Islam is patrilinear.
The son of a Muslim is a Muslim (birth, blood) and Obama did study
Islam, the Quran and the Hadith at the Besuki Primary School in Jakarta,
Indonesia for two years (training). Further, he attended
mengaji classes where he studied the Quran in its native Arabic (more
training).
In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama, himself, mentions studying
the Quran and describes the public school as "a Muslim school." He
wrote, "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made
faces during Koranic studies."
According to Tine Hahiyary, one of Obama's teachers and the principal
from 1971 through 1989, Barry
actively took part in the Islamic
religious lessons during his time at the school. His teacher was
named Maimunah and she lived in the Puncak area, the Cianjur Regency.
"I remembered that he had studied "mengaji" (recitation of the Quran)"
Tine said.
These facts can account for the startling statement Obama made on
February 27th, 2007, when he said the Muslim call to prayer was "one of
the prettiest sounds on Earth."
In an
interview with Nicholas Kristof, published in The New York Times,
Obama recited the Muslim call to prayer, the Adhan, "with a first-class
[Arabic] accent."
The opening lines of the Adhan (Azaan) is the Shahada:
Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that Muhammad is his prophet...
According to Islamic scholars, reciting the Shahada, the Muslim
declaration of faith, makes one a Muslim. This simple yet profound
statement expresses a Muslim's complete acceptance of, and total
commitment to, the message of Islam.
Obama knows this from his Quranic studies -- and he knows the New York
Times will publish this fact and it will be seen throughout the Islamic
world.
Regardless of Obama's religion, what message is he sending the world's
1.2 billion Muslims?
I suppose it's easy for Obama to remember the Shahada for the 35 years
since he left Indonesia -- and in 'first-class' Arabic -- especially
since he believes the Muslim call to prayer is "one of the prettiest
sounds on Earth." -- no matter what religion he belongs to,
those Muslim prayers must run through his head, and often -- what does that
really make him?
And although I do have a Boston accent, of which I'm proud (you can hear
it on the webcast at the link on the main page), Allen gets in a little
ethnic stereotyping by calling my accent a "... thick Boston brogue" --
Bostonians don't have brogues -- my antecedents from Ireland do -- it's
a good thing I don't have a chip on my shoulder and charge "racism" at
such obvious stereotyping -- like some folks might.
And there is no "unnamed 'colleague' in Europe" -- that's probably my
friend and fellow FReeper, ExpatGuy, who operates the "An
American Expat in Southeast Asia" blog (a truly great resource
about Obama's time in Indonesia).
But, what the heck, Europe, Southeast Asia, they're all foreign places--
ya' seen one, ya' seen 'em all.
Allen is also incorrect when she writes, "His initial goal was to take
swats at the liberal left. 'Then this new guy comes along called
Obama,' he said." -- All one has to do is to read the "About"
page on my website to get it right -- "The Obama File is a spinoff of
www.FreedomsEnemies.com
where it started out as a single page. Freedom's Enemies documents
the relationship between the political left and Islamofascism.
Along comes Obama -- with a foot in each camp -- and The Obama File just
evolved.
The reason I spun off The Obama File is that I did not want the name, Freedoms
Enemies, to be a pejorative to the information I was compiling on
Obama.
This sentence is also false -- "Beckwith said he built a Web site that
features hundreds of pages of material intended to undermine Obama." --
There are 18 subject area pages on my website. Because I take
pains to document and provide attribution for everything, those 18 pages
link to thousands of source articles, primarily from mainstream media
sources (including The Washington Post), and my intention is not to
"undermine" poor Barry -- just like it says on my "About"
page -- it is to "oppose the most liberal (read
"left-wing") member of the U. S. Senate sitting in the Oval Office" --
and there is No requirement to
be fair and balanced -- this is an opposition website.
I suppose it could have been more of a hatchet job, but what amazes me
is Allen's obsession with the Muslim thing -- that rumor is more than a year old
and has been fed by Obama and members of his family more than anyone else.
If she wants to know where the "Muslim rumors" came from, she should
look towards Obama.
Had Obama just come out at the beginning of his campaign and simply
stated that he had spent a couple of years as a child in Islamic studies
as the result of having a Muslim step-father, but has since moved away
from Islam, he wouldn't have to deal with this issue.
Instead
he insists on his official website, in spite of all the evidence to
the contrary, "Obama Has Never Been A Muslim" -- and that's
simply not true.
It's Obama's own mendacity and dissimulation that is his
problem and Obama is the source of that problem -- not me or the others
that Allen has chosen to attack.
What I want to know is why she isn't knocking down stories about
Obama's relationship with communists, Marxists, socialists, terrorists,
convicted swindlers, and don't forget the racist Reverends -- Wright, Pfleger, Meeks and Moss.
Could it be that those long-term relationships are just too easy to
document?
Danielle S. Allen is Dean of Humanities and a
Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of
Chicago (where Obama taught) and the UPS Foundation Professor in the
School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), at
Princeton.
She is a past member of the Obama Campaign, resigning the day before she
began this investigation. She is a maximum
contributor to the Obama
Campaign ($2,750) and is probably violating federal law by using
tax-exempt facilities and her grant money to do opposition research for the Obama
Campaign?
She is hardly an
independent investigator, but more likely a friend of Obama from
Chicago -- I wonder where she goes to church?
The Washington Post is silent on these
critical details.
But it is kinda cool that this website is now one of "the most vexing
problems in the universe."
And Matthew Mosk, whose byline the article appears under, is the reporter who
wrote about FreeRepublic.com's (FR) "involvement" with a "smear
campaign" against Maryland's notorious governor, Martin O'Malley. Mosk got himself caught up in the story,
known as the nefarious
MD4Bush scandal,
so much so that he is rumored
to have had an FR screen name at one point.
What is known for sure is that somebody at the Washington Post was
participating in the O'Malley threads; and then, lo and behold, the
Washington Post's Matthew Mosk writes an "expose" about
FreeRepublic.com!
So, one has to wonder about this new attempt by the Washington Post's Matthew Mosk and
this think tank woman to smear FreeRepublic.com and the rest of us --
all conservative, and all in opposition to the Obama candidacy.
How did Danielle Allen find Matthew Mosk to write this piece? Or
did Matthew Mosk feed the FR threads to Allen, and then "discover" her
investigation?
Legendary Chicago Internet columnist and Obama
author Andy Martin, another of Allen's targets has some
interesting observations on Allen, Mosk and The Washington Post --
and
here is an update -- "Washington Post "Obama girl" Danielle Allen;
the mystery woman in her own words."
Read the National Review Online's
take on the Washington Post article.
At least the Washington Post could have put a link to my website
somewhere in this article so their readers could judge "The Obama File"
for themselves.
Update -- Reader, Stanley V. makes several interesting observations:
Dr. Allen seemed impressed with the level of technical proficiency
required to launch an electronic smear campaign. Do these emails
exist or is this just an excuse to try and discount the information
content of your site. For someone advertised as having, "the
classicist's careful attention to texts and language with the political
theorist's sophisticated and informed engagement" her article sadly
seemed to talk a lot about nothing. What did these emails say,
that he was a Muslim? He was educated to be Muslim, was that point
lost on Dr. Allen?
Perhaps, Dr Allen would like to discount all sources of information, web
or email based, as suspect, if they are negative towards Obama, since
there are obviously sophisticated internet conspirators that are
following a schooling fish model acting to confuse and mislead the
easily manipulated American voter. From the IAS towers we may be
too stupid to be allowed to make up our own minds based on the
information from both sides.
It’s interesting that she was put up as the author of this article after
the fact it needed the IAS logo, otherwise it would have no credibility.
I can understand that a candidate would want a fair chance to offer a
rebuttal to an email that has false content, but as the reader I didn’t
see any rebuttal. I was left with the underlying message to
disregard any negative information about the candidate, and the subtle
reminder that I’m too ignorant to be able to spot a false and fabricated
email if there ever was one. How do I know if the email if
fabricated if the Washington Post won’t publish it along with the
article that references it? If it’s fabricated why not reference
the claims and demonstrate why they are false. This comes back to
the audience is felt to be too limited to follow logic.
Google
Google shuts down anti-Obama sites on its blogger platform.
It looks like
Google has officially joined the Obama campaign and decided that its
contribution would be to shut down any blog on the Google owned
Blogspot.com blogging system that has an anti-Obama message. Yes,
it sure seems that Google has begun to go through its many thousands of
blogs to lock out the owners of anti-Obama blogs so that the noObama
message is effectively squelched. Thus far, Google has terminated
the access by blog owners to 7 such sites and the list may be growing.
Boy, it must be nice for Obama to have an ally powerful enough to
silence his opponents like that!
It turns out that there is an interesting pattern where it concerns the
blogs that Google's Blogspot team have summarily locked down on their
service. They all belong to the
Just Say No Deal coalition, a
group of blogs that are standing against the Obama campaign. It
seems the largest portion of these blogs are Hillary supporting blogs,
too.
All I can say is, WOW! If Google is willing to abuse its power like this
even against fellow leftists, what does it plan against conservatives,
the folks Google hates even more!?
Here is a list of the Blogspot blogs that have been frozen by Google
thus far:
Bill Clinton says Barack Obama must "kiss
my ass" for his support.
Strategies
Dreams From His Grandmother -- Ten general-election strategies Obama
can use to disguise his hard-left views, by Victor Davis Hanson.
"I think we are beginning to see the full measure of the Obama general
campaign strategy, framed along ten or so key directives that can allow
the election of the most leftward candidate in American political
history."
"So far the candidate himself needs no coaching, inasmuch he has proved
to be one of the most pragmatic, flexible, and ambitious figures in
recent memory, with superb handlers who understand the challenge of
getting such a hard leftist past the suspicious American electorate."
As
always when Obama waxes "eloquent," the media swooned. And, as
always, the Missouri speech raised interesting questions if you actually read it.
The implicit premise of the speech was that Obama's patriotism is being
widely questioned. As far as I've seen, that isn't true.
What has happened is that Obama's judgment and political ideology have
been questioned because he has chosen to associate himself closely with
people who manifestly are not patriotic, like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah
Wright.
In his speech today, Obama said that America "is the greatest country on
Earth." I'm happy to assume he means it, although whether Obama
ever means what he says is an open question. But how, then, did
Jeremiah "God damn America" Wright become Obama's spiritual guardian for
twenty years? And how do we reconcile Obama's "greatest country on
earth" rhetoric with the cynical comment by his political sponsor Bill
Ayers on Ayers' own acquittal: "Guilty as sin, free as a bird.
What a great country!" Obama failed to acknowledge, let alone
answer, the questions that are raised by these associations.
Then there's this gaffe:
I remember, when living for four years in Indonesia as a child, I
listened to my mother reading me the first lines of the Declaration
of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness."
I would have thought that pretty much everyone -- certainly every
Presidential speechwriter, and every Harvard Law School graduate! --
knows that these are not the "first lines" of the Declaration, which
begins, "When in the course of human events...."
What, exactly, accounts for the fact that Obama is not a laughingstock?
Finally, this:
"As we begin our fourth century as a nation, it is easy to take
the extraordinary nature of America for granted."
"Fourth century?" The United States of America came into
being in 1789. We have just recently begun our third century.
I suppose Obama would say that the 21st century is America's fourth,
just as Minnie Minoso played major league baseball in five decades.
As always with Obama's howlers, you should ask yourself: would the press
have bought it if it came from Dan Quayle?
Maybe there'll be
57 states in
the fourth century? Is Obama trying to get the
™ on bullsh!t?
Obama traveled Monday to Independence, Missouri,
to proclaim his patriotism in an appearance linked to the Fourth of
July holiday. He said: "I will never question the patriotism of
others in this campaign, and I will not stand idly by when I hear others
question mine."
The patriot, Obama, does the crotch salute during the National Anthem. (video)
Obama is a damned, sneaky bastard. He knows he doesn't have to question the patriotism of others,
meaning John McCain, of course, because he has a core group of surrogates that
have been
performing this nasty "artful" work for some time.
On July 8th, George McGovern
argued that John McCain's war experience was not a qualification for
the White House, saying, "But I don't recall ever saying that experience
as a bomber pilot equipped me to be very strong on how to run a war, how
to command the armed forces. Of course, John McCain never said it
was either.
In June,
Wesley Clark
dismissed the import of McCain’s military background in the current
race. "I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is
a qualification to become president," Clark sniffed. The real
issue, according to Clark, was that McCain was "untested and untried."
Again, John McCain never said it was.
But CNN's, John Roberts,
pointed out the most glaring contradiction in Clark's theory of
military experience: his enthusiastic endorsement of the treacherous
John Kerry, whose strategic command experience was nowhere near
McCain's.
Jim Webb didn't have any problem
using his military service to run against George Allen, but now he
says, "Let's get the politics out of the military, take care of our
military people, or have our political arguments in other areas."
Rand Beers, a former Clinton White House aide, was appearing at the
McCain University, a day-long symposia attacking Senator McCain hosted
by John Podesta's Center for American Progress, and he, too,
went after
Senator McCain for his service with an equally outrageous statement.
Beers attacked Senator McCain, saying that he was isolated during the
Vietnam years, causing him to miss all the social revolutions going on
in the 1960s. Yes, he was isolated. He was in a prison cell
in North Vietnam. And he said because he was captured, his
national security experience in that regard is sadly limited -- pretty
outrageous comments.
In May, Tom Harkin
told reporters on a conference call, "He (McCain) comes from a long
line of just military people, so I think his whole worldview, his life
view has been shaped from a military viewpoint, and he has a hard time
thinking beyond that, and I think he's trapped in that. And I think that
can be pretty dangerous."
On April 7th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, in an interview with The
Charleston Gazette,
said, "McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles
from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when
they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care
about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."
The Obama Campaign doesn't want the conversation to be about military
experience, foreign relations or qualification to run our nations
defense -- how convenient, since Obama has no experience with any
of them.
Obama has less than zero military and defense experience, and his foreign relations
experience is limited to being the chairman of the U.S. Senate
Foreign Relations Committee's 11-member Subcommittee on European
Affairs.
The committee's jurisdiction includes the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, which has been providing military support to Afghanistan
since it assumed authority for the International Security Assistance
Force mission in 2003.
As subcommittee chairman, Obama could have held hearings pertaining to
the role of NATO in the war in Afghanistan, but he has not held a
single hearing.
Given the option of either supporting McCain or withholding support
in light of the presumed nomination of Barack Obama for the Democratic
party, 100 Christian leaders have met and decided to make their stand
with McCain.
In making the announcement, Mat Staver, the chairman of Liberty Counsel,
a legal advocacy group, said. "Collectively we feel that he (McCain)
will support and advance those moral values that we hold much greater
than Obama, who in our view will decimate moral values."
Counterfeit
Blogger
admits Obama's Hawaiian Certification Live of Birth is a forgery,
subverting Obama's claims. (see below, 6/22/08)
There is a
copy of this document on the official Obama Campaign website, under the page title,
"The truth about Barack's birth certificate."
Jay McKinnon, a self-described Department of Homeland Security-trained
document specialist, has implicated himself in the production of
fraudulent Hawaiin Certificate of Birth images similar to the one endorsed
as genuine by the Barack Obama campaign, and appearing on the same blog
entry where the supposedly authentic document appears.
The evidence of forgery and manipulation of images of official
documents, triggered by Israel Insider's revelation of the collection of
Hawaiin Certificate of Birth images on the Photobucket site and the
detective work of independent investigative journalists and imaging
professionals in the three weeks since the publication of the images,
implicate the Daily Kos, an extreme left blog site, and the Obama
campaign, in misleading the public with official-looking but manipulated
document images of doubtful provenance.
The perceived unreliability of the image has provoked petitions and
widespread demands for Obama to submit for objective inspection the
paper versions of the "birth certificate" he claimed in his book Dreams
from My Father was in his possession, as well as the paper version of
the Certificate of Live Birth for which the image on the Daily Kos and
the Obama "Fight the Smears" website was supposedly generated.
Without a valid birth certificate, Obama cannot prove he fulfills the
"natural born citizen" requirement of the Constitution, throwing into
doubt his eligibility to run for President.
In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp.
survey
completed in early June before the New York senator ended her White
House bid, 60 percent of Clinton backers polled said they planned on
voting for Obama. In the latest poll, that number has dropped to
54 percent.
In early June, 22 percent of Clinton supporters polled said they would
not vote at all if Obama were the party's nominee, now close to a third
say they will stay home.
In another sign the wounds of the heated primary race have yet to heal,
43 percent of registered Democrats polled still say they would prefer
Clinton to be the party's presidential nominee.
That number is significantly higher than it was in early June, when 35
percent of Democrats polled said they preferred Clinton to lead the
party's presidential ticket.
Research
Did the Obama Campaign Manufacture Internet "Research" for the
Washington Post?
by: Andy Martin
Executive Editor ContrarianCommentary.com
Does the Washington Post Owe Readers a Fuller Explanation?
(New York)(July 5, 2008)
A week ago the Washington Post ("WP")
published a full-page article about the "research" of Dr. Danielle
Allen concerning anti-Muslim e-mails against Senator Barack Obama:
We have continued to investigate this story. I have also sent a
new e-mail to the subject of the WP story, Dr. Allen, seeking new
information and new answers.
Our conclusion: there is a reasonable basis to believe the Washington
Post allowed the Obama campaign to "manufacture" "research" for use in
the WP story.
The now undisputed timeline is critical to understanding why our theory
of the case triggers intense suspicion.
In November, 2007, the WP contacted Beckwith, who manages an Obama web
site, The Obama File.
Thus, as early as November of last year, a WP reporter was working on a
story about anti-Muslim e–mails directed at Obama.
WP reporter, Matthew Mosk, also contacted me about the same anti-Obama
e-mail story. Mr. Mosk subsequently reported our conversation
accurately so I have no personal dispute with his writing.
Although it was several months ago I unfortunately did not keep a record
of the date of my phone call with Mosk.
Mosk's story claimed Allen received an anti-Obama, anti-Islam e-mail on
January 11th, 2008. She allegedly did nothing about the e-mail
until March 5th. In an e-mail to me, Ms. Allen stated that she did
not start researching the anti-Obama e-mails until March 5th. March 5th
was the day after Obama suffered major losses in primary elections.
Allen says that "word of mouth" led Mosk to Allen between March 5th and
late June when Mosk's article appeared in the WP. Here is where
the facts start to look slippery.
Allen has never published anything publicly about her study of the
anti-Obama e-mails. So we are left to accept the claims about her
"research" in the WP at face value.
Whose "word of mouth" was used to refer Mosk to Allen? When was
Mosk referred to her?
Mosk had done his own research and reporting in 2007. He did not
need Allen to do a story on anti-Obama e-mails. They were
circulating across the Internet and "hard left" Obama operatives in the
media had already identified me as the alleged mastermind of a vast
conspiracy to defame the candidate. Indeed, Ben Smith of
Politico.com takes credit for
"exposing" me last year as the e-mail majordomo, when all this time I
was sitting out in the open. How do you "expose" something that
isn't secret?
When and how did Allen surface, and why? By March 5th, when Allen
began her research, Mosk had not yet published any story on the
anti-Obama e-mails; Allen herself apparently did nothing about the
supposedly urgent anti-Obama e-mail before March 5th.
It appears Mosk did his own research for months, and found nothing
sufficient to generate a full-page story. Then Allen began her
"research" and a full-page story suddenly appeared about her efforts to
uncover the anti-Obama online operatives. My conclusion: Mosk went
to the Obama campaign and told them he was working on a story. The
Obama campaign mobilized Allen to do "research" that could be used to
float the report ultimately appearing in the Washington Post.
Is this a plausible conclusion to draw from the available facts? I
believe it is. I invite your responses and suggestions. We
need to get to the bottom of whether the WP allowed itself to be used to
suppress information about Obama, by allowing his campaign to
"manufacture" research for use in a WP feature story.
Alternatively, it looks as though the Post "held" the e-mail story after
being told by the Obama campaign they had someone "doing research" on
the anti-Muslim attacks. We don't have all of the answers, but
there are sure a lot of questions floating around out there. Mr.
Mosk and the WP do not appear to have been candid with their readers.
I would agree with Martin that, on
the whole, Matthew Mosk reported our conversation accurately.
The only thing I have to add, is that in my conversation with Mosk, we
spent time talking about these emails originating at the beginning of
2007 and how the "madrassa," the "swearing in on a Quran " and
other early rumors were knocked down in the spring of 2007. There
was never any talk about Obama being a "radical Muslim," as Allen
charges.
Mosk directly asked me if I thought Obama
was a Muslim, and I replied that I thought Obama was a particularly
skilled politician who was able to be whatever the observer wanted him
to be.
I don't know what he is -- bit I know I don't want to see him sitting in
the Oval Office.
"If you refined crude oil as often as Obama has refined his policy
positions, it would long since have turned to high-test gasoline."
Polls
In the latest Newsweak
Poll, the Illinois senator leads Republican nominee John McCain by
just 3 percentage points, 44 percent to 41 percent. The
statistical dead heat is a marked change from last month's Newsweak
Poll, where Obama led McCain by 15 points, 51 percent to 36 percent.
The race for the White House is tied. The Rasmussen Reports
daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday
shows Barack Obama and John McCain each attract 43% of the vote.
Gaffes
Obama's Unity Gaffe (01:26)
Obama forgets why he came to
the event -- It was supposed to be a moment for Obama to soothe some of the
tension that still exists between his camp and Hillary's. It was supposed
to be a chance for Obama to solicit donations to help retire Clinton’s campaign
debt, that could total $30 million. It was supposed to be all that.
The only problem is, he almost forgot.
Perpetual Campaign
Obama spent almost half of the past decade
campaigning for higher office instead of representing his
constituency.
Let's work backwards from November of this year.
2008: Barring some nefarious plot by Hillary Clinton, Obama will be
running for president until November. For purposes of this
exercise, we'll count this as 11 months of campaigning.
2007: Announced exploratory committee on January 16. Formally
announced presidential campaign on February 10. I'm counting all
12 months.
2006: Serving in U.S. Senate. While some would argue Obama was
unofficially campaigning already, including appearing at events in Iowa,
for the purposes of this calculation we will count his campaigning as
starting from the announcement of the exploratory committee. 0 months.
2005: Serving in U.S. Senate. 0 months.
2004: Running for U.S. Senate; elected in November. 11 months.
2003: Running for U.S. Senate. 12 months.
2002: Spent half the year preparing the groundwork for his U.S. Senate
campaign; he launched his campaign committee in late June. His
campaign often cites the 2002 antiwar rally as a key moment in his
campaign. 6 months.
2001: Serving in Illinois State Legislature. 0 months.
2000: Lost the March 21 House primary against Rep. Bobby Rush. 3
months.
1999: Announces bid to challenge Rep. Bobby Rush in September. 4
months.
1998: Serving in Illinois State Legislature. 0 months.
There are 120 months from November 1998 to November 2008. Of those
120 months, Obama was campaigning for higher office in 59 of them, or
about 49.1 percent.
If you begin counting from September 1999, there are 112 months between
then and November 2008, and Obama has been campaigning for higher office
in 52.6 percent of those months. (This does not count any
campaigning to retain his seat in the state legislature.)
In other words, Obama has spent about half of the past decade
campaigning for higher office.
Insufferable
After a brief bout of Obamamania, some Capitol Hill Democrats have
begun to
complain privately that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is
insular, uncooperative and inattentive to their hopes for a broad
Democratic victory in November.
"They think they know what’s right and everyone else is wrong on
everything," groused one senior Senate Democratic aide. "They are
kind of insufferable at this point."
Rookie
Polls
The New York Times and CBS News released
a poll this week; in it, Americans answered detailed questions about
Obama as the Commander-in-Chief.
The poll’s answers shocked the strategists at the Obama campaign
headquarters in Chicago, because the poll shows Americans
consider Obama lacking in the abilities necessary to run the armed
services, and are afraid of Obama as Commander-in-Chief.
The poll says only 24 percent say Obama would be effective as
commander-in-chief. In fact, 36 percent think it is "not likely"
that Obama will be effective in the position.
Obama’s talents lie in his gift of oratory and his ability to move
people with emotion, but this does not necessarily make for a good
commander. The chief executive’s job requires forward thinking,
realistic assessments of the world’s threats, and the maturity to make
judgments in a crisis.
Not only does Obama have dangerous disarmament plans for America, he
sorely lacks in experience. Besides being a junior senator, he has not
been on any of the major defense committees. He has no previous
hands-on experience with the military nor has he spent time with the men
and women of our armed forces.
The 300
Every day around 8 a.m., foreign policy aides at Senator Barack
Obama's Chicago campaign headquarters send him two e-mails: a briefing
on major world developments over the previous 24 hours and a set of
questions, accompanied by suggested answers, that the candidate is
likely to be asked about international relations during the day.
Behind the e-mail messages is a tight-knit group of aides supported by a
huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a
mini State Department, to assist a candidate whose limited national
security experience remains a concern to many voters.
Tour Of Duty
Whoa! NBC News believes it apt to compare Obama's sojourn to
... an actual military tour of duty. Yes indeed. Check out
this
video showing anchor Lester Holt introducing last evening's Nightly
News -- the legend, "Tour of Duty" is prominently displayed.
Echoes of
John Kerry!
Rejected!
An editorial
written by Republican presidential hopeful McCain has been rejected by
the New York Times -- less than a week after the paper published an
essay written by Obama.
The paper's decision to refuse McCain's direct rebuttal to Obama's "My
Plan for Iraq" has ignited explosive charges of media bias in top
Republican circles.
In McCain's submission to the Times, he writes of Obama: "I am dismayed
that he never talks about winning the war -- only of ending it... if we
don't win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists
would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to
happen as president."
NYT's David Shipley, who served in the Clinton Administration from 1995
until 1997 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Presidential
Speechwriter, advised McCain to try again: "I'd be pleased, though, to
look at another draft."
Shipley continues: "It would be terrific to have an article from Senator
McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece. To that end, the
article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain
defines victory in Iraq."
A top McCain source claims the paper simply does not agree with the
senator's Iraq policy, and wants him to change it, not "re-work the
draft."
McCain writes in the rejected essay: "Progress has been due primarily to
an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy.
I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few
supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally
vocal opponent. "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops
in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there," he said on
January 10, 2007. "In fact, I think it will do the reverse."
After rejecting McCain's rebuttal, Shipley went on vacation.
Update: On Fox News' "The Live Desk," McCain's spokesperson
Jill Hazelbaker said the op-ed was rejected because Shipley wanted
troop levels, timetables and other criteria for a withdrawal.
McCain has repeatedly said his criteria for
withdrawal is VICTORY -- but that is contrary to the Times' agenda of
surrender and defeat.
Update: Here’s the full text of Shipley’s
e-mail:
From: David Shipley/NYT/NYTIMES [mailto:XXXXXXX]
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 8:31 PM
To: XXXXXXX
Cc: XXXXXXX
Subject: Re: JSM Op-Ed
Dear Mr. XXXXXX,
Thank you for sending me Senator McCain’s essay.
I’d be very eager to publish the Senator on the Op-Ed page.
However, I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently
written.
I’d be pleased, though, to look at another draft.
Let me suggest an approach.
The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it
appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator
McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans.
It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors
Senator Obama’s piece. To that end, the article would have to
articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in
Iraq. It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving
victory -- with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling
the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the
Senator’s Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq
plan.
I am going to be out of the office next week. If you decide to
re-work the draft, please be in touch with Mary Duenwald, the Op-Ed
deputy. Her email is XXXXXXXX; her phone is 212-XXXXXXX.
Again, thank you for taking the time to send me the Senator’s draft.
I really hope we can find a way to bring this to a happy resolution.
Sincerely,
David Shipley
Road Trip
The Obama Iraq trip puts on display the unbelievable hypocrisy of
the Obama Campaign.
Obama is in Iraq to meet with General Petraeus, supposedly to receive
his counsel, but anyone that is paying attention knows that Obama
doesn't give one hoot what Petraeus thinks, believes or knows. It
certainly isn't going to change Obama's surrender in 16 months at all
cost plan.
David Axelrod is Obama's Strategist and Media Adviser.
He is Obama's Karl Rove, and primarily responsible for this road trip.
He is the founder of MoveOn.org. MoveOn.org
published a despicable,
full-page ad in The New York Times on September 10, 2007,
attacking General Petraeus as "General Betray Us."
Does anybody believe that the very
people that libeled General Petraeus 10 months ago, calling him a
traitor, are willing to listen to him today?
Anybody that thinks Obama's road trip is
anything other than a campaign stunt is a fool, and anyone that thinks
anything happening over there will change Obama's mind is worse than a
fool.
O-Force One
The Obama Campaign has removed the
American flag from the tail of Sen. Barack Obama's official campaign
airplane and replaced it with the presidential candidate's trademark "O"
symbol.
Obama's redressed airplane boasts Obama's anthem, "Change We Can Believe
In" and the candidate’s website address.
Polls
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday
shows Barack Obama attracting 42% of the vote while John McCain
earns 41%. That’s the lowest level of support measured for Obama
since he clinched the Democratic Presidential nomination on June 3.
McCain is viewed favorably by 57% of voters, Obama by 53%. McCain
is currently supported by 86% of Republicans and holds a modest -- four
percentage point -- lead among unaffiliated voters. Obama earns
the vote from 77% of Democrats.
Another Rasmussen Reports telephone
survey released Monday, of 1,000 likely voters, "found that 49
percent of voters believe most reporters will try to help Obama with
their coverage, up from 44 percent a month ago," compared to a piddling
14 percent who "believe most reporters will try to help John McCain win"
while "just one voter in four (24%) believes that most reporters will
try to offer unbiased coverage."
Exactly half, 50 percent, "believe the media makes economic conditions
appear worse than they really are," a separate Rasmussen Reports
telephone survey posted on Monday determined. That poll discovered
"a plurality of Americans (41%) similarly believe that the media has
tried to make the war in Iraq appear worse that it really is, while 26
percent say reporters have made it look better than reality and 25
percent think they’ve portrayed it accurately."
Newsweak, for example, has had Obama feature on its cover 6 times -- 5
times in the last six months.
Tour Of Duty
Obama Is Hiding From The Press In Iraq (00:32)
Lat evening, on MSNBC's Obama-fawning "Hardball," Andrea Mitchell complained
about the Obama camp's management of the news.
Mitchell says Obama's handlers have kept the media far away from the Senator
while he has been on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead, distributing
carefully selected pictures and interviews from the military.
Mitchell reports that this level of media censorship is unprecedented and she
says that the Obama-related news coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan is so
filtered that "some may call it fake interviews. They're not interviews by
a journalist."
Mitchell says that Obama has had no reporters, no press pool and no press
conferences during what CBS called "Obama's Tour of Duty."
"We've not seen a presidential candidate do this, in my recollection, ever
before."
Postscript -- MSNBC has not published this video or transcript on its website
-- how curious?
This
video
illustrates beautifully why Obama's handlers won't let him talk to the press.
This phony is helpless without a script and a teleprompter.
Add
this to the ever increasing pile of Obama faux pas. I watched it
myself and just shook my head in disbelief.
Speaking to reporters this AM, in Amman, Jordan, Obama wanted to be absolutely
clear on who is Israel's friend and said, "Let me be absolutely clear.
Israel is a strong friend of Israel's. It will be a strong friend of
Israel's under a McCain...administration. It will be a strong friend of
Israel's under an Obama administration. So that policy is not going to
change."
Axelrod never should have allowed the Obamamessiah to speak directly to the
press -- he screwed the pooch big time.
Yup, the eloquent one actually said, "Israel is a strong friend of Israel."
Genius -- pure genius.
Herr Obama
The "Arrogant One" campaigns for "President of the
World"
This is pretty
extraordinary. A candidate for the American Presidency is
using flyers printed in German to turn people out for his campaign rally
in Berlin on Thursday. This flyer can be found on a bilingual page
on BarackObama.com advertising the event. The German flyers bear
Obama’s campaign logo and say "Paid for by Obama for America."
So, this isn’t just some sober, high-minded foreign policy speech, part
of a foreign trip occurring under the auspices of his official Senate
office and therefore paid for by US taxpayers. It is a campaign
rally occurring on foreign soil. They are using the same tactics
to turn out Germans to an event as they would to any rally right here in
America.
"It is not going to be a
political speech," said a senior
foreign policy adviser, who
spoke to reporters on
background. "When the president
of the United States goes and
gives a speech, it is not a
political speech or a political
rally."
"But he is not president
of the United States," a
reporter reminded the adviser.
The European
Scott at PowerLine blog
says
the text of Barack Obama’s
sermon to the Germans in Berlin yesterday is an incredibly rich and
revealing document. Perhaps more than anything else, it was almost
perfectly calibrated to tell the Germans what they want to hear.
The fecklessness of the UN shows how little it means to be a "citizen of
the world." It means something, though, to be a citizen of the EU,
and Obama espoused distinctly European views, pledging to move American
policy in a European direction -- and to make the United States more
European -- under a President Obama.
After giving the Obama version of Cold War history, where humanitarian
aid rolled back communism, Obama devoted a sentence to discussing the
terrorist threat. He moved on to the heart of his speech, stating,
implicitly or explicitly:
• That the Europeans are right to consider global warming the primary
threat we face: "As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing
are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the
Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya," and "This
is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let
us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans
rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands."
• That the US will not act independently of the Europeans: "That is why
we cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large
or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone." Especially not the
Iranian nuclear threat: "My country must stand with yours and with
Europe in sending a direct message to Iran that it must abandon its
nuclear ambitions."
• But that the goal of abolishing nuclear weapons supersedes the goal of
preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon: "This is the moment
when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons… It is
time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of
nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from another era. This
is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without
nuclear weapons."
• That trade policy under an Obama administration won't be for free
trade, but for trade conditioned upon union, environmentalist demands.
Trade will facilitate wealth redistribution rather than a free market:
"Together, we must forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates
wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet."
• That the European Union is the model of the future and that we have
transcended the era in which America should assert itself on the world
stage: "…we need a strong European Union that deepens the security and
prosperity of this continent, while extending a hand abroad. In
this century -- in this city of all cities -- we must reject the Cold
War mind-set of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can,
to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that
extends across this entire continent."
• That we should emulate the Germans on carbon reduction ("Let us
resolve that all nations - including my own -- will act with the same
seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send
into our atmosphere.")
• Finally, Obama apologized for America's wrongdoing, promised to stop
the use of torture, and asked for Germany's (and Europe's) help in
extending European policy across the Atlantic: "Will we reject torture
and stand for the rule of law?" and "Let us build on our common history,
and seize our common destiny, and once again engage in that noble
struggle to bring justice and peace to our world."
Josef Joffe noted in The New Republic, "If he ran in Germany, Obama
would carry the country by a landslide, with 67 percent of the vote."
This comes as no surprise, as this is a speech about turning America
into the European Union more than anything else.
The Snub
Hot Air
reports that the Obama Campaign tried to excuse its snub of wounded
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans by claiming that it wouldn’t be
appropriate to visit the Landstuhl and Ramstein hospitals while on a
campaign-funded portion of his trip -- but that wasn’t the real problem.
When Obama found out he couldn’t use the visit as a photo op, he
canceled.
One military official who was working on the Obama visit said because
political candidates are prohibited from using military installations as
campaign backdrops, Obama’s representatives were told, "he could only
bring two or three of his Senate staff member, no campaign officials or
workers." In addition, "Obama could not bring any media.
Only military photographers would be permitted to record Obama’s visit."
The official said "We didn’t know why the request to visit the wounded
troops was withdrawn. He (Obama) was more than welcome. We
were all ready for him."
This makes the decision track very clear. Obama and his team set
up the visits to military installations before going overseas.
After seeing how the media got excluded in Iraq and Afghanistan, they
decided it wasn’t worth traveling to Ramstein and Landstuhl to visit the
severely wounded troops because they couldn’t bring the campaign and get
the photo ops they wanted.
This is the second article in a two-part series by Judah Benjamin
challenging the Constitutionality of Barack Obama’s bid for President.
PART ONE explores the legal history and definition of "natural born
citizen" under Article II of the US Constitution.
PART TWO explores the factual basis for Barack Obama’s dual citizenship,
and concludes that he has been a citizen of at least two countries, and
therefore is ineligible to be President.
The Author’s End Note presents a request for professional review.
Blackwater
During the Democratic primary battle,
blasting the private security firm Blackwater USA as a bunch
of unaccountable trigger-happy mercenaries was an easy crowd pleaser --
particularly after the September 2006 Nisoor Square incident and a
subsequent congressional report that stated the company's use of force
was "frequent and extensive."
Obama made clear his disdain for the outfit, trumpeting in Iowa City
last October his proposal for "tougher government reforms than any other
candidate in this race -- reforms that would eliminate the kind of
no-bid contracts that this administration has given to Blackwater."
In Pennsylvania in March he stated that "we have to crack down on
private contractors like Blackwater, because I don't believe they should
be able to run amok and put our own troops in danger and get paid three
or four times or ten times what our soldiers are getting paid."
So who do you think protected Obama and his fellow senators Jack Reed
and Chuck Hagel during their recent and much ballyhooed congressional
delegation trip to Afghanistan? Yep, that's right -- Blackwater.
It will be interesting to see whether Obama's public position on
Blackwater changes as a result of his up-close time with their personnel
in Afghanistan.
Show Me The Money
Atlas Shrugs is all over Obama's Anonymous Foreign Donors and
Other Bizarre Illegal Activity
I have been pouring over documents from Obama's foreign contributions
and it's rotten. As I pointed out here, there are way too many
overseas contributions and I find it hard to believe they are all
American citizens. $500,000 came into the campaign via "not
employed" people. How does the FEC monitor that?
Ranging in value from 75 cents to $250 (well over the anonymous limit)
there are 81 donations from all the world (and this is just in the
document I have been analyzing). It is rather suspicious that all
81 anonymous donations are devoid of any identification information.
My file on anonymous donations: Download
Atlas-AllAnnonymous.pdf
For example, there are two donations on sequential on the 13th and 14th
of February of $250 by anonymous country "information requested" no
employer no occupation. Again, over the maximum allowed for
anonymous contributions.
Mind this list is not complete. I have no idea how much more there
is.
If one lists by city, there is $223,000 from "information requested"
(meaning no info) city. Helloooooooooooo. These are some big
donations. Download
Atlas-Allindividualdonations.pdf
Single Donors from overseas that exceed the legal limit: [UPDATE
CORRECTION -$4,600 is the legal limit--$2,300 for primary, $2,300 for
general.]
Single amounts from $4,600 from Margaret Vento (homemaker) on the 8th of
June 2007 her country and state was unidentified. [Can she donate $4,600
to the primary race?]
There 5 donations of $4,600. There are three individuals Philip Ryan who
works for Credit Suisse, London and he gave four separate donations:
On 31st of March 2007, he gave $2,300.
Then on the 29th of September he gave $2,300 which was then "given back"
and on the same day gave he gave $4,600.[Again, this esceeds the primary
limit]
Philip Ryan of London gave of total of $6,900 in the year 2007.
The next bizarre donor is Richard Baumann (UK lawyer) has a total of 29,
yes folks, 29 transactions. Seven of which are negative. And the balance
of which are of course positive.
The total of $4,850 over the legal number. Strangely enough, the all
date January, February, May of '08. They range from $25 to $2,125.
What a mess.
How much money was raised from the phone banks in Gaza (see
video)?
There is a large contributor in the 'G's'. Largest. Name is
Monir Edwan. City is Rafah and the State is GA. You'd think
GA is for Georgia. IT'S NOT! There is no Rafah Georgia.
It's Rafah GAZA. Although election donor data indicate Georgia,
USA here: Donation Details: Adwan, Monir | Rafah, Georgia. There
ain't no such place in the land of Georgia peaches.
It's a Gaza refugee camp.
The file attached has both Monir & Hosam Edwan. Both from Rafah.
Both over allowed spending limit. Here is the file: Download
EdwanDetail.xls. It details Edwans's contributions totaling
$24,321.41. The contributions are all to Obama the candidate.
Different files for the party or committees.
Cathy's source of the data is from the FEC site. Presidential
download file zip. Named ALL. Dated 6/30. She went
back to find it today so I could be sure it was legit.
Jonathan Weisman
tells us that in a closed door meeting with House Democrats Tuesday
night, presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama delivered a real
zinger, according to a witness, suggesting that he was beginning to
believe his own hype.
Obama was waxing lyrical about last week's trip to Europe, when he
concluded, according to the meeting attendee, "this is the moment, as
Nancy [Pelosi] noted, that the world is waiting for."
The 200,000 souls who thronged to his speech in Berlin came not just for
him, he told the enthralled audience of congressional representatives.
"I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning
to our best traditions," he said, according to the source.
On Wednesday morning, House leadership aides pushed back against
interpretations of this comment as self-aggrandizing, saying that when
the presumptive Democratic nominee said, "I have become a symbol of the
possibility of America," he was actually trying to deflect attention
from himself.
No tape of the event exists and no one is denying the quote.
So Obama confuses himself with "our best
traditions" and out the other side of his mouth (next item) reminds us
how evil America is.
Flaws
As August begins, one must reflect on the fact that Obama has absolutely nothing going for him
except that he's young, good looking, black, and does a great job of
reading the speeches his handlers have prepared for him.
Once you get beyond those paper-thin qualifications for office, Obama is
nothing but a mass of flaws, bad character traits, and left-wing
agitprop. While the press lauds Obama as if he just cured cancer
and invented a car that runs on lawn clippings in the same day, everyone
else can't help but notice the Top Ten Flaws That Will Cost Obama
in November:
The Snobbery
The Phony Idealism
The Anti-White Racism
The Lack of Patriotism
His Liberalism
His Changing Position On The War in Iraq
His Inexperience
The Poor Judgment
He's Gaffe Prone
His Fuzzy Platform
Considering this guy wants to be president, We the People have a right
to know who and what he is. We deserve to know.
Original, vault copy birth certificate -- Not released
Certificate of Live Birth -- Released --
Counterfeit
Obama/Dunham marriage license -- Not released
Obama/Dunham divorce --
Released
Soetoro/Dunham marriage license -- Not released
Soetoro adoption records -- Not released
Soetoro/Dunham divorce --
Released
Fransiskus Assisi School School application -- Released
Punahou School records -- Not released
Selective Service Registration -- Released --
Counterfeit
Occidental College records -- Not released
Passport (Pakistan) -- Not released
Columbia College records -- Not released
Columbia thesis -- Not released
Harvard College records -- Not released
Harvard Law Review articles -- None (maybe 1, unsigned?)
Baptism certificate -- None
Medical records -- Not released
Illinois State Senate records -- None
Illinois State Senate schedule -- Lost
Law practice client list -- Not released
University of Chicago scholarly articles -- None
Chicken!
Obama
chickened out from rival John McCain's challenge for a series
of joint appearances at town hall meetings, agreeing only to the
standard three debates in the fall.
The "debates" will be moderated by the usual bunch of liberals from NPR
and NBC, ensuring a fair contest.
In May, when a McCain adviser proposed a series of pre-convention
appearances at the town hall-style meetings, Obama said, "I think that's
a great idea." In summer stumping on the campaign trail, McCain
has often noted that Obama had not followed through and joined him in
any events.
Obama's reversal on town hall debates is part of a play-it-safe strategy
he's adopted since claiming the nomination. Advisers to the
Illinois senator, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are
not authorized to discuss strategy, say Obama is reluctant to take
chances or give McCain a high-profile stage.
McCain's campaign disparaged Obama for backing off. Spokesman
Brian Rogers said. "We understand it might be beneath a worldwide
celebrity of Barack Obama's magnitude to appear at town hall meetings
alongside John McCain and directly answer questions from the American
people, but we hope he'll reconsider."
Show Me The Money
In violation of every election law in the books, the
Obama Campaign is actively soliciting and accepting money from all over
the world.
It is illegal for any U.S. candidate for federal office (and most state
and local offices) to accept campaign contributions from foreign
nationals. It is also illegal for any U.S. candidate for President
to accept more than $2,300 per election cycle.
So, why has Barack Hussein Obama accepted over $24,000 from Monir and
Hosam Edwan in Rafah, Gaza? And why is he lying about it by noting
on his official filings with the Federal Election Commission that Rafah
is in Georgia? Rafah is the HAMAS-controlled city on the border of
Egypt and is the site of the Rafah gate.
Does reporting to the Federal Election Commission FEC on contributions
really matter anymore?
The following information sources are all over this unreported scandal.
Barack Obama’s new
campaign plane is nothing short of grand. Well, for the
candidate that is.
Obama’s section of the plane rivals that of any first class.
Recently the front cabin of the Boeing 757 was retrofitted to install
four individual chairs that resemble La-Z-Boys. They are
free-standing and made of plush leather with pockets on the sides.
Obama's chair has his name and campaign logo embroidered on the back top
-- "Obama ‘08"on one line and"President"underneath.
Palestinian brothers inside the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip are listed
in government election filings as having donated $29,521.54 to Sen.
Barack Obamas campaign, according to WorldNetDailys (WND) Jerusalem
bureau chief, Aaron Klein.
The donations would violate election laws, including prohibitions on
receiving donations from foreigners and guidelines against accepting
more than $2,300 from one individual during a single election, Bob
Biersack, a spokesman for the Federal Election Commission, said in
response to a query.
The contributions also raise numerous questions about the Obama
campaigns lax online donation form, which apparently allows for the
possibility of foreign contributions.
Last week, the Atlas Shrugs blog outlined a series of donations in 2007
made to Obamas campaign from two individuals, Monir Edwan and Hosam
Edwan (See 8/4/08, below). In an online form on Obama's campaign
site, the Edwans listed their street as Tal Esaltan, which they wrote
was located in Rafah, GA.
Rafah is not a city in Georgia. The Atlas blog immediately raised
concerns that the money may have been donated from the Gaza Strip town
of Rafah.
A WND investigation tracked down the Edwans, who are brothers living in
the Tal Esaltan neighborhood of Rafah, a large refugee camp in the
Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
Speaking to WND, the two brothers praised Obama and admitted giving the
money online to his campaign. They said they are not U.S. citizens
or green card holders but are citizens of Palestine.
Monir and Hasam Edwan denied their financial transactions online were
actual donations to Obamas campaign. Instead they claimed they
purchased about $30,000 in Obama T-shirts from the presidential
candidates online store -- a contention that did not hold up during a
WND interview, when they changed their story several times.
Monir Edwan claimed he sold the T-shirts in Gaza for around $9 and that
a profit was made.
But it was pointed out to Edwan the T-shirts for sale on Obama's website
are listed as $20.08 and that selling the merchandise for less would not
yield a profit.
Edwan could not explain how he managed to get shipments of T-shirts into
the Gaza Strip during the months he claimed to have purchased the
merchandise, since Israel imposed a tight closure of the Gaza Strip
starting in June 2007 that lasted until June 2008.
We don't want to cause any damage to Obama's campaign, was Edwan's
reply.
Update (8/10): And here's more ILLEGAL, FOREIGN contributions to
Obama '08.
I just found $399,323,24 in fishy donations from overseas.
Searched for "NA" as State, and voila, 760 contributions from overseas.
NONE of the results are for McCain or Clinton. I used the Orlando
Sentinal's search page.
Click
here for search results showing foreign contributions.
Update (8/12/08): In
digging deeper into the illegal foreign campaign contributions from
Palestinians, Cathy came across these
FEC
letters. Obama knew these contributions were illegal and
"Palestinian". He didn't report them. He took a page from his days as a
"commnity organizer" for the most corrupt political machine in America. It's what they do.
Update: (8/18/08): Obama's campaign contends it returned
$33,500 in illegal contributions from Palestinians in
Hamas-controlled Gaza, but the donors told
WND Today
they have not received any money.
The Wall Street Journal reported it spoke to Obama officials who said
the donations from three Palestinian brothers were received between
Sept. 20 and Dec. 6 last year, and virtually all of the money was
returned by Dec. 6. The campaign said, however, the refunds were
not reported to the Federal Election Commission due to a technical
error.
The Obama camp insisted the remaining $2,500 was refunded Monday and all
of the refunds will be reflected soon in an amended report. The
campaign said new controls are in place to prevent any similar attempts
in the future.
But WND asked two of the brothers -- Monir and Hasam Edwan -- to respond
to the campaign's claims.
"No, we did not receive any money back from the Obama campaign at any
time," said Monir Edwan.
Overexpossed
Obama and his supporters got their panties all in a
twist when the McCain Campaign
compared
Obama's celebrity to the celebrity of Britney and Paris -- but Obama
made the comparison first!
And that's a quote.
What, Me Worry?
This image has not been Photoshopped -- It's the
latest Mad magazine cover.
Aloha!
Before flying with his family for a week's holiday in
Hawaii yesterday, Barack Obama expressed
concern about taking a break in election year. "During the
middle of a campaign you're always worried about taking some time off,"
he said.
He may have good reason to worry. He leaves behind a Democratic
party that over the past fortnight has been showing signs for the first
time of nervousness about the November 4 election.
For them, this is supposed to be the Democrats' year, an inevitable
march towards the White House after the catastrophic defeats of 2000 and
2004. Almost everything seems to be going their way: unpopular
president, disenchantment with the Iraq war, a faltering economy and an
inspirational Democratic candidate.
What is worrying the Democrats, in spite of all these pluses, is that
Obama's poll lead has remained stubbornly small. According to
today's tracking polls, Rassmussen has the race tied, 44% - 44%.
Gallup Has Obama, with a slight lead, 46% - 43%.
"I think there are a lot of Democrats who are nervous," said Tad Devine,
chief strategist for the Kerry White House bid in 2004. "I think
they thought this election would fall into their laps."
The "O" Salute
If a Los Angeles creative agency gets its way, Sen.
Barack Obama will see fans meet him with his own
salute like the one above. "Our goal is to see a crowd of
75,000 people at Obama's nomination speech holding their hands above
their heads, fingers laced together in support of a new direction for
this country, a renewed hope, and acceptance of responsibility for our
future," says Rick Husong, owner of The Loyalty Inc.
Husong tells me that he got the idea after seeing the famous
Obama-Progress poster by artist Shepherd Fairey. "We wanted to get
involved some way," he says. So, the agency came up with their own
a symbol of hope and progress that also plays off Obama's name.
"We thought, 'Let's try and start a movement where even while walking
down the street, people would hold up the O and you would know that they
were for Obama,'" says Husong. Much thought went into the
relatively simple idea. "You interlace your hands in a circle, the
interlacing being a symbol of different types of people coming together
and the circle a symbol of unity," he says. Their design, unlike
Fairey's, is free, and Husong is urging people to download it and print
it on posters and T-shirts. "We want to see it everywhere, but
more importantly we want this sign to take the world by storm."
Show Me The Money
Not only is the Obama Campaign being funded
internationally and by terrorists, (see below - 8/4/08) it's
accepting contributions in violation of Federal Election Commission
rules and federal law.
Obama Donor Over Limits : FEC Data thru 6/30/08
.
contbr_nm
count
contb_receipt_amt
.
ANDERSON, ROBERT
85
13,768.80
.
ANDERSON, JAMES
86
12,651.55
.
ADLER, ROBERT C
6
11,500.00
.
ANDREAS, LOWELL W.
3
10,000.00
.
BROWN, MICHAEL
98
24,755.89
.
BERGER, JONATHAN
15
18,650.00
.
BARBAKOW, MARGO B
7
13,800.00
.
BEHRMAN, GRANT G.
15
13,100.00
.
BROWN, DAVID
82
11,936.26
.
BROWN, LAWRENCE
6
9,700.00
.
BROWN, ROBERT
44
9,388.76
.
COHEN, ROBERT
36
14,334.79
.
COHEN, DAVID
30
13,060.00
.
CLARK, ROBERT
34
11,025.00
.
COZEN, STEPHEN A
3
9,500.00
.
DATE, RAJEEV
9
18,400.00
.
DIES, MARTIN
6
13,800.00
.
DAVIS, MARK
20
10,258.81
.
DAVIS, JAMES
32
10,250.00
This is just a sample. There's a whole bunch more at
this link.
These Marxists have never played by the
rules, so it's not surprising that it is the policy of the Obama
Campaign to accept contributions from anyone, anytime, in any amount and
from anywhere.
Saddleback
There were many revealing
moments during the candidates' forum in Saddleback
Obama is simply not as comfortable as McCain when it comes to answering
questions. This is due in part to the fact that McCain's has been
dealing these kinds of questions on the back of his bus for years.
But it's also due, I think, to the fact that Obama understands that his
liberalism is outside of the mainstream and, if revealed, will cost him
votes. Because virtually any question, no matter how simple and
straightforward, raises the threat of enabling voters to ascertain who
he really is, Obama often can't quite get comfortable. Instead, he
feels the need to dance or to withhold information.
Don't Worry
Describing the Administration as, "...the knuckleheads
who have been in charge," Obama guarantees a win in November,
saying, "I will win, don't worry about
that."
Electoral College
The Electoral-Vote.com web site has graphic maps that
can be used to compares the current electoral college projections with
those on the same date four years ago.
Today's map shows
Obama with a projected 275 votes to McCain's 250, with 13 up for grabs.
Four years ago, the map shows Kerry with 317, Bush 202, and 19 tied.
Bullsh!t
Obama addresses the Veterans of Foreign Wars
Gaffes
According to several Democrat political consultants
presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama spent part of his
Hawaiian vacation working on weaning himself from a heavy dependence on
teleprompters. Even in what are staged as "town hall" events for
Obama, remarks are scripted or formatted into bullet points that scroll
on teleprompter screens. Obama has had several embarrassing events
where the teleprompter either malfunctioned or the screens were not
fully visible.
"He just locks down and can't get the words out," says one political
consultant. "For such a fine speaker, it's really quite remarkable
that he's had issues."
Obama's troubles with unscripted moments contributed to his campaign's
refusal to participate in town hall format debates or discussions with
Sen. John McCain, who feels much more comfortable in the unscripted
moments.
Nigeria's anti-corruption police were questioning the head of the stock
exchange after she organized a gala dinner in support of Barack Obama's
U.S. presidential campaign which raised hundreds of thousands of
dollars.
Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke, chairwoman of the "Africans for Obama"
campaign group, organized the fundraising dinner in the commercial
capital Lagos on August 11. A "platinum" ticket for a table of
eight cost 2.5 million naira ($21,226).
It is illegal under U.S. law for foreign campaign groups to donate funds
to political parties in the United States.
Battle Grounds
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has
put the brakes on ads that were running in seven states carried by
the GOP in the 2004 presidential election, FOX News has learned.
Of the seven states -- including Alaska, Georgia, Montana, North
Carolina, North Dakota -- Florida and Virginia are considered key
battlegrounds this year. Obama’s decision to stop advertising in
those states is raising eyebrows.
Ineligible
A prominent Philadelphia attorney and Hillary Clinton
supporter
filed suit this afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania against Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the
Democratic National Committee and the Federal Election Commission.
The action seeks an injunction preventing the senator from continuing
his candidacy and a court order enjoining the DNC from nominating him
next week, all on grounds that Sen. Obama is constitutionally
ineligible to run for and hold the office of President of the United
States.
17. Obama claims he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4,
1961; however, has never given the name of the hospital he was born in;
whereas Obama’s grandmother on his father’s side, half brother and half
sister claim Obama was born in Kenya. Reports reflect Obama’s
mother went to Kenya during her pregnancy; however, she was prevented
from boarding a flight from Kenya to Hawaii at her late stage of
pregnancy, which apparently was a normal restriction to avoid births
during a flight. Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) gave birth to Obama in
Kenya, after which she flew to Hawaii and registered Obama’s birth.
There are records of a "registry of birth" for Obama, on or about August
8, 1961 in the public records office in Hawaii.
20. Wayne Madsen, Journalist with Online Journal was a
contributing writer and published an article on June 9, 2008, stating
the GOP sent a research team to Mombasa, Kenya and located a Certificate
Registering the birth of Barack Obama, Jr. at a Maternity Hospital, to
his father, a Kenyan Citizen and his mother, a U.S. Citizen.
Is Obama Ready To Be President?
Joe Biden says no, but Obama
doesn't hold a grudge and picked him anyway. On Saturday, Obama
was so excited that he introduced his running mate as "The next
president." (video)
John McCain called Obama's gaffe a "Freudian slip'' that betrayed the
47-year-old Senator's readiness to serve as commander-in-chief.
Then, Biden -- maybe over-compensating for his desire not to call the
junior senator from Illinois "Osama" -- actually called him "Barack
America!" (video)
It's been 68 years since either party put forward a
ticket with no military experience. Now, in 2008, at a time of
war, the Democrats offer us a modern first, a national ticket with two
candidates who never served a day in uniform in any capacity.
Least Qualified
This week, the least qualified man to receive a major
party
nomination for the presidency of the United States in modern times
will be anointed by his party. He could well win the general
election.
Here is Obama's résumé: an Ivy League law degree, a few years of
community organizing, seven years in the Illinois senate, three and a
half years as a U.S. senator. Kind of modest. What has he
accomplished in any of those jobs? Not much, not much at all.
Has he shown great courage in his political career? Has he shunned
the easy path or broken with the conventional liberal pieties of those
around him? Has he taken on his own party on a major issue?
Nope.
Has he shown exemplary character? He has undoubted skills and
abilities. He has always had great potential. But has he
followed through on it? Is there a moment in his public life that
one looks to and says: Agree or disagree, that was impressive?
His defining moment so far was his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic
convention. If one rereads that speech today, one sees more
clearly the emptiness beneath the eloquence, the lack of substance
behind the sizzle.
Intimidation
Intimidation is standard operating procedure with the Obama Campaign,
and it uses its willing and eager supporters in the mainstream media to
apply the pressure.
When attacks from "journalists" fail to censor Obama's critics, then the
lawyers go to work.
Remember this from a few weeks ago?
Beckwith responds to The Washington Post.
The first thing I have to say about "An
Attack That Came Out of the Ether," published by The Washington Post
on June 28th, is that at NO time was I ever contacted by this woman,
Danielle Allen, from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS). I spoke to two male Post reporters, who spoke to
me over the phone for a period of months. The first contact was in
the fall of 2007. They told me they were trying to track down the
source of emails they considered negative to the Obamamessiah.
Allen, who is an Obama
shill from Chicago and who has
contributed $2,750 to Obama, obsesses about the "Muslim" Obama stories, but steers clear of
Obama's relationships with communists, Marxists, socialists, terrorists,
racist reverends
and convicted swindlers. The trick she attempts to use is to knock
down one or two or three items so the other four thousand don't count.
The following notice appears on my website's "About"
page: "I don't write this stuff -- I cherry-pick it and publish it here
-- every attempt is made to provide attribution and/or links to the
original source -- if you don't like the writer's viewpoint -- send them
an email -- not me. If the reader finds content that is
incorrect,I will correct or delete it upon the submission of
two links to an independent source with more accurate information."
And I mean just that and I do just that. I want The Obama File to
be able to withstand the type of attack that Allen attempts in this
article.
Extract -- Read the rest of response on the
Obama's Campaign page -- Find "Danielle Allen"
Toga! Toga!
A proper and fitting venue for the Obamamessiah
Raw Video: First Look Inside Invesco Field (01:02)
Obama's acceptance speech, presented from a movie set "Greek Temple" is
the most ill-advised and ridiculous political misstep ever made by a
presidential candidate. This "temple," from which the would-be
leader is to speak, is a concept 180 degrees out of phase with the
notion of the democratic election of a president of the United States of
America.
It's more like the crowning of an emperor.
8/29/08
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's
campaign on Friday
blasted his Republican rival's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin
as a running-mate, highlighting her "zero" foreign policy experience.
"Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero
foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency," Obama
spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement.
Burton also criticized Palin as a vice presidential pick for her support
of oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness and her anti-abortion stance,
referring to the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in
the United States.
"Governor Palin shares John McCain's commitment to overturning Roe v.
Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush's failed
economic policies. That's not the change we need, it's just more
of the same," he said.
Bill Ayers
Breaking: David Axelrod, Obama's Karl Rove,
is talking regularly with Bill Ayers.
I now have two sources confirming that Barack Obama’s Communications
Director, David Axelrod has been communicating regularly with
unrepentant terrorist and former member of the Weathermen, Bill Ayers,
about how to respond to stories trying to report on Obama’s longstanding
relationship with Ayers. One of my sources tells me that one
person, a TV pundit who wishes to not be named, is talking about this
without mentioning Axelrod. This person told my friend:
"I predict that the howling and whining we hear from the Obama
campaign about Billy Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist who bombed the US.
Capitol and has been linked to candidate Obama at least for the last
dozen years, will get louder, and more hysterical and more damaging
because we will find that not only did Billy Ayers work closely with
Barack Obama to fund left wing school schemes in the hands of Maoists
(Mike Klonsky) and Neo-Stalinists (Bill Ayers) but also Billy Ayers
himself, now, regularly, is talking part in strategy sessions with major
Obama advisers as to how to bury the truth about the terrorist and the
candidate."
Another source with direct access to the Obama campaign reports that it
is David Axelrod who is fielding these calls. It is astonishing
that the Obama team thought they could contain this information.
But they will fail. Their fear about Ayers has little to do with
his past as a bomber of U.S. Government facilities and more to do with
the mismanagement of more than 100 million dollars that was spent by
the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).
Do you ever ask yourself why Barack has not touted his "EXPERIENCE" as
the Chairman of the Board of the CAC? You would think that a man
who headed a $100 million plus foundation would put that at the top of
his resume if he is running for President. Well, he doesn’t.
Why? It appears that his ties to Ayers and how the funds were
actually spent are facts the Obama campaign wants to keep buried.
But the shovels are out and the facts will emerge. I guess the
next question for Barack will be if he thinks it is okay for his
Communication’s Director to talk regularly with an unrepentant
terrorist? I bet most Americans would say no.
Hmmmm?
I wonder if the
fact that
Stevie Wonder, Will.I.Am, Michael McDonald and Sheryl Crow performed
before Obama’s speech and Bon Jovi after had anything to do with the
large crowd?
Radicals
Eighty-five thousand
cheering fans. Pyrotechnics. A dramatic, temple-style backdrop.
Such was the scene in Denver Thursday night as Barack Obama accepted his
party’s presidential nomination with "great humility." As his deep
voice reverberated throughout the massive venue, thousands of eyes
welled up with tears of hope and change. In the sea of faces and
waving flags stood a woman by the name of Marilyn Katz, the head of
security for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Like several of the other radicals who populate Obama’s sphere, she once
advocated guerilla tactics against police officers and participated in
violent riots. Unlike some of her more infamous counterparts like Bill
Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn -- who are in self-imposed exile until November
5 -- Katz is deeply, and officially, involved in Obama’s presidential
campaign.
The
Klan
Klansman Endorses Marxist
-- Robert
Byrd, Democratic senator and former
Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan in
Raleigh County, West Virginia, raises Obama's hand in support. (photo)
The Washington Post
reports that
Bob Byrd, a politically ambitious butcher from West Virginia,
wrote to Samuel Green, an Atlanta doctor and the Imperial Wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan, in late 1941 or early 1942, expressing
interest in joining the Klan. Some time later, he received a letter
from Joel L. Baskin of Arlington, VA, the Grand Dragon of
mid-Atlantic states, saying he would come to Byrd's home in Crab
Orchard whenever Byrd had rounded up 150 recruits for the Klan.
Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a
chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. After Byrd had collected the
$10 joining fee and $3 charge for a robe and hood from every
applicant, Baskin came down to tiny Crab Orchard, W.Va., to
officially organize the chapter. Baskin was so impressed
with the young Byrd's organizational skills that he urged him to
go into politics, saying, "The country needs young men like you
in the leadership of the nation."
Byrd wrote that he continued as Kleagle, recruiting for the Klan
until early 1943, when he and his family left Crab Orchard for a
welding job in a Baltimore shipyard. Returning to West
Virginia after World War II ended in 1945, he launched his
political career, but not before writing another letter, to one
of the Senate's most notorious segregationists, Theodore Bilbo
(D-MS), complaining about the Truman administration's efforts
to integrate the military.
Byrd said in the December 11, 1945, letter -- which would not
become public for 42 more years with the publication of a book
on blacks in the military during World War II by author Graham
Smith -- that he would never fight in the armed forces "with a
Negro by my side." Byrd added that, "Rather I should die a
thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to
rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become
degraded by race mongrels."
Byrd's Klan past became an issue again when he joined with other
southern Democrats to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Byrd filibustered the bill for more than 14 hours as he argued
that it abrogated principles of federalism. However, just
12 years later, when Senator Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) retired as
majority leader in 1976, Byrd, now known as the "the conscience
of the Senate", easily captured the post.
As recently as 2001, the West Virginia Democrat was still using
the N-word in television interviews.
'Bilities
Watch this hilariousvideo of Obama
defending his uh…uhhh…uh.. ability to govern.
CNN's Anderson Cooper: "Some Republican critics say, you don’t have the
experience to handle a situation like this [Hurricane Gustav].
They’ve in fact said that Governor Palin has more executive experience
as mayor of a small town and as governor of a big state like Alaska.
What’s your response?"
Obama: "Well, you know, my understanding is that, uh, Governor Palin’s
town of Wasilly [sic] has, uh, 50 employees, uh, uh, we’ve got 2500, uh,
in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a
year. Uh, uh, we have a budget of about three times that just for
the month. Uh, so I think that, uh, our ability to manage large
systems, uh, and to, uh, execute, uh, I think has been made clear over
the last couple of years. Uh, and certainly, in terms of, uh, the
legislation that I’ve passed just dealing with this issue post-Katrina,
uh, of how we handle emergency management. The fact that, uh, many
of my recommendations were adopted and are being put in place, uh, as we
speak indicates to extent to which we can provide the kinds of support
and good service that the American people expect."
Obama completely ignores the fact that Gov.
Palin runs a state with a $9 billion budget, manages $13 billion in
revenue, directs 25,000 employees, and as the commander of the Alaska
National Guard, she has military command experience.
American Idol
On Fox's "America's Newsroom", Lt. Col. Orson Swindle
(USMC Ret.) said, "we're not here to elect American Idol. We're
here to elect the president of the United States and leader of the Free
Wold."
Captured by the North Vietnamese near the city of Vinh Linh on November
11th, 1966, Capt. Swindle spent the next seven years being shuffled
around various prison camps, including the notorious Hanoi Hilton
complex. While in captivity, he shared a cell with future senator and
presidential candidate John McCain.
Swindle had a distinguished military career in the US Marine Corps,
receiving 20 military decorations for valor in combat including two
Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts.
Fake
Related -- Jay McKinnon, a self-described Department of Homeland
Security-trained document specialist, has implicated himself in the
production of palpably fake Hawaiin birth certificate images
similar to the one endorsed as genuine by the Barack Obama campaign, and
appearing on the same Daily Kos blog entry where the supposedly
authentic document appears.
Berg
Lawsuit
On August 21st, 2008, Philip J. Berg, Esq. filed a
federal lawsuit in federal court (Berg vs. Obama, Civil Action No.
08-cv-4083) seeking a Declaratory Judgment and an Injunction that
Obama does not meet the qualifications to be President of the United
States.
Yesterday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Obama were served
with a complaint and summons. The DNC was served at noon and Obama
was served at 1:00 p.m. All Defendants have now been served so the
case can proceed.
In his lawsuit, Berg stated that Senator Obama:
1. Is not a natural-born citizen; and/or
2. Lost his citizenship when he was adopted in Indonesia; and/or
3. Has dual loyalties because of his citizenship with Kenya and
Indonesia.
Berg said: "I filed this action at this time to avoid the obvious
problems that will occur when the Republican Party raises these issues
after Obama is nominated."
Berg is a former Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania; former
candidate for Governor and U.S. Senate in Democratic Primaries; former
Chair of the Democratic Party in Montgomery County; former member of
Democratic State Committee; an attorney with offices in Montgomery
County, PA and an active practice in Philadelphia, PA.
To
counter Palin, Obama to dispatch female surrogatesattack dogs.
Obama will increasingly lean on prominent Democratic women to undercut
Governor Sarah Palin and Senator John McCain, dispatching Senator
Hillary Rodham Clinton to Florida on Monday and creating a
rapid-response team to deploy female surrogates to battleground states,
Obama advisers said on Thursday.
Irony
Apparently, Barack Obama is no fan of irony. CNN
reports on John McCain’s strategy of attacking Obama on change, with his
attack on Obama’s lack of track record on reform or legislation while
arguing for his own. Obama, predictably, wonders how they can make
that case:
Lord, please have Obama continue to use that Bridge to Nowhere line.
It has progressed from a dumb attack almost all the way to a Big Lie.
Obama voted for that bridge -- twice! So did Joe Biden.
Obama has requested almost a billion dollars in earmarks in just
three years of being in the Senate; McCain doesn’t earmark at all.
Obama is flailing, because he’s getting exposed. All anyone has to
ask Obama is this question: "what have you yourself done to effect
change and reform at any political risk to yourself?" His only
examples come from bills he co-sponsored that were so uncontroversial
that they passed without roll-call votes.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama
tried to
direct more than $3 million in taxpayer funds to a Chicago museum
whose chairman is one of the Illinois senator's largest campaign
fundraisers.
Mr. Obama has twice since fiscal 2006 sought to have taxpayers foot the
bill for a new theater projector and other equipment at the Adler
Planetarium on the Lake Michigan waterfront. Neither of the
requests, which totaled $3.3 million, was approved by Congress, the
museum said.
The planetarium's chairman, then and still, is Frank Clark, chief
executive of ComEd, a unit of Chicago-based Exelon Energy. He has
pledged to raise more than $200,000 for Mr. Obama's run for the White
House.
Moreover, the Adler Planetarium is represented by the lobbying firm
National Group LLP, co-founded by William Oldaker, who helped launch
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s political action committee in 2005. Mr.
Oldaker, a partner with the Delaware Democrat's son in another
Washington lobbying and law firm, is no longer involved with Mr. Biden's
PAC, Unite Our States.
Two years earlier, Mr. Obama sought $300,000 for the Adler in another
unsuccessful earmark request.
The
Brown
Shirts
There is a secret group in the Obama-Biden campaign
tasked with shutting off any leaks from the record that links Barack
Obama to his longtime adviser and mentor Bill Ayers, professor of
education at the University of Illinois and unrepentant Weatherman
terrorist and fugitive from the 1970s.
This surprising fact has been developed by Chicago-born Professor Steve
Diamond of Santa Clara University Law School, who maintains the
Global Labor and Politics
blog and has pieced together over many months the unusual surreptitious
activity around the public records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC)
grant now housed at the University of Illinois and Brown University.
Diamond believes this Obama-Biden "Plumbers" unit was responsible for
the harassment of Stanley Kurtz of National Review, who sought access to
public records of the now defunct CAC at the University of Illinois
Library in Chicago in mid-August. He also believes it may have
played a part in frustrating his own investigation of similar CAC
records in the papers of the nationwide Annenberg Challenge program that
are housed at Brown University. The question now is who among the
major figures in the Chicago progressive circle, as well as former
Annenberg Challenge officials, are unofficial members of Obama's
Plumbers? And who among other responsible officials of the
University of Illinois are their unwitting allies?
There is a substantial independent report from a major Democratic source
that confirms Diamond's suspicions. The source confirms the unit
is led by Bill Ayers himself and likely includes Tom Hayden and other
members of "Progressives for Obama." Most critically, the
Democratic source says this unit has direct access to media adviser
David Axelrod of the Obama-Biden campaign.
Barack Obama's campaign prides itself on grassroots organizing, with
thousands of staff members targeting numerous subsets of the population
for voter registration and persuasion. One even sought to
register inmates.
An internal
email from the Michigan Department of Corrections in August
describes a request from the campaign to enter jails to register those
inmates set to be released before Election Day.
An Obama spokesman in Michigan acknowledged that a new organizer made
the request, but supervisors nixed the idea as soon as they found out
about it. The campaign denied all association with a second
request to the Department of Corrections. The emails say that a
Theresa Collins, identified as the national coordinator of "Inmates to
Support Barack Obama," asked the prison to post information about how
prisoners could make campaign contributions to Obama. That group
doesn't appear to have any Web site.
Obama's
Mind
Obama's Teleprompter Hits the Campaign Trail
It
appears Barack Obama's teleprompter is hitting the campaign trail.
The Democratic presidential nominee has never tried to hide the fact he
delivers speeches off the device, though normally he doesn't use one at
standard campaign rallies and town hall events.
But the Illinois senator used a teleprompter at both his Colorado events
Monday — making for a particularly peculiar scene in Pueblo, where the
prompter was set up in the middle of what is normally a rodeo ring.
Obama's handlers are terrified that the
"uh-uh-uh" guy might say what he really thinks.
Dirty
Tricks
The story
of the Sarah Palin email hack has taken a new turn. According to
security experts, the hackers have been traced to Barack Obama’s
hometown of Chicago. His national headquarters is located there.
In many ways the Palin email hack of her Yahoo account reminds voters of
the Watergate break in of 1972. A generation ago, a very
suspicious presidential candidate ordered his men to break into George
McGovern’s campaign headquarters in Washington DC. The episode was
emblematic of an administration known for dirty tricks politics as
usual.
According to an internet security expert located in San Francisco,
Gabriel Ramuglia, the Palin email hackers were careless and left a
digital trail. That trail leads directly to a server site in
Chicago which happens to be the city where all of Obama’s men plot their
daily moves. Mr. Ramuglia says that their electronic signature
will be easily obtained from the server logs at that site.
Mere coincidence or more Obama dirty tricks? Nobody can say yet
but we will all know soon.
And why is that?
Those familiar with the FBI understand that they take their time with
criminal cases. The FBI methodically develops their evidence over
a long period of data gathering, only bringing criminal indictments when
they feel there is an overwhelming case. Many cases are dropped or
drag on in secret for years because the FBI prizes a high conviction
rate.
Not so with the Secret Service which has taken over from the FBI in this
case. The Secret Service has one primary mission, which is to
protect the individuals under their watch. Their mission is not
just physical protection but privacy protection as well. They
report directly to the Department of Homeland Security under a
no-nonsense director named Michael Chertoff, a Bush political appointee.
Gawker Media published the private emails of a vice presidential
candidate under Secret Service protection. Right Pundits wonders
if our friends at Gawker understand the stakes. We would not be
surprised if their servers are seized within the week and that the
individuals responsible are arrested for election tampering. The
Secret Service does not dick around with evidence building. They
act to protect their subjects.
Stay tuned. The explosive turn of events in the 2008 presidential
election leave much unknown at this point. Was the Obama campaign
involved? Or did individuals act alone? We should know who
was behind the Icegate breakin before the election on November 4th.
The
Alinsky
Now we know where Obama’s mean, nasty, abusive followers
get their marching orders. At a Nevada rally Wednesday, Obama
said this to about 14,000 people:
"I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your
neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or
whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in
their face."
Nice. So much for the politics of hope and unity. So much
for teaching our youth how to be good citizens and neighbors. So
much for teaching tolerance, respect, and bi-partisanship. If
someone doesn’t agree with you, especially if they don’t choose Obama,
just get in their face and pick a fight.
Is this how Obama plans to train his National Citizen Service Corps?
How presidential. Teaching young people how to be Chicago thugs.
More
Alinsky
Obama is demonstrating his Alinsky tactics on the
campaign trail -- "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize
it."
Extensive research
was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine the source of smears
directed toward Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Those smears included false allegations that she belonged to a
secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American
views.
Their research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public
relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors
about Sarah Palin that were known to be false.
These rumors were
spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.
It is also likely that the PR firm was paid by outside sources to run
the smear campaign. While not conclusive, evidence suggests a link
to the Barack Obama campaign.
Namely:
• Evidence suggests that a YouTube
video with false claims about Palin was uploaded and promoted by members
of a professional PR firm.
• The family that runs the PR firm has
extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch
Obama supporters.
• Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in
a concerted effort to distribute the video in such a way that it would
appear to have gone viral on its own. Yet this effort took place
on company time.
• Evidence suggests that these distribution
efforts included actions by at least one employee of the firm who is
unconnected with the family running the company.
• The voice-over artist used in this
supposedly amateur video is a professional.
• This same voice-over artist has worked
extensively with David Axelrod's firm, which has a history of engaging
in phony grassroots efforts, otherwise known as "astroturfing."
• David Axelrod is Barack Obama's chief
media strategist.
• The same voice-over artist has worked
directly for the Barack Obama campaign.
This suggests that false rumors and outright lies about Sarah Palin and
John McCain being spread on the internet are being orchestrated by
political partisans and are not an organic grassroots phenomenon led by
the left wing fringe. Their findings follow.
This incredible report is worth reading.
These guys really did their homework. Watch this story.
Media
Bias
In the final stretch, members of the mainstream media have gone over the line and are now
straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.
While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for
decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are
covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the
other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda.
(The American left-wing version of the Volkischer Beobachter cannot be
far behind.)
And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly
electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway
honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs -- the press.
The image of Obama that the press has presented to the public is not a
fair approximation of the real man. They consciously have ignored
whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such
gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.
Thus, the public image of Obama is of a "man who never was."
Former Fannie Mae chairman Jim Johnson,
one of the architects of the current economic crisis, was dumped
from Obama's vice presidential search team, but as of the end of
September, he's still
playing a behind-the-scenes role on the campaign.
"Jim Johnson and I have scheduled another informal breakfast discussion
and update on the campaign early next month," former Senator Tom Daschle
wrote to a list including Senator John Kerry, James Carville, and
Richard Holbrooke, as well as Clinton's former top campaign aides,
including Howard Wolfson, Geoff Garin, and Harold Ickes.
Johnson's involvement comes at a moment when political association with
the failed mortgage giants is particularly toxic. He was already
the subject of a McCain ad attacking Obama.
Mo
Money
Secret, Foreign Money Floods Into Obama Campaign
October began with the revelation that more than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised
has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won't
disclose.
And questions have arisen about millions more in foreign donations the
Obama campaign has received that apparently have not been vetted as
legitimate.
Federal law does not require the campaigns to identify donors who give
less than $200 during the election cycle. However, it does require
that campaigns calculate running totals for each donor and report them
once they go beyond the $200 mark.
Surprisingly, the great majority of Obama donors never break the $200
threshold.
"Contributions that come under $200 aggregated per person are not
listed," said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the FEC. "They don’t
appear anywhere, so there’s no way of knowing who they are."
The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering
$222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only
$39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has
identified.
It is the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into
the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign
finance reforms of 2002.
More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack
Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama
campaign won't disclose, ad questions have arisen about millions more in
foreign donations the Obama campaign has received that apparently have
not been vetted as legitimate.
Federal law does not require the campaigns to identify donors who give
less than $200 during the election cycle. However, it does require
that campaigns calculate running totals for each donor and report them
once they go beyond the $200 mark.
Surprisingly, the great majority of Obama donors never break the $200
threshold.
"Contributions that come under $200 aggregated per person are not
listed," said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the FEC. "They don't appear
anywhere, so there's no way of knowing who they are."
The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering
$222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only
$39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has
identified. It is the largest pool of unidentified money that has
ever flooded into the U.S. election system.
In a letter dated June 25, 2008, the FEC asked the Obama campaign to
verify a series of $25 donations from a contributor identified as "Will,
Good" from Austin, Texas.
Mr. Good Will listed his employer as "Loving" and his profession as
"You."
A Newsmax analysis of the 1.4 million individual contributions in the
latest master file for the Obama campaign discovered 1,000 separate
entries for Mr. Good Will, most of them for $25, totaling
$17,375.
Federal Election Commission auditor
blows the whistle on $200 million in fishy Obama donations.
An auditor for the Federal Election Commission is attempting to have his
bosses seek a formal investigation into the collection by the Obama for
President campaign of more than $200 million in potentially illegal
political donations, including millions of dollars of illegal, foreign
donations, and has sought a request for assistance from the Department
of Justice or Federal Bureau of Investigation.
But the analyst's requests have largely been ignored. "I can't get
anyone to move. I believe we are looking at a hijacking of our
political system …no one wants to touch it."
Obamalytes
President-elect Barack Obama's
top
asset in pushing his agenda will not be his Cabinet secretaries or
aides, but rather his online network.
Obama's political e-mail
list tops 13 million names, a digital force that the incoming White
House can tap to push for his legislation, tamp down critics or bolster
popular support. It's also a way for Obama to reach into every
state, every city, and every neighborhood.
A study released
Tuesday found that a quarter of Obama voters said they would continue to
work online to support the new administration. The nonpartisan Pew
Internet and American Life Project also found 62 percent of Obama's
voters say they would ask others to support Obama's policies.
Welcome to the Democrats' new permanent campaign, one planned online and
executed on Main Street.
If it works the way Obama's top
lieutenants plan, the White House would marshal hundreds of thousands of
phone calls within hours if it looked as if the president-elect were
losing a policy battle. With the click of a keyboard, Obama's
aides could ask supporters to flood the phone lines of Congress, making
it untenable to ignore the clamor.
That, at least, is the idea.
Obama's Illegal Lottery
Received this email on
1/6/2009:
Thanks to you, President-elect
Obama and Vice President-elect Biden will take their oaths of office in
just 17 days.
You helped shape history, and now you can be a part of
it.
Ten
supporters and their guests will be selected to come to Washington, D.C.
for several days of inaugural events. You could be chosen to fly
to Washington, attend the welcome ceremony, the Inaugural parade, the
swearing-in, and an official Inaugural ball.
This inauguration will be open to
hundreds of thousands of people. To do that, it takes unprecedented
resources.
In
the past, inaugurations have been funded by lobbyists and corporations
making six-figure contributions. Like our campaign, this
inauguration is going to be different. But that means, once again,
Barack and Joe need to ask you for your help.
Supporters like you made this
possible, and with your help Barack and Joe will run their
administration without the influence of big money from Washington
lobbyists or special interests. Funding the Inauguration this way
is another example of the change you helped bring to Washington.
It's up to you, at this crucial
moment, to make the Inauguration a success and give change a strong
start.
Make a
donation of $5 or more now for the opportunity to join Barack and Joe at
the beginning of this historic journey to change our country:
Update -- later in the day -- AND, the first winner is
Cynthia Russell from Newberry, Florida. Cynthia and her guest will
attend the welcome ceremony, Barack's swearing-in, the Inaugural Parade,
and our Neighborhood Inaugural Ball.
Cynthia is a builder and has
been feeling the impact of the recent economic crunch. She wrote:
"I'm a single woman who has been building homes for over 18
years. I've supported myself and have been able to help out my
mother from time to time. Now I find myself wondering how much
longer I can hold on and be able to pay my bills and keep the doors open
for business. Barack gives me hope. Hope that 2009 will
truly bring change to Americans who find themselves in this mess with
me."
Michelle say they need to select 9 more supporters like
Cynthia, and would love for you to be one of them.
So send your money in right away! And check out the Alinsky --
Cynthia's world is collapsing -- Obama to the rescue!
It's Over, For Now
A reader just emailed that the electoral votes were just counted and
announced by Vice President Cheney.
Not one legislator,
Republican or Democrat, Senator or Representative, could or did refute
even one of the
undisputed
facts concerning the eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama to the
office of president under Article II, Section 1, United States
Constitution. Not one!
Well, maybe one. Check out the guy with his
hand up, standing next to Dennis Kucinich.
Congress Certifies
Today is January 8th -- Congress is scheduled to meet
in session to certify the
Electoral ballot count.
Many believe the Supreme Court has not involve itself prior
to today because there is a clear statutory procedure for challenging
the qualification of a President elect.
3 USC 15
provides for a challenge by one Senator and one Representative at
this Session of Congress.
§ 15.
Counting electoral votes in Congress
...the result of the same shall
be delivered to the President of the Senate, who shall thereupon
announce the state of the vote, which announcement shall be deemed a
sufficient declaration of the persons, if any, elected President and
Vice President of the United States, and, together with a list of the
votes, be entered on the Journals of the two Houses. Upon such
reading of any such certificate or paper, the President of the Senate
shall call for objections, if any. Every objection shall be made
in writing, and shall state clearly and concisely, and without argument,
the ground thereof, and shall be signed by at least one Senator and one
Member of the House of Representatives before the same shall be
received. When all objections so made to any vote or paper from a
State shall have been received and read, the Senate shall thereupon
withdraw, and such objections shall be submitted to the Senate for its
decision; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, in like
manner, submit such objections to the House of Representatives for its
decision; and no electoral vote or votes from any State which shall have
been regularly given by electors whose appointment has been lawfully
certified to according to section 6 of this title from which but one
return has been received shall be rejected, but the two Houses
concurrently may reject the vote or votes when they agree that such vote
or votes have not been so regularly given by electors whose appointment
has been so certified.
The 20th amendment describes how the
Congress is to proceed if a President elect is found unqualified.
Dirty Money
Obama spent a record $741 million on his campaign but has disclosed
donors for only $485 million of his windfall. Many of those donors
are subject to questions about exceeding campaign donation limits and
being legitimate donors. His campaign spent $309 million on
Broadcast Media while groups like ACORN received funding and abused
voter registration processes.
Barack Obama filed expenses for
$255 million more than he showed donation receipts for?
The
campaign produced over 2.5 million donor transactions, but there is no
unique identifier to monitor the donors’ total donations and little
validation that they are legitimate donors. The Obama submissions
were riddled with errors on city, state and zip code information, and a
single donor could have several name variations. Some of the
records were flagrant trash like Jfggjjfgj, Jgtj and Khv, Khv and Hkvkv,
K Vkn K V and Hdusahfd, Dahsudhu. Numerous donors had a single
letter given for their last name. Others were listed as Anonymous.
Most of these are errors that can be checked by a simple
computer routine. If the candidate is unwilling to check their own
submissions, then the FEC should have procedures for such checks upon
submission and reject reporting with errors over specified tolerance
levels. And late reporting penalties should be applied.
And
then there is the issue of foreign donorsť, which are expressly
forbidden by U.S. campaign finance law. There are 4,166 donors
listed in the Obama donor records that have foreign address information
and are not obviously with the military or government services overseas.
The Obama campaign’s donation form apparently has no entry for foreign
country specification. There was no attempt made by the Obama
Campaign to verify the American citizenship of each and every donor.
This article’s got lots of fuel for the Obama fans, and it closes
very well (though I can think of at least 6 "first mistakes" that it
left out). What’s remarkable to me is that even when given a
partial list of the Obama administration’s fubars --as listed by
leftist/Obama supporting sites --Obama supporters often deny any and all
mistakes; dismiss them, degrade them. I’ve even seen them declare
that in the time between being elected and being sworn in…he can do no
wrong because, "Barack Obama isn’t even President yet."
While
those same supporters suggest that his opponents (almost half the
nation) "give the man a chance" (i.e., ignore his mistakes until X/Y/ZZ)
there’s a simply delicious irony that the right and Obama’s opponents
are enjoying right now. That irony is that as every day goes by,
Obama’s Administration is either
1) Screwing up so bad that even
the friendly media recognize it 2) Changing his policies, positions,
and promises to not only match, but EXCEED the hated George W Bush
policies and John McCain promises 3) Proving that it IS NOT
INFALLIBLE
Atlas Shrugs
asks if anyone recalls how disgusting the liberal press was when
Bush was inaugurated and the economy was not in dire straits. This
is amazing ......billions on a bleeding country and $150 million
celebrating a socialist coup. Oh the irony!
President Bush
has declared a DC emergency for the Inauguration. The emergency
declaration will let the nation's capital
tap deeper into federal coffers for Barack Obama's inauguration.
When President Bush’s inauguration cost $40 million, liberals
screeched. Now, with Obama's coronation costing in excess of $150
million, liberals beam with pride.
MSNBC will put the news
channel's inaugural coverage in 27 theaters around the country.
Free tickets are being handed out via MSNBC.com to see the
inauguration and parade from 11 a.m.-3:30 p.m. ET at the 27 theaters run
by 11 exhibitor partners in 21 markets.
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United
States to
repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the
limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
January 6, 2009
Mr.
SERRANO introduced the following
joint resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
JOINT RESOLUTION
Proposing an amendment to
the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second
article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of
terms an individual may serve as President.
Resolved by the
Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in
Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That
the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of
the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as
part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of
three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of
its submission for ratification:
Article -- ‘The twenty-second
article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby
repealed.’.
Introduced in the House of Representatives.
This is the original text of the bill as it was written by its sponsor
and submitted to the House for consideration. This is the latest
version of the bill available on this website.
Obama isn't even sworn in yet and the
dhimmicrats are setting the stage for Obama to pull a Hugo Chavez.