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30 June, 2008

The birth certificate saga continues

Is Obababy an American citizen?

A senior official in the State of Hawaii's Department of Health, Director of Communications Janice Okubo, confirms that the image published and circulated by the Obama campaign as his "birth certificate" lacks the necessary embossed seal and signature. Backing away from a quote attributed to her that the image on the campaign site was "valid," she told the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times in an article published yesterday: "I don't know that it's possible for us to even say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents."

Barack Obama has claimed in writing to have a valid printed document: In the first chapter of his book Dreams From My Father, describing his origins, he wrote about finding a local Hawaiian newspaper article about his Kenyan father: "I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school."

So where is that birth certificate? It got lost? The dog ate it? No matter. Barack Obama or an immediate family member can plunk down $10 ($11.50 if he orders online) and have Hawaii mail a certified document to him within a week or two. But more than two weeks have passed since the Obama campaign adopted the suspect, uncertified image of a purported birth document published by a left-wing blog Daily Kos, and nothing certified and nothing on paper has since has been forthcoming. Nor has there been any official comment about the issue from the campaign. They may cling to the hope -- however audacious -- that the one issue that could disqualify their man constitutionally from gaining the presidency will just go away.

Amy Hollyfield of the St. Petersburg Times, and a reporter for the paper's "Politifact" blog, said that she has been seeking the birth certificate "for months." She was frustrated: "Hawaii birth certificates aren't public record. Only family members can request copies, so when the campaign declined to give us one, we were stalled."

Finally, the campaign released the image (resembling the one at the top of this article). Hollyfield e-mailed it to the Hawaii Department of Health, which maintains such records, to ask if it was real. "It's a valid Hawaii state birth certificate," spokesman Janice Okubo told us. Then the firestorm started.

Israel Insider contacted Okubo several days. She could not refer to Obama's specific case, she said, because no one but an authorized family member can do so. But she did confirm that a valid "certification of live birth" would need to have an embossed seal and signature and that it can only be printed and mailed. There is no such thing as an electronic only certification.

In our previous article on this subject we published an example of a certified birth certificate of another Hawaiian citizen, Patricia DeCosta, reproduced below. The stamp and signature are reversed because the embossing is done from the back as per law, as Okubo noted is required by law.

Speaking to National Review Online, Okubo admitted that the Obama image lacked those required features but thought that perhaps the embossing was applied too lightly.

Maybe so, but all the certificates we have seen have the embossed imprint clearly visible, as well as horizontal fold marks.

We got an email yesterday from Bryan Suits who has a radio show on KFI Los Angeles. He writes:

"I have just received my State of Hawaii certified birth certificate for my 1964 debut on the planet earth. It looks....nothing like Obama's. We've scanned it at 72dpi, 300dpi. Nuthin. We can't make the emboss disappear. Also, we can't make THE FOLDS disappear!! How did FightTheSmears do it?

I got curious when I compared his (with the 2007 date bleed) to my old beat-up1986 copy. then I went online on June 13 and ordered the thing. It got here yesterday tri-folded in a state of hawaii envelope. I called the State and asked if I could get an unfolded copy. No dice.

Hollyfield brings up other issues that her readers raised, although she does not address them or explain them [bracketed comments from Israel Insider]:

Where is the embossed seal and the registrar's signature? [Required for validity]

Comparing it to other Hawaii birth certificates, the color shade is different.

Isn't the date stamp bleeding through [in reverse] the back of the document [image] "June [6] 2007?" (Odd since it was supposedly released in June 2008.)

There's no crease from being folded and mailed. [Hawaii requires printing and mailing, according to Okubo. Electronic images are never released, she assured us, nor are they valid.]

It's clearly Photoshopped and a wholesale fraud.

Hollyfield, frustrated by failing to access the required original, being refused by the Obama campaign, and finding only secondary documents from his subsequent career, asks what's "reasonable" and then claims that skeptics about Obama's published birth certificate believe that there's a conspiracy afoot:

Because if this document is forged, then they all are. If this document is forged, a U.S. senator and his presidential campaign have perpetrated a vast, long-term fraud. They have done it with conspiring officials at the Hawaii Department of Health, the Cook County (Ill.) Bureau of Vital Statistics, the Illinois Secretary of State's office, the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois and many other government agencies.

But Hollyfield is mistaken. There would be no need to invent a conspiracy among officials. All Obama needed to do would be to pass off an uncertified document as being certified. He may have done so unwittingly. Then the rest can follow without any need to conspire with any other official. They just take it on faith that the person is an American citizen.

They don't check about the embossing requirements of the State of the Hawaii. They believe Obama. Why should they doubt him, certainly after he becomes a lawyer and a state senator? The officials believe that the claimed document is authentic, and therefore issue other documents, based on the phony one, buried deep in the documentary chain. Unwitting or not, however, the high stakes for basing one's citizenship on an uncertified birth certificate must be pretty obvious to the campaign now.

Nothing else explains why Obama's campaign refused to release the original paper document, to make this distracting controversy go way. Because Hollyfield is right about one thing:

"If this document is forged, a U.S. senator and his presidential campaign have perpetrated a vast, long-term fraud."

U.S. citizens who have written to Israel Insider or have posted on the Internet are not satisfied. Ordinary people are compelled to produce certified paper birth certificates to get a passport or a driver's license. Why, people are asking, doesn't Obama needed to show one to run for President?

In a follow-up contact by Hollyfield, Janice Okubo backtracked and qualified, pointing to the main issue that Israel Insider and others have brought into focus [our comments in brackets]:

"I guess the big issue that's being raised is the lack of an embossed seal and a signature," Okubo said, pointing out that in Hawaii, both those things are on the back of the document. "Because they scanned the front -- you wouldn't see those things." [But of course, as in the DeCosta sample and others, you can see it clearly.]

Okubo says she got a copy of her own birth certificate last year and it is identical to the Obama one we received. [Well, "identical" cannot be correct. Her name is not Obama, Her certificate number was not blacked out, and her certificate had the required embossed certification. So she can only be saying that the form looked the same, as she said to the National Review Online's Jim Geraghty.]

And about the copy we e-mailed her for verification? "When we looked at that image you guys sent us, our registrar, he thought he could see pieces of the embossed image through it." [Except that she received only what was published on the Internet and circulated by email, and no "pieces of the embossed image" do come through that. We have published the highest resolution available and there is no trace of embossed seal or signature. Readers can see for themselves.]

Still, she acknowledges: "I don't know that it's possible for us "to even say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents."

And there you have it. Okubo can't "even say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents" because she is not allowed access to Barack Obama's personal records. State law prohibits it. Only Barack Obama (or another immediate family member) can authorize the release of the paper birth certificate, and submit it to objective analysis. He refuses to do so,

Source




The Chicago Challenge

Barack Obama made one shrewd move this week, along with one risky one. In talking with reporters after the Supreme Court ruled that criminals who rape children may not be executed, Mr. Obama moved smartly to the political center. "I think that the rape of a small child, six or eight years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our Constitution," he said, siding with conservative dissenters in the case.

Mr. Obama was on shakier ground when he insisted that none of the burgeoning scandals in Illinois politics have anything to do with him. In recent days, top Obama fundraiser Tony Rezko was convicted on influence peddling charges and Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich is facing possible impeachment hearings in the Illinois legislature over Rezko-related scandals.

"You will recall that for my entire political career here, I was not the endorsed candidate of any political organization here," Mr. Obama told Chicago reporters. "My reputation in Springfield [as a state legislator] was as an independent. There is no doubt I had friends and continue to have friends who come out of the more traditional school of Chicago politics but that's not what launched my political career and that's not what I've ever depended on to get elected, and I would challenge any Chicago reporter to dispute that basic fact."

Throwing down a challenge to reporters might prove uncomfortable for Mr. Obama. Good government groups in Chicago have long deplored his seeming indifference to the corruption in the Daley machine that has dominated the city since 1955. Indeed, Mr. Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod is also current Mayor Richard J. Daley's top political adviser. And while Mr. Obama was not originally elected with the help of the machine, once in the legislature he became a close ally of state Senate President Emil Jones, a cog in the Daley machine who has been the chief obstacle to passing ethics reform through the state legislature.

"Obama may pretend he is Obambi when it comes to corruption," says Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. "But the fact is that you can't come from Chicago without having your involvement with its politics scrutinized." At Mr. Obama's invitation, here's hoping enterprising reporters start digging.

Source




Mr No-principles

During the Democratic primary season, all those eons ago, Barack Obama deployed no more powerful line against Hillary Clinton than his insistence that 'we can't just tell people what they want to hear. We need to tell them what they need to hear'. More than just a catchy couplet, the phrase was a deadly arrow into the heart of Clintonism.

Few things crippled Hillary's campaign like the belief that she would say or do anything to get elected, from supporting the Iraq War to claiming she'd dodged sniper fire at Tuzla. In Obama, Democrats seemed to have found something refreshing: a brave truth-teller unmoored to pollsters such as Mark Penn, someone who had spoken out against Iraq the war and could at last restore integrity and honesty to Washington politics.

But since Obama dispatched Clinton, he has seemed rather more attuned to what the people want to hear or perhaps he has simply traded the wants of a liberal audience for those of a more moderate one. Either way, he is treading that reliably time-worn path every nominee follows to the political centre. And the question for Democrats is whether to applaud Obama as a cunning politician who knows how to win or fret that he's given undecided voters reason to think his 'politics of hope' are just politics as usual.

First, let us count the repositionings. This past week, Obama expressed surprising disagreement with a Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the death penalty for child rapists (he had previously questioned the rationale of capital punishment). He resisted criticising another high court ruling that affirmed gun owners' rights, even though he had previously seemed to support the gun-control measure at issue.

Obama also dropped his once-stern opposition to a Congressional measure, despised on the left, that would legally shield telecommunications companies that co-operated with extra-legal US government eavesdropping. To some, even the contents of Obama's iPod, recently revealed to Rolling Stone, smacked of political calculation, combining as it did Baby Boomer classics (Stones, Springsteen, Dylan) with highbrow jazz (Coltrane, Miles Davis) mindless top 40 pop (Sheryl Crow) and edgy-but-not-too-edgy hip hop (Jay-Z, Ludacris). Perhaps this playlist should be titled 'Majority Coalition'.

In truth, Obama has been creeping towards the sanitised centre for a while. After disdaining American flag lapel pins last year, he now wears one regularly. When Jeremiah Wright, his controversial former pastor, provoked outrage in March, Obama insisted he could not 'disown' him, but proceeded to do so just a few weeks later with a public condemnation.

Obama now concedes that his sharp criticism of free trade agreements such as Nafta before industrial-area primary voters might have been 'overheated'. He's toughened his talk on Iran and in favour of Israel. He's even shaded his rhetoric on Iraq, downplaying his primary season vow to withdraw all US combat troops within 16 months for more careful talk of a gradual and 'responsible' exit.

Each of these positions has been generally consistent with the prevailing views of the swing voters Obama will need to win in November: independents, liberal Republicans and moderate Democrats whose votes are still up for grabs. After all, Obama has already locked down most core Democrats, who wouldn't think of staying home or voting for the pro-war McCain. But according to an early June Gallup poll, McCain is beating Obama among independents who don't lean toward either party.

McCain campaign operatives have welcomed these interesting new dimensions of Obama's profile. Their core argument, after all, is that Obama is a charlatan - not a harbinger of new politics but a typical pol who has never taken real risks (unlike McCain, who defied his party on campaign finance reform in the late 1990s and recent public opinion over the Iraq War). Obama, they say, is a just another unprincipled flip-flopper: 'John Kerry with a tan,' as prominent conservative activist Grover Norquist recently put it, in a formulation of questionable taste. (Never mind that McCain himself revamped core positions on issues ranging from immigration to tax cuts to secure the Republican nomination.)

That Obama is not the living incarnation of pure principle should be no shock; his vaunted political courage has always been overstated. While prescient, his famous 2002 speech opposing the Iraq War, for instance, was hardly a political risk. Obama represented Chicago's highly liberal Hyde Park area as a state senator and was counting on a similarly anti-war coalition of African-Americans and white liberals in his upcoming US Senate candidacy. And while taking on the Clintons may have been audacious, it was also opportunistic. He did not feel 'the fierce urgency of now' until after the expected challenger to Hillary's crown, former Virginia governor Mark Warner, abandoned his candidacy at the last minute. Savvy Democrats understand that there was always a certain genius to Obama's positioning, that to some degree his talk of changing politics was itself a skilful pose which turned Clinton into a reactionary foil. They will appreciate his awareness for what it takes to get elected. Democrats have long believed that their side practises politics less skilfully, less ruthlessly, than the Republicans. Hence one of Clinton's main promises to Democrats was that she could beat the Republicans at their own cynical game.

For now, they will have to hope that Obama hasn't gone too far. An ever-confounding question of politics is to know at what point a shift to a more majority position is outweighed by the disillusionment and scorn of flip-flopping. Wherever that tipping point is, however, Obama hasn't yet reached it. He is still better off with his current stances than he would be, say, explaining why he doesn't believe that child rapists deserve to die.

It's an unfortunate reality of politics that voters don't want to hear what they need to hear. We want to hear what we want to hear. Obama's recognition of that is a testament that he is, for better or worse, a shrewd, if far from pure, politician. Somewhere Hillary Clinton must be chuckling ruefully.

Source




In Love and Hauteur: Obama and the press, sneering together

The press is in love, really in love, the kind of love that comes twice in a century. Sure, it has had crushes before - on John McCain and Bill Clinton - but those were mere infatuations, and the ardor ebbed quickly. In the cold light of day, the press is finding McCain not quite as cute as they thought him; and as for the old flame, Bill Clinton, when the going got tough and he took swipes at its new love, the press tossed him under the bus and backed over him, most notably with a particularly salacious hit piece - by the husband of one of his former assistants! - in a recent issue of Vanity Fair. That previously Clinton-loving magazine now has a passion for Barack Obama, as do Time and Newsweek, which embarrass themselves on a near-weekly basis. NBC exists mainly to ooze Obamadoration, with other news outlets not far behind.

"Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon," write John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei of Politico.com. Harris thinks some of his reporters need "detox" to get over their rapture, while VandeHei adds, "There is no doubt reporters are smitten with Obama's speeches and promises to change politics." What causes this madness in rational people? Nothing too mad: similar outlooks and interests in common. The press and Obama are a match made in heaven. This isn't insanity, but the product of wholly predictable forces, coming together in an outcome that seems preordained.

Twice before, the American press has had mass crushes on national candidates, but these seem to be two different things. John F. Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt were young - 43 and 42 - when they became president, both fit the template of American royalty, and both had a genius unmatched before or since for marketing themselves and their families for political gain. They served, in effect, as a fantasy grid for the press and the nation, a compilation of much-longed-for assets and traits.

Both men had money, but their families had not yet been softened by privilege. They were unusually literate for politicians - they read books and wrote them - but they also had combat feats to their credit: Kennedy's PT-109 and Roosevelt's inspiring charge at the battle of San Juan Hill. They showed vigor - or, in JFK's case, "vigah" - in the form of touch-football games on the lawn at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis, 50-mile hikes (which JFK inspired, but never managed to go on), and the obstacle courses at Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill, in which hikers were obliged to go through or over - never around - any roadblock that came in their way. There were beautiful women, Alice and Jackie, and adorable sons, Quentin and John Jr., each of whom would later die young in an airplane. There were the many and varied extended-family members, the summer retreats in expensive and picturesque places, and the exotic upper-class pastimes: The Roosevelts liked to go big-game hunting, often in Africa, and Jackie Kennedy, who was given a magnificent Arabian steed by Pakistan's president, enjoyed riding to hounds.

MEET THE PRESS

Many years later, reviving the TR and JFK ambience would make Ralph Lauren a millionaire many times over, but the stars themselves were no slouches when it came to selling their brand. "TR was far from being a spectator in the merchandising of his image," write Peter Collier and David Horowitz in their book on the Roosevelt families. "He always had reporters around, good ones like Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens, who allowed him to go over the heads of politicians. . . . During the Cuban campaign, he had received some of the greatest battlefield publicity in the history of warfare from friendly correspondents like Richard Harding Davis and even from more critical ones like Stephen Crane. . . . The courtship had intensified in Albany, where TR [as governor of New York] had daily informal chats with newspapermen and delivered enticing off-the-record opinions while sitting on the corner of his desk. . . . He was also the first to hold `backgrounders,' briefings at which he would present his ideas not for attribution except as an `informed source.' " He was the first to preempt a rival's move by springing something more newsworthy on him, "the first President to give out press releases on a Sunday so that he would have Monday morning's headlines to himself."

With John F. Kennedy 60 years later, it became plus la mˆme chose. Roosevelt had befriended Riis and Steffens; in Washington, Kennedy befriended Benjamin Bradlee, Charles Bartlett (who introduced him to Jackie), and Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. He was so close to Joseph Alsop that he showed up on Alsop's doorstep after the final Inaugural Ball, and during the Missile Crisis in 1962 he asked Alsop's wife to host a dinner so that he could talk at length to a ranking Soviet expert without arousing suspicion. Like TR, he understood how journalists thought; according to David Halberstam, he could tell when editors went on vacation, because their publications had a different feel. He had briefly been a journalist himself near the end of World War II, after his discharge from the Navy, and he planned, when he left the White House, to publish a newspaper. His kin claim Obama is JFK's heir, but he isn't at all the same thing.

The appeal of Barack Obama is similar to that of TR and JFK, yet different: He seems less a person and more an idea. He is a few years older than the others were when they took office, but he has a rather more boyish air. He is exotic, but not very glamorous. He has money now, but he isn't from privilege. TR and JFK were embedded in their families; Obama seems like an orphan or waif. His wife is stunning (and, fashion-wise, seems to be channeling Jackie), and his children are sweet, but there has been little effort so far to market them. No one aspires to a domestic life like Obama's, as they did with Teddy Roosevelt or John Kennedy, or even with Robert F. Kennedy, whose revels at Hickory Hill were a legend. (On the other hand, neither TR nor any of the Kennedys was ever imagined as the Messiah, portrayed in posters as bathed in a halo-like light.)

To the press of their day, and to most of the public, TR and JFK had the appeal of an intense personality and an opulent lifestyle; to the press of today, and to a much smaller slice of the public, Obama has the appeal of a superior mind and character. To them, he is everything they see in themselves and look for in others: ultra-cool, ultra-refined, extremely articulate, wholly non-violent, and transnational in his instincts and biography. He has lived in Hawaii and Indonesia, but not in "middle America." He knows the slums and the faculty clubs, but not the nation's small towns. He knows nothing of business or the military and seems to hold both in muted disdain.

Obama was not born into the elite, but he has joined it by training and by inclination, and in this sense his journey mirrors that of the press, which began as a trade that drew people from all parts of the culture but has become an exclusive profession, staffed largely by upper-middle-class people who feel a strong sense of mission and an equally great self-regard. Now it shows all the signs of an institution in an advanced stage of decadence: It has built a multimillion-dollar shrine to itself in Washington, along with numerous schools and institutions study its "excellence" (which seems to decline as these studies proliferate), and it convenes endless panels to extol its importance and mission, even as scandals plague its most prominent newsrooms and its ratings and circulation figures decline.

As a result, the press becomes more and more like the academic community, Obama's electoral base, which is similarly out of touch with the larger American public. His support in the press approaches that in the college towns, where he rolled up impressive majorities. Bill Clinton came from Hope, as did Mike Huckabee, but to the press Obama has become Hope personified. Journalists are Obama's disciples; he is their prophet, the mirror in which they see themselves. And journalists spend a lot of time looking in the mirror.

More here




Obama's Global Tax

Senator Barack Obama's sponsorship of Senate Bill 2433 aligns with the emerging core theme of his general election campaign. The change he promises will bring much-needed relief, not just to America's victims of economic injustice, but to victims worldwide.

On December 7, 2007, Obama introduced the Senate version of the Global Poverty Act of 2007 (S.2433). On February 13, the bill cleared the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, on which Obama and 6 (Biden, Dodd, Feingold, Hagel, Lugar, Menendez) of the bill's 9 co-sponsors serve. The House version of the bill (H.R.1302) passed by a unanimous voice vote last September 25. Here's an abstract of the proposed legislation:

"To require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the [U.N.] Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day."

If enacted, how much of a financial commitment would that represent to taxpayers? One estimate is 0.7% of gross national product, or an additional $845 billion over 13 years in addition to existing foreign aid expenditures. So far, this proposal is barely on the MSM radar, but we're likely hear more about it as a full Senate vote approaches. Here's how Senator Obama's website frames the bill:

"With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces," said Senator Obama. "It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking water. As we strive to rebuild America's standing in the world, this important bill will demonstrate our promise and commitment to those in the developing world. Our commitment to the global economy must extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing corporate profits than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere."

In other words, other nations will like us better if we give them our money. And, our trade agreements should not be about business profit, but benevolent social action.

The Global Candidate's sponsorship of the Global Poverty Act thematically aligns with the oft-told story of his life as a child of international parents, as well as with his elliptical juxtaposition of hope and change. He not only offers hope to his U.S. audiences, but to poor children, workers, and small farmers across the globe. George W. Bush's grand theme of spreading democracy globally evolved after 9/11. Obama's grand theme is to spread America's wealth to the world's poor, as the onetime community organizer from the streets of South Chicago goes global.

The species of hope that Barack Obama preaches is a first cousin of disappointment. He speaks to his followers as though they are victims, and it resonates with them because victimhood is a latent element of their collective self-image. Most of the younger ones in his audiences face historically unprecedented educational and vocational opportunities. Within the reasonable grasp of their individual initiatives is a future that is the envy of most of the world's youth. Yet they look longingly for someone from the government to offer them hope.

He says, "It's not too late to claim the American dream," and they cheer wildly, and some even cry. Don't they know that the American dream isn't a wish granted by a politician, or an entitlement from the government? Do they need a political seer to tell them what to hope for, and dream of, because they are unable to find it for themselves?

More here




Obama's Web Site Blows Disclaimer, Now Responsible for All Hate Speech

"Exercise of editorial control" makes Obama 100 percent responsible for his site's hate speech against Jews, pro-Clinton Black people, and seniors

We created our own blog at my.barackobama.com, which carries the following disclaimer: "Content on blogs in My.BarackObama represents the opinions of community members and in no way should be interpreted as endorsed or approved by the campaign." By deleting our blog and disabling our account, the Obama campaign just blew its disclaimer and can now be held 100 percent responsible for the anti-Semitic, racist, misogynist, and ageist hate speech it allowed to stand (in some cases for more than a year). "Exercise of editorial control" is the EXACT issue that forced MoveOn.org to disable its prized Action Forum in 2006, and almost resulted in the organization's total destruction. First, it is necessary to understand the moral (and in some cases legal) meaning of "exercise of editorial control."

The general rule regarding vicarious liability for the publication of defamatory material is that "publishers" are strictly liable for defamatory content in material they publish; mere "distributors," on the other hand, cannot be liable for defamatory content unless they "knew or had reason to know" of that content. Thus, if defamatory material appears in one of my columns, for example, the American Lawyer will be held liable, on the grounds that its exercise of editorial control gives it both the opportunity to screen material prior to distribution and leads readers to conclude that it stands behind whatever it does choose to publish. .

So when Stratton moved for summary judgment on the question of Prodigy's liability, the question before Judge Stuart Ain of the New York State Supreme Court was: does Prodigy more closely resemble a bookseller, in which case Stratton's claim against it must be dismissed, or a newspaper?

The latter, Judge Ain declared: Prodigy "exercise[d] sufficient editorial control over its computer bulletin boards to render it a publisher with the same responsibilities as a newspaper."

We have just established that the Obama campaign exercised editorial control over its computer bulletin boards, thus making Obama the proud owner of material like "Zionist Thought Police," "Jewish Lobby," "House N*****s [for Clinton]," and similar hate speech. On Thursday, we created an account at my.barackobama.com under this name, with no effort to disguise ourselves as anything but an opponent of Obama. We posted several entries of the following nature, and our account was closed within forty-eight hours.

Urban Legend about "Dreams From My Father"

By Winged Hussar 1683 - Jun 26th, 2008 at 2:05 pm EDT

SMEAR EMAIL From Dreams From My Father: `I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mothers race.' We found no such statement in Dreams From My Father

The Truth:

The indicated page numbers are for the paperback edition of "Dreams From My Father," ISBN 978-1-4000-8277-3

It contradicted the morality my mother had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions-between individuals of goodwill and those who wished me ill, between active malice and ignorance or indifference. I had a personal stake in that moral framework; I'd discovered that I couldn't escape it if I tried. And yet perhaps it was a framework that blacks in this country could no longer afford; perhaps it weakened black resolve, encouraged confusion within the ranks. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and for many blacks, times were chronically desperate. If [Black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence. If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness, and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq.

"Dreams From My Father," pp. 199-200

The truth was that I understood [Joyce], her and all the other black kids who felt the way she did. In their mannerisms, their speech, their mixed-up hearts, I kept recognizing pieces of myself. And that's exactly what scared me. Their confusion made me question my own racial credentials all over again. .To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

"Dreams From My Father," pages 99-100

Within less than 48 hours, we got the following when we tried to log in.

"This account has been disabled"

Needless to say, the Obama campaign had every right to delete this hostile material and the account that went with it but, by doing so, it "exercised editorial control" over the nature of the material it allows to appear. This means that its failure to delete the entries about "Zionist Thought Police," "Jewish Lobby," "Hillary Clinton is a b****," McCain is an "old man" who should pay a "well-deserved visit to the undertaker," Clinton supporters are "house n*****s" means that they at least tacitly approved of this material. That is, the Obama campaign's action rendered meaningless the disclaimer "Content on blogs in My.BarackObama represents the opinions of community members and in no way should be interpreted as endorsed or approved by the campaign."

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





29 June, 2008

The Obama Left

The American left can be divided into three distinct strands, each with its own characteristics, identifiers, and methods of operation: the wimp left, the weird left, and the hard left.

The wimp left is the largest, most amorphous, and least impressive faction. These are the people who are leftists because the neighbors are. They're the NPR listeners, the PBS watchers, the slogan repeaters. They view the left as a lifestyle choice, one that makes you a better person (as they never cease telling you). Wimp leftists usually confine their activities to bumper stickers and "trying to live a politically-correct lifestyle", but often break into sporadic bouts of activity involving recycling, marching, or posting on DU or Kos. The New York Times recently featured a story http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/us/02malaria.html about a craze for purchasing mosquito nets for underprivileged Africans that captures the wimp left in all its faddishness, self-righteousness, and futility (the nets in question are supplied in lieu of DDT, the only effective method of preventing malaria, which means that the U.S. do-gooders are actually making things worse). Even the photo is characteristic: precocious children, prematurely dowdy woman, self-conscious emotionalism.

(Obama foreign policy advisor Richard Danzig's suggestion, that we turn to Winnie-the-Pooh for expertise on counterterrorism strategy is all of a piece with this tendency. Misplaced whimsy is a major indicator of wimp leftism. Many readers will recall the craze for giving copies of Dr. Seuss to college grads a few years ago.)

We're all familiar with these types - they appear constantly in media "person in the street" interviews, furrowing their brows and pensively staring off into the distance before intoning that "arms are for hugging", "global warming is about our grandchildren", "change is about hope", or whatever the slogan of the moment happens to be. Wimp lefties don't know much about politics, ideology, or anything else. But they know what's right -- or they will, as soon as the mass media tells them. They're very nice people. They really are. That's what makes them dangerous.

To many conservatives, the weird left -- AKA the wacko left or the loony left, is the left, the perfect representation of left-wing thinking and behavior. The wacko left can be defined as leftism as personality disorder, the contemporary expression of Orwell's "nudists, fruit-juice drinkers, and sandal wearers". They tend to be obsessive single-issue types, overwhelmed with paranoia and consumed with conspiracy theories.

9/11 Truthers are the purest current example of the weird left, as are "AIDS is a CIA plot" types, principally among blacks. These are the people most often found romping on DU and Kos. Although we might be tempted to view them as a pure liability, that in fact is not the case. While their equivalent on the right -- Birchers, McCarthyites and so on -- are usually isolated or ejected, weird lefties actually serve quite a useful purpose, acting as a conduit for ideas -- gay marriage, animal rights, Karl Rove as evil mastermind -- too grotesque to be planted in any other way. Examples of the loony left include such figures as Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan.

The hard left is the core left, the armature without which the other factions would fall apart. They are directly descended from the communist groups (the CPUSA, Trotsyites, and so forth) of the `30s and `40s, through New Left organizations such as the SDS and the Weathermen. The hard left consists of intelligentsia and activists, people who spend their lives reading Alinsky http://www.fraw.org.uk/library/002/anarchism/alinsky_radical.html and Gramsci http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/intro.htm and trying their damndest to put those dicta into practice. They are usually found in universities and surrounding communities, though they are also present in left-wing think tanks and lobbying outfits. Most of us will go through life without ever knowingly encountering one of them. Through their intellectual control over the much larger wimp left (who would be utterly lost without their direction), they possess influence all out of proportion to their numbers. The prototype of the American hard leftist is Tom Hayden.

Usually, a political candidate running on a left-wing platform will be associated with one strand in particular. For hard leftists we have Henry Wallace fronting for the communists in 1948, and George McGovern acting as point man for the antiwar movement in 1972. Representatives of the weird left are rarer, although we do have Dennis Kucinich. As in anything else, there is no lack of wimp leftists in presidential politics -- Kerry, Gore, Mondale... take your pick. Michael Dukakis' unwillingness to use the death penalty for a hypothetical convicted rapist/murderer of his wife is wimp leftism in chemically pure form.

The extraordinary thing about Barack Obama is that he's intimately connected to all these factions in a way that may never quite have been the case before. The wacko left is represented by Jeremiah Wright and James P. Meeks, with their AIDS conspiracies and related yarns, and ACORN, the leftist fringe group for which Obama served as attorney for many years. The hard left is represented by his Marxist mentor Frank Marshall Davis, http://www.aim.org/aim%1ecolumn/obamas%1ecommunist%1ementor/ who introduced Obama to left-wing politics at an early age, Fr. Michael Pfleger, an advocate of "liberation theology", the application of Marxism to Christianity, and former Weatherman Bill Ayers, who was contending that America could be set right by a few bombs as late as September 11, 2001.

The wimp left is, obviously enough, the Obama voter.

Never, I think, has any politician been so closely and equally intertwined with all three aspects of American leftism. It's as if Obama were out to corner the entire American left, leaving no room for anyone else. If that was the case, then he's succeeded.

Of course, it may not have been intentional at all. It may simply be the result of an entire life spent with the left since his early encounters with Davis. But intentionally or not, Obama appears to be adapting the methods of the left, the means by which sanitized, acceptable versions of left-wing ideas are introduced into American political discourse, as part of his campaign strategy.

The Gramscian tactics utilized by the American left were predicated on the internal takeover of various institutions (media, the academy, education) which could then be used to push a left-wing agenda. But there were limitations to this technique: these institutions were nowhere near as powerful in the U.S. as in Gramsci's Europe, where government monopolies and elitism are common. This limited the influence and reach of entrenched American leftists.

This is where the left's triune nature came in. The millions comprising the wimp left served as a transmission belt for ideas and practices developed by the hard leftists of the academy and the activist organizations. By this means such ideas were "laundered", appearing to emerge from sincere, befuddled "liberals", rather than the career apparatchiks, which eased their acceptance by the public at large. More bizarre concepts were presented by the wacko left (the most effective way to make something seem harmless is to arrange to have it said by a clown). If there was too much resistance, the attempt was curtailed, and the wimps, or alternately the wackballs, took the punishment. The hardcore lefties remained safely insulated.

This is an extraordinarily fruitful technique, allowing the introduction and cultivation of ideas -- gay marriage, terrorist nobility, contempt for the armed forces -- that could be introduced in no other way.

Obama appears to be doing much the same thing in his political strategy, selling himself -- or rather, his campaign persona -- in similar fashion. Through his connection to ACORN, Pfleger, and Ayers, Obama assures the hard left that he is one of them, an adherent of their tactics and goals. His connections to Black Liberation Theology imply at least some sympathy for the wacko left. But at the same time, he presents himself to the broader audience of wimps as a purely "liberal" figure, the second coming of JFK, if not the Redeemer Himself.

Every now and then, Obama will come up with a proposal derived directly from the hard-left playbook -- tax the rich, unilateral retreat from Iraq, "war crimes trials" -- couched in terms acceptable to wimp leftists. If a public backlash develops, he simply drops it and returns to soothing Volvo-and-latte platitudes, using the wimps in the same manner as the hard left -- as a shield for his actual agenda.

It's an interesting strategy. But can it work? It's based on several assumptions - that the U.S. is at base a leftist country, open to a leftist message; that the wimp left is a powerful influence; and that a tactic designed for use over the long term can work in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of a political campaign.

But the U.S. remains a center-right country. The wimp left is an object of derision (even among themselves) as much as anything else. And the disturbing results obtained by the hard leftists have come only after lengthy effort, at times stretching to decades.

It's also extremely risky. Obama's worst moments have arisen from his relationships with members of the more radical left-wing branches, Jeremiah Wright representing the loony left, Pfleger and Ayers the hard left. In no case did his elaborately contrived latte-left facade protect him from the ensuing controversy.

Clearly, this strategy comprises a weakness. Obama is figuratively leaping from stone to stone, from a hard-left position here to a "liberal" one there, always keeping on the move, never allowing himself to be cornered, never getting his feet wet. The trick is to hit him in mid-leap and assure that he gets a good dunking. Obama has gotten an easy ride in his previous campaign crises through the assumption that the offenses were personal -- that the problem lay in his relations with Wright, Pfleger and so on. But they were no such thing -- it was the ideas that were the problem.

And Obama was never seriously questioned about those ideas. Did he accept Pfleger's vision of Christ as a revolutionary? Did he share Ayers' blazing contempt for American society? He must have expressed belief in Black Liberation Theology, a doctrine of black supremacy, when joining Jeremiah Wright's church. Did he truly believe it then? Does he believe it now? If not, when did he stop believing it?

By this means, Obama can be cornered. He does not like being cornered. As the last few months make clear, he does not take it well. Corner him enough times, and his facade will crack, his image as a genial Starbucks and Whole Foods lefty will lie in tatters, and his adherence to the cold and crazed doctrines of the core left will be exposed for what it is.

It's not a complete strategy, of course. But the customary electoral strategy of GOP operatives and consultants (e.g. Tom Delay's recent accusation http://edition.cnn.com/POLITICS/blogs/politicalticker/2006/12/is%1eobama%1emarxist%1eleftist.html of Marxism won't work. If didn't work during the Cold War, so it certainly won't work today.)

Obama is a strange candidate -- how strange we have as yet no clear idea. Revealing the depths of that strangeness calls for unconventional political tactics, and the will to use them.

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Obama's oil policy

We have a problem, and it's serious. It's not a particularly new problem, but it does seem to be getting noticeably worse. The problem is that, in a number of areas, our politicians, and sadly, a great number of our people, no longer seem to be able to recognize reality. They simply believe things that cannot possibly be true. The recent wrangling over oil prices, and policy responses epitomize this unhinged mindset.

I wish I could believe this irrationality was confined to energy policy, because that is one area where an inability to moor policy to reality has a long-standing tradition. I happen to work with a person who, back in the 1970s was employed in the oil fields of Kansas. At that time, we were suffering from a big oil price shock as well. One of the "solutions" the Carter Administration came up with was a regulation that said essentially the following to the oil companies:

"The price of oil is too high. We need to control it, so that consumers pay a more reasonable price for oil. So, if you have a drilling lease that produces, on average, more than 100 barrrels a day of oil per well, then you have to sell that oil at no more than $3.50 per barrel. It doesn't matter if the wells are injection or extraction wells. It doesn't matter if most of the wells are capped. At any rate of extraction that averages more than 100 barrels per day per well, you can only sell oil from that lease for $3.50 a barrel. On the other hand, the stripper price for oil, i.e., the actual market price, is significantly higher than $3.50. So, if your lease averages 100 barrels of oil per well every day or less, you can sell that oil for the stripper price, and make a reasonable profit."

What do you suppose happened?

If you are a logical thinker, you'll realize immediately that what happened was that the oil companies did everything possible to ensure that every lease produced an average of less than 100 barrels per rig per day. They capped wells. They turned other wells into injection wells. If they had to, on a 10-well lease, they capped seven, used two others for injection, and produced 99 barrels from a remaining single extraction well.

The end result, of course, was a reduction in the totals amount of available oil, and a particular shortage of price-controlled oil. How can any other result have been reasonably expected?

Now, we're seeking to repeat that same sort of mistake in a number of different ways.

For instance, that Obama supporter on the Cavuto show earlier this week. She declared, with perfect sincerity, that if the government nationalized the oil refineries, and took control of them, that the government could set prices. As if prices bore no relationship to any real-world factors. The government can disguise the price by selling it at a price lower than the cost of production-as long as the remainder of costs are recovered in some other way, i.e., through general taxation. But the cost of production is what it is, and if it isn't paid, then oil won't be produced. No one can "set" prices. It is, literally, impossibility. The price of a good must at least cover the cost of production.

Obama himself weighed in with a few gems. Opening our coastlines to offshore drilling would take at least a decade to produce any oil at all, and the effect on gasoline prices would be negligible at best since America only has 3 percent of the world's oil, Obama said in a statement that did not explicitly distinguish between oil and gas drilling.

Well, now that I've had Mr. Obama explain this to me, I've decided there's no reason to save for retirement. After all, it'll take at least 30 years for that saved money to add up to any significant amount, and by then, I could be so rich I won't even need it.

Of course, in the real world, we actually have 1.2 trillion barrels of oil sitting in oil shale under Colorado, of which about 800 billion barrels are technically recoverable today. That's enough oil to fulfill all of America's energy needs for about 40 years. And, while we're on the subject, we've got about 23 trillion ft3 of natural gas, which could motor us along for another century or so.

But why drill for it? Bit of a waste of time, apparently. But, wait, it gets better. In the same speech, he said:

We will have spent by the time this thing is over well over a trillion dollars, one trillion dollars. Think about what we could have done with a trillion dollars. Think about, think about what we could have done if we had invested even half of that even a quarter of that into research into clean energy, developing new ways of transporting people, if we had tried to look at how are we going to create a new engine that doesn't run on fossil fuels. Imagine that. Over the last five years, we could be in a position now where we could have perhaps sliced our energy consumption by a third, and if we had done that gas prices would be low because people wouldn't be using gas.

So, let's see if I got this straight. If we start drilling for oil, it won't make any difference, but if we'ed spent a quarter trillion bucks five years ago, we'd all have replicators, transporters, and the warp drive engine today?

I think someone's been sneaking into the Jeffries tube for illicit nips of Arcturan brandy a few times too often. Because it's fairly likely that we'd've poured that quarter-trillion down a black hole for no return at all.

Oh, and by the way, who is this "we" Mr. Obama is talking about here? It isn't the government. It's all of us, individually, buying gas, paying electric bills, etc. That trillion dollars didn't come out of some central fund overseen by the government. It was each of us, making voluntary purchases that spent it.

So, five years ago, there wasn't any quarter trillion dollars to be spent on antimatter and dilithium crystals, because we had another use for it, namely, driving to work, heating our homes, and cooking our food. And the only way there'll be a quarter-billion dollars available to do it in the future is if Mr. Obama hikes taxes to take it away from us by force.

I guess Mr. Obama's answer is to spend the next trillion dollars on research into warp drive, which will magically pay off in a ten years, instead of in drilling, which won't accomplish jack.

That is, quite literally, fantastic thinking. It is so divorced from reality-from the way the real world actually works-that it defies description. It is one of the stupidest intellectual positions I have ever heard.

And I have no doubt he believes it with religious fervor.

It's no different with health care, either. The same divorce from fact and reality applies there, too.

Sure, the method of providing health insurance sucks in this country. It sucks primarily because it is a system designed by government to ensure that employers, of all people, provide health insurance for employees. It has the practical effect of ensuring that the people who actually consume health care are not the people who purchase insurance. And the people who consume health care have no choice in the insurance plan they receive. That's the system designed by FDR's administration, and the fact that it works in a less than satisfactory manner is presumed to be the fault of "the market".

And what "market" would that be, precisely?

It's as if there's a determined effort to ignore the way the world actually works and substitute a fantasy for it in order to accomplish some favored political goal.

It's not just liberals who do this, of course. Right now, LA governor Bobby Jindal has a new bill sitting on his desk from the legislature that would require the teaching of Intelligent Design in the science curriculum of public schools. But, Intelligent Design, whatever else it may be-and it may even be true, for all we know-isn't science. If it isn't testable, repeatable, predictive, and falsifiable, it just isn't science, and doesn't be deserved to be taught as such. Yes, science is materialistic, but matter is the only thing we can access. Talk of the Designer, however useful it may be in other areas, has nothing whatever to do with science.

If you want to believe the Baby Jesus created the world at 9:06 am on April 21st, 4004 BC, you're perfectly free to do so. But if you can't prove it by reference to the physical world, it isn't science. Oh, while we're talking about it, maybe the Baby Jesus should've put a little more thought into how much oil we needed when he slapped the whole thing together.

This kind of resistance to reality doesn't bode well for us. It's all part and parcel of the decline of the republic, and the civilization that produced it. Whatever is, is. And no amount of wishful thinking, or policy built on fantasy will make things other than what they are. All that you can accomplish by doing so is simply to make things worse for everyone.

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Obama and big corn

If Obama wants energy independence through alternative fuels, why doesn't he back imported sugar-based ethanol? This old-style politician knows it isn't grown in the Midwest and Brazil has no electoral votes

Barack Obama says he represents change. He also criticizes John McCain for trying to drill our way to energy independence to add to the profits of Big Oil. But it's Obama who's playing politics by trying to plant our way to energy independence, buying votes with alternative fuel subsidies that benefit ethanol producers such as Archer Daniels Midland.

ADM is based in Illinois, the second-largest corn-producing state. Not long after arriving in the U.S. Senate, Obama flew twice on corporate jets owned by the nation's largest ethanol producer. Imagine if McCain flew on the corporate jets of Exxon Mobil.

Corn-based ethanol gets a 51-cents-a-gallon tax subsidy that will cost taxpayers $4.5 billion this year. McCain opposes ethanol subsidies while Obama supports them. McCain opposed them even though Iowa is the first caucus state. Obama, touted by Caroline Kennedy as another JFK, was no profile in courage in Iowa.

That subsidy was cut to 45 cents a gallon in the new farm bill, but more money was pushed toward other biofuels such as switch grass. The Democrats can't wait for offshore oil or ANWR, but they can wait for switch grass. The tariff on imported ethanol was extended. Neither candidate voted on the bill, but Obama said he supported it. McCain said as president he would have vetoed it.

If Obama is sincere about alternative fuels, why does he oppose imported sugar-based ethanol from countries like Brazil? He supports not only the domestic subsidy, but a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. McCain opposes both. Corn ethanol is less energy-efficient and costs more. It generates less than two units of energy for every unit of energy used to produce it. Ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy ratio of more than 8-to-1. Production costs and land prices are cheaper in the countries that produce it.

This year, according to John Lott Jr., senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, 34% of U.S. corn - some 3.65 billion bushels - will be used for fuel. Putting this much food into our gas tanks hasn't reduced gas prices, but it has raised food prices. Farmers in vote-rich farm states plant corn for fuel, not only raising the price of corn, but also milk, eggs, meat and even bread as wheat fields are converted to corn.

Last year, as President Bush was about to sign an energy cooperation agreement with Brazil, Obama said the move would hurt "our country's drive toward energy independence." Really? The only thing it might hurt is Obama's drive to the White House.

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Proof Obama Distorts Bible

Earlier this week, liberals went off their rocker defending Obama's biblical worldview against Dr. James Dobson's comments that he distorts the bible. Dobson was referring to an Obama speech two years ago, which had liberals scrambling to come up with a website defending Obama. The result was JamesDobsonDoesntSpeakForMe. Today, we learned that an Obama campaign worker was instrumental in the launch of that website.

Caldwell, who is affiliated with the website JamesDobsonDoesntSpeakForMe.com, initially told OneNewsNow that the website was operated by Matthew 25, a political action committee working with Obama supporters. However, upon investigation, it was found that the site was actually registered to Alyssa Martin, an intern in the Obama campaign's "religious affairs" department. The domain registration has since been changed to Pastor Caldwell's name.

In an earlier interview, Caldwell told OneNewsNow he did not know Alyssa Martin, but on Thursday afternoon admitted the intern had been helping him set up the website. He also reported that to his knowledge, she is no longer with the Obama campaign.

It is not surprising to learn that an Obama staffer was involved in the setup of this website. It pairs Dobson statements with Obama statements that do not correspond. It gives the appearance that Obama is responding to Dobson, when in fact, the reverse is the truth. Just as Obama plucks scriptures out of context, he has his staff painting an a false image of other Christians in an attempt to hide his wolf's clothing from the sheep.

In addition, on Father's Day, Barack Obama made a speech at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, Illinois, in which he said that "We need fathers to recognize that responsibility doesn't just end at conception." I am thrilled that Sen. Obama believes in the responsibility of fathers, but his voting record contradicts his own statements. He consistently has voted to end life after conception.

Tony Perkins of Family Research Council recorded a video response to this message in which he asks Senator Obama: if my responsibility as a father began at conception, isn't that when the lives of my children began?

Of course, Obama's answer will be that he personally disagrees with child-killing, but the choice should remain legal for women. This may pass as a convincing argument to a liberal, who has no absolutes, and creates values to mold to any given issue. But to a Christian, you cannot twist a moral issue into a political one without distorting the bible. The bible is very clear that murder is a sin. And since most of our Constitution was based on biblical values, the taking of innocent life is illegal. There is a biblical mandate for Christians to defend the defenseless. Obama's distorted interpretation of the bible results in a personal view and political action that contradict one another.

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Obama's Academic Credentials

Obama has often invoked his academic credentials as a proxy for quality in his opinions, including why he is qualified to find certain judicial nominees unqualified or to criticize some judicial opinions. I do not dispute that he had a significant distinction teaching, as the University of Chicago recognizes. But I think most academics expect people claiming to be academics (or former ones) to have some record of scholarship.

If you enter "au(obama)" in the Westlaw "Journals and Law Reviews" database, which is the means to find articles authored by the name in parentheses, you get nothing. Zero results; no articles.

Entering "Obama" in a search of the Social Science Research Network ("SSRN"), a place where most academics place their published scholarly works, retrieves zero results. Again, no articles/no scholarship.

I really don't care much if our politicians are academics or not. But, if they do claim to be so and lack the traditional elements of serious scholarship, that is a problem.

I hope I am wrong. Obama is throwing around a credential as an academic quite often. If any reader can send me an academic article, a serious piece of legal scholarship, he has written, please do and I will retract this post.

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Racism and the 2008 Election Process

So much for all the years of crying and hand wringing for a colorblind society.

A colorblind society is what racial equalist have been crying and wringing their hands over for years. It always seemed a plausible and equitable racial nirvana worthy of achievement. But, historically, when trying to legislate and force an intangible social change, it has never had the desired effect after implementing the application process--especially when there is a black candidate running for president and many of his supporters agree with nothing he represents other than the color of his skin. Obama received over 90% of the black vote in some of the primaries against Hillary Clinton. This, coming from the fair-weather black voters, who had Clinton up by 40 points at one time, and when it looked as if Obama could actually pull it off after winning a few primaries, they came skulking back, but not to Obama per se, but to the pigmentation of his skin.

Obama has accumulated a quantum of white disciples who will vote for him only 1) because of his, and their, nonsensical mantra for change for changes sake, 2) solely because of identity politics 3) they despise the Republican party so much they will vote for whomever the Democrat party presents regardless of platform. The proportion of voters who would not vote for a highly qualified black person solely because of their race is negligible in comparison to voters who would vote for a black candidate just because they are black. The United States, as a country, has achieved an admirable level of colorblindness, but it has unfortunately only been embraced, predominantly, by white America. From a racist perspective, voting for a candidate only because they are black is indiscernible from not voting for a candidate because they are black. And to vote for a black candidate, as many voters have said they would, just because it would be making history, is a malignancy to the democratic process.

Armstrong Williams is a conservative talk show host. He also happens to be black. He champions the virtues of conservatism and Christianity across the airwaves. He has also never voted for a Democrat for president. He has a recording on his website, where he drones on and on about how far to the left Obama is, how liberal he is, his platform and policy faults, and extols the qualifications of John McCain. Yet, he speaks equivocally around the fact that he will not vote for a Republican just because they are a Republican come November. There are only two candidates left, Barack Obama--the antithesis of all conservative and Christian values--and John McCain. If one is an authentic conservative and is involved in the political process, or the reporting of it, as Williams is, one knows the core differences between the two candidates. Obama does, with empirical veracity, have the most liberal voting record in the Senate. If you are black, and if you espouse conservative values, and are torn on who to vote for at this juncture-you are at best, a false prophet, and should be unceremoniously tossed from your conservative pulpit for choosing skin color over the values you purport.

Although the focus of this article was Armstrong Williams, there are many conservative blacks, including conservative black Congressmen, who have expressed the same conviction as Williams. They, by all appearances, believe that being a conservative is just a revenue or power generating, political plaything that can be discarded when a better opportunity presents itself, or a presidential candidate of the same pigmentation comes along. The black conservative turncoats enjoy chastising the Republican Party for not doing enough for blacks, when in reality, the best thing to give someone is an opportunity--but that is not good enough for them. What happened to the patriotic words of JFK: Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

Whoopi Goldberg, while delving into the intellectual metaphysics of racism and politics--an area she is highly qualified to ingress--explained why she will vote for Obama solely because he is black. She responded to the statement, by a white person, of why a voter should look beyond skin color and look at a candidate's qualifications, experience, and the whole picture before picking a candidate. Goldberg glibly stated, "That's a very white way to look at it." Is Goldberg's statement a black way to look at it? Is this viewpoint commonly accepted within the black community? Is it "white" to be concerned about a candidate's qualifications?

Is Obama the great uniter? Based on his racist associations--no; based on his record as a politician, both state and federal--no; based on his personal life--no; based on his terrorist associations--no; based on his criminal associations--no; based on his "axis of evil" endorsements-no. As a leader of a country as diverse as the United States, one cannot lead a country as "one people", and focus and placate to one segment.

Obama's most recent inclusion/exclusion politics came to light this past Father's Day when he prefaced, what could have been a inspiring speech had it been inclusive of all fathers instead of focusing on black fathers, with the words, "You and I know how true this is in the African-American community." Obama called on black fathers who are "missing from too many lives and too many homes," to become active in raising their children. Not all fathers, only black fathers. Although all families suffer for the lack of a father, Obama cannot move past his presumptive racism and speak to all fathers.

The partisans, who are so blindly desperate for Obama to win the presidency, are placing an "all or nothing" bet on him. If he is elected President, conventional wisdom will dictate it was because he is black. And conversely, when he fails--and he will fail spectacularly in the capacity of President--conventional wisdom will dictate he failed because he is black. That will be the prevailing stigma a qualified black presidential candidate will have to overcome--in the not so near future, thanks to the idiocy of the voters. By nominating a black candidate of Obama's character, the Democrat Party and its voters, have put the black community in a no-win situation for future elections. Obama's eminent failure will be because he is obscenely deficient in experience, aptitude, and character to be the Commander in Chief--not because of his skin color.

Does this cast the American voter, in general, as a myopic Pollyanna ? Absolutely, especially when coupled with the fact that the Founding Fathers feared what would happen if there was a direct election for the Presidency. They feared, and rightly so, that some silver tongued mountebank would cause the plebeians and the intellectual defects to swoon and faint on command and march, in a state of catatonic stupor, to the voting booth to make good on their spellbound allegiance. To minimize the chances of this apocalyptic event occurring, the founders devised the Electoral College. Thanks to the prophetic design of the Founding Fathers, Obama could very well win the popular vote, but lose the electoral vote in the general election, and the fundamentals of democracy can, once again, stay somewhat intact, much to the chagrin of Marxists.

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28 June, 2008

How would Bambi handle another 9/11?

Charlie Black is getting rapped on the knuckles for this comment:

As would, Black concedes with startling candor after we raise the issue, another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. "Certainly it would be a big advantage to him," says Black.

Of course. There's no reason to think that after a terrorist attack, Americans would prefer the leadership of a war veteran who's spent his entire career dealing with national security issues. There's every chance that with Americans dead and more attacks possible, they would turn to the former community organizer who, when asked about his military response to terrorist attacks, gives a lengthy answer listing every action except the military response:

Williams then turned to Sen. Barack Obama, second in the polls but gaining fast on the frontrunner, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. "If, God forbid, a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists," Williams said, "and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?"

The question was specifically focused on a military response, but Obama didn't talk about the military, or any use of force at all. "Well, first thing we'd have to do is make sure that we've got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans," Obama said. "And I think that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack."

"The second thing," Obama continued, "is to make sure that we've got good intelligence, A, to find out that we don't have other threats and attacks potentially out there; and B, to find out do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network."

The reference to "some action" might be interpreted as an endorsement of the use of force, but in the rest of his response, Obama softened even that notion. "But what we can't do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast," he said. "Instead, the next thing we would have to do, in addition to talking to the American people, is making sure that we are talking to the international community. Because as has already been stated, we're not going to defeat terrorists on our own. We've got to strengthen our intelligence relationships with them, and they've got to feel a stake in our security by recognizing that we have mutual security interests at stake."

That was it. Obama's answer to a question of how, as commander-in-chief, he would change America's "military stance" in response to an attack by al Qaeda did not involve using the military.

Williams' question deserved a brief answer: "We find the perpetrators and kill them." Or, alternatively, "unleash hell." Or some variation of that.

No, of course, Black is wrong. The American people would eagerly want the guy whose foreign policy advisers contend that Osama bin Laden, if captured, should be allowed to appeal his case to U.S. civilian courts.

They'd love to have a commander in chief who erroneously claims that all of the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing have been brought to justice, and who praises the pre-9/11 approach to al-Qaeda terrorism, ignoring the fact that the attacks kept getting larger.

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It's All About Obama

(Self-centredness is very characteristic of psychopaths)

By KARL ROVE

Many candidates have measured the Oval Office drapes prematurely. But Barack Obama is the first to redesign the presidential seal before the election. His seal featured an eagle emblazoned with his logo, and included a Latin version of his campaign slogan. This was an attempt by Sen. Obama to make himself appear more presidential. But most people saw in the seal something else - chutzpah - and he's stopped using it. Such arrogance - even self-centeredness - have featured often in the Obama campaign.



Consider his treatment of Jeremiah Wright. After Rev. Wright repeated his anti-American slurs at the National Press Club, Mr. Obama said their relationship was forever changed - but not because of what he'd said about America. Instead, Mr. Obama complained, "I don't think he showed much concern for me."

Translation: Rev. Wright is an impediment to my ambitions. So, as it turns out, are some of Mr. Obama's previous pledges. For example, Mr. Obama has said he "strongly supported public financing" and pledged to take federal funds for the fall, thereby limiting his spending to roughly $84 million. Now convinced he can raise more than $84 million, he reversed course last week, ditching the federal money and its limits. But by discarding his earlier pledge so easily, he raises doubts about whether his word can be trusted.

Last month he replied "anywhere, anytime" to John McCain's invitation to have joint town hall appearances. Last week he changed his mind. Fearing 10 impromptu town halls, Mr. Obama parried the invitation by offering two such events - one the night of July 4, when every ambulatory American is watching fireworks or munching hotdogs, and another in August. His spokesman then said, "Take it or leave it." So much for "anywhere, anytime."

My former White House colleague Yuval Levin pointed out that Mr. Obama, in his first national TV ad rolled out Friday, claims credit for having "extended health care for wounded troops," citing the 2008 defense authorization. That bill passed 91-3 - but Mr. Obama was one of only six senators who didn't show up to vote. This brazen claim underscores the candidate's thin resume and, again, his chutzpah.

Mr. Obama has now also played the race card, twice suggesting in recent weeks that Republicans will draw attention to the fact that he's black. Who is unaware of that? Americans overwhelmingly find it a hopeful, optimistic sign that the country could elect an African-American president. But they rightly want to know what kind of leader he might be. They may well reject as cynical any maneuver to discourage close examination of him by suggesting any criticism is racially motivated.

The candidate's self-centeredness has been on display before. Having effectively sewed up the Democratic nomination, he could have agreed to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations (states Hillary Clinton had carried). While reducing his lead by 50 to 55 delegates, it would not have altered the outcome. But Mr. Obama supported cutting these battleground-state delegations in half. At a time when magnanimity was called for, the candidate decided he'd strut.

Mr. Obama's alpha-male attitude was evident even as he stumbled towards and over the primary finish line. First, his campaign announced in May it was talking to Patti Solis Doyle after Sen. Clinton fired her as campaign manager. This served only to pour salt in the Clintons' wounds.

Then, after the primaries ended June 3, Mr. Obama's campaign leaked word that Leon Panetta (a Clinton supporter who'd apparently angered the Clintons by persistent criticism of their performance) and Ms. Doyle would conduct its outreach to the Clinton camp. Ms. Doyle was named chief of staff to the as-yet-to-be-chosen vice presidential running mate. All this was pointless, but reveals a disposition certain to manifest itself in other ways.

Mr. McCain will be helped if he uses Mr. Obama's actions to paint his opponent as someone driven by an all-powerful instinct to look out only for himself. In a contest over who is willing to put principle above personal ambition and self-interest, John McCain, a war hero and a former POW, wins hands down. That may not be the most important issue to voters in electing a president, but it's something they will rightly take into account.

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Obama's lack of ordinary modesty

In his victory speech over Hillary, Barack Obama soared rhetorically about his feelings of humility. And yet he hardly sounded humble:

generations from now,

we will be able to look back

and tell our children

(with mounting excitement)

that this was the moment

when we began to provide care for the sick,

and good jobs for the jobless.

This was the moment

when the riiiiise of the oceans began to slow,

and our planet began to heal.

Now politicians are allowed some rhetorical overkill, but this is straight into Star Wars territory. There are no real precedents for this in traditional American speechifying, and that is saying something. Obama tells his hypnotized followers that we have not been caring for the sick (false); that we have no good jobs for the jobless (false); that the rise of the oceans (which doesn't exist) will begin to slow (false); and that our planet (which is feeling just fine, thanks) will finally begin to heal. (Also false).

So this is pure drivel from the deep regions of fantasyland. But Obama's brain dead followers are marching right in lockstep. They are a million Weekend at Bernie's, with millions of flatlining Obamanites being propped up to look as if they were alive and conscious. It's the Million Man March of the brain dead. This election will pit the mind-numbed robots against sensible voters. Who is the majority? That's not clear at all at this point.

Obama deliberately plays to the lowbrow crowd; after all, half the population has an IQ of less than 100. This hardly shows Obama's modesty and humility of which he boasts in his first sentence. It is wild-eyed I Can Save the Planet grandiosity. This appears to be the real Obama; a Napoleonic Man of Destiny, with the zeal and certainty of a True Believer.

Obama's more-than-human sense of destiny may become a problem for him in the general election against down-to-earth John McCain. His vision of himself as a true revolutionary ready to save America and the world poses great risks to the Democrats, who may not be able to hide their hard-Left associations any more.

Worst of all, Obama's lack of humility may pose a danger to the United States if he should win. Otherworldly grandiosity and a sense of superhuman destiny do not make for sober judgment in a president. Any smart opponent -- Ahmadi-Nejad or Putin -- would simply play to Obama's blatant narcissism and screw the United States, but good.

Fourteen years ago Hillary Clinton closeted herself with a few allies like Ira Magaziner to redesign one-seventh of the three-trillion-dollar American economy. The health care sector is inconceivably complex, just like the climate (which only a delusional zealot like Al Gore claims to understand). No health care economist truly understands that much of the economy to the point of being able to predict supply, demand and prices for the huge range of medical products and services. Anybody who could do that could become a billionaire. Nobody has done it. It's way too complicated.

What we do know is that the health care sector works pretty well, churning out just about the best medical treatments in human history to the largest number of human beings who have ever received such care. It's the goose that lays the golden egg -- but a goose so complicated that no biologist would dare try to build a better one. And yet, Hillary Rodham Clinton never doubted for a moment that she could fashion a better health care system from the top. That is arrogance beyond the ordinary, arrogance to the point of mad grandiosity. It is not a rational state of mind.

That is Obama's brand of arrogance as well -- except that according to Michelle Obama, Barack intends to redesign no less than America as a whole, to "restore our souls." That sort of more-than-human belief in one's own higher power drove Lenin and the Soviet Politburo to create a command economy that had Russian peasants starving for decades. Over seventy years of Communist power the Soviet economy never lived up to its promises. Nearly every year the harvest fell short again, and the Politburo would come up with new excuses, new grand promises for the next Five Year Plan. That looks like the mind-set of candidate Obama.

But in addition to Obama's fanatical belief in his quasi-religion of the Left, he has a sizable chunk of personal narcissism as well. It is visible in his physical stance when he accepts the plaudits of the masses. You and I might be embarrassed by that kind of adulation. Obama bathes in it as a well-deserved tribute. His grand narcissism appears whenever he changes his mind on life-and-death questions like Iranian nukes. One day Iran is a "tiny country" (it's not) and the next day Obama claims to have a fully thought-out policy to solve the knottiest foreign policy dilemma since Jimmy Carter blundered us into it. Yes, well, maybe the mullahs could turn out be a problem after all, says Obama.

Who knows what he really believes? Well, we know what his Imperial Guard believes, and they are downright appeasers to the last man and woman. Obama has the most hard-core Leftist group of advisors, ready to take power by January 2009 and steeer the ship of state straight on the rocks.

Now Obama is a very bright man, but he way overestimates his own capacities. There are limits to human intelligence. Jimmy Carter famously tried to micromanage everything down to the tennis court schedule at the White House. Carter was also possessed of that more-than-human sense that he, of all people, knew all the answers. So did Bill Clinton. Both of them were historic failures in the most basic duty of the presidency, the duty to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

For Obama it may be partly his childhood mentoring by Frank Marshall Davis, a hard-core Stalinist, plus his Harvard elitism, and his Clintonesque cynicism in using slippery words. But a lot of it looks like Pure Obama Arrogance -- something in his character that he's possessed for a long, long time. After all, this is a man who published not just one but two autobiographies before the age of 45. They are sort of proto-biographies, saying, "Here I am, a Man of Destiny, and here is the revolutionary future I bring to all of you."

As Victor Davis Hanson pointed out, Obama spent the first eighteen years of his life outside of the continental United States. He doesn't know this country very well at all. (Hawaii is another-worldly place to grow up in, as is Indonesia, compared to Indiana or Georgia.) Then he entered the unreal Ivory Tower of American colleges, followed by twenty years of weekly indoctrination lectures by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his buds in the Black Liberation Theology political ideology. That's Obama's life to date. Obama's total experience at the national level of American politics comes down to two-plus years in the US Senate, most of which was spent campaigning for president.

So what Barack Obama thinks he knows about the United States comes from reading books and newspapers, and from his carefully chosen friends on the Left, including Jeremiah Wright and old-style Communist Frank Marshall Davis. Obama's immense arrogance comes paired with equally great ignorance. He does not know, nor does he respect the basic rhythms and intuitions of American life.

Now this is very weird indeed for a man running for President of these United States. There are no precedents in American history of a serious candidate for the presidency who just doesn't have much experience of everyday America.

Narcissism is defined in psychiatry as an overweening sense of grandiosity, a sense of entitlement to whatever one desires, and a dehumanizing way of manipulating other people as objects. A lot of presidential candidates have that to some degree; the Clintons are the original poster kids of narcissism. But most candidates in American politics go through a long process of getting beaten up by reality, which helps to modify their outsized egos. Obama has never done that.

Indeed, Obama has done nothing in his life that indicates any ability to deal with reality in the raw. He has never had a job that deals with reality -- farming, business, engineering, science. He is simply Hollywood come to earth. Psychologically, Obama is ET, the Extra-Terrestrial -- he is from another place, a place in the otherworldly imagination of the Left.

Obama's narcissism combined with his fundamental ignorance spells danger for the country. If he does become president -- which looks like at least a 50-50 proposition right now -- he will be the most dangerous occupant in that office ever. He doesn't know where the steering wheel and the brakes are located; but he knows where he wants to go in his fertile imagination. A more dangerous driver of the American ship of state is hard to imagine.

Like Jimmy Carter, Obama will take a significant chunk of American safety and security with him. Obama is a talented actor on the national stage, but he will need a lot more seasoning before we can feel safe having him in the most powerful office in the land.

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Obama's Oil Idiocy

Why does it seem like the Democrats are doing everything in their power to actually prolong the energy crisis? Not content with hamstringing US oil exploration, they are against Iraq handing out contracts: "Senators seek to stop Iraq oil deals". Mustn't let ANYONE provide more oil! Not us, not Iraq. I'm surprised they haven' t leaned on OPEC to cut production. Ben explains:

Note the Dems are a day late and a dollar short, as usual: Total, a FRENCH corporation, just scored a deal with Iraq.

Obama's ignorance is astounding. Try applying his "We can't drill our way out of an oil shortage!" logic to any other commodity, and you get:

"More construction of new homes will NOT reduce the housing shortage!" and

"Increased farming will not ease the food shortage!"

Nothing ever misspoke by Bush has ever been so utterly stupid. It is one thing to fumble the words while processing a coherent thought. Obama is a guy who will clearly and plainly speak words of absolute idiocy.

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Monsieur Obama's Tax Rates

Celebrity chef Alain Ducasse insists that his change of citizenship this week from high-tax France to no-income-tax Monaco wasn't a financial decision but an "affair of the heart." Right. But even if he's being sincere, plenty of other Frenchmen have moved abroad to escape their country's confiscatory taxes. Americans should be so lucky: Theirs is the only industrialized country that taxes its people even if they live overseas. That hasn't been a big problem as long as U.S. tax rates have been relatively low. But with Barack Obama promising to lift rates to French-like levels, this taxman-cometh policy could turn Americans into the world's foremost fiscal prisoners.

And make no mistake, taxes under a President Obama could be truly a la francaise. The top marginal tax rate, including federal, state and local levies, could approach 60% for self-employed New Yorkers and Californians. Not even France's taxes are that high now that President Nicolas Sarkozy has capped the total that high-earning Frenchmen like Mr. Ducasse can pay in income, social and wealth taxes at 50% of earnings.

Mr. Sarkozy set this "fiscal shield" because he knows that tax rates affect behavior. When he visited London this year, he observed that the British capital is now home to so many French bankers and other professionals seeking tax relief that it's the seventh-largest French city. Those expatriates choose not to use their creativity and investment capital to benefit France and its economy.

Senator Obama's plans to raise income, Social Security and capital-gains taxes amount to a belief that people don't react to punitive tax rates. If so, he needn't worry about people leaving the country and could let them pay taxes in whichever part of the globe they choose to live in. Once Americans are paying French-style tax rates, they ought to have the same freedom to move as Alain Ducasse.

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Getting to Know Obama

We are barely at the beginning of the long period in which most Americans will give their first serious scrutiny to the presidential candidates and decide whether Barack Obama or John McCain will get their vote. Americans have many questions about both men. In the Post-ABC News poll last week, only half of those interviewed said they felt they knew an adequate amount about the candidates' stands on specific issues. Voters split evenly on who would be the stronger leader, and they showed great uncertainty about which, if either, would be a safe choice for the White House.

Obama leads on domestic, economic and social issues, but McCain is a strong favorite on national security and terrorism. The former POW's personal appeal looms as the strongest barrier to the Democratic victory indicated by the towering majorities that disapprove of President Bush (68 percent) and that fear the country is headed seriously on the wrong track (84 percent).

Despite those fundamental weaknesses in the Republican position, McCain trails Obama in that same poll by only six points, hardly an impossible margin to overcome. What may be crucial in the end is whether people become comfortable with the prospect of Obama as their president.

McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura. Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating.

That is why a pair of strategy decisions made in the past two weeks could prove troublesome for him. The first was Obama's turning down McCain's invitation to join him in a series of town hall meetings where they would appear together and answer questions from real voters -- without a formal agenda, press panel or professional interviewers.

Obama's manager initially called the idea "appealing," but nine days later, when David Plouffe got around to responding, he countered with something quite different from the 10 informal discussions McCain proposed holding before the late-summer nominating conventions. Plouffe said that in addition to the three traditional debates under official sponsorship later in the fall, there could be only two others -- one on economics on July 4 and another on foreign policy in August.

The McCain side said that few Americans would sacrifice their Independence Day holiday to watch a debate and reiterated its offer to meet Obama anywhere he wanted on any of the next 10 Thursdays.

At a news briefing last week, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs characterized that as a "take it or leave it" stance by the Republicans and suggested that discussions were finished.

At the same briefing, Gibbs and campaign counsel Bob Bauer defended Obama's decision to become the first presidential candidate since the Watergate reforms to decline public financing of his general election campaign.

Gibbs and Bauer in effect blamed McCain, saying repeatedly that he was "gaming the system" by pledging to accept public funds while saying he could not "referee" spending by outside independent groups if it occurred. In fact, McCain had been far more vocal in denouncing such groups on the GOP side than Obama was in criticizing their counterparts playing Democratic presidential politics -- even though Obama has claimed the mantle of campaign finance reformer that McCain has long enjoyed.

Obama supporters note that town halls are McCain's favorite campaign settings, so it's no surprise he prefers them to formal speeches, where Obama excels. They point out that public financing helps McCain, who has lagged all year in his private fundraising, while it would inhibit Obama, who has tapped into a rich vein of small contributors using the Internet.

But it's also the case that the multiple joint town meetings McCain proposed would be a real service to the public and that suspending the dollar chase for the duration of the campaign, as McCain but not Obama will do, would be a major step toward establishing the credibility of the election process.

By refusing to join McCain in these initiatives in order to protect his own interests, Obama raises an important question: Has he built sufficient trust so that his motives will be accepted by the voters who are only now starting to figure out what makes him tick?

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(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





27 June, 2008

Obama's anti-smear site relies on a phony document

For some time now Just One Minute's commenter jmh, Polarik at Townhall and others have examined the "birth certificate" for Obama published on the Daily Kos site as well as the site Obama has established to respond to the "smears" against him. The documents are not identical and seem obviously phony. Israeli Insider confirms their suspicions:

It is now a certainty that the "birth certificate" claimed by the Barack Obama campaign as authentic is a photoshopped fake.....

Some of these oddities surfaced in Israel Insider's previous article on the subject, but new comparative documentary evidence presented below, and official verification obtained by Israel Insider from a senior Hawaiian official, provides the strongest confirmation yet....

Janice Okubo, Director of Communications of the State of Hawaii Department of Health, told Israel Insider: "At this time there are no circumstances in which the State of Hawaii Department of Health would issue a birth certification or certification of live birth only electronically." And, she added, "In the State of Hawaii all certified copies of certificates of live birth have the embossed seal and registrar signature on the back of the document."

Why would Obama's anti-smear site itself rely on a phoney birth certificate? I can't imagine . Some have suggested it's to hide the fact that he was not a "natural born" U.S. citizen and is, therefore, ineligible to run. Maybe.

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Obama embraces the failed policies of the past

High oil prices, like a walk under the summer moon, can drive normally rational people to do foolish things they later regret. For Barack Obama, it is a fling with a windfall profits tax on American oil companies -- one of the most thoroughly discredited economic policies of the past few decades. A 2006 Congressional Research Service report found that Jimmy Carter's version of the tax generated less than one-fourth of expected government revenue while depressing domestic oil output between 1.2 percent and 8 percent and increasing dependence on imported oil between 3 percent and 13 percent.

It is typical of a tired economic liberalism to look at the global energy crisis and see American companies as the problem -- even if punishing them leads to greater dependence on foreign oil. But it is also naive to believe this dependence will be addressed by the normal working of energy markets.

Those markets are producing what one economist calls the "greatest wealth transfer the world has ever known." In a single year, the revenue of oil- and natural gas-producing Persian Gulf states have nearly doubled -- giving nations in the region hundreds of billions of surplus dollars to play with. Recent Saudi promises to increase oil production may help ease prices. It is also the profitable accommodation of an addiction....

His embrace of the discredited windfall profit tax is like his embrace of higher taxes on capital gains even though it reduces revenue. Obama has to be the most economic and history challenged presidential candidate in recent memory. He looks at the tax code as an opportunity to punish achievement so that he can use the proceeds to reward failure. He in effect doubles up the wrong side of encouraging progress and prosperity.

He is also willing to continue the wealth transfer to the Middle East rather than encourage domestic production. It idiocy of his energy policy is blatant enough that voters should be able to see it and reject it if they can get over their anger about Bush being right about the surge.

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On Iran, Obama Is to the Left of UN, Libya, and European Diplomats

For Obama, it's still a question of debate whether Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon. His web site observes only that "Iran has sought nuclear weapons." Obama isn't even willing to go out a limb and say there is no peaceful reason the country with the second or third largest oil reserve in the world would want nuclear power.

While Obama continues to call for "economic pressure," what kind of pressure can possibly be exerted in light of Iran's recent move to transfer all of its funds to non-European bank accounts where they won't be frozen? Sanctions were the right decision five years ago, but the time for them to work has long since passed. The same is true of diplomacy. For several years, the Bush administration has taken part in a multilateral effort to engage Iran with Britain, France, Germany, and several other countries including Libya. Only one condition has ever been proposed: Iran had to suspend its enrichment program for the duration of negotiations. Now Obama would eliminate even this condition, putting him to the left of Libya and sparking reservations among girly-boy European diplomats.

Mohamed El Baradei, head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, said yesterday Iran is six months away from having a nuclear weapon. The choice increasingly looks like one between military action and resigning ourselves to nuclear blackmail. What do you think the candidate who isn't willing to say Iran has an active nuclear weapons program is going to do?

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Nader: Obama trying to 'talk white'

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader accused Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic Party nominee, of downplaying poverty issues, trying to "talk white" and appealing to "white guilt" during his run for the White House.

Nader, a thorn in the Democratic Party's side since the 2000 presidential election, has taken various shots at Obama in recent days while ramping up his latest independent run for president. In a wide-ranging interview with the Rocky Mountain News on Monday, he said he is running because he believes Democrats, like Republicans, are too closely aligned with corporate interests.

Nader was asked if Obama is any different than Democrats he has criticized in the past, considering Obama's pledge to reject campaign contributions from registered lobbyists. "There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American," Nader said. "Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards."

The Obama campaign had only a brief response, calling the remarks disappointing.

Asked to clarify whether he thought Obama does try to "talk white," Nader said: "Of course. "I mean, first of all, the number one thing that a black American politician aspiring to the presidency should be is to candidly describe the plight of the poor, especially in the inner cities and the rural areas, and have a very detailed platform about how the poor is going to be defended by the law, is going to be protected by the law, and is going to be liberated by the law," Nader said. "Haven't heard a thing."

"We are obviously disappointed with these very backward-looking remarks," Obama campaign spokeswoman Shannon Gilson said.

Nader said he plans to travel to Denver during this summer's Democratic National Convention, hoping to highlight an alternative agenda that he thinks the party should pursue. His appearance in the city is sure to anger some Democrats who believe his presence on the ballot during the contested 2000 election cost Al Gore votes, helping Republican George Bush win the disputed election. Nader rejects that blame, saying Democrats "scapegoated" him instead of looking at other factors that contributed to the defeat.

Nader said he is not impressed with Obama and that he does not see him campaigning often enough in low-income, predominantly minority communities where there is a "shocking" amount of economic exploitation. He pointed to issues like predatory lending, shortages of health care and municipal resources, environmental issues and others.

"He wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician," Nader said. "He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he's coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up."

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Obama's money comes from the little guy?

Last week Senator Barack Obama announced that he is opting out of the public financing system and spending limits and instead relying on private donations. He gave a litany of phony reasons and mischaracterizations of the financial picture on both sides. In a video to his supporters and the rest of world, Obama said:

"It's not an easy decision, and especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections. But the public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who've become masters at gaming this broken system. John McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. And we've already seen that he's not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations."

Unfortunately, that fuel won't get Republicans very far. OpenSecrets.org notes that the Republican National Committee actually trailed the Democratic National Committee in PAC money for the 2004 presidential campaign. The Democrats took in 10% of their total from PACs, while Republicans took in 1%. Obama has pledged not to accept PAC or lobbyist money, a pledge that is more smoke than substance.

According to OpenSecrets, "For mega-fundraiser Obama, eschewing PAC and lobbyist money has been a politically smart policy but hasn't entailed a significant financial hit. PAC contributions typically amount to only 1 percent of the giving in a presidential campaign, and lobbyists aren't as generous or numerous as, say, lawyers or Wall Street executives or even college professors."

On the issue of 527s in this election, it's unlikely that they'll have the same impact as they did during the 2004 campaign. McCain himself said 527s "are distorting the entire political process and they need to be outlawed." Politico's Jonathan Martin notes that the conservative organizations that had an impact on the last election -- Freedom's Watch, Progress for America, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- are now defunct or sitting this race out. Martin writes, "Obama's alarmist prophecy -- a bit of typical campaign rhetoric meant to scare his own donors into reaching for their credit cards -- is wildly at odds with the flatlined state of conservative third-party efforts."

On the far-left, MoveOn.org will labor on through November spending more than $35 million despite dumping their 527 entity. Their website states "Obama locked up the nomination. Now he needs our help to win."

On several occasions during the primary season, Obama said he would "aggressively pursue" a public financing system if the Republican candidate also agreed to do so. In his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama wrote of the importance of embracing the changes of a publicly financed campaign system. "But none of these changes can happen of their own accord," he wrote, "Each would require a change in attitude among those in power. Each would require from men and women a willingness to risk what they already have."

Gambling away the Obama campaign's nearly $300 million raised is a big risk. A change in action was made based on what benefited him, not on "reforming a broken system." In short, joining the public financing system is change Obama can't afford.

Regarding his small-dollar donor base, Obama said they "will have as much access and influence over the course of our campaign" as that "traditionally reserved for the wealthy and the powerful." This week on "Meet the Press," Sen. Joe Biden explained that Obama didn't want to be beholden to large donors. Biden touted Obama's 1.5 million donors, many of whom have given $200 or less, and scoffed at any of those donors' influence over Obama. "How much influence do [small donors] have on him?" asked Biden. Do you hear that Obama donors? Biden says you have no influence.

The notion that the Obama campaign is bought and paid for by small donors is a canard. In fact, the number of large donations to both Obama and McCain's campaigns has increased since the 2004 election. The Washington Post's Jay Mandle wrote, "[F]or most of his campaign, big donors have been Obama's mainstay. Employees of investment bank Goldman Sachs, for example, have contributed more than $570,000 to his campaign." Mandle also notes that those considered "small dollar donors" still tend to be upper middle class and not the "working-class families" touted by the campaign.

In "The Audacity of Hope," Obama wrote that during his Senate campaign, wealthy donors became increasingly sympathetic to his cause. In July of 2003, the Chicago Defender reported his successes in "Fund-raising Gives Obama Momentum." It's unlikely that Obama thought this well of support would dry up when he entered the presidential race. The question then becomes did Obama go back on his promise or make a promise that he had no intention of keeping?

Despite Obama's altruistic rhetoric and phony reasons for opting out of the public financing system, the truth is that it was only a promise he was willing to keep if it gave him an edge in the campaign. Since McCain's fundraising hasn't come close to matching Obama's, McCain was certainly willing to participate in the public system. If Obama did in fact plan to participate, why continue collecting from donors who, by his account, are working-class? Surely that money could be more useful to their families. The rest of the country may be facing tough economic times, but it's an economic boom in Obamaland.

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Obama goes for the moron vote

The 2008 race for the Democratic nomination for the presidency looks like a classic pursuit of the Moron Vote. This seems crude to say, so perhaps we should call it the "mentally challenged vote" or the "clueless vote".

Why do I term it so? Consider where the winning Democratic candidate, Barak Obama, stands on issues most Americans care about. In numerous cases he takes positions that seem based on the assumption that voters are idiots, or else those positions show a serious lack of understanding on his part. On second thought - and in the interest of striking a blow at political correctness - let's stick with the title as-is. The simplest, most direct words are always the best.

Gas, oil, energy and quality of life. As I write this, oil has hit $137 a barrel on world markets. Mr. Obama has joined other lawmakers in bashing oil companies for "obscene" profits. He wants to tax their "windfall profits" and spend the money on "alternative energy sources". Yet he is opposed (as most Democrats are) to using nuclear power or coal (of which we have hundreds of years' supply) to generate power. He will not allow oil recovery from shale, which experts believe might contain some 800 billion barrels of oil. And he is unalterably opposed to drilling in either the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (where some 10 billion barrels of oil can be tapped) or off our coasts (where experts believe potential reserves of at least 18 billion barrels lie).

Mr. Obama's positions and oppositions will not produce a drop of new oil, or lower the price by a farthing, or produce the reasonably priced power Americans need. Yet millions of voters - not to mention legions of enthralled reporters - think he walks on water. One is left to infer that his followers either (1) want higher gas prices or (2) are too stupid to realize that their "messiah's" policies will do nothing about either energy supply or price - two of Americans' biggest worries.

Mr. Obama has gone on record saying that we can't expect to keep driving SUVs, eat as much as we want and set our thermostats at 72 degrees, and have the rest of the world say, "OK." Does he think Americans won't notice these declarations? Or is he so convinced of his own infallibility that he believes voters will swarm to his camp anyway? Color me perplexed. Other observers are more definite in their opposition, like the blogger Patstand who wrote, "Wake up people! Scary stuff coming out of the mouth of Barack Hussein Obama. Who is HE to tell us what we can drive and what we can eat?" It's a good question to which I have no answer.

What I do know is that scarce, high-priced gas and promises of a diminished quality of life have knocked two presidents out of the box in the last 1/3 century. Richard Nixon was the first. The conventional story is that Watergate brought him down, but that's too thin. The real issue was gas. (For your car - not the kind Congress produces.) The Watergate burglary happened in mid-1972. Nobody cared much about it until 1974, after oil tripled and gas doubled in price. Congressional Democrats used the Watergate break-in as a springboard, and Mr. Nixon was toast.

Gas in 1979 was as expensive as now, adjusted for inflation. Jimmy Carter said we should turn out the lights, turn down the heat, and put up with high gas prices - and he told us to quit whining about it. He scolded us - something voters don't appreciate. In 1980 they gave Mr. Carter the boot and elected the candidate of optimism, Ronald Reagan. After the feds stopped trying to allocate gas supplies and control prices, supplies stabilized and gas prices dropped.

The Economy... is where Mr. Obama is most clearly going after the Moron Vote. He is smart to do it because it won for Bill Clinton in 1992. Coming out of the 1990-'91 Gulf War, our economy had hit a downturn. Unemployment was 7.3%. Things were not good, but not really terrible in historic terms.

Mr. Clinton brought voters' niggling dissatisfaction to a boil by repeating the preposterous charge that we were in the "worst economy since the Great Depression" - knowing that a large faction of the public would not know this was complete nonsense. President Bush declined to dispute it, thinking the voters could not possibly believe so silly a statement. But he was wrong. The strategy drew the Moron Vote in droves and was a winner. With some help from Ross Perot, Mr. Clinton sneaked in with just 43% of the popular vote. Soon after he took office, the media began to report that (surprise!) the economy wasn't as bad as we thought it was.

Today, Mr. Obama is selling the same snake oil to voters who wouldn't know the Great Depression from the Great Gatsby. They resonate with Mr. Obama's mantra of "change" without having any idea what change he would bring, what it would cost, or how it would affect them. I'm not the first commentator to note that Mr. Obama wants to take us not forward, but backward - back to the New Deal, higher taxes, less economic freedom, a managed economy and the Fairness Doctrine. Millions of voters evidently think that sounds super. (The Moron Vote rises again.)

Mr. Obama distrusts private business, and has what columnist Cal Thomas calls a "can't do" attitude about the future. He believes the ordinary person simply cannot make it without big government's help. Actually, Mr. Obama distrusts not only business: he distrusts the American people. Are we the indomitable people who built the greatest nation and the wealthiest, most robust economy in history? No! We are pitiable, wretched victims of a failed government and a "broken" system who need his "ministry" in order to avoid ruin.

Another aspect of Mr. Obama's appeal to the Moron Vote is his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Labor unions claim it has drained jobs from old-line industries. In fact, NAFTA has opened numerous markets to American goods - thus creating thousands of new American jobs. Mr. Obama is pandering to unions whose support he must have in order to do well in the general election. Since NAFTA has the force of law, only political dunces could buy his promise to "renegotiate" NAFTA in order to protect union jobs from the competition of imports.

Democrats like to characterize American society as divided between winners and losers in "the lottery of life". Those who have worked hard and succeeded in making good livings and accumulating some wealth must "give back" - i.e., subsidize those who didn't work as hard, didn't get educated, and didn't make wise choices in their lives. Liberals sweep inconvenient facts about personal responsibility under the rug by claiming that these "victims" rolled snake-eyes in the great, cosmic crapshoot.

The irony is that Mr. Obama's policies would not empower the down-and-out, but would permanently prevent them from improving their status. Creation of wealth - not envy-taxes, income-transfer or welfare - enables economic advancement. This seems beyond the ken of Mr. Obama's followers. Indeed, it seems beyond Mr. Obama, himself.

National security. Barak Obama has fashioned a successful campaign around the "novel" idea of negotiating away our differences with such thugs as Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran) and Osama Bin Laden (Al Qaida). Except for the serious risk it represents to the country, it would be fascinating to see how long his commitment to palaver with our enemies would last, should he actually gain the office.

Experience shows that no outrage exceeds that of a committed "negotiator" whose overtures to peace and comity have been rudely rebuffed with actual violence. My guess is that Mr. Obama would turn into an "avenging angel" - far beyond anything Mr. Bush has done - once the scales fell from his eyes. Only the danger of actually letting Mr. Obama into the Oval Office restrains me from saying, "let's vote him in as a social experiment."

Mr. Obama's high-minded insistence that negotiation is a novel idea that has not been tried appeals to the Moron Vote. Only the clueless and the appallingly ignorant would buy this line. Negotiating with one's enemies is, in fact, an old idea that has been repeatedly tried and found wanting. Its limitation is the honesty (or lack thereof) of the people one negotiates with.

Japanese ambassadors were in actual talks with Secretary of State Cordell Hull at the very moment when Japanese torpedo planes struck our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. His promises notwithstanding, Hitler had no intention of granting "peace in our time" (or any other time) to the British and French at Munich (October 1938). He later contemptuously called them "worms". Hitler promptly broke his word and took over the rest of Czechoslovakia (March 1939), launching World War II just six months later. "That man lied to me," Neville Chamberlain famously complained after Hitler annexed the part of Czechoslovakia he had sworn to "protect".

Of a piece with Mr. Obama's claims that his brilliant new negotiating skills will obviate the need for war is his oft-stated intention to recall our troops from Iraq without delay, whether the job is done or not. The far left loves this, and the Moron Vote sits reverently at his feet while he spins his Sermon on the Mount yarns about no more war. But, as Lincoln famously said, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one. Just so, saying we won't need to fight any more doesn't make it so - unless we plan on unilateral surrender.

Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, this is the weakest part of his entire messianic presentation. Americans have never developed a taste for surrender. They clearly don't have patience with long wars - much to their credit - but they dislike defeat even more than they dislike long wars. From cab-drivers to construction workers to housewives, Americans must be asking, "Are you kidding me?" when they hear Mr. Obama's rapturous calls to link arms and sing "Kum ba ya" with those loveable fuzz-balls who behead innocent people, strap bombs to children and crash planes into buildings. You don't have to be a war-lover to view this dangerous naivet‚ with a jaundiced eye.

It's a wicked world, and it's a wicked man (or an idiot) who tries to convince large numbers of people that it isn't. Americans need to ask themselves Dirty Harry's famous question: "Do I feel lucky?" The Moron Vote says, "Yes." What about the rest of us?

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26 June, 2008

As Obama courts evangelicals, key leader Dobson criticizes him for `distorting' Bible

As Barack Obama broadens his outreach to evangelical voters, one of the movement's biggest names, James Dobson, accuses the likely Democratic presidential nominee of distorting the Bible and pushing a "fruitcake interpretation" of the Constitution. The criticism, to be aired Tuesday on Dobson's Focus on the Family radio program, comes shortly after an Obama aide suggested a meeting at the organization's headquarters here, said Tom Minnery, senior vice president for government and public policy at Focus on the Family.

The conservative Christian group provided The Associated Press with an advance copy of the pre-taped radio segment, which runs 18 minutes and highlights excerpts of a speech Obama gave in June 2006 to the liberal Christian group Call to Renewal. Obama mentions Dobson in the speech. "Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?" Obama said. "Would we go with James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?" referring to the civil rights leader.

Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy - chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, "a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application." "Folks haven't been reading their Bibles," Obama said.

Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus' teachings in the New Testament. "I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology," Dobson said. "... He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter."

Joshua DuBois, director of religious affairs for Obama's campaign, said in a statement that a full reading of Obama's speech shows he is committed to reaching out to people of faith and standing up for families. "Obama is proud to have the support of millions of Americans of faith and looks forward to working across religious lines to bring our country together," DuBois said.

Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama's argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion's terms but in arguments accessible to all people. He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the "lowest common denominator of morality," labeling it "a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution." "Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?" Dobson said. "What he's trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe."

The program was paid for by a Focus on the Family affiliate whose donations are taxed, Dobson said, so it's legal for that group to get more involved in politics.

Last week, DuBois, a former Assemblies of God associate minister, called Minnery for what Minnery described as a cordial discussion. He would not go into detail, but said Dubois offered to visit the ministry in August when the Democratic National Convention is in Denver. A possible Obama visit was not discussed, but Focus is open to one, Minnery said.

McCain also has not met with Dobson. A McCain campaign staffer offered Dobson a meeting with McCain recently in Denver, Minnery said. Dobson declined because he prefers that candidates visit the Focus on the Family campus to learn more about the organization, Minnery said.

Dobson has not backed off his statement that he could not in good conscience vote for McCain because of concerns over the Arizona senator's conservative credentials. Dobson has said he will vote in November but has suggested he might not vote for president.

Obama recently met in Chicago with religious leaders, including conservative evangelicals. His campaign also plans thousands of "American Values House Parties," where participants discuss Obama and religion, as well as a presence on Christian radio and blogs.

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Obama Targets Blacks, Felons

Post below recycled from Discriminations. See the original for links

The candidate who once said, to support from even surprising quarters, that

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America

is now targeting voters from black America. Hillary Clinton got into a heap of trouble when she said, quoting an Associated Press article, that

Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.

I wonder if the Los Angeles Times's Peter Wallsten will get in similar trouble for reporting that "Obama campaign targets black voters - carefully." And not only black voters, but also felons.

Experts say felons are disproportionately black and, if they can be found, more likely to be Obama backers. This provides a huge potential; about 1.1 million felons in Florida were ineligible to vote in 2004, according to a 2006 book by sociologists Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen. Here too the potential for gains has risk: It could open a door for Republicans to portray Democrats as soft on crime.

The push for new and nontraditional voters is so targeted and aggressive that an NAACP official in Ohio said her organization plans to pursue individuals who are incarcerated but who have not yet been tried or sentenced and, therefore, under state law, remain eligible to vote. The group is also tracking felons who often don't realize that, in Ohio, they are eligible to vote as soon as they leave prison.

Ex-offenders are "just everywhere," said Jocelyn Travis, who heads the Ohio NAACP's voter outreach program. "People who have a felony or criminal background are throughout our community, and they don't realize that they have the right to vote."

Given the preemptive response by Obama and his academic acolytes like Drew Westen to just about any criticism of him as racist and bigoted, what will they make of the Los Angeles Time pointing out that his campaign is targeting black voters, albeit "carefully," and convicted felons, because so many of them are black?




Obama's belief in verbal magic

Wouldn't the world be nice if a spoken word made it so? I think the last time that happened it was God speaking; pretty much every time it's happened actually. Presidential candidate Barack Obama just might be god, America's messiah.

Recently, speaking of how to handle Osama Bin Laden, Obama stated, 'What would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he's engaged in and not to make him into a martyr, and to assure that the United States government is abiding by basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism.'

In effect, Barack is concerned that strong action against Bin Laden will be used by the enemy to propagandize the masses against the United States and for once, the Senator is absolutely correct in his concerns.

But it is notable that such propaganda has occurred and continues to occur, regardless of what manner America acts. During the Clinton administration, while terrorism was handled through the justice system, America was decried as the 'Great Satan' on Arab television and radio and in education, newsprint, and magazine. Has that changed since the Bush administration has taken terrorism on a war footing? Certainly not.

So, I ask Senator Obama or anyone who has an answer. Just what way can we handle Osama Bin Laden that convinces radical extremists who hate us' not to hate us anymore? Is there really some magical way to go about this?

In a previous article I noted how the right words to Hitler would not have stopped his packing trains full of Jews and running them to death camps. Likewise, the right words to terrorist propagandists will not stop them from continuing their brainwashing blitz against Muslims, the world over.

Osama Bin Laden himself is not only a mastermind of organizing terrorist attacks. He has a long history as propagandist himself. He recruited Muslims to extremism and sent them on missions in his stead. That is why he is so high value a target. He was an excellent propagandist and organizer for radical Islam. That is, until America's soldiers started taking apart his network. You see, anything we do to this enemy will be used by the enemy. We could put them in prison. It will be used as propaganda. We could pull out of the Middle East. It will be used as propaganda. We could use nuclear weapons to annihilate millions of people, some of which were the intended targets. It will be used as propaganda. No matter how Osama Bin Laden meets his end, the enemy will STILL declare America the 'Great Satan'.

Besides, if bringing Bin Laden to justice means trying him on a court of law, perhaps we should recall that Bin Laden has been under indictment for well over a decade. Yet, no charges were ever brought to trial. We cannot to be soft-footed when it comes to dealing with this enemy. If they will make martyrs of themselves one way or another we should help them to it first. Shoot them before they blow themselves up in suicide bombings. Shoot them before they shoot at us. Shoot the before they can kidnap another person and send a grisly tape to Al Jazeera.

Propaganda is going to occur no matter what we do. That is how this enemy has always functioned and in the possibility that we could annihilate such enemy, be aware; there will be propaganda to the very end.

But what is really exposed in the Senator's statement is his lack of understanding of this enemy. It shows that he believes America to be partially at fault for their hatred. He is drawn to this notion that if we only acted a certain way, everything would be perfected in the world. There would be no more hate if America put him in the White House because he could make the right decisions.

Senator Obama has declared to America's enemy a willful blindness as to Al Qaeda's real intentions and stated that our actions are responsible for Bin Laden's malice. In doing so, he gives them the same propaganda he's declaring he has the power to stop.

Perhaps this would not be so disturbing if he were a mere reflection of the minuscule Looney left. Is America so far lost that half the nation is ready to agree with and support such an imbecile? Or are we only sick of dealing with an imbecile from the Dems and a wishy-washy dunce from the Reps?

Regardless, I would hope that a man as 'intelligent' as Ivy League educated Barack Obama would surely not buy into this drivel. Merely, that he would tell the left what he must to garner their votes. Yet, I do not see that occurring. I fear that the Senator has been completely honest with America in his views. Barack's words may have the power to make young leftists faint but it holds no sway with our enemies and their supporters unless it plays into their hand.

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Why Flip-Flopping Matters

What restrains politicians and businesses from acting dishonestly? A lot of people would answer: nothing. Periodic political and corporate scandals have created a popular image of politicians and businessmen as little more than a collection of cheats, liars and crooks. However, while there will always be some dishonest people in any profession, the vast majority of American politicians and businessmen do not end up being frog marched out of their offices in handcuffs with their heads held low in shame before a gaggle of news cameras.

What helps keep companies honest is the threat that if they cheat customers, people won't buy from them again. But that won't work for politicians. Politicians don't always have the incentive of re-election because eventually they all face a last term in office. Politicians retire at some point. They can't live forever. So, if it isn't the threat of facing the voters, what could ensure that politicians keep their promises?

There has been a lot of academic work studying this question, and the way to solve the problem is to elect politicians who inherently value the policy positions that they take.

Of course, voters won't exactly figure out whether a politician really values what he claims to value, but there are signals that voters can look for. One is how politicians flip-flop on issues. If a politician can easily change what he claims to believe during a campaign, voters will have a lot less confidence that he really believes in what he is telling them. If he doesn't hold his views strongly, voters can't trust the politician to keep his promises.

We see this in other areas of life as well. For example, with lifetime appointments, Supreme Court justices are removed from any equivalent of re-election pressures. When a president nominates justices, he looks for a judge who will provide a reliable vote for his political orientation. The president analyzes potential nominees' career voting records and looks for other signs of an intrinsic commitment to shared ideals. Judges may be able to hide or misrepresent their true philosophy in hopes of getting a Supreme Court nomination, but it is difficult to do this over a long period of time. Supreme Court nominees will usually have years of consistent rulings that testify to their reliability. It is a major reason why presidents prefer older nominees over younger ones, even though the younger ones can spend a much longer time on the bench.

In the last week, charges of flip-flopping got into high gear against both presidential campaigns. For Senator McCain, the flip-flop everyone focused on is his proposal to resume offshore drilling. As the Washington Post notes: "McCain's announcement is a reversal of the position he took in his 2000 presidential campaign . . ." While the change isn't making environmentalists happy, McCain notes that a policy that made sense when gasoline was about a dollar a gallon doesn't make much sense with gas now at $4.08 a gallon. Obviously the price has risen dramatically even compared to what it was a few months ago.

The charges against Senator Obama over the last week have been more numerous and apparently much more difficult to explain away.

-- NAFTA. During the primaries, an Obama campaign slogan was "Only Barack Obama Consistently Opposed NAFTA" and that he would use the threat to "opt-out" as a "hammer" to force the Canadians and Mexicans to "renegotiate" NAFTA. But last week in an interview with Fortune magazine, Obama reversed course saying that he was "not a big believer in doing things unilaterally' and that he wasn't going to force a renegotiation of NAFTA. Obama's explanation for the switch now that the primaries were over was that "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified."

The flip-flop was all the more difficult to explain because Obama's senior economics adviser, Austin Goolsbee, was caught right before the Ohio primary telling Canadians that Obama didn't really mean his promise to renegotiate the treaty. Whether Obama really believed what he was saying during the campaign became an important question, and Obama went to great length on multiple occasions to assure voters that he would stand by his promise. Both Obama and Goolsbee completely denied the Canadian story, with Goolsbee claiming that the reporting by Canadian TV was "a totally inaccurate story."

-- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). For Democrats during the primary, FISA was something for which no compromise was allowed. Back in September, Obama's campaign vowed he would "support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." But this last week Obama reversed course and supported the FISA compromise granting the companies amnesty. Democrat party activists such as the Daily Kos are describing Obama's switch as a "disaster." Politico reports that "Obama's allies at MoveOn are asking supporters to 'call Sen. Obama today and tell him you're counting on him to keep his word.' "

-- Public Financing of Presidential Campaigns. A year ago Obama gathered favorable headlines and media coverage for his dedication to saving public financing of presidential campaigns. Editorials chided Obama's opponents for not making the promise that he had made. To Obama, the decision likely came down to how much money he can raise for the general election. If Obama can raise as much for the general election as he has for the primaries, he could easily exceed what McCain will be allowed to spend by 4-to-1. Even that might be an underestimate, because he will now have the resources of a united Democratic party.

Obama's explanation for breaking this promise is that "The public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who have become masters at gaming this broken system." Yet, he hasn't explained why the system is any more broken now than it was late last fall.

With the primaries over, both candidates may want to be in the political center. But that is a much more natural place for John McCain with his maverick voting record than it is for Barack Obama. If Obama's awkward movements to the center continue, even his massive money advantages during the general election might be unable to undo the damage to his credibility.

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Obama Does Not Understand Nuremberg

(Or anything else much)

It amazes me that Barack Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for more than a decade, would be unaware of the legal controversy surrounding Nuremberg and the commotion it caused within the U.S. Supreme Court. If Obama taught the U.S. Constitution to his students the same way the Reverend Jeremiah Wright preached to his congregation then heaven help us all.

One of the obvious implications of last week’s Supreme Court decision, which granted inmates at Guantanamo Bay the right of habeas corpus to appeal their detention, is that if Osama bin Laden were captured alive by U.S. forces, the al Qaeda founder could end up in a U.S. civilian court afforded all the protections of law abiding American citizens.

When Barack Obama was asked about this on June 18^th, he suggested that Osama could be adjudicated in the manner of the Nazi War Crime Tribunals at Nuremberg. Obama argued, “I think what would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he’s engaged in and not to make him into a martyr and to assure that the United States government is abiding by the basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism.”

The following day, John McCain replied on his website giving Obama a short history lesson. McCain wrote, “Unfortunately, it is clear Senator Obama does not understand what happened at the Nuremberg trials and what procedures were followed. There was no habeas at Nuremberg and there should be no habeas for Osama bin Laden….By citing a historical precedent that does not include habeas, he sends a signal of confusion and indecision to our allies and adversaries and the American people.”

It also signifies that Barack Obama does not understand 20^th Century history. Yet this should hardly come as a surprise. Up until a few weeks ago, Obama thought it was the Americans, not the Soviets, who liberated Auschwitz.

How did the Nuremberg Trials come about in the first place? They came about when Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied powers in May 1945. The last time I checked Osama bin Laden is the founder of al Qaeda, a terrorist organization and not the head of state or head of any government. How does an entity that is not a nation state (although harbored by some) enter into an instrument of surrender? Terrorist organizations like al Qaeda have changed the terms of war as we understand it.

Nuremberg was prosecuted and adjudicated by an international team consisting of lawyers and judges from the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. If Obama thinks Osama has the right to be heard in a U.S. civilian court does he also think we should involve lawyers and judges from other countries into the proceedings?

Or does Obama think Osama should be tried in an international forum like, well, Nuremberg? The Allies chose to conduct the tribunals in Nuremberg because that is where the Nazi Party was founded. Under those circumstances, wouldn’t be more appropriate for bin Laden to be tried in Kabul rather than in a civilian court in New York City?

It also must be remembered the Nuremberg trials were not universally praised at the time they occurred. Many questioned the legitimacy of such a proceeding. The Chief Prosecutor for the United States was Robert H. Jackson, who took a leave of absence as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court to participate at Nuremberg. In May 2003, when the Robert H. Jackson Center was being dedicated in Jamestown, New York, the late Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist gave the address. Rehnquist, who began his legal career as a clerk for Jackson at the Supreme Court after graduating from law school at Stanford University, drew attention to the criticism of the proceedings. He pointed out that there were objections to a Supreme Court justice acting as a prosecutor. Jackson’s colleague, William O. Douglas, thought Jackson’s appointment violated the separation of powers and that Jackson ought to resign from the bench.

Rehnquist also discussed the objections to the very nature of Nuremberg: The second issue was whether or not this sort of trial – not only the prosecutors, but also the judges – coming from the victors, would be in fact if not in form a “kangaroo court”….Legal scholars also questioned whether the whole idea of such a trial where there was no existing body of law did not violate the principle embodied in the ex post facto prohibition in the United States Constitution. That provision requires that before criminal liability may attach to a person for a particular act, a law making the conduct criminal must have been on the books before he committed the act.

Rehnquist also mentioned that Harlan Fiske Stone, who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during Nuremberg, did not look kindly upon Jackson’s conduct overseas. While Justice Stone could have cared less what happened to the Nazis he wrote, “(B)ut it disturbs me some to have it dressed up in the habiliments of the common law and the Constitutional safeguards to those charged with crime.” Rehnquist further noted that Stone was miffed that Jackson had not informed him of his appointment until it was announced publicly by President Truman.

The Nuremberg Trials were an unprecedented response to an unprecedented calamity. Similarly, the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay are an unprecedented response to an unprecedented calamity. The United States is fighting a war against an Islamic fundamentalist organization that does not fight under the rules of engagement and instead carries out acts of terrorism against innocent civilians on a mass scale. The United States must adapt to those unprecedented circumstances through innovative methods of adjudication.

It amazes me that Barack Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for more than a decade, would be unaware of the legal controversy surrounding Nuremberg and the commotion it caused within the U.S. Supreme Court. If Obama taught the U.S. Constitution to his students the same way the Reverend Jeremiah Wright preached to his congregation then heaven help us all.

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Running on Empty

Democratic energy policies ignore reality

BARACK OBAMA PUNCTUATED his opposition last week to offshore drilling for oil and natural gas with a clever jab at John McCain. "The politics may have changed, but the facts have not," he quipped. A few days earlier, McCain had called for lifting the moratorium on exploration and drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Obama was only half right. With gasoline at $4-plus a gallon, the politics have indeed changed--in favor of increased domestic oil production. But so have the facts. And it's that change that has made offshore drilling cost-effective, environmentally safe, and no threat to become an eyesore off the beaches of California and Florida.

Advances in oil technology--which Obama either doesn't know about or chooses to ignore--allow drilling to go far deeper beneath the sea and thus farther from the coast. Some oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are nearly 200 miles from land. Serious spills from drilling offshore have become practically non-existent. More than 100 rigs in the Gulf were damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single spill.

So Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, was wrong. Now, like other Democrats, he's in a politically awkward position. He opposes new drilling for oil and natural gas at a time when drilling in areas currently off limits has become popular. Three-fourths of likely voters in a new Zogby poll said they favor it, and Republicans have made it their top issue against Democrats.

Democrats appear wary of saying they oppose any boost in domestic oil production, which happens to be the position of a powerful interest group, the environmental lobby. But despite soaring gasoline prices, Democrats are against opening new areas of federal land or offshore for exploitation of oil and natural gas reserves.

Instead, they've come up with lame, dubious, or intellectually dishonest reasons for their opposition. Obama's insistence that the "facts" of oil production haven't changed is just one of those.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that the Democratic Congress is "moving America in a new direction for energy independence." But preserving the ban on offshore drilling isn't new. The ban has been in effect since 1981, but Pelosi said it's not responsible for high gasoline prices. Who's really to blame? The Bush administration and the oil companies, she said.

Pelosi's most implausible claim is that energy companies are hoarding oil. If so, they're doing this as gasoline prices have reached a record high price. And these companies are the same ones that Democrats accuse of being greedy and reaping "obscene profits." Hoarding oil--keeping it off the market--certainly makes no economic sense, which is why oil companies aren't doing it. As supposed evidence, Democrats cite the absence of drilling in 68 million acres of federal oil reserves leased by oil companies. In truth, these areas are under active exploration that may lead to drilling. Drilling, of course, is the last step in oil production. Whatever Democrats may think, oil companies don't drill first, then explore later to find if drilling is actually worthwhile.

Oil companies pay billions to the federal government each year for oil leases, most of which expire after 10 years. They pay an annual fee as well. In 2007, they paid $7 billion for oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico alone. Would they spend so much for leases and fail to follow up and look for oil? Not likely.

Pelosi also made this boast: "The New Direction Congress has enacted into law the first new fuel efficiency standards for vehicles in 32 years." The law would boost vehicle fuel standards to 35 miles a gallon--in 2020. But this legislation was entirely unnecessary. The free market is already increasing fuel efficiency. Car buyers are rushing to trade in gas guzzlers for vehicles with better mileage. And auto companies are closing plants that manufacture low mileage cars as fast as they can as they switch to building more efficient cars.

Democrats have also turned to several hardy perennials, claiming that gouging and "excessive speculation" are chiefly at fault for the rise in the price of gasoline. These charges were aired during the 1970s and found to be false. But there's a new twist this time: the House authorized lawsuits against OPEC, the oil cartel, for price fixing. This tactic is unlikely to be pursued.

The silliest of the ploys came from Rahm Emanuel, the savvy congressman from Chicago. He demanded to know if McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, favors drilling in the Great Lakes. "I just want to help," Emanuel told the Washington Post, "in case geography wasn't where he got an 'A.'" Sure.

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





25 June, 2008

Obama drops 'silly' presidential seal

WHITE House contender Barack Obama will no longer use a campaign seal that critics call an arrogant imitation of the president's official emblem. The seal was first seen on Friday at a meeting between Senator Obama and Democratic state governors, causing tongues to wag owing to its close resemblance to the eagle logo displayed on the lectern whenever the President speaks in public. The Obama seal had the same bald eagle clutching arrows and an olive branch, denoting war and peace, but inserted the words "Vero possumus'' - a loose Latin translation of the Democrat's campaign slogan "Yes, we can.''

One Obama aide told Fox News that the widely panned seal was intended as a one-off for Friday's event. But Atlantic.com reported that the candidate himself felt the image had been a "silly mistake". An Obama spokesman could not be reached for comment.

The seal was greeted with universal derision by US media, and the campaign of Republican candidate John McCain called it "laughable, ridiculous, preposterous and revealing all at the same time".

Source




Media Excuse Obama's False Advertising



Is there a left-wing bent here that has tainted their research? What happens when the "fact-checkers" don't check facts and the "watchdogs" don't watch? Consider the case of those who claim to be watching politicians for lies and deceptions and pretend to analyze Senator Barack Obama's new patriotic "Country I Love" television ad, airing in 18 states. The Annenberg Political Fact Check, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz have written analyses of the Obama ad. But they are as flawed as the ad itself.

The Obama TV ad purports to describe his upbringing and legislative accomplishments but ignores his childhood mentor, Communist Frank Marshall Davis. While Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn looked to Havana and Hanoi for their inspiration and guidance, Davis loved the old Soviet Union and refused to answer questions under oath about his Communist Party membership. He was a Stalinist. Overall, there is a pattern of people who hate America showing up at critical junctions in Obama's life and career to influence and advise him. But he wants us to believe that somehow American "values" have been instilled in him. By whom?

By airing his patriotic ad, Obama is trying to suggest that whatever associations he had with these and other anti-American figures, and whatever mysterious circumstances he may have been raised or trained in, he still managed to somehow become a loyal American. But how is this possible? Which pro-American political figures had any influence at all on his life and career? Would he please name some?

A reasonable interpretation of this ad, based on what we know about Obama so far, would have to conclude that it is the most deceptive commercial ever to air in the history of politics. It is designed to mask the fact that Obama, with all of his baggage, could not by any reasonable standard get a federal security clearance. But our media don't have the basic integrity to point this out.

Another Cover-Up

The Obama ad, which also touts his alleged legislative accomplishments, is curious for another reason. It ignores his costly pro-U.N. Global Poverty Act, now on the verge of full Senate passage. The reason for the omission is obvious: Obama's campaign understands that the bill, which commits the United States to spending more foreign aid money on the rest of the world, is not popular with the American people and would make him look like an anti-American globalist and socialist. This perception has to be avoided at all costs.

"America is a country of strong families and strong values," Obama declares in the ad. "My life's been blessed by both. I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn't have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up." In fact, his white grandfather helped raise Obama by selecting Frank Marshall Davis, a black communist writer and poet, as a father-figure and role model while he was growing up in Hawaii. His values, passed on to Obama, were those of a communist agent who pledged allegiance to Stalin. Among other things, as Obama himself admits in his book, "Frank" told him that blacks had a reason to hate whites and that he should not believe that [expletive deleted] about the American way of life. Davis was an influence over Obama during the years 1975-1979. His "poetry" is viciously anti-American and pro-Soviet. And yet Obama listened to it growing up.

All of this has been well-documented in numerous articles by Accuracy in Media, based on information in Obama's book, Dreams From My Father; books by and about Davis; and interviews with and speeches by those who had information about Davis's role in raising Obama. Congressional investigations named Davis as a key member of the Communist Party USA involved in a Soviet network that also included actor Paul Robeson and labor leader Harry Bridges.

The Davis Connection

Professor Paul Kengor makes the essential point that the role of Davis in influencing Obama has to be taken into account: "Davis and his comrades worked to undermine genuine liberal causes because of their lock-step subservience to the Comintern and the USSR," he notes. "Modern liberals need to understand, for example, how the American communist movement, including men like Davis, flip-flopped on issues as grave as Nazism and World War II based entirely on whether Hitler was signing a non-aggression pact with Stalin or invading Stalin's Soviet Union. The disgusting about-face by CPUSA on this matter was unforgivable. And what a shame that liberal college professors don't teach this to their students. Liberals also need to know how their friends inside government were used by communists who sought victory for Mao Tse-Tung in China in 1949, which would lead to the single greatest concentration of corpses in human history: 60-70 million dead Chinese from 1957 to 1969."

Does Obama understand the dangers of communism and socialism? It is not reassuring to consider that Obama obviously doesn't want the public to know that his childhood mentor was a Stalinist member of a communist network in Hawaii. His "Country I Love" TV ad ignores it. But that's why we are supposed to have outside "fact-checkers," media watchdogs, and the media themselves.

Nevertheless, the Annenberg Political Fact Check project declares that Obama's "description of his upbringing and work history are accurate." It claims, "The basic details that Obama provides about his family are correct. His books and various news reports confirm that Obama was raised in Hawaii by his mother and grandparents, who were transplants from Kansas."

Books and various reports? That seems rather vague. In fact, his book, Dreams From My Father, confirms that a mysterious "Frank" was a mentor, and that he was a significant influence over Obama after his father had abandoned the family. And this "Frank," as we now know, was Frank Marshall Davis. But the folks at "Fact Check" pretend not to know. Perhaps they didn't take the time to examine the facts. This project includes personnel formerly with CNN, Time magazine, and public broadcasting. But a more serious examination of their backgrounds reveals that some of the staffers have had affiliations with liberal causes, personalities, and candidates such as Common Cause, Bill Moyers, the AFL-CIO, and Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark. Is there a left-wing bent here that has tainted their research?

More here




Obama as a grass-roots president?

It's far from clear that he could run the country the way he's running his campaign

More than any other candidate, Barack Obama has used the power of the Internet to involve millions of people in his campaign. His bottom-up approach tapped a wellspring of money and votes. But organizing from the grass roots is one thing. Could he govern that way? He says he wants to, if elected. "Real change doesn't begin in the halls of Washington, but on the streets of America. It doesn't happen from the top down, it happens from the bottom up," the presumed Democratic nominee told an Indiana crowd in April.

Only vigorous citizen involvement can overpower special interest groups and move dead-weight issues through Congress, Mr. Obama preaches. He and his potential White House advisers imagine mobilizing an e-army of millions with a keystroke, then steering it toward Washington on behalf of universal healthcare or reduced greenhouse gases. This could transform the political dynamics in the capital - if an Obama presidency could actually pull it off. The campaign promises much:

Regular "fireside" Internet chats from a President Obama (the country just got a sample of that in his preemptive Web video announcing his reversal on public funding).

Online town-halls held by cabinet members, and important meetings of public agencies streamed live with an ability for public input - a sort of White House C-SPAN.

Laws posted on the Web for public comment five days before Obama would be due to sign them, and federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contacts with officials made easily available for citizen tracking.

Obama's successful harnessing of supporters and self-forming groups in the primaries hints he just might be able to transfer this MO to governing. Analysts estimate his e-mail list to be vast - anywhere from 3 million to 8 million. He's got roughly a million "friends" spreading the word on Facebook, the social-networking site. YouTube circulates video such as his wife's recent appearance on ABC's "The View."

But big questions remain. Presidents, for instance, have a poor track record in going over the heads of Congress. Ronald Reagan succeeded with a campaign to have Americans phone lawmakers and tell them to lower taxes, but that was an exception. George W. Bush could not do it with Social Security reform and Bill Clinton couldn't with healthcare.

Public mobilization can fail for many reasons: presidents get distracted, the public loses interest or becomes disillusioned, opponents are strong, people don't understand the president's message. It's usually a crisis - a civil war, an economic depression - that ushers in big change. A vast majority of Americans believe the country is on the "wrong track." But does this really constitute a crisis?

At the same time, there's a reason why America has representative government and not mob rule. Direct democracy is inefficient. Would mass e-interaction bog down the White House?

Still, even Obama says he was "surprised" by how well his overall campaign message melded with the power of the Internet in running the primary race. In truth, no one really knows whether it could also work in running the country.

Source




Pro-abortion Catholics Line Up for Obama

You are the Democratic candidate for president. You want to reach out to Catholics. So what do you do when the majority of the elected officials on your National Catholic Advisory Council have the seal of approval from NARAL Pro-Choice America? That's the position Barack Obama now finds himself in. A few months ago, his Catholic advisory council was announced with great enthusiasm, and Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) was listed as a national co-chair. His appearance at the top of the council sent a clear message: This campaign is determined to recover some of the lost Democratic sheep who have gravitated to the GOP over abortion.

This council does indeed include some Catholics whose pro-life credentials are impeccable, including Minnesota Congressman James Oberstar. But let us also stipulate the obvious: Of the 21 senators, congressmen and governors listed on the council's National Leadership Committee, 17 have a 90%-100% NARAL approval rating. Even Mr. Casey now enjoys a 65% NARAL approval rating.

It's not as if these NARAL scores are outliers: Sen. Obama himself boasts a 100% NARAL rating, and for good reason. In a speech before Planned Parenthood, he declared that the right to an abortion is at stake in this election, and vowed that he would not yield on appointing judges that would uphold Roe v. Wade.

Mr. Obama is for using tax dollars to fund abortions, and against restrictions on partial-birth abortion. In the Illinois Senate, he voted against legislation protecting a child who was born alive despite an abortion. In sum, if you want to know what Mr. Obama's policies mean, it's this: taxpayer-funded abortion on demand.

Not fair, complains the Obama camp. They point to statements supporting adoption. They cite the story about how he removed language about "right-wing ideologues" from one of his Web sites after a pro-life doctor complained. Above all, they say he has acknowledged a moral dimension to abortion, that he's willing to listen, and that he wants to work for fewer abortions. All very true. Yet this defense reflects a common complaint about the Obama campaign in general: When you look past the soothing language about "change" and the willingness to "listen," the actual policies and voting record are to the left of Ted Kennedy's and Bernie Sanders'.

It's a tough sell to present this record as auguring an America where there are fewer abortions. But some try. Generally there are two lines of argument. The first is to claim that Republicans have done nothing during their time in power to diminish abortion. Plainly this is not the view that Planned Parenthood promotes on its Web site, where President Bush's many actions are chronicled and listed under the heading "war on women." As Mr. Obama himself notes, moreover, Republicans generally do not appoint the kind of judges the pro-choice side demands: That is, judges who can be counted on to impose their own views upon the law on issues that ought properly be left to the American people.

The other line of argument is the They're-Just-As-Bad-As-We-Are defense. Thus the Web sites that go on and on about Catholic social teaching on war and poverty and greed and the death penalty, etc. The implication being, of course, that Republicans are on the wrong side of all these issues - and that simply by enumerating all these concerns, you can somehow balance out the Democratic Party's singular commitment to abortion on demand. These issues are all legitimate subjects for debate, and each can and should be argued. The problem is that abortion is not just any issue. In the language of the church, abortion is an "intrinsic evil," always and everywhere wrong.

That is what Catholics for Obama have to get around. Given this awkward fact, the political reality is that a National Catholic Advisory Council may do less to advance Mr. Obama than to alert the public about how extreme his votes and policies are - not to mention the similar votes and policies of the Catholic politicians supporting him. Already Kathleen Sebelius - governor of Kansas and one of the Catholic co-chairs - has been asked by her bishop to refrain from Communion because of what he says is her support for abortion. As for Sen. Casey, well, let's just say it's hard to imagine his sainted father - who bucked his party's president and refused to support his old friend Sen. Harris Wofford's 1994 re-election bid over the life issue - lending his imprimatur to such a NARAL-friendly enterprise.

It's not that Catholic Democrats lack a moral language. Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.), for example, is another Catholic council member who also enjoys a 100% NARAL approval rating. During recent Senate hearings, he accused oil company executives of having "all the compassion of Burmese generals." When Mr. Durbin is willing to use similar language to describe the taking of innocent, unborn life, we'll know we have change we can believe in.

Source




Obamanomics: How McCain can fight back--if he cares to

by Irwin M. Stelzer

Every day that passes makes one thing clearer and clearer: Barack Obama knows precisely what he wants to do to the U.S. economy, and John McCain is intent on proving his self-confessed lack of knowledge with a charming set of homilies.

Start with Obama's proposal to raise taxes on all families earning more than $250,000 per year in order to finance a $1,000 tax cut for "middle-income" tax payers. Assuming that there is enough money to be had from taxpayers in that higher-income class to fund the cut for the much larger number of middle-income earners--a heroic assumption--McCain's charge that Obama is planning a massive tax increase doesn't apply to this overt redistribution of the tax burden. Taking from Peter and giving to Paul is not an increase in the taking.

Nor can this rejiggering of the tax burden be dismissed out of hand. The transfer of income from one taxpayer to another does not reduce total welfare. Indeed, the Obama proposal arguably increases welfare or, to use the vaguer but more voguish term, "happiness." Economists, and this includes those working for McCain, know that the value ("marginal utility") of a $1,000 increase in income for someone earning $60,000 per year exceeds the loss in value, even of a greater sum, to someone earning $250,000 and more. So Obama can rightly claim that this one of his several tax proposals does not involve a tax increase, and makes a lot of people much better off at the expense of making a few people only slightly worse off. Not bad policy.

Or is it? McCain's people will undoubtedly work the numbers to see if one can indeed take a chunk from a few Peters and get enough to add a consequential amount to lots of poorer Pauls. But even if the numbers don't support the feasibility of the Obama redistribution, I suspect that point will get lost in the welter of statistical claim and counterclaim. The take-away, as the pros in Washington call it, will be: Obama wants to tax those who have appropriated most of the benefits of the recent prosperity and share those benefits more fairly with those who have been left behind.

No, if McCain is to have an answer it must be based on a demolition of the basic Obama thesis that he can make many people better off by making a few worse off, and a demonstration that the Obama program satisfies neither the criterion of economic efficiency nor the (more potent) public notion of what is fair. It will be necessary for McCain to show that the recipients of Obama's $1,000 gift will not be better off, and might indeed be worse off after the income transfer is completed. How could this be?

Taxes change behavior. By raising rates on upper income payers, Obama is reducing their incentive to work and take risks. The income tax increase is not all that he has in mind for them. He plans to increase their payroll taxes, the taxes they pay on dividends received and capital gains earned, and on any transfers they might have in mind to their kith and kin when they shuffle off this mortal coil. If the aggregate of these additional taxes substantially diminishes incentives to set up a small business of the sort that has created most of the new jobs in recent decades, the $1,000 tax rebate will be more than offset by the consequences of reduced growth and new business formation.

There are two problems with this counterpunch. The first is that we have no idea whether it is true. The McCain campaign has shown little taste for doing the sort of empirical work on which the Obama team thrives. The second is that this is just the sort of exercise that McCain finds unappealing. At best, he will leave such matters to "surrogates." Alas, the precise mechanics by which they will answer questions directed at their candidate during the town hall meetings he is proposing have not been worked out.

Perhaps, then, there is some sort of income redistribution with which McCain can be comfortable, the sort that increases faith in the fairness of the market capitalist system of which he is justifiably so fond, and which has produced greater prosperity for more people than any other economic system.

Surely the populist streak in the Arizona Republican leads him to find something wrong--yes, wrong--with the way executive compensation has become divorced from executive performance. And surely he would be comfortable calling for greater shareholder participation in the approval of executive compensation, and supporting the SEC's recent efforts to require corporations to report just how they plan to relate executive compensation to performance.

Surely, too, McCain knows that paying mortgage brokers based on the quantity of business they generate creates incentives to imprudent lending. These are not the much-derided speculators, who actually take large risks with their own money, and who are the favorite target of politicians-on-the-make: These are people who have found a structural flaw in a market, and exploited it while imposing the costs of their activities on society. There's a principle here that would permit McCain to favor regulation--regulation that makes mortgage markets work better.

Then there is energy policy. It should be possible on the straight-talk express to devise some alternative to the patently cynical promise of "energy independence." No such "independence" is within reach, as the successive failures of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and two Bushes to attain it should demonstrate. Leave that pandering to Obama, who would somehow achieve that goal while at the same time foreclosing drilling offshore and in Alaska, and killing the nuclear option by opposing the opening of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, without which nuclear plant construction will be minimal.

McCain, meanwhile, need not feel stuck with his own oft-stated opposition to drilling in Alaska. First, he might point out that a policy appropriate when gasoline was selling for $2 a gallon is not appropriate when it is headed towards $5. Second, since the governor of Alaska has announced that she is eager for exploration to begin in ANWR, McCain can in good conscience apply to Alaska the position he has long taken in regard to offshore drilling in Florida and other states--that the decision should be left to those states. Finally, he might point out that now that we know we are in a long war with radical Islam, it is more than ever incumbent on us to make painful tradeoffs. One such is bearing any environmental consequences of drilling in ANWR, consequences he can continue to regret, in order to achieve the more important goal of depriving Middle East funders of jihadists at least some of the billions now flowing to them by substituting domestic oil for imports.

The art of governing is the art of making just such tough decisions. The political risk of being accused of flip-flopping seems minimal. The voters are ahead of the politicians on this issue, and now lean towards making the most of our domestic resources. Besides, moving energy policy from the realm of economic policy into the realm of national security can only be to McCain's advantage. He would certainly have a more coherent policy position if he argued that it is important to keep money out of the hands of bad guys, than if he continued attacking oil companies for what he calls "obscene profits." After all, polls show that the voters know that it is OPEC, rising demand in China, and the refusal of producer countries to allow our companies to develop their resources--not big, bad oil companies--that are responsible for high oil prices.

McCain might go further, and build on his reputation for opposing earmarks and the worst machinations of the K Street crowd, by abandoning the cap-and-trade system he has been supporting, in part at the urging of his buddy, Joe Lieberman (the man who could have rid the nation of the scourge of Majority Leader Harry Reid, Chairman Patrick Leahy, and the like by voting with the Republicans to organize the Senate). McCain can part with Lieberman by pointing out that what seemed sound theory has turned out in practice to represent everything he opposes. The recent abortive trial run of the cap-and-trade system in Congress showed that it would be a lobbyists' bonanza, as some interest groups scramble for permits to pollute, and other interest groups insert their snouts into the multibillion-dollar trough that would be made available to fund technologies of Friends of Nancy and Harry and assorted bureaucrats.

Finally, and this would require a leap of political courage, McCain should spend ten minutes with his adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who I would guess is still recovering from his embarrassment at McCain's call for a cut in gasoline taxes, to discuss the opposite: a tax on oil products, especially gasoline and heating oil. This doesn't mean abandoning his opposition to higher taxes. Indeed, the point is not to raise federal revenues. Every dollar that comes in should be rebated, perhaps by reducing the payroll taxes of everyone earning less than, say, $50,000 per year, the group Obama intends to benefit by raising taxes on those energetic small-business owners. The beneficiaries of the McCain shift in taxes from work to polluting, imported gasoline would see the reduction in taxes immediately--when they received their first salary check after the new regime was in place. But the main point is this: The money that the Saudis and other supporters of jihadists would otherwise get would be reducing the taxes of hard-pressed Middle America. Take that, Barack Obama. It's called straight talk.

My best guess is that none of this will come to pass. McCain has little interest in economic policy, and prefers the sort of intuitive, ad hoc reaction that unfortunately led him to support the continued closure of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and more sensibly to rail against multi-million payoffs to executives who had almost brought their companies to ruin. His economic policies have been aptly described as the politics of personal honor, which is a nice way of saying incoherent. They will therefore likely continue to be a combination of the good, the bad, and the ugly. If he ends up a winner in the debates as often as Clint Eastwood did in his flicks, McCain's strategy will be vindicated. If not, we are in for an expansion of the role of government in economic life that will make Lyndon Johnson look like laissez-faire.

Source




Obama and the failures of lawfare

SPEAKING without a text in front of him, Barack Obama betrays a troubling lack of knowledge on important issues - such as the law and terrorism. In his ABC interview last Monday, for example, Obama attacked the Bush approach on fighting terror. He claimed that, in the case of "the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated."

As an assistant US attorney, Andrew McCarthy prosecuted the perpetrators of the 1993 WTC attack. He calls Obama's statement "a remarkably ignorant account of the American experience with jihadism." Writing for National Review Online, McCarthy notes: "While the government managed to prosecute many people responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing, many also escaped prosecution because of the limits on civilian criminal prosecution.

"Some who contributed to the attack, like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, continued to operate freely because they were beyond the system's capacity to apprehend. Abdul Rahman Yasin was released prematurely because there was not sufficient evidence to hold him - he fled to Iraq, where he was harbored for a decade (and has never been apprehended)."

Pointing to the later terrorist attacks on Americans and US assets, culminating in 9/11, McCarthy concludes that the law-enforcement approach to combating terrorism was futile.

But Obama's comments fall short on other grounds, too. The convicted spiritual mentor of the 1993 WTC bombers is Omar Abdel-Rahman ("the blind sheik"). By Obama's logic, the blind sheik was "incapacitated" and therefore rendered harmless by his conviction and imprisonment. In fact, Abdel-Rahman continued to wage jihad from behind bars, issuing instructions to his followers in Egypt.

Attorney Lynne Stewart was convicted in February 2005 of conspiracy and providing and concealing material support of terrorism for her actions in smuggling messages from Abdel-Rahman to his followers in the terrorist group Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group).

The jihadist activities of Abdel-Rahman from behind bars, plus the collaboration of his attorney, illustrate the challenges President Bush sought to confront fairly with the arrangements for the detention and isolation of captured enemy combatants in Guantanamo.

Of course, the Supreme Court just upended those arrangements with its controversial ruling in the Boumediene case, which gave Gitmo detainees the right to challenge their confinement through habeas corpus proceedings in federal court.

Obama approves: He recently asserted that the "principle of habeas corpus, that a state can't just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process - that's the essence of who we are."

Obama's stubborn willful ignorance on this subject is a danger to this country if he is elected. If the constitution guarantees habeas corpus rights to enemy combatants, doe sit also guarantee Miranda rights and the appointment of lawyers? Does it require us to treat the battle space as a crime scene? It is cases like this that make liberals look hopelessly naive.

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





24 June, 2008

The Content Of His Character

In August of 1963, a muggy, sweltering day, a Senior at Mt. Vernon High School stood by the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.  The student was only one of many many thousands that day, gathered in the hopes that some day there would be peace between white and black Americans.  That student was me, and I was less than a month from my 17th Birthday. 

As a 6th grader I witnessed the hostility and hatred of my fellow whites when Central High School in Little Rock was integrated.  I cringed when called "nigger-lover" by some of my school mates who had never gone to school with blacks or ever associated with them or maybe even never knew one.  You see, I grew up in the Army, my dad was a career officer and the Military had been integrated by President Truman in 1948.  Integration was all I knew and I had no problems with it.

But, I digress, I stood with the thousands and listened to the tenor voice of Martin Luther King.  As his voice rang out, this phrase in particular struck me, as it still does 45 years later:

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Judged by the content of their character.  What a concept that is, when at the time, so many were judged by the color of their skin, the region they came from or the god that they worshiped, should not be judged by these things, but by their character.

And so we have arrived at today, having been through tumult, asassinations, riots and slow but positive growth, to a point where African Americans are elected by solid majorities to office in the south, where the bastions of hatred have been ground down, but unfortunately, where there are also those who would keep the races apart (Jessie, Al, are you reading this?) and those who depend on anger and hostility to keep their names in light.

We have had African Americans as Secretary of State, as Generals and Admirals, as Presidents of large Corporations, and now, a black American is running for President of the United States and it looks like he will get the nomination from the Democrat Party.  Yet, in my opinion, the content of their character is still important.

Barack Obama proclaimed he would pull out of Iraq immediately, and now he says he won't. He said that he would be using public financing for his race, and now he won't. He has said that NAFTA was anathema, and now all of a sudden, it isn't. He has attended a church where some of the most vile racist comments made from a pulpit have rung forth, and now he says that wasn't the Jeremiah Wright he knew. He has associated with, and benefited from associations with an admitted but unconvicted urban terrorist. He has manipulated opposition off of the ballot in order to win elections. And he has said, in spite of no one making this association BUT him, that the opposition will play the race card.

The content of his character has been weighed. And has been found wanting!

Source




Even Europe is worried about Obama winning



Until now, it seems that everyone outside the United States is crazy about Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Hussein Obama. Now it appears that maybe even the Europeans are beginning to wake up and smell the coffee

European officials are increasingly concerned that Sen. Barack Obama's campaign pledge to begin direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program without preconditions could potentially rupture U.S. relations with key European allies early in a potential Obama administration.

European officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they are wary of giving up a demand that has been so enshrined in U.N. resolutions, particularly without any corresponding concessions by Iran. Although European officials are eager to welcome a U.S. president promising renewed diplomacy and multilateralism after years of tensions with the Bush administration, they feel strongly about continuing on the current path.

"Dropping a unanimous Security Council condition would simply be interpreted by Iran and America's allies as unconditional surrender, and America's friends would view this as confirmation of America's basic unreliability," said Fran‡ois Heisbourg, a Paris-based military analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "A hell of a way to start a presidential term."

Source




Black Republican tells Obama to run as a man and leader, not as a black victim

In response to Obama's claim that Republicans will use race to stoke fear, Lt. Col Allen West, candidate for Congress in Florida's 22 District issued this release:

My advice to Senator Obama is to run as a Man and Leader, and the American people will evaluate you as such, not as a victim. This is a Presidential race, based solely on a capacity to lead the United States of America. It is not about skin tone...however, perhaps we should come to expect these immature statements.

It also seems rather humorous that the Presidential candidate who was supposed to be such a "uniter" and transcend race is the one talking about it the most. If Senator Obama was confident in his abilities and character, he would not need to create a crutch for failure. Senator Obama has just tipped his hand, any criticism of him and his policies will be directly attributed to racism. I congratulate Senator Obama for taking race relations in America back some 30 years.

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Guilt-Baiting "Whitey" to vote for Obama

It's on! Full court press. First Obama tells us that the "typical white person" is scared of him. The he tells people that the GOP would play the "race card" on him to stop him from getting elected. Then the "White Supremacist" are on the loose. Now it's the Washington Post telling us that "racism" could stop Obama from being elected.

"As Sen. Barack Obama opens his campaign as the first African American on a major party presidential ticket, nearly half of all Americans say race relations in the country are in bad shape and three in 10 acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Lingering racial bias affects the public's assessments of the Democrat from Illinois, but offsetting advantages and Sen. John McCain's age could be bigger factors in determining the next occupant of the White House.

Overall, 51 percent call the current state of race relations "excellent" or "good," about the same as said so five years ago. That is a relative thaw from more negative ratings in the 1990s, but the gap between whites and blacks on the issue is now the widest it has been in polls dating to early 1992.

More than six in 10 African Americans now rate race relations as "not so good" or "poor," while 53 percent of whites hold more positive views. Opinions are also divided along racial lines, though less so, on whether blacks face discrimination. There is more similarity on feelings of personal racial prejudice: Thirty percent of whites and 34 percent of blacks admit such sentiments.

At the same time, there is an overwhelming public openness to the idea of electing an African American to the presidency. In a Post-ABC News poll last month, nearly nine in 10 whites said they would be comfortable with a black president. While fewer whites, about two-thirds, said they would be "entirely comfortable" with it, that was more than double the percentage of all adults who said they would be so at ease with someone entering office for the first time at age 72, which McCain (R-Ariz.) would do should he prevail in November.

Even so, just over half of whites in the new poll called Obama a "risky" choice for the White House, while two-thirds said McCain is a "safe" pick. Forty-three percent of whites said Obama has sufficient experience to serve effectively as president, and about two in 10 worry he would overrepresent the interests of African Americans.

Obama will be forced to confront these views as he seeks to broaden his appeal. He leads in the Post-ABC poll by six percentage points among all adults, but among those who are most likely to vote, the contest is a tossup, with McCain at 48 percent and Obama at 47 percent.

His campaign advisers hope race may prove a benefit, that heightened enthusiasm among African Americans will make Obama competitive in GOP-leaning states with large black populations. But to win in November, Obama most likely will have to close what is now a 12-point deficit among whites. (Whites made up 77 percent of all voters in 2004; blacks were 11 percent, according to network exit polls.)"

From all this you can see the ground work being laid that will call Americans "racist" if they don't vote for Obama. So America, and especially "whitey" America, prepare to vote for the nation's first "Affirmative Action" Choice for President. Forget the fact that he's not qualified and indeed under-qualified for the job, you have to vote for him America! You MUST vote for him because after all ."He's black". Who's race-baiting now?

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Obama's policies have been tried before



As the presidential campaign drones on, Barack Obama and the Democrats are fleshing out the promise of "change" with some specific, big-government policy proposals. Many are familiar, perhaps because they already have been tried - in Argentina. That country has gone from South American breadbasket to world-class basket case. For the long version of how it happened and why Americans might not want to try it, hop on a flight to Buenos Aires. Here's a condensed version:

Although the winding down of Argentina to the status of international deadbeat began a century ago, the latest chapter is instructive. In March, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner seized on rising soybean prices to slap "a windfall tax" on soy exports. Farmers refused to pay, the president wouldn't budge, and a deadlock ensued.

Much of the rest of the country joined sides with the growers. But the uprising is no longer a tax revolt. It has become a rebellion against unfettered executive reach - or, in the view of the opposition, Mrs. Kirchner's authoritarianism. A week ago thousands of Argentines poured into the streets of cities around the country, banging pots and pans to express their dissatisfaction with their president's heavy-handed ways. It was the largest public outcry since the economic crisis in 2001.

Mrs. Kirchner, whose approval rating is down to 20%, responded to the protests in a harshly worded speech on Tuesday. She warned that "the country cannot be governed by casserole dishes, bullhorns and roadblocks." Easy to say now. But it was saucepans in the streets that led to the collapse of the government of President Fernando de la Rua in 2001. Mrs. Kirchner didn't seem to mind that overthrow of democracy, perhaps because her Peronist husband N‚stor Kirchner was subsequently elected president.

Nor did Mrs. Kirchner cry foul when her husband used "emergency powers," delegated to him by the Peronist-controlled Congress, to rule by decree for five years. There was no intervention that Mr. Kirchner considered out of bounds. It was, after all, "a crisis." He imposed price controls, raised export taxes, increased populist subsidies, abrogated contracts, stiffed creditors, ended central-bank independence and even manipulated inflation statistics. The private sector and profits were demonized and the press was harassed.

The repression worked well enough to get his wife elected in October, but now the wheels are coming off again. Mrs. Kirchner's recent verbal defense of her beloved "democracy" is hard to square with the fact that she is following in the footsteps of her husband, who had no respect for institutional checks or balances.

This gets us to the root of the problem, which developed long before the Kirchners' abuses of market and legal principles. The constitution once held limited government and private property to be among the highest ideals of the land. But in the 1920s these protections, which had made the country a magnet for immigrants and the seventh-largest economy in the world, began to erode.

An early example of this assault on liberty was when Congress imposed a rent freeze to deal with a housing shortage after World War I. This only exacerbated the problem, and in 1922 a politicized Supreme Court widened state powers to allow the regulation of rents. That decision put property-rights protection on a slippery slope. A decade later the Court gave the legislature the power to regulate interest rates.

The interventions didn't end there, and as state control of the economy expanded and the nation grew poorer, the country could not recover its footing. Economic populism and labor militancy took hold; protectionism blossomed and Argentina became a welfare state. Meanwhile, the informal economy swelled under the high cost of legality.

Fiscal crises have been recurring. According to a paper recently released by researchers at the Buenos Aires business school Eseade, external debt as a percentage of GDP has now climbed to 56% compared to 54% in 2001. If you include the unpaid debt to bondholders, the number is 67%. More than a few analysts are worried that should the economy slow, the government may tap Central Bank reserves, sparking a run against the peso or, fearing that, choose default, for the second time in a decade, as its escape hatch.

Will that mean an end to ballooning entitlements, class warfare, hostility toward producers, capital and private property, protectionism and subsidized central-planning? Unlikely.

Americans reading that laundry list may note that it sounds a lot like the mindset of the left wing that will dominate the Democratic Party's convention and choose Barack Obama as its candidate in August. From nationalized health care and government-owned refineries to punishing taxes on the rich, Argentina has been there, done that. There are good reasons to find the resemblance disturbing.

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Did Barack Obama disparage his trip to Israel?

Barack Obama's views towards Israel have elicited much controversy over the last six months involving his relationship with his pastor (and "sounding board", "moral compass" and "confidant") Jeremiah Wright, his activities with pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel groups in Chicago, problematic foreign policy advisers (who, for good measure, take a jaundiced views of American Jews as well as Israel) and his own foreign policy opinions and actions (Iran is a "tiny nation" that he dismisses as a threat, his outreach efforts towards Iran, his shifting positions on designating the Iran revolutionary Guard as a terror group, and more).

Yet, Congressman Robert Robert Wexler (D-FL) had the audacity very early in Barack Obama's Presidential campaign to hail him as someone who "loves Israel" based on a few days' trip Senator Obama took to Israel last year (his only trip to the Middle East).

How does this square with other facts that have come to light -- especially from Barack Obama himself? Aside from the above points, what has Barack Obama said about his trips overseas and the impact they have had on him, the insight and knowledge and appreciation (let alone "love") that these trips have generated? In fact, he has been quite dismissive of these trips. During his primary campaign, he spoke:

"Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world," he continued, provoking laughter among those present. "This I know. When Senator Clinton brags, `I've met leaders from 80 countries,' I know what those trips are like. I've been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There's a group of children who do a native dance. You meet with the C.I.A. station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of plant that" with "the assistance of Usaid has started something. And then, you go."

Senator Obama has been on three such trips as Senator: to the former Soviet Union, to Kenya, and to the Middle East (in nine days, he visited Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan -- with a focus on Israel -- 5 days spent there).

Now, it would be odd for a man who presumes he is fit to be President to disparage his visit to the former Soviet Union (a key power he will have to deal with and one that is exquisitely sensitive to slights coming from America -- Putin is a nationalist above all who blames America for the chaos that followed from the downfall of Communism), his trip to Kenya had a strong emotional effect on him as Kenya was his father's homeland (he met members of his extended family there) and he touted AIDS relief work there.

Does that leave his excursion to Israel as the one being ridiculed and disparaged by him when he dismisses the value of such trips as a Senator? If so, does he really "love Israel" as is claimed by Robert Wexler?

This claim can also be questioned when listening to Barack Obama's own words when he reflected on this trip in a podcast from the airport when he was preparing to leave Israel. He speaks of traveling through the "Palestinian territories" (prejudging the final status of these lands); talks about the "separation barrier" * (with its apartheid connotations, as opposed to the more common and accurate designation as a "security fence") and states that he believes Israel was strong enough to deter all threats, that Israel "possesses such superior military forces, that they don't really have enormous vulnerability in a conventional sense. There is no risk of invasion by its neighbors" -- thus implying that it could take risks for peace (this was before Hezbollah's attacks on Israel -- which tended to show the opposite).

Much of Senator Obama's discussion revolved around the contrast between a militarily strong Israel with a booming economy and the suffering of Palestinians ** He did blame some of the suffering of the Palestinians on Yasser Arafat (who was alive at the time) and Palestinian leadership. But the lingering image he took with him was a strong and prosperous and militarily strong Israel, and Palestinians suffering behind a "separation barrier".

Given that Barack Obama disparages such trips overseas, and given his depiction of the five days he spent in Israel and among the Palestinians, can we truly take to heart Robert Wexler's over the top claim that Barack Obama "loves Israel". If one can have qualms about this statement, then can we question other claims made by Robert Wexler regarding Barack Obama and his views towards the Middle East conflict?

Quotes from Obama referred to in the paragraphs immediately above:

* "The separation barrier is a major bone of contention between Palestinians and Israelis at this point. In most portions it's a high fence that appears temporary and could be moved if the peace process and negotiations go forward. In some places it is a wall -- a high barrier that can't be breached and certainly looks permanent."

** "As you travel through the West Bank, you get a sense of the differences between life for Palestinians and Israelis in this region. Palestinians have to suffer through the checkpoint system, the barriers, the fenced-in wall that exists just to get to their jobs, often times to travel from north and south even within the west bank. It's created enormous hardship for them -- there is high unemployment and the economy is not doing as well as it should."

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





23 June, 2008

Obama seems unable to look to the future

(It is of course normal for psychopaths to live in an eternal present)

Barack Obama is against lifting the ban on drilling for oil offshore because it would not reduce gas prices "this year, next year, five years from now," according to CNN .

"John McCain's proposal, George Bush's proposal to drill offshore here in Florida, and other places around the country, would not provide families with any relief, this year, next year, five years from now... Believe me, if I thought there was any evidence at all that drilling could save people money who are struggling to fill up their gas tanks by this summer or the next few years, I would consider it, but it won't."

This sure looks like Obama, the great problem solver according to Al Gore , is not interested in solving any problems that show up only beyond "this summer or the next few years" or that take more than a few years to fix (5 tops, apparently).

Not very forward-looking, is he? In fact, his time window of interest seems to coincide rather perfectly with what would be his first term as President. Any problem that won't show up during his term is not a problem he would try to solve. So much for the vision thing.

Then where does that put global warming, by the way? I was not aware that global warming would have dire consequences this summer or the next few years or that it could be solved within 5 years. According to Senator Obama's logic then, why try to solve it? This would be especially so since even global warmists believe the next decade will involve little or no warming . I also did not know that all the alternative energy sources Senator Obama advocates could be brought on line "this summer". Wow, those windmill guys are good.

I guess that means we can count on a President Obama to ignore the impending bankruptcies of Social Security and Medicare, for example. Or what about levee systems that take more than a few years to put in place to help alleviate flooding that isn't even expected to occur for maybe 100 years? Too bad for the next Katrina victims.

Of course, Obama's logic is based on the premise that gasoline prices would not fall until new oil is actually put in barrels. But as Larry Kudlow points out , oil investors will start bidding down the price as soon as the knowledge of the availability of new oil becomes more certain. That could mean that, if the ban on offshore drilling is lifted this summer, gas prices could fall this summer or the next few years. In the long term we are all dead. For Senator Obama, the long term begins about four years from now.

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Obama, the 527 lie (oh, and racism!)

I hadn't been paying much attention to Sen Barack Obama's "flip-flip" on agreeing to use public funds for campaigning. I hadn't thought of it in terms of Obama's rhetoric of "change" and I suspect that for many American's the issue seems like the standard "second tier" sort of lie all politicians tell, the sort of lie we have learned - as this Rasmussen poll demonstrates - to let roll off our backs.

Ed Morrissey opened my eyes this morning, though, by quoting Mark Shields' dismay at Obama's maneuver.. Both pieces are must-reads, but Ed gets the "scathing insight of the day" award:

Obama lied about the 527s. He smeared McCain by accusing him of having fueled his campaign on lobbyist donations. He reversed reality by calling Republicans "masters" of the 527 strategy that his allies George Soros and MoveOn dominated in 2004 and 2000. And Obama didn't even have the courage to negotiate with his political opponent while telling voters that we shouldn't fear negotiating with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Finishes Ed:

Vero Possumus, indeed. - [link to Obama's "Presidential Seal" added - admin]

Seems Obama has also flipped on the FISA bill. Some of this flipping, of course, is merely the insincere step-center that every politician makes once he has secured his party's nomination. What troubles me is the inconsistency of it. He was supposed to be the candidate of UNITY, and yet yesterday he basically insulted half the country by implying that unless they voted for him, they were racists or, at the very least, allowing themselves to be led around by racists. That's a pretty big bomb to throw, especially so early in the campaign, and when some polls say one is riding high. Why toss it? It makes no sense to me. Is it meant to be a "distraction?" Ed Morrissey, again (because the man is firing on all cylinders of logic):

Just as with his untrue statements on Republican financing and 527s, Obama seems content to issue lies and smears in order to inflame the electorate. There is more than a little hint of McCarthyism in this tactic. Joe McCarthy waved pieces of paper around and claimed to have lists of Communists in government that he never substantiated. Obama likes to accuse Republicans of racism without any proof, either, while apparently discounting the real race-card playing in his own party. If he has proof that the Republican Party and/or John McCain plan racist attacks on him, let him show it. If he doesn't, then Obama is guilty of his own racial pandering and should apologize.

Gateway Pundit, meanwhile, highlights what looks to be a bit of fast dishonesty in Obama's first major tv ad. Obama has several times told us that the people he knew yesterday are not the people he knows today. Perhaps the vote he knows today is not the vote he knew yesterday?

What does all of this say about Obama's character? Nothing terrifically impressive, not yet. Apparently some see "change", but I see same old, same old...

Calling "racism" or "sexism" is always easier than dealing with the substance of any issue. Fling those words about and you're going to muddy the waters. Some people will run away, in fear of having the mud smeared upon them; some people will bend over backwards to over-demonstrate how they could not possibly be racists or sexists. I have found that the folks who are fastest to make those accusations are the ones who are fixated on those issues. Their fixations do not make them racists, or sexists, of course. But it does make them the opposite of "color-blind" or "gender-blind". Race and gender become the things they see first and foremost, and - since they're fixated - they think everyone else is, too.

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A uniter, not a divider?

The Democratic presidential candidate outlined his understanding of the GOP election strategy at a fundraiser in Jacksonville, Florida. Reuters:

"It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy.We know what kind of campaign they're going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid.They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?.he's got a feisty wife.We know the strategy because they've already shown their cards."

It would appear that Senator Obama is not looking to attract too many Republican voters, given his characterization of them and their party.

Leaving aside the slurs offered by Senator Obama, is it now to be considered out of bounds to use the "young and inexperienced" argument too? And why didn't he mention the positive and substantive Drill Now! policy program that appears to have caught fire in Republican circles? Is the GOP not to use the questionable foreign policy views or numerous gaffes, or the willful, easily checkable misstatements and naive foreign policy initiatives that appear to be not only fair game in an election but also the very embodiment of "young and inexperienced"?

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Obama on crime

Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said. Today's near silence about crime probably is evidence of social improvement. For many reasons, including better policing and more incarceration, Americans feel, and are, safer. The New York Times has not recently repeated such amusing headlines as "Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling" (1997), "Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops" (1998), "Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction" (2000) and "More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime" (2003).

If crime revives as an issue, it will be through liberal complaints about something that has reduced the salience of the issue -- the incarceration rate. And any revival will be awkward for Barack Obama. Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which "society" writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.

Last July, Obama said that "more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities." Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, "We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives." But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute's City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. Furthermore, Mac Donald cites data indicating that:

"In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer."

Obama sees racism in the incarceration rate: "We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from." Indeed, in 2006, blacks, who are less than 13 percent of the population, were 37.5 percent of all state and federal prisoners. About one in 33 black men was in prison, compared with one in 79 Hispanic men and one in 205 white men....

What Obama leaves out is that most of the victims of those black men in prison were other blacks. The black on black murder rate for young men is a national tragedy. It exceeds the war deaths in Iraq during the height of the war for the equivalent period of time. The fact is that a young black man is more likely to be killed by another young black man than he is likely to be killed in the war.

Obama is spouting the black liberation theology nonsense on victimization. He should be smarter than that. Until those who are committing the crimes change their ways they belong in prison where they cannot create the 10 to 12 real victims a year.

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Why do They All Hope He is Lying?

Zenpundit has discussed the boring and mainstream makeup of Obama's newly announced National Security Working Group. Zen links to Matthew Yglesias, whose commenters are not entirely happy with the low quotient of "change" this group represents. But they hope he is just pointing to these people to get elected, and then the real Barack the "change guy" will come to the fore. It is weird how so many who claim to like Obama hope he is lying. Three examples come to mind immediately:

1. People who like free trade hope he was lying to the voters of Ohio about tearing up NAFTA. He can't really have meant that.

2. People who like the idea of bipartisanship ignore the fact that he is the most partisan Senator in the whole chamber.

3. People who want to believe he will be an incarnation of Leftist hopes and dreams will try to believe that this list of stodgy foreign policy advisers is a subterfuge.

Usually you hope someone you want to vote for is telling the truth. You hope that he will carry through consistently with his track record, and that he will do what he says he will do. Why is Obama different?

My speculation: Because Obama's vacuous campaign of "change" is meant to create a blank whiteboard that everyone can project their fantasy scenarios onto. It is a brilliant marketing gimmick. Every time that Obama seems to suggest an actual direction, it jars with the fantasy, and causes cognitive dissonance and irritation, and a pronouncement that the REAL Obama is the one in my head, not the one who intermittently articulates the ghostly outline of a coherent policy position.

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Republicans Take Obama's Shady Political Director to Task

More Hope, or Change, or something... The people in Ohio are calling out Barack Obama on his controversial new staff member. PolitickerOH reported:

Republicans are attacking Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and his presidential campaign over his new political director who was accused of using felons to get out the vote for the 2004 presidential election in Ohio.

The Obama campaign announced yesterday that Patrick Gaspard will be its new national political director. Gaspard, a New York labor official, was the national field director for America Coming Together during the 2004 cycle. That year the Associated Press reported that ACT under Gaspard paid convicted felons to canvass homes and solicit private information (including Social Security numbers) from voters as part of its GOTV effort. The AP also noted that it is not illegal for felons to canvass, though they are not allowed to vote.

Patrick Gaspard's liberal organization was hiring murderers and rapists in Missouri to go door to door and sign up the vote. His organization was later fined $750,000 for their crimes. This obviously didn't matter to Obama.

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





22 June, 2008

Obama's "achievements" and "brilliance"

Below is an example of how a clever lawyer can make a virtue out of Obama's total lack of significant achievements so far. He obviously has a hard job of it -- "suspecting" achievements where there are none. He refuses to acknowledge that Obama's law review appointment was just affirmative action and no indication of merit -- and goes downhill from there. There is no indication otherwise that Obama was "brilliant". What about Obama's grades? He has not released them despite requests. The author is a highly regarded Australian/British trial lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson. He is of course generally Left-leaning. That he makes such a poor job of selling Obama as brilliant is, I think, instructive. Like Obama himself, it's all flash and no substance

As a brilliant student, the Democratic candidate became the first black editor of the influential Harvard Law Review. What does volume 140 reveal about his future career? If Barack Obama is elected president of the United States, it will be the result of another presidential election back in February 1990. At that time, 80 of his Harvard classmates chose him to be the first black scholar to edit their law review. That instantly brought him to national attention, with articles in the New York Times and other major papers, a book contract and 700 job offers from all the best law firms. He was a mature student of 28 at the time and, after graduation, worked for several years as a community lawyer before ascending the greasy pole of Illinois politics. What does this period of his life foretell?

There are very few back issues of the Harvard Law Review available in the UK. I tracked down volume 140 on a deserted floor of the Middle Temple library, above the amazing Molyneux globe that guided Sir Walter Raleigh to the New World. It was unthumbed and weighed in at 1,964 pages, comprising learned articles, students' case notes and book reviews, with many thousands of footnotes. The university law review is an American phenomenon that has no parallel in our lazier and less academic law schools: the notion of an elite group of students determining the focus of contemporary legal thinking would cause apoplexy in Oxbridge common rooms. But in the US, law reviews are important in shaping the law, and Harvard's is the most important of all.

Hence the newsworthiness of Obama's election. Never before had there been a black editor-in-chief. "The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress," he said at a press conference. "But you have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds of thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance," he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment. It was a worthy beginning, and earned him an affectionate imper sonation in that year's Harvard Law Revue ("In Chicago I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since").

The 1990-91 legal term was an unsettling and unsettled time. Justice William Brennan, architect of Supreme Court activism (such as the New York Times v Sullivan case, a foundation of US press freedom), had just retired, and Obama's volume begins with a tribute to him from Thurgood Marshall, the court's first black justice. William Rehnquist now held the reins, and Ronald Reagan and George Bush appointees were in the majority: the candle of liberal juris prudence, burn ing bright in classrooms inspired by the phil osophy of Ronald Dworkin, was beginning to gutter.

Volume 140 is full of civil liberties issues (Obama had been an editor of the previous year's Civil Liberties Review) and full of apprehension lest Dworkin's moral theories should cut no ice with the conservatives on the Supreme Court. The first major article (solicited, it was noted with surprise, from a non-Ivy League professor) analysed the philosophy of Vaclav Havel, and argued that his "individual responsibility" approach might be better suited to protecting free dom than Dworkin's appeals to individual rights. Volume 140 exhibits a refreshing interest in foreign cases (some Republican justices regard the citation of UK court decisions as tantamount to treason), and there is a contrast between the views of Stephen Sedley QC on the need to censor hate speech and the American Civil Liberties Union's support for the right of racist utterance.

Rhetorical genius

Barack Obama leaves no byline in this volume [i.e. he wrote nothing as far as we can see], but as president he was responsible for selecting the topic of the major student disquisition: a 180-page analysis of the need for new laws to protect the environment. Introduced with quotations from Chekhov, U Thant and the Grateful Dead, it appears prescient today: it was produced long before climate change became topical and its advocacy of "green helmets" and extraterritorial law enforcement against corporate polluters is more relevant than ever.

It is tempting to detect the young Obama's hand in a few of the many unsigned articles and book reviews. There is a scathing dismissal of a book by Roy Grutman, a great courtroom advocate ("Money is what makes his legal world go round"), reminiscent of Obama's later comments that the law "is a sort of glorified accounting that seems to regulate the affairs of those who have power". And I strongly suspect his contribution to the last and best article in volume 104, entitled "Talking of unconscionable niggers".

This is an acidic review of a biography of Frederick Douglass, the slave who became a formid able orator for abolition and later a respected public servant (the title is a quoted reaction to Douglass's modest request to be paid for his services). The review notes how most white abolitionists (including Abraham Lincoln) were opposed to equal rights for freed slaves, and severely criticises the author (a white historian) for failing to notice black women. This is not an admission that Obama - who was shortly to marry Michelle (she had graduated from Harvard before him) - could readily forgive.

Obama himself graduated with the legal world at his feet. He could have taken a highly paid job at a prestigious law firm, or a year's clerkship with a Supreme Court justice [Would any justice have had him? It has been said that none would], followed by an even higher-paid job. Instead, he returned to community work for a small firm in Chicago that specialised in housing, welfare and employment and that paid him a modest $167 an hour. For all his rhetorical genius, he never tried a case, preferring the solicitor's work of researching briefs and preparing witness statements. His clients were whistleblowers and non-governmental organisations anxious to use the law to assist the registration of voters who were poor and black and mainly Democrat. In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate, although he continued to lecture for 12 years on constitutional law as a visiting professor in Chicago. By all accounts, especially those of his students, he was an outstanding teacher.

There is one abiding mystery about Obama's legal career. Although (as his books attest) he is a fine writer, he never put his name to any article, anywhere. But it was a time when the very ambitious had become very cautious: Robert Bork had been denied Supreme Court confirmation on the strength (in fact, the weakness) of his earlier writings, and the mysterious David Souter passed muster only because he had written nothing that Democrats on the Senate's judiciary committee could sink their teeth into (to Republican fury, he turned out to be a closet liberal). Perhaps young Barack decided to leave no hostages to fortune in a career trajectory that could take him to the Supreme Court - or to the White House. Or perhaps he was too busy with his humble work in and for poor commu nities to bother about reshaping a legal system that he had come to believe would inevitably serve the powerful.

Ironically, it is that system which is most at stake in this election. George W Bush leaves a bloc of four dyed-in-the-wool conservatives seated for many years to come on the Supreme Court of nine judges. Three of the remaining moderates (Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and Souter) are likely to leave in the next few years. "Gentleman John" McCain has promised to appoint strict constructionists, judges who will find no constitutional bar to executing juveniles, or limiting abortions or abolishing habeas corpus. The fate of liberal jurisprudence hangs once again in the balance - as it did, in 1990, for the president of the Harvard Law Review.

Barack Obama's legal career never took off, for all its historic promise at Harvard. He turned his back on the glamour of trial attorneyship and the megabucks of a prestige partnership, preferring to help house the poor. That may have been the result of careful calculation, as the quickest way to a political career. Or it may simply be that Barack Obama, despite being a lawyer, is a really good person.

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Obama's Lame Claim About McCain's Money

Obama says McCain is "fueled" by money from lobbyists and PACs, but those sources account for less than 1.7 percent of McCain's money

Summary

Obama announced he would become the first presidential candidate since 1972 to rely totally on private donations for his general election campaign, opting out of the system of public financing and spending limits that was put in place after the Watergate scandal. One reason, he said, is that "John McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs." We find that to be a large exaggeration and a lame excuse. In fact, donations from PACs and lobbyists make up less than 1.7 percent of McCain's total receipts, and they account for only about 1.1 percent of the RNC's receipts.

Analysis

Sen. Barack Obama declared June 19 that he would not accept public funds for his general election campaign and would instead finance it entirely with private donations. Or, as he put it, with money from "the American people." He thus will not be bound by the spending limits that would have come with taxpayer money, and he will be legally free to spend as much as he can manage to raise.

A Lame Excuse

However, the first of the two reasons he gave for his decision doesn't square very well with the facts. In a video recording sent to supporters, Obama said:

Obama: We face opponents who've become masters at gaming this broken system. John McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs.

To say that either the McCain campaign or the RNC are "fueled" by money from lobbyists and PACs is an overstatement, to say the least. Such funds make up less than 1.7 percent of McCain's presidential campaign receipts and 1.1 percent of the RNC's income.

McCain - As of the end of April, the McCain campaign had reported receiving $655,576 from lobbyists, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That is less than seven-tenths of 1 percent of his total receipts of $96,654,783. His campaign also took in $960,990 from PACs, amounting to just under 1 percent of total receipts. The two sources combined make up less than 1.7 percent of his total.

RNC - The Republican National Committee has raised $143,298,225, of which only $135,000 has been come from lobbyists, according to the CRP. That's less than one-tenth of 1 percent. It also took in about 1 percent of its receipts from PACs, CRP said. Taken together, that's about 1.1 percent from PACs and lobbyists.

Obama's Advantage

It's not our place to comment on the wisdom or propriety of Obama's financial strategy, except to note that it is perfectly legal and also that McCain and Obama both refused to accept public funds or spending limits during the primary campaign.

We also note that Obama's decision - whatever may have motivated it - is likely to give him a big financial advantage over McCain in the weeks just before the November election. This is a reversal of the historic pattern, in which Republican candidates have nearly always been able to out-raise their Democratic rivals. Had Obama accepted public funds, as McCain is expected to do, both candidates would have been limited to spending $84.1 million, all of it from taxpayers. But Obama has shown the potential for raising and spending much more.

The Obama campaign already has raised $265 million through the end of April, more than two-and-a-half times as much as McCain has taken in. Figures for May are due out soon. The Obama campaign said on May 6 that it had surpassed 1.5 million individual donors, and it probably has many more than that by now. All of those primary donors are legally free to make new contributions to finance Obama's general election campaign, which officially commences after he becomes certified as the Democratic party's nominee at the convention at the end of August.

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Hugely destructive Obama tax policy

Sen. Barack Obama has a bad idea for "extending the life of Social Security." He has proposed applying the Social Security tax to incomes above $250,000, in addition to the current tax on incomes up to $102,000. It's unfair, he explained, for middle-class earners to pay Social Security tax on "every dime they make" while the very rich pay on "only a very small percentage of their income."

Reporters cited the Obama statement without asking for the logic behind having someone making $100,000 pay on every dime and someone making $250,000 pay on just 41% of income, while someone making $10,000,000 would pay on 98.5% of income. There is no economic principle or theory of tax law that would endorse such a result.

Sen. Obama's logic is fairly obvious, although it hardly makes him an exemplar of the "new politics." The $100,000 to $250,000 group is a targeted voter demographic, and he really didn't want to sock them with a 12.4 percentage point hike in their tax rate. But, as Sen. Obama himself noted in his June 13 announcement, just 3% of workers make more than a quarter-million.

Neither Franklin Roosevelt, who started Social Security, nor the intervening three dozen Congresses thought they were imposing an "unfair" system on the middle class. There is a very good and principled reason why Social Security taxes are paid on just $102,000 of income: Benefits are calculated based on that same $102,000 of income.

The fundamental principle of linking taxes and benefits was established when Roosevelt designed Social Security. He wanted to make sure that it was not a welfare system, calling Social Security "a base upon which each one of our citizens may build his individual security through his own individual efforts." His instincts have generally proved sound. Had Social Security been considered "welfare" rather than a return on taxes earned, it probably would never have had the popularity or the staying power that it has enjoyed for the last seven decades.

Although the formula connecting benefits to tax payments or "contributions" has evolved slightly over time, it still adheres to this basic message. Today, what Social Security terms a "low-wage" worker will pay (in present value terms) $77,197 over his or her lifetime and get $112,261 in benefits. A median-wage worker earning $42,000 will pay $171,550 and get back $187,085. A "high-wage" worker making $67,000 will pay $274,480 and get back $245,085.

Under the current formula, lower-wage workers get a slightly better deal than do higher-wage workers, assuming the same life expectancy. But the principle remains that as workers' wages rise so do the taxes they pay, and so do the benefits they will get from the system.

Sen. Obama would do away with this principle by requiring higher-end workers to pay taxes without getting any extra benefits linked to their higher contributions. This would be a big step toward turning Social Security from a contributory pension scheme into just another welfare program.

The economics of what Sen. Obama is proposing should be at least as troubling. A high-income entrepreneur would see his or her federal marginal tax rate rise to 53% from 37.7% under Sen. Obama's tax plan. He proposes a 4.6 percentage point hike in the personal income tax rate, a loss of some itemized deductions, and a 12.4 percentage point hike in the Social Security payroll tax. This would take a successful entrepreneur's effective marginal tax rate higher than what it was under Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon, when the maximum tax on an entrepreneur was 50%.

One of the lessons from the disastrous economics of the 1970s and the subsequent Reagan tax cuts is that everyone - particularly entrepreneurs - responds to incentives. If you take away 10% of a high earner's after-tax income at the margin, he will cut his taxable income by at least 4%. At the margin, this taxpayer now takes home 62.3% of his earnings, a figure that will drop to 47% under the Obama plan. According to a widely accepted economics rule of thumb, the entrepreneur's taxable profit would drop by 11.2%.

Now consider how the Obama plan would affect the taxes paid by such an entrepreneur with a taxable profit from his business of $500,000. Under current law, he would pay $27,148 in Social Security and Medicare taxes, plus $142,969 in personal income taxes, for a total of $170,117. If the taxpayer did not change his behavior at all, under the Obama plan he would face a $31,000 Social Security tax hike and a $11,494 hike in his personal taxes - or a 25% tax hike. But, if the taxpayer responds as the economic models predict, his taxable profit would drop to $444,000. His Social Security and Medicare tax bill would still soar to $51,580. But his income taxes, even with a higher tax rate, would drop to $132,882 for a total of $184,462.

In other words, Sen. Obama is planning on a combined series of tax hikes to produce $42,000 in tax revenue, but consensus economic modeling suggests the government's net take would rise only $14,000.

We should also keep in mind that the economic well-being of the country is not measured by how much taxes the government can collect, or even the size of the deficit. Rather, it is measured by the country's productive capacity. Our theoretical entrepreneur's 11.2% decline in taxable income reflects both less effort on his part and a less efficient use of his income in order to avoid confiscatory tax rates. Or, to put it directly, Sen. Obama's plan would reduce an entrepreneur's after-tax profits by $70,000 - $56,000 in lost profits and $14,000 more in taxes - just to produce a net revenue gain to the government of $14,000.

It is shocking to think that we have a presidential candidate who would make the private sector $5 poorer in order to make the government $1 richer. More likely, given the calculated political design of the proposal, no one in the Obama campaign told the candidate about the economic, ethical or historical consequences of his suggestion.

This indicates that what is really on offer is not some postpartisan approach to politics, but a Democratic candidate far to the left of Bill Clinton.

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The Two Obamas

DAVID BROOKS draws attention to the psychopathic Obama below

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they're running against some academic liberal who wouldn't wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn't proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they're running against some naive university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there's Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who'd throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He's the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he's too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he's been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in "Entourage" and it all falls into place.

Back when he was in the Illinois State Senate, Dr. Barack could have taken positions on politically uncomfortable issues. But Fast Eddie Obama voted "present" nearly 130 times. From time to time, he threw his voting power under the truck.

Dr. Barack said he could no more disown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than disown his own grandmother. Then the political costs of Rev. Wright escalated and Fast Eddie Obama threw Wright under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have been a workhorse senator. But primary candidates don't do tough votes, so Fast Eddie Obama threw the workhorse duties under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have changed the way presidential campaigning works. John McCain offered to have a series of extended town-hall meetings around the country. But favored candidates don't go in for unscripted free-range conversations. Fast Eddie Obama threw the new-politics mantra under the truck.

And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He's spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama's got more money now.

And Fast Eddie Obama didn't just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa's final steps to sainthood.

The media and the activists won't care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama's money is forever. He's got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.

I have to admit, I'm ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he'll sell that out, what won't he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain't beanbag. If we're going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.

All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naive. But naive is the last word I'd use to describe Barack Obama. He's the most effectively political creature we've seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn't smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

Source




Is There A Pattern Here? If So, Is There A Name For It?

Barack Obama

* opposes school vouchers for poor families but sends his own children to a private school;

* supports "campaign finance reform" but opts out of public financing since he can raise more money privately under the old, presumably corrupt system;

* attests to the centrality of his religious experience in shaping his identity but regards others, who are less privileged and culturally and politically different, as "clinging" to religion;

* promises an end to bitter partisanship even though his own record (what there is of it) is one of the most partisan in the Senate and his opponent's is one of the most bi-partisan;

* promises to transcend race even though he a) married, sat passively for 20 years in the pews of, and raised his children in a church led by and permeated with a militant afro-centrism that often found expression in parnoid (they invented AIDS to kill us), anti-white ("greedy whites" etc.), hatred of America (AmeriKKKa, etc.), and b) continues to support government programs that benefit some and burden others because of their race.

* claims to face the future "with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations" while, several lines later in the same speech, claiming that his own nomination will be regarded in the future as "the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless . the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.."

I know there's a word for a pattern of saying one thing and doing the opposite, but I can't call it to mind right now. Let's see, it's not "Messiah" (despite caring for the sick for the first time, halting the rise of the oceans, and healing the planet) ... it's not "New Politician." Oh well, I'm sure I'll think of it in a while....

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Obama the ignoramus

According to recent headlines, Barack Obama is a man on the "cusp" and in the "swirl" of history. True enough. But for a man poised to make American history, Obama has an alarmingly tenuous grasp of it. He has portrayed himself and his candidacy as an inventible, almost predestined force of history. From launching his campaign on the steps of the Old Illinois State Capitol, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his legendary "House Divided" speech, to basking in the youthful shadow of John F. Kennedy while sharing stages with that martyred president's relatives, Obama has placed his and his family's story firmly in the context of the most noble and heroic aspects of America's past.

However, even casual fans of U.S. history will notice that Obama's understanding of his country's story is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies. On March 4, 2007, speaking at the Selma Voting Rights March Commemoration, Obama, claiming that the legendary march brought his parents together, said, "There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama..." (Sorry Barack, but if that's your only claim on Selma, you don't have one. The bridge protest took place in 1965, four years after you were born.)

In the same speech, Obama linked his father's arrival in America and his own birth to Camelot. "So the Kennedys decided, 'We're going to do an airlift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is," he said. And thus his Kenyan father met his transplanted Kansan mother and history was made.

Not quite. It was Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya who lobbied Americans to bring Africans to the states to create a new class of educated African elite, resulting in the 1959 airlift that brought Barack Obama Sr. to Hawaii. President Kennedy did not take office until 1961, and there is no evidence to suggest that before he took office he or any members of his family supported the program.

This past Memorial Day, Obama, speaking in New Mexico, claimed his uncle was one "of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps." Awkwardly, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz, not Americans forces.

WHILE OBAMA STRUGGLES with dates and facts, even more disturbing is his cockeyed view of past U.S. diplomacy, which he uses to defend his own vision of its future.

Shunning the current administration's strategy for dealing with foreign dangers, Obama recently said "Change is realizing that meeting today's threats requires not just our firepower, but the power of our diplomacy -- tough, direct diplomacy where the president of the United States isn't afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for." He called this the noble "legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy."

So Obama uses the collective legacies of past Democratic presidents as a shield to defend his proposed presidential get-togethers with the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar-al Assad, Hugo Chavez, the Castros and any other murderous dictator that wants to have tea with the leader of the free world.

But Roosevelt never met with Hitler, Mussolini, or Emperor Hirohito. Neither did Truman, who also never met with Kim Il Sung. The inexperienced young Kennedy's Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 is now considered a failure. In fact, reflecting upon the debacle, Kennedy himself later admitted, "He beat the hell out of me."

In fact, it was Kennedy's disastrous interaction with Khrushchev that led the Russian leader to believe that America wouldn't interfere with the construction of the Berlin Wall or take decisive action to stop Operation Anadyr -- the secret deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba.

While Obama freely appropriates history to suggest his coming place in America's pantheon of great leaders, his cheerleading section in the American (and international) press has been rather quiet, only egged on to call Obama on his distortions when conservative bloggers point them out. (One wonders what type of reaction John McCain would get if he were to present a similarly skewed version of American history?)

Obama's capture of the Democratic presidential nomination is indeed historic, as would be his victory in November. But the would-be maker of American history is no student of it. How can someone whose understanding of our history is so hazy now be poised to reshape it?

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





21 June, 2008

THE OBAMA-AYRES CONNECTION:THE BIG LIE

How many times does Barack Obama have to lie before people start realizing that this guy isn't the man that he ,or the press, claims to be. How many lies does he have to tell before someone , somewhere calls him on it? I therefore present to you what I consider to be a major lie in regards to his relationship with William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist from the '60s. In a debate on ABC he was asked about this and his response was :

George, but this is an example of what I'm talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George.

So this kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, is somehow - somehow their ideas could be attributed to me - I think the American people are smarter than that. They're not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn't.

First a little reminder of who William Ayers is. In the late '60's he was a founder of the radical group Weathermen who set over 20 bombs including one that went off in the Pentagon. No one was hurt but many important computers were destroyed. He and his wife and fellow member, Berardine Dohrn, were never charged in the bombings due to government misconduct. However Dohrn did recieve probation for aggravated battery and bail jumping. She also served a year for refusing to testify against another member of the Weatherman who was charged in an armed robbery. In an interview with the New York Times he was quoted as saying ''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' The interview appeared on September 11, 2001. Yes,really. And here he is on the posing on the cover of a local Chicago magazine ..standing on the American flag: Kinda makes you all feel warm and fuzzy doesn't it?

Now back to what Obama said. His statement is entirely misleading. Barack Obama would have you believe that he and Ayers were simply neighborhood acquaintances. The Politico reported that Barack Obama went to the home of Ayers in 1995:

I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor." Obama and Palmer "were both there," he said.

Indeed, the relationship between Obama and Ayers runs deeper. In 1993 Philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg pledged 500 million dollars to a school reform initiative called the Annenberg Challenge . This is where William Ayers comes in:

When three of Chicago's most prominent education reform leaders met for lunch at a Thai restaurant six years ago to discuss the just-announced $500 million Annenberg Challenge, their main goal was to figure out how to ensure that any Annenberg money awarded to Chicago "didn't go down the drain," said William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Ayers, who was at that lunch table in late 1993, helped write the successful Chicago grant application.

So in 1995 The Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund was created. They received 49.2 million dollars. Ayers and his two colleagues went on the form a "working group" that soon comprised over 70 members. But Ayers was a main figure in this working group as he himself says on his website:

Co-Founder and Co-Chair, Chicago School Reform Collaborative (The Annenberg Challenge), 1995-2000. Want to guess who the working group, which morphed into the Chicago School Reform Collaborative , picked to lead the the fund? That's right..Barack Obama was tapped to be the first Chairman of the Board of the newly created Chicago Annenberg Challenge fund. The working group went on to form the CSRC which acted as amongst other things a consultant to the fund.

Now , does Obama really expect us to believe that while serving as the chairman of the board of the CACF he had no contact with William Ayers? And what exactly did Ayers see in Obama to have selected him for this important role? Look at it this way..would Ayers have picked someone who holds MY views..or someone who hold views closer to his own?.If you know anything about these far-left radicals it's that they have very little tolerance for people who don't think like them. For example in 2006 Ayers traveled to Caracas, Venezuela to give a speech on..you guessed it..education. here's some choice excerpts:

President Hugo Chavez, Vice-President Vicente Rangel, Ministers Moncada and Isturiz, invited guests,comrades. I'm honored and humbled to be here with you this morning. I bring greetings and support from your brothers and sisters throughout Northamerica. Welcome to the World Education Forum! Amamos la revolucion Bolivariana!

I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position-and from that day until this I've thought of myself as a teacher, but I've also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: you can change your life-whoever you are, wherever you've been, whatever you've done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!

Totalitarianism demands obedience and conformity, hierarchy, command and control. Royalty requires allegiance. Capitalism promotes racism and militarism - turning people into consumers, not citizens. Participatory democracy, by contrast, requires free people coming together voluntarily as equals who are capable of both self-realization and, at the same time, full participation in a shared political and economic life.

Despite being under constant attack from within and from abroad, the Bolivarian revolution has made astonishing strides in a brief period: from the Mission Simoncito to the Mission Robinson to the Mission Ribas to the Mission Sucre, to the Bolivarian schools and the UBV, Venezuelans have shown the world that with full participation, full inclusion, and popular empowerment, the failings of capitalist schooling can be resisted and overcome. Venezuela is a beacon to the world in its accomplishment of eliminating illiteracy in record time, and engaging virtually the entire population in the ongoing project of education.

Viva Mission Sucre!
Viva Presidente Chavez!
Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana!
Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

Is it not a legitimate question to ask whether the man who wants to be the next President of the United States shares these views?..Or is this simply the William Ayers that Obama didn't know..like the Rev. Wright that he didn't know..or the Tony Rezko that Obama didn't know? I'm sure he'll have some excuse that his simpleton supporters will take on face value- But, not me!

Source




Some good Obamology from Taranto today

Recycled below. See the original for links

Mrs. Obama and the Tuskegee Superstition

In February 2007, we noted a rare instance of agreement between this column and the New York Times editorial page. The topic was whether 11- and 12-year-old girls should be vaccinated for the human papillomavirus. HPV is sexually transmitted and is believed to cause 70% of all cases of cervical cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute, this year 11,070 new cases of cervical cancer are expected to be diagnosed, and 3,870 women are expected to die of the disease. Do the arithmetic: Had the HPV vaccine been administered to these women when they were girls, some 7,749 would have been spared cancer and 2,709 would have died later of some other cause.

"Social conservatives object that the vaccine will encourage promiscuity," the Times wrote last year, "but it seems farfetched to believe that protection from cervical cancer will change any girl's behavior." That seems right to us--and even if the vaccine has some marginal bad effect on sexual behavior, several thousand cancer deaths a year seems a high price to pay to avoid it. Even the Times editors thought cancer prevention an important enough goal to abandon their usual liberal keep-your-laws-off-my-body orthodoxy when it comes to matters gynecological.

Now, as blogger Tom Maguire notes, the subject of HPV vaccination has come up in a different context: yesterday's New York Times story about Michelle Obama's "subtle makeover." Maguire cites an anecdote from Mrs. Obama's work at the University of Chicago Medical Center, a story that, in Maguire's words, is "ludicrously presented as a sympathetic and positive story of her professional efforts":

She also altered the hospital's research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

"She'll talk about the elephant in the room," said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.

This isn't the first time the Tuskegee experiment has come up during the presidential campaign. In April the Obamas' then-pastor, Jeremiah Wright, explained his belief that the U.S. government had invented AIDS as a tool of genocide against black people: "Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything."

The Tuskegee outrage was real. But the notion that the Tuskegee experiment--which began in the Jim Crow era (1932) and ended in 1972, eight years after the Civil Rights Act became law--reflects the attitudes of American governmental and medical institutions today is an urban legend, a superstition--and potentially a deadly one.

The Times's account suggests that girls in Chicago were denied potentially lifesaving vaccinations because Michelle Obama pandered to racial paranoia instead of standing up for the truth. Is that why they pay her the big bucks?


'Overheated and Amplified'

Fortune magazine reports that Barack Obama is publicly backing away from his stated opposition to Nafta, confirming the private assurances he reportedly offered Canadians that he didn't really mean it:

In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine's upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn't want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.

"Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified," he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA "devastating" and "a big mistake," despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? "Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don't exempt myself," he answered.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Just words--just words!

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Just words!

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Just words!

"I have a dream." Just words!

"Only Barack Obama consistently opposed Nafta." Just words!


Obama as Bush's Heir--II

Barack Obama weighed in yesterday on the hunt for Osama bin Laden:

Obama said Wednesday he would bring Osama bin Laden to justice in a way that wouldn't allow the terrorist mastermind to become a martyr, but he may be killed if the U.S. government finds him. "First of all, I think there is an executive order out on Osama bin Laden's head," the Illinois senator said at a news conference. "And if I'm president, and we have the opportunity to capture him, we may not be able to capture him alive."

There's an old poster out West, as we recall, that said, "Wanted: dead or alive."

Obama also complained about America's failure thus far to capture bin Laden:

"Osama bin Laden and his top leadership--the people who murdered 3,000 Americans--have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world," Obama said. "That's the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism."

We're no fan of hate-filled audiotapes, but we prefer them to bombings and hijackings, which is what bin Laden and his cronies were doing before "the Bush-McCain approach."

Besides, those audiotapes are almost certainly protected by the First Amendment unless there is an imminent danger that they will incite someone to commit a crime. Doesn't Obama care about civil liberties?


Out of Wedlock, Into Lockup

The Chicago Defender notes a curious claim by Barack Obama in his Father's Day speech:

"We know that more than half of all Black children live in single-parent households. We know the statistics--that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison," he said, as his wife Michelle and two daughters listened from the front row.

We're certainly inclined to believe that the absence of a father makes a child likelier to run afoul of the law, but can it really be true that fatherless children are 20 times as likely to end up in prison but only five times as likely to commit crimes? That would mean criminals from intact families get away with their crimes three times as often as those raised by single mothers.

Source




Obama hubris

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama: "I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States."

Whew. That's a relief. For a moment there, I thought Obama would embrace the policies of Jimmy Carter.

Oh wait. This fool - this naive twit - is talking about the Bush administration. How dare he? Obama has yet to make one important decision in his adult life. He coasted on good looks and charm. It helps to be connected to the Daley machine, the Loop radicals and the radical black church if you run for office in Chicago. He can eat at the adult table when he actually does something unpopular or even stands up for the rights of an opponent.

He does not want to be lectured? Few know-it-alls do.

Source




Obama Regroups on Foreign Policy

Barack Obama, evidently stung by the fact that his statements on foreign policy have come across as naive at best, ignorant at worst, has gone looking for reinforcements in the form of a new team of national security advisers. The new team includes thirteen members, not counting the 41 retired admirals and generals with whom he also met today. Obama's media availability featuring the announcement of his "new team" took place before a backdrop of 17 American flags. That must be Obama's famous "nuance" at work.

Obama needed some new national security advisers, since he has had to distance himself from several of the original group. There are some good people among the thirteen--Sam Nunn, notably--but it is heavy on Clinton administration retreads and people with no foreign policy expertise at all, as far as I know, like Eric Holder.

The presence of the Clintonistas may account, in part, for Obama's determination to return to the failed policy of fighting terrorism with lawyers. Obama's most telling comment today was this:

Now, my approach is guided by a simple premise. I have confidence that our system of justice and that our traditions of rule of law are strong enough to deal with terrorists.

I have confidence that our system of justice is strong enough to indict terrorists, as we indicted Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and others. That's a far different matter from apprehending and punishing them, however, and--the important point--even when we succeed in punishing terrorists after the fact, law enforcement techniques are insufficient to prevent them from killing thousands of Americans. This isn't an opinion, it's fact proven by experience, as the September 11 Commission found.

Obama's prepared remarks consisted of a tirade against the "Bush/McCain" approach to counter-terrorism:

The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice. They're Osama bin Laden, Al Qaida, and their sponsors, the Taliban.

This is a strange thing to say. A number of those responsible for September 11 have been captured or killed, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mohammed Atef, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh and others. Beyond that, the majority of al Qaeda's leadership has been killed or captured. As for the Taliban, they no longer control Afghanistan, and many hundreds or thousands of their fighters have been killed. So Obama, once again, has a very odd sense of what constitutes being "brought to justice." He appears to think that unless a terrorist has appeared before an American jury, he has gotten off scot-free. Obama's conclusion was the usual refrain:

[T]he record shows that George Bush and John McCain have been weak on terrorism. Their approach has failed. Because of their policies, we are less safe....

This is simply ignorant. As we argued here, it can't be denied that the Bush administration's policies have brought about a remarkable reduction in terrorist attacks against the United States. One can debate which of the administration's policies have been most instrumental in that success, but it can't be denied that, whether Obama and his new team of advisers like it or not, successful they have been.

It's going to take more than a photo-op with the likes of Madeleine Albright, a handful of retired military officers and seventeen flags to make Obama into a credible leader on foreign policy.

Source




Barack Obama should swap Chicago for Phoenix

Obama was formed by the icy, socialist city. But the votes he needs are in John McCain's hot, conservative heartland in Arizona

The coming clash between Barack Obama and John McCain is, the pundits tell us, a struggle between two Americas: liberal and conservative; black and white; young and old. But it is also a confrontation between two very different cities - Obama's Chicago and McCain's Phoenix - and their richly opposing political traditions.

As Upton Sinclair so brutally, brilliantly chronicled in The Jungle, Chicago, Illinois - nicknamed the "Windy City" just as much for its politics as the icy blasts tearing off Lake Michigan - has long been a crucible for US socialism. Together with Philadelphia and Baltimore, it was the premier city of organised labour and radical activism in the late 19th century.

At times, this politics spilled over into violence: the origins of the labour movement's May Day celebrations are to be found not in Clerkenwell or the Left Bank, but in an 1886 riot in Haymarket Square that led to bombs being hurled, policemen killed and the execution of the left-wing ringleaders.

In the last century, Chicago became a bastion of the Democratic Party with its celebrated city boss, Mayor Richard J. Daley, securing the White House for John F. Kennedy with votes culled from the local cemeteries. As a city, it stands in the progressive European tradition - high-density living, mass public transport, strong public sector unions, a pioneering tradition of social work and an attractively cosmopolitan feel (with more Poles than Cracow). All of which has been masterfully chronicled by its unofficial laureate, Studs Terkel, the former communist blacklistee and godfather of American social history.

Yet modern Chicago's most famous resident is the talk-show goddess and Democrat stalwart Oprah Winfrey. For this is a city of stark racial polarities, thanks to Mayor Daley's 1960s zoning strategies that cordoned off the African-American community into vast "projects" to the west and south of downtown. And it was these wretched, ignored, unfunded ghettoes that provided the political base for Jesse Jackson, the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and then a young community organiser called Barack Obama.

For despite the Hawaiian upbringing and Harvard degree, it is the politics of Chicago that has dictated Mr Obama's thinking. His liberalism is not some East Coast effete affair, but a progressive, cosmopolitan street-savvy ideology that has emerged from his South Side activism: a belief in the power of the State; a strict adherence to racial, social and sexual equality; opposition to guns and the death penalty; a commitment to the capacity of church and community to change life chances; pro-Palestinian and, crucially, anti-war.

But Chicago is a complex, unexpected city. For not far from Obama's Hyde Park house stands the University of Chicago - a remarkable institution of terrifying academic rigour where I spent an industrious few terms as an exchange student. Once home to Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and the so-called "Chicago boys", it was the intellectual engine house of supply-side economics, free-market policies and what became the Reagan-Thatcher revolution. Every political principle the city of Chicago stood against roared forth from the university's iconoclastic economics faculty. And while such conservative nostrums were studiously ignored in Cook County, Illinois, they found a warm reception in John McCain's adopted state.

For in contrast to the unionised, left-wing milieu of Chicago, Arizona is the land of Barry Goldwater, less government is good government and a consciously Wild West, libertarian ethos. Joyfully, there are no motorcycle helmet laws in AZ. And if Chicago grew out of the European civic model, Arizona's capital, Phoenix, is a template for postwar US urbanism: born of the airline industry and air-conditioning (which made desert living possible), it is a sprawling megalopolis of low-density housing, car dependency, and monotonous strip-malls stretching into the xeriscape.

"There are no centres, no recognisable borders to shape a sense of geographic identity," writes the New York Times columnist David Brooks of Phoenix and its ilk. It is a polycentric universe where the rhythms of the day are orientated around drives to the shopping mall, gym, church or work. In contrast to the great railway stations and art galleries of Chicago, there isn't much downtown or inner city; few civic landmarks or historic signifiers. Through Phoenix's boomburbs, Wallgreen's follows Burger King follows K-Mart follows Starbucks. I lived for a year in this exurban terrain of freeways and drive-thrus and at least once a week I would get lost trying to find my home through the sprawling, anonymous cityscape.

As such, it is a profoundly individualistic terrain lacking Chicago's engrained social fabric of class, race or community. Instead, its churning cycle of new residents live out the American dream with no time for local taxes, planning laws or local activism (outside the often evangelical churches). Brooks celebrates Senator McCain's exurbia as "a conservative utopia" and it was these self-contained, often gated "communities" that delivered the White House for George W. Bush in 2004.

For if industrial cities such as Chicago were the breeding ground of progressive politics, exurbia represents the amorphous heartland of modern conservatism. A study by The Los Angeles Times revealed that 97 of the 100 fastest-growing communities in America supported President Bush, providing him with a decisive 1.72 million vote advantage over John Kerry. Unfortunately for Mr Obama, this conservative majority has grown, thanks to hundreds of thousands of Americans moving from the cold northern states to the southwest sunshine of Las Vegas, Arizona and Colorado - and bringing with them a remarkable fertility rate.

Those decamping to the zoomburbs are choosing to buck the US birthrate by consciously raising large families. Who then vote Republican. According to analysis by Steve Sailer in The American Conservative, the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates went Republican in 2004. John Kerry, on the other hand, carried the 16 states with the lowest rates of conception.

So here is Mr Obama's urban conundrum. For all his love of metropolitan, liberal Chicago, it is grumpy old John McCain's Phoenix that represents the psephological future. And sooner or later, Mr Obama will have to join those tens of thousands of his Illinois compatriots swapping the icy winds of downtown Chicago for the sprawling embrace of metropolitan Phoenix, "Valley of the Sun". His future job depends on it.

Source




Change We Can Believe In

You'd better believe it. Senator Obama and his supporters dislike traditional Americanism, preferring the Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary change expressed in moral relativism. Senator Obama's army of followers are energized by inexperienced and immature students and by Baby Boomer anarchists eager to relive their activist days of the 1960s and 70s. They stand opposed to the historical traditions of the United States. Theirs is a world in which change is equated with sensual self-indulgence.

Underlying this vision of change is Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis, applied to politics and social interaction by John Dewey in the early 20th century. Dewey taught Columbia University students that Darwin's idea of evolution applied to morality as well as biology. This meant, said Dewey, that there can be no such thing as timeless principles of morality. Rules of social conduct are continually undergoing evolutionary change. All that matters is action that gets you what you want.

This is moral relativism, the rationalization for Senator Obama and his followers arrogating to themselves the right to change society's standards of acceptable behavior. "Bringing us together" in Senator Obama's terms means that traditionalists must conform to the ever-changing social standards of left-wing liberal-progressives.

Senator Obama's social change amounts to Hollywood's and mainstream media's beloved drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, marital infidelity, rampant divorce rates, fathering and abandoning children to single-parent upbringing, murder by abortion to facilitate sexual promiscuity, and same-sex marriage, all undermining the traditional family as the basic unit of society.

In this view, breakdown of traditional morality is liberation of the individual. It stands in contrast to the nation's founding Judeo-Christian understanding that such conduct is sinful defiance of God's Word and that sin is bondage and death.

In classic socialistic doctrine, we must abandon traditional loyalties and find our life's meaning in the collectivist society. We must become Lenin's New Soviet Man, taking only what we need and contributing whatever we have to the political state. Supporting that doctrine, Senator Obama stands firmly behind affirmative action, confiscatory taxes, and expansion of the welfare state to restructure society in conformity with the liberal-progressive-socialist vision of social justice.

Senator Obama's foreign policy rests upon an abstract intellectual concept called the community of nations. The Senator and his followers are eager to change our Constitution and to replace it with a one-world government under the UN, or some other subsidiary of the Socialist International. Hence the rejection of military power to protect our national interests and the naive vision of a changed world in which property and wealth are redistributed equally, a world in which everyone magically will thereafter have the same attitudes and aims, and a world in which Senator Obama's oratory will persuade lions to lie down in peace with lambs.

Those views descend from the 1960s Baby Boomers of Tom Hayden's Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the bomb-throwing bank robbers and murderers of the Weatherman underground, led in the 1970s by Senator Obama's friends and political backers Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. His fascination with those models led to the Senator's initial foray into politics as an SDS type of community organizer, working with Saul Alinsky to foment demands by welfare "clients" for increased handouts from taxpayers.

The bedrock of SDS and Weatherman belief was that ills of the world result from the twin evils of Judeo-Christian morality and economic laissez-faire. This paradigm derived from the 18th century French Revolutionary doctrine that saw private property rights, Christianity, and aristocratic privilege as the only things standing in the way of earthly social perfection.

French revolutionaries gave us the Reign of Terror: murder of more than 70,000 French citizens in the name of the Revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s, Baby Boomers took to the streets and college campuses, as Weatherman put it, to bring the Vietnam War home, ice a few pigs, kill their parents, and destroy Amerika. To that end they resorted to bank robberies, bombings, and murders of co-workers and innocent bystanders.

Liberal-progressive-socialists rationalized this violent destructiveness on a cold-blooded theoretical plane, as they had Stalin's mass murders in the 1930s. The perpetrators, they said, were driven to it by the criminal nature of traditional American society. Violence to combat the evils of spiritual religion, moral codes, and capitalist individualism was justified.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962 issued the Port Huron Statement, its version of the Communist Manifesto. In language that would fit neatly into Senator Obama's standard stump speech, Tom Hayden, Hanoi Jane Fonda's first husband, wrote:

...can we live in a different and better way? if we wanted to change society, how would we do it?..."

The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today..."

We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity...

In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles: that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings;

that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;

The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:

...that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual must share in its full determination;

that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation...

3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.

4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.

5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond...

The bridge to political power, though, will be built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies...

Never lose sight of the historical fact, however, that this lovey-dovey world of SDS and Senator Obama, called participatory democracy by socialists, necessitates the subordination of individual rights to the collective good. And the collective good is always defined by liberal-progressive-socialist leaders. It is the sort of democracy in which the Soviet Politburo could be regarded as speaking for the democratic will of the people.

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





20 June, 2008

Obama birth certificate question re-opened



Look at it. It's lovely, isn't it? There's a much more detailed picture of it here (use the resize gadget to enlarge it).

But, as a graphics expert shows conclusively, it is a fake that somebody has produced using a graphics program.

So where is the real one? Does it exist? Is he really a native-born American, as the constitution requires?




Obama: NAFTA not so bad after all

The man who understands nothing and stands for nothing -- except power

The general campaign is on, independent voters are up for grabs, and Barack Obama is toning down his populist rhetoric - at least when it comes to free trade. In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine's upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn't want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.

"Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified," he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA "devastating" and "a big mistake," despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? "Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don't exempt myself," he answered.

Obama says he believes in "opening up a dialogue" with trading partners Canada and Mexico "and figuring to how we can make this work for all people."

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said that Obama-as the candidate noted in Fortune's interview-has not changed his core position on NAFTA, and that he has always said he would talk to the leaders of Canada and Mexico in an effort to include enforceable labor and environmental standards in the pact.

Nevertheless, Obama's tone stands in marked contrast to his primary campaign's anti-NAFTA fusillades. The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.

The Democratic candidates fought hard to win over those factions of their party, with Obama generally following Hillary Clinton's lead in setting a protectionist tone. In February, as the campaign moved into the Rust Belt, both candidates vowed to invoke a six-month opt-out clause ("as a hammer," in Obama's words) to pressure Canada and Mexico to make concessions. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called that threat a mistake, and other leaders abroad expressed worries about their trade deals. Leading House Democrats, including Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel, distanced themselves from the candidates.

Now, however, Obama says he doesn't believe in unilaterally reopening NAFTA. On the afternoon that I sat down with him to discuss the economy, Obama said he had just spoken with Harper, who had called to congratulate him on winning the nomination. "I'm not a big believer in doing things unilaterally," Obama said. "I'm a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people."

Obama has repeatedly described himself as a free-trade proponent who wants to be a "better bargainer" on behalf of U.S. interests and wants agreements to include labor and environmental standards.

In May 2007, congressional Democrats and the Bush administration agreed to a plan to include environmental and international labor standards in upcoming trade agreements. Still, later that year Obama supported one agreement (Peru) and opposed three others (Panama, Colombia, South Korea). Labor leaders - many of whom backed Obama in the primary - were the chief opponents of those pacts.

Obama jumped into the anti-trade waters with Clinton even though his top economics adviser, the University of Chicago's Austan Goolsbee, has written that America's wage gap is primarily the result of a globalized information economy - not free trade. On Feb. 8, Goolsbee met with the Canadian consul general in Chicago and offered assurances that Obama's rhetoric was "more reflective of political maneuvering than policy," according to a Canadian memo summarizing the meeting that was obtained by Fortune. "In fact," the Canadian memo said, Goolsbee "mentioned that going forward the Obama camp was going to be careful to send the appropriate message without coming off as too protectionist."

In the Fortune interview, Obama noted that despite his support for opening markets, "there are costs to free trade" that must be recognized. He noted that under NAFTA, a more efficient U.S. agricultural industry displaced Mexican farmers, adding to the problem of illegal immigration. We "can't pretend that those costs aren't real," Obama added. Otherwise, he added, it feeds "the protectionist sentiment and the anti-immigration sentiment that is out there in both parties."

Obama also reiterated his determination to be a tougher trade bargainer. "The Chinese love free trade," he said, "but they are tough as nails when it comes to a bargain, right? They will resist any calls to stop manipulating their currency. It's no secret they have consistently encroached on our intellectual property and our copyright laws. ...We should make sure in our trade negotiations that our interests and our values are adequately reflected."

Republican nominee John McCain, for his part, is emphasizing his consistent position as a free-trader. In a press conference in Boston this week, he attacked Obama as protectionist: "Senator Obama said that he would unilaterally - unilaterally! - renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, where 33 percent of our trade exists. And you know what message that sends? That no agreement is sacred if someone declares that as president of the United States they would unilaterally renegotiate it. I stand for free trade, and with all the difficulties and economic troubles we're in today, there's a real bright spot and that's our exports. Protectionism does not work.

Source




Obama's Fantasy Islands

Yesterday I played a number of selections from a single Obama speech made in Pennsylvania over the weekend, excerpts which confirmed the growing sense that Obama has been swimming in the nonsense of the left for so long that he cannot cover it over even for the general election campaign. It seems he really, really believes a lot of nonsense.

In the course of a single speech Obama asserted that offshore oil exploration would --in the very best scenario-- take five years to drive down the cost of gas 3 or 4 cents, but that an investment of 250 billion dollars five years ago would have produced an engine that didn't require fossil fuels.

Obama asserted that we could move to 40 MPG fuel standards for cars, and at another point asserted that the technology existed for 100 MPG cars, even as he asserted that exploration on the outer continental shelf and Alaska would cause permanent environmental damage.

Obama extolled a high school he had visited that --he firmly stated-- was majority Hispanic, and which had gone from a 50% drop-out rate to a 100% graduation and college enrollment rate in one year by using an Afro-American centric curriculum that focused on African music, then blues and jazz. Obama held out this school as an example of what could be achieved when students "were engaged in a curriculum that was interesting to them and seemed relevant to them."

The school he visited is Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts (here's a report of the speech Obama gave.) "MESA", as it is called, is indeed sending all of its class of 2008 to college next year. Obama was simply wrong to assert that the previous year had seen a drop-out rate of 50% for a predecessor school, and neglected to tell the Pennsylvania audience that the graduating class totalled 44 students, that the school and district were special projects of the Gates Foundation, and that a sister school to MESA failed. I cannot find any evidence online to back-up Obama's claim that the school is majority Hispanic, and I can't find any details on the African-American-centric curriculum that Obama credits with fueling the school's success.

It is at best a mangled and exaggerated tall tale, at worst another in Obama's now well-documented pattern of inventing the facts and stories he needs for whatever policy position he is pushing at that moment. Whether it is the success of the Kennedy-Khrushchev Vienna summit or the idea that the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg validated the Supreme Court's decision on habeas rights for Gitmo prisoners, science fiction automobile engines just over the horizon or oil prices unrelated to oil production, Senator Obama glides along on a cushion of fantasy and made-up facts. MSM either doesn't know enough to call him on his serial absurdities or doesn't notice them because of their collective swoon.

But the pattern reflects a life lived in the world of the left where facts just don't matter much when it comes to policy. When you are just building a career for yourself out of nonsense peddled to voters who want to believe tall tales, the cost is limited.

But as president, the toll brought about by a chief executive completely given over to the idea that if enough people repeat fantasy the fantasy will come true would be enormous.

In one speech, Obama visited his fantasy islands of education and energy policy. We can only hope he keeps talking and that MSM starts listening closely and checking his stories.

Source




Kurtzer: Obama Didn't Understand The 'Code Word' When He Spoke To AIPAC

Any excuse to deny the obvious:

Democrat Barack Obama misused a "code word" in Middle East politics when he said Jerusalem should be Israel's "undivided" capital but that does not mean he is naive on foreign policy, a top adviser said on Tuesday. Addressing a pro-Israel lobby group this month, the Democratic White House hopeful said: "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

The comment angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a future state. "He has closed all doors to peace," Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said after the June 4 speech.

Obama later said Palestinians and Israelis had to negotiate the status of the city, in line with long-held U.S. presidential policy.

Daniel Kurtzer, who advises Obama on the Middle East, said Tuesday at the Israel Policy Forum that Obama's comment stemmed from "a picture in his mind of Jerusalem before 1967 with barbed wires and minefields and demilitarized zones."

"So he used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East," Kurtzer said.

If at this late date Kurtzer has to add his 2 cents to clarify, then it is evident that Obama did indeed 'misspeak' and in fact did indeed backtrack. Jennifer Rubin writes about the implications of Obama's mistake:

Not understanding that a key term is a code word, not having a current picture of Jerusalem, and not anticipating the implications of having to reverse field within 24 hours sure sounds naive. Even more so, if the advisor says Obama didn't understand what he was saying.

But wait a minute. Didn't Obama have advisors on Israel assisting him with the speech? Where were they? Once again, this suggests that there is too little adult supervision of a candidate unaccustomed to speaking on the world stage about issues in which there are lots of code words, indeed in which every word (e.g. "preconditons," "immediate withdrawal") has meaning to Americans' foes and friends.

Source




Another Obama policy mystery

The "Change" Candidate Changing Stories Again

Well at least Obama is consistent. Consistent in changing his story to fit the venue. Yesterday he told the press he had spoken with Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, and had told him that he would set a timetable for withdrawal as President. He also said that Zebari had expressed their desire for sovereignty:

"He did emphasize his belief that we've made real progress and I think was eager to see political accommodations between the factions follow up in the wake of this progress.

"I think that he expressed what President Maliki has expressed as well," Obama continued, "which is that the Iraqis are obviously concerned about their sovereignty and are not seeking a long term occupation by the U.S. And so my sense is that we should be able to execute a withdrawal and set a timeframe - a timetable that continues to allow US forces to support Iraqi forces in going after terrorists, that continues to train the Iraqi police and military as long as we're not training militias that are turning on each other."

Problem is Zebari told reporters that it was a much different conversation:

.Mr. Obama has not altered his position: He still proposes withdrawing most U.S. troops according to a fixed timetable, set to the most rapid pace at which commanders have said American forces could be pulled out.

Mr. Zebari, who has served as foreign minister in every Iraqi government since 2003, finds Mr. Obama's proposal worrying. In a meeting with Post editors and reporters Tuesday, he said that after all the pain and sacrifices of the past five years, "we are just turning the corner in Iraq." A precipitous withdrawal, he said, "would create a huge vacuum and undo all the gains and achievements. And the others" - enemies of the United States - "would celebrate."

Mr. Zebari said he told Mr. Obama that "Iraq is not an island." In other words, an American withdrawal that destabilized the country would also roil the region around it and embolden U.S. adversaries such as al-Qaeda and Iran. "We have a deadly enemy," Mr. Zebari said. "When he sees that you commit yourself to a certain timetable, he will use this to increase pressure and attacks, to make it look as though he is forcing you out. We have many actors who would love to take advantage of that opportunity." Mr. Zebari says he believes U.S. forces can and should be drawn down. His point is that reductions should be made gradually, as the Iraqi army becomes stronger.

The foreign minister said "my message" to Mr. Obama "was very clear. . . . Really, we are making progress. I hope any actions you will take will not endanger this progress." He said he was reassured by the candidate's response, which caused him to think that Mr. Obama might not differ all that much from Mr. McCain. Mr. Zebari said that in addition to promising a visit, Mr. Obama said that "if there would be a Democratic administration, it will not take any irresponsible, reckless, sudden decisions or action to endanger your gains, your achievements, your stability or security. Whatever decision he will reach will be made through close consultation with the Iraqi government and U.S. military commanders in the field." Certainly, it makes sense to consult with those who, like Mr. Zebari, have put their lives on the line for an Iraq that would be a democratic U.S. ally. Mr. Obama ought to listen carefully to what they are saying.

Way different perspective huh? Who is lying here? Jim Geraghty also takes note of Obama telling the foreign minister that he would only take action after consulting with military leaders which differs from what he said during a earlier debate:

ABC's Charles Gibson: "And, Senator Obama, your campaign manager, David Plouffe, said, `When he is' - this is talking about you - `When he is elected president, we will be out of Iraq in 16 months at the most. There should be no confusion about that.' So you'd give the same rock-hard pledge, that no matter what the military commanders said, you would give the order to bring them home?"

Obama: "Because the commander-in-chief sets the mission, Charlie. That's not the role of the generals. And one of the things that's been interesting a out the president's approach lately has been to say, `Well, I'm just taking cues from General Petraeus.' Well, the president sets the mission. The general and our troops carry out that mission."

Taking cues from a General after consultation is what good leaders do. A President that wants to micromanage would ignore these cues and tell them what to do instead. So which one will Obama be? We can't tell because he changes his story every other week it appears. Ed Morrissey notes that Obama's changing story on Iraq appears the same as his NAFTA flip-flop:

This adds another data point to that theory. Zebari's recollection of the conversation sounds at least a little similar to the NAFTA Dance, in which Obama adviser Austan Goolsbee reportedly assured the Canadian consulate in Chicago that Obama only attacked NAFTA as a campaign ploy.

We should remember what Wright said about Obama right about now:

"Politicians say what they say and do what they do because of electability," Wright said, arguing that Obama had not seen the sermons played in the media that Obama has called "offensive." "He had to distance himself because he's a politician.Whether he gets elected or not, I'm still going to have to be answerable to God."

This is all about saying whatever is needed to get elected, even if he contradicts himself every other day.

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Obama economic nonsense

And McCain not too good either

By Karl Rove

In Raleigh, N.C., last week, Sen. Obama promised, "I'll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we'll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills."

Set aside for a minute that Jimmy Carter passed a "windfall profits tax" to devastating effect, putting American oil companies at a competitive disadvantage to foreign competitors, virtually ending domestic energy exploration, and making the U.S. more dependent on foreign sources of oil and gas.

Instead ask this: Why should we stop with oil companies? They make about 8.3 cents in gross profit per dollar of sales. Why doesn't Mr. Obama slap a windfall profits tax on sectors of the economy that have fatter margins? Electronics make 14.5 cents per dollar and computer equipment makers take in 13.7 cents per dollar, according to the Census Bureau. Microsoft's margin is 27.5 cents per dollar of sales. Call out Mr. Obama's Windfall Profits Police!

It's not the profit margin, but the total number of dollars earned that is the problem, Mr. Obama might say. But if that were the case, why isn't he targeting other industries? Oil and gas companies made $86.5 billion in profits last year. At the same time, the financial services industry took in $498.5 billion in profits, the retail industry walked away with $137.5 billion, and information technology companies made off with $103.4 billion. What kind of special outrage does Mr. Obama have for these companies?

Sen. McCain doesn't support the windfall profits tax, but he can be as hostile to profits as Mr. Obama. "[W]e should look at any incentives that we are giving," Mr. McCain said in May, even as he talked up a gas tax "holiday" that would give drivers incentives to burn more gasoline. This past Thursday, Mr. McCain came close to advocating a form of industrial policy, saying, "I'm very angry, frankly, at the oil companies not only because of the obscene profits they've made, but their failure to invest in alternate energy."

But oil and gas companies report that they have invested heavily in alternative energy. Out of the $46 billion spent researching alternative energy in North America from 2000 to 2005, $12 billion came from oil and gas companies, making the industry one of the nation's largest backers of wind and solar power, biofuels, lithium-ion batteries and fuel-cell technology.

Such investments, however, are not as important as money spent on technologies that help find and extract more oil. Because oil companies invested in innovation and technology, they are now tapping reserves that were formerly thought to be unrecoverable. Maybe we are all better off when oil companies invest in what they know, not what they don't.

And do we really want the government deciding how profits should be invested? If so, should Microsoft be forced to invest in Linux-based software or McDonald's in weight-loss research?

Most dramatic change comes from new businesses, not old ones. Buggy whip makers did not create the auto industry. Railroads didn't create the airplane. Even when established industries help create new ones, old-line firms are often not as nimble as new ones. IBM helped give rise to personal computers, but didn't see the importance of software and ceded that part of the business to young upstarts who founded Microsoft. So why should Mr. McCain expect oil and gas companies to lead the way in developing alternative energy? As with past technological change, new enterprises will likely be the drivers of alternative energy innovation.

Messrs. Obama and McCain both reveal a disturbing animus toward free markets and success. It is uncalled for and self-defeating for presidential candidates to demonize American companies. It is understandable that Mr. Obama, the most liberal member of the Senate, would endorse reckless policies that are the DNA of the party he leads. But Mr. McCain, a self-described Reagan Republican, should know better.

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(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





19 June, 2008

The Wilful Blindness of Barack Obama

Barack Obama wants to hike social security taxes, double the capital gains tax and restore the death tax to its highest levels.

Barack Obama opposes any expansion of exploration for oil even though the price you are paying at the pump is soaring and the only way to halt the rise is increased production.

Barack Obama wants to meet, without preconditions, with Ahmadinejad, Chavez and Kim Jung Il.

Barack Obama wants the U.S. to quit the field in Iraq ,imperiling the victory there that is emerging with unmistakable clarity.

But perhaps worst of all his many terrible positions, Barack Obama wants to return to the anti-terrorism model of the 1990s --the criminal justice model.

That's what he told ABC News' Jake Tapper yesterday:

And it is my firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution. And there has been no evidence on their part that we can't.

And, you know, let's take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks -- for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.

And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, "Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims."

Over the weekend, my C-SPAN "After Words"interview with Andrew McCarthy, lead prosecutor of killers behind the first attack on the World Trade Center aired. McCarthy's new book, Willful Blindess, details the terrible gaps in the approach to terror that the U.S. pursued in the '90s, gaps which led directly to 9/11.

Obama wants to return to those days, which means a certain countdown to another 9/11. Obama's vacuous assertion that fecklessness in the face of terrorism allows us to say to the world "Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims," is astonishing. It reveals that at Obama's core there is a belief the operation of Gitmo somehow makes the U.S. anti-Muslim, and it buys into the most perverse of charges, that the U.S. has lost "credibility when it comes to the rule of law around the world."

The credibility of our attachment to the rule of law does not depend on the editorial board of Al Jazeera. Nor does it depend on the nod of a first term senator from Illinois with a huge e-mail list. It depends on our actual, magnificent, centuries-old respect for the law and acknowledgement of its authority, a respect for law that is embodied in the military tribunals being used at Gitmo (which were not overthrown by last week's decision which instead supplemented them with additional habeas proceedings.)

Over the weekend Obama incoherently suggested that the example of the Nuremberg Trials somehow indicted our system of using military tribunals to try terrorists. This is another display of historical ignorance by Obama, one that rivals his glowing assessment of the Kennedy-Khrushchev Vienna summit. The Nuremberg Trials were conducted before an International Military Tribunal. Our military tribunals at Gitmo are in fact certainly fairer than those used at Nuremberg because there are no successors to Major-General Iona Nikitchenko on our panels.

There were no habeas rights provided the Nuremberg defendants, as implied by Obama this weekend, just as there is no anti-Muslim prejudice in our system of military tribunals, an accusation endorsed by Obama yesterday.

It has become painfully obvious that Obama's platform embraces all of the anti-American twaddle of the past five years while ignoring all of the great good accomplished in that time, including the overthrow of Saddam and his mad-as-hatter sons, the disarmament of Libya of its WMD, some progress in Lebanon (now imperiled by an emboldened Iran and Syria) and of course no foreign-directed terrorist attack within the U.S. since 9/11. (We should not forget the many examples of Sudden Jihad Syndrome and their victims. In fact, for an example of the efficacy of the Obama model for fighting terrorism, look at the recent result in the trial of the Seattle mass killer: A mistrial.)

On issue after issue we have enormous clarity on the differences between John McCain and Barack Obama, but nowhere are these stark differences more important than on how the two men would conduct the war against jihadism. John McCain will instruct the military to continue to wage it wherever necessary to prevent its return to our shores. Barack Obama will attempt to prosecute terrorists after they kill who knows how many Americans even as he badmouths the American justice system.

Kudos to Tapper on focusing his interview on important issues. I will play the audio of my interview with Andrew McCarthy on today's show.

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Obama's pathetic terrorist rights response

Jeff Zelena of the NY Times Caucus Blog quotes Obama as saying:

"The simple point that I was making, which I will continue to make throughout this campaign, is that we can abide by due process and abide by basic concepts of rule of law and still crack down on terrorists," Mr. Obama said. "None of the folks that were speaking for McCain today have given us one bit of information that would suggest that as a consequence of the court's ruling, terrorists will be able to attack America more effectively."

He is dead wrong and so are a lot of New Yorkers because of the failure of the lawfare approach.

For starters it puts on the strategic defensive. It does not deter terrorist as the subsequent attacks after the 1993 bombing prove. It is an after the fact approach where forensic teams go in after the murders to try to figure out who did it and how.

By going the lawfare approach we also have to turn over vital sources and methods of collecting intelligence. For example, in the African Embassy bombing cases we had to disclose that we had been monitoring bin Laden's satellite phone conversations. Evidence of the calls showed his connection with the bombers. He, of course, quit using his phone after that so we did not get to intercept his communications with the 9-11 attackers. There were a series of attacks on Americans and our interest from 1993 until 2001. Since we have gone on offense those attacks on non combatants have been stopped.

What Obama wants to do will get Americans killed. He is adopting the failed strategy of the Clinton administration, and he is trying to distract us with his bogus attacks on the Iraq war. If the Iraq war was a distraction for anyone it was for al Qaeda which made it a central front in its war against us and has suffered a significant strategic defeat.

Obama does not know enough about military history or strategy to comprehend what has happened to al Qaeda as a result of its failure in Iraq. He may be one of the least knowledgeable Presidential candidates in history when it comes to warfare and military history.

McCain can only hope that he will continue to demonstrate his simpleminded lawfare point. Oh, and hopefully he will keep John Kerry as a spokesman on that point. It worked so well for him in 2004. This is a battle space that favors Republicans.

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A timeline of an undistinguished career

A commenter with a fondness for science-fiction writes:

why does it drive u into a frenzy that ppl believe in O and admire him?

The short answer is that it doesn't, though it strikes me as somewhat irrational and disproportionate to his supposed public accomplishments. From June 1985 to May 1988, Obama was a community organizer with the Developing Communities Project in Chicago, working primarily to organize a housing project called Altgeld Gardens. According to the Boston Globe:

For all its impact on Obama, Altgeld Gardens today seems far from the kind of success story politicians like to tout. Dozens of buildings are boarded up, with fences surrounding much of the property. The roads are a potholed mess. Blinking lights illuminate a series of towers where police have mounted cameras.

That's change you can believe in. Moreover, Hazel Johnson, who has lived at Altgeld Gardens since 1962 - and was an organizer long before Obama appeared on the scene - claims Obama has exaggerated his role in getting asbestos removed from the projects. Otherwise, Obama did not get much done - and even had difficulty explaining what a "community organizer" did. He then departed for Harvard Law School, where he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. The title gained him notoriety, as reported by the New York Times:

He was approached by an agent, Jane Dystel, who got him a contract for a book. Obama missed his deadline, and Dystel promptly got him another contract and a $40,000 advance for the same book.

Obama finished the book while living in Bali. Obama returned to Chicago, where he directed Illinois Project Vote! from April-October 1992. This was a project for ACORN - an ostensibly non-partisan (but actually partisan) voter registration group often charged with voter registration fraud. Nor was his involvement altruistic; the group would later provide the shock troops for his political campaigns.

In his first race for the state Senate in 1996, Obama employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers, thus running unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district:

"That was Chicago politics," said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. "Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice."

Nothing illegal about it, but nothing particularly inspiring about it, either. Though Obama served in the Illinois Senate for seven years, he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year, when Illinois Senate Majority Leader Emil Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills. During this period, he lost the 2000 Democratic primary run for the US House of Representatives to incumbent Bobby Rush by a margin of two to one.

Obama then ran for an open US Senate seat in 2004, winning after Democrat Blair Hull and Republican Jack Ryan turned out to have scandal lurking in newly-unsealed divorce records. In the Senate, Obama points mostly to his role in the 2007 overhaul of Congressional lobbying and ethics rules - a role he has repeatedly overstated. Indeed, Obama was called out publicly by his colleagues for trying to take undeserved credit on the recent immigration reform and housing bills.

Obama also points to the Lugar-Obama nuclear non-proliferation bill - a bill so non-controversial that it was passed into law by unanimous consent. Indeed, when not trying to take credit for the work of others, Obama's Senate record is almost entirely minor legislation, usually passed by unanimous consent or voice vote.

Obama's presidential campaign, recognizing how threadbare his record really is, and how utterly conventional his paltform is within left-leaning politics, insists that what matters is judgment, especially with regard to invading Iraq. Jonah Goldberg recently summed up the issue of Obama's judgment:

The problem is that it doesn't reflect reality. Obama, who was a junior Illinois state senator from a very liberal district in Chicago and a star parishioner of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s Trinity United Church of Christ when the country was debating invading Iraq, would have voters believe that he carefully weighed the pros and cons and concluded it would be a bad idea.

***

But, even if you want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, it's hard to give him the benefit of the facts. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama said he would "unequivocally" oppose President Bush on the war. But once in office, he voted for every war-funding bill - until he decided to run for president.

After the invasion, Obama did not favor an immediate pullout from Iraq. On July 27, 2004, the day after he delivered his brilliant keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, he told the Chicago Tribune that when it came to the war, "there's not much of a difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage." In other words, while he opposed the war, he was now committed to seeing it through. That was hardly the position of Moveon.org and other progressive outfits at the time.

During the long battle for the Democratic nomination, however, Obama's position evolved (or devolved) into a consistent call for withdrawal in order to differentiate himself from Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I would add that his position in 2004 just coincidentally dovetailed with support for the Kerry-Edwards ticket; both had voted to authorize the invasion. But when it came time to run for higher office, he constantly attacked Hillary Clinton for having made the same votes as Kerry and Edwards. That is very conventional politics, not "change we can believe in." His flexibility here says as much about his judgment as his 20-year membership at what he knew was a radical church from the outset.

This leaves Obama's organizational skill, which I have praised before - though not without noting that his campaign was seeded with venture capital from George Soros and the usual Wall Street wheelers and dealers. He was able to defeat Hillary Clinton - another candidate with much more name recognition than record - by putting together a coalition of Hart and Jackson voters against the remainders of a Mondale coalition, with a strategy lifted from the 1972 McGovern campaign. It was no small feat, though the incompetence of the Clinton campaign was also a factor here.

Finally, there is his oratorical skill. Much of Obama's lofty message of unity and hope really came from campaign consultant David Axelrod, who "long ago hatched the idea that Democrats' campaigns should revolve more around personality than policy." Indeed, much of the rhetoric was already test-driven in 2006 by one of Axelrod's other clients, Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. Not that such themes are in any way unique to American presidential politics, as demonstrated by Bill "The Man from Hope" Clinton and George W. "Uniter, not a Divider" Bush.

As I have repeatedly noted here at pw, the candidacies of Obama and John McCain are driven by voters pursuing a mirage of changeyness where bipartisanship reigns and the "moneyed special interests" vanish. And we should Hope that it is a mirage:

The appeal is vague precisely because it is illusory. The Framers of the US Constitution recognized - as James Madison explained in Federalist No. 10 - that factions are one of the costs of liberty. There is nothing high-minded about selling the notion that faction can be magically eliminated - a notion that is equal parts snake oil and tyranny.

Again, there is not much to admire in either snake oil, tyranny or flowery speeches trying to sell either. Moreover, remove Obama from a TelePrompTer and he is every bit the gaffer as any other average politician, though few have had the audacity to base their foreign policy on a debate gaffe.

In sum, Barack Obama's record, judgment and message are at best entirely undistinguished in the field of presidential politics. At worst, we have Axelrod's campaign of personality attracting a cult of followers so creepy that even many Obama backers are put off by it, to a man who admits he is a "blank screen," with a message that is either illusory or tyrannical. It is in those people that I find little to admire.

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Father Greeley's "racist" accusations

The Greeley essay that V.D. Hanson refers to below is here. I am slightly surprised that the ravings of an 80-year old Leftist priest are seen as worth much comment. But I suppose that being Leftist makes a Catholic priest important. He has certainly been given all sorts of honors for it. What Greeley says, moreover is just Leftist boilerplate: It is not racist for blacks to vote for Obama but it is racist for whites to vote against him!

I think I can substantiate Ramesh's casual observation on the type of creepy e-mails one receives. So far I haven't received a single one that pertains to Obama's race in negative fashion, but literally hundreds over the last couple of years voicing the worst sort of anti-Semitic references, in about equal measure from the hard anti-war left and the paleo-conservative right.

Re: Father Andrew Greely's remarks: I have gone to a few bars and locker rooms recently, and haven't heard a word of denigration about Obama's race.

Fr. Greeley's notion that racial prejudice guides the election, at least from my perspective, seems misdirected - though columns like Greely's are unfortunately part of a cascading effort at a sort of racialist preemption to curb others' criticism of Obama's agenda, statements, and record in fear of, well, being denigrated as a sort of racist by custodians of public speech such as Greely. In that context, cf. Greely's own rhetorical question:

"By what stretch of sick logic could the candidate be responsible for what his clergy said and did?"

In fact, by a number of healthy standards a presidential candidate might be held responsible for attending a church for 20 years, baptizing his children in it, marrying in it, subsidizing it with donations of several thousand dollars, and praising the voice of a racist clergyman in terms ranging form "not particularly controversial" and "an old uncle" to "brilliant," while referring to him at various times (contrary to later disclaimers) as "friend", "mentor" and one of his many "spiritual advisors," to such a degree as to adopt the title of his best-selling book from a Wright sermon.

Again, what is sick is not the notion of holding a candidate responsible for all that (Obama, after all, did just that himself [why otherwise did he condemn Wright after the Rev.'s creepy National Press Club speech, and his NAACP exegeses on race, genetics, and brain chemistry, to ensure that we all knew he was no longer "responsible" for Rev. Wright?]) - but Greely's own suggestion that such legitimate worry is "sick logic."

But if Father Greely were really concerned about ubiquitious racism, rather than politics, why hunt for it in locker rooms, bars, and other stealthy places, while neglecting it when it is openly aired and audaciously voiced by Father Pfleger from the pulpit of Trinity Church?

I will offer another of the same tired predictions, namely that should Iraq continue to improve as its constitutional government defeats terrorists and reconciles factions, should the world settle down and begin to fathom that Islamic terrorism is waning while the U.S. continues to be free from another attack, should the fuel crisis enlighten Americans that they must produce more fossil fuel and nuclear energies so they can transition to alternate fuels, and thus should Obama's position on terrorism, war, and energy resonate less by October, we are going to begin to see a lot more columns similar to Greely's.

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Rock-Star Puffery for Obama: Plus Obama vs. Cosby on Black Fathers

Remarks on black parenting that were "inflammatory" when said by Bill Cosby in 2004 are now blunt and striking when coming from Obama

Monday's front page [of the NYT] featured Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg's pro-Obama puffery, "Obama the Delegator Picks When to Take Reins." Like rock journalists following Bono, the Times reporters seem utterly fascinated by the minutia of Obama's day, while taking a few potshots at a Bush administration it's already condemned as doomed to perdition in the history books.

Like most presidential candidates, Mr. Obama is developing his executive skills on the fly, and under intense scrutiny. The evolution of his style in recent months suggests he is still finding the right formula as he confronts a challenge that he has not faced in his career: managing a large organization.

The skill will become more important should he win the presidency, and his style is getting added attention as the country absorbs the lessons of President Bush's tenure in the Oval Office. Mr. Bush's critics, including former aides, have portrayed him as too cloistered, too dependent on a small coterie of trusted aides, unable to distinguish between loyalty and competence, and insufficiently willing to adjust course in the face of events that do not unfold the way he expects.....

Mr. Obama's circle of advisers takes seriously his "no drama" mandate. It is a point of pride in his campaign that there have been virtually no serious leaks to the news media -- small leaks are immediately investigated -- about internal division or infighting. He is a careful reader of daily newspapers and magazines (titles from Foreign Affairs to Maxim are stocked on his campaign plane). He takes his briefing books -- three-ring binders filled with political memorandums and policy discussions -- to his hotel room or home every night, but aides say how well he reads the materials may depend on what is on ESPN.

The story climaxed with a rare Obama visit to his campaign HQ:

Three days after claiming the nomination, Mr. Obama, who makes infrequent visits to the campaign's Chicago headquarters, offered his gratitude by way of a motivational pep talk.

"I want everybody to catch your breath. Do what you do to get your ya-ya's out -- that's an old '60s expression -- and then understand that coming back we're going to have to work twice as hard as we've been working," Mr. Obama said. "We're going to have to be smarter, we're going to have to be tougher, our game is going to have to be tighter."

Before finishing, he included a self-assessment, adding, "I am going to have to be a better candidate."

Also on Monday was Julie Bosman's "Obama Calls for More Responsibility From Black Fathers," in which Obama is given credit for making critical statements about black fathers in front of a black audience.

Addressing a packed congregation at one of the city's largest black churches, Senator Barack Obama on Sunday invoked his own absent father to deliver a sharp message to black men, saying "we need fathers to recognize that responsibility doesn't just end at conception." In an address that was striking for its bluntness and where he chose to give it, Mr. Obama directly addressed one of the most delicate topics confronting black leaders: how much responsibility absent fathers bear for some of the intractable problems afflicting black Americans. Mr. Obama noted that "more than half of all black children live in single-parent households," a number that he said had doubled since his own childhood.

"Too many fathers are M.I.A., too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes," Mr. Obama said to a chorus of approving murmurs from the audience. "They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it."

Bosman wrote:

His themes have also been sounded by the comedian Bill Cosby, who has stirred debate among black Americans by bluntly speaking about an epidemic of fatherlessness in African-American families while suggesting that some blacks use racism as a crutch to explain the lack of economic progress.

"Stirred debate" is a benign term for how the Times has dealt with similar comments from Cosby, with reporter Felicia Lee calling them "inflammatory remarks" in May 2004. Yet when Obama says similar things, he's making a brave and positive stand.

As far as its McCain coverage, the Times made do with a photo of him at the top of a page with the caption "Meeting In Security." McCain met with Iraq's foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari in Arlington, Va.

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Conservative defeatism unwarranted

2008, we're told, is a "transformational" election, a revolutionary moment in which everything that went before will be overturned, and the nation's entire political sphere utterly changed. Barack Obama is the human embodiment of this moment -- the New Moses who will lead the American people into their promised land. (The part about wandering the Sinai for forty years appears to have been overlooked -- note to Republican operatives.) We're called on to prepare ourselves for a combination of the New Deal, the 60s, and the October Revolution all rolled into one.

No small number of conservatives are echoing this view. Even the cynical and wise Victor Davis Hanson is ready to throw up his hands and allow Obama the purple toga, and he is no way alone. It's perfectly understandable that Democrats will view events as occurring due to vast and unopposable historical forces -- they are, after all, ideologues, and such ideas play a prominent part in their ideology. But if conservatives ever begin to look at developments in this way, it will mean the end. The American left will have persuaded their opposition to adapt their worldview, and in so doing, will have won half the battle.

Despair magnifies all difficulties. The stone in the pathway becomes an unclimbable peak. The yapping mutt becomes the Hound of the Baskervilles. And an inexperienced, first-term senator, who barely squeaked his way to victory against one the most despised figures in American public life, becomes a combination of Moses, Gandhi, and Superman.

But if we step back from the left-wing lens, what do we see? A political apocalypse? A leftist tsunami? Some unimaginable historical synthesis bearing down on us? No -- what we in fact see is a very slick and adept Chicago pol, in prophet's rags a little too large for him, with a political party clinging to his goatskin tails. It's this, and this alone, that has so frightened the GOP and sent conservatives into catatonia.

What this collapse is about is not at all clear. Barack Obama is alive and fighting, no more than that. His battle with Madame Hillary has leached virtually all momentum from his campaign. He has spent months calling in airstrikes on his own position and setting up booby traps and minefields in areas that he now has to cross. His primary campaign could be taken as a textbook example on how not to set yourself up for the national contest. And the numbers show it: even with his nomination "bounce", Obama is according to CNN, only 3 points ahead of McCain -- a statistical tie. Among the hurdles that Obama created for himself are:

His messiahhood: The media has done Obama no favor by accepting his self-promotion to secular redeemer. Somebody should read the literature and discover what happens to messiahs after their followers grow tired of them. They might wish to start out with an esoteric collection called "the Gospels". Perhaps an intern could prepare a condensation.

These we-have-seen-the-light campaigns don't wear well. It's difficult to maintain enthusiasm over the long run, and even when that's accomplished, things soon take on a glassy-eyed aura, something on the order of a Moonie mass wedding. Obama long ago passed this point during the primary campaign. Now he has gained a second wind from attaining the nomination. But that will last only weeks before he is required abandon the walk-on-the-water act and attempt something unfamiliar to him: running on his merits.

A related problem that has gone unmentioned involves the Obama iconography. The "halo" photos are a case in point. This motif means one thing alone: that the candidate is being compared to Christ. That will be taken one way by the mass of the country: as blasphemy. It's a comment on the yawning gap between bedrock Americans and the elites that no one has seen this as Obama's strike two. He insulted religious Americans once with his "God n' guns" comment. Now he's redoubled the insult with this.

His disciples: Leading a redemptive movement has its drawbacks. Obamanoids are the same type as those drawn to any pseudo-religious craze -- the confused, the lost, and the demented. People who missed the spaceship behind the comet. Obama will not be able to shake this. The true creepiness of Obamamania will remain a serious issue. And it is not something that the candidate can control. We will very likely see Obamiacs menacing, harassing, and even attacking the opposition before this is over. The opponents of the messiah are, by definition, the essence of evil, yes?

His weird pals: We have met Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Tony "Cell 4, Block D" Rezko. Obama has not had an acceptable explanation for any of them. His uniform response has been "that's not the Jeremiah/Bill/Tony that I knew", which brands him as more than a bit of a schmuck for a man in his mid-forties. It would not be advisable to resort to it again, particularly after the public gets to know James P. Meeks and the folks at ACORN (a radical fringe cult that the candidate happens to have represented as an attorney.)

His gaffes: Obama's numerous gaffes, and his inability/unwillingness to back off from them, have been widely noted. What hasn't been mentioned is the nature of the errors themselves. When made during an interview or discussion, as opposed to offhand misstatements of the United States of Heinz variety, they have an air of pure flippancy, a near-contemptuous off-the-cuff feel: "You want an answer -- haven't thought about it, but... here you go." And when such statements are challenged, they're defended tenaciously -- no matter how bizarre or unreasonable -- as if they were in fact the products of considerable research and thought. The impression created is one of flakiness, of a man in no way qualified for the position he's seeking.

His touchiness: his gaffes are further underlined by his response to criticism: indignant protests that he, Barack Obama, U.S. senator and messiah without portfolio, should be subject to such treatment. Leave my wife alone. President Bush is picking on me. A few more incidents like this will see him labeled as a whiner -- and they will happen, since this seems to be his sole method of dealing with whatever barbs get past his Praetorian guard of media and disciples.

So here we have a candidate running a campaign that seems to be patterned on the dynamics of cult movements, who is the centerpiece of the weirdest crew of cronies and advisors since the heyday of Boss Tweed, who displays a serious unwillingness to back off or even acknowledge errors, who responds to criticism with a sense of privileged pique. A candidate who somehow managed to squeak into the nomination while losing Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and very likely Florida, all states that a winning national candidate must have. A candidate who cannot command the complete loyalty of his party's congressional delegation.

A candidate whose staff allowed vicious antisemitic material to remain on his official website for months. A man whose major slogans calling for "change" happen to be a slight variation (and how can this possibly have been overlooked?) of that used by the Clintons in 1992. And now this strange and lightweight figure is going up against a man who survived the Hanoi Hilton. Good luck with that.

It's universally admitted that the real challenge lies with Congress. The GOP may lose up to ten Senate seats, an astounding figure if true. And yet, when we examine the situation, we again find no rational reason why such a disaster should be inevitable.

In 2006 the Democrats ran as a reform party, taking advantage of Republican ineptness and confusion over a series of ethical lapses. But all promises to clean the place up proved immediately void. The public is well aware of this -- confidence in Congress has bottomed out at 14%, far lower than that of the GOP in 2006. Virtually the entire Democratic leadership, including Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and John Murtha, are under investigation. (This was not true of the "deeply corrupt" GOP. Whatever can be said of Bill Frith and Dennis Hastert, they cannot be accused of dishonesty.)

The living symbol of the current Democratic Congress is William Jefferson, the man who mistook his freezer for a bank. Just a week ago, almost his entire family was indicted, including his sister, brother, and a niece. The police are rumored to be looking for his dog. And to top it off, he's done us all the favor of coming out in support of Obama.

Looking beyond Washington, we have Jennifer Granholm, an expatriate Canadian who found Michigan's economy on the verge of stalling out and proceeded to run it into the deepest ditch she could find. We have John Ford of Tennessee, currently serving a five-year sentence for his first corruption conviction while being tried for his second.

And let's not forget Al Franken, who managed to blow an easy lead over Norman Coleman thanks to a combination of tax evasion and an overworked mouth. (Franken could be beaten simply by YouTubing the old Saturday Night Live footage showing him running around wearing a diaper. That skit is the first thing I recalled when Franken started running his mouth off about politics early in the first Bush term. And yet he's been able to ride easy for the better part of a decade without it ever appearing. Why not? Seems to me that the GOP's opposition research needs a little shaking up.)

Democratic corruption and incompetence aren't limited to Washington. They're systemic. There's a wealth of material here begging to be used. The Democrats, two years ago, hesitated not a moment before branding every member of the GOP a mirror-image of Cunningham and Foley. Yet what do we hear about the Democrat's infinitely more deep corruption from the GOP? Absolutely nothing. To my knowledge, no Republican figure has yet made reference to last week's Great Jefferson Roundup. In an election year, this is either sheer cowardice or collegiality gone mad. Let's get those tarbrushes working -- this stuff is not going to make its way to the public on it own. (Even as the final draft of this essay was being polished, it was revealed that two major Democratic Congressional figures, Christopher Dodd and Kent Conrad, were paid off by the subprime mortgage industry. The RNC has yet to respond.)

As for issues, there's no lack of them either. The Democrats have evidently set out to outdo the GOP Congress's do-nothing reputation, and have a good chance of achieving just that. If not worse: the Democrats' actual efforts have, without notable exception, resulted in pure disaster. First we have the ethanol mandates, in which Congressional action kicked off a commodity run that has resulted in sky-high food prices and actual hunger worldwide. Then we have the contemptuous treatment of Colombia, which has alienated our last remaining ally on the Latin American litoral.

But above all, there's the response to the oil crisis, the speculation-fueled price explosion that has wracked American consumers and jeopardized the recovery from last year's slump. Congressional action was swift and to the point: with oil breaking the $100 a barrel barrier, Democrats once again refused to allow offshore oil exploration or exploitation of Rocky Mountain oil shale, signaling the speculators that were free to inflate oil prices as high as they wished. (These oil shales comprise the largest reserve of oil on the planet, with estimates ranging up to one trillion barrels. No rational reason for outlawing their exploitation has ever been offered.) Robert Novak also points out that, even as gas prices hit $4.00 a gallon, the Democrats were seriously debating raising taxes on gas. No clearer evidence of Democratic acquiescence to the Green lobbies is needed. Both Fred Barnes and Larry Kudlow agree that oil is a can't-miss proposition for Republicans. Eventually, the notion will penetrate the miasma of funk and self-pity surrounding the GOP -- perhaps in time for the 2020 election.

The argument that the Green juggernaut cannot be stopped should have been laid to rest this week with the collapse of efforts to pass the Warner-Leiberman act (AKA the "National Climate Security" act) -- a demented proposal to place the entire American economy under the control of Green bureaucrats in order to curtail global warming. (It snowed the same week -- the first week of June -- in Colorado, the northern Rocky mountain states, and the Pacific Northwest. Who says that God has no sense of humor?) The bill died more from sheer unworthiness to live than anything else, but the coup de grace was given by a group of young Republicans who somehow escaped infection by the prevailing defeatism virus.

All this makes up a pretty decent hand of cards for a party on the outs. But not if you're simply going to toss them aside and weep bitterly about the injustice of being forced to play at all. Republicans in large part have lost their spine, their sense of battle. They are currently more involved in thinking up reasons not to make any effort rather than scheming how to make things more difficult for the Democrats. They have forgotten that the single undeniable way to lose is not to fight.

More here

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





18 June, 2008

Shh! Shhh! Keep Eric Holder Right Where He Is!

Around the blogosphere and web, I see considerable effort to argue that Eric Holder should depart Obama's vice-presidential selection team. I must heartily disagree. In fact, I think those on the right should be doing everything possible to make sure that Eric Holder has as large a role in the selection process as possible. Why? I refer you to that first sentence of that 2001 Washington Post profile: "Eric Holder wishes he had focused for three minutes when he heard the name Marc Rich connected with the word pardon."

A guy who couldn't see political fallout from pardoning Marc Rich probably couldn't find beer in Ireland. If you're hoping for some sort of stumble when Obama selects his running mate... some sort of horrific scandal to surface that blindsides the Obama campaign... then Eric Holder is exactly the guy you want heading up the search. I want Eric Holder vetting the background of my running mate the way I want Larry Johnson assessing the likelihood of terrorists targeting Americans.

Having Holder in charge of weeding out potential scandals is like having the fact-checking done by Dan Rather and Mary Mapes. They might as well make Scott McClellan the spokesman for the search committee, and let Scott Beauchamp, Jayson Blair, and Stephen Glass write up his biographical materials. As long as Eliot Spitzer vouches for the guy's character, Rep. William Jefferson says his finances include plenty of cold hard cash, Sandy Berger says he passed the security background check, Mark Penn says he has no conflicts of interest, and Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger say he's got the spiritual fortitude to handle being a heartbeat away from the presidency, then full speed ahead, I say.

Source




Shocker! Obama's Years As A Community Organizer Produced More Talk Than Action

When pressed on his lack of experience, Obama often cites his years as a 'community organizer' as part of his resume (such as it is). Like most other things about Obama the press has taken that at face value. No one seems to have bothered to follow up and see what it actually means and what, if anything, he accomplished in that oddly titled job. Well, Byron York at National Review took a look and believe it or not, it doesn't seem Obama accomplished much at all.

His greatest hits seem to have been a successful effort to convince the city of Chicago to locate a jobs placement office on the far South Side and his part in a drive to push the city to clean asbestos out of a housing project in the same area. ... Obama, not long out of college, didn't have much experience to qualify him to be an organizer. But he was black - a threshold qualification for this particular job - and he seemed able almost to work magic on those he encountered. "He didn't have experience," Augustine-Herron told me, "but he had a sensitivity that allowed us to believe that he could do that job."

Gee, this all sounds vaguely familiar. It's one thing to take a chance on a smooth talking but inexperienced young guy to be a community organizer, it's quite another to elect someone President with a resume as thin as Obama's.

Source




The Surge worked

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's forced to admit that he was wrong about Iraq - and Republican Sen. John McCain was right. Obama told reporters that he spoke on the phone with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar zebari. "I emphasized to him how encouraged I was by the reductions in violence in Iraq but also insisted that it is important for us to begin the process of withdrawing U.S. troops, making it clear that we have no interest in permanent bases in Iraq," Obama said.

In other words the Surge worked. Had we listened to Obama, the troops would have been home 3 months ago and there would have been a bloodbath that would make the fall of Saigon look like kindergarten. There's your change. Your chump change.

Source




Innoculating Michelle Obama from Criticism

This piece by John Hendren at ABC News is something we should probably have to get used to. Apparently, we are to be prevented from being beastly to Michelle Obama because, after all, she's only the candidate's wife. And when she is out stumping for her husband and criticizes McCain or Republicans, we're supposed to hold our fire because it would be unfair to respond to that criticism. This is the meme gaining steam in recent weeks and will soon make the jump and include Obama himself as off limits as far as criticism is concerned:

The conservative National Review recently showed a stern-faced Michelle Obama on its cover, under the headline, "Mrs. Grievance." The Tennessee Republican Party questioned her patriotism.

Michelle Obama has become a favorite target for critics, drawing many to compare her arrival on the national stage to Hillary Clinton's after she infuriated conservatives when she said, "I could have stayed home and baked cookies."

It's likely to get worse. "It's going to be very ugly stuff," Democratic strategist Tad Devine said. "They're going to try to depict her as someone who is angry, outside the mainstream and not proud to be an American."

I realize it's not polite to laugh at fools but for crying out loud, just about every word uttered by the woman proves that she is "angry," that her politics are "outside the mainstream," and, according to Michelle Obama herself, she is "not proud to be an American." But we can't criticize her for it because that would be "unfair."

Hendren calls her "not proud" statement "artless." I have seen it described elsewhere in the media as "unfortunate" (how true), a "misstatement" (stretching it), a "gaffe" (a doosy), and even that it was "taken out of context" (putting it in context would have made it sound worse.). The point being, it is ridiculous to describe the statement as "artless." How about "heartfelt." How about "relfecting her true feelings." How about "in a moment of candor." But that doesn't follow the narrative so instead, Michelle Obama's clear statement of out of the mainstream political thought is described as "artless."

This stricture against criticizing Michelle Obama will soon make the jump to the candidate himself. This will occur when the race card is employed to maximum effect - that any criticism of an Obama gaffe or policy position will be portrayed as racist. And why wouldn't they use the race card? It is the most effective weapon in the history of presidential politics. They will shame people into voting for them and the press will love them for it.

Source




Obama's "Mideast advisers" set the stage for another bloodbath

Post below recycled from Doug Ross. More pics at the source

Doesn't anyone read history books anymore?

Barack Obama's crack staff of Middle East advisers consist of Dennis Ross and James Steinberg. You may remember the pair: Ross served as President Clinton's lead Mideast negotiator and Steinberg was a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration.

In January 2004, Jonathan S. Tobin described Ross' stellar track record.

..don't blame Dennis Ross personally for the thousands of lives sacrificed in the name of the peace process that he championed. He didn't plant any of the bombs, and his good intentions are not really in question... [but did] Ross learn anything from these failures? And what, if anything, would he do differently if he got another chance to play the game?

...Ross, the supposed arbiter of peace, sanctioned official whitewashes of the P.A. as it built a corrupt dictatorship intent on fomenting hatred of Israel and carrying on a terror war against its existence, rather than fostering peace... ...everything that Ross and his masters did during their years in power had convinced Arafat that they would never turn their backs on him, no matter what outrages the Palestinians committed.

No amount of violence or bad will exhibited by the Arabs would deter either Bush I or Clinton via their envoy Ross from pressuring Israel to give more and more. Sold a program of "land for peace," the Israelis got "land for terror" instead... ...it was Ross who convinced the killers that they would face no penalties for their crimes...

I'm physically disgusted to share a surname with this chump. Let's not forget the Clinton administration's other accomplishments.

... the Clinton administration's effort in 1998 to open a dialogue with Tehran's former reformist leader, President Mohammad Khatami, was rebuffed and did nothing to retard Iran's pursuit of nuclear technologies.

Sen. McCain believes any attempt to reach out to Iran's current hard-line government, particularly President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, could result in a worse outcome... "Such a spectacle would harm Iranian moderates and dissidents as the radicals and hard-liners strengthen their position and suddenly acquire the appearance of respectability," Sen. McCain said.

Members of Sen. Obama's brain trust, however, draw a different lesson from the Clinton overture. Mr. Ross thinks it illustrates the need to reach out to the right leaders in Tehran, rather then the most public ones. Mr. Ross says Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the only official inside Iran's theocracy with the power to authorize and execute the suspension of Iran's nuclear program and its support for militant groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah ...

Well, that's using the phrase "brain trust" loosely.

As for Steinberg, let's not forget the Clinton administration's sparkling record in dealing with terrorism. A brief history of terror attacks prior to 9/11 should be enough to convince an unbiased observer of that administration's repeated failures. And, if not, Sandy Berger's cover-up of Clinton-era activities should sound the alarm klaxons.

Put simply, we tried the Ross/Steinberg approach to dealing with Middle East negotiations and terrorist nutjobs. It yielded thousands of dead Americans and the Intifida as an added bonus. Next time, with these same advisers in an Obama administration, we might not get away that clean. Prepare for the bloodbath




Obama's Inflated Health "Savings"

Press release from FactCheck.org

He claims that a shift to electronic medical records will help save families up to $2,500 a year in his first term. Independent experts say that's wishful thinking.

Summary

Obama says his health care plan will garner large savings - $120 billion a year, or $2,500 per family - with more than half coming from the use of electronic health records. And he says he'll make that happen in his first term. We find his statements to be overly optimistic, misleading and, to some extent, contradicted by one of his own advisers. And it masks the true cost of his plan to cover millions of Americans who now have no health insurance.

* Obama cites a RAND study that found widespread use of electronic health records could save up to $77 billion a year in overall health care spending. But the study says that level of savings won't be reached until 2019, when it projects 90 percent of hospitals and doctors would be using electronic records systems.

* Much could be done to speed up the adoption of electronic record-keeping. But experts, including the lead researcher on the RAND study, are extremely doubtful the U.S. could see widespread adoption in the first term of an Obama presidency, or even a second term. Even a campaign adviser acknowledges Obama's plan likely won't reach the full savings potential until five years into implementation, by which time Obama could be out of office.

* Obama says he'll "lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year" by investing in electronic health records as well as other efforts. But his adviser tells us that $2,500 figure includes savings to government and employers that could, theoretically, lead to lower taxes or higher wages for families - so we shouldn't necessarily expect insurance premiums that are "lower" by that amount.

* The RAND study on which the campaign partly bases its estimates is one of the only reports available on possible cost savings. It may well be correct - no one knows for sure. But it looks at potential savings in an ideal situation and recently has faced criticism.

Many, if not most, health care experts and professionals agree that the use of electronic health records or health IT would have various benefits, in terms of quality of care as well as spending. But doctors and hospitals in the U.S. have been slow to adopt it for several reasons. Whether Obama can effectively bring about widespread adoption and large savings is an open question and not as concrete as his pronouncements imply.

Full article here




China doubts Obama

China's state-run People's Daily Monday cast doubt on Barack Obama's ability to bring change if elected US president, in a commentary that gave a rare insight into the Chinese government's thinking.

The report in the overseas edition of the newspaper -- the mouthpiece of the Communist Party -- also said Obama's emergence as Democratic Party candidate for the US presidential elections did not challenge racial divisions. "Obama has not broken through white America's feeling of superiority, on the contrary, his emergence has reinforced that feeling," said the comment, which was written by the paper's senior editor.

China has so far been publicly mute about the US presidential elections -- due in November -- in an effort to remain neutral. But the comment piece in Monday's People's Daily gave a small glimpse into the Communist Party's thoughts on the US elections after Obama clinched the Democratic Party nomination from rival Hillary Clinton.

Obama has campaigned on a platform for radical change in the US, but the newspaper downplayed his ability to bring about transformation if he was elected. It took Obama's staunch anti-Iraq war stance as an example, saying questions remained over how to pull troops out of the war-torn country. "No one believes that on such a complicated issue, only relying on a firm stance can resolve things," the comment piece said. "The same problem exists for changes in the economy, social security and education."

The paper also pointed to Obama's inexperience compared to rival Republican Party candidate John McCain. "To borrow a phrase used in Clinton and Obama's campaigns, maybe one can describe the feelings that voters might encounter: Everyone imagine for a moment the person who picks up the red phone at 3am in the morning in the White House -- if it's McCain, they will be at ease."

Experts say China's leaders have traditionally preferred Republican presidents over Democratic ones, partly because they tend to focus less on rights issues.

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





17 June, 2008

Rezko tells Obama and governor to look after him

And it doesn't take much of an ear to hear the "or else"

The last thing Sen. Barack Obama and Gov. Rod Blagojevich needed was that letter written by convicted Illinois influence peddler Tony Rezko promising he'd never rat out his pals. The imprisoned political fixer insisted that federal prosecutors are squeezing him, according to an exclusive Tribune report written by federal courts reporter Jeff Coen for Thursday's paper.

"They are pressuring me to tell them the 'wrong' things that I supposedly know about Governor Blagojevich and Senator Obama," the fundraiser (and Obama's personal real estate fairy) wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve. "I have never been a party to any wrongdoing that involved the Governor or the Senator," Rezko argued. "I will never fabricate lies about anyone else for selfish purposes. I will take whatever comes my way, but I will never hurt innocent people."

Amen, Tony. But those who say nothing don't brag. They shut up. Yet those who promise to say nothing, and promise it loudly, often have much to say later, in a calm and rational voice, meekly from the witness box.

I've seen a few lately, a convicted Outfit hit man who killed at least a dozen people and testified against Chicago mob bosses, and, in an unrelated case, a convicted political apparatchik of the GOP who talked like Joe Pesci in the movies until he broke, blubbered and helped put former Gov. George Ryan in prison.

They all want the same thing-to make sure their loved ones are well cared for on the outside. It could be that Rezko, who mentioned his sons in the letter, cares more about them and his wife, Rita, than he does about his political buddies. Hence, the implied threat to the senator and the governor. That could be a problem for both Obama and Blagojevich, but mostly, I think, for Blagojevich, if Rezko-convicted of more than a dozen corruption counts-begins to squeak.

Democrat Obama-whose campaign reiterated he's never done wrong with Rezko-is on the verge of assuming the presidency, about to defeat a Republican Party that has forgotten what it believes. Republicans were blinded and seduced by crooked GOP lobbyists like Jack Abramoff and overspent on Illinois Republican boss-hog-style deals. There was a national conservative silence when phrases such as "big government conservatism" were bandied about without ridicule. So the road was paved for Obama.

Obama's supporters don't know exactly what Obama believes in, but they seem not to care. He's on the way up and out of the wetlands of Chicago politics, reborn unto his national and mythic reform narrative, discovered by joyous national media and embraced, much as the iconic child was discovered and embraced when found in the reed basket floating on the River Potomac.

Obama doesn't need to remind the national media that he walked the Chicago Way, that his feet actually touched the soiled political ground. Rezko's recent conviction and the letter are such reminders. But Blagojevich is the member of Rezko's posse who is federally vulnerable. An unofficial Patty Watch has sprung up among reporters speculating that Blagojevich's wife, Patty, may be the first in the family with federal issues, as the FBI is investigating her own real estate dealings with Rezko and others.

Source




Obama the egotist

He looks down on suburban commuters too

David Mendell's Obama: From Promise to Power, p. 148-149:

"[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn't want to be on one of those trains every day," said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. "The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions... that was scary to him."

Obviously, if Barack Obama were satisfied with an office job, not only would he have not spent three years as a community organizer, he probably wouldn't have ever run for office. Every politician has to have some drive like that, some desire for more than punching the clock from 9 to 5, commuting home, and quiet evenings. They have to be willing to put up with public scrutiny and the constant demands for time, energy, money, and effort...

There's nothing wrong with saying, "that life, taking the New Rochelle train, just isn't for me." But there's a fine line between rejecting that life and looking down at that life. Because some people are just fine with jobs that require them to take the New Rochelle train. Some people actually prefer it to the stress, the risk, the time away from family, the constant demands from strangers. And the world needs these people - who get up every morning, go to work to do jobs with no glamor and little or no prestige, wages modest or worse, and whose names never appear in the newspaper. These folks receive a round of applause when they dance at their wedding, and at their retirement party, and that's about it.

We can't all be touted as secular messiahs, surrounded by adoring throngs. Very few us get crowds chanting our name on a regular basis. Scarlett Johansson doesn't e-mail us, and Jennifer Lopez doesn't visit our offices. Never mind the small towners who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment." Obama didn't want to be a suburban commuter.

Source




The big zero

There's nothing in Obama's "Blueprint for Change" except the usual liberal laundry list of new programs and subsidies for Democratic interest groups. But then you'd expect that in a document prepared for the Democratic Party primary season. Now that Obama's the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party it is time to check his agenda for a heartbeat, and figure out if there is anything there beyond the Big O. You'd think his big speech of Tuesday, June 3, 2008 would give us a clue, and it did. On Iraq, he's beginning to walk back towards the center:

We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in -- but start leaving we must. It's time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.

It's an artful statement that could mean anything, but is certainly meant to reassure independent voters, hinting that an Obama administration would continue the Bush policy of standing-up the Iraqi government.

Then, on health care, Obama in his speech wants to:

...pass a health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants it and brings down premiums for every family who needs it.

To understand what that means you need help, and the June 6, 2008 edition of The Wall Street Journal has an analysis of the candidate's position (available online) that mandates that large companies provide health insurance for their employees. Obama would "increase regulations and spend tax dollars" to guarantee health insurance to every American.

On education, the Journal says that Obama would add more money to support No Child Left Behind but relax its punitive aspects. Says Obama:

[W]e owe it to our children to invest in early childhood education; to recruit an army of new teachers and give them better pay and more support... a college education should not be a privilege for the wealthy few, but the birthright of every American.

In other words, on education it's liberal business-as-usual. There will be more money for the liberal education blob and more subsidies for liberal colleges.

It's on energy that Obama most closely honors his promise of "unity," but that's only because Republican John McCain buys into the liberal "consensus" on global warming. Obama "supports subsidies for solar and wind energy," and doesn't want nuclear power before "storage and safety issues are resolved," according to The Wall Street Journal.

Many conservatives are anxious to paint Barack Obama as a radical left-winger, and maybe he is. But plenty of liberals have flirted with the left, in a youthful experiment with a bit of radical rough trade. They return in their years of political viability to the liberal mainstream, and they propose a new top-down expert-led program here, or ratchet up a subsidy for Democratic voters there, just like every other liberal. Radical or mainstream, the difference is merely one of degree.

Sooner or later, after you've brought more and more of American life under the knout of compulsion and after you have provided every Democratic voter with a four-course dinner of government services you'll get to the day where the American people cry Uncle, break out the booze, and decide they can't take it any more. Until then, here's an audacious hope. When you listen to Obama's rhetoric you may think: I'd have to be born yesterday to believe this! No taxpayer could buy into the notion that this is

...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,

or that college is a "privilege for the wealthy few," not when government in the United States spend north of $900 billion a year each on health care and education.

Maybe there's a clue here. Maybe Obama is the candidate for people born yesterday and the people that don't pay taxes. For the rest of us, the meaning of Obama seems to be symbolized in his ubiquitous "O" logo. He seems to add up not to "change," not to "unity," but to a Big Zero.

Source




Barack Obama: Today's Soylent Green

The Barack Obama campaign phenomenon increasingly resembles the 1973 science fiction movie "Soylent Green" more and more with each passing day. Replace the movie's scenes of huge crowds who desperately gathered for food with the television images of Obama's super-sized campaign rallies, where disaffected voters frantically gather to see the pseudo-messianic figure of Obama deliver vacuous promises of "change" and "hope."

I feel a bit like Charlton Heston's character from the movie, knowing the secret of what was in Soylent Green, but finding it difficult to get people to wake up to the sickening reality. The truth about Barack Obama's indefensible coziness with terrorists and jihadists must similarly be told.

A glimmer of hope emerged yesterday when Politico.com finally broke the mainstream media's silence on the involvement of the radical, Marxist, terrorist-sympathizer Jodie Evan's bundling operations for Obama's presidential campaign. Like Heston's character in Soylent Green, I've been sounding the alarm, pounding the keyboards, speaking publicly, warning everyone about this development since April, including two columns I wrote for WorldNetDaily.com - "Barack's terrorist-sympathizing fundraiser" and "Jeremiah Wright on estrogen."

And there are plenty more terrorist-sympathizers on Barack Obama's speed dial besides Jodie Evans. In January of this year, 80 attorneys for terrorists being held at the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay made a mass-endorsement of Obama's presidential campaign. The Boston Globe reported that the terrorists' lawyers endorsed Obama because he was "the best choice to roll back the Bush-Cheney administration's detention policies in the war on terrorism." So even the terrorists' lawyers admit a vote for Obama is a vote for letting terrorists go free.

This is all the more troubling given that Barack Obama opposes the use of our military to kill the terrorists overseas. But don't worry; Barack Obama's got a plan to help Planned Parenthood kill human babies here in America. For the past several weeks, Democrats in Congress have held up funding for our troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Opposed to the war on terror, Democrats have been blocking the funding of our troops as a means to put political pressure on the Bush administration to abandon the war effort against al-Qaida. When that didn't work, Senate Democrats decided they would force Republicans to give them concessions for passing the war funding measure, and proceeded to tack on an amendment giving Planned Parenthood special discounts on drugs including the abortifacient "morning after" pill.

Barack Obama doesn't merely support the linkage between harming our troops while helping to kill unborn babies through Planned Parenthood, but as Congressional Quarterly reports, he conceived of the idea.

You can imagine how this makes the parents of U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan feel. A dear friend, Beverly Perlson of Chicago, Ill., has been staging repeated vigils outside congressional office buildings pleading with our elected officials to stop their anti-troop games and give our warriors the food, ammunition and support they need to succeed in their missions. Bev Perlson's son is in the 82nd Airborne and has served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. She's formed the organization Band of Mothers and travels all across this nation to rally support for our troops and to counter politicians who try to undercut the war effort.

It's not fair to American military families, like Bev Perlson's, to subject them to the four years of anti-military actions by Barack Obama. For that matter, it's not fair to punish all Americans with four years of left-wing, blame-America-first, terrorist appeasement. Barack Hussein Obama has pledged to meet with Iranian tyrant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, yet he ignores the pleas of his own constituent, Mrs. Perlson, to make sure her son gets the funding he needs to help win the war his nation sent him to fight.

WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein has documented the extensive network of Islamic terrorist groups and their leaders who have endorsed Obama's presidential campaign. On May 15, his report was headlined, "More terrorists endorse Obama." That tells you everything you need to know about why we must stop Barack Obama from becoming the commander in chief of the United States. This is a man who does not share the values of the American people, nor does he appreciate the sacrifices so many have made to make this the greatest nation on earth.

Like Charlton Heston's character in Soylent Green, I know what Barack Obama really is. I know about the danger he poses to this country. I just hope enough people can hear the truth by November to save our nation.

Source




Even when he gets the problems right, Obama still thinks that government is the solution

Barack Obama has demanded fathers, especially black men, shoulder their responsibility to heal broken families and restore hope in crime-ridden communities. In a Father's Day speech at a Chicago church, the Democrat also pressed for government action to help struggling parents, through tax breaks, job training and family-friendly employment laws.

The senator amplified one of his campaign themes in condemning absent fathers who have "abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men''. "You and I know how true this is in the African-American community,'' Senator Obama said, recapping government statistics showing more than half of all black children live in single-parent households. Such children are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison, he said. "And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it,'' said Senator Obama, who dwelt on his own challenges growing up with a single mother from the age of two after his Kenyan father abandoned them.

Highlighting one of the signature themes of his presidential bid, Senator Obama said the "greatest gift" that fathers can give their children is hope. "I'm not talking about an idle hope that's little more than blind optimism or willful ignorance of the problems we face,'' he said. "I'm talking about hope as that spirit inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting for us if we're willing to work for it and fight for it. If we are willing to believe.''

Senator Obama... hit explicitly political notes in promoting government policies to give families a leg-up and craft a better future for today's children. Dwelling on the kind of world his two young daughters may inherit, he said: "Are they living in a country where there's a huge gap between a few who are wealthy and a whole bunch of people who are struggling every day? "Are they living in a country where we are hated around the world because we don't cooperate effectively with other nations? Are they living in a world that is in grave danger because of what we've done to its climate?"

Source




Lieberman irks Democrats by criticizing Obama

Joe Lieberman is fast becoming the Democrats' public enemy No. 1. The four-term Connecticut senator, who came tantalizingly close to being Al Gore's vice president in 2000, not only has been campaigning for his pal, presumed Republican nominee John McCain, now he's publicly criticizing the Democrats' standard-bearer, Barack Obama. Lieberman has strayed before, most notably switching from Democrat to independent in 2006 to hold onto his Senate seat after a Democratic primary loss.

But the latest betrayal has upset Democrats, who often answer in clipped but polite tones when asked about Lieberman. The reason: The independent still caucuses with the Democrats on most issues except the Iraq war, and he holds their slim political majority in his hands. "There's a commonly held hope that he's not going to be transformed into an attack dog for Republicans," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., an Obama supporter.

Lieberman has wasted no time in questioning Obama's positions on Iran and Israel, two topics on which Lieberman and McCain agree. Just one day after Obama clinched his party's nomination, Lieberman joined Republicans on a McCain campaign teleconference call assailing Obama following his foreign policy address to a leading Jewish group. Lieberman accused Obama of blaming U.S. policies for "essentially sort of strengthening" Iran.

"If Israel is in danger today, it's not because of American foreign policy, which has been strongly supportive of Israel in every way," he said. "It is not because of what we have done in Iraq. It is because Iran is a fanatical terrorist, expansionist state."

Later that day, during a budget vote in the Senate, Obama led Lieberman to a corner of the Senate floor for a pointed private conversation. Without elaborating, Obama told reporters the chat was about politics. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had a similar private conversation with Lieberman.

For his part, Lieberman said he assured Obama he would avoid personal attacks. "I said, and we agreed, that any time I get out there mostly I'm going to be talking positively about John McCain - and anytime I would take issue with Barack Obama, it would never be personal because I have the highest regard for him personally," he said.

Still, Democrats were irked. Lieberman seemed to be breaking new ground - shifting gears from simply promoting McCain to taking shots at Obama. "I'm glad that Barack Obama had a direct conversation with Joe," Sen. Dick Durbin, Obama's fellow Illinois senator, told reporters. "I hope that Joe will realize that even though he's a friend of John McCain's and feels differently on the war, there are so many other issues Barack stands for that have been a part of Joe's career."

Lieberman's Connecticut colleague, Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, said he's heard McCain talk about keeping a civil tone to the campaign. "It might be a good message for him to convey to his supporters," said Dodd, also an Obama supporter.

Obama had backed Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut. After he lost to Ned Lamont, an anti-war candidate, Lieberman defied party leaders and ran as an independent in the general election. Leading Democrats - Obama, Dodd and Kerry among them - then backed Lamont. Lieberman was re-elected with support from the GOP, including praise from the White House and fundraising help from prominent Republicans.

Oddly, Lieberman befriended and dispensed advice to Obama when the Illinois senator arrived in Washington in 2005. "We have established a very good relationship," Lieberman says. "I have a lot of affection for him." Call it Lieberman's version of tough love.

The Connecticut lawmaker is willing to speak at the Republican convention this summer if McCain asks. He also has been mentioned as a potential McCain running mate.

Democrats have reason to tolerate Lieberman's actions. If he were to caucus with the GOP, the balance of power in the narrowly divided Senate would slip away, especially with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., battling brain cancer. Democrats need Lieberman to maintain their 51-49 Senate majority.

Beyond Iraq, Lieberman tends to vote with Democrats on major issues. "Joe and I have known each other 40 years," said Dodd. "On almost every issue, Joe is a mainstream Democrat."

There is speculation that if Democrats bolster their Senate majority this fall, they could seek payback by stripping Lieberman of his Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairmanship. While there's no serious talk afoot about punishing Lieberman, Kerry said, "I can't tell you what happens next year."

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





16 June, 2008

THE ANGER OF BARACK OBAMA

Post below recycled from Astute Blogger.

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the underlying emotion of his life had been fear. The underlying emotion of Barack Obama's life is anger. His anger is becoming more and more apparent.

Look at this impromptu bit:



The first thought that comes to his mind, when an elderly gentleman presents him with a lovely hand-carved walking stick, is that he is going to use it to "whup" his colleagues in Congress.

That is just sick.

And then consider his comments regarding Senator McCain's suggestion that the candidates appear in a series of town hall meetings:

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

"We don't have a choice but to win," Obama said, joking that he has heard "folks in Philly like a good brawl. I've seen Eagles games."

Obama has tried to justify his anger as a reaction to what he learned to see as the pervasive racism of American society.

He chose as spiritual mentor a man who made a career out of theatrical expressions of righteous anger. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright expressed openly the emotion that Obama had worked diligently to control and conceal.

However, knowing that (after early childhood years in Indonesia, where obviously he could not have experienced American racism) Obama grew up in a decidedly non-racist environment in Hawaii, I think his anger does not come from American society's racist organization.

The major pain and conflict in Obama's life stems from his father's abandonment of him, when Obama was an infant. His first book was a long meditation on the search for his father, his attempt to come to terms with his father. But since his father is long dead, he can never reconcile with his father face-to-face.

And he would rather attribute the underlying anger of his life to American racism than to the desertion of an alcoholic, communist father.

Analogously, he must have perceived himself to have been abandoned by his communistic mother, when she chose to have her parents raise him in Hawaii, so she could continue her anthropologist's life in Indonesia. And as she is also dead, he cannot reconcile himself with her face-to-face, either.

The humble, self-effacing mask that Obama wears conceals a very different personality. And as he thinks he is getting closer to the Presidency, the ego rush will eventually generate enough psychical energy to overwhelm the mask, and we will see more and more of the real Obama emerge.

It won't be pretty




An interesting cartoon

Is it Obama or is it GWB?



If it is GWB it is highly amusing. If it is Obama it is grossly offensive.

How do I know that? Because it is in fact meant to be GWB, so there has been no media outrage. And we have already seen the ire when Obama and chimps are mentioned together.

Double standard, anyone?




Blue Dogs Keep Their Distance From Obama -- so far

Barack Obama 's Democratic colleagues in the Senate seem ready to turn to the fall campaign and rally behind him as the party's soon-to-be presidential nominee. But in the House, some members of the Blue Dog Coalition of conservative Democrats say they'll keep their distance from Obama, at least until after the party formally nominates the Illinois senator at the Democratic National Convention in late August. Of the roughly 30 House members who have yet to declare a preference in the presidential primaries, which ended June 3, 16 are Blue Dogs.

"Frankly, none of the presidential candidates for either party is doing real well in my district. It's not a good idea to get close to any of them," said Charlie Melancon of Louisiana. "No, I won't be endorsing anyone," agreed fellow Blue Dog Charlie Wilson of Ohio. Nancy Boyda of Kansas represents a district that is part of Obama's family story - his mother was born into a military family at Fort Leavenworth and has ties in the area around the University of Kansas. But Boyda probably won't be escorting Obama around campus in the foreseeable future, and she says she may even skip the convention. "I'm going to stay focused on doing my job. The good people of Kansas are fine with that,'' Boyda said.

Obama made an unannounced visit to the House floor last month to appeal to uncommitted Democrats and supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and he held a private meeting with uncommitted Blue Dogs. Blue Dogs have a long history of holding liberal party leaders at arm's length. In the 2006 election, many of them distanced themselves from Nancy Pelosi of California, now the Speaker of the House.

Melissa Bean of Illinois, a self-described "Obama Mama" and a member of both the Blue Dogs and the New Democrat Coalition, said she expected as many as several dozen House members, including Blue Dogs, to remain uncommitted. "Probably a lot of them, in the Blue Dogs and in the regular part of the caucus, will just kind of stay where they are. Some will come to the convention, some won't. They are independent minded," Bean said.

Several Obama supporters said they expect his backers on Capitol Hill to swing into action to try to soften up resistance among uncommitted lawmakers and Clinton supporters. "Women supporters of Sen. Obama will approach women supporters of Sen. Clinton. There will be a gradual effort to reach out,'' said one of Obama's House backers. But such efforts could have mixed results. For example, Don Cazayoux of Louisiana, who recently won a special election, said he would endorse no one. He said he would later support Obama, but for now the newcomer is focused on showing voters that he is an independent-minded Democrat. "I'm going to represent my district and talk about my own candidacy. I'm not going to be talking about the candidate for president,'' Cazayoux said. "That's because I will agree with him on some issues and I will disagree with him on others."

For their part, Clinton supporters said they would be open to talking with Obama about his coming general election campaign, but many said they were either not ready to switch sides or were uncertain whether the Obama campaign would be inclined to offer them roles. For example, Ellen O. Tauscher of California, chairwoman of the New Democrat Coalition, said she doubted she would be asked to put her Silicon Valley contacts to use for the top of the ticket. "That role will probably fall to either Zoe Lofgren or Anna Eshoo," Tauscher said, referring to two longtime Obama supporters from California. "We'll see what happens."

Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland said he believed Obama would move to close ranks with Clinton and her supporters in coming days. "I have zero doubt that Sen. Clinton and Barack Obama are going to get together," Hoyer said. "They both want to turn the page."

In a joint statement, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., Pelosi and other party leaders set a Friday deadline for uncommitted superdelegates to endorse a candidate, saying the time has come for Democrats to "stand united and begin our march toward reversing the eight years of failed Bush/McCain policies that have weakened our country."

Eight previously uncommitted Senate superdelegates swung to Obama in a group Wednesday. "Our focus now is on victory in November and on giving Barack Obama every ounce of our support, every bit of our energy, and our total commitment to do everything in our power to win the presidency," said a joint statement signed by Sens. Barbara Boxer of California, Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, Ken Salazar of Colorado and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

Source




Black racism shows in recent poll

Gallup:

In an election year in which race is front and center, American blacks have grown more negative toward Hillary Clinton, with her favorable image sinking from 84% to 58% over the last year, while blacks' favorable opinions of Barack Obama have soared from 68% to 86%. Blacks have also become more negative toward John McCain....

Clinton can perhaps take some comfort in the fact that the presumptive Republican nominee, McCain, has also seen his image become more negative in the eyes of black Americans over the last year. In June 2007, McCain's image among blacks was 26% favorable and 33% unfavorable, with 41% saying they either didn't have an opinion or had never heard of McCain. Now, as he has become better known, blacks' opinions of McCain have moved decidedly into the negative column: 58% are now unfavorable, while 27% are favorable.

I think this is a reflection of black racism. There is no reason for McCain's negatives to soar, beyond the fact that his opponent is black. The emotional immaturity reflected in this poll is striking. It is not just that they are going with a tribal affinity, it is that they have developed negative attitudes toward anyone who opposes their guy.

For me, I oppose Obama because he is wrong on the war, taxes and energy. I think his negatives might have gone up too because of his "friends" he apparently did not "know" well for two decades.

Source




Obama: The Stealth Candidate?

For the Obamas, I don't want to have to listen to how bad we are being shoved down our throats by Mrs. "Affirmative Action Attitude" Obama herself for four years with her anti-American, ugly attitude. She is the poster child for why affirmative action is a failure, why it is a curse to the person saddled with the knowledge that somehow they were let into the best universities in our nation because of the "color of their skin", not the quality of their work. What a burden to bear? And with Michelle Obama, it shows. She can hardly make ends meet on that 4 million dollars they made last year. Boo hoo! And her 370,000 dollar salary is provided at tax payer expense through a grant awarded through her husband's influence as a US Senator.

Note to Senator Obama: Geraldine Ferraro is right. If you were a white man, three-years in office senator with very questionable associations with home-grown terrorists and a Syrian immigrant with questionable business practices, you wouldn't be anywhere close to where you are in getting the Democrat nomination.

And about us "clinging to our guns and clinging to our religion", yes, you'll have to pry our guns and Bibles from our cold, dead hands. And how about those Bill of Rights?

But I have a question. It is my understanding that campaign contributions over the internet are more difficult to trace. Yes? No? I wonder how much Islamist money is being funnelled into Obama's campaign. Like it or not, Obama was born a Muslim and reared as a Muslim up through the age of 10. And from what we have heard of the rantings of Jeremiah Wright, Jr., there wasn't much Christian love going on in that church of 8,000 members. America needed to know that black Americans hold the rest of us in such disdain. Thanks, Jeremiah.

Tonight I heard for the first time that a leader of Hamas has even printed messages in the newsletter/bulletin put out by the church Obama attends/has attended for 20 years. So, is that church an Islamist front? What are the ties to the Nation of Islam? What agreements have been made between Louis Farrakan, Jeremiah Wright, and the leader of Libya for the "buying of the US presidency"?

I think Michelle Obama has every reason to be angry. She is the product of teachings of hatred against white Americans, against our nation that has given her every opportunity, and she is the product of affirmative action. She knows or at least has to wonder how she got into Harvard and Princeton. But Obama - still no lapel pin - is a stealth candidate, make no mistake.

Give me a candidate such as Michael Steele or Ward Connerly but not a "feel good" candidate who stoops to the lowest form of insult when he slanders those of us in middle America, those fighting for this nation, those dieing so others may be free, when he says we "cling to our guns" and "to our religion" like acts of desparation when we are frustrated when we are betrayed by the nation we love. We DO NOT WANT government to solve our problems. We want government out of the way.

Nope, Obama's arrogance and elitism is beginning to show and if Obama does get the Democrat nomination, his campaign may have to put Michelle in the closet if he hopes to win...

Source




My change is better than your change

Change is coming, that much Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama agree on as they plunge into a five-month campaign for the White House. The primaries behind them, the presidential rivals were wasting no time drawing the battle line for a fall fight that will make history with the election of either the oldest first-term president in McCain or the first black leader in Obama. In speeches marking the start of the general election, both maneuvered for the advantage with voters sour on the status quo.

McCain, a four-term Arizona senator seeking to succeed a fellow Republican, uttered the word "change" more than 30 times as he tried to distance himself from President Bush and blister his Democratic rival. Obama uttered the phrase 19 times in a speech that claimed the Democratic presidential nomination. "The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again," McCain, 71, said in suburban New Orleans. "I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas."

In St. Paul, Minn., Obama, 46 and a first-term Illinois senator, ceded no ground on the reformer mantle and cast McCain as a continuation of the unpopular Bush's eight-year tenure. "My differences with him are not personal; they are with the policies he has proposed in this campaign. Because while John McCain can legitimately tout moments of independence from his party in the past, such independence has not been the hallmark of his presidential campaign," Obama said.

The campaign is the first in half a century in which neither a sitting president nor a vice president is running for the highest office, and the first since 1960 in which a senator will assume the White House. A fragile economy and an ongoing Iraq war, as well as matters of age and race serve as a backdrop. Both McCain and Obama were full of praise for defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton as the two sought to make a play for her loyalist backers - women and working-class voters.

Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, stopped short of dropping out of the race even though Obama had reached the requisite delegate count for the Democratic Party's nomination. Instead of conceding, Clinton said she would spend the next few days determining "how to move forward with the best interests of our country and our party guiding my way."



Behind the scenes, she maneuvered for the vice presidential spot on Obama's fall ticket, expressing a willingness in a conference call with her state's congressional delegation. "I am open to it" if it would help the party's prospects in November, Clinton replied, according to participants who spoke on condition of anonymity because the call was private. Obama's aides were noncommittal.

In the meantime, the party was swinging behind him. "We have come to the end of an exciting primary and caucus process - the voters have spoken," four top party leaders said in a joint statement issued early Wednesday. "Democrats must now turn our full attention to the general election," they continued. "To that end, we are urging all remaining uncommitted super delegates to make their decisions known by Friday of this week so that our party can stand united and begin our march toward reversing the eight years of failed Bush/McCain policies that have weakened our country."

The statement was issued by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, head of the Democratic Governors Association, and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean. Officials said Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland was ready to endorse Obama on Wednesday. On Wednesday, both Obama and Clinton were addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group.

On the final night of the primary season, Clinton won South Dakota while Obama took Montana - and a slew of party superdelegates who declared their support to help him clinch the party nod. He did it, according to The Associated Press tally, based on primary elections, state Democratic caucuses and support from superdelegates. It took 2,118 delegates to clinch the nomination at the convention in Denver this summer, and Obama had 2,144 by the AP count.

In contrast to the 17-month Democratic primary, Republicans gave McCain the status of likely GOP nominee in March. Since then, McCain has laid the groundwork for the general election campaign by portraying Obama as lacking the experience and judgment needed to be commander in chief. McCain spoke first and he accused his younger rival of voting "to deny funds to the soldiers who have done a brilliant and brave job" in Iraq. It was a reference to 2007 legislation to pay for the Iraq war, a measure Obama opposed, citing the lack of a timetable for withdrawing troops. The Republican was taking his message - that he has a record of reform while his opponent simply has rhetoric - directly to the voters in morning appearances on network news programs from Louisiana, where he will campaign later Wednesday.

Obama addressed thousands of cheering backers in the same Minnesota arena where Republicans will hold their nominating convention in early September. He promised an aboveboard debate and seemed to suggest that the GOP simply engages in divisive politics. Said Obama: "What you don't deserve is another election that's governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon - that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize."

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





15 June, 2008

A very large clash of values

Mr. McCain is the Old America, of course; Mr. Obama the New. Roughly, broadly:

In the Old America, love of country was natural. You breathed it in. You either loved it or knew you should.

In the New America, love of country is a decision. It's one you make after weighing the pros and cons. What you breathe in is skepticism and a heightened appreciation of the global view.

Old America: Tradition is a guide in human affairs. New America: Tradition is a challenge, a barrier, or a lovely antique.

The Old America had big families. You married and had children. Life happened to you. You didn't decide, it decided. Now it's all on you. Old America, when life didn't work out: "Luck of the draw!" New America when life doesn't work: "I made bad choices!" Old America: "I had faith, and trust." New America: "You had limited autonomy!"

Old America: "We've been here three generations." New America: "You're still here?"

Old America: We have to have a government, but that doesn't mean I have to love it. New America: We have to have a government and I am desperate to love it. Old America: Politics is a duty. New America: Politics is life.

The Old America: Religion is good. The New America: Religion is problematic. The Old: Smoke 'em if you got 'em. The New: I'll sue.

Mr. McCain is the old world of concepts like "personal honor," of a manliness that was a style of being, of an attachment to the fact of higher principles. Mr. Obama is the new world, which is marked in part by doubt as to the excellence of the old. It prizes ambivalence as proof of thoughtfulness, as evidence of a textured seriousness.

Both Old and New America honor sacrifice, but in the Old America it was more essential, more needed for survival both personally (don't buy today, save for tomorrow) and in larger ways.

The Old and New define sacrifice differently. An Old America opinion: Abjuring a life as a corporate lawyer and choosing instead community organizing, a job that does not pay you in money but will, if you have political ambitions, provide a base and help you win office, is not precisely a sacrifice. Political office will pay you in power and fame, which will be followed in time by money (see Clinton, Bill). This has more to do with timing than sacrifice. In fact, it's less a sacrifice than a strategy.

A New America answer: He didn't become a rich lawyer like everyone else-and that was a sacrifice! Old America: Five years in a cage-that's a sacrifice!

In the Old America, high value was put on education, but character trumped it. That's how Lincoln got elected: Honest Abe had no formal schooling. In Mr. McCain's world, a Harvard Ph.D. is a very good thing, but it won't help you endure five years in Vietnam. It may be a comfort or an inspiration, but it won't see you through. Only character, and faith, can do that. And they are very Old America.

Old America: candidates for office wear ties. New America: Not if they're women. Old America: There's a place for formality, even the Beatles wore jackets!

I weigh this in favor of the Old America. Hard not to, for I remember it, and its sterling virtues. Maybe if you are 25 years old, your sense of the Old and New is different. In the Old America they were not enlightened about race and sex; they accepted grim factory lines and couldn't even begin to imagine the Internet. Fair enough. But I suspect the political playing out of a long-ongoing cultural and societal shift is part of the dynamic this year.

As to its implications for the race, we'll see. America is always looking forward, not back, it is always in search of the fresh and leaving the tried. That's how we started: We left tired old Europe and came to the new place, we settled the east and pushed West to the new place. We like new. It's in our genes. Hope we know where we're going, though.

Source




Obama is too conservative!

A Leftist perspective below. Like many people, he assumes that Obama means what he says

Like the majority of his colleagues, Obama has done very little to change the face of American politics. He has voted for war spending, appeased the pro-Israel lobby, and helped build the erroneous case against Iran, saying nothing about Israel's plentiful arsenal of nuclear warheads. In short, Barack Obama is not an ally to those of us who oppose the ambiguous War on Terror.

"I want you to know that today I'll be speaking from my heart, and as a true friend of Israel," Obama announced a day after he locked up his party's nomination to a crowd of pro-Israel zealots. "[W]hen I visit with AIPAC, I am among friends, Good friends. Friends who share my strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, tomorrow, and forever."

Yet here we are again, like 2004, with "progressives" and other lefties ogling a hope-filled candidacy. But it's not just Obama's war support that should raise our hackles.

Obama supports the death penalty, opposes single-payer health care, supports nuclear energy, opposes a carbon pollution tax, supports the Cuba embargo, and will not end the vast array of federal subsidies to corporations, including those to the oil and gas cartel.

And as the United States economy slides into a deep recession, Barack Obama is promising more of the same, despite his criticism of John McCain's economic plan. But behind the curtains of Obama's strategy team is the same set of economic troglodytes intellectuals that led us in to our current financial disaster.

Obama's advisory team includes Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman, a former Clinton adviser, who believes we ought to privatize social security. Then we have the renowned David Cutler, another Harvardite, who believes our economy can be boosted through an increase in privatized health care costs. Writing for New England Journal of Medicine in 2006, Cutler explained, "The rising cost ... of health care has been the source of a lot of saber rattling in the media and the public square, without anyone seriously analyzing the benefits gained." And that's just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Perhaps all of these issues are aiding the independent candidacy of Ralph Nader, who is consistently polling above 5% nationwide. This, despite a virtual media blackout and very little support among progressives. Nader still faces many hurdles, from ballot access to fundraising, yet his support is higher at this point than it was at a similar stage during his 2000 Green Party bid. I still believe that if Nader wanted to put real pressure on Obama and the Democrats this year he would focus his finite resources and energy on the states that matter most: Ohio and Florida.

All in all, progressives and others working to bring about real change in this country, ought to escape from under the dark "Nobody but Obama" cloud that hover above. For his campaign, when it comes to the most pressing issues of the day, does not represent "change" and "hope" anymore than Senator McCain's.

Source




The "smear" is true

In an effort to combat what it calls Internet smears, Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign yesterday launched a website with the stated aimed of setting the record straight. One of the main issues addressed by Obama's "Fight the Smears" site is the contention the Illinois senators was once a Muslim. "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim, and is a committed Christian," states the site.

But as WND reported, public records in Indonesia listed Obama as a Muslim during his early years, and a number of childhood friends claimed to the media Obama was once a mosque-attending Muslim.

Obama's campaign has several times wavered in response to reporters queries regarding the issue of Obama's childhood faith. Commenting on a recent Los Angeles Times report quoting a childhood friend stating Obama prayed in a mosque - something the presidential candidate said he never did - Obama's campaign released a statement explaining the senator "has never been a practicing Muslim."

The issue of Obama's personal faith has dogged the candidate amid multiple scandals involving his now former Chicago church and several spiritual advisers. The issue re-emerged in recent months following conflicting media accounts of Obama's enrollment as a Muslim during elementary school in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. Widely distributed reports have noted that in January 1968, Obama was registered as a Muslim at Jakarta's Roman Catholic Franciscus Assisi Primary School under the name Barry Soetoro. He was listed as an Indonesian citizen whose stepfather, listed on school documents as "L Soetoro Ma," worked for the topography department of the Indonesian Army.

Catholic schools in Indonesia routinely accept non-Catholic students but exempt them from studying religion. Obama's school documents, though, wrongly list him as being Indonesian. After attending the Assisi Primary School, Obama was enrolled - also as a Muslim, according to documents - in the Besuki Primary School, a public school in Jakarta. The Loatze blog, run by an American expatriate in Southeast Asia who visited the Besuki school, noted, "All Indonesian students are required to study religion at school, and a young 'Barry Soetoro,' being a Muslim, would have been required to study Islam daily in school. He would have been taught to read and write Arabic, to recite his prayers properly, to read and recite from the Quran and to study the laws of Islam."

Indeed, the Israel Insider online magazine points out that in Obama's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," he acknowledges studying the Quran and describes the public school as "a Muslim school." "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Quranic studies," wrote Obama.

The Indonesian media have been flooded with accounts of Obama's childhood Islamic studies, some describing him as a religious Muslim . Speaking to the country's Kaltim Post, Tine Hahiyary, who was principal of Obama's school while he was enrolled there, said she recalls he studied the Quran in Arabic. "At that time, I was not Barry's teacher, but he is still in my memory" claimed Tine, who is 80 years old. The Kaltim Post says Obama's teacher, named Hendri, died. "I remember that he studied 'mengaji (recitation of the Quran)," Tine said, according to an English translation by Loatze.

Mengaji, or the act of reading the Quran with its correct Arabic punctuation, is usually taught to more religious pupils and is not known as a secular study. Also, Loatze documented the Indonesian daily Banjarmasin Post caught up with Rony Amir, an Obama classmate and Muslim, who describe Obama as "previously quite religious in Islam." "We previously often asked him to the prayer room close to the house. If he was wearing a sarong (waist fabric worn for religious or casual occasions) he looked funny," Amir said.

The Los Angeles Times, which sent a reporter to Jakarta, quoted Zulfin Adi, who identified himself as among Obama's closest childhood friends, stating the presidential candidate prayed in a mosque, something Obama's campaign claimed he never did. "We prayed, but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque. But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played," said Adi.

Friday prayers

Aside from the new site to fight purported smears, Obama's official campaign site has a page titled "Obama has never been a Muslim, and is a committed Christian." The page states, "Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ." But the campaign changed its tune when it issued its "practicing Muslim" clarification to the L.A. Times.

An article in March by the Chicago Tribune apparently disputes Adi's statements to the L.A. paper. The Tribune caught up with Obama's declared childhood friend, who now describes himself as only knowing Obama for a few months in 1970 when his family moved to the neighborhood. Adi said he was unsure about his recollections of Obama. But the Tribune found Obama did attend mosque. "Interviews with dozens of former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends show that Obama was not a regular practicing Muslim when he was in Indonesia," states the Tribune article. It quotes the presidential candidate's former neighbors and 3rd grade teacher recalling Obama "occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers."

Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, notes the Tribune article - cited by liberal blogs as refuting claims Obama is Muslim - actually implies Obama was an irregularly practicing Muslim and twice confirms Obama attended mosque services.

In a free-ranging interview with the New York Times, Obama described the Muslim call to prayer as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset." The Times' Nicholos Kristof wrote Obama recited, "with a first-class [Arabic] accent," the opening lines of the Muslim call to prayer. The first few lines of the call to prayer state:

"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... "

Some attention also has been paid to Obama's paternal side of the family. His father, described in some reports as an atheist, polygamist and alcoholic, was buried in Kenya as a Muslim. Obama Sr., also named Barack Obama, had three sons with another woman who reportedly all are Muslim. Obama's brother Roy is described as a practicing Muslim.

Writing in a chapter of his book describing his 1992 wedding, the presidential candidate stated: "The person who made me proudest of all was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol."

Still, Obama says he was raised by his Christian mother and repeatedly has labeled as "smears" several reports attempting to paint him as a Muslim. "Let's make clear what the facts are: I am a Christian. I have been sworn in with a Bible. I pledge allegiance [to the American flag] and lead the Pledge of Allegiance sometimes in the United States Senate when I'm presiding," he told the UK's Times Online earlier this year.

Source




Obama's Brain: Not Just A New Politics But A New Epistemology

I'm beginning to think that many critics - and I certainly include myself in this group - may have done Rev. Wright a grave injustice. I'm not referring to the denunciation he so richly deserves for his rants against AmeriKKKa, AIDS as purposeful genocide, 9/11 as deserved retribution, etc. I'm referring to his Ebonics-endorsing speech to the Detroit NAACP, dumped on here, in which he offered his offbeat (we thought) roadmap to the different contours of the black brain, including such gems as:

European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America.... Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object.... African and African-American children have a different way of learning. They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object....

Now all this was dismissed, including by me, as just so much hooey, but now I'm starting to have some doubts. For example, if Obama's brain, like the persona he adopted as a young man, is black, and thus is creative and intuitive and not bound by the rigid European and European-American strictures of logic, rationality, and consistency, it suddenly becomes much easier to understand how he can claim to be the candidate who will bridge the partisan divide when he has voted with his party 97% of the time (compared to McCain's relatively low 84% with his party) in the Senate and deviated from its liberal orthodoxy on no controversial issue.

In addition, if Obama is operating under a Wrightian right-brained epistemology it also becomes much easier to understand how he can claim to believe in equal opportunity for all Americans regardless of their race, ethnicity, or gender, as discussed recently here, even as he continues to favor allowing states to discriminate in favor of some citizens and against others because of their race, ethnicity, or gender. Ditto regarding his new, Wrightian black math, discussed in the ADDENDUM to my post just cited, under which zero-sum situations are not really zero-sum.

I do not, Wright's possible perceptiveness notwithstanding, mean to make this new "intuitive, creative" epistemology that now seems to make some sense of Obama's many contradictions a genetic, racial issue, for the same tendencies can be seen in many of those in the media and elsewhere who have become enraptured with Obama.

Take, for example (Please!), the eminent Thomas Friedman in yesterday's New York Times. Before taking him (with or without a grain of salt), however, it will be useful to recall some salient facts from the campaign to date. Foremost among these is the anger and disgust many Democrats, liberals, editorial writers, and journalists (but I repeat myself), and many Republicans as well, direct toward those they regard as rigid, nativist, right-wing, bitter/clinging small town yahoos (I repeat myself again) who insist on believing that Obama is a Muslim or that, at the very least, his middle name, Hussein, reveals something suspicious about him, something they dislike. Now, reminded of that, now switch to Friedman. All of a sudden, what is disgusting at home becomes a glowing sign of hope for a new, better America abroad.

While Obama, who was raised a Christian, is constantly assuring Americans that he is not a Muslim, Egyptians are amazed, excited and agog that America might elect a black man whose father's family was of Muslim heritage. They don't really understand Obama's family tree, but what they do know is that if America - despite being attacked by Muslim militants on 9/11 - were to elect as its president some guy with the middle name "Hussein," it would mark a sea change in America-Muslim world relations.

.... As one U.S. diplomat put it to me: Obama's demeanor suggests to foreigners that he would not only listen to what they have to say but might even take it into account. They anticipate that a U.S. president who spent part of his life looking at America from the outside in - as John McCain did while a P.O.W. in Vietnam - will be much more attuned to global trends.

Of course there is nothing inconsistent here according to the Wrightian and now Times/Friedman epistemology, because everyone who is not a knuckle-dragging bigoted nativist, i.e., a conservative Republican, fervently wants (and some of them even pray) for the U.S. to align itself with "global trends" and usher in "a sea change in America-Muslim world relations" - initiated by "change" in America, not the Muslim world. Friedman also writes:

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats' nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America's image abroad - an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush's invocation of a post-9/11 "crusade," Abu Ghraib, Guant namo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors - than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.

This may sound extreme, but Friedman's infatuation with the hope Obama brings to the Muslim world seems to be pervasive at the New York Times and similar precincts.

My colleague Michael Slackman, The Times's bureau chief in Cairo, told me about a recent encounter he had with a worker at Cairo's famed Blue Mosque: "Gamal Abdul Halem was sitting on a green carpet. When he saw we were Americans, he said: `Hillary-Obama tied?' in thick, broken English. He told me that he lived in the Nile Delta, traveling two hours one way everyday to get to work, and still he found time to keep up with the race. He didn't have anything to say bad about Hillary but felt that Obama would be much better because he is dark-skinned, like him, and because he has Muslim heritage.

So far I've seen no evidence that the New York Times and its far-flung correspondents share Rev. Wright's enthusiasm for ebonics or his extreme left brain - right brain dichotomy, but I do believe their devotion to the "logical and analytical" skills Wright dissed can at least be called into question when many in the Times's orbit (here I'm including devoted readers) believe that it is racist and nativist invective of the worst order for Obama's domestic opponents to assert that his color has been an asset, not a liability, and to believe, despite heated and repeated denials from the Obamaphiles, that he has Muslim ties while at the same time Times writers and many readers point to Muslim infatuation with his dark skin and "Muslim heritage" as prime reasons why "the mere fact of his nomination" has done "more to improve America's image in the world" than anything in recent memory.

When Friedman looks at Obama he thinks of Emerson and swoons with Emersonian visions of America as "the country of the future ... a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations." Me? When I look at Obama I still see a movie star, but as I mentioned here last spring I still can't decide whether he is

a) Jimmy Stewart, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington;

b) Robert Redford, in The Candidate;

c) Peter Sellers (Chauncey Gardner), in Being There; or

d) Laurence Harvey, in The Manchurian Candidate.

I will say, though, that the possibility that he is Mr. Smith has faded into the background.

Source




The far-Left crazies at Firedoglake are just salivating for civil war

Which they project onto others, of course. See below:

If there is a President Obama come next Jan. 20, normal folks better brace for what the right-wing crazies have in mind. Because it's becoming clear that they are winding themselves up now for a fresh spate of violence if Obama wins. You can find the signs in the things they're saying now, both on Internet forums and in the things they say when they think no one is listening. For instance, read some of the details emerging from that militia bust in Pennsylvania that the media have been studiously ignoring. To wit:

Bradley T. Kahle, 60, of Troutville, was one of five people arrested in last weekend's sweep. He told undercover agents he hoped Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama would be killed if they were elected president, and that he would shoot judicial and law enforcement officials if he became terminally ill, according to an affidavit of probable cause made public Tuesday. "Kahle said words to the effect of, that 'if Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, get elected, hopefully they will get assassinated, if not they will disarm the country and we will have a civil war,'" the affidavit stated.

The same man also told authorities he planned to visit Pittsburgh so he could get on top of a high rise and start shooting black people. And of course, the judge let him go on bail. Would I be crazy to suspect that if he were a Muslim talking about shooting white people from a high rise and hoping John McCain would get killed, no judge on earth would let him go?

In any event, a pattern is already developing, ranging from the Klan fellows who promise that Obama will be shot to the white supremacists who are actually rooting for him to win because they're certain he will fail. We're hearing a lot of language from the racist and "Patriot" right indicating that they expect a Democratic president to enact policies (particularly regarding gun control) that will inspire "civil war." Which means they are looking for excuses to act out.

As always with these folks, there's a lot of projection going on here. Because even if a President Obama follows only the most moderate of liberal agendas, the far right will look upon those policies as cause for "civil war." That was how they responded to Bill Clinton, after all -- a white male Southerner with generally conservative leanings. One can only imagine how a liberal black man from Illinois would fare.

The extremist right went into remission, largely, with the election of George W. Bush; militias disbanded because their followers believed the threat of an oppressive, gun-grabbing, baby-killing "New World Order" had largely passed. They bided their time by forming Minutemen brigades. Now they can see that their "safe" era is coming to an end.

All this time, there really has been hankering for an excuse to start acting out violently, and they see any Democratic presidency as providing that excuse. But an Obama presidency in particular will do so. All of which makes rather ironic the fears expressed by the fellow who propped up that phony "Hillary Clinton Supporters For John McCain" page:

What good is a great economy if you have to worry about getting blown up by a car bomb every time you go to the Mall? You want another Baghdad here in the USA, not me! I want my grandkids to be free and that includes being free from the fear of being killed by a terrorist. If Obama is elected, you better hope he adopts Hillary Health Care plan, because you are going to need it with his idea of "Security" for this country.

Well, there is indeed a potential threat looming after this election in which terrorists will make ordinary people feel unsafe about going to places like malls -- just like they did in the 1990s. But they won't be Arabs coming from Baghdad. They'll be little Timmy McVeighs from Buffalo. Then again, to the folks on the right, that doesn't seem to be a problem. To the rest of us, well, we had better be prepared. I think we'll all find that the "law enforcement approach to terrorism" is a lot more effective than those same right-wingers have been telling us the past few years.

Source




The left should shut the hell up about race

They lost that "moral high ground" a long time ago. But it doesn't stop them - see this screed. It's amazing how the only one's making "race the issue" in the "Light Being's" run for office is the left. Yet from the group who had a Black Face party for Joe Lieberman, and Michael Steele, or outright racism against Condi Rice and other black administration officials over the last seven years they've lost the right to talk about anyone else. Again, quoting Dr. King.

"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

The left, not the right, has ignored this dream from the beginning of Obama's run. They - not the right - asked "Is Obama Black Enough", and refererred to him as "The Magic Negro". They have exclusively made his race - exclusive. In fact when Hillary dropped out, the leftist media touted him as the "First Black Presidential Candidate". In the dream of King it doesn't matter what color his skin is, absolutely none.

Yet it goes deeper than that. The historical party of racism, who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights legislation, is now flipping it around and plans to use Obama's race as shield to cover him from his lack of "character". We've seen this numerous times every time someone has the audacity to bring up one of his ever growing gaffes. Watch the next time - and since he has about one a week it shouldn't be long - he has a gaffe, and is called on it, how the left throws out the "race" card to claim he's being picked on.

Actually they can't help themselves, because that's what liberalism does. It never has followed King's dream. Affirmative Action is as far from the dream as Pluto from the Sun. The entire concept is nothing more than the celebration of racism. Yet through that policy liberals tell blacks by design, "You're stupid and inept, but don't worry, we'll help you get ahead, just trust us and us alone".

They're doing no less with the Obamas. Protecting them from - well, themselves. Shielding them from criticism with an almost "How dare you say that!" every time someone brings out any of the serious questions about his candidacy. You will continue to see this played out in the weeks and months to come. Expect it.

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





14 June, 2008

The Gaffemeister has another "whoopsie!"; admits that he likes higher gas prices

Incredible, isn't it, that the more gaffes the Obamamessiah makes, the tighter the mainstream media and his rabid supporters cling to him. The Obamamessiah admitted on national television that he actually likes the idea of higher gas prices, thankyouverymuch, and that the only reason this is presenting a problem for the American people is because they went up so quickly. If they went up gradually, it wouldn't be a strain on the American pocketbook, and everything would be hunky dory. Yes, he really said it.

Maybe in the Obamamessiah's communist paradise, paying $7.00 a gallon could be considered a good thing. The rest of us who aren't multimillionaires, Ivy-league educated, arugula munching elitists can't afford that, no matter how slowly you may adjust the prices.

And for those liberal trolls who are going to immediately go into BDS mode after reading this, screaming about the war for oil, and McHitlerBurton, and all the same tired crap that you always spout anytime Iraq, the Middle East, oil, gas prices, global warming, money, or whatever else that gets mentioned that you find some ridiculous way to tie to BushHitler? Before you start sputtering in indignant rage, feeling triumphant that you've finally, finally got us KKKonservatives, save your breath. No one cares. You've played that card so often that it's old and tired and worn out. Don't even bother. I already know that's exactly what you will do. That's how stupidly transparent you are. So seriously, don't even mention it. (Five bucks says that they still will. Just wait.)

Anyways, Mitch McConnell promptly ripped Obama a new one. Perhaps, as McConnell points out, this is why Democrats simply refuse to act on these outrageous gas prices. They love it! Dems seem to think that the best way to help out the little people, those cute little blue-collar workers they condescendingly claim to fight for, is to raise taxes on them over and over and over again, while bloating the government with pointless bureaucracy. With oil prices skyrocketing, Democrats are seeing another opportunity to impose even more bureaucracy.

Exit question: what is it with the word "change" being prominently displayed in the background of seemingly every Obama video that I watch? I know that's his meme and all, but seriously - will that continue even if he's President? As he's screwing the country into oblivion, we'll be reminded over and over again that it's change, to bring us hope, and that the government is doing all these things for our own good. Maybe seeing those words makes liberals feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but not me. Every time I hear Barack Obama talk about how much he's going to change this country, I worry a little more.

More here




Media defensiveness about Obama and his Communist associations



A couple of weeks ago in Washington, Herb Romerstein and Cliff Kincaid, two veteran investigators of American communism, held a press conference on Capitol Hill to announce the release of two new reports on Barack Obama's radical past, or, more specifically, his association with extremist elements from the American left -- yet more evidence of a frightening pattern of associations by Obama throughout his distant and recent life, from Bill Ayers to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, all of which at the least shows bad judgment. At the press conference, they discussed Romerstein's report on Frank Marshall Davis, an influential figure in Obama's early life, whom Obama refers to only as "Frank" (albeit affectionately) in his autobiography Dreams From My Father. Davis was a communist, a member of CPUSA. Romerstein developed that fact very carefully in his report, which contained at least a half dozen exhibits and other forms of reliable documentation -- a fact that itself is news, since many (on the gullible left) still like to question whether Davis was a Party member.

Before going further, I would like to add a word on Herb Romerstein's credibility: Romerstein himself was a communist early in life, a member of CPUSA. He broke ranks over 50 years ago. He went on to become probably the single most respected authority on American communism. He is the go-to guy on questions of American communism -- thoroughly respected from the legislative to executive branch. He is the individual who did the work on the Venona papers. He is completely credible.

I know this well, because I know Romerstein. I've worked with him on precisely this kind of research. He is extremely fair, precise, nuanced, and knowledgeable. He constantly exhorts me by email or phone: "Now, Paul, be careful there: He was a liberal and never a communist -- a sucker, maybe; but not a communist." Another example, which is a direct quote from an email: "He was a small ‘c' communist, but never a party member, and later a non-communist liberal who cooperated with the FBI." Or, as he often says: "No, Paul, he was a good guy. An anti-communist liberal. No dupe." Romerstein is no witch-hunter and has never been accused of such. He is the epitome of responsible anti-communism.

That said, what did Romerstein find on Frank Marshall Davis? He showed not only that Davis was a communist, but -- listen up, liberals -- how Davis and his comrades worked to undermine genuine liberal causes because of their lock-step subservience to the Comintern and the USSR. Modern liberals need to understand, for example, how the American communist movement, including men like Davis, flip-flopped on issues as grave as Nazism and World War II based entirely on whether Hitler was signing a non-aggression pact with Stalin or invading Stalin's Soviet Union. The disgusting about-face by CPUSA on this matter was unforgivable. And what a shame that liberal college professors don't teach this to their students. Liberals also need to know how their friends inside government were used by communists who sought victory for Mao Tse-Tung in China in 1949, which would lead to the single greatest concentration of corpses in human history: 60-70 million dead Chinese from 1957 to 1969.

Finally, if that doesn't concern liberals, they should understand how communists, including Frank Marshall Davis, used the civil-rights movement, and again and again exploited and undermined the NAACP. Romerstein lays this out at length in his report. He quotes Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, who rightly noted of Davis and his comrades: "they would now destroy the local branch of the NAACP." They would do so after having destroyed another good civil-rights organization. "Comrade Davis," wrote Wilkins, "was supported by others who recently ‘sneaked' into the organization with the avowed intent and purpose of converting it into a front for the Stalinist line." Wilkins knew well that this was a standard "tactic" by the communists; it was known by everyone involved in the NAACP at the time. Wilkins, like many civil-rights leaders of his time, refused to be duped by Davis and his comrades.

Where does Obama meet Davis? -- in Hawaii. Similar to Obama, who moved from Kansas to Honolulu to Chicago, Frank Marshall Davis went from Kansas to Chicago to Honolulu. Obama freely admits to learning and taking advice from Davis, which surely was nothing like the "Midwestern values" that Governor Kathleen Sebelius (D-KS) claimed he learned in Kansas. While most Americans by the late 1970s and early 1980s were at last convinced that détente with the Soviets was a sham, and that the USSR was an Evil Empire that needed to be dissolved, Obama almost certainly was learning exactly the opposite -- moving totally against what Ronald Reagan described as the "tide of history," a "freedom tide" that would "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."

Instead, as Obama writes in Dreams From My Father, he was hanging out with the "Marxist professors," attending "socialist conferences," and "discuss[ing] neocolonialism." Rather than learning about the American exceptionalism that would seek to bring freedom to the USSR and Eastern Europe, Obama was hearing about the glory of the Bolshevik experiment. This was the wrong side of history.

Enter Dana Milbank

Jumping into this unfolding drama is Dana Milbank, the columnist for the Washington Post. Milbank was apparently one of the few mainstream journalists to attend the Romerstein press conference on Capitol Hill, according to the reporting of columnist Bill Steigerwald, a good reporter who was also there. Steigerwald noted that it quickly became apparent that Milbank was basically there to mock the event. In response, Milbank could write about it in the Post, and his fellow liberals could enjoy a chuckle at the expense of the latest exhibit of right-wing anti-communist cavemen.

Milbank didn't disappoint. He described the press conference as a new Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, as the 2008 version of the 2004 Swift Boat veterans, and described Romerstein as "a living relic from the House Committee on Un-American Activities." The whole thing, reported Milbank, sounded "like a UFO convention." He even pooh-poohed the quite legitimate, quite telling point that Obama's past affiliations are so "dodgy" (Milbank's word) that he would have difficulty getting a government security clearance. Indeed, he would-and that's a big deal for a man who could be our next president.

To be fair, Milbank, while at the press conference, did ask the pertinent question: Was Romerstein trying to argue that Obama is a communist? What's the point of this if Obama is not a communist, right?

Well, yes and no. He has not, to anyone's knowledge, ever been a member of the Communist Party. On the other hand, his friends have been members. And there is a clear long-running association in this man's life with the most radical of the far left: on the religion side, there is Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger, on the political side, there is the likes of William Ayers and, yes, Frank Marshall Davis, to name only a few. And remarkably, Obama cites some of these people as mentors, and even draws from their messages in conceiving the title of the bestselling book that made everyone gaga over Obama in the first place -- here I'm referring to Audacity of Hope, which is based on a Rev. Wright sermon.

These associations actually should tell us a lot, as should Obama's struggle to deal with them only once the public learns their full extent. It all points to a truly troubling reality: regardless of whether the man is a communist, his politics are remarkably radical, and have been for a very long and recent time -- and that's a crucial consideration as America considers voting for him.

And guess what? Dana Milbank and his allies know this. They will not admit it because of what they themselves try to conceal on a daily basis, and likewise as poorly as Obama: their obvious liberal bias. Like Obama, the liberal press can never be fully open about its thinking and intentions. And liberals in the press, by and large, clearly want Barack Obama to be president, a bias that clouds their judgment and hinders their ability to do objective reporting. Their lack of objectivity is obvious.

What's more, Milbank and the others would be concerned -- likely obsessed -- if Obama were a Republican who had these sort of long-running associations with the far-right. In fact, they themselves do this kind of hard digging on Republicans.

Frank Marshall Davis, as Roy Wilkins of the NAACP noted, toed the Stalinist line. What would Dana Milbank think of, say, a John McCain mentor who had toed the line for Hitler? I can tell you that I, as a conservative Republican, would be pretty darned disappointed and would demand some answers. I would not turn it into a joke. And if McCain did not absolutely, convincingly repudiate it, I absolutely would not vote for him.

Once again, too, it is the anti-communism that liberals like Milbank visibly despise, not the pro-communism. The end result is that the bad guys on the communist far-left, such as the likes of Frank Marshall Davis, continue to get a pass long after they've departed this world, as will those who consider them mentors. These were extreme leftists who hurt liberalism -- who hurt some of the dearest liberal causes. Davis, in death, is protected, his dirty work covered up, by a press who must now protect their anointed one.

The irony of journalists like Dana Milbank, who is far from alone, is that while they are laughing at the anti-communists, they seem to have no idea that the loudest howls of laughter have always come from the communists who see such journalists as dupes -- as gullible liberals to be duped to advance the communist cause. It is a time-honored tradition, and genuine liberals have filled the role again and again. It is always important to know who you friends are and aren't. And the communists were never the liberals' friends. The fact is that the joke is on liberals, except that none of this is really very funny.

More here




Obama Is Right; Words Matter: Particularly his

By KARL ROVE

"Don't tell me words don't matter!" Sen. Barack Obama thundered at a Wisconsin Democratic Party dinner in February. He should have remembered that at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference last week. There, Mr. Obama defended the outrageous promise he made last July to meet, during his first year as president and without precondition, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Mr. Obama's eagerness to undertake a "World Tyrants Tour" is both naive and foolhardy, and how he dealt with those concerns at AIPAC raises the question of whether he's done his homework.

Mr. Obama knew the audience was wondering what could come from such meetings, except propaganda victories for thugs and a loss of prestige for America. He tried to mitigate the damage of his promised meetings. But the man who criticizes George W. Bush for unilateralism ended up denouncing a multilateral approach to Iran, saying it would "outsource the sustained work to our European allies."

Mr. Obama also said he would practice "tough and principled diplomacy." There would be "careful preparation." He would "open up lines of communication, build an agenda, coordinate closely with our allies." And then he brought up Ronald Reagan. He said he'd be "tough" like Reagan, who "understood that diplomacy backed by real leverage was a fundamental tool of statecraft."

But what do Mr. Obama's words mean? What would his preparations be? What would his agenda be? Does he want to coordinate closely with allies or not "outsource the sustained work" to them? And would he really be anything like Reagan?

As early as March 1975, Reagan described the leverage he would require before sitting down with the Soviets. His key insight was that "We need to remove [the Soviets'] incentive to race ahead by making it clear to them that we can and will compete . . . at the same time we tell them that we prefer to halt this competition and reduce the nuclear arsenals by patient negotiation."

There were three elements to Reagan's strategy. First, he argued America must become a reliable ally and respected by our adversaries. As we did, we would "be tested in ways calculated to try our patience, to confound our resolve and to erode our belief in ourselves." But being consistent and credible was important to friend and foe alike.

Second, Reagan said America must rebuild its conventional as well as its nuclear defenses, because "we are number two in a world where it's dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best." The Soviets must "know we are going about the business of restoring our margin of safety."

Third, Reagan knew "peace is made by the fact of strength - economic, military, and strategic. Peace is lost when such strength disappears or - just as bad - is seen by an adversary as disappearing." America's economy had to be restored, so the Soviets would know the U.S. could compete with them.

Reagan's careful preparation for negotiations with the Evil Empire was simple to explain and difficult to achieve: "a consistent foreign policy, a strong America, and a strong economy." If you want an arms race, we'll give you one, Reagan said, and we will win it, so once you're convinced of that, let's negotiate.

Reagan spoke about his strategy repeatedly in speeches, debates and articles in the half-decade before being elected president. His approach was not cloaked in secrecy. It was not abstract promises. And it was not something to be revealed only after the election. Reagan knew a successful strategy doesn't surprise adversaries, it engages them and draws them toward changes in behavior.

When it comes to America's adversaries, Mr. Obama doesn't have a comprehensive strategy to match Reagan's. Mr. Obama believes in talking and in meeting, in the hope that his charm will sweep despots off their feet like college students in Madison, Cambridge and Berkeley.

If Mr. Obama wants to portray himself as Reagan, then let him show it by spelling out his strategy for Iran and the other rogue states he's pledged to spend his first year visiting. What specifically will he say in those meetings that will cause their leaders to change? What will he do to create the conditions that lead them to abandon their aggressive course?

If Mr. Obama keeps dodging these questions, then the American people will have every reason to view him as unprepared for the world stage. America's adversaries are watching too. And one can only imagine the guffaws in Tehran, Damascus, Pyongyang, Caracas and Havana as tyrants think about how they'd be able to take advantage of Mr. Obama's arrogance and innocence if he were elected president.

Source




Obama Is No 'Post-Racial' Candidate

By WARD CONNERLY (Mr Connerly is a black opponent of racial preferences)

With all my heart - and for the betterment of my country - I desperately wanted to believe that Sen. Barack Obama was not one of the same tired voices who peddle arguments about "institutional racism."

I have heard him say that America is not about "black and white." I was inspired when his supporters chanted at his rally on the night of his victory in South Carolina that "race doesn't matter." I thought his March 18 speech about race had the potential to become a defining moment in our endless struggle to confront and conquer this issue. I was encouraged by his perceptive acknowledgment that affirmative action breeds resentment and hostility. As millions of whites cast their votes for him in predominantly white states, I held out hope that, perhaps, he truly was a transformative leader.

But a June 10 article in USA Today by DeWayne Wickham dashed my hopes for Mr. Obama. Mr. Wickham, who had interviewed the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, wrote that "Obama believes America can keep its promise to women and blacks without dashing the hopes of working-class whites. He doesn't think opportunity guarantees made to one group must come at the expense of another." Then he went on to quote Obama campaign spokeswoman Candice Toliver, who said that "Senator Obama believes in a country in which opportunity is available to all Americans, regardless of race, gender or economic status. That's why he opposes these ballot initiatives, which would roll back opportunity for millions of Americans and cripple efforts to break down historic barriers to the progress of qualified women and minorities." Translation: Mr. Obama supports race preferences.

As many readers will know, I am intimately involved in the effort to enact race-neutral ballot initiatives around the country (right now in Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska). I find it difficult to understand how the senator can "strongly oppose" any initiative that does precisely what he professes to believe and is consistent with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This is the language of the initiatives I am now sponsoring: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin, in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting."

The rationale for using race preferences to "eliminate historic barriers," upon which Mr. Obama relies as his primary justification, has been rejected consistently by the Supreme Court since the Bakke decision in 1978. Only the pursuit of "diversity" by higher education meets the strict constitutional test for race preferences. As a lawyer, I am sure that Mr. Obama must know this.

He must also know that blacks and whites are not the only racial groups in America. Every year there are more than 48,000 applicants for one of the 4,500 seats at the University of California campus at Berkeley. Before the passage of the initiative in that state to outlaw race preferences, thousands of Asian students were denied admission so that a greater number of "underrepresented minorities" could be admitted.

Similar circumstances exist across the nation, because college admissions, public jobs and government contracts are the ultimate "zero-sum" game, and race and gender should not be the determining factors in picking winners and losers. It simply stretches credulity to argue that an "opportunity" given to one, on the basis of race, is not discrimination against another for the same reason.

The issue that troubled many Americans about the widely publicized sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright was his view that America is an "institutionally racist" society. This view lies at the heart of the defense advocates of race preferences make for "affirmative action." It is also at the core of Black Liberation Theology.

By supporting race preferences, Mr. Obama is unmistakably attaching himself to despicable ideas like Rev. Wright's. And, if he believes in those precepts, how does he reconcile his impressive political success and that of Mrs. Clinton with this perspective? Thirty-six million Americans didn't vote for the two of them because the majority of the American people are racist and sexist.

If Mr. Obama wants to be the candidate of "change," why doesn't he change the idiotic racial classification system that burdens millions of Americans? Why doesn't he call attention to the barbaric "one-drop" (of hereditary blood) rule that continues to haunt our nation, and which drives him to identify with the "black community" at the expense of his white ancestry? If he wants to unite the American people, how does he propose to do that by asking some Americans to accept preferential treatment for others and discrimination against themselves?

How does Mr. Obama expect America to compete with China and India when we abandon the principle of individual merit and elevate skin color and sex above performance? Soothing rhetoric about uniting our nation against a backdrop of American flags isn't sufficient to accomplish that objective. Specific policies like affirmative action - and where candidates stand on them - are where the rubber meets the road.

If either Barack Obama or John McCain want to be a truly "post-racial president," then it is essential that they support efforts to place our nation on a path to guarantee equal treatment under the law for all Americans. That means preferential treatment for none on the basis of their race, ethnic background, skin color or sex.

Source




Ex-Friends of Barack

It turns out that Jim Johnson was not the man Barack Obama thought he knew. The presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee threw the former Fannie Mae CEO over the side as his Vice Presidential vetter yesterday, only a day after he'd said that Mr. Johnson was only "tangentially related" to his campaign and that criticism was a "game that can be played."

Mr. Johnson was cast off after the Journal disclosed that he had received sweetheart loans from Countrywide Financial - the very firm that Mr. Obama has specifically excoriated for its role in the mortgage meltdown. The press corps will now move on to other things, but this is more than a campaign issue. The disclosure about Mr. Johnson and his successor as Fannie CEO, Franklin Raines, raises serious questions about the extent to which favorable mortgage pricing contributed to Countrywide's rise and fall. At a minimum, a regulatory probe is warranted.

As for Mr. Obama, Mr. Johnson now joins an intriguing and growing list of Mr. Obama's ex-associates that includes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, and former terrorist bomber William Ayers. We might call this list eclectic, except that there is a consistent pattern of bad judgment followed by an initial defense, then followed by rapid disassociation and regret that none of them were the men Mr. Obama "knew."

We can only wonder if Eric Holder, who is also among Mr. Obama's veep vetters, will be the next to join this club. As Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration, he played a role in the Marc Rich pardon that also deserves to be fully vetted - all the more so if Mr. Holder is on the short list to be Mr. Obama's Attorney General. Caroline Kennedy, the other member of Mr. Obama's veep vetting team, has probably already inherited a stack of files from Mr. Johnson. She might want to take a peek at Mr. Holder's too.

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Revisiting Obama's Speech to AIPAC

Barack Obama's June 4 speech to AIPAC received a favorable initial response, but the more one scrutinizes it, the more troubling it becomes. Here are some of the portions that raised questions, ranging from minor to major:

1. Obama began his speech (the video is here) with something not in his prepared text -- a reference to the need to remember and bring home "the three soldiers still held by Hezbollah." Perhaps it was simply a momentary slip, but it seems strange he did not realize that Gilad Shalit is held by Hamas in Gaza, not by Hezbollah in Lebanon, particularly since Shalit's status has been a key issue in the on-going negotiations over a Gaza truce.

2. More serious was his statement regarding Jerusalem -- and his reversal of it 24 hours later. In a paragraph beginning "Let me be clear," Obama told AIPAC that "Jerusalem must remain undivided." The statement produced a standing ovation. The next day, his campaign decided his statement had to be "clarified." It turned out that, by "undivided," Obama meant that, after the city was divided, there would be no checkpoints between the two sides.

3. Obama's statement to AIPAC that he supported "boycotting firms associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which has rightly been labeled a terrorist organization" was at best disingenuous. He did not acknowledge he had strenuously opposed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment last September, which called for precisely that policy.

His support at AIPAC for boycotting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was thus a little late. The month after Kyl-Lieberman passed the Senate (by 76-22, including 29 Democratic votes), the Bush administration designated the Guard as a terrorist organization and subjected it to sanctions under U.S. law and relevant U.N. resolutions, just as the Senate had urged. At AIPAC, Obama was thus supporting something that (a) had already been done (b) many months before (c) over his objections.

4. The nature of Obama's opposition to Kyl-Lieberman turns out to be instructive. On October 11, 2007, he published a lengthy op-ed in a New Hampshire newspaper about it. In the op-ed, he acknowledged that "[w]e do need to tighten sanctions on the Iranian regime, particularly on Iran's Revolutionary Guard." But he argued "this must be done separately" from Kyl-Lieberman, which he asserted went "out of its way to draw connections between distinct threats" -- the Iraq war and Iran -- and constituted "saber-rattling." He proposed instead "tough and direct diplomacy" with Iran.

It is hard to conceive of a more misleading description of what the Kyl-Lieberman amendment involved. Kyl-Lieberman set forth seven pages of direct quotations from official sources, including: (a) the September 2007 testimony of Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, (b) the August 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, (c) the September 2007 Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, (d) the September 2007 Defense Department report on Stability and Security in Iraq, and other sources.

Based on those sources, the Senate found that Iran was seeking to use the Guard "to turn the Shi'a militia extremists into a Hezbollah-like force" to "fight a proxy war" against the Iraqi government and the American-led forces in Iraq, and that it was a critical U.S. interest to prevent Iran from turning those extremists in Iraq into such a force. The Senate also concluded that the manner in which the U.S. "transitions and structures" its military presence in Iraq would have critical long-term consequences for the ability of Iran to threaten the security of the region and the prospects for democracy in the region. In other words, Kyl-Lieberman did not go "out of its way to draw connections between distinct threats." Its findings established instead that Iran was fighting a proxy war against the United States and its interests in Iraq itself.

The Senate also made findings with respect to the efficacy of diplomacy as a solution to the proxy war. Kyl-Lieberman noted that Ambassador Crocker had held three rounds of talks with Iran on Iraq security since May 2007 and had "found no readiness on the Iranians' side at all to engage seriously on these issues." Crocker testified the Iranians "were interested simply in the appearance of discussions, of being seen to be at the table with the U.S. as an arbiter of Iraq's present and future."

In order to get Democratic votes for Kyl-Lieberman, the amendment was stripped of the provisions stating that: (1) U.S. policy should be "to combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran," and (2) such a policy should be backed by the "prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq." In addition, two new findings were added, noting that both Ambassador Crocker and Defense Secretary Gates had endorsed diplomatic and economic means as the preferable approach to dealing with the Iranian challenge. In other words, not only was Kyl-Lieberman not "saber-rattling," but the faint sound of sabers that had once been in it had been explicitly removed. The only action item left in the amendment when it passed, by an overwhelming margin, was economic sanctions on the Iranian entity seeking to destabilize Iraq.

5. Obama also promised at AIPAC that "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon -- everything." The statement produced another standing ovation, but the repetition of "everything" masked the fact that he was simply pledging a maximum personal effort, not making a presidential commitment to actually achieve that result.

His statement recalled the colloquy during the October 30, 2007 presidential debate, when Tim Russert asked each candidate the same question -- "would you pledge to the American people that Iran will not develop a nuclear bomb while you are president?" -- and Hillary Clinton repeated her talking point three times:

CLINTON: I intend to do everything I can to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.

RUSSERT: But you won't pledge?

CLINTON: I am pledging I will do everything I can to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.

RUSSERT: But, they may.

CLINTON: Well, you know, Tim, you asked me if I would pledge, and I have pledged that I will do everything I can to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.

(LAUGHTER)

Compare Obama's promise to do "everything in my power" (echoing Hillary Clinton's pledge to do "everything I can") with John McCain's statement of a national commitment in his February 7, 2008 speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee:

I intend to make unmistakably clear to Iran we will not permit a government that espouses the destruction of the State of Israel as its fondest wish and pledges undying enmity to the United States to possess the weapons to advance their malevolent ambitions.

6. As Obama gave his AIPAC speech, his positions over the past year had been effectively refuted: he had opposed the surge (which has succeeded), opposed imposing economic sanctions under Kyl-Lieberman (but now favored them seven months after they were implemented), and had drawn no adverse conclusions from the fact that Ambassador Crocker's three rounds of negotiations with Iran had been fruitless and counterproductive. Instead, Obama proposed future "tough and principled" negotiations with Iran that would be conducted while the centrifuges continued to whirl, together with a "redeployment" of troops from Iraq.

7. It was that part of Obama's AIPAC speech that was the most troublesome of all. Here is the process of diplomacy with Iran that Obama outlined at AIPAC:

We will open up lines of communication, build an agenda, coordinate closely with our allies, especially Israel, and evaluate the potential for progress. . . . [W]e will present a clear choice [to Iran]. If you abandon your dangerous nuclear program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, there will be meaningful incentives -- including the lifting of sanctions, and political and economic integration with the international community. If you refuse, we will ratchet up the pressure.

In other words, in 2009 or later, after the lines have been opened, the agenda is built, the allies coordinated, the potential evaluated, the choice presented, the talks held, and the talks eventually fail, Obama will then start to "ratchet up the pressure" -- at just about the time Iran will have completed (or used) its nuclear weapon. But Obama will be able to say don't blame him, he did everything he could.

It is easy to understand why Obama's speech at AIPAC received an enthusiastic response. It reflected his trademark rhetoric: soaring language, an inspiring delivery, sounding great for as long as it lasts (or until one thinks more about it). But like his final primary speech ("this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow") and his speech on race ("I could no more disown . . ."), the rhetoric can be overblown, and its shelf life limited.

Source

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13 June, 2008

It's Getting Crowded Under Obama's Bus

On Tuesday, Barack Obama faced the glare of the cameras and tried to deal with what was rapidly becoming one of those "distractions" he so despises. It turns out that the man he chose to head up the steering committee to help him choose a vice president, Jim Johnson, had a past that was making Obama out to be a hypocrite on the sub-prime mortgage crisis. After skewering John McCain for his connections with sub-prime lenders, it turns out that Mr. Johnson made McCain's connections look positively innocent by comparison.

Johnson, Fannie Mae chief from 1991 through 1998, received more than $7 million in real estate loans from a program open only to "friends of Angelo." The "Angelo" in question is none other than Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide Financial Corporation. Obama, who has heavily criticized Mozilo for accepting hefty bonuses despite the sub-prime crisis, evidently didn't vet Mr. Johnson thoroughly and failed to discover the sweetheart connection.

It should also be noted that according to the Chicago Tribune, the practitioner of "new politics" accepted $1.9 million from sub prime lenders, which only goes to show that when it comes to a decision between engaging in the "new politics" and old fashioned money grubbing, "new politics" gets the shaft.

The revelations about Johnson led to an incredible exchange with ABC News reporter Sunlen Miller, who grilled Obama on why the information hadn't been discovered by the campaign before he hired him. The ensuing explanation by Obama is a jaw dropper.

So without further adieu, I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Barack H. Obama -- Columbia University graduate, Harvard Law, President of the Harvard Law Review, and noted American orator:

"Now look, the, the, ah, ah, ah, I mean the uh first of all uh I, I, I am not vetting my VP search committee for their mortgages so you're going have to uh d-direct... Well, nah I mean becomes sort of a... um... I mean this is a game that can be played everybody... It who is tangentially related to our campaign I think is going to have a whole host of relationships. I would have to hire the vetter to uh vet the vetter."

Huh? It gets murkier -- or more bizarrely incoherent. The following was cleaned up by the ABC website and made into something printable:

"Jim Johnson has a very discrete task," Obama continued, "as does Eric Holder, and that is simply to gather up information about potential vice presidential candidates. They are performing that job well, it's a volunteer, unpaid position. And they are giving me information and I will then exercise judgment in terms of who I want to select as a vice presidential candidate. "So this - you know, these aren't folks who are working for me," Obama said. "They're not people you know who I have assigned to a job in a future administration and, you know, ultimately my assumption is that, you know, this is a discrete task that they're going to performing for me over the next two months."

Whassat? What'd he say? Johnson doesn't really "work" for him because he's a "volunteer" in an "unpaid position." And after all, he hasn't promised him a cabinet post so it's really OK that he didn't vet him and besides this is just a "distraction" so can we please get back to your slavish worship of my awe inspiring talents? Well, on Wednesday, Johnson "unvolunteered" himself from the campaign:

I believe Barack Obama's candidacy for president of the United States is the most exciting and important of my lifetime," he said, according to a Bloomberg report. "I would not dream of being a party to distracting attention from that historic effort."

We all know how much Obama doesn't like "distractions." Obama himself cried a few crocodile tears in giving him the heave ho:

"Jim did not want to distract in any way from the very important task of gathering information about my vice presidential nominee, so he has made a decision to step aside that I accept. We have a very good selection process underway, and I am confident that it will produce a number of highly qualified candidates for me to choose from in the weeks ahead. I remain grateful to Jim for his service and his efforts in this process," Obama said in a statement.

So, another Obama associate is thrown under the bus. One might begin to wonder if there are more people riding on the Obama express or underneath it. Think of all this guy's friends, staffers, spiritual advisors, and assorted far left radicals who have been given the equivalent of a pair of cement galoshes and thrown into the Chicago River. A partial list:

1. Samantha Power, foreign policy advisor, who ended up being just a little bit too frank about some of Obama's less than mainstream plans for Israel and other places if the candidate were to win office.

2. Austan Goolsbee, economic advisor, who whispered to the Canadian government sweet nothings about his boss's NAFTA switcheroo in Ohio -- Obama running around the state, breathing fire about the evils of NAFTA and how he would renegotiate the treaty while Goolsbee was telling the Canadians that the candidate was just politicking and had no intention of touching the treaty.

3. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, friend and spiritual advisor for whom the candidate bravely stood up -- at first -- until Wright's performance at the National Press Club caused the candidate to open the door himself and push the old man under the wheels.

4. Father Michael Pfleger, friend and spiritual advisor, whose spittle flecked rant at Trinity Church against Hillary, America and white people forced the candidate to leave his boot print on the good father's rear end as he too was impelled from behind under the Obama Greyhound.

5. William Ayers, terrorist and future Secretary of Education in an Obama Administration. Well, probably not. But Obama's dismissal of his former boss and friend as "just a neighbor" no doubt hurt the terrorist's feelings but became necessary when the press started to get curious about what a candidate for president was doing associating with someone who doesn't regret blowing people to smithereens.

There are more -- the undercarriage of that bus is bloody indeed. There's the entire congregation of Trinity United Church who now must practice their Black Liberation Theology and "anti-middleclassness" without the man who apparently spent many a pleasant Sunday sleeping through sermons -- or so he would have us believe.

But there is a monumental difference between Obama's previous actions in washing his hands of wayward staffers, bigots, and radicals and having to toss Jim Johnson out the window. The others were handled when he was simply a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. But his choice of Johnson to head up the most important job he has between now and the election -- choosing a vice president -- was made as the presumptive nominee.

In short, Obama's first major decision as the nominee for president of his party was an unmitigated disaster. Not only did he choose someone who opened him up to charges of being a rank hypocrite. But the way he handled himself in off the cuff remarks in trying to defend Johnson was shockingly incoherent and stupid. Trying to pass Johnson off as someone who didn't work for him? That's childish in its attempt to avoid responsibility. One might expect a 7 year old to deny breaking a dinner plate by saying something like "I didn't drop it mom, it fell." But when the potential next president of the United States tries to run away from his mistakes, we can ask legitimate questions on how this man will perform if he reaches the oval office. Craig Crawford brings up another point:

Obama's cavalier response utterly contradicted his campaign's supposed crusade for reform. Not only did those words come across as tone deaf to the very ethical issues that he has raised in this election, but his remarks sounded like the ethical relativism we so often hear from the Washington business-as-usual crowd that Obama claims to be running against.

Chris Cillizza recognizes the danger Obama exposes himself to by latching on to people like Johnson:

For Obama, any questions in voters' minds about whether he truly is a change agent or is legitimately committed to breaking the alleged stranglehold lobbyists and other power brokers have over the political system is potentially disastrous. Because of the peril involved, it's not terribly surprising that Obama moved quickly to "fix the glitch" once he realized questions about Johnson weren't going away. Seen another way, however, this episode could forebode poorly for how Obama handles the various slings and arrows sent his way by Republicans and their famed -- and effective -- noise machine.

This is where the national press has done a heroic job in keeping a well kept secret of Obama's associations and actions in his past that would expose him as the hypocrite he is. No real attempt has been made to ferret out the truth of what his career was like as a Chicago politician. The Obama campaign would blow up if the press ever read some back issues of the Chicago Tribune or Sun Times.

Instead, it is as if Obama sprang fully formed into the world of national politics, unsullied by grubby special interests and lobbyists who afflict everyone else in Washington. His holy throat and golden tongue will lead a revolution that will make America a paradise of unity and happiness. All I can say is we better snap out of it before we elect the most incompetent, the most naive, and perhaps the most dangerous man ever to run for the office of the president.

Source




The Audacity of Gullibility

David Jeffers, a religion columnist at New Media Journal, describes "The Deep Faith of Barack Obama." His analysis dissects a 2004 interview with Obama that is -- to be frank -- quite disturbing given what we now know about his relationships and judgment....First, Senator Obama says in the interview:

So that, one of the churches I met, or one of the churches that I became involved in was Trinity United Church of Christ. And the pastor there, Jeremiah Wright, became a good friend. So I joined that church and committed myself to Christ in that church.

By now most Americans know about the controversy swirling around Reverend Wright and the majority of people do not believe that Senator Obama could be a member of that church and not know about Reverend Wright's racist tendencies. But what if he is telling the truth, what if he didn't know?

Then there is something more troubling and it brings into question Senator Obama's judgment and his ability to evaluate people's motives and desires. How is it possible that a grown man educated in an Ivy League school could be taken completely by surprise over Jeremiah Wright's behavior? When asked if he had people in his life he looked to for guidance, Senator Obama responded:

Well, my pastor is certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for... I have a number of friends who are ministers. Reverend Meeks is a close friend and colleague of mine in the state Senate. Father Michael Pfleger is a dear friend and somebody I interact with closely.

Add on to Senator Obama's list his dear friend convicted felon Tony Rezko and his associate, domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and we have a pattern here. And if it is true that Barack Obama was completely fooled and surprised by the behavior of these four men, three of whom he says "...is not the man I knew", then that leads to a very important question.

How are we to trust this man to sit across the negotiating table with the likes of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syria's Bashar al-Assad, North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, or Venezuela's Hugo Chavez? Senator Obama has already stated that he would initiate "tough negotiations" with these four countries and yet he is unable to know the hearts and minds of three close friends and one political associate?

Source




Limbaugh shows Obama stumbles without his notes

'You take away the prompter, written speeches and you have nothing'

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh says Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is riding on "a wing and a prayer" and cannot sustain his "image" until the general election in the fall. "Ted Kennedy could do a better job," Limbaugh said yesterday. "I've constantly noted, ladies and gentlemen, you take the prompter and the written speeches away from Barak Obama, and you have nothing. You have nothing like the guy with the soaring rhetoric and the inspiring and sermon-like quality," he said.

Obama's campaign has been plagued with issues over statements by his wife who said her husband's campaign finally made her proud of America, his former pastor who said "God d--- America," and by friends who expressed regret they did not do more as violent activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Now Obama's own words are attracting attention, too. Limbaugh said a speech by the candidate illustrates his point.

In the YouTube video, Obama says: "Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. (crowd laughing) I haven't had much sleep in the last 48 hours." Limbaugh commented: "He hasn't had much sleep in the last 48 hours. It's inhaler. There's no such a thing as an inhalator. And a breathalyzer? A breathalyzer is what they give you if you've been overserved adult beverages and you're driving around and the cops catch you."

Limbaugh said Obama's speech in Bristol, Va., just last week was interrupted by the candidate's apparent inability to keep his thoughts in order. In the speech, Obama says: "What they'll say is, 'Well it costs too much money,' but you know what? It would cost, about... It -- it -- it would cost about the same as what we would spend... It... Over the course of 10 years it would cost what it would costs us... (nervous laugh) All right. Okay. We're going to... It... It would cost us about the same as it would cost for about -- hold on one second. I can't hear myself. But I'm glad you're fired up, though. I'm glad."

That is why, Limbaugh said, he doesn't believe Obama "will do as many of these town hall meetings with McCain as his camp is saying. . If this were George Bush that you were listening to, this would have been commented on since it happened. You would have had people all over the country saying, 'Gosh, can't we get a guy that can talk? Can't we get a guy who can put two thoughts together?" "This is the worst example of it, but I have noticed this and I have seen this throughout these town hall debate situations," Limbaugh said.

Limbaugh noted Obama's explanation that he couldn't hear himself. "By the way, when he makes his remark about the audience being loud and distracting, we didn't edit any of the audience out. The audience was not making a sound because the audience is as perplexed as you will be," Limbaugh said.

"Nobody was saying a word. There was no cheering; there was no fainting. There was just disbelief. I have warned you people several times, you get this guy away from the teleprompter and the David Axelrod-written speeches. This guy doesn't even write his own speeches. Mario Cuomo and Malcolm X write these, but the bottom line is, you get this guy away from them, and I don't care, he blames it on lack of sleep. Hey, get used to it, man, you want to be president. Remember that phone call that's going to ring at 3:00 in the morning? It's going to be Hillary saying, 'Have you seen Bill?' And he'll say, 'Yeah, the last time I saw him was in the Oval Office and I couldn't get rid of him so I came up to bed.' This is the guy who wants to run your healthcare," Limbaugh said.

"If the American people had learned 30 years ago that a presidential candidate of any party can number as one of his best friends a terrorist who blew up the Pentagon, he would be finished. Today he's the nominee of the Democrat Party for president of the United States, and this is a man of change and this is a man of hope and dreams. This is a man who is finally going to bring about the federal government fixing everything that's wrong in healthcare," Limbaugh said.

Source




Obama and the giant blogosphere conspiracy

Today's Guardian reports that Barack Obama is setting up an entire unit to combat `virulent rumours' about him on the internet. Doubtless one of the blogs in the sights of team Obama is Little Green Footballs, which in the last few days has been excavating examples of wildly anti-Jewish and anti-American prejudice and conspiracy theories posted up by fans on Obama's own website. LGF is making hay with the fact that the Obamanables are belatedly taking (some of) this stuff down from the site while simultaneously insisting that its presence is nothing to do with them because the website has no moderators. Yeah, right.

The Guardian quotes the director of some monitoring outfit as saying that the blogosphere's smears about Obama are particularly vicious.

He added that one of the most persistent is that Obama, a Christian, is `some kind of Muslim Manchurian candidate, planted by Islamic fundamentalists to betray the country and it is very widespread'.

Well now. Crazed Jew-hating American-loathing moonbats posting comments on Obama's website are one thing. But the fact is that there are serious and troubling questions about Obama's ancestry and associations and what he himself has said about them, which have surfaced in the blogosphere but have been almost wholly ignored by the mainstream media in its collective Obamanic swoon. First is his childhood background. Last November, his campaign website carried a statement with the headline:

Barack Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim

followed by

Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.

Obama has also said:

I've always been a Christian

and

I've never practised Islam.

But none of this is true. As is explored in detail on Daniel Pipes's website, Obama was enrolled at his primary schools in Indonesia as a Muslim; he attended the mosque during that period; his friends from that time testify that he was a devout Muslim boy. A former teacher at one of these schools, Tine Hahiyary, remembers a young Obama who was quite religious and actively took part in `mengaji' classes which teach how to read the Koran in Arabic. The blogger from Indonesia who reported this commented:

`Mengagi' is a word and a term that is accorded the highest value and status in the mindset of fundamentalist societies here in Southeast Asia. To put it quite simply, "mengaji classes" are not something that a non practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to... The fact that Obama had attended mengaji classes is well known in Indonesia and has left many there wondering just when Obama is going to come out of the closet.

His father was a Muslim, as was his stepfather. His grandfather was a Muslim convert. His wider family appear to have been largely devout Muslims. Yes, we only know about Obama's early years as a Muslim; and yes, twenty years ago he became a Christian. The issue, however, is why he has been less than candid about his early background and his family. Indeed, he appears to have actively deceived the public about it. That is why the blogosphere is so exercised about it.

Now here's another curious thing. Much has been made of his membership of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago whose former pastor and his long-standing mentor, Jeremiah Wright, Obama was forced finally to renounce on account of his obnoxious views (although he has signally failed unequivocally to denounce those views themselves and the no less obnoxious philosophy of the Trinity United black power church). But according to a passing reference in a profile in The New Republic last year, Pastor Wright was himself a Muslim convert to Christianity. He seems to have moved from being a Muslim black power fanatic to a Christian black power fanatic - which might go some way to explaining his close affinity to the Muslim black power ideologue Louis Farrakhan.

Then there is also Obama's troubling support for the Kenyan opposition leader -- and his cousin -- Raila Odinga, the leader of the violent uprising a few months ago against the newly elected Kenyan government and who signed a memorandum of understanding with Kenyan Muslims to turn Kenya into an Islamic state governed by sharia law. At the time, the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya released a statement in which church leaders said Odinga

comes across as a presumptive Muslim president bent on forcing Islamic law, religion and culture down the throats of the Kenyan people in total disregard of the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of worship and equal protection of the law for all Kenyans.

As the Atlas Shrugs site reported, Obama actually went to Kenya in 2006 and spoke at rallies in support of Odinga, causing the Kenyan government to denounce him as `Raila's stooge'. Why was Obama supporting such a person? Why has no-one bothered to find out??

Daniel Pipes makes another highly significant point about Obama's Muslim background. He points out that, in the eyes of the Muslim world, Obama remains a Muslim regardless of what religion he now professes because he was born to a Muslim father. By his own admission (of Christianity) therefore, he is a Muslim apostate - a status regarded by the Muslim world as a sin to be punished by death. Pipes thinks this would put his life in danger and undermine his initiatives towards the Muslim world. But surely the more significant point is that much of that Muslim world has actually embraced him. Indeed the Muslim Brothers of Hamas - who most certainly would regard any Muslim apostate as someone to be eliminated - actually came out publicly in support of him (until Obama blotted his copybook by professing undying support for Israel).

We are entitled therefore to ask whether the Muslim world supports him because it believes he is still a Muslim. We are entitled to ask precisely when he stopped being a Muslim, and why. Did Obama embrace Christianity as a tactical manoeuvre to get himself elected? Why indeed has he dissembled about his family background if not for that end?

These multiple known deceptions by someone who may become President of the United States are deeply alarming. The concealment is the issue. To dismiss such concerns and the related questions they provoke as a smear campaign is to attempt to browbeat into silence those who legitimately raise them and require urgent answers as a matter of the most acute public interest.

Update: In this entry I originally included the following quote from the American Expatriate in Indonesia blog quoted above: 'Another of Obama's fo