The Fred Martinez Report

How to Pray

2009-01-19T08:29:00.000-08:00

How to Pray

"Yet everything depends on this ability to stand still and to be present with full inner awareness."

"The basic meaning of the word 'collected' is to be gathered together, united.
A glance at our life will show how much we lack this aptitude. We should have a fixed centre which, like the hub of a wheel, governs our movements and from which all our actions go out and to which they return; a standard, also, or a code by which we distinguish the important from the unimportant, the end from the means and which puts actions and experiences into their proper order; something stable, unaffected by change and yet capable of development, which makes it clear to us who we are and how matters stand with us. We lack this; we, the men of today, lack it more than did those who lived in earlier ages.

"This becomes evident in our attempts to pray. Spiritual teachers speak of 'distraction' as that state in which man lacks poise and unity, that state in which thoughts flit from object to object, in which feelings are vague and unfocused and the will ineffective. Man in this state is not really a person who speaks or who can be spoken to, but merely an unco-ordinated bundle of thoughts, feelings and sensations.

"Collectedness means that he who prays gathers himself together, directs his attention on to what he is doing, draws in all thought—a painstaking task—so as to dedicate himself to prayer as a unified whole. This is the state in which he may, when the call comes to him, answer in the words of Moses, 'Here am I (Exod. 3:4).[page 19]

"In it awakens not only the religious consciousness but a new and higher consciousness, which we might call the spiritual heart of the child of God.

"On this holy ground the reality of God becomes manifest. It may happen that man experiences it suddenly and is overcome by its grandeur and flooded by its proximity. If this happens, he knows that he is receiving the great and intimate mystery of prayer. He must receive it with reverence and guard it well. But such an event is rare indeed and more often than not nothing happens. The God of whom the worshipper had said, 'He is here,' remains silent and hidden. Then the prayer, supported by faith alone, must go out into this silent darkness and maintain itself there.

"In collectedness the worshipper says, 'God is here and here also am I.'" [Page 23]

[Romano Guardini, Prayer in Practice, Page 18, 23]

Stay in Peace in God's Presence

2008-11-05T06:48:00.001-08:00

Stay in Peace in God's Presence
It is now the hour to stay in peace in God's presence.

We must pray and do penance (big or little). The Father, Son and Holy Spirit is in control.

I'll most likely be closing all my blogs except the Catholic Monitor. God is our refuge and we all must be and get closer to Him in this hour.

Fred

O'Brien: Obama "[U]shering in the Time of Great Trial for the Church"

2008-11-02T09:13:00.000-08:00

-I also believe that he is a carrier of a deadly moral virus, indeed a kind of anti-apostle spreading concepts and agendas that are not only anti-Christ but anti-human as well. In this sense he is of the spirit of Antichrist (perhaps without knowing it), and probably is one of several key figures in the world who (knowingly or unknowingly) will be instrumental in ushering in the time of great trial for the Church under its last and worst persecution, amidst the numerous other tribulations prophesied in the books of Daniel and Revelation, and letters of St Paul, St. John, and St. Peter.

StudiObrien newsletter, The U.S. ElectionSaturday, November 1, 2008 1:20 PM
From: "studiObrien" Add sender to Contacts To: undisclosed-recipients

All Saints Day, 1 November 2008

Dear Friends,

From just north of the border, we Canadians, like other people throughout the world, are observing and praying for the coming federal election in the United States of America. I would prefer to keep private my counsel about political choices, because it is not my country. However, I am receiving letters from American subscribers and visitors to my studio website asking me some rather surprising questions about Barack Obama, related to one of my novels.

During the past year I have read a number of his pronouncements, and saw the smoke and mirrors beneath the rhetoric, but couldn't understand why everyone south of the border (the other south of the border, the 49th parallel) was getting so excited about him, both pro and con. Then a few weeks ago a German friend called me immediately after Obama's speech in Berlin, to say that the presidential candidate had mesmerized the crowds, and that a commentator on German television had said: "We have just heard the next President of the United States...and the future President of the World." My friend felt that Obama bore an uncanny resemblance to the fictional character of the President in my novel Father Elijah. I have received several other letters saying the same thing and asking what I thought about it.

From my own reading of Obama's declarations and stated positions, I knew he was an ultra-liberal, a social revolutionary with visionary pretensions. But the Antichrist? No, not possible, I thought. I felt that he was too shallow a man to be the Son of Perdition, the Man of Sin, the Beast of the Book of Revelation. And I still think so. Obama is a crowd-pleaser with just the right ethos of idealistic crusader. That the crusade and the banners under which it marches are evil does not automatically prove that he is the Antichrist.

But now that I have seen the video of the Berlin speech I think there is more here than meets the eye. He is indeed a powerful manipulator of crowds, even as he appears ever so humble and wholesomely charming. I doubt that he is the long-prophesied ruler of the world, but I also believe that he is a carrier of a deadly moral virus, indeed a kind of anti-apostle spreading concepts and agendas that are not only anti-Christ but anti-human as well. In this sense he is of the spirit of Antichrist (perhaps without knowing it), and probably is one of several key figures in the world who (knowingly or unknowingly) will be instrumental in ushering in the time of great trial for the Church under its last and worst persecution, amidst the numerous other tribulations prophesied in the books of Daniel and Revelation, and letters of St Paul, St. John, and St. Peter.

Of course the mystique that has grown up around him is endlessly reinforced by the liberal media, which presents him to us as a high-minded humanist, a kind of secular messiah (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 675). Yet when all the rhetoric is boiled down to its substance, the man is advocating unlimited state-sanctioned murder, and compounds it by indulging in habitual falsehood. He is well accustomed to playing loose with the truth whenever it is expedient for him to do so; or else he is the victim of the largest memory lapses in recorded history; or perhaps he is just not careful about how he expresses things—a blurring or selectivity regarding facts for the purpose of aggrandizing his public image. There is a controversy currently raging in the (admittedly unreliable) forum of the internet, prompted by an African-American talk show host in Los Angeles who listed 39 significant details that Barack Obama claimed were facts about himself, but on fu! rther investigation were proved to be simply untrue. There has been some wild-fire debunking of the debunking, and then more counter-debunking, but it remains obvious that forthrightness and clarity are not major concerns in the Obama camp.

What are we to make of a man who has appeared out of semi-obscurity and become, nearly overnight, so very much an idol of the popular imagination? That he intends to become the most effective advocate of murder of the unborn ever seen in America should give us pause. Murder and lies are as old as the lands east of Eden, of course, but when they are charmingly packaged, proposed as reasonable and just policies (with a smile, a resonant voice, and an appealing flash of the eyes), one begins to wonder just what is afoot in the modern age. It brings to mind a passage from the first Act of Shakespeare's Hamlet:

“That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain...”

The line is from a scene where prince Hamlet has just encountered the ghost of his father, who informs his son that he was poisoned by his own brother Claudius (the "smiling, damned villain"), who after murdering him, seized the king's crown and his queen.

Barack Obama is an image-maker, creating his own myth as he goes along. This would be a sad defect in any human being, but it takes on ominous proportions in a person who may become, after November 4th, one of the most powerful figures in the world. How is it possible that such a tragic turn of events may come about, if indeed a majority of Americans choose to believe the smile and the myth? Why is it that so many people have come to believe that a mirage is reality, even destiny? Do pro-Obama voters hanker for a world figure who would heal old divisions between races and religions, thus heralding a new age for mankind? During this time of near intolerable tensions, does he appear to be the one who can reconcile Islam and Christianity, Africa and America, occident and orient, black and white, rich and poor? Do they see his racial origins as a symbolic victory over the history of racial oppression? Do they see in him the good-hearted "under-dog", the gutsy street fi! ghter who agitates for the rights of the "little guy," whose meteoric rise to a position of maximum influence represents themselves enthroned at last in the high seat of power? Is this why they ignore his every grave fault and hungrily consume his vague idealist platitudes as if these were a kind of new gospel for the third millennium? Our hero. Our visionary. Our Great Friend and spokesman in the forum of the world?

Clearly, contemporary man needs heroes. But why not choose a genuine one, why not look a little deeper and work a little harder to find a man of courage and principle, and if it helps in the historical healing process, why not a very different kind of black man, say a person like Alan Keyes, a scholar, former ambassador, experienced in different levels of government, and (it might be added) an African-American married to a woman from India. Moreover, he is a devout Catholic who believes in moral absolutes and has amply proved that he will stand firm to defend them regardless of the cost to his own career. He knows that kings and presidents cannot usurp the natural law, the moral order of the universe, without bringing down judgment upon their nations. But it need not be Keyes. It might be any number of other men and women of clear thought and clear principle. Surely there are "Ten Just Men" still out there somewhere in America. So why Obama? And why does he ! rise and rise as his mouth smiles and smiles, exuding sincerity as he speaks lies and death?

And why, most horribly, most shamefully, are so many Christians of malformed or unformed conscience supporting him? Is it because they have never been clearly instructed in the truth, never understood the foundation upon which the moral cosmos is built? Is morality for them merely another system of abstract "values" in a crowded playing field of such systems, from which one may pick and choose? In the case of Catholics, for example, have they been blinded by a diet of theological nuances and deadly little loopholes offered to them by the committees of national episcopal conferences — committees that have absolutely no authority over Catholics, yet which are widely revered as a kind of alternative Magisterium? Have they been deadened by a habitual dismissing or dissembling of the solid teaching given to them by the universal Church under Peter? Have they grown accustomed to listening to opinion shapers who tell them that certain excellent apostolic Bishops in ! America who teach the truth without compromise are merely hidebound reactionaries, moralistic extremists, contemporary manifestations of those old boogymen who still haunt the American psyche — the Chillingworths and Dimmesdales and the judges in The Scarlet Letter? And so it goes, this over-reaction to Puritanism played out over centuries, an over-reaction that breeds tragedies a thousand times worse than Salem’s. Lies compounding on lies, and it all floats on an ocean of spilled innocent blood. And who can gaze at that ocean (or be splashed by it) without coming to a radical choice: One either turns away into a deeper state of denial, or one turns heart and mind toward the splendor of Truth, and changes one's life accordingly.

Is this why many of our Catholic people have become impulse-driven impressionists? Of course, the blindness is not due to the failure of pastors alone. The Ministry of Disinformation (by which I mean most modern media) has played a major role. There is also the erosion of truth in the education systems, combined with the gradual confusion and weakening of conscience through our addiction to the "soma" drugs supplied by the entertainment industry. Other factors may be the war in Iraq, or Republican economics, or the Bush administration, or the structure of Capitalism itself, or any number of prudential questions in the sociopolitical order, all of which are presently tangled nests of moral dilemma. But why do they not see that these questions are secondary to the fundamental issue of life itself? Why would they replace one reigning oligarchy with another kind of oligarchy — moreover, one that would kill vast numbers of its own citizens?

"I call on heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live...." (Deuteronomy 30:19)

May God bless and guide you,
in Jesus our Saviour,

with prayers and fasting,

Michael O'Brien

PS: For those interested in a concise examination of the moral parameters of voting in the forthcoming election, I urge you to read an excellent article by Dr. Mark Miravalle, professor of Theology at Franciscan University, Steubenville, available at the following link:

http://www.motherofallpeoples.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1531

How McCain Can Pull a Truman Win with Sarah's Help

2008-11-01T00:06:00.001-07:00

Palin Press Conference Exposing Obama’s Corruption

The media is filtering McCain's Obama message. The only media event they will allow to get through the filter is a Palin press conference.

They think she is dumb and they can destroy her.

She showed in the Biden debate that she is more than a match for them if McCain lets her be herself.

McCain's redistrubutionist Obama taxing taxpayers theme is starting to get through, but he needs a jump start to get it through with only four days left.

Sarah Palin’s huge viewer numbers at the convention, debate and the mock press conference on Saturday Night Live proves a live press conference is a chance to turn the election around with an unfiltered message.

Sarah exposes Obama’s corruption especially on taxes. (Below are a few short examples under Dick Morris' How McCain Can Pull a Truman)

Fred

http://www.newsmax.com/morris/mccain_truman_morris/2008/10/26/144298.html

How McCain Can Pull a Truman

Sunday, October 26, 2008 8:11 PM

By: Dick Morris Article Font Size

The most reliable surveys put McCain five to seven points behind Obama as we enter the last week of this interminable campaign. But in a race that will be famous for years afterwards for its volatility, it is not too late for the Republican to pull out a victory.

For Harry Truman in 1948, the presidential race shifted dramatically in the final week, and it's happened three more times in the past 30 years. In 1980, Reagan came from eight points behind to a solid victory by winning his sole debate with Carter in the last week of October. In 1992, Clinton, who had fallen behind in the polls because of the pounding he was taking over his liberalism and propensity to raise taxes, surged ahead of Bush when Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh announced that he was indicting Defense Secretary Casper (Cap) Weinberger, an indication of Bush's possible complicity in the Iran-Contra scandal. And in 2000, Bush's three-to-four point lead in the polls was erased over the final weekend when reports surfaced that he had been cited for DWI 20 years before and had not revealed the fact to the public. Bush still won the election, of course, but Gore won the popular vote by half a point.

What does McCain have to do to pull off a similar shift this time?

1. Use the stock market crash to highlight the tax issue. With the Dow Jones dropping each day by hundreds of points, this election is being held against a backdrop of economic fear unlike any since the Depression. Almost every reputable economist agrees that it would be catastrophic to add to the economy's woes by raising the capital gains tax. But Obama is on record as favoring an increase from 15% to 20% and suggested during the primaries that he would consider hitting 28%.

McCain should jump on the issue and challenge Obama to agree to a two-year moratorium on increases in the capital gains tax. If Obama agrees, McCain will score points for leadership. If Obama refuses, or ignores the challenge, McCain can attribute much of the drop in the market to the fear of increased capital gains taxation once Obama takes over. After all, its pretty obvious that if you keep 85% of your capital profits right now but stand only to keep 80% or 72% once Obama takes over, it's prudent to unload now. This pressure to sell is exactly what the markets do not need, and McCain can hammer the point home.

McCain can say that Obama's refusal to join in supporting a moratorium on capital gains taxation increases shows his commitment to class warfare - and that big government exceeds any concern he might have for stock market stability or the value of 401Ks or retirement pension funds.

McCain has already scored mightily with his invocation of Joe the Plumber and, polls show, he won the third debate by using the issue of taxes and small businesses. By early this coming week, his advertising will have achieved sufficient levels of frequency to have an impact on the polling.

2. Bring back Rev. Jeremiah Wright. For reasons that are beyond me, John McCain has vowed not to make an issue out of Rev. Wright's extreme anti-American statements. But that should not stop independent expenditure and 527 groups from raising the issue.

A good advertisement would alternate footage of Wright saying "God damn America" and 9/11 was just the "chickens coming home to roost" with an announcer explaining the relationship between the two men. The narrator might remind voters that it was Rev. Wright who married Barack and Michelle Obama and that Obama himself sat in the pews at Wright's church for 20 years as sermons like these were being given. It should point out that Obama only distanced himself from Wright a month after his remarks scandalized all Americans and cost him his momentum in the polls.

McCain is likely fearful that the establishment media would condemn him for running the ads. Their very effectiveness would ensure that the liberal media would fall all over themselves to denounce the tactic. But independent groups who want to prevent a leftist takeover of the government should not let liberal organs dictate their campaign tactics or their message.

3. Warn voters of impending socialism in America. The recent bailout legislation puts the United States government inside the ownership, management and direction of many of our major companies and financial institutions. The bureaucrats have entered as firefighters, trying to extinguish the blazes that threaten to consume these companies. But once the flames are put out, will the firefighters go home or will they set up shop and give the United States a socialist economy akin to that of Western European nations? Will the bureaucrats relinquish the power they are being given in a time of crisis?

McCain needs to point out that bureaucrats never let go of power unless they have to. He should say that with an Obama Administration and a highly Democratic Congress, we could face a long and perhaps permanent period during which entrepreneurial, private-sector capitalism disappears and loan applicants must win government approval for their financing.

Many people have become concerned with the growing power of foreign sovereign wealth funds in major American businesses. Will these funds use their influence and power to alter the financial policies and lending practices of America's leading banks and investment houses? But now the danger comes not just from abroad but from government intervention at home. The sovereign wealth fund that might be most influential in distorting our private capitalist system is the United States Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board.

Under conservative, pro-capitalist Republican management, we can, presumably, trust these institutions to exercise their power benignly and to turn control over to the private sector as soon as possible. We can count on their taking a hands-off policy toward the investment of the banks and financial firms in which they acquire an equity position. Except to control abuses like subprime mortgages and making marginal loans, we can expect that these federal institutions will act in our interest.

But if Obama's appointments take over the Treasury and the Fed, can we be as sure? McCain needs to point out that it was political meddling by liberals that led Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to encourage subprime mortgage loans in the first place. Were it not for the pressure in the Clinton Administration to expand home ownership to poor people and minorities, Freddie and Fannie would not have relaxed their down payment policies and would not have been willing to guarantee mortgages without proof that the borrowers had sufficient income to repay the debts.

McCain needs to point out that it is precisely this sort of liberal pressure which led to the disaster and to warn that the power the bailout legislation gives the next president is so potent that it could destroy our concept of a private economy.

If the Dow continues to terrify investors and distract voters from the election, it will continue to bolster Obama's candidacy and his lead. But if there is some stability in the final week before the election, there is every chance that voters will take another look at Obama and decide that he is too risky. By stressing the tax issue and the potential of an Obama regime to subvert our free enterprise system, McCain can harness the crisis and warn voters of the impact of a decision to elect the most radical candidate for president in our nation's history.

© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Obama’s Corruption from ACORN to Taxes

Obama's Lie on Taxes

During the first Debate:
JOHN MCCAIN: "But again, Senator Obama has shifted on a number of occasions. He has voted in the United States Senate to increase taxes on people who make as low as $42,000 a year."

BARACK OBAMA: "That's not true, John. That's not true."

Record

Barack Obama Voted Twice In Favor Of The Democrats' FY 2009 Budget Resolution That Would Raise Taxes On Those Making Just $42,000 A Year. (S. Con. Res. 70, CQ Vote #85: Adopted 51-44: R 2-43; D 47-1; I 2-0, 3/14/08, Obama Voted Yea; S. Con. Res. 70, CQ Vote #142: Adopted 48- 45: R 2- 44; D 44- 1; I 2-0, 6/4/08, Obama Voted Yea)

· In March 2008, Obama Hailed His Vote For The Budget As Making "Significant Progress In Getting Our Nation's Priorities Back On Track." Obama: "The budget passed by the Senate tonight makes significant progress in getting our nation's priorities back on track. ... We need change in this country, and this budget is an important step in helping bring it about." (Sen. Barack Obama, "Obama Statement On The Senate's Passage Of The FY 2009 Budget," Press Release, obama.senate.gov, 3/14/08)

FactCheck.org: Barack Obama Did Vote For Higher Taxes On People Making $42,000 Despite Saying The Opposite. "Obama denied voting for a bill that called for increased taxes on 'people' making as little as $42,000 a year, as McCain accused him of doing. McCain was right, though only for single taxpayers." ("FactChecking Debate No. 1," FactCheck.org, http://www.factcheck.org, 9/27/08)

· "Yes, As We’ve Said Before, Obama Did In Fact Vote For A Budget Resolution That Called For Higher Federal Income Tax Rates On A Single, Non-Homeowner Who Earned As Little As $42,000 Per Year." ("FactChecking Debate No. 1," FactCheck.org, http://www.factcheck.org, 9/27/08)

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:r2GD__EUSckJ:ncgop.blogspot.com/2008/09/obama-fact-check-on-tax-increases.html+obama+voting+record+on+taxes+%2442,000+per+year.&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&ie=UTF-8

Obama's Lie on ACORN

In third Debate Obama said:“The only involvement I’ve had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department.”

Obama's Website: Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee. Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive[http://fightthesmears.com/articles/20/acornrumor] Barack ran in 1992.

Record

Toni Foulkes, a Chicago Acorn leader wrote:

Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992...Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them)...

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. [Actually, the congressional race was in 2000, SK] By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTNiN2YwMmQ4Njc2MzE4ZDUxYWVlYTA1NzZlMmY3YmM=

Obama's Lie on Same-Sex Marriage

Obama said:

-Obama had previously said he opposes same-sex marriage but that each state should make its own decision.
[http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:jsCGxB36hzEJ:www.sacbee.com/111/story/1051404.html+obama+prop+8&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us&ie=UTF-8]

Record

Obama record:

-Perhaps, it’s because in his first Illinois senate race, Obama is listed by a Chicago gay-lesbian publication as “supports same sex marriage”. Obama’s stand on same sex marriage was one reason he got the endorsement of Outlines, a Chicago-based gay paper that merged with the Windy City Times in 2000.
[http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:_cYvgDcUsqYJ:deathby1000papercuts.com/2008/10/obama-same-sex-marriage-obama-supported-same-sex-marriage-as-ill-state-senator/+obama+I+will+tell+you+that+I+don%27t+believe+in+gay+marriage,+but+I+do+think+that+people&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&ie=UTF-8]

-"And that is why I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts [Proposition 8] to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states," Obama wrote.
[http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:jsCGxB36hzEJ:www.sacbee.com/111/story/1051404.html+obama+prop+8&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us&ie=UTF-8]

Obama's Lie on Abortion

In the third debate Obama said:

-Yes, let me respond to this. If it sounds incredible that I would vote to withhold lifesaving treatment from an infant, that's because it's not true.[http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/oct/08101601.html]

Record

Obama in the Illinois Senate said:

-"I mean, it -- it would essentially bar abortions," said Obama, "because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute."

-Obama said near the beginning of the discussion, "the testimony during the committee indicated that one of the key concerns was -- is that there was a method of abortion, an induced abortion, where the -- the fetus or child, as -- as some might describe it, is still temporarily alive outside the womb."

-For Obama, whether or not a temporarily-alive-outside-the-womb little girl is a "person" entitled to constitutional rights is not determined by her humanity, her age or even her place in space relative to her mother's uterus. It is determined by a whether a doctor has been trying to kill her.

http://www.jillstanek.com/archives/2008/10/the_obama_debat.html

Obama's biggest Lie on hailing himself as the champion of the the middle class

Record

Obama's Church Tenet: "Disavowal of the Pursuit of 'Middleclassness'”
-8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”

- But the tenets of that church during Obama's attendance are well documented. They were on the church website earlier this year and served as the church's tenets for the entirety of the time Obama worshiped there. As they are part of the "Black Value System", they were as follows:

1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the Black Community
3. Commitment to the Black Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”

http://thebigfeed.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-obama-really-thinks-of-middle.html

WHAT OBAMA REALLY THINKS OF THE MIDDLE CLASS: WHAT EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO KNOW
This is a repost.

Barack Obama is spending much of time hailing himself as the champion of the the middle class. He has made his promise of help for the middle class the center of his campaign. But how does he really feel about the middle class?

Truth be told, Barack Obama has spent much of his adult life worshiping in a church that had as one of its basic tenets the "disavowal of the pursuit of middleclassness". What does that mean? Well, If I have to tell you what "middle class" means, please, spend your time at CNN.com. As for the term "disavowal"...It means (and this is solely for your benefit because I have a big brain and already know what it means) "to disclaim knowledge of, responsibility for, or association with". It should be clear to you now what Obama's church meant by "disavowal of the pursuit of middleclassness".

Here is the point that I would normally direct you to Obama's church's website and let you view its basic tenets for yourself. Just so you can see that I'm not BSing you. Alas, that web page listing those tenets has been removed (The work of Obama's "truth squad"?). But the tenets of that church during Obama's attendance are well documented. They were on the church website earlier this year and served as the church's tenets for the entirety of the time Obama worshiped there. As they are part of the "Black Value System", they were as follows:

1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the Black Community
3. Commitment to the Black Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the Black Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting Black Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of the Black Value System.

Number 8, the one at issue, is no longer one of the stated tenets of the church. It has been removed. But it did exist. Again, it served as one of the points of the church for the entire time Obama worshiped under Jerimiah Right, his spiritual mentor. Here's proof. And here's even better proof.

Now, if you take Obama's worship at a church that has as one of its basic points the "disavowal of the pursuit of 'middleclassness'", and you throw it in a pot with the thoughts of his communist mentor Frank Davis and his and his socialist associate Saul Alinsky, and then you add a dash of resentment and condescension for bitter, bible clinging, gun toting types, you really start to get a better picture of exactly what Obama thinks about the middle class. Which is, that he doesn't believe it should exist.

America! Here is a man who is running around the country telling anyone who will listen that HE is the one who is fighting for the middle class. Which, given the above, comes as quite a surprise. After all, he had 20 years to get point 8 removed from his own church's tenets. He did nothing. He had 20 years to tell his congregation that killing the middle class is not such a good idea. Instead, he showed up to church on Sundays and said nothing. And we're now supposed to believe he is our greatest defender? Wolf...sheep's clothing. Y'all know the story. Don't get eaten.

Obama's Taxes Taxpayers for more Welfare Checks to Nontaxpayers

2008-10-30T22:26:00.001-07:00

-In real numbers, 60.7 million people who have no tax burden at all will receive refunds from Obama, while only 33.8 million people, who pay approximately 40 percent of income taxes, will get any kind of refund. Twenty percent[20%] of taxpayers, who pay 87.5 percent of total income taxes, will actually see after-tax income decline under Obama by nearly two percent[2%], according to the Center.

http://www.macpac08.com/2008/10/obamas-tax-lies.html

Oct 16, 2008
Obama's Tax Lies
Interesting article at the Wall Street Journal, outlining how Obama's tax policy is more about wealth redistribution than it is lowering taxes for, as he says "95% of all families."

"For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase "tax credit." Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand no fewer than seven such credits for individuals:

A $500 tax credit ($1,000 a couple) to "make work pay" that phases out at income of $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 per couple.
A $4,000 tax credit for college tuition.
A 10% mortgage interest tax credit (on top of the existing mortgage interest deduction and other housing subsidies).
A "savings" tax credit of 50% up to $1,000.
An expansion of the earned-income tax credit that would allow single workers to receive as much as $555 a year, up from $175 now, and give these workers up to $1,110 if they are paying child support.
A child care credit of 50% up to $6,000 of expenses a year.
A "clean car" tax credit of up to $7,000 on the purchase of certain vehicles.
Here's the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be "refundable," which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer -- a federal check -- from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this "welfare," or in George McGovern's 1972 campaign a "Demogrant." Mr. Obama's genius is to call it a tax cut."

These refunds are claimed on tax returns and are paid to all taxpayers who qualify for them, regardless of whether they owe taxes or not. These refunds have the ability of reducing a taxpayer’s liability below zero, meaning they can get a refund without actually paying taxes.

In real numbers, 60.7 million people who have no tax burden at all will receive refunds from Obama, while only 33.8 million people, who pay approximately 40 percent of income taxes, will get any kind of refund. Twenty percent of taxpayers, who pay 87.5 percent of total income taxes, will actually see after-tax income decline under Obama by nearly two percent, according to the Center.

Thanks To AFBlue at 7:24 AM

“A Third of all the Obama Voters Live with a McCain Voter"

2008-10-27T19:39:00.001-07:00

-Morris suggests a simple plan that could put McCain over the top in votes: “A third of all the Obama voters live with a McCain voter. It’s the McCain voters’ job to read . . . stock up on ammunition, and win the breakfast table conversation!”

http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/Morris_close_prez_race/2008/10/27/144599.html

Dick Morris Says Presidential Race In 'Tremendous Flux,' with McCain Gaining

Monday, October 27, 2008 3:56 PM

By: Kenneth D. Williams Article Font Size

Dick Morris says the presidential race is now in a state of “tremendous flux,” with McCain gaining anywhere from 3 to 7 percentage points in just the past few hours.

Fox News host Neil Cavuto, interviewing Morris for his “Your World” program today, told Morris that, to him, Obama’s economic plan wasn’t adding up. “And no one knows it’s not adding up!” Cavuto said.

Morris agreed, saying, “It’s ridiculous to think that you can pay for an elaborate spending plan like Obama’s by taxing 10 people who happen to be rich in the United States. It’s ludicrous.”

Cavuto pointed out that Obama said he would raise capital gains taxes by 5 percent, and wondered why anyone wouldn’t sell now and save 5 percent on taxes.

Morris reminded Cavuto that Obama probably would raise capital gains taxes by 13 percent, from the current 15 to a high of 28 percent. “During the primary they asked Obama, ‘How high would you raise capital gains taxes?’ And he said, ‘I wouldn’t go higher than it was under Clinton,’ which was 28 percent. So if you’re going to sell your stock now, you get to keep 85 percent of your [gains]. If you sell it later, you only get to keep 80, and probably 72 percent. ”

For McCain’s part, Morris said he could use a “tax-induced market sell-off” scenario against Obama.

“I think that what McCain needs to do is to challenge Obama to two years of moratorium on capital gains tax increases,” Morris told Cavuto, “and say, ‘With the market plunging a couple of hundred points every single day, from here until Election Day, if the voters believe you’re going to raise capital gains taxes, and they feel you’re going to win, it’s going to send the market into a tizzy. Why don’t we both agree not to raise capital gains taxes?’ And Obama can’t follow him on that, and that puts the declining market over the next six or seven days on the Obama campaign’s doorstep.”

Morris then detailed how close the presidential race had become in a matter of hours.

“I want to report that this election right now is in a state of enormous flux,” he said. “Forty-eight hours ago, there was no sign of any McCain movement. Then Zogby first reported it narrowing from a 12-point Obama lead to 9, and then yesterday to 5. Today Rasmussen, who had [Obama’s lead] at 8 reported it at 5, and Gallup, that had it at 6, now reports it at 5. So you have the three most reliable tracking polls, Rasmussen, Zogby and Gallup, all saying 5.”

Morris suggests a simple plan that could put McCain over the top in votes: “A third of all the Obama voters live with a McCain voter. It’s the McCain voters’ job to read . . . stock up on ammunition, and win the breakfast table conversation!”

Obama Caught on Tape Calling for Redistributing Wealth

2008-10-27T10:50:00.000-07:00

http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/obama_spread_wealth/2008/10/27/144493.html

Obama Caught on Tape Calling for Redistributing Wealth

Monday, October 27, 2008 12:22 PM

By: David A. Patten Article Font Size

One of the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement is that it failed to lead to income redistribution in the United States, Barack Obama appears to state in an audio excerpt of a Chicago public radio program recorded in 2001.

Obama, who then was an Illinois state senator, also stated that people continue to “suffer” because there is no government program to take money from the rich and redistribute it to Americans who are less well off.

The excerpt, posted on YouTube.com, has set the blogosphere abuzz.

It also caught the attention of GOP presidential nominee John McCain, who is using it to help drive home the Joe the plumber theme. McCain states that Obama’s plan to “spread the wealth around” amounts to income redistribution.

Obama: Jekyll-Hyde

2008-10-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

-Jekyll-Hyde case. I imagined the leftist Dr. Barack, having won the nomination, drinking a potion and turning into the centrist Mr. Obama for the final campaign. I had to discard this model because Obama manages to hold conflicting positions simultaneously, like one of those images under ridged plastic that changes back and forth as you tilt it.

-There is something like that in C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, wherein one of the damned spirits, an ugly silent dwarf, leads around a large impressive puppet that speaks for him like a ventriloquist's dummy.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2096438/posts

The Enigma of Obama
American Thinker ^ | October 03, 2008 | Paul Shlichta

Posted on Thursday, October 02, 2008 11:55:03 PM by neverdem

A school of thought is emerging that Barack Obama has an advanced form of narcissistic personality disorder. I heartily agree with Robert Bowie Johnson and Dr. Sam Vaknin in their shared conclusion, but I reached it from a somewhat different route. I had been trying to write an article comparing our political candidates to circus freaks such as chameleons, phoobs, and contortionists. But I was stumped when I came to Obama, who seems to partake of all of these metaphors.

How can one categorize a man who combines:

-a revivalist's grandiose and extravagant oratory,
-a charismatic talent for swaying crowds for no logical reason that they can explain,
bewilderingly contradictory changes in positions on issues,
-a squidlike ability to befog and blur statements into ambiguous or ominous vagaries,
-an inflated image (and self-image) covering a naïve and meager mental ability,
-a penchant for gaffes and misstatements combined with a dismissal of any corrections as irrelevant or malignant,
-a humorless rigidity, elitist aloofness, and perpetual air of condescension, and
-a thin-skinned aggrievement at being misinterpreted or of having his privacy violated.

It's like trying to cram a three-ring circus into a pup tent. Unlike a chameleon, he maintains a constant personal image; it is only his positions that change. He shares the ignorance and self confidence of megaegos, but they doggedly stick to one set of dogmas while he changes them with the ease of a shapeshifter. Moreover, he maintains conflicting positions with more grace than a contortionist and more rigidity than an india-rubber man.

I tried thinking of him as a Jekyll-Hyde case. I imagined the leftist Dr. Barack, having won the nomination, drinking a potion and turning into the centrist Mr. Obama for the final campaign. I had to discard this model because Obama manages to hold conflicting positions simultaneously, like one of those images under ridged plastic that changes back and forth as you tilt it.

I next thought of Obama as an amoeba [no anagram intended], incessantly changing its detailed shape. to engulf its prey while maintaining a constant overall appearance. This suggested the image of an amoeba splitting in two (one to reassure the liberals while the other woos the centrists) or of Siamese twins or a two-headed man-a perfect freak for my political sideshow.

And then I saw the ads for "The Dark Knight". Of course, Barack Obama is Harvey Dent! Imagine Two Face in the White House, with his subservient aides saying: "Mister President, Iran has just detonated an atomic bomb. Should we attack them or negotiate?" Without a word, the coin flips up and spins in mid-air....

But all this imagery iconizes only one facet of Obama. His penchant for pyrotechnic oratory calls to mind a sideshow barker or snake oil salesman. His charisma suggests a hypnotist, or perhaps the daring young man on the flying trapeze. His pompous humorlessness suggests Victorian icons that I have described elsewhere. But his most prominent trait is the incongruous combination of meager mental resources, as evidenced by his frequent gaffes and childishly naïve pronouncements, with a greatly inflated self-image of his expertise and capabilities.

I then thought of one of those huge balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.

There is something like that in C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, wherein one of the damned spirits, an ugly silent dwarf, leads around a large impressive puppet that speaks for him like a ventriloquist's dummy.

Or like the old man in "Men in Black", who turns out to be a robot operated by a tiny alien sitting at the control panel inside its head.

But these extravagant fantasies are needless excesses. As she occasionally does, Maureen Dowd managed to pinpoint Obama precisely:

He seems more like a child prodigy. Those enraptured with his gifts urge him on, like anxious parents, trying to pull that sustained, dazzling performance out of him that they believe he's capable of; they are willing to put up with the prodigy's occasional listlessness and crabbiness, his flights of self-regard and self-righteousness.

But Dowd did not carry her analysis far enough. As Johnson and Vaknin and others have already pointed out, the traits she hints at would alert a psychologist to the likelihood of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), whose symptoms include

An exaggerated sense of self-importance; exaggerates achievements and talents; expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements
Need for excessive admiration
A sense of entitlement
Selfishness; taking advantage of others to achieve own ends
Lack of empathy
Arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behavior or attitudes.
It is important to realize that NPD is much more dangerous than simple vanity. Even closer to Dowd's precocious-child model is Joanna Ashmun's description of NPD:

"Narcissists have normal, even superior, intellectual development while remaining emotionally and morally immature. Dealing with them can give you the sense of trying to have a reasonable discussion with a very clever six-year-old -- this is an age when normal children are grandiose and exhibitionistic, when they are very resistant to taking the blame for their own misbehavior, when they understand what the rules are (e.g., that lying, cheating, and stealing are prohibited) but are still trying to wriggle out of accepting those rules for themselves."

The Dowd-Ashmum model, which seems to account for all of the Obamic traits listed above, moves us to pity and then horror. A child with NPD is bad enough -- but what if that child had the immense power of the President of the United States? As if to answer that question, Ashmun's website refers to Jerome Bixby's famous short story "It's a Good Life", in which a small boy is omnipotent, to the servile terror of everyone else in his village. A plot summary can be found in Wikipedia. The whole story can be found here.

But I warn you that, if you read it, you will be very anxious until the election is over -- and perhaps even more so in the years to come.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Government; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: npd; obama

1 posted on Thursday, October 02, 2008 11:55:03 PM by neverdem
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: neverdem
He seems like the perfect prez for our modern world of narcissistic nitwits and pudgy-bodied multiculti emotion-based doofuses who think it’s cruel fate that they have to work for a living.

2 posted on Thursday, October 02, 2008 11:58:59 PM by Darkwolf377 (I've got a bracelet, too. From Sergeant..... uuuuuuuhhhhhhh...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: neverdem
Rasputin

3 posted on Friday, October 03, 2008 12:03:47 AM by bruinbirdman ("Those who control language control minds." - Ayn Rand)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

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To: neverdem
Thank you for posting this. After reading it carefully, I realized that others had put perfectly in words what I contained within myself in feelings towards this very dangerous man.

It explains so many of his bizarre actions and reactions to me.

4 posted on Friday, October 03, 2008 12:04:48 AM by border bud
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

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To: neverdem
Hitler had the same sort of ‘personality’.

Catholic Bishop's Radio Ad could Sink Obama

2008-10-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

-To hear and download bishop Gracida’s radio ad at no charge, go to www.randallterry.com. To organize a press conference in your area on Thursday, October 30, go to www.humbleplea.com for instructions.

-Simply contact your local radio station(s), buy 10 or 20 radio ads yourself, and they can download the audio file to play on their radio station. It is truly that simple. Call your radio station(s), tell them you want to buy ads, and tell them to download the mp3 file from our web site: www.randallterry.com. (For those with questions, call us at 904-687-9804.)

-Catholics to Demonstrate against Obama’s Pro-abortion Agenda
Theme: “No Catholic Can in Good Conscience Vote for Obama.”

At 12 Noon, Thursday, October 30, Catholics will hold a one hour demonstration, accompanied by a press conference, echoing Bishop Gracida’s words: No Catholic can in good conscience vote for Obama, because of his radical support of child-killing.

WOW! Bishop Gracida even names names. He stated and says on the radio, for all to hear, that Barack Hussein Obama is a pro-abortion candidate" and a Catholic CANNOT vote for him.

At last a real shepherd who is not afraid to name names. As far as I know, no other bishop has used Obama's name. If only all the bishops had the same "guts," the killing of unborn children would soon be history.

Get involved -- release the radio ad in your area.

Bishop Rene H. Gracida for Pope.

Frank Joseph M.D.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Breaking News: Bishop Rene H. Gracida releases a radio ad that could sink Obama’s campaign. This “political light saber” is in our hands. What will we do with it?

Bishop Rene H. Gracida releases radio ad against voting for Barack Obama; Catholics Plan anti-Obama Demonstrations and Press Conferences Coast to Coast on Thursday, October 30.

By Randall A. Terry

Like millions of the faithful, I have been thrilled by the sudden and forceful rise of various Bishops’ voices against the errors decimating the hearts of the Faithful in this election cycle. I am speaking of the errors stated by Doug Kmiec (and echoed by others) that go like this: “It is time to set the record straight that it violates no aspect of Catholic teaching for a Catholic Voter to endorse, support, or vote for Barack Obama…” (Doug Kmiec, Catholic Attorney and Author, Can a Catholic Support Him?, pg 36, emphasis added.)

Anyone with “an ear to hear” clearly knows that no Catholic can vote for Obama with a clear conscience – no matter what Doug Kmiec, Roman Catholics for Obama, or any other misguided Catholic may declare. As Bishop Martino declared: “This is madness, people.”

But now – perhaps in an eleventh hour answer to prayer – Bishop Rene H. Gracida has released a stunningly clear radio ad concerning Catholics voting for Barack Obama.

He boldly states:

"This is Bishop Rene H. Gracida, reminding all Catholics that they must vote in this election with an informed conscience. A Catholic cannot be said to have voted in this election with a good conscience if they have voted for a pro-abortion candidate. Barack Hussein Obama is a pro-abortion candidate."

Bishop Gracida recorded the radio spot in English and Spanish; it can be heard at www.randallterry.com.

But there is more good news – where you can be a part of defeating this madness – Bishop Gracida has offered this radio spot without charge for all who want to use it. You - an American citizen committed to protecting innocent unborn life in this election – can download the mp3 file, and pay to place this ad on your local radio station(s).

Simply contact your local radio station(s), buy 10 or 20 radio ads yourself, and they can download the audio file to play on their radio station. It is truly that simple. Call your radio station(s), tell them you want to buy ads, and tell them to download the mp3 file from our web site: www.randallterry.com. (For those with questions, call us at 904-687-9804.)

If this ad receives the airplay it deserves – and the unborn so desperately need – it could jolt Catholic voters back to their senses and moorings; Catholic voters who have been seduced into ethical quicksand by partisan supporters of Obama who betray the lives of innocent unborn children.

Catholics to Demonstrate against Obama’s Pro-abortion Agenda
Theme: “No Catholic Can in Good Conscience Vote for Obama.”

At 12 Noon, Thursday, October 30, Catholics will hold a one hour demonstration, accompanied by a press conference, echoing Bishop Gracida’s words: No Catholic can in good conscience vote for Obama, because of his radical support of child-killing.

Right now, cities include:

Cincinnati, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Indianapolis, Indiana
Denver, Colorado
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Jacksonville, FL
St. Augustine, FL
Miami, FL
Charlotte, NC
Arlington, VA
Richmond, VA
St. Louis, MO
Kansas City, MO
Joplin, MO

Our message to the press will be simple: “As Catholic voters – who put innocent life ahead or partisan politics – we reject the Obama/Biden ticket, and urge our fellow Catholics to abandon their plans to betray their faith.”

Our beloved late Holy Father, John Paul II, clearly stated: “In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to ‘take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it.” 73, Gospel of Life”

With our federal system of government, we do not vote for laws; we vote for lawmakers who make laws in our stead. Given the history and intention of Obama to continue the legalized killing of the unborn, to vote for him is to knowingly to participate in his evil acts and intentions, and in a real way to vote for abortion itself.

We will hold these peaceful vigils, and hopefully have some good “face time” with the media. If we do our job right, we could have millions of Catholics hear the truth through the vehicle of the secular media.

We beg the prayers of our compatriots, and invite others to join us.

We have about 15 cities ready to go; we would love to have 50!

If anyone is interested in leading an event in their city, they can go to www.humbleplea.com and look at the plans we have laid out. We will help anyone with a heart to help the babies in this election cycle.

I know that many are discouraged, many are fearful, and many do not know what to do.

Let us invoke our Blessed Mother for a miracle, and then lift up our voices with all our hearts.

Perhaps – just perhaps – the message of bishop Gracida and the growing chorus of bishops correcting the errors of Kmiec & Co. will reach the hearts of the faithful.

And maybe – if the laity ignites an unquenchable fire of truth through demonstrations, press conferences, and letters to the editor; emails, blogs, and a fervent plea to our pastors – maybe we will see a “Hail Mary” victory for the children in this election. Maybe Our Lady – for the sake of the Innocent – will honor the cries and sighs that have touched her Immaculate Heart.

(To hear and download bishop Gracida’s radio ad at no charge, go to www.randallterry.com. To organize a press conference in your area on Thursday, October 30, go to www.humbleplea.com for instructions.)

_______________________________________________

To respond to this email, subscribe, or unsubscribe, please contact Dr. Frank:

drfrank@abortiontruths.net

Thank you.

Powell and Obama's Gay Army

2008-10-21T05:44:00.000-07:00

-Colin Powell to help army become gay Col.'s pal?

-Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama. Both men have spoken out against the military's discriminatory "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

- Michael Guest was the first publicly gay man to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as a U.S. Ambassador. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly noted the presence of and positively recognized Guest’s same-sex partner, Alex Nevarez, during the swearing-in ceremony. The Human Rights Campaign called Powell’s acknowledgement of Nevarez a “small gesture that spoke volumes.”

http://www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2008/10/colin-powell-to.html

21 hours ago by G-A-Y

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10/20/2008

Colin Powell to help army become gay Col.'s pal?

Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama. Both men have spoken out against the military's discriminatory "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. So what does this melding of the minds mean for the future of this terrible policy? PFLAG's Steve Ralls (who used to toil at the anti-DADT Servicemembers Legal Defense Network) takes a look at that very issue:

What Will Powell's Endorsement Mean for "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and Military Families? [HuffPo]
We certainly hope this is more indication that we're moving to a more inclusive day. After all, we're pretty damn sick of seeing the hostile views of those who crassly make jokes about gays and their "colon pals" exalted above those that seek a more peaceful day. It's time we graduate from junior high.

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:jPoQpCv6D5sJ:thinkprogress.org/2007/12/04/michael-guest/+Colin+Powell+gays+Michael+Guest&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us&ie=UTF-8

Gay Ambassador Resigns Over State Department’s Discrimination Against Gay And Lesbian Employees»

Appointed by President Bush in 2001 to be Ambassador to Romania, Michael Guest was the first publicly gay man to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as a U.S. Ambassador. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly noted the presence of and positively recognized Guest’s same-sex partner, Alex Nevarez, during the swearing-in ceremony. The Human Rights Campaign called Powell’s acknowledgement of Nevarez a “small gesture that spoke volumes.”

But serving as an openly-gay ambassador under the Bush administration proved not to be as pleasant as his swearing-in. Guest retired recently, and at his retirement ceremony, “he did what few people do — displayed uncommon courage and threw a rhetorical hand-grenade into his own party.” The New York Times reports, “Guest took Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who was not present) to task for failing to treat the partners of gay and lesbian foreign service officers the same as the spouses of heterosexual officers.” Guest said that was the reason for his departure:

“Most departing ambassadors use these events to talk about their successes . . . But I want to talk about my signal failure, the failure that in fact is causing me to leave the career that I love,” said Mr. Guest, 50, whose most recent assignment was dean of the leadership and management school at the Foreign Service Institute, the government’s school for diplomats.

“For the past three years, I’ve urged the Secretary and her senior management team to redress policies that discriminate against gay and lesbian employees. Absolutely nothing has resulted from this. And so I’ve felt compelled to choose between obligations to my partner — who is my family — and service to my country. That anyone should have to make that choice is a stain on the Secretary’s leadership and a shame for this institution and our country,” he said.

“Unlike heterosexual spouses, gay partners are not entitled to State Department-provided security training, free medical care at overseas posts, guaranteed evacuation in case of a medical emergency, transportation to overseas posts, or special living allowances when foreign service officers are assigned to places like Iraq, where diplomatic families are not permitted.”

“This is not about gay rights. … It’s about equal treatment of all employees, all of whom have the same service requirements, the same contractual requirements,” said Guest.

While the Bush administration has previously indicated an unwillingness to outlaw employment discrimination, Guest courageously highlights the fact that the administration is also practicing it.

Obama has repeatedly steered taxpayer money to campaign donors

2008-10-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

The Case Against Barack Obama
The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate

FREE OFFER! — Get This Book Free, Click Here Now!

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Newsmax Price: $25.95
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You Don’t Know Barack Obama Until You Read This Book.

This new book — "The Case Against Barack Obama" is published by the same group that brought you "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry" — the book that defeated John Kerry in 2004.

Already the liberal media has condemned "The Case Against Barack Obama" because it could change the outcome of the election.

Make no doubt about it, Barack Obama is the media's darling, the fresh face of the Democratic ticket. But what does Barack Obama really stand for — and will his extreme liberal agenda and complete inexperience in global affairs endanger the country?

That's what David Freddoso, investigative reporter and National Review Online columnist, examines in "The Case Against Barack Obama."

Has any major candidate for president of the United States ever received less critical examination than Barack Obama? Who is this man, who was only elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004?

How did someone with his meager record of accomplishment become the Democratic nominee for president? How did someone with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate and long-standing relationships with a former terrorist, a racist minister, and the corrupt operators of Chicago Machine politics end up as a supposed beacon of a newer, cleaner, bipartisan politics?

Investigative reporter David Freddoso has the answers. Doing the legwork that the mainstream media has neglected, applying a critical eye while the media swoons before the Obama-messiah, and posing the hard questions that Obama needs to answer, Freddoso reveals a politician as calculating as any other, a far-left Democrat who goes beyond "abortion rights" to supporting de facto infanticide, whose "new politics" amount to Chicago-style hardball overlain with lofty rhetoric, and who, from his positions of power, has helped his patrons.

In "The Case Against Barack Obama", you’ll learn:

How Obama’s friendship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was no accident, but a carefully thought-out personal and political decision
The inside story of Obama's association with terrorist Bill Ayers wouldn’t matter — an exposé of the insular radical chic of Chicago's Hyde Park politics
The real story of Obama as a puppet of Mayor Daley's corrupt Chicago political machine
What Obama really did for convicted developer Tony Rezko
Debunking the myth of Obama’s "new" politics: how Obama won his first election by throwing all of his competitors off the ballot
The new 'Dirty Politics': how underhanded politics sabotaged Obama's opponents in his 2004 Senate race
A story Obama would like to stay buried in Chicago: how he used his clout as a U.S. senator to save the corrupt Cook County Political Machine when reformers of both parties tried to challenge the entrenched political bosses
How Barack Obama opposed a bill banning infanticide-by-neglect — a stance too extreme even for Nancy Pelosi. (Freddoso has an exclusive interview with the nurse central to the case.)
Why the National Abortion Rights Action League says Obama is the most pro-abortion candidate they have ever backed
How Obama has repeatedly steered taxpayer money to campaign donors
And much, much more.
Sober, fair, and thoroughly researched — and all the more powerful and provocative because of it — "The Case Against Barack Obama" removes the halo from a man less qualified, and more radical, than the mainstream media has let you know.

Find out why electing this man as our Commander-in-Chief could be the most dangerous decision in American history.

David Freddoso covers Capitol Hill for National Review Online, and was previously a political reporter for the Evans-Novak Political Report and Human Events. A graduate of Notre Dame and the Columbia School of Journalism, he lives in Washington, D.C.

Evidence Mounts:Ayers Co-Wrote Obama’s “Dreams”

2008-10-19T01:13:00.000-07:00

http://www.cashill.com/natl_general/evidence_mounts.htm

Evidence Mounts:Ayers Co-Wrote Obama’s “Dreams”

© Jack Cashill

AmericanThinker.com
October 17, 2008

Evidence continues to mount that Barack Obama had substantial help from Bill Ayers in the creation of his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, a book that Time Magazine has called “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” The evidence falls into five general categories, here summarized:

The discovery of new matching nautical metaphors from both Ayers and Obama that almost assuredly came from the same source: Ayers, a former merchant seaman.

The discovery of a Bill Ayers’ essay on memoir writing, whose postmodern themes and phrases are echoed throughout Dreams.

A newly discovered book chapter from 1990 that shows clearly and painfully the limits of Obama’s prose style the year he received a contract to write Dreams.

The revelation by radical Islamicist Rashid Khalidi that Ayers made his “dining room table” available for neighborhood writers who needed help.

A refined timeline that shows Ayers had the means, the motive and the time to help Obama when he needed it most.

The timeline

A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama’s election as the Harvard Law Review’s first black president in 1990 caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama’s proposed memoir.

Obama repaired to Chicago with advance in hand and dithered. At one point, in order to finish the book without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. His agent hustled him a new, smaller contract.

Ayers published his book To Teach in 1993. Between 1993 and 1996, he had no other formal authorial assignment than to co-edit a collection of essays. This was an unusual hole in his very busy publishing career.

Obama’s memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama’s path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama’s career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama’s belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.

Neighborhood assistance

Allow me to reconstruct how Obama transformed himself into what the New York Times has called “that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself.” There is an element of speculation in this, but new evidence continues to narrow the gap between the speculative and the conclusive. One clue comes from an unexpected source, Rashid Khalidi, the radical Arab-American friend of Obama’s and reputed ally of the PLO.

In the acknowledgment section of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi writes of Ayers, “Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family’s dining room table to do some writing for the project.” Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed the help.

Khalidi had spent several years at Chicago University’s Center for International Studies. At a 2003 farewell dinner on the occasion of his departure from Chicago, Obama toasted him, thanking him and his wife for the many dinners that they had shared as well as for his “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

Chicago’s Hyde Park was home to a tight, influential radical community at whose center were Ayers and Dohrn. In this world, the Ayers’ terrorist rap sheet only heightened their reputation. Obama had to know. The couple had given up revolution in 1980 for the long slow march through the institutions. By 1994, if not earlier, Ayers saw a way to quicken that march.

I believe that after failing to finish his book on time, and after forfeiting his advance from Simon & Schuster, Obama brought a sprawling, messy, sophomoric manuscript to the famed dining room table of Bill Ayers and said, “Help.”

Obama’s limited skills

Obama needed all the help he could get. Prior to 1990, he had written very close to nothing. In 1981 Occidental College published two of Obama’s poems—“Pop” and “Underground. Obama calls it some “very bad poetry,” and he does not sell himself short. From “Underground”:

Under water grottos, caverns

Filled with apes

That eat figs.

Stepping on the figs

That the apes

Eat, they crunch.

The apes howl, bare

Their fangs, dance . . .

It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print and this an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as “a fairly standard example of the genre.”

Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review—more of a popularity than a literary contest--Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal.

In 1990 Obama also contributed an essay to a book published by the University of Illinois at Springfield, an anthology called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.

Although the essay covers many of the issues raised in Dreams and uses some of the memoir’s techniques, it does so without a hint of style, sophistication, or promise. The following two excerpts capture Obama’s range or lack thereof:

“Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.”

“But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well . . . and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts.”

These cliché-choked sentences go beyond the merely unpromising to the fully ungrammatical. “Organizing” does not “face.” “Efforts” do not leave “skeletons.” “Agendas” do not have “anathemas.” Indeed, the essay is clunky, pedestrian, and wonkish, a B- paper in a freshman comp class.

In “Why Organize” Obama makes use of the fully re-created conversation, a technique used to somewhat better effect in Dreams. Here, his ungainly conjuring of black speech makes one cringe:

"I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer."

"Why's that?"

" 'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you."

To read “Why Organize” in its entirety is to understand the profound limits of Obama’s literary talent. I am sure he sensed those limits if no one else did.

Postmodern themes

Bill Ayers’ 2001 memoir Fugitive Days and Obama’s Dreams From My Father follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as “a memory book,” one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.

Dreams and Fugitive Days are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls “our constructed reality.” A serious student of literature, Ayers has written thoughtfully on the role of the first person narrator in the construction of a memoir.

In true postmodernist fashion, he rejects the possibility of an objective, universal truth. He argues instead that our lives are journeys, whose “narratives” we “construct” and, if we have the will and the power, impose on others.

Curiously, Obama says much the same in Dreams and in much the same language. “But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie,” writes Obama, “something I’d constructed from the scraps of information I’d picked up from my mother.”

The evidence strongly suggests that Ayers transformed the stumbling literalist of “Why Organize” into the sophisticated postmodernist of Dreams, and he did not so not by tutoring Obama, but by rewriting his text. The Ayers’ quotes that follow come from an essay of his, “Narrative Push/Narrative Pull.” The Obama quotes come from Dreams:

Ayers:

“The hallmark of writing in the first person is intimacy. . . . But in narrative the universal is revealed through the specific, the general through the particular, the essence through the unique, and necessity is revealed through contingency.”

Obama:

“And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged . . . “

Ayers:

“Narrative begins with something to say—content precedes form.”

Obama:

“I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative . . . “

Ayers:

“Narrative inquiry can be a useful corrective to all this.”

Obama:

“Truth is usually the best corrective.”

Ayers:

“The mind works in contradiction, and honesty requires the writer to reveal disputes with herself on the page.”

Obama:

“Not because that past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that--on the surface, at least--contradict the world I now occupy.”

Ayers:

The reader must actually see the struggle. It’s a journey, not by a tourist, but by a pilgrim.

Obama:

“But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary.”

Ayers:

“Narrative writers strive for a personal signature, but must be aware that the struggle for honesty is constant.”

Obama:

“I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.”

Ayers:

“But that intimacy can trap a writer into a defensive crouch, into airing grievances or self-justification.”

Obama:

“At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap.”

Although I cite one example for each, Dreams offers many more. There are ten “trap” references alone and nearly as many for “narrative,” “struggle,” and “journey.” To be sure, there are other postmodernists in Chicago, but few who write as stylishly and as intelligibly as Ayers and fewer who make their dining room tables available to would-be authors of a leftist bent.

The sea metaphors

A newly discovered anecdote from Bill Ayers’ 1993 book, To Teach, solidifies the case that he is indeed the muse behind Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father.

In the book, Ayers tells the story of an adventurous teacher who would take her students out to the streets of New York to learn interesting life lessons about the culture and history of the city. As Ayers tells it, the students were fascinated by the Hudson River nearby and asked to see it. When they got to the river’s edge, one student said, ” Look, the river is flowing up.” A second student said, “No, it has to flow south-down.”

Not knowing which was right, the teacher and the students did their research. What they discovered, writes Ayers, was “that the Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push.”

In his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama shares a stunningly comparable anecdote about tidal rivers from his own brief New York sojourn. He tells of meeting with “Marty Kauffman” at a Lexington Avenue diner, the man from Chicago who was trying to recruit him as a community organizer.

After the meeting, Obama “took the long way home, along the East River promenade.” This serendipitous journey to the river enables him to tell a story that is transparently fabricated and almost assuredly hatched in the weathered brain of Bill Ayers.

As “a long brown barge rolled through the gray waters toward the sea,” Obama sat down on a bench to consider his options. While sitting, he noticed a black woman and her young son against the railing. Overly fond of the too well remembered detail, Obama observes that “they stood side by side, his arm wrapped around her leg, a single silhouette against the twilight.”

The boy appeared to ask his mother a question that she could not answer and then approached Obama: “Excuse me, mister,” he shouted. “You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?”

"The woman smiled and shook her head, and I said it probably had to do with the tides." Obama uses the seeming indecisiveness of this tidal river as a metaphor for his own. Immediately afterwards, he shakes the indecision and heads for Chicago.

Even were there no other clues, Obama’s frequent and sophisticated use of nautical metaphors like this one makes a powerful case for Ayers’ involvement in the writing of Dreams. Despite growing up in Hawaii, Obama gives no indication than he has had any real experience with the sea or ships. Ayers, however, knew a great deal about the sea. After dropping out of college, he took up the life of a merchant seaman.

Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. “I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience,” Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama’s earth-bound memoir.

“Memory sails out upon a murky sea,” Ayers writes at one point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word “murky” and its aquatic usages.

“The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs,” he writes, one of four times “murky” appears in Dreams. Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. “The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed,” he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word “flutter.”

Not surprisingly, Ayers uses “ship” as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is “the captain of her own ship,” not a substantial one either but “a ragged thing with fatal leaks” launched into a “sea of carelessness.” Obama too finds himself “feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship.” He also makes a metaphorical reference to “a tranquil sea.”

More intriguing is Obama’s use of the word “ragged” as an adjective as in the highly poetic “ragged air” or “ragged laughter.” Both books use “storms” and “horizons” both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an “unbounded horizon,” and Obama writes of “boundless prairie storms” and poetic horizons—“violet horizon,” “eastern horizon,” “western horizon.”

Ayers often speaks of “currents” and “pockets of calm” as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in “a menacing calm” or “against the current” or “into the current.” The metaphorical use of the word “tangled” might also derive from one’s nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his “tangled love affairs” and Obama of his “tangled arguments.”

In Dreams, we read of the “whole panorama of life out there” and in Fugitive Days, “the whole weird panorama.” Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one “an immense panorama of waste and cruelty.” Obama employs the word “cruel” and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.

On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of “despair,” as in the “ocean of despair.” Ayers speaks of a “deepening despair,” a constant theme for him as well. Obama’s "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the pages of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf.

My own semi-memoir, Sucker Punch, offers a useful control here too. The book makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky. None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.

If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers’ involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the black nationalist message:

“A steady attack on the white race . . . served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair.”

As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as “ballast” unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.

Why this matters

Obama’s handlers have “constructed” his persona around his presumably superior intelligence. Bill Buckley’s son Christopher, smitten by Obama’s literary skills, is among those who have yielded to this imagery and joined the Obama crusade. Even if someone benign had ghostwritten the book it would present a problem for Obama.

The question is often asked why Obama associated with Ayers. The more appropriate question is why the powerful Ayers would associate with the then obscure Obama. Before Obama’s ascendancy, it was Ayers who had the connections, the clout, and the street cred. Ayers could also write and write very well. By the mid-1990s he had had several of his books published. What Ayers could never do, however, was run for office on his own.

My suspicion is that Ayers saw the potential in Obama, and chose to mold it. The calculation in Dreams is palpable. Nothing about the book would deny a black Democrat the White House. If it were revealed that the ghostwriter is Ayers, it would suggest that Ayers has played a major role all along in the shaping of Barack Obama. It is unlikely that the McCain camp would have invested so much energy in establishing the Ayers-Obama link if they did not think this was the case.

At the end of the day, the observer is left with only two conclusions: either Barack Obama experienced a quantum surge in his writing skills almost overnight; or someone made a major contribution to the rewriting of his book.

The dispassionate observer has to choose the latter—the former has no precedent. If he can endure the consequences, he concedes that that contributor had to be Bill Ayers.

Jack Cashill is the author, among other books, of Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Hijacked American Culture. He has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University.

Obama Bought off by the Most Vicious Predators on Wall Street

2008-10-19T00:39:00.001-07:00

-But hasn't Senator Obama repeatedly told us in ads and speeches and debates that he wasn't taking money from registered lobbyists? Hasn't the press given him a free pass on this statement?

-The Center for Responsive Politics website allows one to pull up the filings made by lobbyists, registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 with the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives and secretary of the U.S. Senate. These top five contributors to the Obama campaign have filed as registered lobbyists: Sidley Austin LLP; Skadden, Arps, et al; Jenner & Block; Kirkland & Ellis; Wilmerhale, aka Wilmer Cutler Pickering.

-Is it possible that Senator Obama does not know that corporate law firms are also frequently registered lobbyists?

-Or is he making a distinction that because these funds are coming from the employees of these firms, he's not really taking money directly from registered lobbyists?

-That thesis seems disingenuous when many of these individual donors own these law firms as equity partners or shareholders and share in the profits generated from lobbying.

-Far from keeping his distance from lobbyists, Senator Obama and his campaign seems to be brainstorming with them.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=613&Itemid=1

Obama's Money Cartel: How Barack Obama Fronted for the Most Vicious Predators on Wall Street
Presidential Politics 2008 - Obama
Wednesday, 07 May 2008
by Pam Martens

The candidate that claims to be the only presidential contender who doesn't take money from lobbyists is in fact the biggest recipient of lobby-related contributions. Barack Obama rakes in millions from law firms serving the interests of Wall Street, including the financial institutions that gave us the subprime lending crisis. Lawyers that work for firms that earn hundreds of millions of dollars for lobbying may technically not be lobbyists, but they share in their colleagues' earnings as influencers of Congress - a legal loophole that allows Obama to claim his hands are clean of lobby loot. "The top contributors to the Obama campaign are the very Wall Street firms whose shady mortgage lenders buried the elderly and the poor and minority under predatory loans."

Obama's Money Cartel: How Barack Obama Fronted for the Most Vicious Predators on Wall Street

by Pam Martens

This article is the result of a special investigation undertaken by Counterpunch, orignally printed in 2 parts, here and here..

"The top contributors to the Obama campaign are the very Wall Street firms whose shady mortgage lenders buried the elderly and the poor and minority under predatory loans."
Wall Street, known variously as a barren wasteland for diversity or the last plantation in America, has defied courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for decades in its failure to hire blacks as stockbrokers. Now it's marshalling its money machine to elect a black man to the highest office in the land. Why isn't the press curious about this?

Walk into any of the largest Wall Street brokerage firms today and you'll see a self-portrait of upper management racism and sexism: women sitting at secretarial desks outside fancy offices occupied by predominantly white males. According to the EEOC as well as the recent racial discrimination class actions filed against UBS and Merrill Lynch, blacks make up between 1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of stockbrokers - this after 30 years of litigation, settlements and empty promises to do better by the largest Wall Street firms.

The first clue to an entrenched white male bastion seeking a black male occupant in the oval office (having placed only five blacks in the U.S. Senate in the last two centuries) appeared in February on a chart at the Center for Responsive Politics website. It was a list of the 20 top contributors to the Barack Obama campaign, and it looked like one of those comprehension tests where you match up things that go together and eliminate those that don't. Of the 20 top contributors, I eliminated six that didn't compute. I was now looking at a sight only slightly less frightening to democracy than a Diebold voting machine. It was a Wall Street cartel of financial firms, their registered lobbyists, and go-to law firms that have a death grip on our federal government.

Why is the "yes, we can" candidate in bed with this cartel? How can "we," the people, make change if Obama's money backers block our ability to be heard?

Seven of the Obama campaign's top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.

"How can ‘we,' the people, make change if Obama's money backers block our ability to be heard?"

These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to Wall Street. There are five large corporate law firms that are also registered lobbyists; and one is a corporate law firm that is no longer a registered lobbyist but does legal work for Wall Street. The cumulative total of these 14 contributors through February 1, 2008, was $2,872,128, and we're still in the primary season.

But hasn't Senator Obama repeatedly told us in ads and speeches and debates that he wasn't taking money from registered lobbyists? Hasn't the press given him a free pass on this statement?

Barack Obama, speaking in Greenville, South Carolina on January 22, 2008:

"Washington lobbyists haven't funded my campaign, they won't run my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president."

Barack Obama, in an email to supporters on June 25, 2007, as reported by the Boston Globe:

"Candidates typically spend a week like this - right before the critical June 30th financial reporting deadline - on the phone, day and night, begging Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs to write huge checks. Not me. Our campaign has rejected the money-for-influence game and refused to accept funds from registered federal lobbyists and political action committees."

The Center for Responsive Politics website allows one to pull up the filings made by lobbyists, registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 with the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives and secretary of the U.S. Senate. These top five contributors to the Obama campaign have filed as registered lobbyists: Sidley Austin LLP; Skadden, Arps, et al; Jenner & Block; Kirkland & Ellis; Wilmerhale, aka Wilmer Cutler Pickering.

Is it possible that Senator Obama does not know that corporate law firms are also frequently registered lobbyists? Or is he making a distinction that because these funds are coming from the employees of these firms, he's not really taking money directly from registered lobbyists? That thesis seems disingenuous when many of these individual donors own these law firms as equity partners or shareholders and share in the profits generated from lobbying.

Far from keeping his distance from lobbyists, Senator Obama and his campaign seems to be brainstorming with them.

The political publication, The Hill, reported on December 20, 2007, that three salaried aides on the Obama campaign were registered lobbyists for dozens of corporations. (The Obama campaign said they had stopped lobbying since joining the campaign.) Bob Bauer, counsel to the Obama campaign, is an attorney with Perkins Coie. That law firm is also a registered lobbyist.

What might account for this persistent (but non-reality based) theme of distancing the Obama campaign from lobbyists? Odds are it traces back to one of the largest corporate lobbyist spending sprees in the history of Washington whose details would cast an unwholesome pall on the Obama campaign, unless our cognitive abilities are regularly bombarded with abstract vacuities of hope and change and sentimental homages to Dr. King and President Kennedy.

"Many of these individual donors share in the profits generated from lobbying."

On February 10, 2005, Senator Obama voted in favor of the passage of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. Senators Biden, Boxer, Byrd, Clinton, Corzine, Durbin, Feingold, Kerry, Leahy, Reid and 16 other Democrats voted against it. It passed the Senate 72-26 and was signed into law on February 18, 2005. Here is an excerpt of remarks Senator Obama made on the Senate floor on February 14, 2005, concerning the passage of this legislation:

"Every American deserves their day in court. This bill, while not perfect, gives people that day while still providing the reasonable reforms necessary to safeguard against the most blatant abuses of the system. I also hope that the federal judiciary takes seriously their expanded role in class action litigation, and upholds their responsibility to fairly certify class actions so that they may protect our civil and consumer rights...."

Three days before Senator Obama expressed that fateful yea vote, 14 state attorneys general, including Lisa Madigan of Senator Obama's home state of Illinois, filed a letter with the Senate and House, pleading to stop the passage of this corporate giveaway: The AGs wrote: "State attorneys general frequently investigate and bring actions against defendants who have caused harm to our citizens... In some instances, such actions have been brought with the attorney general acting as the class representative for the consumers of the state. We are concerned that certain provisions of S.5 might be misinterpreted to impede the ability of the attorneys general to bring such actions...."

The Senate also received a desperate plea from more than 40 civil rights and labor organizations, including the NAACP, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Human Rights Campaign, American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Justice and Democracy, Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), and Alliance for Justice. They wrote as follows:

"Under the [Class Action Fairness Act of 2005], citizens are denied the right to use their own state courts to bring class actions against corporations that violate these state wage and hour and state civil rights laws, even where that corporation has hundreds of employees in that state. Moving these state law cases into federal court will delay and likely deny justice for working men and women and victims of discrimination. The federal courts are already overburdened. Additionally, federal courts are less likely to certify classes or provide relief for violations of state law."

This legislation, which dramatically impaired labor rights, consumer rights and civil rights, involved five years of pressure from 100 corporations, 475 lobbyists, tens of millions of corporate dollars buying influence in our government, and the active participation of the Wall Street firms now funding the Obama campaign. "The Civil Justice Reform Group, a business alliance comprising general counsels from Fortune 100 firms, was instrumental in drafting the class-action bill," says Public Citizen.

One of the hardest working registered lobbyists to push this corporate giveaway was the law firm Mayer-Brown, hired by the leading business lobby group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Chamber of Commerce spent $16 million in just 2003, lobbying the government on various business issues, including class action reform.

According to a 2003 report from Public Citizen, Mayer-Brown's class action lobbyists included "Mark Gitenstein, former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a leading architect of the Senate strategy in support of class-action legislation; John Schmitz, who was deputy counsel to President George H.W. Bush; David McIntosh, former Republican congressman from Indiana; and Jeffrey Lewis, who was on the staffs of both Sen. John Breaux (D-La) and Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La)".

While not on the Center for Responsive Politics list of the top 20 contributors to the Obama presidential campaign, Mayer-Brown's partners and employees are in rarefied company, giving a total of $92,817 through December 31, 2007, to the Obama campaign. (The firm is also defending Merrill Lynch in court against charges of racial discrimination.)

Senator Obama graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Given those credentials, one assumes that he understood the ramifications to the poor and middle class in this country as he helped gut one of the few weapons left to seek justice against giant corporations and their legions of giant law firms. The class-action vehicle confers upon each citizen one of the most powerful rights in our society: the ability to function as a private attorney general and seek redress for wrongs inflicted on ourselves as well as for those similarly injured that might not otherwise have a voice.

"Obama helped gut one of the few weapons left to seek justice against giant corporations and their legions of giant law firms."

Those rights should have been strengthened, not restricted, at this dangerous time in our nation's history. According to a comprehensive report from the nonprofit group, United for a Fair Economy, over the past eight years the total loss of wealth for people of color is between $164 billion and $213 billion for subprime loans which is the greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern history:

"According to federal data, people of color are more than three times more likely to have subprime loans: high-cost loans account for 55 per cent of loans to blacks, but only 17 per cent of loans to whites."

If there had been equitable distribution of subprime loans, losses for white people would be 44.5 per cent higher and losses for people of color would be about 24 per cent lower. "This is evidence of systemic prejudice and institutional racism."
Before the current crisis, based on improvements in median household net worth, it would take 594 more years for blacks to achieve parity with whites. The current crisis is likely to stretch this even further.

So, how should we react when we learn that the top contributors to the Obama campaign are the very Wall Street firms whose shady mortgage lenders buried the elderly and the poor and minority under predatory loans? How should we react when we learn that on the big donor list is Citigroup, whose former employee at CitiFinancial testified to the Federal Trade Commission that it was standard practice to target people based on race and educational level, with the sales force winning bonuses called "Rocopoly Money" (like a sick board game), after "blitz" nights of soliciting loans by phone? How should we react when we learn that these very same firms, arm in arm with their corporate lawyers and registered lobbyists, have weakened our ability to fight back with the class-action vehicle?

Should there be any doubt left as to who owns our government? The very same cast of characters making the Obama hit parade of campaign loot are the clever creators of the industry solutions to the wave of foreclosures gripping this nation's poor and middle class, effectively putting the solution in the hands of the robbers. The names of these programs (that have failed to make a dent in the problem) have the same vacuous ring: Hope Now; Project Lifeline.

Senator Obama has become the inspiration and role model to millions of children and young people in this country. He has only two paths now: to be a dream maker or a dream killer. But be assured of one thing: this country will not countenance any more grand illusions.

Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years; she has no securities position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article. She writes on public interest issues from New Hampshire. She can be reached at pamk741@aol.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

New Rap Song: NO Bama NO!

2008-10-19T00:20:00.000-07:00

My name is Barack, Im heaven sent-
i want to be your president-
Ill take help from anyone I can-
Farrakhan, Oprah or terrorist man

By now everybody knows my name-
Some vote for me out of shame-
and some will vote for what they see-
Ill take any vote, if its for me-

No-bama No!
No-Bama No!
No-Bama No!
No-Bama No!

Ive got no birth certificate-
Now what the heck did i do with it-
and if I can avoid any more detection-/if you dont make the right selection
youre gonna wish there was another election

I'll give all rights to cross dressers,
and all those other gender benders-
My friends in Hollywood and TV
wont let you hear/know nothing bad about me

No-bama No!
No-Bama No!
No-Bama No!
No-Bama No!

I go to a Church where you can hear,
the name in vain said loud and clear-
I take the kids so they will know,
that they can cuss like so and so

Now I believe what I believe
though I get confused about which creed-
Im a man of prayer-a man of faith-
even if I forget what Im supposed to say-

No-bama No!
No-Bama No!
No-Bama No!
No-Bama No!

My name is Barak Im heaven sent
I want to be your president-
Yes, I really want to win this race
So, ACORN, get those voters in place!!

I'm the doctor of death-the sire of slick-
sometimes I even make myself sick.
I've got an agenda that's well hidden-
(I might not even be a citizen)

No-bama No!
No-Bama No!
No-Bama No!
No-Bama No!

AP/Yahoo shows Obama leading McCain by two points, 44%-42%

2008-10-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

Hey, This Race Might Be Winnable
A lot of the state polls look pretty bad for McCain lately, but there's been an interesting shift in the tracking polls.

* Rasmussen’s Presidential Tracking poll now shows Barack Obama leading John McCain by four points, 50 percent to 46 percent. At one point, Obama was up by 8. * Gallup’s national tracking poll of likely voters has Obama leading McCain by two points, 49 percent to 47 percent. * AP/Yahoo shows Obama leading McCain by two points, 44%-42% * The Reuters/C-Span/Zogby national tracking survey shows Obama leading McCain by five points, 49%-44%. * The GW/Battleground tracking poll has Obama leading McCain by four points, 49%-45%.

The other thing is, in most of these, if there's been movement, Obama's been pretty consistent - right around, or just under, 50 percent. McCain's gains have come from undecideds.

It has been argued that this election is a referendum on Obama, and I largely concur. The endless magazine covers, the ubiquitous commercials, the posters, the stadium rally, his own channel on some cable systems, the postponement of the World Series for his half-hour national address... If you see him as a presidential and ready for the job, you're for him; if you don't, you don't and you vote for the other guy.

(Interesting that McCain referred to Obama during one debate as "that one" since to a lot of voters, McCain is "the other one.")

Obviously, I'd rather be up by four or five than down by four or five. But I'm not sure the instant demonization of Joe the Plumber helps Obama with all of those waverers in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

(10/17/2008)
- National Review Online Blogs, NY

Obama Bought off by Registered Lobbyists as Press Attacks Citizen Joe the Plumber

2008-10-18T06:13:00.000-07:00

Ayers/Obama Funded FactCheck.org

2008-10-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

-Obama called for an $3.5 million dollar earmark for the Annenburg Foundation that sponsors FactCheck.org.

-Factcheck.org is part of the Annenberg Foundation. Yep, that Annenberg Foundation which also funded the Wm. Ayers/Barack Obama Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

http://redgirlrising.blogdns.net/where-do-you-get-your-facts/

Where Do You Get Your “Facts?”
So add another site to the list of online destinations attached to Obama-nation - factcheck.org

Frequently quoted on mainstream news broadcasts and websites, factcheck.org is part of the Annenberg Foundation. Yep, that Annenberg Foundation which also funded the Wm. Ayers/Barack Obama Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Check out their adddress to learn more:

FactCheck.org
Annenberg Public Policy Center
320 National Press Building
Washington DC 20045
Editor@FactCheck.org
Telephone: (Annenberg Public Policy Center)
(202) 879-6700

I’ve used factcheck.org in the past and guess that’s stopping today. Adding to the list of places I don’t do research anymore.

National Review and Michelle Malkin broke the story.

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:dKOuasM6nNEJ:blogs4mccain.com/2008/10/06/obama-ayers-annenburg-factcheckorg/+ayers+FactCheck.org+Annenberg+Public+Policy+Center&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&ie=UTF-8

Obama, Ayers, Annenburg & FactCheck.org
There is a disturbing link between Barack Obama, FactCheck.org, and William Ayers. National Review reports that William Ayers and Barack Obama both served as co-chairs of the Chicago Annenburg Challenge.

Obama called for an $3.5 million dollar earmark for the Annenburg Foundation that sponsors FactCheck.org.

Several FactCheck articles have been viewed as promoting the Obama campaign line instead of truly acting as a fact checkers. Controlling the ‘facts’ is a hallmark of a totalitarian regime, and this is truly an unsettling connection.

Mission statement from FactCheck.org:

The Annenberg Political Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg in 1994 to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state and federal levels.
The APPC accepts NO funding from business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals. It is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.

Requested Anneberg Earmark from Barack Obama - Citation from Answers.BarackObama.com

Obama Requested $3.5 Million For The USC Annenberg Research Network. In 2005, Obama requested $3.5 million for the USC Annenberg Research Network on International Communication, in partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to support the deployment of pervasive broadband for education and economic development.Funding was for the construction of a large-scale broadband wireless systems in two communities—one in South Los Angeles and the other in small-town Illinois. In each community, broadband network coverage will be provided over a minimum of about a half-square mile area, utilizing leading edge wireless technologies. In Los Angeles, this will include the five schools in USC’s immediate neighborhood, with about 8,000 K-12 students. USC also will provide wireless equipment and access to every family with a student entering the first grade of a new Science Center School, and in Illinois, a similar group of students will be selected to receive wireless equipment and access within the coverage area. The impact of these technologies on the students and their families will be tracked. [Obama Request Letter to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, HHS, Education, 6/7/05]

Obama’s Challenge from the National Review

Let’s first review CAC’s [Chicago Annenburg Challenge] initial setup. In the first year, 1995, Obama headed the board, which made fiscal decisions, and Ayers co-chaired the Collaborative, which set education policy. During that first year, Obama’s formal responsibilities mandated close cooperation and coordination with the Collaborative. As board chair and president of the CAC corporation, Obama was authorized to “delegate to the Collaborative the development of collaborative projects and programs . . . to obtain assistance of the Collaborative in the development of requests for proposals . . . and to seek advice from the Collaborative regarding the programmatic aspects of grant proposals.” All this clearly involves significant consultation between the board, headed by Obama, and the Collaborative, co-chaired by Ayers.

Hat Tip to Death by 1000 Papercuts for first reporting this in their article Obama, Bill Ayers, and FactCheck.Org: All Have Ties To Annenberg Foundation

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Clarification: The connection between Obama and Ayers is through
the Chicago Annenberg Challenge that received money from the Annenburg
Foundation, but the Chicago Annenburg Challenge Challenge and the
Annenburg Foundation are not directly connected philosophically. The
earmark Senator Obama requested was for the Annenburg Foundation, which
funded the Chicago Annenburg Challenge and also funds FactCheck.org.
Obama is tied to both groups one via earmark, the other via direct
participation, however, Ayers is not directly connected to
FactCheck.org.

FactCheck.org Lying on Obama’s Second Amendment Record

2008-10-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

Unmitigated Garbage from FactCheck.org on Obama’s Second Amendment Record

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:23 am
Xrlq points us to this ridiculous FactCheck.org piece on Obama and gun rights. I am by now completely disenchanted with FactCheck.org and virtually every other “fact checking” site out there, and this piece does nothing to dispel my depression.

The summary version: FactCheck ridicules the NRA in this piece. But the NRA is careful to say: look at Obama’s record and not his rhetoric. And at least two of the NRA claims are backed up by references to Obama’s record. Yet FactCheck.org goes on to minimize or completely ignore Obama’s record on these points, choosing instead to concentrate on citations to Obama’s later campaign rhetoric.

1) FactCheck.org declares “false” the NRA’s claim that Obama plans to ban the possession, manufacture, and sale of handguns. But it emerges that this claim is directly based on Obama’s “yes” answer to a the following question in a questionnaire: “Do you support legislation to ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns?”

FactCheck.org simply faults the NRA for not noting Obama’s later attempts to explain away this answer. But FactCheck.org doesn’t address the fact that Obama falsely denied even seeing the questionnaire, only to have it later emerge that an amended version had his handwriting on it.

2) FactCheck.org calls “supported” the NRA’s claim that Obama would appoint judges who share his views on the Second Amendment. As part of their evidence, FactCheck.org tells us that Obama didn’t contest the Heller decision, which upheld an individual right to bear arms. But FactCheck.org doesn’t mention that Obama’s campaign had initially said of the D.C.’s total ban on handguns in the home: “Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.” (Obama later tried to back away from that statement, but it is part of his record, just like his answers to the questionnaire that he had claimed he had never seen, but that turned out to bear his handwriting.)

The piece is garbage. Details in the extended entry.

First, some context. The piece criticizes the NRA, which encourages FactCheck.org to look at Obama’s record and not his rhetoric. FactCheck.org says it contacted the NRA’s director of public affairs:

He declined to speak to us except to say that the claims are based on Obama’s voting record and statements he has made in the media. “We’re comfortable with what we put on there,” Arulanandam said. “We believe our facts.”

Sounds like he agreed to make a statement; FactCheck.org just didn’t like it. And no wonder: they go on to do an entire piece on the issue that elevates Obama’s rhetoric over his record. Here are just two examples.

First, FactCheck.org ridicules the NRA’s claim that Obama plans to ban the possession, manufacture, and sale of handguns. Here is FactCheck.org’s “analysis”:

The NRA bases its claim on a disputed 1996 questionnaire that Obama’s Illinois state Senate campaign filled out for the nonprofit voting group, Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization. On it, somebody filled in the word “yes” in response to the question, “Do you support legislation to ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns?”

Hmm. That seems pretty solid.

But the Obama campaign said that the survey was actually filled out by his then-campaign manager who “unintentionally mischaracterized his position,” adding that Obama never saw the survey.

Oh. Well, we should probably take his word for it, then.

As we wrote previously, an amended version of the questionnaire was later submitted to the group, with Obama’s handwritten notes on it providing more detail on some of the answers. Obama clearly saw and handled this version personally and did not alter the question about banning the sale and manufacturing of guns.

Hmm. That seems pretty solid.

FactCheck.org does not mention the fact that Obama was directly questioned in a debate about his answer on the gun rights questionnaire, and denied that his handwriting was on that particular document. In fact, it was. You can learn this if you click through to one of the FactCheck.org links. But if we’re talking about taking his rhetoric at face value, doesn’t it matter that he publicly claiming something directly relevant to the issue that turned out to be false? Shouldn’t this be in the body of the FactCheck.org analysis? Apparently they don’t consider it to be important.

Nevertheless, his aides maintain that the gun-ban answer was a mistake and didn’t reflect Obama’s true position.

Oh. Well, we should probably take their word for it, then.

Imagine, those crazy NRA people, basing their claims on a questionnaire that Obama personally saw, that he knew represented his position! Why didn’t they take at face value the claims made later by his campaign, after his earlier answers came back to haunt him?

I mean: how dare they?

Second, we have FactCheck mocking as “unsupported” the NRA’s claim that Obama would “Appoint Judges to the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Judiciary Who Share His Views on the Second Amendment.” FactCheck.org says:

The NRA’s fact sheet points out that Obama has voted against the two newest members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Obama voted against the confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005 and Justice Samuel Alito in 2006. They happen to be two of the five justices that voted in favor of the Court’s decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s longstanding handgun ban this year. The New York Times has reported that Obama “favored Democratic filibusters to block many Republican nominees deemed too conservative.” But the NRA can point to no statement by Obama calling for a Second-Amendment test for his judicial appointees, and we could find none.

So never mind the justices he has opposed, because he hasn’t explicitly called for a litmus test. But what has he said?

What Obama has actually said about selecting judges is that “[w]e need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

Very sweet. But what has he said about the Second Amendment?

In any case, Obama says he believes the Second Amendment “creates an individual right” to bear arms. That’s at odds with some strong gun-control advocates who had argued that the Second Amendment limited the right to bear arms to a “well-regulated militia.” The Supreme Court rejected that view in its June ruling overturning the D.C. gun ban. But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” Chief Justice John Roberts joined that opinion. To the dismay of gun-control advocates, Obama did not criticize the ruling. Instead, he said it “will provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.”

Really? Is that all he has said about the Heller case?

Once again, if you give primacy to what his recent campaign statements have been, then, by golly, he supports the Second Amendment! But if you look at his record — his past statements — then the NRA is right to be concerned.

Here’s what FackCheck.org doesn’t tell you.

The Supreme Court case in Heller says that the D.C. ban “totally bans handgun possession in the home.” That’s about as clear a Second Amendment encroachment as you can imagine.

And what did Obama’s campaign initially say about that total ban on handguns in the home? The campaign once issued a statement to the Chicago Tribune that said:

Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.

This statement proved to be a political loser, of course — and Obama later ended up trying to distance himself from it. That D.C. handgun law is not the D.C. handgun law he thought he knew.

But it’s part of his record. And if the NRA was truly elevating his record over his rhetoric, they had a completely fair point.

FactCheck.org, at this point, is worse than useless. It is positively misleading voters out there.

Factcheck.org Lying for Obama

2008-10-17T10:30:00.001-07:00

Factcheck.org Lying for Obama

http://www.jillstanek.com/archives/2008/09/factcheckorg_fa.html

September 27, 2008
Fact-checking Factcheck.org on Gianna and Obama ads

Only 4 days ago Michelle Malkin called FactCheck.org's output "pure garbage."

I'm here to corroborate.

On September 24, FC posted an article supposedly fact-checking BornAliveTruth.org's Gianna ad as well as Barack Obama's retaliatory attack ad.

There was no excuse for Jessica Henig's hit piece, at times deliberately deceptive and at times woefully ignorant. We know this because we provided every bit of documentation she requested and some she didn't think to request in the days before she posted her liberal spin.

In addition, we emailed protests with the same corroboration on September 25 to FC's editor, Brooks Jackson, and he, too, lacked the objectivity or understanding to do the right thing as requested, disable the post pending further investigation.

The title of Henig's piece gives its bias away: "'Born Alive' baloney."

I wrote Jackson that Henig's article was wrong from the very first word, indicative of shoddy work to follow. Henig should have started with "An," not "A," and 3 days later it's still wrong:

But that was nothing....

Gianna Jessen did not "say" she survived a failed abortion, verbiage indicating a mere claim has been made. Jessen's legal birth records prove she was aborted. Henig reviewed these records, as evidenced by her email to me stating, "Actually, I feel pretty solid on the circumstances of Gianna's birth, as they're detailed on the website."

If Henig were "solid," she would have reported the nature of Gianna's birth as factual, scanned and posted here and here.

Then, in the blink of an eye, after restating Jessen's thesis, "if Barack Obama had his way, I wouldn't be here," Henig remarkably changed it: "She's wrong. If she'd been born in Illinois, Illinois law would have protected her with or without the 'born alive' legislation that Obama opposed and that this group supports."

But obviously Jessen did not say "If Illinois law had its way....." Jessen's statement had nothing to do with IL law. It focused squarely on Barack Obama and his strong opposition to giving legal status to abortion survivors and providing them medical care.

Did Henig read Obama's 2001 and 2002 floor speeches from the IL Born Alive Infants Protection Act debate? Did she even view Obama's website?

No, Henig ignored irrefutable evidence of Obama's disregard for the postnatal personhood of abortion survivors and instead scampered off on a diversionary rabbit trail.

Had Henig factchecked the right fact, she would have found this immediate example from Obama's own "factcheck" page about an earlier component of IL's Born Alive Act, demonstrating he clearly does not believe abortion survivors like Jessen warrant legal or medical protection:

Given merely the above, how could Henig have determined any other than Obama believes killing abortion survivors like Jessen at birth is nothing more than 4th trimester abortions?

Nevertheless, this turtle will trudge down the rabbit trail after Henig if only to repudiate her misrepresentation of the IL Abortion Act of 1975, with a hat tip to Henig's listed source, Planned Parenthood, which everyone but Henig knows opposed IL's Born Alive.

My information comes from attorney Paul Linton, who represented the American Academy of Medical Ethics when 15 years ago it opposed the US District Court's decision to enjoin much of IL's Abortion Act of 1975.

One section of the IL Abortion Act enjoined in the 1993 Herbst v. O'Malley decision included the definitions of "born alive," "live born," and "live birth."

To restate, there was no enforceable definition of "born alive" in IL law when Obama opposed IL's Born Alive Infants Protection Act.

The IL Born Alive Act would have restored that language. By opposing Born Alive, Obama was agreeing with the Herbst decision that an infant born alive as the result of an abortion should not be protected by the IL Criminal Code.

Further, there are 2 loopholes in the IL Abortion Act.

1. The IL Abortion Act applies only to viable infants, while Born Alive applies to all live-born infants, regardless of viability. In other words, the former dealt with viability, the latter with live birth. Thus, in the case of the live birth of a child who was determined not to be viable at the time the abortion was committed, the 1975 law did not apply.

2. The one determining a baby's viability according to the IL Abortion Act is the abortionist, and s/he is allowed to determine viability pre-birth. Rational people understand the potential for the very person trying to kill the baby pre-birth to subjectively assess the baby's likelihood of survival post-birth.

That said, the IL Abortion Act states that in the event the abortionist determines a baby s/he is trying to kill might survive and might be viable, s/he was to call a 2nd doctor to assess the abortion survivor at birth.

And in this audio clip from Obama's 2002 IL Senate floor debate, he argued against making that very call, stating doing so would be a "burden" to the aborting mother's "original decision." Hear for yourself:

Obama's born alive but let die speech on mp3
Momentarily hopping off her rabbit trail, Henig added:

For the record, Obama says he would have supported "born alive" legislation in Illinois if framed in a way that did not pose a threat to abortion rights granted by the Supreme Court in its Roe v. Wade decision.
Actually, for the real record, Obama opposed identical Born Alive legislation in IL in 2003 that passed 98-0 in the U.S. Senate and for which the pro-abortion group NARAL even went neutral. Furthermore, upon its passage on August 5, 2002, and in the 6 years since, the federal Born Alive law has never been challenged in court.

Finally, after devoting 3/4 of her piece to BornAliveTruth.org's Gianna ad to incorrectly "factcheck" points not even in the ad, Henig finally poked her nose into the Obama attack response ad only to chase off on another rabbit trail to "fact check" an attack Obama made against John McCain in his ad, who had nothing to do with the Gianna ad.

Henig then repeated Obama's deceptive slurs against BornAliveTruth.org's Gianna ad as "sleazy" and "vile" without noting they were actually written by journalists about a completely different ad.

Henig ignored Obama's claim that his Born Alive votes were "taken out of context." The obvious fact check would have been to check their context.

Another fact not checked: Obama threw the word "infanticide" into his ad, never once mentioned by the BornAliveTruth.org ad, in a sentence taken completely out of context by Born Alive's 2003 senate sponsor.

Henig finally did note Obama misrepresented BornAliveTruth.org's ad as being sponsored by McCain only to fittingly close her piece by running off on a 3rd rabbit trail, to say, well, McCain did it, too, and to link to that ad.

Henig must be tired. But she deserves much credit for completely undermining FactCheck.org's stated mission, "to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics."

ACORN Could Cause Obama's Fall

2008-10-16T19:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.newsmax.com/morris/acorn_barack_obama/2008/10/15/140760.html

Dick Morris' Political Insider RSS ARCHIVE

Print Page | Forward Page | E-mail Us

ACORN Could Cause Obama's Fall

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 2:04 PM

By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann Article Font Size

As Obama lengthens his lead, the Republicans are praying that the election becomes close enough for the Democrats not to steal. But meanwhile, ACORN, the radical community group, is becoming an embarrassment for Obama.

It is not as if its shenanigans are likely to tip the result, with the Democrats so far ahead. But as it is raided by the FBI in state after state (11 so far), it is becoming identified as the electoral equivalent of Greenpeace, extremists who will stop at nothing to get their way.

What makes ACORN particularly embarrassing for Obama is that he used to be one of them. He served as general counsel for ACORN in Illinois, channeled millions to the organization from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (whose funds he distributed) and has lately spent $800,000 of his campaign money to subsidize the group's activities.

For this emolument, ACORN has registered voters 15 times over, canvassed the graveyards for votes, and prepared to commit electoral fraud on a massive scale.

With friends like this, Obama doesn't need enemies. As their radical activities make headlines every day, Obama's intimate involvement with these radicals becomes more and more of a political liability.

The other Obama scandals have no topical relevance. The Rev. Wright no longer spews hatred from the pulpit and has apparently been persuaded to stay away from media interviews. William Ayers is likewise making himself scarce, and the Obama/Ayers relationship, whatever it may have been, is clearly in the past.

Rezko is facing sentencing in his own corruption case, but isn't likely to turn on the one man who may acquire the power to pardon him.

But, as Election Day approaches and early balloting proceeds in many states, ACORN's tactics will get more and more media attention. As election officials discover ACORN frauds, the association will become more injurious to Obama, particularly when it is his own campaign that is funding many of the fraudulent activities.

At the very least, the negative publicity ACORN will attract will paint Obama as a radical with questionable judgment. At the most, it might cause voters to wonder if he is not himself involved in electoral fraud.

The recent book by Wall Street Journal editor John Fund, "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy," discusses the prevalence of voter fraud, made newly possible by lax enforcement of laws requiring identification to vote. As Fund indicates, the motor/voter laws have encouraged waves of new voters, many of them ineligible to participate. Let us remember that eight of the Sept. 11 hijackers were registered to vote!

So ACORN is the gift that will keep on giving as its activities attract attention while Election Day nears. But are these McCain attacks on Obama going to work?

Clearly they have not so far. Obama has lower negatives than McCain, and his unfavorable rating has not risen despite the avalanche of attack advertising to which he has been subjected.

Possibly, voters are just inured to the attacks and disregard them. But more likely they are just distracted by the financial meltdown all around them. We have never had a presidential race, since 1944, where the contest was not the most important news in the four weeks before the election. (In 1944, the war overshadowed the election, much to the frustration of the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey.)

The candidates seem unable to get a word in edgewise as the financial news dominates. People follow the Dow Jones more than the Gallup, Rasmussen, or Zogby polls.

If the presidential race remains an afterthought, crowded out by the financial news, Obama will waltz into the White House by a comfortable margin. But if the stock market stops its gyrations for a while and no new household name/corporation or bank goes broke, the negatives against Obama will compel attention at last.

And then the race may close swiftly and dramatically.

© 2008 Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

OCTOBER 18th: WORLDWIDE ROSARY FOR UNBORN BABIES

2008-10-14T22:09:00.000-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 10, 2008
CONTACT: Patrick Benedict

PatrickBenedict@rcin.net

OCTOBER 18th ROSARY FOR UNBORN BABIES RECEIVES INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE (OCTOBER 10th, 2008) -

The October 18th WORLDWIDE ROSARY FOR UNBORN BABIES prayer event, initiated by the Saint Michael the Archangel Organization, has received attention from a number of people from various places throughout the world. Presently, support has come in from at least one source in each of the following nations: Latvia, Tanzania, Italy, England, Lithuania, Croatia, Czech Republic, Philippines, United States, Canada, India, Peru, Ghana, Kenya, and Poland.

" There is no requirement to contact the Saint Michael the Archangel Organization about the WORLDWIDE ROSARY FOR UNBORN BABIES prayer event. But, it is very encouraging to see so much interest in this pro-life prayer event," said Patrick Benedict, a parishioner at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church(Diocese of Memphis in Tennessee) and the President of the Saint Michael the Archangel Organization.

A person who wants to participate in the WORLDWIDE ROSARY FOR UNBORN BABIES prayer event will need to pray the Rosary on Saturday, October 18th for the following intention: For an end to the surgical and non-surgical killing of unborn babies. It is hoped each participant will pray the Rosary during the 9:00 a.m. hour, but this is not required. There is information about the WORLDWIDE ROSARY FOR UNBORN BABIES prayer event available in 12 different languages at the website

www.SaintMichaelTheArchangelOrganization.org

"I very much appreciate all the people who have helped with this pro-life effort", continued Benedict. "And, I hope, with the time left before Oct. 18th, that the people who are planning on participating will contact many other people and let them know about the WORLDWIDE ROSARY FOR UNBORN BABIES prayer event."

Charlie Daniels vs. Obama

2008-10-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

From: Hugh Bodey
aanh@frontiernet.net

Charlie Daniels vs. Obama

Guns and Church

Since I identify with the people who fall into Barrack Obama's elitist description about people of faith who keep firearms I'm not very happy with Barrack Obama's recent remarks.

He said something to the effect that us rednecks cling to our guns and our religion when we get frustrated and I would like to take umbrage to these remarks. My faith goes much deeper than his superficial explanation and I love my guns even when I'm not frustrated.

And I am not by myself. I was going to church and shooting guns before Mr. Obama was even born and come from a long line of good people who have been doing it for generations.
To me this latest Obama blunder only helps reveal the depth of condescension the far left wing of the Democrat party has for the folks out here in flyover country.

Mr. Obama's remarks are insulting to a lot of folks. It's kind of like Abraham Lincoln said, 'God must love the common people because He made so many of them'.

His remarks make me think that Obama doesn't know the people of this country very well. I'm sure he knows the jet set and the Hollywood bunch, the limousine liberals and the save the whales, kill the babies crowd, but does he think that the ordinary people don't count? Does he think that they're so stupid that they don't know who he's talking about when he says these things? Does he think their opinions aren't important? Apparently.

How can a man stand in front of America and tell people what he wants to do for them and have so little respect for a whole segment of the population?? In fact, a very large segment. Does that mean that he would only represent the high-minded liberal ideals of the far left and ignore the rest of us?

What kind of Commander and Chief would he make if he doesn't respect the very people who make up the lion's share of the armed forces?

You may say I'm over reacting, but I'm getting sick and tired of him making these elitist statements and saying that he had been taken out of context or some other flimsy excuse.

After his wife's remark about not being proud of this country and his pastor's statements calling America the U.S.K.K.K.A. and his own statement about not wanting his daughter punished with a baby, it makes me wonder what kind of a man Obama really is and what kind of a President he'd make.

Would he be an antigun advocate pushing the effort to take the firearms out of innocent citizen's hands? Would he not respect the religious beliefs of America, not taking them into account in his agenda?

I really don't know much about the man and neither does America. He basically came from out of nowhere and as the facts come out little by by little, they don't make a particularly confident picture. I have a great fear that if our military gets broken by another president, this time we're not going to have time to fix it again and what that spells for America, I don't even want to contemplate. Oh well, I guess I'll grab my gun and go to church.

Charlie Daniels

"Lord, What would You have me do for YOU today?"

(ASK, then LISTEN for HIS answer!!!)

Ex-FBI Agents Outraged at Obama-Ayers Ties

2008-10-14T06:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/fbi_obama_ayers_/2008/10/14/140252.html

Ex-FBI Agents Outraged at Obama-Ayers Ties

Tuesday, October 14, 2008 9:46 AM

By: Ronald Kessler Article Font Size

Former FBI agents who worked the Weather Underground case are angry about the longtime relationship between Barack Obama and William Ayers, a leader of the domestic terrorist group who has admitted widespread bombings.

“It outrages me to think that a person would be seeking the presidency of the United States and was close to an individual like Bill Ayers,” former agent Max Noel told Newsmax.

Ayers said in his book that he participated in the bombing of New York City police headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. In September 2001, the New York Times quoted him as saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs . . . I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was sent to prison for failing to cooperate in solving the robbery of a Brink's armored car in which two police officers were killed.

Charges against Ayers were dropped because the FBI used so-called national security wiretaps that could not be used legally in criminal cases.

Obama launched his political career at Ayers’ home in 1995. From 1999 to 2002, he served with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago. In response to criticism of their relationship, Obama has said he was 8 when Ayers was bombing buildings.

But the presidential candidate was a grown man when he sought and obtained Ayers’ blessing for his entry into politics.

Former FBI agent Willie Reagan said, “I spent seven years of my life hunting down people who described themselves as revolutionary communists and were involved in bombings.”

Reagan, who infiltrated the Weather Underground in New York, said he witnessed members of the group making bombs.

“At some point, Obama knew of his background and should have repudiated him, not later when he is running for president,” Reagan told Newsmax.

Noel, who worked the Weather Underground case in San Francisco, also questioned Obama’s reaction to questions about the issue, saying, “I have a problem with Obama minimizing the relationship and saying it has nothing to do with anything. Because having done background investigations for security clearances for years, you look into a person’s character, his associates, his loyalty and so forth.”

Noel noted that Ayers was a directing force of the Weather Underground. His wife-to-be, Bernardine, headed that organization.

“They were a violent, violent, anti-government, domestic terrorist organization,” Noel said. “Obama has not only associated with those people, he continued associating with racist people like his minister Jeremiah Wright over a period of 20 years. I don’t think that’s by happenstance. It’s just amazing to me. The American people are being led by the nose by people who say this isn’t important.”

Oliver “Buck” Revell, a former associate deputy director of the FBI, is similarly blunt. “In dealing with Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and the element that they represented, Obama was dealing with individuals who both openly and admittedly have engaged in treasonous activity and violence against the United States,” said Revell, who worked on the Weather Underground case in Philadelphia and Chicago.

The Obama campaign has refused to say when Obama became aware of Ayers’ terrorist background. When Obama began going to Columbia University in 1981, both Ayers and Dohrn were frequently in the news because of their violent past and brushes with the law. Ayers’ past was well known in Chicago, where he was quoted regularly and described as a former radical and former fugitive. Obama continued to serve on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago with Ayers for more than a year after Ayers expressed regret in the New York Times for not bombing more people.

“Obama is a bright man, and he’s certainly well read and intelligent,” Revell said. “He had to know the background and activities which have been openly described by Ayers.

“The relationship says to me that Obama lacks judgment, that he lacks a perspective on what the United States should stand for,” he said. “It’s appalling that he was even elected to the state Senate in Illinois, but to go from there to a United States senator and then to a candidate for president is astounding.”

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via
e-mail. Go here now.

© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved

Obama has 4-point lead on McCain Oct 13

2008-10-13T21:39:00.001-07:00

POLL-Obama has 4-point lead on McCain
Mon Oct 13, 2008 6:03pm EDT Email | Print | Share| Reprints | Single Page | Recommend (1) [-] Text [+] By Andrew Quinn

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama has a 4-point lead over his Republican rival John McCain in the U.S. presidential race, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby tracking poll released on Monday.

Obama leads McCain by 48 percent to 44 percent among likely voters, down 2 percentage points from the lead he enjoyed on Sunday. The poll has a margin of error of 2.9 points.

Pollster John Zogby said Monday's results, which saw Obama drop 1 point and McCain gain 1 point from Sunday's figures, was an indication the race remained competitive in the final weeks before the Nov. 4 election.

"One day does not make a trend, but perhaps McCain may have stopped some bleeding -- and there was bleeding," he said.

Obama had seen his lead firm in recent weeks as the financial crisis grabbed the headlines, unnerving many voters and putting the campaign spotlight on economic issues.

Obama's 6-point lead in Sunday's results from the rolling, 4-day tracking poll had been his strongest since the survey began on Oct. 7.

Zogby said that while Obama still had a 17-point lead among independent voters, this was down from 21 points on Sunday and showed that some independents remain to be persuaded.

"If we see that lead going down again tomorrow, maybe we are talking a horserace," he said.

But Obama still claimed a 9-point lead among women, who will also play a crucial role in the election, while McCain's numbers were lagging among some traditionally Republican groups including older and richer voters, Zogby said.

McCain, a former Navy pilot and Vietnam war prisoner, lost an early advantage among the oldest U.S. voters, who now back Obama by 47 percent to 44 percent.

And poll responents identified as members of the "investor class" -- who backed President George W. Bush by double digits in the 2004 elections -- now support McCain by just 49 percent to 44 percent for Obama.

"McCain obviously has to regain his lead with people over 65 and with the investor class," Zogby said. "He is certainly not out of the woods here."

The two candidates will make their pitches directly to the American people again on Wednesday when they meet for their third and final presidential debate.

The rolling tracking poll surveyed 1,207 likely voters in the presidential election. In a tracking poll, the most recent day's results are added while the oldest day's results are dropped in an effort to track changing momentum.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

Obama has 4-point lead on McCain Oct 13

2008-10-13T21:39:00.000-07:00