Lefties Want A Fight

Well, I just received my most recent “People For The American Way” newsletter. NOTE: For those of you unfamiliar with this organization, PFTAW is a far-left Marxist group, that pretends on every level to be patriotic. “Right Wing Watch In Focus” is just a part of the above mentioned anti-American band of tools.

ACORN supports "People for The American Way".

Personally, I find it amazing that this group can pack so much Bull Shit into one Newsletter.

Gio-

To Hell with Health Care Reform: Religious Right Leaders Attack Obama, Spout GOP Dogma about “Socialism” While Fanning Flames on Abortion

 

The latest Right Wing Watch In Focus report is here and it deals with the Radical Right’s part in trying to derail the health care reform Americans so desperately need.

Religious Right leaders have enthusiastically joined Republican-led opposition to health care reform efforts.

Much of the Religious Right’s organizing energy has been devoted to incendiary and false claims about the administration’s alleged stealth plan to force every health plan to cover — and force all doctors to provide — abortion services. None of these approaches are actually included in the plans working their way through Congress. In fact, anti-choice members of Congress are using health reform to institute a new nationwide abortion ban in private insurance plans taking away coverage women already have.

In addition, Religious Right leaders have joined the parade of talking heads spouting bogus right-wing talking points about health care plans moving in Congress, falsely claiming that reform constitutes a socialist government takeover of the entire health care industry.

Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, on a recent conference call for anti-choice activists, sounded both those charges, calling reform legislation a “huge abortion industry bailout” as well as a “health care power grab by the federal government.”  Operation Rescue similarly conflates the anti-choice and anti-government arguments, urging activists “to act now to stop Obama’s radical, socialistic abortion agenda…”  The Christian Broadcasting Network has provided a major platform for anti-reform activists.

Why is the Religious Right throwing so much rhetorical and organizing energy into defeating health care reform?  Several reasons.

Religious Right leaders share a deep and abiding hostility for President Obama and are using both the anti-choice and anti-government lines of attack to try to discredit him and diminish his political and legislative effectiveness.  In the now-infamous words of Sen. Jim DeMint, unquestionably the number one congressional mouthpiece for the radical Religious Right, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

In addition, Religious Right leaders see the abortion-funding question as a way to enrage and energize anti-choice activists who took a huge beating at the polls in 2008.  And they see the attempt to defeat health care reform as a broader way to breathe new life into the coalition between social conservatives and economic conservatives that the Republican Party has relied on in recent years (at least since Religious Right groups made a bid for greater political influence by deciding that opposition to tax increases of any form was a “family value” and backing the Contract in America).

In the aftermath of the GOP’s 2008 electoral bloodbath, Newt Gingrich, Ralph Reed, and other strategists have launched their own efforts to revitalize the right wing.  Turning health care reform into a battle against both “socialism” and “genocide” is a clear effort to unite both wings of the party, tarnish both the Obama administration and congressional democrats, and boost GOP prospects in 2010 and 2012.

A Family Research Council ad / web video supposedly showing the future after a government take-over of health care features a couple from the “greatest generation” complaining that the government won’t pay for the husband’s surgery, but is forcing them to pay for abortions.  “Our greatest generation denied care, our future generation denied life,” says the ad, which concludes by urging viewers to contact their senators to “stop the government takeover of health care.”

The same political strategy is reflected in the creation of the Freedom Federation, a new confederation of Religious Right groups that managed to publish a long Declaration of American Values that said nothing whatsoever about the moral imperative to make sure all Americans have access to health care, but did insist that progressive taxation is un-Biblical.  Among its commitments:

To secure a system of fair taxes that are not punitive against the institution of marriage or family and are not progressive in nature, and within a limited government framework, to encourage economic opportunity, free enterprise, and free market competition.

And when progressive people of faith organized a campaign to support reform, FRC attacked the effort, saying it advanced “”an anti-faith, anti-family anti-freedom agenda” and calling it “a new strategy to use the veneer of religion to cover a socialist agenda that will federalize another 17% of our nation’s economy.”

Of course, like GOP leaders, Religious Right leaders have not offered their own plan.  The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins has picked up on the fact that just saying “no” is a risky option, and so he says things like “We need accessibility, affordability, portability, and transparency.”  But he’s not very clear on how to get there.  His political and book-publishing partner Bishop Harry Jackson, meanwhile, has not devoted a single one of his weekly Town Hall columns to promoting improved access to affordable health care, even though his 2008 book with Perkins said that making sure all Americans had access to health care was an important moral question.

Attacking Obama

As Sen. DeMint made transparently clear, a major goal of the anti-reform crowd is to continue to portray President Obama as a radical who, with the help of congressional Democrats, is attempting to railroad the country into socialism.  Much of Religious Right leaders’ rhetoric on this front is indistinguishable from GOP political consultant talking points that are recited by the likes of RNC Chairman Michael Steele.
 
Here’s FRC’s Tony Perkins:

Mr. President, it is about you. It is about your insistence on rushing health care legislation that will affect over 16 percent of our nation’s economy. It is about you championing legislation in Congress that will ultimately shut down private businesses and the private health insurance market and take away options for all citizens. It is about your champions in Congress insisting that abortion is a part of “basic health care” and that taxpayers should pay for it.

A variation that amps up the rhetoric even further comes from an FRC action alert:

This week congress is debating President Obama’s plan to seize control of your personal health care. It will produce a moral disaster that puts you and your family under the thumb of politicians and federal bureaucrats.

But with your help today, Family Research Council (FRC) will battle back against this massive, unprecedented attack on faith, family, and freedom.

Televangelist Pat Robertson appeared on Glenn Beck’s show to sound the anti-Obama alarm:

Obama and his crew are taking advantage of this to insert socialism and government control. He, you know, winds up taking over the automobile industry, the banking industry and before long, health care. And it’s a massive power grab to satisfy the left.

Matt Barber, Associate Dean with (Jerry Falwell’s) Liberty University School of Law and Director of Cultural Affairs at Liberty Counsel, recently denounced President Obama’s “über-extremism” and suggested that forced sterilization and abortions were just around the corner:

We have taxpayer-funded abortion, health care rationing for the elderly and infirm, and vaccination interventions in your living room. I fit all that into one sentence. Obamacare is nearly 1,100 pages long, and even the president hasn’t read it. I see no evidence anyone has.

But half the fun is in finding out what other gems it holds. Forced abortion? Compulsory sterilization? Well, maybe not yet, but is it really that much of a stretch?

On a July 23 teleconference organized by a bunch of anti-choice leaders, Rep. Chris Smith, among others, used his remarks to directly attack the credibility of President Obama and his stated efforts to find common ground on reducing the need for abortion. Another speaker said Obama is a “true believer” in abortion and believes “the end justifies the means.”

Some of the anti-Obama rhetoric has been even more pointed.  Day Gardner, who represents an anti-choice group, said on the same conference call that President Obama “might have black skin” but “he does not care about black babies.”

Spouting Right-Wing Talking Points

The Obama administration and congressional leaders decided from the start that they would not seek to replace the current structure of private insurance with a single-payer system sought by many progressive reform advocates.  But that decision has not in any way stopped Religious Right leaders from claiming that the plan represents a government “takeover” of health insurance.  Religious Right leaders have fully embraced the anti-government rhetoric of the enemies of health care reform.  Pat Robertson called it a move toward a “socialist colossus.”

The anti-choice Operation Rescue calls the plan:

“a complete socialization of our health care system…President Obama is demanding that Congress demand to approve what could be the largest transfer of private industry into the hands of big brother, before the American people can understand what is happening…he knows he must move quickly to ram-rod through what amounts to socialized medicine before the people can learn enough about it to oppose it.”

The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins has been at the forefront of the attacks on Democratic health care reform proposals, spouting the anti-government line with Lou Dobbs on CNN:

“It calls the shots, one-size fits all. I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those hospital gowns, they’re ons-size fits all and important things left uncovered. And that’s what will happen with a health care plan.”

and on Focus on the Family founder James Dobson’s radio show:

“government is now talking about taking over health care…I for one do not want to see the federal government taking over health care.”

James Dobson inadvertently made it clear how reflexively anti-Obama the right-wing opposition is when he responded to Perkins’ comments by saying “we don’t even know what it consists of but it’s not going to be good for most Americans.” Concerned Women for America insisted in an action alert that the plan would result in “a massive government take-over of health care….Massive increases in costs (and taxes), yet less access to services.” Perkins even took a clue from the folks who sabotaged the Clinton administration’s reform efforts by creating a video featuring flow charts to complain that reform would be “complicated.” No kidding.

Even Maggie Gallagher, the anti-gay zealot who leads the National Organization for Marriage’s attacks on equality in the states, got into the act recently:

The reality is that for the already insured, Obamacare will mean less care, rationed by government. For the uninsured it will mean much greater expense. Less care, higher costs.

The Right Kind of Health Care Rationing

A key line of attack on health care reform is that efforts to control health care costs would result in some kind of sinister health care “rationing” as if our current system of insurance company restrictions and tens of millions of people without insurance do not result in a particularly brutal form of rationing.

The Christian Broadcasting Network has been pushing the rationing line.  During a story anchor Wendy Griffith summarized claims by a representative of National Right to Life by saying, “what I hear you saying is that this would put the government in the position of playing God.”  A spokesperson for “Conservatives for Patients First” insisted that government control was bad because health care should be a decision between you, your doctor and your family.  There’s no discussion here about the millions of Americans driven into foreclosure or bankruptcy by medical bills sometimes people with insurance that turns out to be relatively useless against a catastrophic medical expense.  Perkins has even complained that the health plan would disadvantage people who under the current system “want to” sell their house because they are so desperate to pay for medical treatment.

The schedule for this year’s Values Voter Summit, the annual gathering of Religious Right leaders sponsored by FRC, Focus on the Family, and other right-wing groups, features no sessions on the importance of making sure that all Americans have access to health care, but does include the following item on its schedule:

OBAMACARE: RATIONING YOUR LIFE AWAY
Long lines, refusal of care, months waiting for needed surgeries, rationing of treatments, mandates in support of abortion. These are all results of the health care plan currently being debated and placed in the United States, affecting all aspects of your life from your family decisions, to your paycheck to your tax bill. Is it the role of the federal government to provide womb to tomb healthcare? What about personal choice?

CWA warned activists that under Obama’s plans, “The disabled and elderly anyone who bureaucrats decide won’t get ‘healthier’ will get cut off.”  In other words, they said, “The bills being debated will determine who decides which patients will get what (if any) treatments, and literally, who will live and who will die.”

Wendy Wright of CWA, on the Religious Right teleconference call, summarized her reasons for opposing the health care bill: “it will take your money to empower bureaucrats” to essentially decide “who will live and who will die”

Abortion

Religious Right groups are working hard to inflame anti-choice activists by claiming falsely that there is a so-called “abortion mandate” in the health care reform bills moving through Congress. They are also going one step further, using manufactured outrage over health care reform to launch a broader attack on Planned Parenthood to try to strip it of federal funding that now supports its clinics’ non-abortion family planning and women’s health services.

The fact is that abortion is not referenced in any of the bills in the same way other medical procedures are not  specified. But a group of anti-choice members of Congress, led by Representatives Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Joe Pitts (R-PA), is pushing an extreme measure that would result in a new nationwide abortion ban in the private health insurance market.  Most private plans currently offer abortion as an option but women who have this coverage would lose it under the extreme Stupak-Pitts proposal.

Fanning the flames

The major focus of Religious Right organizing has been to fan the flames of anti-choice extremists by insisting that the health care bills, which do not mention abortion, would require, in the words of one Concerned Women for America alert to activists, “abortion on demand, unregulated and taxpayer funded.”

Douglas Johnson, National Right to Life Committee legislative director, says “the public is awakening to the Obama Administration’s attempt to smuggle into law the greatest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade.” Said Rep. Chris Smith on the recent conference call, “if we fail, millions of children will die.”

Operation Rescue Founder Randall Terry has repeatedly warned that any taxpayer funding for abortion services would trigger massive refusal by anti-choice activists to pay their taxes and “violent convulsions” by some anti-choice zealots.

Typical of such rhetoric is Operation Rescue’s message to its activists:

“Congress is being pressured to pass a bill that would not do what Obama is telling the nation it would do.  It would force Americans to pay for abortions against their will and their consciences. We must speak out now against this radical march to socialism and state funded child-killing. We cannot allow even one dime of our money to pay for abortion.”

…

“America is about to experience an unparalleled assault on the pre-born child. If Obama succeeds in financing abortion in his health care plan, it will set the pro-life movement back two decades and cost the lives of millions of innocent babies. If we don’t act today, we could come back from our summer vacations to a very different America,” said Newman.

From Catholic League president Bill Donohue: 

“If the Bush administration had said that it wants to seek ‘common ground’ on gun control, and then decided to subsidize handguns in high crime areas, it would have been condemned from high heaven. The Obama administration’s game of playing footsy with the abortion industry should similarly be condemned. Indeed, it represents the audacity of duplicity to dialogue about abortion and then send the public an invoice for killing kids in utero.”

“Bailing out” the “abortion industry” or “taking out” Planned Parenthood

A number of Religious Right leaders, including Focus of the Family’s James Dobson, refer to the bill as a “bailout” of the “abortion industry.”  Some have called it a bailout specifically for Planned Parenthood, and used the health care debate to advance their attacks on family planning funding.

The attack on Planned Parenthood has been a long one.  Last fall, Bishop Harry Jackson told participants in a rally on the National Mall that the organization was waging genocide against black Americans and that rally participants needed to “take Planned Parenthood out.”  On the recent teleconference by anti-choice groups, Jackson again referred to the “genocidal targeting of black fetuses.”  On the same call, Dr. Alveda King, MLK’s niece and a “Pastoral Associate” of Priests for Life, called abortion “genocide” and referred to Planned Parenthood as “the billion-dollar business that has killed more black children than the KKK.” Alveda King’s inflammatory rhetoric was echoed by Day Gardner of the National Black Pro-Life Union, who also compared pro-choice African American leaders to Black slave-traders.  Jesse Jackson, she said, had “sold his soul to the abortion devil.” 

Distraction from the Religious Right’s real goal

Writing for American Prospect, Dana Goldstein has rebutted right-wing claims about the current health care proposals.

In a letter to Congress, National Right to Life Committee legislative director Douglas Johnson warned, “A vote for this legislation, as drafted, is a vote for tax-subsidized abortion on demand.”
This rhetoric is beyond hyperbolic — it is downright deceptive. “When federal law discusses family planning, it never includes abortion,” says Adam Sonfield, a senior policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, which researches sexual and reproductive health. “The federal government would never talk about it in that way.”

“Reproductive rights are under threat in the health care reform debate, not ascendant,” argues Goldstein, noting that “in playing the abortion card, the real goal of anti-choicers is not only to maintain existing restrictions on abortion access, but to use health reform as a vehicle to expand them to the majority of American women.” She explains:

In the Senate, anti-choice Republicans say they will oppose any health reform plan that subsidizes abortion coverage or even includes, in the proposed health insurance exchanges, private insurers that cover abortion. Currently, 87 percent of health plans offer some abortion services. That means if Democrats capitulate, the majority of women who currently have abortion coverage could lose it. The result would be a near-blanket restriction on women’s access to insurance-subsidized abortion, one far more radical than the Hyde Amendment…

…Republicans would like nothing more than to use health reform to withhold from [Planned Parenthood] its $300 million in federal support, which clinics use to provide services such as cancer screenings, pre-natal care, and sex-ed for teenagers.

The Bottom Line

With the occasional rhetorical bone thrown to the needs of millions of Americans and families poorly served by the current health care system, Religious Right leaders have eagerly embraced a right-wing free-market fundamentalism to oppose federal government efforts to expand access to health care.  They are using the current debate to rally anti-choice troops with false claims that we are on the verge of a massive expansion of abortion in America funded by taxpayers, and to sow fear and distrust of the Obama administration by claiming that he is using health care reform to create a “socialist colossus” that will play God by stripping individuals of their health care choices.  The legitimacy of these claims is about on par with the legitimacy of their attacks on the gay-rights movement, which is to say, non-existent.  But Religious Right leaders rarely let the truth stand in the way of a political or fundraising goal.

 

Civil War Coming To America

H/T to Ed Allen of North Carolinians for the Preservation of the Constitution on Patriotic Resistance!

This is an interesting perspective from a Russian historian. You will notice pauses after one or the other people in the video speaks. Please don’t be alarmed because each person is waiting for an interpretation to finish in their ear-peice.

Who’s the Good Guy?-Updated

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Who’s the good guy in this pic? Two guesses!

P.S. Obama and “Skip” Gates are old friends.

H/t invaluable GiovanniWorld member MissMuffin!

~Eowyn

………….

A teaching moment: Sgt. James Crowley, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Barack Hussein Obama

UPDATE:

Now, contrast the pic above with this one:

President George W. Bush helping frail Dem Senator & former KKK member Robert Byrd

Also, here’s Thomas Lifson’s analysis of the implications of this pic. For the whole article on American Thinker, go HERE:

I think this photo constitutes another major Obama blunder.

As some AT commentators point out, this picture becomes a metaphor for ObamaCare. The elderly are left in the back, with only the kindness of the Crowleys of the world, the stand up guys, to depend on. The government has other priorities.

One of the major subtexts of the health care debate involves the public’s fear of indifferent, powerful bureaucrats ruling their lives. It is one thing to wait in line at the DMV to find out which other line you should wait in, in order to begin the process of waiting for multiple bureaucrats to go through the motions of processing your request. I have spent entire afternoons going through this process.

But when we get to health care, waiting often means enduring pain and dysfunction longer than necessary, sometimes a worsening of the condition, and sometimes death.

That’s why I think this image will have genuine resonance. It captures something that older Americans in particular can relate to. The President presses ahead with a program that will tell them to take painkillers instead of getting that artificial hip.

At every stage of the entire Gates affair, Obama has provided a revealing tell. The “acted stupidly” blunder revealed that he automatically blames the police and thinks they really are stupid to begin with. It didn’t trigger a single alarm bell in his mind as he figured out what to say.

Then, the non-apology apology revealed an arrogant man who cannot do what honest people do: admit it when they make a mistake.

Now at stage three, the beer photo op looked OK. It didn’t turn into a disaster.

But then in a small moment that nobody in the White House had the brains to understand, Obama goes and send a body language message like this.

I think he is going to get deeper and deeper into trouble. He is no longer repeating the familiar scripts dreamed up for the campaign. He was a master performer.

But when he goes improv, as a president must do, he lets his true character show. This helps widen the level of doubt that Obama is the same guy a majority voted for.  Those doubts can only grow.

Andrew McCarthy has assembled an overwhelming case that Obama has lied about who he is. I predict that more and more Americans will become open to the argument that they have been had by a sophisticated and ruthless effort to foist a phony on America.

POS Andrea Mitchell’s Liberal Elitism

Andrea Mitchell, who knows better what's good for us, with husband Alan Greenspan

This morning, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” reporter Andrea Mitchell (who is married to former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan) made the following condescending remark about Americans who oppose ObamaCare:

“You’ve got 47% of the people in our NBC/Wall Street Journal opinion poll who have health insurance who don’t like what the president is doing.  The problem he’s got — 47% of the people who’ve got coverage don’t want change.  They don’t like what they’re hearing. Now, they may not know what’s good for them, but the problem is that he always knew he was going to have to persuade people with insurance, that’s the largest number, not the people without insurance, for expanded coverage.  So they’ve got a real problem.”

For the video, go HERE.

~Eowyn

5 Freedoms We’ll Lose in ObamaCare

Fortune magazine has an article warning us that “If you read the fine print in the Congressional plans, you’ll find that a lot of cherished aspects of the current system would disappear.”

Specifically, there are five freedoms we’ll lose if the nationalized healthcare reform bill becomes law. They are:

1. Freedom to choose what’s in your plan.

2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs.

3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage

4. Freedom to keep your existing plan

5. Freedom to choose your doctors

For the whole article, go HERE.

~Eowyn

Even HuffPo Calls For Birth Certificate

The Only Thing Weirder Than The Birthers….

By Mark Joseph – July 30, 2009 – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-joseph/the-only-thing-weirder-th_b_248227.html

Mark Joseph is a producer, author, talk show host and editor of Bullypulpit.com

The only thing weirder than the Birthers are the anti-Birthers, who blame the Birthers for being conspiracy theorists yet actively feed the conspiracy by refusing to call for President Obama to release his birth certificate.

The state official in Hawaii who manages such things has reiterated that there is indeed an original birth certificate on file which would confirm President Obama’s having been born in Hawaii and that she has seen it, but state law won’t allow her to release it unless the president authorizes it.

So what’s the problem here? Release the original and let’s be done with this madness.

I realize there are some faith-based Obama supporters who believe without seeing, but the rest of us in the reality-based world are starting to get that strange feeling we got when Mark Sanford tried to convince us that he was away from his family on Father’s Day, hiking the Appalachian trail in order to clear his head and write a book.

During the last campaign, John McCain faced similar questions and promptly responded by releasing his original birth certificate. That’s how normal people with nothing to hide handle these things.

Most American’s aren’t Birthers or anti-Birthers, but we are beginning to wonder why the president doesn’t put this one to rest once and for all. Every day he allows this circus to continue is another day that he behaves less like the President of the United States facing weird accusations from fringe groups and more like a strange politician flying to Argentina to visit his soul-mate while pretending to be hiking the Appalachians.

We’re Mad As Hell

American people are mad as Hell, and we won’t take it anymore!

H/t outraged GiovanniWorld member Steve!

~Eowyn

………………

Town halls gone wild

Alex Isenstadt –  Jul 31, 2009 – http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090731/pl_politico/25646

Screaming constituents, protesters dragged out by the cops, congressmen fearful for their safety — welcome to the new town-hall-style meeting, the once-staid forum that is rapidly turning into a house of horrors for members of Congress.

On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control.

“I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to temporarily suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.”

In Bishop’s case, his decision came on the heels of a June 22 event he held in Setauket, N.Y., in which protesters dominated the meeting by shouting criticisms at the congressman for his positions on energy policy, health care and the bailout of the auto industry.

Within an hour of the disruption, police were called in to escort the 59-year-old Democrat — who has held more than 100 town hall meetings since he was elected in 2002 — to his car safely.

“I have no problem with someone disagreeing with positions I hold,” Bishop said, noting that, for the time being, he was using other platforms to communicate with his constituents. “But I also believe no one is served if you can’t talk through differences.”

Bishop isn’t the only one confronted by boiling anger and rising incivility. At a health care town hall event in Syracuse, N.Y., earlier this month, police were called in to restore order, and at least one heckler was taken away by local police. Close to 100 sign-carrying protesters greeted Rep. Allen Boyd (D-Fla.) at a late June community college small-business development forum in Panama City, Fla. Last week, Danville, Va., anti-tax tea party activists claimed they were “refused an opportunity” to ask Rep. Thomas Perriello (D-Va.) a question at a town hall event and instructed by a plainclothes police officer to leave the property after they attempted to hold up protest signs.

The targets in most cases are House Democrats, who over the past few months have tackled controversial legislation including a $787 billion economic stimulus package, a landmark energy proposal and an overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

Democrats, acknowledging the increasing unruliness of the town-hall-style events, say the hot-button issues they are taking on have a lot to do with it.

“I think it’s just the fact that we are dealing with some of the most important public policy issues in a generation,” said Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa), who was confronted by a protester angry about his position on health care reform at a town hall event several weeks ago.

“I think in general what is going on is we are tackling issues that have been ignored for a long time, and I think that is disruptive to a lot of people,” said Bishop, a four-term congressman. “We are trying, one by one, to deal with a set of issues that can’t be ignored, and I think that’s unsettling to a lot of people.”

Freshman Rep. Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.), whose event at a Syracuse middle school was disrupted, said that he still planned to hold additional town halls but that he was also thinking about other options.

“I think you’ve got to communicate through a variety of different ways. You should do the telephone town hall meetings. You should do the town hall meetings. You should do the smaller group meetings,” said Maffei. “It’s important to do things in a variety of ways, so you don’t have one mode of communication.”

“You’re going to have people of varying views, and in this case, you’ve got the two extremes who were the most vocal,” Maffei said of the flare-up at his July 12 event.

On Tuesday, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who handles incumbent retention duties for House Democrats in addition to chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, met with freshman members to discuss their plans for the monthlong August recess. While the specific issue of town hall protesters never came up, according to sources familiar with the meeting, he urged them not to back away from opponents.

“He said, ‘Go on offense. Stay on the offense. It’s really important that your constituents hear directly from you. You shouldn’t let a day go by [that] your constituents don’t hear from you,’” said one House Democratic leadership aide familiar with the meeting.

Some members profess to enjoy the give-and-take of the town halls, even if lately it’s become more take than give.

“Town halls are a favorite part of my job,” said Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.), a third-term congressman from St. Louis who noted that a “handful” of disruptions had taken place at his meetings. “It’s what I do. It’s what I will continue to do.”

“People have gotten fired up and all that, but I think that’s what makes town halls fun,” said Perriello, a freshman who is among the most vulnerable Democrats in 2010. “I think that most of the time when we get out there, it’s a good chance for people to vent and offer their thoughts. It’s been good.”

“I enjoy it, and people have a chance to speak their mind,” he said.

Both Carnahan and Perriello said they were plunging forward with plans to hold more town hall meetings.

Republicans, with an eye toward 2010, are keeping close track of the climate at Democratic events.

“We’ve seen Russ Carnahan, we’ve seen Tim Bishop, we’ve seen some other people face some very different crowds back home,” said National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas). “The days of you having a town hall meeting where maybe 15 or 20 of your friends show up — they’re over. You’ve now got real people who are showing up — and that’s going to be a factor.”

Asked later how or whether the GOP would use the confrontations against Democrats, Sessions responded: “Wait till next year.”

But Democrats are quick to point out they’re not the only ones facing hostile audiences. They single out Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.), who found himself in a confrontation earlier this month with a “birther” protester, and insist that Republicans face a backlash of their own if it appears the party is too closely aligned with tea party activists or other conservative-oriented protesters.

“It’s a risk that they align themselves with such a small minority in the party,” said Brian Smoot, who served as political director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the past election cycle. “They risk alienating moderates.”

ObamaCare Contract With Congress

Here’s a great idea:

Tell your Senators & Congressmen/women that we’ll support ObamaCare, the nationalized healthcare communist deathcare plan, if they’ll sign the contract below!

H/t GiovanniWorld member LittleMissMuffin!

~Eowyn

…………..

Make every rep sign this contract!

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issues/alert/?alertid=13815686&content_d
ir=ua_congressorg

Contract on Health Care Reform Bill 2009 – 2010

My Pledge to my Employers, the People, as their Elected Representative

I, _____________________________, your elected representative for district ______ in the state of _________________ hereby pledge to enroll in the new U.S. government health care plan as passed by the Congress and the Senate and signed into law by President of the United States starting in the year 2009 or in the year that it is enacted.

I, ______________________________, pledge to remain in the above aforementioned government health care plan as long as I am employed by the people of the United States of America to represent them and seated in any U.S., State, or City government position.

I, _____________________________, pledge to vote for an amendment requiring all elected government employees to be on the same government health care plan as their employers — the citizens of the United States of America.

I, ______________________________, pledge to vote for an amendment to terminate the present health care plan that the Congress, the Senate, and the President are covered by today.

Signed: __________________________ Dated: _________________ Print Name: _______________________

Can Obama Be Trusted?

This is a long piece on the Obama birth controversy, but a damn good one. Sit back, put your feet up, and enjoy.

Gio-

National Review Online

Suborned in the U.S.A.
The birth-certificate controversy is about Obama’s honesty, not where he was born.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Throughout the 2008 campaign, Barack Hussein Obama claimed it was a “smear” to refer to him as “Barack Hussein Obama.” The candidate had initially rhapsodized over how his middle name, the name of the prophet Mohammed’s grandson, would signal a new beginning in American relations with the Muslim world. But when the nomination fight intensified, Obama decided that Islamic heritage was a net negative. So, with a media reliably uncurious about political biographies outside metropolitan Wasilla, Obama did what Obama always does: He airbrushed his personal history on the fly.

Suddenly, it was “just making stuff up,” as Obama put it, for questioners “to say that, you know, maybe he’s got Muslim connections.” “The only connection I’ve had to Islam,” the candidate insisted, “is that my grandfather on my father’s side came from [Kenya]. But I’ve never practiced Islam.” Forget about “Hussein”; the mere mention of Obama’s middle initial — “H” — riled the famously thin-skinned senator. Supporters charged that “shadowy attackers” were “lying about Barack’s religion, claiming he is a Muslim.” The Obamedia division at USA Today, in a report subtly titled “Obama’s grandma slams ‘untruths,’” went so far as to claim that Obama’s Kenyan grandmother is a Christian — even though a year earlier, when Obama’s “flaunt Muslim ties” script was still operative, the New York Times had described the same woman, 85-year-old Sara Hussein Obama, as a “lifelong Muslim” who proclaimed, “I am a strong believer of the Islamic faith.”

Such was the ardor of Obama’s denials that jaws dropped when, once safely elected, he reversed course (again) and embraced his Islamic heritage. “The president himself experienced Islam on three continents,” an administration spokesman announced. “You know, growing up in Indonesia, having a Muslim father . . .” The “Muslim father” theme was an interesting touch: During the campaign, when the question of Barack Hussein Obama Sr.’s Islamic faith reared its head, the candidate curtly denied it with an air of what’s-that-got-to-do-with-me? finality: “My father was basically agnostic, as far as I can tell, and I didn’t know him.” And, it turns out, the spokesman’s fleeting bit about “growing up in Indonesia” wasn’t the half of it: Obama had actually been raised as a Muslim in Indonesia — or, at least that’s what his parents told his schools (more on that in due course).

These twists and turns in the Obama narrative rush to mind when we consider National Review’s leap into the Obama-birth-certificate fray with Tuesday’s editorial, “Born in the U.S.A.”

The editorial desire to put to rest the “Obama was born in Kenya” canard is justifiable. The overwhelming evidence is that Obama was born an American citizen on Aug. 4, 1961, which almost certainly makes him constitutionally eligible to hold his office. I say “almost certainly” because Obama, as we shall see, presents complex dual-citizenship issues. For now, let’s just stick with what’s indisputable: He was also born a Kenyan citizen. In theory, that could raise a question about whether he qualifies as a “natural born” American — an uncharted constitutional concept.

The mission of National Review has always included keeping the Right honest, which includes debunking crackpot conspiracy theories. The theory that Obama was born in Kenya, that he was smuggled into the U.S., and that his parents somehow hoodwinked Hawaiian authorities into falsely certifying his birth in Oahu, is crazy stuff. Even Obama’s dual Kenyan citizenship is of dubious materiality: It is a function of foreign law, involving no action on his part (to think otherwise, you’d have to conclude that if Yemen passed a law tomorrow saying, “All Americans — except, of course, Jews — are hereby awarded Yemeni citizenship,” only Jewish Americans could henceforth run for president). In any event, even if you were of a mind to indulge the Kenyan-birth fantasy, stop, count to ten, and think: Hillary Clinton. Is there any chance on God’s green earth that, if Obama were not qualified to be president, the Clinton machine would have failed to get that information out?

CERTIFICATE AND CERTIFICATION

 

So, end of story, right? Well, no. The relevance of information related to the birth of our 44th president is not limited to his eligibility to be our 44th president. On this issue, NRO’s editorial has come in for some blistering criticism. The editorial argues:

The fundamental fiction is that Obama has refused to release his “real” birth certificate. This is untrue. The document that Obama has made available is the document that Hawaiian authorities issue when they are asked for a birth certificate. There is no secondary document cloaked in darkness, only the state records that are used to generate birth certificates when they are requested.

On reflection, I think this was an ill-considered assertion. (I should add that I saw a draft of the editorial before its publication, was invited to comment, and lodged no objection to this part.) The folly is made starkly clear in the photos that accompany this angry (at NRO) post from Dave Jeffers, who runs a blog called “Salt and Light.”

To summarize: What Obama has made available is a Hawaiian “certification of live birth” (emphasis added), not a birth certificate (or what the state calls a “certificate of live birth”). The certification form provides a short, very general attestation of a few facts about the person’s birth: name and sex of the newborn; date and time of birth; city or town of birth, along with the name of the Hawaiian island and the county; the mother’s maiden name and race; the father’s name and race; and the date the certification was filed. This certification is not the same thing as the certificate, which is what I believe we were referring to in the editorial as “the state records that are used to generate birth certificates [sic] when they are requested.”

To the contrary, “the state records” are the certificate. They are used to generate the more limited birth certifications on request. As the Jeffers post shows, these state records are far more detailed. They include, for example, the name of the hospital, institution, or street address where the birth occurred; the full name, age, birthplace, race, and occupation of each parent; the mother’s residential address (and whether that address is within the city or town of birth); the signature of at least one parent (or “informant”) attesting to the accuracy of the information provided; the identity and signature of an attending physician (or other “attendant”) who certifies the occurrence of a live birth at the time and place specified; and the identity and signature of the local registrar who filed the birth record.

Plainly, this is different (additional) information from what is included in the certification. Yet, our editorial says that “several state officials have confirmed that the information in permanent state records is identical to that on the president’s birth certificate [by which we clearly meant ‘certification’],” and that the “director of Hawaii’s health department and the registrar of records each has personally verified that the information on Obama’s birth certificate [i.e., certification] is identical to that in the state’s records, the so-called vault copy.” (Italics mine.)

That misses the point. The information in the certification may be identical as far as it goes to what’s in the complete state records, but there are evidently many more details in the state records than are set forth in the certification. Contrary to the editors’ description, those who want to see the full state record — the certificate or the so-called “vault copy” — are not on a wild-goose chase for a “secondary document cloaked in darkness.” That confuses their motives (which vary) with what they’ve actually requested (which is entirely reasonable). Regardless of why people may want to see the vault copy, what’s been requested is a primary document that is materially more detailed than what Obama has thus far provided.

Now, let’s address motives for a moment. Are some of those demanding the full state records engaged in a futile quest to prove Obama is not a U.S. citizen? Are they on what the editors call “the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of [Obama’s] election and presidency disappear”? Sure they are. But not everyone who wants to see the full state records falls into that category. I, for one, have very different reasons for being curious.

WHO IS THIS GUY?

 

Before January 20 of this year, Barack Obama had a negligible public record. He burst onto the national scene what seemed like five minutes before his election to the presidency: a first-term U.S. senator who actually served less than four years in that post — after a short time as a state legislator, some shadowy years as a “community organizer,” and scholastic terms at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard that remain shrouded in mystery. The primary qualification supporters offered for Obama’s candidacy was his compelling life story, as packaged in 850 pages’ worth of the not one but two autobiographies this seemingly unaccomplished candidate had written by the age of 45.

Yet we now know that this life story is chock full of fiction. Typical and disturbing, to take just one example, is the entirely fabricated account in Dreams from My Father of Obama’s first job after college:

Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool. They treated me like a son, those black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day. . . . The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors — see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand — and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve. . . .

As the website Sweetness & Light details, this is bunk. Obama did not work at “a consulting house to multinational corporations”; it was, a then-colleague of his has related, “a small company that published newsletters on international business.” He wasn’t the only black man in the company, and he didn’t have an office, have a secretary, wear a suit and tie on the job, or conduct “interviews” with “Japanese financiers or German bond traders” — he was a junior copyeditor.

What’s unnerving about this is that it is so gratuitous. It would have made no difference to anyone curious about Obama’s life that he, like most of us, took a ho-hum entry-level job to establish himself. But Obama lies about the small things, the inconsequential things, just as he does about the important ones — depending on what he is trying to accomplish at any given time.

In the above fairy tale, he sought to frame his life as a morality play: the hero giving up the cushy life of the capitalist “enemy” for the virtues of community organizing. But we’ve seen this dance a hundred times. If Obama wants to strike a connection with graduating students in Moscow, he makes up a story about meeting his “future wife . . . in class” (Barack and Michelle Obama met at work). If he wants to posture about his poverty and struggle in America, he waxes eloquent about his single mother’s surviving on “food stamps” so she could use every cent to send him “to the best schools in the country” (Obama was raised by his maternal grandparents, who had good jobs and were able to pull strings to get him into an elite Hawaiian prep school). If he wants to tie himself to the civil-rights struggle of African Americans, he tells an audience in Selma, “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma . . . so [my parents] got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born” (Obama was born in 1961, four years before the civil-rights march in Selma — by which time his parents had divorced and his mother was planning a move to Indonesia with the second of her two non-African-American husbands). If he wants to buy a home he can’t afford, he “unwittingly” collaborates with a key fundraiser (who had been publicly reported to be under federal investigation for fraud and political corruption). If he wants to sell a phony stimulus as a job-creator, he tells the country that Caterpillar has told him the stimulus will enable the company “to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off” (Caterpillar’s CEO actually said no, “we’re going to have more layoffs before we start hiring again”).

The fact is that Obama’s account of his background is increasingly revealed as a fabrication, not his life as lived; his utterances reflect the expediencies of the moment, not the truth. What is supposed to save the country from fraudulence of this sort is the media. Here, though, the establishment press is deep in Obama’s tank — so much so that they can’t even accurately report his flub of a ceremonial opening pitch lest he come off as something less than Sandy Koufax. Astonishingly, reporters see their job not as reporting Obama news but as debunking Obama news, or flat-out suppressing it. How many Americans know, for example, that as a sitting U.S. senator in 2006, Obama interfered in a Kenyan election, publicly ripping the incumbent government (a U.S. ally) for corruption while he was its guest and barnstorming with his preferred candidate: a Marxist now known to have made a secret agreement with Islamists to convert Kenya to sharia law, and whose supporters, upon losing the election, committed murder and mayhem, displacing thousands of Kenyans and plunging their country into utter chaos?

A MUSLIM CITIZEN OF INDONESIA
The aforementioned Indonesian interval in Obama’s childhood is instructive. Obama and the media worked in tireless harmony to refute any indication that he had ever been a Muslim. It’s now apparent, however, not only that he was raised as a Muslim while living for four years in the world’s most populous Islamic country, but that he very likely became a naturalized citizen of Indonesia.

 

 

Shortly after divorcing Barack Obama Sr., Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, married an Indonesian Muslim, Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo, whom she met — just as she had met Barack Sr. — when both were students at the University of Hawaii. At some point, Soetoro almost certainly adopted the youngster, who became known as “Barry Soetoro.” Obama’s lengthy, deeply introspective autobiographies do not address whether he was adopted by the stepfather whose surname he shared for many years, but in all likelihood that did happen in Hawaii, before the family moved to Jakarta.

Under Indonesian law, adoption before the age of six by an Indonesian male qualified a child for citizenship. According to Dreams from My Father, Obama was four when he met Lolo Soetoro; his mother married Soetoro shortly thereafter; and Obama was already registered for school when he and his mother relocated to Jakarta, where Soetoro was an oil-company executive and liaison to the Suharto government. That was in 1966, when Obama was five. Obama attended Indonesian elementary schools, which, in Suharto’s police state, were generally reserved for citizens (and students were required to carry identity cards that matched student registration information). The records of the Catholic school Obama/Soetoro attended for three years identify him as a citizen of Indonesia. Thus Obama probably obtained Indonesian citizenship through his adoption by Soetoro in Hawaii. That inference is bolstered by the 1980 divorce submission of Ann Dunham and Lolo Soetoro, filed in Hawaii state court. It said “the parties” (Ann and Lolo) had a child (name not given) who was no longer a minor (Obama was 19 at the time). If Soetoro had not adopted Obama, there would have been no basis for the couple to refer to Obama as their child — he’d have been only Ann Dunham’s child.

In any event, the records of the Catholic school and the public school Obama attended during his last year in Indonesia identify him as a Muslim. As Obama relates in Dreams from My Father, he took Koran classes. As Obama doesn’t relate in Dreams from My Father, children in Indonesia attended religious instruction in accordance with their family’s chosen faith. Moreover, acquaintances recall that young Barry occasionally attended Friday prayers at the local mosque, and Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half-sister (born after Lolo and Ann moved the family to Jakarta), told the New York Times in a 2008 interview, “My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.” In fact, back in March 2007 — i.e., during the early “Islamic ties are good” phase of Obama’s campaign — the candidate wistfully shared with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof his memories of the muezzin’s Arabic call to prayer: “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset.” Kristof marveled at the “first-rate accent” with which Obama was able to repeat its opening lines.

The point here is not to join another crackpot conspiracy, the “Obama as Muslim Manchurian Candidate” canard. Obama was only ten years old when he left Indonesia; there is no known evidence of his having made an adult choice to practice Islam, and he is a professed Christian. The point is that he lies elaborately about himself and plainly doesn’t believe it’s important to be straight with the American people — to whom he is constantly making bold promises. And it makes a difference whether he was ever a Muslim. He knows that — it’s exactly why, as a candidate, he originally suggested his name and heritage would be a selling point. Obama’s religious background matters in terms of how he is perceived by Muslims (Islam rejects the notion of renouncing the faith; some Muslims, like Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi, make no bones about regarding Obama as a Muslim; and — as the mainstream media took pains not to report during the campaign — it is suspected that significant illegal donations poured into the Obama campaign from Islamic countries and territories). Obama’s religious background also matters in terms of how he views American policies bearing on the Muslim world.

WHEN DID INFORMATION SUDDENLY BECOME A BAD THING?

 

While it is all well and good to belittle the birth-certificate controversy, without it we’d know only what the media and Obama himself would tell us about his multiple citizenships, which is nothing. As noted above, we now know Obama, by operation of British and Kenyan law, was a citizen of Kenya (a status that lapsed in 1982, when he turned 21). That’s something voters would find relevant, especially when Obama’s shocking 2006 conduct in Kenya is considered. But we don’t know about his Kenyan citizenship because the media thought it was newsworthy. We know it only because of the birth-certificate controversy: Pressed to debunk the allegation that Obama was born in Kenya, his embarrassed supporters felt compelled to clarify his Kenyan citizenship.

By contrast, the question whether Obama ever was an Indonesian citizen is still unresolved, as are such related matters as whether the foreign citizenship (if he had it) ever lapsed, and whether he ever held or used an Indonesian passport — for example, during a mysterious trip to Pakistan he took in 1981, after Zia’s coup, when advisories warned Americans against traveling there. By the way, many details about that journey, too, remain unknown. Obama strangely neglected to mention it in his 850 pages of autobiography, even though the 20-year-old’s adventure included a stay at the home of prominent Pakistani politicians.

There may be perfectly benign answers to all of this. But the real question is: Why don’t the media — the watchdog legions who trekked to Sarah Palin’s Alaska hometown to scour for every kernel of gossip, and who were so desperate for Bush dirt that they ran with palpably forged military records — want to dig into Obama’s background?

Who cares that Hawaii’s full state records would doubtless confirm what we already know about Obama’s birthplace? They would also reveal interesting facts about Obama’s life: the delivering doctor, how his parents described themselves, which of them provided the pertinent information, etc. Wasn’t the press once in the business of interesting — and even not-so-interesting — news?

And why would Obama not welcome Hawaii’s release of any record in its possession about the facts and circumstances of his birth? Isn’t that kind of weird? It would, after all, make the whole issue go away and, if there’s nothing there, make those who’ve obsessed over it look like fools. Why should I need any better reason to be curious than Obama’s odd resistance to so obvious a resolution?

There’s speculation out there from the former CIA officer Larry Johnson — who is no right-winger and is convinced the president was born in Hawaii — that the full state records would probably show Obama was adopted by the Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro and became formally known as “Barry Soetoro.” Obama may have wanted that suppressed for a host of reasons: issues about his citizenship, questions about his name (it’s been claimed that Obama represented in his application to the Illinois bar that he had never been known by any name other than Barack Obama), and the undermining of his (false) claim of remoteness from Islam. Is that true? I don’t know and neither do you.

But we should know. The point has little to do with whether Obama was born in Hawaii. I’m quite confident that he was. The issue is: What is the true personal history of the man who has been sold to us based on nothing but his personal history? On that issue, Obama has demonstrated himself to be an unreliable source and, sadly, we can’t trust the media to get to the bottom of it. What’s wrong with saying, to a president who promised unprecedented “transparency”: Give us all the raw data and we’ll figure it out for ourselves?

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

Obama the Racist

The author of this article, Frances Rice, is a retired Army Lt. Colonel, a lawyer and chairman of the National Black Republican Association, an organization that is committed to returning African Americans to their Republican Party roots.

~Eowyn

…………..

IS OBAMA A RACIST?

Frances Rice with RNC Chairman Michael Steele

By Frances Rice – July 30, 2009 – http://blackrepublican.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-obama-racist.html

How do we decide who is a racist?  The dictionary tells us a racist harbors feelings of antagonism and superiority based on biological differences, such as skin color.   So, what demonstrates that President Barack Obama harbors such feelings toward white people?

Glimpses of Obama’s mindset can be obtained from reading his two books, “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams from My Father” where Obama describes his animosity toward white people.

In “Dreams from My Father” Obama wrote:  “I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.”  This book also contains an explanation of why Obama joined and remained for 20 years in Trinity United Church of Christ, the church of black liberation theologian Rev. Jeremiah Wright who preached hatred against whites.  Obama wrote: “It came about as a choice and not an epiphany”.  The core of black liberation theology is black separatism, a movement that, for more than a century, has been opposed to racial integration.  Equally troubling is Obama’s church giving a lifetime award to one of our nation’s most racist men, Louis Farrakhan.

Obama’s belief system on race was on full display during the 2008 campaign when, on a Philadelphia radio sports program, he described his grandmother as a “typical white person” who fears blacks.

From the roots of Obama’s enmity toward white people sprang his gratuitous attack on Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley.  Obama declared that the sergeant “acted stupidly” while doing his duty, when all Obama knew, admittedly, was that the sergeant was white and the person arrested, Obama’s friend Harvard Processor Henry Gates, was black.  Without bothering to learn the facts, Obama used the power of his position as President of the United States to demonize an American citizen because of his race.  Details of the arrest are in the article “Obama Plays the Race Card” by Ronald Kessler that is on the Internet at:
http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/obama_race_gates/2009/07/23/239408.html

A video featuring the testimonial of two black officers in support of Sergeant Crowley, including the comments of Officer Kelly King who states that she supported and voted for Obama, but would not vote for him again, is posted on YouTube at:
http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2009/07/26/nr.comrade.in.arms.cnn

Obama, in his rush to judgment, ignored pertinent facts, such as one of the arresting officers is black, the Cambridge Mayor is black and the Massachusetts Governor is black.  From his lofty perch as the leader of the free world, Obama focused like a laser beam on the skin color of one man and engaged in grievance mongering about “racial profiling,” a charge that hampers law enforcement in black communities and was not even a factor in the Cambridge case.  In an instant, Obama abandoned any pretense of being “post racial” and, before our very eyes, was transformed into our “race-baiter-in-chief”.

How ironic that the wrongs against blacks that are the genesis of Obama’s racial hostility were committed by the whites who supported the racist agenda of the Democratic Party (not that many years ago), the party Obama now heads.  During his research, author Wayne Perryman uncovered documents which reveal that the Democratic Party was once proudly called the “Party of White Supremacy”.  According to Perryman, Democratic Party campaign posters issued from 1868 to the early 1900’s declared: “This is a white man’s country – let the white man rule”.   Perryman further pointed out that Democratic Senator Ben Tillman in 1909 said: “We reorganized the Democratic Party with one plank and only one plank, namely, that this is a white man’s country and the white men must govern it.”

Today, Obama is changing the Democratic Party into a party with the sinister premise that America is a black man’s country and the black men must govern it.  Perhaps this is why Obama refused to prosecute Black Panthers who wielded weapons, hurled racial insults at voters and blocked the entrance at a Philadelphia polling place during the 2008 Election.  “Protecting Black Panthers” is an editorial by “The Washington Times” that reveals how Jerry Jackson, one of the Black Panther defendants, is an elected member of Philadelphia’s 14th Ward Democratic Committee and was a credentialed poll watcher for Obama and the Democratic Party.  That article can be found on the Internet at:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/29/protecting-black-panthers/

The intimidation tactics by Black Panthers are a chilling reminder about how the Democrats not long ago used the Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, to intimidate and terrorize Republican voters, black and white.  Democratic Party racism is precisely what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Republican, was fighting against.  In Obama’s world, the civil rights accomplishments of Dr. King have been abandoned, and we are now encouraged to judge people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.  An analysis of Obama’s embracement of racial bigotry is provided in the article “How Our Post-Racial President Uses Race Card As Both Sword And Shield” by Larry Elder and is on the Internet at:
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=483546

The article “A Post-Racial President?” by Thomas Sowell reveals in stark relief how destructive to our national fiber is Obama’s racial politics and can be found on the Internet at: http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/07/28/a_post-racial_president?page=full&comments=true

A good day for the Marine Corps

‘A good day for the Corps’

By Peter  Bronson

“Our  vehicles came under a barrage of enemy RPGs (rocket  propelled
grenades) and machine gun  fire.  One  of our humvees was disabled from RPG fire,
and the Marines inside dismounted  and laid down suppression fire so they
could  evacuate a Marine who was knocked unconscious from the blast.”
That’s  not from an episode of The Unit o r 24.  It’s  not from an anti-war
movie.  It’s  not from any newspaper or TV news reports I could find.

The quote comes  from a “designated marksman who requested to remain
unidentified.”  He  was reporting what happened recently in the city of Shewan ,
Afghanistan .  The  story was told in a Marine Corps News report  by Cpl.
James M. Mercure.

It  will give you goose bumps and make you want to stand up and salute the
nearest  flag.  Here’s  more, because it’s a lot better than anything I
could write today:

“The  day started out with a 10-kilometer patrol with elements mounted and
dismounted, so by the time we got to Shewan, we were pretty beat,” the
marksman said.  Mercure  reported, “Shewan had been a thorn in the side of
Task  Force 2d Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment,  Special Purpose Marine Air
Ground  Task Force  Afghanistan throughout the Marines’  deployment  here in
support of Operation Enduring Freedom,  because it controls an important
supply route into the Bala Baluk district.  Opening  the route was key to continu
ing combat operations in the area.”

“The  vicious attack that left the humvee destroyed and several of the
Marines  pinned down in the kill zone sparked an intense  eight-hour battle as
the platoon desperately fought to recover their comrades.  After  recovering
the Marines trapped in the kill zone, another platoon sergeant  personally
led numerous attacks on enemy fortified positions while the platoon  fought
house to house and trench to trench in order to clear through the enemy
ambush site.

“The biggest thing to take from that day is what Marines  can accomplish
when they’re given the opportunity to fight,” the sniper  said.  “A small
group of Marines  met a numerically superior force and embarrassed them in
their own backyard.  The  insurgents told the townspeople that they were
stronger than the Americans,  and that day we showed them they were wrong.”

“During the battle, the  designated marksman single handedly thwarted a
company-sized enemy RPG and  machinegun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy
fighters with his  devastatingly accurate precision fire.  He  selflessly
exposed himself time and again to intense enemy fire during a  critical point
in the eight-hour battle for Shewan in order to kill any enemy combatants
who atte mpted to engage or maneuver  on the Marines in the kill zone.
What  made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn’t
miss any  shots, despite the enemies’ rounds impacting within a foot of his
fighting  position.  “I  was in my own little world,” the young corporal said.
  “I  wasn’t even aware of a lot of the rounds impacting near my position,
because I  was concentrating so hard on making sure my rounds were on
target.”

After calling for close-air support, the small group of  Marines pushed
forward and broke the enemies’ spirit as many of them dropped  their weap ons
and fled the battlefield.  At  the end of the battle, the Marines had
reduced an enemy stronghold, killed  more than 50 insurgents and wounded several
more.  “I  didn’t realize how many bad guys there were until we had broken
through the  enemies’ lines and forced them to retreat.  It  was roughly 250
insurgents against 30 of us,” the corporal said.  < /SPAN> “It  was a good
day for the Marine Corps.  We  killed a lot of bad guys, and none of our
guys were seriously  injured.”

Such an amazing story of heroism and victory would have been  on Page One
in every paper in the country during World  War II.  Just  30 Marines giving
eight hours of hell to 250 insurgents is the kind of story  that would make
a good movie — if that kind of movie still could be  made.

But  these days, it did not even make Page 10.  I  couldn’t find a story
about it anywhere.  The  only mentions were on conservative blogs and
military Web sites.  The  soldiers who are fighting for their lives and our
country might as well be in  another dimension.  News  from the battlefronts in
Iraq and Afghanistan is  apparently not important.  It  reminds the jaded
anti-war crowd that they were wrong.  We’re  winning.  It  reminds a
self-centered nation that some Americans are making sacrifices much  bigger than a
loss in their  401(k)s .

So we don’t hear about  it.

But we need to hear news like that, because a good day for the  Marine
Corps is a good day for freedom.  And  that’s a good day for America .
“Saepius  Exertus, Semper Fidelis, Frater Infinitas”
“Often Tested,  Always Faithful, Brothers Forever”
United  States Marines

Obama Needs To Apologize To Country

Yes, you read that correctly. I want, no… I demand that Obama apologize to America in a very public way for the hard feelings, the mis-understandings, and for having almost caused a race riot over something that he is covering for. I don’t care if Gates is his friend. I don’t care if Gates is black. And I certainly don’t give a rip if Obama’s poll numbers tank. What I do care about is seeing that the “right thing” is done.

The ONLY reason why Obama said publicly that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly” is he knew Gates is black and the arresting officer was white. In the minds of millions of clear thinking Americans, this is how a racist thinks! 

While we’re at it, Obama and Gates need to personally apologize to Officer Crowely and Officer Lashley. The sooner the better!

Gio-

 

Black cop at Gates home regrets ‘Uncle Tom’ label

(AP) – 2 hours ago

 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A black sergeant who was at the home of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. when he was arrested says he’s been maligned as an “Uncle Tom” for supporting the actions of the white arresting officer.

Cambridge Sgt. Leon Lashley gave a letter to Sgt. James Crowley to give to President Barack Obama during their so-called beer summit with Gates on Thursday night at the White House.

In the letter, which was also sent to CNN, Lashley says Gates “may have caused grave and potentially irreparable harm to the struggle for racial harmony.”

Lashley says he has become known as a traitor to his heritage by some because he “spoke the truth” about the arrest.

Gates was charged with disorderly conduct by police investigating a burglary. The charge was later dropped.

 

 

Please consider taking the “I Am Not A Racist” pledge.

John F. Kerry Comedian

Senator John F. Kerry (who served in Vietnam) has added Comedian to his resume’ as of today. Ok, so he’s lousy at it, but why would that be any different than anything else he’s ever done. Read the following article, which could be mistaken for satire, and you get an idea of what I’m talking about. There are a few moments in the article that may bring a slow lazy grin to your face, but there is no break-out moment until you get to the last 4 words.

The World according to John F. Kerry

When Richard Nixon first visited China back in 1972, his journey seemed far longer than the seven thousand miles that actually separate Washington from Beijing. He was bridging the gap between two worlds separated for a generation.

President Nixon understood that such a moment demanded a dramatic signal to drive home a new diplomatic reality. To do that, he chose a simple gesture, but one laden with meaning. Zhou Enlai, China’s premier, had nursed a grudge ever since Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to shake his hand back in 1954. And so, when Nixon walked out onto the tarmac in Beijing, he took several steps toward Zhou with his hand obviously, unmistakably outstretched. The message was clear — and powerful — and it marked a watershed in US China relations.

Our two nations have just met again at the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the most important forum in our bilateral relationship. Only this time, it’s not just our geopolitics that are changing — but the earth itself. Global climate change poses a real and present danger of environmental destruction and human dislocation on a scale we’ve never seen.

America and China must change the world again. But this time a handshake alone won’t get the job done: nothing less than a complete and collaborative transformation of the global energy economy will be enough.

Between our peoples, especially on the subject of climate change, there is still mistrust and misunderstanding: too many Americans are convinced that China won’t lift a finger to fight climate change, or that China will hurt us economically if we do. Similarly, too many in China fear that the United States is merely attempting to smother China’s economic rise. And too many in the world believe that neither country will take credible and necessary action.

I believe all the doubters are wrong — but it’s up to us to craft a partnership with China that proves them wrong. What’s needed are simple gestures, backed by strong actions and concrete decisions, to move forward in a new direction.

And make no mistake, unless we act dramatically — and act fast — science tells us our climate and our way of life are literally in jeopardy. Just the basics: In the industrial era, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 280 to 385 parts per million. Scientists have drawn a red line at 450ppm — which represents a warming of 2 degrees Celsius. Anything beyond that presents an unacceptable risk. But unless we take dramatic action — now — we are actually headed to 1,000 ppm by century’s end. And today, over 40% of those emissions belong to the United States and China.

Undeniably, all of us must do more to meet it. But China and America — the world’s largest emitter today and history’s largest cumulative emitter — have a special responsibility. 192 nations will gather this December in Copenhagen to hammer out a new global climate treaty. Two will set the tone and define what is possible. The crucial question is: can America and China forge a partnership capable of acting boldly enough to prevent a climate catastrophe? Science tells us, the answer had better be “yes.”

The good news is that the potential is there. In May, I visited China and met with political and military leaders, energy executives, scientists, students, and environmentalists to gauge China’s seriousness and build momentum toward a deal this December. What I found was a country that had undergone a sea change. Today, Chinese investment in renewable capacity is second in the world only to Germany. They have tripled their wind capacity goals in the last two years. In the last three years, China has improved its energy intensity by 10%. China has publicly announced its intention to become the world’s number one producer of electric cars. Leaders who weren’t even willing to entertain this discussion ten years ago are now equally unequivocal — only this time, they’re arguing that China grasps the urgency and is ready to be a “positive, constructive” player in international climate talks.

It’s an impressive turnaround, but aspirational statements alone are no substitute for legal commitments on the international stage. China needs to understand that we will not enter into a global treaty without a meaningful commitment from China to be part of the solution.

Ultimately, our climate diplomacy depends on building a framework that is flexible enough to accommodate individual countries’ wants and needs, but firm enough to bring all of us on board and hold all nations accountable. That is the challenge we face: one that will be made easier as people everywhere begin to realize that in the twenty-first century, the challenge of developing clean energy sources isn’t a brake on economic growth — it is the engine.

When we look back on these upcoming years, I want to be able to tell a story in which America’s climate partnership with China becomes the clear beginning of a new era: where Americans embrace clean energy — where a 21st-century grid supports cutting-edge energy technology that modernizes America and creates millions of new jobs — where billions of Indians and Chinese are lifted out of poverty and see clean energy as an opportunity for development — and where diplomacy warms up, but the planet doesn’t, because the world’s two largest emitters came together to take responsibility and deliver change.

Those are the stakes, and this can be our world. But it won’t happen by accident. When Nixon visited China, he quoted some writings from China’s leader: “Time passes. Ten thousand years are too long. Seize the day, seize the hour.” We made real progress at this week’s meetings, but we don’t have ten thousand years to fix climate change — we don’t even have ten years. If we want to create the US-China climate partnership the world needs, China needs, and America needs, we have to seize the day. We have to seize the hour. We have to act, because otherwise the debate of the 1950’s over ‘who lost China’ will be a twenty first century debate over ‘who lost the Earth?’

Republicans vs Democrats

Seems to me that neither party really gives a rats patoot about our Constitution, they only care about their own power. What is truly worrisome is how the Democrat party is wanting to drastically change the United States of America into a slave nation again, while the Republican party denies what the Dems are doing, but still insist they are different.

This graphic from Glenn Beck is very appropiate…

Blame Obama For Birthers

H/t GiovanniWorld member LittleMissMuffin!

~Eowyn

…………..

Tommy De Seno – FOXNews.com – July 29, 2009

Obama’s to Blame for the Birther Movement

Obama can end the “birthers” controversy in one single day by releasing the original documents, but for some inexplicable reason he refuses, and the love-struck media never ask him why…

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/07/29/tommy-seno-obama-birthers/

“Trust but verify.” ~Ronald Reagan

It’s good practice to take a person at his word until someone shows you proof he is lying.

Barack Obama says he was born in Hawaii, and since no one has shown any proof he was born in Kenya or elsewhere, it’s OK to conclude he was born in Hawaii.

Sure his grammar school records show that he was enrolled as an Indonesian Muslim, but some people will say anything to get their kid in the right school.  It doesn’t really answer the question.

It’s OK though for others not to use my deferential standard and continue to question whether Obama was born in Hawaii.  We aren’t talking about a 12-year-old qualifying to play Little League here.  There is a Constitutional mandate that the President be a natural-born citizen, and if Obama is not one, he certainly will have committed the biggest fraud since the White Sox threw the World Series.

The reason why people still question Obama’s citizen status is one-fold:  “President Transparency” has refused to release any original documents on the matter. He can end the controversy in a day by releasing original documents, but for some inexplicable reason he refuses, and his love-struck media never asks him why he won’t. The media instead spends hell-bent hours on making the Birther movement look like fringy, conspiracy-hungry kooks.

You have to admit though, even if you are a devout Obama-bot, Obama’s refusal to release any original documents makes for a newsworthy story by itself.

If he really wants the Birthers to shut up, he has the power to do it by releasing the original documents. Why not just do it then? It’s a simple task. Why not get rid of a conversation that has been with America since the campaign?

The issue is the subject of several lawsuits, which only seek a peek at original documents. Can anyone explain why it is smarter for Obama to spend tens of thousands of dollars and man-hours defending the suits when he can win the lawsuit for free by showing the original documents?

By defending the lawsuits and not showing the documents, Obama feeds the suspicion of those who already think he is lying.  That’s why this issue has the power to linger, and that’s Obama’s fault alone.

Let’s look at what Obama has released, and you will see they are hearsay documents and not best evidence.

The Birth Certificate: The certificate put on the Internet by Obama and held up by the media was created in 2007.  In the lower left corner of the form there is reference to a Hawaiian statute that was revised in November of 2001, and if you look closely at the front you can see bleeding through from the back the date stamp from 2007 when the document was created.  It’s a certification that an original does exit.

So the the Birthers say:  “Fine.  Then show us the original.”  Obama says, “No.”  Why?

The Newspaper Announcements: Two birth announcements from Hawaiian local papers show Obama’s birth.  The Birthers have a couple of good arguments about them.  First, Hawaii is where Obama’s grandparents lived and it’s not unusual for grandparents to announce a birth to their friends, even if the grandson lives elsewhere. Also, if Obama’s parents lived in Hawaii then moved to Kenya when they birthed him, it wouldn’t be unusual to announce the birth in the old neighborhood for friends to see.

The newspaper announcements cut against the Birthers, but they are hearsay documents and don’t answer the citizen question any more than his grammar school records prove he is a Muslim. The original Birth Certificate will end it all.

School Records:  The Birthers believe that Obama’s records from college and graduate school will show he matriculated as a foreign born student.  This is easy — shut them up by releasing them!  Obama’s response?  “No.”  Why?

This one reminds me of John Kerry not releasing his Yale records until after the election.  During the campaign Kerry soaked in the warm media bath that swore he was the intellectual and George Bush the dolt. When the records came out later it was quietly reported that George Bush had a higher grade point average at Yale.

Media’s penchant to cover for Democrat candidates fuels the Birther fire as well.  See as an example John Edwards’ love affair.

Financial Aid Records:  Barack Obama relishes his own personal Sonia Sotomayor-like story of how he came from a broken home and pulled himself up by his own bootstraps.  But he refuses to show how his very expensive tuition at Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School were paid for.

The Birthers believe the records will show Obama received financial aid as a foreign born student.  Obama says they won’t.  Not to sound like a broken record, but releasing the records will end the controversy, and Obama refuses. Why?

The Birther movement is Obama’s fault for not releasing the records.  I hope the Birthers continue to bite his ankles until he releases the records. He deserves nothing less.

Read more Tommy De Seno at www.JustifiedRight.com

Stimulus Taxpayer Porn

Stimulus Bill Funds Go to Art Houses Showing ‘Pervert’ Revues, Underground Pornography

Emergency grants from the National Endowment for the Arts may be going to help fund nude simulated-sex dances, Saturday night “pervert” revues and the airing of pornographic horror films at art houses in San Francisco.

By Joseph Abrams

Talk about a stimulus package.

The National Endowment for the Arts may be spending some of the money it received from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act to fund nude simulated-sex dances, Saturday night “pervert” revues and the airing of pornographic horror films at art houses in San Francisco.

The NEA was given $80 million of the government’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill to spread around to needy artists nationwide, and most of the money is being spent to help preserve jobs in museums, orchestras, theaters and dance troupes that have been hit hard by the recession.

But some of the NEA’s grants are spicing up more than the economy. A few of their more risque choices have some taxpayer advocates hot under the collar, including a $50,000 infusion for the Frameline film house, which recently screened Thundercrack, “the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla.”

“When you spend so much money in a short amount of time … you’re going to have nonsense like this, and that’s why the stimulus should never have been done in the first place,” said David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste.

Click here for a full list of all of the NEA’s Recovery Act grants.

Williams said such support for the arts is a luxury at a time when the president and Congress have been telling the public to make sacrifices to manage the recession.

“When taxpayers see this, they realize that’s just a bunch of hot air,” he told FOXNews.com.

Some members of Congress raised alarms as the stimulus bill was being drafted and approved, but President Obama, while admitting there were problems with the $787 billion legislation, stressed the need for immediate action to resuscitate the economy.

“We can’t afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary,” Obama said at the time.

But he presumably didn’t intend to have stimulus money help fund the weekly production of “Perverts Put Out” at San Francisco’s CounterPULSE, whose “long-running pansexual performance series” invites guests to “join your fellow pervs for some explicit, twisted fun.”

CounterPULSE received a $25,000 grant in the “Dance” category; a staffer there said they were pleased to receive the grant, “which over the next year will be used to preserve jobs at our small non-profit.”

Similarly, the director of Frameline, the gay and lesbian film house, told FOXNews.com in an e-mail that their $50,000 grant was not to support any program in particular.

“The grant is not intended for a specific program; it’s to be used for the preservation of jobs at our media arts nonprofit organization over the next year during the economic downturn,” wrote K.C. Price, who listed four other NEA grants his organization has received.

An NEA spokeswoman defended the agency’s choices and said its grants would help “preserve jobs in danger of going away or that had gone away because of the economic downturn.”

“Our review process is very comprehensive — we take great care with applicants and with grantees,” said NEA spokeswoman Victoria Hutter. “It’s a thorough, rigorous process that they all go through, and we’re proud of the projects that we’ve been able to support.”

Though the process was sped up, the NEA’s 109 panelist reviewers handled the compressed schedule by giving their $50 million in direct grants only to individuals and groups that have received funding in the past and have already passed muster. An additional $30 million was given to state agencies to parcel out to local artists during this year.

One project that has received past NEA funding and stands to get an additional boost from a $25,000 stimulus grant is “The Symmetry Project,” a dance piece by choreographer Jess Curtis.

The show depicts “the sharing of a central axis, [as] spine, mouth, genitals, face, and anus reveal their interconnectedness and centrality in embodied experience,” according to a description offered on Curtis’ Web site.

In the flesh — and there’s a lot of it — it amounts to two people writhing naked on the floor, a government-funded tango in the altogether.

Curtis said that diminished support from regular funders like San Francisco Grants for the Arts “would mean lots less work and less ability to organize … to get the work out in front of people.” He said the NEA funding will help keep his art afloat.

“I think art is an incredibly important part of our culture and our life and … that it’s very much appropriate that our government should be supporting it,” he told FOXNews.com.

San Francisco’s economy is driven by the arts, which provided nearly 30,000 jobs in the city last year, according to Luis R. Cancel, director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Council.

“The city’s non-profit arts and cultural sector generates $1.03 billion in local economic activity annually and, therefore, it will play a critical role in our recovery,” Cancel said in a statement.

“With these stimulus funds San Francisco arts organizations will be able to weather the storm and continue to provide jobs and to generate revenue while enriching people’s lives through innovative, high quality programming.”

Williams, the taxpayer advocate, allowed that the $100,000 granted to the three groups “isn’t going to make or break the country financially,” but he said arts institutions should try to raise money by raising ticket prices — not by taxing individuals.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, he said. “These sorts of programs really do need to be funded by the patrons that go to the performances — not by the federal government.”

Soldier Demands Apology From Senator McCaskill

Incredible inspiration for all patriots. This is how you get your representatives attention!

The highlight of this post is the very first video of a U.S. Soldier demanding an apology from Senator McCaskill during a town hall meeting 2 days ago. The other short videos are from the same event. As the Senator tries to sell the Obama way of doing things, the American citizenry starts to wise-up.

US Soldier Demands Apology From Senator Claire McCaskill at Town Hall

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y98HxYbsdBM

Claire McCaskill’s Office Holds Town Hall– Tea Party Breaks Out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn71-wNccsw

Health care reform meeting with Sen. Claire McCaskill’s staff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5fFBIhn550

Hundreds Attend McCaskill’s Town Hall Meeting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEksP8O7VYY

I Know How She Feels

Because I know you'd rather see a pic of baby hedgehogs than of The Fraud

Carroll woman’s answer to highly visible Obama: Selling her televisions

By DOUGLAS BURNS

July 29, 2009 http://carrollspaper.1upsoftware.com/print.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=8449

A 78-year-old Carroll woman says she’s so tired of seeing President Barack Obama on the airwaves that she’s selling her television sets – two of them.

Deloris Nissen, a retired nurses’ aide and former Kmart employee who was raised on a farm near Audubon, placed a classified advertisement with The Daily Times Herald for Friday’s paper.

In the $5.50 ad, Nissen tells readers she has two television sets for sale.

The reason: “Obama on every channel and station.”

In an interview Nissen said she is serious about selling two TVs – and genuine about her disgust with what she believes to be an overexposed president.

“I just got tired of watching him on every channel,” Nissen said. “I thought, my gosh, does he ever stay at the White House?”

Nissen, who voted for U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the 2008 presidential election, said she could live with seeing Obama come on television to make serious announcements. But he seems to be on all the time, Nissen said.

When the president does appear on a channel she happens to be watching, Nissen said, she quickly turns.

“I have the remote real handy,” Nissen said. “I have the batteries. I’m ready for him.”

Nissen’s annoyance with the president as a frequent presence on her television doesn’t mean she’ll abandon the medium altogether.

She’s keeping a bigger flat-screen television and selling an older 20-inch Sony and possibly a 13-inch set.

“It’s too heavy,” Nissen said of the 20-inch TV. “I can’t handle it anymore.”

That said, she doesn’t plan on selling it for less than $100 – even if Obama was just on Tuesday pitching his health-care-reform plans.

Obama’s own advisers and political observers across the ideological spectrum have for months debated whether the now popular president is overexposed.

For her part, Nissen said she expects to take some flack for the advertisement in her local paper. After all, Obama did win Iowa and Carroll County in the 2008 election.

But she’s not worried about any criticism.

“I’m an old lady, and I don’t care,” Nissen said.

Still Sinking….

Today’s Rasmussen Reports’ daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that 28% of the nation’s voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty percent (40%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -12. That’s the lowest rating yet recorded for Obama.

Only 30% of U.S. voters give Obama good or excellent marks for his handling of the Henry Louis Gates vs. Cambridge police incident. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 44% believe Obama has done a poor job dealing with the situation in recent days.

Bad Guys Are Now Good

This is a perfect example of why Sonia Sotomayor, and any other activist Judges should NOT be put on the highest court in the land. Check out the two bits highlighted in dark blue.

 

Gio-

——————

WASHINGTON – A judge ruled Thursday that one of the youngest detainees brought to Guantanamo Bay is being held illegally and must be released.

U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle’s order does not end the case of Mohammed Jawad, however. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ian Gershengorn told the judge that as the United States negotiates with the detainee’s home country of Afghanistan for his return next month, the Justice Department also is pursuing a criminal investigation.

Gershengorn said Attorney General Eric Holder has not yet decided whether to indict Jawad, who allegedly threw a grenade that wounded two U.S. soldiers and their interpreter in December 2002. That means it’s possible he could be brought to the United States for a criminal trial.

Huvelle said she had no authority to prevent an indictment, but she encouraged prosecutors to think hard about problems with the case, including Jawad’s mental competency to stand trial and the fact that he’s already been incarcerated for 6 1/2 years.

“After this horrible, long, tortured history, I hope the government will succeed in getting him back home,” she said. “Enough has been imposed on this young man to date.”

Huvelle gave the government three weeks to fulfill legal requirements to report to Congress about any national security risks and diplomatic agreements for Jawad’s release. She ordered the government to report back to her by Aug. 24 and said she hoped by then he was on a trans-Atlantic flight.

Jawad’s attorneys say he was only about 12 years old when he was arrested in December 2002, although there aren’t records of his birth in a refugee camp in Pakistan, so his age is uncertain. The Pentagon says a bone scan shows Jawad was older, about 17, when he was arrested.

Jawad’s attorneys argue he only confessed to throwing the grenade after Afghan officials threatened to kill him and his family. A military judge agreed that he was tortured and ruled in October that the confession couldn’t be used in military tribunals at Guantanamo. The Justice Department agreed earlier this month not to use any of Jawad’s statements during interrogations by Afghan or U.S. officials in the case in the Washington courtroom, either.

The Justice Department said Friday it would no longer hold Jawad as a wartime prisoner. But officials wanted to keep him at Guantanamo while conducting a criminal investigation, saying the government had new eyewitness evidence and would speed up a grand jury investigation.

Jawad’s attorneys responded that the United States has no authority to continue holding him at Guantanamo Bay and asked Huvelle to allow him to return to Afghanistan immediately.