Toddlers for Obama
Hi there, My name Max and my sister, Zofia and I are asking you to help us and our mommy to raise 5,000 bucks for the Obama Campaign.
Mommy and Max and I are all working hard to try and raise money so that every time those nasty 527’s creeps run a smear ad we can effectively counter punch them.
We have already raise 1275.00, but that’s not nearly enough. If we want Barack in the White House you grown-ups have to be willing to do three things 1) vote in November, 2) put your money where your heart is, and 3) get out there and hit the streets and spread the word! See you on the road to victory!
Peace, Love and Action Always
Zofia and Max
Please help Mommy and us to raise more cash for Obama’s war chest. Donate today at my Mommy’s official Obama donation page: http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/Trace Let’s keep hope alive!
This is critical information that can help us prevent any more vote tampering! Your vote is too important, so please pass this on. Go to the black box toolkit site to see how you can help ensure that your vote and the votes of millions of other democrats is protected!
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+| Black Box Voting 2008 Election Protection Toolkit || from the making-a-difference dept. || posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 09, @08:12 (Government) || http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/09/0123249 |+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
[0]Gottesser writes "Bev Harris over at Black Box Voting has doneeveryone a favor and released her [1]2008 Election Protection toolkit asan ebook. It's like Cliff notes of Bev's 8+ years of experience on thefront lines of the modern voting rights movement. The ebook presentssuccinct information to get individuals actively involved in thefull-contact sport that is democracy. The target audience is those whobelieve that the political process requires more than just showing up tovote once every four years those who know that something's up with thosevoting machines. You may remember Bev Harris from her Emmy-nominated HBOdocumentary 'Hacking Democracy.' I've been working on election integrityissues in Ohio for some time now and have met Bev several times. Her workis nothing less than groundbreaking. Please check it out."
Discuss this story at: http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=08/09/09/0123249
Links: 0. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ 1. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.html
There are publicized concerns that the Obama camp is not keeping up with the funds they had hoped to raise to compete in all 50 states, and as you know, the swing states that Obama hopes to put in play this year are states we need to force John McCain to spend a lot of money in if we are to stay competitive on the electoral map.
Gov. Sarah Palin made her first potentially major gaffe during her time on the national scene while discussing the developments of the perilous housing market this past weekend.
Speaking before voters in Colorado Springs, the Republican vice presidential nominee claimed that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had "gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers." The companies, as McClatchy reported, "aren't taxpayer funded but operate as private companies. The takeover may result in a taxpayer bailout during reorganization."
Economists and analysts pounced on the misstatement, saying it demonstrated a lack of understanding about one of the key economic issues likely to face the next administration.
"You would like to think that someone who is going to be vice president and conceivable president would know what Fannie and Freddie do," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "These are huge institutions and they are absolutely central to our country's mortgage debt. To not have a clue what they do doesn't speak well for her, I'd say."
Added Andrew Jakabovics, an economic analysts for the progressive think tank, Center for American Progress: "It is somewhat nonsensical because up until yesterday there was sort of no public funding there. Even today they haven't drawn down any of the credit line they have given to Treasury. 'Gotten too big and too expensive' are two separate things. The too big has been a conservative mantra for a while and there is something to be said of that in that they hold about half of the mortgage guarantees that are out there. And in the last year they have been responsible for roughly 80 percent out there. The 'too expensive to tax payers,' I don't know where that comes from."
Even conservative analysts acknowledged that the statement simply did not hold true.
"Heretofore, if the treasury had a balance sheet there would have been a liability but there was never a taxpayer payment before [the bailout]," said Gerald P. O'Driscoll, an economist with the Cato Institute. "[Fannie and Freddie] were not taxpayer funded. They had taxpayer guarantee, which is worth something, especially in the stock market..."
The Palin misstatement comes as Fannie and Freddie are set to be placed under control of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, created by President Bush in late July to help regulate the two housing giants. Both presidential candidates have been critical of Fannie and Freddie but neither is opposed to the government's plans for the companies. The treasury is hoping that the government's role will help stabilize credit markets and incentive more mortgage lending.
"With the takeover they will be taxpayer funded," said O'Driscoll. "As I understand it they get to withdraw funds with permission going forward."
How politically significant a "gaffe" it is remains to be seen. The major concern about Palin's position on the ticket is that she lacks the economic and foreign policy wherewithal to serve as vice president. This certainly doesn't help on that front. At the same time, the remark went almost entirely unnoticed over the weekend and discussions on the developments of the housing market can be difficult to process for even the most attuned voter.
There are varying explanations that could be offered for Palin's defense. As O'Driscoll noted, both Fannie and Freddie "were hybrid institutions because they had private ownership but... an implicit government guarantee which people thought at the end of the day was explicit." Meanwhile, as Baker noted, as of July the two lenders were being offered low market interest rates by the fed again, theoretically, at the taxpayer's expense. But, he added, "I kind of doubt she had any sense of that."
Am I the only one who is nauseated and infuriated by the fact that the media is treating McCain/Palin with kid gloves? And why are they letting this "CHANGE" mantra rip-off fly without a second look? I know Obama needs to keep things high-minded, but where the hell are the armies of investigative journalsits breaking the important stories about McCain/Palin's warped position on the issues?Are we going to have to do their damned jobs for them? I encourage all of my fellow democrats who have republican or indepoendent friends and associates to please PLEASE PLEASE work hard to deliberately educate at least one of these people in your circle on the MCCain/Palin issues. FUrther I challange each of you to please write at least one letter to the editor of your local newspaper to get the word out. Highlight the hypocisy, their lack of understanding fo the issues, their lack of compassion for anyone making under 5,000,000.00 per year. Mudflats.com is an excellent Alaskan blog created by people who have known Palin as she botched her executive duties in her own community. Direct people there to do the reserach themselves. Also- the Alaska state website has released the tapes of Troopergate and they are free and availablet anty anyone visiting that site. People, we MUST do everything in our power NOW to ensure that the weak-minded sheep of this country don't give us another 4 years of ruinous Republicanism. If you thought Bush was scary- look out. The future of our children hangs in the balance. These are not the ramblings of some conspiracy theorist....I'm a compassionate and loving middle class working mom who wants my children to live a life free of hate, war, poverty and banned books!
Peace
Tracey
From Huffy Post:
Bowing to President Bush's demands, the Senate sent the White House a bill Wednesday overhauling bitterly disputed rules on secret government eavesdropping and shielding telecommunications companies from lawsuits complaining they helped the U.S. spy on Americans.
The relatively one-sided vote, 69-28, came only after a lengthy and heated debate that pitted privacy and civil liberties concerns against the desire to prevent terrorist attacks. It ended almost a year of wrangling over surveillance rules and the president's warrantless wiretapping program that was initiated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The House passed the same bill last month, and Bush said he would sign it soon.
Opponents assailed the eavesdropping program, asserting that it imperiled citizens' rights of privacy from government intrusion. But Bush said the legislation protects those rights as well as Americans' security.
"This bill will help our intelligence professionals learn who the terrorists are talking to, what they're saying and what they're planing," he said in a brief White House appearance after the Senate vote.
* * * * * *
The LA Times reported in late June that only 23 percent of registered voters approved of the job the President is doing:
Seven months before the end of his term, President Bush's approval rating is at an all-time low. In the just-released Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll, the president won approval from 23% of all registered voters -- including 3% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans. Those numbers are down from February, when he had an approval rating of 35%. His high mark, according to the poll, was in November 2001, just after the 9/11 terror attacks, when the president's popularity rating among registered voters was at 85%.
In the just-released Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll, the president won approval from 23% of all registered voters -- including 3% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans. Those numbers are down from February, when he had an approval rating of 35%. His high mark, according to the poll, was in November 2001, just after the 9/11 terror attacks, when the president's popularity rating among registered voters was at 85%.
Sen. Barack Obama voted for the compromise while Sen. Hillary Clinton voted against it.
Watch a video about the money trail surrounding the bill from the American News Project. Read more about the bill here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-bosworth/fisa-fight-attack-of-the_b_111699.html
By Martin Bosworth / Huffy Post
Today is going to go down as a dark day in our nation's history, as the Senate completes its total capitulation to the Bush administration and its corporate masters, through passing legislation that dramatically expands the government's surveillance powers and immunizes the companies responsible for illegally spying on us from any form of legal redress for the victims.
It's unbelievable that nearly three years of campaigning, legislating, debating, and shouting from the rooftops on this issue, one of the most important of the time, has had almost no effect. Worse yet, the new law that is about to be passed is the worst possible permutation imaginable--not only does it perform all the aforementioned perfidious tasks of justifying lawbreaking and expanding our surveillance state, it practically removes all oversight from the process and allows the surveillance system to be easily tailored to pick on purely domestic issues, ranging from illegal online gambling to P2P file sharing. All the Attorney General and the DNI have to do now is say, "Hey, the President authorized this. Here's his signature," and the FISA judge has to essentially sign off on a rubber-stamp for surveillance of potentially dozens--hundreds--of people, all without individual warrants. Because, of course, no sitting President or Attorney General would ever abuse such a system for their own ends. No sir.
This was a battle the Democrats absolutely could have won. They could have stood their ground and fought the new laws every step of the way, and gotten good press, more donations, and the respect of their constitutents. Instead, they knuckled under to protect their corrupt leadership from being hit by lawsuits for their part in the surveillance, and in so doing, granted one of the most corrupt and authoritarian American presidents in our history one of his greatest victories--the unchecked expansion of "Total Information Awareness," a vast data dragnet where your every move is catalogued, cross-referenced, and analyzed for "suspicious behavior." It's the stated aim of current DNI Mike McConnell to not only expand the government's surveillance reach not only to the Internet and databases, but to outsource that surveillance to corporate partners such as AT&T--the same company which is up to its eyeballs in the illegal spying scandal.
Barack Obama's surrender on the FISA fight was a perfect example of giving in when fighting back could have accomplished so much more. Obama surrendered both his base and his convictions (He's a Constitutional law professor, for fuck's sake!) to please the chattering class of so-called "centrist" pundits and weed carriers who demand repeated obeisance to Republican and corporatist aims in order to appear Sensible, Serious, and Respectable. With a word, he could have roused his supporters and activists to fight this thing to the bitter end, and assured his place in history as an avatar of real change. Instead, he folded, and now it's hard to see him as anything more than a typical politician who promises whatever's politically convenient at the time.
It's a dark day. For our country, our history, our values, and our people. We will beat this back, though--make no mistake. There are always new battles to be fought, and we will win. But every time it's going to be a little harder, and every time we should count less on the support of the people who claim to represent us--because this decision has made clear that their interests are no longer our interests. The Constitution just doesn't matter enough anymore.
https://www.lobbydelegates.com
Folks- PLEASE go to this amazing website and lobby your superdelegates. It's easy as pie and its totally free if you check the option to "not to donate" and "email and post". It will take you less than 5 mintues to lobby all the superdelgates from your state! There is even an option to lobby Clinton's super delegates to switch to obama! LEt's get this moving, folks!
While Hillary Clinton battles Barack Obama on the campaign trail, a judge in Los Angeles is quietly preparing to set a trial date in a $17 million fraud suit that aims to expose an alleged culture of widespread corruption by the Clintons and the Democratic Party.
At the conclusion of a hearing Thursday morning before California Superior Court Judge Aurelio N. Munoz, lawyers for Hollywood mogul Peter F. Paul will begin seeking sworn testimony from all three Clintons – Bill, Hillary and Chelsea – along with top Democratic Party leaders and A-list celebrities, including Barbra Streisand, John Travolta, Brad Pitt and Cher.
Paul's team hopes for a trial in October. The Clinton's longtime lawyer David Kendall, who will attend the hearing, has declined comment on the suit.
The Clintons have tried to dismiss the case, but the California Supreme Court, in 2004, upheld a lower-court decision to deny the motion.
Bill Clinton, according to the complaint, promised to promote Paul's Internet entertainment company, Stan Lee Media, in exchange for stock, cash options and massive contributions to his wife's 2000 Senate campaign. Paul contends he was directed by the Clintons and Democratic Party leaders to produce, pay for and then join them in lying about footing the bill for a Hollywood gala and fundraiser.
The Clintons' legal counsel has denied the former president made any deal with Paul. But Paul attorney Colette Wilson told WND there are witnesses who say it was common knowledge at Stan Lee Media that Bill Clinton was preparing to be a rainmaker for the company after he left office.
Paul claims former Vice President Al Gore, former Democratic Party chairman Ed Rendell and Clinton presidential campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe also are among the people who can confirm Paul engaged in the deal.
Paul claims Rendell directed various illegal contributions to the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign and failed to report to the Federal Election Commission more than $100,000 given for a Hollywood event for Gore's campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2000. McAuliffe, Paul says, counseled him in two separate meetings to become a major donor to Hillary Clinton to pave the way to hire her husband. Paul asserts top Clinton adviser Harold Ickes also directed him to give money to the Senate campaign but hid that fact in "perjured testimony" during the trial of campaign finance director David Rosen.
Rosen was acquitted in 2005 for filing false campaign reports that later were charged by the FEC to treasurer Andrew Grossman, who accepted responsibility in a conciliation agreement that fined the campaign 35,000. Paul points out the Rosen trial established his contention that he personally gave more than $1.2 million to Clinton's campaign and that his contributions intentionally were hidden from the public and the Federal Election Commission.
Rosen, accused of concealing Paul's in-kind contribution of more than $1 million, was acquitted, but Paul contends the Clinton staffer was a scapegoat. Paul points out chief Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told the Washington Post he was aware of the donation, yet he never was called as a witness in the Rosen trial.
Paul contends his case will expose "the institutional culture of corruption embraced by the Clinton leadership of the Democratic Party," which seeks to attain "unaccountable power for the Clintons at the expense of the rule of law and respect for the constitutional processes of government."
The complaint asserts Clinton has filed four false reports to the FEC of Paul's donations in an attempt to distance herself from him after a Washington Post story days after the August 2000 fundraiser reported his past felony convictions. Clinton then returned a check for $2,000, insisting it was the only money she had taken from Paul. But one month later, she demanded another $100,000, to be hidden in a state committee using untraceable securities.
"Why wouldn't that cause someone to inquire?" Paul asked. "Especially since it was days after she said she wouldn't take any more money from me."
Paul has the support of a new grass-roots political action group that is helping garner the assistance of one of the nation's top lawyers
Republican activist Rod Martin says his group plans to highlight Paul's case as it launches an organization based on the business model of the left-wing MoveOn.org but rooted in the principles and political philosophy of former President Reagan.
Martin's group also is assisting in Paul's complaint to the FEC asserting that unless the agency sets aside the conciliation agreement and rescinds immunity granted the senator, it will "have aided and abetted in the commission" of a felony.
Paul's case is the subject of a video documentary largely comprised of intimate "home movies" of Hillary Clinton and her Hollywood supporters captured by Paul during the period.
SOURCE: World Net Daily
http://www.electionreturns.state.pa.us/ElectionsInformation.aspx?FunctionID=12&ElectionID=27
Hillary won by 9% not 10%
Get your facts straight MSNBC and CNN!
Great Article from The Nation
Gaiutra Bahadur
In her victory speech last night, Hillary Clinton continued to cast herself as a Rocky figure in Pennsylvania. She told the television cameras that her win in the state was one "for everyone who's ever been counted out." Cue the movie's theme song "Gonna Fly Now," and cut to the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum.
Clinton did, in fact, do quite well on the home turf of Rocky: the rowhouses of white, working-class South Philadelphia. The Obama campaign office responsible for South Philadelphia covers five wards: two of them predominantly African-American, and three of them historically white, blue-collar strongholds. Obama won by 4-1 in the former, and Clinton won by 3-1 in the latter. The results, there and statewide where Clinton won white voters roughly 60-40 and Obama won black voters nearly 90-10, seem to indicate that balloting by identity politics prevailed. "There was a strong correlation along racial lines," said Joe Barbiero, an Obama field organizer in South Philadelphia.
The turnout at the polls was mostly white, mostly female and mostly over the age of 45: Clinton's demographic. The politics of identity seemed to work in her favor, while they hurt Obama. According to exit polls, an equal number of voters--20 percent--said that race or gender helped decide the primary for them. But Clinton's gender was a positive factor for both men and women who said it contributed to their vote, while Obama's race was a negative factor among white voters who said it was important to them. They include people like Antoinette, a pharmacy technician and Catholic churchgoer born and raised in South Philadelphia who was undecided but ultimately cast her vote for Hillary. "One thing that I didn't like was that Obama said 'typical white people,' " she told me.
So race matters. But diversity--white voters living alongside African-American and Asian and Latino voters--also matters. Before last night, Obama had won overwhelmingly white states and those with African-American populations large enough to tilt the race. Meanwhile, Hillary had scored victories in places black enough for race to be injected regularly into the language of politics but not black enough for that group to be decisive. The trend continued in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
Largely minority Philadelphia voted as a whole for Obama, but he was clobbered in the vast stretch of the state populated by once-upon-a-time coal and steel communities. Obama last night maintained that "we rallied people of every age and race and background to the cause," soon after giving a shout-out to supporter John "I was born in a small town" Mellencamp. That may have been the case in some instances, but he performed worse in only one county than he did in Luzerne County, anchored by the town of Hazleton. The town has seen both diversity and its backlash in recent years, with an infamously polarizing immigration ordinance that set Dominican and Puerto Rican newcomers against the white descendants of the Irish, Italian and German coal miners who built the town. Does living in mixed communities make people less or more vulnerable to campaigning that plays on ethnic and racial divisions? The South Philly ward that's home to Geno's Steaks--the cheesesteak joint that posted signs at its takeout window reading, "This is AMERICA. WHEN ORDERING, please 'SPEAK ENGLISH' "--is its most diverse and divided.
Obama won 36 percent of the vote there--only slightly better than he did in South Philly's other majority white ethnic neighborhoods. The numbers from Luzerne County are even harder to ignore: Obama won only 25 percent of the vote, his second-worst showing statewide.
David- I have great respect for you as a journalist, but I have to tell you, I'm really annoyed that you folks out there in "pundit land" are all frothing over what you seem to see as Obama's potential political demise with regard to the Reverend Wright matter. To begin with, and Chris Matthews rightly has said as much in defense of Mr. Romney's faith with regard to his presidential bid, religion has no place in politics - it is simply a matter that should be entirely "off the table" and must not be in any way a measure by which we judge the candidate's ability to lead the country. If we assume this to be true, then it would indeed stand to reason that this never-ending media discussion about Mr. Obama's decision not to completely admonish the man that he has chosen and has long respected as his spiritual advisor, would also be off the table. It’s seems inappropriate to me that you folks persist in not only questioning Senator Obama's motives to remain in a church that YOU find offensive, but furthermore, that you continue to make sport of it for your own satisfaction. I urge all of you to ask yourselves, is this a standard by which you also choose to be judged?
Granted, Reverend Wright has without question made some inflammatory remarks that many might find offensive, but I hasten to remind you that those snippets that you keep airing in a continuous loop have been taken out of context and cannot possibly serve to summarize the sum total of this man's life or his work. He has done enormous good in his lifetime and the fact that the punditry elite continue to choose to seize upon a few of his more bitter moments seems to me to underscore that you are in no small way encouraging the genesis of further racial bitterness. To put it simply- in continuing this discussion, you are fanning the flames that played apart in Reverend Wright’s belief that he was justified in making the comments he made in the first place. And until you stop, you are all part of the larger problem.
Tracey from South Bend, IN
http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/dashboard/main/Trace
From: The Nation:
Barbara Ehrenreich
T here's a reason Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.
You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as "The "Fellowship," also known as The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.
Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," but that term applies far more aptly to Clinton's "Family," which is organized into "cells"--their term--and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia. In 2002, Sharlet joined The Family's home for young men, forswearing sex, drugs and alcohol, and participating in endless discussions of Jesus and power. He wasn't undercover; he used his own name and admitted to being a writer. But he wasn't completely out of danger either. When he went outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he was followed. He still gets calls from Family associates asking him to meet them in diners--alone.
The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes on behind the scenes--knitting together international networks of right-wing leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolf Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:
During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.
At the heart of The Family's American branch is a collection of powerful right-wing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe and Rick Santorum. They get to use The Family's spacious estate on the Potomac, The Cedars, which is maintained by young men in Family group homes and where meals are served by The Family's young women's group. And, at The Family's frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already powerful.
Clinton fell in with The Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the Senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, The Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."
Furthermore, The Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.
What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the international right? Maybe it was just a phase in her tormented search for identity, marked by ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many potential spiritual mentors during her White House days, including New Age guru Marianne Williamson and the liberal rabbi Michael Lerner. But it was the Family association that stuck.
Sharlet generously attributes Clinton's involvement to the under-appreciated depth of her religiosity, but he himself struggles to define The Family's theological underpinnings. The Family avoids the word Christian but worships Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the "meek." They believe that, in mass societies, it's only the elites who matter, the political leaders who can build God's "dominion" on earth. Insofar as The Family has a consistent philosophy, it's all about power--cultivating it, building it and networking it together into ever-stronger units, or "cells." "We work with power where we can," Doug Coe has said, and "build new power where we can't."
Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity United Church of Christ. Now it's up to Clinton to explain--or, better yet, renounce--her long-standing connection with the fascist-leaning Family.
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By Frank Schaeffer
Senator Obama has a problem: the hardening of the American heart, the closing of the American mind, the shriveling of our souls, the shrinking capacity of our imaginations, our jaded senses, the seen-it-all attitude that makes us into sneering voyeurs too mean spirited to save ourselves.
I was a guest on a PRI radio show the day after Obama delivered is historic speech on race. I was a guest along with a person that the host introduced as "most responsible" for making Obama's minister's charged comments into a political football. According to the host's introduction, Republican activist Ronald Kessler used his website to turn Obama's minister's words into the story the media jumped on. Kessler had just heard Obama's March 18 speech on race too. He said it left him unmoved. He was in a sneering mood bristling with ever-so-reasonable middle class certitude of his conservative righteousness. To Kessler the speech was just politics, nothing more. The idea of it's truth was of no consequence. To him it was all about tactics. That night I was listening to Laura Ingraham (a show that I was on several times and where Laura repeatedly called me a "great American" because, as the father of a Marine, I'd written Keeping Faith and then Faith of Our Sons, books that praised and explained the military family.) Laura was sneering at Obama's speech. Her candidate had been Mitt Romney. As Romney's self-described "conservative-conservative" Ingraham had also been routinely mocking McCain. And she hates Clinton. Now she hates Obama more...Bitterness as a way of life marches forward on the left as well as the right. I read the responses from Clinton supporters (on various websites) also damning Obama's speech as "just words." Some of the Clinton people sounded even more cynical than Kessler and Ingraham.Obama is the chef who opens a new restaurant and serves honest good and beautifully prepared food made of the most wholesome ingredients only to have the food critic pan his offerings as "all too ordinary." "Where," asks the seen-it-all jaded bored critic, "are the calf's brains marinated in truffle-soaked baby duck's testicles?"Obama offers civility in the midst of a drunken national bar fight. Obama speaks in complete sentences, well-turned paragraphs, offers thoughts with intellectual depth, nuance, humility and compassion. Obama is a reasoned essay cast before sound-bite swine who seem ready to tear anything that falls into their sty to shreds.
By providence or blind luck, we are being given a second chance. In Obama our founders appear once again stepping from the mists of time to offer a wayward great, great grandchild an opportunity for redemption. But everything is turned on its head. Good is called bad. The greatest things about Obama are used against him, decency and transparency are mocked.
Obama stands in the tradition of our founders, a citizen running for office, not a "professional" striver. But the cry goes up, "He doesn't have the experience!" Experience? At what? Playing games with our country's soul while the only real game in our nation's capitol is hanging on to power, enriching oneself at the political trough through connections, taking us to war after war, making us hated throughout the world by catering to our insatiable, unreasoning fears.
Obama is the man who reaches out to help a dying passerby and the passerby snarls, "What do you really want?" Obama came to us on March, 18 with one of the most generous and brilliant speeches that has been delivered on American soil. He spoke honestly of things all other American leaders have been too timid and self-serving to even mention. Standing behind him were the sprits of countless murdered, enslaved, tortured, lost black Americans. Their blood cries out for revenge and yet Obama offered forgiveness, perspective and understanding.
Obama is not Jesus. Obama makes mistakes. He is rightly self-deprecating. Nevertheless, imperfect as he is, Obama is offering America a fresh start. There is more decent intelligent authenticity in his little finger than the Clintons will ever know. There is more kind wisdom in Obama than in all our sneering bloodsucking moronic media combined. But we have imbibed detritus for so long that when clean food is offered we can't taste it.This isn't about politics. I'm a fifty-five year old white man who has been a conservative all my life. I've been a right wing Republican activist. I'm a big fan of the military. If Obama can reach out to me he can reach out to anyone. He can win in November. What I'm saying here will lose me friends. For instance the Bush family gave one of my recent military-related books a ringing endorsement. After Laura Bush read an excerpt out on Meet The Press sales skyrocketed. I probably won't get too many more of those sorts of endorsements. But the chips are down and the presidential choices this year are too important not to not fight for.As I see it our choice is between a good and heroic old man whose time has past and who will perpetuate failed policy, a jaded woman of the establishment, who will do anything to perpetuate her family's dynastic "claim" to power, and a brilliant, openhearted new founding father the likes of which America has not seen. Obama comes to us from outside the system that has produced our present multiple crises of wars of choice and a failing economy. He does what all truly great leaders do: he speaks to the soul in plain self-revealing words of hope.If we squander this undeserved reprieve and choose business-as-usual, if we don't elevate ourselves out of our self-made mire, we will step into a future of steep and steady decline and war without end. It won't matter if you are right or left. It won't matter if the Republicans or the Democratic Party wins. We will all lose.I think there is reason to hope. There are decent people out there who have refused to go along with the smear-by-association campaign. Mike Huckabee defended Obama. McCain said we can't blame Obama for his minister's words. Not everyone on the right is stooping as low as the Clintons and the right-wing media scavengers. Obama is worth fighting for. He is worth losing old friends for. History has thrown America an unlikely lifeline. Do we have the decency, the sense, the last glimmer of sanity needed to open our hearts to change?
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It
By Michael Goldfarb
London - Even on this side of the ocean Barack Obama's speech on his personal Jeremiah has made waves but I see that the usual suspects in the right-wing commentariat are not satisfied: Krauthammer in the Washington Post opinion pages today and Michael Gerson in the same place earlier in the week. How can a pastor, a man of the cloth attack the U.S. with words like "God Damn America?" they ask and demand total renunciation, repudiation etc., etc...
In the autumn of 1995 I was traveling around Mississippi doing some reporting for the BBC World Service. I try to get to the deep South once a decade because for better or worse it remains the cauldron where this nation's politics are forged. People reading this on either coast may think they set the nation's agenda. They don't. The South does. White southerner's lingering resentment to being conquered and occupied for the best part of a century is what drive's American politics. Nixon knew it and that's why the southern strategy was so successful. White southerners are their own tectonic plate crashing into one party or another for a time and creating the political equivalent to a super continent.
Anyway as I'm cruising the surprisingly well-paved back roads of Miss'ippi I'm listening to AM radio. A white Christian station comes up and I hear a song that is absolutely shocking. It calls on God to destroy America. Why? So it can be reclaimed for Christ. I was so stunned by the tune that the next time it came on, as I was driving through a white section of Clarksdale I pulled over, took out my Sony Pro tape machine and recorded it. The chorus ran, "Even if you have to bring her to her knees/Lord, please/ revive her again."
The song's image of America destroyed so it can be reclaimed for white Southern Christians was only one example of the relentless disparaging of the U.S. along with damnings to Hell of vast swathes of American society to be heard being broadcast by white Christian pastors.
These same pastors of course preach the politics of the right from their pulpits and their congregations provide the foot soldiers of the conservative movement.
No one ever demanded of President Bush that he repudiate these hellfire and brimstone types, yet even after delivering one of the great speeches of the last several decades the ideologues are demanding something more of Obama.
The hypocrisy here is large; I would not expect anything else from Krauthammer but Michael Gerson is a "person of faith." And surely he knows the danger of hypocrisy in that part of the public sphere where religion intersects with politics. I'm sure he knows much of the Gospel of Matthew by heart. I am certain at this season of the passion he is re-reading it fervently. But in case he is speed reading it let me remind of Matthew 23 verses 13-15. Each verse begins, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"
America needs no heavenly destroyer to revive itself, it needs people in Gerson's position to examine their consciences and stop being hypocrites. A good place to start would be for him to address the shocking statements made by white Christian preachers over the air waves every day. He might take advantage of the opportunity to repudiate them by name and renounce their help in electing Republicans to office. If not, to quote the Gospel, "Woe unto him ..."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-goldfarb/hypocrisy-in-the-public-s_b_92849.html
If you follow thepundits, you know that they are saying Barack Obama is going to have trouble bringig in the white middle class voter. I have found a website that debunks the myth that Obama only seeks to support folks earning $50,000 or more a year. Please share this with people when you hear this myth repeated. It shows his voting record for his entire time int he senate and rates his votes as to whether or not they are "Middle Class" Friendly.
http://www.themiddleclass.org/legislator/barack-obama-511?gclid=CM_a9KbFm5ICFQbNIgod0Fi96g
Yes we can!
