Obama Replaces Vulgar Jeremiah Wright with Homosexual Bishop

J.F.K. and Barack Obama both affiliated closely with clergymen - Kennedy with cold warrior Cardinal Spellman, and Obama with liberation theologian Jeremiah Wright. Obama denounced Wright after his mentor persisted in embarrassing him during the primary campaign. This article reports that he has replaced Wright with homosexual Episcopalian bishop Eugene Robinson, who has provoked numerous congregations to leave his denomination.

Activist: 'Pastor to presidents' replaced by gay bishop
by Jim Brown

OneNewsNow

A conservative Christian activist says it's a sad omen for the Obama administration and the United States that Barack Obama has been seeking guidance from the Episcopal Church's first openly homosexual bishop.

The Times of London reports that the president-elect sought out New Hampshire homosexual bishop Vicki Gene Robinson for advice three times during his presidential campaign. Robinson, whose ordination in the Episcopal Church has caused a deep rift within the Anglican Communion, was reportedly sought out by Obama to discuss what it feels like to be "first."

Robinson notes in their three private conversations, Obama voiced his support for "equal civil rights" for homosexuals and described the election as a "religious experience."

Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, believes Obama's consultations with Robinson show the true tenor of his upcoming administration. "It looks like Billy Graham has been replaced by a gay bishop. We're moving to, perhaps, our first anti-Christian president; it's beyond post-Christian. Gene Robinson advocates homosexuality as part of the Christian experience," he explains. "Now Bible-believing Christians cannot accept that. Homosexual practice is sinful, as taught by the scriptures. This man [Obama] pretends to be faithful to Christianity, even as he works very hard to undermine it."

LaBarbera suggests Robinson may possibly replace Jeremiah Wright as one of Obama's main spiritual advisers. Wright was Obama's Chicago pastor for 20 years before disassociating with the controversial preacher during the presidential campaign.

Obama plays masterful Edgar Bergen to the church's Charlie McCarthy

John F. Kennedy made a financial contribution to fellow anti-communist and WWII Navy veteran Richard M. Nixon when, early in his political career, Nixon was running against a Democrat who was soft on Communism. Some have attributed this to cynical motives, but in all likelihood this contribution predated both men's cynicism, and thus expressed genuine solidarity against Communism and its enablers in the American Left.

Barack Obama, by contrast, has unmistakable Marxist impulses and can be described without caricature as a disciple of Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals. But Obama, too, is aware of the advantages of straying across the line to forage in Conservative orchards. The Obama campaign recognized early on that the Left has no credibility with centrist Americans under its own name, owing to decades of condescension and outright hostility to American religion, mores and working-class culture.

With only a brief, quickly suppressed gaffe that disparaged white Pennsylvanians for "clinging" to their guns and churches, the Obama machine has exercised remarkable message discipline by co-opting the Christian label, and has used social conservatives' language to soften the distinctions that will be painfully evident once Obama appoints his cabinet and nominates his judges.

The Black Church has apparently put itself entirely at the disposal of the Obama campaign. But Obama has also made major inroads in the white evangelical and Catholic communities. He has drawn endorsements from former pro-life stalwarts Douglas Kmiec and Frankie Schaeffer, and a divorced white Florida name-it-and-claim-it Megachurch preacher couple who will go unnamed here.

This was possible, of course, only with the collaboration of Obama's confederates in the mass media. The New York Times, for example, has mastered the technique of putting Leftist words in conservatives' mouths, often by identifying apostates as conservatives long after they cross over to make separate peace with the Left.

The Times article about the Supreme Court's Heller decision last week is a case in point:

October 21, 2008
Ruling on Guns Elicits Rebuke From the Right
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Four months after the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess guns, its decision is under assault — from the right.
Two prominent federal appeals court judges say that Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the case, District of Columbia v. Heller, is illegitimate, activist, poorly reasoned and fueled by politics rather than principle. The 5-to-4 decision in Heller struck down parts of a District of Columbia gun control law.

The judges used what in conservative legal circles are the ultimate fighting words: They said the gun ruling was a right-wing version of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that identified a constitutional right to abortion. Justice Scalia has said that Roe had no basis in the Constitution and amounted to a judicial imposition of a value judgment that should have been left to state legislatures.

Comparisons of the two decisions, then, seemed calculated to sting.

“The Roe and Heller courts are guilty of the same sins,” one of the two appeals court judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, wrote in an article to be published in the spring in The Virginia Law Review.

Similarly, Judge Richard A. Posner, in an article in The New Republic in August, wrote that Heller’s failure to allow the political process to work out varying approaches to gun control that were suited to local conditions “was the mistake that the Supreme Court made when it nationalized abortion rights in Roe v. Wade.”

Sharp criticism of a recent Supreme Court decision by federal appeals court judges is quite unusual, though these two judges — both Reagan appointees — are more outspoken than most.
Judge Wilkinson, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., was recently considered for a spot on the Supreme Court. Judge Posner, of the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, is perhaps the most influential judge not on the Supreme Court.
Not all conservatives agree with the critics, of course. Robert A. Levy, a libertarian lawyer who was a principal architect of the victorious strategy in the Heller case, rejected the comparison to Roe.

The two sides in the Heller case claimed to rely on the original meaning of the Second Amendment, based on analysis of its text in light of historical materials. The amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The more liberal justices said the amendment protected only a collective right tied to state militias, thus allowing most gun control laws. The more conservative justices found an individual right and struck down parts of a District of Columbia gun control law.

In Judge Wilkinson’s view, the upshot of the court’s extensive historical analysis was that “both sides fought into overtime to a draw.”

Others said the quality of the combat was low. “Neither of the two main opinions in Heller would pass muster as serious historical writing,” Jack Rakove, a historian at Stanford, wrote on the blog Balkinization soon after the decision was issued.

The strong reaction from the right after Heller was preceded, with a sort of symmetry, by liberal support for an individual-rights reading of the Second Amendment. For much of the 20th century, the conventional view of the amendment had been that it only protects a collective right. (Warren E. Burger, after retiring as chief justice in 1986, called the individual rights view “one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen.”)

But some prominent liberal law professors, including Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard, Akhil Reed Amar of Yale and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, have concluded, sometimes reluctantly, that the amendment in fact protects an individual right. Professor Levinson’s seminal 1989 article in The Yale Law Journal captured the tone of the enterprise. It was called “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”

In an interview, Professor Levinson said, “The result in Heller is eminently respectable.” But he added that he understood why some conservatives were upset. “People say the Roe court was too interventionist,” he said. “So is the Heller court from that perspective.”

Judge Wilkinson’s basic critique is that the majority, like that in Roe, used an ambiguous text to impose its policy preference on the nation, at great cost to the democratic process and to local values. He assumed, as most experts do, that the decision would apply to the states.

“In both Roe and Heller,” Judge Wilkinson wrote, “the court claimed to find in the Constitution the authority to overrule the wishes of the people’s representatives. In both cases, the constitutional text did not clearly mandate the result, and the court had discretion to decide the case either way.”

Judge Posner built on themes in his recent book “How Judges Think,” which argued that constitutional adjudication by the Supreme Court is largely and necessarily political. The Heller decision, he wrote in The New Republic, “is evidence that the Supreme Court, in deciding constitutional cases, exercises a freewheeling discretion strongly flavored with ideology.”

Indeed, Judge Wilkinson wrote, “Some observers may be tempted to view Heller as a revenge of sorts for Roe” or “a sort of judicial tit-for-tat.” As Judge Posner put it, “The idea behind the decision” in Heller “may simply be that turnabout is fair play.”

Mr. Levy, who helped win Heller, said some conservatives wanted almost all decisions to be made by the political branches rather than the courts.

“But these are constitutional rights,” Mr. Levy, now chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group, said of the rights protected by the Second Amendment. “They are not rights consigned to the legislature.”

The analogy to Roe, he went on, is misguided. There is no reference to abortion in the Constitution.

The Second Amendment, by contrast, indisputably protects a right to keep and bear arms, though there is sharp disagreement about the scope of the right. Mr. Levy said the natural reading of the amendment, one supported by historical materials, was that it protected an individual right.

In his article, Judge Wilkinson wrote that he “readily agreed” that Roe “involved the more brazen assertion of judicial authority.” But he added that the Roe and Heller cases shared a number of common flaws, including “a failure to respect legislative judgments,” “a rejection of the principles of federalism” and “a willingness to embark on a complex endeavor that will require fine-tuning over many years of litigation.”

Judge Wilkinson saved particular scorn for a brief passage in Justice Scalia’s opinion that seemed to endorse a variety of restrictions on gun ownership. “Nothing in our opinion,” Justice Scalia wrote, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Whatever else may be said about the Second Amendment, Judge Wilkinson wrote, those presumptions have no basis in the Constitution. “The Constitution’s text,” he wrote, “has as little to say about restrictions on firearm ownership by felons as it does about the trimesters of pregnancy.”

Mr. Levy, too, said he was not a fan of the passage. “I would have preferred that that not have been there,” he said. “It created more confusion than light.”

It is too soon to say much about the legacy of Heller. But Judge Wilkinson said that Heller, at a minimum, represented “the worst of missed opportunities — the chance to ground conservative jurisprudence in enduring and consistent principles of restraint.” At worst, he warned, “There is now a real risk that the Second Amendment will damage conservative judicial philosophy” as much as Roe “damaged its liberal counterpart.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 23, 2008 An article on Tuesday about conservative criticism of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the application of the Second Amendment to gun control in the District of Columbia omitted two words from a passage in the decision concerning gun regulations that remained presumptively lawful. “Nothing in our opinion,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” The words “felons and” were omitted.

Obama's Campaign Would Have Been the Envy of Nixon, Maybe Even Gordon Liddy

JFK had a spirited contest with his Republican opponent Richard Nixon in 1960, and even his own son John Jr. joked about the voter fraud in Chicago that helped turn the tide in JFK's favor. But it's safe to say JFK and his brother Bobby would have been aghast at the spectacle of Democratic law enforcement and prosecutors marshalling the coercive powers of the state against political speech by his opponents.

Obama has been silent as his organization has put together a law enforcement campaign against his adversaries that would have made Nixon envious.

There is much that the disgraced Republican would have been still more envious of: the mainstream media's silent complicity and abstention from any serious investigation of the Obama organization's campaign against dissent, the internal discipline within the Obama campaign - no "John Dean" ratting Obama out, no "Deep Throat" informing investigative reporters (who in any case haven't the least inclination to discredit Obama), no "Alexander Haig" recruiting coup d'etat participants. And externally, Obama faces no "John Sirica" or "Sam Ervin" figure. Truly, Obama is blessed.

This WorldNetDaily article describes some of the intimidation the
Obama campaign is bringing to bear in Missouri and Pennsylvania, important
battleground states in the upcoming election.


Prosecutors for Obama hunting for 'lying ads'
'Truth Squad' using sheriffs, DAs to police bias against candidate
WorldNetDaily

A team of Obama-supporting prosecutors and sheriffs in Missouri is preparing to pursue legal challenges to any presidential campaign ads deemed to be false or misleading.

KMOV-TV in St. Louis reports District Attorney Robert McCulloch, a past president of the National District Attorneys Association, said that whether the ads could be attributed to an opponent's campaign itself, or another organization, "If they're not going to tell the truth, somebody's got to step up and say, 'That's not the truth. This is the truth.' "

The effort appeared to be part of a move by the Obama campaign to block advertisements to which it objects. The campaign also sent "threatening" letters to several news agencies in Pennsylvania and Ohio demanding they stop airing ads exposing Obama's gun stance, according to the National Rifle Association.

The NRA's Political Victory Fund condemned the attempt at censorship.

"Barack Obama and his campaign are terrified of the truth," said Chris W. Cox, chairman of organization. "Sen. Obama's statements and support for restricting access to firearms, raising taxes on guns and ammunition and voting against the use of firearms for self-defense in the home are a matter of public record. NRA-PVF will make sure that everyone knows of Obama's abysmal record on guns and hunting."

The Obama campaign declined to respond to a WND request for comment.

The NRA said Obama sent "cease and desist letters" to news outlets in the two states, "denouncing the ads and demanding their removal from the airwaves."

"Barack Obama would be the most anti-gun president in our nation's history. That's the truth," said Cox." NRA-PVF has the facts on our side. No amount of running from or lying about his record and then intimidating news outlets in the hope of deceiving American gun owners and hunters is going to work. Those strong arm tactics may work in Chicago, but not in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and not as long as NRA-PVF has anything to say about it."

The warnings were from Obama lawyer Robert Bauer, who told station managers that in order to stay in the Federal Communication Commission's good graces, they should not air the ads.

Josh Marquis, an Oregon prosecutor who serves as a spokesman for the NDAA, said the comments from Missouri don't sound like the McCulloch he knows.

"I'm really surprised. I know Bob," Marquis told WND.

The KMOV report said the Obama campaign asked members of Missouri's law enforcement to target anyone who "lies" or issues misleading television ads. Formation of the Obama "Truth Squad" was the result, the report said.

McCulloch declined to return a call from WND seeking comment.

The KMOV report said the campaign was being conducted by McCulloch and another prosecutor, Jennifer Joyce, along with a number of sheriffs throughout the state.

"They will be reminding voters that Barack Obama is a Christian who wants to cut taxes for anyone who makes less than $250,000 a year. They also say they plan to respond immediately to any ads and statements that violate Missouri's ethics laws," the report said.

"We want to keep this campaign focused on issues," Joyce told the station. "We don't want people to get distracted. Missourians don't want to be distracted by the divisive character attacks."

The campaign was assembled to "set the record straight," they said.

Officials with the Missouri Sheriff's Association declined to talk about any sheriffs who might be involved in the campaign.

At the blog Gateway Pundit, the reaction was immediate.

"St. Louis and Missouri Democrat sheriffs and top prosecutors are planning to go after anyone who makes false statements against Obama during his campaign. This is so one sided I can't even being to describe how wrong this agenda is," writes blogger Jim Hoft.

Hoft said Joyce and McCulloch "are threatening to bring libel charges against those who speak out falsely against Barack Obama."

Missouri blogger Doctor Bulldog commented: "Don't think they will stop with just the local radio and television stations. Oh, no. We bloggers are next on the chopping block. It doesn't matter if it is the truth. It only matters if Obama deems it a lie (i.e. – something that can cause damage to his bid to be president). Basically, no one is free to criticize Obama here in Missouri."

In the St. Louis Examiner, a commentary said, "Look, politicians are all about lies. It may be annoying (I find it entertaining), but that's for their opponents and good-government groups to counter – not law enforcement. … Even if the officeholders joining the 'truth squad' are nominally stepping out of their official roles in order to put on their (political) party hats and play politics, it's inappropriate. They wield too much power to use it to wag their fingers at people who say un-nice things about political hopefuls. Prosecutors and sheriffs are, after all, normally thought of as people with the clout to put their targets behind bars."

Marquis told WND politicians keep their right to have a political opinion and express it, but the DA's organization strives hard not to be partisan.

Savoir Faire and Connections Trumped Harvard Scholarship, Integrity

Barack Obama and J.F.K. both wrote two best-selling books. Kennedy's authorship of Why England Slept and Profiles in Courage has been disparaged even by admirers like journalist Richard Reeves, who told Brian Lamb on C-Span's Booknotes program:

Both of Kennedy's books were knockoffs of Winston Churchill books. There is a
certain controversy: Did he write his own books? Well, he probably did, but they
were written first by Winston Churchill, the same books, where Winston Churchill
did a book on British political leadership at the turn of the century which was
exactly the same as Profiles in Courage. Some of the sentences were exactly
the same. Why England Slept, which was Kennedy's college thesis, was taken from
and often repeated Winston Churchill's book While England Slept.

It appears that Kennedy couldn't even be bothered to filch material from Churchill unassisted. A Wikipedia article reports that Georgetown professor "Jules Davids 'materially assisted in the preparation of several chapters' according to the [Profiles in Courage] Foreword, but extensive revelations from many sources, including a detailed account by Jules Davids himself, establish that Davids prepared initial drafts of five of the chapters on the book that then won Kennedy a Pulitzer Prize."

There is no corresponding dispute as to Obama's authorship of his two best-selling autobiographies, Dreams From My Father or The Audacity of Hope.

However, his Harvard academic bona fides are highly suspect. In this article, California conservative writer Jack Cashill turns a critical eye toward Obama's Harvard Law credential.


Why Obama is mum about Harvard
The reason Barack, Michelle don't talk about editor post
By Jack Cashill

On the surface, at least, Barack Obama's single most impressive accomplishment has been his 1990 election to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review. This position also provided Obama his only real executive experience as he supervised the law review's staff of 80 editors.

One has to wonder, then, why neither he nor wife Michelle emphasized this singular honor during the up-by-the-bootstraps biographical sections of their respective speeches in Denver. In fact, neither of them so much as mentioned Obama's time at Harvard, this despite his vulnerability on the executive experience charge.

Their silence likely derives from one verifiable fact: Obama's record at Harvard was no more authentic than John Kerry's record inVietnam. Obama seems to have learned from Kerry.

In the age of the Internet, the less said about a dubious credential the better, and Obama's law presidency credential is dubious on any number of levels.

For starters, Obama did not do nearly well enough at his previous stop, Columbia University, to justify admission to Harvard Law. According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science, but without honors. In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform dramatically to avoid minimal honors.

Obama apparently did just that. The specifics we may never know. As the New York Times concedes, Obama "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."

Would that Bristol Palin could get off so easily!

There are any number of possible reasons for Obama's reticence about Columbia : his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of course, his associations.

At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which adjoins the Columbia campus.

Five years after leaving Columbia , Obama decided on law school. His lack of resources did not deter him from thinking big. Nor did his B-minus effort at his Hawaii prep school or his equally indifferent grades at Columbia. As Obama relates in "Dreams From My Father," he limited his choices to only three law schools - "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." (It must be nice to be Obama.) He does not mention his connections.

Harvard Law School is notoriously difficult to get into. Annually, some 7,000 applications apply for some 500 seats. Applicant LSAT scores generally chart in the 98 to 99 percentile range, and GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95. If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission, we would know about them. We don't. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets.

We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard. As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it.

As previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf. An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.

These are not connections that Obama would like to see broadcast, which further explains his shyness about the Harvard experience.

There is more. Obama did not make the Harvard Law Review (HLR) the old-fashioned way, the way HLR's first black editor, Charles Houston, did 70 years prior. To Obama's good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades - the president being the student with the highest academic rank - with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.

This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was "meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review." It did just that. At the end of his first year, Obama was named, along with 40 or so of his classmates, an editor of the HLR.

Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note. In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any limits on abortion, citing the government's interest in "preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair."

Obama's timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the Harvard Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha. Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty. This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.

Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African-American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.

"Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported, "sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once." In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all-day affair, Obama's fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR's small conservative faction threw him its support.

Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."

One more thing: The 1990 Times article about Obama's election notes that the president of the HLR usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a Supreme Court justice. Not the Mansourian Candidate. Here, oddly, his ambition deserted him. He told the Times that he planned "to spend two or three years in private law practice and then return to Chicago to re-enter community work, either in politics or in local organizing." In this unlikely surrender to Chicago politics, the realist sees insecurity at best and, at worst, the quid for al-Mansour's quo.

Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.

Barack Obama's Flip-Flops Make John Kerry Look Resolute by Comparison

JFK was known to waffle and flip-flop, most notably at the Bay of Pigs when he promised then withheld air support from Cuban exiles who mounted a 1961 attack on Castro's forces in southwest Cuba. But his word was generally his bond. He certainly never approached Barack Obama's remarkable streak of policy changes and "clarifications."

A February 25 Washington Post article outlined five Obama flip-flops that have already been eclipsed by mightier and more recent tergiversations.

The five listed by the Post were:

1. Campaign contributions from unions. In January, the Obama campaign described union contributions to the Edwards and Clinton campaigns as "special interest" money. Then as unions began to endorse him, he began referring to them as representatives of "working people" whose support he was "thrilled" to receive.

2. Public financing of campaigns. Just this past September, Obama said he would agree to public financing of the 2008 presidential election if the GOP nominee does likewise. By February, it was clear that Obama's fundraising juggernaut would outperform any Republican counterpart by multiples.

His spokesman weaseled that Obama had never actually committed to public financing. (Shades of "no controlling legal authority.") Obama himself added several new conditions before he would honor his agreement to submit to public financing, including the impossible demand for regulation of outside groups. Recently he reneged altogether, rationalizing that the system of public financing of elections is "broken."

It was transparently self-serving and, I would argue, excusable in terms of sheer self-interest. But true to form, Obama admitted no fault and instead used the announcement as an occasion to accuse Republicans prospectively of (future) attack ads. The best defense is a good offense.

3. The Cuba embargo. In remarks at Southern Illinois University in 2004, he said it was time "to end the embargo with Cuba" because it had "utterly failed in the attempt to overthrow Castro." But in August 2007, speaking this time to a Cuban-American group in vote-rich Miami, he said he would not "take off the embargo" because it is "an important inducement for change."

Since then, he has revised his position again, to permit unrestricted travel to Cuba, and to allow a free flow of financial remittances from Cubans in the U.S. back to Cuba.

4. Illegal immigration. In a March 2004 questionnaire, Obama reported that he would "oppose" government efforts to "crack down on businesses that hire illegal immigrants." But under working class pressure from the Edwards and Clinton constituencies this past January, he said in a televised debate that "we do have to crack down on those employers that are taking advantage of the situation."

5. Legalizing marijuana. While running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama told college students that he supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use. In an October presidential debate, he joined other Democratic candidates in opposing the decriminalization of marijuana.

As the Washington Times wryly commented a month before the Post ran its piece, " Barack Obama, the senatorial candidate of 2004, might have a bone to pick with Barack Obama, the presidential candidate of 2008."

Intellectually, Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight

The Washington Post article was in no way exhaustive, as Obama has reversed himself on a number of issues, including health care for illegal immigrants, Jeremiah Wright, and the severity of the geo-political threats posed by Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

" I mean, think about it," he coaxed an adoring crowd in Oregon last month.

"Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us, you know, Iran, they spend one one-hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance."

Conservative critics began to get traction that Obama is a lightweight in foreign policy and geopolitics, out of his depth and a menace to the troops he would command and the economy he would shepherd. Just one day after his gaffe, he "clarified" in Montana.

"Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports terrorism across the region and militias in Iraq. It threatens Israel's existence. It denies the Holocaust...." Alrighty, then.

"When is Iran a threat to the US and when is it not? As far as Barack Obama is concerned," quipped British blogger Alex Spillius, "the answer can vary within 24 hours."

Second term of Jimmy Carter?

"From the beginning, Barack Obama's special appeal was his vow to remain an idealistic outsider, courageous and optimistic, and never to shift his positions for political expediency, or become a captive of the Inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia, or kiss up to special interests and big money donors," wrote Margaret Talev of McClatchy's Washington bureau Thursday.

"In recent weeks, though, Obama has done all those things.

"He abandoned public campaign financing after years of championing it. Backed a compromise on wiretap legislation that gives telecom companies retroactive immunity for helping the government conduct spying without warrants. Dumped his controversial pastor of two decades — then his church — after saying he could no more abandon the pastor than abandon his own grandmother.

"He said he wouldn't wear the U.S. flag pin because it had become a substitute for true patriotism, then started wearing it. Ramped up his courtship of unions. Shifted from a pledge to protect working-class families from tax increases to a far more expensive promise not to raise taxes on families that earn up to $250,000 a year. Turned to longtime D.C. Democratic wise men to run his vice-presidential search and staff his foreign-policy brain trust.

"Presidential candidates often tack toward the center after securing their party's nominations. But all this tactical repositioning by Obama suggests that he's a more complex, pragmatic and arguably more opportunistic politician than the fresh face of "change we can believe in" that he presented during the primary season."

Obama is not the only revisionist in the campaign. Presumptive G.O.P. nominee John McCain has changed his positions on tax cuts, amnesty for illegal immigrants and offshore oil drilling. But Obama's pretension as a uniquely principled man of granitic integrity, a man who transcends the squalid politics of mere mortals, imparts a fragrance of hypocrisy to his agile pragmatism.

Yet Obama's support is sturdy, not issue-based. This is because so many of his followers are otherwise apolitical, and fairly contemptuous of conventional civic engagement. They are more enamored with the idea of Obama than with the actual man standing before them. He is a battle shield against the accountability and moralism of the Christian Right.

"My support is still strong," said Obama supporter David Christie, 20, in Talev's piece. "And I don't think folks my age will turn on him if he keeps doing things like that. Folks my age are excited, and that's not going to die because of a couple of decisions."

And for battle-hardened Democratic foot-soldiers, hungry after eight years out of office, hypocrisy and duplicity are a small price to pay for a return to happy days of free-flowing patronage.

"Rejecting public financing does seem kind of cynical," said Democratic legislator Ellen Nielsen of New Hampshire, "but for someone who wants to be president, if you aspire to that job I guess you have to do it. I don't expect him to be a moral paragon. You don't get to where he is if you are."

Obama Inoculates Against His Choice Not to Serve

Today, Obama and his confederates in the mass media are busily at work trying to refocus voters' attention from the fact that, although he is a healthy, strapping physical specimen, Obama has never served five minutes in the military. National Guardsmen Dan Quayle and George W. Bush are grizzled warriors by comparison. When it comes to military bona fides, Obama takes his place with the much-deferred Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and college cheerleader Trent Lott.

This presents some difficulties on Memorial Day weekend, as he attempts to hold his own against Republican candidate John McCain, Vietnam War hero, prisoner of war and U.S.S. Forrestal survivor. But Obama has made the best of a bad situation, putting McCain on the defensive for voting against a liberalized G.I. Bill that would have reduced military retention rates by an estimated 18 percent during a manpower crisis in the voluntary force in time of war. Adult supervision often presents a fat, immobile target.

Obama also appealed to military veterans and pro-military voters by promising that he will have a policy of "zero tolerance" for homelessness among veterans. Oh, really? Is he going to prohibit mental illness? Is he going to immunize veterans against all criminal prosecution? Maybe Montel's RV will be stocking Obama's magic "change" pill to prevent all drug abuse and alcoholism among veterans?

I wonder if Obama realizes how many veterans there are in this country? He's making promises to an awful lot of people. There probably weren't a whole lot of veterans going into "community organizing" back in Chicago, so we ought to forgive him if he has miscalculated.

JFK didn't need to out-promise his opponent, partly because his own World War II resume was so strong. He was the hero of PT 109, and suffered a back injury in action against the Japanese that pained him for the rest of his life. His opponent Richard Nixon was, like JFK, a WWII Navy veteran of the Pacific theater. The poker-playing supply officer Nixon had, admittedly, been more of a Sergeant Bilko figure than combat hero. But he and Kennedy shared the same basic worldview.

Obama has no such luxury. The contest between Obama and his opponent is often the difference between two starkly contrasting worldviews. McCain and his constituency self-identify as citizens of a grand and exceptional nation whereas early Obama supporters, upon honest reflection, would more likely identify themselves as citizens of the world. Now Obama must broaden his base. He must reach out to the people largely despised by his core supporters - he must appeal to voters who feel blessed, not embarrassed, to be American.

The pattern for Obama is that wherever he is weak, he promises more extravagantly. He knows next to nothing about international diplomacy and geo-political strategy; he promises a new era of friendship and world peace. He is clueless about economics; he promises to halt outsourcing, excessive corporate profits and capital flight, and to restore good manufacturing jobs. On health issues, he is slightly better informed, and his positions are accordingly more nuanced, more responsible than Hillary Clinton's.

This would seem to suggest that we have picked Obama before he was ripe. He may be a wise statesman twenty years from now, but we are locking him into snap judgments that we demand of him while he is yet very green, and it's going to be an ugly scene next year or the next when his various parasitical constituencies demand that he make good on his absurd promises. He will either have to break his promises, or dispossess innocent bystanders to satisfy his stalwart supporters and enforcers.

If he chooses the latter course, he will eventually learn the lessons of Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe: you can kill the goose that lays the golden egg, but you can only kill it once.

Humor in the Democratic Primaries

J.F.K. distinguished himself in part by his wit, but in the (pre-Vietnam) 1960 election the mass media were still somewhat deferential, or at least courteous, to political leaders on the national stage. There was no Laugh-In, no Rich Little, no Chevy Chase, no Saturday Night Live yet. And so J.F.K. could dish out the humor, but wasn't generally an object of parody or derision.

Times have changed. Despite the Liberal U.S. news media's obvious favor, Barack Obama has nevertheless been satirized and parodied to an extent J.F.K. could never have imagined.

The news media abstained from any serious scrutiny of Obama until the cumulative primary election results were irreversible, but all good things must come to an end, and when Saturday Night Live broke ranks to parody its own (NBC) newsman Tim Russert, much of the news herd shifted to more even-handed treatment of Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Neither would J.F.K. have recognized the cottage industry in humor driven by the news cycle, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Obama figured prominently in the Daily Show's April 14 "Gaffe-In" feature after his condescending comments about embittered, xenophobic blue-collar Pennsylvanians "clinging" to their (Christian) faith and their guns due to unkept political promises. http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=166074&title=headlines-gaffe-in

The most absurd and stinging parodies nowadays come from the blogosphere. Perhaps the zaniest is Red State Update, presented by two exaggerated "good ole boys" from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on YouTube.com. Here is their parody of former presidential candidate Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama, accomplished by overdubbing an actual joint interview. It is absurd, more than a little offensive, and side-splittingly hilarious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsvJyJsoBLY

Columnist Says Rezko Protege Obama Helped Cause Chicago Subprime Crisis

JFK was economically sophisticated, as befits an Ivy League-educated heir to the enormous Kennedy fortune. In some ways, he was Ronald Reagan's economic policy precursor, boldly slashing taxes to stimulate the economy and, counter-intuitively, increase government revenues.

But Barack Obama's economic policies - despite his own biography of privilege and prosperity - focus on class envy and poverty rather than the creation, much less the conservation, of wealth.

The Community Reinvestment Act, passed in reaction to racially bounded "redlining," legally empowered community organizers like Obama to pressure banks into extending loans, against their better judgment, to subprime borrowers.

According to Jerry Bowyer, Obama and his comrades are responsible for much of the vast increase in subprime portfolios that now threatens to bring the U.S. economy down. Here, Bowyer brings his accusation against economically clueless community activists and demagogues who insisted on egalitarian loan policies as if there would be no day of reckoning.

How "Community Organizers" (Like Obama) Created the Subprime Crisis

by Jerry Bowyer
TownHall.com

I wrote to you previously (Meet Barry Obama, 'Fair Housing' Lawyer) about the Community Reinvestment Act, a law which compels banks to make home loans in minority neighborhoods to people who were poor credit risks.

Although the CRA is well known in the financial industry, political pundits and reporters often know very little about finance and so have missed this extremely important aspect of the story. Ignorance of economics doesn't help much either. The political class seems blissfully unaware of the concept of unintended consequences which is the idea that laws which are designed to make our lives better often make our lives worse.

On a recent edition of Kudlow and Company, I debated Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders on precisely this point. He seemed not only to disagree with my point that if congress compels banks to make Subprime loans, then they share responsibility for the crisis that results when the borrowers default; he seemed not to understand it. For him once we identify the target group as bankers, nothing else matters - they're bad and he's good, no more reasoning is necessary.

It's not just Congress that's responsible. Yes, they forged the weapons, but some army needed to wield them. That's where guys like Barry Obama came in to the picture.

When Barry (who was gradually changing his name to Barack around this time) graduated from Columbia, he took a brief stint as a researcher writing for a corporate consulting firm. According to his memoirs he thought of himself as 'a spy' who was dropped 'behind enemy lines'.

Shortly thereafter, he left the enemy territory of corporate America and moved to a job about which he could feel proud - he went to work for the New York branch of the Public Interest Research Group.

PIRG is one of those left of center activist groups who, among other things, uses the legitimate concept of 'fair housing' to force banks into making bad loans. PIRG has actively lobbied for a stronger (yes, you guessed it) Community Reinvestment Act.

According to his bio, and accounts from friends, Obama became an expert in real estate law and fair housing while working as a community organizer and public interest lawyer. This is especially the case during his Chicago period.

After graduating from law school Barack worked for various community groups which were attempting to get black churches politically involved in left-of-center causes. He was hired because the Developing Communities Project, which was headed by two older Jewish gentlemen, was having trouble making headway in the black community. By then, the name change to Barack was complete and so was the shift to an Afro-centric identity. Barack was a natural.

He was able to play upon crowds' sense of racial identity, castigating black audiences for their failure to embrace the right policies, but offering hope to them in the form of his own leadership. He joined a prominent Afro-centric church at this time, headed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Eventually Barack joined the civil rights law firm, Miner, Ballard and Galland, where he specialized in fair housing. That's where he did work for the (now indicted) Syrian-born entrepreneur Tony Rezko.

Rezko was a very powerful and politically connected urban real estate developer who did quite a lot of business with the government. Rezko helped Barack go from public interest lawyer to State Senator. And Rezko didn't just help Barack into the upper legislative house, he helped him into his family house as well.

One wonders to what degree Rezko was helped by low-income-sub-prime-lending-fair-housing-industrial complex of urban Chicago. For all the details we may need to wait for the Rezko trial.

One thing, however, is perfectly clear already. Obama spent his pre-elected career working right in the middle of the complex of law firms and activist groups which use law and regulations to push banks into vastly increasing their lending to Subprime borrowers right in the middle of the golden age of the expansion of the Subprime industry.

Like JFK, Obama Lacks Spine to Repudiate Racists Whose Support He Needs

JFK made nice speeches about civil rights, but knew that he needed the support of racist Southern Democrats in the U.S. Senate, so he was relatively inert during the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement.

He also understood that Blacks were inalienably Democratic, and therefore would remain in his column despite his flirtations with white racist demogogues like James Eastland, Orville Faubus, William Fulbright and Sam Ervin.

Likewise, Sen. Obama has generated some soaring rhetoric about unity and racial reconciliation, but he understands as a prosperous biracial man that his bona fides with the resentful Black underclass are not secure enough to permit him to repudiate Black racist demogogues and economic hypocrites like his Chicago pastor.

Just in case Obama wavers, ideological enforcers like the Washington Post's Colbert King are at the ready with columns like the one below.

Why Obama Stands With His Church
By Colbert King

All they wanted to do was pray with the rest of the congregation. But that was asking too much.

To be sure, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two leaders in Philadelphia's black community, enjoyed great success in bringing African Americans into the Christian fold. But the steady growth in black membership at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church distressed the white congregation that owned the church.

At first, black Christians were moved to seats along the wall. That still allowed for too much mingling. So one Sunday morning as Allen, Jones and the other black worshipers knelt to pray, white church elders tapped Jones and Allen on the shoulders and told them to take their praying upstairs to a recently built balcony.

Rather than submit to such humiliation, Jones, Allen and the rest of the black worshipers walked out. The two men formed their own congregations.

Jones gained permission from the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania to establish America's first black parish, St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. He eventually became the Episcopal Church's first African American priest.

Allen formed a Methodist congregation that eventually became today's multimillion-member African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

The walkout in the City of Brotherly Love occurred in 1787 -- a year that marks the beginning of America's independent black church, a theological movement born out of racism.

This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC's Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian."

Trinity is Barack Obama's church and the place where the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. -- a gift to all who would bring down Obama -- served as pastor until his recent retirement.

Buchanan and his ilk look at Trinity's slogan with horror. They label the church's theological values "Afro-centric" and "racially exclusive." Trinity is beyond the pale of Christianity, at least their version of it. Psst: Trinity has plenty of company, coast to coast.

Many black congregations, from storefronts to mega-churches, are in sync with the Trinity slogan. They, too, see no need to apologize for their African roots. Nor are they ashamed of preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But hey, what's with this newfound concern about African Americans worshiping among themselves in their own way? More important, who forced that separation?

As sociologist Kenneth Clark noted in his book "Dark Ghetto," ministers and lay leaders of white Christian churches historically were unwilling to incorporate large numbers of blacks into their houses of Christ. That's still the case today with some churches.

Truth is, folks like Buchanan don't really care that America's Christian congregations don't look like salt and pepper on Sunday mornings. The reality of blacks and whites worshiping apart doesn't disturb them. If anything, Buchanan thinks African Americans are ingrates -- that we should be satisfied with our station in life.

"America has been the best country on earth for black folks," Buchanan wrote in his column, " PJB: A Brief for Whitey," posted on his Web site yesterday.

"It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known," he wrote.

Like JFK, Obama Leading "Double Life"

JFK was a notorious adulterer who profaned the presidency with multiple trysts, and used the White House staff to prevent his wife from discovering women with him there. By contrast, Obama appears to be a faithful husband. Yet, as Thomas Sowell writes below, he "has been leading as much of a double life as Eliot Spitzer."

What Obama found irresistible, however, was not a mini-skirt or a bursting bodice, but the cult of Black racism and treason in Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Now he is telling his spiritual mistress of 20 years not to call him at work, and not to embarrass him in front of his new friends. But it's hard not to notice the lipstick on his collar.

Race and Politics
By Thomas Sowell
March 18, 2008

There is something both poignant and galling about the candidacy of Barack Obama. Any American, regardless of party or race, has to find it heartening that the country has reached the point where a black candidate for President of the United States sweeps so many primaries in states where the overwhelming majority of the population is white.

We have all seen the crowds enthralled by Barack Obama's rhetoric and theatrical style. Many of his supporters put their money where their mouths were, so that this recently arrived Senator received more millions of dollars in donations than candidates who have been far more visible on the national stage for far more years.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Barack Obama has been leading as much of a double life as Eliot Spitzer.

While talking about bringing us together and deploring "divisive" actions, Senator Obama has for 20 years been a member of a church whose minister, Jeremiah Wright, has said that "God Bless America" should be replaced by "God damn America" -- among many other wild and even obscene denunciations of American society, including blanket racist attacks on whites.

Nor was this an isolated example. Fox News Channel has played tapes of various sermons of Jeremiah Wright, and says that it has tapes with hours of more of the same.

Wright's actions matched his words. He went with Louis Farrakhan to Libya and Farrakhan received an award from his church.

Sean Hannity began reporting on Jeremiah Wright back in April of 2007. But the mainstream media saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil.

Now that the facts have come out in a number of places, and can no longer be suppressed, many in the media are trying to spin these facts out of existence.

Spin number one is that Jeremiah Wright's words were "taken out of context." Like most people who use this escape hatch, those who say this do not explain what the words mean when taken in context. In just what context does "God damn America" mean something different?

Spin number two is that Barack Obama says he didn't hear the particular things that Jeremiah Wright said that are now causing so much comment.

It wasn't just an isolated remark. Nor were the enthusiastic responses of the churchgoers something which suggests that this anti-American attitude was news to them or something that they didn't agree with. If Barack Obama was not in church that particular day, he belonged to that church for 20 years. He made a donation of more than $20,000 to that church. In all that time, he never had a clue as to what kind of man Jeremiah Wright was? Give me a break! You can't be with someone for 20 years, call him your mentor, and not know about his racist and anti-American views.

Neither Barack Obama nor his media spinmeisters can put this story behind him with some facile election year rhetoric. If Senator Obama wants to run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds, then at least let the rabbits and the hounds know that.

The fact that Obama talks differently than Jeremiah Wright does not mean that his track record is different. Barack Obama's voting record in the Senate is perfectly consistent with the far left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife's statement that she was never proud of her country before is consistent with that ideology.

Senator Barack Obama's political success thus far has been a blow for equality. But equality has its down side. Equality means that a black demagogue who has been exposed as a phony deserves exactly the same treatment as a white demagogue who has been exposed as a phony.

We don't need a President of the United States who got to the White House by talking one way, voting a very different way in the Senate, and who for 20 years followed a man whose words and deeds contradict Obama's carefully crafted election year image.
--------
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

JFK felt obliged to make a major speech during his 1960 presidential campaign when critics predicted that the Catholic Church would dominate the U.S. government under the Catholic Kennedy. He promised that no clergyman would influence his decisions in the White House, and most Americans found that convincing. As it turns out, there is some evidence that Francis Cardinal Spellman was unusually influential as to U.S. foreign policy, but this was no less true during the Eisenhower administration.

Obama has had the opposite errand until recently. Last year he was pledging his devotion to 20-year spiritual adviser Jeremiah Wright. This was in part to deflect accusations that he is a secret Muslim. Now he may wish he had identified himself as a Muslim, because his ties to Wright are proving controversial and embarrassing. Now Obama has to make a speech accounting for his devotion to a racist, divisive pastor and congregation.

If you missed the "Black Values" on Barack Obama's church's About Us page, it's too late.

The 160-word section has since been deleted from the About Us page, replaced by videotaped testimonials from church members vouching for Pastor Jeremiah Wright, including a white official from the parent denomination, United Church of Christ, who said she feels welcome at predominantly black Trinity.

“These black ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever blacks are gathered,” the original page said. But it was taken down, and Wright has gone into seclusion, unavailable for comment.

Obama is expected to deliver a speech today to clarify his views on the racially inflammatory, anti-American sermons that Wright has delivered at Trinity United Church of Christ during the two decades Obama has been a member.

JFK had Spellman; Obama has Wright

Like Barack Obama, JFK was close to a churchman, Cardinal Francis Spellman. Spellman was alleged to have been complicit in the coup against South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, himself a Catholic, which led to Diem's assassination by Buddhist forces.

Spellman was a fierce anti-Communist who was very influential in U.S. foreign policy, and was occasionally dispatched by the Vatican to represent Catholic interests with national leaders, including Eisenhower and Kennedy.

Obama, too, has close ties to a churchman with foreign policy interests and strong opinions about the illegitimacy of American society. Obama's confidante, United Church of Christ preacher Jeremiah A. Wright, laid out his view of America in a YouTube sermon described below by Newsmax.com correspondent Ronald Kessler.

Obama Minister's Hatred of America
By Ronald Kessler

In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama’s longtime minister, friend, and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs, and creating a racist society that would never elect a black man as president. The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor of Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, gave the sermon at the school’s Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel in Washington on Jan. 15, 2006.

While snippets from the sermon have appeared in a few magazines, no news outlet has previously run the entire text of Wright’s diatribe. An audio recording of the sermon appears on YouTube.

Raising his voice in rage, Wright began his sermon by saying, “Fact No. 1: We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college. Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body.”

Omitting fact No. 2, Wright thundered on: “Fact No. 3: America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. We invaded Grenada for no other reason than to get Maurice Bishop [a Grenada revolutionary who seized power in 1979], invaded Panama because Noriega would not dance to our tune any more. We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers. We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Qaddafi.”

Wright continued: “Fact No. 4: We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.

Fact No. 5: We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-semitic.”

His voice rising, Wright was on a roll: “Fact No. 6: We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. They’re just finding out about that. We care nothing about human life if the ends justifies the means.

Fact No. 7: We do not care if poor black and brown children cannot read and kill each other senselessly. We abandoned the cities back in the '60s when the riots started and it really doesn’t matter what those nations do to each other; we gave up on them and public education of poor people who live in the projects . . .”

Wright went on: “Fact No. 8: We started the AIDS virus, and now that it is out of control, we still put more money in the military than in medicine; more money in hate than in humanitarian concerns. Everybody does not have access to healthcare, I don’t care what the rich white boys in the Senate say. Listen up: If you are poor, black and elderly, forget it.”

Concluding, Wright said: “Fact No. 9: We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty.

And fact No. 10: We are selfish, self-centered egotists who are arrogant and ignorant and betray our church and do not try to make the kingdom that Jesus talked about a reality. And — and — and in light of these 10 facts, God has got to be sick of this s***.”

Meeting with Jewish leaders in Cleveland on Feb. 24, Obama described Wright as being like “an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with.” He rarely mentions the items of disagreement.

Obama went on to explain away Wright’s anti-Zionist statements as being rooted in his anger over the Jewish state’s support for South Africa under its previous policy of apartheid. As with a previous claim that his church gave an award to Louis Farrakhan because of his work with ex-offenders, Obama made that up out of thin air. Wright’s statements denouncing Israel have not been qualified in any way.

As for Wright’s repeated comments blaming America for the 9/11 attacks, Obama has said it sounds as if the minister was trying to be “provocative.” Hearing Wright’s venomous and paranoid denunciations of this country, the vast majority of Americans would walk out. Instead, Obama and his wife Michelle have presumably sat through hundreds of similar sermons. Indeed, Obama has described Wright as his “sounding board” during the two decades he has known him.

Obama has said he found religion through Wright in the 1980s and consulted him before deciding to run for president. He prayed privately with Wright before announcing his candidacy last year. Aside from showing poor judgment, it’s difficult to imagine that Obama could be so close to Wright without agreeing with at least some of his views.

In light of Wright’s perspective, Michelle Obama’s comment that she feels proud of America for the first time makes perfect sense. (In a second iteration, she said she feels “really proud” for the first time.)

Wright’s blame-America mentality also fits in neatly with many on the left who support Obama’s weak approach to national security and dealing with foreign dictators. To date, the Obama-loving media have largely ignored the senator’s close association with Wright. The question is whether the blackout will be lifted before voters decide whether they want to entrust Obama with America’s future.

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com.

Somali Tribesmen Assert Jurisdiction Over Obama's Female Rival, Demand U.S. Apology

John F. Kennedy had a devoted following in his family's ancestral homeland, but Ireland generally stayed out of U.S. elections, and there was no Irish concept of dhimmi. Barack Obama's ethnic Somali kinsmen in Kenya are decidedly less deferential toward U.S. sovereignty, and have intiated a trial of Obama's American rival Hillary Clinton in absentia for campaign tactics they have declared unacceptable.

Pro-Obama Somali immigrant activists in Minneapolis, also, have demanded an apology for the release of a photograph that shows the Illinois Senator wearing a Somali turban and tribal robes during a visit to his father's homeland in western Kenya.

In 1993, Somali Muslims massacred several U.S. soldiers who were part of a U.N. peacekeeping mission to Mogadishu, then mutilated them, displayed them to gawkers, and drug their bodies through the streets to the merriment of Somali onlookers.

The Obama photograph presents an unforgettable image of a potential U.S. Commander-in-Chief dressing himself in the robes and turban of an ethnic group whose response to the mutilation of idealistic young American soldiers was joy and celebration.

The ceremonial photo does not predate the "Blackhawk Down" tragedy, and therefore Obama's worldview can legitimately be analyzed in the context of Mogadishu. One wonders what Obama was thinking when he let these people dress him up and photograph him like that, and it is impossible to imagine J.F.K. committing any analogous gaffe.

You have to wonder what Obama will let other foreigners do to and in the United States, as long as they express personal admiration for him.

Clinton faces Kenya cattle fine over Obama photo
By Daniel Wallis

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenyan elders may impose a fine on U.S. presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, payable in livestock, after a photo of her rival Barack Obama in robes dragged their people into the race for the White House.

The picture, which appeared on a U.S. Web site, showed the Illinois senator in a white headdress and traditional Somali attire during a 2006 visit to Wajir in Kenya's remote northeast.

Obama has battled a whispering campaign by fringe elements who wrongly say he is Muslim and his aides accused Clinton's campaign of "the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering" after the photograph was published.

Wajir elders resolved to file an official complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, dropping earlier plans to hold a protest after Friday prayers.

They said they would also convene a traditional Somali court to investigate the matter. It can impose fines that are payable in cattle, goats or camels.

"We will go ahead with this case whether Senator Clinton or Democratic party leaders turn up or not," said Mohamed Ibrahim, a member of the clan that hosted Obama during his trip. "But this whole thing can be avoided if only an apology is made."

The late father of the Democratic frontrunner was from western Kenya. Many in the east African country support Obama the way the Irish idolized President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s -- as one of their own who succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

"The clan he was with have every right to be offended," said Hussein Ali, a 32-year-old unemployed man outside the main Jamia Mosque in the capital Nairobi.

"Obama's enemies are trying to portray him as a terrorist, saying all Muslims, and especially Somalis, are dangerous men."

MOLLIFYING (OBAMA'S KINSMEN)

Clinton's campaign denies authorizing the release of the controversial photo but says that, with 700 staffers, it could not be certain someone had not sent it out unofficially.

That has not mollified locals in Wajir, a small desert town near the Somali border, who demanded Clinton "clear her name".

Other Kenyans questioned the timing of the picture's publication, days before make-or-break votes in Ohio and Texas next week.

For many Americans, Somalia conjures up disturbing images of dead U.S. troops being dragged through Mogadishu's dusty streets during the "Black Hawk Down" battle of 1993.

The U.S. military launched air strikes on the Horn of Africa country last year in its hunt for al Qaeda, including suspects wanted over the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1988.

"We suspect the intent behind releasing this picture now, just before Tuesday's very critical vote," said Omar Jamal, head of the St Paul, Minnesota-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center.

His lobby group, which works with Somali immigrants in the United States, has also demanded an apology from Clinton's camp.

"They are trying to make a link between a man who could be the next U.S. president and a country with al Qaeda terrorist activities. They're trying to tell citizens, look who you might be voting for," he told Reuters by telephone.

"Everyone is very upset. It's outrageous and undermining."

Why Are Barack & Michelle Obama Devoted to a Racist, Divisive, Anti-American Church?

John F. Kennedy was a lifelong, if nominal, member of the Catholic Church, which is not associated with any particular ethnic group, and indeed may consist of every race and ethnicity on the planet.

Barak H. Obama, by contrast, is a member of a highly ethnocentric sect so preoccupied with African racial identity that it lauds non-Christian afrocentric allies like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in its official publications.

Like Erik Rush, I have waited in vain for Sen. Obama to account for his devotion to a sect that is so hostile to assimilated American identification, and so hospitable to the divisive, anti-Semitic, racially inflammatory message of a Muslim race-baiter.

Demercrats
item by Erik Rush

How many Americans would vote for a presidential candidate who was the member of a church that professed the following credo?

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

The question is rhetorical, of course. The answer is that such a candidate wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected dog catcher...let alone President, because that candidate would be instantly branded a racist, among the most vile and frightening of white supremacists. And those holding the branding irons would be 100% right.

Yet, in the “About” section of the U.S. Senate website for Barack Obama, Democratic senator from Illinois and contender for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, it states that Obama and his family “live on Chicago’s South Side where they attend Trinity United Church of Christ.”

So…? Well, to say that the Trinity United Church of Christ (http://www.tucc.org) is afrocentric in the extreme would be a gross understatement. It’s not simply afrocentric, it’s African-centric. In fact, one could argue that this organization worships things African to a far greater degree than they do Christ, and gives the impression of being a separatist “church” in the same vein as do certain supremacist “white brethren” churches – or even Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

Shocking? An overstatement? An overreaction? One can see for oneself on the Trinity United Church website, which is replete with confirmation of what I present here.

What follows is an excerpt from their Mission Statement:

“We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent.

We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism.

It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.

“Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee chaired by Vallmer Jordan in 1981. We believe in the following 12 precepts and covenantal statements. These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered. They must reflect on the following concepts:

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

Sound familiar? Of course it is, since it’s identical to the 12-point list at the beginning of this column – the one from the theoretical white supremacist candidate’s church; the only difference is the substitution of the word “Black” for “White.”

Trinity United Church of Christ’s congregation also claims to hold to a “10-point Vision” which is similarly afrocentric or, if you will, separatist. Again, like the Nation of Islam, a white separatist church or the Branch Davidians, Trinity United more resembles a cult than a church. Only this one has as one of its most prominent members a serious contender for the White House. And George W. Bush’s born-again Christian status scares people?

These revelations, of course shed all the light we need on Obama’s inscrutability; since before he announced his candidacy, both the Right and Left have commented on the lack of information vis-à-vis just who Barack Obama is and what he’s about.

From The Chicago Tribune, February 6, 2007, column "Against Middleclassness?" by Rich Lowry: “Vallmer Jordan, a church member who helped draft the precepts, said they were designed to empower the black community and counter a value system imposed by whites. ‘The big question mark was racism,’ he said. ‘Black disempowerment was an integral part of that historical value system. It became increasingly apparent to me that we black people had not developed our own value system . . . to help us overcome all we knew we had to battle.’”

“A value system imposed by whites…” Is Jordan speaking of the value system that kept families together and promoted morality, industry and integrity, or the one imposed by Liberal dependency pimps since the Civil Rights Movement?

True enough that many blacks did abandon values; again, this was due to the corruption of the black clergy by white socialists and their black foremen.

Trinity United seems to have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Gravitation toward an Africanized “year-round Kwanzaa”-based pseudo-Christianity seems less of a solution than returning to the moral and social conservatism Blacks held prior to the aforementioned socialists gaining their stranglehold in the black community.

So is Obama seeking to be our first black president, or our first stealth black nationalist president?

You see, were he a run-of-the-mill insincere Christian of convenience like Bill Clinton, Obama might belong to a run-of-the-mill, lukewarm, large nondescript church. But he doesn’t.

He belongs to a church which is (as I indicated before) blatantly afrocentric and even suggests the supremacy of Africa’s descendants in America. Granted that the Left will have no qualms about this highly questionable affiliation, but what about all of the American swing voters to whom Obama has built broad appeal by presenting himself as sort of a generic, open-minded moderate Democrat (as Bill Clinton also did, by the way)? Are they going to go for a candidate whose heart is actually closer to that of a refined Black Panther?

Trinity United clearly embraces things African above things American. The content of their website makes this undeniably clear. Aside from this tack being divisive, separatist and calling into question its adherents’ identification as Americans, if they’re looking for values, they – and Obama – would be better served by looking to modern political conservatives and traditional Christianity than retrograde African precepts and the Democrat Party.

Obama’s affiliation with this church, if I must call it that, should be as alarming to the American voter as a Republican candidate for president belonging to the Aryan Brethren Church of Christ. Any argument against this assertion is politically-correct delusion, reverse discrimination and a hypocrisy – a very dangerous one.

Republicans Relieved as Barack Obama Dispatches Formidable Hillary Clinton

John F. Kennedy was not an all-out Liberal, and in fact campaign records show that he donated money to one of Richard Nixon's early campaigns. When he ran against Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, he was able to get out to Nixon's right on some foreign policy issues, and to paint the Republican as soft on Communism.

Barack Obama couldn't do that to Rudy Giuliani, much less John McCain. And of course he wouldn't want to. His Senate voting record is to the left of Teddy Kennedy's, Dick Durbin's and Charles Schumer's. But this will leave him less room for maneuver in September and October, when the conventional wisdom is that both candidates contest for moderate and independent votes.

Obama might defy that conventional wisdom, and turn out enough hip-hop youngsters and swooning celebrity worshippers to win without making any concessions to the center. I believe it's possible. But Republicans don't think he can, and according to Christopher Ruddy of Newsmax, they're breathing a sigh of relief as they see Obama putting Hillary out of business.

Here's his article:

Why the GOP Loves Obama
by Christopher Ruddy

Republicans this week are breathing a deep sigh of relief.

What was seen as a washout for them this coming November — with big losses expected in the House and Senate and a catastrophic loss of the White House — is now shaping up to be less ominous.

With the Democrats moving to pick Sen. Barack Obama as their nominee, the Republicans see a real opportunity to keep the Oval Office in GOP hands.

There is no question that the Republicans had viewed Hillary Clinton as the most formidable of the Democratic candidates.

During one of the primary debates, Obama suggested that the Republicans were “comfortable” attacking Hillary, suggesting they actually wanted her to be the nominee. Au contraire. Republicans were attacking Mrs. Clinton because they believed she would be the nominee. They could hardly foresee Obama’s rise.

Indeed, she was the Democratic front-runner and hence the focus of their attacks. Now, Obama is discovering that he’s the focus of Republican scrutiny, with John McCain highlighting Obama's accommodationist views with tyrants.

The glee seen in GOP eyes this week can be chalked up to the clearly visible fault lines shaping up for the November election, a seismic battle between McCain and Obama.

There are many reasons the GOP would rather face Obama. Here are some of the best reasons:
Obama is the risky liberal. Every time the Democrats run a liberal like Obama, who the National Journal reports has a 100 percent liberal voting record, they lose.

Remember President McGovern, President Dukakis, President Kerry? Mrs. Clinton, however, has been quite clever in her record and rhetoric to come across as more moderate. In New York state she consistently won hardcore Republican districts in her two Senate races.

A McCain insider told me this week that Obama’s support — for example, for driver's licenses for illegals — is worth at least “five percentage points in the election.” Mrs. Clinton was smart enough to back away from that hot-button issue.

Obama energizes Democratic voters. It’s been talked about quite a bit that Obama is a charismatic man who energizes young voters. But young voters notoriously don’t vote.
Remember all the hoopla in the last election with MTV and its “Vote or Die” campaign to bring out antiwar young voters for President Kerry?

Indeed, Obama, as the first African-American candidate of a major party, will energize black voters. But don’t the Democrats know that black voters vote as a bloc for them already?

What does Obama actually bring to the table for Democrats? It’s not clear. Mrs. Clinton, as her longtime critic Dick Morris likes to point out, would have most assuredly energized women voters, especially millions of single moms that have never voted before.

Obama’s Latino problem. Clearly Latino or Hispanic voters are shaping up to be the key swing vote in this election, as they have been in recent elections. Some political pundits say George Bush’s come-from-behind win in 2004 was due to the solid 40 percent of Hispanics who voted for him, tipping the election in his favor.

This year was shaping up to be a terrible year for the GOP vis-à-vis Hispanic voters. But in primary after primary, Obama has had great difficulty winning over Latino voters.
Even in Illinois, where he beat Hillary to 2 to 1 in the primary, he only captured 52 percent of his home state’s Hispanic vote.

There are a variety of explanations for Obama’s Latino problem, including the belief there is an ethnic rivalry between Hispanics and blacks. Hispanics would like to see a Latino president in the White House, so the theory goes.

Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, has done extremely well among Latino voters, perhaps owing to her husband’s likeability among these voters.

The recent primaries show Obama improving with Hispanic voters. Republicans, however, believe the problem with this key group will persist.

And then there is John McCain, who is the one Republican who is very well liked by Latino voters. He’s also a strong leader, which Hispanics respect. He’s pro-immigrant. As we all know, McCain joined Ted Kennedy in backing the recent immigration bill.

There’s little doubt Hillary could keep the Democratic stranglehold on Latino voters. Obama won’t.

Obama’s naiveté. Don’t forget, America is still in a war on terror. It is doubtful America will be tempted to go for an untested leader, no matter how charismatic he may be.

Some have drawn the comparison between Obama and JFK’s election win in 1960 during the height of the Cold War. But the Kennedy-Obama comparison is a weak one. For starters, John Kennedy was a war hero when he was elected president. Obama can make no such claim.

Kennedy also had far more Washington experience in Congress and the Senate than Obama.

JFK also had his well-known father Joe at his side. And Democrats like to forget this, but Kennedy outflanked Nixon on defense issues, arguing that Nixon was too soft on communism. Obama’s dovish complaints about the Bush administration being too hawkish on terror won’t resonate with middle-of-the-road voters.

With good reason, the GOP is feeling better, finding its second wind as it coalesces around John McCain.

Despite some differences with the maverick senator, the Republican base will turn out for him. His $12 million fundraising haul for January is just one sign of that.

But there are many other reasons the GOP is more comfortable with Hillary out of the picture and Obama as the nominee.

First, Obama will not be able to lay claim to the good economic times of the 1990s that Bill Clinton presided over, as Hillary can.

And Obama will be a nightmare for Democrats with swing voters in key states. Take for example the highly influential Cuban-American vote that Bill Clinton won in 1992 and 1996 — and was the key reason George Bush beat Al Gore.

The Cuban vote has been moving into the Democratic column but they will not go for Obama because he has clearly stated he will open up relations with Castro.

Sen. Clinton’s announced Cuba policies take a hard line, which resonates with these voters. And then there are the key Jewish communities in swing states like Florida and Ohio that are already deeply worried about electing Obama to the presidency.

Obama has talked openly about sitting down — without any preconditions — with Iran’s diabolical leader Ahmadinejad, who just this week referred to Israel as “bacteria” and has said in the past that the Jewish state is a “disgraceful blot” that should be “wiped off the map.”

With the McCain campaign blanketing key markets with TV ads featuring “independent Democrat” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Obama will be in deep trouble.

The Democrats haven’t completely abandoned Hillary. But it sure looks that way.

There’s an oft-quoted saying that the Democrats “fall in love and Republicans fall in line.”

After this November, we may have to change that to “Democrats often like to run off the side of a cliff and the Republicans love to watch them.”

© 2008 Newsmax.