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BARACK
OBAMA
JANUARY 2010
OBAMA GOT $20 MILLION FROM HEALTH
INDUSTRY IN 2008
A FEW QUESTIONS FOR BARACK OBAMA
OBAMA & THE AMERICAN OLIGARCHY
MOVING ON WITHOUT OBAMA
SUMMERS HANDLED HARVARD'S FUNDS
AS BADLY AS OURS
OBAMA GETS INTO BED WITH COPYRIGHT
EXTREMISTS
OBAMA HELPING TO WEAKEN OFFSHORE
TAX RESTRICTION
BIG TIME PAY TO PLAY AT THE WHITE
HOUSE
NOVEMBER 2009
OBAMA BACKS MAJOR RESTRICTIONS
ON FREE SPEECH
OBAMA FIGHTING TO CONCEAL TORTURE
EVIDENCE
HOW OBAMA CAVED TO BIG PHARMA
OBAMA'S GUERRILLA WAR AGAINST
THE AMERICAN LEFT
OCTOBER 2009
OBAMA'S NOBEL COMPANY
PUTTING OBAMA BEHIND US
OBAMA TALKS ABOUT HIMSELF 1200
TIMES IN 41 SPEECHES
MODIFIED DREAMS FROM OBAMA'S FATHER
OBAMA SNUBS GORDON BROWN
SEPTEMBER 2009
THE ENDLESS OBAMAMERCIAL
DEMOCRATS BECOMING SKEPTICS OF
CZARISM
OBAMA DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW
IF YOU'RE ON THE TERRORIST WATCH LIST
AUGUST 2009
HOW TO SPOT A CONSERVATIVE
WHAT IF OBAMA IS WRONG?
A GOOD SUMMARY OF THE OBAMA BIRTH
CONTROVERSY
GREAT THOUGHTS OF BARACK OBAMA
BEFORE HE WAS PRESIDENT AND TRYING TO RUSH THROUGH A 1000 PAGE
HEALTH CARE PLAN
JULY 2009
REMEMBER HOW OBAMA WAS GOING TO
GET THOSE LOBBYISTS OFF OUR BACK?
OBAMA CLAIMS RIGHT TO KEEP PEOPLE
IMPRISONED EVEN IF ACQUITTED
OBAMA WANTS TO DECIDE WHEN YOU’RE
NOT WORTH LIVING ANYMORE
OBAMA'S CLASSROOM SPIES
SMOKE GETS IN OBAMA'S MOUTH
OBAMA DISSES MAYORS
OBAMA IN TROUBLE WITH RURAL DEMOCRATS
OVER CAR DEALERS
JUNE 2009
OBAMA FIRES INSPECTOR GENERAL
WHO WENT AFTER HIS PAL
FOLLOW THE BOUNCING 'JOBS SAVED'
OBAMA NAMES ANTI-ABORTION FIGURE
TO KEY HEALTH JOB
THE PANOBAMARAMA VIEW OF THINGS
OBAMA SEEKS POWER TO HIDE WAR
CRIMES
GRAND THEFT AUTO: OBAMA'S PENSION
SCAM
DREAMS FROM MY FATHER, WORDS FROM
BILL AYERS?
MULTICULTURALISM ON THE CHEAP
ANOTHER OBAMA PROMISE DOWN THE
DRAIN
MAY 2009
OBAMA CONSIDERS VAT TAX
OBAMA SEEKS POWERS OF A DICTATOR
OBAMA ACCUSED OF DECEIVING CONGRESS
MEMBERS ON AUTO PLANT CLOSINGS
HOLBROOKE, OTHER OBAMITES, REPORTED
TO BILDERBERG
HEALTH INDUSTRY SAYS OBAMA MISLED
ON ITS PROMISE
OBAMA, MEDIA LAUNCH WAR ON SOCIAL
SECURITY & MEDICARE
OBAMA'S HEALTHCARE REFORM MALPRACTICE
OBAMA'S HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANY
BAILOUT
OBAMA PROMISES SOME PROTECTION
FROM OFFSHORE SCAMS
STATS: PRESS FAWNS OVER OBAMA
OBAMA'S CZAROMANIA
OBAMA DUMPS NAFTA CAMPAIGN PROMISE
OBAMA
WIGGLES ON PROSECUTION OF BUSH REGIME CRIMES
OBAMA REFUSES TO PROSECUTE CIA
TORTURE CRIMINALS
APRIL 2009
OBAMA NAMES FIFTH RIAA ATTORNEY
TO JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
OBAMA GOES BEYOND BUSH IN SUPPORT
OF ILLEGAL WIRETAPS
LIBERAL GROUPS HAPPILY ENLIST
IN OBAMA'S WAR
OBAMA SAY U.S. IS NOT AT WAR WITH
ISLAM (NOT INCULDING PALESTINE, SYRIA, IRAN, IRAQ, PAKISTAN &
AFGHANISTAN)
OBAMA BACKS SCHOOL DISCRIMINATION
WELCOME TO OBAMA'S WAR
HILL PROGRESSIVES BEING DISSED
BY OBAMA
OBAMA ALIGNS HIMSELF WITH RIGHT
WING OF DEMOCRATS
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SUPPORTS
RECORDING INDUSTRY BULLIES
OBAMA CAVES TO ISRAEL LOBBY
MARCH 2009
OBAMA HAVING A HARD TIME KEEPING
UP WITH IT ALL
OBAMA'S TELEPROMPTER DEPENDENCE
OBAMA'S TECHNOCRATIC AUTOCRACY
ANOTHER CZAR, ANOTHER CONFLICT
OF INTEREST
OBAMA FURTHERS THE MYTH ABOUT
SCHOOLS AND JOBS
OBAMA PROMISES TO OBSERVE TWO-THIRDS
OF HIS IRAQ PROMISE
WHOSE DEFICIT IS IT?
NIXON & OBAMA'S FIRST 100
DAYS
THE STORY SO FAR: OBAMA &
THE RIGHT
OBAMA'S TEAM: CLINTONISTA RETREADS
& ELITE COLLEGE GRADS
OBAMA AIDES SAY OUTSOURCING TORTURE
IS 'STATE SECRET'
FEBRUARY 2009
FORGET THE HONEYMOON
WHAT THE CENTRISTS HAVE WROUGHT
OBAMA BREAKS FAITH ON FAITH POLICY
YOU KNOW IT'S BAD WHEN THE HOUSE
OF LORDS IS MORE CONCERNED ABOUT FREEDOM THAN OBAMA OR THE DEMOCRATS
ZINNI GETS OBAMA BRUSH-OFF
DESPITE CAMPAIGN PROMISES, OBAMA
HIRES LOBBYISTS
POST PARTISAN DEPRESSION
OBAMA EXEMPTS MAJOR DEFENSE LOBBYIST
FROM HIS OWN ETHICS RULES
OBAMA JOINS WAR ON SOCIAL SECURITY,
MEDICARE
OBAMA PRAISES AMERICA'S FIRST
FISCAL CON MAN
OBAMA STRIKES BLOW FOR FUEL EFFICIENCY
CITIZEN GROUPS TROUBLED BY OBAMA'S
MEDICAL RECORD PLAN
OBAMA BUYS INTO CONSERVATIVE TAX
CUT MYTH
OBAMA TO OVERTURN FAMILY PLANNING
ADVICE BAN
JANUARY 2009
OBAMA READY TO SWITCH AFGHAN PUPPETS
IN MID STREAM
THINKING ABOUT OBAMA
PROBLEMS AT THE STARTING GATE
ENOUGH OF LINCOLN, ALREADY
OBAMA'S DUBIOUS & HYPER EXPENSIVE
MEDICAL RECORDS PLAN
OBAMA STIMULUS WILL LEAVE ECONOMY
FLACCID
OBAMA'S NON-COMBAT TROOP TRICK
DEPARTMENT OF HMMM.
.
Obama's first official
photo has him wearing an American flag lapel. A year ago he said,
"Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we're talking
about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true
patriotism."
Times UK - Barack Obama
suggested last night that removing Osama bin Laden from the battlefield
was no longer essential and that America's security goals could
be achieved merely by keeping al-Qaeda "on the run".
. . . His comments. . . appear to contradict Mr Obama's own statements
made in the election campaign. As recently as October 7, in a
presidential debate, Mr Obama said: "We will kill bin Laden.
We will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security
priority."
Chicago Daily Observer
- She hasn't shown up for work very regularly over the last year
or so, so when Michelle Obama's $300,000 job was cut at the University
of Chicago Hospitals, it may have been hard to notice the difference.
. . The Tribune announced the layoff without much analysis, but
let the cat far enough out of the bag to prompt our Don Rose
to question how important Michelle Obama's job must have been,
as it was so easily eliminated.
Politico - In a 1996 questionnaire
filled out for a Chicago gay and lesbian newspaper, then called
Outlines, Obama came out clearly in favor of same-sex marriage,
which he has opposed on the public record throughout his short
career in national politics. "I favor legalizing same-sex
marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages,"
Obama wrote in the typed, signed, statement.. . . On another
questionnaire the same year, Obama said he would support a resolution
in support of same-sex marriage. . . Obama now says he opposes
same-sex marriage, though he backs giving gays and lesbians a
parallel package of marriage-like rights, and opposes a federal
ban on same-sex marriage.
THE STRANGE RISE OF OBAMA
OBAMA'S NUKE BUDDIES JOIN WITH
FRENCH FIRM TO COOPERATE "ON NUCLEAR POWER MATTERS."
OBAMA AND NUCLEAR POWER
THE OBAMA CON
HOW TO RAISE CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS
WITHOUT BEING INDICTED
WILL OBAMA GIVE BUSH & CHENEY
AN ILLEGAL PASS ON THEIR WAR CRIMES?
OBAMA: NO TRANSITION ON MARIJUANA
BLAGOJEVICH AND OBAMA
OBAMA'S SECRET LIFE AS A FOOD
CRITIC
THE
STRANGE RISE OF OBAMA
As we have noted, one
of the unanswered questions about Barack Obama is how a young
politician of such little achievement got so far so fast - from
state senator to president in four years. Wayne Madsen and Bill
Blum provides new light on the subject. To understand this phenomenon,
it is important to recognize that if a young Obama was vetted
or otherwise used by the CIA, it was not all that unusual. From
the 1950s on, the agency repeatedly interfered in the education
of the talented young by recruiting or co-opting them for its
own purposes. Yale's Skull & Bones Club, for example, was
a classic case of a recruitment camp for future intelligence
types. The purpose - for the short run - is more information,
and - for the long run - a supply of US future government officials
whom the agency trusts and can use. And it often begins with
a bright college student an insider thinks might fill the bill.
. . .
Wayne Madsen Report -
WMR has obtained additional details on Business International
Corporation, the CIA front company where President Obama spent
a year working after graduating from Columbia University in 1983.
BIC used journalists as
non-official cover agents around the world. The firm published
weekly and fortnightly newsletters for business executives. .
.
On February 24, WMR reported:
"For one year, Obama worked as a researcher in BIC's financial
services division where he wrote for two BIC publications, Financing
Foreign Operations and Business International Money Report, a
weekly newsletter.
An informed source has
told WMR that Obama's tuition debt at Columbia was paid off by
BIC. In addition, WMR has learned that when Obama lived in Indonesia
with his mother and his adoptive father Lolo Soetoro, the 20-year-old
Obama, who was known as 'Barry Soetoro,' traveled to Pakistan
in 1981 and was hosted by the family of Muhammadmian Soomro,
a Pakistani Sindhi who became acting President of Pakistan after
the resignation of General Pervez Musharraf on August 18, 2008.
WMR was told that the Obama/Soetoro trip to Pakistan, ostensibly
to go 'partridge hunting' with the Soomros, related to unknown
CIA business. The covert CIA program to assist the Afghan mujaheddin
was already well underway at the time and Pakistan was the major
base of operations for the CIA's support . . .
Through its contacts with
leading liberals around the world, BIC sought to recruit those
on the left as CIA agents and assets. . . .
Obama's mother, Ann Dunham,
and his father, Barack Obama, Sr., met at the University of Hawaii
in 1960 in a Russian-language class. . . After marrying Indonesian
national Lolo Soetoro, Dunham moved with Barack Obama, Jr. to
Indonesia in 1966. . . Dunham left Indonesia in 1972, returning
to Hawaii with her son. Dunham periodically made trips back to
Indonesia, as well as to Pakistan, while working for the Ford
Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development,
the latter commonly used by the CIA for official cover agents.
Dunham Soetoro was in
Indonesia when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Barack
Obama visited Lahore, Pakistan, where his mother worked as a
"consultant," in 1981. . .
Bill Blum, Anti-Empire
Report - The question
that may never go away: Who really is Barack Obama? In his autobiography,
"Dreams From My Fathers", Barack Obama writes of taking
a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University
in 1983. He describes his employer as "a consulting house
to multinational corporations" in New York City, and his
functions as a "research assistant" and "financial
writer." The odd part of Obama's story is that he doesn't
mention the name of his employer.
However, a New York Times
story of 2007 identifies the company as Business International
Corporation. Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its
readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that
Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees
in various countries between 1955 and 1960. The British journal,
Lobster Magazine -- which, despite its incongruous name, is a
venerable international publication on intelligence matters --
has reported that Business International was active in the 1980s
promoting the candidacy of Washington-favored candidates in Australia
and Fiji. In 1987, the CIA overthrew the Fiji government after
but one month in office because of its policy of maintaining
the island as a nuclear-free zone, meaning that American nuclear-powered
or nuclear-weapons-carrying ships could not make port calls.
After the Fiji coup, the candidate supported by Business International,
who was much more amenable to Washington's nuclear desires, was
reinstated to power.
In his book, not only
doesn't Obama mention his employer's name; he fails to say when
he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no
significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International
has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert
actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left -- including
Students for a Democratic Society -- it's valid to wonder if
the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own
association with this world.
Colony Net, 2008 -
In an effort to
shore up his foreign policy credentials during the primary campaign,
the junior senator from Illinois - then in a tight primary contest
with Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania - bragged about the time
he had spent in Pakistan. He argued that Clinton's foreign policy
"experience" consisted only of quick photo ops, while
he had spent "quality time" with "real people."
Not only that, he had actually gone on a partridge-hunting trip
near the Pakistan city of Larkana. His partridge-hunting apparently
impressed the gun owners of Pennsylvania very little, inasmuch
as Clinton won that primary by 10 per cent.
Eager to impress the Pennsylvania
crowd with his "foreign policy experience" and knowledge
of guns, Obama thus let slip the fact that he'd been to Pakistan.
(It is believed that he made two trips to Pakistan.) There must
have been more to that trip than meets the eye, however, because
the candidate has said virtually nothing about it since. You
won't find anything on the Obama campaign site. . .
Astute readers may have
begun to wonder how a struggling young college student with a
divorced, middle-class mother managed to fund a three week trip
to Pakistan. . . But Barry Obama-Soetoro was off shooting partridges
in Pakistan, hosted by a young man named Muhammed Hasan Chandio.
Chandio's family owned a substantial amount of land in the region,
and Obama apparently met him while both were students. (Chandio
is currently a financial consultant in New York, and a donor
to the Obama campaign.). . .
Another of Obama's hosts
in Pakistan was Muhammadian Mian Soomro, Obama's senior by about
11 years, son of a Pakistani politician and himself a politician,
who became interim President of Pakistan when Pervez Musharraf
resigned in August of 2008. Soomro has said that "someone"
personally requested that he "watch over" Barack Obama,
but will not name that individual . . .
A trip to Pakistan is
no doubt more than a jaunt to a Florida beach. Few Americans
would consider traveling there now, thinking it to be a dangerous
place. In 1981, when one of Obama's possible two trips there
occurred, it was less safe. Because of the war between Afghanistan
and the Soviet Union, millions of Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan,
which was under martial law. The Afghan "mujahedeen"
fighters had bases in Pakistan, and they moved back and forth
to fight the Soviets. . .
In the early 1980s, Pakistan
was one of the destinations Americans were prohibited from visiting
- it was on the State Department's list of banned countries.
Non-Muslims were not welcome, unless they were on official business,
formalized through the embassy of the country of origin. The
simple truth is that no young American would have a reason to
or be able to visit Pakistan in 1981, unless he was on official
government business of which the State Department was aware.
. .
Adding to the mix is the
fact that Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, had visited at least 13
countries in her lifetime, and had worked for companies that
required travel to Pakistan. Her employers appear to have included
the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation,
Women's World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. Note that
USAID and the Ford Foundation have (allegedly) been used as covers
for CIA agents. . . .
The story of Business
International also
includes its 1960s joint meetings with members of SDS at the
prodding of Carl Oglesby. Not everyone was happy at the idea
- including Bernadette Dorn - and probably for good cause.
Obama also was one
of eight students
selected to study sovietology by Columbia professor Zbigniew
Brzezinski who, if he wasn't a CIA official, was as close as
you can otherwise get. Brzesinski is now a member of Obama's
inner circle.
If the Obama Pakistan
story sounds somewhat familiar, it may because the Review was
one of the few places that reported one of Bill Clinton's similar
interesting trips:
"1960s: Bill Clinton,
according to several agency sources interviewed by biographer
Roger Morris, works as a CIA informer while briefly and erratically
a Rhodes Scholar in England. Although without visible means of
support, he travels around Europe and the Soviet Union, staying
at the ritziest hotel in Moscow. During this period the US government
is using well educated assets such as Clinton as part of Operation
Chaos, a major attempt to break student resistance to the war
and the draft. According to former White House FBI agent Gary
Aldrich Clinton is told by Oxford officials that he is no longer
welcome there."
DECEMBER 2008
THE MICHELLE THAT OBAMA SHOULD
AVOID
OBAMA POISED TO BLUNDER IN AFGHANISTAN
OBAMA OWES CARTER AN APOLOGY
OBAMA & CASTRO ON LATIN AMERICA
RENDITION ADVOCATE LEADING OBAMA'S
REVIEW OF INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES
OBAMA'S BAIT & SWITCH APPROACH
TO WHITE LIBERALS
OBAMA: JUST ONE MORE PROBLEM PROGRESSIVES
FACE
OBAMA PUTTING KNIFE IN SINGLE
PAYER HEALTHCARE
TURNOUT NOT AS IMPRESSIVE AS EXPECTED
NOVEMBER 2008
SCOWCROFT ADVISING OBAMA
WHAT'S WRONG WITH OBAMA'S HEALTH
PLAN
IN 2006 INTERVIEW EMANUEL URGED
MANDATORY NATIONAL SERVICE
NY TIMES NOTE PROGRESSIVE QUALMS
ABOUT SUMMERS, GEITHNER
OBAMA HAS 200 COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS
FIRED AT DNC
A NOVEL BLEND OF MINORITIES AND
WEALTH ELECTED OBAMA
THE REVIEW HELPS CLOSE DOOR ON
OBAMA'S DRAFT
OBAMA PRAYING AND PALLING WITH
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISTS
THE FIRST BLACK BILL CLINTON
HOW THE OBAMA FAIRY TALE BEGAN
Paul Street Z Mag - Conventional
wisdom holds that Obama entered national politics with his instantly
famous keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
But, as Ken Silverstein noted in Harper's in the fall of 2006,
"If the speech was his debut to the wider American public,
he had already undergone an equally successful but much quieter
audition with Democratic Party leaders and fund-raisers, without
whose support he would surely never have been chosen for such
a prominent role at the convention.
The favorable elite assessment
of Obama began in October of 2003. That's when "Vernon Jordan,
the well-known power broker and corporate board-member who chaired
Bill Clinton's presidential transition team after the 1992 election,
placed calls to roughly twenty of his friends and invited them
to a fund-raiser at his home. That event," Silverstein noted,
"marked his entry into a well-established Washington ritual-the
gauntlet of fund-raising parties and meet-and-greets through
which potential stars are vetted by fixers, donors, and lobbyists."
Drawing on his undoubted
charm, wit, intelligence, and Harvard credentials, Obama passed
this trial with shining colors. At a series of social meetings
with assorted big "players" from the financial, legal
and lobbyist sectors, Obama impressed key establishment figures
like Gregory Craig (a longtime leading attorney and former special
counsel to the White House), Mike Williams (the legislative director
of the Bond Market Association), Tom Quinn (a partner at the
top corporate law firm Venable and a leading Democratic Party
"power broker"), and Robert Harmala, another Venable
partner and "a big player in Democratic circles."
Craig liked the fact that
Obama was not a racial "polarizer" on the model of
past African-American leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Williams was soothed by
Obama's reassurances that he was not "anti-business"
and became "convinced...that the two could work together."
"There's a reasonableness
about him," Harmala told Silverstein. "I don't see
him as being on the liberal fringe."
By Silverstein's account,
the good "word about Obama spread through Washington's blue-chip
law firms, lobby shops, and political offices, and this accelerated
after his win in the March [2004] Democratic primary." Elite
financial, legal, and lobbyists contributions came into Obama's
coffers at a rapid and accelerating pace.
The "good news"
for Washington and Wall Street insiders was that Obama's "star
quality" would not be directed against the elite segments
of the business class. The interesting black legislator from
the South Side of Chicago was "someone the rich and powerful
could work with." According to Obama biographer and Chicago
Tribune reporter David Mendell, in late 2003 and early 2004:
"Word of Obama's
rising star was now spreading beyond Illinois, especially through
influential Washington political circles like blue chip law firms,
party insiders, lobbying houses. They were all hearing about
this rare, exciting, charismatic, up-and-coming African American
who unbelievably could win votes across color lines. . . [his
handlers and] influential Chicago supporters and fund-raisers
all vigorously worked their D.C. contacts to help Obama make
the rounds with the Democrats' set of power brokers. . .
According to Mendell,
Obama now cultivated the support of the privileged few by "advocat[ing]
fiscal restraint" and "calling for pay-as-you-go government"
and "extol[ing] the merits of free trade and charter schools."
He "moved beyond being an obscure good-government reformer
to being a candidate more than palatable to the moneyed and political
establishment." .
"On condition of
anonymity," Silverstein reported two years ago, "one
Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the
obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they
didn't see him as a 'player.' The lobbyist added: 'What's the
dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?'"
WHY IS OBAMA'S FIRST OBLIGATION
TO THE REPUBLICANS?
OBAMA MAY NAME CONTROVERSIAL CONGRESSMAN
AS CHIEF OF STAFF
18 HOURS A DAY WITH OBAMA &
STILL NOT KNOWING HIM
NAMES ON THE LIST: TIM GEITHNER,
POSSIBLE TREASURY SECRETARY
YOU VOTE FOR A HARVARD LAW SCHOOL
GRAD,
YOU GET A HARVARD LAW SCHOOL GRAD
Excerpts from
the seven page questionaire for Obama job seekers
OCTOBER 2008
KICKING OBAMA ACROSS THE GOAL
LINE
FORGET ABOUT BILL AYERS, HERE
ARE SOME OF OBAMA'S PALS YOU SHOULD WORRY ABOUT
OBAMA KNEW BILL AYERS; MCCAIN
IS DEPENDING ON PEOPLE LIKE THESE
FORGET ABOUT AYERS, OBAMA'S CHICAGO
PROJECT WAS FUNDED BY WEALTH OF A RIGHTWING REPUBLICAN
ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE
EIGHT YEARS AGO?
A CAMPAIGN FOR OBAMA IN ELEVEN
SENTENCES
HOW TO BEAT THE REPUBLICANS
STARTLING NEW EVIDENCE THAT OBAMA
ISN'T MUSLIM . HE'S IRISH. . . THEY JUST FORGOT THE APOSTROPHE
VENETIAN GONDOLIERS BACKING OBAMA
BRITISH AMBASSADOR SHOWS GOOD
HANDLE ON OBAMA IN PRIVATE LETTER
OBAMA GETS CLOSER TO CONSERVATIVE
DEMOCRATS
OBAMA DOES WELL AMONG LATINOS
OBAMA BACKTRACKS ON HIS POLICIES
SEPTEMBER 2008
THINGS PRESIDENT OBAMA IS GOING
TO REGRET
OBAMA HINTS RETURN OF DRAFT
MTV NEWS BRINGS OUT THE BETTER
OBAMA
MTV News host Swaye gets
Obama out of the pulpit, away from the ponderous and off the
parsing to produce one
of his best interviews we've seen and far more appealing
that his stiff debate appearance. It was relaxed, friendly and
plain spoken. If Obama talked to older Americans this way, he's
do a lot better. [Be sure to
watch all the clips; they automatically follow each other]
MICHELLE OBAMA HAS COUSIN WHO'S
A RABBI
YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO
KNOW WHICH WAY OBAMA'S WIND IS BLOWING
THE BLACK AGENDA FOR OBAMA: NOTHING
Glen Ford, Black Agenda
Report - The current election cycle is, indeed, one for the history
books. For the first time since the rebellions of the Sixties,
we hardly hear the call for a Marshall-type plan to rebuild the
cities - once the near-unanimous, unifying demand of virtually
the entire spectrum of Black "leadership." Not that
the demand has been made moot or passé by great achievements
in rendering urban America more habitable to Blacks or more recent
influxes of browns. The opposite is true: urban centers have
become far more hostile environments to the non-affluent of all
ethnicities. . .
In place of a massive
public sector-led Marshall Plan to rehabilitate the cities for
the benefit of the largely African American populations that
inherited them by default through government-subsidized white
flight, public policy now facilitates the Corporate Plan for
the cities: Black removal.
If any handwriting-on-the-wall
were needed to graphically illustrate the grand corporate scheme
for the cities, it is written on the walls of the 70,000-plus
unrehabilitated, empty homes of the scattered, mostly Black and
poor classes of metropolitan New Orleans; in the rubble of countless
demolished public housing projects across the nation, not one
of which has ever been replaced unit-for-unit; and in the millions
of affordable private dwellings that have been supplanted by
habitats for well-to-do urban newcomers - a small fraction of
whom are Black or brown. . .
With the ascension of
Barack Obama, all Black agitation has been subordinated to his
election, leaving African Americans as the only constituency
that has presented no demands to the two corporate candidates.
Black misleadership simply accepts what Obama feels comfortable
in offering. His Denver acceptance speech shows Obama is prepared
to give Blacks precisely what they have asked for: nothing. .
.
Even as Hurricane Gustav
bore down on New Orleans, Obama made only the most oblique reference
to the 2005 catastrophe, with a swipe at "a government.
. . that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns
before our eyes." . . . If Obama cannot commit to making
the displaced residents of New Orleans whole - despite, in his
opinion, their having been victimized by government "incompetence"
- then he will never lift a finger to derail the slow-motion
displacement of gentrification elsewhere in urban America.
AUGUST 2008
UNIONS CONCERNED OVER OBAMA'S
WALL STREET POLITICS
GREAT MOMENTS IN CHICAGO POLITICS
OBAMA PADS HIS RESUME
VANITY FAIR CLAIMS TO HAVE FOUND
OBAMA'S LOST BROTHER
MIDDLE CLASS MORE PROGRESSIVE
THAN OBAMA, CONGRESS
DEMOCRATIC POLS IN SWING STATES
SAY OBAMA SHOULD CUT THE HOPE CRAP AND GET STRONGER ON ISSUES
OBAMA BEATS MCCAIN AMONG CHRISTIANS
OBAMA: THE MAN AND THE MACHINE
THE SORRY HISTORY OF OBAMA'S APPROACH
TO IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN
OBAMA CAMPAIGN STAGNATES
OBAMA FLIPS BIG TIME ON OFFSHORE
DRILLING
OBAMA & MCCAIN: LIFE WITHOUT
FATHER
OBAMA TALKS SENSE ABOUT AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION
OBAMA'S OWN GREEN ADVISOR DIFFERS
ON ETHANOL
OBAMA & THE END OF POLITICS
JULY 2008
PRESS & OBAMA END THEIR AFFAIR
THE PROGRESSIVE PUZZLE: DEALING
WITH THE OBAMA PROBLEM
STATE SENATOR OBAMA WAS IN POCKET
OF COAL INDUSTRY
THE CHANGE WAR CANDIDATE
DEMOCRATS UNUSUALLY PSYCHED OVER
ELECTION
OBAMA VETTING RIGHT WING AGRIBUSINESS
LAWYER FOR VEEP
IS OBAMA QUIETLY PUSHING A NATIONAL
DRAFT?
OBAMA ADVISOR WARNS AGAINST HOLDING
THOSE IN POWER LIABLE FOR CRIMINAL ACTS
OBAMA WILL GET THE TROOPS OUT
OF IRAQ . . .EXCEPT FOR THE ONES HE LEAVES THERE
OBAMA'S STRANGE AFFECTION FOR
REAGAN
David Paul Kuhn, Politico
- During his bid for the presidency, Obama has repeatedly praised
the political gifts of Reagan, the modern president most revered
by Republicans, and whose policies are still held in contempt
by many leading liberals. A year ago Obama compared Reagan favorably
to President Bush in a primary debate while defending his pledge
to meet directly with the leaders of hostile nations without
preconditions. "Ronald Reagan called [Russia] an evil empire,"
said Obama, but he also "spoke to the Soviet Union."
In January, Obama came
under fire from within his party after casting himself as an
emotive heir to Reagan. "Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory
of America," Obama told a Nevada newspaper in January, noting
that Reagan "tapped into what people were already feeling,
which is: We want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return
to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been
missing."
David Bonior, then John
Edwards' campaign manager, charged that Obama was "wrong,
frightfully so, in using Ronald Reagan as an example of voters
reaching for change. The breadth of change Ronald Reagan brought
was crippling for millions of Americans.". . .
"The idea that Ronald
Reagan was a unifying figure, that the nation rallied around
him, that politics were not divisive in that time, is wrong,"
said Peter Robinson, who drafted the "tear down this wall"
speech. "Ronald Reagan was denounced again and again and
again from the beginning of his presidency through to the very
end.". . .
Looking back earlier this
week on Obama's previous praise of Reagan, Mario Cuomo asked,
rhetorically, "What did Reagan transform?" He answered:
"It wasn't morning in America. If you are saying he transformed
Americans toward a new hopefulness, hopefulness doesn't buy peace,
it doesn't buy jobs."
THE COWBOYS & THE IVIES
OBAMA: THE SORRIEST POLITICIAN
AROUND
JESSE JACKSON'S NUTCRACKER BLEEP
OBAMA FLIP FLOP OF THE DAY: WELFARE
POLICY
MERKEL TELLS OBAMA TO KEEP HIS
CAMPAIGNING AT HOME
OBAMA VOTES TO TRASH FOURTH AMENDMENT,
LET BUSH & TELCOMS ESCAPE PROSECUTION
OBAMA FLIP FLOP OF THE DAY: WELFARE
POLICY
MAKING A MUDDLE OF THE POLITICAL
MIDDLE & WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
OBAMA LINKED TO THE ATTACK ON
PUBLIC HOUSING
TELLING THE FACTS ABOUT OBAMA
JUNE 2008
RECOVERED HISTORY: OBAMA AND ISLAM
BILL CLINTON SAYS OBAMA WILL HAVE
TO 'KISS MY ASS' FOR HIS SUPPORT
ONE OF OBAMA'S CHICAGO CONSTITUENTS
TELLS HOW TO DEAL WITH HIM
WHO'S OBAMA TALKING WITH?
QADDAFI
ON OBAMA
BEST BUMPER STICKER OF THE YEAR
OBAMA THROWS PUBLIC FINANCING
UNDER THE BUS
WHY WHAT OBAMA IS DOING IS NOT
COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
POWELL MIGHT SUPPORT OBAMA
OBAMA SPIN A LITTLE OUT OF CONTROL
MORE THAN 85% OF AMERICANS WOULD
DO BETTER UNDER OBAMA'S TAX PLAN
OBAMA SUPPORTS AMNESTY FOR ILLEGAL
SEARCHES
WASHINGTON POST Sen. Barack Obama
(D-Ill.) announced his support for a sweeping intelligence surveillance
law that has been heavily denounced by the liberal activists
who have fueled the financial engines of his presidential campaign.
In his most substantive break with the Democratic Party's base
since becoming the presumptive nominee, Obama declared he will
support the bill when it comes to a Senate vote, likely next
week, despite misgivings about legal provisions for telecommunications
corporations that cooperated with the Bush administration's warrantless
surveillance program of suspected terrorists. . .
"Given the legitimate threats
we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with
appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support
the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president,
I will carefully monitor the program," Obama said in a statement
hours after the House approved the legislation 293-129.
This marks something of a reversal
of Obama's position from an earlier version of the bill, which
was approved by the Senate Feb. 12, when Obama was locked in
a fight for the Democratic nomination with Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton (D-N.Y.).
Obama missed the February vote on
that FISA bill as he campaigned in the "Potomac Primaries,"
but issued a statement that day declaring "I am proud to
stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement
of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections
for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty."
GLENN GREENWALD, SALON Telling Americans
that we have to give up basic constitutional rights -- and allow
rampant lawbreaking -- if we want to save ourselves from "the
grave threats we face" sounds awfully familiar. . . . Obama
has obviously calculated that sacrificing the rule of law and
the Fourth Amendment is a worthwhile price to pay to bolster
his standing a tiny bit in a couple of swing states.
THE SPLIT PERSONALITY OF BARACK
OBAMA
DAVID BROOKS, NY TIMES As recent
weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality
politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr.
Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent
this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling
the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there's
Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago
pol who'd throw you under the truck for votes. This guy is the
whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting
a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He's the only politician of
our lifetime who is underestimated because he's too intelligent.
He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to
appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside. . .
And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie
Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political
reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political
reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He's spent
much of his career talking about how much he believes in public
financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing
system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to
limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he
were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively
pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network
questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime
advocate of the public-financing system.
But Thursday, at the first breath
of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing
under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow
to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that
changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that
Obama's got more money now.
And Fast Eddie Obama didn't just
sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style.
He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down
in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama
blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that
private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat
political calculation seem like Mother Teresa's final steps to
sainthood.
OBAMA DITCHES NAFTA
POSITION THAT HELPED HIM WIN THE PRIMARIES
CNN In an interview with Fortune to be featured
in the magazine's upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic
nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement
and indicated he didn't want to unilaterally reopen negotiations
on NAFTA. "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets
overheated and amplified," he conceded, after I reminded
him that he had called NAFTA "devastating" and "a
big mistake," despite nonpartisan studies concluding that
the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.
Does that mean his rhetoric was
overheated and amplified? "Politicians are always guilty
of that, and I don't exempt myself," he answered. . .
Obama's tone stands in marked contrast
to his primary campaign's anti-NAFTA fusillades. The pact creating
a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's
signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union
leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free
trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.
The Democratic candidates fought
hard to win over those factions of their party, with Obama generally
following Hillary Clinton's lead in setting a protectionist tone.
In February, as the campaign moved
into the Rust Belt, both candidates vowed to invoke a six-month
opt-out clause ("as a hammer," in Obama's words) to
pressure Canada and Mexico to make concessions. . .
Now, however, Obama says he doesn't
believe in unilaterally reopening NAFTA. On the afternoon that
I sat down with him to discuss the economy, Obama said he had
just spoken with Harper, who had called to congratulate him on
winning the nomination.
OBAMA CLOSE TO ETHANOL INDUSTRY
LARRY ROHTER, NEW YORK TIMES Mr.
Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the influence
of special interests. But like any other politician, he has powerful
constituencies that help shape his views. And when it comes to
domestic ethanol, almost all of which is made from corn, he also
has advisers and prominent supporters with close ties to the
industry at a time when energy policy is a point of sharp contrast
between the parties and their presidential candidates.
Nowadays, when Mr. Obama travels
in farm country, he is sometimes accompanied by his friend Tom
Daschle, the former Senate majority leader from South Dakota.
Mr. Daschle now serves on the boards of three ethanol companies
and works at a Washington law firm where, according to his online
job description, "he spends a substantial amount of time
providing strategic and policy advice to clients in renewable
energy."
Mr. Obama's lead advisor on energy
and environmental issues, Jason Grumet, came to the campaign
from the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan initiative
associated with Mr. Daschle and Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican
who is also a former Senate majority leader and a big ethanol
backer who had close ties to the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels
Midland.
Not long after arriving in the Senate,
Mr. Obama himself briefly provoked a controversy by flying at
subsidized rates on corporate airplanes, including twice on jets
owned by Archer Daniels Midland, which is the nation's largest
ethanol producer and is based in his home state.
WILL OBAMA TAKE ON CREDIT CARD
USURY?
OBAMA'S CHICAGO BOYS
OBAMA FANS THE BLACK FATHER MYTH
JAMES JOHNSON EMBARASSED OUT OF
OBAMA POST
OBAMA MAKES WAR WITH IRAN FAR
MORE LIKELY
OBAMA WOULD GIVE ALL OF JERUSALEM
TO ISRAELIS
DID OBAMA & CLINTON GO TO
SECRET BILDERBERG MEETING, TOO?
MORE REASONS OBAMA SHOULD HAVE
VETTED HIS VETTERS
WASH POST As CEO of Fannie Mae,
Johnson, a former chief of staff to Vice President Walter F.
Mondale and chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center, was
the beneficiary of accounting in which Fannie Mae's earnings
were manipulated so that executives could earn larger bonuses.
The accounting manipulation for 1998 resulted in the maximum
payouts to Fannie Mae's senior executives -- $1.9 million in
Johnson's case -- when the company's performance that year would
have otherwise resulted in no bonuses at all, according to reports
in 2004 and 2006 by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise
Oversight.
In a 2006 civil enforcement action
against Fannie Mae, another agency, the Securities and Exchange
Commission, called the company's 1998 accounting "fraudulent"
and said numbers were "intentionally manipulated to trigger
management bonuses."
Johnson left the company before
it was swept up in an accounting scandal that tarred its reputation,
but even during the years of scandal, Johnson was reaping hundreds
of thousands of dollars in consulting fees and other compensation,
$3.3 million in all between 2001 and 2006.
Brian Brooks, an attorney for Johnson,
said last night that the accounting issues at Fannie Mae were
thoroughly investigated, and that "no one has ever suggested
that Mr. Johnson was responsible for the accounting decisions
at issue, nor has he had any involvement with these accounting
issues during his tenure as a consultant since leaving employment
with the company in 1999."
But Johnson is not the only member
of Obama's vice presidential vetting committee that Republicans
have targeted.
They also are preparing a case against
former deputy attorney general Eric Holder for his role in the
granting of a pardon to fugitive financier Marc Rich in the last
days of the Clinton White House.
In December 2000, as Rich's lawyers
were closing in on the pardon, one of them, Jack Quinn, singled
out Holder in an e-mail. "The greatest danger lies with
the lawyers," Quinn wrote his co-counsels. "I have
worked them hard and I am hopeful that E. Holder will be helpful
to us."
Any attacks on Holder will probably
not mention that one of Rich's lawyers, I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, went on to become Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.
. .
Johnson who provides the most immediate
fodder for attack. His lavish lifestyle, multiple homes, personal
staff and chauffeur strike a dissonant chord as Obama excoriates
Republican "tax cuts for the rich" and calls McCain,
the presumptive Republican nominee, an out-of-touch Washington
insider.
Although OFHEO said Johnson benefited
from the earnings manipulations, the agency did not accuse him
of participating in them, and the SEC did not accuse him of any
wrongdoing. He ended his term as chairman and chief executive
of the District-based company in December 1998, before Fannie
Mae reported its financial results for that year. In 1999, he
served as chairman of the company's executive committee.
A federal regulatory agency suggested
that even if Johnson's compensation for 1998 were entirely justified,
Fannie Mae obscured its magnitude, disclosing pay of $6 million
to $7 million a year in 1998. But Johnson was allowed to defer
111,623 shares of Fannie Mae stock, a move that was relegated
to a footnote and not included in the company's summary compensation
table.
Total compensation that year was
closer to $21 million, according to an internal Fannie Mae analysis
cited by OFHEO. . .
Among Johnson's post-employment
perks were an inflation-adjusted consulting contract of $390,500
that began in 2002, two employees and a chauffeur, and office
space at the Watergate, even after he began work at Perseus,
an investment firm that gave him his own office. His lawyer described
that compensation yesterday as "consistent with what is
customarily provided to retiring Fortune 100 CEOs."
Johnson was supposed to reimburse
the company for 50 percent of the chauffeur's time, but that
did not apply to time spent waiting for Johnson or driving his
wife. Consequently, he reimbursed Fannie for about 15 percent
of the cost.
OBAMA'S VETTER BLEW MONDALE'S RACE
CRAIG CRAWFORD On so many fronts,
I knew there was trouble for Barack Obama when he picked Jim
Johnson for his vice presidential vetting team. Not only is Johnson
a big-business Democrat with icky ties to even ickier businesses,
like mortgage lending firms in trouble. But the longtime party
insider is also firmly entrenched with Democratic losers going
back to Walter Mondale, whose pathetic 1984 presidential campaign
was run by Johnson.
If Obama is about a break with the
past, he could find no one more counter-intuitive than Johnson.
Already, Johnson is under fire for his own sweetheart loans.
More than likely Obama will eventually come under intense pressure
to dump his VP vetter.
For a clue about Johnson's questionable
political acumen, here's what I remember from my own experience
as a field operative in Mondale's presidential campaign. Johnson
blew the only moment when it looked like Mondale might actually
have a chance at overcoming Ronald Reagan's reelection bid.
Following Reagan's disastrous debate
performance against Mondale, when the media began to seriously
question the president's mental fitness, many Democratic insiders
counseled their nominee to go in for the kill in the next debate.
But Johnson, apparently believing that Mondale had a lock on
the election, advised his candidate to back off, counseling that
it would seem mean-spirited to do otherwise.
Johnson could not have been more
wrong, as many of us in the campaign thought at the time. Still,
Mondale followed his manager's advice and Reagan won the day
- and probably the election - at the subsequent debate as the
Democrat foolishly held his fire.
For some reason, Democratic nominees
ever since - except Bill Clinton - have thought Johnson was some
sort of genius. And it is no accident that Clinton is the only
one to win the White House.
HOW
MANY TROOPS IN AN OBAMA RESIDUE?
OBAMA FLIP FLOPS ON CUBA
OBAMA'S TOP AIDE IS CORPORATE PR OPERATIVE
OBAMA'S IRAQ POSITION REMAINS
IN DOUBT
HAROLD FORD TELLS OBAMA HOW TO
CAMPAIGN
POLL FINDS OBAMA'S JEWISH PROBLEM
A MYTH
CBS NEWS According to exit polls
conducted in 30 primary states, Jewish Democratic primary voters
overall supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama - 53 percent
chose Clinton compared to 45% who chose Obama. . . Although Jewish
Democratic voters favored Clinton in the primaries, Jewish registered
voters overall say they would support either Obama or Clinton
in a November match-up with McCain. According to CBS News Polls
conducted from February to May, both Obama and Clinton would
win among Jewish voters nationally by a comfortable margin. If
the candidates were Obama and McCain, the polls show Obama would
get 65 percent of the vote of Jewish registered voters to 28
percent for McCain. If the candidates were Clinton and McCain,
Clinton would get 68 percent to 26 percent for McCain.
MAY 2008
IN FIRST 100 DAYS, OBAMA WOULD
REVIEW EVERY BUSH EXECUTIVE ORDER
REUTERS If elected president, Democratic
White House hopeful Barack Obama said one of the first things
he wants to do is ensure the constitutionality of all the laws
and executive orders passed while Republican President George
W. Bush has been in office. Those that don’t pass muster
will be overturned, he said.Other goals for his first 100 days:
work out a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq; make progress on
alternative energy plans and launch legislation to reform the
health care system
OFFICIAL OBAMA BINGO CARD
Already geting
tired of Barack Obama's platitudes? Stay awake with the Review's
official Obama bingo card
Improvements
welcomed
OBAMA'S VIEWS ON THE SUPREME COURT
OBAMA'S TOP AIDE IS CORPORATE PR OPERATIVE
NEWSWEEK When Illinois
utility Commonwealth Edison wanted state lawmakers to back a
hefty rate hike two years ago, it took a creative lobbying approach,
concocting a new outfit that seemed devoted to the public interest:
Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity, or CORE. CORE ran
TV ads warning of a "California-style energy crisis"
if the rate increase wasn't approved-but without disclosing the
commercials were funded by Commonwealth Edison. The ad campaign
provoked a brief uproar when its ties to the utility, which is
owned by Exelon Corp., became known. "It's corporate money
trying to hoodwink the public," the state's Democratic Lt.
Gov. Pat Quinn said. What got scant notice then-but may soon
get more scrutiny-is that CORE was the brainchild of ASK Public
Strategies, a consulting firm whose senior partner is David Axelrod,
now chief strategist for Barack Obama.
Last week, Obama hit John
McCain for hiring "some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington"
to run his campaign; Obama's aides say their candidate, as a
foe of "special interests," has refused to take money
from lobbyists or employ them. Neither Axelrod nor his partners
at ASK ever registered as lobbyists for Commonwealth Edison-and
under Illinois's loose disclosure laws, they were not required
to. "I've never lobbied anybody in my life," Axelrod
tells NEWSWEEK. "I've never talked to any public official
on behalf of a corporate client." (He also says "no
one ever denied" that Edison was the "principal funder"
of his firm's ad campaign.)
But the activities of
ASK (located in the same office as Axelrod's political firm)
illustrate the difficulties in defining exactly who a lobbyist
is. In 2004, Cablevision hired ASK to set up a group similar
to CORE to block a new stadium for the New York Jets in Manhattan.
Unlike Illinois, New York disclosure laws do cover such work,
and ASK's $1.1 million fee was listed as the "largest lobbying
contract" of the year in the annual report of the state's
lobbying commission. ASK last year proposed a similar "political
campaign style approach" to help Illinois hospitals block
a state proposal that would have forced them to provide more
medical care to the indigent. One part of its plan: create a
"grassroots" group of medical experts "capable
of contacting policymakers to advocate for our position,"
according to a copy of the proposal. (ASK didn't get the contract.)
Public-interest watchdogs say these grassroots campaigns are
state of the art in the lobbying world. "There's no way
with a straight face to say that's not lobbying," says Ellen
Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes government
transparency.
Axelrod says there are
still huge differences between him and top McCain advisers, including
the fact that he doesn't work in D.C. But his corporate clients
do have business in the capital. One of them, Exelon, lobbied
Obama two years ago on a nuclear bill; the firm's executives
and employees have also been a top source of cash for Obama's
campaign, contributing $236,211. Axelrod says he's never talked
to Obama about Exelon matters. "I'm not going to public
officials with bundles of money on behalf of a corporate client,"
Axelrod says.
OBAMA ADDS FAITH TO HOPE & CHANGE
OBAMA MOVES HARD RIGHT ON ISRAEL-PALESTINE
WITH OBAMA, THE DLC WINS AGAIN
TIME MAGAZINE DISCOVERS THAT OBAMA
HAD A WHITE MOTHER
OBAMA'S ARMS LENGTH APPROACH TO
THE GAY MEDIA
OBAMA'S KEY ADVISOR WANTS 60,000-80,000
AMERICAN TROOPS TO STAY IN IRAQ
OBAMA PRAISES FIRST GULF WAR,
FOREIGN POLICIES OF REAGAN AND DADDY BUSH
ABE FOXMAN AND BARACK OBAMA
INTERESTING 1995 CHICAGO READER
PIECE ON OBAMA
GOP CONGRESSMAN: TERRORISTS WOULD
DANCE IN THE STREET IF OBAMA WINS
WHY DOES WALL STREET LOVE OBAMA?
THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT
OBAMA
OBAMA CAMPAIGN CAUGHT IN NAFTA
DOUBLE TALK
THE OBAMA - REZKO STORY
OBAMA CAMPAIGN REPORTER: "HARD
NOT TO DRINK THE KOOL AID"
CLINTON, OBAMA BRIBING SUPER DELEGATES
THE NEED FOR PROGRESSIVE PRESSURE
ON OBAMA
OBAMA'S FINANCE CHAIR TIED TO
SUBPRIME SCANDAL
BEHIND THE FARRAKHAN CONTROVERSY
LAND DEAL COMES BACK TO HAUNT
OBAMA
OBAMA ON IRAQ: FEWER TROOPS, MORE
BLACKWATER?
OBAMA TAKING BACK DOOR FUNDING
FROM LOBBYISTS
GOP USING JOE MCCARTHY TACTICS
AGAINST OBAMA
MICHELLE OBAMA'S THESIS
HOLDING OBAMA TO ACCOUNT
JUST WORDS ON JUST WORDS
SOME JEWISH LEADERS OUT TO GET
OBAMA AS JEWISH VOTERS CARE MORE ABOUT DOMESTIC ISSUES
TOP OBAMA AIDE IS SENIOR ECONOMIST
AT DEMOCRATIC ABANDONSHIP COUNCIL
ACADEMICS LAUNCH CAMPAIGN AGAINST
PRO-ISRAELI MCCARTHYISM
OBAMA'S MANY VIEWS ON MARIJUANA
OBAMA JOINS THE BUTTONED UP LOOK
SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT OBAMA'S
PALS?
SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT DRUGS & OBAMA?
BLACK COLLEGE PAPER QUESTIONS
BLIND LOYALTY TO OBAMA
OBAMA DISSES 1960S AND 1970S
WATCHING OBAMA
BIPARTISANSHIP IS BAD FOR YOUR
HEALTH
GRATUITOUS GRAVITAS & KING
KAROAKE
THE TIMIDITY OF HOPE
JOHN KERRYING BARACK OBAMA
VIDEO OF OBAMA ON THE COURT IN
HIGH SCHOOL
OBAMA WILLING TO PUT EXTREME RIGHTWINGERS
IN CABINET
WHY OBAMA IS CALLED BLACK
WITH OBAMA, THE DLC WINS AGAIN
BRUCE DIXON, BLACK AGENDA REPORT
Obama has chosen to "reach out" to white and Republican
voters while challenging none of their assumptions about America,
racism or empire, at the same time, counting on on a deaf and
blind black nationalism to shield him from accountability to
African Americans. Republicans (and Hillary Clinton) know all
they need do to counter him is prove to whites that he is not
as conservative as he seems. Obama will thus be forced scramble
relentlessly rightward from here on, disowning, denouncing and
dishonoring any and all stirrings of black or grassroots militancy
to keep white support without telling white America anything
it doesn't want to know.
Back in 2003, when Obama was a candidate
for the US Senate in the Illinois Democratic primary this reporter
and Glen Ford challenged him on his affiliation with the Democratic
Leadership Council. The right-wing, corporate-funded Trojan Horse
inside the Democratic party had fervently embraced his political
career, naming him one of its "100 to Watch" for 2003.
DLC endorsement is the gold standard
of political reliability for Wall Street, Big Energy, Big Pharma,
insurance, the airlines and more. Though candidates normally
undergo extensive questioning and interviews before DLC endorsement,
Obama insisted the blessing of these corporate special interests
had been bestowed on him without these formalities and without
his advance knowledge, and formally disassociated himself from
the DLC. But like Hillary Clinton, and every front running Democrat
since Michale Dukakis in 1988, Barack Obama's campaign has adopted
the classic right wing DLC strategy.
In the DLC playbook, the road to
winning elections is appealing to Republican-leaning white voters
- demographic groups which pollsters and consultants in previous
elections called "suburban soccer moms", NASCAR dads,"
and before that "Reagan Democrats." Candidates do this
by decrying excessive partisanship, embracing "free trade"
and "conservative" values, and displays of public piety.
. .
By contrast, the 1984 and 1988 presidential
campaigns of Rev. Jesse Jackson won white support too, but embraced
the burden of challenging white American assumptions about the
essential goodness of America, about empire, and race and class.
If you were organizing against police brutality or farm foreclosures,
organizing a union or protesting the illegal war in Central America,
the campaign in many cases came to you and augmented your local
efforts. The Obama must campaign avoid this kind of activism
like Dracula avoids crosses, because its candidate's appeal is
based on challenging none of the fake history, none of the racism,
injustice and unearned privilege at the heart of American life.
. .
If there was an actual mass-based
progressive movement in the US, operating on the ground and independent
of political parties and campaigns, it might have a prayer of
holding Barack Obama accountable. But there isn't.
APRIL 2008
LIVE WITH THE ELITE,
DIE WITH THE ELITE
SAM SMITH
Sure, Obama is an elitist. I thought
it the first time I saw him. The tone, the dress, the moves,
the constant pretense of being in deep thought, the patronizing
explanation replacing impassioned argument. Another smart-ass
from an Ivy League law school. The ones that talk grandly and
carry a little feather. We've got a lot of them in Washington.
That's why many white liberals went
for him. He was comfortably familiar in all but hue. They treat
him like a prophet but in fact he's just another of the black
ivies who are riding the political waves these days. For Obama
and Patrick Deval it was Harvard, for Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia
it was the Wharton School at Penn, for DC's Mayor Fenty is was
Oberlin and for Newark's Cory Book it was Oxford on a Rhodes
Scholarship. Not bad if you can't have a mother who was Irish
or latino.
But it's not as politically wonderful
as it seems to some. St. Barack still can't get comfortably past
one of the sleaziest politicians in his party's modern history
and shows up weakly in matches against a guy who hasn't done
anything worth remembering since Vietnam. His purported magnificence
somehow fails to make the same impression at the polls as it
does at the rallies and fundraisers of the well committed.
That's not surprising but it's worth
noting and suggests a bit more humility in the Obama camp wouldn't
hurt.
Of course, humility is not highly valued there. After all, it
takes something beyond ordinary self-confidence to move from
state senator to presidential candidate without even finishing
your freshman term in the Senate.
On the other hand, Obama's not a
corrupt and conniving cad nor a decrepit warrior looking for
another dogfight, so it looks like he's the best we're going
to get.
And it's not totally his fault that
he sees himself as God's gift to his party and his country. His
elitism is not really the problem; it is the elitism of those
who convinced him of this: the white liberals.
These are the people who couldn't
stand John Edwards, the candidate who came closest to the New
Deal and Great Society values of any Democratic leader in decades.
But his policies didn't move them, only his accent and haircut.
This is not a new problem. I wrote
about it almost two decades ago:
Today's liberals seem to lack a
sense of politics as war, in which one constantly rearranges
the order of battle to win one's ultimate objective. They see
politics more as a secular form of religion in which success
is judged not by societal change but by the rigor with which
the faith is maintained. They are political fundamentalists and,
like religious fundamentalists, as far removed from their liberal
heritage as Pat Robertson is from Jesus.
As with the religious fundamentalists,
the liberal true believers often miss the point. The canon becomes
particularized and heavily a matter of style and form. They know
how to speak like liberals to other liberals but not how to talk
to the rest of the world.
The result is a strange distortion
of liberal priorities. Gut issues of immense potential popularity
such as health, housing, job creation and education are left
by the wayside in favor of issues that, no matter how worthy
they may be, are most likely to alienate liberalism from the
largest number of Americans.
This then is Obama's problem now:
not so much that he's an elitist but that he's surrounded by
them, funded by them, guided by them - and for too long has been
trying to imitate them. If Ed Rendell was not so foolishly infatuated
with the latest pretender to the Bush-Clinton duopoly, he might
take Obama aside and give him a few lessons in talking like a
real person again. Look at what a good job Rendell is doing making
Clinton sound like one.
But Obama doesn't seemed blessed
by that sort of advice. Both his white liberal and black constituencies
love him too much for getting this far and wouldn't think of
suggesting that he dismount his great stallion and reach out
beyond the Ebenezer Baptist - Harvard Law axis to people who
are seeking something more.
It wouldn't be hard. He could join
a majority of doctors in this country and support single payer
health insurance. He could go after usurious interest rates.
He could propose a housing policy in which the government become
equity partners with less wealthy homebuyers and recovered its
share at sale.
Hell, he could take just one position
without a dozen conditions and it would probably help.
But instead, it looks like he will
continue to be the man his fans adore and the rest can't quite
figure out.
That's not the best way to win an
election.
MEDIA BIAS DOESN'T GET MUCH WORSE
THAN THIS
All three major presidential candidates
have highly controversial religious ties. We searched news sites
for mention of these candidates and their ties and came up with
these results:
- HILLARY CLINTON AND THE FELLOWSHIP:
45 MENTIONS
- JOHN MCCAIN AND REV JOHN HAGEE:
502 MENTIONS
- BARACK OBAMA AND REV JEREMIAH WRIGHT:
17,258 MENTIONS
WHO'S A PATRIOT?
LAWRENCE KORB AND IAN MOSS, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
In 1961, a young African-American
man, after hearing President John F. Kennedy's challenge to,
"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you
can do for your country," gave up his student deferment,
left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines.
In 1963, this man, having completed his two years of service
in the Marines, volunteered again to become a Navy corpsman.
(They provide medical assistance to the Marines as well as to
Navy personnel.)
The man did so well in corpsman
school that he was the valedictorian and became a cardiopulmonary
technician. Not surprisingly, he was assigned to the Navy's premier
medical facility, Bethesda Naval Hospital, as a member of the
commander in chief's medical team, and helped care for President
Lyndon B. Johnson after his 1966 surgery. For his service on
the team, which he left in 1967, the White House awarded him
three letters of commendation.. . .
While this young man was serving
six years on active duty, Vice President Dick Cheney, who was
born the same year as the Marine/sailor, received five deferments,
four for being an undergraduate and graduate student and one
for being a prospective father. Presidents Bill Clinton and George
W. Bush, both five years younger than the African-American youth,
used their student deferments to stay in college until 1968.
Both then avoided going on active duty through family connections.
Who is the real patriot? The young
man who interrupted his studies to serve his country for six
years or our three political leaders who beat the system? Are
the patriots the people who actually sacrifice something or those
who merely talk about their love of the country?
After leaving the service of his
country, the young African-American finished his final year of
college, entered the seminary, was ordained as a minister, and
eventually became pastor of a large church in one of America's
biggest cities.
This man is Rev. Jeremiah Wright,
the retiring pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, who has
been in the news for comments he made over the last three decades.
OBAMA'S KEY ADVISOR WANTS 60,000-80,000
AMERICAN TROOPS TO STAY IN IRAQ
ELI LAKE, NY SUN A key adviser to
Senator Obama's campaign is recommending in a confidential paper
that America keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq as
of late 2010, a plan at odds with the public pledge of the Illinois
senator to withdraw combat forces from Iraq within 16 months
of taking office.
The paper, obtained by The New York
Sun, was written by Colin Kahl for the center-left Center for
a New American Security. In "Stay on Success: A Policy of
Conditional Engagement," Mr. Kahl writes that through negotiations
with the Iraqi government "the U.S. should aim to transition
to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000-80,000
forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should
be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground)."
Mr. Kahl is the day-to-day coordinator
of the Obama campaign's working group on Iraq. . .
Both Mr. Kahl and a senior Obama
campaign adviser reached yesterday said the paper does not represent
the campaign's Iraq position. Nonetheless, the paper could provide
clues as to the ultimate size of the residual American force
the candidate has said would remain in Iraq after the withdrawal
of combat brigades. The campaign has not publicly discussed the
size of such a force in the past.
This is not the first time the opinion
of an adviser to the Obama campaign has differed with the candidate's
stated Iraq policy. In February, Mr. Obama's first foreign policy
tutor, Samantha Power, told BBC that the senator's current Iraq
plan would likely change based on the advice of military commanders
in 2009. She has since resigned her position as a formal adviser.
. .
In an interview yesterday, a senior
Obama foreign affairs adviser, Susan Rice, said the Iraq working
group is not the last word on the campaign's Iraq policy. . .
Mr. Obama's policy to date also allows for a residual force for
Iraq. In early Iowa debates, the senator would not pledge to
remove all soldiers from Iraq, a distinction from his promise
to withdraw all combat brigades. Also, Mr. Obama has stipulated
that he would be open to having the military train the Iraqi
Security Forces if he received guarantees that those forces would
not be the shock troops of one side of an Iraqi civil war.
But the Obama campaign has also
not said how many troops would make up this residual force. "We
have not put a number on that. It depends on the circumstances
on the ground," Ms. Rice said. She added, "It would
be worse than folly, it would be dangerous, to put a hard number
on the residual forces."
Mr. Kahl's paper laid out what he
called a "middle way" between unlimited engagement
in Iraq and complete and rapid disengagement. The approach is
contingent, he said, on the progress and willingness of Iraq's
major confessional parties in reaching political accommodation.
"There is a fundamental difference
in the assumption between the Democratic approach and the Bush-McCain
approach. That approach is premised on the assumption the Iraqi
government wants to reach accommodation and what they need is
time. The surge is premised on the notion of creating breathing
space," Mr. Kahl said. He added that his strategy would
pressure and entice the Iraqi government to begin political accommodation
by not only starting the withdrawal, but also by stating that
America had no intention to hold permanent bases in the country.
DOUG HENWOOD'S OBAMA REALITY
CHECK
DOUG HENWOOD, LEFT BUSINESS OBSERVER
Obama is inspiring the young, lifting the alienated off their
couches, and catalyzing a new movement for . . . change, presumably
one we can believe in. The content of this change is hard to
specify. Some serious leftists we know and love point to Obama's
roots as a community organizer in Chicago, though many people
in a position to know say he didn't rock many boats in those
days. He was embraced by foundation liberals, however, who greased
his way into the Harvard Law School via a lakefront condo.
All of which doesn't make Obama
uniquely bad: he's just another mainstream Democrat with a sleazy
real estate guy in his past. Though he's being touted as an early
opponent of the Iraq war, he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004:
'There's not that much difference between my position and George
Bush's position . . . ' He voted to renew the PATRIOT Act, campaigned
for happy warrior Joe Lieberman against Ned Lamont in 2006, and
wants to increase the size of the U.S. military. He supports
Israel's continuing torture of the Palestinians penned into the
Gaza Strip. A Congressional Quarterly study found his Senate
voting record was virtually indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton's;
the only major difference in their votes is a surprising one:
a move to limit class actions suits against corporations, which
Clinton voted against, and Obama for. Obama's vote was against
the preferences of a Dem financial base, trial lawyers, but pleasing
to the Fortune 500 and Wall Street. . .
Some more thoughtful victims of
Obama Disease point to detailed position papers on the candidate's
website. These must always be taken with a grain of salt, especially
during primary season. Candidate Bill Clinton promised to 'invest
in people' and ended up being the president of 'a bunch of fucking
bond traders,' as Hillary's husband memorably put it. LBJ campaigned
as the peace candidate in 1964, and ended up killing a million
Indochinese.
Obamians also point to his rejection
of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council; they put him on
their list of rising stars, and he asked to be removed. Encouraging-except
for the fact that his chief economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee,
the fellow who told the Canadians not to take the anti-NAFTA
rhetoric seriously, is the DLC's chief economist. Goolsbee has
written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea
of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures. That hire is more significant
than asking to be struck from a list.
Big capital would have no problem
with an Obama presidency. Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones
threw a fundraiser for him at his Greenwich house last spring,
'The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,' one source said of
the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him
because they're socially liberal, up to a point, and probably
eager for a little less war, and think he's the man to do their
work. They're also confident he wouldn't undertake any renovations
to the distribution of wealth. You could say the same about Clinton-but
you know those hedge fund guys. They like a contrary bet. . .
What does Obama have? A lot of slogans
that connect with nothing in the real world; in fact, their very
emptiness may be the source of their appeal, because it allows
people to project whatever they want to onto him, without getting
bogged down in specifics, as Reagan liked to say. . . And despite
the grand claims of enthusiasts, he doesn't really have a movement
behind him-he's got a fan club. How does a fan club hold a candidate
accountable? It's not like he'll take the phone calls of all
those 27-year-olds who gave him $100 on the web as quickly as
he'd answer a summons from Paul Tudor Jones.
Obama's appeal is a strange thing.
Though he's added to it as his political momentum builds, his
original base consisted of blacks and upper-status whites. The
black support is out of racial pride, but the initial white support
was driven by his post-partisan, post-racial appeal. Well-off
whites love to hear a black man say that racism has largely receded
as a toxic force, though it's really hard to figure out what
the hell he's talking about in a world where black households
earn about 60% as much as whites, and where black men are incarcerated
at more than six times the rate of white men. And what of this
post-partisan business? Politics is about conflicts over resources
and priorities, and over the state's power to coerce; how ever
could comity prevail in a world where interests and preferences
diverge so widely?
As Adolph Reed told LBO, an Obama
presidency "could give us the worst of all possible of worlds:
one in which race is completely repackaged as a discourse of
celebration and, to the extent that that had already become the
only metaphor through which American politics could accommodate
critical discussion of inequality, the language of '˜disparity,'
it will no longer be possible for critiques of inequality to
be heard as an appropriate topic for political discussion. .
.
There's no doubt that Obamalust
does embody some phantasmic longing for a better world-more peaceful,
egalitarian, and humane. He'll deliver little of that-but there's
evidence of some admirable popular desires behind the crush.
And they will inevitably be disappointed.
As this newsletter has argued for
years, there's great political potential in popular disillusionment
with Democrats. The phenomenon was first diagnosed by Garry Wills
in Nixon Agonistes. As Wills explained it, throughout the 1950s,
left-liberals intellectuals thought that the national malaise
was the fault of Eisenhower, and a Democrat would cure it. Well,
they got JFK and everything still pretty much sucked, which is
what gave rise to the rebellions of the 1960s (and all that excess
that Obama wants to junk any remnant of). You could argue that
the movements of the 1990s that culminated in Seattle were a
minor rerun of this. The sense of malaise and alienation is probably
stronger now than it was 50 years ago, and includes a lot more
of the working class, whom Stanley Greenberg's focus groups find
to be really pissed off about the cost of living and the way
the rich are lording it over the rest of us.
Never did the possibility of disappointment
offer so much hope. That's not what the candidate means by that
word, but history can be a great ironist.
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Obama.html
MARCH 2008
OBAMA RAISES TWICE AS MUCH FROM
BIG BUSINESS INTERESTS AS MCCAIN
If the Catholic Church acted like
the Democrats it would get its big bucks from atheists, porn
stars and drug dealers. Read this and you'll understand why Democrats
don't act like Democrats
BRODY MULLINS, WALL STREET JOURNAL
Of seven major industries that have been the most reliable Republican
resources, Sen. McCain has beaten Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen.
Barack Obama in only one, according to data from the Center for
Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization. Even that one,
transportation, is a close call. Among the seven combined, the
expected Republican nominee raised $13.1 million through February,
compared with $22.5 million for Sen. Obama and $27.1 million
for Sen. Clinton.
The Republican standard-bearer's
attempt to claw back financial support from the GOP's business
base could be a pivotal factor in determining the outcome of
the presidential race. Employees of financial-services, insurance
and real-estate companies so far have donated to Sen. Obama over
Sen. McCain by almost two-to-one -- and favored Sen. Clinton
by even more. Health-care and pharmaceutical firms have given
three times as much to each of the two Democrats as to Sen. McCain.
Defense firms put Sen. McCain ahead of Sen. Obama, but behind
Sen. Clinton. Energy, construction and agribusiness firms have
given more to both Democrats. . .
Two main factors have combined to
put Sen. McCain in such a deep hole with businesses. First: Since
early 2007, Democrats in general have been more successful at
fund raising than their Republican counterparts. The unusually
strong business-sector fund raising of Sen. Clinton and Sen.
Obama has been helped by a wide expectation during 2007 of likely
Democratic success in the White House and congressional races
because of President Bush's unpopularity. . . Second, Sen. McCain's
maverick status in his party and frequent tangles with big business
interests made other Republican candidates far more attractive
to many industry donors. . .
Individually, Sens. Clinton and
Obama haven't just beaten Sen. McCain to business donors. In
many areas they bested the top Republican fund-raisers, Messrs.
Romney and Giuliani, too.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120709422285181841.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news
TAKE THE TEST
OBAMA PRAISES FIRST GULF WAR,
FOREIGN POLICIES OF REAGAN AND DADDY BUSH
AP
Sen. Barack Obama said Friday he would return the country to
the more "traditional" foreign policy efforts of past
presidents, such as George H.W. Bush, John F. Kennedy and Ronald
Reagan. At a town hall event at a local high school gymnasium,
Obama praised George H.W. Bush - father of the president - for
the way he handled the Persian Gulf War: with a large coalition
and carefully defined objectives. . . "The truth is that
my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan
realistic policy of George Bush's father, of John F. Kennedy,
of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan, and it is George Bush that's
been naive and it's people like John McCain and, unfortunately,
some Democrats that have facilitated him acting in these naive
ways that have caused us so much damage in our reputation around
the world," he said.
UDATE: OBAMA'S POSITION ON IRAQ
AMY GOODMAN:
Senator Obama, quick question: 70 percent of Iraqis say they
want the US to withdraw completely; why don’t you call for
a total withdrawal?
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I do, except
for our embassy. I call for amnesty and protecting our civilian
contractors there.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said a
residual force-
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, but-
AMY GOODMAN: -which means [inaudible]
thousands [inaudible].
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, no. I mean,
I don’t think that you’ve read exactly what I’ve
said. What I said is that we do need to have a strike force in
the region. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in Iraq; it
could be in Kuwait or other places. But we do have to have some
presence in order to not only protect them, but also potentially
to protect their territorial integrity.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you call for a
ban on the private military contractors like Blackwater?
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I’ve actually-I’m
the one who sponsored the bill that called for the investigation
of Blackwater in [inaudible], so-
AMY GOODMAN: But would you support
the Sanders one now?
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Here’s the
problem: we have 140,000 private contractors right there, so
unless we want to replace all of or a big chunk of those with
US troops, we can’t draw down the contractors faster than
we can draw down our troops. So what I want to do is draw-I want
them out in the same way that we make sure that we draw out our
own combat troops. Alright? I mean, I-
AMY GOODMAN: Not a ban?
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I don’t
want to replace those contractors with more US troops, because
we don’t have them, alright?
OBAMA CAMPAIGN CAUGHT IN NAFTA
DOUBLE TALK
AP - Barack Obama's senior economic
policy adviser privately told Canadian officials to view the
debate in Ohio over trade as "political positioning,"
according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press that was
rejected by the adviser. A Barack Obama adviser says Canadian
officials inaccurately portrayed talk about the camp's trade
policy. . . .
The memo is the first documentation
to emerge publicly out of the meeting between the adviser, Austan
Goolsbee, and officials with the Canadian consulate in Chicago,
but Goolsbee said it misinterprets what he told them. The memo
was written by Joseph DeMora, who works for the consulate and
attended the meeting.
"Noting anxiety among many
U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee
candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged,
particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign,"
the memo said. "He cautioned that this messaging should
not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about
political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."
Goolsbee disputed the characterization
from the conservative government official. "This thing about
'it's more about political positioning than a clear articulation
of policy plans,' that's this guy's language," Goolsbee
said of DeMora. "He's not quoting me. "I certainly
did not use that phrase in any way," he said.
The Obama campaign and the Canadian
embassy denied there was any inconsistency between what the candidate
was saying publicly and what advisers were saying privately.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/03/obama.nafta.ap/index.html
CNN - The Canadian memo said that
when Rioux "asked whether we could expect to hear more of
this as the elections progressed, Goolsbee thought not. In fact,
he mentioned that going forward the Obama camp was going to be
careful to send the appropriate message without coming off too
protectionist.
"As Obama continues to court
the economic populist vote, particularly in upcoming contests
like Ohio, we are likely to see a continuation of some of the
messaging that hasn't played in Canada's favor, but this should
continue to be viewed in the context in which it is delivered,"
DeMora wrote in the closing section.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton said
Goolsbee's visit was not as an emissary from the campaign, but
as a professor from the University of Chicago. He was not authorized
to share any messages from the campaign, Burton said.
CNN - "This is being reported
as if somehow this is an official meeting of an Obama representative
and the Canadian government," Obama campaign manager David
Plouffe said in a conference call with reporters. "That
was not the case. He was essentially doing a walking tour and
was essentially having a casual conversation and the report on
that conversation was not accurate."
But the Associated Press *reported
Monday it had obtained a memo from a Canadian diplomat essentially
confirming CTV's story and stating Goolsbee said Obama's tough
talk on NAFTA was "more about political positioning than
a clear articulation of policy plans." Goolsbee denied Monday
he ever made such a suggestion, and the Canadian embassy issued
a statement saying there was it had "no intention to convey,
in any way, that Senator Obama and his campaign team were taking
a different position in public from views expressed in private.
OBAMA PLANS TO APPOINT EXTREME RIGHT WINGERS
TO TOP CABINET POSTS
TIMES, UK - Obama is hoping to appoint
cross-party figures to his cabinet such as Chuck Hagel, the Republican
senator for Nebraska and an opponent of the Iraq war, and Richard
Lugar, leader of the Republicans on the Senate foreign relations
committee. Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated
Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain's closest friends in the
Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defence secretary.
Some regard the outspoken Republican as a possible vice-presidential
nominee although that might be regarded as a "stretch".
. .
Obama believes he will be able to
neutralise McCain by drawing on the expertise of independent
Republicans such as Hagel and Lugar, who is regarded by Obama
as a potential secretary of state.
Larry Korb, a defence official under
President Ronald Reagan who is backing Obama, said: "By
putting a Republican in the Pentagon and the State Department
you send a signal to Congress and the American people that issues
of national security are above politics."
Korb recalled that President John
F Kennedy appointed Robert McNamara, a Republican, as defense
secretary in 1961. "Hagel is not only a Republican but a
military veteran who would reassure the troops that there was
somebody in the Pentagon who understood their hopes, concerns
and fears," he said.
LUGAR
Rated 0% by SANE
Rated 0% by AFL-CIO
Rated 0% BY NARAL
Rated 12% by American Public Health Association
Rated 0% by Alliance for Retired Americans
Rated 27% by the National Education Association
Rated 5% by League of Conservation Voters
Voted no on implementing the 9/11
Commission report
Vote against providing habeas corpus for Gitmo prisoners
Voted no on comprehensive test ban treaty
Voted against same sex marriage
Strongly anti-abortion
Opposed to more federal funding for healthcare
Voted for unconstitutional wiretapping
Voted to increase penalties for drug violations
HAGEL
Rated 0% BY NARAL
Rated 11% by NAACP
Rated 0% by Human Rights Coalition
Rated 100% by Christian Coalition
Rated 12% by American Public Health Association
Rated 22% by Alliance for Retired Americans
Rated 36% by the National Education Association
Rated 0% by League of Conservation Voters
Rated 8% by AFL-CIO
Strongly anti-abortion
Voted for anti-flag desecration amendment
Voted to increase penalties for drug violations
Favors privatizing Social Security
THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT
OBAMA
[Matt Gonzales is running with Ralph
Nader as an independent vice presidential candidate. From an
article in Counterpunch]
CLASS ACTION REFORM: In 2005, Obama
joined Republicans in passing a law dubiously called the Class
Action Fairness Act that would shut down state courts as a venue
to hear many class action lawsuits. Long a desired objective
of large corporations and President George Bush, Obama in effect
voted to deny redress in many of the courts where these kinds
of cases have the best chance of surviving corporate legal challenges.
Instead, it forces them into the backlogged Republican-judge
dominated federal courts. By contrast, Senators Clinton, Edwards
and Kerry joined 23 others to vote against CAFA, noting the "reform"
was a thinly-veiled "special interest extravaganza"
that favored banking, creditors and other corporate interests.
. .
CREDIT CARD INTEREST RATES: Obama
has a way of ducking hard votes or explaining away his bad votes
by trying to blame poorly-written statutes. Case in point: an
amendment he voted on as part of a recent bankruptcy bill before
the US Senate would have capped credit card interest rates at
30 percent. Inexplicably, Obama voted against it, although it
would have been the beginning of setting these predatory lending
rates under federal control. Even Senator Hillary Clinton supported
it. Now Obama explains his vote by saying the amendment was poorly
written or set the ceiling too high. His explanation isn't credible
as Obama offered no lower number as an alternative, and didn't
put forward his own amendment clarifying whatever language he
found objectionable.
LIMITING NON-ECONOMIC DAMAGES: These
seemingly unusual votes wherein Obama aligns himself with Republican
Party interests aren't new. While in the Illinois Senate, Obama
voted to limit the recovery that victims of medical malpractice
could obtain through the courts. Capping non-economic damages
in medical malpractice cases means a victim cannot fully recover
for pain and suffering or for punitive damages. Moreover, it
ignored that courts were already empowered to adjust awards when
appropriate, and that the Illinois Supreme Court had previously
ruled such limits on tort reform violated the state constitution.
. .
MINING LAW OF 1872: In November
2007, Obama came out against a bill that would have reformed
the notorious Mining Law of 1872. The current statute, signed
into law by Ulysses Grant, allows mining companies to pay a nominal
fee, as little as $2.50 an acre, to mine for hardrock minerals
like gold, silver, and copper without paying royalties. . . The
Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act of 2007 would have finally
overhauled the law and allowed American taxpayers to reap part
of the royalties. . . Later it came to light that one of Obama's
key advisors in Nevada is a Nevada-based lobbyist in the employ
of various mining companies
ENERGY POLICY: On energy policy,
it turns out Obama is a big supporter of corn-based ethanol which
is well known for being an energy-intensive crop to grow. It
is estimated that seven barrels of oil are required to produce
eight barrels of corn ethanol, according to research by the Cato
Institute. Ethanol's impact on climate change is nominal and
isn't "green" according to Alisa Gravitz, Co-op America
executive director. "It simply isn't a major improvement
over gasoline when it comes to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions."
. . . Obama voted in favor of $8 billion worth of corn subsidies
in 2006 alone, when most of that money should have been committed
to alternative energy sources such as solar, tidal and wind.
SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE: Obama
opposed single-payer bill HR676, sponsored by Congressmen Dennis
Kucinich and John Conyers in 2006, although at least 75 members
of Congress supported it. . . Obama's own plan has been widely
criticized for leaving health care industry administrative costs
in place and for allowing millions of people to remain uninsured.
"Sicko" filmmaker Michael Moore ridiculed it saying,
"Obama wants the insurance companies to help us develop
a new health care plan-the same companies who have created the
mess in the first place."
NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT:
Regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement, Obama recently
boasted, "I don't think NAFTA has been good for Americans,
and I never have." Yet, Calvin Woodward reviewed Obama's
record on NAFTA in a February 26, 2008 Associated Press article
and found that comment to be misleading: "In his 2004 Senate
campaign, Obama said the US should pursue more deals such as
NAFTA, and argued more broadly that his opponent's call for tariffs
would spark a trade war. AP reported then that the Illinois senator
had spoken of enormous benefits having accrued to his state from
NAFTA, while adding that he also called for more aggressive trade
protections for US workers.". . . Obama cast the deciding
vote against an amendment to a September 2005 Commerce Appropriations
Bill, proposed by North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, that would
have prohibited US trade negotiators from weakening US laws that
provide safeguards from unfair foreign trade practices
SOME FINAL EXAMPLES: On March 2,
2007 Obama gave a speech at AIPAC, America's pro-Israeli government
lobby, wherein he disavowed his previous support for the plight
of the Palestinians. . .
He wouldn't have his picture taken
with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom when visiting San Francisco
for a fundraiser in his honor because Obama was scared voters
might think he supports gay marriage . . .
Obama acknowledges the disproportionate
impact the death penalty has on blacks, but still supports it,
while other politicians are fighting to stop it. . .
Obama aggressively opposed initiating
impeachment proceedings against the president and he wouldn't
even support Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's effort to censure
the Bush administration for illegally wiretapping American citizens
in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
. .
http://counterpunch.com/gonzalez02292008.html
STRANGE COINCIDENCES
ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION
WE SHALL BE OVERCOME
OH BUMMER
SAM SMITH
I am already in trouble for not
being sufficiently enthusiastic about Barack Obama and the dude
hasn't even been nominated yet.
I even wrote that he was the best
candidate who could possibly win, albeit adding that this was
more cause for concern than for joy.
But the days when you took someone's
vote and didn't ask too many questions are apparently over. In
modern liberalism, you not only have to be on the right side
but for the right reasons.
And so now, according to one blog,
I am "excoriating Barack Obama" and full of "fear
and loathing." Another reader writes to say, "you nay-sayers
can either get on the train or get out of the way." Even
two-thirds of my immediate family is on my case.
Yet before I am dragged off to my
first Skeptics Anonymous meeting, let me try to explain why I
haven't turned to Barack with appropriate enthusiasm and faith.
Just writing that seems silly. After
all, until now even missionaries understood that it was their
job to convert and not the heathens' task to justify their apathy
and doubt.
On the other hand, I have been through
this before. It wasn't long after I began writing critically
of Bill Clinton that I became a "Clinton hater," a
marvelous piece of snake oil semiotics in which the Clintonistas
claimed the status of oppressed peoples while his opponents were
dumped amongst the ranks of anti-Semites and the KKK.
One of the few pleasures of the
last eight years, despite regularly excoriating the Bush regime,
has been that no one has called me a "hater." In fact,
in fifty years of journalism, Clinton is apparently the only
politician I have ever "hated." The rest I have just
criticized or exposed. I thought I was doing the same thing with
Clinton but then I didn't yet understand post-modern politics.
All along, I just thought I was
doing my job, serving my readers instead of power, the latter
being the preferred cause of the more conventional media which
has never understood the difference between objectivity and obsequiousness.
Twenty years ago, I put it this way:
"The preoccupation of the press
with power, in no small part, is a reflection of its own social
ambitions rather than an accurate description of the world. The
erstwhile dictum that the only way for a journalist to look at
a politician is down his nose has been replaced by the dictum:
don't bite the source that feeds and glamorizes you."
By the way, the politician the press
was protecting then was named Ronald Reagan. Its love of power
is quite non-partisan and the reader has become its non-partisan
victim.
Then there's the problem of policy.
I call it life but apparently the correct word is policy. In
pro-Obama writings you find a dismissive approach towards "policies"
as though they were nice things as long as hidden away in statements
or for fellows at the Brookings Institution, but not the real
- like enthusiasm, hope and faith.
Here's where I fail again. I actually
think providing Americans with decent healthcare and housing
and ending usurious interest rates is more important than having
a nice president talking with enthusiasm about hope and faith.
Where did I pick up this odd idea?
From the Democratic Party, which from Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson
had it as a central thesis. Which is why we have a minimum wage,
Medicare, Social Security and some modicum of control over banks
and investment firms. Social Security once symbolized real hope
to Americans. Now Obama symbolizes hope and, according to him,
everything about Social Security is "on the table."
Sadly, for anyone under 35 there
has hardly been a measure passed in their lifetime that would
give much credibility to "policies." But it is possible.
Consider what that evil man Richard Nixon did. He proposed a
healthcare plan to the left of either Obama or Clinton. This
plan included a provision in which any American could sign up
for Medicaid paying on a sliding income scale. He indexed Social
Security for inflation, created the Environmental Protection
Agency and OSHA as well as the first real federal affirmative
action program. If a guy as bad as Nixon could do all that, shouldn't
we expect a bit more from the sainted Barack Obama?
Then there's the politics of the
situation. In the old Democratic Party, liberals instinctively
understood they were fighting a two front war: one front against
the Republicans and the other against the bad guys in their own
party: George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Carmine DeSapio, Richard
Daley etc. With Clinton, the liberal wing of the party became
gutless puppets of the Democratic Abandonship Council.
Compare that with the Republicans
who reached their modern pinnacle in a state of constant internal
conflict that goes on to this day. It is interesting to speculate
on whether liberals, if they had been as assertive within their
own party as the GOP right, might not have had similar results.
One other thing: I suffer from the
delusion that if I want words put together well I should go to
a bookstore and not to a political speech. As George Orwell noted,
"in our time, political speech and writing are largely the
defense of the indefensible. Thus political language has to consist
largely of euphemisms, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."
In one debate, for example, Obama
and Clinton spent a half hour on healthcare and no one noticed
that their entire purpose was to defend programs designed to
protect the useless and destructive private insurance industry.
I would feel quite differently about Obama's language if he used
the words "single payer" as often as he does "hope."
Finally, if they insist on talking
about hope, I've got the Obamists beat. My optimism far exceeds
theirs because I truly believe we could have done better than
Barack Obama. And still can some day.
WHY CHEERING IS BAD FOR YOUR
HEALTH
Sam Smith
Two essential facts about the presidential
campaign:
1. Of the present candidates who
could possibly be elected, Barack Obama is clearly the best.
2. This is more cause for concern
than for hope.
Symbolizing the new Middle Ages
in which we live - in which thought and action are guided by
media-driven myth (as opposed to the church-driven myth of the
earlier medieval era) - Obama has arrived at his status without
record, without programs and without a vision beyond a collection
of trite but effective evangelical cliches. He is, however, of
the right mythical looks, age and color.
Early in the campaign, I compared
him to Chauncy Gardiner aka Chance the Gardener, an earlier manifestation
of magnificent nothingness to appear on the American political
scene - albeit the fiction of Chance was safely contained in
the movie "Being There" while Obama was running for
election to a real White House.
In the final scene, reports Wikipedia,
"Chance is seen apparently walking across the surface of
a lake while the most important movers and shakers in the USA
discuss running him for President. This scene continues to generate
discussion and controversy. Clearly we see Chance walking on
water, an act with a clear biblical reference. . . Is there a
prosaic explanation, such as hidden stepping-stones? Or is Chance
the Savior (as so many of the characters are looking for)? Does
he truly possess some special grace, given his simple innocence
and simply being present to each moment without filters and ideas?
In his 2001 book, The Great Movies, Roger Ebert argues for the
latter interpretation. Another view is that the director (and
the author) are simply asking the audience: "How much more
would you have believed? We've been kidding you all along you
know!"
The novel upon which the movie was
based was written over thirty years ago by Jerzy Kosinski. The
Obama candidacy may elevate Kosinksi to one of the most prescient
political authors of modern times. After all, what is more Obamesque
than the sort of phrase that got Chance started? - "In the
garden, growth has its seasons. First comes spring and summer,
but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and
summer again."
If you think that's an exaggeration,
consider this from Chauncy Obama: "If you're walking down
the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually
you'll make progress."
So here we are. We don't know what
we have and we don't know what we're going to get. But to many
it looks great.
Yet one thing is certain. The current
mindless infatuation of Obama's supporters, while harmless enough
with a rock star, will do our politics and our lives no good.
We have, after all, some experience
with this. Obama isn't the first Democratic candidate to try
to ride into town on the back of hope. Bill Clinton brought the
whole town of Hope with him but by the end of his first term
the word had all but dropped from sight.
Instead, Clinton mangled the social
democracy of his predecessors, raised corruption to new heights
and paved the way for the Bush regime, aided in no small part
by the groupiesque infatuation among the liberal class.
If there was one thing we should
have learned from the Clinton years is the danger of adoring
politicians instead of pragmatically using them.
Sadly, however, the last presidential
candidate to even hint at this was Eugene Debs who said once,
"Too long have the workers of the world waited for some
Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never
will come. I would not lead you out if I could for if you could
be led out, you could be led back again."
Instead, we have a candidate who
declares, "We are the ones we've been waiting for. . . We
are the change that we seek."
Instead, we have a candidate who
says, "My job this morning is to be so persuasive . . .
that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light
will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and
you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote
for Barack."
As Joe Klein noted in Time, "the
campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire.
Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause - other than
an amorphous desire for change - the message is becoming dangerously
self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how
wonderful the Obama campaign is."
The blogger Barhu writes, "What
I find interesting about Obama is how narcissistic he is with
his own rhetorical gifts. With so many millions of people finding
so much inspiration in his rhetoric, what is it, exactly, that
he is trying to inspire them to do? Has he made appeals to his
young followers to join the military, the Peace Corps, Teach
For America? Has he inspired them to give back to his country,
to seek out public service, to serve, as John McCain has implored
his followers, a cause greater than ourselves? Has he inspired
his over-educated, overpaid followers to raise money for victims
of Katrina or the tornadoes, to lobby for higher taxes, to sacrifice
any of their wealth or intellect in the service of America? Has
he tried, in any way, shape or form, to use his gifts to inspire
his minions to become apart of the fabric of public service,
to improve our nation through volunteerism, charitable donations,
self service of any kind whatsoever?
"No. The only thing Barack
Obama has ever inspired anyone to do is vote for Barack Obama."
This is the technique of generations
of hustlers, many of them generating their con from the pulpit,
others leading pseudo-psychological workshops, and a few - the
most dangerous - with whole armies behind them. If you listen
to Obama with any sense of history, you can not but be concerned.
Still the alternative is the atrocious
Clinton or the egregious McCain and there is no suggestion here
that these are better choices. Only that voters - instead of
being reduced to hand clapping, check writing automatons - understand
what they are getting with their vote and that, if that vote
succeeds, they must be constantly on guard, know when to oppose
and when to, as Pogo once put it, stand up on the piano and demand
outrage action. We are not getting a savior, but at best an occasional
ally.
We should be no less cautious of
our politicians than the Roman Church is of its potential saints.
The Guardian described John Paul II as having to go through the
following:
"Theological experts will review
John Paul's published works to determine if they are theologically
sound, a historical commission will gather information to document
his life, and Rev D'Alonzo and Monsignour Oder will start interviewing
witnesses.
"When the material is gathered,
the Vatican appoints a commission to review the case and make
a final report to the Pope for him to decide if John Paul led
a life of 'heroic virtue'".
"If he does, and the Vatican
then confirms a miracle has occurred after John Paul's death
thanks to his intercession, he can be beatified. A second miracle
is needed for him to be made a saint."
Mind you, we are choosing something
far more important than a mere saint; we are selecting a president
- and, theoretically, not one to serve but to serve us. To the
extent we ignore this difference, we approach the point described
by Albert Camus to a German friend after the Second World War:
"This is what separated us from you; we made demands. You
were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed
of giving ours the truth."
IN SEARCH OF OBAMA
MONEY, ECONOMY & LABOR
AUDACITY OF HOPE - "Conservatives
and Bill Clinton were right about welfare"
PAUL STREET - He opposed an amendment
to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest
rates at 30 percent.
Obama voted for a business-friendly
"tort reform" bill that rolls back working peoples'
ability to obtain reasonable redress and compensation from misbehaving
corporations
THE NATION - John Edwards and Hillary
Clinton are pledging substantial federal resources to stabilize
the mortgage market and intervene on behalf of borrowers. Barack
Obama's proposal is tepid by comparison, short on aggressive
government involvement and infused with conservative rhetoric
about fiscal responsibility. As he has done on domestic issues
like healthcare, job creation and energy policy, Obama is staking
out a position to the right of not only populist Edwards but
Clinton as well. . . Though he has been a proponent of mortgage
fraud legislation in the Senate, he has remained silent on further
financial regulations. And much like his broader economic stimulus
package, Obama's foreclosure plan mostly avoids direct government
spending in favor of a tax credit for homeowners, which amounts
to about $500 on average, beyond which only certain borrowers
would be eligible for help from an additional fund. . .
Obama's disappointing foreclosure
plan stems from the centrist politics of his three chief economic
advisers and his campaign's ties to Wall Street institutions
opposed to increased financial regulation. David Cutler and Jeffrey
Liebman are both Harvard economists who served in the Clinton
Administration, and they work on market-oriented solutions to
social welfare issues. Cutler advocates improving healthcare
through financial incentives; Liebman, the partial privatization
of Social Security.
Austan Goolsbee, an economist at
the University of Chicago who calls himself a "centrist
market economist," has been most directly involved with
crafting Obama's subprime agenda. . . Robert Pollin, an economist
at the University of Massachussets, believes "these three
advisers generally reflect Obama's very moderate economic program,
similar to Clintonism." Wall Street apparently has come
to a similar conclusion. Obama had received nearly $10 million
in contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate
sector through October, and he's second among presidential candidates
of either party in money raised from commercial banks, trailing
only Clinton. Goldman Sachs, which made $6 billion from devalued
mortgage securities in the first nine months of 2007, is Obama's
top contributor. When asked if Obama would hold these financial
institutions accountable for losses incurred by homeowners and
investors, his campaign refused to comment.
PAUL STREET - Obama has lent his
support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neoliberal
Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and "other Wall Street Democrats"
to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies
within the Democratic Party.
IDEOLOGY
PAUL STREET - Obama was recently
hailed as a "Hamiltonian" believer in "limited
government" and "free trade" by Republican New
York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having
"a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS."
. . .
POLITICS
PAUL STREET - He had to be shamed
off the "New Democrat Directory" of the corporate-right
Democratic Leadership Council by the popular left black Internet
magazine Black Commentator.
The list was compiled by the DLC
and Obama asked to be removed after he began getting flack about
it - TPR
He lent his politically influential
and financially rewarding assistance to neoconservative pro-war
Senator Joe Lieberman's struggle against the Democratic antiwar
insurgent Ned Lamont. Obama has supported other "mainstream
Democrats" fighting antiwar progressives in primary races
Obama later reversed his position
and supported Lamont in the general election - TPR
He criticized efforts to enact filibuster
proceedings against reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel
Alito.
Obama "dismissively" referred-in
a "tone laced with contempt"-to the late progressive
and populist U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone as "something of
a gadfly."
He opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy
Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent.
WASHINGTON TIMES - Barack Obama,
the senatorial candidate of 2004, might have a bone to pick with
Barack Obama, the presidential candidate of 2008. Videotapes
of debates and speeches that were obtained by The Washington
Times show that Mr. Obama took positions during his Senate campaign
on nearly a half-dozen issues ranging from the Cuba embargo to
health care for illegal aliens that conflict with statements
that he has made during his run for the White House.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Obama voted to make John Negroponte
the National Intelligence Director.
PAUL STREET - He voted for the appointment
of the war criminal Condaleeza Rice to Secretary of State.
He refuses to foreswear the use
of first-strike nuclear weapons against Iran.
WASHINGTON TIMES - In 2004, Mr.
Obama told an audience at Southern Illinois University, "I
think it's time for us to end the embargo with Cuba. . . It's
time for us to acknowledge that that particular policy has failed."
However, he stopped short of calling for an end to the embargo
in a Miami Herald op-ed in August. He said he would rely on diplomacy,
with a message that if a post-Fidel Castro government made democratic
changes, the U.S. "is prepared to take steps to normalize
relations and ease the embargo."
NEDRA PICKLER, ASSOCIATED PRESS
- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday
that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down
terrorists. . .
BUSH REGIME
AP- Democratic presidential candidate
Barack Obama laid out list of political shortcomings he sees
in the Bush administration but said he opposes impeachment for
either President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney.
. . "I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breeches,
and intentional breeches of the president's authority,"
he said.
HEALTH
PAUL STREET - Obama claims to oppose
the introduction of single-payer national health insurance on
the grounds that such a widely supported social-democratic change
would lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private
insurance industry-at places like Kaiser and Blue Cross Blue
Shield. Does Obama support the American scourge of racially disparate
mass incarceration on the grounds that it provides work for tens
of thousands of prison guards?
WASHINGTON TIMES - Mr. Obama told
an AFL-CIO group in June 2003: "I happen to be a proponent
of a single-payer, universal health care plan." But in a
recent debate he said he has never endorsed such a plan. "Senator
Obama has always said that single-payer universal care is a good
idea because it would increase efficiency in the system, but
the problem is that it's not achievable," Mr. Vietor said.
CIVIL LIBERTIES
He voted to confirm Michael Chertoff
as head of HSA
PAUL STREET - Obama voted to re-authorize
the repressive PATRIOT Act.
He opposed Senator Russ Feingold's
(D-WI) move to censure the Bush administration after the president
was found to have illegally wiretapped U.S. citizens.
WASHINGTON TIMES - In an October
2003 NAACP debate, Mr. Obama said he would "vote to abolish"
mandatory minimum sentences. "The mandatory minimums take
too much discretion away from judges," he said. Mr. Obama
now says on his web site that he would "immediately review
sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce
the ineffective warehousing of nonviolent drug offenders."
WHAT OTHERS SAY
WASHINGTON LOBBYIST - Big donors
would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a ‘player'.
. . What's the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
PAUL STREET - Obama assiduously
supported the ethanol-promoting objectives of the Illinois-based
firm Archer-Daniels Midland, which has provided him with private
jets on at least two occasions. He has also defended the interests
of Illinois' gigantic electrical firm Exelon, America's leading
nuclear plant operator and a company that has given more than
$74,000 to his campaigns.
NUCLEAR ENERGY
Obama voted for a nuclear energy
bill that included money for bunker buster bombs and full funding
for Yucca Mountain.
DALLAS NEWS - Barack Obama says
nuclear power should be explored as an energy option. Hillary
Rodham Clinton says she's "agnostic" on whether more
nuclear plants should be built. . . "They've gone from 'no'
to 'yes, but,' and some even describe themselves as agnostics,
and that's a big improvement," said Derrick Freeman, senior
director of legislative programs for the Nuclear Energy Institute,
which supports the nuclear industry. . .
SOURCES OF FUNDING
PAUL STREET - His top career sponsors
include Goldman Sachs, Exelon (a leading Midwestern utility and
the world's leading nuclear plant operator), Soros Fund Management,
J.P Morgan Chase & Co., a number of leading corporate law
and lobbying firms (including Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden Arps,
and Sidley Austin LLP), top Chicago investment interests (including
Henry Crown & Co and Aerial Capital Management) and the like.
HIS BOOK
PAUL STREET - Obama relates youthful
discomfort with his college roommates' "irresponsible"
criticism of "capitalism" and then confesses respect
for Ronald Reagan's supposed success in embodying what Obama
calls "American's longing for order" (p. 31)
Obama commends "the need to
raise money from economic elites to finance elections" for
"prevent[ing] Democrats...from straying too far from the
center" and for marginalizing "those within the Democratic
Party who tend toward zealotry" (p. 38) and "radical
ideas"
Obama praises fellow centrist Senators
John F. Kerry (D-MA) and Hilary Clinton (D-NY) for "believing
in maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military" and
embracing "the virtues of capitalism" (p. 38). He applauds
his "recognizably progressive" Third Way hero Bill
Clinton for showing that "markets and fiscal discipline"
and "personal responsibility [are] needed to combat poverty"
(pp. 34-35).
Obama contends that defense of New
Deal and Great Society programs is contrary to "the changing
circumstances of globalization" (p.38).
Obama claims that the 1960s New
Left expressed the same self-indulgent "more absolutism"
(pp. 26-33) that animated the New Right.
The American people, Obama argues,
harbor only modest expectation of their government (p.7), reflecting
little concern (by Obama's account) with traditional left goals
of social justice and equality.
In Obama's brand of "progressivism,"
serious concern over the nation's harsh disparities is consigned
to leftist "cranks" and other assorted "unreasonable
zealots" – people walking in the "absolutist"
footsteps of Marx, the New Left, and (though Obama would never
acknowledge this) the democratic socialist Martin Luther King,
Jr.
Obama praises the United States'
founders for "recognize[ing] that there were seeds of anarchy
in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in
the idea of equality." If "everybody is truly free,
without the constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social
order," Obama asks, then "how can we ever hope to form
a society that coheres?" (pp. 86-87)
The Bush-Cheney gang-bangers are
"possessed," Obama says, "of the same mix of virtues
and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries as the rest
of us."
Obama roots the greatness of America
in its "free market" capitalist system and "business
culture."
It is left to alienated carpers,
"cranks" and "moral absolutists" of the "unreasonable"
left (Obama's basic understanding of radicals) to observe the
terrible outcomes of "our" distinctively anti-social
(and incidentally heavily state-protected) "market system."
Obama criticizes "left-leaning
populists" like "Venezuela's Hugo Chavez" for
daring to think that developing nations "should resist America's
efforts to expand its hegemony" and for trying to "follow
their own path to development." Such dysfunctional "reject[ion]
[of] the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy" will
only worsen the situation of the global poor, Obama claims (p.
315).
THE MESSIAH AND HIS GROUPIES
I've been following politics since
I was about 5. I've never seen anything like this. This is bigger
than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers.
This is the New Testament. - Chris Matthews
It's almost like the Messiah, you
know? - Jan Young
He looked at me, and the look in
his eyes was worth 1,000 words - Field worker
You don't need to debate policy
or discuss the day's headlines. You have a very personal reason
for investing your time and energy in this campaign – that
is the most compelling story you can tell. - Obama site
The New Kennedy - Morgenpost, Berlin
"Obama's finest speeches do
not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire.
They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history
has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted
around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in
it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over
flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've
heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his
best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place
where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its
honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of
sharing in its meaning and transcendence. - Ezra Klein
When you listen to Barack Obama,
when you really hear him, you witness a very rare thing. You
witness a politician who has an ear for eloquence and a tongue
dipped in the unvarnished truth - Oprah Winfrey
REALITY CHECK: ENVIRONMENT
[From the Daily Green]
JOHN MCCAIN - Global Warming: Has
supported cutting carbon dioxide emissions 30% below present
levels by 2050 with a cap-and-trade regulation. Alternative Energy:
Supports a variety of energy technologies, including nuclear
energy, but has not spelled out a specific plan for research,
development and deployment of new energy technologies. Also Notable:
McCain co-authored the first Senate legislation designed to regulate
greenhouse gas emissions, in 2003.
BARACK OBAMA - Global Warming: Cut
carbon dioxide emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 with a
cap-and-trade regulation. Alternative Energy: Spend $150 billion
over 10 years on renewable, alternative and clean energy research
and development. Also Notable: Obama would create an independent,
private clean technologies deployment venture capital fund to
partner with existing investment funds and national laboratories
to invest in new energy technologies.
HILLARY CLINTON Global Warming:
Cut carbon dioxide emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 with
a cap-and-trade regulation. Alternative Energy: Start a $50 Billion
Strategic Energy Fund to pay for research, development and deployment
of renewable, alternative and clean energy technologies Also
Notable: Clinton would develop a "Connie Mae" program
to help low- and middle-income families make investments in home
energy efficiency
DALLAS NEWS - Barack
Obama says nuclear power should be explored as an energy option.
Hillary Rodham Clinton says she's "agnostic" on whether
more nuclear plants should be built. . . "They've gone from
'no' to 'yes, but,' and some even describe themselves as agnostics,
and that's a big improvement," said Derrick Freeman, senior
director of legislative programs for the Nuclear Energy Institute,
which supports the nuclear industry. . .
John Edwards opposes nuclear power.
He has said there's no safe way to dispose of the waste, and
reactors take a long time - and a lot of money - to build.
Mr. Obama is in the opposite camp.
"We should explore nuclear power as part of the energy mix,"
he said during last summer's CNN-YouTube debate. Nuclear plants
can cut greenhouse gas emissions, he says.
Mrs. Clinton articulates both views.
She worries about climate change, as well as nuclear waste spills.
But American technology can address those worries, she said during
the debate last summer. She doesn't state explicitly whether
she supports building new plants
OBAMA ARGUES WITH HIMSELF
JANUARY 2008
THE ECONOMICS OF OBAMA
THE REAL STORY BEHIND OBAMA'S
'PRESENT VOTES
GRATUITOUS GRAVITAS
& KING KAROAKE
The choice
between the two leading Democratic candidates is really between
favoring the vast amount one doesn't know about Obama over the
vast amount one should know about Clinton but which too many
ignore. It is a choice between a guess and the gross, the unknown
hustler and the known perp, the blank page over an overflowing,
disingenuous and dishonorable record.
Mae West
said that when faced with the choice between two evils, she always
picked the one she hadn't tried before. This is clearly a strong
argument for Obama, but fortunately we still have another choice
left: John Edwards, whose proposals are the most progressive
of the lot and whose supporters include those among the most
active in pushing for real change and not just gossamer clouds
of undefined hope.
Even if
Edwards can't win the election, he will definitely win the argument
because an America that succeeds will adopt his approach and
one that fails will be sorry it hadn't. A fantasized future or
a falsified past won't save America: real progress for real people
just might.
JOHN KERRYING BARACK OBAMA
BIPARTISANSHIP IS BAD FOR YOUR
HEALTH
What is the bipartisan solution
for. . .
The Iraq war, which was started
and continued with full support of both the Republican and Democratic
parties?
The destruction of the Constitution
through such means as runaway wiretapping and the Patriot Act,
both of which have received strong bipartisan support including
from major Democratic presidential candidates?
The harm done by the cynical No
Child Left Behind Act, which received broad bipartisan support?
The growing use of torture by the
US government, support for which is so bipartisan it hasn't hardly
been mentioned during the current campaign?
Global warming, around which Republicans
and Democrats have reached a consensus to keep as much below
the surface as possible?
If we have much more bipartisanship,
it may prove fatal. Candidates proposing bipartisanship or "post-partisanship"
are really arguing for merging two dangerous mobs even more than
at present.
Bipartisanship does not end conflict,
it simply strengthens the conflict by those in power against
the rest of us.
As Harry Truman noted, "Whenever
a fellow tells me he is bipartisan, I know he is going to vote
against me."
FLOTSAM & JETSAM:
WATCHING OBAMA
Sam Smith
I've been trying to figure out why
I find Barack Obama less impressive than many of my white friends
and have come up with two tentative answers:
First, I went to the same school
as Obama, albeit graduating magna cum probation from Harvard
College rather than with honors from its law school. Now Harvard
graduates come in all flavors, but too many of the most successful
ones learn quickly to gravitate to gratuitous gravitas. If you
watch Obama closely he seems in public to have only two moods,
happy or look-how-serious-I-am-about-this, the latter being the
quality that allows Washington officials - and Harvard Law grads
- to convince everyone else they should invade Iraq and Vietnam
or forget about global warming for the time being. The problem
is that, as one journalist noted, there is a big difference between
being somber and being serious. And gravitas - with which Obama
overflows - seems often just a karaoke version of seriousness.
(If you are inclined to think that
college background is irrelevant, remember this: The Vietnam
war was in no small part the invention and obsession of machismo-seeking
Harvard grads and during the last twenty years of America's extraordinary
decline, our country has been in the hands of products of Yale:
two Bushes and a Clinton.)
The other difference I have with
many of my white friends is that I have lived and worked most
of my life in Washington, DC, which has as much pulpit borne
politics per square inch as any place in the country. When Obama
does his Martin Luther King cover, therefore, what comes to mind
is not "I have a Dream" but, "Oh no, not again,"
for it brings to mind crummy council members and dubious mayors
being propelled into office with the help of similar irrelevant
rhetoric.
The fact is that King is long dead
and black preachers, just like white ones, don't act like that
much any more regardless of their comfortable cadences. The ministry
- white and black - has walked away from the 1960s and its values
just as surely as have the politicians and the media. So when
someone tries to pull the noble preacher shtick, I feel more
like I'm being conned than being converted.
The alternative to this is to spend
less time looking for Jesus or JFK and MLK and more time seeking
policies and a politics with which one is comfortable. They can
come in all colors, geographies and genders - not because of
them but because, for the good things in life, it just doesn't
matter.
DECEMBER 2007
VIDEO OF OBAMA ON THE COURT IN HIGH SCHOOL
OBAMA
VOTED 'PRESENT' 130 TIMES IN ILLINOIS STATE SENATE
OBAMA WILLING TO PUT EXTREME RIGHTWINGERS
IN CABINET
NOVEMBER 2007
OBAMA PLAYED FOR SUCKER ON SOCIAL
SECURITY
PAUL KRUGMAN, NY TIMES - Lately,
Barack Obama has been saying that major action is needed to avert
what he keeps calling a "crisis" in Social Security
- most recently in an interview with The National Journal. Progressives
who fought hard and successfully against the Bush administration's
attempt to panic America into privatizing the New Deal's crown
jewel are outraged, and rightly so.
But Mr. Obama's Social Security
mistake was, in fact, exactly what you'd expect from a candidate
who promises to transcend partisanship in an age when that's
neither possible nor desirable. . .
Inside the Beltway, doomsaying about
Social Security - declaring that the program as we know it can't
survive the onslaught of retiring baby boomers - is regarded
as a sort of badge of seriousness, a way of showing how statesmanlike
and tough-minded you are.
Consider, for example, this exchange
about Social Security between Chris Matthews of MSNBC and Tim
Russert of NBC, on a recent edition of Mr. Matthews's program
"Hardball."
Mr. Russert: "Everyone knows
Social Security, as it's constructed, is not going to be in the
same place it's going to be for the next generation, Democrats,
Republicans, liberals, conservatives."
Mr. Matthews: "It's a bad Ponzi
scheme, at this point."
Mr. Russert: "Yes."
But the "everyone" who
knows that Social Security is doomed doesn't include anyone who
actually understands the numbers. In fact, the whole Beltway
obsession with the fiscal burden of an aging population is misguided.
As Peter Orszag, the director of
the Congressional Budget Office, put it in a recent article co-authored
with senior analyst Philip Ellis: "The long-term fiscal
condition of the United States has been largely misdiagnosed.
Despite all the attention paid to demographic challenges, such
as the coming retirement of the baby-boom generation, our country's
financial health will in fact be determined primarily by the
growth rate of per capita health care costs.". . .
I don't believe Mr. Obama is a closet
privatizer. He is, however, someone who keeps insisting that
he can transcend the partisanship of our times - and in this
case, that turned him into a sucker. . .
http://www.nytimes.com http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/16/5276/
SEPTEMBER 2007
GREAT
MOMENTS IN CAMPAIGN HYPE
AUGUST 20007
THE OBAMA WAFFLE SHOP
DERRICK Z. JACKSON, BOSTON GLOBE - It is unclear if Barack Obama's caution
precedes consensus or cave-in. Asked if he would eliminate discriminatory
laws that punish crack cocaine possession so heavily that it
would take 100 times more in powder cocaine for the same sentence,
Obama started off by saying the law was a mistake. He talked
about his record in the Illinois Senate.
"I want to point out that I
fought provisions like this and in many cases voted against provisions
like this, knowing the way they could be exploited politically,"
Obama told the Trotter Group of African-American newspaper columnists
last week after addressing the National Association of Black
Journalists. "I thought it was the right thing to do. Even
though the politics of it was tough back in the '90s, as a state
legislator I took some tough votes to make sure we didn't see
the perpetration of these kinds of unjust laws.". . .
Vacillation became evident as he
kept talking about crack-vs.-powder sentencing, which has come
to symbolize racial injustice in criminal justice. He said that
if he were to become president, he would support a commission
to issue a report "that allows me to say that based on the
expert evidence, this is not working and it's unfair and unjust.
Then I would move legislation forward."
That was a puzzling statement because
the US Sentencing Commission, created by Congress in 1984, has
long said the system is not working and reaffirmed in April that
the 100-to-1 ratio "significantly undermines" sentencing
reform.
Obama asked if he could make a "broader"
point. "Even if we fix this, if it was a 1-to-1 ratio, it's
still a problem that folks are selling crack. It's still a problem
that our young men are in a situation where they believe the
only recourse for them is the drug trade. So there is a balancing
act that has to be done in terms of, do we want to spend all
our political capital on a very difficult issue that doesn't
get at some of the underlying issues; whether we want to spend
more of that political capital getting early childhood education
in place, getting after-school programs in place, getting summer
school programs in place."
Obama claimed, "I'm not suggesting
it's an either/or but I'm suggesting that an even higher priority
for me is getting young men and increasingly young women to stop
getting involved in the drug trade in the first place. And that's
going to require pretty heavy lifting. That's going to require
some billions of dollars of expenditure that aren't there right
now."
By asking an open question about
spending "all our political capital" on eliminating
the 100-to-1 ratio, that raises the possibility he will spend
little or none on it. By talking about a "broader"
prescription of early childhood school programs -- which means
nothing to a 17-year-old in jail-- Obama risks flashing a losing
card of being non-confrontational.
OBAMA THREATENS TO INVADE PAKISTAN
NEDRA PICKLER, ASSOCIATED PRESS - Democratic presidential candidate
Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops
into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, an attempt to show strength
when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills
as naive. The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen.
Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist
operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under an
Obama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion
and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.
"Let me make this clear," Obama said in a speech prepared
for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
"There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered
3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a
terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take
out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable
intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President
Musharraf won't act, we will."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070801/ap_on_el_pr/obama_terrorism_7
JUNE 2007
OBAMA DOESN'T THINK PRESIDENT'S
ILLEGALITIES ALL THAT BAD
AP- Democratic presidential candidate
Barack Obama laid out list of political shortcomings he sees
in the Bush administration but said he opposes impeachment for
either President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney.
. . "I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breeches,
and intentional breeches of the president's authority,"
he said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/28/america/NA-POL-US-Obama-No-Impeachment.php
UNMARKED
BLACK HAWK CONFIRMED AS OBAMA
WE RECENTLY suggested that Obama's
foreign policy was nowhere near as liberal as many liberals believed.
This view has now been confirmed by the Washington Post's conservative
editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt
FRED HIATT, WASHINGTON POST - [Barack
Obama and Mitt Romney] have laid out their foreign policy visions
in parallel articles, released prior to publication in the July/August
issue of Foreign Affairs. And after you cut through some of their
campaign rhetoric, here's what you find:
(1) The two candidates' programs
are strikingly similar to each other.
(2) Both are strikingly similar
to Bush administration policy.
(3) And both, far from retreating
to isolationism in the face of Iraq and other challenges, set
forth their own wildly ambitious calls for American leadership
and the promotion of American values. "Boldness" is
an operative word for both of them.
Obama begins: "After Iraq,
we may be tempted to turn inward. That would be a mistake. The
American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew."
Romney writes: "In the aftermath
of World War II and with the coming of the Cold War, members
of the 'greatest generation' united America and the free world
around shared values and actions that changed history. . . .
Our times call for equally bold leadership."
The two differ in some respects,
of course. Romney puts more emphasis on combating radical Islam
and less on promoting freedom. Obama dwells more on Bush's failures
and the value of diplomacy and endorses a "phased withdrawal"
of U.S. troops from Iraq. But even there, the differences are
not as stark as the candidates would like them to appear. Obama
would maintain in Iraq enough troops "to protect American
personnel and facilities, continue training Iraqi security forces,
and root out al Qaeda."
And the similarities dwarf the differences.
Both want bigger, not smaller, armed forces: Obama calls for
an additional 92,000 ground troops, Romney for 100,000.
Obama calls for a doubling of foreign
aid; Romney wants a Marshall Plan-like "Partnership for
Prosperity and Progress" that would support schools, microcredit,
the rule of law, human rights, health care and the free market
in Islamic states.
Romney says that "the jihadist
threat is the defining challenge of our generation," as
real as the threat that was posed by Nazi Germany and Stalin's
Soviet Union, and he promises an appropriately sized response.
Obama, albeit using slightly different terms, agrees: "To
defeat al Qaeda, I will build a twenty-first-century military
and twenty-first-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist
alliance that won the Cold War to stay on the offense everywhere
from Djibouti to Kandahar.". . .
In both cases, the criticism is
not that Bush took on too much but that he accomplished too little.
"We are a unique nation, and there is no substitute for
our leadership," says Romney. Agrees Obama: "We can
be this America again. . . . [A]n America that battles immediate
evils, promotes an ultimate good, and leads the world once more."
If Iraq-weary voters are looking
for someone who will call on America to "come home,"
they won't find that candidate here.
OBAMA GOT $168,000 FROM INDICTED
BUSINESSMAN OVER THE YEARS
OBAMA:
BRANDING TIMIDITY AS A VIRTUE
OBAMA PUSHING COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE
ENERGY PLAN
MAY 2007
OBAMA WOULD CONSIDER
WEAKENING SOCIAL SECURITY: "EVERYTHING IS ON THE TABLE"
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS - You've also
said that with Social Security, everything should be on the table.
OBAMA: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Raising the retirement
age?
OBAMA: Everything should be on the
table.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Raising payroll
taxes?
OBAMA: Everything should be on the
table. I think we should approach it the same way Tip O'Neill
and Ronald Reagan did back in 1983. They came together. I don't
want to lay out my preferences beforehand, but what I know is
that Social Security is solvable. It is not as difficult a problem
as we're going to have with Medicaid and Medicare.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Partial privatization?
OBAMA: Privatization is not something
that I would consider . . .
http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/05/obama_brushes_a.html
OBAMA MAY NOT LIKE PACs BUT IS IN TIGHT
WITH LOBBYISTS
WHY OBAMA IS CALLED
BLACK
One of the jobs of a journalist
is to keep cleaning up one's own mind. It is so easy to drift
into a colloquial world in which habit, cliche and spin conspire
to make one an unconscious co-conspirator in the myths of the
time.
For example, I've been calling Barack
Obama black.
Yet the only way Obama is black
is if one accepts a definition that is culturally rather than
scientifically derived.
White liberals want Obama to be
black because it helps them feel that this election is another
freedom ride and blacks accept Obama as black in a long tradition
of turning the majority's cruelty to their own purposes, thus
expanding their base in American society.
As a scientific matter, however,
race is a racist concept and doesn't exist. It was invented as
a tool of prejudice and still manages to survive despite even
DNA evidence to the contrary. Race is to culture as intelligent
design is to evolution. Here's the way I put in The Great American
Political Repair Manual:
|||||
What are considered genetic characteristics
are often the result of cultural habit and environmental adaptation.
As far back as 1785, a German philosopher noted that "complexions
run into each other." Julian Huxley suggested in 1941 that
"it would be highly desirable if we could banish the question-begging
term 'race' from all discussions of human affairs and substitute
the noncommittal phrase 'ethnic group.' That would be a first
step toward rational consideration of the problem at hand."
Anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1942 called race our "most
dangerous myth."
Yet in our conversations and arguments,
in our media, and even in our laws, the illusion of race is given
great credibility. As a result, that which is transmitted culturally
is considered genetically fixed, that which is an environmental
adaptation is regarded as innate and that which is fluid is declared
immutable.
Many still hang on to a notion similar
to that of Carolus Linnaeus, who declared in 1758 that there
were four races: white, red, dark and black. Others make up their
own races, applying the term to religions (Jewish), language
groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish). Modern science has little
impact on our views.
Our concept of race comes largely
from religion, literature, politics, and the oral tradition.
It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the ages. It reeks
of territoriality, of jingoism, of subjugation, and of the abuse
of power.
DNA research has revealed just how
great is our misconception of race. In The History and Geography
of Human Genes, Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford and his colleagues
describe how many of the variations between humans are really
adaptations to different environmental conditions (such as the
relative density of sweat glands or lean bodies to dissipate
heat and fat ones to retain it). But that's not the sort of thing
you can easily build a system of apartheid around. As Thomas
S. Martin has written:
"The widest genetic divergence
in human groups separates the Africans from the Australian aborigines,
though ironically these two 'races' have the same skin color.
. . There is no clearly distinguishable 'white race.' What Cavalli-Sforza
calls the Caucasoids are a hybrid, about two-thirds Mongoloid
and one-third African. Finns and Hungarians are slightly more
Mongoloid, while Italians and Spaniards are more African, but
the deviation is vanishingly slight."
|||||
One of the reasons that so many
consider Obama black is because of the one drop rule, which Wikipedia
explains like this:
||||
According to the United States'
colloquial term one drop rule, a black is any person with any
known African ancestry. The one drop rule is virtually unique
to the United States and was applied almost exclusively to blacks.
Outside of the US, definitions of who is black vary from country
to country but generally, multiracial people are not required
by society to identify themselves as black. The most significant
consequence of the one drop rule was that many African Americans
who had significant European ancestry, whose appearance was very
European, would identify themselves as black.
The one drop rule originated as
a racist attempt to keep the white race pure, however one of
its unintended consequences was uniting the African American
community and preserving an African identity. Some of the most
prominent civil rights activists were multiracial but yet stood
up for equality for all. It is said the W.E.B. Du Bois could
have easily passed for white yet he became the preeminent scholar
in Afro-American studies. He chose to spend his final years in
Africa and immigrated to Ghana where he died aged 95. Other scholars
such as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass both had
white fathers.[20] Even the more radical activists such as Malcolm
X and Louis Farrakhan both had white grandparents. That said,
colorism, or intraracial discrimination based on skin tone, does
affect the black community. It is a sensitive issue or a taboo
subject. Open discussions are often labeled as "airing dirty
laundry."
Many people in the United States
are increasingly rejecting the one drop rule, and are questioning
whether even as much as 50% black ancestry should be considered
black. Although politician Barack Obama self-identifies as black,
55 percent of whites and 61 percent of Hispanics classified him
as biracial instead of black after being told that his mother
is white. Blacks were less likely to acknowledge a multiracial
category, with 66% labeling Obama as black. However when it came
to Tiger Woods, only 42% of African-Americans described him as
black, as did only 7% of White Americans.
||||
But politics isn't science; it isn't
even traditional culture. It's its own world. Thus we have a
man who hopes to be America's first black president whose only
upbringing by a black parent ended when he was two years old.
Barack Obama's mother is white.
His stepfather was Indonesian. The grandparents with whom he
was sent to live when he was ten were white. But according to
the media and his supporters, Obama is still black.
In Obama's case this is a myth that's
a little hard to sustain, but by keeping his white relatives
sternly away from the media and by playing up his culturally
tangential connection to Kenya including a media-enhanced visit,
he's done an impressive job.
But journalists aren't meant to
play along with myths. Obama isn't black. Since the word race
shouldn't even be used these days, it would be best to call him
bi-ethnic or multicultural. There's nothing wrong with this;
it just doesn't seem to attract as many votes and dollars.
If you look at Obama's life from
a purely cultural standpoint, he is mainly part Indonesian and
part Hawaiian, impressive but not exactly the deep pockets campaign
fundraisers are looking for except for the fact that one of his
school mates was Steve Case.
What is troubling about Obama's
past is not what it was, but what he and his supporters have
made it out to be. For example, it's dishonest to make his white
relatives off-limits to the press. It is misleading to make him
into an icon of American black culture. It is pure spin to give
so much mileage to a Kenyan father who left the family when Obama
was two and so little to his white mother or the white grandparents
who raised him.
There is also a disturbing hidden
parallel between Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Both had fathers
who failed their families. Both relied heavily on extended family
for the love and support parents are supposed to provide. Both
still seem to be seeking personal love and admiration in a massive
public forum. It may be an unfair comparison, but America certainly
suffered because of the screw-ups in Clinton's family. It should
be at least fair for Americans to wonder whether they want vote
themselves into another group therapy session.
If Obama would campaign as a multi-cultural
candidate and tell us what - other than pulpit style cliches
- his messed up past might suggest in terms of public policy,
he would be a more honest and appealing candidate. He might help
us grow out of race. But his advisors probably already know that
the number of Americans willing to reveal their multi-cultural
past on Census forms is miniscule and actually dropping. And
he has clearly found that playing to the liberal evangelicals
is paying off.
So instead, all we're getting is
another political fairy tale.
OBAMA'S WHITE MOTHER
CHICAGO TRIBUNE - For [Chip] Wall
and a few dozen others, Obama on the campaign trail often brings
to mind Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama's mother and a strong-willed,
unconventional member of the Mercer Island [WA] High School graduating
class of 1960. "She was not a standard-issue girl of her
times. . . She wasn't part of the matched-sweater-set crowd,"
said Wall, a classmate and retired philosophy teacher who used
to make after-school runs to Seattle with Dunham to sit and talk
-- for hours and hours -- in coffee shops. . .
In his best-selling book, "Dreams
From My Father" and in campaign speeches, Obama frequently
describes the story of his mother, who died of cancer in 1995,
as a tale of the Heartland. She's the white woman from the flatlands
of Kansas and the only daughter of parents who grew up in the
"dab-smack, landlocked center of the country," in towns
"too small to warrant boldface on a roadmap.". . .
Her parents, Stanley and Madelyn
Dunham -- he was a boisterous, itinerant furniture salesman in
downtown Seattle, she worked for a bank and was the quiet yet
firm influence at home -- moved to Mercer Island in 1956, after
one year in a Seattle apartment. The lure was the high school
that had just opened and the opportunity it offered for their
daughter, who was then 13. Stanley Dunham died in 1992, and the
Obama campaign declined to make Madelyn Dunham, 84, available.
. .
Boyish-looking, Stanley Ann was
prone to rolling her eyes when she heard something she didn't
agree with. She didn't like her nose, she worried about her weight,
she complained about her parents -- especially her domineering
father. Her sarcasm could be withering and, while she enjoyed
arguing, she did not like to draw attention to herself. The bite
of her wit was leavened by a good sense of humor. . .
In a recent interview, Obama called
his mother "the dominant figure in my formative years. .
. . The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when
it comes to how I go about the world of politics.". . .
Madelyn Payne was born in the oil
boomtown of Augusta, to stern Methodist parents who did not believe
in drinking, playing cards or dancing. She was one of the best
students in the graduating class of 1940. And, in ways that would
foretell the flouting of conventions by her daughter Stanley
Ann, Madelyn was different. . .
Four years older, Stanley Armour
Dunham lived 17 miles east, in El Dorado. In 1920, El Dorado,
with a population of 12,000, seemed to exist solely for the purpose
of drilling holes in the ground. And for good reason. In 1918,
the El Dorado field produced 9 percent of the world's oil production.
The Dunhams were Baptists. Unlike
the Paynes, Stanley Dunham did not come from the white-collar
crowd. Gregarious, friendly, challenging and loud, "he was
such a loose wheel at times," said Clarence Kerns, from
the El Dorado class of 1935. . .
Stanley Ann began classes at the
University of Hawaii in 1960, and shortly after that, Box received
a letter saying that her friend had fallen in love with a grad
student. He was black, from Kenya and named Obama. . .
The Dunhams weren't happy. Stanley
Ann's prospective father-in-law was furious. He wrote the Dunhams
"this long, nasty letter saying that he didn't approve of
the marriage," Obama recounted his mother telling him in
"Dreams." "He didn't want the Obama blood sullied
by a white woman."
Parental objections didn't matter.
For Stanley Ann, her new relationship with Barack Obama and weekend
discussions seemed to be, in part, a logical extension of long
coffeehouse sessions in Seattle and the teachings of Wichterman
and Foubert. The forum now involved graduate students from the
University of Hawaii. They spent weekends listening to jazz,
drinking beer and debating politics and world affairs.
The self-assured and opinionated
Obama spoke with a voice so deep that "he made James Earl
Jones seem like a tenor," said Neil Abercrombie, a Democratic
congressman from Hawaii who was part of those regular gatherings.
. .
Although he didn't say it at the
time, Abercrombie privately feared that the relationship would
be short-lived. Obama was one of the most ambitious, self-focused
men he had ever met. After Obama was accepted to study at Harvard,
Stanley Ann disappeared from the University of Hawaii student
gatherings, but she did not accompany her husband to Harvard.
Abercrombie said he rarely saw her after that.
"I know he loved Ann,"
Abercrombie said, but "I think he didn't want the impediment
of being responsible for a family. He expected great things of
himself and he was going off to achieve them."
The marriage failed. Stanley Ann
filed for divorce in 1964 and remarried two years later, when
her son was 5. The senior Obama finished his work at Harvard
and returned to Kenya, where he hoped to realize his big dreams
of taking a place in the Kenyan government.
Years later, Abercrombie and another
grad school friend looked up their old pal during a trip through
Africa.
At that point, the senior Obama
was a bitter man, according to the congressman, feeling that
he had been denied due opportunities to influence the running
of his country. "He was drinking too much; his frustration
was apparent," Abercrombie said. To Abercrombie's surprise,
Obama never asked about his ex-wife or his son.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-0703270151mar27,0,3977057,print.story
NY TIMES, 2004
- Mr. Obama, 42, was not raised by black parents. His mother,
who is white and from Kansas, split with his father, a Kenyan
economist, when he was just a toddler. His father returned to
Africa - and visited his son just once, when Barack was 10.
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama's mother and
her parents raised him, mainly in Hawaii. He did not grow up
in a black world and his family had no particular connection
to the black experience in America. . .
Mr. Obama seems to have realized
early on that his situation would present him with some odd and
complicated choices. In his memoir, "Dreams From My Father,"
he writes that he did not talk much about his mother's whiteness
because he feared that "by doing so I was ingratiating myself
to whites" - a shrewd assessment of white people for a 12-year-old,
and an even shrewder assessment of himself.
He would, therefore, go in the world
as black because he thought it was the right thing to do, and
because - it's clear from his book - he loved and missed and
was mad at his father. . .
In a May article about Mr. Obama
in The New Republic, Noam Scheiber wrote, "The power of
Obama's exotic background to neutralize race as an issue, combined
with his elite education and his credential as the first African-American
Harvard Law Review president, made him an African-American candidate
who was not stereotypically African-American."
BBC - Mr Obama is named after his
father, who grew up in Kenya herding goats but gained a scholarship
to study in Hawaii. There the Kenyan met and married Mr Obama's
mother, who was living in Honolulu with her parents. When Mr
Obama was a toddler, his father got a chance to study at Harvard
but there was no money for the family to go with him. He later
returned to Kenya alone, where he worked as a government economist,
and the couple divorced. When Mr Obama was six, his mother, Ann,
married an Indonesian man and the family moved to Jakarta. The
boy lived there for four years, but then moved back to Hawaii
to live with his grandparents and attend school.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3936013.stm
CHICAGO TRIBUNE - Obama was born
in Hawaii. His mother was an 18-year-old white college student,
whose parents had moved to Hawaii from Kansas. His father, Barack
Hussein Obama, was an African, a native of Kenya employed as
a low-level clerk who wrote letters to 30 colleges in the United
States asking for a scholarship before getting an offer from
the University of Hawaii. Obama already had a wife and family
in Kenya when he married Obama's mother, Stanley Ann. When he
left Honolulu, Stanley Ann and their two-year-old son did not
go with him because he could not afford it on the scholarship
Harvard offered. Obama saw his father again only once - when
he was 10 and his father came to visit.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-0703270151mar27,0,5157609.story
LINDA CHAVEZ, TOWN HALL - Obama never fully comes to grips with
the single fact that is responsible for his own confusion about
who he is. Obama was abandoned: first by his father, a Kenyan
undergraduate who met and married Obama's mother while on a scholarship
at the University of Hawaii, and then by his mother, who remarried
after Obama's father left, divorced again, and sent Obama to
live with his grandparents. . .
Obama tells us less about his mother,
who was still alive at the time he wrote this book. She is missing
through most of the book. Even when Obama describes his time
in Indonesia when he lived briefly with his mother and her second
husband, an Indonesian, the details are sketchy.
What does come across, indirectly,
is Obama's sense of loss when his mother sends him back to Hawaii
to live with her parents, while choosing to keep his younger
half-sister with her. Obama describes his awkward reunion with
his grandparents at Honolulu's airport: "suddenly, the conversation
stopped. I realized that I was to live with strangers."
This can't have been easy on a 10-year-old boy.
"Dreams from My Father"
never directly grapples with the question of what these abandonments
did to shape Obama.
MSNBC - At school, Obama was surrounded
by the island's richest and most accomplished students. America
Online founder Steve Case, actress Kelly Preston and former Dallas
Cowboys lineman Mark Tuinei, who died in 1999, attended the school
around that time. Pro golf sensation Michelle Wie, 17, is a student
there now.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17003563/
ONE DROP RULE
WIKIPEDIA - The one-drop rule is
a historical colloquial term in the United States that holds
that a person with any trace of sub-Saharan ancestry (however
small or invisible) cannot be considered white and so unless
said person has an alternative non-white ancestry they can claim,
such as Native American, Asian, Arab, Australian aboriginal,
they must be considered black.
This notion of invisible - intangible
membership in a "racial" group has seldom been applied
to people of Native American ancestry. The notion has been largely
applied to those of black African ancestry. Langston Hughes wrote,
"You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots
of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United
States, the word 'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any Negro
blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure.
It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown.". . .
Before 1930, individuals of mixed
European and African ancestry had usually been classed as mulattoes,
sometimes as black and sometimes as white. The main purpose of
the one-drop rule was to prevent interracial relationships and
thus keep whites "pure." In 1924 Plecker wrote, "Two
races as materially divergent as the white and negro, in morals,
mental powers, and cultural fitness, cannot live in close contact
without injury to the higher." In line with this concept
was also the assumption that blacks would somehow be "improved"
through white intermixture. . .
In the case of Native American admixture
with whites the one-drop rule was extended only as far as those
with one-quarter Indian blood due to what was known as the "Pocahontas
exception." The "Pocahontas exception" existed
because many influential Virginia families claimed descent from
Pocahontas. To avoid classifying them as non-white the Virginia
General Assembly declared that a person could be considered white
long as they had no more than one-sixteenth Indian blood.
In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court,
in its ruling on the case of Loving v. Virginia, conclusively
invalidated Plecker's Virginia Racial Integrity Act, along with
its key component, the one-drop rule, as unconstitutional. Despite
this holding, the one-drop theory is still influential in U.S.
society. Multiracial individuals with visible mixed European
and African and/or Native American ancestry are often still considered
non-white, unless they explicitly declare themselves white or
Anglo. . . By contrast these standards are widely rejected by
America's Latino community, the majority of whom are of mixed
ancestry, but for whom their Latino cultural heritage is more
important to their ethnic identities than "race." The
one-drop rule is not generally applied to Latinos of mixed origin
or to Arab-Americans.
The one drop rule does not apply
outside of the United States. Many other countries treat race
much less formally, and when they do self-identify racially,
they often do so in ways that surprise Americans. Just as a person
with physically recognizable sub-Saharan ancestry can claim to
be black in the United States, someone with recognizable Caucasian
ancestry may be considered white in Latin America. . .
Professor J.B. Bird has said that
Latin America is not alone in rejecting the United States' notion
than any visible African ancestry is enough to make one black:
" In most countries of the Caribbean, Colin Powell would
be described as a Creole, reflecting his mixed heritage. In Belize,
he might further be described as a 'High Creole', because of
his extremely light complexion.". . .
Another consequence of the one-drop
rule is that multiracial children of Black and White couples
are less likely to self-identify as White as children of Asian
and White couples. . .
THE
POLITICS OF NOTHINGNESS
Sam Smith - Perusing still more puerile pandering in
the cause of pacific politics by Barack Oblather, a vision suddenly
appeared. While, according to Google, a few others have already
experienced this transformational experience, it is still rare
enough to deserve mention.
The apparition was, without doubt,
Chauncy Gardiner aka Chance the gardener, the last manifestation
of magnificent nothingness to appear on the American political
scene - albeit the fiction of Chance was safely contained in
the movie "Being There" while Obama is running for
election to a real White House.
Like Obama, no one knew where Chance
had come from. Even the CIA and FBI were unable to discover any
information, with each concluding he is a clever cover-up by
one of their own agents.
In the final scene, reports Wikipedia,
"Chance is seen apparently walking across the surface of
a lake while the most important movers and shakers in the USA
discuss running him for President. This scene continues to generate
discussion and controversy. Clearly we see Chance walking on
water, an act with a clear biblical reference. . . Is there a
prosaic explanation, such as hidden stepping-stones? Or is Chance
the Savior (as so many of the characters are looking for)? Does
he truly possess some special grace, given his simple innocence
and simply being present to each moment without filters and ideas?
In his 2001 book, The Great Movies, Roger Ebert argues for the
latter interpretation. Another view is that the director (and
the author) are simply asking the audience: "How much more
would you have believed? We've been kidding you all along you
know!"
The novel upon which the movie was
based was written over thirty years ago by Jerzy Kosinski. The
Obama candidacy may elevate Kosinksi to one of the most precient
political authors of modern times. After all, what is more Obamesque
than the sort of phrase that got Chance started? - "In the
garden, growth has its seasons. First comes spring and summer,
but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and
summer again."
Of course, there are differences
between Obama and Chance. Obama does have a modest political
record and he is intelligent where Chance was dense. But the
dynamics of his unprecedented rise has painfully similarities,
especially in the willingness of the public and the media to
turn the corny platitudes into evidence of a Second Coming.
At a time of economic disjunction,
enormous military failure, a national reputation on the skids
and massive political corruption, it is not hard to see why the
unwary should be attracted to one whose name in Swahili means
"one who is blessed."
This illusion is aided by a media
that has, to a major degree, given up covering facts in political
campaigns in favor a deconstruction of images, rhetoric and sensations.
One of the results is what candidates pretend to be becomes infinitely
more important than what they actually are.
Thus the media has all but ignored
the long list of scandals in Hillary Clinton's past in favor
of such things as positive coverage of how she cynically responds
to mention of her husband's impeachment.
Obama is playing this same card
for all its worth. He knows full well that the presidency is
not about the "audacity of hope" and that, even if
it were, he has no right to control its downloads as though he
was the CEO of the RIAA of optimism.
Obama is engaged in a sophisticated
con with a long history in this country. We normally associated
it with evangelicals - the Elmer Gantrys and the Jerry Falwells
- but the scam can be used by liberals as well. Born-again liberals
can turn their backs on reality as well as any conservative,
finding solace in the comforting chicken soup of faith and hope.
The problem, of course, is that reality just keeps truckin' along
and Americans need far more than cliches to get them through
the next few years.
While Obama is clearly being intellectually
dishonest, this is, to be sure, a lesser sin than the congenital
variety practiced by his leading opponent. The little available
evidence suggests that Obama would more likely be a disappointment
than a disgrace. Still in the end it's a sad choice between the
venal and the vacuum.
WHY
OBAMA ATTRACTS THE RIGHT
SAM SMITH - Harry Truman remarked
that whenever anyone said they were bipartisan he knew they were
going to vote against him. Barrack Obama is the latest major
politician to use this ploy, promising mushy abstractions instead
of actual policies, making nice to everyone in the room while
ducking the issues they raise and, in a time of historic confrontation
over whether America can recover its constitutional democracy,
pretending that the answer is somewhere in the middle.
But what is the middle ground between
democracy and fascism? Between having a job or a house or being
unemployed or homeless? Between having health care or dying?
As William Lloyd Garrison put it,
"Tell a man whose house is on fire to give moderate alarm;
tel1 him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the
ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from
the fire into which it has fallen."
The myth of the happy center is
a major illusion dominating public life in Washington. But the
truth is that from that internecine struggle of two factions
of the American middle known as the Civil War to FBI assaults
on activist organizations in the 60s and 70s, from the Palmer
raids to anti-terrorism legislation, Americans have traditionally
had more to fear from people they have elected than from those
on the fringes of politics. In fact, the latter have often served
largely as an excuse for the American center to tighten its grip
on the political and economic system. This is not to say that
the left and the right would not enjoy being just as violent
and repressive given the chance, but the American center has
rarely allowed that.
Even the KKK, so often cited as
an example of the sort of threat the non-center poses, was powerful
primarily because it was at the center, holding political and
judicial and law enforcement office as well as hiding beneath
its robes. In some towns, lynching parties were even announced
in the local paper. And in the 1920s, both the Colorado governor
and mayor of Denver were members of the Klan, the latter well
enough regarded to have had Stapleton airport named after him.
The centrist myth most dramatically
fails when those acting upon it dramatically fail. What is the
center on Iraq? On climate change? On the creeping coup taking
over America? On the monopolization of the marketplace?
A 10,000 word piece in the New Yorker
- purveyor of the appropriate to the liberal elite - features
Obama as the "conciliator" with hardly a solid program
or policy mentioned. The message of the article - like Obama's
- is that we don't need a president, just a therapist.
Take healthcare for example:
"'We've got to put more money
in prevention,' he said. "It makes no sense for children
to be going to the emergency room for treatable ailments like
asthma. Twenty per cent of our patients who have chronic illnesses
account for eighty per cent of the costs, so it's absolutely
critical that we invest in managing those with chronic illnesses
like diabetes. If we hire a case manager to work with them to
insure that they're taking the proper treatments, then potentially
we're not going to have to spend thirty thousand dollars on a
leg amputation.' A young man asked about health care for minorities.
'Obesity and diabetes in minority communities are more severe,'
Obama said, "so I think we need targeted programs, particularly
to children in those communities, to make sure that they've got
sound nutrition, that they have access to fruits and vegetables
and not just Popeyes, and that they have decent spaces to play
in instead of being cooped up in the house all day.'"
So just eat your vegetables and
stay away from Popeyes and all will be fine.
Pressed on the matter, Obama does
go a little deeper:
"'If you're starting from scratch,"
he says, 'then a single-payer system' -a government-managed system
like Canada's, which disconnects health insurance from employment-
'would probably make sense. But we've got all these legacy systems
in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the
culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off.
So we may need a system that's not so disruptive that people
feel like suddenly what they've known for most of their lives
is thrown by the wayside.'"
Since ordinary people could adapt,
say, to the expansion of the Medicare system in a matter of days,
who are these people of whom Obama speaks who might "feel
like suddenly what they've known for most of their lives is thrown
by the wayside?" Well, the insurance companies would be
the ones most affected, and Obama has just sent a clear if covert
signal that he won't be messing with them.
The right understands the centrist
myth far better than liberals. They know that the center is homeland
security for inaction in public, lots of action behind the scenes,
and power staying where it should: with the powerful. It's not
surprising that some of them see Obama as their man, the "black
Reagan" as he has been called.
Yet he is also the liberals' Pat
Robertson, and while the right can see where they can cut deals
with him, the liberal evangelicals are all misty eyed by his
talk of hope and faith. But Harry Truman was right: that guy
serving you the happy meals of centrism in the campaign is likely
going to be on the other side after election day.
A FEW THINGS TO FORGET ABOUT WHEN
SUPPORTING OBAMA
WHY THE MEDIA IS PUSHING OBAMA
OBAMA: IMPERIALIST
IN DOVE'S CLOTHING
[Mind you, this isn't an attack.
Kagan likes it all, not all that surprising since he is with
what is perhaps the most falsely named group in America this
side of the Progressive Policy Institute: the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace]
ROBERT KAGAN, WASHINGTON POST - Obama's speech at the Chicago Council on
Global Affairs last week was pure John Kennedy, without a trace
of John Mearsheimer. . . No one speaks of the "free world"
these days, and Obama's insistence that we not "cede our
claim of leadership in world affairs" will sound like an
anachronistic conceit to many Europeans, who even in the 1990s
complained about the bullying "hyperpower." In Moscow
and Beijing it will confirm suspicions about America's inherent
hegemonism. But Obama believes the world yearns to follow us,
if only we restore our worthiness to lead. . .
His critique is not that we've meddled
too much but that we haven't meddled enough. There is more to
building democracy than "deposing a dictator and setting
up a ballot box." We must build societies with "a strong
legislature, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, a vibrant
civil society, a free press, and an honest police force."
We must build up "the capacity of the world's weakest states"
and provide them "what they need to reduce poverty, build
healthy and educated communities, develop markets, . . . generate
wealth . . . fight terrorism . . . halt the proliferation of
deadly weapons" and fight disease. Obama proposes to double
annual expenditures on these efforts, to $50 billion, by 2012.
. .
"We cannot hope to shape a
world where opportunity outweighs danger unless we ensure that
every child, everywhere, is taught to build and not to destroy.
. .
Okay, you say, but at least Obama
is proposing all this Peace Corps-like activity as a substitute
for military power. Surely he intends to cut or at least cap
a defense budget soaring over $500 billion a year. Surely he
understands there is no military answer to terrorism. Actually,
Obama wants to increase defense spending. He wants to add 65,000
troops to the Army and recruit 27,000 more Marines. Why? To fight
terrorism.
He wants the American military to
"stay on the offense, from Djibouti to Kandahar," and
he believes that "the ability to put boots on the ground
will be critical in eliminating the shadowy terrorist networks
we now face." He wants to ensure that we continue to have
"the strongest, best-equipped military in the world."
Obama never once says that military
force should be used only as a last resort. Rather, he insists
that "no president should ever hesitate to use force --
unilaterally if necessary," not only "to protect ourselves
. . . when we are attacked," but also to protect "our
vital interests" when they are "imminently threatened."
That's known as preemptive military action. It won't reassure
those around the world who worry about letting an American president
decide what a "vital interest" is and when it is "imminently
threatened."
Nor will they be comforted to hear
that "when we use force in situations other than self-defense,
we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation
of others." Make every effort?
Conspicuously absent from Obama's
discussion of the use of force are four words: United Nations
Security Council.
Obama talks about "rogue nations,"
"hostile dictators," "muscular alliances"
and maintaining "a strong nuclear deterrent." He talks
about how we need to "seize" the "American moment."
We must "begin the world anew." . . .
THE
TIMIDITY OF HOPE
Sam Smith - Here's one reason Barack Obama talks so
much about the audacity of hope: his policies are so meek.
For example, he is clearly afraid
to get anywhere near single payer healthcare so he comes up with
a plan where the federal government would subsidize the auto
companies' healthcare in return for more fuel efficient cars.
Aside from the fact that this is
in opposition to far wiser efforts to disassociate healthcare
from the work place, aside from the fact it is a corporatist
policy that makes government even more a hostage of industry,
aside from the subsidy to General Motors and its ilk, Obama not
only is afraid of challenging the health insurance industry,
he wants government to help further fill its trough. Although
less bizarre than Hillary Clinton's 1990s health plan, there
is no justification for it other than pure political convenience.
If this is the best he can come
up with, there's good reason he's taken the easy way out and
applied the marketing principles of Tony Robbins and Marianne
Williamson to a political campaign. Having gone through eight
years of EST with Bill Clinton and almost that much of AA with
George Bush, we should be burned out on psycho-therapeutics as
opposed to physical reality but sadly many are taken in by Obama's
covert message that if you trust in hope you don't have to worry
about the details like pensions and healthcare.
There are several problems with
this.
One is that no one has presented
the slightest evidence of why Obama's hope and faith is better
than that of any of the other candidates.
The second problem is that hope
is not audacious at all. Audacious would be doing something now,
audacious would be taking a personal political risk because the
country needs it, audacious would be saying something unconventional
because the conventional is killing us. Audacity is not turning
one's back on present needs and praying that the future will
straighten it all out.
One of the best kept secrets in
America today is the extent to which hope and faith are being
used as seedy substitutes for action and reason. Too often, hope
is a form of postponement and faith a substitute for action or
facing the truth.
But as they say in the 'hood, hope
don't pay the cable.
And as Tijn Touber has noted, "If
you hang on to hope, you'll always have to wait" and "waiting
makes you passive."
Thus, someone like Obama functions
as a political sedative. His message is that we don't have to
worry so much about what's happening because we can let the future
handle it.
This is not audacious; it's either
a con or cowardice.
APRIL 2007
OBAMA WORKED FOR LAW FIRM TIED
TO DUBIOUS LANDLORD
HIDDEN TRUTHS ABOUT
BARACK OBAMA
FRANK JAMES, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
- There's the new Harper's
magazine cover story [BY Ken Silverstein] whose essential point
appears to be that the junior senator from Illinois is really
shaping up to be a tool of the monied interest. . . Here's a
taste of the article which is captured in its last couple of
sentences. "On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist
I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors
would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a 'player.'
The lobbyist added: 'What's the dollar value of a starry-eyed
idealist?' "
Very little, is the answer both
the lobbyist and Silverstein imply. Obama has raised a lot of
money from such lobbyists so draw your own conclusions, the article
seems to say.
A lot of lobbyists have contributed
to Obama's campaign and political action committee for the same
reason a lot of non-lobbyists are energized by him--he's smart
and charismatic, Silverstein suggests. . .
Obama voted against the overall
bill which was supported by the financial-services industry.
But he sided with the industry on certain proposals. For instance,
he opposed a proposal that would have capped credit-card interest
rates at 30 percent, a limit that was sought by consumer groups.
. .
Silverstein also noted the senator's
push for the increased use of alternative fuels like ethanol
to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and help reduce carbon
emissions.
That seems a mighty environmentally friendly and national-security
conscious position to take. But remember that Illinois is a big
producer of corn, from which ethanol is made, and is home to
agribusiness giants Archer Daniels Midland and Aventine Renewable
Energy, Silverstein says, the implication being that Obama is
doing agribusiness's bidding in order to keep raising big money.
He has raised more than $21 million since he announced his run
for the U.S. Senate, Silverstein tells us. . .
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/news_theswamp/2006/10/is_the_obama_ho.html
[From the Harper's website, some
additional thoughts not in the article]
KEN SILVERSTEIN, HARPER'S - Since announcing his candidacy for the
Illinois Senate seat, Obama has raised the astonishing sum of
nearly $21 million and has built close relationships with a number
of traditional fat-cat donors. For example, one of Obama's leading
career patrons is Skadden, Arps ($53,271, according to the most
recent disclosure filings), a leading corporate law firm and
one of the biggest donors to the Democratic Party.
Several of the firm's lawyers donated
money to Obama and also helped raise money for him as well. That
includes Christina Tchen, a corporate litigator at Skadden who
has represented major financial firms in consumer class-action
suits. . .
In November of last year, three
other Skadden attorneys helped organize a fundraiser for Obama's
Leadership PAC, the vehicle he uses to support other Democratic
candidates, and to boost his own political profile and gain support
within the party. . . Others who have helped raise funds for
Obama's Leadership PAC include John Gorman of Texas-based Tejas
Securities, a major funder of Senate Democrats (and of the Bush
presidential campaigns) and Winston & Strawn, the Chicago-based
law and lobbying firm. Individual contributors to Obama include
some of the best-connected lobbyists in town, including Jeffrey
Peck (whose clients include MasterCard, the Business Roundtable,
and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) and Rich Tarplin (Chevron,
the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association
of Manufacturers).
In the magazine article, I asserted
that Obama is not a mouthpiece for his donors; neither does his
voting record mirrors the wishes of his contributor list. But,
as I suggested, it's naive to think that he's completely unaware
of who's footing the bills. Exelon, a leading nuclear-plant operator
based in Illinois, is a big donor to Obama, and its executive
and employees have given him more than $70,000 since 2004. The
Obama staffer pointed out that the senator pushed for legislation
that would require nuclear companies to "inform state and
local officials if there is an accidental or unintentional leak
of a radioactive substance," according to an office press
release. Obama took a stand on that issue following reports that
a plant operated by Exelon had leaked tritium several times over
the past decade.
But Exelon is probably not entirely
unhappy with Obama. At a 2005 hearing at the Senate Committee
on Environment & Public Works, of which Obama is a member,
the senator-echoing the nuclear industry's current campaign to
promotes nuclear energy as "green" - said that since
Congress was debating "policies to address air quality and
the deleterious effects of carbon emissions on the global ecosystem,
it is reasonable - and realistic - for nuclear power to remain
on the table for consideration." He was immediately lauded
by the industry publication Nuclear Notes, which said, "Back
during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004, [Obama] said
that he rejected both liberal and conservative labels in favor
of 'common sense solutions.' And when it comes to nuclear energy,
it seems like the Senator is keeping an open mind."
To anyone who thinks Obama is blissfully
oblivious to the fundraising imperative, consider the following:
in one of his earliest votes as a senator, Obama helped pass
a class-action "reform" bill that was a long-standing
and cherished goal of business groups. (The bill was the focus
of a significant lobbying effort by financial firms, who constitute
Obama's second-biggest single bloc of donors.). . .
http://www.harpers.org/sb-a-little-bit-more-on-obama-1161881683.html |