Date Vote Position GOP opinion DEM opinion 8/3/07 Vote 309: S 1927: This amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 passed 60-28 on August 3. The bill gives U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order. The bill gives the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General authorization for periods up to one year, to information concerning suspected terrorists outside the United States. The existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act contained a 30-year-old statute requiring a warrant to monitor calls intercepted in the United States, regardless of their origin. The new Protect America Act amends this stipulation, allowing U.S. intelligence officials to monitor suspicious communication originating inside the U.S. The Bush administration argued that it needs the expanded power to confront terrorist threats. Civil liberties and privacy advocates argue the bill jeopardizes the Fourth Amendment privacy rights and allows for the warrantless monitoring of virtually any form of communication originating in the United States. Democrats managed a minor victory requiring a sunset clause effective 180 days after the bill is signed. In place of a court's approval, the National Security Agency plans to institute a system of internal bureaucratic controls. The bill passed in the House 227-183, and was sent to the White House soon after to be signed into law. No Yes No 8/2/07 Vote 307: H R 976: In this 68 to 31 vote the Senate passed an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. The bill also passed the House by a vote of 265 to 159. The bill increases total funding for the program to $60 billion over the next five years and provides health insurance for 9 million currently uninsured American children. The $7 billion yearly expansions were a major sticking point for the White House and ultimately lead to the fourth presidential veto from the Bush administration. The measure is a key agenda item for the Democratic majority in Congress, and Democratic leaders have vowed to push for a veto override, which would require a two-thirds vote. White House press secretary Dana Perino criticized Democrats for sending the president a bill she said they knew would be dead on arrival. “They made their political point,” Perino said. The White House contended that the 61-cent increase in the federal tobacco tax would not be able to recoup the required funds needed to fund the bill. White House officials also argued the measure would push millions of children already covered by private health insurance into publicly financed health care program Yes No Yes 7/26/07 Vote 284: H R 1: This amendment to the Homeland Security Act of 2002 was made in order to implement the recommendations made by the 9/11 commission. Different versions of the bill were passed in the House on Jan. 9 and in the Senate on July 9. A modified version of the bill, with conference report changes, was revisited on July 27 and passed by a vote of 85-8. The bill requires the inspection of all cargo traveling on passenger aircrafts and establishes the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. This panel, suggested by the 9/11 commission, is responsible for advising the president and senior White House officials maintaining respect for privacy laws and civil liberties. Other provisions of the bill include grants to states, urban areas, regions, or directly eligible tribes to be used to improve the ability for first responders to react to and prevent terrorist attacks, according to the Congressional Research Service. The bill also outlined details regarding the detention and treatment of captured terrorists. The bill was signed into law by President Bush on August 3. Not Voting Yes Yes 6/11/07 Vote 207: On the Cloture Motion: With this vote Democrats and some Republicans in the Senate sought to move forward on a measure that would have registered the Senate's official opposition to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose tenure was plagued by controversy. The Washington Post reported that “Democrats fell seven votes short of the 60 needed to invoke cloture and begin the debate on a resolution condemning Gonzales.” Seven Republicans distanced themselves from the Bush administration and refused to support the attorney general who had been a target of sharp criticism for five months. Gonzales came under fire for his involvement in administration policies such as harsh interrogation policies, secret overseas prisons, and a domestic surveillance program. But his most controversial action was the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year. The attorney general's critics claimed he fired the prosecutors for political reasons. If passed, the resolution would have done nothing more than send a public rebuke to Bush and Gonzales. But enough Republicans were able oppose "cloture," effectively killing the measure. As the Post reported, “Democrats were aware that victory on the vote was unlikely, but they claimed a symbolic triumph in getting more than a handful of Republicans to join the effort to publicly shame the attorney general.” Gonzales, who initially claimed he would not step down amid the controversies, announced his resignation on August 27. Not Voting No Yes 6/7/07 Vote 204: On the Cloture Motion: This cloture vote would have moved the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 forward to an "up or down" vote on the Senate floor. But the cloture vote failed, 34 to 61, leaving the bill subject to unlimited debate and effectively killing it. The bill set forth border security measures and enforcement provisions which were seen as controversial on both sides of the aisle. The bill called for a crack down on the hiring of illegal immigrants and would have required $10-15 billion in total spending, GOP aides told The Washington Post. If passed, the bill would have, “tightened border security, cracked down on the hiring of illegal immigrants and provided a path for such immigrants to stay and work legally in the United States,” reported the Washington Post. The bill also allowed for a guest-worker program to be established after five years and explicitly made it “unlawful to knowingly hire, recruit, or refer for a fee an unauthorized alien” according to the Congressional Research Service. The bill was defeated by opposition from conservative and liberal causes alike. From the Democratic side, labor unions protested the guest-worker program as a threat to American jobs. For conservatives of both parties, the path-to-citizenship provision was interpreted as "amnesty" for lawbreakers. President Bush threw his full support behind this bill, even making a rare visit to Capitol Hill in hopes of bolstering support after it appeared doomed. Despite his attempts, Bush found his major domestic initiative blocked by most members of his own party as well as a few Democrats. Yes No Yes 5/24/07 Vote 181: On the Motion: This $120 billion dollar package was passed in the Senate by an 80-14 vote on May 24. The bill primarily focuses on funding for the Iraq war but also addresses other unrelated topics. A previous war funding bill was vetoed by the president because it included troop withdrawal deadlines, which were largely supported by anti-war Democrats. Ten Democrats opposed this new bill with no withdrawal deadlines, while 37 supported its passage. Congress had to act to replace war funding that would have ended May 28. According to the Washington Post, this bill includes 18 “benchmarks that the Iraqi government must meet to continue receiving reconstruction aid.” One hundred billion dollars in funding is slated to support continuing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill says that the President and Congress must not take any action that will endanger the troops and that they provide any funds necessary for training, equipment and other types of support to ensure their safety and the effectiveness of their missions. The president is required to give a first report on the Iraqis' progress in meeting the benchmarks to Congress on July 15. Seventeen billion dollars in the package is for domestic spending. Out of this funding, $6.4 billion is for Gulf Coast hurricane relief efforts, $3 billion in emergency aid for farmers, $1 billion to upgrade port and mass transit security, $3 billion towards converting closing U.S. military bases to other uses, and $650 million to increase funding for children’s health care. A Congressional Research Service summary states that the “other domestic beneficiaries include state HIV grant programs, mine safety research, youth violence prevention activities, and pandemic flu protection.” Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hilary Clinton (N.Y.) were among the 14 who opposed the bill. No Yes Yes 4/26/07 Vote 147: H R 1591: House and Senate conferees approved this legislation providing $124.2 billion primarily for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and setting benchmarks and a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, but President Bush vetoed the bill on May 1. The measure, which also addresses a wide variety of unrelated issues, makes emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. The conference agreement on H.R. 1591 also aims to improve health care for returning soldiers and veterans. It addresses needs related to hurricane recovery for the Gulf Coast, bolsters homeland security programs and provides emergency drought relief for farmers. The legislation says that troops in Iraq would not have their service extended beyond a year for any tour of duty. It also mandates that the president must certify that the Iraqi government is meeting certain diplomatic and security benchmarks. If that certification is made, deployment would begin no later than Oct. 1, 2007, with a goal of completing the redeployment by within 180 days. Some U.S. forces could remain in Iraq for special counterterrorism efforts along with protection, training and equipping Iraqi troops. According to a bill summary provided by the House Appropriations Committee, the legislation seeks to make it possible for the U.S. military to focus resources on al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and to destroy his base of operations in Afghanistan. The conference report also provides $3 billion for special vehicles designed to withstand roadside bombs, and it increases from 20 to 270 the number of heavy and light armored vehicles authorized to be purchased for force protection purposes in Iraq and Afghanistan. It prohibits government funds from being used to establish any military installation or base for a permanent stationing of U.S. armed forces in Iraq and does not allow funds to be used to exercise U.S. control over any Iraqi oil resource. It does not fund two Joint Strike fighters and five of six electronic attack airplanes because lawmakers say they are not urgent. The conference agreement provides $268 million for the FBI, that’s about $150 million above the president’s request. The agency’s budget includes $10 million for the FBI to implement the Office of Inspector General’s recommendations about the use of special secret subpoenas called national security letters. On the homeland security front, it provides funding for port and mass transit security as well as other similar investments for a total of $2.25 billion. Meanwhile, farmers and ranchers would get $3.5 billion to help ameliorate agricultural disasters. The agreement also includes emergency funding for forest firefighting, low-income home energy assistance and pandemic flu preparations. The legislation includes $5 billion for health care for returning troops and veterans, $8.9 billion for victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It also offers approximately $650 million for a children’s state health insurance program. It phases in a federal minimum wage increase to $7.25 an hour and applies the increase to the Northern Mariana Islands. It also amends tax law to allow certain benefits for small businesses that were not included in the House or Senate bills. It provides an additional $17 million for domestic violence programs. Among many other things, it makes additional fiscal 2008 appropriations for the U.S. Agency for International Development along with funding for a program aiding Africa, and monies for international narcotics control and enforcement, refugee assistance and international broadcasting operations. Yes No Yes 3/29/07 Vote 126: H R 1591: This $122 billion war spending bill calls for combat troops to begin withdrawing from Iraq this summer. The 51-47 vote fell mostly along party lines. Two Republicans -- Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Gordon Smith of Oregon -- joined Democrats in support of the package, which would fund U.S. military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Democrats also attached language that would start troop withdrawals within 120 days of passage, with a March 31, 2008, goal for completing the process. The bill addresses many unrelated issues. It offers funds for disaster relief and recovery stemming from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, funds influenza pandemic response programs, offers disaster assistance for livestock and crops, and makes appropriations to bolster Medicare and Medicaid. It also requires the secretary of Defense to inspect military medical treatment facilities and housing. It prohibits the use of funds in this or any other act to change essential services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center until certain requirements are met. It requires the Congressional Budget Office to report to appropriators on anticipated funds necessary for the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to continue providing health care to Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. It also requires the Coast Guard to exercise competition for contracts related to the Integrated Deepwater System Program. Lastly, among many other things, it provides funds to assist Liberia, Jordan and Lebanon. Yes No Yes 3/15/07 Vote 75: S J RES 9: This non-binding resolution would have revised U.S. policy on Iraq. However, it was defeated 48-50. The measure had directed the president to begin a phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq within 120 days of the resolution’s enactment. The measure’s main sponsor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, sought redeployment by Mar. 31, 2008, of all U.S. combat forces from Iraq. It included exceptions for certain forces charged with protecting coalition members as well as those who support infrastructure, conduct training, equip Iraqi forces and conduct counter-terrorism operations. The resolution also had directed the president to report to Congress on the progress of the suggested plan. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) did not vote. Yes No Yes 2/1/07 Vote 42: H R 2: This bill would increase the federal minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour over two years. It would increase the minimum wage in three increments. Sixty days after enactment, the minimum wage is to be raised to $5.85. A year after that it will be $6.55, and a year after that it will be $7.25. This would be the first change to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 since 1997 when the federal minimum wage was increased from $4.75 to $5.15 an hour. The bill would also apply the federal minimum wage to the Northern Mariana Islands, a territory of the United States. The legislation passed in the Senate on Feb. 1, 2007, on a 94-3 vote. The Senate measure includes about $8 billion over 10 years in tax breaks for businesses like restaurants, which is likely to be a sticking point when the chamber tries to reconcile its version with the House. The House passed its version of the bill on Jan. 10, 2007, with a vote of 315-116. Every House Democrat voted in favor of the proposal along with 82 Republicans. Yes Yes Yes 1/18/07 Vote 19: S 1: The measure is designed to provide greater transparency in the legislative process and is commonly known as the “ethics reform” bill. The bill amends Senate rules in an effort to make more transparent legislative earmarks. It also aims to make clearer the relationship of lobbyists and lawmakers by changing rules governing meals and travel that lobbyists provide to lawmakers and their staff. The bill also makes some restrictions on post-employment for members and staff. For example, the bill amends a current rule so that if a member’s spouse or immediate family member is a registered lobbyist or works for a lobbyist, that the lawmaker’s staff is not allowed to have any official contact with the lawmaker’s spouse or immediate family member. Among other things, the measure requires all Senate bills or conference reports to include a list of earmarks in the measure, to list the lawmaker who introduced the earmark, and to explain why the earmark is essential. It also requires public disclosure of a senator’s intent to object to proceeding to a measure or matter. The bill also requires that conference reports be posted on the Internet for at least 48 hours before the Senate considers the report. Yes Yes Yes 9/29/06 Vote 262: H R 6061: H.R. 6061; Secure Fence Act of 2006 Yes Yes Yes 9/28/06 Vote 259: S 3930: S. 3930 As Amended; Military Commissions Act of 2006 No Yes No 8/3/06 Vote 229: On the Cloture Motion: Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed to Consider H.R.5970; Estate Tax and Extension of Tax Relief Act of 2006 No Yes No 7/18/06 Vote 206: H R 810: This legislation would allow federal funding for research on stem cell lines derived from embryos that would otherwise be destroyed. Yes No Yes 6/27/06 Vote 189: S J RES 12: This vote would have given Senate approval to a proposed constitutional amendment that would give Congress the authority to ban 'desecration of the American flag.' No Yes No 6/22/06 Vote 182: S 2766: This amendment called on the president to withdraw troops from Iraq, but set no firm deadline. Yes No Yes 6/22/06 Vote 181: S 2766: This amendment to the annual defense appropriations bill would have set a firm deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. No No No 6/7/06 Vote 163: On the Cloture Motion: A Senate cloture vote on the gay marriage amendment failed, effectively killing the amendment. No Yes No 5/25/06 Vote 157: S 2611: Would tighten border security and establish guest worker and "path to citizenship" programs Yes No Yes 5/11/06 Vote 118: H R 4297: Extended the Bush tax cuts. No Yes No 3/2/06 Vote 29: H R 3199: Reauthorized a slightly modified version of the 2001 USA Patriot Act. Yes Yes Yes 1/31/06 Vote 2: On the Nomination: Confirmation of Samuel A. Alito, Jr. to be an Associate Supreme Court Justice. No Yes No 12/21/05 Vote 363: On the Motion: Cut nearly $40 billion from the federal budget by imposing substantial changes on welfare, child support and student lending programs. No Yes No 10/5/05 Vote 249: H R 2863: Supported a ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees held by U.S. forces and to requires the military to follow the Army field manual for interrogations. Yes Yes Yes 9/29/05 Vote 245: On the Nomination: Confirmation of John G. Roberts, Jr., to be Chief Justice of the United States. No Yes 7/29/05 Vote 213: H R 6: Offered tax breaks and incentives in what supporters said was an effort to spur oil and gas companies to provide innovative wasy to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil, conserve resources and reduce pollution. Yes Yes Yes 6/30/05 Vote 170: S 1307: Established a free trade zone between the United States, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua; a separate agreement with the Dominican Republican was also included in the measure. No Yes No 6/20/05 Vote 142: On the Cloture Motion: Blocked, for the second time, the confirmation President Bush's choice for U.N. Ambassador, John Bolton. Those opposed to the confirmation voted "no" on a measure to limit debate. Those in favor of the confirmation fell short of the 60 votes needed to limit debate and move the nomination process forward. No Yes No 3/10/05 Vote 44: S 256: Made it harder for people to erase debt by declaring bankruptcy. No Yes No 2/10/05 Vote 9: S 5: Sought to curtail the ability of plaintiffs to file class-action lawsuits against corporations by making cases that were filed in multiple states the responsibility of federal courts. Yes Yes No © 2008 The Washington Post Company

March 02, 2008 Obama: A Thin Record For a Bridge Builder By David Ignatius WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton has been trying to make a point about Barack Obama that deserves one last careful look before Tuesday's probably decisive Democratic primaries: If Obama truly intends to unite America across party lines and break the Washington logjam, then why has he shown so little interest or aptitude for the hard work of bipartisan government? This is the real "where's the beef?" question about Obama, and it still doesn't have a good answer. He gives a great speech, and he promises that he can heal the terrible partisan divisions that have enfeebled American politics over the past decade. And this is a message of hope that the country clearly wants to hear. But can he do it? The record is mixed, but it's fair to say that Obama has not shown much willingness to take risks or make enemies to try to restore a working center in Washington. Clinton, for all her reputation as a divisive figure, has a much stronger record of bipartisan achievement. And the likely Republican nominee, John McCain, has a better record still. Obama's argument is that he can mobilize a new coalition that will embrace his proclamation that "yes, we can" break out of the straitjacket. But for voters to feel confident that he can achieve this transformation should he become president, they would need evidence that he has fought and won similar battles in the past. The record here, to put it mildly, is thin. What I hear from politicians who have worked with Obama, both in Illinois state politics and here in Washington, gives me pause. They describe someone with an extraordinary ability to work across racial lines, but not someone who has earned any profiles in courage for standing up to special interests or divisive party activists. Indeed, the trait people remember best about Obama, in addition to his intellect, is his ambition. Obama worked on some bipartisan issues, such as a state version of the earned-income tax credit, after he was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996. But he also gained a reputation for skipping tough votes. The most famous example was a key gun-control vote that he missed in December 1999 because he was vacationing in Hawaii. The Chicago Tribune blasted him and several other vote-skippers as "gutless." One Chicago pol says that "the myth developed that when there was a tough vote, he was gone." Obama's brash self-confidence led him into his only big political blunder. Prodded by the Daley machine, he challenged Bobby Rush, an incumbent Democratic congressman and former Black Panther, in 2000. Rush pounded Obama by more than 2-1in the primary. "He was blinded by his ambition," Rush told The New York Times last year. Obama has been running for president almost since he arrived in the U.S. Senate in 2005, so his Senate colleagues say it's hard to evaluate his record. But what stands out in his brief Senate career is his liberal voting record, not a history of fighting across party lines to get legislation passed. He wasn't part of the 2005 "Gang of 14" bipartisan coalition that sought to break the logjam on judicial nominations, but neither were Clinton or other prominent Democrats. He did support the bipartisan effort to get an immigration bill last year, winning a plaudit from McCain. But he didn't work closely with the White House, as did Sen. Edward Kennedy. The Obama campaign sent me an eight-page summary of his "bipartisan accomplishments," and it includes some encouraging examples of working across the aisle on issues such as nuclear proliferation, energy, veterans affairs, budget earmarks and ethics reforms. So the cupboard isn't entirely bare. It's just that, unlike McCain, Obama bears no obvious political scars for fighting bipartisan battles that were unpopular with his party's base. "The authentic Barack Obama? We just don't know. The level of uncertainty is too high," one Democratic senator told me last week. He noted that Obama hasn't been involved in any "transformative battles" where he might anger any of the party's interest groups. "If his voting record in the past is the real Barack Obama, then there isn't going to be any bipartisanship," this senator cautioned. Voting for a candidate is always an act of faith -- a belief that the politician will win a mandate that allows him to transcend his own past limitations and those of his party. Ronald Reagan taught the country something about the ability of a world-class communicator to create such a new political space that defies the previous categories. No one who has watched Obama's sweep toward the nomination would say it's impossible that he can be the great uniter. I just wish we had more evidence.

If there are images in this attachment, they will not be displayed. Download the original attachment Page 1 BARACK OBAMAEXPOSED! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 2 Barack Obama: EXPOSED!Copyright ©2008 by HUMANEVENTS. All rights reserved.No excerpting or copying permitted without written consent.Published by:Eagle Publishing, Inc.One Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.Washington, D.C. 200011-888-467-4448Website: www.humanevents.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 3 Ann Coulter Jonathan Livingston Obama4Bill O’ReillyThe Perils of Obama6Mac JohnsonBarack Obama: The Human Rorschach Blot7Monica CrowleyWho The Liberals Really Are9Patrick J. BuchananPlaying by Obama’s Rules11Cal ThomasObama the Inexperienced13Walter E. WilliamsIs Obama Ready for America?15Michael ReaganThe Other Obama16Robert NovakObama: Flawed or Fantastic?17Ann CoulterDreams From My Father, Lame Excuses From My Grandfather19Gary BauerObama’s Controversial Views on Israel21Ann CoulterObama’s Dimestore ‘Mein Kampf’23David LimbaughOver the Top Barack25Brent BozellBarack Potatoe Obama?27Robert SpencerHow Would Iran Read Obama?29Table of Contents -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 4 â– â– â– 4ANN COULTERJonathan Livingston Obama I’ve caught Obama fever! Obamamania, Obamarama,Obama, Obama, Obama. (I just pray to God this isclean, renewable electricity I’m feeling.)Only white guilt could explain the insanely hyper-bolic descriptions of Obama’s “eloquence.” Hisspeeches are a run-on string of embarrassing, sopho-moric Hallmark bromides.In announcing his candidacy, Obama confirmedthat he believes in “the basic decency of the Americanpeople.” And let the chips fall where they may!Obama forthrightly decried “a smallness of ourpolitics” — deftly slipping a sword into the sides ofthe smallness-in-politics advocates. (To his credit, hesomehow avoided saying, “My fellow Americans,size does matter.”)He took a strong stand against the anti-hopecrowd, saying: “There are those who don’t believe intalking about hope.” Take that, Hillary! Most weirdly, he said: “I recognize there is a cer-tain presumptuousness in this — a certain audacity— to this announcement.” What is so audacious about announcing that you’rerunning for president? Any idiot can run for president.Dennis Kucinich is running for president. Until he wasimprisoned, Lyndon LaRouche used to run for presi-dent constantly. John Kerry ran for president. Today,all you have to do is suggest a date by which U.S.forces in Iraq should surrender, and you’re officially aDemocratic candidate for president.Obama made his announcement surrounded byhundreds of adoring Democratic voters. And thosewere just the reporters. There were about 400 morereporters at Obama’s announcement than Mitt Rom-ney’s, who, by the way, is more likely to be sworn in asour next president than B. Hussein Obama. Obama has locked up the Hollywood money.Even Miss America has endorsed Obama. (John“Two Americas” Edwards is still hoping for the otherMiss America to endorse him.) But Obama tells us he’s brave for announcing thathe’s running for president. And if life gives youlemons, make lemonade!I don’t want to say that Obama didn’t say any-thing in his announcement, but afterward, even JesseJackson was asking, “What did he say?” There wasone refreshing aspect to Obama’s announcement: Itwas nice to see a man call a press conference toannounce something other than he was the father ofAnna Nicole Smith’s baby.B. Hussein Obama’s announcement also includedthis gem: “I know that I haven’t spent a lot of timelearning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been therelong enough to know that the ways of Washingtonmust change.” As long as Obama insists on usingHallmark card greetings in his speeches, he could atleast get Jesse Jackson to help him with the rhyming.If Obama’s biggest asset is his inexperience, thenif by the slightest chance he were elected and were torun for a second term, he will have to claim he did-n’t learn anything the first four years. There was also this inspirational nugget: “Eachand every time, a new generation has risen up anddone what’s needed to be done. Today we are calledonce more, and it is time for our generation toanswer that call.” Is this guy running for president ortrying to get people to switch to a new long-distanceprovider?He said that “we learned to disagree withoutbeing disagreeable.” (There goes Howard Dean’sendorsement.) This was an improvement on the firstdraft, which read, “It’s nice to be important, but it’smore important to be nice.”This guy’s like the ANWR of trite political apho-risms. There’s no telling exactly how many he’s sit-ting on, but it could be in the billions. Obama’s famed eloquence reminds me of a bookof platitudes I read about once called “Life Lessons.”The book contained such inspiring thoughts as:“When was the last time you really looked at thesea? Or smelled the morning? Touched a baby’s hair?Really tasted and enjoyed food? Walked barefoot inthe grass? Looked in the blue sky?” (When was the -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 5 â– â– â– 5last time you fantasized about dismembering theauthors of a book of platitudes?)I can’t wait for Obama’s inaugural address whenhe reveals that he loves long walks in the rain, sun-sets, and fresh-baked cookies shaped like puppies.The guy I feel sorry for is Harold Ford. The for-mer representative from Tennessee is also black, aDemocrat, about the same age as Obama, and isevery bit as attractive. The difference is, when hetalks, you don’t fantasize about plunging knittingneedles into your ears to stop the gusher of meaning-less platitudes. Ford ran as a Democrat in Republican Tennesseeand almost won — and the press didn’t knock out hisopponent for him by unsealing sealed divorcerecords, as it did for B. Hussein Obama. Yet no oneever talks about Ford as the second coming of CaryGrant and Albert Einstein.Maybe liberals aren’t secret racists expunging vaststores of white guilt by hyperventilating over B. Hus-sein Obama. Maybe they’re just running out of greet-ing card inscriptions.Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMANEVENTSand author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors,Slander, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), and mostrecently, Godless. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 6 â– â– â– 6BILL O’REILLY The Perils of ObamaSen. Barack Obama seems to be a nice guy. I won’tsay he’s “articulate,” because some African Amer-icans hear that word and take offense. In fact, I won’tgive the senator any compliments other than the niceguy description, just to be on the safe side.Is there any question that we are living in an ageof hypersensitivity? Some of that, of course, is justi-fied. When Sen. Joe Biden described Obama as“clean,” it was a verbal disaster, adjectival Armaged-don. “Clean”? As opposed to what?Some whites thought the reaction to Biden’sremark was overblown, but consider this: If someonedescribed me, an Irish-American, as a “soberthinker,” surely most Irish folks would raise a collec-tive eyebrow.But when President Bush said Sen. Obama wasarticulate, I’ll confess to thinking he was giving theguy a genuine compliment. I mean who knew someAfrican-Americans would find the “a” word offen-sive? Many of us are still confused.According to some columnists, if you label a blackperson “articulate,” you are implying that otherblacks are not. You are expressing surprise that anAfrican-American can actually speak English well.And that’s condescending, is it not?Well, I guess it could be. But Mr. Bush’s tone was-n’t condescending at all. So I chalk this one up tomild paranoia and/or a victimization play.Many of us know people of all races who are pro-fessional victims. They see slights everywhere. Theworld is against them, and if you live in the world, soare you. These people are tough to deal with. Any-thing you say to them can and will be used againstyou.Few want to deal with this victim mentality, andthat’s the danger in this articulate controversy. Iknow some white people who don’t know what tosay to black Americans so they completely disengage.They don’t want to offend, and they don’t reallyunderstand the “rules,” so they play it cautiously.This is not a good thing for America. All respon-sible citizens should be trying to break down racialand religious barriers and work together. But, believeme, there is fear in the marketplace—fear along raciallines.None of this, of course, is Barack Obama’s fault,but he may suffer because of it. On Jan. 17, a Ras-mussen poll had him tied among Democrats withHillary Clinton in the presidential sweepstakes. Twoweeks later, Obama was behind Hillary by 14 pointsin the same poll.It is speculation, but all this word controversystuff can’t be helping Sen. Obama. For any candidateto be elected to high office, there has to be a certaincomfort level with the folks. I don’t know about you,but the articulation thing wasn’t comfortable for me.The solution here is for honorable people to giveother people the benefit of the doubt. Sen. Bidenmade a mistake, but it was not born from malice.President Bush simply did nothing wrong. We haveenough problems in this country without creatingphantom annoyances. And that’s about as articulateas I can be.Mr. O’Reilly is host of the Fox News show “The O’ReillyFactor” and author of Who’s Looking Out for You? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 7 â– â– â– 7MAC JOHNSONBarack Obama: The Human Rorschach BlotBarack Obama is like a small, shiny object. The eas-ily fascinated can stare deeply into his blank sheenand see… their own reflections. He can be anything toanyone because he is nothing in particular. Yet listen-ing to the leftstream media, one would have to con-clude that the man is a multifaceted miracle.He’s a moderate. He’s a third way. He’s demo-graphic fusion cuisine. He’s a floor wax. He’s a deserttopping. He’s everything you’d hoped for and what-ever you need. That’s the beauty of being unknown.He’s like that girl way over there at the other endof the bar — perfect, unknown, perfectly unknown,and improved mightily by distance and pent-updesire. Mentally, you’re in love and three weeks intothe relationship before you even make it halfwayover to meet her. Then you notice her eyes and think, “Man, whichone do I look at when I speak, because they don’tpoint in the same direction. And what’s with theAdam’s apple?” But at that point it’s too late to turnaround, because one of those eyes has seen youalready. I think that’s the way a lot of folks are goingto feel about their Obamaphilia after a few monthsof campaigning have removed the gauze filter fromhis carefully blurred image.If any of the fawning were asked to name hisgreatest accomplishment, could they name an accom-plishment? Other than being elected to the Senate justtwo and a half years ago, and being simultaneouslyblack and yet likeable to white folks, I mean.For emphasis, let’s examine a list of Obama’smajor accomplishments (so far):1. Simultaneously black and yet likeable to whitefolks2. Made the initials “B.O.” cool again3. Good oral hygieneThat’s it. He’s the Wayne Brady of politics —everything white folks had been hoping for in at leastone black person, the big payoff for all that toleranceand diversity babble. That may not be the politicallycorrect thing to say, but it is an honest assessment ofexactly what pent-up desire is fueling Obamamaniaamong his white, liberal fan base.Obama’s resume and record (even just a record offirm opinions on important issues) are so thin that Ireally believed that early media talk of his runningfor President was an affectionate nicety — like amanager saying of a favored intern, “You’ll be run-ning this corporation before the summer’s over!”Yet here we are, just a year after such talk began,and the intern has announced that he’s putting hisresume in for the position. Well, I’ll alert humanresources.Allegedly, his appeal rests with his “inspiring”story. Lord knows he’s told his story enough: in twobooks, uncounted speeches and interviews and occa-sionally in explanations of why the story in the booksseems to differ from the facts. (Obama was telling the“literary” truth, rather than getting bogged down inthe literal truth.) Come to think of it, I should add afourth bullet point to my list of Obama’s majoraccomplishments (so far):4. Telling his own story The man’s Jesus and John the Baptist all rolledinto one — the Messiah that foretells his own com-ing. But what, really, is so inspiring about his story?He is alleged to have overcome the odds — to havesucceeded in the face of oppression. But to see“black” as a synonym for “oppressed” is just astereotype (oh, and the rationale behind affirmativeaction laws). And we all know that stereotypes arewrong. I keep waiting for some real tale of the adver-sity he’s faced and I have yet to hear it. As far as I can tell, this is his inspiring story of suc-cess despite oppression:He overcame the oppression of being born to awell-off middle class white woman and a HarvardPh.D. father, then he overcame the oppression ofattending private schools his entire life. His storytook a dark turn toward further oppression when hewas admitted to Columbia University and then —gasp — Harvard Law School — where he was -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 8 â– â– â– 8practically lynched into the position of President ofthe Law Review by an overwhelming majority. Nay,an oppressive majority. From there, his life has justbeen a Hell of accolade and accomplishment.The Boston Globe this week cited as an exampleof his oppression that children at his private schoolsometimes made fun of his unusual name. Pleaseexcuse me if I don’t rush off to a sit-in on his behalf.As a child named “Mac””entering elementary schoolright about the time of McDonald’s famous “BigMac Attack” campaign and “Big Mac” jingle (“twoall beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, picklesand onions on a sesame seed bun” as I seem torecall), and who soon learned that Mac rhymes with“Quack!” and “Whack!” I would now like toannounce my candidacy for the presidency of theUnited States based on my inspiring story. I still can’thear a quip about “special sauce” without thinkingof the oppression of my fathers... or at least the Clin-ton administration. Get in line, crybaby.The only real adversity I can find in his life is thathis mother couldn’t seem to stay married to the sameman for much time and his father couldn’t seem tomarry just one woman at a time. And, again, if hav-ing a screwed up family is a primary political asset,we’ll need to form a really long line. The only thingweirder than the average family would be a normalfamily.Yet the CNN.com poll question for Saturday was“Does Barack Obama’s life story inspire you?” (Surpris-ingly, most respondents said “No.” So I am not alone inmy underwhelming enthusiasm for the media darling.)If stories like Barack’s are inspiring, then the field isplainly crowded with inspirational tales:Mitt Romney: An eloquent son of a former gover-nor of Michigan. Like Barack, he overcame his priv-ileged background to become a successful politician.Although, if it’s triumph over real adversity and prej-udice that you want, consider that young Romneyspent 30 months as a Mormon missionary in France!Now this is a man that has known struggle againstthe odds.Joe Biden: Born to a used car salesman, he some-how found a talent for politics. He later overcame adevastating battle with congenital dihydrotestos-terone-induced alopecia. Despite its ravages, Bidenhas bravely kept “plugging away” at politics eversince, chairing numerous televised hairings. Uh, Imean “hearings.”Tom Tancredo: Actually did come from a humblebackground, went to a humble school, became a pub-lic school teacher, married a public school teacherand yet went on to engineer a national politicalcareer. People don’t like that story though, so let’sfocus on the fact that he was involved in public edu-cation and still became an unabashed conservative.Talk about overcoming oppression.John Edwards: The son of a textile worker and apostal employee, grew up working class in ruralNorth Carolina. He overcame this humble back-ground to become a primping effete metrosexual mil-lionaire trial lawyer. Perhaps picking leaders based onhumble beginnings is not a foolproof system.Dennis Kucinich: The son of an Ohio truck driverand a stay-at-home mom, Kucinich went on to over-come his obvious mental illness and the malnutritionof a vegetarian diet to become the member of Con-gress voted “most detached from world reality.”Again, perhaps choosing leaders based on humblebeginnings is not a foolproof system.I could go on and on (and often do), but you getthe idea. Barack Obama called his political aspira-tions “The Audacity of Hope,” but really they’renothing so much as the audacity of hype.Obama is just a human Rorschach Blot — a figureso devoid of definition and meaning that what hisdevotees see in him is more an insight into them thaninto him.Mr. Johnson, a writer and medical researcher in Cambridge,MA., is a regular contributor to HUMANEVENTS. His columngenerally appears on Tuesdays. Archives and additional mate-rial can be found at www.macjohnson.com. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 9 â– â– â– 9Who The Liberals Really AreWhen the Democrats tell you who they are, whatthey think, and what they intend to do, believethem. When they claim (with Oscar-worthy straightfaces) they “support the troops,” their history —both past and recent betrays that vacuous claim.Last week, Senator Barack Obama made his thirdbig mistake, the result of a series of on-the-fly policypronouncements. Mistake Number One was hisstatement that he’d move more aggressively into Pak-istan if, as president, he had “actionable intelligence”about al Qaeda operating there. The statement itselfwas quite hawkish, so the mistake wasn’t on the pol-icy, it was political: he ticked off his liberal base,which does not want escalated military action in Pak-istan, or frankly, anywhere else. Mistake NumberTwo came when he tried to fix Mistake NumberOne: he said he’d take nuclear weapons “off thetable.” This brought him back into the liberal loven-est, but just about everyone else thought it was“naïve and irresponsible.”Then came the Third Big Mistake. He was askedabout U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, and he said this:“We’ve got to get the job done there. And thatrequires us to have enough troops so that we’re notjust air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which iscausing enormous problems there.” Throwing American troops down the stairs. Itmay have been the first time Obama has done it, butit’s not the first time his party has.Another liberal Junior Senator repeatedly madewild accusations about the conduct of the Americanmilitary in a different war:“...they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut offheads, taped wires from portable telephones tohuman genitals and turned up the power, cut offlimbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians,razed villages in fashion reminiscent of GenghisKhan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned foodstocks, and generally ravaged the countryside ofSouth Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage ofwar, and the normal and very particular ravagingwhich is done by the applied bombing power of thiscountry.”The year was 1971, the war was Vietnam, and theman was an aspiring politician (and president) namedJohn Kerry.The routine was the same: Accusing U.S. troops ofwidespread barbaric acts. Equating them with thesavage beasts they were fighting. Essentially sayingthat they are no better than the enemies trying to killthem — and us.Where else have you heard a similar tune recently?In the pages of The New Republic, a left-leaning pub-lication, that ran columns from Iraq, written by ananonymous soldier, called “Baghdad Diarist.” In thesecolumns, the soldier accused his fellow troops of“mocking and sexually harassing a woman whose facehad been marred by an I.E.D.” and “one soldier ofwearing part of an Iraqi boy’s skull under his helmet,”among other things. The Weekly Standard raised some serious ques-tions about those “reports,” forcing The NewRepublic to identify the writer as Pvt. Scott ThomasBeauchamp. The military then did its own thoroughinvestigation and found that the allegations made byBeauchamp were “false.” Beauchamp himself signedstatements recanting the stories as “exaggerationsand falsehoods.”It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to see an ugly pat-tern here. Liberals with a predilection for slander-ously and maliciously skewering American troops inorder to further their own agendas.This is who the liberals are. This is what theybelieve. These are the “values” they would bring ifthey win the presidency and hence, the role of com-mander-in-chief. At least Senator Hillary Clinton was smart enoughto “decline to comment” on Obama’s remark aboutour troops in Afghanistan. But remember: she andBill slashed military budgets when they were presi-dent the first time around. During his draft evasiondays, he was on record as saying he “loathed” theMONICA CROWLEY -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 10 â– â– â– 10military. He was accused of using the military duringtimes of personal political crisis, and only from polit-ically safe heights of 30,000 feet.John Kerry, 1971. Bill and Hillary Clinton, 1992-2000. Harry “the war is lost” Reid, 2007. The NewRepublic, a few months ago. Barack Obama, lastweek. They are all cut from the same cloth, singingthe same refrain. And despite their self-serving andempty rhetoric to the contrary, it isn’t about “sup-porting the troops.”Monica Crowley, Ph.D., is a nationally syndicated radiohost and television commentator. She has also written forThe New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Los AngelesTimes, The Baltimore Sun and The New York Post.www.monicamemo.com. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 11 â– â– â– 11Playing by Obama’s RulesTo observe Democrats, savaging one of their hero-ines, is to understand why the party is unreadyto rule. Consider: At the 1984 Democratic convention inSan Francisco, an unknown member of Congress wasvaulted into history by being chosen the first womanever to run on a national party ticket. Geraldine Ferraro became a household name. Andthough the Mondale-Ferraro ticket went down to a49-state defeat, “Gerry” became an icon to Demo-cratic women.This week, however, after being subjected for 48hours to accusations of divisiveness by BarackObama, and racism by his agents and auxiliaries inthe media, Ferraro resigned from Clinton’s campaign.What had she said to send the Obamaites into parox-ysms of rage? She stated an obvious truth: Had Barack not beena black male, he probably would not be the front-runner for the nomination. Here are the words that sent her to the scaffold. “If Obama was a white man he would not be inthis position. And if he was a woman (of any color)he would not be in this position. He happens to bevery lucky to be who he is. And the country is caughtup with the concept.” Note that Ferraro did not say race was the onlyreason Barack was succeeding. She simply said thatbeing an African-American has been as indispensableto his success as her being a woman was to her suc-cess in 1984. Had my name been “Gerald” ratherthan Geraldine, I would not have been on the ‘84ticket, Ferraro conceded. In calling her comments racist, Barack’s retinue isasserting that his race has nothing to do with his suc-cess, even implying that it is racist to suggest it. Thisis preposterous. What Geraldine Ferraro said is pal-pably true, and everyone knows it. Was the fact that Barack is black irrelevant to theparty’s decision to give a state senator the keynoteaddress at the 2004 convention? Did Barack’s beingAfrican-American have nothing to do with his run-ning up 91 percent of the black vote in Mississippi onTuesday? Did Barack’s being black have nothing to do withthe decision of civil rights legend John Lewis to dumpHillary and endorse him, though Lewis talks of howhis constituents do not want to lose this first greatopportunity to have an African-American president? Can political analysts explain why Barack willsweep Philly in the Pennsylvania primary, thoughHillary has the backing of the African-Americanmayor and Gov. Ed Rendell, without referring toBarack’s ethnic appeal to black voters?What else explains why the mainstream media aregoing so ga-ga over Obama they are being satirizedon “Saturday Night Live”? Barack Obama has a chance of being the firstblack president. And holding out that special hopehas been crucial to his candidacy. To deny this is self-delusion — or deceit. Nor is this unusual. John F.Kennedy would not have gotten 78 percent of theCatholic vote had he not been Catholic. Hillarywould not have rolled up those margins among whitewomen in New Hampshire had she not been a sisterin trouble. Mitt Romney would not have swept Utahand flamed out in Dixie were he not a Mormon.Mike Huckabee would not have marched tri-umphantly through the Bible Belt were he not a Bap-tist preacher and evangelical Christian. All politics istribal. The first campaign this writer ever covered wasthe New York mayoral race of 1961. Republicansstitched together the legendary ticket of Lefkowitz,Fino and Gilhooley, to touch three ethnic bases. Folkslaughed. No one would have professed moral out-rage had anyone suggested they were appealing to, oreven pandering to, the Jewish, Italian and Irish vot-ers of New York. People were more honest then. Obama’s agents suggest that Ferraro deliberatelyinjected race into the campaign. But this, too, isridiculous. Her quote came in an interview with thePATRICK J. BUCHANAN -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 12 â– â– â– 12Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., not “Meet thePress.” The attack on Ferraro comes out of a consciousstrategy of the Obama campaign — to seek immunityfrom attack by smearing any and all attackers as hav-ing racist motives. When Bill Clinton dismissedObama’s claim to have been consistently antiwar asa “fairy tale,” and twinned Obama’s victory in SouthCarolina with Jesse Jackson’s, his statements weredescribed as tinged with racism. Early this week, Harvard Professor Orlando Pat-terson’s sensitive nostrils sniffed out racism inHillary’s Red Phone ad, as there were no blacks in it.Patterson said it reminded him of D.W. Griffith’s pro-KKK “Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 film. What Barack’s allies seem to be demanding isimmunity, a special exemption from political attack,because he is African-American. And those who goafter him are to be brought up on charges of racism,as has Bill Clinton, Ed Rendell and now GeraldineFerraro. Hillary, hoping to appease Barack’s constituency,is ceding the point. Will the Republican Party and theright do the same? Play by Obama rules, and you loseto Obama.Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist andauthor of The Death of the West, The Great Betrayal, ARepublic, Not an Empire and Where the Right Went Wrong. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 13 â– â– â– 13Obama the InexperiencedWhile the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continues to playout in sound bites on cable TV and talk radio, itisn’t Wright who might be president. It is Barack Obamawho wants that job. Rev. Wright is consistent in hispreaching that America bore some responsibility for the9/11 attacks and in his conspiratorial lunacy about “howthe government lied about inventing the HIV virus as ameans of genocide against people of color,” but Obamahas been inconsistent in what he has said about issues thatwill have a far greater impact than the outrage producedby his former pastor.I am all for a post-racial, nonpolarized society, butObama has yet to detail how that would work andon which issues he is willing to move toward the cen-ter from positions any reasonable observer wouldhave to describe as far-left, even radical.On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace tried to getObama to say where he might find common groundwith Republicans when he asked him: “Can youname a hot-button issue where you would be willingto buck the Democratic Party line and say, ‘Youknow what? Republicans have a better idea here.’”Obama offered regulation and charter schools, notexactly hot-button issues. Moving away from hisvote against banning partial-birth abortion, as otherDemocrats have done, would have been a good hot-button issue on which he might have compromised,but abortion is the unholy grail of the left and noDemocrat can get the presidential nomination unlesshe (or she) buys the entire abortion package.Obama has the right attitude, as in, “My goal is toget us out of this polarizing debate where we’realways trying to score cheap political points andactually get things done.” That’s admirable, so let’sexamine a few of the things Obama says he wouldlike to do.On the war, Obama said on Fox, “I will listen toGen. (David) Petraeus, given the experience that he’saccumulated over the last several years. It would bestupid of me to ignore what he has to say.”Admirable. But in testimony last September beforethe Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of whichObama is a member, Gen. Petraeus said, “I believeIraq’s problems will require a long-term effort.” Theday after Petraeus’ testimony, Obama called for theU.S. to “Immediately begin to remove our combattroops from Iraq.” Which is it, immediate, or heed-ing Gen. Petraeus and his long-term approach forbringing stability to Iraq?On Fox, Obama said he would raise capital gainstaxes to no more than 20 percent. But on March 27,Obama told CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo he wouldraise capital gains taxes to 28 percent. Obama saidhis goal is to “create additional revenue.” But as TheWall Street Journal noted in an editorial recently,lower capital gains taxes have, in fact, historicallyproduced more tax revenue while higher capital gainstaxes bring in less, as people are less willing to sellstocks because it will cost them more in taxes.What about payroll taxes? On Fox, Obama saidhe’s for raising them on Americans earning more than$102,000 annually. But just two weeks ago, Obamasaid he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone making lessthan $200,000. When asked by ABC’s GeorgeStephanopoulos during the Philadelphia debate withHillary Clinton if he would pledge not to raise taxeson the middle class, Obama responded, “I not onlyhave pledged not to raise their taxes, I’ve been thefirst candidate in this race to specifically say I wouldcut their taxes.” Again, which is it?Obama’s view of government is classic liberalpaternalism: “... what (the American people) arelooking for is somebody who can solve their prob-lems … who will tell them the truth about how we’regoing to bring down gas prices, how we’re going tobring back jobs,” he told Wallace.No president can solve my problems, or bringdown gas prices (those are set by market forces) orcreate jobs, other than more government jobs. In allof Obama’s impressive rhetorical skills, there is noth-ing about the role of the individual, only the role ofbig government. His uncertainty and inconsistencyCAL THOMAS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 14 â– â– â– 14on issues ranging from war to taxes reveal his inex-perience and youthful stumbling, two qualities thatmake him unprepared to be president.And now we return to our regularly scheduledprogram of the rantings of Rev. Wright.Mr. Thomas is America’s most widely syndicated op-ed colum-nist. He is a commentator/analyst for the Fox News Channeland appears weekly as a panelist on “Fox News Watch,” andan author of 10 books, including Blinded by Might: Why theReligious Right Can’t Save America (HarperCollins/ Zonder-van). His latest is, The Wit and Wisdom of Cal Thomas. Con-tact him at CalThomas@tribune.com. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 15 â– â– â– 15Is Obama Ready for America?Some pundits ask whether America is ready forObama. The much more important question iswhether Obama is ready for America and even moreimportant is whether black people can affordObama. Let’s look at it in the context of a historicaltidbit.In 1947, Jackie Robinson, signing a contract withthe Brooklyn Dodgers, broke the color barrier inmajor league baseball. He encountered open racisttaunts and slurs from fans, opposing team playersand even some players on his own team. Despite that,his first year batting average was .297. He led theNational League in stolen bases and won the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award. Without question,Jackie Robinson was an exceptional player. There’sno sense of justice that should require that a playerbe as good as Jackie Robinson in order to be a rookiein the major leagues but the hard fact of the matter,as a first black player, he had to be. In 1947, black people could not afford a stubblebum baseball player. By contrast, today black peoplecan afford stubble bum black baseball players. Thesimple reason is that as a result of the excellence ofJackie Robinson, as well those who immediately fol-lowed him such as Satchel Paige, Don Newcombe,Larry Doby and Roy Campanella, there’s no one inhis right mind, who might watch the incompetenceof a particular black player, who can say, “Thoseblacks can’t play baseball.” Whether we like it or not,whether for good reason or bad reason, people makestereotypes and stereotypes can have effects.For the nation and for black people, the first blackpresident should be the caliber of a Jackie Robinsonand Barack Obama is not. Barack Obama hascharisma and charm but in terms of character, valuesand understanding, he is no Jackie Robinson. Bynow, many Americans have heard the racist and anti-American tirades of Obama’s minister and spiritualcounselor. There’s no way that Obama could havebeen a 20-year member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’schurch and not been aware of his statements.Wright’s racist and anti-American ideas are by nomeans unique. They are the ideas of many leftist pro-fessors and taught to our young people. The basicdifference between Sen. Obama, Wright and leftistprofessors is simply a matter of style and language.His Philadelphia speech demonstrated his clever stylewhere he merely changed the subject. The contro-versy was not about race. It was about his longtimeassociation with such a hatemonger and whether heshared the Reverend’s vision.Obama’s success is truly a remarkable commen-tary on the goodness of Americans and how farwe’ve come in resolving matters of race. I’m 72 yearsold. For almost all of my life, a black having a realchance at becoming the president of the United Stateswas at best a pipe dream. Obama has convincinglywon primaries in states with insignificant black pop-ulations. As such, it further confirms what I’ve oftensaid: The civil rights struggle in America is over andit’s won. At one time black Americans did not havethe constitutional guarantees enjoyed by white Amer-icans; now we do. The fact that the civil rights strug-gle is over and won does not mean that there are notmajor problems confronting many members of theblack community but they are not civil rights prob-lems and have little or nothing to do with racial dis-crimination.While not every single vestige of racial discrimina-tion has disappeared, Obama and the Rev. Wright areabsolutely wrong in suggesting that racial discrimina-tion is anywhere near the major problem confrontinga large segment of the black community. The majorproblems are: family breakdown, illegitimacy, fraud-ulent education and a high rate of criminality. To con-front these problems, that are not the fault of thelarger society, requires political courage and that’s anattribute that Obama and most other politicians lack.WALTER E. WILLIAMSDr. Williams is a nationally syndicated columnist, formerchairman of the economics department at George Mason Uni-versity, and author of More Liberty Means Less Government. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 16 â– â– â– 16The Other ObamaHere we go again. After being subjected to eightyears of the collegial presidency of Bill andHillary, when we were told that when we got Bill wegot Hillary as a bonus, it looks as if we are facinganother twofer: Barack and Michelle. Effete liberal Democrats are all but canonizingBarack Obama, who they see as one of their own —cool, detached, impressively intellectual — all in allwhat Pat Buchanan described as something fresh out ofthe faculty lounge, where lofty thoughts abound andcontempt for the great unwashed is hardly concealed. That may be an apt description, implying that theBarack Obama who scorned ordinary folks in smalltowns who, he sneered, cling to such lower-classcrutches as religion and guns, is above the distrac-tions of the madding crowd.It does not, however, fit the other half of the newtwofer, Michelle Obama, who far from being aboveit all is down there in the trenches acting like theflame-throwing liberal activist she is. To know her isto know what her husband really believes.As I have told my listeners of my radio show, ifyou want to understand how Barack Obama uncom-plainingly sat through all those fire-breathing ser-mons without so much as stirring uncomfortably youneed to understand the way husbands and wivespractice their religion these days. The men in the pews for the most part are passive,while the wives tend to be passionate. In most cases hus-bands are there because their wives have dragged themthere. Chances are that while the women sit in rapt atten-tion to the words of their pastor, the husbands are snooz-ing, blissfully unaware of what the reverend is preaching.From what we’ve heard from Mrs. Obama she waspaying close attention to the Reverend Mr. Wright, eat-ing up his fiery words and probably enthusiasticallynodding agreement as he blamed whitey for inventingAIDS to kill blacks as Barack dozed beside her, wonder-ing when the Reverend Wright was going to shut up.Barack is now wide awake, and for the next sevenmonths he’s going to continue to be faced with explain-ing why he remained silent while his pastor ranted inthe pulpit. And insisting that during his presence in thepews the Reverend Wright never once acted like Rev-erend Wright just won’t wash. Poor Barack, how canhe admit that he didn’t hear any of that rabble-rousingrhetoric because he slept through all 20 years of it?If you want to find the culprit here, turn toMichelle. I’m willing to bet she heard every word ofthe Reverend Wright’s inflammatory sermons, swal-lowed them whole, and seethed in anger over WhiteAmerica’s wretched mistreatment of her fellow blackAmericans as described by her pastor.Nowadays she’s playing the role of dutiful wifeand doting mother, but every once in a while heranger surfaces as it did most famously when she tolda group in Milwaukee, “For the first time in myadult life, I am proud of my country because it feelslike hope is making a comeback.”Just what is hope in Michelle Obama’s lexicon? Why it’s nobody other than the man she shared apew with for 20 years, her husband, who she brags“is one of the smartest people you will ever encounterwho will deign [i.e. “lower himself”] to enter thismessy thing called politics.” “We have lost the understanding that in a democ-racy, we have a mutual obligation to one another —that we cannot measure the greatness of our societyby the strongest and richest of us, but we have tomeasure our greatness by the least of these,” she says. “That we have to compromise and sacrifice forone another in order to get things done. That is whyI am here, because Barack Obama is the only personin this who understands that. That before we canwork on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Oursouls are broken in this nation.”Barack Obama, our sole hope — the cobblerwho’ll mend our poor broken souls. With, of course,the help of his wife Michelle.BY MICHAEL REAGANMr. Reagan is a syndicated radio talk-show host, author ofTwice Adopted (Broadman & Holman Publishers) and TheCity on a Hill, and the son of former President Ronald Reagan. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 17 â– â– â– 17BY ROBERT NOVAKObama: Flawed or Fantastic?Buyer’s remorse was beginning to afflict support-ers of Barack Obama before a recent primaryelection returns showed he had delivered a knockoutpunch against Hillary Clinton. The young oratorwho had seemed so fantastic beginning with his 2007Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech in Iowa disappointedeven his own advisers over the past two weeks, andold party hands mourned that they were stuck witha flawed candidate. The whipping Obama gave Clinton in North Car-olina and his near miss in Indiana transformed thatimpression. The candidate who delivered the victoryspeech in Raleigh, N.C., was the Obama of DesMoines, bearing no resemblance to the gloomy,uneasy candidate who had seemed unable to effec-tively deal with bumps in the campaign road. Return-ing to his eloquent call for unity, the victoriousObama in advance dismissed Republican criticism ofhis ideology or his past as the same old partisan bick-ering that the people hate. John McCain as the Republican candidate doesnot like that kind of campaigning, either. But a gen-tlemanly contest between the old war hero from outof the past and the new advocate of reform from thefuture probably would guarantee Democratictakeover of the White House. The Republican Party,suffering from public disrepute, faces major Demo-cratic gains in each house of Congress — leaving thedefeat of Obama as the sole GOP hope for 2008.Republicans were cheered and Democrats dis-tressed by an inexperienced Obama’s ineptitude inhandled adversity the past month. The new Republi-can consensus considered Obama the weaker of thetwo Democratic candidates. Indeed, Hillary Clintonhad finally shaken off pretensions of entitlement andconsigned Bill Clinton to rural America, raising spec-ulation that she would decisively carry Indiana andthreaten Obama in North Carolina. Clinton’s failureTuesday was a product of demographics rather thanObama’s campaign skill. Consistently winning over90 percent of the African-American vote, Obama isunbeatable in a primary where the black electorate isas large as North Carolina’s (half the registered Dem-ocratic vote there). Indiana differed from seeminglysimilar Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Clinton scoredbig wins, because it borders Obama’s state of Illinois,with many voters in the Chicago media market.As the clear winner and the presumptive nominee,Obama in Raleigh Tuesday unveiled his general elec-tion strategy. Dismissing McCain’s “ideas” as “noth-ing more than the failed policies of the past,” Obamadenounced what he called the Republican campaignplan: “Yes, we know what’s coming. ... We’ve alreadyseen it, the same names and labels they always pin oneveryone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas.” Thus, Obama seems to be ruling out not only dis-cussion of his 20-year association with the Rev. Jere-miah Wright but also any identification of theDemocratic presidential candidate as “liberal” or asan advocate of higher taxes, higher domestic spend-ing, abortion rights and gun control. These issuesappear to be included in what Obama at Raleighcalled “attempts to play on our fears and exploit ourdifferences.” The test of Obama’s strategy may be his friendshipwith and support from William Ayers, an unrepen-tant member of the Weatherman terrorist under-ground of the 1960s. Instead of totally disavowingAyers as he belatedly did his former pastor Wright,Obama potentially deepened his problem by referringto Ayers as just a college professor — “a guy wholives in my neighborhood.” He then compared theirrelationship with his friendship with conservativeRepublican Sen. Tom Coburn, as he had comparedWright’s racism with his white grandmother’s. Democrats abhor bringing up what Obama callsAyers’ “detestable acts 40 years ago,” but it will bebrought into the public arena even if it is notMcCain’s style of politics. A photo of Ayers stomp-ing on the American flag in 2001 has been all overthe Internet this week. That was the year Obamaaccepted a $200 political contribution from Ayers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 18 â– â– â– 18and the year in which the former Weatherman said:“I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t doenough.” While McCain will demand no response fromObama, others will. How the prospective nomineehandles this in the future will help define whether heis seen as flawed or fantastic in the long campaignahead.Mr. Novak is a syndicated columnist and editor of the Evans-Novak Political Report, a political newsletter he founded in1967 with Rowland Evans. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 19 â– â– â– 19ANN COULTERDreams From My Father, Lame ExcusesFrom My GrandfatherSince a Chinese graduate student at Columbia Uni-versity, Minghui Yu, was killed recently whenblack youths violently set upon him, sending himrunning into traffic to escape, I think B. HusseinObama ought to start referring to the mind-set of the“typical Asian person.”As of Wednesday, police had no motive for theattack, and witnesses said they heard no demand formoney or anything else. The Associated Press reportsthat the assailant simply said to his friend, “Watchwhat I do to this guy” before punching Yu.Meanwhile, let’s revisit the story about Obama’sgrandmother being guilty of thinking like a “typicalwhite person.” As recounted in Obama’s autobiogra-phy, the only evidence that his grandmother fearedblack men comes from Obama’s good-for-nothing,chronically unemployed white grandfather, whoaccuses Grandma of racism as his third excuse not toget dressed and drive her to work.His grandmother wanted a ride to work at 6:30 inthe morning because, the day before, she had beenaggressively solicited by a homeless man at the busstop. On her account, the panhandler “was veryaggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dol-lar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn’t come, I thinkhe might have hit me over the head.”Even Obama’s shiftless grandfather didn’t play therace card until pretty far into the argument overwhether he would drive Grandma to work. First, thegood-for-nothing grandfather told Obama thatGrandma was just trying to guilt him into driving her,saying, “(S)he just wants me to feel bad.”Next, he complained about his non-work routinebeing disrupted, saying: “She’s been catching the busever since she started at the bank. ... And now, justbecause she gets pestered a little, she wants to changeeverything!”Only after Obama had offered to drive his grand-mother to work himself and it was becoming increas-ingly clear what a selfish lout the grandfather was,did Grandpa produce his trump card. The reason hewouldn’t get his lazy butt dressed and drive Grandmato work was... she was a racist!As Obama recounts it, on Grandpa’s third try atan excuse, he told Obama: “You know why she’s soscared this time? I’ll tell you why. Before you camein, she told me the fella was black. That’s the real rea-son she’s bothered. And I just don’t think that’sright.” So I guess I’ll be heading back to the sacknow!That makes sense. It certainly never bothers mewhen crazy white people harass and threaten me.This is Obama’s own account of what happened,which — as anyone can see — consisted of his slackergrandfather making a series of excuses to avoid hav-ing to drive the sole bread-earner in the family towork.But Obama says, “The words were like a fist inmy stomach, and I wobbled to regain my compo-sure.” (It was as if he had been punched by anaggressive panhandler at a bus stop!) And notbecause his grandfather’s sorry excuse reminded himthat he came from a long line of callow, worthlessmen, both black and white.No, Obama swallowed his grandfather’s patheticexcuse hook, line and sinker, leading Obama to areverie about his grandparents: “I knew that menwho might easily have been my brothers could stillinspire their rawest fears.” That’s true — assuminghis brothers and sisters were menacing people at busstops.How deranged would you have to be to cite thisincident as evidence that your grandmother thoughtlike a “typical white person” — as opposed to yourgrandfather being worthless and lazy? For thosekeeping score, Obama is aghast at his grandmother’salleged racism, but had no problem with JeremiahWright’s manifest racism.If Obama is sent reeling by the mere words of anelderly white woman, how is he going to negotiatewith a guy like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? What ifAhmadinejad calls him “booger-face”? Will he run -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 20 â– â– â– 20crying from the table? Your grandmother wasn’t a racist, Barack. Yourgrandpa was just a loser. Can we wrap up ournational conversation about race now? I think we’dlike to move onto questions about your stupid planto hold talks with Iran.Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMANEVENTSand author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Slan-der, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), Godless, andmost recently, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d BeRepublicans. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 21 â– â– â– 21GARY BAUERObama’s Controversial Views on IsraelFor those of us with access to the Internet, it’s beendifficult to miss the circulating e-mails claimingthat Barack Obama attended a Madrassa (an Islamicschool) as a child in Indonesia. Or perhaps the oneinforming us that Obama’s middle name is Hussein.Then there’s the Internet allegation that Obama isreally a “secret Muslim.” Innuendo about Barack Obama’s faith andupbringing often dominate discussions regardinghow the likely Democratic presidential nomineemight conduct his foreign policy. That’s a shame,because it distracts us from more legitimate and fardeeper concerns over Obama’s relationship not withIslam but with Israel, the principal rhetorical and mil-itary target of that religion’s most extreme adherents. Of course, as with Obama’s remarks on manyissues, it’s easy to cherry-pick a few of his statementsabout Israel that make it seem as if a PresidentObama would be a loyal friend of the beleagueredstate. Such as when he says, “peace through securityis the only way for Israel” and “when I am president,the United States will stand shoulder to shoulder withIsrael.” What’s not to like, right? Well, a more thoroughexamination of Obama’s statements, his backgroundand previous associations and, most importantly, hiswould-be foreign policy team reveals a far differentreality — one that has caused many supporters ofIsrael, including me, to worry about what an Obamapresidency might do to the long-term support for theJewish State.First off, Obama demonstrates a deep misunder-standing of the Middle East when he calls for theimmediate removal of American forces from Iraq,which would expose Iraq to worse ethnic bloodshedand embolden the enemies of Israel and the UnitedStates. Senator Obama also voted against legislationto place the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on the listof terrorist organizations and criticizes Hillary Clin-ton for voting in favor of the legislation, whichpassed with the support of over three-quarters of theSenate. He has also pledged to meet without precon-ditions with Iran’s Holocaust-denying leader,Ahmadinejad. Just as disturbing are Obama’s statements aboutthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which include:“Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian peo-ple” and the clueless remark that “the Israeli govern-ment must make difficult concessions for the peaceprocess to restart.” These troubling statements caused my friend andformer Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Danny Ayalonto ask in a recent op-ed, “Who are you, BarackObama?” Ayalon wrote that after meeting withObama on two occasions, he was “left with theimpression that [Obama] was not entirely forthrightwith his thinking [about Israel].”Ayalon’s skepticism no doubt stems from the factthat Obama’s more recent pro-Israel statements donot square with his past sympathy for Palestinianradicals. Anti-Israel activist Ali Abunimah claims toknow Obama well and to have met him at severalpro-Palestinian events in Chicago when Obama wasan Illinois state senator. In an article, Abunimahlamented that “Obama used to be very comfortablespeaking up for and being associated with Palestin-ian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation.”“Obama’s about-face is not surprising,” Abunimahinsisted, “He is merely doing what he think is neces-sary to get elected and he will continue doing it aslong as it keeps him in power.”Then there’s Obama’s church, Trinity UnitedChurch of Christ, whose anti-Semitism is now wellknown. Among many anti-Semitic documents thatthe church has published on its website is a letter thatalleges Israeli “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” ofPalestinians and claims that Israelis “worked on anethnic bomb that kills blacks and Arabs.” Trinity’sformer pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who Obamahas described as a “spiritual mentor,” gave anti-Sem-ite Louis Farrakhan an award for being a leader who“truly epitomized greatness.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 22 â– â– â– 22Wright even traveled to meet with Libyan terror-ist leader Muammar al-Gaddafi and has comparedconditions in Israel to the apartheid of South Africa.Of course, you won’t hear much from Wright thesedays. As Wright told PBS last year, he understandsthat Obama must keep his distance because “he can’tafford the Jewish support to wane or start question-ing his allegiance to Israel.”But nothing should concern Israel supporters asmuch as Obama’s foreign policy team, which consistsof the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a remnant of theadministration of President Jimmy Carter, who, likeRev. Wright, calls Israel an apartheid state. Brzezin-ski, Carter’s national security advisor, has long heldanti-Israel views and supports open dialogue with theterrorist group Hamas. Other top foreign policy advi-sors with avowed hostility toward Israel includeSusan Rice and Robert Malley.Most recently, it was revealed that Obama militaryadvisor and national campaign co-chairman Merrill“Tony” McPeak has a long history of criticizingIsrael and in 2003 alleged that American Middle Eastpolicy is being controlled by Jews at the expense ofAmerican interests in the Middle East. During theinterviewer with the Oregonian, McPeak was askedwhy there was a lack of action in the Israeli-Palestin-ian peace process. He responded, “New York City.Miami. We have a large vote — vote, here in favorof Israel. And no politician wants to run against it.”What’s most worrying about Obama’s foreign pol-icy team is that given the candidate’s extreme lack offoreign policy experience (he once declared that thefour years he spent living in Indonesia as a child givehim credibility on the world stage), one would expectObama to lean heavily on it for advice. That’s some-thing that should concern anyone who understandsthe value of supporting America’s only reliable allyfrom a region in which we are engaged in two wars. Mr. Bauer, a 2000 candidate for president, is chairman ofCampaign for Working Families and president of AmericanValues. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 23 â– â– â– 23ANN COULTERObama’s Dimestore ‘Mein Kampf’If characters from “The Hills” were to emote aboutrace, I imagine it would sound like B. HusseinObama’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father.”Has anybody read this book? Inasmuch as thebook reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, Igather the answer is no. Obama is about to be ournext president: You might want to take a peek. Ifonly people had read “Mein Kampf” ...Nearly every page — save the ones dedicated tocataloguing the mundane details of his life — is bris-tling with anger at some imputed racist incident. Thelast time I heard this much race-baiting invective Iwas ... in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sun-day morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ inChicago.Obama tells a story about taking two whitefriends from the high school basketball team to a“black party.” Despite their deep-seated, unconscioushatred of blacks, the friends readily accepted. At theparty, they managed not to scream the N-word, butinstead “made some small talk, took a couple of thegirls out on the dance floor.”But with his racial hair-trigger, Obama sensed thewhites were not comfortable because “they kept smil-ing a lot.” And then, in an incident reminiscent of thedarkest days of the Jim Crow South ... they asked toleave after spending only about an hour at the party!It was practically an etiquette lynching!In the car on the way home, one of the friendsempathizes with Obama, saying: “You know, man,that really taught me something. I mean, I can seehow it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, atschool parties ... being the only black guys and all.”And thus Obama felt the cruel lash of racism! Heactually writes that his response to his friend’s per-fectly lovely remark was: “A part of me wanted topunch him right there.”Listen, I don’t want anybody telling Obama aboutBill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” line.Wanting to punch his white friend in the stomachwas the introductory anecdote to a full-page psy-chotic rant about living by “the white man’s rules.”(One rule he missed was: “Never punch out yourempathetic white friend after dragging him to acrappy all-black party.”)Obama’s gaseous disquisition on the “white man’srules” leads to this charming crescendo: “Should yourefuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, theywould have a name for that, too, a name that couldcage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent.Nigger.” For those of you in the “When is Obama gonnaplay the ‘N-word’ card?” pool, the winner is ... Page85! Congratulations!When his mother expresses concern aboutObama’s high school friend being busted for drugs,Obama says he patted his mother’s hand and told hernot to worry.This, too, prompted Obama to share with hisreaders a life lesson on how to handle white people:“It was usually an effective tactic, another one ofthose tricks I had learned: People were satisfied solong as you were courteous and smiled and made nosudden moves. They were more than satisfied, theywere relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find awell-mannered young black man who didn’t seemangry all the time.” First of all, I note that this technique seems to bethe basis of Obama’s entire presidential campaign.But moreover — he was talking about his ownmother! As Obama says: “Any distinction betweengood and bad whites held negligible meaning.” Say,do you think a white person who said that aboutblacks would be a leading presidential candidate?The man is stark bonkersville.He says the reason black people keep to them-selves is that it’s “easier than spending all your timemad or trying to guess whatever it was that whitefolks were thinking about you.”Here’s a little inside scoop about white people:We’re not thinking about you. Especially WASPs. Wethink everybody is inferior, and we are perfectly -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 24 â– â– â– 24charming about it.In college, Obama explains to a girl why he wasreading Joseph Conrad’s 1902 classic, “Heart ofDarkness”: “I read the book to help me understandjust what it is that makes white people so afraid.Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. Ihelps me understand how people learn to hate.” By contrast, Malcolm X’s autobiography “spoke”to Obama. One line in particular “stayed with me,”he says. “He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wishthat the white blood that ran through him, there byan act of violence, might somehow be expunged.”Forget Rev. Jeremiah Wright — Wright is BookerT. Washington compared to this guy.Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMANEVENTSand author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Slan-der, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), Godless, andmost recently, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d BeRepublicans. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 25 â– â– â– 25Over the Top BarackDAVID LIMBAUGHBased on Barack Obama’s hysterical, paranoidreaction to President Bush’s remarks to the IsraeliKnesset condemning the practice of appeasing terror-ists, one might infer Obama was lying in wait for justsuch an opportunity to capture some national secu-rity street cred.After all, Democrats begin any presidential racewith a national security credibility deficit, and thisone should be no different, notwithstanding theunpopularity of the Iraq war. Democrats like to thinkthey gained congressional seats in 2006 because ofthe war, but a better read is that Republicans didthemselves in through reckless spending, scandalsand other abandonment of conservative principles.Despite his puffed-up posturing, Obama probablyrecognizes this, as well. Otherwise, why would hehave lashed out so nastily at both Mr. Bush (and Sen.McCain) for assuring our closest Middle Eastern allythat we would stand by it?Obama was so sure Bush’s remarks were aimed athim that he shed his nice-guy facade and gave thenation a little glimpse of his inner anger. For thosewho insist Obama is all sweet and light, I challengeyou to listen to his tantrums in response to the pres-ident’s non-attack.Obama shouted: “I’m a strong believer in biparti-san foreign policy, but that cause is not served withdishonest, divisive attacks of the sort that we’ve seenout of George Bush and John McCain over the lastcouple days. They aren’t telling you the truth.”Let me ask you: Where does Barack Obama getoff proclaiming himself the high arbiter of civility andbipartisanship while he is engaged in a sputteringtirade of abject incivility and partisanship? Obamaapparently expects us to assess his civility not on thebasis of his conduct, but solely on the strength of hisdistorted self-description.Like so many other liberals, Obama exempts him-self from behavioral accountability through identifi-cation with liberal policies, which confer upon himthe irrebuttable presumption that he is kind and com-passionate. But those not subject to the self-deludingspell of liberalism or Obamaphilia will not be fooledby such hypocrisy. They will judge Obama’s claim tocivility not on his self-elevating but empty words, buton his self-damning, nasty ones.Obama’s joining with other Democrats to bearfalse witness against President Bush is a perfect exam-ple of the type of incivility for which he disingenu-ously excoriates President Bush.Obama also decried the president’s remarks as“exactly the kind of appalling attack that’s dividedour country and alienated us from the rest of theworld.”No, Sen. Obama, what have divided this countryand alienated us from the rest of the world are thenonstop Democratic assaults against President Bush— assaults that you not only did not condemn asuncivil, dishonest and divisive but also haveembraced and echoed.What has placed America in a falsely negativelight to the world is the Democratic chorus of liesthat President Bush misled us into war in Iraq; thathe is responsible for the killing of hundreds of thou-sands of Iraqi civilians; that the United States is tor-turing and otherwise violating the “rights” of ourenemy prisoners at Guantanamo Bay; that this verydetention center is comparable to a Soviet Gulag orNazi prison camp; that the Bush government is spy-ing on its own citizens; that America, because of itscorporate greed, refuses to lead the world againstapocalyptic global warming; and that the heartlandof America is inhabited by jingoistic, imperialistic,intolerant, homophobic, xenophobic, racist and real-ity-challenged Bible-thumpers.President Bush is not guilty of leveling a partisanattack against Barack Obama in Israel. But if he wereto change course after seven long years on the receiv-ing end and start returning cheap shots at Democrats,say, at the rate of 10 per day for the remainder of histerm, he still would be behind Democrats in thisdepartment by a sizeable multiple. Truly, it amazes -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 26 â– â– â– 26me how civil, composed and un-reciprocal PresidentBush has been in the face of this incessant barrage ofpartisan vitriol.Shame on Barack Obama for falsely accusing thepresident of behavior he and his party have perfectedthrough meticulous practice. Shame on him for pre-tending that he offers bipartisanship when his actualrecord is one of extreme liberalism and is strikinglybereft of aisle crossing or compromise. Shame on himfor defining bipartisanship and civility, in effect, asacquiescing to his dictates.Obama likens his own foreign policy approach tothat of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, but realityplaces him closer to George McGovern or MichaelDukakis. But there is a method to his madness. Hehas assumed the offense against his Republican rivalsto divert our attention from his demonstrable lack oftoughness in the war on terror.Mr. Limbaugh is a nationally syndicated columnist andauthor of Bankrupt: The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcyof Today’s Democratic Party, Absolute Power and Persecu-tion. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 27 â– â– â– 27BRENT BOZELLBarack Potatoe Obama?Imagine that John McCain named a young runningmate to campaign with him, and this nationalrookie suggested America had 58 states, repeatedlyused the wrong names for the cities he was visiting,and honored a Memorial Day crowd by acknowledg-ing the “fallen heroes” who were present, somehowalive and standing in the audience. How long wouldit take for the national media to see another DanQuayle caricature? Let’s raise the stakes. What if itwas the GOP presidential candidate making thesethoroughly ridiculous comments? This scenario isvery real, except it isn’t McCain. It’s the other fellow.ABC reporter Jake Tapper follows politiciansaround for a living. On his blog, he suggested BarackObama has a problem: “The man has been a one-man gaffe machine.”In Sunrise, Fla., Obama said, “How’s it going,Sunshine?” He did the same thing in Sioux Falls,S.D., calling it “Sioux City.” Some of his geographicstruggles seem calculated. When asked why HillaryClinton trounced him in Kentucky, Obama claimed“I’m not very well known in that part of the country... Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, com-ing from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not sur-prising that she would have an advantage in some ofthose states in the middle.” But Obama’s home stateof Illinois is more than “near” Kentucky — it bor-ders Kentucky.In Oregon, there was a doozy. Obama said of hislong campaign, “I’ve been in 57 states, I think, oneleft to go.” No one in the press made much of this.As former ABC political reporter Marc Ambinder,now with the Atlantic Monthly magazine, admitted:“But if John McCain did this — if he mistakenly saidhe’d visited 57 states — the media would be all up inhis grill, accusing him of a senior moment.” If youdoubt him, remember how most media outlets noted,then underlined McCain’s error about al-Qaedabeing trained and funded by Iran.In New Mexico, Obama suggested he was like ayoung Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense,” withthe ability to see dead people: “On this MemorialDay, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallenheroes — and I see many of them in the audiencehere today — our sense of patriotism is particularlystrong.” Fallen heroes in the audience? Is this BarackPotatoe Obama? This is precisely the kind of mis-statement that Dan Quayle-bashers would run adinfinitum.But there have also been gaffes on more seriousmatters. ABC found that campaigning in Rush Lim-baugh’s hometown of Cape Girardeau, Mo., Obamaargued that our military’s Arabic translators in Iraqare needed in Afghanistan: “We only have a certainnumber of them and if they are all in Iraq, then it’sharder for us to use them in Afghanistan,” heclaimed. But Afghans don’t speak Arabic; they speakseveral other languages. That’s a lot like McCain’sgaffe — except for the degree of media attention,which in the Democrat’s case was virtually nonexist-ent.McCain also would have enjoyed more mediafocus on Obama’s completely muddled analysis ofSouth America last week. He told the Orlando Sen-tinel on Thursday that he would meet with Chavezto discuss “the fermentation of anti-American senti-ment in Latin America, his support of FARC inColombia and other issues he would want to talkabout.” But on Friday in Miami, he insisted anycountry supporting the Marxist guerrillas of FARCshould suffer “regional isolation.” This left Obamaadvisers scrambling to suggest that these two oppos-ing statements can somehow be put together, that hecan meet Chavez and isolate him at the same time.Sometimes, Obama invents Bosnia-sniper-stylewhoppers about his personal history. In Selma, Ala.,Obama claimed that the spirit of hope derived fromthe civil rights protests in Selma in 1965 inspired hisbirth — when he was born in 1961. He also has inac-curately claimed that the Kennedys funded hisKenyan father’s trip to America in 1959.While he was making boo-boos in New Mexico -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 28 â– â– â– 28on Memorial Day, Obama also (according to CBSreporter/blogger Maria Gavrilovic) talked aboutpost-traumatic stress disorder by claiming he had anuncle “who was part of the American brigade thathelped to liberate Auschwitz,” and then came homeand spent six months in an attic. Gavrilovic didn’tnote that the prisoners at Auschwitz were liberatedby the Red Army. Obama earlier made the claim onhis campaign site that his grandfather knew Ameri-can troops who liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka(also liberated by the Red Army).Everyone should grant these candidates a littleroom for error in the long slog of presidential cam-paigning. But what about some balance? The samenational media that turned Dan Quayle’s name intoan instant joke are now working over time to presentObama as Captain Competent.Mr. Bozell is president of the Media Research Center. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 29 â– â– â– 29How Would Iran Read Obama?ROBERT SPENCERReeling from President Bush’s criticism of theproposition that we should negotiate with terror-ists, “as if some ingenious argument will persuadethem they have been wrong all along,” BarackObama was at first indignant, declaring: “GeorgeBush knows that I have never supported engagementwith terrorists.” But apparently he doesn’t considerIran, for all the genocidal bellicosity of its PresidentMahmoud Ahmadinejad, a terrorist state: on Mondayhe reaffirmed that he would indeed sit down with theleaders of Iran (as well as with those of Cuba andVenezuela), and that no one should be disturbed bythis, since these countries “don’t pose a serious threatto us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.”And speaking specifically about Iran, the presump-tive Democratic nominee continued: “If Iran ever triedto pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand achance. And we should use that position of strengththat we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen.That doesn’t mean we agree with them on everything.We might not compromise on any issues, but at least,we should find out other areas of potential commoninterest, and we can reduce some of the tensions thathas caused us so many problems around the world.”Yes, he really said that “we should find out otherareas of potential common interest.” He didn’texplain what these might be, but here John McCain’scomment was particularly apposite. “It shows naiveteand inexperience and lack of judgment,” observed theGOP standard-bearer, “to say that he wants to sitdown across the table from an individual who leads acountry that says that Israel is a ‘stinking corpse,’ thatis dedicated to the extinction of the state of Israel. Myquestion is, what does he want to talk about?”That’s not all. Obama is apparently not aware thatAhmadinejad has made it clear that he is in no moodto sit down with Americans unless the Americansknow their place. “The American administration,”he said in 2006, “is still dreaming of returning theIranian people 30 years backwards. As long as Amer-ica has this dream, these [relations] will not happen.”What should America do instead? “They shouldwake up from this dream and see the facts. Theyshould change their behavior and mend their ways.They should take a fair position. We have told themwhat they have to do, and if they do it, there will beno problem as far as we are concerned.” “We have told them what they have to do, and ifthey do it, there will be no problem as far as we areconcerned”! As if that weren’t clear enough, hewarned America and its allies that “if you want tohave good relations with the Iranian people in thefuture, you should acknowledge the right and themight of the Iranian people, and you should bow andsurrender to the might of the Iranian people. If youdo not accept this, the Iranian people will force youto bow and surrender.”Would Iran’s Thug-In-Chief regard Obama’s invita-tion to sit down and chat as a sign that he was willing to“bow and surrender”? There is no reason to think hewould regard it in any other way. Islamic law stipulatesthat Islamic forces may only ask for a truce with theenemy under two conditions: if they have a reasonableexpectation that the enemy may convert to Islam, or —more commonly — if the Muslims are weak and need tobuy some time to recover their strength to fight againmore effectively. With this understanding, the Iranianmullahs might be forgiven for assuming that if Obama iscoming to them hat-in-hand, he must be weak. GivenAhmadinejad’s oft-repeated declarations that Israel willsoon cease to exist (it was only last week that he said thatit was “on its way to annihilation”), weakness might notbe the wisest thing to project to them at this point. Unless, of course, the bright new President Obamais prepared to deal with a nuclear mushroom cloudover Tel Aviv. That will certainly give him andAhmadinejad plenty to talk about.Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of ThePolitically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), TheTruth About Muhammad and Religion of Peace? (all fromRegnery — a HUMANEVENTSsister company). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 30 One Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. • Washington, D.C. 200011-888-467-4448 • www.HumanEvents.comHuman EventsThe National Conservative Weekly

GET INFORMED!!! Fact: Obama campaign has proposed a tax plan that includes: Top individual income tax rate raised by 13%, to 39.6% Top capital gains tax rate increased by 33% Top dividends tax rate increased by 33% Reinstatement of the federal estate tax to 45% New payroll tax for health insurance Higher tariffs Increased corporate income taxes, including windfall profits taxes This analysis is from the Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy Peter Ferrara. These increases don't come close to covering the massive increase in entitlements he has proposed. It is also poor monetary policy in the face of current economic conditions. Including the word "Cut" in Sen. Obama's plan is rubbish rhetoric for the uninformed voter. Let's get real people!!!!

We want change then vote all imcumbents out...all 535 of them. The president is a figure head with a pen, who doesn't even read any legislation word for word, he is told what it contains. The people who write legislation are in congress...they are the ones who have a adverse effect on our lives..DIRECTLY.

August 27, 2008 Obama's lies about supporting gun rights Rick Moran David Freddoso of NRO and best selling author of the book The Case Against Barack Obama has an article today that shows how Obama's "ingenius lack of specificity" helps him in obscuring his true positions on the issues. On gun rights, Freddoso points out that Obama stated on national television that the recent Heller decision was "in line with his own view" on gun rights. Nothing could be further from the truth: According to a 1996 questionnaire he filled out while running for the Illinois Senate, Obama promised to support a ban on "the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns." Even though Obama's handwriting appeared on the questionnaire, Obama's campaign would claim earlier this year that his staff filled it out and he was completely unaware of the answer he had given. You don't have to go back that far to find Obama taking an extreme stance against gun rights. In 2004, while running for the U.S. Senate, he promised to bar citizens nationwide from receiving concealed-carry permits. The Chicago Tribune reported then that Obama "backed federal legislation that would ban citizens from carrying weapons, except for law enforcement." Obama explained his plan to pre-empt state concealed-carry laws with a federal bill: "National legislation," Obama said at the time, "will prevent other states' flawed concealed-weapons laws from threatening the safety of Illinois residents." Senator Obama also supported the District of Columbia's comprehensive gun ban - he said so in a February television interview with Washington's WJLA, available on YouTube. The D.C. gun ban prevented district residents from owning handguns even in their own homes. It required that long guns, all of which had to be registered, be kept locked and disassembled. There wasn't even a provision allowing them to be reassembled in the event of an emergency. Obama's flip flops on guns is especially dizzying, but simply par for the course for Obama when it comes to projecting "misleading moderation" as Freddoso calls it. And unless the voter takes the time to dig into what Obama really thinks, they probably walk away with the opinion that Obama is not really the far left liberal he truly is. For those interested in understanding the real Obama, make sure you pick up a copy of David's book. And here is a podcast from last night's Rick Moran Show where Ed Lasky and I interviewed David. It may open your eyes a bit more into how truly dishonest Obama is. Hat Tip: Ed Lasky

US Senator Joseph Lieberman speaks at Republican National Convention From Wikinews, the free news source you can write! Jump to: navigation, search Wednesday, September 3, 2008 2008 United States Presidential Election 2008 US Presidential Election stories 17 September 2008: Libertarian National Committee motion to chastise Ron Paul for not endorsing U.S. presidential nominee Bob Barr released 15 September 2008: Libertarian National Committee in fierce deadlock over how to address growing Bob Barr controversies 15 September 2008: Despite threats, "Alaska Women Reject Palin" rally held 13 September 2008: New polls show third party U.S. presidential candidates varying radically in popularity 13 September 2008: Plans set in motion for the removal of Bob Barr as the Libertarian Party's U.S. presidential nominee Joseph Lieberman Image: US Government.United States Senator Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT) delivered an impassioned speech yesterday to Republicans at the 2008 Republican National Convention. His choice to do so angered numerous congressional Democrats, and may lead to sanctions by the party. Lieberman spent 18 years as a Democrat, winning his first Senate race in 1988. After three terms, Lieberman narrowly lost the Democratic primary in the lead-up to the 2006 election. Running instead under the "Connecticut for Lieberman" party banner, Lieberman beat his former democratic opponent Ned Lamont, Republican Alan Schlesinger and third-party candidates thereby retaining his seat. He promptly changed his official party affiliation to "Independent Democrat", which he continues to use. Lieberman, who had previously endorsed John McCain for the presidency and was long considered as a possible running mate, spoke to the Republican party about choosing a maverick: ... But when they look to Washington, all too often they do not see their leaders coming together to tackle these problems. Instead they see Democrats and Republicans fighting each other, rather than fighting for the American people...It shouldn't take a natural disaster to teach us that the American people don't care much if you have an "R" or a "D" after your name. ... Lieberman also took shots at his own party, and its candidate, Senator Barack Obama: ... Senator Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who can do great things for our country in the years ahead. But eloquence is no substitute for a record—not in these tough times. In the Senate he has not reached across party lines to get anything significant done, nor has he been willing to take on powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party. Contrast that to John McCain's record, or the record of the last Democratic President, Bill Clinton, who stood up to some of those same Democratic interest groups and worked with Republicans to get important things done like welfare reform, free trade agreements, and a balanced budget. ... He also elicited booing when mentioning Obama's stance on ground-troop funding: ... When others wanted to retreat in defeat from the field of battle, when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground, John McCain had the courage to stand against the tide of public opinion and support the surge, and because of that, today, our troops are at last beginning to come home, not in failure, but in honor. ... Lieberman's decision to speak at the Convention sparked anger from many of his Democratic colleagues. A "Lieberman Must Go" petition, boasting over 50,000 signatures, was launched by filmmaker Robert Greenwald. Greenwald seeks to have Lieberman stripped of his chairmanship on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Pundits consider this likely if Democrats gain Senate seats in the upcoming election, guaranteeing a safe majority. (The current makeup of the Senate is 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and two independents, Lieberman and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.) Lieberman's speech came on the first day of the convention, and followed that of Senator Fred Thompson and the televised appearance of U.S. President George W. Bush. The convention will conclude on Thursday, 4 September. Have an opinion on this story? Post it! [edit] Sources Connecticut United States Senate election, 2006 at Wikipedia "Lieberman: Call Me Independent-Democrat". Associated Press, 2006-11-12 Joe Lieberman "JOE LIEBERMAN: MCCAIN FOR PRESIDENT". New York Post, 2008-02-03 Elisabeth Bumiller and Michael Cooper "Advisers say conservative ire pushed McCain away from picking Lieberman". International Herald Tribune, 2008-08-31 "Full Text Of Lieberman's RNC Speech". courant.com, 2008-09-02 Peter Urban "Lieberman's Republican convention slot angers Dems". Stamford Advocate, 2008-08-21 Frank James "GOP releases full convention roster". Swamp Politics,

Lieberman: 'McCain Is Not Your Ordinary Candidate' On the Road at the Conventions Blog Campaign '08 Complete Coverage ST. PAUL, Minn. (CBS News) ― Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential pick eight years ago, appeared at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday and criticized his former party's nominee Barack Obama as an untested candidate unwilling to challenge powerful interest groups as both Republican John McCain and one-time Democratic President Clinton have done. "Sen. Barack Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who I think can do great things for our country in the years ahead,'' Lieberman said. "But my friends, eloquence is no substitute for a record--not in these tough times.'' Playing his former party's spoiler, the Democrat-turned-Independent called McCain--not Democratic nominee Obama--the best choice to lead the country forward. "What, after all, is a Democrat like me doing at a Republican convention like this?" Lieberman asked the cheering crowd. "Well, I'll tell you what, I'm here to support John McCain because country matters more than party. "John McCain is the best choice to bring our country together and lead America forward," Lieberman added. Appearing from the White House via satellite earlier in the night, President Bush hailed McCain as a man "ready to lead this nation," a courageous candidate who risked his White House ambitions to support an unpopular Iraq war. Bush reprised the national security themes that propelled him to a second term as he spoke. "We need a president who understands the lessons of Sept. 11, 2001," he said. "That to protect America, we must stay on the offense, stop attacks before they happen and not wait to be hit again. The man we need is John McCain." "No matter what the issue, this man is honest and speaks straight from the heart," Bush said. Meanwhile, Republicans defended vice presidential running mate Sarah Palin in the face of fresh convention-week controversy. Inside the convention hall, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson delivered a strong defense of Palin. Thompson said the Alaska governor, was "from a small town, with small town values, but apparently that's not good enough for some of the folks who are out there now attacking her and her family." He said McCain's decision to place her on the ticket "has the other side and their friends in the media in a state of panic." Other Republicans - delegates and luminaries alike - defended Palin, who disclosed on Monday that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is pregnant. In addition, a lawyer has been hired to represent the governor in an ethics-related controversy back home in Alaska. "I haven't seen anything that comes out about her that in any way troubles me or shakes my confidence in her," said former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who ran unsuccessfully for the party's presidential nomination this year. "All it has done for me is say she is a human person with a real family." And Ron Nehring, chairman of the California state party, said video footage of Palin on a firing range was helping her cause. "The reports I'm getting back is that every time they show that footage we get 1,000 precinct walkers from the NRA," he told members of his state's delegation, to laughter. "She cuts taxes and shoots moose. That's Gov. Palin," Nehring said. Thompson jabbed at Obama on abortion, as well. "We need a president who doesn't think that the protection of the unborn or a newly born baby is above his pay grade," he said in prepared remarks, referring to a recent episode in which McCain's White House rival said it was "above my pay grade" to decide the point at which an unborn child is entitled to rights. Despite Thompson's remarks - and McCain's declaration that he was satisfied with the scrutiny his aides had given Palin before his selection there were fresh disclosures. Among them: that both as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and as governor, she had sought earmarks for local projects. Her most recent round of requests totaled $300 for every Alaskan. McCain has frequently vowed to veto any earmark legislation, and has said she will be a force in his battle to wipe them out. Additionally, the lawyer hired to defend Palin in an ethics investigation said he also is representing her personally and is permitted to bill the state up to $95,000 for work in the current case. The issue involves the dismissal of public safety commissioner Walt Monegan after he refused to fire a state trooper who had divorced the governor's sister. Republicans handed Lieberman the prime spot in the evening lineup, and he was set to blend praise for McCain with criticism of Obama. "When others wanted to retreat in defeat from the field of battle, when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground, John McCain had the courage to stand against the tide of public opinion," the Connecticut Democratic-turned-independent senator said in excerpts released in advance of his speech. The decision to place Lieberman out front on the convention's second night capped an unprecedented political migration. Only eight years ago, he stood before a cheering throng at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles and accepted the nomination as Al Gore's running mate. In the years since, he lost badly in 2004 when he sought the Democratic presidential nomination, lost a Democratic nomination for a new term at home in Connecticut in 2006, then recovered quickly to win re-election as an independent. Back in the Senate, his vote allows the Democrats to command a narrow majority, yet he has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the war in Iraq. He has traveled widely with McCain in recent months, and occasionally has angered Democrats with remarks critical of Obama. Mr. Bush, with his approval ratings in the 30-percent range, was relegated to a relatively minor role at the convention of a party that has twice nominated him to the White House. The president scrapped a planned Monday night speech because of the threat Hurricane Gustav posed to New Orleans. With polls making it clear the nation is ready for a change, the McCain campaign indicated there was no reason for him to make the trip to St. Paul. One day after a frightening Gulf Coast hurricane prompted a subdued opening to the McCain convention, political combat enjoyed a resurgence. McCain's aides disputed a claim that vice presidential running mate Sarah Palin had once been a member of a third party - and accused Democratic rival Obama's camp of spreading false information. Obama spokesman Bill Burton said that as far as he'd seen, "the only person talking about her being in the Alaska Independence Party is the head of the Alaska Independence Party." "Their gripe is with those folks," he said of the McCain campaign. Protesters outside the hall vowed to resume demonstrations that turned violent on Monday and resulted in 286 arrests. (© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

Democrat U.S. Senator from Illinois Far-left Democrat candidate for President of the United States in 2008 For an in-depth look at a host of Barack Obama's key personal and political affiliations, visit DiscoverTheNetworks' special feature, Barack's World. Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. is a United States Senator from Illinois. In 2008 he defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii to a white mother from Kansas and a black Muslim father from Kenya who met as students at the University of Hawaii. His mother Anna, as Obama describes her in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, was “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” His father, also named Barack (Swahili for “One who is blessed by God”) Obama, left his rural Luo-speaking village and his Muslim father to become an “agnostic” and study economics abroad. His son was two years old when the elder Barack left the boy and his mother and returned to Harvard University and then to Kenya, where he became a globe-traveling economist for the government. When the young Obama was six, his mother married an Indonesian oil manager, a “non-practicing Muslim,” and the family moved to Jakarta, where Barack’s half-sister Maya was born. The family would reside there for four years. Vis a vis Barack Obama’s religious upbringing, Islam scholar Daniel Pipes reports the following: “In Islam, religion passes from the father to the child. Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. [his Kenyan birth father] was a Muslim who named his boy Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Only Muslim children are named ‘Hussein’.… [Barack Obama’s] stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was also a Muslim. In fact, as Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng explained to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times: ‘My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.’ An Indonesian publication, the Banjarmasin Post reports a former classmate, Rony Amir, recalling that ‘All the relatives of Barry's [Barack’s] father were very devout Muslims.’” Obama’s good friend, the attorney and novelist Scott Turow, wrote that Obama as a child spent “two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school.” School records show that when Obama attended Catholic school, he was enrolled as a Muslim. Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times learned from Obama’s childhood friends that “Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque.” Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune found that “Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers.” An Indonesian friend of Obama, Zulfin Adi, states that “[Obama] was Muslim. He went to the mosque. I remember him wearing a sarong [a garment associated with Muslims].” The aforementioned Rony Amir describes Obama as “previously quite religious in Islam.” In December 2007 Obama would say, “I've always been a Christian. The only connection I've had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father's side came from that country [Kenya]. But I've never practiced Islam.” In February 2008 he elaborated, “I have never been a Muslim.… [O]ther than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for four years when I was a child [Indonesia, 1967-71] I have very little connection to the Islamic religion.” At age ten, Obama was sent back to Hawaii to be raised largely by his middle-class white maternal grandparents, and to attend the prestigious Punahou Academy. For only one month of his life, also when he was ten, Obama was visited by his biological father. In the 1970s the Obama family became friendly with Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987), a black writer and fellow Hawaiian resident. Davis wrote for the Honolulu Record (a Communist newspaper) and was a known member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA). He soon became the young Barack Obama’s mentor and advisor. In Dreams From My Father, Obama writes about Davis but does not reveal the latter’s full name, identifying him only as “a poet named Frank” -- a man with much “hard-earned knowledge” who had known “some modest notoriety once” but was now “pushing eighty.” (Several sources -- including Professor Gerald Horne, Dr. Kathryn Takara, and libertarian writer Trevor Loudon -- have confirmed that Obama’s “Frank” was indeed Frank Marshall Davis.) Obama in his book recounts how, just prior to heading off to Occidental College (in California) in 1979, he spent some time with “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self.” Obama writes that “Frank” told him that college was merely “an advanced degree in compromise,” and cautioned the young man not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh--.” From Occidental, Obama transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science. He applied for work as a community organizer with groups across the United States while working as a writer and financial analyst for Business International Corporation. One small group of 20-odd churches in Chicago offered Obama a job helping residents of poor, predominantly black, Far South Side neighborhoods. He moved to Chicago and in June 1985 became Director of the Developing Communities Project, working for the next three years on efforts that ranged from job training to school reform to hazardous waste cleanup. Obama was trained by the Saul Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago. (The Developing Communities Project itself was an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of “a more just and democratic society” is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method.) Alinsky was known for helping to establish the aggressive political tactics that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States. In the Alinsky model, “organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution” -- a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America's social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted -- a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo’s complete collapse -- to be followed by the erection of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal “changes” are needed. But Alinsky's brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic, sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As Richard Poe puts it, “Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties.” Alinsky advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to introduce changes from that platform. One of Obama's early mentors in the Alinsky method, Mike Kruglik, would later say the following about Obama: "He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better." For several years, Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Obama worked with ACORN, a creation of the Alinsky network. ACORN was a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley's National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), whose members in the late 1960s and early 70s had invaded welfare offices across the U.S. -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law “entitled” them.[1] Obama also worked for Project Vote, the voter-mobilization arm of ACORN. Project Vote’s professed purpose is to carry out “non-partisan” voter-registration drives; to counsel voters on their rights; and to litigate on behalf of voting rights -- focusing on the rights of the poor and the “disenfranchised.”[2] In 1988 Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated magna cum laude in 1991. From April to November of 1992, Obama served as the Director of “Illinois Project Vote,” which registered approximately 150,000 mostly poor, mostly Democratic voters in Chicago’s Cook County before that year’s presidential election. Also in 1992, Obama married Michelle Robinson (now Michelle Obama). In 1993 Barack Obama took a job as a litigator of voting rights and employment cases with the law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C. (a.k.a. Davis Miner), where he remains a Counsel today. In 1993 he also became a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, another position he still holds. In 1994 Obama worked for Davis Miner on a case titled Barnett v. Daley, where he was part of a legal team that challenged the racial makeup of Chicago’s voting districts. The Obama team sought to raise the number of black super-majority districts from 19 to 24. According to the judge in the case, Richard Posner, Obama and his fellow litigators held that “no black aldermanic candidate in Chicago has ever beaten a white in a ward that had a black majority of less than 62.6 percent, and it is emphatic that the ward in which the population is 55 percent black is not a black ward -- is indeed a white ward, even though only 42 percent of its population is white.” In a 1995 case known as Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, Obama and his fellow Davis Miner attorneys charged that Citibank was making too few loans to black applicants, and they won the case.[3] Also in 1995, Obama sued, on behalf of ACORN, for the implementation of the Motor Voter law in Illinois. Jim Edgar, the state's Republican Governor, opposed the law because he believed that allowing voters to register using only a postcard would breed widespread fraud. ACORN would later invite Obama to help train its staff. Moreover, Obama eventually would sit on the Board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which gave a number of sizable grants to ACORN. In 1995 Obama -- along with such notables as Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright -- helped organize the Washington, DC-based Million Man March which featured Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Said Obama in the immediate aftermath of the March: “What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society…. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn’t care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.” In the mid-1990s, Obama developed a friendship with fellow Chicagoans Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, university professors who hosted meetings at their home to introduce Obama to their neighbors during his first run for the Illinois state senate in 1996. Ayers (who contributed money to Obama’s 1996 campaign) and Dohrn had been leaders of the 1960s domestic terrorist group Weatherman, a Communist-driven splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society. The pair had participated personally in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. To this day, both have remained unrepentant about their former terrorist activities and their hatred of the United States.[4] A notable attendee at the Ayers/Dohrn-hosted political gatherings was Democratic state senator Alice J. Palmer (of Illinois’ 13th District), who soon developed a friendly relationship with Obama. Prior to her stint in politics, Palmer had worked for the Black Press Institute and was editor of the Black Press Review. During the Cold War, she supported the Soviet Union and spoke against the United States. In the 1980s she served as an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a Communist front group (and which was an affiliate of the World Peace Council, an international Soviet front). Palmer participated in the World Peace Council’s Prague assembly in 1983 -- just as the USSR was launching its “nuclear freeze” movement, a scheme that would have frozen Soviet nuclear and military superiority in place. State senator Palmer was instrumental in Obama's entry into politics. In 1995 Palmer decided to pursue an opportunity to run for a higher office when Mel Reynolds, the congressman from Illinois’ 2nd District, resigned from the House of Representatives amid a sexual scandal involving him and an underage campaign volunteer. As Palmer prepared to leave the state senate, she hand-picked Obama as the person she most wanted to fill her newly vacated senate seat. Toward that end, she introduced Obama to party elders and donors as her preferred successor, and helped him gather the signatures required for getting his name placed on the ballot. But in November 1995, Jesse Jackson, Jr. defeated Palmer in a special election for Reynolds’ empty congressional seat. At that point, Palmer filed to retain the Democratic nomination for the state senate seat she had encouraged Obama to pursue; that seat would be up for grabs in the November 1996 elections. She asked Obama to politely withdraw from the race and offered to help him find an alternative position elsewhere. But Obama refused to withdraw, so Palmer resolved to run against him (and two other opponents who also had declared their candidacy) in the 1996 Democratic primary. To get her name placed on the ballot, Palmer hastily gathered the minimum number of signatures required. Obama promptly challenged the legitimacy of those signatures and charged Palmer with fraud. A subsequent investigation found that a number of the names on Palmer’s petition were invalid, thus she was knocked off the ballot. (Names could be eliminated from a candidate's petition for a variety of reasons. For example, if a name was printed rather than written in cursive script, it was considered invalid. Or if the person collecting the signatures was not registered to perform that task, any signatures that he or she had collected likewise were nullified.) Obama also successfully challenged the signatures gathered by his other two opponents, and both of them were disqualified as well. Consequently, Obama ran unopposed in the Democratic primary and won by default. “I liked Alice Palmer a lot,” Obama would later reflect. “I thought she was a good public servant. It [the process by which Obama had gotten Palmer's name removed from the ballot] was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently.” Another key supporter of Obama’s 1996 state senate campaign was Carl Davidson, a Marxist who in the 1960s had been a national secretary of Students of a Democratic Society and a national leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement. In 1969 Davidson (along with Tom Hayden) helped launch the “Venceremos Brigades,” which covertly transported hundreds of young Americans to Cuba to help harvest sugar cane and interact with Havana’s communist revolutionary leadership. (The Brigades were organized by Fidel Castro's Cuban intelligence agency, which trained "brigadistas" in guerrilla warfare techniques, including the use of arms and explosives.) In 1988 Davidson founded Networking for Democracy (NFD), a program encouraging high-school students to engage in “mass action” aimed at “tearing down the old structures of race and class privilege” in the U.S. “and around the world.” In 1992 he became a leader of the newly formed Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and members of the Communist Party USA. In the mid-1990s Davidson was a major player in the Chicago branch of a Marxist political coalition known as the New Party, whose endorsement Obama actively sought -- and received -- for his Illinois state senate run in 1996. Moreover, Obama used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers. Obama’s 1996 senate campaign also secured the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the United States and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International. Obama’s affiliation with DSA was longstanding, as evidenced by his reference, in Dreams From My Father, to the fact that during his student years at Columbia University he “went to socialist conferences at Cooper Union,” a privately funded college for the advancement of science and art. From the early 1980s until 2004, Cooper Union had served as the usual venue of the annual Socialist Scholars Conference. According to Trevor Loudon, guest speakers at these conferences included “members of the Communist Party USA and its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence, as well as Maoists, Trotsyists, black radicals, gay activists and radical feminists.” Mr. London observes that “Obama speaks of ‘conferences’ plural, indicating [that] his attendance was not the result of accident or youthful curiosity.” Obama won his 1996 race for the Illinois state senate in the 13th District, which mostly represented poor South Side blacks but also a few wealthy neighborhoods. In 1998 Obama became a board member of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, which targets its philanthropy in large measure toward organizations dedicated to the agendas of radical environmentalism, “social justice,” prison reform, and increased government funding for social services, particularly for minorities. Obama would remain a board member for three years, during which time the Joyce Foundation made grants to such groups as the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Children's Defense Fund of Ohio, the Jane Addams Resource Corporation, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Izaak Walton League of America, the Union of Concerned Scientists, SUSTAIN, the Tides Center, the Environmental Working Group, the World Resources Institute, the League of Women Voters Education Fund, the Democracy 21 Education Fund, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Brookings Institution, Alliance For Justice, the Council on Foundations, the Center for Community Change, the National Network of Grantmakers, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, the Nine to Five Working Women Education Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, Environmental Defense and the Urban Institute. Obama also had been a member of the Woods Fund of Chicago since 1993. In 1999 he was joined on this board by Bill Ayers, who would serve alongside Obama until the latter left the Fund in December 2002. (In 2002 -- while Obama was still on the board -- the Woods Fund made a grant to Northwestern University Law School's Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was employed.) In 2000, Obama ran against former Black Panther and incumbent congressman Bobby Rush in the Democratic Primary for the U.S. House of Representatives. Rush denounced Obama as an “elitist” who “wasn’t black enough,” and crushed him by nearly a two-to-one vote margin. Obama returned to the Illinois state senate for another four-year term. As noted earlier, during these years Obama was a lecturer at the University of Chicago law school, where he became friendly with Rashid Khalidi, a professor in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Obama and his wife were regular dinner guests at Khalidi’s Hyde Park home. Khalidi and his wife Mona had founded in 1995 the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), noted for its contention that Arab Americans face widespread discrimination in the United States, and for its view that Israel’s creation in 1948 was a "catastrophe" for Arab people. In 2001 and again in 2002, the Woods Fund of Chicago, while Obama served on its board, made grants totaling $75,000 to AAAN. (In 2003 Obama would attend a farewell party in Khalidi’s honor when the latter was leaving the University of Chicago to embark on a new position at Columbia University.) According to journalist John Batchelor, "AAAN vice-president Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada [a website that, like AAAN, refers to Israel’s creation as a "catastrophe"] has remembered Mr. Obama's speaking in 1999 against ‘Israeli occupation’ at a charity event for a West Bank refugee camp; and Mr. Abunimah … has also recalled Mr. and Mrs. Obama at a fundraiser held for the then-Congressional candidate Obama in 2000 at Rashid and Mona Khalidi's home, where Mr. Obama made convincing statements in support of the Palestinian cause.” Shortly after Obama’s unsuccessful run for Congress in 2000, he was deeply in debt, with little cash at his disposal (his annual part-time salary as a state senator was $58,000) and a stagnant law practice that he had largely neglected during a year of political campaigning. In early 2001 a longtime political supporter, Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell, Jr., hired Obama to provide legal advice for his (Blackwell’s) growing technology firm, Electronic Knowledge Interchange (EKI). In exchange for his services, Blackwell paid Obama an $8,000 retainer each month for roughly a 14-month period -- a total of $118,000. In return for these payments, Obama pressured the Illinois state tourism board to send a $50,000 grant to EKI. He also issued a formal written request for Illinois officials to furnish a $50,000 tourism promotion grant to another Blackwell company, Killerspin, which sells equipment and apparel related to the sport of table tennis. The day after Obama wrote this letter, his U.S. Senate campaign received a $1,000 donation from Blackwell. Killerspin would not receive the full $50,000 it was seeking that year, but only $20,000. With Obama’s help, however, the company eventually secured $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize the table tennis tournaments it sponsored. As blogger Ed Morrissey observes: “This looks like a rather obvious quid pro quo…. In exchange for $118,000 in salary, Blackwell received $320,000 in state taxpayer money and influence at the highest level of state politics.” Obama’s presidential campaign website reported that Blackwell in 2008 committed to raise between $100,000 and $200,000 for Obama’s White House run that year. Obama was an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War ever since it was first discussed as a possible means of unseating Saddam Hussein from power. On October 2, 2002, Obama gave an antiwar speech alongside Jesse Jackson on the very day that President Bush and Congress had agreed on a joint resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. (That date was Gandhi's birthday, and thus was selected for its symbolism.) It was with this speech that Obama first caught the attention of the American public. Suggesting that the prospect of war was largely a Republican ploy to distract voters from domestic issues that were impacting minorities negatively, Obama said: “What I am opposed to is the attempt by potential hacks like [Republican strategist] Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty state, a drop in the medium income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone thorough the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I am opposed to.” The Chicago rally was staged by a group called Chicagoans Against the War. Some of the key organizers were Carl Davidson (the aforementioned Marxist antiwar activist and Obama supporter), BettyLu Saltzman (an officer of the New Israel Fund), and Marilyn Katz (a former Students for a Democratic Society radical in the Sixties). In July 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. He used the speech to introduce himself to a national audience while impugning the Bush administration and the War in Iraq. In 2004 Obama ran for one of Illinois’ two seats in the U.S. Senate. The Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama’s campaign. More importantly, the Tribune persuaded a Democrat-appointed judge in California to open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s Republican opponent to the media. The resulting sex scandal, based on allegations in the divorce records by a Hollywood actress eager to prevent her ex-husband from getting custody of their children, prompted the Republican to resign from the race. With a $10 million campaign war chest from contributors, and with no Republican opponent who could garner much support, Obama had an open road to become the next U.S. Senator from Illinois. His friend and political supporter, the longtime Chicago alderwoman Dorothy Tillman, helped him win the voting in Chicago’s predominantly black wards. He also received valuable backing from the Jesse Jacksons, Junior and Senior, and Rev. Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. In March 2005 Obama joined forces with the Web-based, grassroots political network MoveOn -- which seeks to use its fundraising clout to push the Democratic Party ever further to the political left -- in an effort to raise campaign money for West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd’s 2006 reelection bid. In a letter to MoveOn members, Obama wrote: “You and millions of others, working through MoveOn, have helped change the way politics works in this country.” In a 2005 commencement address, Obama described the conservative philosophy of government as one that promises “to give everyone one big refund on their government, divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on.” “In Washington,” said Obama, “they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it, Social Darwinism, every man or woman for him or herself. It's a tempting idea, because it doesn't require much thought or ingenuity.” In September 2005, Obama spoke at a town hall meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus. Nominally devoted to the subject of “eradicating poverty,” the meeting was replete with condemnations of President George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and America’s purportedly intractable racial inequities. Obama stopped short of suggesting that the allegedly slow federal response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina (which had devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast earlier that month) -- especially black victims -- was motivated by racism. But he nonetheless claimed that racism was the cause of what he perceived to be the Bush administration’s indifference to the struggles of African Americans generally. “The incompetence was colorblind,” said Obama. “What wasn’t colorblind was the indifference. Human efforts will always pale in comparison to nature’s forces. But [the Bush administration] is a set of folks who simply don’t recognize what’s happening in large parts of the country.” Blacks in hurricane-hit areas were poor, Obama further charged, because of the Bush administration’s “decision to give tax breaks to Paris Hilton instead of providing child care and education …” In 2006 Obama endorsed the aforementioned Dorothy Tillman in the Third Ward race for the Chicago City Council. A passionate admirer of Louis Farrakhan, Tillman was a leading proponent of reparations for slavery. Claiming that America remains “one of the cruelest nations in the world when it comes to black folks,” Tillman continues to declare that the U.S. “owes blacks a debt.” In December of 2006, Obama, who by then was contemplating a run for the presidency, met in New York with billionaire financier George Soros, who previously had hosted a fundraiser for Obama during the latter’s 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. One of the most powerful men on earth, Soros is a hedge fund manager who has amassed a personal fortune estimated at about $7.2 billion. His management company controls billions more in investor assets. Since 1979, Soros’ foundation network -- whose flagship is the Open Society Institute (OSI) -- has dispensed more than $5 billion to a multitude of organizations whose objectives can be summarized as follows: promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens defending suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left advocating America’s unilateral disarmament and/or a steep reduction in its military spending opposing the death penalty in all circumstances promoting socialized medicine in the United States promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is “not clean air and clean water, [but] rather ... the demolition of technological/industrial civilization” bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike On January 16, 2007, Obama announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee, and within hours Soros sent the senator a contribution of $2,100, the maximum amount allowable under campaign finance laws. Later that week the New York Daily News reported that Soros would back Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton, whom he had supported in the past. At the time Obama announced the formation of his exploratory committee, he had logged a mere 143 days of experience in the U.S. Senate (i.e., the number of days the Senate had been in session since his swearing in on January 4, 2005). On February 10, 2007, Obama officially announced his candidacy for President. Having served for only two years as a U.S. Senator, and with no experience in an executive office, Obama said: “I recognize that there is a certain presumptuousness in this, a certain audacity to this announcement. I know that I have not spent a long time learning the ways of Washington, but I have been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington have to change.” Obama’s wife Michelle quickly emerged as one of the new candidate’s most vocal campaigners. In a February 2007 appearance with her husband on the television program 60 Minutes, Mrs. Obama implied that America’s allegedly rampant white racism posed a great physical threat to her husband. Said Mrs. Obama: “As a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.” In a January 2008 speech, Mrs. Obama depicted the U.S. as a nation whose people are inclined to “hold on to [their] own stereotypes and misconceptions,” and to thereby “feel justified in [their] own ignorance.” During a February 18, 2008 speech in Milwaukee on behalf of her husband’s campaign, she declared, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.” In March 2008 a New Yorker profile quoted Mrs. Obama saying, in a stump speech she had made in South Carolina, that the United States is “just downright mean” as a nation. Many notable individuals and organizations began to identify themselves publicly as Obama supporters. Among these were: George Clooney; Rob Reiner; Ariana Huffington; Jesse Jackson; Michael Eric Dyson; Manning Marable; Cornel West; Barbara Weinstein; Laurence Tribe; Jane Fonda; Tom Hayden; Michael Ratner; Danny Glover; Martin Sheen; Susan Sarandon; Spike Lee; Michael Moore; Bill Maher; Bruce Springsteen; Ted Kennedy; John Kerry; John Conyers; Luis Gutierrez; Barbara Lee; Major Owens; Jan Schakowsky; Bobby Rush; Pearl Jam; and ACORN. In April 2007, Obama addressed the activist Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, telling an overflow crowd of listeners about his success as an Illinois lawmaker in making health insurance available to children and reducing the cost of prescription drugs for senior citizens. He also expressed his opposition to racial profiling in law enforcement, detailing how he had helped pass legislation against the practice. In addition, he asserted that society must help ex-convicts escape an “economic death sentence” by securing jobs for them when they leave prison. In 2007 Obama appointed Robert Malley, the Middle East and North Africa Program Director for the International Crisis Group, as a foreign policy advisor to his campaign. ICG receives funding from the Open Society Institute (whose founder, George Soros, serves on the ICG Board and Executive Committee). Prior to joining ICG, Malley had served as President Bill Clinton’s Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs (1998-2001); National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s Executive Assistant (1996-1998); and the National Security Council’s Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and Humanitarian Affairs (1994-1996). Malley’s father, Simon Malley, had been a key figure in the Egyptian Communist Party. Rabidly anti-Israel, Simon Malley was a confidante of the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat; an inveterate critic of “Western imperialism”; a supporter of various leftist revolutionary “liberation movements,” particularly the Palestinian cause; a beneficiary of Soviet funding; and a supporter of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Robert Malley alleges that Israeli -- not Palestinian -- inflexibility caused the 2000 Camp David peace talks (brokered by Bill Clinton) to fail. He has penned several controversial articles -- some he co-wrote with Hussein Agha, a former adviser to Arafat -- blaming Israel and exonerating Arafat for that failure. (In 2008, the Obama campaign would sever its ties with Malley after the latter told the Times of London that he -- Malley -- had been in regular contact with Hamas as part of his work for ICG.) In October 2007 Obama stated that, if elected, he would offer a high-level position in his administration to former Vice President Al Gore. On December 4, 2007, Obama’s campaign announced the creation of its African American Religious Leadership Committee. Among the committee's more notable members were Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Rev. Otis Moss III, and Rev. Joseph E. Lowery. From March 1972 until February 2008, Jeremiah Wright -- whom Barack Obama described as his “spiritual advisor,” his “mentor,” and “one of the greatest preachers in America” -- was the pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), where Obama had attended services since 1988, and where he (Obama) had been a member since 1992. Wright embraces the tenets of black liberation theology, which seeks to foment Marxist revolutionary fervor founded on racial rather than class solidarity. His writings, public statements, and sermons reflect his conviction that America is a nation infested with racism, prejudice, and injustice. Wright is also a strong supporter of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Controversy erupted in early 2008 when news reports surfaced detailing Wright’s incendiary comments. Obama initially dismissed the audio/video clips as mere “snippets,” claiming that the media were highlighting only Wright’s “most offensive words,” and that his statements had been taken out of context. In May 2008, Obama finally made a move to distance himself from Wright and to denounce aspects of his preachings. As a result of the controversy, Wright stepped down from his position with the Obama campaign’s African American Religious Leadership Committee. Rev. Otis Moss III -- whom Obama has extolled as a “wonderful young pastor” -- served as assistant pastor of TUCC from 2006-2008 and then succeeded Jeremiah Wright as pastor when the latter retired. In one notable sermon, Moss likened the condition of contemporary black Americans to that of the hapless lepers referenced in biblical stories. He further implied that whites -- who, in his estimation, continue to segregate blacks both socially and economically -- are the “enemy” of African Americans. “Our society creates thugs,” Moss added. “Children are not born thugs. Thugs are made and not born.” Rev. Joseph Lowery is a prominent figure in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Viewing the United States as a nation that is “not committed to serious efforts to address the issue of racism,” he has warned that “white racism is gaining respectability again,” and that “there’s a resurgence of racism … at almost every level of life.” Lowery has expressed contempt for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, specifically because the black conservative Thomas opposes the use of affirmative action (i.e., race preferences) in business and academia. Says Lowery: “I have told [Thomas] I am ashamed of him, because he is becoming to the black community what Benedict Arnold was to the nation he deserted; and what Judas Iscariot was to Jesus: a traitor; and what Brutus was to Caesar: an assassin.” Another notable religious supporter of Barack Obama is Rev. Michael Pfleger, a white Roman Catholic priest who has been the pastor of Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago since 1981. A great admirer of Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, Pfleger views America as a nation plagued by “classism and racism,” and he identifies white racism as “the number one sin in this country.” Pfleger has had a longstanding friendly relationship (since the late 1980s) with Obama and has played a significant role as a spiritual advisor for the latter. Between 1995 and 2001, Pfleger contributed a total of $1,500 to Obama’s various political campaigns -- including a $200 donation in April 2001, approximately three months after Obama (who was then an Illinois state senator) had announced that St. Sabina programs would be receiving $225,000 in state grants. (After Obama's 2004 election to the U.S. Senate, he would earmark an additional $100,000 in federal tax money for Pfleger's work.) Pfleger also has hosted a number of faith forums for Obama during his political campaigns. In May 2008 Pfleger was a guest preacher at Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), where he condemned America as a racist nation that "has been raping people of color." He also declared that Hillary Clinton felt a sense of "white entitlement" in her quest to become President. When portions of this sermon were aired widely by the media, Obama denounced Pfleger's rhetoric as "divisive" and "backward-looking," and soon thereafter he announced that he was leaving Trinity church. Yet another religious figure affiliated with Obama is Rev. James Meeks, a Democratic member of the Illinois state senate, where he served alongside Obama from 2002-2004 (prior to Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate). Meeks also has been the pastor of Chicago’s 22,000-member Salem Baptist Church since 1985, and he was once the executive vice president of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH coalition. In July 2006, Meeks sparked controversy when he delivered a heated sermon excoriating Chicago mayor Richard Daley and others regarding public-school funding issues. “We don’t have slave masters,” Meeks shouted. “We got mayors. But they still the same white people who are presiding over systems where black people are not able, or to be educated.” Also among the targets of Meeks’ wrath were African Americans who supported Daley. Said Meeks: “You got some preachers that are house niggers. You got some elected officials that are house niggers. And rather than them trying to break this up, they gonna fight you to protect this white man.” Meeks is a longtime political ally of Barack Obama, who in 2003 and 2004 frequently campaigned at Salem Baptist Church during his run for the U.S. Senate. Meeks, meanwhile, appeared in television ads supporting Obama’s candidacy. Also in 2004, Obama personally selected Meeks to endorse him in a radio ad. In a 2004 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Obama described Meeks as an adviser to whom he looked for “spiritual counsel.” In 2007 Meeks served on Obama’s exploratory committee for the presidency. The Obama campaign website listed Meeks as one of the candidate’s “influential black supporters.” A Meeks endorsement of Obama was featured on that same website in 2008. Also in 2008, Meeks was named as an Illinois superdelegate pledged to Obama for the Democratic convention in Denver, Colorado. During a Democratic presidential debate on January 21, 2008, Obama expressed his belief that Republican politicians had failed to provide adequate opportunities for the social and economic advancement of minorities: “I am absolutely convinced that white, black, Latino, Asian, people want to move beyond our divisions, and they want to join together in order to create a movement for change in this country. The Republicans may have a different attitude.... The policies that they have promoted have not been good at providing ladders for upward mobility and opportunity for all people.” Also in January 2008, Obama’s relationship with a federally indicted real estate developer came to light when rival candidate Hillary Clinton said, during a South Carolina Democratic Party presidential debate: “I was fighting against … [Republican] ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago.” Clinton’s reference was to Tony Rezko, a Syrian-born, Chicago-based restaurateur and real estate developer who had been one of the first major financial contributors to Barack Obama’s political campaigns in the 1990s. For a full explanation of Rezko’s relationship with Obama, click on the footnote number here: [5] In March 2008 the controversial Al Sharpton, a strong supporter of Obama’s presidential candidacy, revealed publicly that he was in the habit of speaking to Obama on a regular basis -- “two or three times a week.” Sharpton also said that he had told Obama four months earlier, “I won’t either endorse you or not endorse you. But I will tell you I can be freer not endorsing you to help you and everybody else.” According to Sharpton, Obama then protested and asked for his public support: “No, no, no. I want you to endorse.” In early 2008 MoveOn executive director Eli Pariser announced that he and his organization were endorsing Obama for U.S. President. “We’ve learned that the key to achieving change in Washington without compromising core values is having a galvanized electorate to back you up,” said Pariser, “and Barack Obama has our members ‘fired up and ready to go’ on that front.” Said Obama in response: “In just a few years, the members of MoveOn have once again demonstrated that real change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up. From their principled opposition to the Iraq war -- a war I also opposed from the start -- to their strong support for a number of progressive causes, MoveOn shows what Americans can achieve when we come together in a grassroots movement for change…. I thank them for their support and look forward to working with their members in the weeks and months ahead.” In April 2008 Ahmed Yousef, a political advisor for the terrorist group Hamas, told interviewer Aaron Klein that his (Yousef’s) organization was hopeful that Obama would win the presidential election and change America’s foreign policy vis a vis the Arab-Israeli conflict. When reporters subsequently asked Obama what he thought of the Hamas leader’s endorsement, Obama said: “My position on Hamas is indistinguishable from the position of Hillary Clinton or [Republican presidential candidate] John McCain. I said they are a terrorist organization, and I've repeatedly condemned them. I’ve repeatedly said, and I mean what I say: Since they are a terrorist organization, we should not be dealing with them until they recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements.” During an April 2008 campaign stop in San Francisco, Obama said, “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” At a June 2008 campaign stop in Jacksonville, Florida, Obama suggested that his political opponents were trying to exploit the issue of race to undermine his candidacy. “It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy,” he said. “We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?” The following month, Obama told his listeners at another campaign event: “They [Republicans] know that you’re not real happy with them and so the only way they figure they’re going to win this election is if they make you scared of me. What they’re saying is ‘Well, we know we’re not very good but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency, he’s a got a funny name.’” Speaking at a July 2008 gathering of hundreds of minority journalists in Chicago, Obama said the United States should acknowledge its history of poor treatment of certain ethnic groups: “There's no doubt that when it comes to our treatment of Native Americans as well as other persons of color in this country, we've got some very sad and difficult things to account for…. I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged…. I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds.” Obama’s Positions and Voting Record Miscellaneous Issues (gun control, health care, Cuba, affirmative action, pornography): Barack Obama is a strong supporter of gun control, a proponent of socialized medicine, and an advocate of loosening restrictions on trade with -- and travel to -- Communist-controlled Cuba. He favors racial preferences for minorities in university admissions, public employment, and state contracting. “I still believe in affirmative action as a means of overcoming both historic and potentially current discrimination,” says Obama. In 2001 Obama voted “Present” on a bill to restrict the location of buildings with “adult” uses (meaning pornographic video stores, strip clubs, etc.) within 1,000 feet of any school, public park, place of worship, preschool, day-care facility, or residential area. In 1999 he voted “No” on a bill requiring school boards to install software that would block sexually explicit material on public computers accessible to minors. Same-Sex Marriage: In the wake of a May 2008 California Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in that state (similar to a 2003 decision by the high court of Massachusetts), Obama issued a call to “fully repeal” the Defense of Marriage Act (signed into law by President Clinton in 1996), a move that would have the effect of legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. The Defense of Marriage Act currently protects states from having to recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other states. Says Obama’s campaign website: “Obama also believes we need to fully repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally recognized unions.” Notably, no Congress or state legislature has ever voted to define homosexual unions as marriages. And wherever proposals for same-sex marriage have been put up for popular vote, they have been rejected by the American people. In the 13 states where gay marriage was on the ballot in 2004, for example, it was defeated by majorities ranging in size from 58 percent to 85 percent of the voters. Abortion: Obama has consistently voted in favor of expanding abortion rights and the funding of abortion services with taxpayer dollars. As a state senator in 1997, he voted against Senate Bill 230, which sought to ban partial-birth abortions unless necessary to save the life of a mother. He also voted against a 2000 bill that would have ended state funding of partial-birth abortions. He voted “No” on a bill prohibiting minors from crossing state lines to gain access to abortion services, and “No” to requiring physicians to notify parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions. As a state senator in 2002, he voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, which was intended to protect babies that survived late-term abortions from being permitted to die from intentional neglect. He voted against this same legislation in 2003, and as chair of the Health and Human Services Committee, he blocked another attempt to bring the bill to the floor of the Illinois Senate. Obama’s voting record in the foregoing matters earned him a 100% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America in 2005, 2006, and 2007. He also received a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood in 2006, and a zero percent rating from the National Right-to-Life Committee (an anti-abortion group) in 2005 and 2006. In 2006 Obama voted “Yes” on a Senate Budget amendment allocating $100 million to: “increas[e] funding and access to family planning services”; “fun[d] legislation that requires equitable prescription coverage for contraceptives under health plans”; and “fun[d] legislation that would create and expand teen pregnancy prevention programs and education programs concerning emergency contraceptives.”[6] Criminal Justice: Obama as a lawmaker has opposed the death penalty and authored legislation requiring police to keep records of the race of everyone questioned, detained or arrested.[7] Obama promises that as President, he will work to ban racial profiling and eliminate racial disparities in criminal sentencing. “The criminal justice system is not color blind,” he says. “It does not work for all people equally, and that is why it's critical to have a president who sends a signal that we are going to have a system of justice that is not just us, but is everybody.” According to Obama, “[W]e know that in our criminal justice system, African-Americans and whites, for the same crime … are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, receive very different sentences. That is something that we have to talk about. But that's a substantive issue and it has to do with how … we pursue racial justice. If I am president, I will have a civil rights division that is working with local law enforcement so that they are enforcing laws fairly and justly.”[8] Obama contends that the much harsher penalties for crimes involving crack cocaine as opposed to powder-based cocaine -- the former disproportionately involve black offenders, whereas the latter involve mostly white offenders -- are wrong and should be completely eliminated.[9] He also pledges to “provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that [ex-convicts] are successfully re-integrated into society.” Moreover, he vows to create “a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates.” In Obama’s calculus, many young black men engage in street-level drug dealing not because they seek to profit handsomely from it, but because they are unable to find legitimate jobs anywhere. Says Obama: “For many inner-city men, what prevents gainful employment is not simply the absence of motivation to get off the streets but the absence of a job history or any marketable skills -- and, increasingly, the stigma of a prison record. We can assume that with lawful work available for young men now in the drug trade, crime in any community would drop.” During his years as a legislator, Obama voted against a proposal to criminalize contact with gang members for any convicts who were free on probation or on bail. In 2001 he opposed, for reasons of racial equity, making gang activity a consideration in determining who may be eligible for capital punishment. “There's a strong overlap between gang affiliation and young men of color,” said Obama. “… I think it's problematic for them [nonwhites] to be singled out as more likely to receive the death penalty for carrying out certain acts than are others who do the same thing.” In 1999, Obama was the only state senator to oppose a bill prohibiting early prison release for offenders convicted of sex crimes. Education: Obama has occasionally attacked special interests in the Democratic Party. In the past, for instance, he was prepared to help students escape from bad public schools by considering school vouchers. But he now toes the anti-voucher party line and thus the special interest of the Democratic Party’s biggest funding and activist base, the National Education Association. In his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama stressed the importance of increasing government expenditures on public education. “We're going to put more money into education than we have,” he said. “We have to invest in human capital.” Obama’s education plan calls for “investing” $10 billion annually in a comprehensive “Zero to Five” plan that “will provide critical supports to young children and their parents.” These funds will be used to “create or expand high-quality early care and education programs for pregnant women and children from birth to age five”; to “quadruple the number of eligible children for Early Head Start”; to “ensure [that] all children have access to pre-school”; to “provide affordable and high-quality child care that will … ease the burden on working families”; to allow “more money” to be funneled “into after-school programs”; and to fund “home visiting programs [by health-care personnel] to all low-income, first-time mothers.” In Obama’s view, virtually all schooling-related problems can be solved with an infusion of additional cash. Consider, for instance, his perspective on the low graduation rate of nonwhite minorities: “Latinos have such a high dropout rate. What you see consistently are children at a very early age are starting school already behind. That’s why I’ve said that I’m going to put billions of dollars into early childhood education that makes sure that our African-American youth, Latino youth, poor youth of every race, are getting the kind of help that they need so that they know their numbers, their colors, their letters.”[10] Obama opposed the Supreme Court’s 2007 split decision that invalidated programs in Seattle and Louisville (Kentucky) which sought to maintain “diversity” in local schools by factoring race into decisions about which students could be admitted to any particular school, or which students could be allowed to transfer from one school to another. Under these programs, parents were not free to send their children to the schools of their choice. Instead they were obliged to abide by the quotas preordained by bureaucrats who had never met any of the children whose educational lives they sought to micromanage. Both the Seattle and Louisville programs were representative of similar plans in hundreds of other school districts nationwide. In Obama’s opinion, the Court’s “wrong-headed” ruling was “but the latest in a string of decisions by this conservative bloc of Justices that turn back the clock on decades of advancement and progress in the struggle for equality.” “The Supreme Court was wrong,” Obama added. “These were local school districts that had voluntarily made a determination that all children would be better off if they learned together. The notion that this Supreme Court would equate that with the segregation as tasked would make Thurgood Marshall turn in his grave.”[11] Viewing racial mixing as an educational objective compelling enough to warrant the use of quotas and bussing for its attainment, Obama stated that “a racially diverse learning environment has a profoundly positive educational impact on all students,” and thus he remains “devoted to working toward this goal.”[12] Health Insurance: Obama has said many times, "I am going to give health insurance to 47 million Americans who are now without coverage." But as Dick Morris points out, the 47 million statistic includes at least 12 million illegal immigrants who are uninsured. Another 15 million uninsured are eligible for Medicaid but have not yet registered for it — primarily because they have not yet been ill. When they do enroll eventually, they will receive inexpensive health care, courtesy of the American taxpayers. Then there are uninsured children, almost all of whom are eligible for the State Children's Health Insurance Program — even if their parents have not yet enrolled them therein. That leaves fewer than 20 million uninsured adults who are either American citizens or legal immigrant non-citizens. To address this situation, Obama proposes to drastically alter the country's health-care system. Gender Discrimination: The Obama campaign asserts that gender-based “discrimination on the job” is a big problem in America. “For every $1.00 earned by a man, the average woman receives only 77 cents,” says the campaign website. “A recent study estimates it will take another 47 years for women to close the wage gap with men.” To rectify this, Obama “believes the government needs to take steps to better enforce the Equal Pay Act, fight job discrimination, and improve child care options and family medical leave to give women equal footing in the workplace.”[13] Energy: Obama voted against permitting the U.S. to drill for oil and natural gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Says Obama: “It is hard to overstate the degree to which our addiction to oil undermines our future…. A large portion of the $800 million we spend on foreign oil every day goes to some of the world's most volatile regimes. And there are the environmental consequences. Just about every scientist outside the White House believes climate change is real. We cannot drill our way out of the problem. Instead of subsidizing the oil industry, we should end every single tax break the industry currently receives and demand that 1% of the revenues from oil companies with over $1 billion in quarterly profits go toward financing alternative energy research and infrastructure.” At a July 30, 2008 campaign stop in Missouri, Obama said: “There are things that you can do individually ... to save energy; making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing, but we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off [from] drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups. You could actually save just as much.” Environment: Obama’s position on the issue of global warming is unambiguous. Says the Obama campaign: “Global warming is real, is happening now and is the result of human activities. The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last 30 years. Glaciers are melting faster; the polar ice caps are shrinking; trees are blooming earlier; oceans are becoming more acidic, threatening marine life; people are dying in heat waves; species are migrating, and eventually many will become extinct. Scientists predict that absent major emission reductions, climate change will worsen famine and drought in some of the poorest places in the world and wreak havoc across the globe. In the U.S., sea-level rise threatens to cause massive economic and ecological damage to our populated coastal areas.”[14] During a 2008 campaign stop in Oregon, Obama called on the United States to “lead by example” on global warming. “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” he said. “That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.” Homeland Security / War on Terror: Obama voted “No” on a bill to remove the need for a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant before the government may proceed with wiretapping in terrorism-related investigations of suspects in other countries. “Warrantless surveillance of American citizens, in defiance of FISA, is unlawful and unconstitutional,” says Obama.[15] In Obama’s view, “the creation of military commissions” to try terror suspects captured in the War on Terror was, from its inception, “a bad idea.”[16] Such commissions are designed to adjudicate the cases of so-called “unlawful combatants” -- as distinguished from “lawful combatants” -- who are captured in battle. The former are entitled to prisoner-of-war status and its accompanying Geneva Convention protections; the latter are entitled to none of that. Article IV of the Geneva Convention defines lawful combatants as those whose military organization meets four very specific criteria: “(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign [a uniform or emblem] recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; [and] (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.” Al Qaeda, for one, fails even to come close to satisfying these conditions. Obama opposes the distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants, and has called for the repeal of any separate standards regulating the treatment of each.[17] Obama has also voted in favor of preserving habeas corpus -- the notion that the government may not detain a prisoner without filing specific charges that can expeditiously be brought before a court -- for the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. U.S. officials consider these prisoners -- captured mostly on the battlefields of the Middle East -- to be of the highest value for intelligence purposes, or to constitute, in their own persons, a great threat to the United States. Says Obama: “Why don’t we close Guantanamo and restore the right of habeas corpus, because that’s how we lead, not with the might of our military, but the power of our ideals and the power of our values. It’s time to show the world we’re not a country that ships prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far off countries.” On June 19, 2008, political analyst Dick Morris described Obama's prescription for dealing with terrorism as follows: "[Obama has] urged us to go back to the era of criminal-justice prosecution of terror suspects, citing the successful efforts to imprison those who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. [He said] 'It is my firm belief that we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution.... In previous terrorist attacks -- for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated.' "This is big -- because that prosecution, and the ground rules for it, had more to do with our inability to avert 9/11 than any other single factor. Because we treated the 1993 WTC bombing as simply a crime, our investigation was slow, sluggish and constrained by the need to acquire admissible evidence to convict the terrorists. "As a result, we didn't know that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were responsible for the attack until 1997 -- too late for us to grab Osama when Sudan offered to send him to us in 1996. Clinton and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger turned down the offer, saying we had no grounds on which to hold him or to order his kidnapping or death. "Obama's embrace of the post-'93 approach shows a blindness to the key distinction that has kept us safe since 9/11 -- the difference between prosecution and protection." Iraq War: The Obama campaign website declared that Obama, as President, “would immediately begin to pull out troops engaged in combat operations at a pace of one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the end of [2009]. He would call for a new constitutional convention in Iraq, convened with the United Nations, which would not adjourn until Iraq’s leaders reach a new accord on reconciliation. He would use presidential leadership to surge our diplomacy with all of the nations of the region on behalf of a new regional security compact. And he would take immediate steps to confront the humanitarian disaster in Iraq, and to hold accountable any perpetrators of potential war crimes.” Obama also vows to “fulfill America's obligation to accept refugees” from Iraq. “The State Department pledged to allow 7,000 Iraqi refugees into America,” says the Obama campaign, “but has only let 190 into the United States. [President] Obama would expedite the Department of Homeland Security's review of Iraqi asylum applicants.” After President Bush announced in January 2007 that he would send a “surge” of some 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in an effort to quell the insurgency there. In response, Obama said: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” Throughout 2007, Obama continued to argue that the surge was ill-advised. In July 2008, by which time the surge had proven to be extremely effective in reducing the violence in Iraq, newscaster Katie Couric asked Obama: “But yet you're saying ... given what you know now, you still wouldn't support [the surge] ... so I'm just trying to understand this.” Obama replied: “Because ... it's pretty straightforward. By us putting $10 billion to $12 billion a month, $200 billion, that's money that could have gone into Afghanistan. Those additional troops could have gone into Afghanistan. That money also could have been used to shore up a declining economic situation in the United States. That money could have been applied to having a serious energy security plan so that we were reducing our demand on oil, which is helping to fund the insurgents in many countries. So those are all factors that would be taken into consideration in my decision -- to deal with a specific tactic or strategy inside of Iraq.” Israel: While running for Congress in 2000, Obama prepared a position paper on Israel in which he stated, “Jerusalem should remain united and should be recognized as Israel's capital.” In January 2008 Obama wrote, in response to an American Jewish Committee Election Questionaire's question about how he foresaw "the likely final status of Jerusalem," that “Jerusalem will remain Israel's capital, and no one should want or expect it to be re-divided.” In a June 4, 2008 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Obama said, “Let me be clear…. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” The next day, an unnamed Obama adviser tried to “clarify” the candidate’s statement by suggesting that it left room for Palestinian sovereignty. Soon thereafter, Obama said: “[T]he truth is that this was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech” and a reminder of the need to be “careful in terms of our syntax.” He said his point had been “simply” that “we don't want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the '67 war.” Military/Missile Defense/Weapons Systems: Obama has consistently opposed America's development of a missile defense system. In a February 2008 campaign ad, he stated: “I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems. I will institute an independent Defense Priorities Board to ensure that the Quadrennial Defense Review is not used to justify unnecessary defense spending.... I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop new nuclear weapons. I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material….” Hostile Nations: During a May 18, 2008 campaign event, Obama said: “Iran, Cuba, Venezuela -- these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us…. Iran may spend one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance.” Two days later, he told another audience: “Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports terrorism across the regions and militias in Iraq. It threatens Israel’s existence. It denies the holocaust….” Taxes: Obama generally favors significant increases in the tax rates paid by Americans. During a June 28, 2007 primary debate at Howard University, he was asked, “Do you agree that the rich aren't paying their fair share of taxes?” He replied, “There’s no doubt that the tax system has been skewed. And the Bush tax cuts -- people didn’t need them, and they weren't even asking for them, and that’s why they need to be less, so that we can pay for universal health care and other initiatives.” In 1999 Obama voted “No” on a bill to create an income tax credit for the families of all full-time K-12 pupils. In 2003 he voted “Yes” on a bill to retain the Illinois Estate Tax. He also supported raising taxes on insurance premiums and levying a new tax on businesses. In his keynote address at a 2006 “Building a Covenant for a New America” conference, he urged Americans of all faiths to convene on Capitol Hill and give it an “injection of morality” by opposing a repeal of the estate tax. In June 2008, Rea Hederman and Patrick Tyrell of the Heritage Foundation summarized Obama's tax proposals as follows: "His plan would boost the top marginal [income tax] rate to well over 55 percent—before the inclusion of state and local taxes—resulting in many individuals seeing their marginal tax rate double…. Senator Obama would end the Bush tax cuts and allow the top two tax rates to return to 36 and 39.6 percent. He also would allow personal exemptions and deductions to be phased out for those with income over $250,000 … [and] would end the Social Security payroll tax cap for those over $250,000 in earnings. (The cap is currently set at $102,000.) These individuals will then face a tax rate of 15.65 percent from payroll taxes and the top income tax rate of 39.6 percent for a combined top rate of over 56 percent on each additional dollar earned. "High-income individuals will be forced to pay even more if they live in cities or states with high taxes such as New York City, California, or Maryland. These unlucky people would pay over two-thirds of each new dollar in earnings to the federal government…. Senator Obama's new tax rate would give the United States one of the highest tax rates among developed countries. Currently only six of the top 30 industrial nations have a tax rate for all levels of government combined of over 55 percent. Under this tax plan, the United States would join this group and have a higher top rate than such high-tax nations as Sweden and Denmark. The top marginal rate would exceed 60 percent with the inclusion of state and local taxes, which means that only Hungary would exceed Senator Obama's new proposed top tax rate. In an April 2008 Democratic primary debate, Obama was asked, by journalist Charlie Gibson, a question about his proposal to nearly double the capital gains tax (from 15 percent to 28 percent). Said Gibson: “… In each instance when the rate dropped [in the 1990s], revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the [capital gains] tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?” Obama replied that he wished to raise the tax “for purposes of fairness.” “We saw an article today,” he explained, “which showed that the top 50 hedge fund managers made $29 billion last year…. [T]hose who are able to work the stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. That’s not fair.” In a September 2008 Fox News Channel television interview, Obama reiterated his pledge to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, while raising taxes on those who earn more than $250,000. Political commentator Bill O’Reilly objected, “That's class warfare. You're taking the wealthy in America, the big earners … you're taking money away from them and you're giving it to people who don't. That's called income redistribution. It's a socialist tenet. Come on, you know that.” Obama replied, “Teddy Roosevelt supported a progressive income tax…. If I am sitting pretty and you've got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can't, what's the big deal for me to say, I'm going to pay a little bit more? That is neighborliness.” The National Taxpayers Union -- an organization that "seeks to reduce government spending, cut taxes, and protect the rights of taxpayers" -- gave Obama ratings of zero percent, 16 percent, and "F" in 2005, 2006, and 2007, respectively. Americans for Tax Reform -- which "believes in a system in which taxes are simpler, fairer, flatter, more visible, and lower than they are today" -- gave Obama a zero percent rating in 2005 and a 15 percent rating in 2006. The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council -- which "works to influence legislation and policies that help to create a favorable and productive environment for small businesses and entrepreneurship" -- gave Obama a rating of 9 percent in 2005. The National Federation of Independent Business -- which seeks "to impact public policy at the state and federal level and be a key business resource for small and independent business in America" -- gave Obama a rating of 12 percent in 2005-2006. The Business-Industry Political Action Committee -- which "supports pro-business candidates who have demonstrated the skill and leadership necessary to fuel a pro-business Congress" -- rated Obama 15 percent in 2005 and 10 percent in 2006. Immigration: Obama opposes immigration raids designed to identify illegal aliens in workplaces or housing units. He says the U.S. should “allow undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.” “When I was a state senator in Illinois,” Obama says, “I voted to require that illegal aliens get trained, get a license, get insurance to protect public safety. That was my intention. The problem we have here is not driver’s licenses. Undocumented workers do not come here to drive. They’re here to work.” Obama voted in favor of allowing former illegal aliens who had previously worked at jobs under phony or stolen Social Security numbers, to someday reap the benefits of whatever Social Security contributions they may have made while they were so employed. He voted in favor of an amendment placing an expiration date on a point-based immigration system (i.e., a system that seeks to ensure that people with skills that society needs are given preference for entry into the United States). Obama instead advocates a system focusing on the reunification of family members, even if that means permitting the relatives of illegal aliens to join the latter in America. Obama seeks to delineate a “path to citizenship” for illegal aliens, so as to “bring people out of the shadows” and allow them to “to fully embrace our values and become full members of our democracy.” Says the Obama campaign, “America has always been a nation of immigrants…. For the millions living here illegally but otherwise playing by the rules, we must encourage them to come out of hiding and get right with the law.” Obama is a supporter of the DREAM Act, intended to allow illegal aliens to attend college at the reduced tuition rates normally reserved for in-state legal residents. He helped to pass a state version of such a law in Illinois during his years as a state senator. Says the Obama campaign, the DREAM Act “would allow undocumented children brought to the United states the opportunity to pursue higher education or serve in our military, and eventually becoming legalized citizens…. [I]nstead of driving thousands of children who were on the right path into the shadows, we need to giver those who play by the rules the opportunity to succeed.” In July 2007 Obama was a featured speaker at the annual convention of the National Council of La Raza, an open-borders group that lobbies for racial preferences, mass immigration, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Among his remarks were the following: “I will never walk away from the 12 million undocumented immigrants who live, work, and contribute to our country every single day. “There are few better examples of how broken, bitter, and divisive our politics has become than the immigration debate that played out in Washington a few weeks ago. So many of us -- Democrats and Republicans -- were willing to compromise in order to pass comprehensive reform that would secure our borders while giving the undocumented a chance to earn their citizenship.... “[W]e are a nation of immigrants -- a nation that has always been willing to give weary travelers from around the world the chance to come here and reach for the dream that so many of us have reached for. That's the America that answered my father's letters and his prayers and brought him here from Kenya so long ago. That's the America we believe in. “But that's the America that the President and too many Republicans walked away from when the politics got tough.... [W]e saw parts of the immigration debate took a turn that was both ugly and racist in a way we haven't seen since the struggle for civil rights.... “We don't expect our government to guarantee success and happiness, but when millions of children start the race of life so far behind only because of race, only because of class, that's a betrayal of our ideals. That's not just a Latino problem or an African-American problem; that is an American problem that we have to solve.... “It's an American problem when one in four Latinos cannot communicate well with their doctor about what's wrong or fill out medical forms because there are language barriers we refuse to break down....” In July 2008, Obama again spoke to NCLR. Among his remarks were the following: “The theme of this [La Raza] conference is the work of your lives: strengthening America together. It's been the work of this organization for four decades --lifting up families and transforming communities across America. And for that, I honor you, I congratulate you, I thank you, and I wish you another forty years as extraordinary as your last…. “The system isn't working when a child in a crumbling school graduates without learning to read or doesn't graduate at all. Or when a young person at the top of her class -- a young person with so much to offer this country -- can't attend a public college. “The system isn't working when Hispanics are losing their jobs faster than almost anybody else, or working jobs that pay less, and come with fewer benefits than almost anybody else. “The system isn't working when 12 million people live in hiding, and hundreds of thousands cross our borders illegally each year; when companies hire undocumented immigrants instead of legal citizens to avoid paying overtime or to avoid a union; when communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids -- when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel…. “[W]e'll make the system work again for everyone. By living up to the ideals that this organization has always embodied the ideals reflected in your name, ‘Raza,’ the people. [Actually, a literal translation is “the race.”] … And together, we won't just win an election; we will transform this nation.” The U.S. Border Control (USBC), a nonprofit citizen's lobby dedicated to ending illegal immigration and securing America’s borders, reports that Obama’s immigration-related votes are consistent with USBC’s values only 8 percent of the time. By USBC’s definition, Obama’s stance on immigration qualifies him as an “open borders” advocate. English Language: Obama voted against a bill to declare English the official language of the U.S. government. Under this bill, no person would be entitled to have the government communicate with him (or provide materials for him) in any language other than English. Nothing in the bill, however, prohibited the use of a language other than English. Constitution / Supreme Court: In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Obama expresses his belief that the U.S. Constitution is a living document, and states that, as President, he would not appoint a strict constructionist to the Supreme Court: “When we get in a tussle, we appeal to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution’s ratifiers to give direction. Some, like Justice Scalia, conclude that the original understanding must be followed and if we obey this rule, democracy is respected. Others, like Justice Breyer, insist that sometimes the original understanding can take you only so far -- that on the truly big arguments, we have to take context, history, and the practical outcomes of a decision into account. I have to side with Justice Breyer’s view of the Constitution -- that it is not a static but rather a living document and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.” When President Bush in 2005 nominated John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Obama stated that few Supreme Court cases involve any controversy at all, “so that both a [conservative like] Scalia and a [leftist like] Ginsburg will arrive at the same place most of the time on those 95 percent of cases.” In the other 5 percent, he said, “the critical ingredient” was neither the law nor the Constitution says, but rather “what is in the judge’s heart.” “[W]hen I examined Judge Roberts’ record and history of public service, it is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak,” Obama said in a floor speech on September 22, 2005. “In his work in the White House and the Solicitor General’s Office, he seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in our political process. In these same positions, he seemed dismissive of concerns that it is harder to make it in this world and in this economy when you are a woman rather than a man.” Obama was also “deeply troubled” by “the philosophy, ideology and record” of yet another Bush nominee to the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito. “There is no indication that he is not a man of fine character,” Obama said in a floor speech on January 26, 2006. “But when you look at his record, when it comes to his understanding of the Constitution, I found that in almost every case he consistently sides on behalf of the powerful against the powerless.” Columnist Terrence Jeffrey observes: “In contrast to his soaring campaign rhetoric about bringing America together, Obama’s Senate speeches against Roberts and Alito revealed a polarizing vision of America. Minorities, women, employees and criminal defendants were among the weak; majorities, men, employers and prosecutors were among the strong.” In an August 2008 symposium, Obama was asked which, if any, of the current Supreme Court Justices he would not have nominated if he had been President at the time. He replied that he would not have nominated Clarence Thomas, because “I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution.” Foreign Aid: Obama supports an initiative known as the Global Poverty Act (GPA), which, if signed into law, would compel the U.S. President to develop “and implement” a policy to “cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015 through aid, trade, debt relief,” and other means. “With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces,” Obama says. “It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking water. As we strive to rebuild America’s standing in the world, this important bill will demonstrate our promise and commitment to those in the developing world…. Our commitment to the global economy must extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing profits than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere.” According to a report by Accuracy in Media editor Cliff Kincaid, the adoption of the GPA could “result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States” and would make levels “of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations.” Kincaid states that the legislation would earmark some 0.7 percent of the U.S. gross national product to foreign aid, which over a 13-year period would amount to roughly $845 billion “over and above what the U.S. already spends.” Obama's Overall Record: In January 2008 the National Journal published its rankings of all U.S. senators -- based on how they had voted on a host of foreign and domestic policy bills -- and rated Barack Obama “the most liberal Senator of 2007.” “Obama’s [foreign policy] liberal score of 92 and conservative score of 7 indicate that he was more liberal in that issue area than 92 percent of the senators and more conservative than 7 percent,” the researchers explained. In the area of domestic policy voting, the study found that “Obama voted the liberal position on 65 of the 66 key votes on which he voted … [and] garnered perfect liberal scores in both the economic and social categories.” The leftist organization Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) similarly rated Obama’s Senate voting record at 97.5 percent. By contrast, the American Conservative Union (the ADA’s ideological antithesis) gave Obama a rating of 8 percent. Around July 19, 2007 -- after slightly more than five months had passed since he had declared his presidential candidacy -- Obama clearly became far more focused on campaigning for his White House run, than on performing the legislative duties for which he had been elected to the U.S. Senate. From that date through May 22, 2008, Obama voted on just 34 percent of all the bills that came before the Senate. On the other 66 percent, he cast no vote of any kind, either for or against the legislation in question. Notes: [1] ACORN's mandate today includes all issues touching low-income and working-class people. The organization runs schools where children are trained in class consciousness; it oversees a network of “boot camps” where street activists are trained; and it conducts operations that extort contributions from banks and other businesses under threat of trumped-up civil rights charges. [2] In the 2004 and 2006 election cycles, both Project Vote and ACORN ran nationwide voter-mobilization drives marred by allegations of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams. [3] As one observer noted in May 2008, legal “successes” such as this were probably responsible for the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007. That is, banks were not loaning to blacks whose credit was poor. When the law forced them to lend money anyway, the inevitable happened. [4] When Obama ran for the presidency in 2008, and his relationship with Ayers and Dohrn became a matter of public controversy, his campaign produced a “fact sheet” pronouncing the former terrorists now to be "respectable" members of the "mainstream" community. [5] Rezko had initially met Obama in 1990, when the former was a low-income housing developer in Chicago and the latter was a Harvard Law School student. In fact, Rezko offered Obama a job with his company, Rezmar Corporation, but Obama turned it down. Obama eventually found employment in 1993 with the aforementioned Chicago law firm Davis Miner Barnhill, which represented developers who built low-income housing with government funds. In 1995 one of the firm's clients -- the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corporation (WPIC) -- partnered with Rezmar Corporation in a project to convert an abandoned nursing home into low-income apartments. Obama was instrumental in helping Rezmar Corporation and WPIC strike their deal. Rezmar Corporation would also partner with WPIC clients in four later deals. When Obama announced in 1995 that he was running for an Illinois Senate seat (which would be up for grabs in 1996), two of Tony Rezko’s companies donated a total of $2,000 to Obama’s campaign. Over the course of the entire primary season, Rezko raised between $10,000 and $15,000 of the roughly $100,000 Obama collected overall. Obama won the November 1996 election, and the district he represented included 11 of Rezko's 30 low-income housing projects. Rezko served on the campaign committee for Obama’s failed congressional run against U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush in 2000, raising between $50,000 and $75,000 of the estimated $600,000 Obama collected for that race. In 2001 Rezko’s Rezmar Corporation stopped making its mortgage payments on the old nursing home it had converted into apartments, and the state of Illinois foreclosed on the building, which was located in Obama's Senate district. In 2003 Obama announced that he would run for an Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate which would be open the following year. He again named Rezko to his campaign finance committee. It is estimated that Rezko raised some $160,000 for Obama during the Senate primary season. In November 2004 Obama was elected U.S. Senator. A few months later, he and Rezko's wife, Rita, purchased adjacent pieces of property in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood. Obama’s portion of the deal involved a mansion for which he paid $1.65 million -- $300,000 below the seller’s asking price. Meanwhile, Rezko's wife (who earned only $37,000 per year and owned few assets) paid the full asking price -- $625,000 -- for a vacant lot adjacent to Obama’s mansion. At this time, Mr. Rezko was being pursued by creditors seeking more than $10 million which Rezko owed on defaulted loans and failed business ventures. At least 12 lawsuits had been filed against Rezko and his businesses from November 2002 to January 2005, including one by the G.E. Commercial Finance Corporation, which had extended more than $5 million in loans for Rezko’s 17 Papa Johns’ Pizza parlors in Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee. In November 2004, G.E. obtained a court judgment against Mr. Rezko for the $3.5 million that it said was outstanding on its loans. Obama says he does not know why the Rezkos decided to purchase the vacant lot at that time. But the Rezkos’ involvement was crucial because the owners of the house and the lot had stipulated that neither property could be sold unless a deal for the other also closed on the same day. Both deals indeed closed on the same day in June 2005. At the time of the purchase, Mr. Rezko was ostensibly destitute; that is why his wife was named officially as the sole purchaser of the vacant lot. In December 2005 Obama paid Rita Rezko $104,500 for a strip that constituted one-sixth of her newly acquired lot, so that he could increase the width of his yard by ten feet. At the time of this deal, Tony Rezko was under federal investigation on charges that he had solicited kickbacks from companies seeking state pension business under his friend, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, for whom Rezko reportedly had raised as much as $500,000. For more than two years before the property purchases, news articles also had raised questions about Mr. Rezko’s influence over state appointments and contracts. Moreover, reports swirled that the FBI was investigating accusations of a shakedown scheme in which Mr. Rezko had suggested appointments to a state hospital board. Obama rejects any suggestion that the Rezkos, by paying full price for the vacant lot, had enabled him to save $300,000 on his home’s purchase price and were perhaps seeking political favors in return. “Frankly, I don’t think he [Mr. Rezko] was doing me a favor,” Obama has said. In October 2006, Mr. Rezko was indicted on extortion charges. According to federal prosecutors, Rezko had funneled $10,000 in kickback fees to Obama's 2004 Senate campaign. Rezko remained free on bail until January 28, 2008, when a U.S. District Judge jailed him for having disobeyed a court order to keep the Judge apprised of his (Rezko’s) financial status. Most notably, Rezko had failed to tell the judge about a $3.5 million loan he had received (in mid-2005) from London-based Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi -- a loan that Auchi later forgave in exchange for shares in a prime slice of Chicago real estate. According to the Associated Press, Rezko “gave $700,000 of the [$3.5 million] to his wife [for the purchase of the vacant lot adjacent to Obama’s mansion] and used the rest to pay legal bills and funnel cash to various supporters.” [6] Such an approach to “pregnancy prevention” had been tried before, with disastrous results. In the 1960s, leftists in politics and academia demanded that sex education be added to public-school curricula nationwide, and that government-funded “family planning” (abortion) services be made more widely available. By 1968, almost half of all U.S. schools—public and private, religious and secular—had instituted sex education programs for their students; these programs continued to spread widely throughout the American educational system in the 1970s. “Family planning” clinics also proliferated exponentially from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies. Between the late Sixties and 1978, federal expenditures for “family planning” and “population” legislation grew from $16 million annually to $279 million. Whereas in 1969 fewer than 250,000 teenagers used the services provided by abortion clinics, by 1976 their number had risen to 1.2 million. Between 1970 and 1980, the pregnancy rate among 15- to 19-year-olds rose by more than 40 percent. Among unmarried girls aged 15 to 17, birth rates rose 29 percent between 1970 and 1984—even as the number of abortions more than doubled during the same period. [7] These rules to deter racial profiling, say critics, lead to “de-policing.” To avoid charges of racism if they question or arrest too many minority suspects, police find it easier to protect their careers by turning a blind eye and leaving minority criminals alone. [8] Obama’s premise of a discriminatory justice system is entirely mistaken, as Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald points out: “Let’s start with the idea that cops over-arrest blacks and ignore white criminals. In fact, the race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data. As long ago as 1978, a study of robbery and aggravated assault in eight cities found parity between the race of assailants in victim identifications and in arrests—a finding replicated many times since, across a range of crimes. No one has ever come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports. “Moving up the enforcement chain, the campaign against the criminal-justice system next claims that prosecutors overcharge and judges oversentence blacks.… In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They concluded that ‘large racial differences in criminal offending,’ not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms. A 1987 analysis of Georgia felony convictions, for example, found that blacks frequently received disproportionately lenient punishment. A 1990 study of 11,000 California cases found that slight racial disparities in sentence length resulted from blacks’ prior records and other legally relevant variables. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did, and that they [blacks] were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Following conviction, blacks were more likely to receive prison sentences, however—an outcome that reflected the gravity of their offenses as well as their criminal records. “Another criminologist—easily as liberal as Sampson—reached the same conclusion in 1995: ‘Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,’ Michael Tonry wrote in Malign Neglect…. The media’s favorite criminologist, Alfred Blumstein, found in 1993 that blacks were significantly underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their presence in arrest.” [9] The Congressional Record shows that the strict, federal anti-crack legislation dates back to 1986, when the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) -- deeply concerned about the degree to which crack was decimating the black community -- strongly supported the legislation and actually pressed for even harsher penalties. In fact, a few years earlier CBC members had pushed President Reagan to create the Office of National Drug Control Policy. [10] In their 1997 book America in Black and White, scholars Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom debunk the claim that big-city public schools attended mostly by blacks are under-funded in comparison to mostly white, suburban schools. Research actually shows that the higher the percentage of minority students in a school district, the higher the per-pupil expenditures. Mostly-minority school districts spend fully 15 percent more money on each student than districts where minority enrollment is below 5 percent. Moreover, per-pupil spending in the central cities of metropolitan areas—regardless of race—is identical to spending levels in the surrounding suburbs. [11] Many critics of the Court’s decision contended that it had undone the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954. But these charges were untrue. The Brown case addressed the issue of mandatory racial segregation in America’s public schools, an issue which had become an international embarrassment for the United States. The case centered around a black third-grader named Linda Brown who had been denied admission to an all-white school located just a few blocks from her home in Topeka, Kansas, and was forced instead to take a bus to an all-black school in a more distant neighborhood. Because millions of other blacks nationwide faced the same dilemma, her case had far-reaching, monumental implications. Miss Brown’s father successfully sued the Topeka Board of Education on grounds that, contrary to a previous Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), segregated schools were separate but not equal and thus failed to fulfill the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the laws. On May 17, 1954, the Court handed down a 9-0 decision which stated unequivocally: “Where a State has undertaken to provide an opportunity for an education in its public schools, such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” In other words, Brown overturned the notion that it was permissible to use race as the basis for denying students the right to attend the schools they preferred. Like the 1964 Civil Rights Act that would become law ten years later, Brown was intended to remove barriers to integration by outlawing de jure segregation, but it issued no mandate for measures (like busing or racial quotas) to forcibly integrate America’s schools or workplaces. [12] Hoover Institution fellow and Stanford University sociologist Thomas Sowell, who has studied this matter in great depth, explains that the “‘compelling’ benefits of ‘diversity’ are “as invisible as the proverbial emperor’s new clothes”; that “[n]ot only is there no hard evidence that mixing and matching black and white kids in school produces either educational or social benefits, there have been a number of studies of all-black schools whose educational performances equal or exceed the national average”; that “[s]ome black students -- in fact, whole schools of them -- have performed dramatically better than other black students and exceeded the norms in white schools,” and that this phenomenon dates back as far as the late 19th century; that black students who have been bussed into white schools have seen no discernible rise in their standardized test scores -- “not even after decades of bussing”; and that “[n]ot only is there no hard evidence” for the dogma “that there needs to be a ‘critical mass’ of black students in a given school or college in order for them to perform up to standard,” but that “such hard evidence as there is points in the opposite direction. Bright black kids have benefited from being in classes with other bright kids, regardless of the other kids’ color.” [13] In his 2005 book Why Men Earn More, former National Organization for Women board member Warren Farrell examines the earnings of men and women and concludes that when a range of key variables are factored into the equation, there is no evidence of systemic gender-based discrimination in the American workplace. These variables include: occupational field and subspecialty; marital status; age; physical hazards associated with one’s chosen line of work; the number of consecutive years during which one has been in the workplace; the number of hours worked per week; one’s willingness to commute long distances; one’s willingness to relocate; the amount of responsibility associated with one's job; the amount of training or education required for a job; and one’s actual productivity on the job. In his synopsis of Farrell’s book, syndicated columnist John Leo writes: “Some of Farrell's findings: Women are 15 times as likely as men to become top executives in major corporations before the age of 40. Never-married, college-educated males who work full time make only 85 percent of what comparable women earn. Female pay exceeds male pay in more than 80 different fields, 39 of them large fields that offer good jobs, like financial analyst, engineering manager, sales engineer, statistician, surveying and mapping technicians, agricultural and food scientists, and aerospace engineer. A female investment banker's starting salary is 116 percent of a male's. Part-time female workers make $1.10 for every $1 earned by part-time males…. As long ago as the early 1980s,... the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that companies paid men and women equal money when their titles and responsibilities were the same. In 1969, data from the American Council on Education showed that female professors who had never been married and had never published earned 145 percent of their male counterparts' pay. Even during the 1950s ... the gender pay gap for all never-married workers was less than 2 percent while never-married white women between 45 and 54 earned 106 percent of what their white male counterparts made.” [14] Contrary to Obama’s claim, in May 2008 it was announced that more than 31,000 scientists across the U.S. -- including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields such as atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties -- had signed a petition rejecting the claim that the human production of greenhouse gases is causing "global warming" that damages the Earth's climate. "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate," the petition stated. "Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth." [15] Most legal scholars believe the president has inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless wiretaps to collect foreign intelligence, and no statute -- including FISA -- can reverse that. Citing a 22-year-old precedent, the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ruled in 2002 that “the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.... We take for granted that the president does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the president’s constitutional power.” John Schmidt, President Clinton’s associate attorney general from 1994-97, wrote that NSA [National Security Agency] surveillance against al-Qaeda “is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents”; FISA, he explained, “did not alter the constitutional situation.” Schmidt quoted Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick’s 1994 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee: “The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes.” [16] Obama and his fellow critics of military commissions accuse such tribunals of trampling on the civil rights and liberties of defendants who, the critics contend, should be entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the American criminal court system -- where the standards that govern the admissibility of evidence are considerably stricter than the counterpart standards in military tribunals. In November 2006 Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, formally authorizing the adjudication of war crimes and terrorism cases in military courts. The House of Representatives vote was 253 to 168 (Republicans voted 219 to 7 in favor, Democrats 160 to 34 against); the overall Senate margin was 65 to 34 in favor. According to the Defense Department, military tribunals, where military officers serve as the judges and jurors, are designed to deal with offenses committed in the context of warfare — including pillaging; terrorism; willfully killing or attacking civilians; taking hostages; employing poison or analogous weapons; using civilians as human shields; torture; mutilation or maiming; improperly using a flag of surrender; desecrating or abusing a dead body; rape; hijacking or hazarding a vessel or aircraft; aiding the enemy; spying; providing false testimony or perjury; soliciting others to commit offenses that are triable by military jurisprudence; and intending or conspiring to commit, or to aid in the commission of, such crimes. The issue of whether it is appropriate to try someone accused of the aforementioned transgressions in a military court depends upon how one answers a single overriding question: Is terrorism a matter of war, or is it a legal issue where redress should be pursued via the criminal-justice system — like robbery, vandalism, or murder. [17] “Our government, the Supreme Court has ruled, “by thus defining lawful belligerents entitled to be treated as prisoners of war, has recognized that there is a class of unlawful belligerents not entitled to that privilege, including those who, though combatants, do not wear ‘fixed and distinctive emblems.’” Apart from the question of whether military tribunals are a good idea philosophically, trying terrorists and war criminals in civilian rather than military courts poses a number of serious problems from a practical standpoint. For one thing, the rules defining admissible and inadmissible evidence in each venue differ dramatically. In civilian trials, neither coerced testimony, nor confessions made in the absence of a Miranda warning, nor hearsay evidence can presented to the court; in military tribunals the opposite is true, provided that the court determines such evidence to have “probative value to a reasonable person.” Attorneys Spencer J. Crona and Neal A. Richardson explain the profound significance of this: “A relaxation of the hearsay rule might become critical in a prosecution for terrorism where it may be impossible to produce live witnesses to an event which occurred years earlier in a foreign country. For example, the indictment in the Pan Am Flight 103 case details the alleged purchase of clothing, by Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Bassett, for placement in the suitcase with the bomb. The clothing was used to disguise the contents of the suitcase containing the bomb, which was placed inside a radio-cassette player. Under the rules of evidence applicable in U.S. District Court, the prosecution would have to produce in person the Maltese shopkeeper to identify Abdel Bassett as the man who allegedly purchased the clothing back in 1988, as opposed to producing the investigator who tracked down the shopkeeper and showed him a photograph of Abdel Bassett. Even if we assume that the shopkeeper could be located six years or more after the fact, we recognize that it is nearly impossible to secure involuntary testimony from a witness who is a citizen of a foreign country, especially one that historically has been less than sympathetic to the United States. The reach of a federal court subpoena simply does not extend to Malta.” Another exceedingly significant weakness inherent in civilian trials for terrorists is the fact that in such proceedings, there exists a high likelihood that classified intelligence sources will be compromised. If the government wishes to present certain incriminating evidence in a civilian trial, which is open to the public, it must disclose its sources as well as the techniques it used for obtaining the information from them. This obviously would place those sources in grave danger and would quickly lead to the non-cooperation or disappearance of many of them — to say nothing of the future potential informants who would undoubtedly choose to avoid placing themselves in similar peril. Moreover, the effectiveness of any publicly disclosed information-gathering techniques would thereafter be permanently compromised. By contrast, military tribunals permit incriminating evidence to be presented to the judge and jury, while being kept secret from the public as well as from the defendant and his attorney. For those who are concerned about legal precedent, it must be understood that the use of military tribunals for the adjudication of war crimes is in no way a departure from past practices. military commissions were used commonly during the Civil War. Prior to that, General George Washington employed such tribunals during the American Revolution in the late 18th century. In the era following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, military tribunals were first convened by Major General Winfield Scott during the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, to adjudicate the alleged war crimes of American troops and Mexican guerrilla fighters alike. World War II also saw the use of military courts, the most famous case involving eight marines of the Third Reich (one of whom was an American citizen named Herbert Haupt) who rode a Nazi U-boat to the east coast of the United States, where, laden with explosives, they disembarked and set off toward various locations with the intent of bombing railroads, hydroelectric plants, factories, department stores, and defense facilities across the country. The saboteurs were wearing no military uniforms or identifying emblems when they were captured, meaning that they were, in the eyes of the law (as defined by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin, quoted earlier in this article), “unlawful combatants.” Refusing to grant the perpetrators civilian jury trials, President Franklin D. Roosevelt quickly created a secret military commission to hear their cases. All eight were convicted and sentenced to death, though two turncoats later had their sentences commuted to life in prison.

Home | Weblog | Articles | Satire | Links | About | Contact Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > Barack Obama's New Muslim Advisor Cements Campaign's Ties To Terror Friendly Organisations Barack Obama's New Muslim Advisor Cements Campaign's Ties To Terror Friendly Organisations August 2, 2008 Barack Obama's New Muslim Advisor Cements Campaign's Ties To Terror Friendly Organizations By BEILA RABINOWITZ and WILLIAM MAYER August 1, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In a desperate attempt to win Muslim votes and to overcome a recent PR debacle - a June 16 Barack Obama rally in Detroit during which the campaign moved two women who were wearing hijab so they would not appear in images featuring the candidate - his campaign has announced the appointment of a "liaison" to the Arab and Muslim community, Mazen Asbahi. Asbahi's Islamist credentials are reflected by the enthusiasm with which the news was greeted by American Islamists, including the Muslim Public Affairs Council [MPAC] which stated: "Mr. Asbahi will further the Obama campaigns outreach efforts and participation of the Muslim American community…MPAC is confident that Mr. Asbahi will encourage Muslim Americans to be civically engaged." [source, http://www.mpac.org/article.php?id=673] Understanding MPAC's MO, "Civically engaged" should be interpreted as a euphemism for implementing shari'a; the organization's goals having been characterized by Dr. Daniel Pipes as: "Impeding counterterrorism efforts and forwarding an Islamist vision of America..." [source, http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2004/07/the-difference-between-cair-and-mpac.html] In testimony delivered before the House Foreign Relations Committee just yesterday, noted terror authority Steven Emerson observed about MPAC: "Marayati has repeatedly justified the actions of Hizbollah before the Department of State invited him as a speaker. In November 1999, on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Marayati responded to accusations that he supports Hizbollah, "If the Lebanese people are resisting Israeli intransigence on Lebanese soil, then that is the right of resistance and they have the right to target Israeli soldiers in this conflict. That is not terrorism. That is a legitimate resistance." [source, Steven Emerson Testimony, U.S. House Committe On Foreign Affairs, pg. 4] The constellation of organizations to which Mr. Asbahi is linked should give pause for concern. For example, Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer, is on the speakers list of the Islamic Society of North America [ISNA] [see, http://www.isna.net/Programs/pages/Speakers-Services.aspx#17]. ISNA is widely understood to be linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, the terrorist Egyptian group that created Hamas. ISNA was named last summer as an unindicted co-conspirator in the nation's largest terror prosecution, U.S. vs Holy Land Foundation and is the largest Saudi funded da'wa enterprise in North America. [source, http://www.nysun.com/article/55778?access=284047] Asbahi's ISNA biography reveals that he is involved in numerous Islamist organizations including the Nawawi Foundation [a da'wa organization run by a convert to Islam which presents all of history from an Islamist perspective] as well as the National Association of Muslim Lawyers [NAML] which has close ties to the Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR], which has been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas as well as having been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the ongoing Holy Land prosecution. According to his ISNA bio, Asbahi also, "serves as a member of the board of directors of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding," [ISPU]. The ISPU's Islamist roots run deep. Muktedar Khan, a prominent Islamist and fellow at ISPU, testified before Congress [see, http://www.ispu.org/policy_briefs/articledetailpb-8.html] absurdly claiming that Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group, "is struggling for independence," and that Hezbollah is only, "motivated by geopolitics," and does not share, "political goals with Al Qaeda." The National Association of Muslim Lawyers often serves as the legal mouthpiece for terror friendly groups such as CAIR and ISNA and recently petitioned the Attorney General to remove, both CAIR and ISNA from their designation as co-conspirators in the Holy Land case. The appointment of Mazen Asbahi to be Obama's liason to Arab and Muslims is another indication of Obama's worrying associations. With Islamist Asbahi at the helm of the campaign's outreach effort to Muslims it is clear that an Obama presidency would give groups like MPAC and ISNA intimate access to key government decision makers and bring the "United States of Allah," one step closer to reality . http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=obamaid=8.1.08%2Ehtm ----------------------------- MIM: Mazen Asbahi's message to Obama supporters. All - Assalamu-Aleikum. My name is Mazen Asbahi and I've been blessed and privileged to be serving the Obama for America Campaign as the National Coordinator for Muslim American Affairs. I'm also coordinating Arab American matters. I'm treating the two roles separately as these are two separate constituencies, though of course there is some overlap. In order to get Senator Obama elected, the Campaign needs all of you to continue your support and if possible to take it to another level. It's a race for every vote in the key battleground states, such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. We need Muslim Americans to get excited about the Campaign, and there's a lot to get excited about! Sure, there have been mis-steps. And of course there are added sensitivities with our faith given the "smear" campaign trying to paint the Senator as too exotic and too un-American to be President. If you have not plugged into the Campaign, please do. The Campaign makes it very easy to do. Visit your local Obama offices and register voters, raise money, get the word out, and pull in your friends and family to also participate. Please feel free to contact me with ideas, critiques and suggestions for improvements on our outreach strategies. (Please keep in mind that I've just signed on :)). Peace, Mazen Asbahi Mazen Asbahi | National Coordinator for Muslim American Affairs | Obama for America | mazen.asbahi@gmail.com | 312.933.5423 cell http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/lawrencemuhammad/gGxYtc -------------------------------------------------- MIM: Mazen Asbahi's speakers biography on the ISNA website. http://www.isna.net/Programs/pages/Speakers-Services.aspx#17 Mazen Asbahi Mazen Asbahi is a senior associate at the law firm of Schiff Hardin LLP in its corporate & securities and intellectual property groups. Mr. Asbahi serves as general counsel to a number of nonprofit entities and is active with a variety of civic, educational and charitable groups. Mr. Asbahi serves as a member of the board of directors of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), as director of publications for the Nawawi Foundation and as a member of the Auxiliary Board of the Chicago Legal Clinic. He is a 2007 Fellow of Leadership Greater Chicago and has previously served as president of the Muslim Bar Association of Chicago. He also serves on the Charities Advisory Committee of Muslim Advocates, the charitable sister organization to the National Association of Muslim Lawyers (NAML). Mr. Asbahi received his undergraduate degree in political science and Islamic studies, with highest honors, from the University of Michigan in 1996. He attended the Northwestern University School of Law, where he received his law degree, cum laude, in 2000. -------------------------------------------------------------------- MIM: The forum which Mazen Ashabi moderated at the 44th ISNA convention is highlighted. Among the panelists was the radical Imam Zaid Shakir who has made a CD to clarify the difference between Jihad and the concept of terrorism, which according to him does not exist in Islam. "The enemies of Islam have linked [Jihad and Terrorism] together as far as we Muslims are concerned, by trying to make one synonymous with the other. They say that Jihad is irresponsible, random, senseless, violence, and terrorism is Jihad... The two are not synonymous; they can't be synonymous." -- Imam Zaid Shakir Among the topics on the CD are: -If the enemies of Islam attack Muslim civilians, can we attack non-Muslim civilians? -What is the role of Muslims living amongst non-Muslims in the West? -Jihad and terrorism, objective or subjective? -What is the meaning of the word Jihad? -Are we obliged to stay in the West? -Who sanctions Jihad? -World Trade Center Bombing! -Hijacking Airplanes! -Should we vote? -Hijra or Jihad? http://www.onlineislamicstore.com/jihortercdim.html http://www.isna.net/Conferences/pages/WebCast.aspx 44th Annual ISNA Convention Webcast Please click on the session title to view the main session webcast. Friday Main session webcast: 3:00 – 4:30 PM Inaugural Session Hall A Presidents: Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) – Ingrid Mattson Muslim Students Association (MSA) – Asma Mirza Muslim Youth of North America (MYNA) – Zaki Barzinji Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers (AMSE) – Khurshid A. Qureshi Association of Pakistani Physicians of North America (APPNA) – Nadeem Kazi Islamic Medical Association of North America (IMANA) – Ashraf Sufi Council of Islamic Schools in North America (CISNA) – Safaa Zarzour Chairs: Convention Program – Azhar Azeez Convention – Abdul Wahab Steering Committee – Abdul Malik Mujahid Moderator: Azhar Azeez 5:00 – 6:30 PM Session 1A: In the Footsteps of the Beloved: From Emulation to Internalization Hall A While undoubtedly loving the Prophet Muhammad (s) is a universal claim among Muslims, there is often a disproportionate correlation between this professed love and the actual implementation of his spiritual and moral example in our daily lives. Indeed he is the model of perfection to be followed in all aspects of life. However, this emulation should entail more than a rote mimicking his actions. True love means internalizing not only his Sunnah, but truly embodying his very character. It involves an emotional connection with him that should serve as the motivational factor in inculcating and nurturing faith in our daily life. This session will both explain the importance of loving the beloved Prophet (s) and illuminate ways in which we can truly exemplify this love in our daily life. Speakers: Muhammad Nur Abdullah, Mokhtar Maghraoui, Zaid Shakir Moderator: Mazen Asbahi 8:30 - 10:15 PM Session 2A: Righting the Wrongs: Faith and Social Justice Hall A While one of the most basic teachings of Islam is the obligation of working for social justice in society, we are often too involved in our personal lives or too removed from the reality of injustices, to devote attention to this essential part of our faith. Professing faith alone and ignoring the broader social concerns through a notion of insulated protection, is not only impractical, but insincere to our Divine obligation. This session will elucidate Islamic principles relating to social justice, with the aim of awakening our social consciousness through a deepening of our faith. Speakers will identify commonalities with American concepts of justice and address some particular areas needing our focus, such as, racial and gender justice, civil liberties, and economic justice and equity. Speakers: David Cole, Siraj Wahhaj, Ebrahim Moosa Moderator: Syed Imtiaz Ahmad Saturday Main session webcast: 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. Session 3A: The Family Fortune: From Theory to Practice Hall A Strong and harmonious families form the foundation of a healthy society. However, reality is often far from this ideal as families struggle to balance the needs between husbands and wives, and youth and elders, while trying to cope with the challenges of the contemporary world. Although Islam places important emphasis on kindness to and the rights of all family members, and while it clearly advocates the principle "the best of you is best to their family", there is sometimes a disconnect between upholding faith and people's behavior in their private family life. This session will highlight Islamic principles as well as offer concrete suggestions for addressing some of the major challenges confronting families today, including generation gap, general family discord, and the often hidden topic of domestic violence. Speakers: Aisha Al-Adawiyya, Altaf Husain, Safaa Zarzour Moderator: Ghulam Bakali 10:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m Session 4A: Serving the Community: From Theory to Practice Hall A As annunciated by this year's theme "Upholding Faith, Serving Community", there is a clear connection between faith and service to others. While indeed one's faith is a personal endeavor, an extension of that faith is one's actions towards others, as elucidated by numerous verses and prophetic traditions. While many Muslims uphold this theory in principle, there is often a gap between theory and practice. This session will examine some of the Islamic precepts that emphasize the importance of community service, while also providing actual models and examples of such principles in action on the local, national, and global level. Emphasis will be placed on the methodology used to identify and effectively serve the needs of different communities. Speakers: Sherman Abd al-Hakim Jackson, Muneer Fareed, Rami Nashishibi, Anwar Khan Moderator: Parvez Ahmed 2:45- 4:00 p.m. Session 5A: Faith in Practice: Understanding Basic Principles of Fiqh Hall A It is not the first time Muslims have existed as a minority in a non-Muslim polity. Our predecessors who found themselves a religious minority navigated the social, political, cultural, and legal constructs of their hosts to engender a communal reality that was at once coherent with their own reality and sincere to their faith. These communities engaged the basic principles of fiqh as they proceeded to organically create their indigenous identity. This session will examine some of these basic principles that should equip us to make some of the decisions we are faced with daily on our own, while addressing some of the unique aspects of the Fiqh of Minorities, with an emphasis on Muslims in America. Speakers: Yusuf Kavakci, Zainab Alwani, Muzammil Siddiqi Moderator: Iqbal Unus 4:30 – 6:00 p.m Session 6A: From the Margins to the Mainstream: Effective Outreach Hall A Misrepresentations and bias about Islam and Muslims has never been more pervasive, today with Islamophobia on the rise across the world. Both detractors of Islam, and Muslims misappropriating the religion create false impressions daily. There has never been a greater need for understanding and dialogue than today, but there are major and serious challenges from both sides. The opportunities for creating this understanding are numerous, whether through interfaith, education, dialogue, personal relations, or the media, but the urgency of this obligation requires the participation of more than a few groups or individuals. This session emphasizes the need for this critical work, the importance of understanding and addressing one's audience, and practical steps and that can be taken by each one of us. Speakers: Ibrahim Hooper, Sayyid M. Syeed, Kareem Irfan, Salam Al-Marayati Moderator: Wafa Unus 8:15 – 10:30 p.m. Session 7A: Upholding Faith, Serving Humanity Hall A This session aims to address the main theme of the convention. Our duty as Muslims is to represent the true meaning of Islam while. By reaching out to the broader community we serve not only the underprivileged and underrepresented but also revitalize our souls through action. As tensions continue to increase throughout the world, we as North American Muslims have a unique opportunity rarely found elsewhere to serve our community with assurances of security and freedom. Using the Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him) as our shining example, this session aims –through diverse, informed, and unique speakers - to motivate, inspire, and move us beyond mere words and rhetoric, to truly living a way of life dedicated to serving God by serving humanity. Speakers: Ingrid Mattson, Siraj Wahhaj, Zaid Shakir, Hamza Yusuf, Keith Ellison , Abdalla Idris Ali, Asma Mirza, Zaki Barzinji Moderator: Altaf Husain Sunday Main session webcast: 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. Session 8A: Connecting to God: Finding Our Spiritual Compass Hall A One of the greatest challenges for people of faith today is finding the time and means to nourish their faith, while cultivating their relationship with God in the face of numerous diversions and distractions that preoccupy an increasing part of our lives. Additionally challenging is the trend towards limiting the influence of religion in the public square and navigating the often conflicting aspects of our lives. As Muslims who attempt to find balance between the terrestrial and the celestial, these realities can not be ignored. At the core of our collective concern is how to keep God front and center in both public and private, intra- and inter-communal, and personal and professional realities. This session will aim to understand what Muslims believe about God as well as how that belief relates to some of the mundane, philosophical, and epistemological concerns of our times. Speakers: Umar F. Abd-Allah, Abdullah Adhami, Maha Hamoui Moderator: Ghulam Nabi Mir 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Session 9A: Finding Unity within Our Diversity Hall A Diversity of opinion has been the cornerstone of our rich intellectual discourse in Islam. However, divergent opinions have sometimes resulted in major divisions within the community. Achieving unity beyond mere rhetoric requires open and honest conversations on the reasons behind the division. Moreover, this discussion must focus on similarities from which an understanding of the other can be achieved. Although this discussion is vital to have between specific groups such as the Shi'a and Sunni communities in America, this is an important conversation that can benefit various diverse groups in the Muslim American community. Speakers: Ihsan Bagby, Hamid Mavani, Mohamed Hagmagid Ali, Abdul Malik Mujahid (CIOGC Presentation) Moderator: Louay Safi 4:30-6:00 p.m. Session 11A: Stewards Over the Earth: Faith and the Environment Hall A Today the earth is faced with one of the most catastrophic threats in its history: global warming. This phenomenon has the potential to wreak havoc on every aspect of our lives if steps are not taken to curb greenhouse gases. Added to this are numerous other devastating affects of unchecked modernity, such as water and air pollution, deforestation, diminishing resources, extinction of species, and a plethora of other environmental problems. The Qur'an contains hundreds of references to nature and creation as signs of God and a bounty for humankind and humans' role as stewards over this earth. This session will examine numerous environmental principals illustrated in Islam, explain the concepts of stewardship and ecology, and identify concrete steps we can take collectively to address this serious crisis. Speakers: Ameena Jandali, Jamal Badawi, Hakim Archuletta Moderator: Sami Catovic --------------------------------------- MIM: In 2006 Asbahi spoke at the ISNA Leadership Development Center Washington Conference. For more on ISNA see: "CAIR and ISNA named as part of criminal conspiracy in Hamas funding case -link to U.S. government indictment" http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2951 Leadership Track at ISNA Washignton Conference The ISNA Leadership Development Center (ILDC) successfully delivered its Leadership Track during the 2006 ISNA East Zone conference on May 27 – 29, 2006 in Washington DC. The track consisted of four sessions conducted over the two day period. Dr. Rafik Beekun, Professor of Management and Strategy and former chair of the Managerial Sciences Department at the University of Nevada, presented on Team Building in Islamic Organizations highlighting the importance of team spirit and demonstrating how Islamic organizations can develop effective teams. His lecture was followed by Dr. Louay Safi, Executive Director of ILDC, session titled Compassionate Leadership and Community Empowerment which focused on the role of community leaders in setting the tone for an open atmosphere that invites cooperation and involvement among community leaders. The last two sessions were continued on Sunday with joint presentations by Dr. Rafik Beekun and Mazen Asbahi, senior associate at the law firm of Goldberg Kohn in its corporate and intellectual property groups. Both Dr. Beekun and Mr. Asbahi presented on Enhancing Your Islamic Organization's Board of Directors and Improving Transparency and Accountability in Muslim Non-Profits. Both of these interactive sessions focused on discussing duties of the boards and providing a number of important business and legal tools that can be used to enhance ones board of directors. These four sessions were attended by nearly 35 participants including community leaders, social activist, teachers and directors of mosque boards. Resources shared in the presentations were made available for the participants. The program was designed to provide an integrated exposure to leadership and management skills, challenges and issues facing the growing Muslim community, and well as share knowledge of Islamic principles in their application in North America. This was the first time the Leadership Track was implemented in an ISNA conference. Due to the success of the initiative and the positive feedback, the Leadership Track will be continued in the other ISNA regional and zonal conferences. http://www.ildc.net/ildc-news/2006/6/7/leadership-track-at-isna-washignton-conference.html -------------------------------------- MIM: Asbahi also chairs the "Charities Advisory Committee of Muslim Advocates which is the sister organisation of NAML the National Association of Muslim Lawyers a group which seeks to Islamise the American legal system. MIM: About NAML The National Association of Muslim Lawyers (NAML) is the national representative of the Muslim legal profession. NAML serves Muslims, the public and the legal profession by promoting justice for all peoples and improvements in American laws and the American justice system. NAML believes that sustained involvement in the executive, legislative and judicial decision-making processes is essential to the long-term well-being and successful integration of Muslims into American society. The Muslim community's interests are best protected by those with an understanding of and respect for the law, legal process, and the role of the legal profession in developing, enforcing and changing the law. NAML intends to promote meaningful access to legal representation for Muslims, and in turn to promote full, fair and equal participation by Muslims in American society overall. http://www.namlnet.org/missionstatement.php ------------------------------------------------- MIM: The mission statement of Muslim Advocates. About Us After several years of volunteer operation, the National Association of Muslim Lawyers (NAML) is extremely pleased to announce the expansion of its advocacy and educational operations to serve the needs of the Muslim American community and, in turn, to defend our nation's founding principles. Beginning this summer of 2005, NAML appointed its first full-time executive director and launched a new charitable sister organization, Muslim Advocates. Muslim Advocates envisions a world in which equality, liberty, and justice are guaranteed for all, regardless of faith, and in which the Muslim American legal community is vital to promoting and protecting these values. In pursuit of this vision, Muslim Advocates' mission is to promote equality, liberty, and justice for all by providing leadership through legal advocacy, policy engagement, and civic education, and by serving as a legal resource to promote the full and meaningful participation of Muslims in American public life. The events of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath presented an overwhelming challenge to the Muslim American community. In this new environment, sophisticated and well-orchestrated advocacy and educational campaigns by Muslim Americans are essential to ensure that we remain entitled to the same rights and protections guaranteed to every American. Muslim American lawyers, who understand U.S. legal, legislative, and political systems, bring a much-needed perspective and vital skill sets to the table. Lending such knowledge and expertise, we seek to partner with both lawyers and non-lawyers in the Muslim community, as well as all Americans, regardless of faith background, who share our commitment to liberty, justice and equality for all. Muslim Advocates is a public, tax-exempt charity under Section 501©(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. We invite your support and participation in this exciting new phase of our growth and development. http://www.muslimadvocates.org/about/main.html -------------------------------- MIM: The mission statement of the Nawawi Foundation where Mazen Asbahi is director of publications. Ingrid Mattson, the president of the Islamic Society of North America sits on the board of directors.http://www.nawawi.org/aboutus/board.html http://www.nawawi.org/aboutus/mission.html MISSION The Nawawi Foundation supports the work of the noted American Muslim scholar Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah and his vision of building a successful American Muslim cultural identity. This vision is based on Dr. Abd-Allah's extensive knowledge and expertise in the fields of Islamic studies and the history of Islam in America. The Foundation increases American Islamic cultural and religious literacy by publishing literature and creating life experiences through traveling abroad. The Foundation's writings are respected by academics, accepted in traditional circles, and easily accessed and understood by the public. Our organized international cultural-immersion trips provide fun-with-learning opportunities for American Muslims to recognize and appreciate their role in the American and global Muslim communities. ----------------------------------------------- MIM: A Facebook post by Asbahi to Obama supporters. Post #1 Mazen wroteon Aug 1, 2008 at 4:35 PM All - Please visit the new Arab Americans page at www.barackobama.com, and join the email listserve "National Arab Americans for Obama." http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/aahome Arab Americans all around the country are working within their communities to get everyone excited about an Obama presidency and registered to vote. Folks: There's a lot to get excited about! Yours, Mazen Asbahi National Coordinator for Arab American Affairs Obama for America mazen.asbahi@gmail.com ------------------------------- MIM: The home page of Arab Americans for Obama Welcome to Arab Americans for Obama "If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper - that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. 'E pluribus unum.' Out of many, one."" — Barack Obama Keynote Address at the Democratic National Convention July 27, 2004 Barack Obama on Key Issues of Concern to Arab Americans Civil Rights Foreign Policy Iraq Faith Economy Healthcare Family Immigration We are a community of Arab Americans who are working nationwide to elect Senator Barack Obama the next President of our nation. We believe in Senator Obama's message of hope, action and change. We believe that Senator Obama has the judgment to lead and the courage to renew America's promise. Senator Obama is committed to the issues that our community cares deeply about: civil rights, profiling, a just peace to the Arab-Israeli conflict, a wise withdrawal from Iraq, closing Guantanamo, immigration reform and promoting human and civil rights in the Arab World. We also care deeply about building an America where the American Dream is open to all - immigrant and non-immigrant alike. We recognize the urgent need to be a part of the movement to bring positive change to Washington and to the nation. Barack believes that if we can put an end to partisan politics, bring people together, and recognize that what unites us is greater than what divides us - then we can make fundamental change possible in our country. Whether it is ending the Iraq war, providing universal health care, making college tuition more affordable, placing a quality teacher in every classroom, providing meaningful support for small business or making "equal justice under the law" a reality for every citizen, we believe that you can have confidence in the courage, sound judgment, and leadership of Senator Barack Obama. Many Arab Americans across the country are working hard to get Barack elected. Let's join together and with others and build a better America for our children and their children. http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/aahome -------------------------------- MIM: The Muslim Public Affairs Council announcement welcoming the appointment of Mazen Asbahi. Obama Appoints National Coordinator for Muslim American Affairs July 28, 2008 The Muslim Public Affairs Council welcomes the appointment of Mazen Asbahi as the National Coordinator for Muslim American Affairs for the Obama 08 Presidential Campaign. Mr. Asbahi will further the Obama campaigns outreach efforts and participation in the Muslim American community. He will be based in Chicago at the campaigns headquarters. Additionally, he will serve as the National Coordinator of Arab American Affairs. MPAC looks forward to working with Muslim and Arab American organizations to develop a united effort to maximize our representation in the electoral process. Asbahi is a senior associate at the law firm of Schiff Hardin LLP in its corporate and securities group in Chicago, IL. Additionally he serves as general counsel to a number of nonprofit entities and is active in a variety of civic, educational and charitable groups. He graduated cum laude from the Northwestern University School of Law in 2000. The inclusion of a Muslim American voice in the presidental campaign reinforces the principle of pluralism in the electoral process. MPAC is confident that Mr. Asbahi will encourage Muslim Americans to be civically engaged. MPAC encourages the presemptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, to form a similar Muslim outreach program or appoint a liaison to the Muslim American community. http://www.mpac.org/article.php?id=673 --------------------------------------------- MIM: Mazen Asbahi emceed a dinner for the Council of Islamic Organisations of Greater Chicago. For more on the CIOGC and it's former president Kareem Irfan see: "Chicago Islamist leader Kareem Irfan of the CIOGC excuses beheadings as "a primordial sense of retaliation and revenge"http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/177 "Abdul Malik Mujahid: CIOGC chairman publishes "Commanders of the Muslim Army" Jihad book -Council of Islamic Organisations of Greater Chicago gets funding to help Muslims become American citizens" http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/414 Review of Council's 12th Annual Dinner. 12th Annual CIOGC Dinner Related Links Picture Gallery A diverse gathering of nearly 500 Muslims from the Chicago area met Sunday, Dec. 12, for the 12th Annual Dinner of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. The Council is an umbrella group representing mosques, social service groups and other Muslim-based organizations. Held at the Marriott Hotel in Burr Ridge, the dinner was emceed by Mazen Asbahi, president of the Muslim Bar Association. Keynote speaker John Esposito, a scholar of Islam at Georgetown University, was unable to attend due to fierce winds at O'Hare Airport, which cancelled his flight from Washington. Esposito delivered his address via speakerphone, commending the Council for its high-profile advocacy on behalf of Chicago-area Muslims. "The 21st century may well be the century of Islam and of Muslims in America," Esposito said. He characterized this as a challenging, threatening yet promising time for the U.S. Muslim community. "Solidarity is key", he said, as is a recognition that "theologies of hate" must be fought within and outside of Islam. He emphasized the Muslims' concerns about secularism, materialism, and individualism are not out of step with American culture, and said American Muslim youth are a critical factor. Outgoing Council president, Kareem Irfan, whose four-year term concludes in January, delivered an urgent plea for support, citing the many ways the Council has raised the profile of the Muslim community in the media, locally and abroad, and worked on behalf of interfaith outreach, civil rights and social causes in the Chicago area. He asked for prayer, financial support, and most importantly, personal involvement. "The need of the hour is solidarity," Irfan said, "We know that there is no clash of civilizations. We believe that. The key is what are we prepared to do?" A centerpiece of the evening was an awards ceremony, the first of its kind for the 12-year-old Council. Dr. Hesham Hassaballa hosted the awards ceremony, which honored individuals in the area of Islam, law enforcement outreach, media and interfaith relations. The law enforcement award went to Thomas Kneir, retired FBI agent. Kneir said his relationship with Irfan and the Council "helped pave the way" for better relations and procedures between law enforcement and Muslims throughout the United States. Geneive Abdo, former Chicago Tribune religion reporter and now Middle East correspondent for USA Today, was honored for her coverage of the Muslim community. Abdo urged Muslims to organize and speak up against what she believes is a strong anti-Muslim bias in the mainstream media. Iman W. D. Mohammad was honored for his work on behalf of Muslims in Chicago. The Rev. Paul Rutgers, executive director of the Council of Religious Leaders of Chicago, was honored for his interfaith work with the Muslim community. He said people frequently ask him where are the voices of moderate Muslims. People frequently ask him why they are not hearing the voices of moderate Muslims. He responded, "I hear them all around. Why aren't you hearing them?" Rami Nashashibi, director and a founder of IMAN, the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, gave the closing address. He praised the work of the Muslim Journal newspaper and urged greater cooperation between immigrant Muslims and their descendants and the largely urban African American Muslim community. A doctoral student in sociology at the University of Chicago, Nashashibi said the Chicago Muslim community stands at a unique place in history.Unlike Muslims in Europe, he said, in the United States we have an unquestionable historical connection to a legacy.He said the U.S. Muslim community may be one of the most important minorities in history. http://www.ciogc.org/pages/News/annualdinner/pageDetailPB.html http://www.ciogc.org/board.html Executive Committee Position Name E-Mail Chairperson Abdul Malik Mujahid malik@ciogc.org Vice-Chair Dr. Zaher Sahloul Secretary Vaseem Iftekhar Treasurer Tasneem Osmani treasurer@ciogc.org Director LaDale George Director Rezwanul Haque Director Misbahuddin Rufai Director Sultan Salahuddin Director Saleem Shaikh ------------------------------------------------------- MIM: In 2006 Asbahi participated in a conference on Islamic Education in America. PDF] Georgetown Report.indd File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML MAZEN ASBAHI, JD. Mazen Asbahi was a member of the ISPU Board of Directors and has recently been appoint-. ed Execu ve Director. ... www.ispu.us/files/PDFs/georgetown%20report%20(si).pdf - Similar pages Printer-friendly version Email this item to a friend Comment on this item Name: Email Address: Display email address publicly on site Title of Comments: Comments: Note: Comments will be screened for substance and tone, and in some cases edited, before appearing on this site. Reasoned disagreement is welcome, but not hostile or otherwise objectionable statements. All published comments © Militant Islam Monitor.