Once again, a problem for the Obama campaign is blamed on a bad job by an underling:
ABC News' Teddy Davis and Alexa Ainsworth Report: With the Supreme Court poised to rule on Washington, D.C.'s, gun ban, the Obama campaign is disavowing what it calls an "inartful" statement to the Chicago Tribune last year in which an unnamed aide characterized Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., as believing that the DC ban was constitutional.
"That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator's consistent position," Obama spokesman Bill Burton tells ABC News.
Yep, because we know that Obama's the artful dodger.
But Matt Burns, a spokesman for the Republican convention, looks on with undisguised glee at some of the Democrats' efforts -- such as the "lean 'n' green" catering guidelines.
Among them: No fried food. And, on the theory that nutritious food is more vibrant, each meal should include "at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white." (Garnishes don't count.) At least 70% of ingredients should be organic or grown locally, to minimize emissions from fuel burned during transportation. "One would think," says Mr. Burns, "that the Democrats in Denver have bigger fish to bake -- they have ruled out frying already -- than mandating color-coordinated pretzel platters."
Is there anything other than blueberries and jello?
Richard Cohen hits the ball on the screws with this one:
But here is the difference between McCain and Obama -- and Obama had better pay attention. McCain is a known commodity. It's not just that he's been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It's also -- and more important -- that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This -- not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express -- is what commends him to so many journalists.
I doubt very much that Jeb Bush is on anybody's list. Martinez can't run, having been born in Cuba. And Klein concludes with this laugher:
Update: As several commenters point out, this list is defective. Gotta figure that Zell Lieberman is at the tippy-top of McCain's wish list.
All this talk of selecting a VP from the other party is nonsense, whether it's Lieberman for McCain or Hagel for Obama. It would be a huge mistake for either candidate to reach across the aisle. First, it sets up a situation where there is no heir apparent for the next go-round. Suppose McCain is elected with Lieberman as his VP. If McCain decides to step down in 2012 or is term-limited out in 2016, who's the Republican frontrunner? Nobody, because Lieberman is very unlikely to inherit his boss' mantle. This is exactly the situation that applied this time around, with Cheney unable to run because of his health problems.
World To End Tomorrow; Lesbians Suffer Disproportionately
Jeez, does this story fit the New York Times' bias perfectly?
The Army and Air Force discharged a disproportionate number of women in 2007 under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prohibits openly gay people from serving in the military, according to Pentagon statistics gathered by an advocacy group.
While women make up 14 percent of Army personnel, 46 percent of those discharged under the policy last year were women. And while 20 percent of Air Force personnel are women, 49 percent of its discharges under the policy last year were women.
Of course the Times doesn't think very hard about this. If a disproportionate number of women are getting discharged under "Dont Ask, Don't Tell" it must be (by definition) because a disproportionate number of them are telling. And indeed this amounts to a "get out of the service free" card as you'll note here:
Over all, the number of gay men and lesbians discharged from the military in 2007 rose to 627 from 612 a year before, according to Pentagon statistics. Those figures represent a drop of about 50 percent from a peak in 2001, before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So if you joined the Army because of the benefits and the training, and you discover a war is about to come, you simply "tell" and you get out of fighting. It's Corporal Klinger's dream come true.
What to do about a bunch of high school girls who decided to get pregnant?
But by May, after nurse practitioner Kim Daly had administered some 150 pregnancy tests at Gloucester High's student clinic, she and the clinic's medical director, Dr. Brian Orr, a local pediatrician, began to advocate prescribing contraceptives regardless of parental consent, a practice at about 15 public high schools in Massachusetts. Currently Gloucester teens must travel about 20 miles (30 km) to reach the nearest women's health clinic; younger girls have to get a ride or take the train and walk. But the notion of a school handing out birth control pills has met with hostility. Says Mayor Carolyn Kirk: "Dr. Orr and Ms. Daly have no right to decide this for our children." The pair resigned in protest on May 30.
If kids were getting pregnant "by accident" I could see this reducing teen pregnancy. But if they want to get pregnant, how exactly would contraceptives help?
"We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice," Velvel said. "And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940s."
Apparently Velvel is a typical unreconstructed 1960s radical.
Senator Barack Obama announced on Thursday that he would not participate in the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He argued that the system had collapsed, and would put him at a disadvantage running against Senator John McCain, his likely Republican opponent.
With his decision, Mr. Obama became the first candidate of a major party to decline public financing — and the spending limits that go with it — since the system was created in 1976, after the Watergate scandals.
In November 2007, Obama answered "Yes" to Common Cause when asked "If you are nominated for President in 2008 and your major opponents agree to forgo private funding in the general election campaign, will you participate in the presidential public financing system?"
Obama wrote: "In February 2007, I proposed a novel way to preserve the strength of the public financing system in the 2008 election. My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election. My proposal followed announcements by some presidential candidates that they would forgo public financing so they could raise unlimited funds in the general election. The Federal Election Commission ruled the proposal legal, and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has already pledged to accept this fundraising pledge. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election."
And his excuse? The mean Republicans are making him do it!
"We've made the decision not to participate in the public financing system for the general election," Obama says in the video, blaming it on the need to combat Republicans, saying "we face opponents who’ve become masters at gaming this broken system. John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. And we’ve already seen that he’s not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations."
If you think Hillary's supporters are going to line up behind Obama, think again:
“We have a Clinton national (convention) delegate who says she’s voting for John McCain?” Wineke repeated, for clarification. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
Wineke said “almost everybody I know who was for Hillary” is solidly behind Obama now. As for Bartoshevich, he said, “my suspicion is she doesn’t know what she’s getting into” because “the delegates to this convention will be very upset.”
In addition, despite the supposed enthusiasm gap, Gallup is reporting Obama with only a three-point lead.
This will be a continuing watch on the efforts by the denizens of loony leftville to raise Obama to the level of Jesus Christ. It's easily the creepiest thing I've seen in politics as yet, and it's everywhere.
Consider this tee shirt:
What would Obama do? He'd probably buy up a million of these posters and blanket the sky with them:
What's next, little statuettes of Obama's mother for the dashboard of the car?
Here's one of my favorites:
See, Obama's got this drawer where his stomach is supposed to be and when he pulls it open, doves and butterflies fly out. Note the hands of the girl at the left are in the praying position.
It was in the spring of 1976, in London England. I was on a semester abroad, studying the parliamentary system and staying with about 30 other students at a small hotel in the Maida Vale section of town. It was an ordinary afternoon, and I happened to be studying in the front room of the hotel when the doorbell rang. I answered it and goggled at the visitor outside.
"You're Jim McKay," I said observantly.
"Yes, and you are?" he replied.
His son, Sean McManus (McKay's real last name) was on the program with us, and I had heard from somebody early in the semester that he had a famous dad.
"I watch Wide World of Sports every weekend," I gushed a bit as I led them into a waiting area, then dashed down the stairs. As the clip hints, McKay could make a tiddlywinks championship seem like an historic event. His son is currently the president of both CBS News and CBS Sports, and does a terrific job at the latter (the news section, which he inherited after the Rathergate fiasco, remains a mess). I don't remember all that much about Sean other than that he was as diametrically opposite from his father as he could be; quiet and reserved rather than ebullient and forceful. But they are both major figures in sports over the last 50 plus years.
McKay's big moment was the Munich Olympics of 1972, when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Village. A botched rescue attempt resulted in the deaths of all the athletes and terrorists, as McKay reports near the end of the clip.
All Jewish lobbies and organizations are interconnected and there are hundreds upon hundreds of them. The leaders of the numerous Jewish Lobby Groups go to the same synagogues, country clubs, and share the same Jewish investment bankers. And this inter-connectedness extends to the Jews who run the Federal Reserve Bank, US Homeland Security, and the US State Department.
In other words, “Jews stick together.” Americans must know how extremely powerful the Jewish Lobby is and how it operates to undermine America’s interests both at home and abroad. At home - by corrupting America’s political system, and abroad - by dictating American Foreign Policy against America’s best interests.
Ordinarily, you'd have to go to a skinhead conference to get this kind of information.
Of course, this is not an official position of the Obama campaign; it comes from a page wonderfully entitled "Socialists for Obama"; sorta shows the downside of having webpages that users can update. "Socialists for Obama also show off their 9-11 nuttery, republishing an article from 9-11 kook, Holocaust Denier and fugitive felon Christopher Bollyn.
Here's a rather facile discussion of the possibles. No mention of the 800-pound gor-Hilla, no note that John Edwards has already publicly declined the position.
1. If she wants it, she's earned it. 18 million votes. Tireless campaigning over endless months. Supporters who really love her. You can't snub her and get away with it.
2. McCain is ready to embrace and absorb her supporters. All those women. All those flyover state white men that you disrespected.
I doubt she's really interested. She's been vice president already (effectively). Wouldn't she be better served by hoping Obama loses to McCain, giving her the chance to run again in 2012?
Or, the hunt for the great whitey video. The saga continues today, with Hillbuzz (a pro-Hillary site) providing more details:
The Michelle Obama Rant Tape was filmed between June 26th - July 1st 2004 in Chicago, IL at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Conference at Trinity United Church: specifically the Women's Event.
And:
For about 30 minutes, Michelle Obama launched into a rant about the evils of America, and how America is to blame for the problems of Africa. Michelle personally blamed President Clinton for the deaths of millions of Africans and said America is responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis and other ethnic groups. She then launched into an attack on "whitey", and talked about solutions to black on black crime in the realm of diverting those actions onto white America. Her rant was fueled by the crowd: they reacted strongly to what she said, so she got more passionate and enraged, and that's when she completely loses it and says things that have made the mouths drop of everyone who's seen this.
There's also a claim that Giuliani's team has the DVD. If so, it will surely come out. I'll admit though that I'm still in the skeptic corner.
Here's a terrific piece on the effort to get Sgt. Paul R. Smith his Congressional Medal of Honor, with some more details about the action that led to his death:
Sergeant Smith was directing his platoon to lay concertina wire across the corner of a courtyard near the airport, in order to create a temporary holding area for Iraqi prisoners of war. Then he noticed Iraqi troops massing, armed with AK-47s, RPGs, and mortars. Soon, mortar fire had wounded three of his men—the crew of the platoon’s M113A3 armored personnel carrier. A hundred well-armed Iraqis were now firing on his 16-man platoon.
Sergeant Smith threw grenades and fired an AT-4, a bazooka-like anti-tank weapon. A Bradley fighting vehicle from another unit managed to hold off the Iraqis for a few minutes, but then inexplicably left (out of ammunition, it would later turn out). Sergeant Smith was now in his rights to withdraw his men from the courtyard. But he rejected that option because it would have threatened American soldiers who were manning a nearby road block and an aid station. Instead, he decided to climb atop the Vietnam-era armored personnel carrier whose crew had been wounded and man the .50- caliber machine gun himself. He asked Private Michael Seaman to go inside the vehicle, and to feed him a box of ammunition whenever the private heard the gun go silent.
Pfleger, who has raised holy hell about racist policies, including those fostered by churches under the umbrella of the archdiocese, has been a modern-day John Brown.
For those who are fuzzy about history, in 1859, Brown was the white abolitionist who led an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, trying to arm blacks for an assault on slaveholders.
They were stopped before carrying out the plan, but the insurrection put the South on notice that there were abolitionists willing to wage fierce battle to end slavery in America.
"As a white man who was willing to pick up arms against slavery, John Brown was in many ways a perfect icon for the [Weather Underground Organization] (minus his patriarchal mindset and fervent Christianity). The sympbol of Borwn was fitting for the WUO because the organization tried to carry on his tradition of militant white anti-racism. Black Liberation Army soldier Ashanti Alston called the WUO "John Brown's children". in 1969, Mark Rudd said Weatherman was an attempt to create two, three, many John Browns."
US deaths in Iraq were the lowest since the war began, and oil production there set a new record as well.
The U.S. military said 19 soldiers died in May, the lowest monthly death toll in a five-year-old war that has so far claimed the lives of more than 4,000 American soldiers.
Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani told Reuters in an interview that the improved security had helped Iraq, which has the world's third-largest oil reserves, raise oil production to a post-war high of 2.5 million barrels per day in May.
We could have "hope". Or we could have the reality that the surge has worked.
Not to those of us who've been paying attention all along, but to the news media and the pollsters and the voters. Paul Harris:
Obama supporters reject this argument and point to his record of boosting Democratic voter turnout, especially among the young. But sceptics in the party, already nervous about nominating Obama after the furore over outspoken pastor Jeremiah Wright, are growing increasingly concerned. 'There is an element of buyer's remorse in some areas. The question is whether it gets really strong now or in September - or even after the election is over, if he loses,' said Steve Mitchell, head of political consultancy Mitchell Research.
Get this absolutely stunning poll result:
It is that prospect, Clinton supporters say, that leads them to keep fighting. They point to Obama's performance in North Carolina as a bellwether: it was his strong win there earlier this month that dealt an almost fatal blow to Clinton's chances. Yet, two weeks after that win, polls showed Clinton easily outperformed Obama there when measured against McCain. 'Clinton has a very strong argument that she is a stronger candidate against McCain. It is just that it has fallen on deaf ears,' said Mitchell.
A lot of people have been interpreting his problem as "just Appalachia" and chalking it up to racism. I suspect there's something else going on here. Obama based his campaign on his being a transformative black candidate. He was not another Jesse Jackson, selling the politics of resentment. He was Tiger Woods, a guy who happens to be black, but doesn't let color define him.
Now that facade seems to be slipping away. I assume that all of you have seen this video of Father Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest, giving a speech at Obama's Trinity Church last weekend, but if you haven't it's quite stunning:
He reminds me a bit of Anthony Michael Hall pretending to be "black" in Weird Science. While I still don't believe the claim by Larry Johnson that there's a video of Michelle Obama railing against "whitey", certainly that performance makes it seem at least possible.
Obama has resigned from the church, but the horse is already out of the barn.
New and dramatic developments. This is a heads up. I’ll post the news Monday morning by 0900 hours. Now I know why people who have seen the videotape say it is stunning. Barack’s headaches are only starting.
Yellow light all the way on this one. To me, the "Whitey" video seems too good to be true. If you want to believe it's true and you're still not sure, that's a pretty solid sign that it's not.
