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seems like yuu have unilaterally changed the code of conduct for the board
In the interest of clarity it might be better if you changed them so people might know that their posts will be deleted and speech muzzled at your whim
ON THE SEPARATION OF SENSE AND STATE
A CLARIFICATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH
IN NORTHERN COLORADO
To Catholics of the Archdiocese of Denver:
Catholic public leaders inconvenienced by the abortion debate tend to take a hard line in talking about the "separation of Church and state." But their idea of separation often seems to work one way. In fact, some officials also seem comfortable in the role of theologian. And that warrants some interest, not as a "political" issue, but as a matter of accuracy and justice.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a gifted public servant of strong convictions and many professional skills. Regrettably, knowledge of Catholic history and teaching does not seem to be one of them.
Interviewed on Meet the Press August 24, Speaker Pelosi was asked when human life begins. She said the following:
"I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time.And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don't know. The point is, is that it shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose."
Since Speaker Pelosi has, in her words, studied the issue "for a long time," she must know very well one of the premier works on the subject, Jesuit John Connery's Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977). Here's how Connery concludes his study:
"The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemnation of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it. Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term, abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion."
Or to put it in the blunter words of the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
"Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has
bestowed on this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder."
Ardent, practicing Catholics will quickly learn from the historical record that from apostolic times, the Christian tradition overwhelmingly held that abortion was grievously evil. In the absence of modern medical knowledge, some of the Early Fathers held that abortion was homicide; others that it was tantamount to homicide; and various scholars theorized about when and how the unborn child might be animated or "ensouled." But none diminished the unique evil of abortion as an attack on life itself, and the early Church closely associated abortion with infanticide. In short, from the beginning, the believing Christian community held that abortion was always, gravely wrong.
Of course, we now know with biological certainty exactly when human life begins. Thus, today's religious alibis for abortion and a so-called "right to choose" are nothing more than that - alibis that break radically with historic Christian and Catholic belief.
Abortion kills an unborn, developing human life. It is always gravely evil, and so are the evasions employed to justify it. Catholics who make excuses for it - whether they're famous or not - fool only themselves and abuse the fidelity of those Catholics who do sincerely seek to follow the Gospel and live their Catholic faith.
The duty of the Church and other religious communities is moral witness. The duty of the state and its officials is to serve the common good, which is always rooted in moral truth. A proper understanding of the "separation of Church and state" does not imply a separation of faith from political life. But of course, it's always important to know what our faith actually teaches.
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
Archbishop of Denver
James D. Conley
Auxiliary Bishop of Denver[/I]
I wonder how Susans speaking out would be dealt in China or the Muslim world?
I'm suer your buddies the Iranians would greet her protests with support and encouragement
Sorta interesting that Arabs have voting rights in Israel also
His infantile whining that people would actually react with displeasure at his political views is typical of the entitlement issues with liberals.
His analysis is pathetically childish
STFU and try to act
DIdn't he make a pledge to leave the country if Bush was elected?
IN addition to being stupid, he's dishonest
The Biggest Missing Story in Politics
By Bruce Walker
The Battleground Poll, the most respected and thorough of all public opinion polls, released its latest results on August 20th. Although many people read this poll for the data on voter preference in upcoming elections, for voter opinions about the two major political parties, for what things matter most to voters, I always zip past this data in the first fifteen pages of poll results and go straight to Question D3, which very quietly and totally ignored proclaims the biggest missing story in American politics and which is the only story, in the long run, that really matters.
I have been tracking Question D3 for a long time, since June 2002, in thirteen straight Battleground Poll results. Americans respond to this question more consistently than to any other question in those thirteen Battleground Poll surveys. People many change their opinions dramatically about Iraq or President Bush or drilling for oil, but not their answer to Question D3.
The Battleground Poll is different. It is bipartisan. A Republican polling organization, the Terrance Group, and a Democrat polling organization, Lake Research Partners, collaborate in picking the questions, selecting the sample population, conducting the surveys, and analyzing the results. The Battleground Poll website, along with the raw data, is "Republican Strategic Analysis" and "Democratic Strategic Analysis." There are few polls that are bipartisan. No other polling organization asks the same questions year after year, none that reveal the internals of their poll results so completely, and none ask anything like Question D3 in every survey. What is Question D3 and what were the results to Question D3 in the August 20, 2008 Battleground Poll? It is this:
"When thinking about politics and government, do you consider yourself to be...
Very conservative
Somewhat conservative
MODERATE
Somewhat liberal
Very liberal
UNSURE/REFUSED"
In August 2008, Americans answered that question this way: (1) 20% of Americans considered themselves to be very conservative; (2) 40% of Americans considered themselves to be somewhat conservative; (3) 2% of Americans considered themselves to be moderate; (4) 27% of Americans considered themselves to be somewhat liberal; (5) 9% of Americans considered themselves to be very liberal; and (6) 3% of Americans did not know or refused to answer.
Sixty percent of Americans considered themselves conservative. Does this mean that most Americans do not know what "conservative" means? No: The question specifically provides an out to people who are not sure about their ideology; it provides an out to people who want to be considered "moderate." Americans reject those choices. They overwhelmingly define themselves as "conservative." This is a huge political story - except that it is not "new" at all. Look at the thirteen Battleground Poll results over the last six years, and how do Americans answer that very question? Here are the percentages of Americans in those polls who call themselves "conservative" since June 2002: 59% (June 2002 poll), 59% (September 2003 poll), 61% (April 2004 poll), 59% (June 2004 poll), 60% (September 2004 poll), 61% (October 2005 poll), 59% (March 2006), 61% (October 2006), 59% (January 2007), 63% (July 2007), 58% (December 2007), 63% (May 2008), and now 60% (August 2008.)
The percentage of Americans who define themselves as "somewhat liberal" or "very liberal" has always been puny. In thirteen straight polls, this percentage has never been higher than 38% (June 2004) and it has usually been much lower. The gap between self-defined conservatives and self-defined liberals has been as high as thirty percentage points and as low as twenty-one percentage points. What does that translate into in electoral politics? If conservative presidential candidates simply got all the conservative votes - if virtually all moderate voters, uncommitted voters, and liberal voters went for the liberal candidate - then the conservative candidates would win a landslide bigger than Ronald Reagan in 1988. Have you ever wondered why liberals like Obama never call themselves liberals? Maybe their advisers have read the Battleground Poll internals.
Are these remarkable results skewed? This has always been the argument, but it is a hopelessly flawed argument. The poll results are incredibly consistent over time. These results are the same when President Bush has poll numbers at rock bottom and when Republicans were facing electoral disaster, like in October 2006 when 61% of Americans called themselves conservatives. The very consistency of these percentages is powerful evidence of their inherent validity.
If people did not know what conservative, liberal, and moderate meant, then the poll results to that question would bounce around over time and people would flock to define themselves as "moderate" or they would say "don't know." When given four different options to the conservative label, respondents overwhelmingly chose to define themselves, instead, as conservatives.
Do people feel pressured into calling themselves conservatives? Think: Hollywood regularly excoriates the image of conservatives; the mainstream media demonizes conservatives; schools teach that conservatives are narrow minded bigots; academia tries to hound independent conservative newspapers and organizations off campus. It requires much more courage to define yourself as a conservative than any other label, particularly when the banal "moderate" answer is so easily grasped. No: These answers to Question D3 are real, profound, and great.
Why, then, do other polls show Americans so different from conservatives? The short answer is that other polls are scrupulously constructed to hide the tsunami of conservative opinion in America. On abortion, for example, polls will report that Americans define themselves at least as much as "pro-choice" as they do "pro-life," but that is just not true. The "pro-choice" advocates nationally oppose bans on partial birth abortion, oppose parental notification, and oppose counseling on abortion. Led by men like Obama, the "pro-choice" position is, quite simply, that a woman always has a right to choose an abortion.
Polls do not show support for that at all. Polls over the last few months give the following levels of support to making abortion always legal: "always legal - 19%" (Quinnipiac Poll, July 2008); "legal in all cases - 19%" (Pew Poll, June 2008); "legal in all cases - 18%" (ABC / Washington Post Poll, June 2008). While it is true that the percentage of Americans who want abortion illegal in all situations is almost exactly the same as those who want abortion legal in all cases, the overwhelming percentage of Americans want just what pro-life advocates want: abortion generally available in cases of rape, incest, or life-threatening health problems for the mother; abortion for minors regulated just like abortion for any major medical procedure for minors is regulated; and abortion on account of personal inconvenience more strictly regulated. All of these polls showing Americans equally divided were crafted by people and by groups intent upon presenting a false impression of how Americans felt about abortion.
Polls on other issues are just as bad. The CNN poll of June 2008 on gun control is a good example. CNN asks people to interpret the Constitution, by reciting the text of the Second Amendment. Then asks whether this text in the Bill of Rights was intended to provide for "a well regulated militia" or to preserve "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." In other words, the question implies that the Second Amendment cannot preserve two rights, both of which are explicitly recited within the text of that amendment: A well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is specifically guaranteed as well.
Like everything that the Left does, from entertainment to higher education, the structure, the format, and the revealed results of information is conformed to present an image in which conservatives and their values are as invisible as blacks in the Antebellum South. Even Leftists themselves believe this false picture. Consider, in 1988, how many liberal Democrats did not believe that Reagan had won an overwhelming landslide because they, personally, knew of no one who voted for him. Consider how blindsided the Left was by the overwhelming popularity of an unapologetic conservative like Rush Limbaugh. Consider that Republicans walk about in a blue funk wondering where the next Reagan is, utterly forgetting that not only Leftists, but "moderate" Republicans in 1980 were labeling Reagan as far, far too conservative. The Gipper, in fact, was comfortably in the middle of a huge American majority. The extremists are that 9% of Americans who call themselves "very liberal."
Conservatives are like those proverbial sailors becalmed off the coast of Brazil, dying of thirst, and wondering how they would survive until tomorrow. When another ship passed asked the listless sailing ship if its crew needed help, the urgent call was for fresh water, to which the passing ship replied "Lift down your buckets into the sea. You are in the mouth of the Amazon." Fresh water was everywhere around the dehydrated men; they just did not know it. Conservatives are not just a majority of Americans, but an utterly overwhelming majority of all Americans. As soon as they grasp this huge fact, government and politics in America will be transformed.
The son of Barack Obama's vice presidential pick, Sen. Joe Biden, is a top partner at a Washington law firm that has lobbied his father's office, a family tie that could prove embarrassing for a campaign that has positioned itself as fighting lobbyists and special interests in Washington.
In the first six months of this year R. Hunter Biden, a founding partner of Oldaker, Biden & Belair, has worked on accounts that brought it $470,000 from nine clients, according to lobbying disclosure records.…
But the connections between the law firm and Biden are very close.
For instance, William Oldaker, another named partner and former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission, has been Sen. Biden's campaign treasurer for Congress.
Oldaker has advised Biden on campaign issues, first during the Senator's failed 1988 presidential bid. And while Oldaker has said he does not lobby Biden personally, he has spoken with Biden's staff about some clients.
The media is shying away from covering this story. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, CNN, etc. don't think it is relevant to the campaign. And why should they cover it? It's not like they put the spotlight on other candidates' children's lobbying ties on the front page of the newspaper.
On Christmas Eve 1994, Fred D. Thompson Jr. was out of a job. A 34-year-old self-described late bloomer, Mr. Thompson had graduated from law school just two years before and practiced law only for his father, Fred D. Thompson Sr., who was about to be sworn in as a senator from Tennessee.
''I was out on the street, knocking on doors,'' recalled the younger Mr. Thompson, who is known as Tony.
But attending Brentwood Methodist Church in Nashville that night, Tony Thompson ran into the departing incumbent senator, Harlan Mathews, a Democrat. Mr. Mathews invited Tony to join him in a Nashville lobbying business, a job that would let him capitalize on his father's new position.
That was David D. Kilpatrick on Page A1 of the New York Times on July 2, 2007.
In five years since leaving the Senate, Fred Thompson's PAC "has paid more money to his son than it has contributed to help elect" GOPers to Congress. Since he decided to retire in '02, Thompson's PAC paid $244K in "management/consulting fees" to lawyer/lobbyist/Thompson son Daniel Thompson's Nashville consulting firm, according to records filed with the FEC.
That was the Hotline on April 23, 2007.
No, the media does not cover stories about the children of politicians. After all the media has never run detailed stories about Harry Reid's family's lobbying contracts and how the Reid family benefits by Harry pushing legislation for them.
You'll not read about the Biden children in the paper. It just does not happen. The Fred Thompson stuff was just an anomaly. No doubt the New York Times regrets ever writing that story, as does the Hotline.
Of course, it is going to get a little awkward when the Obama-Biden tickets talks about Biden's son in Iraq and totally ignores the one the campaign describes "as a lawyer" who just so happened to rake in $380,000 in the first six months of the year thanks to his dad's connections.
Change you can cash in on
Apparently part of your post was deleted
Very interesting especially in light of the rules posted:
"Any burning desires to "label" politicians and their supporters with whatever adjectives is allowed here. Just avoid George Carlin's 7 deadlies.
U. of C. shunning poor patients?
HOSPITAL DISPUTE | Obama's wife, 3 aides tied to plan to free up space
August 23, 2008
BY TIM NOVAK AND CHRIS FUSCO Staff Reporters
Sen. Barack Obama's wife and three close advisers have been involved with a program at the University of Chicago Medical Center that steers patients who don't have private insurance -- primarily poor, black people -- to other health care facilities.
Michelle Obama -- currently on unpaid leave from her $317,000-a-year job as a vice president of the prestigious hospital -- helped create the program, which aims to find neighborhood doctors for low-income people who were flooding the emergency room for basic treatment. Hospital officials say such patients hinder their ability to focus on more critically ill patients in need of specialized care, such as cancer treatment and organ transplants.
» Click to enlarge image
Obama's top political strategist David Alexrod.
(AP file)
RELATED STORIES
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Obama's top political strategist, David Axelrod, co-owns the firm, ASK Public Strategies, that was hired by the hospital last year to sell the program -- called the Urban Health Initiative -- to the community as a better alternative for poor patients. Obama's wife and Valerie Jarrett, an Obama friend and adviser who chairs the medical center's board, backed the Axelrod firm's hiring, hospital officials said.
Another Obama adviser and close friend, Dr. Eric Whitaker, took over the Urban Health Initiative when he was hired at U. of C. in October 2007. Whitaker previously had been director of the Illinois Department of Public Health. Obama has said he recommended Whitaker for the state job, giving his name to Tony Rezko, who helped Gov. Blagojevich assemble his Cabinet. Rezko, a former fund-raiser for Obama and Blagojevich, was convicted in June on federal corruption charges tied to state deals.
Medical center officials and Obama's presidential campaign staff say the Urban Health Initiative -- along with a three-year-old companion program called the South Side Health Collaborative -- will dramatically improve health care for thousands of South Side residents. They say that, rather than having to wait hours at U. of C.'s emergency room, those patients get seen sooner and at less expense at neighborhood clinics and other hospitals. U. of C. even offers them a ride on a shuttle bus to other centers and sometimes provides the doctors at those facilities.
"Senator Obama sees community health centers as a vital part of efforts to invest in prevention and reduce costs," said Ben LaBolt, an Obama spokesman.
But the Urban Health Initiative has critics, including South Side residents and medical professionals.
"I've heard complaints from a handful of constituents, but I've also had calls from people in the health care profession complaining," said Ald. Toni Preckwinkle, whose 4th Ward is just north of the hospital. "The medical professionals who have come to me are accusing the university of dumping patients on its neighboring institutions. ... Whether it's being implemented in the way that's in the best interest of the patient, I can't tell you."
Sen. John McCain, Obama's Republican opponent, criticized the Democratic presidential hopeful Friday for having pledged on the campaign trail to expand health care for Americans at the same time his top political strategist "was running a campaign to cut coverage for the poor."
Axelrod, whose firm stopped working on the project in October, responded that he was concerned that presidential politics was distorting the university's efforts to improve health care for poor people and to lower costs.
Whitaker, who has traveled with Obama on the presidential campaign trail, chalked up the criticism to people opposed to change.
"In the past, we opened our doors and saw whoever came," Whitaker said Friday. "We would see a patient who had general pneumonia, and if we needed to see a patient who needed a liver transplant, that liver transplant patient couldn't get in the door."
And rather than dump patients on other health care facilities, Whitaker said the initiative actually is improving their bottom lines.
"We were taking general patients away from Mercy Hospital, Michael Reese, and they were financially at risk," Whitaker said. "We harmed other hospitals without knowing we harmed other hospitals."
At the same time, the Urban Health Initiative is improving the university's finances. Fewer poor patients are showing up at the U. of C. emergency room for basic medical treatment and are no longer admitted to the hospital. That frees beds for transplants, cancer care and other more-profitable medical procedures that the university prides itself on.
"The collapse of the health care system was driving more and more people to the emergency room," Axelrod said. "The trend line was and is a disastrous one from the standpoint of maintaining the hospital. Their goal was to find an answer."
Axelrod's firm did polling and found that some of the university's primary-care doctors feared the hospital was turning its back on surrounding poor neighborhoods, according to a May 2007 report the firm gave the university.
Axelrod's firm also suggested the program's name be changed. "Some participants view the word 'urban' as code for 'black,' " according to a poll the firm commissioned.
Doing good Steph, thanks
I'm in Portland right now, visiting my family
"Lose the personal attacks and name calling. Or go find some other board to post on.
Understand?
From Bullbear
Gee, I wonder if seabass got the same message??
I highly doubt it
Iran's Ahmadinejad in new verbal attack on Israel
Aug 23 04:58 PM US/Eastern
131 Comments
View larger image
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad renewed his verbal attacks on arch-foe Israel on Saturday, accusing it of dragging the world into turmoil and predicting its demise.
"About 2,000 organised Zionists and 7,000 to 8,000 agents of Zionism have dragged the world into turmoil," Ahmadinejad told a rally in the central Iranian city of Arak carried live on state television.
He said that if the West does not restrain Zionism, "the powerful hand of the nations will clean these sources of corruption from the face of the earth," without specifying which nations.
Iran does not recognise the Jewish state and Ahmadinejad has drawn international condemnation by repeatedly saying since his election in 2005 that Israel is doomed to disappear.
Yep but according to the Israel hater sortaqueen, Iran are just misunderstood good guys defending themselves
Frickin stupid is as frickin stupid does
WAS HE CONVICTED OF OUTING HER????????
NO
IN ESSENCE THEY DID PROVE THAT SHE WASN"T COVERT AND THAT SHE WAS OUTED
HOW COULD THEY "PROVE" IT W/O A TRIAL??? HOW EXACTLY COULD THEY HAVE PROVED IT BEFORE TRIAL? FITZ WAS DEAD SET ON HIS COURSE OF ACTION REGARDLESS? THERE WAS A DIFFERENCE AND UNDER OUR SYSTEM< THOSE ARE SETTLED IN COURT
FITZ HAD THE POWER TO INDICT AND HE USED IT EVEN THOUGH HE KNEW IT WAS ARMITAGE THAT OUTED HER
YOU VIEW FITZ AS THE WHITE KNIGHT IN THIS SCENARIO- TO ME IT"S OBVIOUS HE HAD POLITICAL MOTIVATION
WHAT"S MORE FRICKIN STUPID THAN HOLDING ON TO A BELIEF THAT WILL NEVER BE SHOWN TO BE TRUE
Ummm, Libby was convicted of perjury. not under the FISA law statute for outing
You rationalize that it was because of this or that excuse, but the fact remains, he wasn't convicted under the FISA statute and no one will ever be
The only false premise is your dogged refusal to admit that reality
Her statements and Haydens statement and Fitzs statement don't mean squat in any legal sense
You can keep your opinion as long as it makes you feel good, but in any legal sense no outing occurred
The point about roe v wade is that it is just poor constitutional law
A right- the right of privacy- was made up to justify abortion. It never existed in the constitution
If Roe v Wade was overturned, it would be a states rights issue- where it belongs.
Most states would continue to allow abortions
Ummm, Barry made 4 million last year
The fact that Biden hasn't been able to capitalize on is 35 years in the Senate to make more money just shows what an idiot he is
Not nervous ta all- Biden is the best possible pick for people who don't want to see Barry elected
ANd by your typical bot like refusal to answer a direct question that's uncomfortable to you, I guess you ahve no standard for " too old " other than the dem candidate would never be too old
I'm guessing you have absolutely no problem with Bidens age- 65 , yet you repeatedly bot out McCains 72 year old age
What exactly is the cut off Peggy???
TIA
The point is it's not a lie- he probably believes it, but it's not fact. It will never be proven that Plame was a covert agent. Fitz was simply expressing his opinion.
And seeing as how he was the prosecutor in the case a biased opinion.
Hello, Biden… Bye, Bye Change
By Betsy Newmark
High School Government and History Teacher/Blogger
So, this is what the media was in a frenzy about and had to spend the day staking out the houses of all the short-list guys? I hope that all those who signed up for the text message to be the first to know are happy about it, although it seems that the story was leaked hours before the text message could go out. But hey, now they can be text buddies with the Obama campaign so it’s not a loss, at least not for the Obama people.
I guess that whole change message is tossed to the wayside.
Instead Obama picked a guy who has spent just about his whole adult life in the Senate, having only worked as a lawyer three years before he was elected in 1972 as one of the youngest guys ever to the Senate.
Obama seems to be throwing in the towel on his argument that his judgment trumps any of the experience or expertise that other candidates might have. And if the point is that Biden provides so much more knowledge because of his experience on the Foreign Relations Committee, what about this 2007 quote from Senator Obama?
First, he said, I’m on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where I serve with a number of Senators who are widely regarded as leading experts on foreign policy — and I can tell you that I know as much about foreign policy at this point as most of them.
Perhaps someone could ask Senator Obama if Joe Biden was included in that sweeping bit of arrogance?
Of course, there are all the quotes that everyone has been storing up of what Biden has said previously about both McCain and Obama. Check out Jim Geraghty’s handy list that includes some of these quotes that the McCain team is already putting into ads.
Biden, on a post-debate appearance on MSNBC, October 30, 2007: “The only guy on the other side who’s qualified is John McCain.”
Biden appearing on The Daily Show, August 2, 2005: “John McCain is a personal friend, a great friend, and I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off, be well off no matter who…”
Also from that Observer interview: “But — and the ‘but’ was clearly inevitable — he doubts whether American voters are going to elect ‘a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate,’ and added: ‘I don’t recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan or a tactic.’”
September 26, 2007: Biden for President Campaign Manager Luis Navarro said, “Sen. Obama said he would do everything possible to end the war in Iraq and emphasized the need for a political solution yet he failed to show up to vote for Sen. Biden’s critical amendment to provide a political solution in Iraq.
Are all these statements part of that vaunted experience and wisdom that Obama is looking for in his pick?
And you can add in all his statements in 2002 about the need to go to war to take out Saddam Hussein’s WMD.
Biden on “Meet the Press” in 2002, discussing Saddam Hussein: “He’s a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security… “We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.”
Biden on Meet the Press in 2002: “Saddam must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.”
Biden on Meet the Press in 2007, on Hussein’s WMDs: “Well, the point is, it turned out they didn’t, but everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them. He catalogued — they catalogued them. This was not some, some Cheney, you know, pipe dream. This was, in fact, catalogued.”
He was against the sort of pull out from Iraq that the Democrats were pushing before the 2006 elections.
Biden to the Brookings Institution in 2005: “We can call it quits and withdraw from Iraq. I think that would be a gigantic mistake. Or we can set a deadline for pulling out, which I fear will only encourage our enemies to wait us out — equally a mistake.”
But then, as he was running for president, he was against the surge and was as convinced as Obama that that would be a mistake. So they both got that one wrong.
On Meet the Press, January 7, 2007, assessing the proposal of a surge of troops to Iraq: “If he surges another 20, 30, or whatever number he’s going to, into Baghdad, it’ll be a tragic mistake, in my view, but, as a practical matter, there’s no way to say, ‘Mr. President, stop.’”
And then Mickey Kaus reminds us of this prize Biden moment from 1987 when he made five boasts about his academic record. And four of them were totally, disprovably false.
He then went on to say that he ”went to law school on a full academic scholarship - the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,” Mr. Biden said. He also said that he ”ended up in the top half” of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was ”the outstanding student in the political science department” and ”graduated with three degrees from college.”
The moot court thing seems to check out. The other boasts - not so much. He was 76th in a class of 85.
But the real kicker is what he told the guy who seemed to be asking a rather mild question:
The tape, which was made available by C-SPAN in response to a reporter’s request, showed a testy exchange in response to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as ”Frank.” Mr. Biden looked at his questioner and said: ”I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.”
So now the Democrats have two guys who think they’re smarter than other people and who like to talk a lot. They’re the all arrogant, all talk ticket. Perhaps the McCain people can find that C-Span tape and run clips of the friendly Joe Biden telling some guy he meets in a campaign event that he thinks he has a much higher I.Q. That will go over big.
Joe’s excuse for all the prevarications in that exchange?
‘I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Mr. Biden said, ”but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.”
Well, except for the four statements that weren’t true.
Sure, McCain graduated near the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, but at least he has never pretended otherwise.
Michael Crowley at the New Republic had this profile of Biden back in 2001. Biden was convinced that the man and the moment had arrived. He had the expertise from the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee that would be necessary after 9/11. He had been warning about terrorism back in the 1990s after the Oklahoma bombing. All that is good. And sure, as Crowley points out, the guy goes on and on and on when he talks, but people like him.
Then there is this one anecdote.
At the Tuesday-morning meeting with committee staffers, Biden launches into a stream-of-consciousness monologue about what his committee should be doing, before he finally admits the obvious: “I’m groping here.” Then he hits on an idea: America needs to show the Arab world that we’re not bent on its destruction. “Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran,” Biden declares. He surveys the table with raised eyebrows, a ‘How do ya like that?’ look on his face.
The staffers sit in silence. Finally somebody ventures a response: “I think they’d send it back.” Then another aide speaks up delicately: “The thing I would worry about is that it would almost look like a publicity stunt.” Still another reminds Biden that an Iranian delegation is in Moscow that very day to discuss a $300 million arms deal with Vladimir Putin that the United States has strongly condemned. But Joe Biden is barely listening anymore. He’s already moved on to something else.
Besides the ludicrousness of the idea of giving a couple of hundred million to Iran, who had never shown any inclination that they were favorably disposed to the United States, doesn’t this vaunted expert on foreign policy realize that the Iranians are not Arabs and so giving them money out of the blue wouldn’t do anything to make Arabs feel better about the U.S.?
With this pick, a fun and fascinating political campaign just got a whole lot more fun. The big story for the next few two and a half months will be whether or not Biden can keep from making any more fun gaffes.– Perhaps, he does have that sort of will power, but he’s never demonstrated it yet.
He’s also going to have to start explaining how Obama didn’t have the experience to be commander in chief a year ago, but having spent a year on the campaign trail, now he’s gained it. Yeah, that will be believable. And if he truly believes that going around in the campaign bubble for a year and a half prepares someone to be the president, then why should we be impressed with Biden’s 35 and a half years in the Senate?
Well, at least Obama-Biden does have a sort of a nice rhythm and ring to it.
Get more Betsy, click here.
In popular mythology, the Ostrich is famous for hiding its head in the sand at the first sign of danger.[38] The Roman writer Pliny the Elder is noted for his descriptions of the ostrich in his Naturalis Historia, where he describes the Ostrich and the fact that it hides its head in a bush
It's a metaphor for avoiding any facts that might disagree with your preconceived ideas
I guess metaphors and similes and logic just aren't taught in bot school
Keep dreaming
Biden was absolutely the best choice that Barry could have made to help the repubs
They'll now he his verbal gaffes to add on to Barry's when he's off the teleprompter
What difference does it make whether he likes ROmney??
Biden has already stated that Barry isn't ready for prime time and that McCain is
Joe Biden: Foreign Policy Savant
consistency isn't a virtue when you're always wrong
Posted by: Streiff
Saturday, August 23, 2008 at 08:54AM
3 Comments
Other than comedic relief the only possible reason Barack Obama could have for choosing Joe Biden as his running mate (other than the obvious which is to reassure the political center that he will have a babysitter should he be elected president) is his alleged foreign policy expertise.
Biden has a long track record in foreign policy that we will explore in the coming days.
Consider:
* Joe Biden was in favor of the Nuclear Freeze movement of which large parts were subsidized by the KGB.
* Joe Biden was in favor of sustaining the communist dictatorship in Nicaragua and against supporting a nascent democracy in El Salvador.
* Joe Biden was against the development and deployment of MX and Trident ICBMs.
* Joe Biden voted against the use of force to force Iraq to leave Kuwait in 1990.
* Joe Biden was, and as far as I know still, in favor of breaking up Iraq into unsustainable ethnic ghettos and leaving.
Glib and verbose does not equal intelligent or insightfu
LMAO
THe hide your hand in the sand theory of information gathering
BRILLIANT
Peg doesn't click on links. doesn't do you tube
I guess life is stress free when you opinions are just downloaded from you programmer
LMAO
Tough choices????
Choosing a man as your running mate who said he'd be honored to run as McCain's running mate sounds like an easy choice- only an idiot would do that
Yep, brilliant- the campaign of hope and change chooses a 35 year Washington pol with lobbying ties and many previous problems ( plagiarism etc )
It just shows Obama's desperation in recognizing that he just an empty suit and people are seeing him for what he is
YEp, the prosecutor in a case is always the best unbiased source for information and analysis
Fitz wasn't on tirqal and any statement he made was just his opinion and he would never be subject to perjury. Every closing statement by any attorney for a guilty client would then be subject to perjury charges Get a f'n clue
Duh
You'll continue to believe whatever your bias forces you to, but bottom line despite your rationalizing. no one will be convicted of outing Plame in a criminal or civil court
AP: Biden choice demonstrates lack of confidence; Update: Plagiarism flashbacks
posted at 8:20 am on August 23, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Ron Fournier makes the obvious analysis with Barack Obama's selection of Joe Biden as running mate. The AP's political analyst says the move acknowledges Obama's weakness in experience and foreign policy, and shows the pressure coming from Democrats worried about losing the election:
In picking Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, Barack Obama sought to shore up his weakness -- inexperience in office and on foreign policy -- rather than underscore his strength as a new-generation candidate defying political conventions.
He picked a 35-year veteran of the Senate -- the ultimate insider -- rather than a candidate from outside Washington, such as Govs. Tim Kaine of Virginia or Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas; or from outside his party, such as Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska; or from outside the mostly white male club of vice presidential candidates. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't even make his short list.
The picks say something profound about Obama: For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn't beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden pick is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative -- a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.
It's an admission that Obama's inexperience has finally begun worrying voters, and not just Democratic power brokers. There really is no other way to see an addition of Biden to the ticket. Obama can't be worried about carrying Delaware, after all; it's as safe a state that Democrats have. Nor does Biden have a natural national constituency, as his own flop of a presidential campaign proved this cycle.
The Biden choice is an act of desperation borne of a summer-long catastrophe. There isn't any other reason for Obama to choose a 35-year veteran of the Senate with as long a history of gaffes and flat-out dishonesty as his second on the campaign for Hope and Change. In fact, I can't wait for writers to twist themselves into knots to avoid the cardinal sin of writing, plagiarism, which Biden committed more than once, as Jim Geraghty recounted in 2003:
"Much like Gary Hart, he's identified more with the party's presidential past than its present or future," said political scientist Larry Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia. "He was, after all, forced out by a mini-scandal which would come up again."
In 1987, Biden quit the Democratic primary race early after the revelation that he had delivered, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock. A barrage of subsidiary revelations by the press also hammered Biden's image: a serious plagiarism incident from his law-school years, boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event, and the discovery of other quotations in Biden's speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians.
Now Obama, who supposedly represents a new brand of politics, has instead hitched his wagon to an old-time pol who has trouble coming up with his own words when he campaigns. That's desperation, and what's more, it's obvious desperation. And in politics, just as in dating, desperation is not an aphrodisiac.
Update: E.J. Dionne contemporaneously covered Biden's plagiarism in college and on the 1987 campaign trail in detail for the New York Times. Note that in lifting Neil Kinnock's speech, he attributed to his own family the humble origins of Kinnock's -- which wasn't true.
Update II: Maureen Dowd also covered the plagiarism of Biden's speech in 1987 for the New York Times, and contrary to what Biden claims now, he didn't credit Kinnock in other deliveries of the speech:
Mr. Donilon noted that Mr. Biden - who has been working to overhaul his message, which earlier included themes and words reminiscent of John F. Kennedy, as his campaign got off to a shaky start - had credited various ideas he took from Mr. Kinnock at several other campaign appearances. But, at those times, Mr. Biden was talking more generally about Mr. Kinnock's concept of building a party that could be a platform for the middle class to improve their lives and the lives of their children.
Asked which of Mr. Biden's relatives had been coal miners, Mr. Donilon said the Senator had not necessarily been referring to his own relatives but had been talking about the "people that his ancestors grew up with in the Scranton region, and in general the people of that region were coal miners."
Told that Mr. Biden had used the phrase, "my ancestors," Mr. Donilon said, "Evidently he had a great-grandfather who worked in a mining company." Asked the name of the man, the company and the sort of job he held, Mr. Donilon pronounced himself at a loss.
How delicious is it that the two reporters whose work recalls Biden's theft of Kinnock's personal anecdotes as well as speech are Maureen Dowd and E.J. Dionne?
Bill & Barack's Excellent Adventure
By Thomas Lifson
William Ayers, unrepentant terrorist and education professor, is once again being tied to Barack Obama in the public mind. Controversy builds over the withholding of the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an expensive failed school reform effort headed by Obama and effectively run by Ayers, held by the library of the University of Illinois Chicago. Researchers who have gained access to a few documents recording the history of the project have found strong evidence of a very important working relationship between the two men on the project, Obama's sole claim to executive experience.
Oddly enough, even though the project produced no measurable improvement in student performance according to its own final report, educators and administrators -- participants and grantees of the CAC -- were reported by outside monitors to be often "ebullient" about the activities. For insiders, it was an excellent adventure. For the pupils stuck in the failing public schools of Chicago, an ongoing, unrelieved disaster.
Obama and his campaign long have gone out of their way to downplay, in fact distort, the long and evidently deep relationship between Ayers and Obama. In the Philadelphia Democratic debate last April, George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with Ayers, and the candidate responded:
"This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.
"And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George. [....]
"So this kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, is somehow -- somehow their ideas could be attributed to me -- I think the American people are smarter than that. They're not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn't."
Almost two months earlier, the "neighbor" talking point campaign manager David Axelrod introduced the notion that Obama and Ayers were mostly just neighbors, telling The Politico's Ben Smith,
"Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school," he said. "They're certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together."
Ayers and his wife are in their sixties, while the Obamas are in their mid-forties. Ayers' children are all adults, while Obama's children are currently 10 and 7. Axelrod's prevarication is telling, bespeaking confidence that nobody in the media will bother to dispute an obvious falsehood.
"Flimsy" turns out to be a completely misleading word when it comes to characterizing the Obama-Ayers relationship.
Notwithstanding the campaign's efforts to direct attention away from Ayers, a 527 group, American Issues Project, has just released the following ad tying Obama to Ayers, and says it is spending 2.8 million on television airtime in key states.
Despite the legally questionable embargo of the CAC archives, most of its tax returns and official evaluations of the CAC have already been made public. In the hands of intrepid bloggers such as Steve Diamond, Tom Maguire and Dan Riehl, there is already proof of Obama's extensive involvement with Ayers over the course of his chairmanship, and an emerging picture of Obama's indecisiveness and absence when serious problems needed leadership.
Barack Obama joined the CAC shortly after William Ayers and Anne C. Hallett received news that their letter of November 8, 1994 submitting a grant proposal to The Annenberg Challenge had been approved. They were to get as much as $49 million from Annenberg, plus tens of millions more dollars from other foundations. Obama's involvement predates by months the actual incorporation of the CAC and his appointment as founding chairman of the board. He came on board almost as soon as the proposal was approved.
How on earth did a relatively unknown associate at a politically-connected but small Chicago law firm come to be entrusted with the heady task of handing out tens of millions of dollars of other people's money?
Keep in mind that Obama was at this point in his career very undistinguished considering his pedigree. It would be a kind understatement to say he had underperformed his academic resume. Three years out of Harvard Law and the Law Review Presidency, here is a short list of some of the things Obama had not done:
Clerked for a US Supreme Court Justice (or any Federal Judge);
worked in an important legal position at any level of serious responsibility;
written a law review article or note or published anything of legal substance.
As of 1995 Obama may have had the most professionally empty resume of any President of the Harvard Law Review three years gone from "The Law School."
And yet Ayers gave him a gig that would enable him to hand out large amounts of money to many people in Chicago, who could be expected to be grateful, once Obama ran for office -- as he was to do later that very year, in an event held at the home of Ayers and Dohrn.
Quite clearly, Obama was already well-enough known and trusted by Ayers to be offered the sensitive, prestigious and highly visible post of chairman of this important new undertaking. So we must ask, when did Obama and Ayers actually first get to know one another? And how did they come to trust one another?
One possible connection between Ayers and Obama was Sidley Austin, the prestigious Chicago law firm where Obama had a summer job after his first year at Harvard Law School, and where he met his future wife Michelle, assigned to him as a mentor. Also working at Sidley Austin was Bernadine Dohrn, wife of William Ayers, and a fellow Weather Underground terrorist. Given the shared "progressive" politics of the three, they probably knew one another and associated together at a firm known as a white shoe corporate practice.
Or Obama might have met Ayers even earlier, during his stint as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, in fact. Ayers was a well-known and very active figure in left wing Chicago politics, and might have encountered the young, articulate, Ivy League educated rookie black radical Obama, working in a Saul Alinksy spinoff.
We soon will know much more about the period of collaboration between Obama and Ayers following the start of the CAC. Even if the archives continue to be withheld from public scrutiny, the cat is out of the bag with the documents available to all. The formidable analytical engine of bloggers trading insights and new data is warming up.
But the period prior to 1995, the time when Bill and Barack, the terrorist and the presidential aspirant, got to know one another and build the relationship of trust, is one excellent adventure likely to remain obscure.
Hat tip: James Edward Pennington and Ed Lasky
Thomas Lifson is editor and publisher of American Thinker.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/08/bill_baracks_excellent_adventu.html
Check out the Aptera- only for sale in Ca. right now
Way cool electric car
Hey, tell it to the judge(s)- again, no one was ( or will be ) convicted of outing Valerie Plame
See, reading rantings in left wing blogs is NOT reflective of reality
I'm sure you're still convinced Bush is gonna be impeached also, huh?
What's really funniest is that no one was or will be convicted- in criminal or civil court for outing anyone
What's funnierest is that you still continue to believe that she as in danger or actually working undercover
She had a desk job in Virginia and did TWO photo shoots in magazines after her dangerous outing
Has the Gaffe Machine Gone Too Far?
Barack Obama without a teleprompter is an accident waiting to happen. Sometimes he reveals his ignorance of history, sometimes he stumbles incoherently, and sometimes he blurts out what he really believes. That's what happened today when Obama tried to talk about Georgia, a topic that has embarrassed him more than once already, beginning when, in the first hours after the invasion, he parroted the Russian line.
Today Obama equated Russia's invasion of Georgia with our toppling of Saddam Hussein:
Democrat Barack Obama scolded Russia again on Wednesday for invading another country's sovereign territory while adding a new twist: the United States, he said, should set a better example on that front, too.
The Illinois senator's opposition to the Iraq war, which his comment clearly referenced, is well known. But this was the first time the Democratic presidential candidate has made a comparison between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia's recent military activity in Georgia.
"We've got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies," Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. "They can't charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point."
So our "charging into" Iraq--with dozens of allies, supported by a U.N. resolution, as a last resort after six months of build-up and negotiations, to unseat one of the cruelest dictators of modern times who had twice invaded neighboring states, was in violation of more than a dozen U.N. resolutions and was responsible for the deaths of something like two million people, who was shooting at American aircraft and had tried to assassinate a former President of the United States, in Obama's childish mind, was just like Russia's "charging into" Georgia, which resembles Saddam's Iraq in no respect. And, of course, we invaded a horrifying charnel-house so as to establish a democracy, whereas Russia invaded a peaceful democracy that it wants to re-incorporate into its empire.
Is Obama an idiot? I don't think so, really. But one of the many problems with being a leftist is that it leads you to say lots of stupid things. Today, the Obama gaffe machine went into overdrive. By November, I suspect that most voters will have heard enough to know that Barack Obama is unqualified to be a middle-manager in a well-run company, let alone President of the United States.
Hey, looks like the Plame civil suit got laughed out of court
Go figure
How about when he launched his political career, it was at Ayers house
There are tons of other connections
But, if he is just part of the intellegentsia, why try and hide the connections?
Ayers in 2006: Weather Underground a "great teaching moment"
posted at 12:30 pm on August 21, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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For those still unfamiliar with the "mainstream" William Ayers, as Barack Obama described him on his campaign web site, this 2006 interview with Venezuelan socialist Luis Bonilla-Molina, founder of the Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM). In this clip, Ayers speaks about how the Vietnam War forced an escalation of tactics to violence and notes the terrorist Weather Underground as a "great teaching moment" -- a telling description for this professor of education:
3:20 - The particular crisis we faced with the Vietnam War was a crisis that called on us to escalate, to resist in more intense and, and, uh, uh, in more extreme ways. But one way of looking at it is that the Weather Underground was a great teaching moment. And, to the extent that we didn't fully realize what we were trying to do, we were bad teachers, and to the extent that we did good things, we were good teachers.
5:42 - I mean, to go from underground, when we really thought we were in a revolutionary crisis … and there's no question that when we left the underground, we lost something valuable -- we lost our treasure.
Note the Che picture in the background, too. It goes well with the mission of CIM, which is "to create critical thinking and raise consciousness to advance the idea of 21st Century Socialism," according to the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, a British apologist group for Hugo Chavez and his regime. Bonilla Molina himself co-authored a history of the "Bolivarian Revolution" with Chavez' personal aide, Hairman el-Troudi.
Ayers explains that America forced him to become a terrorist, and that leaving the terrorist life was a setback to him and the movement. That hardly sounds as if Ayers repents of his former life; in fact, he believes he made a mistake by leaving it. In other words, the "great teaching moment" wasn't that political violence was wrong -- it was that he should have kept it going.
The Weather Underground wasn't a "great teaching moment" for anyone interested in normal political activism. It only "taught" violence and terrorism. The long association of Barack Obama and the Daleys with this radical doesn't make Ayers mainstream -- it puts Obama and Daily out of the mainstream, and squarely among radical sympathizers. Who else would work with such an unrepentant terrorist and fringe radical for years on two different projects?
Blowback
Note from Hot Air manageme
Look at this video:
I TOLD YOU THAT IT WAS A BAD IDEA for Obama to bring up houses again. "Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses?"
Plus, more Rezko reminiscences. "On June 15, 2005, Obama bought a gorgeous house in Hyde Park for $1.65 million - $300,000 below the list price. Rezko bought the empty but attractive lot next door from the same seller at the same time; Obama would later buy part of Rezko's lot, overpaying him. The transaction was shady, but not obviously corrupt. The overall Obama-Rezko relationship looks worse." And now the McCain people have an excuse to bring it up.
But wait, there's more:
Obama is more vulnerable on this stuff than he thinks. Not only because of Rezko but because of Jim Johnson, his former go-to-guy on veeps who was instrumental to the mortgage crisis we have today as Chairman of Fannie Mae.
Indeed.
OBAMA: OF COURSE THE SURGE SUCCEEDED:
Sen. Barack Obama, edging away from a long-held position, tacitly acknowledged the success of the Iraq troop-surge strategy during an appearance Tuesday before the country's largest organization of combat veterans.
"Let's be clear, our troops have completed every mission they've been given," Mr. Obama said at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Orlando, Fla., where the likely Democratic presidential nominee courted military voters who are expected to play a pivotal role in several swing states. "They have created the space for political reconciliation."
Well, he's only a few months late in recognizing that.
UPDATE: Reader James Paternoster emails: "So the mission was accomplished? Time for a photoshop of Obama on the Lincoln with President Bush? That, too, marked the success of their first mission, which was to overthrow Saddam Hussein. I never expected Obama to recognize that. :)"
Heh.
More of Barry's lies
Embracing the Axis of Evil: An Obama Adviser Goes To Syria and Comes Home Unsure if He Was Used
It's like pregnancy. You either are or you are not. There is no middle ground.
Posted by: Erick Erickson
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 at 10:51AM
2 Comments
Obama has previously said he would unconditionally meet with the presidents of Syria and Iran.
Now one of his advisors has gone to Syria to offer some advice to Syria's leaders.
Daniel Kurtzer, one of Obama's many, many foreign policy advisers, went to Syria and met with Syria's Foreign Minister, Walid al-Moallem.
Kurtzer and the Obama campaign say this was unrelated to the campaign. There seems to be a series of Obama advisers doing things on the national and international stage that all of a sudden do not represent the Obama camp once they are caught, despite clear benefits to the campaign.
You and I both know it'd be front page in the New York Times were this guy an adviser to John McCain. Look at how hard the Times and others pushed the "Randy Scheunemann used to be a lobbyist for Georgia" story.
There are some serious take away points from the article and we, yet again, must question who these people are with whom Obama has chosen to surround himself.
First, the trip was paid for by an oil company. Yes, an Obama adviser went to visit the junior partner of the Axis of Evil using petro-dollars. Again, imagine the outcry if he worked for McCain.
Second, the guy may have been used by the Syrians. Don't believe me? Look at what Kurtzer himself says.
"None of us thought we were being used or abused," he added. "But we will see over time."
What the heck? Can you imagine the stink the media and Obama would make had this been a McCain adviser [Note: A McCain adviser would not answer the question so vaguely about being used. It'd be a definitive "no" unlike this guy]. And this is the guy Obama took to Israel last month to advise him on Middle Eastern issues!?!?!?! Now, here is the real kicker. Tony Badran, an expert with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, notes that
"[I]t's not a secret that the Syrians are openly banking on Barack Obama. It's not surprising that they would build bridges in advance and do this through the window of the peace process."
We have Obama's Mid-East guy, the one he selected to go with him to Israel last month, use petro-dollars to fly to Syria to meet with Syria's foreign minister, and he does not know if he was being used.
Obama lacks the experience to deal with these issues himself and lacks the judgment to surround himself with people who can deal with the issues without being used by the other side.
The world is far too dangerous a place to put Obama in office if he's going to surround himself with people like Mr. Kurtzer.
Conservative Scholar Takes On U. of Illinois in Fight Over Papers Linked to Obama
Stanley Kurtz suspects that the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is playing down his ties to the radical left. The conservative scholar just can’t prove it.
That’s because the University of Illinois at Chicago, which houses the papers of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge — a defunct education foundation with ties to both Mr. Obama and the former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers — won’t let him see the papers.
Mr. Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, says the university initially said he could review the records, but then revoked the permission just before he left for Chicago, explaining that portions of the files were restricted. When Mr. Kurtz suggested that the restricted documents be removed from the files, he was told that the donor had informed the university that it did “not have a signed deed of gift,” and therefore had no legal right to release the documents, he recounts in an article in the National Review.
Ultimately he was allowed to peruse only a single folder from the records. In the article, Mr. Kurtz speculates that Mr. Ayers, a longtime professor of education at the college, may have been the interfering donor. He asks readers to write to the president of the University of Illilnois system demanding that he release the donor’s identity and make the records public.
“Not only would these files illuminate the working relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, they would also provide significant insight into a web of ties linking Obama to various radical organizations,” he writes.
Now tell us how Reuters is a right wing org
LOL
Poll shows McCain in 5-point lead over Obama
Wed Aug 20, 2008 8:01am EDT
By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a sharp turnaround, Republican John McCain has opened a 5-point lead on Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential race and is seen as a stronger manager of the economy, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.
McCain leads Obama among likely U.S. voters by 46 percent to 41 percent, wiping out Obama's solid 7-point advantage in July and taking his first lead in the monthly Reuters/Zogby poll.
The reversal follows a month of attacks by McCain, who has questioned Obama's experience, criticized his opposition to most new offshore oil drilling and mocked his overseas trip.
The poll was taken Thursday through Saturday as Obama wrapped up a weeklong vacation in Hawaii that ceded the political spotlight to McCain, who seized on Russia's invasion of Georgia to emphasize his foreign policy views.
"There is no doubt the campaign to discredit Obama is paying off for McCain right now," pollster John Zogby said. "This is a significant ebb for Obama."
McCain now has a 9-point edge, 49 percent to 40 percent, over Obama on the critical question of who would be the best manager of the economy -- an issue nearly half of voters said was their top concern in the November 4 presidential election.
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Barack Obama 264 John McCain 274