F6 - nice start .. then the bimbo took 1.57 to turn me off the other videos .. John Koster? (raised eyebrows) .. Jack Wu (i forget) .. then "scientists are very close minded", hmmm, reconsider isn't a hope i guess .. then Bishop Daniel Jenky, a bishop .. yeah, i had 'without a brain', but guess he has one .. the Jacksonville Fla. gas station effigy was horrific to see .. October job report good .. and the links? .. like i said nice start, that "Knock-Knock-Knocking On Hell's Door" is really a money maker, eh .. wow!
lol .. i hereby make claim to be the 2nd one to click recently on EVERYONE of your links .. top effort F6, there is so much more anyone could say to that one .. anyway, moving on .. Yahoo is weakening ..
Obama seems to have early vote lead in key states
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER | Associated Press – 12 hrs ago
.. image inside .. Associated Press/David Goldman - Supporters spell out "Ohio" as they cheer for Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, not pictured, as he speaks during a campaign event at …more
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama heads toward Election Day with an apparent lead over Republican Mitt Romney among early voters in key states that could decide the election.
Obama's advantage, however, isn't as big as the one he had over John McCain four years ago, giving Romney's campaign hope that the former Massachusetts governor can erase the gap when people vote on Tuesday.
More than 27 million people already have voted in 34 states and the District of Columbia. No votes will be counted until Election Day but several battleground states are releasing the party affiliation of people who have voted early.
So far, Democratic voters outnumber Republicans in Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio — five states that could decide the election, if they voted the same way. Republicans have the edge in Colorado, which Obama won in 2008.
Obama dominated early voting in 2008, building up such big leads in Colorado, Florida, Iowa and North Carolina that he won each state despite losing the Election Day vote, according to voting data compiled by The Associated Press.
"In 2008, the McCain campaign didn't have any mobilization in place to really do early voting," said Michael McDonald, an early voting expert at George Mason University who tallies voting statistics for the United States Elections Project. "This time around the Romney campaign is not making the same mistake as the McCain campaign did."
McDonald said he sees a shift toward Republicans among early voters, which could make a difference in North Carolina, which Obama won by the slimmest of margins in 2008, only 14,000 votes. The Republican shift, however, might not be enough to wipe out Obama's advantage in Iowa and Nevada, which Obama won more comfortably in 2008.
In Colorado, Florida and Ohio, get ready for a long night of vote counting on Tuesday.
Romney's campaign aides say they are doing so much better than McCain did four years ago that Romney is in great shape to overtake Obama in many of the most competitive states.
"They are underperforming what their 2008 numbers were and we are overperforming where we were in 2008," said Rich Beeson, Romney's political director. "We feel very good heading into the Tuesday election."
Obama's campaign counters that Romney can't win the presidency simply by doing better than McCain.
"It's not about whether or not they're doing better than John McCain did," said Jeremy Bird, Obama's national field director. "It's about whether or not they're doing better than us."
About 35 percent of voters are expected to cast ballots before Tuesday, either by mail or in person.
Voters always can cross party lines when they vote for any office, and there are enough independent voters in many states to swing the election, if enough of them vote the same way. Still, both campaigns are following the early voting numbers closely, using them to gauge their progress and plan their Election Day strategies.
A look at early voting in the tightest states:
___
Colorado
About 1.6 million people have voted, and Republicans outnumber Democrats 37 percent to 35 percent. Those numbers are a reversal from four years ago at this time. Inevitably, Obama won the early vote by 9 percentage points in 2008, giving him a big enough cushion to win the state, despite narrowly losing the Election Day vote.
Early voting in Colorado is expected to account for about 80 percent of all votes cast, giving it more weight than in other states.
___
Florida
About 3.9 million people have voted, and 43 percent were Democrats and 40 percent were Republicans. For years ago at this time, Democratic early voters had a 9 percentage point lead over Republicans.
Obama won Florida's early vote by 10 percentage points in 2008, getting 400,000 more early votes than McCain, enough to offset McCain's advantage on Election Day.
In Florida, Republicans have historically done better among people who vote by mail, while Democrats have done better among people who vote early in person. For 2012, Florida's Republican-led Legislature reduced the number of in-person early voting days from 14 to eight.
The Obama campaign responded by encouraging more supporters to vote by mail, and Democrats were able to narrow the gap among mail ballots. Democrats quickly took the lead among all early voters, once in-person early voting started. But the margins are slim.
The Obama campaign acknowledges it must do better among Florida's Election Day voters than Obama did on 2008, when McCain won the Election Day vote by 5 percentage points.
___
Iowa
About 614,000 people have voted, already exceeding Iowa's total number of early votes in 2008. So far this year, 43 percent of early voters were Democrats and 32 percent were Republicans.
Four years ago, Obama won the early vote in Iowa by a whopping 27 percentage points, 63 percent to 36 percent. McCain, meanwhile, won the Election Day vote by about 1,800 votes — less than a percentage point. Together, they added up to a 10-point victory for Obama.
Romney's campaign argues that Democrats always do better among early voters in Iowa while Republicans do better among Election Day voters, even when President George W. Bush narrowly carried the state in 2004.
Obama's campaign counters that with early voting on the rise, Romney will be left with fewer Election Day voters to make up the difference.
___
Nevada
About 628,000 people have voted, and 44 percent were Democrats and 37 percent were Republicans. Four years ago, Obama won Nevada's early vote big, 59 percent to 39 percent. Obama also won Nevada's Election Day vote on his way to a comfortable 13-point win over McCain.
The Romney campaign argues that Obama isn't doing nearly as well among early voters in Nevada as he did in 2008. The Obama campaign argues that it doesn't have to.
___
North Carolina
About 2.5 million people have voted, and 48 percent of them were Democrats and 32 percent of them were Republicans. Four years ago at this time, Democrats had a slightly larger lead over Republicans, and Obama won the early vote by 11 percentage points.
Obama lost the Election Day Vote by 17 percentage points in 2008. But the early vote was much bigger than the Election Day vote, resulting in Obama's narrow win.
Obama's campaign cites the big lead for Democrats among early voters, while Romney's campaign argues that even a small shift toward the Republicans could flip the state to Romney.
___
Ohio
More than 1.6 million people have voted, and 29 percent were Democrats and 23 percent were Republicans. Forty-seven percent were unaffiliated, more than enough voters to swing the state to either candidate.
Ohio may once again be pivotal in the race for the presidency. Unfortunately, Ohio's early voting data is limited. Party affiliation in Ohio is based on the last primary in which a voter participated, so new voters and those who don't vote in primaries are listed as unaffiliated.
In 2008, Obama won Ohio by 5 percentage points.
___
Associated Press Senior Elections Research Coordinator Cliff Maceda contributed to this report.
But in early September, he broke with practice and hosted a special one-hour show, asking his audience, “Does Mitt Romney [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/mitt-romney ]’s Mormonism make him too scary or weird to be elected to president of the United States?”
Mr. Beck has not always supported Mr. Romney. (“I think he’s an honorable man, but I don’t trust him,” he said last year.) But as perhaps the best-known Mormon after the Republican presidential candidate and a major influence on evangelical Christians, Mr. Beck has emerged as an unlikely theological bridge between the first Mormon presidential nominee and a critical electorate.
At the same time, Mr. Beck’s defense of his and Mr. Romney’s shared faith speaks to the long-frayed relationship between evangelical Christians and Mormons and raises the question of whether evangelicals will ultimately put aside religious differences and vote on common conservative issues.
During his special program, Mr. Beck took questions from mostly evangelical Christian listeners, colorfully debunking misperceptions about Mormonism. The “magic underwear” was compared to a skullcap, and Mr. Beck insisted that polygamy [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/polygamy/index.html ] was seen as a “perversion” in the modern church.
“It’s not weird to be a Mormon,” he assured his listeners at the end of the program, “and it’s not weird to be president if you’re Mormon.”
Although Mr. Beck’s national media profile has waned since he left Fox News last year, his support among his core audience remains strong. “The Glenn Beck Program” is typically the third-most-popular talk-news radio show, after “The Rush Limbaugh Show” and “The Sean Hannity Show.” In September, an agreement was reached with Dish Network to bring Mr. Beck’s online network, The Blaze, to traditional television.
Mr. Beck’s unique position as both a Mormon and a prominent voice among evangelicals has been too tempting for Mr. Romney’s campaign to pass up. Campaign officials have quietly courted Mr. Beck, according to a person briefed on his meetings with campaign surrogates who could not discuss private conversations publicly. Mr. Beck declined to comment for this article.
Last month, Mr. Beck, along with former Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Romney’s son Josh, headlined a Dallas fund-raiser that brought in more than $250,000 for the Romney Victory committee, and on Friday Mr. Beck held a rally in Columbus, Ohio, intended to influence voters in that swing state. On Saturday, he attended Mr. Romney’s rally in Dubuque, Iowa.
Stalwart conservatives who support the Romney-Ryan ticket, like Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas; Rick Santorum, a former senator and Republican presidential candidate; and retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin, have appeared on Mr. Beck’s program not so much to tout Mr. Romney directly as to discuss hot-button political issues like the handling of the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya.
Mostly Mr. Beck has helped Mr. Romney by directly addressing his devout Mormon faith, something the candidate himself rarely does. “I believe Mr. Romney prays on his knees every day,” Mr. Beck said recently on his radio program. “I believe he is being guided.” He has also said that a Romney victory would be “a sign from God.”
Mr. Romney already enjoys a commanding lead among white evangelical Protestant voters — 76 percent to 17 percent for President Obama, according to a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey released on Monday [ http://projects.pewforum.org/2012-presidential-election-candidate-religious-groups/#for-obama ], and 54 percent to Mr. Obama’s 39 percent among Protestant voters. Influential Christian leaders including the Rev. Billy Graham and Ralph Reed have endorsed Mr. Romney.
But deep-rooted tensions between Mormons and evangelical Christians persist, and could affect the turnout on Tuesday, several evangelical leaders said.
“Romney has staked out issues that are aligned with evangelicals,” said Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for the conservative nonprofit American Family Association. But, he added, Mr. Romney’s faith may ultimately present a problem in the voting booth. “It’s still an issue for some evangelicals and may influence their voting decision on Nov. 6,” he said. “There are a number of evangelicals who will not vote for someone who doesn’t adhere to orthodox Christianity.”
Mr. Beck and Mr. Romney’s relationship dates to before the presidential campaign when they crossed paths from time to time at events in Salt Lake City. In 2009, Mr. Romney called Mr. Beck “my friend and a statesman in his own right” when he announced Mr. Beck via video at a fund-raiser for George Wythe University.
Born a Roman Catholic, Mr. Beck, 48, converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1999 just before he married his second wife, Tania. His personal story of born-again transformation from drug addict and alcoholic to best-selling inspirational author, as well as his rants against big government, made him a favorite among Tea Party [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/tea_party_movement/index.html ] conservatives.
But that does not mean they accept him as one of their own, spiritually speaking. Mr. Beck has come under fire from religious leaders, especially after his 2010 Restoring Honor rally in Washington, which some evangelical leaders suggested was a Mormon tent revival masquerading as a political event. Denny Burk, an associate professor of biblical studies at Boyce College in Louisville, Ky., part of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, called the event “Mormon-American-pie-populist politics.”
Russell D. Moore, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said, “It’s sad to see so many Christians confusing Mormon politics or American nationalism with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Mr. Fischer said of the complicated relationship between evangelical Christians and Mormons that “evangelicals appreciate what Glenn Beck has done in refocusing attention on the values of our founding fathers,” but “that doesn’t mean evangelicals regard him as a Christian.”
“I think when people of other faiths decide to focus more on common values and less on common theology, they can get quite comfortable with Mitt Romney,” said Mark DeMoss, an evangelical Christian and a senior adviser to Mr. Romney.
The focus on issues rather than religious outreach has been a relief to some evangelical leaders. “I’m frankly surprised and relieved that I don’t see a movement of evangelicals who are waiting to claim Mitt Romney as a brother in Christ,” Mr. Moore said in an interview. “He’s won over evangelicals politically, not religiously.”
The reluctance to embrace Mormonism was reflected in a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey [ http://www.pewforum.org/christian/mormon/mormons-in-america-executive-summary.aspx ], released Jan. 12, that found that about a third of adults in the United States said Mormonism was not a Christian faith and 17 percent said they did not know. Until last month, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s Web site listed Mormonism as a “cult” along with Scientology and Jehovah’s Witnesses. That characterization was taken off the Web site last month around the time that Mr. Graham endorsed Mr. Romney. The Rev. Franklin Graham, chief executive of his father’s association, said the characterization had been added by a staff member and should never have been on the site.
In an interview, Franklin Graham said Mr. Romney’s opposition to same-sex marriage trumped any concerns over his faith. “We have to remember we’re not voting for a pastor in chief,” he said.
David Neff, editor in chief of Christianity Today, said that while evangelical Christians have no problem with Mormon politicians like Senators Harry Reid of Nevada and Orrin D. Hatch of Utah, a Mormon president would “mainstream a religion they’d like to keep marginalized.”
That fear of making Mormonism mainstream is perhaps the biggest difference between evangelicals’ willingness to accept a Mormon TV pundit who shares their views, as opposed to a Mormon presidential candidate.
“There’s a difference between a public figure like Glenn Beck and someone who could be the president of the United States,” said John C. Green, the author of “The Faith Factor: How Religion Influences American Elections.” “Many evangelicals believe this country was founded by Christian leaders. It’s important that the person in the White House be positive about Christianity, if not a devout Christian himself.”
Dave Roever gives the closing prayer at the Restoring Honor Rally, and then a beautiful song to close out a historic day.
8/28/10- At the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Glenn Beck and hundreds of thousands of Americans from all backgrounds came together on this day to restore honor to a great nation.
Note: If you were a part of the event and would like a custom clip made, feel free to e-mail me at thedailybeck@gmail.com and I would be glad to do it for you.
Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" Rally - Interviews With Participants
Uploaded by NewLeftMedia on Aug 30, 2010
Produced and edited by Chase Whiteside (interviews) and Erick Stoll (camera) with additional camera from Kasey Hosp.
On 8.28.2010, Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally was held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The purpose of the rally, which Beck claimed to be "non-political" despite featuring Tea Party-favorite Sarah Palin as a speaker and its being attended entirely by conservatives, was unclear. The participants spoke abstractly about the need to restore "honor" and "pride" to a country that had lost it. When pressed for when our country had lost its honor, most cited the election of Barack Obama.
8.28.2010 also represented the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, and Glenn Beck has been criticized for by civil rights groups for trying to misappropriate the occasion.
Last year, Beck referred to Barack Obama—our country's first African-American President--as a "racist... who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." When offered the chance to respond to Beck's statements, his fans either agreed with him or simply refused to believe that he had ever made them.
While the speaker list was diverse, the overwhelmingly white crowd expressed paranoid and conspiratorial fears of multiculturalism—that atheists or black liberation theologists or radical Muslims or "free-loading" Latinos were going to ruin our country. There was the constant suggestion that white Christians and their way of life are somehow under assault, and that the attendees of this rally were here to put an end to it and return the country to what it used to be.
Some interview footage that didn't make it in our original film covering Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" Rally, linked here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht8PmEjxUfg[just above]
And before you comment or message to let me know: Koch is pronounced Coke. My guess was incorrect.
At the end of the video, two Tea Partiers bicker over who should get a certain location from which to view Mr. Beck's speech.
Produced and edited by Chase Whiteside (interviews) and Erick Stoll (camera) with additional camera from Kasey Hosp.
Election observers believe that Ohio is the state most likely to decide who becomes our next President. These interviews were conducted with Ohio voters at a recent Romney rally in Defiance, OH.
Ohio Romney Rally - Interview B-Roll - Social Issues
Published on Nov 2, 2012 by NewLeftMedia
Election observers believe that Ohio is the state most likely to decide who becomes our next President. These are interviews that didn't make it in our original coverage of a recent Romney rally in Defiance, OH.
The Republican Party continues to pass harsh laws restricting access to women's healthcare across the country, but the mainstream press has stopped paying attention.
That's why we've produced a short documentary that cogently explains the state and national efforts by Republicans--including Mitt Romney--to limit access to birth control and other basic women's health services.
Featured interviews include Rep. Lois Capps (CA-23), who as a former nurse has long been a leader on women's health issues; Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY's List; and Dr. Kimberly Shepherd, an OB/GYN who provides medical authority on issues that never should've been politicized in the first place.
With the lives of millions of women potentially impacted by the dangerous proposals of Mitt Romney and Republican lawmakers, it's vital that this issue isn't forgotten this election season. Help us spread the word.
Religion And Politics: IRS Not Enforcing Rules On Separation Of Church And State
By RACHEL ZOLL Posted: 11/03/2012 1:53 pm EDT Updated: 11/04/2012 11:19 am EST
NEW YORK (AP) — For the past three years, the Internal Revenue Service hasn't been investigating complaints of partisan political activity by churches, leaving religious groups who make direct or thinly veiled endorsements of political candidates unchallenged.
The IRS monitors religious and other nonprofits on everything from salaries to spending, and that oversight continues. However, Russell Renwicks, a manager in the IRS Mid-Atlantic region, recently said the agency had suspended audits of churches suspected of breaching federal restrictions on political activity. A 2009 federal court ruling required the IRS to clarify which high-ranking official could authorize audits over the tax code's political rules. The IRS has yet to do so.
Dean Patterson, an IRS spokesman in Washington, said Renwicks, who examines large tax-exempt groups, "misspoke." Patterson would not provide any specifics beyond saying that "the IRS continues to run a balanced program that follows up on potential noncompliance."
However, attorneys who specialize in tax law for religious groups, as well as advocacy groups who monitor the cases, say they know of no IRS inquiries in the past three years into claims of partisanship by houses of worship. IRS church audits are confidential, but usually become public as the targeted religious groups fight to maintain their nonprofit status.
"The impression created is that no one is minding the store," said Melissa Rogers, a legal scholar and director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University Divinity School in North Carolina. "When there's an impression the IRS is not enforcing the restriction — that seems to embolden some to cross the line."
The issue is closely watched by a cadre of attorneys and former IRS officials who specialize in tax-exempt law, along with watchdog groups on competing sides of the church-state debate.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which seeks strict limits on religious involvement in politics, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, which considers the regulations unconstitutional government intrusion, scour the political landscape for any potential cases. While Americans United gathers evidence it hopes will prompt an IRS investigation, the Alliance Defending Freedom jumps in to provide a defense. Neither group knows of any IRS contact with houses of worship over political activity since the 2009 federal ruling.
Nicholas Cafardi, a Duquesne University Law School professor and Roman Catholic canon lawyer who specializes in tax-exempt law, said he has heard of no IRS inquiries over churches and politics in the last three years. Neither has Marcus Owens, a Washington attorney who spent a decade as head of the IRS tax-exempt division and is now in private practice.
Owens, who was with the IRS through 2000, said the agency had once initiated between 20 and 30 inquiries each year concerning political activity by churches or pastors. He said he knows of only two recent cases the IRS pursued against houses of worship or pastors, and neither involved complaints over partisan activity.
"What the IRS is desperate to do is to avoid signaling to churches and pastors that there is no administrative oversight," Owens said. "The IRS has been vigilant with regard to civil fraud and criminal cases, but those aren't all that common."
The tax code allows a wide range of political activity by houses of worship, including speaking out on social issues and organizing congregants to vote. But churches cannot endorse a candidate or engage in partisan advocacy. The presidential election has seen a series of statements by clergy that critics say amount to political endorsements. Religious leaders say they are speaking about public policies, not candidates, and have every right to do so.
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has recently taken out full-page ads in major newspapers, featuring a photo of renowned evangelist Billy Graham, urging Americans to vote along biblical principles. Graham met last month with Mitt Romney and pledged to do "all I can" to help the Republican presidential nominee.
In a survey last week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 40 percent of black Protestants who attend worship services regularly said their clergy have discussed a specific candidate in church — and the candidate in every instance was President Barack Obama.
This Sunday, Roman Catholic Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Ill., ordered all the priests in his diocese to read a statement urging Catholics to vote and stating that, "Catholic politicians, bureaucrats, and their electoral supporters who callously enable the destruction of innocent human life in the womb also thereby reject Jesus as their Lord."
In Texas, a pastor of a small independent church posted a sign on the front of the building that read, "Vote for the Mormon, not the Muslim." Romney is the first Mormon nominee for president by a major party. Opponents of Obama, who is Christian, have spread false rumors that he is Muslim.
Renwicks made his comments Oct. 18, at a Washington seminar on tax-exempt organizations presented by the American Law Institute-Continuing Legal Education. Responding to a moderator's question about the status of church audits, Renwicks said, "we're basically holding any potential church audits — they're basically in abeyance.
"I haven't done a church audit in quite some time," said Renwicks, according to a recording of the talk provided by the American Law Institute. "There were one or two — what I'd call somewhat, maybe potentially egregious cases — where I thought maybe, we need to go out there, but even those were put in abeyance until we get the signature issue resolved."
An IRS reorganization in 1998 put responsibility for authorizing the audits in the hands of lower-ranking IRS officials. A Minnesota pastor, who faced an audit over his 2007 endorsement from the pulpit of Rep. Michele Bachmann, argued the IRS was violating its own rules. In 2009, a federal judge agreed, prompting a formal IRS rule-making process that continues today.
Dean Zerbe, a former senior counsel to the Senate Finance Committee who specializes in tax fraud and abuse, said the audits are "an extremely hellish area for the IRS to deal with."
The agency has to balance enforcement with churches' First Amendment rights. Even when the federal agency finds an outright violation, the penalty for houses of worship is usually little more than a warning. The IRS has revoked nonprofit status in just a handful of these cases since the rules for religious groups were adopted in 1954.
Last month, more than 1,500 pastors, organized by the Alliance Defending Freedom, endorsed a candidate from the pulpit and then sent a record of their statement to the IRS, hoping their challenge would eventually end up in court. The Alliance has organized the event, called "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," since 2008. The IRS has never contacted a pastor involved in the protest.
"I think people are misled to think the IRS wakes up every morning wanting to knock on the door of a church or synagogue," said Zerbe. "Most senators blanch at the idea of having an IRS agent in the pews listening to what's going on from the pulpit. ... I think the IRS in some ways reflects that similar discomfort."
So, for a while there during the campaign it seemed very iffy. But in the end, discipline and being on the right side of the issues prevailed. Yes, Elizabeth Warren won!
Oh, and that guy Obama too.
Tomorrow — or I guess today — comes the cleanup; when thousands, perhaps millions, of right-wing heads explode, it makes quite a mess. Also, notice that the polls were right. I wonder if I can get invited when Nate Silver is sworn in as president?
OK, somewhat more seriously: one big thing that just happened was that the real America trumped the “real America”. And it’s also the election that lets us ask, finally, “Who cares what’s the matter with Kansas?”
For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the “real America”, all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people, to which both parties must abase themselves. Meanwhile, the actual electorate was getting racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly tolerant too. The 2008 Obama coalition wasn’t a fluke; it was the country we are becoming.
And sure enough that more diverse and, if you ask me, better nation just won big.
Notice too that to the extent that social issues played in this election, they played in favor of Democrats. Gods, guns, and gays didn’t swing voters into supporting corporate interests; instead, human dignity for women swung votes the other way.
A huge night for truth, justice, and the real American way.
Obama Was Re-Elected - I'm pissed - This ain't pretty. NSFW!!! (Or civilized humans.)
Published on Nov 7, 2012 by shellymicAB
I offer my opinion...I don't CARE if you like it or not. ***Thank you for all the VIEWS you Ron Paul loving douchebags!!! The views, unlike? YOU, will REMAIN on my channel forever. Ha. Ha. Ha.*** Thanks a bunch, Paulqaeda.
I allowed over 180 of your worthless comments. If there'd been more than 3 of you that anything worthwhile to say, I probably wouldn't have disabled the comments. You've got to be the most un-educated, simple-minded fools in this country. YOU are WHY we are IN the situation we're in. Your problem is that YOU can't recognize that fact. YOU and your families will pay the price. You now know what will befall them. Whether you seek to help them or not is up to you. How good of a person do you think you are? About 90% of you are mentally disabled.
At a a town hall in New Orleans, a child asks President Obama "Why do people hate you?"
Transcript:
Okay, here's -- this young man, right here. I'm going to let him use my special mic. Hey, this is a big guy -- don't go "awww." Come on, man, I mean, this is a -- all right, what's your name?
Q Terrence Scott (phonetic).
THE PRESIDENT: Terrence Scott. What do you have to say?
Q I have to say, why do people hate you and why -- they supposed to love you, and God is love and --
THE PRESIDENT: That's what I'm talking about. (Laughter and applause.) Come on. That's what I'm talking about. Terrence, I appreciate that. What grade are you in?
Q Fourth.
THE PRESIDENT: You're in fourth grade? Well, now, first of all, I did get elected President, so not everybody hates me, now. I don't want you to -- (laughter.) I got a whole lot of votes. I want to make sure everybody understands. But you know, what is true is if you were watching TV lately, it seems like everybody is just getting mad all the time. And, you know, I think that you've got to take it with a grain of salt. Some of it is just what's called politics, where once one party wins then the other party kind of gets -- feels like it needs to poke you a little bit to keep you on your toes. And so you shouldn't take it too seriously.
And then sometimes -- as I said before, people just -- I think they're worried about their own lives. A lot of people are losing their jobs right now. A lot of people are losing their health care or they've lost their homes to foreclosure. And they're feeling frustrated. And when you're President of the United States, you know, you've got to deal with all of that. That's exactly right. And, you know, you get some of the credit when things go good; and when things are going tough, then you're going to get some of the blame and that's part of the job.
But, you know, I'm a pretty tough guy. Are you a tough guy? You look like you're pretty tough. And so you've just got to keep on going even when folks are criticizing you. Because -- as long as you know that you're doing it for other people, all right?" Obama concluded.
Ask Hef Anything: Hef weighs in on Sarah Palin's fitness to be VP, if he wants her to pose and more. See Hef's answers to all sorts of questions at http://www.playboy.com
Buzzfeed's Chris Gelder reports [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/jarrett-obama-so-absolutely-delighted-with-marr ] that Obama Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett spoke to supporters of the Human Rights Campaign on Nov. 8, and said the president believes voters in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington "all came down on the right side of history."
"Those voters turned out, and they voted overwhelmingly against Obama," said Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, of evangelical Christians. Win Mcnamee/Getty Images
“The entire moral landscape has changed,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, via Associated Press
“We’re not going away, we just need to recalibrate,” said Bob Vander Plaats, president of the Iowa-based Family Leader. Steve Hebert for The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Published: November 9, 2012
Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them.
It is not as though they did not put up a fight; they went all out as never before: The Rev. Billy Graham dropped any pretense of nonpartisanship and all but endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Roman Catholic bishops denounced President Obama’s policies as a threat to life, religious liberty and the traditional nuclear family. Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition distributed more voter guides in churches and contacted more homes by mail and phone than ever before.
“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary [ http://www.sbts.edu/ ], in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.
“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”
Conservative Christian leaders said that they would intensify their efforts to make their case, but were just beginning to discuss how to proceed. “We’re not going away, we just need to recalibrate,” said Bob Vander Plaats, president and chief executive of The Family Leader [ http://www.thefamilyleader.com/ ], an evangelical organization in Iowa.
The election results are just one indication of larger trends in American religion that Christian conservatives are still digesting, political analysts say. Americans who have no religious affiliation — pollsters call them the “nones” — are now about one-fifth of the population over all, according to a study [ http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx ] released last month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life [ http://www.pewforum.org/ ].
The younger generation is even less religious: about one-third of Americans ages 18 to 22 say they are either atheists, agnostics or nothing in particular. Americans who are secular are far more likely to vote for liberal candidates and for same-sex marriage. Seventy percent of those who said they had no religion voted for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.
“This election signaled the last where a white Christian strategy is workable,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute [ http://publicreligion.org/ ], a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization based in Washington.
“Barack Obama’s coalition was less than 4 in 10 white Christian,” Dr. Jones said. “He made up for that with not only overwhelming support from the African-American and Latino community, but also with the support of the religiously unaffiliated.”
In interviews, conservative Christian leaders pointed to other factors that may have blunted their impact in this election: they were outspent by gay rights advocates in the states where marriage was on the ballot; comments on rape by the Senate candidates Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard E. Mourdock in Indiana were ridiculed nationwide and alienated women; and they never trusted Mr. Romney as a reliably conservative voice on social issues.
However, they acknowledge that they are losing ground. The evangelical share of the population is both declining and graying, studies show. Large churches like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Assemblies of God, which have provided an organizing base for the Christian right, are losing members.
“In the long run, this means that the Republican constituency is going to be shrinking on the religious end as well as the ethnic end,” said James L. Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.
Meanwhile, religious liberals are gradually becoming more visible. Liberal clergy members spoke out in support of same-sex marriage, and one group ran ads praising Mr. Obama’s health care plan for insuring the poor and the sick. In a development that highlighted the diversity within the Catholic Church, the “Nuns on the Bus” [ http://nunsonthebus.com/ ] drove through the Midwest warning that the budget proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, would cut the social safety net.
For the Christian right in this election, fervor and turnout were not the problem, many organizers said in interviews. White evangelicals made up 26 percent of the electorate — 3 percent more than in 2004, when they helped to propel President George W. Bush to re-election. During the Republican primaries, some commentators said that Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith would drive away evangelicals, many of whom consider his church a heretical cult.
And yet, in the end, evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Romney — even matching the presidential vote of Mormons: 78 percent for Mr. Romney and 21 percent for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls by Edison Research.
“We did our job,” said Mr. Reed, who helped pioneer religious voter mobilization with the Christian Coalition in the 1980s and ’90s, and is now founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition [ http://ffcoalition.com/ ]. He said that his organization outdid itself this year, putting out 30 million voter guides in 117,000 churches, 24 million mailings to voters in battleground states and 26 million phone calls.
“Those voters turned out, and they voted overwhelmingly against Obama,” Mr. Reed said. “But you can’t be driving in the front of the boat and leaking in the back of the boat, and win the election.
“You can’t just overperform among voters of faith,” he continued. “There’s got to be a strategy for younger voters, unmarried voters, women voters — especially single women — and minorities.”
The Christian right should have a natural inroad with Hispanics. The vast majority of Hispanics are evangelical or Catholic, and many of those are religious conservatives opposed to same-sex marriage and abortion. And yet, the pressing issue of immigration [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html ] trumped religion, and Mr. Obama won the Hispanic vote by 44 percentage points.
“Latino Protestants were almost as inclined to vote for Mr. Obama as their Catholic brethren were,” said Dr. Guth, at Furman, “and that’s certainly a big change, and going the wrong direction as far as Republicans are concerned.”
The election outcome was also sobering news for Catholic bishops, who this year spoke out on politics more forcefully and more explicitly than ever before, some experts said. The bishops and Catholic conservative groups helped lead the fight against same-sex marriage in the four states where that issue was on the ballot. Nationwide, they undertook a campaign that accused Mr. Obama of undermining religious liberty, redoubling their efforts when a provision in the health care overhaul [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/health_care_reform/index.html ] required most employers to provide coverage for contraception.
Despite this, Mr. Obama retained the Catholic vote, 50 to 48 percent, according to exit polls, although his support slipped from four years ago. Also, solid majorities of Catholics supported same-sex marriage, said Dr. Jones, the pollster.
Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento, who serves on the bishops’ domestic policy committee, said that the bishops spoke out on many issues, including immigration and poverty, but got news media attention only when they talked about abortion, same-sex marriage and religious liberty. Voters who identify as Catholic but do not attend Mass on Sunday may not have been listening, he said, but Catholics who attend Mass probably “weigh what the church has to say.”
“I think good Catholics can be found across the political spectrum,” Bishop Soto said, “but I do think they wrestle with what the church teaches.”
By David Gibson Posted: 11/08/2012 4:55 pm EST Updated: 11/08/2012 4:55 pm EST
(RNS) Mitt Romney failed in his bid to win the White House back for Republicans, but the biggest losers in Tuesday's voting may be Christian conservatives who put everything they had into denying President Obama a second term and battling other threats to their agenda.
Instead of the promised victories, the religious right encountered defeat at almost every turn. Not only did Obama win convincingly, but Democrats held onto the Senate -- and the power to confirm judges -- and Wisconsin elected the nation's first openly gay senator, Tammy Baldwin.
Meanwhile, Republican senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock went down to unanticipated defeat in large part because of their strongly anti-abortion views, and an effort in Florida to restrict abortion failed. For the first time ever, same-sex marriage proponents won on ballots in four out of four states, while marijuana for recreational use was legalized in two out of three states where the question was on the ballot.
Even Michele Bachmann, an icon among Christian conservatives, barely held onto her House seat in Minnesota while Tea Party favorite Allen West lost his congressional district in Florida.
"Evangelical Christians must see the 2012 election as a catastrophe for crucial moral concerns," R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in a sobering post-mortem.
"DISASTER," David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network wrote on his blog. He then amended his lament to read: "COLOSSAL DISASTER."
Yet as bad as the results were for social conservatives, they may now face an equally difficult fight as they try to defend their agenda. Sifting through the electoral rubble, some conservatives and GOP leaders argue that the party's positions and presentation on issues like gay marriage and abortion rights turn off more voters than they attract.
This internal battle is in many respects the natural aftermath of a painful political loss, and Republicans are already involved in a process of soul-searching -- and back-biting -- that will likely continue for some time as the GOP tries to figure out how it can find a winning formula.
But this time around, more than in previous election cycles, Christian conservatives are a particularly large target, and they are feeling especially exposed to criticism.
Even before the votes were counted, for example, Romney's shift to the center -- he studiously downplayed social issues like gay rights and abortion in the last month of the campaign -- coincided with a surge in the polls and bolstered arguments that the party should soft-pedal traditional sexual morality in order to win elections and promote economic conservatism.
As Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist who backed Romney, wrote Wednesday in The Washington Post, "the issue of gay marriage is a generational one, a battle that social conservatives have lost ... The American people have changed their minds on the issue and fighting this one is political flat-earthism."
Christian conservatives are not about to accept that view, however, and in the hours after Romney's defeat they seemed to take two main tacks in rebuttal.
One was to double-down on their agenda by pinning the blame on Romney and his campaign for not stressing social issues much more forcefully.
"Mitt Romney is a good man, but let's just be honest -- we Republicans nominated the most liberal Republican nominee in history," said Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who joined a Wednesday morning webcast with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.
Jordan said that doubts about Romney's convictions, as well as his campaign's modulation near the end, disappointed values voters and doomed the ticket.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of the Susan B. Anthony List, a leading anti-abortion lobby, agreed.
"What was presented as discipline by the Romney campaign by staying on one message -- the economy -- was a strategic error that resulted in a winning margin of pro-life votes being left on the table," Dannenfelser said. "Victory was handed to the opponent."
The other tack that emerged, however, was to concede that Christian conservatives may need to change the tone if not the substance of their message in order to appeal to voters who are increasingly non-male, non-white and even non-Christian. The electorate today is increasingly Latino, and younger, and both those groups are turned off by anything that smacks of righteous moralizing.
"No party can win if it is seen as heartless," said Mohler. "No party can win if it appeals only to white and older Americans. No party can win if it looks more like the way to the past than the way to the future."
Indeed, exit polls indicated that evangelicals turned out more strongly for Romney (or against Obama) than they had for any other Republican in history -- but that nearly 80 percent margin was still not enough in raw numbers to put the GOP ticket over the top.
"My message really today is we have more work to do to become more diverse, but the party has to start building bridges and practicing the politics of addition to bring more people in," Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said at a morning-after briefing in Washington.
"My corollary message," he added, "is there is no inherent conflict between those folks coming in and us. In most cases there's a great deal of commonality."
But in the wake of Tuesday's defeat, that's a message that Christian conservatives are going to have to sell to the Republican Party itself before they can make it to the general public.
Bill O'Reilly may have surrendered, but America's dangerous divisions go deeper than party, race or religion
By Andrew O'Hehir Saturday, Nov 10, 2012 02:00 PM CST
This may come as news to you, but our country is severely divided. Seriously, though: Tuesday’s election, in which 120 million voters were united only by the belief that the other side’s candidate was a nightmare, was only the most recent illustration of a profound cultural divide in American life that goes back at least 50 or 60 years (and arguably much longer). It’s a major talking point on cable news shows and in opinion columns of all stripes – yes, duh, mea culpa – one that has sparked the careers of numerous pundits and commentators.
David Brooks [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html ] and Thomas Frank [ http://www.tcfrank.com/ ], to cite the obvious examples, have dined out for a decade or more on their purported ability to diagnose the worsening antagonism reflected in the 2012 election, when multicultural metropolitan elite groups on both coasts overwhelmingly voted for one candidate and lower-status white people in the middle of the country overwhelmingly voted for the other. Brooks has long specialized in boiling this down to pithy phrases: Volvos vs. F-150 pickups, Walmart shoppers vs. Whole Foods shoppers, and so on. (As my wife recently observed, in today’s economy it could more accurately be put this way: The people who shop at Target vs. the other people who shop at Target.)
But if we think we can understand this division better by using cute demographic shorthand or by trying to claim that it’s fundamentally about religion or abortion or sexual morality or the role of government or whatever other hobby horse we choose to ride, we’re kidding ourselves. Those are significant issues that provoke strong feelings on both sides, to be sure, but I believe they are symbols or symptoms of division rather than its underlying causes. Anytime we get fixated on the centrality of any one of those factors, we risk being left behind by the rushing river of history.
I recently came upon a column Pat Buchanan [ http://buchanan.org/blog/the-antietam-of-the-culture-war-5074 ] wrote back in April in which he argued that same-sex marriage would be the defining issue of the 2012 campaign and that election day was “shaping up as the Antietam of the culture war.” We’ll get back to Buchanan later — he is a central figure in the history of cultural warfare — but as is so often the case, he was right in an upside-down Bizarro World fashion. Gay marriage was a total non-issue in the campaign, and as every month passes, it becomes an ever-more-ordinary part of American life, roughly as exciting as the other kind of marriage. That in itself suggests that his turning-point analogy may be accurate but also that his side didn’t even show up to fight the battle. (If you need to go Google “Antietam” right now, I will join Buchanan in lamenting the failures of our educational system.)
It’s my premise that the division in America is indeed cultural in nature, using the Lévi-Strauss [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lévi-Strauss ] anthropological sense of that word, although other senses come into it, too. (The people who watch HBO, for example, or who saw “Moonrise Kingdom [ http://www.salon.com/topic/moonrise_kingdom/ ]” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild [ http://www.salon.com/topic/beasts_of_the_southern_wild/ ]” in theaters fall overwhelmingly on one side.) Defining it as libertarian vs. communitarian, for instance, or as a religious view of society set against a more secular one always simplifies or overlooks some aspect of the problem. It involves values or mores that people hold on a primordial or unconscious level, which are not easily expressed in language and not readily subjected to rational inquiry. Translated into the political realm, these fundamental cultural mores become entrenched ideological positions, modes of expressing the unshakable conviction that my side is right and yours is wrong. It’s easy from there, when you’re convinced of your own righteousness, to tip over into paranoia or caricature: Obama’s a Muslim traitor, born in a Taliban test tube; the Republicans are gaming the voting machines, en route to a 1,000-year Fourth Reich.
If you’re warming up your emailing fingers to type the words “false equivalency,” give me a second here. I live in New York City in a neighborhood where Barack Obama got better than 90 percent of the vote, and I write for Salon. I’m not claiming some neutral position in the culture wars. That would be absurd. My own fundamental cultural precepts point toward the belief that one side descends from the Enlightenment, more or less, while the other traces its roots (again, more or less) back to the medieval Church. Of course, I believe that young-Earth Creationists and climate-change deniers are dangerous nuts and that raising taxes on the rich is a moral imperative.
But part of that post-Enlightenment relativism, I guess, leads me to doubt that either side has a monopoly on truth and to suspect that my side, as well, has major cultural blind spots. On a more pragmatic level, the way these profound cultural differences get filtered into strident political disagreement is precisely the problem. We just had an election that was a de facto contest between America’s competing cultural factions, and one side won a narrow but decisive victory to the intense amazement and anger of the other. More name-calling isn’t going to help. If there were ever a moment to talk about this stuff dispassionately, this would be it.
My point is that we haven’t found ways of talking about this issue that go beyond buzzwords – the Cosmopolitans and the Heartlanders, or whatever terms David Brooks is peddling these days – and that address questions more meaningful than how to win elections. Thomas Frank is clearly right that the Republican Party has manipulated this cultural gulf to persuade working-class whites by the millions to vote against their own economic interests, and my Salon colleague Joan Walsh [ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/joan_walsh_on_the_crisis_of_white_america/ ] is correct that the Democrats can fight back, to some degree, by stressing economic populism. (Obama’s victory in Ohio, which left Karl Rove fuming and sputtering in disbelief, turned on that tactic.)
But the American division is not essentially about partisan politics or ideological labels, and it can only sometimes be reduced to questions of economic policy. It is sometimes but not always about racial resentment, sometimes but not always about the contested public role of Christianity, and often but not always about big words that are inherently squashy and subjective, like “patriotism” and “freedom.” One of the key concepts, to my mind, is what sociologists call the loss of “relative privilege.” Many white men perceive, correctly, that they have lost social status relative to women and minorities, especially when they compare themselves to their fathers and grandfathers, who benefited from white supremacy and male supremacy (whether or not they personally held racist or sexist views). But is that really the central issue or just the one that my own cultural and educational backgrounds point me toward? We have to be careful about forming conclusions when the evidence is so deeply buried.
You may have seen a video that made the rounds last weekend, including here on Salon [ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/04/i_believe_in_god_and_god_is_going_to_make_sure_mr_romney_wins/ (the video and related B-roll video at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81134840 {and preceding and following})], in which a lefty sandbagger type interviewed a bunch of white people at a Romney-Ryan rally in Ohio. They wore discount-store clothing and drove pickup trucks, and roughly 100 percent of them appeared to belong to the class most likely to suffer under a Republican budget-slashing regime. Hardly any could come up with coherent reasons for choosing Romney over Obama beyond a few Fox News talking points about nonexistent higher taxes and weak leadership and some free-floating paranoia. (One lady suggested that a drone had followed her from her front door to the rally; whether Obama was operating it personally remained unclear.)
I can’t speak to the intentions of the people who made the video, but on the Internet it became a source of ribaldry, an opportunity to mock the clueless rubes for their half-formed delusions, poor fashion sense and infelicity at crafting sound bites. I laughed too, and then I felt awful. Some of those people may be dumb, and others may be evil; you’ll find that in every cohort. But they’ve suffered from downward mobility for most of the last 40 years. While the educated elite in New York and San Francisco have sneered at their backward tastes and appetites, the captains of capital have crapped on their gimme caps and told them to like it. Because: America! Is it really surprising that they’ve anchored themselves to some sense of shared cultural identity, incoherent as it may be?
I was a young reporter on the floor of the Houston Astrodome during the Republican National Convention of 1992 when Pat Buchanan made his legendary speech [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9gSWZxtN1g (next below)]
about the “culture war” in America. As terrifying as that was to witness in person, surrounded by the bull-necked, crewcut-wearing young men of the Texas A&M cheering squad, I thought he was right at the time, and I still think so now. I don’t mean he was right on the issues (although let’s give him credit for opposing NAFTA way back when). I mean that he correctly observed that he and I were on different sides of a long-running conflict over what kind of country America was and how its citizens were to think about themselves.
Buchanan didn’t start that war. It goes clear back through the history of America, from Vietnam to the Red Scare to the Civil War to the Revolutionary War and the witch-hunting Puritans, and it has its origins, at least arguably, in the social revolutions of early modern Europe. He doesn’t have the power to end it, although his recent work tends toward elegiac pronouncements about “dying Christian America” and the end of Western culture, swamped by lesbians and Muslims and free government marijuana. (Bill O’Reilly’s election-night outburst [ http://www.thewrap.com/tv/column-post/bill-oreilly-its-not-traditional-america-anymore-white-establishment-now-minority-64021 ] about the death of “traditional America” and the eclipse of the “white establishment” was nothing more than warmed-over Buchananism.)
Maybe the fact that the Christian-Caucasian-libertarian-capitalist-nationalist cultural faction has absorbed another bitter political defeat will spark some new dynamic in American life. But I wouldn’t bet on it. An angry, declining minority that believes itself oppressed can be an unstable and dangerous phenomenon. The worst sin of the secular-multicultural-communitarian-internationalist-environmentalist faction (other than all that oaky California chardonnay) is its smugness and superiority, its sense of historical mission and its confidence that it has nothing to learn from its diminished opponents and bears no responsibility for their plight. Pride goeth before the fall, as a text prized by both sides for different reasons puts it. If we can’t find a way to address the American cultural divide, beyond insults and quadrennial beauty contests, it is sure to destroy us.
[obviously from 2008 before the election; not gonna take the time right to now to figure out whether it predates os postdates the next in this sequence of Pat Buchanan videos]
On Sunday, the exceedingly thin-skinned Graham was still shocked, saddened and outraged over Obama's throwaway line, spoken days earlier, about not looking like previous presidents. Graham said on "Fox News Sunday" that "there's no doubt in my mind that what Senator Obama is trying to suggest -- that he's a victim of something." Graham later added: "We're not going to run a campaign like he did in the primary. Every time somebody brings up a challenge to who you are and what you believe, 'You're a racist.' That's not going to happen in this campaign."
The key words are "victim" and "racist" -- which Obama did not say. Graham puts them in Obama's mouth because of their power to alienate.
With the first loaded word, Graham is trying to tie Obama to a stereotype: the Great African American Victim. He's playing to the annoyance some whites feel at being reminded of racial sins committed long before they were born or even long before their families came to this country.
As Graham well knows, Obama has taken great pains to sanitize his campaign of even the faintest whiff of victimhood. Obama understands that in order to be elected president, he has to come off as the least-aggrieved black man in America.
Most of his supporters understand this, too. They know that he can't react with anger when his love of country is questioned over a flag pin. They see that he can't be seen to take offense when his self-confidence -- a quality shared by every U.S. senator I've ever met -- is portrayed as arrogance, as if he had somehow reached beyond his station by thinking he is worthy of being elected president.
As the kerfuffle of the past week indicates, it's apparently even problematic for Obama to attempt to describe the Republican Party's obvious game plan of defining him as different, exotic and risky.
Obama could note, however, that the tactic doesn't seem to be working. A new poll by The Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University shows him leading McCain by 10 points, 47 to 37 percent, among white low-income workers. These people have to be made to fear or distrust Obama, and in a hurry, or McCain loses.
The second of the bombshell words that Obama didn't say -- but that Graham would like you to think that he said -- is an even bigger canard. He called me a racist has become a popular and convenient refuge of scoundrels. It's the place, for example, where Geraldine Ferraro went to hide when she was challenged on her claim that Obama wouldn't be where he was if he weren't black. In fact, as far as I'm aware, nobody called Ferraro a racist; to do so would imply knowledge of her most private thoughts, as well as a reassessment of her long career in public life. Rather, what I and many others said was that her remarks were insulting and wrong -- with the focus on what she had said, not on what was in her soul.
There's an obvious difference, which Lindsey Graham surely understands. But on Sunday, when former senator -- and current Obama supporter -- Tom Daschle accurately reminded Graham that Obama "has never said that he believes that John McCain is a racist," Graham wouldn't acknowledge the point. As long as he doesn't, it's possible to create the false impression that Obama accuses his critics of being racists.
This battle over Obama's image as a black man is arguably the central front of the presidential campaign right now. Once-sharp lines between the candidates on issues such as withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq or allowing new offshore oil drilling are becoming blurred. The Democratic Party's structural advantages going into the election are formidable. It's hard to imagine how McCain could possibly win unless he generates doubt in voters' minds about Obama.
One way to do that would be to fabricate the impression that Obama is demanding special treatment and privilege because he is black -- in other words, turn a self-made man into a stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action.
In what should have been a responsible discussion of Attorney General Eric Holder's comments about race Dr. Eric Michael Dyson and Pat Buchanan appeared on HARDBALL. The discussion which was moderated by Mike Barnicle who was sitting in for Chris Matthews quickly disintegrated when Pat Buchanan lashed out at Black institutions, without knowing their reasons for even existing, and then he basically ran than a list of crime statistics and out of wedlock births.
Pat Buchanan once again falls off into the deep end where he flounders around barely keeping his head above the mess he spews. Rachel Maddow draws him out on why only old white males are "normal" in the US, and why affirmative action is necessary to open doors to those who are just as qualified but would otherwise be excluded by that same old white male network that has ruled the top positions of power since the nation's beginning. Buchanan never can or refuses to grasp the concept and is left drowning in the cesspool of his own crap.
The End of White America? The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so? January/February 2009 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/01/the-end-of-white-america/307208/ [with comments]
--
Pat Buchanan on why MSNBC fired him - Part 1 of 2
Uploaded by ThePoliticalLion on Feb 19, 2012
Pat Buchanan, conservative author, discusses why MSNBC fired him. There is a liberal blacklist in America
How to get ready for 2016 [and 2014] Sure, rest up. But if you want to really make a difference in American politics, the time to get started is now Nov 10, 2012 http://www.salon.com/2012/11/10/how_to_get_ready_for_2016/ [with comments]
a caring conservative face .. after the Romney bimbo + a couple .. just over a quarter down in yours .. ~~~~~~~~
In this study, researchers used an ARVD/C patient's skin cells to make induced pluripotent stem cells. Then they used those stem cells to generate ARVD/C patient-specific heart cells (shown here in green). These heart cells provide a valuable “disease in a dish” model that can be used to study ARVD/C and test new treatments. (Credit: Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute)
Jan. 27, 2013 — Most patients with an inherited heart condition known as arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia/cardiomyopathy (ARVD/C) don't know they have a problem until they're in their early 20s. The lack of symptoms at younger ages makes it very difficult for researchers to study how ARVD/C evolves or to develop treatments. A new stem cell-based technology created by 2012 Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka, M.D., Ph.D., helps solve this problem. With this technology, researchers can generate heart muscle cells from a patient's own skin cells. However, these newly made heart cells are mostly immature. That raises questions about whether or not they can be used to mimic a disease that occurs in adulthood.
In a paper published January 27 in Nature, researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute and Johns Hopkins University unveil the first maturation-based "disease in a dish" model for ARVD/C. The model was created using Yamanaka's technology and a new method to mimic maturity by making the cells' metabolism more like that in adult hearts. For that reason, this model is likely more relevant to human ARVD/C than other models and therefore better suited for studying the disease and testing new treatments.
"It's tough to demonstrate that a disease-in-a-dish model is clinically relevant for an adult-onset disease. But we made a key finding here -- we can recapitulate the defects in this disease only when we induce adult-like metabolism. This is an important breakthrough considering that ARVD/C symptoms usually don't arise until young adulthood. Yet the stem cells we're working with are embryonic in nature," said Huei-Sheng Vincent Chen, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor at Sanford-Burnham and senior author of the study.
To establish this model, Chen teamed up with expert ARVD/C cardiologists Daniel Judge, M.D., Joseph Marine, M.D., and Hugh Calkins, M.D., at Johns Hopkins University. Johns Hopkins is home to one of the largest ARVD/C patient registries in the world.
"There is currently no treatment to prevent progression of ARVD/C, a rare disorder that preferentially affects athletes. With this new model, we hope we are now on a path to develop better therapies for this life-threatening disease," said Judge, associate professor and medical director of the Center for Inherited Heart Disease at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Disease in a dish
To recreate a person's own unique ARVD/C in the lab, the team first obtained skin samples from ARVD/C patients with certain mutations believed to be involved in the disease. Next they performed Yamanaka's technique: adding a few molecules that dial back the developmental clock on these adult skin cells, producing embryonic-like induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The researchers then coaxed the iPSCs into producing an unlimited supply of patient-specific heart muscle cells. These heart cells were largely embryonic in nature, but carried along the original patient's genetic mutations.
However, for nearly a year, no matter what they tried, the team couldn't get their ARVD/C heart muscle cells to show any signs of the disease. Without actual signs of adult-onset ARVD/C, these young, patient-specific heart muscle cells were no use for studying the disease or testing new therapeutic drugs.
Speeding up time
Eventually, the team experienced the big "aha!" moment they'd been looking for. They discovered that metabolic maturity is the key to inducing signs of ARVD/C, an adult disease, in their embryonic-like cells. Human fetal heart muscle cells use glucose (sugar) as their primary source of energy. In contrast, adult heart muscle cells prefer using fat for energy production. So Chen's team applied several cocktails to trigger this shift to adult metabolism in their model.
After more trial and error, they discovered that metabolic malfunction is at the core of ARVD/C disease. Moreover, Chen's team tracked down the final piece of puzzle to make patient-specific heart muscle cells behave like sick ARVD/C hearts: the abnormal over-activation of a protein called PPAR?. Scientists previously attributed ARVD/C to a problem in weakened connections between heart muscle cells, which occur only in half of the ARVD/C patients. With the newly established model, they not only replicated this adult-onset disease in a dish, but also presented new potential drug targets for treating ARVD/C.
What's next?
Chen's team was recently awarded a new grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to create additional iPSC-based ARVD/C models. With more ARVD/C models, they will determine whether or not all (or at least most) patients develop the disease via the same metabolic defects discovered in this current study.
Together with the Johns Hopkins team, Chen also hopes to conduct preclinical studies to find a new therapy for this deadly heart condition.
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