Free Republic

There are many questions which remain unanswered about the mysterious Barack Obama. The mainstream media has vetted Gov. Sarah Palin more in the past week than they've bothered to vet Sen. Barack Obama over the past year. When you start digging into Obama's background, you turn up more questions than answers. Obama's father was a Kenyan citizen and his mother was American. His name as a young child was changed to Barry Soetoro when his mother married Indonesian citizen Lolo Soetoro and moved to Jakarta. Indonesian school records state that Obama was an Indonesian citizen and not an American citizen...

WHITEMARSH - In a society criticized for being too litigious, lawsuits filed by local maverick attorney Philip Berg rank as some of the most sensational. In the past decade, Berg challenged the results of the 2000 presidential election, sued the Bush administration in 2004 for alleged complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks and filed a suit recently claiming that Sen. Barack Obama is not really a U.S. citizen. After the U.S. Supreme Court's election decision, the Lafayette Hill lawyer demanded that three Supreme Court justices be disbarred for alleged conflict of interest. Several counts in the Sept. 11 lawsuit were...

Having written a book on intellectual fraud, "Hoodwinked," and being something of a literary detective, I had no doubt on reading Barack Obama's 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," that Obama did not really write it. The style is above his pay grade, way above. As Obama tells the story of the book's genesis, "a few publishers called" after he had been elected president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. In the real world, publishers don't call unknowns unless someone influential prompts them. Obama does not tell us who. Nor does Obama tell the reader how he got elected...

The Washington Post reports that Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley has turned his scrutiny of nonprofit organizations to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where Sen. Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, has worked for about ten years: The ranking minority member on the Senate Finance Committee is seeking information from the non-profit University of Chicago Medical Center about jobs held by Sen. Barack Obama’s wife and one of his best friends, The Post’s Joe Stephens reports. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) on Friday sent the center a letter saying he was “troubled” by recent news reports about the hospital’s efforts to steer patients...

Barack Obama contends that he is more experienced in executive matters than Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin because he has managed his presidential campaign for the past 18 months. Speaking on a cable news channel Monday night, the Democratic presidential nominee said he is better prepared to handle a disaster like Hurricane Gustav because of his pursuit of the White House. “Well, my understanding is that Governor Palin’s town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees. We’ve got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three...

(CNN) — Barack Obama defended his experience in dealing with natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, and took a swipe at newly minted GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. In an interview on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Monday night, Obama was asked about whether his experience in the U.S. Senate dealing with weather-related situations compares to Palin’s executive experience running the state of Alaska and as the small town mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. “My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We've got 2500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million...

Controversial Hollywood filmmaker Spike Lee is certain that the US presidential hopeful Barack Obama will change the face of African-American music if he wins the election. According to contactmusic.com, Lee is one of the many celebrities who is supporting the Democratic Party candidate Obama. Lee believes Obama will inspire a revival among artists. He said: "We gotta step it up. This is too important. We should use an event like Barack's presidency, which I feel is probably one of the most important moments in the history of this country, to galvanise us, to inspire us, and, yo, let's go! "I...

Anderson Cooper asked Barack Obama last night to answer the claim that Sarah Palin has more applicable experience than he does. In response, he completely ignores Palin’s status as governor, and then makes the claim that a campaign counts as executive experience: AC: Some Republican critics say, you don’t have the experience to handle a situation like this [Hurricane Gustav]. They’ve in fact said that Governor Palin has more executive experience as mayor of a small town and as governor of a big state like Alaska. What’s your response? BO: Well, you know, my understanding is that, uh, Governor Palin’s...

In Artful Dodger style, Barack Obama, plays down his mentorship with Communist author Saul Alinsky. But Alinsky’s son, L. David Alinsky, credits Obama for “learning his lesson well” from the Communist guru. Indeed, Alinsky Jr. who credits his late father for the success of last week’s Democratic National Convention, may have done something that Obama’s detractors couldn’t: blown the cover on the presidential hopeful’s communist leanings. No one can blame Alinsky for the pretentiousness of the Ancient Greek Temple from which Obama addressed plebes, or for the tacky neon colours on display at the Pepsi Centre, but it was Alinsky...

Who is Khalid al-Mansour? And more importantly, why was he promoting Barack Obama in the 1980’s and raising money for him, when Obama was in his twenties? I caught this story, first, over at Atlas Shrugs, where this odd thing jumped out at me: Townhall links to a video in which civil rights activist Percy Sutton claimed he was asked by a certain “Dr. Khalid al Mansour”, adviser to ‘one of the richest men in the world’ to write a letter of reccomendation on behalf of Barack Obama to help him gain acceptance to Harvard many years ago. Mansour was...

Joe Biden once got in trouble for plagiarizing a speech and inflating his academic record. So it will not surprise you to find that his famous working-class background turns out to be mythical. But it may surprise you to learn that Biden isn't the one who has trouble with the facts. In his Wednesday night speech at the Democratic convention, Biden referred to "those of us who grew up in middle-class neighborhoods like Scranton and Wilmington [Delaware]." In the video preceding his address, he said that the people he knew as a boy didn't regard themselves as working class but...

Obama knows he’s weak on guns. Real weak. He’s setting up a bunch of “lifelong Republicans” and astroturf Zumbos* like the American Hunters’ Arms Are For Hugging to vouch for him, but he’s not fooling anybody who doesn’t want to be fooled. Least of all a former-liberal scholar named John Lott, who knows quite a bit about the social science of the Second Amendment and zeroes in on the candidate’s evasions: A candidate questionnaire shows that Mr. Obama supported a ban on handguns in 1996. In 1998, he backed a ban on the sale of all semiautomatic guns (a ban...

Joe Biden - who despite representing Delaware in the Senate likes to make a big deal about being born in Scranton Pennsylvania because, let’s face it, the latter is more important on the election map - introduced Obama in Beaver Pennsylvania in what has to be one of the most awkwardly-worded introductions of all time "Bob Casey was twelve years older than me, and Bobby Casey was twelve years younger than me. And I knew somebody famous was going to come out of Scranton, and I sure a’ hell knew it wadn’t gonna be me." Uh, yeah Anyway, what’s interesting...

DENVER (AP) — The release of a 2004 interview with former 1960s radical William Ayers, in which he compared U.S. government actions to the Sept. 11 attacks, drew renewed attention Tuesday to his association with Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign on Friday blasted his Republican rival's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a running-mate, highlighting her "zero" foreign policy experience. "Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement. Burton also criticized Palin as a vice presidential pick for her support of oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness and her anti-abortion stance, referring to the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in the United States. "Governor Palin shares John...

The Democrats pulled out all the theatrical stops tonight. They filled a football stadium, built part of a Greek temple, and put on a fireworks show worthy of the 4th of July. Barack Obama, for his part, pulled out all the rhetorical stops. His speech was a patchwork of homey sentimentality, Clintonesque laundry lists, and Obama's version of Jesse Jackson's preacher man. If a particular riff that has worked somewhere on the stump didn't fit into one of these slots, it was given its own. All of these elements have worked for politicians at times and Obama pulls each off...

A few weeks back, I wrote a column titled, "Who Wrote 'Dreams From My Father'?" My research led me to the conclusion that a literary neophyte like Obama could not have written the memoir on his own. It was simply too well crafted. I was also suspicious about his claim that publishers had sought him out, while still unknown, contract in hand. I doubted, too, that the publisher would have paid him a hefty advance. And I refused to believe that his publisher would have invested the hefty ghostwriting fee needed to rescue the project after four years of amateurish...

Congressman Ron Paul says there is 'no difference' between US presidential candidates, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. "Their foreign policies are identical," the Texas congressman said in an interview with CNN on Thursday. "There's no difference." "They want more troops in Afghanistan. They want to send more support to Georgia to protect the oil line there. Neither one says bring home the troops from Iraq from the bases -- you know the bases are going to stay there, the embassy as big as the Vatican, that's going to remain. So their foreign policies are exactly the same," he...

Senator Barack Obama will promise change -- and spells out specifics such as tax cuts for the middle class -- as he accepts the Democratic presidential nomination tonight. Obama also warns that Republican John McCain would mean four more years of President Bush's flawed policies, declaring “America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.”. Here are excerpts of the speech, titled "The American Promise," just released by Obama's campaign: “Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story – of the brief union between a young man from Kenya...

DENVER -- The most revealing moments at the Democratic National Convention didn't happen in the hall or on the stage. They occurred as activists, political operatives and thinkers gather at small forums around Denver to talk about the future. Two panels this week revealed potential fault lines among Democrats if they end up in control of the White House and Congress. A morning panel sponsored by The American Prospect made clear that the more liberal wing of the party feels resurgent and wants sweeping change reminiscent of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. An afternoon forum sponsored by the insider publication...

Time has been kind to Joan Baez. Over peppermint tea in the restaurant of a South London hotel, the queen of America’s folk scene in the Sixties appears extremely youthful for someone in the fifth decade of her career. “We’ll sit here until we get thrown out,” she says, firmly but quietly, after the manager protests at our not wanting dinner. She appears the model of calm, unwavering serenity, but something about her unblinking stare — and her swift dismissal of a fussy maitre d’ — suggests that you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her. Perhaps...

DENVER (AP) — John McCain is airing a one-evening-only ad with a simple message for Barack Obama: "Job well done." The ad coincides with Obama's nomination acceptance speech.

When Barack Obama finishes his speech accepting the Democratic nomination to be president, his entire family will join him onstage — and present America with a tableau unlike anything they've ever seen at a nominating convention. "We are colorful, for sure," Maya Soetero-Ng, Obama's sister, told Michele Norris. Obama's mother was white and from Kansas; his father was black and Kenyan. Obama and Soetero-Ng grew up in the unique culture of Hawaii. "I have great hope that that spectrum will be regarded as gorgeous, and that everyone will see themselves in it," said Soetero-Ng, who teaches high school in Hawaii....

BARACK OBAMA can deliver a brilliant speech tonight, but its impact could evaporate within days. John McCain and his allies have opened the 2008 Swift Boating season. Four years ago, a smear outfit called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began trashing John Kerry's Vietnam War record. Kerry was never the same. Helter Skelter. What the GOP does is throw out so many attacks that the target and voters get confused and disoriented. This all-out Helter Skelter Republican attack machine is something Obama has never experienced. It always starts small. A small lie. First, they say he's like Paris Hilton. Then...

While the Obama coronation proceeds apace in Denver, it is in Chicago that Americans are getting a disturbing demonstration of his thuggish methods of stifling criticism. Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Harvard-educated social anthropologist and frequent contributor to National Review, among other publications. He is widely respected for his meticulous research and measured commentary. For months, he has been doing the job the mainstream media refuses to do: examining the background and public record of Barack Obama, the first-term senator Democrats are about to make their nominee for president despite the...

Civil rights activist Percy Sutton said he was solicited by a man named Dr. Khalid al Mansour to send a letter of reccomendation on behalf of Barack Obama to help him gain acceptance to Harvard many years ago. (This video and transcript is at the bottom of the post), But who is Khalid al Mansour and how did he know Barack Obama? A cursory search on Youtube turns up several controversial clips, in the vein of Obama's longtime friend and former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. One of these videos is more than an hour long, but I am going to...

UPDATE: Percy Sutton, NYC political icon in the African American community, tells a news reporter that Dr. Khalid al Mansour solicited favor and recommendation on behalf of Barack Hussein Obama in order to secure Barack's entry into Harvard. Think about that. During the 1950's and 1960's, Percy Sutton became one of American's best known lawyers. He represented many controversial figures such as Malcolm X and argued many cases (photo: Malcolm X and Percy Sutton at a Harlem rally on Seventh Avenue between 125th and 126th streets, 1963) Richard Fernanadez over at Fallback Belmont has a very curious piece on the...

It is one thing to be called "The Blogger Behind the Obama Hit Job" and quite another to be referred to as a "less-than-authoritative source". Needless to say, it naturally begs the question - Who would be an authoritative source? For much of America's mainstream media, the answer is of course themselves. But alas the times they are a changing. On to the rebuttal. "The first mention of Martin's blog comes on Page 52 of Obama Nation, when it is cited as the source for Corsi's assertion that when Obama's Muslim stepfather registered him at a Catholic school in Indonesia,...

Larry Martin owns Frontera Bar and Grill, a Tex-Mex restaurant in Kuala Lumpur. He imports mesquite charcoal from San Francisco and, he says, "serves peace love and American hegemony, one plate of tacos at a time" to Malaysian customers. In his spare time, he writes a semi-anonymous blog, An American Expat in Southeast Asia, on which he rails against mainstream American media, multiculturalism — and Barack Obama. And that is how Martin has come to the attention of a broader audience. His blog is repeatedly cited as a source in Jerome R. Corsi's best-selling anti-Obama book, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics...

Orthodox Islamic lecturer, Texas attorney, adviser to Saudi billionaires...who is Dr. Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al-Mansour? Townhall links to a video in which civil rights activist Percy Sutton claimed he was asked by a certain “Dr. Khalid al Mansour”, supposed adviser to ‘one of the richest men in the world’, to write a letter of reccomendation on behalf of Barack Obama to help him gain acceptance to the Harvard Law Review many years ago. Mansour was raising money for Obama at the time,according to Sutton, a circumstance strange enough in itself. Townhall identifies the Mansour in question as a preacher from...

The family of Joe Biden, who will be officially nominated as the vice presidential candidate of the Democratic Party's 'reform Washington' ticket with Barack Obama Thursday night, appears to be enmeshed in the same D.C. money game that Obama denounces. One of the senator's sons -- Hunter, a Washington lobbyist -- and the senator's brother, James --received a $1 million investment in their purchase of a hedge fund company from the senator's largest political donor, an Illinois law firm, SimmonsCooper. The brother and the son subsequently repaid the $1 million to the law firm, which specializes in representing asbestos victims....

Every night before we go to bed, my daughters and I talk about our worst and best parts of the day. Today, we all agreed that the best part was watching Michelle Obama's warm and passionate speech, and then seeing her girls come onto the stage. As a mom, I felt we were experiencing a piece of history together... The fact that today a smart, articulate, beautiful and accomplished black woman from the South side of Chicago stood before seasoned politicians, an audience of men and women, of whites, blacks, Latinos (and did you see the Indian sardar on CNN!),...

Barack Obama's campaign plans to relaunch his "urban agenda" Monday in what people close to the strategy say is an effort to assure urban leaders and voters of the Democratic nominee's commitment to cities and minorities without alienating skeptical white voters. The plan features an increase in the minimum hourly wage, a new White House office focused on metropolitan areas and $60 billion to establish a national bank to finance public-works projects. The campaign didn't give a total cost for the plan, but the 32-page blueprint that will be released during a meeting of the Democratic Party's African-American caucus includes...

DENVER -- There's little question that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are the two most compelling political figures to emerge in the Democratic party over the last three decades. And yet, the relationship between the two men has been described as polite at best and strained and standoffish at worst. Bill Clinton has made little secret of his distaste for the way in which Obama portrayed his eight years in the White House during the primary campaign, painting the former president's tendency toward hyper-partisanship as part of what's wrong in Washington. The former president also bristled at the idea that...

CHICAGO, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- Reporters reviewing records in Chicago have so far found nothing startling in documents linking Sen. Barack Obama to 1960s radical William Ayers. The man soon to become the Democratic presidential nominee served with Ayers on an education reform group, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, during the 1990s. Files detailing activities of the panel were made available to the media Tuesday after being restricted by the Daley Library at the University of Illinois in Chicago. The UIC records show that Obama and Ayers attended board meetings, retreats and at least one news conference together as the program...

Barack Obama is in Montana today taking questions from a group of his supporters. Someone made a joke about dumping nuclear waste in one or more of John McCain’s houses. Obama get’s a big laugh from the idea and repeats it. Classy!

Barack Obama's rise through the rough-and-tumble politics of Chicago, his victory over a well-heeled and well-known front-runner and his ability to draw out new voters in droves shows character traits of a great president, said a panel of two Obama supporters and a presidential historian. They were in Denver today to discus the qualities it takes to distinguish the best in Oval Office occupants. Obama may be young and somewhat untested on a national level, but his actions so far show promise, they concluded. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., who is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, argued that Obama's ability...

Barack Obama's big speech on tomorrow night will be delivered from an elaborate columned platform resembling a miniature Greek temple, it has been revealed. The stage is similar to structures used for rock concerts and has been set up at the 50-yard-line, the midpoint of Invesco Field, the stadium where the Denver Broncos' American football team plays. Up to 80,000 supporters will see Mr Obama appear from between plywood columns painted off-white, reminiscent of the White House, to accept the party's nomination for president. He will stride out to a raised platform to a podium that can be raised from...

Barack Obama: The first metrosexual candidate for President of the United States Feet and shoes take center place in Andy Martin's web-footed analysis of the left's effort to demonize Senator John McCain "Factually Correct, Not Politically Correct" AMERICA'S #1 POLITICAL BLOG ON THE 2008 CAMPAIGN ------------------------------------------------------------- We're not always first because we're #1; We're #1 because we are always first. ------------------------------------------------------------- BARACK OBAMA SHOULD STAY AWAY FROM SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN'S FEET, OR HE RISKS GETTING THE BOOT FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE COMMENTS BY KEITH OLBERMANN DO GET THE BOOT FROM ANDY MARTIN METROSEXUAL DEMOCRAT OBAMA SHOULD TREAD LIGHTLY ON MCCAIN'S...

I'll let Vets for Freedom speak for themselves. (click to see video) To give Obama his due, he has acknowledged the success of the surge, but there's always a caveat. It's the liberal instinct, really, to give credit to the other while being overly critical of the self. It's the kind of credit a guy might give his wife on how hot she looks after her new boob job, but what are you going to do about those cottage cheese thighs? Jack's Smirking Revenge knows what I'm talking about.....

DENVER (CBS) ― Michelle Obama's big speech at the Democratic convention Monday night was being anticipated not just for what she'd say -- but for what she'd wear. The would-be first lady's fashion flair is already grabbing attention -- she's being closely watched as a possible budding fashion icon -- and most observers the outfit she selected for the big event clicked. Among those whose keen eyes were trained on Michelle is Laura Schwartz, a former adviser to the wife of former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, Teresa Heinz Kerry. Schwartz also worked in the Clinton White...

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean said Tuesday that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) will unveil “a different message for a different audience” in the general election campaign, as opposed to the one he used to capture the Democratic presidential nomination. But he told a breakfast fundraiser for a fellow Vermont Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy, that Obama still has to rely on campaign workers knocking on doors and taking that message to prospective voters, just as they did during the primaries. “The message is different but not the mechanism,” the former governor and head of the Democratic National Committee said when asked...

Exactly what is controversial about Michelle Obama? It has become accepted that the wife of the Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama, is controversial. Pundits referred to her as such during coverage of the Democratic National Convention's first night. Much energy was spent Monday night telling her story, which didn’t sound controversial at all. She grew up on the south side of Chicago in a working class family, achieved her way to college at Princeton and then Harvard, and returned to Chicago and worked as an attorney, which is where she met her future husband. She was his supervisor. Eventually,...

Plenty of people know who Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, and Tony Rezko are, but Senator Barack Obama's got another friend stirring a new controversy—his mentor, Illinois Senate President Emil Jones. Jones is accused of calling a Hillary supporter and Chicago political consultant an "Uncle Tom." After refusing to apologize, he later offered a semi-apology, ONLY after being offered a speaking role at the Democratic National Convention by Obama. This is the latest in a string of Obama's associates who have been publically discredited for crimes, bigotry, and anti-Americanism. "Being president means making personal judgments about the character and intentions of...

The Berkeley-based nonprofit Free History Project has sent a cease-and-desist letter to a right-wing political group which used footage from one of the project’s documentaries in a new ad that tries to tie Barack Obama to 1960s-era radical William Ayers. The letter demands that all broadcasts of the American Issues Project ad, now running in Michigan and Ohio, be halted as a violation of copyright law. San Francisco attorney John Keker wrote the ad’s producers have “willfully violated the Free History Project’s intellectual property rights,” and demanded that they “immediately remove the advertisement from any television, cable network, or other...

The Obama campaign has gone on the offensive against a multi-million dollar ad campaign by the American Issues Project, a conservative group tying the Democratic candidate to Bill Ayers, a one-time leader of the Weather Underground. This new ad from the Obama campaign asks why John McCain is "talking about the '60s" -- a direct message that he's ignoring current problems and a subtext that he's stuck in the past. And because this is a campaign finance issue, there's also action on the legal front. Obama's lawyer Robert Bauer has done what lawyers do -- dispatch letters, both to the...

Senator Barack Obama really wants to tackle climate change, of course. That’s such a big issue, it’s running neck-and-neck with health care at the top of the Democratic economic agenda. And Senator Edward Kennedy barely mentioned climate change in his teary convention speech, unlike health care. (Our colleagues at the Health Blog tackle that issue here.) The usual problem is that expensive, broad-reaching programs like that tend to get bogged down on the Hill. But President Obama would act on the climate with or without the help of Congress, apparently. From today’s WSJ: The Obama camp also believes it has...

Michelle Obama quotes lines some radicalFar Left book in her DNC Convention speech. What to make of Michelle Obama's use the terms, “The world as it is” and “The world as it should be?” From whence do they originate? Try Chapter 2 of Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals. In last night's speech, Michelle Obama said something that peeked my curiousity. She said: "Barack stood up that day," talking about a visit to Chicago neighborhoods, "and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about “The world as it is” and “The world as it should be..."...

Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, claims Jerome Corsi, the author of the New York Times No. 1 best-seller "The Obama Nation," was "just makin' stuff up." But he thought the issues revealed in the book important enough to write a 40-page response and publicize it, trying to defuse concerns that may have been raised by Corsi's book. The author has now, however, confirmed he's taken Obama's new explanations to task in a 70-page document that he'll be releasing exclusively on WND later this week. The personal attack from Obama came, according to a McClatchy Newspapers report,...

As the Democratic National Convention gets underway in Denver, the media is full of profiles of the party’s soon-to-be nominee. Who is Barack Obama? they ask, an odd question. After 19 months of campaigning shouldn’t they know? But reading the stories, it is clear that those covering him – despite the worshipful reporting -- are not finding the answer all that easy to pin down. Perhaps the reason is that, in surprising respects, Senator Obama resembles a certain similarly memorable but also enigmatic character from fiction, one who almost entirely invented himself – the Great Gatsby. Every first-class politician must...