Free Republic

When Barack Obama promises change for America, I graciously assume, for now, that he doesn't mean he will change America to conform to his apparently racist pastor's vision for this country, though that whole subject deserves far more scrutiny. But we should also seriously examine his promise to deliver a more harmonious climate. It's not just Obama. A lot of Democrats have been pushing the idea of bipartisanship for years. One of the Democrats' earliest criticisms of President Bush was that he didn't reach across the aisle and extend a hand to Democrats. Of course, the truth is precisely the...

One of Obama's Earmarks Went to Hospital That Employs Michelle Obama. In the list of earmarks he requested, $1 Million was requested for the construction of a new hospital pavilion at the University Of Chicago. You know who works for the University of Chicago Hospital? Michelle Obama. She's vice president of community affairs. As Byron noted, "In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just...

Obama says that rather than advising him on strategy, Wright helps keep his priorities straight and his moral compass calibrated. "What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice," Obama said. "He's much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I'm not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that's involved in national politics." Wright has continued on an independent path ever since, often questioning the common sense of Scripture, objecting to mandatory prayer in...

While senators gravely speak about the nation's fiscal health all day during the Senate budget debate, they're not above making purely political points aimed at embarrassing one another. To wit: Sen. Wayne Allard, a Republican from Colorado, has crafted a massive budget amendment that claims to fund every policy proposed by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on the presidential campaign trail. Allard's amendment — doomed to fail by a significant margin — includes $1.4 trillion in spending over five years by proposing Obama's universal health care program ($65 billion a year), expanding the Army ($6.6 billion a year) and eliminating income...

Barack Obama's words are often attractive but oddly concealing. His speeches are all balm and mood. It's all very well to seek, as Mr. Obama claims, to transcend old categories, to reject the "old politics." But then what? This graceful rhetorician leaves you wondering: Who is he really? What does he want for himself and for his country? In search of answers that go deeper than the Congressional Record, I read his first book, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." Once you get past the happy surprise of finding a politician who can actually write, the...

Democrat Barack Obama ridiculed the idea of being Hillary Rodham Clinton's running mate Monday, saying voters must choose between the two for the top spot on the fall ticket. The Illinois senator used his first public appearance of the week to knock down the notion that he might accept the party's vice presidential nomination. He noted that he has won more states, votes and delegates than Clinton so far. "I don't know how somebody who is in second place is offering the vice presidency to the person who is first place," Obama said, drawing cheers and a long standing ovation...

ABC News' Kate Snow and Eloise Harper report: A controversial party guest was spotted at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's election night party in Columbus, Ohio Tuesday. He was hard to miss. He was the one wearing the "Osama for Obama" t-shirt. Columbus resident Todd Elbaum told ABC News his friend makes the t-shirts. Elbaum did not hold back on his views of Obama when he was interviewed by ABC within full view of a Clinton staffer. "The truth is he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim, his mother married a Muslim after divorcing his father. His grandfather...

In a stump speech at Hocking College in Nelsonville, Ohio, on Sunday, Sen. Barack Obama said his support for same-sex unions is rooted in the New Testament's Sermon on the Mount, as reported by Cybercast News Service. But theologians and other experts don't agree on what Obama's biblical reference meant. "If he's finding support for same-sex marriage from the Sermon on the Mount, he's reading a different Bible than I've ever read," Tom Minnery, senior vice president of government and public policy with the Christian Focus on the Family, told Cybercast News Service. "I think Obama needs to grapple with...

Obama If elected I will use the bully pulpit for gay causes http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=27510 . . . Barack Obama sought the support of voters in the homosexual community Feb. 28, telling them in a letter that if elected president he would work to pass laws important to that constituency and would use the "bully pulpit" to urge states to grant same-sex couples the legal benefits of marriage. . . He used the acronym LGBT -- which stands for "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender" -- six times. "As your President, I will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat same-sex...

NELSONVILLE, Ohio (BP)--Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama defended his belief in same-sex civil unions March 2 by referencing Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and then implicitly criticizing those who view Romans as a binding teaching on homosexuality. Obama made the comments during a question-and-answer session with voters in Nelsonville, Ohio. A local pastor asked Obama how he plans to win the votes of evangelical voters when they disagree with him on moral issues. "I believe in civil unions that allow a same-sex couple to visit each other in a hospital or transfer property to each other," he said, referring to...

SAN ANTONIO It took many months and the mockery of "Saturday Night Live" to make it happen, but the lumbering beast that is the press corps finally roused itself from its slumber Monday and greeted Barack Obama with a menacing growl. The day before primaries in Ohio and Texas that could effectively seal the Democratic presidential nomination for him, a smiling Obama strode out to a news conference at a veterans facility here. But the grin was quickly replaced by the surprised look of a man bitten by his own dog. Reporters from the Associated Press and Reuters went after...

<p>New York (AP) -- The IRS is investigating the United Church of Christ over a speech Barack Obama gave to its national meeting last year after he became a candidate for president.</p>

McCain says he will 'absolutely repudiate' comments by an introductory speaker who says Obama sympathizes with 'world leaders who want to kill us.' CINCINNATI -- In a possible foreshadowing of a potentially bruising general election campaign, a speaker who introduced presidential candidate John McCain at a rally here today accused Barack Obama of sympathizing with "world leaders who want to kill us" and invoked Obama's middle name -- three times calling him "Barack Hussein Obama." Local conservative radio talk show host Bill Cunningham described Obama as "a hack Chicago Daley-style politician who is picturing himself as change. When he gets...

Obama is a product of the corrupt Chicago Machine. One of the key players in this corrupt machine is Tony Rezko - a Syrian real estate developer/slumlord who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the machine and to Obama's law firm and to Obama's various campaign funds - and was VERY connected to the governor of Illinois. We've covered it previously HERE. NOW, THERE'S NEW NEWS: The real estate agent who sold Obama the house he now lives in - for more than a million bucks - was a pal of Rezko, someone he'd been pressuring the guv to...

Barack Obama criticised over 'cult-like' rallies By William Lowther in Washington Last Updated: 4:24pm GMT 23/02/2008 For many it is simply a sign of his charisma. But for a growing number of Barack Obama sceptics, there is something disturbing about the adulation with which the senator and Democratic presidential frontrunner is greeted as he campaigns for the White House - unnervingly akin to the hysteria of a cult, or the fervour of a religious revival. Thousands wait in line to see him wherever he stops. Members of the audience have taken to rushing the stage during campaign rallies, forcing the...

Only a link is permitted.Obama Says Community Colleges Key to Economy

I am having trouble fully appreciating the phenomenon that is Senator Obama. Certainly, Obama’s overpowering charisma has an amazing effect on any listener, such as spontaneous tears or quasi-erotic tingling in one’s leg. (The latter phenomenon is dubbed the "Matthews syndrome” after a man whose capacity for rational thought has been completely destroyed by the syndrome’s effects.) For me, however, any such tingling is immediately recognized and countered by my brain, which forces the nascent Obasm to a premature and unsatisfying conclusion. Usually, my brain counters the Obasm by asking difficult and disturbing questions. For example, I will begin trembling...

Cure for mysterious ailment causing women to faint at Barack Obama rallies discovered. Obamaplexy now has a cure.

On Sunday, after he learned he'd won that day's Democratic presidential primary in Maine but before his appearance on CBS's "60 Minutes," Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) sat down at the keyboard of his computer to write an e-mail. Not to a media consultant or a delegate counter, but to banker Robert Wolf, chief executive of UBS (UBS, news, msgs) Group for the Americas. The two men exchanged notes about the Senate-passed economic stimulus package and that weekend's G-7 economic summit, Wolf says. ... Obama has also been in touch with former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who endorsed the freshman...

A nice-sounding bill called the "Global Poverty Act," sponsored by Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Barack Obama, is up for a Senate vote on Thursday and could result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations. Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has not endorsed either Senator Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. But on Thursday, February 14, he is trying to rush Obama's...

To get right to the point, I believe Barack Obama is going to win the Democratic nomination setting the table for a great race for the fall. Here's why: In doing the math on delegates, it looks highly likely that Obama will end up with a pledged delegate lead when all this is finished by June. Even if Hillary wins some big states along the way, Obama will score enough delegates to keep his count moving. The super delegates (those 796 party folks who can decide on their own who to vote for and change their mind along the way)...

Senator Barack Obama says the top priority of the next president should be to create a more lasting and equitable prosperity than achieved by either President Bush in the current decade or even Bill Clinton in the 1990s. In an hourlong interview outlining his economic views, Mr. Obama praised the Clinton administration for reducing the deficit and setting the stage for the ’90s boom. But he said Mr. Clinton had failed to halt a long-term increase in income inequality that had left the middle class feeling squeezed. If elected, Mr. Obama said he would to try to forge a popular...

EZRA Klein, a prominent young blogger at the liberal American Prospect, recently opined: "Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. "The other great leaders I've heard guide us toward a better politics, but Obama is, at his best,...

The media said Obama took the majority of the youth vote under 30. In other words he owns the indoctrinated. This is a group that will tell you George Bush brought down the WTC but can't tell you who Ramsey Yousef is. This is a group that will swear we went to war with Iraq because Cheney wanted the oil but can't tell you why Cheney called for the end to hostilities after liberating Kuwait. This is a group that can't tell you what ANY of the specifics are of Obama's proposals. I suppose we can give them a pass...

"As president, I will set a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming, an 80 percent reduction by 2050," he said. He proposed a modified "cap and trade" approach to reduce emissions, requiring businesses to buy allowances if they pollute, creating an incentive to reduce energy usage. "No business will be allowed to emit any greenhouse gases for free," he said. "Businesses don't own the sky, the public does, and if we want them to stop polluting it, we have to put a price on all pollution." Sen. Hillary...

Senator Barack Obama will propose on Tuesday setting a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world, saying the United States should greatly reduce its stockpiles to lower the threat of nuclear terrorism, aides say. In a speech at DePaul University in Chicago, Mr. Obama will add his voice to a plan endorsed earlier this year by a bipartisan group of former government officials from the cold war era who say the United States must begin building a global consensus to reverse a reliance on nuclear weapons that have become “increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” Mr. Obama, according to...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday proposed overhauling the tax code to lower taxes for the poor and middle class, increase them for the rich and make it so most Americans can file their taxes in five minutes. The tax relief plan he envisions for the middle class alone would mean $80 billion or more in tax cuts, he said. Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is a front-runner for his party's 2008 presidential nomination, said during a speech at the Tax Policy Center that the present tax code reflects the wrong priorities because it rewards wealth instead of...

Democratic Presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) speaks to the Executive Council of New York at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, September 17, 2007. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid (UNITED STATES)

Two days after Barak Obama's latest foreign-policy gaffe—allowing reporters to see him reading a memo from his campaign advisors on how to spin the war in Iraq—there's a new round whispering among Washington's foreign-policy watchers as to whether the Illinois senator and presidential wannabe can really be taken seriously on these subjects. Similar chatter could be heard this summer after Obama's previous blunders on Pakistan and Israel-Palestine. This most recent episode occurred during Tuesday's Senate testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker. To be Reading a memo about how to politicize the war during their testimony showed incredibly...

There have been enough Democratic presidential debates to conclude that White House hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has not mastered the short answer format. Obama demonstrated at Tuesday's Senate Foreign Relations hearing with Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq Ambassador Ryan Crocker he also has trouble with questions. The long-winded Obama, who bills himself as a consensus builder, wasted an opportunity to show how it could work. Each member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had seven minutes to question Petraeus and Crocker about the Iraq War. Obama used about six minutes of his time to lecture Petraeus and Crocker that...

Sept. 12: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama...

Unscrupulous lenders who deceptively sold subprime mortgages to millions of Americans should be fined and the proceeds used to help bail out borrowers facing a wave of foreclosures, according to Barack Obama, the Democratic senator running to be his party’s presidential candidate. The proposal is among the most radical yet from a leading Democrat and comes as Washington tries to respond to a growing wave of foreclosures and a crisis in credit markets. It also comes amid greater discussion in Washington on whether the mortgage industry – including credit rating agencies involved in rating mortgage-related securities – should be more...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Democrat Barack Obama said Tuesday the recent increase in American troops in Iraq may well have helped tamp down violence, but he insisted there is no military solution to the country's problems and U.S. forces should be redeployed soon. Obama spoke a day after his main Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, made similar comments. She said the tactics of the short-term troop increase were working but political progress did not seem to be in sight and the U.S. should begin bringing some troops home. Obama said in a telephone briefing, "If we put 30,000 additional...

As Sen. Barack Obama competes to be commander-in-chief, he might want to get a quick tutorial on military nomenclature. At the Iowa State Fair last week, he asked two soldiers in battle dress uniforms, or BDUs, who waited to greet him what their "squad" was. "What squad are you guys with?" was his exact question. The soldiers were respectful and answered the question Obama was trying to ask. You hear one of the soldier's say "We're with the 103rd out of Ft. Des Moines." What Obama should've asked the soldiers for was their "unit," not squad. A squad is among...

Not all the nation's ills can be blamed on President Bush, Democratic candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday as he called on Americans to change the nature of politics and institute more openness in government. Part of the problem here is not just George Bush and the White House," Obama told a crowd of hundreds gathered at a park in Cedar Falls.

Candidate Obama made another gaffe last night that is barely getting the MSM’s attention Asked whether he would move U.S. troops out of Iraq to better fight terrorism elsewhere, he brought up Afghanistan and said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama came under fire Tuesday for saying that U.S. troops in Afghanistan are "just air-raiding villages and killing civilians." The junior senator from Illinois made the comment Monday at a campaign stop in Nashua, New Hampshire. "We've got to get the job done there," he said of Afghanistan. "And that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there." The comment drew a rebuke Tuesday from the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. "That is a very troubling remark on so...

"Waitress Laura Carter takes Democratic presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's, D-Ill., food order during a quick stop at the Tumble Inn diner where Obama met with patrons and ordered lunch to go to go in Claremont, N.H."

Asked what he'd do about the North American trade deal, Obama said it needs changes, so he'd "immediately call the president of Mexico (and) the president of Canada."

OAKLAND -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama publicly urged his supporters today not to contribute to independent and unregulated groups - particularly so-called 527 organizations -- that are currently raising money to aid his cause, saying that if backers give directly to his campaign instead, "we'll all be better off.'' The Illinois senator's comments came in response to a Chronicle story published today that detailed an effort by wealthy Bay Area backers to create a 527 group, independent of the campaign, to raise large donations and expand voter registration and turnout for Obama in the February 2008 California presidential primary....

The long-standing argument centers around outer hair cells, which are rod-shaped cells that respond to sound waves. Located in the fluid-filled part of the inner ear called the cochlea, these outer hair cells sport tufts of hair-like cilia that project into the fluid. The presence of outer hair cells makes mammalian hearing more than 100 times better than it would be if the cells were absent. As sound waves race into the inner ear at hundreds of miles per hour, their energy--although dissipated by the cochlear fluid--generates waves in the fluid, somewhat like the tiny waves made by a pebble...

OBAMA: NO NUKES... Obama said Thursday he would not use nuclear weapons 'in any circumstance'... 'I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,' Obama said, with a pause, 'involving civilians' Then he quickly added, 'Let me scratch that'...

Not fighting them there Barack Obama regarding al-Qaida's finding years of safe haven in Pakistan: "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will." No response yet from the 9/11 cut-and-runners in the White House. mailto:qt@suntimes.com

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), in a speech in which he also advocated launching attacks against terrorists in Pakistan, on Wednesday levied heavy accusations against President Bush, including the pronouncement that Bush is “fighting the war the terrorists want us to fight” in Iraq. “By refusing to end the war in Iraq, President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to give them in 2002: a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences,” Obama said in an address at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “[Osama bin Laden] and...

I guess hereby I am saying goodbye to this place. That is though, I will check back here when big breaking news stories happen. My first consern is saving my own nation. When the war on terror started I never thought it would come to this. I got into fisty cuffs with an anti American idiot over here... Now, I see people here (free-republic) cheering on the demise of the civilization in Europe. Cheering on the demise of my own nation. All the while Bush, advocates Turkey to become a member of the EU. Your president can go to Hades...

Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is silhouetted against a light while speaking to residents at the Earl M. Bourdon Centre in Claremont, New Hampshire March 16, 2007. REUTERS/Brian Snyder (UNITED STATES)

Barack Obama is taking heat from Jews and homosexuals in the wake of a report in the Los Angeles Times that he was once a "registered" Muslim. The LA Times reports that Obama did not attend a radical madrasa as Fox News claimed earlier this year. But the LA Times discovered that "Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both of the schools he attended" in Indonesia as a child. The Obama campaign has consistently downplayed any Islamic connection. The revelation won't play well with many Americans. The Des Moines Register reports today that "Obama's expression of...

Before Barack Obama was a United States senator and a presidential hopeful, he was a Harvard University law student living in Somerville who parked in bus stops and accumulated hundreds of dollars in parking tickets. And for nearly two decades those parking tickets went unpaid, until a representative of Obama’s settled all his outstanding debts with Cambridge’s Traffic, Parking and Transportation Department Jan. 26. Obama attended Harvard Law School from 1988 to 1991. During his time at Harvard, Obama lived at 365 Broadway in Somerville, according to his parking tickets. Records from the Cambridge Traffic, Parking and Transportation office show...

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is apologizing for saying the lives of the more than 3,000 U.S. troops killed in the Iraq war were "wasted." During his first campaign trip this weekend, the Illinois senator told a crowd in Iowa: "We now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted." He immediately apologized on Sunday, saying the remark was "a slip of the tongue." During an appearance Monday in Nashua, N.H., he apologized again, telling reporters he meant to criticize the civilian leadership of the war, not those serving in the military....