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In West Texas, it was not uncommon to see the bumper sticker “fear the government that fears your gun” on a lot of pick-up trucks during both terms of the Clinton administration. Like the rest of the South and much of the Midwest, we were hypersensitive to the thought of having our right to keep and bear arms infringed upon in any way. Moreover, common sense and annual FBI crime statistics taught us that 99.9% of the population only used their guns for defensive reasons, thus we were particularly leery of an administration that sought to take away our instruments...

Although the press has been notably lax about pursuing the matter, the full story of the Obama-Ayers relationship calls the truth of Obama’s account seriously into question. When Obama made his first run for political office, articles in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald featured among his qualifications his position as chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation where Ayers was a founder and guiding force. Obama assumed the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office, and almost certainly received the job at the behest of Bill Ayers. During...

August 05, 2008, 7:00 a.m. Dreams From My FarmerIf Obama is a reformer, why doesn’t he vote like one? By David Freddoso When conservatives complain about the Obamalovefest all around, it’s not all a reaction to the messianism. The more down-to-earth complaint is that mainstream-media organs have uncritically bought a key idea promoted by Obama’s well-crafted media campaign: that he is a reformer, a positive agent of change who reaches across partisan divides and bucks parochial interests for the common good. This idea is a great lie, and there is a long record to prove it in Springfield and...

What does the recent brouhaha about race in the presidential election tell us about Barack Obama? On the one hand, the scuffle has revealed him as more ruthless and cynical than he might like to appear to his young, idealistic supporters, which may not be a bad thing. That he is not as nice as he looks is good news if he is to counter the world’s tyrants. But his campaign has also revealed a less flattering side: a willingness to silence political opponents by airing imaginary grievances. Obama apparently considers false indignation a legitimate weapon in his political arsenal....

Americans are much smarter than our media or political leadership give us credit for Well, it’s unanimous. For the first time since this endless election cycle started, it appears that people are finally getting sick and tired of hearing about Barack Obama. Recent news reports show that large percentages of Americans believe Obama is completely over-exposed and given far too much praise and positive publicity. It would be nice if the nation could focus on a different subject, perhaps one that actually has some substance, but the mainstream media simply won’t allow that to happen. Instead of providing coverage of...

Two percent. That's the percent of voters outside the "Motor City" that have a favorable impression of embattled Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. You don't have to be a pollster to understand how strongly disliked Kilpatrick is throughout Michigan. Sit in any restaurant or bar, and all you hear is people talking about Kilpatrick's troubles. Indicted in March on eight felony counts for committing perjury during a whistleblower trial that eventually cost the city about $9 million, the Mayor spent one night in jail on August 7th for violating his bond and then was arraigned the next day for a new...

There is palpable anxiety, even despair, among many Republicans and conservatives over the possibility that Barack Obama will be elected president this November.  This anxiety is being fueled by the mainstream media's fawning coverage of Obama's every word, while shamelessly downplaying John McCain's campaign; by public opinion polls that purport to show Obama "leading" the race over McCain; and by political commentators, on both sides of the aisle, who believe this is the Democrats' "election to lose," based on historical cycles, an uneven economy, high gas prices, continuing opposition to the Iraq War, and President Bush's dismal approval ratings. I...

Growing doubts weaken Obama, polls show White, independent voters hedge S.A. Miller and Stephen Dinan Wednesday, August 6, 2008 Growing doubts among white working-class and independent voters blunted the momentum of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential run in recent days, leaving him in a tight contest with Republican candidate Sen. John McCain, pollsters say. "His bubble hasn't burst, but it's leaking a little bit," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "It is not massive. It is incremental, but we've seen it across the board in all of these states, that [Mr. McCain] is doing better among...

Senator Obama refuses to be boxed in between what he considers two “false choices”, either:1) …On such and such date, come Hell or high water we’ve gotten our troops out, and be blind to anything that happens in intermediate months2) …completely defer to whatever the commanders on the ground say (because his military and strategic knowledge is better than theirs)LINKBy dismissing out of hand the absoluteness of a calender date by which all Americans will be out of Iraq, Senator Obama has just capitulated the political left’s dogma for the past six years (a debate that started in 2002 before...

There is some irony in the fact that Democrats, after years of deriding Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as a hopeless bungler and conniving Shiite sectarian, are now treating as sacrosanct his suggestion that Iraq will be ready to assume responsibility for its own security by 2010. Naturally this is because his position seems to support that of Barack Obama. A little skepticism is in order here. The prime minister has political motives for what he's saying -- whatever that is. An anonymous Iraqi official told the state-owned Al-Sabah newspaper, "Maliki thinks that Obama is most likely to win in...

Michelle Obama was both personal and policy-driven while speaking to a crowd of about 150 who paid from $1,000 to $10,000 to sip wine, eat dinner standing up and hear her talk. She got the laughs - telling a story about how Barack Obama had asked her out - but she also got solemn silence when she painted contrasts between her husband and his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain. "We have one candidate who essentially is telling us every day that the world as it is is just fine, that what we've been doing for the last eight years is...

A political messiah, who — unlike Reagan and Kennedy — needn't bother to do anything. Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast — a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins — would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign-policy credentials. --snip--After all, in the words of his own slogan, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” which, translating the royal “we,” means: “I am the one we’ve been waiting for.” Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his...

Americans are sharply divided by race heading into the first election in which an African-American will be a major-party presidential nominee, with blacks and whites holding vastly different views of Senator Barack Obama, the state of race relations and how black Americans are treated by society, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. The results of the poll, conducted against the backdrop of a campaign in which race has been a constant if not always overt issue, suggested that Mr. Obama’s candidacy, while generating high levels of enthusiasm among black voters, is not seen by them as evidence...

Barack Obama isn’t just conducting a political campaign; he’s launching his very own religious cult. Under the headline “Obama Supporters Take His Name as Their Own,” the New York Times reported on a bizarre fad among the candidate’s enraptured acolytes: across the country, they’ve begun adopting his middle name, Hussein. “The result is a group of unlikely sounding Husseins,” writes reporter Jodi Kantor, “from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Oklahoma, to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.” One of the key elements in many religious cults involves a name change – like transitioning...

Rally Memo From: Leni Riefenstahl To: Barack Hussein (dare I say it?) Obama Subject: Ideas for the rally Dear Mr. Obama: I've been reading of your plans for the Invesco Field mass rally in Denver. I've had some experience documenting such things and am delighted to offer my suggestions. You are the one I've been waiting for.

This fall, watch for David Axelrod, Obama's campaign manager, to choreograph at least two post-convention mass events at least slightly reminiscent of the stagecraft of Leni Riefenstahl in 1934 Germany. Ms. Riefenstahl first heard her idol at a 1932 rally. She was enthralled by his public speaking ability and became a devotee, dedicating her genius to making films that deified The Leader. Her 1934 work entitled "Triumph of the Will," documenting a mass rally in Nuremberg, remains a movie classic with its pioneering dramatic camera work and superbly suggestive imagery. Riefenstahl, a former dancer, put a camera on a semi-circular...

More than halfway through one of the grimmest elections in the history of the US presidency, we gratefully snatch at any source of innocent merriment we can find. Fortunately, there is something intrinsically ridiculous about Obama's retinue of starstruck devotees. Even "Saturday Night Live", hardly a bastion of conservatism, has snickered at the slavish pandering of the media. And the hyperbolic praise of his devoted adherents verges on, or even wallows in, silliness. Younger critics may liken Obama and his followers to a rock star surrounded by groupies. But I'm inclined to hark back to Victorian models of esthetic gurus, such...

Gun Control: Barack Obama says he won't take folks' guns away as long as they're hunters. But when the hunted are his constituents, well, that's different: He opposes concealed carry and the right to self-defense.There's something about an election that brings out the sportsman in a Democratic presidential candidate. Recall John Kerry's sudden fondness for hunting four years ago. And speaking in Idaho earlier this year, Barack Obama told the crowd, "We got a lot of hunters in the state of Illinois, and I have no intention of taking away folks' guns." Except he does. In a 1996 questionnaire, Obama...

Return to the Article June 30, 2008Obama's Callous IndifferenceBy Peter Kirsanow Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen declares that Barack Obama is " 'likable enough' -- in fact, so much so that he is the most charismatic presidential candidate I have seen since Robert F.Kennedy." Well, even though I've  never spoken with Obama, I don't like him very much  (I did testify with him [and a few others] once about a bill he'd sponsored on voter intimidation, but at the time he didn't impress me as unlikable, just a little intellectually lazy) . This hasn't always been the case.  Until...

A Who’s Who of 1968 radicals supports the candidate. Backing a major-party candidate for president would have been anathema to Michael Klonsky 40 summers ago, when the organization he led, Students for a Democratic Society, urged young people to spurn elections. “By ’68, our line was ‘Vote in the Streets,’” Klonsky told me last spring. “We thought we had to fight with Eugene McCarthy and those people.” In August 1968, protesters clashed with police outside the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago—but far from being political innocents who took to the streets to protest Vietnam War hawks’ capture of the...

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   On the Second Amendment, Don’t Believe Obama!   Friday, June 06, 2008   On the Second Amendment,Don’t Believe Obama! The presidential primary season is finally over, and it is now time for gun owners to take a careful look at just where apparent nominee Barack Obama stands on issues related to the Second Amendment. During the primaries, Obama tried to hide behind vague statements of support for “sportsmen” or unfounded claims of general support for the right to keep and bear arms. Print PDF version But his real record, based on...

June 11, 2008, 6:00 a.m. Obama’s Unofficial Slogan: ‘No, You’re Wrong.’Whatever happened to his ‘pang of shame’? By Jim Geraghty As Barack Obama’s campaign becomes defined by a series of embarrassments — his assessment of what small-town residents cling to, a mentor who believes the government created HIV, a friend of 20 years who takes to the pulpit and demands whites give up 401(k) accounts to atone for their ancestor’s racist sins, a wife who pledges to take away some people’s pie and give it to others, an associate who expresses no regret over planting a bomb in a...

WASHINGTON - An emboldened Barack Obama browbeat Sen. Joe Lieberman on the Senate floor after the self-proclaimed "Independent Democrat" slammed the candidate on behalf of Republican John McCain. Flexing his new power as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Obama greeted Lieberman, a prominent McCain backer, on the Senate floor Wednesday - then promptly led him by the hand to a back corner to give him a talking-to. "He had him pinned against the wall," said one Senate aide who saw the tete-a-tete...

June 05, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Rezko: GuiltyFor an untouchable change agent, Obama certainly has a lot of questionable associates. By Stephen Spruiell Talk about bad timing. Barack Obama’s friend and fundraiser Antoin “Tony� Rezko was found guilty today of mail fraud, wire fraud, soliciting bribes, and money laundering in connection to a federal investigation into political corruption in the state of Illinois. Rezko now faces sentencing on 16 of 24 counts, some of which carry punishments of up to 20 years in prison. The verdict comes as Obama is securing the Democratic nomination and trying to put behind him...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H11x6bMu4Y

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tried to deflect a question about his relationship with terrorist Bill Ayers by saying that he “engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old” and that he was now a professor and a neighbor. The real issue is whether Obama shares Ayers’ communist views. Obama admitted to exchanging ideas with Ayers on an irregular basis but did not say what those ideas were. But we know that Ayers, rather than just being a 1960s “radical,” was a member of a Marxist-Leninist communist group. The Weather Under-ground, or Weathermen, wasn’t just...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Unlike Hillary Rodham Clinton, rival Barack Obama planned for the long haul. Clinton hinged her whole campaign on an early knockout blow on Super Tuesday, while Obama's staff researched congressional districts in states with primaries that were months away. What they found were opportunities to win delegates, even in states they would eventually lose. Obama's campaign mastered some of the most arcane rules in politics, and then used them to foil a front-runner who seemed to have every advantage - money, fame and a husband who had essentially run the Democratic Party for eight years as president....

For months, Barack Obama has had the image of an incandescent, golden-tongued Wundercandidate. That image may be fraying now. As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter. He has large gaps in his knowledge base, and is just as likely to dig in and embrace a policy misstatement as abandon it. ABC reporter Jake Tapper calls him "a one-man gaffe machine." Take the Auschwitz flub, where Mr. Obama erroneously claimed last weekend in New Mexico that his uncle helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp. Reporters noted Mr. Obama's revised claim, that...

IN his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy expressed in two eloquent sentences, often invoked by Barack Obama, a policy that turned out to be one of his presidency’s — indeed one of the cold war’s — most consequential: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s special assistant, called those sentences “the distinctive note” of the inaugural. They have also been a distinctive note in Senator Obama’s campaign, and were made even more prominent last week when President Bush, in a speech to Israel’s Parliament, disparaged a willingness to...

Is anyone else bothered by the superhuman rise of Barack Obama? Granted all his virtues, his intelligence, his fast footwork, and the grand rhetoric of his stump speech. Does anyone feel bothered by the fact that he has a conspicuously invisible track record, and that his Illinois years are marred by doctrinaire leftism and intimate connections with the Chicago Machine? Here's a telling fact: Michelle Obama is the daughter of a Daley Machine precinct captain. She grew up watching Chicago politics up close; now she is its biggest homegrown star. Maybe it's not that hard to understand Obama marrying Michelle...

Most pundits are telling Senator Hillary Clinton that it's all over but the shouting.  The math is against her.  However, the math is also currently against Senator Obama -- neither candidate can earn the needed majority in the remaining primaries.  The decision will be made by the Democrats' superdelegates, who are not obligated to decide whom they support until the convention. And they are empowered to change their allegiance at any time, based on their "read" of what's best for the party. This means that until the first ballot in Denver in August, Hillary still has a chance. Conventional wisdom...

Four score and seven years ago… No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or (if like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860. And, of course, the Senator’s speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates’s Apology, etc: It’s history. He said, apropos the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that “I could no more disown him...

Appeal Refocused Amid Tight Race After Clinton Win ANDERSON, Ind. -- Barack Obama recast his call for change by speaking more directly to voters' economic concerns as polls show him in a dead heat with Hillary Clinton in Indiana. The shift comes amid signs that Sen. Obama's lofty appeals for hope and change may not be resonating with financially insecure voters, and may even be driving them away. Campaigning in central Indiana, which has been hit hard by plant closings this decade and where unemployment is two percentage points above the national average, the presidential candidate spoke about how he...

Return to the Article April 28, 2008The Moment of Truth for the Left has ArrivedBy James Lewis If you haven't listened to Jeremiah Wright's hate sermons at Hugh Hewitt's website, you must do so.  Every American with open eyes and ears has to listen to the voice of racial hatred, coming not from the Klan but from a clergyman of the Christian Left. Reading his words isn't enough, because you won't hear the unmistakable meaning of his vocal intonations. If you are a person of good will you will feel upset. But it's of the utmost importance to understand this...

Allow me to introduce myself. According to the general clucking of the national punditry, my 2004 book – "What's the Matter With Kansas?" – is supposed to have persuaded Barack Obama to describe the yeomanry of Pennsylvania as "bitter" people who "cling to guns or religion or . . . anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Mr. Obama's offense is so grave that the custodians of our national consensus have elevated it to gatehood: "Bittergate." In truth, I have no way of knowing whether some passage of mine inspired Mr. Obama's tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch...

Jeremiah Wright speaking live now. Fascinating. You can also get it live streaming from CNN

Traveling the country the past few months, I have encountered habitual Republican voters so entranced by Barack Obama’s potential to lead the nation that they plan to vote for him in November. Once Hillary Clinton’s defected supporters return to loyalty, Obama Republicans could produce a Democratic presidential landslide. But Obama’s current missteps jeopardize their support and imperil his election. These apostate Republicans never were deluded into considering him anything other than a doctrinaire liberal who wants a more intrusive government with higher taxation and tougher regulation. But they have leaned toward him as an exceptional candidate in the mold of...

This is an absolutely blatant attempt to rewrite history by Barack Obama, documented at ABC News Political Punch. First, I honestly don’t care much whether a person wears a flag pin, and you can certainly be a patriot without wearing a badge proclaiming it. The issue for me: Obama’s reasons for taking off that pin. Barack Obama on his refusal to wear a flag pin, now: Obama’s two radically different versions of his reasons for not wearing the pin are there for you to read. Here’s our post about it at the time. You decide who’s telling the truth.

apallasch@suntimes.com In a sit-down interview with the Sun-Times, White House hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday he has been following with great concern the gun violence that has plagued the city in recent weeks. "The news has just been heart-breaking," Obama said after a speech to union members at McCormick Place. "I've asked my staff to contact the Chicago Police Department, and I'm going to put in a call to the mayor just to find out just what is accounting for this huge uptick." Obama said elected officials can help by restoring federal funding to put more police on the street...

Michelle, ma belle: These are words that go together well. She looks fabulous, like a presidential spouse out of some dream movie — glossy hair, triple strand of pearls, vaguely retro suits that subtly remind you she’d be the most glamorous first lady since Jackie Kennedy. Michelle, “fear,” “cynicism”: These are words that go together more problematically. Mrs. Obama is most famous for declaring, about her husband’s candidacy, that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country.” Just a throwaway line reflecting no more than the narcissism and self-absorption required to mount a presidential...

Hillary Clinton won a decisive ten-round decision over Barack Obama in Pennsylvania's Democratic primary, but she didn't score a knockout. The struggle continues. Clinton still has virtually no chance of overtaking Obama's delegate lead or his edge in the popular vote. And the superdelegates will be loath to ignore this advantage. Meanwhile, Obama's weaknesses as a general election candidate grow more apparent with each successive primary.Clinton's best chance of winning the nomination was to win Pennsylvania so decisively that she would have set off a media firestorm about Obama's electability--one that would lead superdelegates to wonder whether she would not...

GUEST COLUMNIST Some liberal commentators have downplayed the effect of Barack Obama's recent fundraising speech in San Francisco. But that's wishful thinking. Along with the revelations about Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright, his remarks in San Francisco will haunt him not only in the upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, but also in the general election against John McCain, assuming he gets the Democratic nomination. To win in November, a Democratic presidential candidate has to carry most of the industrial heartland states that stretch from Pennsylvania to Missouri. That becomes even more imperative if a Democrat can't carry...

The primary thus far has been a deservedly hellish experience for presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and things are only going to get worse. But what should the nation expect from a “congenital liar” and a Centrist imposter who represent a Democratic Party so much dominated by Liberals that its Congressional Moderates and Conservatives could hold their meetings in a cloakroom that doubles as the Blue Dog Democrat Clubhouse.

April 20, 2008 Redefining 'Swiftboating' and Rewriting History By Henry P. Wickham, Jr. If the words "swift" and "boat" must be combined and turned into a verb, then let us insist on its proper use. The word as a verb originates from the campaign undertaken in 2004 by the Swift Boat Veterans in response to the John Kerry presidential candidacy. The word means, or should mean, the exposure of a fraudulent autobiography of one seeking political office or public influence. It is the correction of a personal and professional record that has been selectively and dishonestly compiled, as the Swift...

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Sen. Barack Obama, after accusing Sen. Hillary Clinton of "playing gotcha games," declined Thursday to commit to a debate in North Carolina before the state's May 6 primary. "We're trying to figure out what our schedule looks like, but I'll be honest with you, we've now had 21" debates, Obama said in response to an audience member's question at a rally at the state fairgrounds. Clinton has agreed to a debate proposed for April 27 in Raleigh. Over the last three days, Gov. Mike Easley, former Gov. Jim Hunt and Democratic leaders of the state legislature have...

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new-—an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that. But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal. He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the...

Liberalism is the home and incubator of “multiculturalism” -- the belief that all cultures have value and should in no way be changed by little things like the Western world, or modernity. If you practice a form of herbal voodoo and speak a language with 13 remaining adherants, they’ll argue you should be celebrated, subsidized, and provided with a full-time interpreter should you decide to get a job at the Department of Motor Vehicles. In general, the stranger and more rare one’s culture, the more valuable it is held to be as a specimen in the collection of the multicultural...

When they face off Wednesday night in their Pennsylvania debate, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be fighting each other for the Keystone State's 158 delegates. But they'll also be fighting a common foe: A growing belief that neither can win the general election in November. It's a problem Clinton has had all along, and Obama, despite being the front-runner, is now proving he belongs in the same soup. Clinton started with half of America's voters saying they would never support her for President, and the number hasn't budged. Against Republican John McCain, she would have to win virtually every...

Well, he's done it again. Barak Obama has inadvertently parted the curtain and allowed us to have a peek behind his carefully crafted stage persona. Yet he even outdid himself this time, when he showed his disdain for people of faith as well as gun owners, deriding both groups as "bitter" while clearly characterizing them as weak and misguided. Starting in the 1960's the Democratic party abandoned its roots as "the party of the working man." It is now run by arrogant elitists like Michel Moore who see people who actually go to church as rubes, and gun owners as...

Barack Obama seemed to have survived the blasphemous rants of his preacher and remained relatively untarnished by the perceived dissatisfactions of his privileged wife. But he may be less lucky with remarks he made recently about embittered, small-town Americans, who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Those words now cling to Obama like Styrofoam packing peanuts. The more he tries to brush them away, the more they seem to burrow into the American psyche. Being effete comes naturally to Democrats...