Here are the facts, not the spin:

State Sen. Obama helped secure thousands in state money for a Chicago entrepreneur who had paid him as a legal adviser.

Robert Blackwell, a Chicago entrepreneur also became an Obama donor.

Obama’s Ethics disclosure forms do not make the link clear.

William Ayers Employed Barack Obama for eight years.

The Los Angeles Times broke the ethics story in today’s paper  reporting that Obama used Illinois state letterhead to request a $50,000  tourism promotion grant for a longtime political donor and employer, Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell, Jr. and his company Killerspin.  Obama  mailed the request within months after receiving a final $8,000 per month retainer from Blackwell’s company Electronic Knowledge Interchange.

Blackwell  paid  Obama the retainer  to give legal advice to his growing technology firm.  The monthly sum from this Blackwell company  totaled $112,000.  Then, with support from Obama, other state officials and an Obama aide who went to work part time for Killerspin, this Blackwell Company eventually obtained $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize its table tennis tournaments.

Killerspin specializes in table tennis, running tournaments nationwide and selling its own line of equipment and apparel and DVD recordings of the competitions.

Obama’s staff said the senator advocated only for the first year’s grant — which ended up being $20,000, not $50,000. The day after Obama wrote his letter urging the awarding of the state funds, however, Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign received a $1,000 donation from Blackwell.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/ nation/la-na-killerspin27apr27,1,7266833 .story?page=1&track=rss

Now about Willaim Ayers

In addition to this failure to ethically disclose an important donor, Obama has been breathtakingly  misleading about his relationship with William Ayers. In the past Obama described Ayers as an “acquaintance.”  He also said in the recent ABC debate that Ayers is “Not someone I’ve accepted endorsement of, it’s not someone I exchange ideas with on a regular bassis.”Whopper!! Pinocchio!! William Ayers empoyed Obama for eight years as the Director of the Annenberg Challenge Board.

Thanks to Larry Johnson here http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/04/26/ why-is-obama-hiding-the-truth-about-will iam-ayers-follow-the-money/

 In 1995, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created to raise funds to help reform the Chicago public schools. Ayers co-wrote the initial grant proposal, lists himself on his own website as the co-founder of the Challenge; and he helped select the first director of the board of this program: Barack Obama. Obama served on the board for eight years until the Challenge ended in 2003. Bill Ayers was intimately involved in the Challenge over this same time period.

Senator Obama needs to stop pushing a message of `no politics as usual’ and start answering questions put to him about his associates and financial connections honestly and forthrightly. These disclosures after his repeated mis-statements and lack of full disclosure on ethics forms and about his associations– in debates or in the press– is serving him poorly.

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Here are the facts, not the spin:

State Sen. Obama helped secure thousands in state money for a Chicago entrepreneur who had paid him as a legal adviser.

Robert Blackwell, a Chicago entrepreneur also became an Obama donor.

Obama’s Ethics disclosure forms do not make the link clear.

William Ayers Employed Barack Obama for eight years.

The Los Angeles Times broke the ethics story in today’s paper  reporting that Obama used Illinois state letterhead to request a $50,000  tourism promotion grant for a longtime political donor and employer, Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell, Jr. and his company Killerspin.  Obama  mailed the request within months after receiving a final $8,000 per month retainer from Blackwell’s company Electronic Knowledge Interchange.

Blackwell  paid  Obama the retainer  to give legal advice to his growing technology firm.  The monthly sum from this Blackwell company  totaled $112,000.  Then, with support from Obama, other state officials and an Obama aide who went to work part time for Killerspin, this Blackwell Company eventually obtained $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize its table tennis tournaments.

Killerspin specializes in table tennis, running tournaments nationwide and selling its own line of equipment and apparel and DVD recordings of the competitions.

Obama’s staff said the senator advocated only for the first year’s grant — which ended up being $20,000, not $50,000. The day after Obama wrote his letter urging the awarding of the state funds, however, Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign received a $1,000 donation from Blackwell.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/ nation/la-na-killerspin27apr27,1,7266833 .story?page=1&track=rss

Now about Willaim Ayers

In addition to this failure to ethically disclose an important donor, Obama has been breathtakingly  misleading about his relationship with William Ayers. In the past Obama described Ayers as an “acquaintance.”  He also said in the recent ABC debate that Ayers is “Not someone I’ve accepted endorsement of, it’s not someone I exchange ideas with on a regular bassis.”Whopper!! Pinocchio!! William Ayers empoyed Obama for eight years as the Director of the Annenberg Challenge Board.

Thanks to Larry Johnson here http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/04/26/ why-is-obama-hiding-the-truth-about-will iam-ayers-follow-the-money/

 In 1995, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created to raise funds to help reform the Chicago public schools. Ayers co-wrote the initial grant proposal, lists himself on his own website as the co-founder of the Challenge; and he helped select the first director of the board of this program: Barack Obama. Obama served on the board for eight years until the Challenge ended in 2003. Bill Ayers was intimately involved in the Challenge over this same time period.

Senator Obama needs to stop pushing a message of `no politics as usual’ and start answering questions put to him about his associates and financial connections honestly and forthrightly. These disclosures after his repeated mis-statements and lack of full disclosure on ethics forms and about his associations– in debates or in the press– is serving him poorly.

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by Lin Farley

It is amazing how often this primary season has prompted me to haul out a spyglass to peer back into my life. A lot of the memories are soft focus now, a little more so with each passing year; but the time period from the early 60’s to the end of the 70’s is when I was young. And I hold the recollections of this time to be dear, shared only with intimates. I have never written about them although I am a fierce critic of those who do.

The tale of the 60’s and 70’s has never been told to my satisfaction probably because I keep seeking my story, and it is never there. I was more political than a flower child. Free love and drugs were ok, if that was your thing, and I smoked grass, especially when I went dancing; but to me this aspect of the era was more incidental than substantial. Love-ins, flower power, bell bottoms and tambourines were the trappings. The meat of the era was Political and no song summed it up better than “Something Happening Here” by Buffalo Springfield:

There’s something happening here

What it is ain’t exactly clear

There’s a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

There’s battle lines being drawn

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong

Young people speaking their minds

Getting so much resistance from behind

I think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

What a field-day for the heat

A thousand people in the street

Singing songs and carrying signs

Mostly say, hooray for our side

It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you’re always afraid

You step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop, hey, what’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

Stop, hey, what’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

Stop, now, what’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

Stop, children, what’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

The song captures an entire gestalt, the mindset of a generation not only committed to ending a war of intervention, but also determined to make the world into a better, safer, more humane place. One fit for children and animals, which was a slogan one often saw on posters. But we were not self conscious about it. People rarely wrote things down. No one imagined how this time in our lives would become almost mythological. We all believed the way it was is the way it would always be. I didn’t write much either. In those days I was just a face in the crowd. I listened, clapped, carried signs, and cheered others. This was fine with me. I didn’t aspire to more of a role. The working class part of me remained a little withheld. It took a lot for me to break the law; so many others were way ahead of me. And yet it seems to me now, that I was there, at so many of the Big Moments.

In 1963 during the Cuban Missile crises I was a 17 year-old freshman at Berkeley terrified I would never get to have sex before we were vaporized by a Russian bomb. I had already joined SLATE, which many now consider to be the beginning of the New Left and the ‘Grandaddy’ of all the student movements that would follow on. The next year some of my friends in SLATE would help to found the Free Speech Movement, but I had already have moved on.

In those days I checked in and out of colleges the way some people check in and out of motels. Scholarships always appeared. Middle class teachers seemed to view me as the working class kid `with all the potential,’ and remaking me in their image was a project they enjoyed. At USC, where I had a journalism scholarship, I came close to graduating until Barbara Meyerhoff, the anthropologist who became famous but whose acclaim had not yet arrived, ‘adored’ my final project. This was a two hour reel-to-reel tape of carefully selected songs to communicate our `revolution.’ She asked me to write a paper with her that would accompany the tape and which we would present at an international gathering of anthropologist’s. The music had to speak for itself I declared. So I declined. Myerhoff alternately cajoled and ranted, but I remained adamant because the essence of the whole project was: No Words.

My generation didn’t trust words at all. Words were the way people lied and exploited other people. What we trusted was music. It was our salvation, our language, and our guided missile launched at the brain of the war machine. From Janis Joplin to Marvin Gay; from Donovan to the Rolling Stones; from the Platters to Simon & Garfunkle; from Joan Baez to Jimi Hendrix, from the Beatles to Pete Seeger, we gamboled inside the greatest explosion of popular music styles than at any other time in American history.

The altercation with Myerhoff unnerved me and true to my MO in those years, I left school to seek fame and fortune back east. Myerhoff eventually came around and gave me a notebook for my trip into `who I would become.’ I threw it in the passenger seat, slipped behind the wheel of my blue VW bug, and headed into the future with the radio on high and all my failures still to come.

I arrived in Manhattan in time for the March 7, 1970 townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village which killed 3 Weather Underground members who were preparing a bomb to be set off at a noncommissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The bomb, a makeshift anti-personnel weapon studded with roofing nails, exploded prematurely killing Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins. Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and Cathlyn Wilkerson, upstairs at the time of the blast, were helped by rescue workers and then disappeared before they could be questioned. William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn also disappeared. The Townhouse Explosion on 11th St. became one of my first feature stories for the Associated Press.

A few months later I wrote the headlines that appeared on the AP sign that went around the top of a building in Time Square. Late in the day on Monday, May 4 that sign announced: Ohio National Guard Members Murder Four Kent State Students. A huge crowd gathered and police feared a riot; so they called us to take down the sign. I refused. This became my first taste of the power that comes with authority, and what began as a taste became a meal when on Tuesday the AP not only backed me up, but lauded my judgment.

Still, I left the AP some months later after I participated in a Red Stockings consciousness-raising group and became a full time activist in the women’s movement. After waving goodbye to the upscale West Village, I moved to the East Village where I ate at Leshkos and hung out with radicals. Again I was a nobody. A cipher really. But I now embraced feminism with a passion I had until then only given to the antiwar movement. My apartment on E. 6th St, a railroad flat and a 5th floor walkup, was across from the first gay rights office in Manhattan and barely a block from the old Fillmore East.

And this is when the Weather Underground entered my own personal space, impacting me outwardly as well as reverberating internally, so that I finally decided where I stood on the issue of violence and civil disobedience. You could not be a radical in that time without confronting violence: the use of force by the government, `violent action’ by our side, the sds who immolated a dog with napalm, gay kids kicked and mauled by police, protesters of all kinds beaten with nightsticks and worse, not to mention Vietnam and My Lai. As early as Los Angeles, when I worked for the City News Service, we carried a story saying that no one had been seriously hurt in the Century City anti-war demonstrations, when our own reporter was in the hospital, perhaps paralyzed from injury to his spinal cord after the police shoved him and he fell on a sprinkler head.

Violence was everywhere. The best leaders of my generation disappeared in blood drenched assassinations. Nightsticks, police dogs and bombs dotted the south like ornaments on some macabre tree where hate and prejudice replaced the normal limbs of life. A woman was murdered and the police questioned me and my friends. We knew it was her boyfriend, but they didn’t believe us.

How far were you prepared to go? We talked about it all the time. And even in sleep violence prevailed. I would soon move into a woman’s collective in Washington DC, and after that I often dreamed that men with long handled axes, who could slip under doors and slide along walls, chased me with red tongues lolling like mad dogs announcing their intention to hack me into pieces for moving in with a `bunch of women.’

It was because of the collective we named Amazing Grace that I met some Weather Underground people, and then my phone was tapped by the feds. I was one of 4 from New York invited to join this collective, which was to be housed in Washington DC. In the planning stages we drove down to DC on a Friday night only to find our place to stay had evaporated. So someone, a friend of a friend of the DC women, fixed us up at another `house.’

I didn’t like the looks of the place from the second I saw it. Weeds grew everywhere, the blinds were all down, inside there was only a hodge podge of furniture; and it was like no one actually lived there. Everything was makeshift. The kitchen smelled and the counters appeared overrun by red spaghetti splashes and dried milk stains. Some cereal boxes, one canted sideways decorated the kitchen table. The faces of the people I met were pinched and hard. They didn’t smile. A kind of hostile paranoia invaded the place. I never got the story straight, but in the middle of the night we were awakened and told to get out fast. The police were going to raid the house because Weather Underground people were there now or had been there right before us.

As we were rushing out to our car, a woman from the `house’ whispered to me, ‘be careful, the pigs will nail you. They are taking everyone down.’ I was so furious I couldn’t speak. We were threats to society now. And you couldn’t just go and say, “Hey, policeman, sir; this is all a big mistake.’

And that’s when what I felt about violence crystallized. Sure, I was scared. But the fear did not arise out of some imagined harm. I was scared that I would be seen as someone I was not. Someone who could kill innocents. And I couldn’t. I was a lot more Ghandi than terrorist. I didn’t know that word then, but I didn’t have to know the word to understand the behavior. These people hated. They killed. And they did it because they believed in themselves above all others. I would place my commitment to peace and to liberation alongside anyone’s in those days, but I would not kill to make the world more like I believed it should be.

Timothy Noah in Slate Aug22, 2001 wrote:

“The weather underground was full of rich kids who thought they knew best. Who wanted to kill in order to stop killing. To many on the left they were heroes, I thought they were jackals. And William Ayers exemplified the worst when on 9/11, 2001, in an interview for his book ” Fugitive” he said in the NY times:

‘I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.’

…Much of what Ayers self-interestedly leaves out of his book is more personally embarrassing than illegal. Ayers takes care not to dwell on his own Establishment credentials. (His father was chairman of the energy company Commonwealth Edison, a fact Ayers conveys only by writing, “My dad worked for Edison.”) Ayers omits any discussion of his famous 1970 statement, “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” He also omits any discussion of his wife Bernardine Dohrn’s famous reaction to the Manson killings, as conveyed by journalist Peter Collier: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!” (In a 1993 Chicago Magazine profile, Dohrn claimed, implausibly, that she’d been trying to convey that “Americans love to read about violence.”) Nor does he address fellow radical Jane Alpert’s charge that Ayers was “notorious for his callous treatment and abandonment of Diana Oughton before her death and for his generally fickle and high-handed treatment of women” (though Ayers does manage to get across the message, to those few who haven’t heard it, that the late 1960s and early 1970s were a golden age for getting laid).”

slateid/1008160/

I didn’t last in the DC collective long. Rich kids who wanted to play poor infuriated me. I returned to my apartment to find out my phone was tapped and that the police had been by. The phone tap, accompanied by clicking sounds and by guys who would occasionally snicker at some conversations intended to be private, lasted for years. I got used to it. And eventually people would stop by to hear what a real tap sounded like. It became a giggle.

And ‘Grandma,’ an older Ukrainian lady of indeterminate age with an expanding waistline and gray hair who daily sat on the front stoop of our building with her Yuncheck, a fiercesome German shepherd, turned out to be my friend. ‘Grandma’ guarded the building. There is no other way to describe it. No one got in our out without first getting by Grandma and Yunchek. My friends and I would laugh how if the police ever came they would have a hard time with Grandma. I never saw this as anything but a joke. And then the police did come.

“I tell them notink,” she announced grabbing my arm as I walked up the stairs. It took awhile for me to understand from her broken English that the police had actually come looking for me. When I asked her to describe them she said, “Men in suits with no smiles. They want you.” I stayed with friends for a few days. And then mustered the courage to go home. They never came for me again.

I do not understand how William Ayers wound up teaching at a University, holding forth on how he didn’t do anything wrong. I can understand people in succeeding generations wanting to talk to the real deal. But I cannot understand lauding a man who does not regret setting bombs. I believe Weather Underground takes responsibility for over 200 bombings nationwide. I also cannot understand the attitude of a man who wants to be President of all the people of this country associating with Ayers. Let’s not debate the association. It is well documented and it goes beyond ‘we met a few times.’

The crucial question to me is similar to the quesiton I have about Wright, and it goes to the issue of his judgment. I was 23. Obama is twice my age, and these associations are recent. For me they have set off an alarm. Every person who loves this country and who hates injustice, sooner or later, must come to terms with how he or she will seek change. Obama, has to answer for his associates. He cannot dodge the issue by saying they are ‘harmless.’ These people are not innocent. And Obama’s association with Wright and Ayers is haunted by the cries of the ordinary and everyday people who have been killed by prejudice and by bombs all over this precious and vulnerable world.

©2008 Lin Farley, of SAVAGEPOLITICS.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Barack Obama tried to “Wipe the Dirt Off His Shoulder” after a poor performance in the debate two nights ago.

What most of us “typical white people” don’t know is that Obama’s gesture is part of the Hip Hop Gangsta culture, and it stems from a song by artist Jay-Z.Jay-Z has endorsed Obama publicly and even did campaign robo-calls for Obama in Ohio. Obama told Angie Martinez of New York’s Hot 97 FM:“On my iPod, I’ve got a little bit of Jay-Z and a little bit of Beyonce,” said the senator. “A little bit of that stuff. I don’t want to pretend that I know as much as my 9-year old or 6-year old daughter.” Holy smoke, do his daughters listen to Jay-Z? Why not, I guess, when they hear Reverend Jeremiah Wright every Sunday.Here are the lyrics to Dirt Off Your Shoulder: 

The line “middle finger to the law” highlighted, because that is exactly what Obama did to Clinton in that “wipe the dirt off” diatribe. He did it slyly, in such a way that one could argue that he was just scratching an itch off his face, but coupled with the “wipe off gesture”, his intent was unmistakable.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but what ever happened to respect? I have to tell you that I find this absolutely repugnant. Is this the kind of person we want in the White House? Please, please, tell me it isn’t!

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“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they 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.”    

~ Barack Obama

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.”    

~ Karl Marx

When I saw the symbolism that was being used in the Obama campaign it send a shudder through me. There have been many radical men lifted to prominence using these techniques, and I wondered if we were looking at another one.

Obama claims to be leading a movement of hope and change, but after all these months we still really don’t know what that means. The fawning over him by big media, latte liberals and young students have framed his campaign in terms of messianic inevitibility.

However, Obama “the mortal” has done very little to warrant this blind faith and adoration. Followers seem to be caught up in a cult of personality, enamored with Obama “the symbol”. His mixed DNA, his rather exotic background, and his ability to give a good speech make him “on paper” an ideal person to prop up in the White House to prove to the world that America really is about inclusion of cultural and religious differences. I understand why folks would pin their dreams for a better and more loving world on someone like this.

Sadly, Obama “the mortal” has red flags all around him. He has continually left us scratching our heads as, one by one, his long time associations are revealed to us. Political fundraiser and close associate for fifteen years, Syrian-born Antoin Rezko, is currently on trial in Chicago accused of political fixing and draining Illinois state coffers for his own gain. At the trial it was revealed that some of these funds found their way into the campaign coffers of local politicians, including Barack Obama. Obama was purportedly the recipient of nearly a quarter of a million dollars through contact with Rezko, including ill-gotten gains which were donated to his various senate and presidential campaigns.

Obama trumpets transparency, and yet, as was pointed out today by the Clinton campaign, has not released tax returns for 1997, 1998 and 1999, even though he was a state senator during those years. In addition, Obama either destroyed or did not keep personal schedules of his days in the Illinois senate, a period of time when Sen. Obama was accepting contributions from special interest lobbyists, PACs and even directly from corporations.

“When it comes to transparency, the only thing transparent about Senator Obama is his claim to be transparent.” ~ Clinton Campaign

Obama attempts to paint himself a man of the people, above all the partisan machinations that have played out in every election since the beginning of time. And yet, he uses surrogates to defile and defame, and attempt to humiliate his opponent at every turn. Many of Obama’s critics have received hate mail and death threats, especially those that are African American and believe that Clinton would be a better president.

That Obama might be an elitist is really the least of my fears. I worry that he is actually dangerous.  Intense pressure has been applied to party members to support him. Critics have been  silenced and swayed by the threat of losing their senate and congressional seats. There has an avalanche of vile comments attacking Clinton supporters on websites, including the public outing of their personal information such as addresses, phone numbers, and employers. There have also been coordinated attempts at intimidation, organized chaos, disinformation, and flagrant violation of DNC rules at caucus sites by Obama supporters as well.

Then there was the obviously organized jeering and disruption by SEIU union workers during Clinton speeches this week in Pennsylvania. 

His campaign obsessively calls media outlets demanding the scrubbing of unfavorable news items and headlines and the media inexplicably obliges. Big Media is also seemingly complicit in the spinning and suppression of polls,  along with willful denigration of both Clintons.

All this makes one wonder who the hell this man is, who’s interests he represents, and what change really means.

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Today he launched into a tirade, scolding Hillary for questioning Obama’s choice of words during the now famous Bittergate fundraiser at a United Steelworker’s rally in Steelton, PA.

Obama expressed his disappointment with Hillary in this way:

“She’s running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment, she’s talking like she’s Annie Oakley! Hillary Clinton’s out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday, she’s packin’ a six shooter! C’mon! She knows better. That’s some politics being played by Hillary Clinton. I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blinds.”

Well, as any duck hunter knows, you would never take a six-shooter into a duck blind. The NRA will have a field day with this one! 

Apparently he also is unaware that Annie Oakley is true hero to women all over small town America. This is from PBS.org, the American Experience:

Annie Oakley may not have considered herself a feminist, but she showed the world what a strong woman could accomplish in an era when women were struggling to gain greater equality, including the right to vote.

Again, we see that Barack Obama doesn’t know us. He wants to preside over this great country? He doesn’t realize that some of us see Hillary Clinton as cut from the same cloth as “Little Sure Shot”, Annie Oakley.

Hillary Clinton welcomes the comparison…in fact, she will probably send him a personal thank you note.

“In her life, Annie overcame poverty, mistreatment and physical injury with her determination and strength of character. She played a role in breaking barriers for women with her talent and accomplishments in her sport. She showed great compassion and generosity to orphans, widows and other young women.”

It is also ironic that Oakley lived out several years of her life fighting a libel suit against 55 newspapers that printed a scandalous false story originated by the original “Big Media” guy, William Randolph Hearst in of all places, Chicago.

By all accounts Oakley was persuasive in the courtroom; she dressed conservatively, spoke courteously, and exuded respectability. Hearst tried to undermine her by having a detective go back to Darke County, Ohio, and try to dig up dirt, but he came up empty and was prevented by locals from staying overnight.  

She eventually won her battles, and the newspapers were required to file apologies and pay monetary damages.

Sorry Barack, you got your folk heroes mixed up. But you almost hit your mark.

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Today he launched into a tirade about Hillary questioning Obama’s choice of words during the now famous Bittergate fundraiser at a United Steelworker’s rally in Steelton, PA.

Obama expressed his disappointment with Hillary in this way:

“She’s running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment, she’s talking like she’s Annie Oakley! Hillary Clinton’s out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday, she’s packin’ a six shooter! C’mon! She knows better. That’s some politics being played by Hillary Clinton. I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blinds.”

Well, as any duck hunter knows, you would never take a six-shooter into a duck blind. The NRA will have a field day with this one! 

Apparently he also is unaware that Annie Oakley is true hero to women all over small town America. This is from PBS.org, the American Experience:

Annie Oakley may not have considered herself a feminist, but she showed the world what a strong woman could accomplish in an era when women were struggling to gain greater equality, including the right to vote. Working with a partner, create a two-part timeline: on one side of the timeline, list some of the notable events of Oakley’s life; on the other side, list the major developments in the long campaign for women’s suffrage, beginning with the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration. Be sure to include the western territories and states that allowed women to vote long before women’s voting rights became part of the U.S. Constitution.

Again, we see that Barack Obama doesn’t know us. And he wants to preside over this great country. 

Hillary Clinton welcomes the comparison…in fact, she will probably send him a thank you note personally!

“In her life, Annie overcame poverty, mistreatment and physical injury with her determination and strength of character. She played a role in breaking barriers for women with her talent and accomplishments in her sport. She showed great compassion and generosity to orphans, widows and other young women.”

It is also ironic that Oakley lived out several years of her life fighting a libel suit against 55 newspapers that printed a scandalous false story originated by the original “Big Media” guy William Randolph Hearst in Chicago.

By all accounts Oakley was persuasive in the courtroom; she dressed conservatively, spoke courteously, and exuded respectability. Hearst tried to undermine her by having a detective go back to Darke County, Ohio, and try to dig up dirt, but he came up empty and was prevented by locals from staying overnight.  

She eventually won her battles, and the newspapers were required to file apologies and pay monetary damages.

Ahh, if only Hillary could do the same.

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“Our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives,” he said. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.”

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they 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.”

This statement is offensive on many levels. First, the purpose appears to be an effort to tarnish the record of the previous Clinton administration and diminish the accomplishments of that time. During Bill Clinton’s administration Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate shrunk from 7.3% to 4.1 (which is considered nearly full employment). 486,300 new jobs were created in Pennsylvania from 1993 to 2000. 81,758 children received healthcare that didn’t have it before during this period, so Obama’s statement that “they fell through the Clinton administration” is disingenuous.

Let’s examine his next statement:

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they 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.”

Here Obama inexplicably ties Middle America’s beliefs about their second amendment rights, and their desire to exercise their freedom of religion under the Bill of Rights to bitterness over their woeful economic status brought on by government shortcomings over the last 25 years. He does this in such a way you would think he was describing someone turning to drugs or alchohol to escape their miserable lives.

Hillary Clinton immediately addressed this statement with one of her own:

“Pennsylvania doesn’t need a president who looks down on them,” she said told a rally. “They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families.”

A spokesman for John McCain called Obama’s comments “remarkable and extremely revealing.”

“It shows an elitism and condescension toward hard-working Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking,” said Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to the Arizona senator. “It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.”

Obama, in an obvious attempt to blunt criticism of the remarks went on the offensive. At an event in Indiana, he tried to turn the tables.

“When I go around and I talk to people, there is frustration, and there is anger, and there is bitterness,” Obama began. “I want to make a point here. I was in San Francisco talking at a fundraiser, and somebody asked me “well, how are you going to get votes in Pennsylvania? I heard that it’s hard for some working class people to get behind your campaign. Why is that?” I said, well look, they’re frustrated and for good reason, because for the last 25 years they’ve seen jobs shipped overseas, they’ve seen their economies collapse. They have lost their jobs, they’ve lost their pensions. They’ve lost their health care.”

Notice that Obama here does not really answer the question about why working class Pennsylvanians find it hard to get behind his campaign.

Obama stated that politicians from both sides of the aisle have promised answers but that “nothing ever happens” as if that is why they are not interested in voting for him specifically. This is a very clever way to skirt a question he does not want to give an accurate answer for.

“So…they don’t vote on economic because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them,” Obama said, adding that instead they end up voting on issues that include “gun rights”, “gay marriage”, and “faith”.

However, this is quite a departure from his original statement that people “get bitter” and that they ”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.”

Notice too, that Obama has now introduced an “anti-gay” element into this conversation, making us wonder if he really believes middle-America is nothing but typical gun-toting, immigrant hating, bible-thumping, gay-bashing, NAFTA cursing white people that have been let down by our government.

He then lashes out at Clinton and McCain.

“Here’s what’s rich,” Obama said. “Sen. Clinton says, ‘Well I don’t think people are bitter in Pennsylvania. I think Barack’s being condescending.’ John McCain says, ‘Oh, how could he say that? How could he say people are bitter? He’s obviously out of touch with people. ”

Hillary Clinton did not say that she thought Barack Obama was being condescending (although she surely thought it). She said that it wasn’t her experience that the people of Pennsylvania were bitter. For someone that is supposed to be the harbinger of hope, Obama sure is a downer.

Obama railed next against the McCain camp.

“Out of touch?” Obama said. “I mean, John McCain, it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem and to come up with a plan for it, and he’s saying I’m out of touch?”

“Sen. Clinton voted for a credit card sponsored bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people to get out of debt after taking money from the financial services companies, and she says I’m out of touch?”

Ok, now I have to stop here and to correct the record. The reason that Clinton voted for this bill is that it actually capped the interest that credit card companies could charge to 30%. Granted, this is still too high, but a no vote (as Obama cast) just allowed these financial institutions to charge whatever exhorbitant interest rates they wanted with no limits. Obama was not willing to stick his neck out on this bill because it was not “perfect”. Sometimes change needs to be made incrementally when big business is involved…sad but true. Obama seems to have an “all or nothing” approach that will not net him the bi-partisan support he campaigns on.

Obama ’s speech was true to one of the basic principals of his Saul Alinsky-based training in community organization, the principal of agitation. According to Alinsky, the agitator’s job is to make people realize that they are miserable, and that their misery is rooted in failures of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations.

This method is used to great effect by Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Obama concludes his speech with this:

“No. I’m in touch. I know exactly what’s going on. I know what’s going on in Pennsylvania, I know what’s going on in Indiana, [and] I know what’s going on in Illinois. People are fed up.”

It is becoming apparent that Obama and Pastor Wright may be more similar than they are different.   

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“After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as chief strategist of the Clinton Campaign,” Maggie Williams, Clinton’s campaign manager said today in a statement. ”Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign.”

Penn, the CEO of Burson-Masrsteller, has apologized for the meeting and for not making it clear to the Colombians that he was not meeting with them as a representative of the Clinton campaign. Hillary Clinton has publicly criticized the trade agreement.  

Labor unions are in strong opposition to the agreement hammered out by the Bush administration originally in 2006. According to The Nation, since 1991, there have been more than 2,300 trade unionists murdered in Colombia. In 2007, there were 39 murdered and this 13 in 2008 making it one of the most treacherous places in the world to be a union member.

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We think that his actual comment warrants further examination:

“Let me just tell you that Hillary Clinton’s plan in the United States Senate is a nonstarter, because it starts with a mandate that is unachievable in the Senate in what we need to do.”

This comes from a man that backed universal healthcare by introducing a bill in 2006 that would also have mandated that everyone was covered by 2012.

Kerry is obviously admitting here that he did not have the political capital to get this major overhaul of the healthcare system through because of the influence of lobbyists and money in our political system. Why else could anyone be opposed to healthcare for all? If it is mandate through payroll deductions, then everyone that works will be paying into the system, including migrant workers and even those with illegal identification. Allowances will be made for those that are out of work or can’t work. It is win-win for the people.

Is he actually saying that there is no way to get the legislative body to do the right thing because they are in the pockets of the HMO’s and drug companies?

Is the of universal healthcare coverage really a goal of the democratic party? The official stance is “A Healthcare System that Works for Everyone”. Perhaps I am getting cynical, but those sound a bit like weasal words. If your platform is universal healthcare, come out and say it - celebrate it!

Yes, Bush vetoed the Children’s Health Bill, though not all Republicans are opposed to insurance mandates.

Senator Wyden from Oregon has submitted proposals that include individual requirements for coverage that was co-sponsored by eight republicans, and endorsed by Governor Schwarzenner of California and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.

If the democratic party does the right thing and recognizes the voters in Michigan and Florida, we should finally have a president in office that we can work with. If we don’t make universal healthcare a top priority this fall when so many people are suffering and with a majority in the legislature, we have no right to call ourselves democrats.

Mr. Kerry, your constituents didn’t elect you to say ”No, We Can’t”.