RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Barack Hussein Obama in '08?

“Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!...We [in the U.S.] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.”

“In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01, White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns. The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for over 40 years now, divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community and wake up Americans concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.”

ABC: Is former Reverend a liability for Obama?
David Edwards and Nick Juliano
Published: Thursday March 13, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama's former preacher has delivered some controversial sermons in which he said the US invited the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he has said African Americans should sing "God damn America" instead of God bless America.

ABC News has reviewed dozens of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons, and the network aired some of his most inflammatory rhetoric in a segment Thursday on Good Morning America. Wright was Obama's pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for the last two decades, until his retirement earlier this year.

The Democratic presidential candidate credited Wright for the title of his book, "The Audacity of Hope," and Wright performed Obama's marriage and baptized his two daughters. But Obama has described the preacher as "like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with."

The latest statements unearthed by ABC, which reviewed videos of the sermons the church offers for sale, could cause more headaches for Obama during a campaign in which supporters' comments have increasingly drawn scrutiny.

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," Wright said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

It's unclear whether Obama was in the audience when Wright gave that sermon, but he has previously told the New York Times that he did not attend a service in which Wright implied that the US invited the 9/11 attacks.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans," Wright said, "and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Obama religious adviser Shaun Casey appeared on Good Morning America to defend Obama saying he had already repudiated Wright's controversial remarks. Casey said other candidates were not getting the same scrutiny.

"I mean, it's interesting to me you haven't vetted Hillary Clinton's pastor's sermons, you haven't vetted President Bush's pastor's sermons," he said. "You haven't vetted John McCain's pastor's sermons. So, you're not holding them to that standard, which I think is very interesting."

Doesn't this, therefore, effectively disqualify Obama as a VP also? Otherwise, isn't Hillary endorsing this sort of rhetoric from the crazy reverend?

So, then, why would this disqualify Obama for anything if he's already denounced it.

So, then, why would this disqualify Obama for anything if he's already denounced it.

My point was that MEM seemed to think it was a problem for Obama. I was asking MEM why, if that were the case, it didn't also disqualify him as Hillary's VP. I was pointing out the strange, if not demeaning, logic that Hillary and her supporters seem to be using: that argues Obama is unqualified and/or dangerous but would be a great VP.

It wasn't really an effort to play "gotcha," MEM, at least against you. I was just observing that it tends to show that Hillary's talk of a "unity ticket" is unlikely to result in an actual shared ticket.

I'd like to take this moment to try and bring a end to the fighting on this board. The politics of division are tearing us a part.

Let us rally around words of peace and virtue. Here are some soothing words from the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, my church Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.







I hope that we can somehow come together as I do with this man in church each Sunday to better understand how to battle the politics of division.

"I have never heard an anti-Semitic (remark) made inside of our church. I have never heard anything that would suggest anti-semitism on the part of the pastor,"

A New Hope

JANN S. WENNER



The tides of history are rising higher and faster these days. Read them right and ride them, or be crushed. And then along comes Barack Obama, with the kinds of gifts that appear in politics but once every few generations. There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline. It's not just that he is eloquent — with that ability to speak both to you and to speak for you — it's that he has a quality of thinking and intellectual and emotional honesty that is extraordinary.

I first learned of Barack Obama from a man who was at the highest level of George W. Bush's political organization through two presidential campaigns. He described the first-term senator from Illinois as "a walking hope machine" and told me that he would not work for any Republican candidate in 2008 if Obama was nominated. He challenged me to read Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father.

The book was a revelation. Here was a man whose honesty about himself and understanding of the human condition are both deep and compassionate. Born to a white mother and an African father, he was raised in multiracial Hawaii and for several years in Indonesia. He drifted through some druggy teenage years — no apologies! — before emerging as a star at Harvard Law School. He chose to work as a community organizer in the projects of Chicago rather than join the wealthy insider world of corporate law. And as a young adult, he searched, in the distant villages of Kenya, for the father and family he never knew.

As I read all this, so elegantly written, my mind kept rolling over: Might it be possible? Is there some fate by which we could have this man as president of the United States?

Throughout the primaries, and during a visit he paid to our offices, we have come to know Barack Obama, his toughness and his grace. He would not be intimidated, and he declined to back down, when Senator Clinton called him "frankly, naive" for his willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations. When one of her top campaign officials tried to smear him for his earlier drug use, he did not equivocate or backtrack. On the matter of experience and capability, he has run an impressive, nearly flawless campaign — one that whupped America's most hard-boiled political infighters. Indeed, Obama was far more prepared to run a presidential campaign — from Day One — than Senator Clinton. And at no point did he go negative with personal attacks or character assassination; as much as they might have been justified, they didn't even seem tempting to him.

Obama has emerged by displaying precisely the kind of character and judgment we need in a president: renouncing the politics of fear, speaking frankly on the most pressing issues facing the country and sticking to his principles. He recognizes that running for president is an opportunity to inspire an entire nation.

All this was made clearer by the contrast with Hillary Clinton, a capable and personable senator who has run the kind of campaign that reminds us of what makes us so discouraged about our politics. Her campaign certainly proved her experience didn't count for much: She was a bad manager and a bad strategist who naturally and easily engaged in the politics of distraction, trivialization and personal attack. She never convinced us that her vote for the war in Iraq was anything other than a strategic political calculation that placed her presidential ambitions above the horrifying consequences of a war. Her calibrated course corrections over the past three years were painful. Like John Kerry — who also voted for the war while planning a presidential run — it helped cost her that goal.

Although Obama declined to attack her personally for her vote for the war in Iraq, he did call it, devastatingly enough, a clear demonstration of her so-called experience and "judgment." He has also spoken forcefully about the need to break the grip of lobbyists — at a time when Clinton is the largest recipient of drug-company donations of anyone in Congress. Clinton could not address this issue at all, and neither will John McCain, who is equally a player in Washington's lobbyist culture.

Obama also denounced the Republican campaign of fear. Early in the campaign, John Edwards took the lead, calling the War on Terror a campaign slogan, not a policy. Obama rejected the subtle imagery of false patriotism by not wearing a flag pin in his lapel, and he dismissed the broader notion that the Democratic Party had to find a way to buy into this entire load of fear-mongering War on Terror bullshit — to out-Republican the Republicans — and thus become, in his description of Hillary Clinton's macho posturing on foreign policy, little more than "Bush-Cheney lite."

The similarities between John Kennedy and Barack Obama come to mind easily: the youth, the magnetism, the natural grace, the eloquence, the wit, the intelligence, the hope of a new generation.

But it might be more to the point to view Obama as Lincolnesque in his own origins, his sobriety and what history now demands.

We have a deeply divided nation, driven apart by economic policies that have deliberately created the largest income disparities in our history, with stunning tax breaks for the wealthiest and subsidies for giant industries. The income of the average citizen is stagnant, and his quality of life continues to slowly erode from inflation.

We are embittered and hobbled by the unnecessary and failed war in Iraq. We have been worn down by long years of fear- and hate-filled political strategies, assaults on constitutional freedoms, and levels of greed and cynicism, that — once seen for what they are — no people of moral values or ethics can tolerate.

A new president must heal these divides, must at long last face the hypocrisy and inequity of unprecedented government handouts to oil giants, hedge-fund barons, agriculture combines and drug companies. At the same time, the new president must transform our lethal energy economy — replacing oil and coal and the ethanol fraud with green alternatives and strict rain-forest preservation and tough international standards — before the planet becomes inhospitable for most human life. Although Obama has been slow to address global warming, I feel confident that his intelligence and morality will lead him clearly on this issue.

We need to recover the spiritual and moral direction that should describe our country and ourselves. We see this in Obama, and we see the promise he represents to bring factions together, to achieve again the unity that drives great change and faces difficult, and inconvenient, truths and peril.

We need to send a message to ourselves and to the world that we truly do stand for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And in electing an African-American, we also profoundly renounce an ugliness and violence in our national character that have been further stoked by our president in these last eight years.

Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon "the better angels of our nature."

The Machinery of Hope

Inside the grass-roots field operation of Barack Obama, who is transforming the way political campaigns are run

Over the past year, the Obama campaign has quietly worked to integrate the online technologies that fueled the rise of Howard Dean —as well as social-networking and video tools that didn't even exist in 2004 — with the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor movement-building that Obama learned as a young organizer on the streets of Chicago. "That's the magic of what they've done," says Simon Rosenberg, president of the Democratic think tank NDN. "They've married the incredibly powerful online community they built with real on-the-ground field operations. We've never seen anything like this before in American political history."

In the process, the Obama campaign has shattered the top-down, command-and-control, broadcast-TV model that has dominated American politics since the early 1960s. "They have taken the bottom-up campaign and absolutely perfected it," says Joe Trippi, who masterminded Dean's Internet campaign in 2004. "It's light-years ahead of where we were four years ago. They'll have 100,000 people in a state who have signed up on their Web site and put in their zip code. Now, paid organizers can get in touch with people at the precinct level and help them build the organization bottom up. That's never happened before. It never was possible before."

This is the same grass-roots effort that has trounced the Clinton campaign — a classic top-down operation run by high-paid consultants — in ten straight contests by an average of more than thirty points. It has evolved into the mother of all get-out-the-vote campaigns, one that has enabled Obama to collect more votes in Virginia and Wisconsin than all of the GOP candidates combined.

Obama supporters pressed officials to keep Colbert off ballot


COLUMBIA, South Carolina (CNN) -- Two prominent supporters of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign in South Carolina called state Democratic Party officials and urged them to keep funnyman Stephen Colbert's name off the primary ballot, according to party officials and Obama supporters.

The Obama campaign denied any connection to the phone calls.

"Democrats in South Carolina, including supporters of ours, had strong feelings on both sides of the ballot issue, and ultimately it was South Carolina Democrats who made this decision," said Obama's South Carolina communications director Kevin Griffis.

The South Carolina Democratic Party Executive Council voted last week 13-3 to block Colbert's bid for the Democratic primary.

To get on the ballot, a candidate had to demonstrate two requirements: that he or she was viable nationally and had spent time campaigning in the state.

The majority of voters said Colbert, host of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," did not meet the standard of national viability.

At least one member of the executive council, who requested anonymity, told CNN he felt "pressured" by former State Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum to oppose placing Colbert on the ballot.

Tenenbaum, who ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, is a high-profile supporter of Obama. Her endorsement of Obama in April was touted by the campaign, and she has appeared at several Obama campaign events, including the opening of a campaign headquarters this summer.

"She said it wouldn't be fair to the other candidates. That he [Colbert] wouldn't be sincere. That he was only running in one state," said the executive council official.VideoWatch CNN's Peter Hamby's explain why Obama's supporters wanted Colbert off the ballot »

The official added: "The Obama people, they just didn't want him at all."

Tenenbaum disagreed with characterization that she lobbied to keep Colbert off the ballot for political reasons.

"I think lobbying was too strong a word," she said in an interview with CNN.

"I called them to see what they were thinking and if they had made up their mind. I am a volunteer in that campaign, and so I am not a staffer. And I thought it could have taken votes away from a lot of people."

Another Obama endorser who regularly appears at campaign events, state Rep. Bakari Sellers, also made phone calls to members of the party's executive council about Colbert, according to Sellers.

"I placed the calls as a concerned Democrat, realizing that we are a country in despair," Sellers told CNN. "It is not a time for games or to make a mockery of the process."

Given the lopsided vote of the executive council, it was unclear if the calls had significant bearing on Colbert's fate as a bona fide presidential candidate.

But the calls raise questions about the Obama supporters' motives, given their close ties to the campaign and the fact that Colbert and Obama both draw support from a similar demographic.

"A lot of Obama's support is among younger, college-educated folks, and a lot of Colbert's watchers are younger, college-educated folks," said Scott Huffmon, a political scientist at Winthrop University.

"I understand that Obama might potentially lose some voters," said Huffmon, who also noted that having Colbert on the ballot would likely bring in new primary voters rather than take them from other candidates. "But in a race where every vote counts it's a valid concern."

A

Tenenbaum said her quarrel with having Colbert's name on the ballot was pragmatic rather than political. In deciding which candidates to allow in the primary, the state Democratic Party also had to consider that for every name on the ballot, they would have to pay $20,000 to the state election commission.

"The whole thing is just the money," said Tenenbaum, who said she is fundraising for the party. "He did not meet the criteria. ... It's all in fun and let's just leave it at that."

The three members of the executive council who voted in favor of putting Colbert on the ballot were Charles Hamby, former chairman of the Oconee County Democratic Party; state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter of Orangeburg; and Lumus Byrd.

The Columbia-based lawyer who represented Colbert in his bid to be placed on the ballot, Dwight Drake, is a supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton, although Drake has told CNN in the past he was initially contacted by Colbert's surrogates to assist in the comedian's bid.

As for Colbert, he issued a statement late Monday declaring that his campaign is officially over.

"I am shocked and saddened by the South Carolina Democratic Executive Council's 13-to-3 vote to keep me off their presidential primary ballot," Colbert said. "Although I lost by the slimmest margin in presidential election history (only 10 votes) I have chosen not to put the country through another agonizing Supreme Court battle. It is time for this nation to heal.

"I want say to my supporters, this is not over. While I may accept the decision of the Council, the fight goes on! The dream endures! And I am going off the air until I can talk about this without weeping."

Obama Slams Sermons: Obama 'strongly' condemns 'inflammatory and appalling' anti-U.S. sermons from controversial Chicago pastor.

He was so "appalled" that he kept going to the same church for twenty years. Way to show the courage of hope there, Obama.

G-man posted this in the religion forum but since it's Obama spiritual advisor it deserves a post here as well...

RAW
This isn't something you just quietly dissagree with & expect to win a general election.

the greatest part is whomod has had so many sources disproved, he had to start quoting a entertainment magazine!

Just cuz the doctor alleged that the Gretna AP article was fake isn't "many sources disproved" you retard. I myself posted several active links from newspapers that republished ap stories that don't show up at the AP site either.

So fuck you.

How are the two stories different?

The implication of the story you fabricated was that members of the U.S. military, as part of a sanctioned government policy, were trying to prevent African Americans from evacuating New Orleans.

The story you posted as "proof" of that, however, was about a small town police force, acting seemingly on its own with no official federal sanction whatsoever, against people of varying races.

name one.

Just cuz the doctor alleged that the Gretna AP article was fake isn't "many sources disproved" you retard. I myself posted several active links from newspapers that republished ap stories that don't show up at the AP site either.

So fuck you.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

-- Gandhi

an assertion that I don't see anyone here challenging much.

How are the two stories different?

The implication of the story you fabricated was that members of the U.S. military, as part of a sanctioned government policy, were trying to prevent African Americans from evacuating New Orleans.

The story you posted as "proof" of that, however, was about a small town police force, acting seemingly on its own with no official federal sanction whatsoever, against people of varying races.

Basically, other than the tie to Katrina, the only thing the two stories have in common is a bridge. In which case, you might as well post the lyrics to Simon and Garfunkel's "Feelin' Groovy" and call THAT proof.

In fact, let me save you the trouble and go one better. Here's a YOUTUBE video of that song, in which people trying to cross a bridge are told "Slow down..."



My god. An actual piece of video footage. Can there BE higher proof than that?

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

-- Gandhi

How so? They were the same story! the only fact I got wrong was that I initially said troops and not cops, troopers, state police deputies or whatever the hell they were. that was because at the time I wrote it, I was going on memory about something I read over 2 years ago. The point I was trying to make was that black residents were trapped in New Orleans and not there because they were too stupid or lazy to get out. My point wasn't about troops, it was about people being prevented from leaving by force. And that hasn't changed once in all of this.

The level of venom raised by all this though is astounding to me. The fact that cops stood at a bridge and stopped people from leaving doesn't offend you guys as much as me having gotten a detail about whether it was cops or troops? And could there have been white people among them? Probably a few. From everything I read on this though, it was mostly if not entirely a black crowd. And yeah, there are arguments that it was a public safety issue and not racism and all that. The 60 Minutes piece I posted addresses all those arguments nicely.

BTW. The AP sites archives are shit. I've checked several other AP stories from a few years ago even under advanced search with precise dates and info, they don't show up.

The only way they do appear to be valid and real is under a Nexis search.

All your cries of evil racism aren't supported by your own articles. All those articles show is further incompetence by Ray Nagin and the other New Orleans officials by sending unescorted civilians across dangerous, post-Katrina New Orleans with false promises of buses that WEREN'T THERE just to get them out of their jurisdiction. I've already said that those towns' reactions were drastic, but you probably had your head too far up your ass to read that. My position is that nothing that you've posted is proof of racism. You, and many who liked to play the race card during and after Katrina, seem to forget that it was terrible event that made life hard on everyone. But, if I remember correctly, you're the asshole who first tried to politicize Katrina on this board to begin with.

name one.

Just cuz the doctor alleged that the Gretna AP article was fake isn't "many sources disproved" you retard. I myself posted several active links from newspapers that republished ap stories that don't show up at the AP site either.

So fuck you.