RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Free Speech in the Era of Obama

I know they get to you. That's why you keep responding.

There are also whiter versions of Trinity that I also don't care for either.

In an online chat at the Washington Times today the most famous plumber since Art Carney, Toledo's own Samuel Joseph "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, expressed some mighty skepticism about Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

“When I was face to face with him, my honest first impression was that I expected something more,” wrote Wurzelbacher, in response to a question from “Thomasville, AL.” “I had heard so much about ‘his presence’ in the media that I was surprised to find that he seemed very average. My gut feeling as he answered my questions? I was scared for America.”

“Do you believe Obama will actually stick to his current promise of only raising taxes on incomes above $250k, or will it go lower?” asked “La Jolla, CA.”

“That's the big question isn't it,” replied Joe. “What worries me is that he is deciding that $250k is rich right now, but what's to stop him from changing his mind? As we all know, politicians change their minds at the drop of a poll. Personally, I think it will have to go lower. How else will he pay for all he wants big government to do?”

Oddly, Wurzelbacher says of Sen. John McCain’s "Joe The Plumber" tour, “I did not receive an invitation and learned about it on the news only this morning. No one from either campaign has asked me to join them. I'm out to stick up for the regular folks.”

When one correspondent suggested that Wurzelbacher would fare better under Obama’s tax plan than under McCain’s, Wurzelbacher responded, “Whether or not his tax plan, as he states it today, would help me, it still comes down to principles. I don't want someone else's hard earned money. How can you be sure they're not going to change their minds and decide you make too much money and want to take more of it to "spread" to someone else. Unfortunately, as much as Obama says he wants to help out small businesses, this small business opportunity is now dead.”

Joe the plumber said a bunch of stuff that didn't check out with the talking heads I swear by, I'm gonna act all dismissive regarding his statements so they don't report me to the DNC.

Joe the plumber said a bunch of stuff that didn't check out, don't really give a shit what his opinion is.

Biden Grilling Too Well Done? Obama campaign pulls the plug on all interviews with Florida TV station after Biden is asked critical questions.

The Obamacrats can't handle their VP nominee getting anything but softball questions so they put him in hiding.

The only interview that was cancelled was one with Biden's wife.

Where are all the free speech absolutists when you need them? Over the past month, left-wing partisans and Democratic lawyers have waged a brass-knuckled intimidation campaign against GOP donors, TV and radio stations, and even an investigative journalist because they have all dared to question the radical cult of Barack Obama. A chill wind blows, but where the valiant protectors of political dissent are, nobody knows.

On August 11, I called the American Civil Liberties Union national headquarters in New York for comment about the Chicago gangland tactics of one of these groups -- a nonprofit called “Accountable America” that is spearheaded by a former operative of the Obama-endorsing MoveOn outfit.

“Accountable America” is trolling campaign finance databases and targeting conservative donors with “warning” letters in a thuggish attempt to depress Republican fundraising. (You’ll be interested to know that the official registered agent of Accountable America is Laurence Gold, a high-powered attorney for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) who has testified before the Senate complaining about the use of campaign finance laws to stifle the speech of union workers -- a pet cause of the ACLU.)

The ACLU press office failed to respond to my initial call. On August 13, I followed up through e-mail:

“I called on Monday requesting a statement from the ACLU about Accountable America’s intimidation campaign against GOP donors. What is the ACLU’s position with regard to such efforts? Waiting for your statement...”

ACLU press officer Pamela Bradshaw e-mailed back:

“Michelle, My apologies that I cannot be of more assistance, but we don’t have anyone available. Thanks, Pam.”

My reply: “Pam -- Does this mean you don’t have anyone available today, this week, or for the foreseeable future?”

On August 20, after a week of silence, I forwarded the message again to the ACLU press office. No response.

So, I won’t bother asking the ACLU’s opinion of the latest wave of speech-squelching moves by the Obama campaign:

On Monday, Obama demanded that the Justice Department stop TV stations from airing a documented, accurate independent ad spotlighting Obama’s longtime working relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Obama summoned his followers to bombard stations, many of them owned by conservative-leaning Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails to squelch the commercial.

On Tuesday, the Obama campaign sent another letter to the Justice Department demanding investigation and prosecution of American Issues Project, the group that produced the Ayers ad, as well as Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, who funded it.

And on Wednesday, Obama exhorted his followers to sabotage the WGN radio show of veteran Chicago host and University of Chicago Professor Milt Rosenberg. Why? Because he invited National Review writer Stanley Kurtz to discuss his investigative findings about Obama’s ties to Ayers and the underwhelming results of their collaboration on a left-wing educational project sponsored by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The “Obama Action Wire” supplied Rosenberg’s call-in line and talking points like this:

“Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse. ... It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves.”

Behind the glowing, peaceful facade lies Barack “The Silencer” Obama and his silent enablers on the left. While mainstream journalists schmoozed with liberal celebrities in Denver, practiced yoga with left-wing bloggers and received massages at the Google convention tent near touchy-feely Barackopolis, Team Obama was on an ugly, aggressive warpath sanctioned by Mr. Civility. While compassionate Obama prepared to stand before thousands of worshipers at Invesco Field, purporting to give voice to the voiceless, his Chicago-schooled campaign machine was working overtime to muzzle conservative critics. “We want it to stop,” ordered one pro-Obama caller to WGN.

Welcome to the future: the politics of Hope and Change enforced by the missionaries of Search and Destroy.

In other words, if a reporter doesn't ask the Obamacrats softball questions, that reporter's news organization will be punished.

Obama Does Not Support Return of Fairness Doctrine

I've said it before and I'll say it again... as soon as Obama signs it, if not sooner, MEM will start backpeddling on his earlier critique of the Fairness Doctrine and either (a) find an excuse to support it; (b) find some Republican that also supports it to excuse his party's overwhelming support of same; or (c) both.

Barack Obama's campaign is firing back against criticism over a seven-year-old radio interview in which Obama discussed wealth redistribution, specifically blaming FOX News for drawing attention to the issue.

In the interview, conducted by Chicago Public Radio in 2001 while Obama was an Illinois state senator and a law professor at the University of Chicago, Obama discusses the failure of the Supreme Court to rule on redistributing wealth in its civil rights decisions. The unearthed conversations gave fresh ammunition to critics who say the Democratic presidential candidate has a socialist agenda.

But Obama spokesman Bill Burton on Monday accused FOX News of pushing a "fake news controversy" to further an agenda. Though FOX News played the audio tape for its viewers and did not just recap Republican criticism, Burton suggested FOX News was conspiring with the McCain campaign and the Drudge Report, which posted the material on its Web site.

"This is a fake news controversy drummed up by the all too common alliance of FOX News, the Drudge Report and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months," Burton said in a written statement Monday. "In this seven-year-old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all."

In a heated interview later on FOX News, Burton accused the channel of giving McCain advertising "for free every single day," and trying to "continually trump up these fake controversies and have folks on to talk about things that don't have anything to do with the issues that are important to the American people."

"This was indeed an issue that has been driven by the FOX News Channel," Burton said. "And so this notion that somehow FOX News has been fair on these points, it just does not hold up to the reality of sort of the coverage that it's been getting. And I think ... it is rarely so crystal clear when FOX News in and of itself is driving its own specific agenda helping John McCain frankly more than John McCain sometimes helps himself."

However, the 2001 interview evoked recent questioning by Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher, the Ohio man who asked Obama about his proposal to raise taxes on people making more than $250,000. Obama told Wurzelbacher he wants to hike taxes on the wealthy so that the government can spread the wealth.

In the radio interview, Obama delved into whether the civil rights movement should have gone further than it did, so that when "dispossessed peoples" appealed to the high court on the right to sit at the lunch counter, they should have also appealed for the right to have someone else pay for the meal.

Obama said the civil rights movement was victorious in some regards, but failed to create a "redistributive change" in its appeals to the Supreme Court, led at the time by Chief Justice Earl Warren. He suggested that such change should occur at the state legislature level, since the courts did not interpret the U.S. Constitution to permit such change.

"The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of basic issues of political and economic justice in this society, and to that extent as radical as people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical," Obama said in the interview, a recording of which surfaced on the Internet over the weekend.

"It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted.

"And the Warren court interpreted it generally in the same way -- that the Constitution is a document of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn't shifted.

"And I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that," Obama said.

Burton said Monday the comments on the tape have "nothing to do with Obama's economic plan or his plan to give the middle class a tax cut."

"Here are the facts. In the interview, Obama went into extensive detail to explain why the courts should not get into that business of 'redistributing' wealth. Obama's point -- and what he called a tragedy -- was that legal victories in the civil rights led too many people to rely on the courts to change society for the better. That view is shared by conservative judges and legal scholars across the country," Burton said.

"And so Obama's point was simply that if we want to improve economic conditions for people in this country, we should do so by bringing people together at the community level and getting everyone involved in our democratic process," Burton continued.

John McCain's campaign said the tape proves that Obama is too liberal for the White House.

"Now we know that the slogans 'change you can believe in' and 'change we need' are code words for Barack Obama's ultimate goal: 'redistributive change,'" said McCain-Palin senior policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin.

"Barack Obama expressed his regret that the Supreme Court hadn't been more 'radical' and described as a 'tragedy' the court's refusal to take up 'the issues of redistribution of wealth.' No wonder he wants to appoint judges that legislate from the bench," Holtz-Eakin continued.

National Review reporter Byron York, a FOX News contributor, said the U.S. government already has a progressive tax system that gives money earned by one group to another group, but it's a matter of degree. He added that Obama's outlook on that system hasn't changed.

"It seems clear from listening to this that the Obama of 2001 and probably the Obama of today feels that the government doesn't do that enough, and I think that's probably the big point in this tape," York said.

"You've got to take him at his word," York added. "It seems to me that the tape shows that this is simply a goal he has had for a long time."

In a speech in Cleveland on Monday, McCain said the Obama interview is just another indication that the Democrat wants to increase sharply the amount of government spending.

"Today, he claims he will only tax the rich. But we've seen in the past that he's willing to support taxes that hit people squarely in the middle class, and with a trillion dollars in new spending, the most likely outcome is that everyone who pays taxes will be paying for his spending," McCain said.

Sen. Menendez was just on Fox on Cavuto's show. Cavuto took Menendez to the woodshed regarding Obama's economic plan and the fairness doctrine and it got pretty heated.

Democrats are criticizing a 38-year-old man who parked a trailer load of manure across the street from Whitehall's Democratic campaign office to protest presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

Terry Reed, who owns a construction and excavation company in Whitehall, parked the trailer near the office on Saturday. He also posted a sign in the manure mocking Obama's "change we can believe in" slogan as "a load of crap."

"I think Obama's plan is just one big old poop sandwich and we're all going to have to take a bite," he said.

Suzanne Molyneaux, the Obama campaign's election team leader in Whitehall, said traffic came to a near standstill as people stopped to take pictures of the trailer.

"People in Whitehall were upset, they were outraged," she said. "I don't think Whitehall should be represented as this podunk, ignorant community. There are lots of good people here."

Reed said he doesn't plan to move the trailer until after Election Day.

"My only regret is that I didn't do something sooner," he said.

The name of "reform" simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.