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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (40027)8/17/2008 5:02:55 AM
From: puborectalis  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 224748
 
August 17, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Candidate We Still Don’t Know
By FRANK RICH
AS I went on vacation at the end of July, Barack Obama was leading John McCain by three to four percentage points in national polls. When I returned last week he still was. But lo and behold, a whole new plot twist had rolled off the bloviation assembly line in those intervening two weeks: Obama had lost the election!

The poor guy should be winning in a landslide against the despised party of Bush-Cheney, and he’s not. He should be passing the 50 percent mark in polls, and he’s not. He’s been done in by that ad with Britney and Paris and by a new international crisis that allows McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocons identify a new battleground for igniting World War III, whether Baghdad or Tehran or Moscow, and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts.

Obama has also been defeated by racism (again). He can’t connect and “close the deal” with ordinary Americans too doltish to comprehend a multicultural biography that includes what Cokie Roberts of ABC News has damned as the “foreign, exotic place” of Hawaii. As The Economist sums up the received wisdom, “lunch-pail Ohio Democrats” find Obama’s ideas of change “airy-fairy” and are all asking, “Who on earth is this guy?”

It seems almost churlish to look at some actual facts. No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election.

Yet surely, we keep hearing, Obama should be running away with the thing. Even Michael Dukakis was beating the first George Bush by 17 percentage points in the summer of 1988. Of course, were Obama ahead by 17 points today, the same prognosticators now fussing over his narrow lead would be predicting that the arrogant and presumptuous Obama was destined to squander that landslide on vacation and tank just like his hapless predecessor.

The truth is we have no idea what will happen in November. But for the sake of argument, let’s posit that one thread of the Obama-is-doomed scenario is right: His lead should be huge in a year when the G.O.P. is in such disrepute that at least eight of the party’s own senatorial incumbents are skipping their own convention, the fail-safe way to avoid being caught near the Larry Craig Memorial Men’s Room at the Twin Cities airport.

So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer — and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it — is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is. The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they’re “hearing too much” about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It’s past time for that pressing educational need to be met.

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” — as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”

Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being “proud” of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about “whitey.” But we still haven’t been inside Cindy McCain’s tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, “lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety,” in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain’s future role in her beer empire won’t be revealed before the election.

Some of those who know McCain best — Republicans — are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama — temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others — are missing in McCain. “He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. “If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,” she complained, adding, “That’s not the man we want for president.”

McCain has even prompted alarms from the right’s own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of “Unfit to Command” in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, “The Obama Nation.”

Corsi’s writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi’s publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author’s “scholarship.” If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi’s research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi’s scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received “strong” financial support from a “group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.”

As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there’s one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told.



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (40027)8/17/2008 7:10:54 AM
From: lorne  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 224748
 
Kenneth...for just a moment or so try and think in a logical manner and look at the radical people who have supported and brought along barrack hussein obama...if you do this then you have no choice but to understand. Think out of the dem party box for just a moment

Obama Confirms Relationship with CPUSA Member
By Cliff Kincaid
August 15, 2008
aim.org

With the release of a 40-page “Unfit for Publication” report attacking Jerome Corsi’s new book, The Obama Nation, it should be obvious that the media-backed presidential candidate, Barack Obama, is terrified of having his carefully concealed communist and foreign connections exposed to public view.

However, the Obama campaign’s attack on Corsi’s book and Corsi personally acknowledges on pages 9 and 10 of its report that the mysterious “Frank” in Obama’s 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, is in fact the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member Frank Marshall Davis. This identification by AIM and others hasn’t been disputed by the media, which has desperately tried to ignore the Obama-Davis relationship, but the Obama campaign has not responded to it until now.

The admission that Obama’s mentor was Frank Marshall Davis, an identified CPUSA member, can only add to growing public concern about Obama’s relationship with a Communist pawn of Moscow who was the subject of security investigations by the FBI and various congressional committees which examined Soviet activities in the U.S.

According to these official documents, cited first by AIM and also by Corsi in his book, Davis was a secret CPUSA member who became a member of an underground communist apparatus in Hawaii. As late as the 1970s, Davis was involved with a CPUSA front organization, the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, dedicated to keeping foreign communists such as labor leader Harry Bridges from being deported from the U.S. Davis, a friend of Bridges, a secret CPUSA member, became Obama’s mentor during the years 1975-1979.

But the Obama report makes no admission that Davis was a communist and doesn’t dispute anything Corsi documents about Davis’s membership in the Communist Party. Instead, the report picks and chooses from Obama’s book in order to try to put some distance between Obama and Davis. The report attempts to play down instances in which Obama soaks up Davis’s anti-American thoughts and pro-communist “poetry.”

But if the relationship were so innocent, why didn’t Obama identify Frank by his full name in his book and denounce his communist and anti-American views? Why doesn’t he denounce those views now?

At this point, it is clear that Corsi is to Obama what the National Enquirer is to admitted adulterer and liar John Edwards. The Enquirer exposed Edwards secret life when the rest of the media were refusing to investigate the candidate and making fun of the Enquirer.

It is noteworthy that the Obama campaign’s “Unfit for Publication” report begins with citing negative “reviews” of the Corsi book from various publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Time magazine. The media are angry and jealous because Corsi did the heavy lifting that the media refuse to do.

While Obama’s communist and foreign connections are of serious and ongoing concern, Corsi’s treatment of Obama’s admitted drug use has emerged as a special raw nerve for the Obama campaign and his media acolytes. They realize that many Americans, whose families have been decimated and destroyed by illegal drugs, may recoil at the thought of having an admitted user of marijuana and cocaine occupy the oval office.

The Attack Begins

Acting on information provided by a left-wing group known as Media Matters, which functions as an unofficial arm of the Democratic Party, the New York Times attacked Corsi for charging that Obama has “yet to answer” whether he ever dealt drugs and when he stopped, if indeed he ever did. The Times protested that Obama has answered that charge, at least the part about quitting marijuana and cocaine, by saying that he hasn’t used drugs since he was 20 years old.

So why did Corsi raise the subject when it supposedly has been put to rest? It’s because, as an experienced investigative reporter, he knows that a few perfunctory denials, which could be expected from someone running for office, do not constitute any form of proof or convincing answer that he in fact ever did quit drugs. As Corsi has suggested in defending his book’s account of Obama’s admitted drug use, self-reporting by drug users about when they quit is notoriously unreliable. Every drug addict claims to have quit at one time or another. That’s what drug testing is all about.

Joyce Nalepka, president of Drug-Free Kids: America’s Challenge, points out that recovering cocaine addicts say that the high from cocaine is so intense that you never stop wanting it. She points to the case of former Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, who was caught twice using cocaine. Barry was caught in one case as a result of a police sting and another because of court-ordered drug testing.

Don’t you believe Obama when he says he quit drugs? “No,” replied Nalepka. “And I didn’t believe Mayor Barry either.”

The Soros Connection

However, she does believe that, if Obama is elected, his backers in the drug legalization movement funded by billionaire George Soros will press for legalization of marijuana, cocaine and other dangerous drugs. Soros is a big backer of Obama and has contributed financially to his campaign.

During the Reagan Administration, Nalepka served as the president of the anti-drug group that Nancy Reagan served as honorary chair. She warns that Obama has “voted for at least two pro-legalization [of marijuana] bills” and that drug legalization advocates are spreading the word that Obama will not support federal enforcement of federal marijuana arrests. She said a questionnaire, which includes the question, “Do you support keeping drug possession, dealing and trafficking a crime?,” has not been answered by the Obama campaign. John McCain, on the other hand, vows to “uphold the law,” she says.

When she made several calls trying to find out what happened to the questionnaire, an Obama staff member said that the appropriate official would call “within the hour.” But that was “weeks ago,” Nalepka says.

Even if Obama took and passed a drug test, Nalepka says she would never vote for him, explaining, “It appalls me at the thought that people would be naïve enough to vote for someone who admits drug use.” She says this view stems from 30 years of “watching parents wail and cry and talk about the hell their families went through” because of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs.

“I would never vote for an elected official who was ever a drug user,” she tells AIM. “We have to get this country back to being an honorable nation with honorable people running it.”

But the views of Nalepka and others in the campaign against illegal drugs have been ignored by media anxious to accept Obama’s word that he has quit dangerous mind-altering drugs.

Nalepka is concerned that progress that has been made is at risk. “We worked long and hard to close those drug paraphernalia shops in the 1980s and long and hard again to get student drug testing in the schools so we could get drugs out of the schools,” she said. “And we’re going to allow someone to come in to the White House of the United States of America who was a drug user?”

Corsi’s account of Obama’s drug use is apparently one of many “lies” that an official Obama campaign spokesman has alleged to be in the book. The Times story defending Obama against Corsi’s book was followed by a Washington Post story attacking the author. The liberal media have been forced to take note of the book because it has become number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Davis Connection

Regarding the Davis-Obama relationship, now confirmed by the Obama campaign, the Post, as well as its “conservative” competitor, the Washington Times, recently ran a dishonest Associated Press story that portrayed Davis as a positive influence on Obama who had no affiliation with the CPUSA. This was the real lie.

Prior to that, the only time the Post came close to mentioning Davis was after I held a May 22 news briefing on the subject and Post reporter Dana Milbank attended and then attacked our event without mentioning that the main subject was none other than Frank Marshall Davis. Of course, dishonest coverage like this helps explain why Corsi’s book is meeting a pent-up demand for facts about the candidate and is so successful. The American people understand that they are not getting the truth about Obama from the mainstream media.

Another line of attack—that Corsi is doing the bidding of the Republican Party and the John McCain campaign—makes no sense because Corsi writes very critically of McCain and is a member of the Constitution Party, which is fielding its own presidential candidate, Chuck Baldwin, this fall. Plus, Corsi’s editor at WorldNetDaily, where he writes regularly, is Joseph Farah, whose book, None of the Above, argues against Obama and McCain.

The pro-Obama media emphasize that the Corsi book is published by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions, whose main editor is former GOP strategist Mary Matalin. The 40-page Obama report dishonestly claims the Corsi book is “brought to you by the Bush/Cheney Attack Machine.” But it is clearly the case that Corsi and Farah are independent conservatives who have no allegiance to the GOP. Corsi has written articles and even a book attacking the Bush/Cheney Administration’s secretive Security and Prosperity Partnership, a forerunner for an emerging North American Union.

Corsi has written a book on Obama for the obvious reason that little is known about the Democratic candidate, and there is no evidence that the major media are interested in uncovering or publicizing the hidden facts about him. On the other hand, the media are doing a good job covering McCain’s controversial connections, such as his ties to lobbyists for foreign countries.

Post reporter Eli Saslow writes that the Corsi book “lacks major revelations.” Wouldn’t it be nice if the Post let us decide that for ourselves? Why not run a true and accurate story about Frank Marshall Davis and let the readers decide? But Saslow must figure that such a story would only hurt the media’s candidate.

Saslow let the truth slip: “Until recently, he [Obama] had the luxury of presenting his story alone.” Since when should a presidential candidate have the ability to present his own story without critical comment and investigation by the media? And especially on the subject of admitted use of marijuana and cocaine and connections to communists? But that has been the case with Obama, and that is why Corsi is being attacked.

Larry King as Obama Puppet

As part of the campaign to destroy Corsi, some reporters have dredged up some controversial comments he posted on a website that people found objectionable. CNN’s Larry King, with the help of a “progressive” from Media Matters named Paul Waldman, tried this and other tactics on his show on Wednesday night. They are just a diversion from the substance of the book. King found Corsi guilty of “false” claims against Obama even before he introduced Corsi on the show.

On the other hand, King identified Waldman as being from “A progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the United States media.” This is how the organization, which has significant links to the Democratic Party, describes itself. It started out as a front for Hillary Clinton but is now spending most of its time defending Obama.

It is interesting to note that the title of the official Obama campaign report on Corsi, “Unfit for Publication,” was an actual headline over a previous Media Matters account of Corsi’s book. In attacking AIM’s reporting on the costs of Obama’s Global Poverty Act, the Obama report also cites misleading charges from Media Matters (Jonathon Moseley addresses this controversy in the August-B AIM Report.) So it is obvious that the Obama campaign and Media Matters are colluding.

These pathetic attacks will probably generate more interest in the book. And once people read the book, they will only have more questions and suspicions about Obama and his powerful media machine.



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (40027)8/17/2008 7:12:04 AM
From: lorne  Respond to of 224748
 
Top CEOs give 10 times more to McCain than to Obama
By Michael O'Brien
Posted: 08/15/08 01:15 PM [ET]
thehill.com

The top executives of America’s biggest companies are more willing to open their wallets for John McCain than his Democratic rival, donating 10 times as much to the Arizona senator’s campaign as to Barack Obama’s.

Obama’s campaign seized on the findings of The Hill’s review of campaign finance records to suggest that the gap was due to “special favors” McCain has given corporations.

The presumptive GOP nominee has received $208,200 from the chief executive officers of the 100 biggest Fortune 500 corporations, according to a review of campaign finance reports. Obama has taken in $20,400 from the same group of people.

“It is not surprising that a Washington celebrity like John McCain would be able to collect contributions based on 26 years of special favors provided to individual businesses,” said Jason Furman, Obama’s economic policy director.

The McCain campaign hit back, saying it makes sense that business leaders would support a nominee whose policies would promote economic growth.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise that John McCain’s plan to cut taxes, fight wasteful spending and grow jobs is preferred by business leaders and hardworking families both,” said spokesman Tucker Bounds. “It’s also no surprise that Barack Obama doesn’t have a record of doing any of those things — celebrities don’t cut taxes, they take beach vacations.”

But in a McCain television ad that began airing May 29, the narrator says McCain will "make … corporate CEOs accountable."

Obama is shattering fundraising records and has significantly outraised McCain. Federal Election Commission records show that through June the Illinois senator raised more money from donations of less than $200 than his rival has raised in total.

The Democrat became the first candidate to opt out of public funding for the general election since campaign finance rules were tightened in the aftermath of Watergate. Obama cited these small donations to justify his decision to back away from earlier assertions that he would accept the public funds.

During an Aug. 4 conference call on small businesses and economic policy, Obama surrogate Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) hit McCain for his ties to business. “His agenda primarily benefits big business,” Velázquez said. “It really is a laundry list for corporate America.”

In 2004, the difference between the Republican and the Democratic candidates was much less pronounced in terms of Fortune 100 donations. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) nearly kept pace with President Bush.

Among the same 100 individuals, the vast majority of whom were in their current positions in 2004, Kerry raised nearly three-quarters of what Bush did. Kerry brought in $74,500 from the business leaders, while Bush raised $103,200. The difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates this election is more clear-cut, with McCain’s 10-to-1 advantage over Obama.

But while Bush drew on a larger base — 42 of the CEOs donated to his campaign; only 29 have donated to McCain — the president’s would-be Republican successor has managed to bring in more than twice as much than Bush did, despite drawing on fewer CEOs as donors.

That uptick has been largely due to the fact that several donors have contributed large additional sums to McCain’s Victory 2008 political action committee (PAC).

Three corporate chiefs from Fortune’s top 100 stand out as McCain’s biggest backers. In addition to maximum $4,600 personal donations to McCain, Verizon Communications CEO Ivan G. Seidenberg, Merrill Lynch CEO John A. Thain and Hess Corporation chief John B. Hess have also donated $28,500 each to McCain’s Victory 2008 PAC.

Hess also donated $2,300 to Obama’s campaign.

Two other CEOs, Marathon Oil’s Clarence P. Cazalot and Liberty Mutual’s Edmund F. Kelly, have also made large PAC donations. Cazalot donated $15,000 to McCain’s PAC, and Kelly donated $10,000. Like Hess, Kelly has also donated $2,300 to Obama.

It is a far smaller number of CEOs that have donated to both Obama and McCain. The two campaigns share five donors: the previously mentioned Hess and Kelly plus State Farm CEO Edward Rust, Lehman Brothers’ Richard S. Fuld, and Allstate chief Thomas J. Wilson. But even among these shared donors, McCain has raised $64,100 to Obama’s $8,900.

Of the shared donors, only Fuld’s and Rust’s donations split evenly between Obama and McCain; Fuld donated $2,300 to each and Rust donated $1,000 to each campaign. Allstate’s Wilson gave $4,600 to McCain and $1,000 to Obama.

Lehman Brothers’ Fuld has been a prolific fundraiser for both candidates, but was recently touted as one of Wall Street’s top Obama supporters by the New York Post, which reported that there was a copy of Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, on Fuld’s desk.

Obama has only drawn exclusive donations from Costco CEO James Sinegal, Motorola CEO Gregory Q. Brown and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet. Sinegal’s single $25,000 contribution to Kerry’s 2004 Victory PAC is more than the $20,400 total Obama has raised from these three donors and the five he shares with McCain.

Obama has also struggled to win over the 13 CEOs who donated to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) primary campaign. Of those 13, only two have donated to Obama as well — Buffett and Fuld.

Five of Clinton’s corporate donors, though, have also given to McCain: GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt, Walgreen CEO Jeffrey Rein, Newscorp head Rupert Murdoch, Seidenberg and Fuld. Those five donors gave a total of $13,800 to Clinton but gave a total of $45,600 to McCain.



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (40027)8/17/2008 7:14:39 AM
From: lorne  Respond to of 224748
 
...."Arnold was partly responsible for that mess."....

So what percentage do you feel Arnold is responsible for?

Did gerry brown have a hand in this mess?



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (40027)8/17/2008 10:33:58 AM
From: Hope Praytochange  Respond to of 224748
 
demoRATs and kennyRAT demoralized on news: Kremlin Says Troops Will Begin Georgia Withdrawal
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY and C.J. CHIVERS 28 minutes ago
French President Nicolas Sarkozy told Russia that there would be “serious consequences” if Russian compliance with the accord was not rapid and complete.



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (40027)8/17/2008 11:12:32 PM
From: puborectalis  Respond to of 224748
 
Compensation for employees on Wall Street averaged $399,360 in 2007, compared with $62,390 for New York City jobs outside the securities industry, according to the state comptroller's office.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which has cut 1,500 jobs, paid its employees an average of $661,490 last year, company filings show.

still not rich according to McCain!



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (40027)8/18/2008 4:13:46 PM
From: Ann Corrigan  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 224748
 
Obama's Ignorance of the Constitution is a Preamble to his Weak Leadership Style:

August 18, 2008

A former law clerk for Clarence Thomas is leading a pack of critics who say Barack Obama’s comments about the Supreme Court justice reveal the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s ignorance and misunderstanding of the Constitution.

A weekend event at the 22,000-member Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., was meant to give both Obama and John McCain a chance to address questions of importance to the large evangelical community. Church Pastor Rick Warren, known for his bestselling book “The Purpose-Driven Life,” posed the series of questions to each candidate, which were aimed at getting to their personalities, foibles and leadership styles.

During the symposium, Obama said he would not have nominated Thomas to the bench because “I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution.”

Click here to see many of the question-and-answer segments at the Saddleback forum.

Obama then added that he would not have nominated Justice Antonin Scalia because they disagree, not because of any intellectual deficiencies.

Wendy E. Long, currently counsel to the The Judicial Confirmation Network, called Obama’s responses about the bench “ludicrous.” Long released a statement saying the remarks demonstrate Obama contradicts himself in his “own alleged criteria” for high court nominees.

”Obama started to say that Justice Thomas didn’t have enough ‘experience’ for the Supreme Court. In mid-sentence, when Obama realized that he himself has far less experience for the presidency than Justice Thomas had for the court in 1991, he shifted and said Justice Thomas ‘was not a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time,’” said Long, a former Senate aide whose conservative group works to get “highly qualified” justices confirmed to the bench.

“This is all reminiscent of (Senate Majority Leader) Harry Reid’s comment several years ago that Justice Thomas was ‘an embarrassment to the court’ and that his opinions ‘were poorly written’. Reid was exposed as the ignoramus then, and the Congressional Black Caucus asked him to stop using ‘stereotypes and caricatures,’” she continued.

Reid is among several critics who have called Thomas’ written opinions lightweight and suggested that he wants to abandon the principle of “stare decisis” — standing by precedent — and reinvent the wheel with every case.

The topic of several biographies, Thomas, who was confirmed to the court by a 52-48 margin, has also been described as disinterested because he does not ask questions during oral presentations before the court. The justice has defended himself against the criticism, it as an effort to demonstrate respect for the attorneys presenting their cases.

“Reasonable Supreme Court observers of all political stripes, who do not necessarily agree with Justice Thomas’ jurisprudence, consider his work to be scholarly and of top quality. And yet Senator Obama is, sadly, unable to acknowledge even that much about an intelligent, wonderful and kind man who broke racial barriers to rise to the very top of the legal profession,” said Helgi Walker, a former associate counsel to President Bush and former law clerk for Thomas.

Long and others said Thomas has repeatedly proven critics wrong about his intellectual capacity and repeated previous defenses that much of the criticism of Thomas is because he is a black conservative.

“Apparently, Obama can do no better than to recycle discredited statements of Harry Reid when it comes to Justice Thomas. Like other liberal elites, Obama cannot stand it when a black man strays from the ideological plantation and refuses to implement liberal policies through the courts. But Obama will never point out any intellectual deficiencies in Justice Thomas’s work, because he can’t. Justice Thomas’s opinions consistently reveal faithfulness to the Constitution, judicial modesty and deference to the will of the people in our representative democracy. That is opposed to everything that Obama and the liberals are trying to do in grabbing power from the people and giving it to the courts,” she said.

“It’s precisely because Justice Thomas has proven himself such a faithful steward of the Constitution that Barack Obama says he wouldn’t have nominated him,” said Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Policy Center and a former law clerk to Scalia. “If he is elected, Obama is a sure bet to appoint liberal judicial activists eager to invent farfetched constitutional ‘rights’ that entrench the left’s agenda on issues like same-sex marriage, stripping God out of the Pledge of Allegiance, child pornography, partial-birth abortion, and national security. It’s Obama who lacks the experience and judgment for the position that he seeks.”

Long did not offer comment to McCain’s response to the same question in which he said, “with all due respect,” he would not have nominated Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens.

“Well, I think that the president of the United States has incredible responsibility in nominating people to the United States Supreme Court. They are lifetime positions, as well as the federal bench. There will be two or maybe three vacancies. This nomination should be based on the criteria of proven record, of strictly adhering to the Constitution of the United States of America and not legislating from the bench. Some of the worst damage has been done by legislating from the bench,” McCain said.

Left off both candidates’ lists were the nominal moderate in the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy, and the newest Justice on the court Samuel Alito.

The nomination of justices to the bench is one of the most important criteria for conservatives in the coming election, and several leaders on the right have said they will swallow their distaste for McCain’s record on other matters and vote for him because they know he will nominate conservative justices.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page also took jabs at Obama’s answer, noting both his and Thomas’ career at the time they reached the highest office of their ambitions. The editorial noted that Obama’s response may have been inartful.

“Even more troubling is what the Illinois Democrat’s answer betrays about his political habits of mind. Asked a question he didn’t expect at a rare unscripted event, the rookie candidate didn’t merely say he disagreed with Justice Thomas. Instead, he instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court’s black conservative isn’t up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are,” the editorial board wrote.

Long warned that Obama’s response reveals the kind of judges Obama would appoint.

“Obama wants justices who will do his bidding, who will implement the preferred policies of the liberal establishment – not Justices like Thomas, Scalia, Roberts and Alito, who understand that the role of a judge is not to legislate from the bench,” she said.

She also slammed the candidate for saying that he would take the counsel from his wife and grandmother as well as former Sen. Sam Nunn and Sens. Dick Lugar, Ted Kennedy and Tom Coburn.

“Obama’s answer about the three wisest people in his life, upon whom he would rely heavily in his administration, also sheds light on the way he would choose Supreme Court Justices. Obama said he would consult his grandmother, his wife, and Ted Kennedy. This is unlikely to yield the highest quality judicial nominees who understand the Constitution and the role of judges in our constitutional democracy,” Long said.

elections.foxnews.com



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (40027)8/18/2008 5:29:54 PM
From: puborectalis  Respond to of 224748
 
The NYT newsroom was buzzing late Monday afternoon after Obama-beat reporter Jeff Zeleny learned how the Dem hopeful has now finalized his choice for a running-mate.

Obama has set out an elaborate roll-out to announce his decision that will begin with an early morning e-mail to supporters, perhaps as early as Tuesday, Zeleny and Adam Nagourney have been told.

Is it Nunn? Is it Kaine? Is Hillary there? What about Kerry?

Developing...