Power Line Forum

Obama may not be a U.S. citizen

2008-07-04T09:23:13-05:00

Being a natural-born citizen of these here United States is one of the prerequisites to become president. Now, it appears that some efforts are being made to hide Senator Obama’s birth certificate.

And why is that? The IsraelInsider has a 4 part series that exposes a lot of fraud in Kos posting of Obama’s birth certificate a few days back. The bloggers are looking at it, and “opendna,” a self-proclaimed DHS “document expert,” is coming up short in the truthful department. Apparently, they learned quite a bit from Rathergate but, obviously, still have much to do.

It’s way too long to post here, so I’ll provide the link below. The summary is that Obama is refusing to release his birth certificate. He writes in his book that he has a copy of it. The Daily Kos commandante Markos his ownself says Obama’s campaign just gave him a copy of the birth certificate when he asked for it. He posted it on Kos, after getting “opendna” to authenticate it. (are we noticing a pattern here? <G>)

Now the Obama campaign says they have released the birth certificate and you can view it on Kos. Why can’t they just release it outright?

That’s precisely the kind of behavior that starts “cover-up” and “forgery” threads. Of course, it helps when the “opendna” guy who vouched for the birth certificate, has left an audit trail of Hawaiian Live Birth certificates in various stages of being forged, manipulated, and otherwise faked. And in the Kos archives, although they have now been removed from live content.

So that brings us to the obvious question, doesn’t it?

Who believes Hillary and Bill are raising the “Fake but accurate” birth certificate issue just in time for Denver?

Click here to read the whole thing.

Obama, Unrepentent Flip-Flopper

2008-07-03T21:49:27-05:00

Charges of flip-flopping do play a big role--perhaps too much--in the rapid response operations of both campaigns. There are obviously a lot of reasons a candidate might alter his position that have nothing to do with political opportunism. After 9/11, for example, President Bush’s foreign policy changed in a dramatic way. I don’t think anyone--save perhaps Ron Paul--implored President Bush on 9/12 to stick with the neo-isolationist talking points of his campaign. Flip-flopping is very relevant, however, when it demonstrates a candidate either doesn’t know what he believes or is willing to set aside any conviction for political advancement.

In Obama’s case, I’m not sure which is true, but it is patently obvious from the speed and frequency with which his flip-flops seem to come that principle is not playing any role. Just consider his evolution in a single month: Obama opposed welfare reform, and now he supports it. Obama supported the D.C. handgun ban, and now he believes it was unconstitutional. Obama said he would accept public financing, and now he won’t. Obama opposed immunity for telecommunications companies involved in terrorist surveillance, and now he supports it. Obama opposed the death penalty in all cases, and now believes it is justified in certain extreme instances. Obama supported immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and now he’ll listen to the commanders on the ground if they tell him to phase out the troops slowly.

Nothing has fundamentally changed with any of these issues. The only thing that has changed is that Obama became the presumptive nominee. Andrew Sullivan says, “Sometimes a flip-flop is a sign of real maturity in a politician responding to new events or facts.” That’s only true however, when a candidate acknowledges and explains why he’s changing.

Principle plays no role when the pol instead self-righteously asserts that there has been no change at all. Principle doesn’t play a role when a candidate claims that everyone simply misunderstood his previous position--as with the meaning of “negotiate with Iran without precondition"--even when the misperception was widely reported and the candidate did nothing to correct it for many months. Aside from charging the other side with flip-flopping, one other job typically assigned to a campaign’s war-room is correcting media reports that mischaracterize their candidate’s position. That Obama’s staff was apparently sitting on its hands shows Obama either meant what he said or wanted people to believe that he did.

http://tinyurl.com/56ylq7

I wonder if anyone is keeping track of how many flip flops the messiah has done in just the last week or so.

Poll: Some Clinton supporters still not embracing Obama

2008-07-05T08:53:54-05:00

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/04/clinton.poll/

Looks like PUMA Power is growing

In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey completed in early June before the New York senator ended her White House bid, 60 percent of Clinton backers polled said they planned on voting for Obama. In the latest poll, that number has dropped to 54 percent.

In early June, 22 percent of Clinton supporters polled said they would not vote at all if Obama were the party’s nominee, now close to a third say they will stay home.

In another sign the wounds of the heated primary race have yet to heal, 43 percent of registered Democrats polled still say they would prefer Clinton to be the party’s presidential nominee.

That number is significantly higher than it was in early June, when 35 percent of Democrats polled said they preferred Clinton to lead the party’s presidential ticket.

Some of the increase is likely due to the flip flops of BHO causing more rejections of his positions and just reinforcing their doubts about BHO.

What is John McCain doing in Colombia?

2008-07-03T00:15:41-05:00

For the love of G*d, gas is pushing $5/gallon, the dollar is trading roughly on par with the peso and Senator McCain is trailing Hamas’s and the Weather Underground’s favorite son in the polls nationally, and here in PA, by about 7 points. So he puts out a commercial about the Colombia free trade deal and travels to Columbia?? wtf??

Hello, McFly, most Americans can’t find Colombia on the map, and the rest don’t care about ‘free trade’ with that country! And why should they?!?

This is beyond stupid. It is just a little bit insane. Can one of his defenders here explain this bizarre lapse in judgment?

Jeb Bush Joins McCain in Mexico, Predicts Win

2008-07-04T12:36:59-05:00

Jeb Bush Joins McCain in Mexico, Predicts Win

Thursday, July 3, 2008 5:14 PM

By: Rick Pedraza Article Font Size

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, whose name has been mentioned as a dark-horse running mate for presumptive presidential nominee John McCain, joined the Senator from Arizona Thursday during a visit to the famed Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City.

Bush, the younger brother of President Bush who also has been touted by the GOP as a future presidential candidate, was visiting Mexico on a business trip.

Bush accompanied McCain atop the Papal balcony to pay homage to one of the holiest sites for Mexican Roman Catholics and predicted a win for the Republican candidate in November.

“I think he’s going to win,” Bush tells The Associated Press of McCain’s chances against presidential rival Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. “He just needs to be himself and not let Senator Obama redefine himself.”

Although the two did not speak to reporters during their tour, Bush reportedly expressed confidence to McCain that the White House will remain in Republican hands.

Even the NY Times editorial page notices the flip flops

2008-07-04T10:31:22-05:00

Senator Barack Obama stirred his legions of supporters, and raised our hopes, promising to change the old order of things. He spoke with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and catering to special pleaders, promised to end President Bush’s abuses of power and subverting of the Constitution and disowned the big-money power brokers who have corrupted Washington politics.

Now there seems to be a new Barack Obama on the hustings. First, he broke his promise to try to keep both major parties within public-financing limits for the general election. His team explained that, saying he had a grass-roots-based model and that while he was forgoing public money, he also was eschewing gold-plated fund-raisers. These days he’s on a high-roller hunt.

Even his own chief money collector, Penny Pritzker, suggests that the magic of $20 donations from the Web was less a matter of principle than of scheduling. “We have not been able to have much of the senator’s time during the primaries, so we have had to rely more on the Internet,” she explained as she and her team busily scheduled more than a dozen big-ticket events over the next few weeks at which the target price for quality time with the candidate is more than $30,000 per person.

The new Barack Obama has abandoned his vow to filibuster an electronic wiretapping bill if it includes an immunity clause for telecommunications companies that amounts to a sanctioned cover-up of Mr. Bush’s unlawful eavesdropping after 9/11.

In January, when he was battling for Super Tuesday votes, Mr. Obama said that the 1978 law requiring warrants for wiretapping, and the special court it created, worked. “We can trace, track down and take out terrorists while ensuring that our actions are subject to vigorous oversight and do not undermine the very laws and freedom that we are fighting to defend,” he declared.

Now, he supports the immunity clause as part of what he calls a compromise but actually is a classic, cynical Washington deal that erodes the power of the special court, virtually eliminates “vigorous oversight” and allows more warrantless eavesdropping than ever.

The Barack Obama of the primary season used to brag that he would stand before interest groups and tell them tough truths. The new Mr. Obama tells evangelical Christians that he wants to expand President Bush’s policy of funneling public money for social spending to religious-based organizations — a policy that violates the separation of church and state and turns a government function into a charitable donation.

He says he would not allow those groups to discriminate in employment, as Mr. Bush did, which is nice. But the Constitution exists to protect democracy, no matter who is president and how good his intentions may be.

On top of these perplexing shifts in position, we find ourselves disagreeing powerfully with Mr. Obama on two other issues: the death penalty and gun control.

Mr. Obama endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s gun-control law. We knew he ascribed to the anti-gun-control groups’ misreading of the Constitution as implying an individual right to bear arms. But it was distressing to see him declare that the court provided a guide to “reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe.”

What could be more reasonable than a city restricting handguns, or requiring that firearms be stored in ways that do not present a mortal threat to children?

We were equally distressed by Mr. Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s barring the death penalty for crimes that do not involve murder.

We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.

There are still vital differences between Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain on issues like the war in Iraq, taxes, health care and Supreme Court nominations. We don’t want any “redefining” on these big questions. This country needs change it can believe in.

http://tinyurl.com/6gonuv

A Man of Seasonal Principles

2008-07-04T20:18:52-05:00

You’ll notice Barack Obama is now wearing a flag pin. Again. During the primary campaign, he refused to, explaining that he’d worn one after Sept. 11 but then stopped because it “became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism.” So why is he back to sporting pseudo-patriotism on his chest? Need you ask? The primaries are over. While seducing the hard-core MoveOn Democrats that delivered him the caucuses—hence, the Democratic nomination—Obama not only disdained the pin. He disparaged it. Now that he’s running in a general election against John McCain, and in dire need of the gun-and-God-clinging working-class votes he could not win against Hillary Clinton, the pin is back. His country ‘tis of thee.

In last week’s column, I thought I had thoroughly chronicled Obama’s brazen reversals of position and abandonment of principles—on public financing of campaigns, on NAFTA, on telecom immunity for post-Sept. 11 wiretaps, on unconditional talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—as he moved to the center for the general election campaign. I misjudged him. He was just getting started.

Last week, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, Obama immediately declared that he agreed with the decision. This is after his campaign explicitly told the Chicago Tribune last November that he believes the D.C. gun ban is constitutional.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton explains the inexplicable by calling the November—i.e., the primary season—statement “inartful.” Which suggests a first entry in the Obamaworld dictionary—“Inartful: clear and straightforward, lacking the artistry that allows subsequent self-refutation and denial.”

Obama’s seasonally adjusted principles are beginning to pile up: NAFTA, campaign finance reform, warrantless wiretaps, flag pins, gun control. What’s left?

Iraq. The reversal is coming, and soon.

Two weeks ago, I predicted that by Election Day Obama will have erased all meaningful differences with McCain on withdrawal from Iraq. I underestimated Obama’s cynicism. He will make the move much sooner. He will use his upcoming Iraq trip to finally acknowledge the remarkable improvements on the ground and to formally abandon his primary season commitment to a fixed 16-month timetable for removal of all combat troops.

The shift has already begun. Yesterday, he said that his “original position” on withdrawal has always been that “we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable.” And that “when I go to Iraq . . . I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies.”

He hasn’t even gone to Iraq and the flip is almost complete. All that’s left to say is that the 16-month time frame remains his goal but that he will, of course, take into account the situation on the ground and the recommendation of his generals in deciding whether the withdrawal is to occur later or even sooner.

Done.

And with that, the Obama of the primaries, the Obama with last year’s most liberal voting record in the Senate, will have disappeared into the collective memory hole.

Obama’s strategy is obvious. The country is in a deep malaise and eager for change. He and his party already have the advantage on economic and domestic issues. Obama, therefore, aims to clear the deck by moving rapidly to the center in those areas where he and his party are weakest, namely national security and the broader cultural issues. With these—and, most important, his war-losing Iraq policy—out of the way, the election will be decided on charisma and persona. In this corner: the young sleek cool hip elegant challenger. In the other corner: the old guy. No contest.

After all, that’s how he beat Hillary. She originally ran as a centrist, expecting her nomination to be a mere coronation. At the first sign of serious opposition, however, she panicked and veered left. It was a fatal error. It eliminated all significant ideological and policy differences with Obama—her desperate attempts to magnify their minuscule disagreement on health-care universality became almost comical—making the contest entirely one of personality. No contest.

As Obama assiduously obliterates all differences with McCain on national security and social issues, he remains rightly confident that Bush fatigue, the lousy economy and his own charisma—he is easily the most dazzling political personality since John Kennedy—will carry him to the White House.

Of course, once he gets there he will have to figure out what he really believes. The conventional liberal/populist stuff he campaigned on during the primaries? Or the reversals he is so artfully offering up now?

I have no idea. Do you? Does he?

http://tinyurl.com/6sxu2x

This article hits the nail on the head!

Mr. Obama: Don’t Betray My People

2008-07-04T20:04:27-05:00

By Amil Imani

It looks like Mr. Obama may well be the next resident of the White House. It also looks like my people are going to be betrayed once again by a badly misguided American president. Jimmy Carter helped give birth to the virulent Shiite Islamism by forbidding the Shah of Iran to crush the bloodthirsty Ayatollah Khomeini and his band of rabid Islamists. Now, Mr. Obama intends to confer legitimacy on the illegitimate child, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Jimmy Carter, the self-appointed touring ambassador of bad-mouthing America must be rejoicing in the prospect of Mr. Obama’s presidency. Mr. Obama holds the promise of not only carrying on the Carterian misguided policies, but taking them to their very ruinous end.

Jimmy Carter did his thing and my people died. In no time at all, the vicious Mullahs gutted the Iranian armed forces and executed many of its most capable officers. Saddam Hussein watched gleefully as the Iranian military disintegrated, and found the opportunity to carry out his Pan Arabism ambition by attacking Iran. Some eight years of barbaric butchery killed and maimed millions on both sides, gutted the vibrant Iranian economy, and visited misery of all sorts upon the Iranian people.

Iran’s Mullahs, with the aid of the beguiled illiterate and religiously fanatic masses, strengthened their stranglehold as they blamed others for their incompetence and larcenous nature for the people’s intractable problems. The ever-machinating Mullahs had to find a scapegoat, preferably many scapegoats, to blame. True to form they turned and bit the hand that helped bring them to power—the United States. For good measure, the Mullahs included Israel. Jews have always been good scapegoats for Islamists, going back to the time of Muhammad in Medina. The prophet of Allah, as soon as he gathered enough power, found it expedient to plunder the Jews’ properties, kill the men and take the women and children as slaves to exploit or sell.

The Mullahs who took over Iran needed more straw-men, preferably on the home-front itself. Well, Allah helped them with that problem with some 300-400 thousand peaceful Baha’is. Baha’is were perfect for the part, since they had their holy places in Israel and that automatically made them agents of the Little Satan.

Now, history is about to repeat itself. While the ever-contrite ambassador of apology, Carter, cavorts with the officially designated terrorist Hamas, bestowing legitimacy on the thuggish Islamists, Mr. Obama is promising to outdo his idol Jimmy by engaging in negotiations or discussions with the “loveable” president Ahmadinejad of the IRI: a sort of tete-a-tete of two heads of states to settle things amicably. Doesn’t that sound lovely and a sure vote-getter? But, I am troubled and I have serious concerns.

Mr. Obama, you keep blaring about “change,” but you hardly spell out the details. Recall, the devil is in the details, as they say. Change from what to what, Mr. Charisma?

Mr. Obama, how do you propose to engage the point-man of the end-of-the-worlder Shiite regime in negotiation or discussion, without sacrificing the valiant Iranian people who are struggling to free themselves from the yoke of fascist Islamists? You believe that you, still somewhat wet behind the ears, can do better than the four-year combined efforts of seasoned diplomats from France, Germany, and Great Britain?

Mr. Obama, do you have trouble reading the man’s lips? Ahmadinejad, the one you wish to engage in negotiation, shouts as clearly and as often as he can that he is not going to stop enriching uranium; that he is irrevocably committed to the destruction of Israel; that the U.S. must pack, abandon all its interests and friends in the Middle East and leave the Mullahs in control of the world’s major oil spigot.

Mr. Obama, how are you going to sweeten the deal for Ahmadinejad? What would you give him to stop killing our GIs in Iraq; to arm and finance Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and its ilk next door to Israel, and even the Taliban in Afghanistan? Give him Iraq and its oil? How about at least parts of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait?

Mr. Obama, it takes two to tango, as the old saying goes. The uncompromising oil-intoxicated fanatics of Iran and their proxies don’t want to dance with you. They want the entire floor—the Middle East—and the rest of the world down the road.

Mr. Obama, if you get elected as president, don’t you even think of doing anything that would further whet the insatiable appetite of the Islamists. Your mentor and idol, Carter, helped the Islamists and an untold number of my people died and are still dying. And by “my people,” I include both innocent people of my native birthplace Iran, as well as many noble compatriots of my adopted homeland, America.

Mr. Obama, you are either naïve or find it politically expedient to propose your foreign policy approach. In either case, you’d best keep in mind that the Islamist enemy plays by a completely different set of rules. Negotiating with the Islamists is like flipping a coin: Heads they win, tails you lose.

Mr. Obama, in your meteoric rise to power, you found it expedient to throw your wonderful grandmother under the bus, so to speak. She has been joined by many others, most recently General Clark. Now, who else are the people you intend to steamroll over to service your personal ambition?

Mr. Obama, I repeat, if elected president, don’t betray my people.

http://tinyurl.com/5mtmmu

I am afraid, Mr. Imani, that the messiah WILL betray your people.

Another messiah lie

2008-07-04T19:58:00-05:00

Barack Obama Champions Welfare Reform In Ad
Tuesday , July 01, 2008

By Brit Hume

For His Welfare

Barack Obama is championing welfare reform in his new television ad titled “Dignity.” The ad says that Obama “passed a law to move people from welfare to work — slashed the rolls by 80 percent.”

But the television spot fails to mention that Obama resisted the very welfare reform bill that led to the reduction in the caseload. Back in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a federal reform bill in an effort to make welfare what he called “a second chance, not a way of life.”

But then-Illinois state Senator Obama told the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper that year that Mr. Clinton’s stance on welfare was “disturbing.”

And on May 31, 1997 Obama said on the floor of the Illinois state Senate, “I probably would not have supported the federal legislation.”

http://tinyurl.com/5ksezd

Once again the left’s messiah has lied. What a surprise.

Why more Jews won’t be voting Democrat this year

2008-07-04T20:01:07-05:00

Defenders of Barack Obama, and sometimes Obama himself, seem frustrated that some American Jews refuse to assume their traditional role of support for the Democratic presidential nominee. The Obama defenders are irked that not all Jews accept at face value Obama’s expressions of devotion to Israel and commitment to her security.

Why can’t these contrarians just take Obama at his word (he is a Zionist, he really is, they insist)? The answer is “1973.”

But the explanation starts in 2008. Many Jewish Obama doubters are convinced that Israel faces a true existential threat unlike any in 35 years. From nation states like Iran, which threaten to destroy Israel, to Hizbullah and Hamas terrorists, Israel may in the next decade be pushed to the brink of its existence. Israel’s failure to defeat Hizbullah in 2006 demonstrated the limits of Israel’s historic military advantage.

With the spread of nuclear weapons and other deadly technologies a second Holocaust - that is, the annihilation of a substantial portion of world Jewry - is not out of the realm of imagination.

THESE OBAMA skeptics recall a similar time, 1973, when Israel also faced extermination. Prime minister Golda Meir had miscalculated Anwar Sadat’s willingness to go to war and decided against a first strike against Egypt. The Arab nations attacked in October 1973, and within days Israel was facing defeat.

The Israelis went to president Richard Nixon with a request for a massive infusion of arms. The Defense and State Departments squabbled. Our European allies, who feared an oil embargo (and would refuse us bases to refuel our planes), inveighed against it, and the Soviets blustered. Many on Nixon’s staff wanted to deny the request, or offer only token assistance. Don’t antagonize the Arab states, they counseled.

Nixon persisted and, according to some accounts, doubled the amount of aid Israel had requested. Riding herd on the bureaucrats, Nixon repeatedly intervened to push the transports along. Informed about a dispute regarding the type of air transportation, Nixon at one point exclaimed in frustration: “Tell them to send everything that can fly.” Over the course of a month US airplanes conducted 815 sorties with over 27,900 tons of materiel.

Israel was saved due to this massive infusion of military aid. Meir referred to Nixon with enormous affection for the rest of her life. Nixon, despised by many in the US, was hailed as a hero in Israel. And Nixon (who had garnered a minority of the Jewish vote in 1972) received little or no political benefit at home for his trouble, leaving office the following year.

SO WHAT does this have to do with Obama? The Obama skeptics do not for a moment believe that Obama, in the face of domestic and international pressure similar to what Nixon faced, would rise to the occasion at a critical moment in Israel’s history and “tell them to send everything that can fly.”

In every significant interaction in Obama’s adult life with those who distain and vilify Israel - from Rashid Khalidi to Reverend Jeremiah Wright to Louis Farrakhan - Obama has demonstrated passive resignation and indifference.

He did not stand up to his friend Khalidi, the Palestinian activist, professor and former Palestinian spokesman whom Obama honored at a farewell dinner, and object to Palestinian invectives that Israel was an apartheid state. He did not recoil, until Wright insulted him at the National Press Club, from Wright when he learned that Wright considered Israel a “dirty word” and postulated that Israel had invented an “ethnic bomb.”

He did not heed (or was oblivious to) public pleas from Jewish organizations to avoid the Million Man March that Farrakhan organized; nor did he years later leave his church when it honored Farrakhan. It took a hateful rant from another wide-eyed preacher against Hillary Clinton, just when Obama needed to cool intra-party animosities, to do that.

AND IF any further proof were needed, Obama’s actions with regard to the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, the measure to classify the Iranian National Guard as a terrorist organization, should settle the question of Obama’s intestinal fortitude when it comes to Israel. An issue presented itself: a choice between, on the one hand, taking a stance against Israel’s most vile enemy, Iran, and, on the other, appeasing the far Left of his own party.

Obama chose to satisfy the MoveOn.org crowd and opposed the amendment. The amendment would have been “saber rattling” and unduly provocative, Obama argued at the time. Senators Dick Durbin, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton and three quarters of the US Senate voted for the amendment.

Once his nomination was secured, Obama told those assembled at the AIPAC convention that he supported classification of the Iranian National Guard as a terrorist organization, a move he well understood was important to Israel’s security and to AIPAC’s members. Yet under just a smidgen of political pressure during the primary race, he had not been able to muster the will to support a modest measure which inured to Israel’s benefit.

IS THERE anything in all this to suggest that in a potential crisis, when much of the world would be pressuring him to let Israel die, Obama would push all the naysayers aside and demand to “send them everything that can fly”? There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that he would be beyond persuasion when it came down to Israel’s survival. In fact, all the available evidence indicates that the opposite is true.

Read the rest at the link.

http://tinyurl.com/683qh6

The messiah can try and lie his way into the Jewish hearts, but, thankfully, the Jews seem to have him pegged.