All Things Pro-Obama

[lostfan]

The demographics here are HUGE for her. Hell there is a good portion of the state that still has Klan memberships... they aren't voting for Obama.

Actually - and I was surprised to read this - I was reading some law enforcement assessment from somewhere (I forget which state, and obviously I can't link you to it so you just have to take my word for it) and it said that the writings on white supremacist websites have been basically saying Obama is the lesser of three evils because they see McCain and Hillary as being owned by the Jews and Israel. Take that for what it's worth, but remember, we're talking about white supremacists. So they don't want to see them in office and they'd rather see Obama get elected, even though they hate it, because he hasn't been corrupted yet.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Actually - and I was surprised to read this - I was reading some law enforcement assessment from somewhere (I forget which state, and obviously I can't link you to it so you just have to take my word for it) and it said that the writings on white supremacist websites have been basically saying Obama is the lesser of three evils because they see McCain and Hillary as being owned by the Jews and Israel. Take that for what it's worth, but remember, we're talking about white supremacists. So they don't want to see them in office and they'd rather see Obama get elected, even though they hate it, because he hasn't been corrupted yet.

WOW! Weird!

That caught me off guard.

[lostfan]

WOW! Weird!

That caught me off guard.

Yeah, me too. But then again we're not talking about the most rational group of people either.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Yeah, me too. But then again we're not talking about the most rational group of people either.

That, sir, is an understatment

[lostfan]

I found an article similar to what I was talking about, not exactly the same though.

http://www.tnr.com/toc/story.html?id=90727...49-e95b7293d6a0

 

David Duke was on the phone, talking about Barack Obama. Yes, that David Duke: After a query lodged at his website, the infamous ex-Klansman had responded via a mysterious e-mail address--he appeared in my inbox as "info45." (Duke regularly changes address to combat hate mail--the kind he doesn't like, that is.) Duke said he was traveling in Europe, where he often meets with fellow Holocaust deniers, and agreed to discuss the possibility that the United States might soon elect a black president.

Logo from an anti-Zionist website

 

Logo from an anti-Zionist website

 

Putting it mildly, one would not expect Duke to applaud this development. During Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign, after all, Duke said Jackson's election "would be the greatest tragedy ever to befall this country." Warning that "the white majority in this country are losing their rights," Duke announced his own counter-candidacy, one whose main purpose seemed to be hounding Jackson.

 

Yet, far from railing at Obama's rise, Duke seems almost nonchalant about it. Self-described white nationalists like himself, he explained cordially, "don't see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton--or, for that matter, John McCain." Sure, Duke considers Obama "a racist individual," citing his Afrocentric Chicago church. But soon the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People was critiquing Obama as overhyped and insubstantial in terms you might hear from, say, Clinton strategist Mark Penn. "They say he's for change. What change? He's become almost a cult figure. I don't see any shining light around Obama's head. I don't see any halos," Duke said.

 

Sure, we may not see David Duke strolling around with The Audacity of Hope under his arm any time soon. But his mild tone is still a curious reaction to what white supremacists have long considered a sign of racial apocalypse. "Does Race Still Matter?" asks the latest issue of US News & World Report, which features Obama on its cover. Undoubtedly, it does. But, thus far, Obama is largely delivering on his promise as a post-racial candidate--and hilariously confounding the worldview of white supremacists at the same time.

 

 

 

After Obama won the Iowa caucuses last month, Mark Potok, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, decided to survey the latest writings of the major right-wing hate groups he regularly monitors. How would America's vilest race-mongers respond to a black candidate's victory in a white Midwestern state? Again, the response was counterintuitive. "It was extremely weak," Potok says. "You could find people saying nasty words about Obama, but it wasn't red-hot at all."

 

That has remained the case even as Obama has become the front-runner. On several websites, forums, and online journals that promote the view of white superiority over blacks--the types of outlets that rejoiced over Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward--there is precious little discussion of Obama's campaign. The day after Obama's blowout win in Wisconsin, for instance, the home page of the poisonous Vanguard News Network featured stories on Serbian nationalism, home schooling, Holocaust-denial, and Pat Buchanan--yet nothing about Obama. It turns out that, although the white right certainly has no love for Obama, its hatred of him is muted--and directed less at Obama himself than at other nefarious forces behind him.

 

To be sure, it's no challenge to unearth racist invective about the man. One bilious anti-Obama blog's URL, for instance, seamlessly conjoins his name with the N-word. Elsewhere, Obama is cast as a covert black-power agent. An essay by a David Duke compatriot compares Obama to Malcolm X and likens his slogan of "Si Se Puede!" to chanting "Kill the whites!" There are rumblings about mass slavery reparations (even though, in 2004, Obama said he opposes "just signing checks over to African Americans"). And some even see hints that Obama may be leading a national black uprising. "Are blacks becoming more hostile towards whites?" asked a recent entry at the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens website. The author, citing the early February rampage by a black gunman near St. Louis, Missouri, advised that "the success of the Obama campaign might be emboldening blacks to be more aggressive towards white on a national scale." (No word on whether such hostility subsided after Hillary's New Hampshire and Nevada victories.)

 

Yet, for every instance of loony racist paranoia, one finds a countervailing explanation for why Obama's rise is not a story about black America rising up. White supremacists are less inclined to hate Obama than the white race-traitors who are enabling him. "If you are a white supremacist who is dedicated to a biological understanding of racism that says blacks are inferior, the only way [Obama] could be elected is with the conniving of unseen forces," explains Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a Boston-based expert on white supremacists.

 

Thus, a recent essay by one John Brown on the website of the racialist journal American Renaissance attributes Obama's rise to white liberals in search of an idyllic post-racist society (which of course they will never actually find): "The reality is that white America has more invested in this candidate than does black America." For Brown, Obama's success against Hillary should actually comfort anyone wringing their hands over a White House beholden to black America: "f Clinton wins, she will be more beholden to African Americans than Obama will be if he wins. She will owe them in a way that Obama [never] will."

 

There's an even bigger culprit in this world than white liberals, however. Naturally, we speak here of the Jews. It turns out that what truly animates the white supremacist contingent these days is not racism but anti-Semitism. The black man is of trifling concern next to the "Zionist Occupation Government," or ZOG, a term that describes puppet regimes of the global Zionist conspiracy. As one commenter on the popular white-power Web forum Stormfront explains it: "The blacks would be a non-factor if it weren't for the ZOG's legislations and skullduggery (civil rights act, hate crime laws, affirmative action, welfare, forced integration, etc etc ...), allied with a compliant media that promotes black worship." Thus, when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published an anodyne article on Obama's support among American Jews, white-power sites like National Alliance News ("your single source for worldwide pro-White news") quickly pounced. "Barack Obama: The Jewish Connection" came the breathless headline. (Never mind that Obama has had a rockier relationship with the American Jewish community than has Clinton.) "ltimately he's just another Jew puppet," concludes another Stormfront commenter. "I look at his foreign advisers," adds David Duke. "[They're] Israeli supremacists. He's even got Dennis Ross!"

 

All this contorted rationalization suggests that white supremacists feel compelled to explain away the confounding notion of an immensely gifted and appealing black man. Yet it also reflects the fact that, unlike Jesse Jackson, Obama simply lacks certain cultural signifiers--not to mention an urban-centric policy agenda--that would viscerally threaten racist whites obsessed with maintaining "white rights," ending affirmative action, and cutting off nearly all non-European immigration.

 

But there may be one more factor at work: hatred overload. It's a testament of sorts to Hillary Clinton that, by virtue of her cartoonish image as a leftist man-hating shrew, she manages to arouse more vitriol among white supremacists than a black man. Meanwhile, white racists absolutely despise John McCain for his support of George W. Bush's immigration reform plan, which they view as a dire threat to America's European-based culture. "I don't think Obama will be any more negative for the United States than Hillary or John McCain," explains Duke. "In fact," he added, "we probably have less preference for a European like a John McCain or a Hillary who has betrayed our interests, our heritage, our rights."

 

Edward Sebesta, a Dallas-based expert on neo-Confederate groups, says that, in a match-up against Obama, McCain might wind up suffering the brunt of the hatred: "They really hate McCain," he says. "They're suffering from emotional exhaustion. They might not have the energy to be infuriated by two candidates at the same time." Amazingly, some commenters on racist websites are already debating the grim choice between Obama and McCain. Who knows, maybe David Duke can form the oddest MySpace group of all time: Klansmen for Obama. Now that would be post-racial.

[southsider2k5]

Actually - and I was surprised to read this - I was reading some law enforcement assessment from somewhere (I forget which state, and obviously I can't link you to it so you just have to take my word for it) and it said that the writings on white supremacist websites have been basically saying Obama is the lesser of three evils because they see McCain and Hillary as being owned by the Jews and Israel. Take that for what it's worth, but remember, we're talking about white supremacists. So they don't want to see them in office and they'd rather see Obama get elected, even though they hate it, because he hasn't been corrupted yet.

 

Wow, that is counter to everything I would have ever guessed. Jew>Black? Huh. Learn something new everyday.

[NorthSideSox72]

So, Hillary Clinton has a new ad campaign out, hitting Obama directly on two subjects. What I find hilarious is, Clinton's approach to the two subjects is laughably useless. Clinton wants a 90 day moratorium on foreclosures, and she wants a brief "tax holiday" on gas taxes. Both of these measures are of course exactly the kind of useless, temporary fixes that will make matters worse later. They are pure political B.S. Anyway, the ad hits Obama because he doesn't support either one.

 

For reference, Obama prefers a "windfall tax" on oil companies instead, with the monies going towards alternative fuel research (I'd rather see them just stop giving the companies welfare, but this is as close to that as is politically palatable), and on mortgages, favors an array of other alternatives.

 

McCain also favors the tax holiday, along with Clinton.

 

Here is the article.

 

[lostfan]

So, Hillary Clinton has a new ad campaign out, hitting Obama directly on two subjects. What I find hilarious is, Clinton's approach to the two subjects is laughably useless. Clinton wants a 90 day moratorium on foreclosures, and she wants a brief "tax holiday" on gas taxes. Both of these measures are of course exactly the kind of useless, temporary fixes that will make matters worse later. They are pure political B.S. Anyway, the ad hits Obama because he doesn't support either one.

 

For reference, Obama prefers a "windfall tax" on oil companies instead, with the monies going towards alternative fuel research (I'd rather see them just stop giving the companies welfare, but this is as close to that as is politically palatable), and on mortgages, favors an array of other alternatives.

 

McCain also favors the tax holiday, along with Clinton.

 

Here is the article.

It's the equivalent of putting a band-aid over your chest when you're having a heart attack, exactly. Ad campaigns like that are pretty effective too, because most people don't realize it's just a band-aid, and it's not going to help anything, so you can effectively portray someone as favoring oil companies over the people and they usually take it at face value just because they need something to be mad at.

[NorthSideSox72]

It's the equivalent of putting a band-aid over your chest when you're having a heart attack, exactly. Ad campaigns like that are pretty effective too, because most people don't realize it's just a band-aid, and it's not going to help anything, so you can effectively portray someone as favoring oil companies over the people and they usually take it at face value just because they need something to be mad at.

Clinton's sweet spot is uneducated white folks, so, I guess she's just playing to that group.

 

[StrangeSox]

It's the equivalent of putting a band-aid over your chest when you're having a heart attack, exactly. Ad campaigns like that are pretty effective too, because most people don't realize it's just a band-aid, and it's not going to help anything, so you can effectively portray someone as favoring oil companies over the people and they usually take it at face value just because they need something to be mad at.

 

Its more like the equivalent of rubbing salt in the wound. With the way the economics work out, we end up paying roughly the same price after a little while. But, instead of having .30 per gallon (or whatever it is) go to the roads and infrastructure, it goes to Gas Company XYZ. These types of economic proposals show the politicians who either a) understand very little about economics or B ), don't care that their policies are horrible as long as people buy into them.

[HuskyCaucasian]

It's the equivalent of putting a band-aid over your chest when you're having a heart attack, exactly. Ad campaigns like that are pretty effective too, because most people don't realize it's just a band-aid, and it's not going to help anything, so you can effectively portray someone as favoring oil companies over the people and they usually take it at face value just because they need something to be mad at.

That's what I have really come to hate about politics. Presidents and presidential candidates like to look in the short term. What makes me look good now. Not what makes the country better. That's why i like Barack. He seems to have a more long term look at how this country needs to work. I think he said something to the effect that the gas tax holiday was the equivalent of one tank of gas over the course of 90 days.

 

Some say this $600 tax rebate program wont work, how will one tank of gas?

[BigSqwert]

I know we've heard this before but apparently Obama has a lot of superdelegates waiting in the wings according to Senator McCaskill.

“The majority of superdelegates I’ve talked to are committed, but it is a matter of timing,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). “They’re just preferring to make their decision public after the primaries are over. ... They would like someone else to act for them before they talk about it in the cold light of day.”

 

Obama currently holds an 18-13 lead among committed superdelegates in the Senate, while Clinton holds a 77-74 lead in the House. Asked which way the committed-but-unannounced superdelegates are leaning, McCaskill — who has endorsed Obama — said: “James Brown would say, ‘I Feel Good.’”

[HuskyCaucasian]

Clinton Caught in Another Lie.. This Time About Factory Sale

It's a story Hillary Clinton loves to tell, about how the Chinese government bought a good American company in Indiana, laid off all its workers and moved its critical defense technology work to China.

 

And it's a story with a dramatic, political ending. Republican President George W. Bush could have stopped it, but didn't.

 

in fact the Clinton administration rubber-stamped this along with the sale of numerous other high-tech secrets to the Chinese.

[HuskyCaucasian]

West Virginia Secretary of State Disenfranchising Thousands of Obama Voters?

West Virginia has an open primary, which means you can vote even if you are an independent. However, if you are a Democrat or a Republican, you are automatically given a normal ballot in a primary. If you are an independent, you are pointed to a touch screen device which does not list a Presidential choice.

[NorthSideSox72]

West Virginia Secretary of State Disenfranchising Thousands of Obama Voters?

Well forget about Obama for the moment... that glitch will confuse and disenfranchise people who aren't affiliated with a party, and that's a load of crap.

 

[HuskyCaucasian]

Well forget about Obama for the moment... that glitch will confuse and disenfranchise people who aren't affiliated with a party, and that's a load of crap.

The title of their article is a little biased, but yea... it sucks for any independent voter.

[StrangeSox]

Well forget about Obama for the moment... that glitch will confuse and disenfranchise people who aren't affiliated with a party, and that's a load of crap.

 

I don't see the problem. It's a primary, not a general election. If you don't pick up a Dem. ticket, why should you be voting on the Dem. candidate for President? It works that way in Illinois.

[NorthSideSox72]

I don't see the problem. It's a primary, not a general election. If you don't pick up a Dem. ticket, why should you be voting on the Dem. candidate for President? It works that way in Illinois.

No it doesn't. In illinois for the primary, you get one or the other - a Dem slate or a GOP slate.

[StrangeSox]

No it doesn't. In illinois for the primary, you get one or the other - a Dem slate or a GOP slate.

 

I know I picked up an independent one in 2006. The only thing on it was a library or school tax proposition. There was also a Green Party ballot.

 

Either way, I still don't see the problem. Pick up a Dem. card, a Rep. Card, or an Ind. Card. If you don't pick up a Dem. card, you don't get to choose the Dem. candidate. Same for the Rep. side. How does this disenfranchise anyone?

Edited April 30, 2008 by StrangeSox

[NorthSideSox72]

I know I picked up an independent one in 2006. The only thing on it was a library or school tax proposition. There was also a Green Party ballot.

 

Either way, I still don't see the problem. Pick up a Dem. card, a Rep. Card, or an Ind. Card. If you don't pick up a Dem. card, you don't get to choose the Dem. candidate. Same for the Rep. side. How does this disenfranchise anyone?

I voted in the Feb primary in Illinois. I showed my ID (heh), and they said "Dem or Rep?" Those were the two options. They handed me the Dem ballot, and I voted.

 

With the machine as its structured, it asks if you are registered Dem, GOP or Ind - that is the issue here, right? So if you are registered Ind, it doesn't allow you to vote in either primary. It should be asking which ballot you want, not what you are registered as.

 

[StrangeSox]

I voted in the Feb primary in Illinois. I showed my ID (heh), and they said "Dem or Rep?" Those were the two options. They handed me the Dem ballot, and I voted.

 

You had more options than that. THAT is honest, genuine disenfranchisement.

 

http://chicago.about.com/od/governmentandm...rimaryGreen.htm

http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/i...gularities.html

 

With the machine as its structured, it asks if you are registered Dem, GOP or Ind - that is the issue here, right? So if you are registered Ind, it doesn't allow you to vote in either primary. It should be asking which ballot you want, not what you are registered as.

 

This sounds identical to Illinois to me as long as you can change your affiliation at the polling place, like in Illinois. Go in, ask for the appropriate ballot, vote, go home. If you don't ask for the appropriate ballot, you can't vote in that party's primary. I really don't see the issue.

Edited April 30, 2008 by StrangeSox

[HuskyCaucasian]

Obama camp's FEC complaint against Pro-Clinton 527 Group

The Obama camp held a conference call Wednesday morning to publicize a 64-page complaint it has filed with the Federal Election Commission against the American Leadership Project, which is running an anti-Obama ad in Indiana and which Obama's lawyer called Swift Boat wannabes.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Obama responds to Gas Tax Holiday...

 

[BigSqwert]

World’s coolest guy endorses world’s other coolest guy.

[BigSqwert]

So, Hillary Clinton has a new ad campaign out, hitting Obama directly on two subjects. What I find hilarious is, Clinton's approach to the two subjects is laughably useless. Clinton wants a 90 day moratorium on foreclosures, and she wants a brief "tax holiday" on gas taxes. Both of these measures are of course exactly the kind of useless, temporary fixes that will make matters worse later. They are pure political B.S. Anyway, the ad hits Obama because he doesn't support either one.

 

For reference, Obama prefers a "windfall tax" on oil companies instead, with the monies going towards alternative fuel research (I'd rather see them just stop giving the companies welfare, but this is as close to that as is politically palatable), and on mortgages, favors an array of other alternatives.

 

McCain also favors the tax holiday, along with Clinton.

 

Here is the article.

This was an interesting read regarding the tax holiday...

 

Over the past several days, some of the nation's leading economic and political pundits have weighed in critically on the proposal of both Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain to institute a gas tax holiday this summer.

 

Paul Krugman of the New York Times said on Tuesday that Clinton's idea, while less "evil" than McCain's, was still "pointless" and "disappointing."

 

One day later, Tom Friedman, also of the Times, called the idea "so ridiculous...it takes your breath away."

 

And Jonathan Alter of Newsweek piled on: "Hillary Clinton has now joined John McCain in proposing the most irresponsible policy idea of the year -- an idea that actually could aid the terrorists."

 

Surely, however, there must be someone out there not associated with a politician or a candidate who supported the idea of a gas tax reprieve -- especially if, as Clinton suggests, it would be paid for by an excess profits tax on oil companies.

 

I emailed Howard Wolfson, Clinton's spokesperson, asking him to put me in touch with an economic or environmental analyst who favored his boss' plan. He never wrote back.

 

Read the rest of the article