Friday, February 20, 2009
Obama’s Sleight of Mouth
How much will you pay for Wall Street bailout?
By Chelsea Schilling
A grassroots online community dedicated to driving home the costs of the government's Wall Street bailout has created a calculator showing exactly how much each and every American family will pay for the spending spree. "Here's the deal," Right.org states. "A bunch of jet-set corporate executives made bad bets for their companies and lost, big time. Normally, these companies would go bankrupt. This time, our government is taking money from our families to prop up these insolvent companies."
Right.org describes itself as "a community of Americans who are intensely concerned about the bailout culture in Washington." One of those Americans, Evan Baehr, told WND the website grew out of conversations on an e-mail list of friends who work in journalism, finance, law and the non-profit sector.
"As the bailouts began in earnest last fall, two things dismayed us: First, how non-transparent they were; and second, how they contravened common sense and what we think as sound economics," he said.
Baehr said the government is forcing taxpayers to invest in assets the private sector won't touch and dodging inquiries into details about acquisition of the assets.
"Something had to be done, and we felt like there wasn't any voice out there gathering the opposition to these bailouts and bringing pressure to bear on Congress and the president," he said. "Americans deserve a better sense of what started the economic crisis, the types and sizes of bailout packages and what some possible ways out might be."
The website offers a calculator so every family may see how much they must pay in taxes to finance the Wall Street bailouts.
"TARP and the bailouts of Bear Stearns and Citigroup are just the tip of the iceberg," the website states. "So far, our government committed more than $8 trillion to funding failed companies (that's over $60,000 per family in America!). ..."
According to the calculator, with a total bailout of nearly $8.5 trillion divided among 300 million Americans, every man, woman and child in the U.S. would have a tax burden of $27,599. (The IRS reports there were only 138 million taxpayers in 2007, putting the load at $61,153.04 per taxpayer.)
The U.S. Census Bureau's 2005-2007 American Community Survey reports the median family income is approximately $60,374, and the average U.S. family is made up of three people. If every person were to pay for the Wall treet bailout, the calculator reveals that a family of three making $60,374 with a current income tax of $12,712 would face an additional tax of $5,333 each year to cover its costs – equal to a 42 percent tax increase.In a period of 30 years at 5 percent interest, the calculator estimates the average family would pay $160,009 – or the cost of 12 Chevy Aveos
"What's worse? It's not making a difference," Right.org states. "The line for bailouts is growing, and includes the telecom industry, airlines, as well as city and state governments."
Calculations do not include costs to taxpayers associated with the Obama administration's newly approved $787 billion stimulus plan.
The website is circulating a petition to lawmakers demanding that they do force taxpayers to pay for corporate failures and asking them to sign the following oath:
I pledge to oppose all future bailout requests that would make my constituents pay for business or government failures that are not my constituents' fault. This pledge applies to bailouts in all forms, including loans or other financings, equity infusions or other investments, asset purchases, guarantees, and any other type of bailout transaction.
"This isn't so complicated: bailouts keep bad businesses afloat and prevent capital from flowing to productive areas of the economy," the petition states. "That puts jobs at risk and jeopardizes our competitive edge against foreign countries."
The group accuses President Obama of talking a "tough game about bailouts" but not following through on his promises.
"[H]is own stimulus package and his bank bailout proposal hand billions more of our dollars to failed companies," it says. "Urge the government to do what's right: Stop the bailouts!"
On Monday, Right.org will launch a video contest with a grand prize of $27,599 – the estimated tax burden for one American. Each contestant must submit a 30-second film explaining why they oppose the bailout.
"Spreading the word about the true size and impact of bailouts is the major push for us now," Baehr said. "Opposing bailouts isn't partisan. It's everyone's issue because it's everyone's dollar."Obama backs Bush: No rights for Bagram prisoners
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.
In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.
"The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we'd hoped," said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. "We all expected better."
The Supreme Court last summer gave al-Qaida and Taliban suspects held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their detention. With about 600 detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and thousands more held in Iraq, courts are grappling with whether they, too, can sue to be released.
Three months after the Supreme Court's ruling on Guantanamo Bay, four Afghan citizens being detained at Bagram tried to challenge their detentions in U.S. District Court in Washington. Court filings alleged that the U.S. military had held them without charges, repeatedly interrogating them without any means to contact an attorney. Their petition was filed by relatives on their behalf since they had no way of getting access to the legal system.
The military has determined that all the detainees at Bagram are "enemy combatants." The Bush administration said in a response to the petition last year that the enemy combatant status of the Bagram detainees is reviewed every six months, taking into consideration classified intelligence and testimony from those involved in their capture and interrogation.
After Barack Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it wanted to stand by Bush's legal argument. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd says the filing speaks for itself.
"They've now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees.
The Justice Department argues that Bagram is different from Guantanamo Bay because it is in an overseas war zone and the prisoners there are being held as part of a military action. The government argues that releasing enemy combatants into the Afghan war zone, or even diverting U.S. personnel there to consider their legal cases, could threaten security.
The government also said if the Bagram detainees got access to the courts, it would allow all foreigners captured by the United States in conflicts worldwide to do the same.
It's not the first time that the Obama administration has used a Bush administration legal argument after promising to review it. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of every court case in which the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, a separate legal tool it used to have lawsuits thrown out rather than reveal secrets.
The same day, however, Justice Department attorney Douglas Letter cited that privilege in asking an appeals court to uphold dismissal of a suit accusing a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA fly suspected terrorists to allied foreign nations that tortured them.
Letter said that Obama officials approved his argument.
AP Interview: Transportation secretary says taxing how much we drive may replace gasoline tax
WASHINGTON (AP) — Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says he wants to consider taxing motorists based on how many miles they drive rather than how much gasoline they burn — an idea that has angered drivers in some states where it has been proposed.
Gasoline taxes that for nearly half a century have paid for the federal share of highway and bridge construction can no longer be counted on to raise enough money to keep the nation's transportation system moving, LaHood said in an interview with The Associated Press.....
Obama tells Spanish radio: Immigration reform coming
NEW YORK – President Obama affirmed in an interview with a Spanish-language radio show that his administration is preparing to push for a new round of "comprehensive immigration reform."
The White House confirmed to WND Obama was a guest on the Univision show "Piolin por la Manana," or "Piolin for the morning," hosted by Eddie "Piolin" Sotelo. A transcript of the interview, however, was not posted on the White House website. ....
Barricaded NYU Protesters Demand Aid For Gaza Jihadis
Drudge is running the headline, “NYU Students Barricaded Up To Protest Budget…“
Yeah, it is true that they are demanding to know where their $50,000 per year tuition money goes, but you have to read all the way to the very bottom of the article to find this little gem:
There are also other demands that don’t concern the budget. The group wants 13 scholarships a year provided for students of the Gaza Strip, and to give surplus supplies to the Islamic university in Gaza.
Hopefully they all find out exactly where their money is going, and hopefully they are all thrown out of school.
Is Twitter useful afterall?
Announcing $35M in new funding last Friday Twitter was one of the few bright spots in a collapsing economy. The micro-blogging service has been attracting increasing attention within the mainstream, as the political classes adopt the service – most notably, congressman Pete Hokestra (R-Mich.)who produced a stream of tweets detailing his location as he traveled from Andrew’s Air Force base to Baghdad and back. Besides the disbelieving head shaking this particular series of political tweets attracted, it does highlight the amorphous nature of Twitter -- it isn’t clear what it really is.
Certainly, the revenue model remains unclear, as does its true utility or even what the unintended consequences of using the service may be. In a National Security sense Twitter emerged as a powerful networked communications platform during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when a stream of tweets marked #Mumbai (# being the global tagging system Twitter employs) gave a seemingly real-time commentary on events as they unfolded in Mumbai. Similarly, Twitter has been used to communicate the message and activity surrounding the riots in Greece using the #Griot tag. These are examples of the network effect working with a rapid communications platform and developing a powerful narrative from many different observation points. The style is anarchic but increasingly compelling.
Therefore, one argument regarding the long-term use of Twitter, in the National Security space at least, is that Twitter in conjunction with other tools, continues the trend of making ordinary citizens active producers of potentially actionable intelligence. This equally applies to Microsoft Photosynth and the meshing of user created digital platforms is a future trend, which doesn’t seem too far away. One of Twitter’s more recent high profile moments was the picture of the USAirways plane in the Hudson taken by an ordinary citizen who happened to be on a ferry, which went to the scene. This picture quickly and succinctly explained the situation to any emergency service in the area. This same principal can clearly be globally extended in terms of data and geographic reach. In fact it is the increasing penetration of mobile devices, which would seem to offer a bright future for the Twitter platform.
An area, which the Twitter platform excels in are the tools that can be used to manipulate the information within Twitter. This is where the open feel of the service suggests it somehow has more potential than the well designed social networking platforms such as Facebook. Information is messy and Twitter fits around this principle.
In order to examine Twitter we established a Twitter feed at www.twitter/In_Terrain. The idea behind this was to use the RSS feed Twitter tool TwitterFeed to push content of interest (such as the CT Blog) to a Twitter account and then examine ways in which this could be consumed. The results so far have been impressive. Twitterrific available for Apple products displays the security information feed in a very useful way. Tweetr for windows does a similar thing for Microsoft based systems. If users join Twitter they can chose to ‘follow’ the In_Terrain feed and receive the same information and potentially reply to specific tweets they find interesting – thus creating the ‘conversation’ Twitter, desires. Similarly, if other security and intelligence focused twitter feeds become apparent the In_Terrain twitter feed can ‘follow’ those conversations – thus beginning the network effect.
Clearly, this is still experimental and there are other avenues to explore with regard to GPS Twitter applications. The aim with the In_Terrain Twitter account is to generate tweets from mainstream information sources as well as the 'lower frequencies'. Starting a National Security focused tweet seems like an interesting idea right now – so I welcome CTBlog readers to ‘join the conversation’ – and please make suggestions for improvements or content additions. Maybe it will even become useful.Skype Users Beware: Big Brother May Be Listening
How do terrorists who know they’re being monitored by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) communicate with one another? Whenever I get the opportunity to interview people in the intelligence community, I always ask this question. One of the more interesting ways, I once learned, was that some terrorists were using the blogging software WordPress.
There’s a feature on WordPress that allows one blogger to write a draft of something which he/she then “saves as draft” but doesn’t publish. Along comes a second blogger, with proprietary access to the WordPress account, who then reads the draft written by the first blogger (in this case, terrorist), erases those words, and types his/her own message, which is then also saved as a draft. At first, the NSA had a hard time accessing the WordPress system. But then they did. For obvious reasons, I was not told how.
As for me, I talk to my sources on Skype, a software program that allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet for free. The headset you need costs about $59. It is common knowledge that the NSA can’t hack into Skype, which is why it’s a popular tool for anyone who worries, with good reason, that the NSA might be listening in on them — journalists, whistleblowers, and terrorists alike.
Apparently not for long. Internet technology reporter Lewis Page writes in The Register that a source at the Counter Terror Expo in London says, “America’s super secret National Security Agency (NSA) is offering ‘billions’ to any firm which can offer reliable eavesdropping on Skype IM and voice traffic.”
But maybe, just maybe, the NSA and Skype are already in bed together, and the billion-dollar offer being made is just another way to keep the journalists, whistleblowers, and terrorists talking. What better place for the spreading of disinformation than the Counter Terror Expo — in London, no less. Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky believes this may in fact be the case. A physicist and speech technology expert who writes for emerging technology giant O’Reilly.com, Yudkowsky cites a bizarre case in Hungary in March 2007 to make his point.
That’s when a then-Hillary Clinton presidential campaign staffer, who recently left a job at the NSA, was arrested on espionage charges. Hungarian police had examined the staffer’s briefcase and found a transcript between the head of the Hungarian police, a man named Laszlo Bene, and the head of the police in Brussels, Belgium, a man named Stefan Feller. The Clinton staffer confessed to eavesdropping, which in turn produced the transcript of the conversation between the two police chiefs.
But the eavesdropping process, Yudkowsky explains, was far from what you might expect. There was no “bug” hidden in a vase under a mantelpiece or stuck to a lamp. Instead, the “bug” was in the form of the already existing microphone on the Hungarian police chief’s computer. The police chief — like journalists, whistleblowers, and terrorists — also used Skype to communicate. Yudkowsky explains:
Sources in the Hungarian police department revealed that the background traffic associated with running Skype on a personal computer provides an ideal method to hide the transfer of data from an individual’s computer without the owner’s knowledge or consent. Skype can “turn on a computer’s microphone on command,” said a highly placed source, “and no one will be the wiser.” The data are routed to servers that use speech recognition to look for suspicious phrases. Furthermore, algorithms can use the sound of keyclicks to guess at which keys are being struck, which allows anyone listening to determine not only what is being said but what is being typed.
Immediately after the bust, the European Commission opened an investigation. Alain Brun, the head of data protection at the Commission, told reporters, “The suspect [i.e., Clinton staffer] worked at the U.S. National Security Agency, where he learned of an agreement between Skype and Echelon to enable a ’spy’ mode on all Skype products.” What has yet to be explained is: What did Hillary Clinton’s staffer need this information for? And where has this former Clinton staffer gone?
Dr. Yudkowsky found a source at Dean Witter who believes the Skype-NSA-as-bedfellows idea could explain how Skype has been making money. After all, its users are able to use it for free. “Outside payments by government agencies would explain how Skype can hope to make a profit,” the source told Dr. Yudkowsky. “Otherwise the purchase of Skype by eBay [in 2005] still doesn’t make sense.”
Maybe the NSA has spent its “billions” already, after all.
Magic Madrassa Bus comes to San Fran
The Bay Area Chapter of the Islamic Circle of North America will launch a bus ad campaign in San Francisco on today to encourage people to break stereotypes about Muslims.
People can expect to see the hot line (877) WHY-ISLAM and the Web site www.whyislam.org on the sides of more than 140 buses because the ICNA wants to make a point. ....
Thursday, February 19, 2009
ACORN and Obama - together again
Mich
Fresh off the trillion-dollar porkulus bill signing in
In tandem with the White House Bad Borrowers Bailout, Obama's old friends at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) are launching a new campaign of their own: the "Home Savers" campaign. What a coinky-dinky, huh? As with most of the bully tactics of the radical left-wing group, it ain't gonna be pretty. They are the shock troops on the streets doing the dirty work while the Community Organizer-in-Chief keeps his d
Trumpets ACORN: l"On Feb. 19, ACORN members will launch a new tactic in fighting forclosures : civil disobedience. Participants in the ACORN Home Savers campaign nationwide will simply refuse to move out of foreclosed homes, or in some cases, will move back in. ACORN homesteaders intend to squat in their homes until a comprehensive, federal solution for people facing foreclosure is put in place."
ACORN's foot soldiers, funded with your tax dollars, will scream, pound their fists, chain thems
"After you've used all your legal options, your last resort is civil disobedience. We're talking about families who have been in their homes 20 or 30 years. People who are assets in the community, who look out for the
We can all sympathize with good folks who can't pay their bills. But as I've said repeatedly in my criticism of the mortgage entitlement mentality embraced by both parties in
Now that's the kind of theft that should be the subject of civil disobedience.
Instead, ACORN offices, funded with your tax dollars, are training teams of "Home Savers" -- described as "people ready and willing to mobilize on short notice to defend the homesteaders against attempts to evict them." Ready, willing and able to mobilize on short notice because they are either unemployed or employed full-time as ACORN shakedown artists.
Guess who's encouraging them to defy the law. Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of
ACORN is targeting the following cities: Tucson, Ariz.; Oakland, Calif.; Los Ang
ACORN has waited three decades for this moment in the sun. And as Obama promised ACORN members at a forum in December 2007, "We're going to be calling all of you in to h
Bush Lied, People Died – But Did President Bush Really Lie?
by Herbert London
Israel’s Farewell Dossier? If They’re Not Doing It, They Should Be
Iran holds enough uranium for bomb
Iran has built up a stockpile of enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb, United Nations officials acknowledged on Thursday.
In a development that comes as the Obama administration is drawing up its policy on negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programme, UN officials said Iran had produced more nuclear material than previously thought. ....
Media/Gov't Mum—Frightening Documentary on Muslim Terrorist Camps in America
Jihad Camps in America http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcJ_hhe1ip4
- Red House Virginia (over 120 Acres)
- Mecca Circle, Wayne County, GA
- Islamber, NY (considered their headquarters)
- Holy Islamville, SC (another huge compound and extremely active)
- Baladullah, CA (Huge and also extremely active)
- A new one PA (Wayne County)
- Fairfax, VA
- York, SC
- Hancock, NY
- Deposit, NY
- Springfield, MA
- Philadelphia, PA
- Hyattsville, MD
- Bethany, WV
- Meherrin, VA
- Dover, TN
- Commerce, GA
- Jessup, GA
- Marion, AL
- Talhina, OK
- Houston, TX
- Coldwater, MI
- Buena Vista, CO
- Oak Hill, CA
- Onalska, WA
- ETC ETC ETC
Source: Strains, threats hurt military readiness
By LOLITA C. BALDOR
WASHINGTON (AP) - For the third consecutive year, a classified Pentagon assessment has concluded there's a significant risk that the U.S. military could not respond quickly and fully to any new crisis, The Associated Press has learned. The latest risk assessment, drawn up by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, comes despite recent security gains in Iraq and plans for troop cuts there.
The assessment finds that the U.S. continues to face persistent terrorist threats, and the military is still stretched and strained from long and repeated tours to the warfront.
Senior military officials spoke about the report on condition of anonymity because it is a classified document.
Prepared every year, and routinely delivered to Congress with the budget, the risk assessment paints a broad picture of the security threats and hotspots around the world and the U.S. military's ability to deal with them. Mullen has delivered it to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Because the threat is rated as significant, Gates will send an accompanying report to Congress outlining what the military is doing to address the risks. That report has not yet been finished.
This year's assessment finds many of the same global security issues as previous years - ranging from terrorist organizations and unstable governments to the potential for high-tech cyber attacks. It also reflects the Pentagon's ongoing struggle to maintain a military that can respond to threats from other countries, while honing newer counterinsurgency techniques to battle more unconventional dangers, such as suicide bombers and lethal roadside bombs.
Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a military policy research group in Arlington, Va., said the assessment would take into account the strains on the force, the wear and tear on aircraft and other military equipment, and a whole host of global flashpoints.
"This is a chairman who looks around the world and sees - right now, today - immediate, near-term problems like North Korea, the larger questions of Pakistan and its future, Iran and what is going on there, Russia and Georgia, Venezuela, which has a close relationship with Russia and is buying arms all over the place, and Cuba," Goure said.
While officials are preparing to reduce troop levels in Iraq, they are increasing their forces in Afghanistan - giving troops little break from their battlefield tours. The Pentagon has repeatedly stressed ongoing efforts to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps, but that growth is only now starting to have an impact.
There are 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 38,000 in Afghanistan - 19,000 in the NATO-led force and 19,000 fighting insurgents and training Afghan forces.
One senior military official said that while there have been security gains in Iraq, military units leaving there have been sapped by repeated war tours that have also battered their equipment and vehicles. It will take time to restore the force and repair or replace the equipment. In other cases, equipment has been left in Iraq for use by the steadily growing Iraqi security forces.
Two years ago, then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace raised the risk level from moderate to significant, pointing to an overall decline in military readiness that he said would take several years to correct. A year later, Mullen maintained that risk level, saying that strains on the military, persistent terrorist activity and other threats had prevented the Pentagon from improving its ability to respond to any new crises.
Last year, Gates listed increased intelligence gathering as a key need to address military shortfalls. Since then, the Pentagon has steadily increased its inventory of unmanned aircraft, boosting the number of 24-hour unmanned air patrols over the Iraq and Afghanistan battlefront from 24 to 33.
Savage goes on offense in 'Fairness Doctrine' battle
Americann Rancher ordered to pay illegals $77,000
.....Many of the aliens are residents of Michoacan, Mexico. Four live in Illinois, one resides in Georgia and another in Michigan. All of the plaintiffs currently living in the U.S. listed pseudonyms in the lawsuit due to "fear of adverse action based on immigration status."
Ten of the illegal alien plaintiffs didn't show up to the trial, but the remaining six said they were given permission to re-enter the United States and testify against Barnett.
"That was a shocker to me. All the ones who testified said that they were here legally and that their attorneys had done the paperwork," Hardy said. "There's nothing like your government backing you."....
MALDEF claimed the family attacked, harassed, threatened and held the illegals against their will, because they were motivated by racial and class-based discrimination. The complaint said the Barnetts allegedly caused the group "severe emotional and mental distress," including fear, anxiety, humiliation, stress, frustration and sadness. Each illegal alien sued for $1 million in actual damages and $1 million for punitive or exemplary damages. .... All together, the illegals received only $77,804 of the $32 million they requested – and Hardy believes that award will be thrown out in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. ....
---------------------------
Illegal Alien Suit against Arizona Rancher Should Signal a Call to Action by Citizens
Latest Economic stimulus bill
While on the site (CLICK ON THE TITLE ABOVE) you can use the search or "find" option to look for certain items. Example type "Census" and you will find.
For an additional amount for ‘‘Periodic Censuses and Programs’’,
$1,000,000,000
Imagine! The census office just got an additional $1 BILLION to spend, doesn't say where, or how, or when, just a gift to the director of a Billion dollars.
Check this one out: This is $16 Billion for what? Who spends it, and how?
Energy Efficiency and Renewable
Energy’’, $16,800,000,000: Provided, That $3,200,000,000 shall be
available for Energy Efficiency and Conservation
Trader Buzz & Rick's Rant
CNBC's Rick Santelli and the traders on the floor of the CBOE express outrage over the notion they may have to pay their neighbor's mortgage, particularly if they bought far more house than they could actually afford, with Jason Roney, Sharmac Capital.
Click photo to play video:

Syria Building Chemical Weapons Plant
Syria has been conducting extensive construction work on a chemical weapons facility in the country's northwest, satellite images obtained by the defense analyst group Jane's reveal.
The images of a chemical weapons facility identified as al-Safir were taken by several commercial sources from 2005 to 2008, the analyst group said.
Imagery obtained by DigitalGlobe's WorldView-1 satellite shows that extensive construction has taken place at the facility, as well as at an adjacent missile base, the group wrote. In addition, the images showed that the site contained a number of the "defining features of a chemical weapons facility."
Al-Safir is home to a chemical weapons production facility and a missile base that holds a significant part of Syria's long-range Scud D ballistic missiles, according to foreign reports. The Scud D has a range of 700 kilometers and al-Safir is reported to have several dozen underground fortified bunkers where the launchers and the missiles are stored.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Obama’s Revenge
by Joan Swirsky
Grooming the perfect Marxist candidate
Once upon a time, a white teenager from Kansas got pregnant by her black Kenyan boyfriend, Barack Obama Sr., or was it her husband? Whatever. (I say whatever because we’ve never seen either marriage or divorce certificates). Some say the couple was in Kenya visiting relatives when the birth of their son, Barack Obama Jr., occurred. No matter. (I say no matter because we’ve never seen an authentic birth certificate). By the time the baby was two years old his father abandoned him for his other wife and child in Kenya.
I wonder how toddler Barry felt when his father left him, and never reappeared until a single time when the boy was 10. Bewildered? Sad? Lonely? Angry? What do two-year-olds do with those feelings?
It didn’t take long for Barry’s mother to meet and marry an Indonesian native named Lolo Soetoro. They moved to Indonesia, where her child became Barry Soetoro, took on Indonesian citizenship, and was presumably schooled in public, Christian, and Muslim schools. (I say presumably because we’ve never seen those school records). But when Barry was 10 years old, his mother sent him back to the U.S. to be raised by her parents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, although she kept her baby daughter Maya Soetoro with her.
I wonder how the by-now fully-sentient young Barry felt when his mother sent him packing. Sad? Jealous of the baby who remained behind with mommy? Confused and dizzy by the disparate cultures – languages, customs, foods, sights, sounds, schooling – he had experienced? Resentful? What did Barry do with those feelings?
By the time he was 10, the boy had been abandoned three times – by his father, stepfather, and mother. And although he was raised by his white grandparents in Hawaii – where “people of color” were not his color – he found out soon enough that his mixed-race background rendered him, in effect, an outsider. Did that make him feel self-conscious, indignant, victimized?
But he wasn’t altogether an outsider. In Hawaii, young Barry met Frank Marshall Davis, his first and perhaps most influential mentor. The infamous Marshall, a Communist activist (and self-confessed pedophile) taught Barry – was it Obama, Soetero, Dunham? – that white people were the devil incarnate and that blacks were the most “victimized” people on earth.
Yet the abandoned and rejected child was lucky. His white-devil grandparents gave him a comfortable life in Hawaii, and an education that apparently qualified him to attend several prestigious schools – Occidental College in CA, Columbia Univ. in NY City, and Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA.(I say apparently qualified because we’ve never seen any of his college transcripts).
BARRY MORPHS INTO BARACK
After his undergraduate days at Columbia, Obama chose not to go to graduate school, but instead held various jobs in the Big Apple and then moved to Chicago to become a community organizer. Although he had been exposed to American exceptionalism through his life in the United States and his privileged education, it is clear that his experiences in impoverished Kenya and totalitarian Indonesia, as well as his exposure to Marshall and the other radicals he had met during his years in New York – among them the unrepentant domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn of Weather Underground infamy – made the deepest and most lasting impressions.
Their messages of American imperialism and its white-devil culture clearly resonated in the thrice-abandoned boy. In his young-adult and adult years, free to choose his friends and pursuits, he opted exclusively for far-left socialists and Marxists, and activities aimed at relieving the suffering of people he perceived to be as victimized as apparently he felt he had been. He understood their feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and impotent rage, as well as the pain of fatherlessness. After all, his Harvard-educated father consciously chose to leave him. And his mother gave him away. Was that depressing to Barry? Infuriating?
When given the opportunity to join one of dozens of churches in Chicago, Barry – who had morphed into Barack – opted for the Trinity United Church of Christ, which was led by the fire-breathing Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose decades-long anti-American and anti-Semitic rants apparently resonated in Obama’s rejected and abandoned heart and soul. (I say apparently resonated because in over 20 years of regular attendance, Obama said he heard nothing inflammatory or anti-American, and we’ve never seen the videotapes of any sermon, although each one was unfailingly recorded).
“God damn America,” Wright raged. “The chickens have come home to roost,” he “preached” to his whooping and hollering congregation after 9/11. Obama heard nothing.
But it wasn’t only Wright who Obama was attracted to in Chicago. He was also drawn to another hate-spewing radical, Rev. Louis Farrakhan, as well as to the raving Father Michael Phleger, the radical Islamist Khalid Rashidi, his friends and neighbors the Ayers, and to equally-close friends “Tony” and Rita Rezko – Tony being the notorious “fixer” and now-convicted-and-imprisoned felon for fraud, bribery, and money laundering. What did the seemingly mild-mannered Obama find so irresistible in these angry and/or crooked people and others like them? Was it the same thing that a shy man finds in his attraction to a flamboyant girlfriend – and alter-ego, a person who expresses what he really feels but is unable to give voice to?
In these relationships and in community organizing – which offers inner-city mostly-black residents job training, tutoring, and methods to organize tenants’-rights groups and voter-registration drives, etc. – the twenty-something Obama apparently found his calling, and also a renewed and burning ambition.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE
While his community-organizing job paid a paltry $12,000 or so per year, Obama somehow managed to pay his way through one of the priciest graduate schools in the world, Harvard Law School. (I say somehow managed because we have no record of his tuition payments). Even more amazing, he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review without ever producing a written paper – or at least a paper that the public has ever read.
There is a good deal of evidence that Obama’s acceptance at Harvard Law – and his tuition – were facilitated by friends who had a vested interest in the community organizer. Among them was Percy Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president and ardent leftist, who was also Malcolm X’s lawyer. In an interview last year, the octogenarian Sutton stated: “I was introduced to [Obama] by a friend. The friend’s name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction took place about 20 years ago.” Sutton described al-Mansour as “the principle adviser to one of the world’s richest men” and suggested that al-Mansour was raising money for Obama. Knowing that Sutton had friends at Harvard, al-Mansour asked him if he would write a letter to Harvard recommending Obama, which Sutton did most agreeably. This took place about 1988 when 27-year-old Obama was applying to Harvard Law.
Journalist Jack Cashill has credibly speculated that Obama’s two memoirs were actually written by his pal Bill Ayers, who was and is a University of Illinois at Chicago English professor, having escaped life in prison on a technicality. Two years [after he was admitted to law school], Cashill writes, “while still a law student, Obama improbably received an advance to write a memoir that would be called `Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,’ which was published in 1995.” His second memoir, published in 2006, was “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.” (I suspect Cashill said “improbably received an advance” because, as stated earlier, Obama had not produced even one paper or distinguished himself in any way to have inspired a major publishing company to approach him).
Al this begs the question: Who writes two memoirs about himself before the age of 45? My own speculation is that it could be no one but a narcissist. As most people know in this age of pop psychology, the psychiatric disorder of narcissism derives from the Greek myth in which Narcissus, a handsome young man, became obsessed with himself and fell in love with his own image as he gazed into a pool of water. A lot of people have some degree of narcissism, which is characterized by grandiosity, an unquenchable need for admiration, unhealthy self-absorption, dependence on the affirmation of others, and also a lack of empathy, which is hidden by both personal charm and the kind of earnest language that pretends to “feel your pain.”
Or he could be a malignant narcissist., which psychiatrist Dr. Otto Kernberg, a legendary leader in thought disorders, compares to a narcissist on steroids. This variety involves paranoid traits (think of Obama’s thin-skinned, quasi-hysterical reactions to Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin), and ego-syntonic aggression, which means the person is perfectly in-sync with people who have the courage he lacks to lash out.
But consider the source! Obama’s father was a self-aggrandizing narcissist who thought nothing of throwing his son away to fulfill his own ambitions and his mother also threw him away for the same reason. Talk about DNA, which Obama perfectly exhibited when, during his campaign, he unflinchingly dispensed with both his white grandmother and his black “mentor” Rev. Wright for his personal ambition.
GROOMING THE PERFECT MARXIST CANDIDATE
This leads me to only one conclusion, which I wrote about in a former article: “Obama: The Trojan Horse.” My theory is that President Obama’s narcissistic charm, even temperament, skill with words (teleprompter included), hunger to please, radical agenda, and subterranean rage at the “unfair” American system have been brilliantly exploited by powerful leftist radicals and Marxists in the United States, who for decades have plotted America’s path to socialism. He is their pawn, totally dispensable but handy while the “aura” lasts.
These “handlers” saw in Obama the ideal blank slate on which to actualize their agenda, and they made sure the slate remained blank by concealing (or destroying) any evidence of his past, including his birth certificate, Selective Service record, visa(s), school transcripts, and other vital documents. All of which is costing his moneyed backers – including America-loathing billionaire George Soros – multimillions in lawyers’ fees to fight the proliferating lawsuits that seek the truth about this stealth president.
In fact, former ambassador Alan Keyes, one of the many plaintiffs seeking proof of Obama’s American citizenship, has reported that Obama’s lawyers have now filed a motion “to quash our effort to obtain the relevant documents…[which] confirms Obama’s ruthless determination to destroy anyone who continues to seek the information the Constitution requires. Obama thus signals his intent to bring financial ruin on those who won’t accept his cover-up of the circumstances of his birth is a tactical escalation. It confirms the common sense suspicion that he won’t act forthrightly in this matter because he has something to hide.”
It is clear that Obama and his fellow radicals are restive. In the less-than four weeks of his presidency, the new president has taken volumes from the Marxian handbook, which dictates that the stupid masses be blitzed with an overload of information, hollow press conferences, appointments, dismantling of formerly effective national-security programs, et al., in order to set the stage for a massive, Soviet-style takeover of our government, including a civilian national security force that Obama has said should be “just as powerful, strong and well-funded as the U.S. military.” Echoes of Nazi Germany in 1938, anyone?
According to writer Kyle-Anne Shrive, in Obama’s ascendance:
“We have yet to see a more perfect collision of Murphy’s Law with the Peter Principle. In only three weeks’ time, [he] has signaled to every terrorist on the planet that we are a sorry, groveling, ashamed nation ready to come to the diplomatic confessional. He is closing Gitmo within one year, has suspended trials there, and dismissed the charges against the U.S.S. Cole plotter. [He] has just put our money where his mouth is and is using $20.3 million to bring in Palestinian refugees from Gaza…[he] had the gall to pronounce the so-called economic stimulus bill absolutely free of `earmarks’ and `make-do work’…but according to the Congressional Budget Office [this bill] will do worse to our overall economy than no government action whatsoever.”
And Obama has done all this with the predictable double-speak that characterizes malevolent intention, i.e., touting transparency while concealing everything, speaking of integrity while appointing crooks and incompetents riddled with conflicts-of-interest, supporting energy independence while killing off-shore and domestic oil-drilling and nuclear power, and feigning optimism while he speaks of impending “catastrophe” in order to push through a pork-laden, trillion-dollar-plus Stimulus plan that rewards the corrupt voter-fraud organization Acorn with billions and unions with discriminatory union-only labor agreements, paves the way for socialized medicine, and threatens to take away the most cherished rights of We The People.
As blogger Eric Gurr has said: “We still talk about the health care crisis, the environmental crisis, the oil crisis, the banking crisis. Let me tell you my friends you are about to learn the meaning of the only crisis that matters, the survival crisis.”
You can be sure that the sad-lonely-angry two-year-old, the jealous-confused-resentful 10-year-old, the self-conscious- cheated-victimized adolescent, and the man who found solace in and identified with his hate-America mentors is now determined to redeem all of his demons.
Unfortunately, he is acting out his rage on free-market capitalism, a free press, property and gun rights, a limited constitutional government, protection of the unborn, and everything else that is good and great about our country.
This is Obama’s revenge!