A website dedicated to the man so uniquely unqualified to be President. This blog by by radio talk host Todd Feinburg has been replaced by RealClearThinker.com.
FALSANI: Do you have people in your life that you look to for guidance?
OBAMA: Well, my pastor [Jeremiah Wright] is certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for.
I have a number of friends who are ministers. Reverend Meeks is a close friend and colleague of mine in the state Senate. Father Michael Pfleger is a dear friend, and somebody I interact with closely.
FALSANI: Those two will keep you on your toes.
OBAMA: And theyr'e good friends. Because both of them are in the public eye, there are ways we can all reflect on what's happening to each of us in ways that are useful.
I think they can help me, they can appreciate certain specific challenges that I go through as a public figure.
“One of the churches that I became involved in was Trinity United Church of Christ,” Obama said in the interview. “And the pastor there, Jeremiah Wright, became a good friend. So I joined that church and committed myself to Christ in that church.”
Obama began attending the church in 1988 and formally joined Trinity in 1992. Falsani asked, “Do you still attend Trinity?”
Obama answered, “Yep. Every week. 11 o’clock service. Ever been there? Good service.
Hmm. This sounds a bit different from Barack said during the campaign.
“As young marrieds, Barack and Michelle (who also didn't go to church regularly as a child) went to church fairly often—two or three times a month. But after their first child, Malia, was born, they found making the effort more difficult. ‘I don't know if you've had the experience of taking young, squirming children to church, but it's not easy,’ he says.
“‘Trinity was always packed, and so you had to get there early. And if you went to the morning service, you were looking at—it just was difficult. So that would cut back on our involvement.’
It's always the same question with liberal politicians - why don't their kids attend public schools?
Where will the Obama girls go to school? Will Michelle and Barack Obama choose private or public? What statement will their choice make? These are some of the questions on the minds of many Washington observers after the news that Michelle Obama visited a private school in D.C this week.
The unspoken reality is that people with the money to send their kids to private schools keep them out of urban public schools, owned and operated by Democrats and crippled by liberal ideology and the Democrats partnership with the teachers unions, and send them where they'll get a good education.
The Post's education columnist, Jay Mathews, is betting on Georgetown Day School as the Obamas' likely choice. Mathews says this is fitting on two fronts: Georgetown Day School was the first racially integrated school in D.C., and it is similar to the academically rigorous University of Chicago Laboratory Schools that Malia, a fifth grader, and Sasha, a second grader, currently attend. Several key Obama advisers send their children there.
Democrats should get called on it whenever they opt out of public schools - over time, perhaps voters would start to realize that Democrats operate on an educational double standard - they refuse to allow school choice, except for the affluent.
There is also the well-known fact that, despite some progress, D.C. schools are among the most dysfunctional, academically underachieving schools in the country. If Obama decides to send his daughters to a public school in the city, he would be the first president to do so since Jimmy Carter.
Here's Michelle Obama's argument about how people should decide who to vote for. If they follow her advice, most Barack supporters will have to switch to McCain.
They've saved prime time - 10pm on - when the alphabet networks pick up coverage - for Michelle Obama. This is important - they want to introduce her as Donna Reed to Americans who haven't met her yet. They want to make it harder to pin an anti-American label on her.
Here's part of the email that went out under Michelle's name today:
This week, folks from across the country will get to know Barack and our family a little better. Tonight I'm giving a speech at the convention, and I'm planning to share a few stories about the Barack I know -- the husband, the father, and the man who shares my dreams for our girls, for this country, and for our future.
Before my speech, we're also going to show a video introducing our family to families across the country. Make sure to turn on your TV at 10:30 p.m. EDT (8:30 p.m. MDT) to see it, or you can watch it at www.BarackObama.com.
Michelle will be preceded by a film. This is like 7th grade with all the film strips.
Hillary's name is being put into nomination, and some delegates will get a chance to vote for her, but then the vote will be stopped, perhaps by Hillary, and a request will be made that Barack be declared the nominee by acclamation. This is the plan to avoid embarrassment.
But at 10pm it's not Michelle, it's former Rep. Jim Leach, a Republican who has endorsed Barack. He's a terrible speaker, and the networks are ignoring him. ABC is showing Teddy, but the other networks are doing recaps.
The pundits seem happy with the Kennedy moment, saying this is what got the convention on track, that Kennedy gave things a starting point. But they're at the convention - and when you're at TV events, you don't get to see how it plays on TV.
Chuck Todd, NBC political director, said there's a lot of glossing over tonight, referring to the Clinton/Obama conflict. Here are the two big Democratic families, he adds, handing over the keys to the party to Obama. One eagerly, one reluctantly.
Caroline is on a panel on ABC. Stephanopolous, Diane Sawyer, Charlie Gibson are sucking up on Kennedy drama. It's amazing that Ted was here, says Caroline. Diane - how does he inspire the family, she wants to know. Does he sit family members down individually? No, he leads by example. My children, says Caroline, were inspired by him tonight. Pathetic to think that these used to be news organizations.
CBS is using Katie Couric. She's interviewing Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who would have made a good VP choice. Americans just need to get to know Michelle, she says. They'll find her to be a wonderful inspiration as first lady. Ugh.
On CNN, they're asking Donna Brazille why Claire McCaskill is giving a speech during prime time. Isn't this an expensive favor to be giving her, they want to know, to let her speak in prime time?
This story is in today's Chicago Sun-Times, accusing Michelle and David Axelrod of being involved with a program that shuffles poor blacks away from health care so doctors can focus on more lucrative patients.
BY TIM NOVAK AND CHRIS FUSCO Staff Reporters Sen. Barack Obama's wife and three close advisers have been involved with a program at the University of Chicago Medical Center that steers patients who don't have private insurance -- primarily poor, black people -- to other health care facilities.
Why is Jerome Corsi's new book on Barack, The Obama Nation, so freely called 'slime,' without evidence of it's sliminess being offered? For example, on the Washington Post blog The Swamp, Frank James quotes Paul Waldman of Media Matters on Larry King as saying, "You can put slime in the covers of a book and it's still slime."
But there's no evidence presented that the book is unfairly attacking Barack. Instead, evidence is presented that Corsi is trying to dig through the record to answer questions.
Anyone who's been following the controversy over the book or who watches this Larry King segment or, better yet, who has seen the infamous New Yorker cover featuring the Obama caricatures, already knows pretty much all they need to know about the contents of this book. Through innuendo, it forwards the rumors that Sen. Barack Obama is a crypto-Muslim and that his wife Michelle is the spiritual twin of Angela Davis.
Why is this not a reasonable exploration? There is evidence, presented by Michelle herself, that her views are quite radical and that she's very judgmental toward America. Should those views, and a pretty clear attempt to coverup that record, go uncovered? And if Barack has a Muslim history, what's wrong with that and why shouldn't it be part of the record? If you listen to the King interview, what you see is an attempt to shoot the messenger, not attack the arguments made.
KING: Jerome, if a man says he is a Christian, why doubt that?
CORSI: Well, I don't. I say in the book I can't read Barack Obama's soul. I can't look into his mind. If he says he's a Christian, he's a Christian. What I say is...
KING: So (INAUDIBLE).
CORSI: Well, but what I document Barack Obama just there said he was not raised as a Muslim. I very clearly document in Indonesia, when he was six to 10 years old, living with his mother and his Islamic stepfather, he did attend a public school where he received Muslim education. And he...
KING: But...
CORSI: ...it was the type of Islamic education that was for a person registered as a Muslim in that school, which Barack Obama had also been when he attended Catholic school in (INAUDIBLE).
KING: But Jerome, you know that Jewish kids go to Catholic schools. It doesn't make them Catholic.
CORSI: Well, he was registered as a Muslim. The documentation -- I thoroughly researched it from the Indonesian newspapers and Indonesian television. He attended mosque with his stepfather. The friends who were in school with him attest that he was then considered a Muslim. And that's the testimony of the people in Indonesia who grew up in those six years (INAUDIBLE)...
But reporting by CNN in Jakarta, Indonesia and Washington, D.C., shows the allegations that Obama attended a madrassa to be false. CNN dispatched Senior International Correspondent John Vause to Jakarta to investigate.
He visited the Basuki school, which Obama attended from 1969 to 1971.
Now in the book, Corsi says CNN misses the point. He allows that Obama didn't attend a madrassa. But that doesn't mean he wasn't exposed to Islamic precepts and the Koran as a grade-schooler, writes Corsi.
In the book, Corsi leads us through a confusing (at least I was confused) exploration of exactly what neighborhood young Barry lived in when he attended this school or that. He claims Obama's autobiography, "Dreams of My Father" is unclear on the point. Then he gives two possible explanations, one benign, the other sinister.
Whether the realities of Barack's past are relevant or not is up to voters to decide - after the facts are on the table.
"The truth is that we do not know for sure how many moves there were or where Obama was living when he attended the government run public school. Unfortunately, what Obama writes about his time in Indonesia is not precise enough, with regard to locations and dates, to help us to sort it out. Obama was young when he was in Indonesia and maybe some of the details of the experience are obscure, even to him. Or, maybe he is trying to minimize intentionally the extent to which the experience placed him in an Islamic setting where he received public school education in Islam. Again, we simply don't know."
The attempt to know the truth about Barack is reasonable. The pursuit is fair, and it is one that we should expect authors and media writers to be engaged in. Why the attempt to Swift Boat authors?
And if you're Corsi, this kind of uncertainty, if it be that, is actually what you thrive on since it allows you to raise questions about Obama's truthfulness etc. Corsi admits to anyone who asks, as King did, if he is out to defeat Obama. Indeed he is, he said. He sees the senator from Illinois as "unfit for command" to use the title of Corsi's previous book on Sen. John Kerry. So he's not about to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. It's more like damning by doubt.
I've only browsed Corsi's book thus far, so I don't know how to react to it, but when those refuting the claims in the book are lying themselves, and when the media is so frenzied in its desire to blast the book, I get concerned.
How does Barack's candidacy survive Michelle's view of America?
You combine these sorts of clips with Reverends Wright and Pfleger, sprinkle in a little Tony Rezko and Bill Ayers, and you've got an ad that the Swift Boat guys from 4 years ago could only dream about.
Dick Morris mentioned recently that one of the biggest mistakes the Obama campaign has made was not realizing earlier the importance of controlling Michelle. She is on the record as having a negative attitude towards this country, providing a very damaging confirmation of Barack's long connection to radicals. A relatively unexplored foundational member of the Obamafia is Frank Marshall Davis. But he'll play a starring role in the fall.
As noted in the July 29 curtain-raiser to this series, the seeds of Obama's far-left ideology were planted in his formative years as a teenager growing up in Hawaii — and they were far more radical than any biography or media profile has portrayed.
Poet-journalist Davis speaks in Hawaii in this undated photo.
A careful reading of Obama's first memoir, "Dreams From My Father," reveals that his childhood mentor up to the age of 18 — a man he refers to only as "Frank" — was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who fled Chicago after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his "subversive," "un-American activities."
In a belated story on the relationship, the Associated Press describes Davis as "left-leaning."
In fact, Davis was a member of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, according to the 1953 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities of the Territory of Hawaii, which labeled him "a bitter opponent of capitalism." The report was introduced as evidence in the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee hearings probing the "Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States."
Barack is engaging in the old kinda politics again, trying to create standard left/right polarity - the opposite of trying to bring us together.
Senator Obama is blaming the news media — and especially FOX News — for Michelle Obama's high negative ratings. Just under 30 percent of those polled had an unfavorable view of Michelle Obama in our last FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll. A Rasmussen Reports poll last month put her unfavorable rating at 42 percent.
Ya, the Obamas are victims! It's not their fault that they let Michelle go out onto the campaign trail and talk about how the U.S. isn't a very nice place.
Obama tells Glamour magazine that political spouses should be off-limits. He says the "conservative press — FOX News... went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way... spouses are civilians. They didn't sign up for this."
Some do, and some don't. Those that advertise their disdain for the country are at the top of the sign up list. Those that mind their business and stay in the background, like Cindy McCain, they have a bigger right to be left alone.
Though Obama failed to mention it, his wife has made a number of official campaign stops with him and has even campaigned for him on her own.
When you're a practitioner of the old fashioned politics, being forthright isn't part of the equation. He's just looking for the wedge.
Obama then added, "If you start being subjected to rants by Sean Hannity and the like, day in day out, that'll drive up your negatives."
There's a safe bet for mobilizing liberals - bring out the old demon Sean Hannity.
But the recent Newsweek poll shows that Michelle is doing just fine with voters, despite her comments on her country, so this whole thing is just posturing, anyway. Making Barack look like a tough, protective patriarch. Who's going to think ill of him for doing a little Harry Truman routine?
The Newsweek poll found that voters thought Obama would make a better First Lady than McCain by a 31% to 25% margin.
That surprising figure suggests a possible reversal in a trend that has favored more traditional, Republican First Ladies. At this point in the 1996 campaign, voters preferred Elizabeth Dole over Hillary Clinton by 14points, and in 2004, they preferred Laura Bush over Teresa Heinz Kerry by 20 points.
