WHAT DOES HE KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT?


Racist RINO Colin Powell
- on Meet the Press

QUOTE

- There is going to be a Crisis on January 21 or 22 that we don't know about

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPOeQZdHYw

He knew who was going to win, just a ways before he endorsed him. Powell is a smart guy.

He's an "Advisor", isn't he?

You''re full of sheit. It doesn't matter how many times the man explains why he voted for and endorsed Obama idiots will still reinterpret his motives. Personally? I'd believe him over y'all.

You're one to talk. You are gullible as hell. OK judy, when the date comes and goes will you admit you were wrong?

Judy didn't set a date... Colin Powell set a date.

Why didn't he do it right away and work for Obama? Powell is an opportunist, that's all.

Agreed.. and he is not a loyal friend. He's made lots of questionable statements in the past.

He's learned how to work the establishment. It's no worse than a lot of other people in power.

He explained that too. He didn't know who he was going to endorse. McCain is more of the Bush doctrine.







You're going to think that anyway.

Loyal friend? Screw that. You idiots value loyalty to the party higher than loyalty to the country. You need to get your priorities straight. As far as his UN disaster that enabled Bush and friends? He has said that was a black mark on his career.

A Black Mark on his Career? He gives Black Marks to those who helped his career!!

Powell served a White House fellowship, a highly selective and prestigious position, under President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1973.

In the early 80s General John Hudachek, his commander said in an efficiency evaluation that Powell was a poor leader who should not be promoted.

At the age of 49, Powell became Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor, serving from 1987 to 1989 while retaining his Army commission as a lieutenant general. After his tenure with the National Security Counsel, Powell was promoted to a full general under President George H.W. Bush and briefly served as Commander-in-Chief (CINC) of the Army's Forces Command (FORSCOM), overseeing all Army, Army Reserve, and National Guard units in the Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.

Powell opposed the majority of George H.W. Bush Administration officials who advocated the deployment of troops to the Middle East to force Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to withdraw his armies from neighboring Kuwait, believing the dictator could instead be contained through sanctions and a buildup of forces around Kuwait.

Colin Luther Powell, a retired four-star general in the United States Army. He was the 65th United States Secretary of State (2001-2005), serving under President George W. Bush. He was the first African American appointed to that position


Obviously, he used people to his own advantage and will then stick a fork in their eyes!

You're a god damned moron. Your idea of loyalty is Reagan's 11th commandment. Loyalty to party above all else. Your ilk have allowed criminals of the highest order to fester and grow in your party. Powell couldn't stand the MUSLIM!!! shriekers. Barack the Magic Negro just proves his point.

Colin Powell decided to become a limp wristed liberal when he realized he couldn't get any farther than Secretary of State. He is one of the most bitter angry people around.the values of conservatives have not changed…and should not.As long as liberals offer "minorites' stuff for free and conservaties don't, liberals will get the vote. Powell, a sorry angry loser.

Exactly. You proved my point.

I didn't prove your point!

Colin Powell said it. All it proves that you and he are in the same league!

Little league.

No, not that big! Tiny weeney, itsy bitsy league.

The inyerface's brain league.

get any predictions correct in 2000?

lets compare!

how did the dittomorons do?

Interesting!


The December 24, 2008 Honolulu Star-Bulletin describes the memorial for Madelyn Dunham:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/oba...o_libera_1.html

.......Aides said Obama's half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, and her husband, Konrad Ng, also were present...."

.......Soetoro-Ng is able to make that last claim based entirely on Obama's 1988 decision to join Jeremiah Wright's Black Liberation Theology Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988. Dr James Cone of Union Theological Seminary invented Black Liberation Theology. Explains Cone, "If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him."

But Obama resigned from Trinity after a May 25, 2008 sermon by Rev. Michael Pfleger worsened political problems caused by exposure of Wright's "God damn America" sermons. Has Obama's "skepticism of organized religion" been rekindled by the damage done to his political aspirations by Trinity?

At the time of his resignation Obama told reporters:

"I'm confident we'll be able to find a church that we're comfortable with. We probably won't make any firm decision on this until January, when we know what our lives are going to be like. My faith is not contingent on the particular church that I belong to...."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/oba...o_libera_1.html

OBAMA WATCH CENTRAL
Eligibility remains focus of Supremes' conferences

Dispute posted on docket twice after Electoral College votes in

December 26, 2008


A second conference has been posted on the docket for the U.S. Supreme Court over the issue of Barack Obama's eligibility to occupy the White House, this one scheduled a week after Congress is to review the Electoral College vote tabulation.

The latest issue posted is a request for an injunction on the election results pending the resolution of a petition for a writ of certiorari filed by attorney Philip J. Berg, a case that is docketed for a similar conference among the justices on Jan. 9.

Berg's original case raises questions about Obama's eligibility and his injunction request first was filed early in December. It was submitted to and rejected by two different justices before it came before Justice Antonin Scalia on Dec. 18. Then just before Christmas the docket was updated to reflect that the motion had been "distributed for conference of January 16, 2009."



On Berg's Obama Crimes.com website, he said Congress is scheduled to hear the Electoral College results on Jan. 8. Then on Jan. 9 there's the conference scheduled on Berg's case itself, with the injunction issue to be addressed a week later.

WND has reported Berg's case, one of the first legal challenges to Obama's eligibility to reach the Supreme Court, alleges he cannot constitutionally be inaugurated.

"I know that Mr. Obama is not a constitutionally qualified natural born citizen and is ineligible to assume the office of president of the United States," Berg said in a statement on his ObamaCrimes.com website.

"Obama knows he is not 'natural born' as he knows where he was born and he knows he was adopted in Indonesia; Obama is an attorney, Harvard Law grad who taught Constitutional law; Obama knows his candidacy is the largest 'hoax' attempted on the citizens of the United States in over 200 years; Obama places our Constitution in a 'crisis' situation; and Obama is in a situation where he can be blackmailed by leaders around the world who know Obama is not qualified," Berg's statement continued.

"The Supreme Court has listed the case of Berg vs. Obama for 'conference' on January 9," the website said.

"I am appalled that the main stream media continues to ignore this issue as we are headed to a 'Constitution Crisis,'" Berg wrote. "There is nothing more important than our U.S. Constitution and it must be enforced. I am concerned that our courts have not yet decided to look into the merits of our allegations."

WND previously reported on a case brought by Cort Wrotnowski. It fell by the wayside when the justices heard about it in conference but refused to give it a further hearing. That was the same fate handed to a case brought by Leo Donofrio. Both challenged Obama on essentially the same issue: allegations that dual citizenship based on a father who was a British subject and a mother who was an American minor disqualified him for office.





Where's the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the "natural-born American" clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 190,000 others and sign up now!

The high court previously turned down a request from Berg to stop the Electoral College from selecting the 44th president until Obama documents his eligibility for the office.

As WND has reported, more than a dozen lawsuits have been filed over Obama's eligibility to assume the office of the president, many have been dismissed, while others remain pending.

The cases, in various ways, have alleged Obama does not meet the "natural born citizen" clause of the U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, which reads, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."

Some of the legal challenges have alleged Obama was not born in Hawaii, as he insists, but in Kenya. Obama's American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.

Other challenges have focused on Obama's citizenship through his father, a Kenyan subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of his birth, thus making him a dual citizen. Such cases contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.

Several details of Obama's past have added twists to the question of his eligibility and citizenship, including his family's move to Indonesia when he was a child, his travel to Pakistan in the '80s when such travel was forbidden to American citizens and conflicting reports from Obama's family about his place of birth.

A partial listing and status update for several of the cases surrounding Obama's eligibility to serve as president is below:

• Philip J. Berg, a Pennsylvania Democrat, demanded that the courts verify Obama's original birth certificate and other documents proving his American citizenship. Supreme Court conferences on the case and its motions are scheduled Jan. 9 and 16.
  
• Leo Donofrio of New Jersey filed a lawsuit claiming Obama's dual citizenship disqualified him from serving as president. His case was considered in conference by the U.S. Supreme Court but denied a full hearing.
• Cort Wrotnowski filed suit against Connecticut's secretary of state, making a similar argument to Donofrio. His case was considered in conference by the U.S. Supreme Court, but was denied a full hearing.
• Former presidential candidate Alan Keyes headlines a list of people filing a suit in California, in a case handled by the United States Justice Foundation, that asks the secretary of state to refuse to allow the state's 55 Electoral College votes to be cast in the 2008 presidential election until Obama verifies his eligibility to hold the office. The case is pending, and lawyers are seeking the public's support.
• Chicago attorney Andy Martin sought legal action requiring Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle to release Obama's vital statistics record. The case was dismissed by Hawaii Circuit Court Judge Bert Ayabe.
• Lt. Col. Donald Sullivan sought a temporary restraining order to stop the Electoral College vote in North Carolina until Barack Obama's eligibility could be confirmed, alleging doubt about Obama's citizenship. His case was denied.
• In Ohio, David M. Neal sued to force the secretary of state to request documents from the Federal Elections Commission, the Democratic National Committee, the Ohio Democratic Party and Obama to show the presidential candidate was born in Hawaii. The case was denied.
• In Washington state, Steven Marquis sued the secretary of state seeking a determination on Obama's citizenship. The case was denied.
• In Georgia, Rev. Tom Terry asked the state Supreme Court to authenticate Obama's birth certificate. His request for an injuction against Georgia's secretary of state was denied by Georgia Superior Court Judge Jerry W. Baxter.
• California attorney Orly Taitz also has brought a complaint alleging Obama is not a "natural born" citizen and has written an open letter to the Supreme Court asking for the issue to be resolved.

Last month, WND reported the worries over a "constitutional crisis" that could be looming over the issue of Obama's citizenship.

"Should Senator Obama be discovered, after he takes office, to be ineligible for the Office of President of the United States of America and, thereby, his election declared void," argues the Alan Keyes case pending in California, "Americans will suffer irreparable harm in that (a) usurper will be sitting as the President of the United States, and none of the treaties, laws, or executive orders signed by him will be valid or legal."

With such high stakes potentially at risk, WND earlier launched a letter campaign to contact Electoral College members and urge them to review the controversy.

That followed a campaign that sent more than 60,000 letters by overnight delivery to the U.S. Supreme Court when one case contesting Obama's eligibility for the Oval Office was pending.

A separate petition, already signed by more than 190,000 also is ongoing asking authorities in the election to seek proof Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the "natural-born American" clause in the Constitution.

WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi had gone to both Kenya and Hawaii prior to the election to investigate issues surrounding Obama's birth. But his research and discoveries only raised more questions.

The biggest question was why, if a Hawaii birth certificate exists as his campaign has stated, Obama hasn't simply ordered it made available to settle the rumors. The image his campaign posted online has been rejected by critics since it is a "certification of live birth," not a birth certificate, and under Hawaii law at the time such certifications were given to parents of children born outside the state.

The governor's office in Hawaii said there is a valid certificate but rejected requests for access and left ambiguous its origin: Does the certificate on file with the Department of Health indicate a Hawaii birth or was it generated after the Obama family registered a Kenyan birth in Hawaii?

Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro, has named two different Hawaii hospitals where Obama could have been born. There have been other allegations that Obama actually was born in Kenya during a time when his father was a British subject. At one point a Kenyan ambassador said Obama's birthplace in Kenya already was being recognized. Source

Where's Nomarch when you need him?

December 28, 2008
The Improvised Odyssey of Barack Obama
By Jack Cashill

There is no science to validate the thesis that follows, no academy to adjudicate it, and little hope of convincing the Obama faithful even to consider it, let alone concede its validity. That much said, the evidence is self-evident, accessible to all, and overwhelming.

QUOTE

The thesis is simple enough: Bill Ayers served as Barack Obama's muse in the creation of Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. Ayers breathed creative life into this ungifted amateur, who had written nothing of note before, and reconceived him as a literary prodigy.

"I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase," said Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison of the Dreams' author. "I was very impressed. This was not a normal political biography." Agreed, it was not normal at all.

For simplicity's sake, I refer to the author of Dreams as "Obama." He provided the basic narrative and surely had the final say. Not content to merely edit, however, the highly skilled Ayers appears to have woven the rough strands of Obama's life with tales from Homer's Odyssey and spun a work of literature in the process.


Ayers leaves scarcely an Homeric trope unturned in his mining of the Odyssey to describe Obama's "personal interior journey." Before he completes his heroic cycle, Obama will confront green-eyed seductresses, blind seers, lotus-eaters, the "ghosts" of the underworld, whirlpools, and about a half dozen sundry "demons." It was not, however, until I identified a menacing one-eyed bald man in Dreams that I became convinced that the parallelism was conscious.



Early in his own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, Ayers tips his Homeric hand. "Memory sails out upon a murky sea-wine-dark, opaque, unfathomable," he writes with a knowing wink. "Wine-dark" is quintessential Homer. Best-selling author Thomas Cahill named his book on ancient Greece, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea. It did not surprise me to learn that Cahill had attended my high school, but then again so had Weather Underground member, Brian Flanagan, who took the same Greek courses I did. Ayers and pals may have been lunatics, but they were literate ones.


Dreams and the Odyssey both begin in media res, a literary technique in which the narrative starts in mid-story and not from the literal beginning. Odysseus's son, Telemachus, is twenty when the Odyssey begins. Obama, now in New York, tells the reader he has just turned twenty-one at the outset of Dreams.



More intriguing, each begins with the young protagonist receiving an unexpected call that inspires him to seek out his missing father. The goddess Athena, in disguise, gives Telemachus the word. In Dreams, it is Obama's Aunt Jane from Nairobi. Odysseus had quit the isle of Ithaca and abandoned his son to fight in the Trojan War when Telemachus was a month old. Obama's father quit the isle of Hawaii and abandoned his son for Harvard when Obama was two.



It is only after his aunt calls to tell Obama that his father has been killed in a car accident that he begins his journey of discovery in earnest. On this journey, he assumes the role of both Telemachus and Odysseus, the son seeking the father, and the father seeking home.



Ayers, by the way, so liked the dramatic structure of the Dreams' opening sequence that he repeated it in Fugitive Days, which also opens in media res with a dramatic phone call. Ayers learns that the woman he then loved, Diana Oughton, had been killed in a Greenwich Village bomb blast. Like Obama, he has a hard time understanding what he is hearing. He drops the line in shock, and the conversation ends abruptly just as it does in Dreams.



A serious student of literature -- Hyde Park neighbor Rashid Khalidi gives Ayers major credit for helping with his book, Resurrecting Empire -- Ayers has written thoughtfully about the art of the memoir. "The reader must actually see the struggle," he writes in an essay, "Narrative Push/Narrative Pull." "It's a journey, not by a tourist, but by a pilgrim."



As a former merchant seaman, Ayers often thought in terms of charts and maps when plotting life's journey. In Fugitive Days, he yearns for a "mariner's chart of the past" to help navigate, but he knows there is no such thing. He and his colleagues must face every day "as free people with neither road maps nor guarantees."



Obama uses the imagery of maps and charts much as Ayers does. In the introduction of Dreams, Obama talks of the book he had originally intended to write, a prosaic analysis of race and law. He describes it as "an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary." He changed his mind, of course, and settled on "a record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American."



As Obama becomes aware of his blackness, he begins "to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications." He traces the map's origins back to the day, centuries earlier, when "blind hunger" drove the white man to land on Africa's shores.



"That first encounter had redrawn the map of black life," Obama argues, "recentered its universe, created the very idea of escape." At this stage of his life certainly, Obama sees the universe in naturalistic terms as a cruel and godless place. No amount of good works had "the power to change its blind, mindless course."



An amoral blindness deforms the world of Fugitive Days as well. Ayers writes of the "blinding myth" of progress, the "willed blindness" of suburban America, the sadness of "those who are perpetually blind to the cruel side of the world."



"We imagine a world," Ayers writes, "we create a reality, we bracket a piece of experience, and it becomes acute, hyperreal, dazzling, revealing, enabling, and also blinding, perhaps deadly." He fears that if he yields to inaction, he too will be "moving along blindly" like the rest of humanity.


"I was operating mainly on impulse," Obama says of his life before being called to action, "like a salmon swimming blindly upstream toward the site of his own conception."



Swimming imagery courses through Dreams and Fugitive Days as freely as "blind" imagery. In Fugitive Days, Ayers relates that he and his radical pals were "swimming silently in the sea of the people." This became a common theme among them. They saw themselves as "fish in the sea," finding anonymity in faceless crowds.



If Ayers swam comfortably in his metaphoric water, Obama did not. Later, an African aunt will caution him, "If one is a fish, one does not try to fly -- one swims with other fish." But at the stage of his life, Obama is neither fish nor fowl, and he knows it. He swims blindly through a blind universe without a clear sense of who he is.



The crafty Ayers writes about the sea almost as knowingly as Homer. "I'd thought that when I signed on [as a merchant seaman] that I might write an American novel about a young man at sea," says Ayers in Fugitive Days. He never wrote that novel, but he infused just everything he wrote or inspired with the language of the sea.



Although there are only the briefest of literal sea experiences in Dreams, the following words appear in both Dreams and in Ayers' work: fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky.



My own memoir on race, Sucker Punch, offers a useful control. It makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to any of the above words save "current" and "tides." Yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean and many a day on a boat.



On first reading, I thought the muse had simply been careless, leaving his sea-stained fingerprints all over Obama's memoir. On closer reading, though, the nautical imagery seems more artful than accidental. Obama, after all, sees himself as a voyager, a postmodern Odysseus. When he leaves Hawaii for college in Los Angeles, he leaves his white mother and grandparents "at some uncharted border." From this point on, he himself will be responsible for "charting his way through the world."



Like Odysseus, Obama feels himself "unanchored to place." He adds, "What I needed was a community." Obama's effort to locate that community in the African-American homeland, like Odysseus's effort to regain his troubled Ithaca home, is fraught with peril and temptation, some of it factual, some of it finessed from facts, some of it fully invented.



Obama is not the first writer to see Los Angeles as the land of the lotus-eaters "Junkie. Pothead," he writes in retrospect of the experience, "That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man."


In Los Angeles too, he seals his ears to the siren call of "green-eyed Joyce." This is the young woman at Occidental College who had tried to lure him from his inexorable journey to black self-fulfillment with the seduction of "multiracial" anonymity. Despite her "honey skin and pouty lips," Obama resists the "gravitational pull" of her post-racial promise.



While still in Los Angeles, Obama finds his own private Cyclops in a scene that feels largely, if not wholly, contrived. An Iranian student sitting across from Obama at the library, whom Obama describes as "older balding man with a glass eye," chides him and a black friend about the failure of American slaves to rebel in any meaningful way.


Obama's friend falls strangely mute before the attack, but Obama leaps to the slaves' defense despite his lack of natural connection to their legacy. "Was the collaboration of some slaves any different than the silence of some Iranians who stood by and did nothing as Savak thugs murdered and tortured opponents of the Shah?" he asks.



This conversation allegedly takes place in the spring of 1981, just months after the release of 52 American hostages from 444 days of captivity in the newly Islamic Iran. If Obama were still focusing his anti-Iranian wrath on the Shah and Savak, he was among the handful of Americans so inclined. The implicit anti-Americanism in this scene seems to be as much the inspiration of Obama's muse as the Homeric allusion.



Obama leaves Los Angeles for Columbia later that same year. As might be expected, Manhattan proves more seductive than Hawaii or Los Angeles. Obama finds himself as attracted as he is repelled by "the beauty, the filth, the noise, and the excess" of the city. There was no denying "the city's allure," he writes, nor "its consequent power to corrupt." This was Obama's monstrous rock-based Scylla, the notorious devourer of men. Its power makes him "fearful of falling into old habits."



While in New York, having quit his job "behind enemy lines" in a corporate office, Obama takes a contemplative detour to the East River. In front of him churns his personal Charybdis. "You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?" a young black boy asks him. "It probably had to do with the tides," Obama tells the boy, but he sees mirrored in the swirling waters of the river his own paralyzing indecision. Caught between the Charybdis of confusion and the Scylla of corruption, Obama feels himself "uncertain of my ability to steer a course of moderation."



If this Homeric allusion is open to debate, there is no denying the muse's hand in this passage. In Ayers' 1993 book, To Teach, he tells a stunningly similar story about a group of students who excitedly discover the parallel spot on the Hudson, also a tidal river, where the southern flow of the river meets the northern flow of the tides. In Fugitive Days, Ayers likewise uses the phrase "behind enemy lines" to describe his band's position in the battle against "the monster." That monster, as Ayers describes it, is "capitalism itself, the system of imperialism."




It is in Manhattan too that Obama meets his Circe. "She was white. She had dark hair and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime," he would later tell his half-sister Auma. "We saw each other for almost a year." Obama, however, came to see that he and the girl lived in "two worlds." He sensed that "if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers." And so he pushes her away.



Odysseus too shared the temptress Circe's bed for a year. Like Obama's unnamed girlfriend, Circe lived in a "splendid house" on "spacious grounds." She likewise wanted her lover to stay forever, but Odysseus's mates warned him off, "You god-driven man, now the time has come to think about your native land once more, if you are fated to be saved and reach your high-roofed home and your own country." (Ian Johnston translation)



If Obama's friend nicely fills the Circe role, she is nonetheless grounded in the real life person of Diana Oughton. As her FBI files attest, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes. Ayers' lover Oughton and Obama's alleged lover shared similar family backgrounds as well. In fact, as I have detailed in these pages earlier, they seemed to have grown up on the very same estate, right down to the ancestral home, the encircling trees, and small lake in the middle.



The passage in Dreams in which Obama describes this lover, the only woman so identified in the memoir, begins with one intriguing detail. After Auma questions him about his past love, and before he answers, Obama pulls out "two green peppers, setting them on the cutting board." To be sure, the author here takes a fair amount of poetic license. Writing this ten years after the fact, Obama would have been hard pressed to remember the conversation, let alone the food he was preparing at the time.



What intrigues about the detail is that in his 1997 book, A Kind And Just Parent, Ayers specifically links "green peppers" with "saltpeter" and other substances that scare young men with the threat of impotence. Obama's muse would have known of Circe's power to turn Odysseus into "an unmanned weakling," but the subtlety of the green peppers reference here seems somehow more personal



In any case, Obama manages to find his way to Chicago and a career as a community organizer. Obama has convinced himself that even if he were not born into African American culture, he could somehow earn his way in through good works. And good works, he reckons, offer the "promise of redemption."



What the fatherless Obama lacks, however, is a "guide that might show me how to join this troubled world." Even after attaching himself to the Reverend Wright's church, he still feels the "incompleteness" of his identity as a black American. As the book is laid out, it is immediately after his first visit to Wright's church that Obama leaves on his African pilgrimage.



His first stop is Europe. This, Obama realizes, is a "mistake." Although beautiful, Europe wasn't his. "I began to suspect," writes Obama, "that my European stop was just one more means of delay, one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old Man." Like Odysseus, he knows he has to go home.



Home for Obama, however, is not exactly Africa. This he senses almost immediately. "For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the free freedom that comes from not feeling watched," Obama discovers, but that sensation does not endure. He still looks and thinks like an American.



Africa does serve a purpose, the same purpose, in fact, that Odysseus' trip to the underworld serves, a chance to reconcile with the spirits of the past. "The Old Man's here," Obama thinks, "although he doesn't say anything to me. He's here, asking me to understand.



Needing to consult the blind prophet Teiresias, Odysseus makes a long and difficult journey to "Hades' murky home," specifically a stream called Acheron, which branches off the river Styx. There, he is instructed to pour libations to the deceased. Once he does, he is swarmed by the many and sundry "shades of the dead."



Obama makes a comparably difficult journey of several days duration by train, bus, jalopy and finally on foot to "a wide chocolate- brown river," besides which rests the grave of Obama's great-great grandfather in the heart of "Obama Land." Here, Obama meets, among other relatives, a blind great uncle who pours him his own home brewed libation. The night passes for Obama as in a dream. Men come and go, drinking "ceremoniously," perhaps six men, perhaps ten. Obama is not quite sure. They "merge with the shadows of corn."


Among the friends and relations that Odysseus meets is Agamemnon. Having been betrayed by his own wife, he warns his friend of the dangers that women pose. "That's why you should never treat them kindly," he says, "not even your own wife."


A cousin freely gives Obama similar advice. "I swear, bwana, marriage takes you," he tells Obama. "Of course, there are limits to what a man should take. My wife knows not to cross me too often."



If the blind seer Teiresias gives Odysseus involved instructions on how to return home, Obama's great uncle cuts to the chase. He tells Obama that many men have been lost to the "white man's country," including his own son. "Such men are like ghosts," he says, adding that if Obama hears of his son, "You should tell him that he should come home." Obama leaves the land of his ancestors wiser than when he came, his great uncle's "blind eyes staring out into the darkness." He knows that he has to go home too.



What Obama pulls from his African experience, in a sequence that feels heavily indebted to his muse and largely contrived after the fact, is that home is where the heart is. Cultural "authenticity" is an illusion, and there is "no shame in confusion." There was only shame in the silence that leads the individual to try to form his identity -- to become authentically himself -- without help from others.


From Africa, the book passes at warp speed through Obama's Harvard experience and culminates with his wedding to Michelle. As with all previous relationships, this tale of courtship is strikingly devoid of any reference to love, sex, or romance. At his most passionate, Obama says of Michelle that "in her eminent practicality and Midwestern attitudes, she reminds me not a little of Toot [his grandmother]." That description must have warmed Michelle's heart.


More important to Obama is that Michelle is "a daughter of the South Side," an instinctive African American, one descended from slaves. Just as the Odyssey ends with Odysseus reuniting with his wife, Penelope, Obama rounds his circle by marrying into the culture that has eluded him all his life. With the promise of fatherhood implicit in marriage, the abandoned son claims the potential to be a father and the father of authentic African Americans at that.



On a final note, the penultimate paragraph of the book has Obama describing his older brother Roy, who now calls himself "Abongo." The alert reader hears in this description, especially its first sentence, a mischievous muse describing Obama:

The words he speaks are not fully his own, and in his transition he can sometimes sound stilted and dogmatic. But the magic of his laughter remains, and we can disagree without rancor. His conversion has given him solid ground to stand on, a pride in his place in the world. From that base I see his confidence building; he begins to venture out and ask harder questions; he starts to slough off the formulas and slogans and decides what works best for him. He can't help himself in this process, for his heart is too generous and full of good humor, his attitude toward people too gentle and forgiving, to find simple solutions to the puzzle of being a black man.

Mischievous indeed!

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/the...ey_of_bara.html

You are a tool.

Doesn't take much.

Barack the magic sure is stirring up a storm for the candidates for the GOP chair. THEY are the one's raising hell and I think it's a good thing. Maybe they can purge the racists and bigots.



Naaaah, they'll take a stand the other way.

its like winning the WOT or the drug war

if it happens, the cash flow stops

war is their best friend

then comes racism

ANY way to divide and conquer

NostraDumbAss
There be only four lines in a quatrain, nostra.

Eligibility case finds 'standing'?


Attorney Stephen Pigeon


New suit claims unique state law enables citizens to demand proof

A new case challenging Barack Obama's natural-born citizenship

and, therefore, constitutional eligibility to serve as president has the potential to clear a hurdle that caused several other similar cases' dismissal: the issue of "standing."



In the case brought by Pennsylvania Democrat Philip Berg, for example, a federal judge ruled against the lawsuit in deciding Berg lacked the "standing" to sue, arguing that the election of Obama wouldn't cause the plaintiff specific, personal injury.

In Washington state's Broe v. Reed case, however, plaintiff's attorney Stephen Pidgeon says a unique state statute grants everyday citizens the required standing.

"These lawsuits have pointed their fingers at the various secretaries of state and said, 'You handle the elections, it's your job [to verify Obama's eligibility],'" Stephen Pidgeon told WND, "and the secretaries of state have said, 'No, it's not our job. You the voter have to prove he was ineligible.' But when the voters try to do it, the courts tell them they have no standing. So it presents a catch-22.

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"Here, we have standing by means of statute," Pidgeon continued. "This particular statute provides for any registered voter to challenge the election of a candidate if the candidate at the time of the election was ineligible to hold office."

Where's the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the "natural-born American" clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 200,000 others and sign up now!

Further, Pidgeon explained, "In Washington we also have a constitutional clause in Article 1 that says the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of land, so it's very much a state issue that the secretary of state has a duty to enforce the U.S. Constitution.

"He doesn't think he does; we think he does. That's really the issue before the court," Pidgeon said.


Washington's secretary of state, Mr. Sam Reed, has opposed the lawsuit, brought by a group of 12 registered Washington voters with Pidgeon's representation, on several grounds, including the argument that the issue is moot now that Obama has been voted upon by the people.

Pidgeon argues, however, that even if Obama remains in office two years from now, the issue will not be moot.

"The Constitution's criteria for president are never moot," Pidgeon explained. "Article 2, Section 1 says 'eligible to the Office of President'; it doesn't say 'eligible for candidacy to the Office of President."

Therefore, Pidgeon argues, the Constitution's natural-born citizen clause specifically and expressly addresses the man sitting in the Oval Office, not just the main elected and waiting to get in.

"If, at any time during his tenure, a birth certificate actually surfaces showing [Obama] born in Kenya," Pidgeon said, "he is disqualified from the presidency at any time. And the constitutional crisis that is rising out of this – the longer he's in that office, the greater the problem becomes, because everything he does will be illegal."

The Washington Supreme Court is set to hear Broe v. Reed on Jan. 8, but the entire case may be delayed intentionally, as the plaintiffs wait to see if the court will rule first on a requested subpoena of Obama's birth certificate from Hawaii.

Unlike other states where lawsuits challenging Obama's natural-born citizen status were required to move through lower courts, Washington law grants the case "original jurisdiction" at the state Supreme Court, which means the plaintiff can present new evidence, including – if the court will indeed subpoena it – Obama's birth records.

"We have opportunity to present facts before the Supreme Court, where you wouldn't have that normally," Pidgeon told WND. "With original jurisdiction, we have the opportunity to present factual argument, and so what we have said to the court is, 'At no time did Senator Obama produce a single piece of evidence upon which the secretary of state could rely to establish that he was a natural born citizen, or that he was even an American citizen, or that he was running under his legal name.' Those are the three facets of our lawsuit."

Pidgeon also told WND that the case's primary hurdle now is the natural predisposition judges have toward complying with the democratic will of the people. They rarely "upset the apple cart," Pidgeon said, by overturning the results of an election.

Still, Pidgeon believes pursuing Broe v. Reed is necessary.



"The question is," Pidgeon figures, "will the Washington Supreme Court stand for the rule of law or are they going to stand for an overthrow of the constitutional republic by the will of the electorate?"

Last month, WND reported on the potential complications an ineligible president could create.

"Should Senator Obama be discovered, after he takes office, to be ineligible for the Office of President of the United States of America and, thereby, his election declared void," argues a similar case brought by Alan Keyes and pending in California, "Americans will suffer irreparable harm in that (a) usurper will be sitting as the President of the United States, and none of the treaties, laws, or executive orders signed by him will be valid or legal."

With such high stakes potentially at risk, WND earlier launched a letter campaign to contact Electoral College members and urge them to review the controversy.

That followed a campaign that sent more than 60,000 letters by overnight delivery to the U.S. Supreme Court when one case contesting Obama's eligibility for the Oval Office was pending.

A separate petition, already signed by more than 200,000 also is ongoing asking authorities in the election to seek proof Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the "natural-born American" clause in the Constitution.

WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi had gone to both Kenya and Hawaii prior to the election to investigate issues surrounding Obama's birth. But his research and discoveries only raised more questions.

The biggest question was why, if a Hawaii birth certificate exists as his campaign has stated, Obama hasn't simply ordered it made available to settle the rumors

The governor's office in Hawaii said there is a valid certificate but rejected requests for access and left ambiguous its origin: Does the certificate on file with the Department of Health indicate a Hawaii birth or was it generated after the Obama family registered a Kenyan birth in Hawaii? Source

Arnold is hoping that they drop this and he can try for his dream.

Make Room for Golf Clubs in the Oval Office

New York Times, by Larry Dorman

12/31/2008 3:47:13 AM


Word out of Hawaii is that President-elect Barack Obama has blown his cover. After three golf outings (and counting) at a private course during his extended vacation at Kailua last week, it became clear that previous portrayals of Obama as a hard-core basketball player with an occasional dalliance in golf were inaccurate.

fascinating

They wanted a painting?

there's no such thing as bad publicity

From Books, New President Found Voice

New York Times, by Michiko Kakutani

1/19/2009 5:23:53 AM

In college, as he was getting involved in protests against the apartheid government in South Africa, Barack Obama noticed, he has written, “that people had begun to listen to my opinions.” Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power “to transform”: “with the right words everything could change -— South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.”


I "HOPE" he works as well as he talks! As for me, personally, I have found I work and accomplish much better than I talk!

when does it start

Limbaugh: ‘I Hope Obama Fails’»

“Are conservative talk-show hosts eager to go on the attack, after years of defending Bush?” asks the Louisville Courier-Journal’s Larry Muhammad. The answer is clearly yes.

Barack Obama has not yet taken office, and Rush Limbaugh is already rooting for his failure. On his radio show last Friday, Limbaugh said,

“I disagree fervently with the people on our [Republican] side of the aisle who have caved and who say, ‘Well, I hope he succeeds.’”

Limbaugh told his listeners that he was asked by “a major American print publication” to offer a 400-word statement explaining his “hope for the Obama presidency.” He responded:

So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, “Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.” (interruption) What are you laughing at? See, here’s the point. Everybody thinks it’s outrageous to say. Look, even my staff, “Oh, you can’t do that.” Why not? Why is it any different, what’s new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it? I don’t care what the Drive-By story is. I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: “Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails.” Somebody’s gotta say it.

It hasn’t taken long for Limbaugh to reveal his core hypocrisy. In July 2006, with conservatives in power, Limbaugh offered one of his common screeds against the left. “I’m getting so sick and tired of people rooting for the defeat of the good guys,” he complained.

During the Clinton presidency in the 90s, Limbaugh would begin his show with a gimmick, purporting to count the days America had been “held hostage.” In May 2007, Limbaugh recalled:

Back when Clinton was inaugurated in 1993 and we began our America Held Hostage countdown, the number of days left until Clinton was gone so we’d all be released from bondage, the joke, do you remember how mad the liberals got at that? Do you remember how mad the Drive-Bys got at that? Then they started running stories how I, Rush Limbaugh, was destroying the respect for the office of the presidency that the American people had.

A disastrous Bush presidency has come and gone, but some things haven’t changed a bit.


http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/20/limbaugh-obama-fail/

What an a-hole.

Somebody had to take charge.
Anyone recall bush doing such a thing?

Rev. Lowery didn't sound happy about the accomplishments
made by President Obama or happy about this day when
all blacks should be very proud.

Yeah, that was a bit tacky.

What did you think of the poet's words?

Which were those?