konane's Blog

A follow-up to the video Todd posted. 

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"BTW I'm Voting For Mccain / Palin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxhYampIl7A&feature=rec-fresh

I'm not posting the entire article hered due to graphic details given by conditions found so if you click the link be warned.  Shows a whole nother side to Fergie I was not aware of, very courageous, very selfless and humanitarian.

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"Fergie undercover: The Duchess of York bluffs her way into orphanages in Turkey

By Chris Rogers

Source Daily Mail UK
Last updated at 5:24 PM on 02nd November 2008

"In a dark wig and a headscarf, the Duchess of York has bluffed her way into orphanages in Turkey. The profoundly shocking scenes she found have made her - and her daughters, who went with her - determined to fight for change.

Nothing could have prepared us for this. The member of staff had been reluctant when I asked her to unlock the door of the building. Now it was clear why.

Before us was a sea of red and blue cribs - hundreds of them. Toddlers and teenagers alike were confined, many tied by hands or ankles to the cribs' metal bars. In a far corner, one little boy peered over the edge of the 5ft-high box in which he was kept. According to staff, he was too hyperactive for a crib.

This wasn't an orphanage. This was a warehouse for abandoned children.

Two months ago, I travelled to Turkey to film a documentary about conditions inside state-run institutions for unwanted and disabled children.

It was an unusual and affecting trip. Not least because my travelling companion and fellow witness to some truly horrific scenes was the Duchess of York.

Sarah Ferguson had contacted me a few months earlier to say she had been moved by my investigations into inhumane institutions - as an ITN correspondent, I had visited and secretly filmed these bleak places across the world.

The Duchess herself has worked to improve the lives of children over the past 15 years, using funds from her commercial work and private donations to help care for children with Aids and build schools for deprived children in Africa.

Now she wanted to come with me on my next venture and lend her profile to a cause in need of exposure. More than that, her teenage daughters Beatrice and Eugenie wanted to join us for sections of the journey and all had agreed to allow ITV1's Tonight cameras to follow our progress. ..........."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1082355/Fergie-undercover-The-Duchess-York-bluffs-way-orphanages-Turkey.html

"Barack Obama victory will hurt US firms - and world economy

By Janet Daley
Source Telegraph UK
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 03/11/2008

"Well, it's nearly over - this presidential election campaign that has gone on for so long I can scarcely remember what life was like before it started. So long has it been running that the world has actually gone through two tumultuous transformations of political reality during its span.

First there was the emergence of Russia as a threat to international stability in a form that should not have, but nevertheless did, come as a startling revelation to a complacent free world: a phenomenon which, in cynical partisan terms, played heavily in John McCain's favour. But that was followed, and almost totally eclipsed, by the economic implosion that brought every earlier assumption about the electorate crashing down with it.

So, in one of those bizarre jokes that history sometimes plays, the United States is apparently about to choose as president the most inexperienced, untried and virtually unknowable (because there is so little to know) candidate who has ever run for that office at a time of unquantifiable international risk and unprecedented economic instability: a candidate who, as Bill Clinton revealed in a wonderfully back-handed "tribute", responded to the banking collapse by ringing every expert he could find (including Bill) to ask them what he should be saying.  

And not only does it seem likely that Barack Obama will be elected president, but that he will arrive in office accompanied by a legion of new Democratic senators and congressmen which will give his party a lock on both the executive and legislative branches of government, thus permitting it to do precisely anything it wants.

A week ago in New York, I talked to senior Republicans who were dividing their time between conference calls to the White House to discuss the economic crisis and exasperated confrontations with the McCain campaign team over the ineffectiveness of its strategy. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the state of dissension and dissatisfaction within the higher ranks of the Republican Party - which is why the Obama claim that a McCain White House would simply be George Bush by other means is so ludicrous and disingenuous.

In truth, McCain's status as an outlaw within his own party ("maverick" is much too mild a word) has meant that he has had only the most ambivalent relationship with what was once a very professional Republican campaigning machine. Those members of the Bush team who have been involved with the McCain-Palin ticket have been accused of being so out of sympathy with its message and tone as to be positively counter-productive.

Combine this with the fact that McCain has been running against not just a super-financed Obama machine but the most monolithically hostile media barrage in electoral history, which forced him to spend most of his time and energy on defensive fire-fighting, and you get a sense of why the Republican effort has so often seemed at cross-purposes with itself.

This media phenomenon may yet prove double-edged. There is just a possibility (maybe I am clutching at straws here, but we shall see) that the relentless onslaught from the mainstream press and television networks has made support for McCain unsayable rather than impossible and that this is producing seriously skewed opinion-polling results. This could mean, to put it in British historical terms, that this election will be 1992 (complete with premature victory celebrations) rather than 1997. Interestingly, in the 1992 election it was the issue of tax that brought about Labour's defeat in the face of resounding leads in the polls. And it is tax policy that is Obama's most dangerous ground. It must be surprising to British observers that his proposal to cut taxes for the 95 per cent of people who earn less than $200,000 a year (down, incidentally, from his initial figure of $250,000) has not straightforwardly won the day in the American national debate.

In Britain, such a promise (if believed) would be an electoral free pass to Downing Street. But in the US, voters are aware that the largest category of people who would be hit by Obama's higher tax would be those who own small businesses, as Joe the Plumber famously aspired to do and as many, many of his countrymen already do. Ordinary working-class people in America do not automatically expect to be low earners, or even employees, all of their lives: they believe that through hard work and resourcefulness, they are as likely as anyone to rise in the world. And so they do not necessarily take kindly to someone who wants to penalise them as soon as they break through an income ceiling in order, as Obama fatally put it, to "spread the wealth around".

But there is another facet of Obama taxation with even more serious consequences for the US. In order to pay for his tax cut for 95 per cent of the population (half of whom do not pay income tax and whose "cut" would be in the form of a cash rebate), President Obama and his Democratic Congress would raise the US rate of corporation tax - already the second highest in the world - from 15 to 20 per cent. They also plan to punish through taxation companies that employ people overseas rather than "creating American jobs". These measures would have the almost immediate effect of driving companies and capital out of the US.

In the same "help the little guy" spirit, Obama proposes to raise capital gains tax, thus penalising those whose investment is desperately needed for market recovery. As my economist friends always tell me when I advocate tax cuts for the low-paid: it may seem a morally and politically attractive policy but it doesn't do a damn thing for economic growth. The tiny amounts that the lower-paid receive in such wide-ranging cuts make little difference as a stimulus and if they are balanced by penalties on business and on the investing classes, they are worse than useless.

So what will happen? For what it is worth, I think it will be a close presidential race with the favourite, Obama, winning by a squeak (which is what happened in 1960 when the then favourite, John Kennedy, was the voice of the "future"). Whoever gets the White House, America will eventually return to being what it must be: the economic engine of the world and the greatest testimony to the power of human initiative in history. On both of those counts, it will once again be resented. But it will take a while longer to reach that point under Barack Obama."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/03/do0301.xml 

"OBAMA CAUGHT SAYING ACORN AND FRIENDS WILL SHAPE HIS PRESIDENTIAL AGENDA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJcVgJhNaU

               

Jarasan said early on if the press calls this wrong they're toast.

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"Asteroid!

Inescapable cataclysm! Total destruction! Nowhere to hide! Make peace with your God!

By Bill Whittle

Source NationalReviewOnline

Prepare yourselves, sayeth the news. This thing is coming and you can’t stop it. You’ve seen the numbers. Banks of supercomputers refining to the eighth significant figure the precise moment of impact; the location down to a half mile. The giant Obamaroid bearing down on us: unstoppable by mere puny earthlings; a rock the size of Ireland, immutable, inevitable, crushing and final. Run all you want; you’ll just die tired. This is it. The end of all we hold dear.

And what advice do we hear from political-science advisers, our best and brightest stalwarts rallied to stave off this disaster? What say these wise men in white coats, men that spend decades in labs, dissecting every trend and poll, crunching numbers and assaying intentions to the milligram? What help might we look to them for?

Ah! Some instructions! Something at last, some hope to cling to! Let me just check the official printout here…

    On the morning of impact, grab the sturdiest chair you can find. Move it away from all doors and windows. A basement is your best bet, if you have one. Place the chair in any doorway underneath a load-bearing beam — a steel I-beam is ideal. Sit down and place your feet about two feet apart, firmly pressing down on the floor. Open your mouth slightly to relieve the overpressure from the impact, and the instant you see the flash of light, close you eyes immediately, lean forward as far as you can, put your hands over your ears and kiss your ass goodbye.

You know, I love cheap sci-fi. And one of my favorite lines from an absolutely terrific little cheap sci-fi film is this: History is made at night. Character is what you are in the dark.

This attitude of despair is being trumpeted from the Left for the sensible and understandable reason that if they lose this election — with all the advantages they have at this precise point in time — then they can never win. Not ever. And the media is pulling with their teeth now, because if Obama loses they will have destroyed their credibility — for nothing.

That’s all fine with me. I know what they and the press sayeth. Sayeth I:

      If we are mark’d to lose, we are enow
      To do our party loss; and if to live,
      The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
      God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
      Let he which hath no stomach to this fight,
      Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
      And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
      We would not vote in that man’s company
      That fears his fellowship to vote with us.
      This day is call’d the eve of Elect-ian.
      He that votes this day, and comes safe home,
      Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
      And rouse him at the name of Republican
      He that shall live this day, and see old age,
      Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
      And say ‘To-morrow is the fourth of November’
      Then will he strip his sleeve and show his hands,
      And say ‘With these I moved yon levers on election day.’
      Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
      But he’ll remember, with advantages,
      What votes he did cast that day. 

      We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
      For he to-day that shares his vote with me
      Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
      This day shall gentle his condition;
      And gentlemen and lady pundits now-a-bed
      Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
      And hold their book deals cheap whilst any speaks
      That voted with us upon election day.

The original is a speech promising glory in the face of overwhelming defeat. King Henry V went on to win perhaps the most miraculous victory in the history of mankind.

This is not an asteroid we face. It is not preordained, unstoppable, inevitable. It is a choice made by human men and women, an individual decision made a hundred million times and not the cold, precise product of gravity and mass.

I am new to The Show. So perhaps you will let me point out two of my friends from back in the minors, because they have something to say on the matter.

My friend Iowahawk writes some of the most brilliant satire I have ever read. He likes to come across as a beer-swilling gearhead — because he is — but look at this analysis of what probability and polling is and isn’t, which I will proceed to steal a graph or two from, simply so that I may bask in its reflected glory:

    You take a simple random sample of 1000 balls from an urn containing 120,000,000 red and blue balls, and your sample shows 450 red balls and 550 blue balls. Construct a 95% confidence interval for the true proportion of blue balls in the urn.

    …Works pretty well if you’re interested in hypothetical colored balls in hypothetical giant urns, or survival rates of plants in a controlled experiment, or defects in a batch of factory products. It may even work well if you’re interested in blind cola taste tests. But what if the thing you are studying doesn’t quite fit the balls & urns template?

        * What if 40% of the balls have personally chosen to live in an urn that you legally can’t stick your hand into?
        * What if 50% of the balls who live in the legal urn explicitly refuse to let you select them?
        * What if the balls inside the urn are constantly interacting and talking and arguing with each other, and can decide to change their color on a whim?
        * What if you have to rely on the balls to report their own color, and some unknown number are probably lying to you?
        * What if you’ve been hired to count balls by a company who has endorsed blue as their favorite color?
        * What if you have outsourced the urn-ball counting to part-time temp balls, most of whom happen to be blue?
        * What if the balls inside the urn are listening to you counting out there, and it affects whether they want to be counted, and/or which color they want to be?

(And what, I wonder, if all around you, every day, you are told by all of the coolest, hippest, prettiest balls that your color is mean, irrelevant, unpopular, un-cool, evil, old, incompetent, and probably racist? Would you stick to your guns in the face of that, or keep your mouth shut and show ‘em when the curtain closes?)

Iowahawk concludes:

    If one or more of the above statements are true, then the formula for margin of error simplifies to

    Margin of Error = Who the hell knows?

    The moral of this midterm for all would-be pollsters: if you are really interested in how many of us red and blue balls there are in this great big urn, sit back and relax until Tuesday, and let us show our true colors.

Well said, buddy. And finally, this, from Zombietime.com:

    It may very well be that an army of glum, dispirited and pessimistic conservatives will reluctantly trudge to the polls on November 4, each one imagining they are the only remaining person in the entire country voting for McCain, and lo and behold — they’ll turn out to be a silent majority after all.

That may be the most prophetic sentence of the year.

I don’t want to be the person who sat home and missed being a part of that. And I won’t be.

See you there.  "

  — Bill Whittle lives in Los Angeles and is an on-air commentator for www.pjtv.com. You can find him online at www.ejectejecteject.com "

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2FhYzkwYmQ5ZjI2ZmQ4OGY0NGFiOWNjYmQzYTViMDM=&w=MQ==

"SHOCK Audio Unearthed OBAMA TELLS SAN FRANCISCO HE WILL BANKRUPT THE COAL INDUSTRY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdi4onAQBWQ

Extensive collection of clips.

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"Barack Obama Pastor Jeremiah Wright NEW TAPES!!!! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc2FCJ7zWEQ

"Obama Civilian Security

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt2yGzHfy7s

"Senator Stealth
How to advance radical causes when no one’s looking.

By Stanley Kurtz
Source National Review Online

"AUTHOR'S NOTE: When I wrote “Senator Stealth,” just over two months ago, it still seemed realistic to expect that its revelations might stimulate press follow-up. After all, the Wright affair had occasioned significant media interest. Since “Senator Stealth” established that Barack Obama had intimate and long-standing ties to yet another organization with Wright-like anti-American views, the piece’s news value seemed obvious. The Wright affair was no fluke, but part of a systematic pattern. Unfortunately, as Obama moved closer to nominee status, the press circled the wagons and began its own systematic pattern of refusing to question or report on his past.

Beyond its revelation that Obama’s original community organizer home-base is pervaded by anti-Americanism, “Senator Stealth” foreshadows today’s debates over redistributionism, and shows that concerns over Obama’s radical “associations” cannot be separated from the most significant policy disputes of the campaign.

“Senator Stealth” also lays out a way of resolving the contradiction between Obama’s radical past and his apparently moderate present. After learning that incrementalism, rhetorical disguise, and ideological stealth are second nature to Obama’s community organizer compatriots, it’s tougher to take his current self-presentation at face value. More than two months later, the same issues play out in the latest flap over Obama’s ties to the New Party.  http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MmVlOTk1MzkwYmM2YTQzZmIxOTRlMjY3ZjZkMTg0OTM

Finally, I couldn’t have guessed, more than two months ago, that the Obama campaign, abetted by the press, would have taken refuge in near-total denial of his unsavory associations, from the question of his New Party membership, to the relationship to Bill Ayers, to the links to ACORN. Obama has downplayed or denied these many ties to an extent that is shockingly at odds with the public record, while the press has played along.

As the race tightens, let us hope that, however belatedly, the sheer weight of questions and revelations are beginning to take their toll. — Stanley Kurtz "

"After hearing about Barack Obama’s ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Fr. Michael Pfleger, and the militant activists of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), it should be clear to everyone that his extremist roots run deep. But the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has yet another connection with the world of far-Left radicalism. Obama has long been linked — through foundation grants, shared political activism, collaboration on legislation and tactics, and mutual praise and support — with the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, one of the least known yet most influential national umbrella groups for church-based “community organizers.”

The same separatist, anti-American theology of liberation that was so boldly and bitterly proclaimed by Obama’s pastor is shared, if more quietly, by Obama’s Gamaliel colleagues. The operative word here is “quietly.” Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical himself. Obama’s legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions of non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors’ most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago’s supposedly nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies — at the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political career. It’s high time for these shadowy, perhaps improper, ties to receive a dose of sunlight.

The connections are numerous. Gregory Galluzzo, Gamaliel’s co-founder and executive director, served as a trainer and mentor during Obama’s mid-1980s organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities Project, which first hired Obama, is part of the Gamaliel network. Obama became a consultant and eventually a trainer of community organizers for Gamaliel. (He also served as a trainer for ACORN.) And he has kept up his ties with Gamaliel during his time in the U.S. Senate.

The Gamaliel connection appears to supply a solution to the riddle of Obama’s mysterious political persona. On one hand, he likes to highlight his days as a community organizer — a profession with proudly radical roots in the teachings of Chicago’s Saul Alinsky, author of the highly influential text Rules for Radicals. Obama even goes so far as to make the community-organizer image a metaphor for his distinctive conception of elective office. On the other hand, Obama presents himself as a post-ideological, consensus-minded politician who favors pragmatic, common-sense solutions to the issues of the day. How can Obama be radical and post-radical at the same time? Perhaps by deploying Gamaliel techniques. Gamaliel organizers have discovered a way to fuse their Left-extremist political beliefs with a smooth, non-ideological surface of down-to-earth pragmatism: the substance of Jeremiah Wright with the appearance of Norman Vincent Peale. Could this be Obama’s secret?

FROM REVELATION TO REVOLUTION
Before outlining Gamaliel’s techniques of political stealth, we need to identify the views that they are camouflaging. These can be found in Dennis Jacobsen’s book Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing. Jacobsen is the pastor of Incarnation Lutheran Church in Milwaukee and director of the Gamaliel National Clergy Caucus. Jacobsen’s book, which is part of the first-year reading list for new Gamaliel organizers, lays out the underlying theology of Gamaliel’s activities. While Jacobsen’s book was published in 2001, it is based on presentations Jacobsen has been making at Gamaliel’s clergy-training center since 1992 and clearly has Galluzzo’s endorsement. So while we cannot be sure that Obama has read or taught Doing Justice, the book certainly embodies a political perspective to which Obama’s more than 20 years of friendship with Galluzzo, and his stint as a Gamaliel instructor, would surely have exposed him.

In Jacobsen’s conception, America is a sinful and fallen nation whose pervasive classism, racism, and militarism authentic Christians must constantly resist. Drawing on the Book of Revelation, Jacobsen exhorts, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! . . . Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins.” The United States, Jacobsen maintains, employs nationalism, propaganda, racism, bogus “civil religion,” and class enmity to bolster its entrenched and oppressive corporate system. Authentic Christians forced to live in such a nation can “come out of Babylon,” says Jacobsen, only by entering into “a perpetual state of internal exile.”

Of course, many believers do feel at home in the United States, but according to Jacobsen, these inauthentic and misguided Christians have been lulled into the false belief that the United States is somehow different from other countries — that it stands as a genuine defender of freedom and democracy. According to Jacobsen, the desire of most Americans to create a safe, secure life for themselves and their families constitutes an unacceptable emotional distancing from the sufferings of the urban poor. Jacobsen says that whenever he feels himself seduced by the American dream of personal security — this “unconscionable removal from the lives of those who suffer” — he rejects its pull as the deplorable “encroachment of America on my soul.” To “feel at home in the United States,” maintains Jacobsen, is not only to fall victim to a scarcely disguised form of political despotism; it is to betray Christianity itself.

Although Jacobsen acknowledges that the sufferings of the poor in America do not quite rise to the level of the Nazi Holocaust, he nonetheless finds a similarity: “The accommodation and silence of the church amidst Nazi atrocities are paralleled by the accommodation and silence of the church in this country amidst a calculated war against the poor.” He recounts being present at the Pentagon “to fast and vigil with a group of religious resisters against the madness of nuclear build-up and militarism generated in that place” and is horrified when he sees that many in the American military actually think of themselves as Christians. For Jacobsen, this means that the church has “aligned itself with oppressive forces and crucified its Lord anew.”

Jacobsen has a low opinion of the food pantries, homeless shelters, and walk-a-thons that make up so much religious charitable activity in the United States. All that charity, says Jacobsen, tends to suppress the truth that the system itself is designed to benefit the prosperous and keep the poor down. He complains: “The Christians who are so generous with food baskets at Thanksgiving or with presents for the poor at Christmas often vote into office politicians whose policies ignore or crush those living in poverty.” “Most churches do not operate on the basis of healthy agitation,” he says, but instead “on the basis of manipulation, authoritarianism, or guilt-tripping.”

The solution, says Jacobsen, is community organizing: “Metropolitan organizing offers a chance to end the warfare against the poor and to heal the divisions of class and race that separate this sick society.” “Militant mass action . . . fueled by righteous anger,” he maintains, offers authentic community, and therefore “the possibility of fulfillment in a vacuous society.” He continues: “If the pain and human degradation all around us doesn’t stir up within us sufficient anger to want to shake the foundations of this society, then it’s probably best for us to go back to playing church.”

Other than the sense of community that is generated by militant struggle, what does Jacobsen offer as the cure for America’s ills? He is short on detail here, but there are tantalizing hints. Jacobsen invokes the communal property and absence of private ownership that prevailed among early Christians as a possible model. Despite his initial skepticism regarding such selflessness, says Jacobsen, he has seen this sort of “radical sharing of limited resources” on a trip to a poor African church in Tanzania. Unfortunately, says Jacobsen, “the church in the United States lacks community. The American church by and large is privatistic, insular, and individualistic. It reflects American culture.”

These, then, are the beliefs at the spiritual heart of the Gamaliel Foundation’s community-organizing efforts. They show clear echoes of Jeremiah Wright’s and James Cone’s black-liberation theology, and it’s evident that Obama has an affinity for organizations that embody this point of view. But a question arises. Gamaliel’s goal is to build church-based coalitions capable of wielding power on behalf of the poor. These congregation-based organizations are supposed to counterbalance and undercut America’s oppressive power structures. Yet if most American Christians are deluded servants of a sinful and oppressive system, how can they be molded into a majority coalition for change? Given the privatistic, insular, and individualistic character of American culture, theological frankness might backfire and drive away potential allies, exactly as happened with Reverend Wright. Thus arises the need for stealth.

FAKE RIGHT, GO LEFT
It might have been all but impossible to penetrate the strategic thinking of Obama’s cohorts if not for the fortuitous 2008 publication of Organizing Urban America: Secular and Faith-based Progressive Movements, by Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts. This is the first book-length study of the organizing tactics and political ideologies of Gamaliel and ACORN, the two groups to which Obama’s community-organizing ties are closest. Swarts’s study focuses on Gamaliel and ACORN in St. Louis, but given the degree of national coordination by both groups, the carry-over of her findings to Chicago is bound to be substantial. Because Swarts is highly sympathetic to the community-organizing groups she studies, she was granted an unusual degree of access to strategic discussions during her period of fieldwork.

Swarts calls groups like ACORN and (especially) Gamaliel “invisible actors,” hidden from public view because they often prefer to downplay their efforts, because they work locally, and because scholars and journalists pay greater attention to movements with national profiles (like the Sierra Club or the Christian Coalition). Congregation-based community organizations like Gamaliel, by contrast, are often invisible even at the local level. A newspaper might report on a demonstration led by a local minister or priest, for example, without noticing that the clergyman in question is part of the Gamaliel network. “Though often hidden from view,” says Swarts, “leaders have intentionally and strategically organized these movements that appear to well up and erupt from below.”

Although Gamaliel and ACORN have significantly different tactics and styles, Swarts notes that their political goals and ideologies are broadly similar. Both groups press the state for economic redistribution. The tactics of Gamaliel and ACORN have been shaped in a “post-Alinsky” era of welfare reform and conservative resurgence, posing a severe challenge to those who wish to expand the welfare state. The answer these activists have hit upon, says Swarts, is to work incrementally in urban areas, while deliberately downplaying the far-Left ideology that stands behind their carefully targeted campaigns.

While ACORN’s membership is fairly homogeneous, consisting chiefly of inner-city blacks and Hispanics, congregation-based community organizations like the Gamaliel Foundation tend to have more racially, culturally, and politically mixed constituencies. The need to overcome these divisions and gather a broad coalition behind its hard-Left agenda has pushed Gamaliel to develop what Swarts calls an “innovative cultural strategy.” Because of the suspicions that blue-collar members might harbor toward its elite, liberal leaders, Gamaliel’s main “ideological tactic,” says Swarts, is to present its organizers as the opposite of radical, elite, or ideological. As Swarts explains, they deliberately refrain from using leftist jargon like “racism,” “sexism,” “classism,” “homophobia,” “oppression,” or “multiple oppressions” in front of ordinary members — even though, amongst themselves, Gamaliel’s organizers toss around this sort of lingo with abandon, just as Jacobsen does in his book.

Swarts supplies a chart listing “common working-class perceptions of liberal social movements” on one side, while displaying on the other side Gamaliel organizers’ tricky tactics for getting around them. To avoid seeming like radicals or “hippies left over from the sixties,” Gamaliel organizers are careful to wear conventional clothing and conduct themselves with dignity, even formality. Since liberal social movements tend to come off as naïve and idealistic, Gamaliel organizers make a point of presenting their ideas as practical, pragmatic, and down-to-earth. When no one else is listening, Gamaliel organizers may rail at “racism,” “sexism,” and “oppressive corporate systems,” but when speaking to their blue-collar followers, they describe their plans as “common sense solutions for working families.”

Although the Gamaliel agenda is deeply collectivist and redistributionist, organizers are schooled to frame their program in traditional American, individualist terms. As Swarts puts it:

    What makes [Gamaliel’s] ideology liberal rather than conservative is that it advocates not private or voluntary solutions but collective public programs. They seek action from the state: social welfare programs, redistribution, or regulation. . . . But publicly [Gamaliel and other congregation-based groups] usually emphasize individual responsibility on the part of authorities.

What Gamaliel really wants, in other words, is for the public as a whole to fork over funds to the government, but they’re careful to frame this demand as a call for “personal responsibility” by particular government officials.

The relative homogeneity of ACORN’s membership allows it to display its radicalism more openly. According to Swarts, ACORN members think of themselves as “oppositional outlaws” and “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” Yet even ACORN has a deeper, hidden ideological dimension. “Long-term ACORN organizers . . . tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists,” says Swarts, while ordinary members rarely think in these overtly ideological terms; for them, it’s more about attacking specific problems. In general, ACORN avoids programmatic statements. During a 1980 effort to purge conservatives from its ranks, however, the organization did release a detailed political platform — which Swarts calls “a veritable laundry list of progressive positions.”

Although ACORN’s radicalism is somewhat more frank than Gamaliel’s, ACORN has an “innovative cultural strategy” of its own. ACORN’s radicalism is incremental; it’s happy to work toward ambitious long-term goals through a series of baby steps. For example, although ACORN has fought for “living wage” laws in several American cities, these affect only the small fraction of the workforce employed directly by city governments. The real purpose of ACORN’s urban living-wage campaigns, says Swarts, is not economic but political. ACORN’s long-term goal is an across-the-board minimum-wage increase at the state and federal levels. The public debate spurred by local campaigns is meant to prepare the political ground for ACORN’s more ambitious political goals, and to build up membership in the meantime.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
Throughout his career, Obama has drawn on all of these strategies. In Illinois’s Republican-controlled state senate, Obama specialized in incremental legislation, often drawn up in collaboration with groups like Gamaliel and ACORN. His tiny, targeted expansions of government-financed health care, for example, were designed to build political momentum for universal health care. And his claim to be a “common-sense pragmatist,” rather than a leftist ideologue, comes straight out of the Gamaliel playbook.

New evidence now ties Obama still more closely to both organizations. Not only was Obama a trainer for Gamaliel and ACORN, he appears to have used his influence to secure a major increase in funding for both groups — arguably stretching the bounds of propriety in the process.

In 2005, the year after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Community Change released a report titled “Promising Practices in Revenue Generation for Community Organizing.” One of the report’s authors was Jean Rudd, Obama’s friend and the president of the Woods Fund during Obama’s years on that foundation’s board. Buried deep within the report lies the story of Obama’s role in expanding the Woods Fund’s financial support for groups like Gamaliel and ACORN.

Since the start of his organizing career, Obama was recognized by the Woods Fund as “a great analyst and interpreter of organizing,” according to the 2005 report. Initially an adviser, Obama became a Woods Fund board member, and finally board chairman, serving as a key advocate of increased funding for organizing during that period. In 1995, the Woods Fund commissioned a special evaluation of its funding for community organizing — a report that eventually recommended a major expansion of financial support. Obama chaired a committee of organizers that advised the Woods Fund on this important shift.

The committee’s report, “Evaluation of the Fund’s Community Organizing Grant Program,” is based on interviews with all the big names in Obama’s personal organizer network. Greg Galluzzo and other Gamaliel Foundation officials were consulted, as were several ACORN organizers, including Madeline Talbott, Obama’s key ACORN contact. Talbott, an expert on ACORN’s tactics of confrontation and disruption, is quoted more often than any other organizer in the report, sometimes with additional comments from Obama himself. The report holds up Gamaliel and ACORN as models for other groups and supports Talbott’s call for “‘a massive infusion of resources’ to make organizing a truly mass-based movement.”

Support from the Woods Fund had importance for these groups that went way beyond the money itself. Since community organizers often use confrontation, intimidation, and “civil disobedience” in the service of their political goals, even liberal foundations sometimes find it difficult to fund them without risking public criticism. As the report puts it: “Some funders . . . are averse to confrontational tactics, and are loathe [sic] to support organizing for that reason. They essentially equate organizing with the embarrassment of their business and government associates.” The Woods Fund is both highly respected and one of the few foundations to consistently support community organizing, so its money acts as a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, providing political cover for other foundations interested in funding the hard Left. Obama apparently sought to capitalize on this effect, not only by expanding the Woods Fund’s involvement in organizing, but by distributing the Woods report to a national network of potential funders.

Formally, the Woods Fund claims to be “non-ideological.” According to the report: “This stance has enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments,’ without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship.” Yet ACORN received substantial funding from Woods, apparently aided by Obama’s internal advocacy, and we now know that ACORN members have played key roles as volunteer ground troops in Obama’s various political campaigns. That would seem to raise the specter of partisanship.

A 2004 article in Social Policy by Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes, titled “Case Study: Chicago —The Barack Obama Campaign,” explains that, given Obama’s long and close relationship to ACORN, “it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers” in Obama’s campaigns. Perhaps ACORN volunteers observed the technical legalities and helped Obama merely in their capacity as private citizens. Even so, it seems at least possible that Obama used his position at a supposedly nonpartisan foundation to direct money to an allegedly nonpartisan group, in pursuit of what were in fact nakedly partisan ends.

Given Obama’s political aspirations, it’s notable that the focus of his Woods Fund report is its call for “improving the tie between organizing and policy making” and shifting organizing’s focus from local battles to “citywide or statewide coalitions.” The report boldly criticizes Saul Alinsky himself for being excessively focused on local issues, complaining that “he did not seek to fundamentally upset the distribution of power in the wider society.”

The ultimate goal of all these efforts — fundamental disruption of America’s power structure, and economic redistribution along race, poverty, and gender lines — is entirely compatible with the program outlined by Dennis Jacobsen in Doing Justice. Obama could hardly have been unfamiliar with the general drift of Gamaliel ideology, especially given his reputation as an analyst of community organizing and his supervision of a comprehensive review of the field.

Even after becoming a U.S. senator, Obama has maintained his ties to the Gamaliel Foundation. According to an October 2007 report for the University of California by Todd Swanstrom and Brian Banks, “it is almost unheard of for a U.S. Senator to attend a public meeting of a community organization, but Senator Obama attended a Gamaliel affiliate public meeting in Chicago.” Given this ongoing contact, given the radicalism of Gamaliel’s core ideology, given Obama’s close association with Gamaliel’s co-founder, Gregory Galluzzo, given Obama’s role as a Gamaliel consultant and trainer, and given Obama’s outsized role in channeling allegedly “nonpartisan” funding to Gamaliel affiliates (and to his political ground troops at ACORN), some questions are in order. Obama needs to detail the nature of his ties to both Gamaliel and ACORN, and should discuss the extent of his knowledge of Gamaliel’s guiding ideology. Ultimately, we need to know if Obama is the post-ideological pragmatist he sometimes claims to be, or in fact a stealth radical. "

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center."

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjdjY2Y2YWU5YjQ1Y2Y5Mzg0MGRlNDQ4YTkwYmI2ZDE=&w=MA==

Have heard about these accounts ever since I can remember so am wondering how many who and where are going to make tomorrow's headlines. 

Fair Tax eliminates all federal income taxes including FICA, capital gains and death tax.

There's approx.  20+% EMBEDDED TAX included in the purchase price of all goods and services that WE ALREADY PAY WITHOUT REALIZING IT.  These EMBEDDED TAXES WOULD BE TOTALLY ELIMINATED under Fair Tax, along with tax loopholes.  IRS eliminated, April 15th filing eliminated along with cost and nuisance of paperwork to comply with our ridiculously complex tax code. 

People would bring home all their paychecks!!!!!

Bet Fair Tax gains some traction soon. 

___________________

"Is Obama Wright? - Pastor Jeremiah Wright & Senator Barack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72B3tUAqpo4&NR=1

YouTube - Would You?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stvbo5D1ZXs

"Obama Calls Low Taxes "Selfishness"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGAYc66vK7k

"An "idiot wind" or a useful idiot

Source Powerlineblog.com

Posted by Paul at 9:18 PM

"The Washington Post editorial board attacks John McCain for making an issue of Barack Obama's association with Rashid Khalidi. The Post is disturbed that the McCain campaign characterizes Khalidi as "a PLO spokesman." But the Los Angeles Times has reported that "when Khalidi taught at a university in Beirut, he often spoke to reporters on behalf of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization." And Khalidi's association with the PLO was evident in an interview in 1981 (at a time when Arafat's organization was launching terrorist attacks in Israel and creating havoc in Lebanon). In the interview Khalidi referred to the exiled PLO's growing standing among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, saying "we have built up tremendous links with the Palestinians 'on the inside' in different ways. We can render them services ... we've never been stronger there, and the trend is continuing."

The Post acknowledges that Khalidi's views are at odds with the ones that Obama presents in the presidential campaign. But it calls Khalidi's views "complex" and notes that even though he doesn't appear to favor a two-state solution, he thinks that the alternatives are suspect too.

In reality, Khalidi's views are not so much "complex" as hard to discern due to his poor writing. As far as I can tell from the article in the Nation magazine on which the Post relies, Khalidi doesn't like either a two-state solution or a one-state nation solution in which Jews and Arabs co-exist. Since he plainly hates the status quo, Israeli Jews can reasonably wonder what Khalidi has in mind for them. The Mediterranean Sea comes to mind.

The Post's main point is that Obama doesn't agree with Khalidi's views (whatever their precise nature) but, as "a man of considerable intellectual curiosity," he probably just wanted "to hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians."

The Post is correct that there would be nothing wrong with hearing Khalidi out. But Obama did more. Their relationship was longstanding. And when Khalidi moved from Chicago, not only did Obama toast the "militant advocate," but in doing so praised him for "offer[ing] constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases." In other words, Khalidi affected Obama's thinking, causing him to believe that his disagreements with Khalidi were the result of "blind spots" and "biases." This suggests that, in Obama's view, Khalidi was right and he was wrong on at least some matters.

Until Obama explains how this process played out, McCain has every right to raise the issue and to press for the tape that might well shed additional light on the matter (though if the Los Angeles really promised not to make the tape public, I think it is within its rights to keep that promise).

The Post informs us that when it contacted Khalidi about the matter, he said he was waiting for the "idiot wind [to] blow over." The Post adopts Khalidi's phrase as the title for its editorial and notes that the idiot wind "is likely to keep blowing for four more days." One might say the same about the Post's election coverage.

UPDATE: According to Fox News, in 1991 Khalidi wrote an obituary for Salah Khalaf, a founding member of the terrorist Black September organization which, among other things, carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Khalaf was known as Israel's most-wanted terrorist. Fox News reports that in the obituary Khalidi praised Khalaf and said he would be "sorely missed by the Palestinian people to whom he devoted his life."

But the Post isn't worried. After all, Khalidi went to Yale.

JOHN adds: This strikes me as a major story. Salah Khalaf, better known as Abu Iyad, masterminded the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. By his own account in his memoirs, he personally selected the terrorists who carried out the attack and delivered weapons to them. So the fact that he was a leading terrorist was anything but a secret. Nevertheless, when Khalaf was murdered in 1991, Obama's close friend Rashid Khalidi praised him and said that he would be "sorely missed." He was, no doubt, missed by those who approve of terrorist mass murders. It is fair to say that Khalidi, a representative of the PLO, was among that number.

It was shortly after this that Obama and Khalidi became friends and, as Obama has said, Khalidi "offered constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases." Isn't this a bit odd, to say the least? A person of normal sensibility would say that someone who praises the founder of Black September and the perpetrator of the Munich horror suffers from "blind spots and biases." (I, actually, wouldn't put it that politely.) So what was it, exactly, that Obama learned from Khalidi? Why did he, by his own account, find Khalidi to be not only a congenial friend but a mentor of sorts?

In short, what sort of a person would consider a professor who speaks for Yaser Arafat's PLO and mourns the death of a proud terrorist, the perpetrator of one of the 20th century's vilest acts, to be not just a profound thinker but a moral compass? That is to say: what sort of a person is Barack Obama?  "
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2008/10/021940.php