Brain Shavings

How dare a lowly conservative columnist unearth public records about the Obamessiah's friendship and work history with an unrepentant terrorist? Stanley Kurtz had the gall to speak about the Anointed One's ties to Bill Ayers in a radio interview, and he will be punished.

From: Obama Action Wire

Date: Wed, Aug 27, 2008

Subject: Chicago: CALL TONIGHT to fight the latest smear

[Name] --

In the next few hours, we have a crucial opportunity to fight one of the most cynical and offensive smears ever launched against Barack.

Tonight, WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears. He's currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers.

Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse.

...

It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies.

Kurtz is scheduled to appear from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. in the Chicago market.

Calling will only take a minute, and it will make a huge difference if we nip this smear in the bud. Confront Kurtz tonight before this goes any further:

The candidate doth protest too much, methinks.

Hat tip: Byron York

--

Update: Andy McCarthy reacts during and after the interview. The Obama cultists didn't exactly shine.

Here's the ad the Obama campaign doesn't want you to see:

This TV spot by The American Issues Project hit a very raw nerve, because here's how the Obama team reacted:

1. They released a "response" ad that refutes nothing.
2. They threatened TV stations not to air the AIP ad.
3. They asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute AIP, its officers, its board of directors, and its donors.

That's not how a politician responds to a lie. Rather, it's how a politician tries to bury the truth.

Enjoy the discussion.

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan recently pandered to überlefty Keith Olbermann, claiming that Fox News parroted talking points sent to them by the White House ...

... but retracted his claim when confronted by Bill O'Reilly:

Just listen to this guy frantically try to avoid admitting his falsehoods. He's not a very good spin doctor, and O'Reilly flat out pins McClellan's hide to the wall, vaporizing the last shreds of credibility this flack still had.

Hat tip: Thespis Journal

Ten bucks says this assessment of Obama's arrogance gets mentioned on Rush Limbaugh's show today.

During the Obamessiah's pilgrimage to Europe, he had made plans to visit wounded U.S. troops at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. But shortly before he was to arrive, he changed his mind and went shopping.

Despite his campaign's numerous (and conflicting) excuses, the real reason Obama blew off the troops was the prohibition on cameras inside the military hospital. For a cut-and-run appeasement junkie like Saint Barack, there's no point in slumming with the warmongers if you can't score cheap political points by doing so.

This makes the decision track very clear. Obama and his team set up the visits to military installations before going overseas. After seeing how the media got excluded in Iraq and Afghanistan, they decided it wasn’t worth traveling to Ramstein and Landstuhl to visit the severely wounded troops because they couldn’t bring the campaign and get the photo ops they wanted. Instead, Obama went shopping in Berlin.

I hear there are some wicked deals on Che Guevara t-shirts to be found in Berlin.

From the Book of Obama, Chapter 1:

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

Go ye forth, and read.

He does if you're a member of the mainstream media.

Rest in peace, Tony.

Sights like these never fail to warm my heart.

Before ...

A couple of years ago I wrote a detailed research piece for a law school class on firearms law. I went way back and looked at sources like the transcripts of the debates during the Constitutional Convention, the constitutions of various states, letters and speeches by the Founding Fathers, and I discovered what they thought about keeping and bearing arms. They understood the 2nd Amendment to allow the private ownership of military weapons. All military weapons. Period.

Here's a summary of my research:

Everyone knows that rifles, pistols, and shotguns are "arms," but what about other weapons like clubs, knives, swords, artillery, bombs, missiles, or weapons of mass destruction? Although this question sounds silly at first, Larry Arnn of the Claremont Institute once remarked that if the courts interpreted the Second Amendment as they do the First Amendment, we would all have the right to own nuclear weapons. Some scholars think this kind of reading of the Second Amendment means that "individuals may keep and bear . . . whatever 'arms' they desire."

So does our Constitution recognize your neighbor's right to park a brand new M-1 Abrams main battle tank in his driveway? Should we permit gun shops to hold tent sales offering great low prices on military-grade flamethrowers and nerve-gas-tipped artillery shells? Must the U.S. Government allow you to carry a "suitcase nuke" to avoid violating your fundamental Constitutional rights, even if you might trip while carrying it and level a city block?

Part I of this article summarizes the recent Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that acts as the point of departure for this journey into the "what-ifs" of the right to keep and bear arms.

Part II looks at the decision's inconclusive treatment of what "arms" means, and explains why the "textualism" school of constitutional interpretation should control the search for the meaning of "arms," instead of the "living document" or "framer's intent" schools.

Part III explains what the Founders and their informed contemporaries understood "arms" to mean in their day: that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual's right to keep and bear any and all weapons, no matter how destructive.

Part IV brings that definition forward to modern times and identifies the unacceptable social risks posed by private citizens' possession and use of today's most powerful weapons.

Part V makes some tentative and preliminary suggestions for a Twenty-Eigth Amendment limiting individual access to excessively destructive weapons that threaten society, while preserving the common-sense meaning of the individual right protected by the text of the Second Amendment.

Read the whole thing and then tell me that "arms" doesn't include a .50 caliber machine gun or an M-1 tank. You probably won't like it (I don't completely like it myself), but unless you're willing to let the courts twist the meaning of the Constitution in whatever way they want, you'll have to agree with my conclusion.

It's about time. The case is District of Columbia v. Heller.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

It's news to me.

I really hope your buddy John McCain will straighten up and fly right after reading your upcoming columns, Fred.

If we housed terrorist prisoners in these barracks, the world would scream bloody murder. This is completely unacceptable.

More at Hot Air.

CNN has an interesting article about a couple that married in Kansas several years ago. What the wife, who is a US Citizen, didn’t know while they were dating was that her husband was an illegal immigrant. He tried to do the right thing earlier this year, which was to return to Mexico and apply for legal immigration status. The problem is, since he was in the country illegally for over a year, he is barred from returning for over 10 years unless there are extreme extenuating circumstances. You can read about it here.

While I have my doubts about this case (a 26 year old man marries a 40 year old woman, hmm...), this is one case out of over 12 million currently in the US. It illustrates, however, the difficulty faced by true immigration reform. When an illegal immigrant marries a US Citizen and they start a family (where under the Constitution the kids are US Citizens), do we tear the family apart to enforce immigration laws?

How we tackle this debate will in some ways define us as a nation, since we are a nation of immigrants. Keep in mind that 100 years ago, to the best of my knowledge, there was no such thing as "illegal" immigration. Here’s my two-cents:

It is interesting to look back at the fighting that occurred in Iraq this past week and a half when Iraqi forces entered Basra to contain and control militias in the second largest city in Iraq. All week we've been subjected to headlines of "The Lessons of Basra" (The Nation), "A Civil War Iraq Can't Win" (NYT), "Basra Assault Exposed U.S., Iraqi Limits: Anti-Sadr Gambit Seen Aiding Cleric" (The Washington Post)...you get the picture. Here's the part I don't understand:

1. As of March 30th, when the cease-fire was declared, Iraqi forces had killed 571 Mahdi Army fighters, wounded 881, captured 490, and accepted the surrender of 30 throughout Iraq.
2. Al-Sadr ordered his fighters to quit fighting, then called it a "cease-fire." While he tried to put terms on it, the Iraqi government did not accept any of the terms, with the exception of "if you quit fighting us, we won't kill you."
3. Al-Sadr "brokered" the cease-fire with the help of Iran, because that is where he is at. He is not in Iraq (nor has he been seen there in over a year), because he fears to return.
4. The Iraqi army has entered Basra in Brigade strength to restablish order. Curfews still exist for Sadr City and Basra. Not exactly conditions for the Medhi Army to be dancing in the streets.
5. In six days of fighting, the Mehdi Army suffered major setbacks in Hillah, Najaf, Karbala, Diwaniyah, Amarah, Kut, and Nasiriyah.
6. When the cease-fire was granted by the Iraqi Army, Al-Sadr's Medhi army was critically low on food, water and ammunition in Basra due to the border with Iran being sealed.

Explain to me please how people can say he "won?" I just don't get it.

... I must be doing something right. Especially when it's Tim Russo.

Behold the wages of identity politics.

When will an interviewer or a reporter ask Barack Obama whether he believes in Black Liberation Theology? It's definitely not orthodox Christianity.

Imagine that I'm a leading Democrat candidate for President, and I've been a member of the Westboro Baptist Church for 20 years, and donated tens of thousands of dollars to the ministry. I've also called the Reverend Fred Phelps my friend and spiritual mentor for years. Furthermore, he presided over my marriage and baptized my two daughters.

Now when embarrassing video clips of Fred Phelps' sermons surface during my campaign, I start distancing myself from the specific offensive statements in the specific videos. I also play down my association with Phelps by likening him to a crazy uncle and claiming "Gosh, he never said stuff like that when I was in the pews; the few times I attended it was all about Jesus and love and faith and family."

My supporters claim the media cherry-picked quotes to serve their own agenda, that people are afraid of me, and that my accusers don't understand the "context" of the rhetoric used in churches that focus primarily on homosexuals.

Would anybody believe a single word I said? Of course not. They'd all call B.S.

So why in the world do the Obamassiah's followers expect me to swallow his line of bull?

--

Update: Spin, baby, spin.

Are you ready for an eye-opening look at the kind of racist bilge that's taught by the church that Obama chose to support and attend for the last twenty years? Make sure you're sitting down first, because this is black liberation theology in its unvarnished ugliness.

Whoopsie:

Contrary to Senator Barack Obama’s claim that he never heard his pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. preach hatred of America, Obama was in the pews last July 22 when the minister blamed the “white arrogance” of America’s Caucasian majority for the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.

...

In fact, Obama was present in the South Side Chicago church on July 22 last year when Jim Davis, a freelance correspondent for Newsmax, attended services along with Obama. [See: ”Obama’s Church: Cauldron of Division.”]

How many of these sermons did Obama attend? More importantly, if he lied about his supposed ignorance of Wright's hateful rhetoric, why should we believe Obama when he "condemns" those sermons?

More analysis at Hot Air.

From Barack Obama's initial stab at damage control over his anti-American racist pastor, Jeremiah Wright:

Most importantly, Rev. Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life. In other words, he has never been my political advisor; he's been my pastor. And the sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.

Pray tell, what is the Gospel that forms the basis of Obama's life and beliefs? Not being one to stick to what's actually in the Bible, Pastor Wright apparently teaches another gospel:

Concerning his pastor, Obama said last week that Wright "has said some things that are considered controversial because he's considered that part of his social gospel."

When Obama says "social gospel" he means Black Liberation Theology (as Pastor Wright confirmed on March 1st, 2007). Does Obama share his pastor's belief in the Marxist principles of Kawaida? A candidate's worldview is fair game for detailed examination; Americans deserve to have enough information to make an educated decision in the voting booth. It would be nice to know if this potential President is a devotee of a kooky anti-American pseudo-religion, or whether he'll base his decisions on something resembling actual Christianity. Heck, I'd prefer a pro-American atheist as President to Jeremiah Wright's brand of wild eyed nutcase.

So far, there hasn't been much in the way of a coherent explanation from the Obamassiah.

One of the stories from Ohio’s primary yesterday that is really bothering me was a report of 21 precincts in Cuyahoga County ordered to remain open by a Federal Judge’s decree until 9:00pm due to “voting improprieties.” Specifically, the Obama campaign sued the Ohio Secretary of State about a shortage of ballots and heavy winter weather supposedly preventing voters from being able to get in line to vote before the 7:30pm deadline. Here’s why this bothers me so much. Within the documents presented, there were no witness statements or evidence collaborating the charges (normally a requirement), and more importantly the 21 precincts appear to have been “cherry picked” due to their racial demographics (i.e. mostly African-American).

I’ve been wondering for a while how fair the rules are governing who gets a state’s delegates for the democrats. I feel a little disenfranchised right now, because there is no reasonable way for me to have a say in who is selected from my home state (Wyoming). As a military family, because Wyoming is a “Caucus” state for all intents and purposes we don’t count. My wife is an ardent Hillary Clinton supporter, and at least in the primaries my loyalties follow the same path (though in the general right now my preference is for McCain). It bothers me a little bit that she cannot make her opinion known because she is currently deployed to Iraq, and that the only way I could participate would be to buy two very expensive plane tickets to our home state, then arrange for a babysitter for my four year old daughter while I go stand in a gym someplace waiting to very publicly (vs. a secret ballot) make my selection known.

Because I couldn’t sleep, I decided to take a look at a couple of figures related to how the candidates in this election are selected. An interesting contrast is created when you look at a couple of “what if” scenarios involving the way democratic delegates are awarded. What if the states were awarded like the general election, namely “winner-take-all” vs. the current allocation. If this were the case, the numbers would be Clinton in the lead with 1738 to Obama’s 1559 (at the time I am writing this, Texas Caucus results are unknown, though the primary in Texas has been called for Clinton). My assumption here is that Texas would be awarded solely to Clinton due to the Primary. If you factor in Florida and Michigan (which Clinton won, but don’t count due to moving their primaries up) the numbers would jump to 2051 vs. 1559. In other words, the contest would be over, and Clinton would be the nominee.

You've probably heard of "broken glass voters." Well, I just rolled my manual wheelchair through wind-driven sleet and two inches of bat-guano-slick slush to vote in Ohio's primary election. I'm not alone in braving the crud to go vote either.

The turnout according to the poll workers had topped 630 voters as I arrived 15 minutes from poll-closing time. Typical turnout for presidential primaries here runs about 400-450 voters. More interesting yet, the sign-in desk had almost used up its allotted stack of change-your-party-affiliation forms. With ~20 pages in the stack and 5 signature blocks on each form, that means that close to 100 voters in this suburban Cleveland area district changed their party affiliation.

With John McCain having the GOP nomination all but sewn up already, I'll give you three guesses which party's members were flocking to vote for the other side's nominee ... and your first two guesses don't count.

I'll be keeping an eye out for airborne swine, because it's been that kind of day.

Why is the question of John McCain’s citizenship being brought up now? Not meaning to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it sure seems like the NY Times has suddenly made it their mission to bring up the most asinine of charges against the presumptive Republican nominee. Here is the article McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out.

This issue hits a little close to home for me. My daughter was born overseas, specifically in the US Military Hospital in Wuerzburg, Germany while my wife was assigned there as a member of the US Army. If you follow the argument set out by the NY Times (and now floating around the blogs), she would be ineligible to become the President of this country, while the child of an illegal immigrant born in an Arizona hospital could someday become the Commander-in-Chief. Now I’m not a Constitutional Scholar, but I believe that the common sense definition needs to come into play.

Why was John McCain born in Panama? His father was a career US Navy Officer, stationed at the US Military Base in Panama at the time he was born. By pushing this argument, it means that the child of any military member, ambassador, embassy worker, or citizen serving their country outside the US borders born overseas is ineligible for this nation’s highest office. This is just flat out stupid.

When you're a Democrat running for president, you have to woo superdelegates to your side. But who's got any time in their busy campaign schedule to meet with them all to persuade them? It's so much easier to just buy them outright with campaign contributions.

H/T: Bearing Drift Ohio

Heere Bigynneth the Tale of the Asse-Hatte.

Hat tip: Pro Ecclesia