What Is This World Coming To?

The fawning media coverage given the Obama-Biden ticket during the campaign is beginning to pay dividends as the Obama-Biden campaign began paying off some of its campaign debts.

TIME Magazine’s Jay Carney was tapped as assistant to the vice president and director of communications. Noted Politico.com;

Carney, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, is one of Washington’s best-known talking heads, with regular appearances on ABC’s “This Week,” “The McLaughlin Group” and MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

Biden has assembled a team of heavyweights: Ron Klain, who was chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore, as chief of staff; Mike Donilon, one of Washington’s best connected Democratic consultants, as counselor; and Tony Blinken, a longtime Biden adviser, who is expected to fill a senior role on the National Security Council or on Biden’s staff.

Later in the piece Politico quoted an anonymous ‘Democratic official’ stating the obvious; “There are those on the right who will see this as the embodiment of their assertions about the media and Obama, and this is just making it official.”

Ya think?

Nobody has said it out loud, but the silence could not make it any more clear.   It doesn’t matter if Barack Hussein Obama is Constitutionally eligible to be the President of the United States.   He’s The One, and that’s all there is to it.

If we have to change the Constititution, we’d better get to it, because Barack Hussein Obama is The One.

Enough with silly lawsuits, it’s time to change Constitution on presidential eligibility.

Citizenship — natural-born or naturalized — has a bit role in a presidential drama, with an important constitutional lesson. The United States Constitution says that “No person except a natural-born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of President …”  This provision is “an anachronism that discriminates against far too many Americans.”

That is the “Our View” page from the Merced Sun-Star expressing its contention that Obama ought to be allowed to serve, even if he is only “naturalized.”    (The citizens of Merced are poorly served  — if Obama isn’t natural-born, he isn’t naturalized, either, since naturalization is NOT automatic under any circumstances, but must be officially applied for and granted)

One Otis L. Sanford of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal writes in that paper’s op-ed section:

“Hear ye, hear ye. The U.S. Supreme Court has spoken.Or more precisely, it has refused to listen. And every rational-thinking American should be grateful.”

This establishes what passes for ‘thinking’ among Obama’s supporters — that a refusal to listen is the same thing has rendering a favorable opinion.  Call me crazy, but if the Supreme Court expected Obama could and would prove his eligibility, they would have heard the case just to eliminate future challenges.

It is far more likely they refused to hear it because they didn’t want to be forced into a position where they had to rule on what to do when the president elect is not eligible to serve.

Salon published a column by Alex Koppleman making fun of the idiots who insist that Barack Obama’s refusal to provide a birth certificate means something.

You might think these rumors would have died off after Obama produced proof in June that he was, in fact, born in Hawaii to an American citizen, his mother, Ann, or after Hawaii state officials confirmed in October that he was born there. You might think the rumors would have died off after he was elected by a comfortable margin. Instead, they’ve intensified. There have been paid advertisements in the Chicago Tribune questioning the president-elect’s birth certificate and eligibility, and one group is raising money to run a similar ad on television. The right-wing Web site WorldNetDaily has been reporting on the issue almost nonstop. Numerous plaintiffs have filed lawsuits in various states.

You might think Koppleman would read the ‘evidence’ he is citing.  All Hawaii state officials did was confirm that there is a certificate on file for Barack Obama — not that he was born there.

Perhaps the most common argument of those questioning Obama’s eligibility is that he should just release his full, original birth certificate, rather than the shorter certification, which is a copy. His failure to do so only proves there is reason to be suspicious, they say, and if the document was released, the issue would go away.

Koppleman concludes that even that evidence wouldn’t satisfy Obama’s critics”

If the long-form birth certificate were released, with its unequivocal identification of Hawaii as Obama’s place of birth, the cycle would almost certainly continue.

THIS is Obama-journalism:  It would ‘almost certainly’ continue anyway, so why release the proof?  Koppleman concludes:

We could be dealing with the repercussions of the tangled web these people have woven for years after Obama is inaugurated.

But the only way Koppleman will be correct is if Obama is successful for years in keeping his birth records shielded from ‘these people’.  But if Koppleman is right and Obama is inaugurated without putting the controversy to rest, what then?

In the worse case scenario we will have taken just another baby step towards losing our Republic and the rule of law when that dusty and irritating Constitution becomes something to just be ignored or set aside whenever it might be inconvenient, or upset some people, or just be impractical for this particular “situation”.

Maybe we have reached the point where we just set aside parts of the Constitution if they are inconvenient and that might potentially be a problem for He Who Will Slow the Rising of the Seas and the fainting, ecstatic, potentially angry mob who propelled him to power. We have already journeyed a ways down the road once traveled by ancient Rome where the elites began to worry about the mood and reactions of the masses who openly threatened disorder and mayhem if they were unhappy, while those who held the reigns of power increasingly ignored the once revered rules that had held their political system together.

Obama’s entire campaign was centered around the need for change in Washington.   A vote for Obama was a vote for a fresh, new approach to government — one run by the people, not by the professional politicians. 

Obama is different — that’s what got him elected.  It couldn’t have been his character — we don’t know anything about it — or his background — what we DO know would have sunk any normal candidate — if Obama wasn’t telling us outright how different he was, he was reminding us that he didn’t look like the presidents that grace US currency.

(Of course, neither did George Bush.  Or Ronald Reagan.  Or Richard Nixon.  Even Alexander Hamiliton’s picture doesn’t look like Abe Lincoln’s or Ulysses S Grant’s - but Obama voters have short attention spans.  (That’s how you can tell — they are Obama voters).

Notes Politico about the new Agents of Change that are going to fix Washington:

Obama’s first major appointments have been Democrats who worked for President Clinton and did not endorse him in the primary: Transition chief John Podesta and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who will be White House chief of staff, stayed neutral, and Ron Klain, who will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff, backed Biden.

Obama, advisers told Politico, may even be weighing offering Hillary Rodham Clinton herself the Cabinet plum of Secretary of State. “Obama is showing great good sense in making use of their experience,” said William Galston, a former Clinton domestic policy adviser who’s now at the Brookings Institution.

“You have an entire cadre of people in their 30s and 40s and early 50s who were either in senior jobs or second- and third-tier jobs in the Clinton administration, who really earned their spurs and know their way around — and know something about how the institutions in which they served actually function.”

It turns out the Washington Post is shocked to discover it was in the tank for Obama.

“The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain’s 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama’s battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that.

“McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, three months before Obama won his. From June 4 to Election Day, the tally was Obama, 626 stories, and McCain, 584. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both. …

“But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama’s acknowledged drug use as a teenager. …

“One gaping hole in coverage involved Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate. When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right.”

But the media had NOTHING to do with his victory.  Just ask Shep Smith.

by Frank Spaniak

The Next President  of the US is going to have his hands full when he takes charge.

A Google search on 11/08/2008 Here shows he has several top priority items (summarized):

• Transition Plan
• Uniting the country around hope
• Get Congress to work and solve problems
• The economy
• Creating jobs
• Economic Policy
• Economic recovery
• Fiscal responsibility
• Stem the loss of jobs
• Stabilizing the economy
• Create millions of new jobs
• Balancing the federal budget
• Keeping the budget balanced
• Reviving the American economy
• Getting the economy back on track
• Restoring opportunity on Main Street
• Restore oversight of our financial markets
• Getting the country back to a place of financial stability
• Energy
• Clean energy
• Energy Policy
• An energy bill
• His energy policy
• Energy independence
• Making government green
• Spark a New Energy Economy
• Reduce US dependence on fossil fuels
• Ending US dependence on Middle Eastern oil
• Reduce the United States’ dependence on foreign oil
• Free the country of its Middle Eastern oil dependence in 10 years
• Dealing with the energy crisis – and by association, the climate crisis
• Gay issues
• Road projects
• Domestic Policy
• Health-care reform
• Education spending
• Education and hope
• Freedom of Choice Act
• Spreading the wealth around
• Expanding affordable health care
• Comprehensive immigration reform
• Ensure that all Americans have health coverage
• Foreign Policy
• Stop the killings of innocents
• Increase the H-1B visas from India
• Building a close strategic partnership with India
• Re-establish and strengthen America’s relations with its democratic allies
• Defense Policy
• National security
• Eliminate debt to other countries

I think my own priority’s shifting too, my top priority’s are:

• Praying Mr President-elect Obama, that that you can listen better than you do in church since you have been going to church with Rev Wright for 20 years and do not seem to have a clue what he believes.
• Protect my daughters from having to go on the front lines in the war(s), in the interests of equality
• protecting from the incredible invasion of privacy that I believe is coming so that the wealth can be redistributed fairly
• Protecting my wallet and 401k (as small as it is now after the recent shellacking).

May the media continue, through their ceaseless, tireless and ethicless efforts, make possible that which was entirely impossible without their shameless, arrogant and condescending intervention make that their top priority in helping you.

As is usual with US elections,  now that it’s over,  reality and some measure of the truth start to kick in.  In other words -  The political lying season is over, and it’s time for the newly elected officials to assess what our condition actually is.

In a UK Times online article here Matthew Parris submits an entry for for Daniel Finkelstein’s Comment Central competition for an eight-word expression of hope for the President-elect of the United States. Eight words precisely.

“I hope he will let us down gently.”

Amidst all the fawning and gushing worldwide praise and hope for President elect Obama, the author writes:

And this whole thing could go very sour. A politician who has subtly insinuated himself into the imaginations of millions as a secret friend and the personal champion of all their hopes for the world may find their disappointment the more bitter in the end.

Say it isn’t so! Do you mean that if someone were to meet him in person they might find out that he is a extreme leftist with little or no substance? Someone, who, it their first news conference insults the wife of one of the greatest former leaders of the opposition?  Where is a teleprompter when you need it.

He truly cannot be ‘The One’ while he is constrained by that pesky US Constitution or 48% of the electorate disagreeing with him. So my Eight word submission is this:

“I hope you don’t do anything at all”

Now that America has proved itself righteous and color blind by electing Barack Obama to the White House based on his two year Senate career (and his color) how is the rest of the world reacting?

Was Vice-President elect Joe Biden’s prediction about an Obama ‘test’ really a gaffe?

The morning after the election, Israel launched its first airstrikes against targets in Gaza in nearly six months.  Hamas fired thirty-five rockets into Israel from Gaza.

Iran issued a ‘warning’ to the US military in what Reuters characterized as “a message analysts said seemed directed at the new U.S. president-elect more than neighboring American troops.”

The Russians announced that they will place short-range missile systems along the European Union’s eastern border.  They waited to find out whether they would be facing a President John McCain or a President Barack Obama before announcing the decision.

Worldnetdaily is reporting that Hamas is composing a congratulatory letter to the president-elect.  Obama is already beginning to heal America’s broken image.  (Sigh.)