Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama
QUESTION: Why is Jesse Jackson pushing Obama to pardon Hillary?
One of the mysteries of the week is what Jesse Jackson is up to in pushing Obama to pardon Hillary. What’s Jesse’s end game?
He’s in his own twilight. He has no love for the Clintons. Remember that he and Bill have gotten into it on more than one occasion in recent years. The fall of the Clintons might not benefit Jesse directly, but I think them losing power means that Jesse gains power and status as a longtime figure in the Democrat Party. He would not have to share a stage with them or operate in their shadow.
Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for “all crimes he may have committed as president.” Similarly, Obama seems to be able to pardon Hillary Clinton for “all crimes she may have committed as Secretary of State.”
I also wonder if Jimmy Carter’s pardon of the Vietnam War draft-dodgers is precedent for Obama to be able to give a blanket pardon to all Clinton Foundation employees (such as Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and others). Is that a way for Democrats to make all of this go away? Just give a blanket draft-dodger pardon to anyone who may have been involved in anything that the Clinton Foundation was doing for years and years?
It feels like the entire political Establishment WANTS scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation to end immediately before other powerful people are brought down or anyone figures out exactly what was happening over there. This could be why Cheryl Mills didn’t want Hillary to run for president again in 2016. Maybe it was not so much that Mills was smart enough to realize that Hillary would lose but that Mills was scared that a second presidential run would only succeed in drawing attention to everything that the Clintons wanted to hide about that foundation.
It sure feels like the Clinton Foundation could be a bigger scandal than Watergate…but this time the Dishonest Media has absolutely no interest in reporting on it (unlike the glee they took in bringing down Nixon). Because the Clintons going down would also drag much of the Democrat Party down with them, notice how no reporters seem at all interested in any of this.
I wonder if Jesse Jackson is trying to start a psychological push for the country as a whole to view the Clintons as guilty of something with that Foundation…because most people see someone who is said to need a pardon as being guilty of something. Innocent people do not need pardons. Mainly it’s just black people who even listen to Jesse Jackson, so here he is telling black people that the Clintons need a pardon. Which means he is telling black people that the Clintons are guilty of something. Why is he doing that?
Is it out of malice of some kind towards the Clintons?
Is he trying to ensure that the Democrat Party veers further Left and doesn’t attempt any future Centrist triangulation like Bill Clinton pulled off in the early 1990s?
Is he just jockeying for more power in the Democrat Party by pulling this stunt to further decimate the Clintons so he can push them off the stage?
I wonder what Jesse Jackson is up to here. It will be interesting to see what Al Sharpton says and does on the subject as well. If he starts calling for Obama to pardon Hillary as well and if other elements on the Left start doing this too, then there is for sure something up that we are not understanding.
It may also be that everyone on the Left is so shocked she lost that there is no plan and they are just wandering around speaking extemporaneously without concern or consideration of any bigger picture.
How Birtherism REALLY Started (SPOILER: You Won’t Like the Truth)
[Click above to embiggen: one of Trump’s tweets, where he took credit for forcing Obama to release his certificate of live birth, after refusing to do so for years and years…and thus needlessly keeping controversy going, as that controversy always benefitted him.]
In the last few weeks, several websites have been pushing the theory that Birtherism originated in the Clinton campaign back in 2008. Lester Holt also decided to make Birtherism a big focus of the First Presidential Debate. I lived and breathed the 2008 Hillary campaign on the ground in Chicago…and actually started HillBuzz.org in February of 2008 because someone on the campaign who I had been working with told me to start a supporter website for her, as nothing like that really existed at the time and her supporters wanted someone to call out the Media for relentlessly attacking Hillary and trying to drive her out of the race and hand the nomination over to Obama. My job was to watch what people like Chris Matthews and Tim Russert were doing to Hillary every day and then rebut them…and also to get information about Obama out to the public that people here in Chicago fed me about him, but the Media refused to report about him because, of course, the Media didn’t want to ever say anything negative about him because they wanted him to win. Everyone working in the Media was committed heart and soul to electing that man and covering up his past. The Clinton campaign’s efforts to expose Obama were 100% centered around Jeremiah Wright, his radical connections to Wright’s hateful “church,” Obama’s connections to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, the mystery of Obama’s mother’s relationship with Frank Marshall Davis, and the truth about Obama’s adoption by Lolo Soetoro in the 1970s (which included Obama becoming an Indonesian citizen and gaining an Indonesian passport) and how that factored into Obama’s admission to Columbia University (where I believe that Obama applied to this college under his Indonesian credentials in order to secure admission and benefits he would not have received if he used his American identity when filling out all the paperwork; in short, Obama gamed the system like he always does and to this this day he’s never been exposed for it because people for some reason didn’t find this scheme of his interesting enough to look into).
It is an absolute lie that Birtherism started in Hillary’s campaign. In that primary race, there were scores of other things that Team Hillary wanted to go viral to defeat Obama (as noted above), but claiming he was secretly born in Kenya was NOT amongst them. What follows below is what REALLY happened eight years ago, as I remember it. This is one of those instances in life where the truth is not as much fun or as useful for some people as they would like it to be and the lie they want to believe is more interesting…but the truth is that the only person who ever benefitted from Birtherism is Barack Obama himself and the Obama campaign itself pushed Birtherism as a false flag/red herring to discredit Obama’s critics and silence all criticism of his strange and mysterious past. That’s because Birtherism kept everyone from ever talking about all bizarre things about his life before he entered Columbia University that, to this day, he never wants anyone to ever talk about. So, here you go.
All About Birtherism: the Ingenious Red Herring That Has Successfully Kept All of Obama’s Real Secrets Hidden to This Very Day
Not many people seem to remember how much Birtherism helped Barack Obama back in his 2008 primary race against Hillary Clinton and the subsequent general election against John McCain. To this day, what is called “Birtherism” — the conspiratorial belief that Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and that fact making him somehow ineligible for the presidency — prevents any sort of conversation about the very real possibility that Frank Marshall Davis is actually Barack Obama’s biological father or that Obama may have fraudulently obtained favorable treatment from Columbia University in New York City by claiming he was Indonesian, not a black American, when applying to college there. Those are just two of the unlimited potential scandals that Obama artfully dodged because everyone and their brother was caught up in Birtherism and didn’t want to talk about anything else in 2008.
Has anyone ever stopped to think that maybe the Obama campaign itself created the whole Kenyan Birtherism red herring to keep people from digging into all the real secrets that Obama’s handlers wanted to keep hidden? After all, who other than Barack Obama ever benefitted from all the smoke and mirrors of Birtherism?
Just say for a moment that you were running a presidential campaign and you knew that your candidate had unique vulnerabilities that could cause everything to come crashing down around you if anyone poked around in his past, investigated his radical associates, evaluated how he misrepresented himself at various points in his life and career, and fact-checked his much-celebrated autobiography? What if you knew for a fact that your candidate was a sociopathic fraud and that he had aggressively lied through the years, inconsistently telling whatever useful lie he felt that he needed to tell in each critical moment to get ahead? If the campaign would have imploded if the right people started asking the right questions then the only way to win was to preemptively obliterate anyone’s abilities to ask those particular questions. In this mental exercise, remember that you are a Democrat, you care nothing about the truth, you believe that the ends always justify the means, and you think Saul Alinsky was someone commendable who should be revered and admired.
I argue that the luckiest of all breaks that Barack Obama had back in 2008 on his road to power was the whole Birtherism fixation on Kenya. Once Birtherism captured people’s wildest imaginations, even the demented ravings of Reverend Jeremiah “Chickens Coming Home to Roost!” Wright and Obama’s obvious connections to domestic terrorist William Ayers were lost in the background and no criticism at all of Obama’s past dealings was allowed. Anyone questioning anything at all about the suspicious and irregular holes in Obama’s biography, particularly about his sketchy time in Indonesia and stretch at Occidental College in Los Angeles before heading to Columbia, was lambasted as a “Birther,” with the net result being that Obama mostly sailed through the 2008 election without the kind of scrutiny that would have dredged up inconsistencies or oddities in his published life’s story.
The ridiculous Kenyan Birtherism conspiracy story allowed the Media to mockingly point at someone asking legitimate questions about Obama’s strange and elusive past and label that person “a Birther.” Once that mocking started, no one was willing to publicly entertain the thought that Obama was really hiding something horrible in his past from the American people…something that could have (and should have) ended his campaign for the presidency. People were much too afraid of being lumped in with the Birthers and so they kept their mouths shut about anything strange they would have otherwise talked about regarding Obama.
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Sarah Palin Was Right
Back in 2008, following Obama’s less than compelling reaction on the campaign trail to Russia invading neighboring Georgia, Sarah Palin remarked that Ukraine could be next. The left attacked her, mocked her, called her comments “strange” and “far-fetched”.
Today, the scenario is very real. Russia’s puppet parliament just voted unanimously to approve military action against Ukraine. This after paramilitary forces, likely of Russian origin and backing, have already seized government buildings and airports within the Crimean region of Ukraine.
Which means, all those fawning, sycophantic, Obama-protecting liberals… all those self-righteous, self-described “experts” on foreign policy… all those talking heads on the television were WRONG.
Sarah Palin was right, folks.
I wonder which of those supposed experts has the guts to admit it.
That moment liberals realize they were wrong and Sarah Palin was right.
5 Takeaways from the Obama/O’Reilly Super Bowl Interview
Before the two best teams in the NFL squared off against one another, two political titans entered their own arena to do battle. Here are my five takeaways from the Obama / O’Reilly Super Bowl interview.
1. The entire Obama administration is technologically naive
O’Reilly pressed Obama on the botched Obamacare rollout. Obama repeated multiple times:
“I don’t think anybody anticipated the degree of problems”
Really? Nobody in the entire administration anticipated these problems? I find this incredibly difficult to believe. I work in the web industry. I develop web applications used by hundreds of thousands and even millions of people. I can tell you from personal experience that if my deadline was approaching and the product was not ready, I would be in regular communications with the client discussing crisis mode options.
CGI Federal has taken a lot of heat for the botched rollout. Some of that they deserve, no doubt. But I suspect the #1 problem was a terrible set of specifications delivered from the government. Poor specifications leads to poor product. I also suspect that the middlemen within the Administration did not possess enough tech knowledge to comprehend the extent of the disastrous rollout.
“[Nobody] anticipated the degree of problems.” Obama’s own words. I expected more from the supposedly “most tech-savvy administration in history.”
2. Holding people accountable is now officially meaningless
O’Reilly challenged Obama on Kathleen Sebelius’ continued employment. O’Reilly clearly believes she failed and she should go. I happen to agree. However, Obama’s reassures us:
I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable.
Okay, but what does this mean? Obama has told us before that he holds people accountable. Other than General Stanley McChrystal, who has Obama actually fired? Only a select few have even resigned.
In the Obama administration, you can oversee the Fast and Furious scandal, lie about the cause of the attack in Benghazi, lie to Congress about the government’s data-collection policies, and even botch the rollout of the President’s signature legislation and your job is secure. But dare to mock Joe Biden and you’re fired!
Romney/Ryan Headed for Landslide Victory?
An electoral college computer model which has accurately predicted every Presidential election since 1980 is signaling a landslide victory for Romney in November, 320 to 218.
While media outlets generally call the race with a slight Obama victory, those analyses rely on current polling data and do not take into account how trends will break as the election nears. This model, on the other hand, examines more meaningful data like economic statistics from individual states. It suggests voters hold Democrats responsible for high unemployment, and Republicans responsible for low per-capita income. Democrats tend to lose the White House anytime unemployment is above 5.6%.
It’s worth noting that Dick Morris has been predicting a big Romney win for awhile now.
Of course it’s still too early to truly call this race and anything can happen between now and November. Still, the results of this prediction have to be concerning to the Obama re-election team.
Obama Wasted Our Money for Political Gain
On August 2nd the House released an investigative report on Solyndra, the failed solar energy company, which shows beyond a doubt the Obama administration abused taxpayer dollars for political gain.
Solyndra received a $535 million loan, straight from our pocket, as part of Obama’s “green jobs” strategy. Indeed, Solyndra was considered one of the jewels in Obama’s green recovery crown. When Obama visited the plant in 2010, he highlighted Solyndra as an example of the “right thing to do for the economy,” claiming the plant would employ at least 1,000 high paying jobs.
As is so often the case with lofty oratory, the reality never lived up to the rhetoric.
First, the Obama administration pressured federal reviewers to sign off on Solyndra despite misgivings about the viability of the company and of the government’s loan model. Emails released by the investigators show the Office of Management and Budget responding to White House requests by saying “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.” The loan was ultimately approved, clearly under political duress as an OMB staffer remarked “given the time pressure we are under to sign off on Solyndra, we don’t have time to change the model.”
Solyndra’s CEO at the time hailed the “Bank of Washington” for coming to their aid.
It quickly became clear that Solyndra was in peril as it began to miss payments on the loan. A government analysis warned that the company would run out of money in September of 2011 and recommended that the government simply cut its losses. Instead, the government chose to restructure the loan, ultimately wasting MORE of our tax dollars than if they had simply allowed Solyndra to fail.
The investigators released emails which clearly indicate the decision to restructure the loan – which inexplicably put taxpayers LAST to recoup losses – was made for political reasons. One government analyst remarked that a Solyndra failure “would likely be very embarrassing for DOE and the Administration.” Another commented that she was “vastly confused by DOE’s decision to negotiate away their senior position in this transaction.”
The final insult came when White House Chief of Staff Jack Yew, perhaps sensing that Solyndra was beyond saving, decided to wash his hands of any further involvement in the Solyndra restructuring. Let me say that again to be sure it sinks in:
Despite the administration’s self-proclaimed “quite active interest” in securing the loan for Solyndra, just months before it failed, the White House distanced itself from any further decision making.
No doubt so that when it finally failed, they could blame it on OMB / DOE / Bush (which is exactly what they tried to do).
Still undetermined is exactly what role Obama bundler Robert Kaiser played in securing Solyndra’s loan in the first place. Emails show Kaiser “advised associates” on how to secure federal assistance for Solyndra. As it turns out, Kaiser’s family also had a “substantial” financial stake in Solyndra. Coincidence?
This is an example of Chicago Politics at its finest. We have a choice in 2012. Are you voting for four more years of cronyism and abuse of our wallets? “Bank of Washington” my ass… it’s the Bank of We the People. I say we shut the damn doors. #ABO2012
Think Your Political Preference is Private? Think Again.
Here in the U.S. we have a long tradition of secret ballots, and we feel like our political preference is generally a private matter unless we choose to reveal it to those with whom we interact. Unfortunately, we couldn’t be more wrong about these assumptions.
I first discovered the ugly truth about our political privacy purely on accident while researching the history of campaign finance laws. I’ve always known that campaigns and political organizations are required to disclose their contributors. What I didn’t know is that the entirety of that disclosed information is public record and easily obtainable by anyone with access to the Internet.
Let me introduce you to one of the most potentially dangerous tools on the Internet: The Federal Election Commission’s financial disclosure database. Curious about the political affiliations of your neighbors? How about the businesses you frequent? Just punch in your zip code and prepare to be shocked. Anyone who has contributed $200 or more will be shown with their name, employer, and you can even click through to the filing form to see their home address.
The danger is not so much the fact that the information is collected, or even that it is made public. The danger is in the level of accessibility. Imagine a world where anyone could open up a “Political Contributors” app on their iPhone and, with GPS technology, call up a summary of contributions by party for each nearby address. Imagine if Yelp included a “political affiliation” tag for each business, or a tally of how many employees contributed to each party.
Federal law currently prohibits the use of disclosure records for commercial purposes or to solicit contributions, but the rules on use are kind of wishy-washy. I see a whole lot of loopholes. Plus, it is not clear to me exactly how the FEC would determine that anybody was breaking the law.
The implications are serious. Politically-motivated vandalism could become commonplace, especially as we trend towards greater political division. Local boycotts could become as easy as logging in to an app on your mobile phone. People could even stage protests at businesses who employ too many contributors to a particular party.
Blue flags mark the homes of known Democrats
Some will say I’m just being paranoid. I concede the possibility. However, you may recall that theft and vandalism already occurs due to campaign signs. For every one person who displays a sign in their yard, there are probably 5 more who have contributed but don’t want their political ideology plastered on their front door. Imagine if it was in the palm of everyone’s hand.
The technology is much closer than many may realize. Just a few days ago, the Obama campaign released an app that shows you nearby Democrat households. Still think I’m paranoid?
As technology improves, the lines of political privacy will continue to blur. Combine this with a growing push for ever-greater disclosure requirements and we’re headed for a dangerous “brown shirt army” situation.
This is not a partisan topic. This should concern everyone. The technology is in its infancy — we can barely imagine the potential in years to come. Entrenched interests on both sides of the aisle will seek to use it to their own advantage, which will ultimately be detrimental to the privacy and freedoms of all of us.
I used to believe that campaign contribution disclosure was generally a good thing. After all, I like to know who guys like George Soros are supporting. Now I’m not so sure.
During my research, I found that one of this nation’s original campaign finance laws (the Tillman Act) was actually created by a notoriously racist Democrat with the purpose of browbeating anti-slavery Republican corporations. As I thought about it, I realized that our current disclosure laws are right on the cusp of allowing the same type of abuse Tillman envisioned. As technology advances, political privacy is going to continue to disappear, unless disclosure laws are repealed or reformed.
What say you?
You Didn’t Win That. Somebody Else Made That Happen.
With the Olympics on everyone’s television, what better way to highlight the true idiocy of Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment than with a brand new meme.
Obama reveals his theory on Olympic success
Hey Missy Franklin, Michael Phelps, Gabby Douglas and all the other gold medalists… in the spirit of President Obama’s theory on human success… you didn’t win that! Somebody else made that happen! After all, you couldn’t possibly have been successful without the roads and bridges that allowed you to reach the pool and the gym! The focus, the training, the countless hours of dedication… that nice but it’s barely a footnote to the contribution of the government!
No rational person would agree with the paragraph above. And yet, millions of dutifully ignorant Obama supporters see nothing wrong with the application of the same theory towards business owners. It’s madness.
Not everyone can be an gold medalist. Can we agree that these exceptional men and women are indeed born with a natural affinity for their sport? Is it OK to acknowledge that nature does play a role in the creation of an Olympic athlete?
Not everyone can be a business owner either. It takes a certain kind of person to be successful in business, and it takes an awful lot of focus and dedication. Well beyond the level of “hard work” that most non-business-owners — including President Obama — assume is necessary.
The great thing about a truly FREE country is that we don’t all have to be superstar athletes or exceptionally wealthy business owners to be successful. But in that same vein, we should not castigate those folks simply because their success is different than ours, or because we feel inadequate by comparison, or “cheated” by the system. No, we should be celebrating the success of American entrepreneurial exceptionalism the same way we celebrate our phenomenal athletes.
Obama Campaign Accuses Romney of Lying for Quoting Obama
Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has posted a new ad accusing Mitt Romney of launching a false attack. The ad plays a clip of Romney quoting Obama’s speech where he said “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” The ad then shows text saying Obama never said that. A few seconds later, the ad even plays a clip of Obama saying those exact words.
This is phenomenal. Obama’s campaign is literally calling Romney a “liar” and a “say anything” candidate for quoting Obama’s own speech! The emperor is truly naked folks.
This is also just another example in a growing litany of evidence that whatever terrible thing the Progressive Left accuses the right of doing, they are already doing it themselves.
Click over to YouTube to watch the ad, and then give it a dislike just for fun.
Personally, I think this is a mistake on the part of the Obama campaign. Claiming your guy didn’t say something and then playing your guy saying that exact thing is pretty dumb. It will be interesting to see if the campaign pulls this ad. If they do, you can also catch Beck’s analysis (currently free). He doesn’t show the ad but he does play the audio and then plays Romney’s speech and Obama’s speech side by side.
This whole incident rekindles my theory that the main factor in choosing Biden for Vice President was to give the late night comedians a more obvious target to roast. Obama’s off-prompter gaffe record isn’t exactly stellar. All I know is that Romney better ride this horse as far as it will go because after this, I doubt Obama will go off prompter again through the rest of the campaign.
On the other hand, he seems to be so arrogant that maybe he will and just assume he can lie his way out of it like he’s trying to do here. What say you?
JoePa Worship Reveals Danger in Obama Worship
Hagiography. I was not familiar with the word until reading Rick Reilly’s commentary on ESPN where he shares his thoughts on JoePa’s role in the Penn State Sandusky scandal. In this context, “hagiography” is used to mean the anointment or idolization of JoePa — those who bought in to his legacy literally thought he could do no wrong.
Reilly points out that even as the Sandusky scandal was breaking, he and others thought JoePa couldn’t possibly have had knowledge. As he put it, JoePa was “too old and too addled to understand, too grandfatherly and Catholic to get that Sandusky was committing grisly crimes.” For all intents and purposes, they believed Joe Paterno was a saint.
Even now, after the Freeh report has laid bare the extent of the coverup and of Paterno’s depth of knowledge, the Internet is alive with JoePa defenders. I admit that I find myself not wanting to believe the evidence, and I’m not even a Penn State fan. Clearly, the lure of the legend is powerful.
As I read ESPN’s article I was struck by the thought that Obama enjoys similar hagiography as JoePa. Case in point: Chris “thrill up my leg” Matthews recently commented that Obama was basically “perfect.” This from the same guy who said his job was to make Obama a successful president, and once compared Obama to Jesus. The Internet overflows with other examples of the cult-like support of Obama.
I believe that once a person buys in to a legend, in some ways they feel like they become a part of that legend. And they perpetuate and even grow that legend – and their own perceived role within it – through their own retelling. When this happens, their dedication to the legend becomes more powerful than the legend itself.
When people by in to a legend, they become incapable of seeing the truth. Anything which could shatter the legend is willfully ignored. Not just because it would destroy the legend itself, but also because it would mean the person’s investment into said legend would have been false from the beginning.
JoePa, Tiger Woods, Barack Obama. All legends, all recipients of blind hagiography.
The media really should wake up. I firmly believe that our leaders — regardless of party — should be treated tough by the media. Fair, but tough. There is no room for idolatry in a free country.
As the unnamed professor from Reilly’s commentary said, “What you media are doing is dangerous.” Yes, it is dangerous. Idolization allows Obama to be a lazy president and a weaker leader, which damages us both domestically and throughout the world. Media, take a lesson from the blind beatification of JoePa and do your damn job.
