Thread: Vetting Obama-Your Right To Know

Originally Posted by astralis

gunnut,



you ain't gonna beat dalem in the dirty sexual reference wars

Aww, shucks. Thanks.

-dale

I can try.

I see sending Burns to these talks as a political ploy to undercut Obama and make republicans seem less intransigent on talks, but this is the type of get together that leads to conditions, but settles nothing.

Policy Shift Seen in U.S. Decision on Iran Talks

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: July 17, 2008
PARIS — The decision by the Bush administration to send a senior American official to participate in international talks with Iran this weekend reflects a double policy shift in the struggle to resolve the impasse over the country’s nuclear program.

First, the Bush administration has decided to abandon its longstanding position that it will only meet face-to-face with Iran after it first suspends uranium enrichment as demanded by the United Nations Security Council.

Second, it infuses the negotiating track between Iran on the one side and the six global powers — France, Britain, Germany, Russia, China and the United States — on the other with new importance, even though their official stance is that no substantive talks can begin until the uranium enrichment stops.

The presence of William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, at the meeting led by Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, and Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator, in Geneva on Saturday brings with it both symbolic and substantive significance.

All of the Bush administration’s negotiating partners, particularly the Europeans and the Russians, have been pressing Washington to join the talks. They welcomed the decision to send Mr. Burns as an important signal by the Bush administration, in its final months in office, that it is seeking a peaceful solution to the nuclear crisis and not moving toward military action against Iran.

“We are awaiting the formal announcement from Washington, and if this is the case, we are very pleased by the administration’s decision,” said Cristina Gallach, Mr. Solana’s spokesman, in a telephone interview. “It is a clear signal to the Iranians of the engagement of the United States and its commitment to pursue a negotiated solution. At the same time, it is a clear message to the Iranians of the seriousness of this exercise.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice informed Mr. Solana by phone on Tuesday of the decision to send Mr. Burns, the State Department’s third-ranking official, to the talks, according to European officials who spoke on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules.

The officials added that the mere presence of an American at the table will help to still the rhetoric of those calling for military action against Iran because of both its recent expansion of its uranium enrichment program and its unwillingness to cooperate more fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency on explaining suspicious past nuclear activities.

Mr. Burns will neither meet privately nor negotiate directly with Mr. Jalili, administration and European officials said. They expect his attendance to be a one-time event in what are being described as “pre-negotiations” on the shape and timing of more substantive talks. Ms. Rice told Mr. Solana that Mr. Burns would be there “to listen,” one official added.

In Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and the country’s ultimate authority, said on Wednesday on state television that his country would not bow to any threat made during negotiations, Agence France-Presse reported.

“Iran has decided to take part in negotiations but it will not accept any threat,” the ayatollah was quoted as saying. He added, “Our red lines are clear and if the other parties respect the Iranian people, the dignity of the Islamic republic and these red lines, our officials will negotiate as long as no one makes any threats against Iran.”

Iran repeatedly has made clear that its “red lines” refer to its insistence that it has the right to peaceful nuclear energy as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including the enrichment of uranium.

American and Iranian envoys, including the American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, have met episodically in several face-to-face talks in Baghdad in an effort to discuss areas of common concern over Iraq.

But there have been very few other direct encounters between American and Iranian officials since relations between the two countries were severed following Iran’s seizure of the U.S. Embassy in late 1979 and its 15-month holding of 52 American hostages.

During the hostage crisis, President Carter once secretly sent Hamilton Jordan, his chief of staff, dressed in disguise as part of a parade of potential negotiators.

In 1986, President Reagan sent his former national security adviser, Robert C. McFarlane, on a secret arms-for hostages mission to Iran bearing gifts: a key-shaped chocolate cake from a kosher bakery in Tel Aviv and a Bible which Mr. Reagan had inscribed with a New Testament passage.

There were also unannounced mid-level contacts involving American and Iranian officials on the sidelines of six-country talks on Afghanistan in Geneva several years ago.

The one-day meeting in Geneva in a location to be arranged by the Swiss government will include the political directors of the five other countries involved in the Iran talks.

Earlier this month, Iran formally responded to a proposal of broad political and economic incentives by the six powers aimed at resolving the nuclear impasse, but ignored the key issue of its uranium enrichment activities.

Instead, the response, which came in a letter by Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki addressed to Mr. Solana and the six world powers, said that Iran would be willing to open a comprehensive negotiation with them.

That the letter was also addressed to Ms. Rice as well as the foreign ministers of the five other countries was seen as a sign of Iran’s willingness to engage directly with the United States and may have factored into the American decision to send Mr. Burns.

The letter, which has not been made public, said Iran’s policy on negotiations over its nuclear program was to “find common ground through logical and constructive actions” and a “positive attitude.” It also noted that there were “certain similarities” between a letter Mr. Mottaki presented to the United Nations earlier this year and the one presented as part of the incentives initiative last month by the six powers.

The letter also criticized Security Council sanctions against Iran as “illegal,” adding, “The time for negotiating from the condescending position of inequality has come to an end,” the Iranian response said, according to officials who have seen the document.

The letter was clearly aimed at getting a negotiating process started, and the six powers were not in a position to say no.

Under the incentives proposal offered to Iran, the two sides would agree to a mutual “freeze for freeze” under which Iran would not increas uranium enrichment activities and the six powers would not seek more international sanctions.

During this period, the two sides would work out the shape of further negotiations. For substantive negotiations to start, Iran first will have to halt its production of enriched uranium, which, depending on the enrichment level, can be used to produce electricity or fuel bombs.

On Monday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said that in the meeting this weekend, the two sides would discuss a “timetable” lasting a certain number of weeks in an effort to break the deadlock.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/wo...17iran.html?hp

Does America want a president it can't joke about? Anyone got any good one-liners for these deprived comedians?

May We Mock, Barack?

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 16, 2008 (New York Times)
WASHINGTON

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I interviewed Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for Rolling Stone a couple years ago, I wondered what Barack Obama would mean for them.

“It seems like a President Obama would be harder to make fun of than these guys,” I said.

“Are you kidding me?” Stewart scoffed.

Then he and Colbert both said at the same time: “His dad was a goat-herder!”

When I noted that Obama, in his memoir, had revealed that he had done some pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,” the two comedians began riffing about the dapper senator’s familiarity with drug slang.

Colbert: Wow, that’s a very street way of putting it. ‘A little blow.’

Stewart: A little bit of the white rabbit.

Colbert: ‘Yeah, I packed a cocktail straw of cocaine and had a prostitute blow it in my ear, but that is all I did. High-fivin.’ ’

Flash forward to the kerfuffle — and Obama’s icy reaction — over this week’s New Yorker cover parodying fears about the Obamas.

“We’ve already scratched thrift, candor and brevity off the list of virtues in this presidential cycle, so why not eliminate humor, too?” wrote James Rainey in The Los Angeles Times, suggesting “an irony deficiency” in Obama and his fans.

Many of the late-night comics and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing “buffoonish” about Obama — and because many in their audiences are intoxicated by him and resistant to seeing him skewered — he has not been flayed by the sort of ridicule that diminished Dukakis, Gore and Kerry.

“There’s a weird reverse racism going on,” Jimmy Kimmel said.

Carter also observed that there’s no easy comedic “take” on Obama, “like allegations of Bill Clinton’s womanizing, or President Bush’s goofy bumbling or Al Gore’s robotic personality.”

At first blush, it would seem to be a positive for Obama that he is hard to mock. But on second thought, is it another sign that he’s trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying? Or that eight years of W. and Cheney have robbed Democratic voters of their sense of humor?

Certainly, as the potential first black president, and as a contender with tender experience, Obama must feel under strain to be serious.

But he does not want the “take” on him to become that he’s so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can’t even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters are so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don’t mess with our messiah!

If Obama keeps being stingy with his quips and smiles, and if the dominant perception of him is that you can’t make jokes about him, it might infect his campaign with an airless quality. His humorlessness could spark humor.

On Tuesday, Andy Borowitz satirized on that subject. He said that Obama, sympathetic to comics’ attempts to find jokes to make about him, had put out a list of official ones, including this:

“A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, ‘I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.’ Barack Obama replies, ‘She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American dream.’ ”

John McCain’s Don Rickles routines — “Thanks for the question, you little jerk” — can fall flat. But he seems like a guy who can be teased harmlessly. If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he needs to be.

He’s already in danger of seeming too prissy about food — a perception heightened when The Wall Street Journal reported that the planners for Obama’s convention have hired the first-ever Director of Greening, the environmental activist Andrea Robinson. She in turn hired an Official Carbon Adviser to “measure the greenhouse-gas emissions of every placard, every plane trip, every appetizer prepared and every coffee cup tossed.”

The “lean ‘n’ green” catering guidelines, The Journal said, bar fried food and instruct that, “on the theory that nutritious food is more vibrant, each meal should include ‘at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white.’ (Garnishes don’t count.) At least 70% of the ingredients should be organic or grown locally, to minimize emissions from fuel during transportation.”

Bring it on, Ozone Democrats! Because if Obama gets elected and there is nothing funny about him, it won’t be the economy that’s depressed. It will be the rest of us.

I'm going to bump this thread because I found some lost papers on during Obama’s early political career-the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004, the period Obama seems least eager to talk about.

Here is just snippet:

No Hispanics Encroaching in Black Areas

When the 2000 census revealed dramatic growth in Chicago’s Hispanic and Asian populations alongside a decline in the number of African Americans, the Illinois black caucus was alarmed at the prospect that the number of blacks in the Illinois General Assembly might decline. At that point, Obama stepped to the forefront of the effort to preserve as many black seats as possible. The Defender quotes Obama as saying that, “while everyone agrees that the Hispanic population has grown, they cannot expand by taking African-American seats.”

The rest can be found at Bombshell: Howard Kurtz Discovers Obama's "Lost" Papers | The Patriot Room

Obama keeps reaching back to his Chicago political past for his policy advisers, and pulling one despicable, vile, and even evil “rabbit” after another out of his hat.

The list of Barack Obama’s radical associations is long and it keeps getting longer. Some are now well-known, but many are not.

They need to be.

We certainly could learn more about another of Barack Obama’s friends from Chicago, Penny Pritzker, who heads the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee. We can look into her own financial background and learn that not only was she the president of Superior Bank - which massively failed; and not only did she literally personally buy her way out of jail by paying a $460 MILLION dollar “fine”; but that she was at the very epicenter of what would become known as “the subprime loan scandal” that would come to eat this nation’s financial system alive.

We could look at former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, former head of Obama’s vice presidential selection committee until it was discovered that he had benefited from sweetheart loans from subprime king Countrywide.

The name Tony Rezko certainly ought to sound familiar.

The name William Ayers, terrorist bomber, Obama-co-lecturer, fellow board member, neighbor, and friend should certainly come to mind.

Now we find another Obama association that exposes a whole other ugly can of worms.

Chicago lawyer Mazen Asbahi, who was appointed as the national coordinator for Muslim American affairs by the Obama campaign (if this link fails you will know that the Obama campaign is continuing to scrub its website) less than two weeks ago, stepped down Monday after an Internet newsletter wrote about his brief stint on the fund’s board - which also included a fundamentalist imam - prompting The Wall Street Journal to email inquiries. Asbahi attempted to make his brief time on a board the issue, when the real issues were his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, and his 8-year long personal relationship with Hamas fundraiser Jamal Said.

Gee, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama. If you really want people to forget that you are the son of a Muslim father who served an incredibly brutal and corrupt Kenyan government; if you want them to forget that you attended a madrassa in Indonesia as a child and even practiced Islam; if you want them to forget that you campaigned in Kenya on behalf of your cousin, Raila Odinga, who relied upon chaos, corruption, and even violence in his campaign; numerous other troubling associations between yourself and radical Muslims; forget those photographs of you waling around in traditional Muslim clothes, well then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t hang around with Muslim radicals such as Mazen Asbahi and another radical pal of yours, the anti-Semite Rashid Khalidi.

It is frankly impossible for me to understand how Barack Obama managed to win the Democratic nomination. That so many Americans could care less about who their candidate really is - beyond the fact that he is the Democrat in the race - is simply amazing.

Obama Discovered With Yet Another Radical Association « American Sentinel

August 9th, 2008 at 12:26 pm

Obama appears to have a small lead. But he doesn’t come close to maximizing the Democratic vote. And there is some evidence that the balance of enthusiasm has shifted and that young people — who seemed to turn out and vote for Obama in unusually high numbers in the primaries and caucuses — are no long [sic] so enthusiastic about him.

The first bit of evidence comes from the July 10-13 ABC/Washington Post poll. It asked registered voters if they were “certain” to vote. Only 46 percent of voters under 30 said they were — substantially lower than the 66 percent who said so in the ABC/Washington Post poll taken Feb. 28-March 2, at a time when Obama was enjoying a string of primary and caucus victories and before the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright were circulated on youtube.com on March 13.

That is a 20 point drop in 5 months. Now that 46% may be a problem for Obama, especially since John Kerry (who, incidentally, served in Vietnam) received 47% of the 18-24 year old vote in 2004. If His Rockstarness can’t beat Lurch with the kids, he’s toast.

And attacking McCain as a worn out old geezer may just backfire. You see, worn out old geezers, a big McCain demographic, actually get their worn out old geezer asses to the polls.

The 46 percent of young voters saying in July they were certain to vote was far lower than the 79 percent of 65 and over voters who said they were.

Obama's All-Important Youth Vote Evaporating: 20 Point Drop Since March | The Patriot Room

As James Carville once said, "There's a name for candidates who depend on the youth vote--Losers!". :P

Well the youth vote was never going to tip the scale for Obama; too short an attention span. The "old geezer" vote is more reliable, and if Obama tries to play the age issue too much, look out. Obama will win the black vote, and the 18-25 year-olds, but those are not big groups. The white male, and over 50 vote will probably go to McCain, which leaves the middle-age moderate white woman voter as the swing--the Hillary voter. Obama needs it, Hillary can deliver it, but won't be on the ticket. It will be an interesting finish.

My predictions from 5 months ago are all coming true:

1. Obama will lose if he goes after the 10% and forgets about the other 90%.
2. Obama will lose if he relies on the youth vote. The youth don't vote.
3. Obama's church will come back to haunt him.

Originally Posted by Julie

It is frankly impossible for me to understand how Barack Obama managed to win the Democratic nomination. That so many Americans could care less about who their candidate really is - beyond the fact that he is the Democrat in the race - is simply amazing.

Obama Discovered With Yet Another Radical Association « American Sentinel

This is EXACTLY what I've been beating the drum about, people. In ANY rational time, place, or party, this nugget wouldn't be electable to ANY office. It passes my understanding how ANYbody out there does not simply die of shame to declare they're a Democrat, or to put an Obama '08 sign in their yard or a bumpersticker on their car.

For MY money, they may as well declare that they're paid-up-for-life members of NAMBLA, al Qaeda, or the Cali Cartel.

I will say it again: one simply cannot be 1) a Democrat, 2)well-informed, AND 3) patriotic, simultaneously.

Can't be done.

Julie:

We aren't gonna win with all these innuendo-filled articles and hand-wringing U-Tube clips.

We'll have to beat him on the issues, his flipping, and the experience factor. Contrast his reaction to McCain's on Russia's incursion into Georgia. Neatly ambivilent versus definitive denouncement.

Originally Posted by JAD_333

Julie:

We aren't gonna win with all these innuendo-filled articles and hand-wringing U-Tube clips.

We'll have to beat him on the issues, his flipping, and the experience factor. Contrast his reaction to McCain's on Russia's incursion into Georgia. Neatly ambivilent versus definitive denouncement.

You are absolutely right. Forgive me, I am a former Democrat, and it's hard to break those old tactical ways. I'll try to do better.