Barack Hussein Obama: Our Political Messiah?

I had to post this column by Kathleen Parker. She writes for the Washington Post Group, so she's as mainstream as you can get.

The column is the most precise explanation of Mr. Obama's unprecedented "American Idol" success as a political candidate. Ms. Parker accurately captures the broader cultural underpinnings of his attraction, and argues that he is the cusp of a new generation's self-expression through the political process.

She is absolutely correct.

If you want to understand how an out-of-nowhere candidate like Mr. Obama can torpedo the decades-long ambitions of Hills, read this article:

By Kathleen Parker

Much has been made of the religious tenor of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Reports of women weeping and swooning — even of an audience applauding when The One cleared his proboscis (blew his nose for you mortals) — have become frequent events in the heavenly realm of Obi-Wan Obama.

His rhetoric, meanwhile, drips with hints of resurrection, redemption and second comings. "We are the ones we've been waiting for," he said on Super Tuesday night. And his people were glad.

Actually, they were hysterical, the word that best describes what surrounds this young savior, and that may be more apt than we imagine. The word is derived from the Greek hystera, or womb. The ancient Greeks considered hysteria a psychoneurosis peculiar to women caused by disturbances of the uterus.

Well, you don't see any men fainting in Obi's presence.

Barack Obama has many appealing qualities, not least his own reluctance to be swaddled in purple. Nothing quite says "I'm only human" like whipping out a hankie and blowing one's nose in front of 17,000 admirers. The audience's applause was reportedly awkward, as if the crowd was both approving of anything their savior did, but a little disappointed at this rather ungodly behavior.

So what is the source of this infatuation with Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?

If anthropologists made predictions the way meteorologists do, they might have anticipated Obama's astronomical rise to supernova status in 2008 of the Common Era. Consider the cultural coordinates, and Obama's intersection with history becomes almost inevitable.

To play weatherman for a moment, he is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society in which fathers (both the holy and the secular) have been increasingly marginalized from the lives of a generation of young Americans.

All of these trends have been gaining momentum the past few decades. Social critic Christopher Lasch named the culture of narcissism a generation ago and cited addiction to celebrity as one of the disease's symptoms — all tied to the decline of the family.

That culture has merely become more exaggerated as spiritual alienation and fatherlessness have collided with technology (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) that enables the self-absorption of the narcissistic personality.

Grown-ups with decades under their double chins may have a variety of reasons for supporting Obama, but the youth who pack convention halls and stadiums as if for a rock concert constitute a tipping point of another order.

One of Obama's TV ads, set to rock 'n' roll, has a Woodstock feel to it. Text alternating with crowd scenes reads: "We Can Change The World" and "We Can Save The Planet."

Those are some kind of campaign promises. The kind no mortal could possibly keep, but never mind. Obi-Wan Obama is about hope — and hope, he'll tell you, knows no limits.

It is thus no surprise that the young are enamored of Obama. He's a rock star. A telegenic, ultra-bright redeemer fluent in the planetary language of a cosmic generation. The force is with him.

But underpinning that popularity is something that transcends mere policy or politics. It is hunger, and that hunger is clearly spiritual. Human beings seem to have a yearning for the transcendent — hence thousands of years of religion — but we have lately shied away from traditional approaches and old gods.

Thus, in post-Judeo-Christian America, the sports club is the new church. Global warming is the new religion. Vegetarianism is the new sacrament. Hooking up, the new prayer. Talk therapy, the new witnessing. Tattooing and piercing, the new sacred symbols and rituals.

And apparently, Barack Obama is the new messiah.

Here's how a 20-year-old woman in Seattle described that Obama feeling, "When he was talking about hope, it actually almost made me cry. Like it really made sense, like, for the first, like, whoa . . ."

This New Age glossolalia may be more sonorous than the guttural emanations from the revival tent, but the emotion is the same. It's all religion by any other name.

Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.

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KATHLEEN PARKER

Write Kathleen Parker, Washington Post Writer's Group, 115015th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071.

Sen. Barack Obama skewered by New York Times

The push-back on Sen. Barack Obama is beginning.

You can't tell first-tier information organizations to take a hike about their concerns over the honesty of the candidate's pronouncements and practices forever.

On Jan. 1, 2008, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post spelled this out to his readers. He was commenting on the way the Obama camp ignores the truth and repeats lies that they know are lies. There is no way to sugar-coat this: Barack Obama is a pathological liar.

Mr. Cohen first lays out the foundation of Mr. Obama's twisted sense of truth and lies, then delivers a haymaker about the senator's staff and its treatment of Michael Dobbs, a one-man truth squad at the Post: "I and others have written that Obama -- as he himself says in the introduction to this book -- invented composite characters and altered chronology. But as the Chicago Tribune also reported, some of the events Obama passionately details seem not to have happened at all. Maybe his memory played tricks on him. Mine sure does . . .

" . . . So the cavalier dismissal of Dobbs, The Post's truth-hunter, is troubling. Since he writes that the Obama campaign would not comment, it is reasonable to assume that it doesn't give a damn -- that this is a little matter and the candidate is engaged in something grand. The phony statistic is, in its way, like a composite. There's a larger truth here, get it?"

Sooner or later - in this case sooner - journalists and opinion writers start a drumbeat that reverberates outward to smaller markets and niche audiences.

David Brooks of the New York Times took up the beat in his Feb. 19, 2008 column entitled, "When the Magic Fades."

He writes within a framework of satirical reference to Mr. Obama's cultish popularity. Mr. Brooks refers to him in prior paragraphs as The Chosen One; His Hopeness; The Hope Pope; and the Trophy Messiah.

Further down the column, he writes a tip-off about where he is headed next: "As the syndrome progresses, they begin to ask questions about The Presence himself."

Asking questions about Barack Obama is exactly where this is all headed. As I wrote previously, the national desks at the first-tier print publications lacked the budget necessary to flesh out Mr. Obama's past, and compare his autobiographical story line to the documentable reality of his life.

But with him in the lead, the money is flowing freely to researchers who are the unseen power behind the executive editor's throne. With web-induced 24/7 news cycles, writers are under around-the-clock deadline pressures to turn out fresh stories and update older ones.

You can't write under the gun like that and still do quality research on your own. Professional researchers are the gatekeepers who decide what to give - or withhold - from journalists. They are the real power that decides what the journalists and editors have to work with, and therefore they control content from the time the article is on the news budget until it prints.

But keep that to yourself. Professional researchers want editors and journalists to believe that editors and journalists are in control. But never forget that editors and journalists only have the research that is gathered by researchers for them. It's a bit of a Flip Wilson routine where life imitates art: What you see (on your desk from your researchers) is what you get (to document your story and send it off to layout for publishing in print and on the web.)

I spell all this out so you can put the arrogant attitude of the Obama camp towards the Post's Mr. Dobbs into its proper perspective. Once Mr. Obama stiffed Mr. Dobbs, it set off what is going to grow into a mad rush to find everything out there that is a negative for Mr. Obama.

This very second, researchers are thinking - expressed borrowing lines voiced by Randy Hayes of the parody troupe My Way Entertainment, "This guy must be crazy. Doesn't he know who we are? We're the Juggernaut! We control the flow of information to editors and journalists. They write from whatever we give to them."

That power is why Mr. Obama is now beginning to get pricked by columnists; telling a news organization's researchers - the keeper of the information gates at that organization - where to get off is telling the columnist where to get off.

The American Idol cult can carry a candidate for a while, but the candidate will always reach a point when he or she must talk one-on-one with journalists.

When that point is reached the journalist will be armed with whatever the researcher provided. It may be good - or - it may be bad. The candidate's relationship with the journalist's researchers determine whether the researchers decide to use this captive interview occasion to get pay-backs for the way the researchers were treated by the candidate and his or her staff in the past.

Looking at the way Mr. Obama handled Mr. Dobbs, I can safely say Sen. Obama doesn't get it.

With that foundation laid, we return to Mr. Brooks, who continues writing that, "Barack Obama vowed to abide by the public finance campaign-spending rules in the general election if his opponent did. But now he’s waffling on his promise. Why does he need to check with his campaign staff members when deciding whether to keep his word?

"Obama says he is practicing a new kind of politics, but why has his PAC sloshed $698,000 to the campaigns of the superdelegates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics? Is giving Robert Byrd’s campaign $10,000 the kind of change we can believe in?"

It gets worse for Mr. Obama: "And should we be worried about Obama’s mountainous self-confidence?

"These doubts lead O.C.S. (Obama Comedown Syndrome) sufferers down the path to the question that is the Unholy of the Unholies for Obama-maniacs: How exactly would all this unity he talks about come to pass?

"How is a 47-year-old novice going to unify highly polarized 70-something committee chairs? What will happen if the nation’s 261,000 lobbyists don’t see the light, even after the laying on of hands? Does The Changemaker have the guts to take on the special interests in his own party — the trial lawyers, the teachers’ unions, the AARP?

"The Gang of 14 created bipartisan unity on judges, but Obama sat it out. Kennedy and McCain created a bipartisan deal on immigration. Obama opted out of the parts that displeased the unions. Sixty-eight senators supported a bipartisan deal on FISA. Obama voted no. And if he were president now, how would the High Deacon of Unity heal the breach that split the House last week?"

The way I expect this to play out is that a number of Times' columnists will continue to do a hatchet job on Sen. John McCain. It doesn't have any choice because the Times has to cover itself with its core constituencies organized along racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation lines.

In just the past week, Frank Rich wrote "The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama;" Roger Cohen wrote, "A Realist Called Obama;" and Maureen Dowd penned, "To Catch a Thief."

Ultimately, those columnists will have to explain why they are dissing Sen. McCain while giving Sen. Obama a free pass on the personal integrity score.

Ultimately, the Gray Lady will tell her lover to tell her the truth about himself.

She'll demand it.

But she won't get it.

Because for her to get it, Barack Obama has to get it first.
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Sen. Barack Obama fails FactCheck.org scrutiny

I received this email from FactCheck.org - a respected independent verifier of all sorts of statements put out to the public. Specifically, they are Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

As I continue to write, it is not the lies that come from the mouth of Sen. Obama that demonstrate a lack of integrity - sometimes speakers make mistakes.

The problem with Sen. Obama is that he will continue to make lying statements in the face of knowing they are lying statements.

It is the fact that he will lie - knowing he is lying - that is the fatal character flaw.

As for sourcing, I don't know of anyone who believes an Ivy League university is part and parcel of some "right-wing conspiracy."

FactCheck.org is trusted in the research circles of the first-tier information organizations.

Please visit

http://factcheck.org/

to see what they do and how they do it.

The unedited text of the email is reproduced below:

Dear Subscriber: We have posted an important update to yesterday's article regarding competing claims about the Obama and Clinton healthcare plans. We find a new ad by Obama to be misleading and in one respect false.

The following is the new material we added today:

Summary:

* Update, Feb. 15: A new Obama ad in Wisconsin misrepresents the words of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, falsely claiming he said the Obama plan produced greater savings than the Clinton plan.


Analysis:

Obama's Misleading Ad

Update, Feb. 15: This section was added after our original item was posted.

The Obama campaign released a new ad Feb. 14 in Wisconsin called "Debate," quoting Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, as saying Obama’s plan covers “more people” than Clinton's. We find the ad misleading and, in one respect, false.

Obama Ad: "Debate"

Narrator: After 18 debates, with two more coming, Hillary says Barrack Obama’s ducking debates?

It’s the same old politics of phony charges and false attacks.

On health care, even Bill Clinton’s own labor secretary says Obama covers more people than Hillary, and does more to cut costs, saving twenty-five hundred dollars for the typical family.

Obama’s housing plan? It stems foreclosures and cracks down on crooked lenders. That’s change we can believe in.

Obama: I’m Barrack Obama and I approved this message.


It’s true that Reich expressed the opinion <http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-is-hrc-stooping-so-low.html> on his blog back on Dec. 3 that Obama's plan covers "more people" than Clinton's. That was in an item criticizing Clinton for “stooping . . . low” to attack Obama for wanting to bolster Social Security’s finances and for not including a mandate in his health-care plan:

Reich, Dec. 3, 2007: I’ve compared the two plans in detail. Both of them are big advances over what we have now. But in my view Obama’s would insure more people, not fewer, than HRC’s. That’s because Obama’s puts more money up front and contains sufficient subsidies to insure everyone who’s likely to need help – including all children and young adults up to 25 years old.

More recently, however, Reich has not been so emphatic. In a Jan. 13 item he found the plans of Obama and Clinton to be “the same” in almost every important respect. While on Dec. 3 he said he thought Obama's plan would cover more people because it "puts more money up front," by Jan. 13 he said that all Democratic plans "spend nearly an identical amount of money." On the question of whether Clinton or Obama's position on mandates is best, he said <http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2008/01/democrats-should-stop-squabbling-over.html> , “Who's correct? It's hard to know.” He urged the Democratic candidates to “stop squabbling over healthcare mandates.”

Reich did not, however, state in any of his blog items that the Obama plan "does more to cut costs" or that it saves $2,500 for the typical family. Those are claims made by the Obama campaign, not by Reich as the ad falsely claims. And we're skeptical of the claims that both Clinton and Obama make about the lavish savings their plans would produce, for reasons we get to later in this article.

Reich is a professor of public policy and has been in a running feud with another liberal professor, Paul Krugman, a Yale economist who writes a column for the New York Times and who has been attacking Obama and his healthcare plan in that space and on his own blog. Reich’s most recent word on the subject, in fact, is headlined “Krugman Still Has it Wrong on Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s Health Care Plans <http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2008/02/krugman-still-has-it-wrong-on-obamas.html> ,” which simply refers readers back to his Jan. 13 posting which says it’s “hard to know” which is best.

We note here that both Reich and Krugman are best known for their liberal commentary and neither is a specialist in healthcare economics. Also, Reich states in his Jan. 13 article that “Only around 3% of the population” would be left without health insurance in the absence of mandated coverage for adults. He doesn’t say where he got this figure. We find that hard to reconcile with the hard fact that millions of Americans are currently eligible for cheap health insurance and still don’t sign up for it. As mentioned earlier, for example, about three-quarters of the 9 million uninsured children in the U.S. are eligible for SCHIP or Medicaid, and Gruber estimates that about 7 million adults don’t take advantage of the health insurance their employers offer now. We therefore give more weight to the estimates of Sheils and Gruber than to Reich's.

Note: For the full article including video of the ads, please see our Web site:

Desktop users <http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/theyve_got_you_covered.html>

Mobile users <http://www.factcheck.org/mobile/article.php?id=487>

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Sen. Barack Obama: It's time to test the DNA

In reviewing some of the many comments I've received about the ethnic composition of Barack Obama, the range of social intercourse has come from every imaginable angle.

I've had pictures taken from Mr. Obama's so-called "African Tour" purporting to show just how black the people who live in the area of his father's birth are, Ph.D. level dissertations on the Luo tribe and its interaction with the Arab slave trader forefathers of Mr. Obama, to opinions that this controversy shows the madness of trying to run a "Melting Pot" society with ethnic labels pasted on the foreheads of its citizens.

In reading this range of thought, I've come to believe the Big Scoop on this topic will come when someone grabs something with Mr. Obama's DNA smeared on it, then runs it to a lab for analysis.

I'm serious about that. There is no better proof available in our time than a DNA test.

The challenge is, however, who will hang the bell on the cat's tail - when Secret Service agents, local law enforcement, and big-bruiser bodyguards keep everyone but the pre-screened supporters too far away to get something suitable for testing.

DNA analysis is not my field. So I'm stuck with only what I've been told about it; I hope one of you reading this will send in a comment to flesh out the hows, and what the results can tell us.

I'm thinking that the most vulnerable time for Mr. Obama will be when he makes local talk radio and TV appearances.

It's not hard to imagine a resourceful soul getting what the DNA analysts need: "Here you are, Sen. Obama, have a glass of water, and here's a kerchief to wipe your brow to keep the sweat from rolling down your face . . . and I'll be happy to dispose of the glass and kerchief when you're finished."

Of course, now that I've laid out the scenario, it will be interesting to see what his traveling campaign staff does to keep anyone from doing what I just described. I'm not so unaware of the early timeline nature of this ethnic composition problem; right now, I seriously doubt anyone at that level of his campaign knows anything about this fermenting in the blogs.

What that means to our resourceful soul is that there is no better time than now to get a sample. Once his staff gets wind of this, they will lock out everyone else from getting anything that can be tested.

But the irony of it all is that by turning themselves into a cross of Mr. Clean, and Rosie "The Quicker Picker Upper," picking up anything he breathed upon and spraying Lysol on everything he touches, they will actually be telling us all that they know that what we want to prove is the truth.

The bizarre picture of his staff behaving that way will just turn up the heat for someone to get through their lines. I can see some first-tier journalist telling the senator's press secretary, "I just want this dinner napkin to take home to my kids as a souvenir."

Now that will be funny.

If you have the ability to get something that can be analyzed, please do so at your first opportunity. It really does matter. You will be doing a tremendous "good deed" for America, and the world.

Be sure to establish a "chain of custody" from his body to the lab. You know Sen. Obama will lie about everything having to do with getting to the truth about him.

And when he does that, it will bring more attention to it. The goal here is to create such a level of interest that the first-tier information organizations are forced to deal with the issue. Be sure to be nice to them by giving them a loophole big enough for a 747 to explain away why they never thought of this first. They will be incredibly grateful to you for that loophole.

If the test came up as I researched, with a African Negro component less than the federal threshold of 12.5%, then Sen. Obama will have a major problem on his hands.

Unlike his non-votes of "Present" in the Illinois State Senate when bombshell issues arrived at his doorstep and he couldn't take an honest stand one way or the other on them, a DNA test will be published, it will have the necessary scientific gravitas to demand attention from the first-tier information organizations; he can't duck out and hide.

I don't know who will get the sample for testing, but now that the idea is out in the open, it will be only a matter of time until it happens.

And to whomever this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity graces, get yourself a great lawyer when the results come back to you. I can assure you that Sen. Obama will do everything he can to lock you down.

But like little white spots on the front of a dress, this sample of DNA will also bring a political life of lies to a sudden end. "Hell hath no fury" like an ethnic constituency played for fools.
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Answering Comments about Sen. Barack Obama

Receiving the flood of comments about the Obama research is highly complementary. Thanks to all who take the time to write and share their thoughts.

I also want to thank those who are posting my research, or are linking to this blog. I'm open to cross-linking to your site if you will submit the information I need to post to get readers to your site. Please send it to the Comments with the way you want your name to appear to readers, and of course, the http:// address of your site.

Back to the subject of replying to comments, I want to toss out that I do work 10 - 12 hours daily, under tight deadline pressure. Because of that, I will not be able to do the following:

1) Post comments immediately;

2) Answer comments immediately;

3) Put as many words into my replies as those writing may be able to do with their writing.

I'm open to those who agree, and those who disagree. Generally speaking, I will answer comments in the evening or in the late night / early morning hours when I've finished my day's work. Please be patient.

I know from posting messages myself how anxious a person can become looking for their comment, and a reply. I ask your understanding that I lack the luxury of time needed to converse with so many thoughtful people. If my reply is short, please don't take that as anything but the pressures that I work under sapping time for replying to comments.

I'm finding many of the comments fascinating, and appreciate the intellectual energy, combined with mutually respectful language. Even if you disagree with me, if your comment is thought provoking, or edifying, or entertaining, I'll share it as a matter of boosting the overall intellectual interaction.

By the way, if you see a comment and want to address that individual in your comment, feel free to do so. So long as they are elevated to the level of sincere discourse, they will get out for others to read. Caveat: I don't publish flaming posts.

One last point: I explained in a previous post the way my hands may be tied vis a vis what I can write. Please keep in mind those issues when you comment and seek a reply.

"Thank you!" in advance to all who consider my timelines and cooperate.
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Barack Obama: Presidency Now American Idol?

From a couple of the comments I just received, I can see where this is headed concerning wanting the root research I used for my post about Sen. Barack Obama's ethnic composition.

I am going to share with you what I just wrote to another correspondent, and I'm putting it out here as a post so no one can say they didn't see it because it was done as a reply to the comments about the Obama article.

I feel what follows is as straight-forward as I can be about this; if anyone disagrees, post a $US1-million indemnification bond for me to use when I get sued for going beyond my rights under standard research contracting agreements by giving away proprietary information that isn't mine to give away.

Here is what I wrote:

"Please convey to her I'm not in a position to take on the deep pockets of News Corp.

"I have to reveal what I can in a manner that keeps me out of court. That is why I stated in the letter to Mr. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post that it was initiated by a News Corp. property - please convey I'm not in a position to have my professional reputation trashed for violating contractual agreements on use.

"I've written the article as I have to keep myself out of that litigation.

"My goal in this is to provoke other information enterprises to launch their own research guided by the map I laid out in the article. I told everyone where to go look for the records - the Kenyan government! I've spelled out to everybody where to find the correct filing cabinet - now I hope someone will open the drawer on their own and report what they find. That is why I articulated my offer to Mr. Cohen as an academic endeavor when I discussed having the Washington Post's researchers "document my documentation." Can anyone spell it out any more clearly?

"I feel she will understand my situation, and appreciate that I have done everything but file a summons against myself in taking this as far as I have in this article. I'm not in any position to get papers telling me to appear before some Court of Civil Record in New York City."

Now then, that's the situation I'm in.

I am well-aware of this as an issue - I stated this is "radioactive," and a political "nuclear bomb." I land research assignments from the people I listed because I fully appreciate those concepts in the research I render.

So here is where it is: I've drawn the map - to the detail I feel comfortable is going to keep me out of court. Beyond that, it is up to people way up the food chain from me to assign their resources, put them on a plane to Kenya, dig up what they need in the capital, then contract for service to the tribal homeland in western Kenya along Lake Victoria, and then report what they find.

What I've written below is as far as I can take it under the present circumstances.

If that doesn't satisfy you, then there is nothing I can do for you. I'm not going to be stampeded, or intimidated, into throwing away my professional and financial life over Sen. Barack Obama's very well-documented proclivity to lie without conscience. Read the Chicago Tribune's hyperlink below, and that alone should give you more than enough reason to doubt anything else he says about himself, his life - and his ethnic composition.

But toss in the hyperlinks to Mr. Cohen's columns, and the work of Post factchecker Michael Dobbs if you really want it beat into your brain.

When the candidate's hometown paper publishes an article with 40 interviews, all saying that the candidate lied, and the WashPost's most open-minded columnist brings it up, then brings it up again when his paper's factchecker gets blown off by the Obama campaign manager, then what I'm writing is icing on the cake. I'm certainly not the first - and most certainly will not be the last - to document the reality of Mr. Obama's pathological lying.

Let me put it this way: The only reason Mr. Obama doesn't have a longer track record of lying about his life is because he has only been in the US Senate for barely more than a year - so who cares about these things when he was in the Illinois State Senate?

Nobody cared about his veracity before now.

The Chicago Tribune's investigation into the lies in his autobiography started out as a puff piece about the hometown boy who made good. Nobody checked on the autobiography's contents before then; what started as a puff piece turned into a revelation of endless lies. Editors were shocked to find out how badly they, and the community, had been duped by the senator.

They entitled the piece, "The not-so-simple story of Barack Obama's youth." I pulled a couple of the top paragraphs to give you the feel of what the Tribune found:

"In his best-selling autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama describes having heated conversations about racism with another black student, "Ray." The real Ray, Keith Kakugawa, is half black and half Japanese.

"In an interview with the Tribune on Saturday, Kakugawa said he always considered himself mixed race, like so many of his friends in Hawaii, and was not an angry young black man.

"He said he does recall long, soulful talks with the young Obama and that his friend confided his longing and loneliness. But those talks, Kakugawa said, were not about race.

"Not even close," he said, adding that Obama was dealing with "some inner turmoil" in those days."But it wasn't a race thing," he said. "Barry's biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is [bull]."

"Then there's the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don't exist, say the magazine's own historians."

A few paragraphs later, the article returns to the Life magazine lie to expand upon it, and their findings. Please note that Mr. Obama retells this story "in remarkable detail." So he tells a story in remarkable detail, but the truth is that the issue of Life magazine he describes never existed.

Law enforcement officers will tell you that one of the first tell-tale signs that a suspect is lying is that they tell their story "in remarkable detail."

See this now for yourself in the case of Mr. Obama's so-called racial epiphany:

"Memories of a racial awakening?

"Obama has told the story--one of the watershed moments of his racial awareness--time and again, in remarkable detail.

"He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with her new husband, Lolo Satori, a few years earlier. One day while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine.

"He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an "ambush attack."

"The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled.

"I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation," Obama wrote of the magazine photos in "Dreams."

"Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, "It might have been an Ebony or it might have been ... who knows what it was?" (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)"

I think that by now everyone reading this post should be getting the idea.

Keep in mind Mr. Obama had only been sworn in as a US Senator 2 months earlier. Less than 14 days later, he declared himself a candidate running for president. That's not enough time to find out the truth about any politician, especially in this era of near bankrupt newsroom budgets.

And now, he has been a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination for - and think this through - for what; 8 weeks maybe?

We're going to turn the White House over to a guy we've only just met, and really began to care about doing serious research, for just about two months? Nobody took him seriously to beat Hills until the last 60 days. And with the depressed economy and budgets slashed everywhere, that means no news organizations at the first-tier put any research money into finding out the truth about him because nobody thought he would turn into an American Idol running for president.

I am not the only responsible researcher in America that is in complete shock to think that the presidency is totally devolved into an electoral version of American Idol.

This cultish passion for him reminds me of the bizarre trip when that skinny guy from India with the wierd long hair was being touted into a cult following to win that contest.

Do we really know any more about Barack Obama's mind, or the truth of his background, or the most important thing of all: the truth of his promises and policies - than we knew about the skinny guy's ability to sing?

No, we don't. Nobody has, until now, put any money into finding out because nobody realized just how intellectually shallow the American electorate has become. You could substitute pictures of 12-year old girls swooning for the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show and have exactly what you see today for Obama.

Yeah, it's gone downhill that far. I read just today stories about people fainting in his presence. The Beatles on Ed Sullivan; Barack Obama on the stump. You tell me the difference on the faces of the crowds in those pictures.

So that's what it's down to: the presidency of the United States is reduced to a spin-off of American Idol.

OK, so I sit here, knowing what I know, knowing this guy is a liar and self-hater from the get-go, obsessed with telling the world how black he is to repress the reality that he isn't black - and I'm confronted with the question: "How do I get it out there without getting sued - or worse - getting struck from the list of every client of mine out there for committing the cardinal sin of going from behind the researcher's curtain to being in front?"

They don't pay me to be out front. That's not what researchers for news organizations do. Researchers are never seen or heard. When have you ever seen a news organization's researchers put out in front?

Never.

But to know what I know - not just this, but so much else - what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to just let American Idol get to put his finger on the button? Just let American Idol pay off the Chicago connections with senior level positions after he is elected when I know they are nothing but David Dukes in black skin?

For those who are open minded and understand my situation - "Thank you."

For those who fail to appreciate my situation, then you'll just have to continue to fail to appreciate my situation.

I've been an open book about this, and now others with the resources needed must rise to cover the story with their "original" efforts - hopefully made highly concise by the road map I drew in this post, and in the earlier one below.
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Thanks to Mr. Mustin for this correction on Obama

I received a note from a Mr. Mustin in California noting that I left out a "great" in front of the bloodline of Sen. Obama's father. My thanks for his sharp-eyed notice.

That led to a rewrite of the paragraph to make the concept easier to communicate. It now reads:

"Mr. Obama is 50% Caucasian, that from his mother. What those who want Mr. Obama to write history by becoming "America's first African-American president" ignore is that his father was ethnically Arabic, with only 1 relative ethnically African Negro - a maternal great-grandparent (Sen. Obama's great-great grandparent, thus the 6.25% ethnic contribution to the senator's ethnic composition.).

"That means that Mr. Obama is 50% Caucasian from his mother's side. He is 43.75% Arabic, and 6.25% African Negro from his father's side.

"Put another way, his father could honestly claim African-American ethnic classification. He was the last generation able to do so.

"Sen. Obama could honestly say, "My father was African-American." Racist presumptions led an Ivy League admissions committee, and lazy "newspapers of record" factcheckers, to presume that if his father is African-American, then Sen. Obama must be African-American also.

"But it doesn't work that way. Racist presumptions coupled with sloppy vetting don't turn a lie into the truth.

"Sen. Obama is one generation too far removed from the ethnic African Negro input to make the same claim as his father, Harvard's Admission's stamp of approval notwithstanding.

"As you can see for yourself, Sen. Obama's African-American ethnic claim, when properly researched and documented, is a lie."

My thanks to you for helping proof this critically important research. The post that follows contains this corrected information.
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Ghosts of the Scottsboro Boys hover over Durham

It might do Durham good to step back from the trees, and see how the forest looks through the out-of-state eyes of a born and breed Southerner.

I’ve never seen anything in my 34-year journalism career that compares to the apparent racism, motivated by the desire for political gain, that fuels the Duke lacrosse team’s rape accusations. The only high-profile analogy I know is Alabama’s attempt to lynch, legally of course, the Scottsboro Boys in 1931.

Douglas O. Linder, the Elmer Powell Peer Professor of Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City School of Law, wrote about that trial (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scottsboro/scottsb.htm):

“No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931.

“Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the ‘Scottsboro Boys,’ as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes . . . and divided America's political left.”

The parallels already scream at us. First, now, as then, did a crime occur?

There is already more than enough reasonable doubt from evidence made public. Thank the unrelenting efforts of your local journalists digging out the truth, despite the best efforts of District Attorney Mike Nifong, and your police chief, Steven Chalmers, to hide it from you.

This is the First Amendment and Government in the Sunshine protecting you from the state’s police power. Keep that in mind when you complain about the Founding Fathers, and subsequent state legislators, putting them in place.

The latest public revelation proves defendant Reade Seligmann was nowhere near the accuser’s claimed rape location.

The only time for the DA’s crime theory of the rape is 12:10 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. Time-stamped digital photos of the accuser eliminate all other times.

The Grand Jury’s indictment claims Mr. Seligmann, “willfully and feloniously, did ravish and carnally know” the accuser “by force and against her will.” Further, he kidnapped her, “for the purposes of terrorizing her and facilitating the commission of the felonies . . .”

To be true, the defendant had to pull off those crimes in less than four minutes. That’s all the time there is once you know Mr. Seligmann’s cell phone proves he called a taxi at 12:14 a.m., left the scene at 12:19 a.m., hit his ATM at 12:24 a.m., and digitally checked into his dorm room at 12:49 a.m.

Going back to those digital photos, the other defendant, Collin Finnerty, doesn’t show up in any of them. It’s reasonable to ask why he doesn’t.

Something else doesn’t show up either: neither his DNA, nor the DNA of anybody else who is white and on the Duke lacrosse team shows up on the accuser - the accuser who was supposedly brutally beaten, raped, and sodomized.

Mr. Nifong’s sleight-of-hand explanation was the rapists wore long sleeves and jackets. Mr. Nifong is no magician; his trick doesn’t work once you know the digital photos prove they wore short sleeves.

I don’t know anyone who believes him any longer. Regardless, Mr. Nifong said he is going for a third defendant.

File as he wills, without a miraculous recovery, he, the police chief, the judge who presides, and every other person whose fingerprints end up on this case, will become infamous. Their legacy will be on par with those involved with the Scottsboro Boys.

Just as Jim Crow didn’t leave town until whites stopped lying about their racist apartheid policies against blacks, this DA’s travesty won’t end until those blacks and their white allies organizing the daily protests stop lying about appearing to be the “new whites” persecuting the “new blacks.” Just as in the Scottsboro Boys case, it’s all about the color of a person’s skin.

Anyone will understand why Mr. Nifong isn’t taking interview appointments. If the truth, mined by journalists, continues to show his actions are as ill bent as they all appear to be so far, he’ll likely face charges of malicious prosecution. If that happens, the chief may well join him in the dock.

It’s time for the governor or attorney general to pull the plug on Mr. Nifong and Chief Chalmers. North Carolina’s commitment to eliminating racism in the criminal justice system is on trial across America and around the world.

So far, Durham looks to join 1931 Alabama as guilty of racist motivations.

Mr. Nifong’s political ambitions are destroying lives, careers, the university, and the community itself. The police chief appears as his accomplice. But justice will come.

Just as it did for those who persecuted the Scottsboro Boys.

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They want to be Americans - They are just like us

The biggest political rally in recent memory: More than 1,000 people showed up at the Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza Monday on the immigration issue. Just as the Civil Rights Movement caught up Pensacola then, this one catches Pensacola now.

Already people speak about what “they” want from “us.”

After Ivan, people hailed the presumed Mexicans a Godsend. Not that they were all actually Mexican nationals; if their skin was brown they got the label. Born off the beaches of Santa Rosa County, USA, or Santa Rosa, Peru, no one I know asked to see a Green Card from the people putting our lives back together.

But before long, anti-brown fever began to spread.

You know its symptoms: They walked late night in “gangs” at food stores, startling us. They spoke a language foreign to us; were they talking about us, laughing at us, plotting against us?

They were hard-working dirty, paid with big rolls of cash, and seemed too loud, or too quiet, for us.

We liked the idea they worked for cheap. We didn’t think the contractors were cheap; we thought they were legalized extortionists. But, we said to ourselves, just think what the price would be if they didn’t hire that cheap Mexican labor.

The brown-skinned profile shrank when many headed west, itinerant manual labor in Katrina’s ravaging wake.

But many stayed. Many, many more than many non-Hispanics ever imagined.

When 1,000 gathered in the plaza, it shocked many non-Hispanics. “They” were still here. And they wanted to stay here.

On the intellectualized level of theory and photographic images recalled from youth, immigration doesn’t bother white non-Hispanics. The word conjures up old daguerreotypes of huddled masses -- Italian, Russian, Irish, German, and Slavic, mixed among the other European bloodlines flooding Ellis Island.

But Monday’s rally replaced theory and nostalgia with visible reality. It brought home that these immigrants don’t look like us. They don’t speak like us.

Their real crime is that they don’t fit into the mental pictures of immigrants at Ellis Island whose progeny is us.

The Founding Fathers instructed us about becoming an American. The 1790 Naturalization Act made it crystal clear.

If you were free, white, and male, lived on this side of the border for two years – no matter how you got here, with one year lived in any particular state, territory, or district, didn’t break any laws, and told a court of record you swear allegiance to the US Constitution, you are a bona fide US citizen.

No muss, no fuss, no multi-billion dollar bureaucracies.

The dirty little secret of immigration legislation your congressman won’t confess is the law only changes when they – the immigrants who don’t look like the current us group in power, becomes too visible.

History tells the truth, even if the members of Congress don’t.

The 1798 Naturalization Act increased residency to 14 years. Why? Because the Federalists wanted to keep French and Irish immigrants from becoming citizens. They voted Democratic-Republican. America’s second revolution, the election of 1800, swept it away when Congress repealed it in 1802.

The law didn’t change significantly until 1882. Congress declared they, Chinese in America, were taking the West away from us. The Chinese Exclusion Act’s motivation is self-evident.

Congress passed The Immigration Act of 1917 to protect us from Asiatic and British Indian geographic zones -- unless the immigrant was white. They could come in; they were like us.

Eugenicist Madison Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race promoting northern European superiority maintained through racial hygiene, focused the next two changes.

By 1921, Grant inspired Congress to believe they who threatened us were southern and eastern Europeans. The Emergency Quota Act cut their allowable numbers by 75 percent. The 1924 Immigration Quota Act squeezed them further. If that’s your heritage, be glad your grandfolks got in, before Congress kept them out.

Since World War II, Congress has passed more immigration acts than it did in the entire prior history of America. Each new bill worsens the situation’s downward death spiral.

Dan McFaul, US Rep. Jeff Miller’s brilliant public front man, brought home the issue’s tortured convulsions of corkscrew thinking. We knew they wouldn’t take the Republic away from us because his boss, courageously, “supports legal immigration.”

So who doesn’t? It was a no-brainer embarrassment of a brain-dead position.

He could respect our intelligence enough to say that just like every other immigration fight from the moment our nation was born, this one is about the fear that they will take away our lifestyle and power from us.

There are two lessons here. First, this is the Founding Fathers’ American Dream: After two years, if you abide by our laws and then swear to support our Constitution on the record in open court, you are a bona fide American. They never passed any law making the act of being here, by itself, a crime.

The second is shorter, but incredibly more powerful: The Hispanics in the Plaza are exactly what our Founding Fathers wanted. They want to be Americans.

They are just like us.
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Kenneth E. Lamb hosts the news-interview program “Sunday Morning” broadcast on NewsTalk 1370 WCOA, produced in cooperation with the Pensacola News Journal.

Find the entire index of various blogs at his Blogger Profile (http://www.blogger.com/profile/14444338) or visit his personal site, KennethELamb.com for great portal links and his full bio.

Glat Kosher - why Hecht's Bookstore is always your first call!

I don’t usually plug a business, but this time I’m going to make an exception. I’m going to order two mezuzahs for my home and office, two hamsas for the same, and some other items along those lines.

Stay with me for a minute, and you’ll see where this is heading. Whether you are Jewish or Gentile you need this information. I’m going to tell you where I go to get those types of things, and why you should make this business your first call whenever you are shopping for such items.

I’m an Apostolic Christian. I’m not going to go into a theological discussion or explanation about it at this point; I offer that up to say that as a Gentile and student of Classical Judaism, I’m always looking for authentic Jewish resources.

Back beginning in 1993, when I started working for the Jewish Information Network, based in NYC, Cantor Beck, president of the JIN, introduced me to Rabbi Shalom Hecht, owner of Hecht’s Bookstore, and the C & S Skullcap Company, at 1265 Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn.

As the only Gentile to work for the JIN, (it is a conserva-dox oriented organization focused on Jewish education and stopping assimilation), in addition to being a researcher and author, I was the Shabbat Goy. Call your rabbi, or a rabbi, for the details about that. At any rate, let’s just say it is fun getting to talk to the best and the brightest at The Yeshiva University, the Israeli government, at Jewish organizations, scholars, rabbis, and civic leaders – among a host of other categories and people.

Back to Hecht’s. If you want anything Judaica, anything in reference works, anything for your shul – or for your church, or whatever it is that you call your place where you worship the god of your understanding, anything in clothing, anything for gifts, items for the home or business . . . you get the drift, anything Jewish – and you want to know it is pure orthodox, glat kosher . . . you want to go to this web site: http://www.gotjudaica.com/.

Make sure you Bookmark it (Firefox, Netscape, Opera) - or share it to your Favorites (Internet Explorer) so you won’t go crazy in the future trying to remember where to find this treasure trove web site!

If you go to the customer service link, you will get their store phone number, and street address. You will talk to one of four people – the elder Rabbi Hecht who founded the business in 1961, his wife Joan, her sister Harriet, or Rabbi Hecht’s son – the younger Rabbi Shea Hecht.

OK, we’re talking family business here. We’re talking about incredible service, outrageous levels of knowledge, and again, more authentic and kosher than anywhere else on the planet.

Bottom Line: Anything you want, the Hechts can get for you. They ship worldwide. It will be 100% kosher – beyond any doubt whatsoever.

Here are two final notes for credibility’s sake:

First, NO, I don’t have any business interest in Hecht’s, or their affiliates, or anything else associated with them, and I don’t get any money for click-throughs to their site. I’m writing this 100% straight up as a journalist – using the rules a person my age imbued within, as opposed to the corrupt set of so-called ethics practiced by the glamour queens of today’s media-entertainment industry. I put all that in knowing the incredible cynicism of today’s bloggers and their readers – which is unfortunately more often than not very well justified.

Second, and much more important, when the New York City Board of Rabbis commissioned the menorah for the 9/11 site, they commissioned the younger Rabbi Hecht to design it, build it, and place it. What does that tell you about them?

OK, so use a little moxie, and schlep on over to their web site, or give them a call directly. Without any doubt whatsoever, you will be very, very pleased.
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