It’s OK to make fun of Sarah Palin, but not Barack Obama?

Given the insults and parodies of Sarah Palin, I can hardly empathize with the PC police who are screaming outrage over this harmless poke at Obama.

Does anyone remember the 1993 Spy Magazine cover photo of Hillary Clinton in a dominatrix outfit? Sure, it was over the top but it was still funny and no one had to apologize about it.

How about the parody of Sarah Palin in a bikini holding a rifle? Anyone expressing outrage over that one? Of course not.

To everyone who is up in arms, if you really have a problem with this then you ARE a racist!  I say, Get a life and a sense of humor!

Overwhelmed by economic fear and anger, voters ignore Obama’s tainted past.

If you’re getting the impression, as I am, that it doesn’t matter how much “dirt” the media throws his way, that Barack Obama, The Chosen One, is destined to become president of the United States, your impression is correct. And here’s why –

If your ship is sinking and you suddenly find yourself in shark-infested waters, the last thing on your mind is the personal history of the person throwing you a life-jacket. Your survival instincts tell you to just grab the jacket, save yourself, and ask questions later, if at all.

Americans know their economic ship is sinking. They are losing their jobs, their homes, their life savings. More importantly, they are losing faith in themselves and in the ability of our country to solve this crisis.

The Democratic Party, represented by Barack Obama, is offering the life-jacket that many Americans believe will save them. The specifics policies aren’t important; voter perception that Obama has the life-jacket and John McCain doesn’t, is what really matters. 

For over a year, revelations about Barack Obama’s relationships with various people and organizations have raised serious concerns among many of us. Now, with just a month before the election, even as the accusations of poor judgment and questionable associations escalate, the American voter just doesn’t seem to care. They are preoccupied with their own survival.

Here are some of the Obama scandals they seem willing to ignore.

The Racist Connection –

For over a year, revelations about the people in Barack Obama’s past have raised concerns among many of us. First we had Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s long-time friend and pastor. Wright, you will recall, is the minister who proclaimed after 9/11 that “America’s chickens have come home to roost.”

What was most troubling about the Wright connection was the anti-white rage that poured from his sermons. Obama at first tried to pretend he didn’t know about Wright’s anti-American, anti-white views. Fact is, he sat in the pews of that church for 20 years and never saw fit to contradict his pastor until he was forced to do so.

 

The Voter Fraud Connection –

Barack Obama’s connection to ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — is now being more fully explored in the mainstream media. ACORN’s reputation is that of an aggressive, pro-Obama organization that has been frequently linked to voter fraud.

Just this week an ACORN office in Las Vegas, Nevada, was raided by state authorities.

Bob Walsh, spokesman for the Nevada secretary of state’s office, told FOXNews. com the raid was prompted by ongoing complaints about “erroneous” registration information being submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN. The group was submitting the information through a voter sign-up drive known as Project Vote.

“Some of them used nonexistent names, some of them used false addresses and some of them were duplicates of previously filed applications,” Walsh said, describing the complaints, which largely came from the registrar in Clark County, Nev. Secretary of State Ross Miller said the fraudulent registrations included forms for the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team.”

According to Brian Faughnan, writing for the Weekly Standard, Barack Obama formerly represented ACORN and taught classes for their future leaders. While he served on the Board of Directors of the Woods Foundation, that group received about $200,000 from ACORN. When he began his presidential run, Obama paid ACORN more than $800,000 to help ‘Get Out the Vote’–although it was not originally reported that way to the FEC.

The Terrorist Connection –

The most recent revelation about Barack Obama’s past concerns his connection to William Ayers, a former member of the terrorist organization, the Weather Underground, which was responsible for numerous bombings and other violent acts against U.S. targets. Ayers, who is now a professor in Obama’s hometown of Chicago, has expressed regret — not for his terrorist acts, but because he did not do more damage.

As with Rev. Wright and ACORN, the Obama campaign has tried to minimize senator’s relationship with Ayers, saying that Obama was eight years old when Ayers and his co-terrorist wife, Bernadine Dohrn, committed the worst of their activities. That much is true. But Obama has had a long-standing relationship as an adult, communty activist and politician with both Ayers and Dohrn.

Here’s how CNN describes Obama’s connection to Ayers:

The relationship between Obama and Ayers went deeper, ran longer and was more political than Obama — and his surrogates — have revealed, documents and interviews show. A review of board minutes and records by CNN show Obama crossed paths repeatedly with Ayers at board meetings of the Annenberg Challenge Project. The Annenberg Foundation gave the project a $50 million grant to match local private funds to improve schools, and Ayers fought to bring the grant to Chicago, according to participants and project records.

According to CNN, the project’s organizing committee asked Obama to serve as the board chairman in 1995. While working on the Annenberg project, Obama and Ayers also served together on a second charitable foundation, the Woods Fund. It was that foundation that Obama referenced in the debate — not the Annenberg Challenge.

Among Wood Foundation recipients were the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church, where Obama attended and was married; and the Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers’ wife Dohrn was director.

For Obama, the chairmanship of the $100 million Annenberg board helped vault him from a South Side lawyer to political player. And there, too, is an Ayers connection.

In 1995, months after the little-known Obama became Annenberg chairman, state Sen. Alice Palmer introduced the young lawyer as her political heir apparent. The introduction was made over coffee at the home of Ayers and Dohrn. Two people who attended the event told CNN the introduction of Obama included a solicitation for campaign funds.

It is clear that Obama’s connection to Ayers is far more significant than the campaigns has been willing to admit. Let’s be clear about this: what Ayers and Dohrn did as members of the Weather Underground is precisely the type of terrorist activity that this country has been attempting to prevent since the Al-Qaeda attack on 9/11.

Numerous Obama critics have tried to make a false connection between Obama and overseas Muslim extremists. They don’t have to go that far. Obama’s support came from terrorists right in our own back yard.

In the best of times, the weight of Obama’s questionable connections to a racist like Wright, a terrorist like Ayers, and a fraudulent organization like ACORN, would have doomed his candidacy. But these are quickly becoming the worst of times, and Americans want to be rescued from the economic threats that are closing in around them. With the sharks getting closer, Obama’s relationships with Wright, Ayers, and ACORN diminish in significance.

The American people just want to be saved.

From last night’s debate, add two more to the list of Joe Biden lies.

During last night’s debate with Sarah Palin, in his effort to portray himself as a regular joe-six-pack, Joe Biden invited viewers to come with him to Katie’s Restaurant on Union Street or to the Home Depot.

Katie’s Restaurant closed about 15 years ago.

There is no Home Depot on Union Street either.

And it seems that the “Joey Danko” that he just happened to meet at his “local” gas station is a Washington lobbyist.

Are these earth-shattering revelations? Of course not. But they are part of a pattern of lies, plagiarism, and questionable embellishments that got Biden kicked out of the 1988 presidential campaign. 

Here’s what Joe had to say –

Here’s a list of prior major Biden fibs compiled by Fox News –

1. Forced Down by Terrorists?

“If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where (Usama) bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me. Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are,” Biden said at a campaign stop in Baltimore last week.

Sen. John Kerry, however, set the record straight, telling the Associated Press that the helicopter was “forced down” by a snowstorm.

“It went pretty blind, pretty fast and we were around some pretty dangerous ridges,” Kerry said. “So the pilot exercised his judgment that we were better off putting down there, and we all agreed.”

2. FDR Did What?

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed,” Biden told the CBS Evening News on Sept. 22.

But Herbert Hoover was president in October 1929 when the stock market crashed. FDR wasn’t elected until 1932, and television made its debut a decade later, in 1939.

3. That’s a Terrible Ad!

When asked by CBS on Sept. 22 how he felt about an Obama campaign ad that made fun of John McCain’s inability to use a computer, Biden replied that he thought it was “terrible.”

“I didn’t know we did it,” he said, adding that he wouldn’t have approved the ad, but defended Obama’s decision to approve it. “The answer is I don’t think anything was intentional about that. They were trying to make another point,” he said.

4. Working in Coal Mine

“Hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard coal miner — anthracite coal, Scranton, Pennsylvania, that’s where I was born and raised,” Biden said to mine workers in Virginia on Sept. 20.

While his great-grandfather was a mining engineer, his father ran a Delaware car dealership and worked in the oil business. His campaign tried to spin the comments as a joke.

5. “No Coal Plants in America!”

On Sept. 17 at a campaign stop in Maumee, Ohio, Biden told an environmentalist that the Democrats don’t support clean coal. “We’re not supporting clean coal,” he said.

But they do. Obama said his administration will “enter into public private partnerships to develop five ‘first-of-a-kind’ commercial scale coal-fired plants with clean carbon capture and sequestration technology.”

Biden had criticized China for building “two dirty coal plants” every week and polluting the United States. “No coal plants in America,” he said. “If they’re going to build them over there, make them clean, because they’re killing you.”

6. He Should Have Picked Hillary

At a campaign stop in Nashua, N.H., on Sept. 10, Biden said Obama may have been better off had he picked Hillary Clinton to be his running mate.

“Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Let’s get that straight,” he said. “She’s a truly close personal friend; she is qualified to be president of the United States of America. She’s easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me, but she is first-rate.”

7. You in the Wheelchair, Get Up!

On the campaign train in Columbia, Mo., on Sept. 9, Biden asked State Sen. Chuck Graham to stand up for the crowd. “Stand up Chuck let me see you,” Biden said to Graham, who is in a wheelchair. “Oh, God love you, what I am talking about. You’re making everybody else stand up though, aren’t you pal.” Biden then asked everyone in the room to stand up for Graham.

8. Whose Campaign is it Anyway?

On Aug. 23, after Obama announced that he had chosen the Delaware senator as his running mate, Biden slipped and called him “Barack America.”

On Sept. 3 at a campaign stop in Fort Myers, Fla., Biden referred to the future “Biden Administration,” which he quickly corrected to an “Obama-Biden Administration.”

“Believe me, that wasn’t a Freudian slip,” Biden said. “Oh Lordy day, I tell ya.”

9. Shot at Seven Times in Iraq?

Biden said in a CNN/YouTube debate on July 23, 2007, that he was shot at seven times inside Iraq’s Green Zone.

Two weeks later, however, he amended his story, telling The Hill newspaper, “I was near where a shot landed.” He said a shot landed outside the building in the Green Zone where he and another senator spent the night in December 2005. While they were shaving in the morning, the building shook.

“No one got up and ran from the room-it wasn’t that kind of thing,” Biden told the Hill. “It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.”

10. So Fresh and So Clean

When talking about his eventual running mate when they were still competing for the Democratic presidential nomination in January 2007, Biden blundered when talking about Sen. Barack Obama to the New York Observer.

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

He quickly retracted the statement, explaining, “Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican Party has produced at least since I’ve been around,” he said in a conference call a few days later. “And he’s fresh. He’s new. He’s smart. He’s insightful. And I really regret that some have taken totally out of context my use of the world ‘clean.’”

11. Biden on Race

In June 2006, at the outset of a run for the presidency, Biden joked on camera, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”

When the video hit YouTube the next month, Biden’s office defended him, saying, “The point Senator Biden was making is that there has been a vibrant Indian-American community in Delaware for decades.”

12. Grandson of a Coal Miner?

Bidents 1988 presidential bid imploded when it was revealed he was lifting parts of his stump speech — and parts of his supposed family history — from a speech given by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

Biden said he was the first in his family to go to college. He wasn’t. He said he was the grandson of a coal miner who “would come up [from the mines] after 12 hours and play football.”

While Biden did attribute statements to Kinnock several times, in a Democratic debate at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 23, 1987, he didn’t give Kinnock credit when he plagiarized his speech. It was also revealed that Biden plagiarized a paper in law school. That tape kicked off the controversy that sunk his campaign.

The Noose Around John McCain’s Neck Is Called Reaganomics.

Suicides leave behind many more questions than answers. In most cases, instead of feeling pity for the deceased, the survivors feel anger and resentment. Their reaction is understandable.

They are left to wonder: What drove him to such a desperate act? Was it something we did — was it our fault? Was there anything we could have done to save him? Did we fail him in some way?

Friends and family members are left only to speculate about the real reasons for this brutal ending of a life. Even if there is a suicide note — and often there isn’t one — it is like a hieroglyph, a cryptic suggestion of the real reasons. Ultimately, they are left with more questions, more riddles. Meaning refuses to reveal itself.

For weeks now, I have been trying to understand John McCain’s suicide. Ever since the Republican convention, it has been clear to me that he was on a path towards self-destruction. The question was, why? Was there a way out? If there was a way to escape destruction, would he see it in time? Would he take it, to save himself and his Party?

For weeks now, I have been cheering McCain along. I met him briefly during the 2000 New Hampshire primary. Even though I was a lifelong Democrat, there really was no Democratic primary — Gore was a given — so many of us here turned our attention to the Republicans. I liked McCain on a variety of issues, mainly campaign finance reform, which was a big issue in those days. Plus, I got a chance to vote against another Bush.

So when Hillary dropped out this spring and I was left with The Enigma as my party’s choice, my attention turned again to McCain. The “ready to lead” mantra certainly had me in its grasp. I had no trust or confidence in Barack Obama. McCain had my trust. I believed in the man.

Then came Sarah Palin. Nothing do I love more than a clever strategic move, and picking her was as clever as it could get. And loving the underdog, the more the mainstream media and the Obama Plumber-wannabes tried to cut her down, the more I loved her and wished for her success.

Then came Wall Street.

Weeks ago I wrote about the holes in the McCain economic program. That was before the markets turned inside out, and what was once an inconvenience to us pseudo-Dems who wanted to support McCain turned into Katrina and Gustav and Ike all rolled into one big disaster. Though I tried to ignore the collapsing sea walls and portals of wealth, I was finally forced to admit that the economy was in shambles and that McCain had no plan.

He never had one.

David S. Broder, grand-daddy of Washington punditry, had it all figured out before the rest of us. Last week he wrote:

This year, a calamity has occurred in the financial world. The nonsense about Sarah Palin’s family dynamics and other matters, down to and including lipstick on pigs, has been banished by the mayhem on Wall Street as ruthlessly as the Condit story was erased seven years ago.

Obama, campaigning in Colorado, delivered an unusually tough critique of McCain’s long record as an advocate of deregulating markets. Obama was reinforced in an orchestrated chorus of Democratic voices, liberated from their preoccupation with the governor of Alaska and her family.

The lack of content does not reduce the political significance of what has happened. For months, McCain’s managers have understood that his biggest challenge is that eight out of 10 Americans think the country is moving in the wrong direction. To overcome the voters’ natural inclination to punish the party in power, there are relatively few things McCain can do.

In fact, there is little from McCain in response except to create a media stunt by “canceling” his campaign until Washington resolves this latest economic crisis. But all this does is to shine a cold, irrevocable light on McCain’s economic philosophy.

It is the economic philosophy of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. It’s the economic philosophy of those solipsistic, free-market Republicans who wouldn’t pull a screaming baby out of a burning car-wreck unless they could profit from it. It’s all self interest and self-interested.

Remember Reaganomics? The four pillars of Reagan’s economic policy were to:

• reduce the growth of government spending,
• reduce marginal tax rates on income from labor and capital,
• reduce government regulation of the economy,
• control the money supply to reduce inflation.

During the Republican convention, as I listened to Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard and John McCain’s campaign chair, I had a discouraging sense of deja vu. With sonorous predictability, she listed McCain’s non-solutions to what ails America’s economy. What I heard has been said at every Republican conventions since I started voting in 1972 and became part of our national economic history starting with the first Reagan term.

The solutions they offer are the same tired ideologies of the individual, the free market economy, a government that governs least. It’s DOA Reaganomics, circa 2008. As a political party the GOP is bankrupt of new economic ideas.

No, I am not anti-individual, anti-free market, pro government.

But what I do understand as a student of political and economic history, is that sometimes an external force is needed to correct a negative economic trend. I understand that sometimes people who have been beaten down by an economy that has stripped them of their jobs, decreased their buying power, and shattered their faith in the American dream, need more than lectures about the virtues of a free market.  They need someone who can revitalize their hopes and keep them from sinking financially while the fundamentals of the national economy are restored.

The Republicans have never understood that and still don’t. No one doubts McCain’s vastly superior credentials and experience when it comes to foreign policy. Yes, the American people want to be safe. But they also want to be able to pay their mortgages, afford health care, send their kids to college, and not feel they are swimming backwards financially.

Every poll shows that the top concern of most Americans in this election is the economy. And the GOP is trying to ignore it because they don’t know how to fix it. That’s not how they will take this election from Obama, who does get it.

Someone in the McCain campaign needs to draw up one of those signs screaming what the rest of us already  know: “IT”S STILL THE ECONOMY, STUPID!” and put it where McCain, Palin, Fiorina, et al can see it. Next, and perhaps the tougher task, is to get them to actually come up with economic solutions that inspire, not insult, American voters.

This is like asking the proverbial tiger — in this case McCain — to change his stripes. What are the chances of that happening?

Instead, he has called off the debate and wants to fix Wall Street. Of all the symbolism for a Republican to embrace, would would be more predictable than Wall Street? For most Americans, that means greedy, overpaid CEOs and senior management lap-dogs with golden parachutes and homes in the Hamptons.

In the meantime, the McCain campaign is on the wrong side of jobs, on the wrong side of taxes, on the wrong side of health care reform, on the wrong side of the minimum wage, on the wrong side of social security. Why can’t he just come out and say he WILL NOT privatize social security? Because John cannot tell a lie. And like a good student of Reaganomics, he would certainly privatize social security if he could.

I can’t for a moment believe that John McCain doesn’t know what he is doing, that the price he is paying for his allegiance to the man who welcomed him home from Hanoi and made him part of the Reagan Revolution is to lose this election. It is McCain who has gathered the rope, thrown it over the ledge, and pulled it tight around his neck.

It is the rest of us, the survivors who supported him and who wanted him to win, who are left behind, abandoned, questioning, and angry.

Biden says FDR went on TV in 1929 to explain stock market crash.

Found today on the American Pundit:

During his interview with Katie Couric on CBS News, Joe Biden (AKA Gaffemaster) had this to say:

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘look, here’s what happened.’”

First of all, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected 1932 — the market crashed in 1929. Second of all, Philo Farnsworth created the first working television in 1928. Again, the market crashed in 1929. FDR got on a device nobody had at a time when he wasn’t president? Joe, get a history book. Good Lord.

Perhaps Harvard might ditch any ideas of giving Joe Biden an honorary degree.