Media

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‘I want to rip (Bill Clinton’s) eyes out. Kidding!’

Posted by Road Apples on 07 May 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Issues, John McCain, Media, News

ELECTION 2008

Michelle Obama’s latest gaffe: ‘See, this is what gets me into trouble’


www.worldnetdaily.com

 

Michelle Obama, wife of presidential candidate Barack Obama, known for saying what’s on her mind – candidly, spontaneously and frequently – has exposed this trait yet again in a profile in the London Guardian.

Asked how she feels about Bill Clinton’s use of the phrase “fairytale” to describe her husband’s characterization of his position on the Iraq war, she first responded: “No.”

But, after a few seconds of contemplation, and gesturing with her fingernails, she told the reporter: “I want to rip his eyes out!”

Noticing an aide giving her a nervous look, she added: “Kidding! See, this is what gets

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When Will We Admit the Truth About Barack Obama?

Posted by True Obama Facts on 24 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Issues, Media, News

This is an awesome article by Selwyn Duke from American Thinker: 
—–

If you interview someone for a job, you’ll expect him to tell you what you want to hear.  There’ll be a façade, and his darker side will remain well-hidden.  Now, let’s say a requirement for the job is that the applicant likes children, and he does his best Captain Kangaroo.  But then you find out he has a job history of indifference to and perhaps even abuse of kids and that, during unguarded moments, he has expressed disdain for them.  What will you believe, what he tries to sell you, or history and hair-down revelations? 
Remember this when evaluating the profound discrepancy between Barack Obama’s damage-control denials and flowery rhetoric, and his long track record.  Understand that he, like the other candidates, is interviewing for the job of president with you, the interviewer.  His job is to bend the truth; your job is to discern it.  The only question is: Who will do a better job, he or you?
Either Obama really is a savior for the third millennium, or the answer is that he is, thus far, besting many of you.  Millions flock to him, registering oohs and ahs, fainting and fawning.  Even critics and watchdogs heap praise upon him; Bill O’Reilly said he likes Obama and Sean Hannity proclaimed him a “good man.”  But what is the truth about this applicant?
Let me tell you a story.  In 2002, President Bush signed into law a bill titled the “Born Alive Infants Protection Act” (BAIPA).  This law was necessary because, believe it or not, infants were being Continue Reading »

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Sen. Obama coddles evil

Posted by Road Apples on 09 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Information, Iran, Iraq War, Islam, John McCain, Media, Muslim, News

By Benjamin Shapiro http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=61117

Yesterday morning, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that Iran was busily installing 6,000 new centrifuges for development of nuclear material. Further, Ahmadinejad stated, Iran would begin testing a new type of centrifuge that works five times faster than ordinary centrifuges.

Yesterday afternoon, Democratic presidential front-runner Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., declared that the U.S. should engage in a “diplomatic surge” in Iraq. In particular, he said, America should embrace talks with Iran. “I do not believe we are going to be able to stabilize the situation without that,” Obama told Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker. “I continue to believe that the original decision to go into Iraq was a massive strategic blunder, that the two problems you pointed out – al-Qaida in Iraq and increased Iranian influence in the region – are a direct result of that original decision.”

Never mind the unbelievable arrogance of a foreign policy boob like Barack Obama lecturing the two most knowledgeable on-the-ground figures in Iraq on the best military strategy for Iraq.

Barack Obama’s scariest characteristic isn’t his ego, though its sheer size threatens to shift the globe out of orbit. Obama’s scariest characteristic is his Continue Reading »

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Not all Racists are White

Posted by Road Apples on 18 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Issues, John McCain, Media

Obama pastor’s theology: Destroy ‘the white enemy’
‘If God is not for us and against whites … we had better kill him’


Article credits: www.worldnetdaily.com

Barack Obama’s suddenly radioactive pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has defended himself against charges of anti-Americanism and racism by referring to his foundational philosophy, the “black liberation theology” of scholars such as James Cone, who regard Jesus Christ as a “black messiah” and blacks as “the chosen people” who will only accept a god who assists their aim of destroying the “white enemy.”

“If God is not for us and against white people,” writes Cone, “then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill gods who do not belong to the black community.”

Wright has not talked to media since video segments of his sermons over the past decade surfaced last week – including one in 2003 in which he encouraged blacks to damn America in God’s name. But in a 2007 interview replayed on the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity and Colmes” show Friday, he repeatedly fended off Sean Hannity’s questions with an appeal to authority, asking if the host had read any of the books of Cone, professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, or Dwight Hopkins, professor at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, notes the Asia Times columnist who writes under the pseudonym Spengler.”

Obama, who has spoken of his pastor of more than 20 years as his mentor and moral compass, “wants to talk about what Wright is, rather than what he says,” notes Spengler, by referring him as a “respected biblical scholar, and as someone who taught or lectured at seminaries across the country, from Union Theological Seminary to the University of Chicago.”

But Spengler says “that way lies apolitical quicksand.”

Cone, he points out, was the most prominent theologian in the “black liberation” school in the 1960s, teaching that Jesus Christ himself is black.

Continue Reading »

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Media really, really needs to look at Obama’s Record, and examine the facts

Posted by True Obama Facts on 14 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Health Care, Hillary Clinton, Issues, John McCain, Media, National Debt, Rezko, Video

 

Obama is asked by fawning press, “Are you comfortable?” The video start in the middle, but still gives a good view of the media of this year’s campaigns bias. To see the whole video go to AlterNet Blogs The Media has never played to a candidate like this before. They refuse to look at his record, and don’t look the Obama/Rezko problem. They don’t look at his experience record, or his lack of it, for that matter. They just by into the “Obama is the Messiah” hype. Just wait until the actual race if Obama gets the nomination. He will crumble under John McCain, who has REAL experience.

Obama’s health care plan is not what he says it is. His stance on the Iraq War was not what he said it was. In 2004 he wanted to hit Iran and maybe Pakistan with Missiles. His budget plan is insane, adding $860 Billion in the next ten year for… Global Poverty!! Obama supports Partial Birth abortion, a practice most liberals are disgusted by!

 

Senator Obama is NOT WHAT HE SAYS HE IS!! Please, for America’s future, look at the FACTS!!

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Obama’s Hollow “Judgment” and Empty Record

Posted by True Obama Facts on 14 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Iraq War, Issues, Media

From Huffinton Post: 

Barack Obama argues that he deserves the Democratic nomination and Hillary Clinton doesn’t because he possesses superior “judgment,” as he calls it, on the key issues we face as a nation. As definitive proof he offers one speech he made in 2002 during a reelection campaign for an Illinois senate seat in the most liberal district in the state, so liberal that no other position would have been viable. When he made that speech, Obama was not privy to the briefings by, among others, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in support of the Authorization of Use of Military Force as a diplomatic tool to push the international community to impose intrusive inspections on Saddam Hussein.

Would Obama have acted differently had he been in Washington or had he had the benefit of the arguments and the intelligence that the administration was offering to the Congress debating that resolution? During the 2002-2003 timeframe, he was a minor local official uninvolved in the national debate on the war so we can only judge from his own statements prior to the 2008 campaign. Obama repeated these points in a whole host of interviews prior to announcing his candidacy. On July 27, 2004, he told the Chicago Tribune on Iraq: “There’s not much of a difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage.” In his book, The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006, he wrote, “…on the merits I didn’t consider the case against war to be cut-and- dried.” And, in Continue Reading »

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Barack Obama and Me

Posted by True Obama Facts on 10 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Issues, Media

By Todd Spivak

It was the year 2000 and I was a young hungry reporter in Chicago covering a young hungry state legislator. 

It’s not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn’t yet hit local newsstands.

It’s the first time I ever heard him yell, and I’m trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

This is before Obama Girl, before the secret service detail, before he becomes a best-selling author. His book Dreams From My Father has been out of print for years.

I often see Obama smoking cigarettes on brisk Chicago mornings in front of his condominium high-rise along Lake Michigan, or getting his hair buzzed at the corner barbershop on 53rd and Harper in his Hyde Park neighborhood.

This is before he becomes a U.S. senator, before Oprah starts stumping for him, before he positions himself to become the country’s first black president.

He is just a rank-and-file state senator in Illinois and I work for a string of small, scrappy newspapers there.
_____________________

The other day, while stuck in traffic on Houston’s Southwest Freeway, I was flipping through right-wing rants on AM radio. Dennis Praeger was railing against Michelle Obama for her clumsy comment on being proud of her country for the first time.

Praeger went on to call her husband a blank slate. There’s no record to look at, he complained, unless you lived in Barack Obama’s old state Senate district.

Well, I lived and worked in that district for three years — nearly half Obama’s tenure in the Illinois Legislature. D-13, the district was called, and it spanned a large swath of the city’s poor, black, crime-­ridden South Side.

It was 2000 and I was a young, hungry reporter at the Hyde Park Herald and Lakefront Outlook community newspapers earning $19,000 a year covering politics and crime.

I talked with Obama on a regular basis — a couple times a month, at least. I’d ask him about his campaign-finance reports, legislation he was sponsoring and various local issues. He wrote an occasional column published in our papers. It ran with a headshot that made him look about 14 years old.

Spinning through my old Rolodex, I see that I had two cell phone numbers for Obama. Both have since been ­disconnected.

I also had cell phone numbers for Jesse Jackson, his son Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., and David Axelrod, who now serves as Obama’s senior presidential campaign adviser.

Axelrod, too, had begun his journalism career at the Hyde Park Herald before joining the Chicago Tribune as a political reporter then starting a political consulting firm. Another Hyde Park Herald alum was Seymour Hersh, the legendary investigative reporter who uncovered the My Lai massacre for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal for The New Yorker.

My view of Obama then wasn’t all that different from the image he projects now. He was smart, confident, charismatic and liberal. One thing I can say is, I never heard him launch into the preacher-man voice he now employs during speeches. He sounded vanilla, and activists in his mostly black district often chided him for it.

I was 25 and had no problem interviewing big-wig politicians. But I always had to steel my nerves when calling Obama. His intelligence was intimidating, and my hands inevitably shook with sweat.

It was serendipity that I ever came to know Obama at all. Looking back, I think of it as a Forrest Gump moment: History was unfolding and I was at the center of it, clueless. It’s a huge bummer to me that I never taped our interviews.

I moved to Chicago from the East Coast after a bad breakup. I had just one year of newspaper experience under my belt, working the courts beat for a small Vermont daily.

I picked Chicago because I had friends there. Plus, Continue Reading »

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Make the World Safe for Hope

Posted by True Obama Facts on 08 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Iraq War, Issues, Media

Can Barack Obama, who campaigns as an icon of peace, actually be more bellicose than Bush? Yes, he can.

by Brendan O’Neill

Obama-mania is getting out of hand. Full-grown and well-educated men—from swooning Andrew Sullivan to the entire staff of GQ magazine—are developing “man crushes” on Barack Obama, going weak in the knees for his immaculately pressed suits, oratorical skills, and shameless hope-mongering.

“I’ve never wanted anyone more than I want you,” warbles Obama Girl in a song called “I Got a Crush on Obama,” which has been viewed over 6 million times on YouTube. Celebs are queuing up to fall at his feet. “My heart belongs to Barack,” says Scarlett Johansson. There’s a palpable whiff of semi-religious hysteria at Obama rallies. As Joel Stein wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Obamaphilia has gotten creepy,” and its “fanatical” adherents are starting to embarrass themselves.

Actually, it’s worse than that: they are deluding themselves. Many Democrats have become so goggle-eyed, so insanely convinced that Obama is the savior of American politics (potentially rescuing both the Democratic Party from political ruin and America herself from the decadence and violence of the Bush era), that they are beginning to suffer political hallucinations. They fantasize that he is pure and righteous, a miracle-worker who, in a pique of rage, will overturn the conventions of neocon-ruled America.

The blind hope in Obama-as-messiah is most clearly expressed in the widespread

Continue Reading »

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Glorifying Obama Is One Of The Greatest Journalistic Failures In American History

Posted by True Obama Facts on 07 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Issues, Media

From The Bulletin: 

The mainstream media have just committed one of the most disgraceful acts of journalistic malfeasance and nonfeasance in the history of America. By glorifying, deifying and canonizing Sen. Barack Obama and failing to examine his record, the mainstream media helped assure his nomination. Some experts say it is already in the bag, even if Hillary Clinton completes her astounding comeback by winning Pennsylvania on April 22.

The second act in that journalistic disgrace is that after the outcome of the nomination process was almost over, suddenly the mainstream media came to its senses and started half-heartedly covering the whole Obama story, which if told, in my view, would make it apparent that he is unfit for the presidency. For more on that conclusion, see my columns in the box accompanying this story.

Newsweek magazine, one of the worst offenders, is the publication that did a cover story on the senator and then on his wife, in which the two were painted as paragons of perfection, apparently without flaws. The first of the cover stories on the senator moved the great columnist Charles Krauthammer to observe that Newsweek had used up all its adjectives of praise and glory and will have nothing left for the Second Coming. Stories like that led to the Center for Media and Public Affairs finding that from mid-December through mid-February, Sen. Obama had coverage that was positive 84 percent of the time (while Hillary Clinton had positive coverage 53 percent of the time).

That same Newsweek, part of that paragon of biased and dishonest journalism family of the Washington Post organization, ran a story on its Web site that had this lead: “Life imitating art or just a Continue Reading »

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Obama ‘04: For Hitting Iran, Even Pakistan

Posted by True Obama Facts on 04 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Iraq War, Issues, Media

Found this article at: Obama ‘04: For Hitting Iran, Even Pakistan

Senator Obama is a flipflopper also…

From the September 24, 2004 edition of the Chicago Tribune:

By David Mendell, Tribune staff reporter


Obama would consider missile strikes on Iran
September 25, 2004

U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama suggested Friday that the United States one day might have to launch surgical missile strikes into Iran and Pakistan to keep extremists from getting control of nuclear bombs.

Obama, a Democratic state senator from the Hyde Park neighborhood, made the remarks during a meeting Friday with the Tribune editorial board. Obama’s Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, was invited to attend the same session but declined.

Iran announced on Tuesday that it has begun converting tons of uranium into gas, a crucial step in making fuel for a nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency has called for Iran to suspend all such activities.

Obama said the United States must first address Iran’s attempt to gain nuclear capabilities by going before the United Nations Security Council and lobbying the international community to apply more pressure on Iran to cease nuclear activities. That pressure should come in the form of economic sanctions, he said.

But if those measures fall short, the United States should not rule out military strikes to destroy nuclear production sites in Iran, Obama said.

“The big question is going to be, if Iran is

Continue Reading »

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Barack Obama’s Word Games

Posted by True Obama Facts on 04 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Media

Much is being made of Barack Obama’s oratory skills. True, he is quite good when it comes to captivating a crowd of sycophants and this includes the lemmings in the mainstream media. But if words matter, as Obama (and surreptitiously Duval Patrick) claims they do, then we must acknowledge that in this case words do make the man, in this case Mr. Obama must be judged in his words and in the deeds that back-up those words.

Ironically, I agree with Mr. Obama when he says that words matter. One of the harshest criticisms I have had of the Bush Administration is that communication between the presidency and the American people has been, at best, horrible. While I can lay much of the blame on a hateful mainstream media who wouldn’t cover the White House if it was on fire, a gaggle of journalistic abortions hell-bent on achieving an anti-Bush/anti-Republican agenda, so too blame must be laid at the feet of an administration that failed to use all the tools available to the bully pulpit to get its message across.

Words do matter. In a society that has grown so delinquent in teaching its populace critical thinking skills, words — and the choice of words — have become the upper-tier chess pieces in the tactical game of attaining and holding on to power. Of course, this is nothing new.

Great people through time have understood the importance of words, their meaning and their successful communication. Cicero, Aristotle, Plato, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes certainly knew the importance of words. Through their philosophy the seeds of our uniquely American ideology were planted. Those who understood the importance of their message, their words — Franklin, Adams, Jefferson and Madison — were able to manifest the American experience, to motivate a people to the quest of freedom and liberty. These great men — our Founders and Framers — also had a penchant for words as is evidenced by the Charters of Freedom, which stand alone in their ideology of liberty.

But just as there were great people who Continue Reading »

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The Real Obama

Posted by True Obama Facts on 27 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Iraq War, Issues, Media

Michelle Obama’s comment that, for the first time in her adult life, she feels proud of America helps crystallize who Barack Obama is.

To be sure, the wife of a candidate is perfectly free to have views that are distinct from her husband’s. But on a matter that is so fundamental to one’s being as love of country, it is difficult to imagine that Michelle Obama would publicly twice make such a statement suggesting disdain for America unless she felt it comported with her husband’s views.

Equally important, her statement aligns perfectly with the hate-America views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s minister, friend, and sounding board for more than two decades. On the Sunday following 9/11, Wright characterized the terrorist attacks as a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later, Wright suggested that the attacks were retribution for America’s racism.

“In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01,” Wright wrote in his church magazine Trumpet. “White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”

Wright has been a key supporter of Louis Farrakhan, and in December, honored the Nation of Islam leader for lifetime achievement, saying he “truly epitomize[s] greatness.”

Farrakhan has repeatedly made hate-filled statements targeting Jews, whites, America, and homosexuals.

Those who think two of the closest people to Obama could publicly make anti-America statements unless Obama himself felt that way, are fooling themselves. To date, Obama has proven himself to be nothing more than a great orator, rendering the statements of those around him even more important in illuminating his true character and agenda. During his Senate career, he skipped 17 percent of the votes and sponsored only one bill that became law. That bill was to promote “relief, security, and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Bereft of official accomplishments, Obama has distinguished himself mainly by being against measures that protect American security, such as finishing the mission in Iraq. If we were to leave Iraq quickly, as Obama vows he would do, it would become a launch pad for al-Qaida attacks on the U.S.

Obama avoided voting on extending the Protect America Act, thus putting America at risk when immediate interception of terrorist communications is required. Last August, Obama voted against a measure that would have allowed the U.S. to continue to monitor overseas conversations of terrorists like Osama bin Laden without first obtaining a warrant.

If his radical vote had prevailed, bin Laden would have been given the same rights as Americans.

To this day, Obama has not distanced himself from Continue Reading »

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Obama’s Politics of Collective Redemption

Posted by True Obama Facts on 27 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Issues, Media

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

“Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much.  Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.”   Pope Benedict XVI

A messianic fever grips a segment of the American populace and media.  A great leader seems to them poised to redeem our collective sins and change nearly everything, bringing about a new era in which permanent solutions are found to age-old conditions.
Whenever I watch Barack Obama, listen to his eloquent but nonspecific oratory, and see the near-swooning young people who invariably follow him wherever he goes, I cannot help but think of the pied piper and wonder toward what destination he is marching our youth.  pied piper of ChicagoObama is having this pied-piper effect not only on kids, but also on a large swath of  Democrat and not a few independents and Republican voters, too.
Call me skeptical, but this whole Obama phenomenon seems downright eerie.
Over and over again, Obama invokes his double mantra: “It’s time for change!”  and “Yes, we can!”
Singer Wil.i.am’s (Yes, that’s right; it’s Wil I Am.) YouTube “Yes, we can!” video has already had over 2 million hits, and it has a hypnotic quality reminiscent of eastern religious meditations.  I urge every American still capable of thinking for himself to take a serious look at this video.
Then, consider these numbers on  recent Google searches using only Obama’s name plus one other word:

  • Obama + messianic  75,200
  • Obama + savior  226,000
  • Obama + prophet  312,000
  • Obama + Christ 504,000
  • Obama + change 4,540,000

A number of internet postings indicate that a great many see Obama in not only political terms, but also Continue Reading »

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Barack and Michelle Keeping the Faith

Posted by True Obama Facts on 26 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Issues, Media

I’m not buying the Obama campaign spin on Michelle Obama’s patriotic faux pas this week, any more than I’m inclined to believe that Barack Obama’s refusal to wear our flag pin in his lapel is a meaningless gesture.  Both Michelle’s stated lack of pride in America until this precise moment in history, and Barack’s unwillingness to don our national symbol are in perfect keeping with the doctrines of their church, Trinity United Church of Christ.

The simple truth is that if any of us exposed ourselves to the kind of teachings espoused by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, we might find it downright impossible to do any better than Barack and Michelle in the loving-America category of citizenship. 
We probably couldn’t summon a whole lot of American patriotism if our brains were  stuffed on a weekly basis with sermons like this:

“Racism is how this country (America) was founded and how this country is still run!”

or this:

“We (Americans) are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!”

If I listened to stuff like this every Sunday for 20 years, I probably wouldn’t be all that proud of my Country either, and certainly would feel it hypocritical to wear the symbol of this God-forsaken Nation in my lapel.
Wouldn’t you?
Trinity’s Black Liberation Theology
The Chicago Tribune’s religion reporter, Manya Brachear, interviewed Rev. Wright in January 2007, writing:

“Wright sought to build on the black theology of liberation introduced in 1968 by Rev. James Cone of New York, by emphasizing Africa’s contribution to Christianity rather than that of mainstream white theologians.”

If only it were this simple. 
But it isn’t.
According to Cone:

“Christian theology is language about God’s liberating activity in the world on behalf of freedom of the oppressed.  Any talk about God that fails to make God’s liberation of the oppressed its starting point is not Christian.” (Speaking the Truth; James H. Cone; p. 4)

The gospel according to Cone revolves around a single dimension of the Christian faith and necessarily interprets the very nature of “oppression” as solely material and of this world.  In effect, black liberation theology reduces the entire Gospel down to a Marxist people’s struggle and hijacks the Christ for political purpose.

“What else can the crucifixion mean except that God, the Holy One of Israel, became identified with the victims of oppression?  What else can the resurrection mean except that God’s victory in Christ is the poor person’s victory over poverty?”  (Speaking the Truth; p. 6)

This certainly puts an altogether different light on the crucifixion than Continue Reading »

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Barack by the Issues

Posted by True Obama Facts on 24 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Barack Obama, Issues, Media, National Debt, Taxes

This article appeared in the Sacramento Bee on February 21, 2008.

– 

Barack Obama is now the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. He’s risen high on his inspiring persona and uplifting rhetoric. At a time of prolonged war and economic uncertainty, he appeals to Americans’ hope for something better than the bitter partisan infighting that has paralyzed Washington. And Obama offers an opportunity for closing America’s racial divide. It is hard not to cheer his success.

Yet, politics is also about issues. And on this score, Sen. Obama represents less hope and change than a wish list for every conceivable liberal special interest group.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to the respected and nonpartisan National Journal, Obama is the most liberal U.S. senator, with a voting record actually to the left of Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s self-proclaimed socialist. Consider what Obama actually promises to do:

TAXES AND SPENDING: There is no doubt that an Obama presidency would represent a return to traditional tax and spend liberalism. According to the National Taxpayers Union, Obama has so far proposed at least $287 billion per year in new government spending. And that was before he unveiled his $150 billion “green energy plan” last week. Nor does that include the spending proposals he has supported in the Senate but not discussed on the campaign trail. For example, Obama is the co-sponsor of a Senate bill to spend at least $845 billion over the next five years to fight global poverty. CNBC economic analyst Larry Kudlow estimates that, when all is said and done, Obama’s new spending plans will cost us more than $800 billion per year.

He would pay for all of this with higher - much higher - taxes. He would, of course, allow the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010. But that’s just the beginning. Obama has also called for removing the cap on Social Security payroll tax, a $1.3 trillion tax hike over the first five years. And, at a time when the U.S. economy is slowing down, Obama would significantly increase taxes on business, investment, and job creation, including nearly doubling taxes on capital gains. Americans would face some of the highest marginal tax rates in the world.

HEALTH CARE: A President Obama would take America down the road to a government-run health care system. He supports a concept known as “managed competition” under which insurance would remain privately owned, but would operate in an artificial marketplace with strict government regulation, much like a public utility. The government would determine what types of benefits you would be required to purchase and how much insurers could charge. Young and healthy people would have to pay more than they ought to in order to subsidize premiums for older sicker individuals.

While he would not actually mandate that individuals buy health insurance - a point of contention with Hillary Clinton - Obama would mandate that all employers provide their workers with insurance. That proposal would almost certainly end up hurting workers. An employer is indifferent as to whether compensation comes in the form of wages, taxes, health insurance or other benefits. Employers will therefore have to find ways to offset the added costs. This they can do by raising prices, lowering wages or reducing future wage increases, reducing other benefits such as pensions, or hiring fewer workers. As always, employees will be the net losers, with the low-skilled suffering most.

REGULATION: A health care mandate is not the only new regulation that Obama wants to impose. For example, he would require businesses to pay an undefined “living wage.” He would require paid “family and medical leave.” He would regulate mortgages and credit card interest rates. He would impose a host of environmental and labor restrictions. The net cost of this regulatory burden will almost certainly be higher unemployment and greater poverty.

And it’s not just businesses that would feel the regulatory hand of an Obama presidency. Consumers too will have to pay, as he imposes new costs on products ranging from homes to automobiles and appliances. In almost everything we do, Obama sees a need for the government to intervene.

A President Obama would mean a much bigger, more intrusive, and costlier government. Indeed, when considering his policies, one searches in vain for any break with liberal orthodoxy. Personal accounts for Social Security? Entitlement reform? School choice? Obama rejects them all, calling such proposals, “Social Darwinism.”

That’s a lot less inspiring than Obama the candidate.

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