Maggie's Farm

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke


So ,get started and Google Obama and NOI (Nation of Islam) to continue the building blocks to the understanding of this man.

Hey, I like that ..maybe some of those third world countries need five star hotels and gold courses, staffed with ex patriots. Room and board free, of course, and unlimited mulligans.

OK, I did it......

Obama's Nation of Islam Staffers

Responding to criticism by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, Barack Obama declared his strong opposition to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan:

I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan.

Obama also went on to condemn his Church's award to Farrakhan and his minister's tight relationship with him.

But a former Obama insider says that Obama's sudden aversion to NOI and Farrakhan is belied by the fact that Obama employed and continues to employ several Farrakhan acolytes in high positions on his Illinois and U.S. Senate campaign and office staffs. I have verified that this person--who agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity--held a key position in the Obama campaign. The insider was so close to Senator Obama that they frequently personally discussed and exchanged direct e-mail messages on campaign and policy matters. This person is not connected with the Clintons and is not a disgruntled employee.

The insider says he frequently objected to Mr. Obama's placement of Cynthia K. Miller, a member of the Nation of Islam, as the Treasurer of his U.S. Senate campaign . When I contacted Miller, now a Chicago real estate agent, to verify whether she was a member of the Nation of Islam and whether she shared Louis Farrakhan's bigoted views about Jews, she responded, "None of your business! Where are you going with this?" She said her resignation as Obama's treasurer had nothing to do with her Nation of Islam ties. Then, she hung up.

The Obama insider says he also objected to Obama's involvement with Jennifer Mason, whom he says is also a member of the Nation of Islam Mason is Obama's Director of Constituent Services in his U.S. Senate office and is also in charge of selecting Obama's Senate interns. She did not respond to repeated calls for comment.

But it's not just that he employed these individuals in positions of power in his office, it's that when the former associate raised objections, he says Mr. Obama's position was that he saw nothing wrong with the Nation of Islam and didn't think it was a problem. If true--and the fact that Ms. Mason still holds her prominent Obama Senate staff position bears that out--Obama's condemnation of Farrakhan, this month, is phony.

But the insider says there is more to it than that. Obama's Illinois State Senate district consisted of prime Nation of Islam territory, including Hyde Park, home to Farrakhan's mansion It is not possible, Illinois politicos say, to win that district without the blessing of the NOI leader . NOI members, including consultant Shakir Muhammad, held important roles in the Obama state senate campaign.

How many Nation of Islam members will work in an Obama White House?

Then, there is the issue of Israel . When Obama first ran for the U.S. Senate, he gave militant responses to the Chicago Jewish News about Israel. Obama denounced Israel's fence--which he called a "wall" and "barrier to peace"--to keep out terrorists and favored working with Yasser Arafat. When members of the Chicago Jewish community circulated his responses, Obama said that the answers were not his positions, but the work of a low-level intern. He submitted new answers. But that was a lie, the insider says. In fact, they were the work of Obama's Policy Director, Audra Wilson. Moreover, Obama told the insider that he blamed the Mideast conflict on the Jews:

Barack told me that he felt that Jewish community was too inflexible, and that was why the situation in the Mideast could not be resolved .

This is the man who says in a new campaign ad that Hillary Clinton will say anything but change nothing. Barack Obama will say anything, but change his answers.

Palestinian activist and Islamist Ali Abunimah, who was a close friend of Obama's, attended an Arab fundraiser at which the late Edward Said--plagiarist, fabricator, and prominent PLO/Arafat advisor--was the keynote speaker, and at which the Obamas were notably in attendance. Pictures on Abunimah's site, posted above, show Obama and wife, Michelle, sitting next to Said and engaging in conversation. Abunimah, in a must-read article, says the Senator has since "changed" his proclaimed views from those he expressed privately, in order to get Jewish donors and votes.

And he has succeeded in spades. Lee Rosenberg a top Illinois official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobby is a big Obama donor. Ditto for former national AIPAC official Bob Asher. And Penny Pritzker of the pro-Israel family that owns Hyatt hotels. And there are so many others who have bought in to Obama's newly pro-Israel views. The insider says Obama pulled the wool over their eyes.

Then, there's Bettylu Saltzman, also Jewish and one of Obama's first major supporters and donors. She is a major Peace Now devotee, officer of the far-left, pro-capitulation New Israel Fund, and wrote a letter to a Chicago newspaper praising Jimmy Carter's book calling Israel an apartheid state. The Obama insider says she has Obama's ear on the Mideast and "will be a major policy person for Barack. Very dangerous."

The insider points to Mr. Obama's changing views in Iraq as another area of uncertainty. He has highlighted his opposition to the War in Iraq. The insider says there is strong speculation that Obama attempted to get his crony, Federal Indictee Tony Rezko, a contract to build a nuclear power plant in the new Iraq. Rezko, a Syrian Arab who helped Obama in a deal to purchase his home, was in a partnership with NOI founder Elijah Muhammad's son, Jabir.

Barack Obama can denounce Louis Farrakhan ad infinitum. But with supporters like Ms. Saltzman, high-level staffers who are Nation of Islam members, and constantly morphing views on Israel merely for donor appeal, a Barack Obama White House bodes poorly both for Israel and--far more important--for America.
Debbie Schlussel
http://tinyurl.com/3dd536

The Audacity of Selling Hope

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 15, 2008; A21

There's no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns-- boat, shoe, clock -- by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity -- salvation -- for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a "salvational fervor" and "idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria."

"We are the hope of the future," sayeth Obama. We can "remake this world as it should be." Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country -- nay, we can become "a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest."

And believe they do. After eight straight victories -- and two more (Hawaii and Wisconsin) almost certain to follow -- Obama is near to rendering moot all the post-Super Tuesday fretting about a deadlocked convention with unelected superdelegates deciding the nominee. Unless Hillary Clinton can somehow do in Ohio and Texas on March 4 what Rudy Giuliani proved is almost impossible to do -- maintain a big-state firewall after an unrelenting string of smaller defeats -- the superdelegates will flock to Obama. Hope will have carried the day.

Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoral victories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction after another, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouse skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media .

ABC's Jake Tapper notes the "Helter-Skelter cult-ish qualities" of "Obama worshipers," what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls "the Cult of Obama." Obama's Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre . Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience -- to such rhetorical nonsense as "We are the ones we've been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek."

That was too much for Time's Joe Klein. "There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism ," he wrote. " The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is ."

You might dismiss as hyperbole the complaint by the New York Times's Paul Krugman that "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality
." Until you hear Chris Matthews, who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama's Potomac primary victory speech with "My, I felt this thrill going up my leg." When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama "comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament."

I've seen only one similar national swoon. As a teenager growing up in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go from obscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on a wave of what was called Trudeaumania.

But even there the object of his countrymen's unrestrained affections was no blank slate. Pierre Trudeau was already a serious intellectual who had written and thought and lectured long about the nature and future of his country.

Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail . He's going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war -- with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.

Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude .


Habu: Sounds like th MSM is catching on to this charlatan. The general election will , or should , expose him as simply the new pet rock that everybody wanted and then put away and forgot about.

February 15, 2008
Obama receives the Danny Ortega Seal of Approval
Rick Moran-American Thinker
There are endorsements. And then there are "endorsements."

Former dictator and current Nicarauguan president Danny Ortega has endorsed Senator Barack Obama's candidacy for US president, calling his campaign "revolutionary :"


"It's not to say that there is already a revolution under way in the U.S. ... but yes, they are laying the foundations for a revolutionary change," the Sandinista leader said Wednesday night as he accepted an honorary doctorate from an engineering university.

Ortega led a Soviet-backed government that battled U.S.-supported Contra rebels before he lost power in a 1990 election. He returned to office last year via the ballot box.

In statements broadcast on Sandinista Radio La Primerisima, Ortega said he has "faith in God and in the North American people, and above all in the youth, that the moment of great change in the U.S. will come and it will act differently, with justice and equality toward all nations."

Obama, a senator from Illinois, is locked in a tight race with Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Ortega also called Obama a spokesman for the millions of Central American and Mexican citizens who migrate to the U.S. in search of work, though polls indicate most Latino voters so far have favored Clinton over Obama.
Ortega has mostly behaved himself since regaining power in 2006. He learned a little about electoral politics, embracing an anti-abortion law prior to the 2006 contest after governing in the 1980's as a pro-choice president.

While he occasionally spouts about US imperialism and "justice," his policies have been center-left for the most part, concentrating on improving health care and schools. Gone are the draconian redistributive policies that set much of the country against him and caused his defeat at the polls in 1990.

Ortega himself doesn't need the money. Just prior to being kicked out of office, the Sandinistas passed a law that gave the larger estates seized by the communists to individual members of the party -- including Ortega himself.

Perhaps now that he is a rich, propertied communist, he feels he has a little more to lose if things get too "revolutionary."

Ortega's endorsement of Obama can only help him with the greying, aging old left who flocked to the Sandinista banner in the 1980's -- despite the dictatorial policies of Sandinista thugs who closed opposition newspapers, broke up opposition political rallies with clubs, arrested opposition leaders, threw more moderate Nicaraguans out of the ruling coalition, and carried out a ruthless campaign against the Mesquite indians who refused to give up their lands to the Sandinistas.

Yes...but they hated Reagan which was good enough for the lefties in this country.

Richard Baehr adds:

Here is an idea for Hillary if she wins. Appoint Obama a special emissary to Latin America thugs and have him pay special tribute to Che Guevara.

Thanks Buddy,

What is curious to me is that very very few of the posts I've put up on Obama garner any comments at all.

I'm unsure of the reason but we're talking some serious revelations coming to light on this guy and it's like , ho hum, so what.

Now I realize that a great many people are loathe to critique a black man over anything lest they be labeled a racist or whatever but I put them out there and it's like, hey fella just save your time cause we're not going to comment ....and it's got to be because of his ethnicity...other candidates with his background would get skewered.

Please someone go into a a deep rationalization for me on this so I too can say, lets just let the most liberal Senator in the Senate, an anti Semite and friend of Louis Farrakhan become President. A guy who eschewed his supportive white family to "go find his blackness" in a menage of his fathers five or six wives and countless offspring.