Another Crazy Obama Pastor!!!!! From the Trinity Church

Once again, we aren't allowed to criticize Obama or cite articles about him. I guess we are supposed to be mindless Obama Zombies.

 

If you don't think what he said and HOW he said it(Did you watch the video?) then you really are insensitive. What he said and his Wright impression was out of line because it divides people, it's disrespectful to the Clintons, to white people, and to Catholics who don't believe this priests views. And as I repeatedly stated before, this is just yet ANOTHER example of the type of people Obama associates himself with. He associates himself with people that want to DIVIDE this country. Actions speak louder than words. Obama can sure talk a good game just like GWB did in 2000. Take a look at the people GWB surrounded himself with - real winners. Now take a look at the people Obama surrounds himself with - A slumlord(Tony Rezko), A bigot Pastor, a bitter Wife, a known domestic Terrorist (Ayers), and now a crazy Catholic priest. How can you people NOT be worried about the people he hangs around with. Haven't you learned from listening to charming personalities with Bush? He too talked about being a Uniter not a divider and the American people fell for it - TWICE. Now you guys are just ready to embrace Obama. I can only imagine what his cabinet is going to be like. More bitter, angry, far-left liberals. oh JOY!

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0420chapmanapr20,1,2975893.column

Obama minimized his relationship by acknowledging only that he knows Ayers. But they have quite a bit more of a connection than that. He’s appeared on panels with Ayers, served on a foundation board with him and held a 1995 campaign event at the home of Ayers and his wife, fellow former terrorist Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers even gave money to one of his campaigns.

It’s not as though Ayers and Dohrn have denied or repudiated their crimes. After emerging from years in hiding, they escaped federal prosecution because of government misconduct in gathering evidence, but they don’t pretend they were innocent. In 2001, Ayers said, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” …

It’s hard to imagine he would be so indulgent if we learned that John McCain had a long association with a former Klansman who used to terrorize African-Americans. Obama’s conduct exposes a moral blind spot about these onetime terrorists, who get a pass because they a) fall on the left end of the spectrum and b) haven’t planted any bombs lately.

You can tell a lot about someone from his choice of friends. What this friendship reveals is that when it comes to practicing sound moral hygiene, Obama has work to do and no interest in doing it.

However, Obama and the Left want to demand an end to the probing of the years-long Obama-Ayers association as irrelevant. Never mind that Ayers has openly bragged of bombing the Pentagon. Never mind that Obama and Ayers voted to give $75,000 to Rashid Khalidi, a Yasser Arafat protege in the PLO, during their tenure with the Woods Foundation. The difference apparently is in the target of one’s hatreds; as long as the hatred was directed at the American government, the Left believes it to be irrelevant.


So yea... AYERS is RELEVANT.

 

I'm not running for President tho he is.

 

Yet Obama is supposed to be above all of that.

 

I never said white privilege doesn't exist so don't put words in my mouth.
And as I said before, it's also HOW he said it that is offensive.

I find his Wright impersonation at the Trinity Church offensive and I'm not even white.

So to generalize that all white people and all catholics are like this priest is ok? So now plenty of white people need their cages rattled? riiiigghhhttttt! No just the bitter angry ones like yourself.

The Clintons have always been disrespectful but everyone knows that already. However, Obama and the people he surrounds himself along with people like you are supposed to be ABOVE all the dirty politics right? You guys are supposed to be UNITING THIS COUNTRY RIGHT? You can't even unite your own party. Obama couldn't even unite his pastor and church. Some uniter he is.

 

Who's ignoring? I'm not giving McCain a pass either on any of the things you mentioned about him. Have I ever Defended McCain? NOPE!

Maybe Obama doesn't share all of their beliefs - nobody will really know until he gets elected. However, if you look at all the people that he surrounds himself with. That will give you a pretty good idea of where he's heading. At the end of the day, he is still a politician and will answer to some lobbyist one way or the other. Just because he doesn't have those connections now won't mean he won't have them later. He is after all a 2 year Senator. Give him time and he'll be just like the rest of the politicians. The notion that he is going to be above the regular Washington Politics is funny. No matter what he says, he can't change the game in Washington. He will become a part of it just you wait and see. What is scary is that he'll be answering to the Bitter, bigoted, Left-wing lobbyists.

 

Obama’s Lobbying Ties

Barack Obama stepped up his anti-lobbyist rhetoric yesterday after a fifth McCain staffer, former Texas Rep. Tom Loeffler, resigned due to lobbying ties. Obama took the opportunity to reiterate his stance on lobbyists: “We're not gonna take money from PACs, we're not gonna take money from federally registered lobbyists, because we want to be accountable to the American people.”

But it’s almost impossible to get elected without relying to some degree on lobbyists, and the Obama campaign is no exception. Candidates need to know the best-connected people in Washington; and the best-connected people in Washington tend to lobby. So, naturally, any candidate needs to make some exceptions. Here’s a rundown of the campaign’s lobbying loopholes, from smallest to largest:

State and local lobbyists are OK. In January, former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges became Obama’s national co-chair, despite having founded the state-based lobbying firm Hodges Consulting Group in 2003. Likewise, his New Hampshire co-chair is a state lobbyist for the pharmaceutical and financial services industries. Taking money and services from state lobbyists is fair game, Obama says, because he doesn’t have any influence on the state level. But that didn’t stop him from criticizing John Edwards in January when it was revealed that a contributor of his was a state lobbyist. So when you hear the candidates talk about rejecting “Washington lobbyists,” remember that “Washington” is a qualifier.

Employers of lobbyists are OK. Obama has taken $15 million from lawyers/law firms, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and many of those firms employ lobbyists. Clinton has taken slightly more from this group ($15.4 million) while McCain has taken less ($4.2 million).

Employees of firms that lobby are OK. Take Tom Daschle. The former senator was an early and avid Obama supporter and is now a national campaign co-chair. Daschle is not himself a federally registered lobbyist, but he works at Alston & Bird, a firm that employs federally registered lobbyists and raked in $2.6 million in lobbying fees in 2004.

Advice is OK. Obama does not ban even current lobbyists from lending advice to the campaign—which could be considered an “in kind” contribution. Moses Mercado, a former adviser to Dick Gephardt and a lobbyist for Ogilvy Government Relations, volunteers his advice and time for the campaign but declined to be on payroll.

Spouses and family members are OK. Even if being a lobbyist makes you an untouchable scumbag, that doesn’t mean your spouse is. Back in December, The Hill reported that an Obama fundraiser had encouraged a lobbyist to have his wife contribute. “I was quite taken aback,” the lobbyist said. There’s currently no database of spouse contributions.

Former and future lobbyists are OK. The Obama campaign restricts current lobbyists from joining the campaign. But a bunch of former lobbyists have helped out—including deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, Teal Baker, and Emmett Beliveau—who could easily slip back onto K Street once the campaign is over. Obama now has 14 bundlers who are also federally registered lobbyists, but they are currently inactive, according to Public Citizen. (Clinton has 22 lobbyist bundlers; McCain has 70.) However, campaign-finance reformers point out that no campaign has ever taken the step of banning current and former lobbyists. “It’s hard to come up with any stronger of a firewall,” says Craig Holman of Public Citizen.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/trailhead/archive/2008/05/19/obama-s-lobbying-ties.aspx

 

and


Obama’s Lobbyist Connection
Michael Isikoff
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 11:06 AM ET May 24, 2008

When Illinois utility Commonwealth Edison wanted state lawmakers to back a hefty rate hike two years ago, it took a creative lobbying approach, concocting a new outfit that seemed devoted to the public interest: Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity, or CORE. CORE ran TV ads warning of a "California-style energy crisis" if the rate increase wasn't approved—but without disclosing the commercials were funded by Commonwealth Edison. The ad campaign provoked a brief uproar when its ties to the utility, which is owned by Exelon Corp., became known. "It's corporate money trying to hoodwink the public," the state's Democratic Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn said. What got scant notice then—but may soon get more scrutiny—is that CORE was the brainchild of ASK Public Strategies, a consulting firm whose senior partner is David Axelrod, now chief strategist for Barack Obama.

Last week, Obama hit John McCain for hiring "some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington" to run his campaign; Obama's aides say their candidate, as a foe of "special interests," has refused to take money from lobbyists or employ them. Neither Axelrod nor his partners at ASK ever registered as lobbyists for Commonwealth Edison—and under Illinois's loose disclosure laws, they were not required to. "I've never lobbied anybody in my life," Axelrod tells NEWSWEEK. "I've never talked to any public official on behalf of a corporate client." (He also says "no one ever denied" that Edison was the "principal funder" of his firm's ad campaign.)

But the activities of ASK (located in the same office as Axelrod's political firm) illustrate the difficulties in defining exactly who a lobbyist is. In 2004, Cablevision hired ASK to set up a group similar to CORE to block a new stadium for the New York Jets in Manhattan. Unlike Illinois, New York disclosure laws do cover such work, and ASK's $1.1 million fee was listed as the "largest lobbying contract" of the year in the annual report of the state's lobbying commission. ASK last year proposed a similar "political campaign style approach" to help Illinois hospitals block a state proposal that would have forced them to provide more medical care to the indigent. One part of its plan: create a "grassroots" group of medical experts "capable of contacting policymakers to advocate for our position," according to a copy of the proposal. (ASK didn't get the contract.) Public-interest watchdogs say these grassroots campaigns are state of the art in the lobbying world. "There's no way with a straight face to say that's not lobbying," says Ellen Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes government transparency.

Axelrod says there are still huge differences between him and top McCain advisers, including the fact that he doesn't work in D.C. But his corporate clients do have business in the capital. One of them, Exelon, lobbied Obama two years ago on a nuclear bill; the firm's executives and employees have also been a top source of cash for Obama's campaign, contributing $236,211. Axelrod says he's never talked to Obama about Exelon matters. "I'm not going to public officials with bundles of money on behalf of a corporate client," Axelrod says.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/138519/output/print

 

1. Yes
2. None of the above

No President is going to lessen the effects of white, black, latino, asian, gay or any other group's privilege.