One of the constants espoused by conservative media analysts is that the views of most mainstream press members are not shared by the majority of Americans. This week represented a fabulous example of this assertion as media member after media member gushed over Barack Obama's performance in Philadelphia on Tuesday while a majority of citizens in a recent poll said that they were less likely to vote for the junior senator from Illinois as result of this speech. As announced Thursday by Southern Political Report:
Barack Obama's speech about race on Tuesday impressed many who witnessed it or read it. But most of America did neither, and many of them -- white and black -- were less persuaded of the speech's capacity to heal racial wounds, or to put the issue of race behind Obama as he continues his quest for the White House. That's according to a new poll by InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion. [...]
Of those who knew about the controversy and the speech, we asked, "Taking all this into account, are you more or less likely to support Obama for president?"
Less likely (52%)
More likely (19%)
About the same (27%)
No opinion (2%) [...]
[T]he poll displays no numbers flattering to Obama. Most startling is that blacks by 56% to 31% said the speech made them less likely to vote for him. [...]
Democrats disapproved 48% to 28%, which looks sobering for Obama on first glance, but might portend otherwise. [...]
The disturbing numbers for Obama are the independent voters. By 56% to 13%, they said they're less likely to vote for him because of the speech.
This finding might explain media's errors:
And Democratic whites were more sympathetic with the speech's message than black ones.
As most press members are "Democratic whites," this explains a lot, doesn't it?
Source
The Obama Associates
Post below lifted from Flopping Aces. See the original for links
We've known for sometime now that Obama has made some questionable decisions on who to befriend. People like Rezko and Auchi, Odinga, Ayers, The New Black Panther Party, La Raza, Farrakhan, and how could we forget the man of the hour, His holiness in hate, the mentor to Barack..Mr. Wright...now a talk show host in Oregon is bringing up another association that Obama had that should be questioned:
During Obama's last year on the board of The Woods Fund (2002), he participated in awarding grants, including a $70,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network, a Chicago-based group founded by Rashid and Mona Khalidi. In another suspected quid pro quo arrangement similar to those with Ayers and Rezko, Rashid Khalidi also held a fundraising event in his home for Barack Obama.
In the Middle East, Rashid Khalidi was known as a man to be reckoned with. From 1972 through 1983, Khalidi was the director in Beirut of the official Palestinian press agency, FAFA. His wife worked there as well. According to sources, when the Khalidi's left Chicago for Columbia University in New York, Rashid was honored with the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at that Ivy League university. Their goodbye party in Chicago included testimonials from Bill Ayers and Barack Obama.
"What other fund raising connections does Obama have? How many times can you look the other way in church and with fund raising situations with more than questionable people?" asked Ms. Roth. "We all make mistakes in judgment with people and their backgrounds sometimes, but usually we learn and pick better friends and associates. How come Obama seems to have continued hanging around more than questionable characters with anti American backgrounds and some with criminal behaviors? Now one is being indicted, Tony Rezco, who raised a ton of money for Obama," she said.
"As President, how much would he look the other way when dealing with national security and dangers to our country? How much would he listen passively to terrorist leaders then lecture us on our ugly American status? This kind of change is not what our country needs!" added the popular talk show host, whose show is syndicated by USA Radio Network
Read all about Khalidi here. It's not pretty.
Yes, its only a fundraising event and taken in that context only it would not be that big of a deal. But you add up the totality of his associations and you have to be a little wary of where this guy is coming from, and in which direction he is heading.
Typical White Fact-Based Reasoning
Senator Barack Obama said in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope, "The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact." Yet he also claimed that to fear a black person on the street more than a white person is a racial "stereotype", "bred" into us.
To the contrary, such a fear is actually "grounded in reason and fact." When the numbers are crunched, a black person is almost six times more likely than a white person to be a murderer.Senator Barack Obama in his Race Speech said his white grandmother "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street". In a follow-up interview he clarified that remark by saying,
"She is a typical white person who, you know, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there is a reaction. That has been bred into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way." He described such feelings as, "racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
It is true that Jesse Jackson confessed to the same fear . More importantly, that fear is a rational one, borne out by "reason and fact". The data are available. The U.S. Justice Department provides a breakdown of homicides by the race of both the victim and offender. Looking at the data for 2005 (the latest year available), we find that whites committed 48.0% of all murders and blacks committed 51.2% of all murders. However, whites outnumber blacks in the population. In fact, non-Hispanic whites are about 69% of the population and blacks are about 13% . These statistics alone, that blacks are 13% of the population but commit 51.2% of the murders, indicate that blacks commit a seriously disproportionate number of murders.
What we would like to find specifically is the likelihood that a given person is a murderer. The Justice department also provides overall murder rates. In 2004 (last year of available data), 5.9 people were murdered out of every 100,000. Since some of those were multiple murders, let's assume that only 5 people of every 100,000 were murderers. That is, the chance that some person you see on the street will murder someone this year, knowing nothing else, is about 5 in 100,000.... That means a black person is 5.6 times more likely than a white person to be a murderer.
It is totally rational for a any person (including Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama's grandmother) to fear a black person more than a white one. In fact, you should fear them 5.6 times more.
More here
Obama could learn from his white grandparents
Richard Landes has some thoughts on Obama, Wright and the prophetic tradition, in the course of which he recounts the following:
Although Reverend Wright has no problem attributing paranoia and stupidity to the "group of patriots in power", he does not seem to have much awareness of the power of paranoid thinking on his own ministry, and the terrible consequences of taking refuge in this thinking. And this is, indeed, a pervasive problem in the Black community.
I had my first glimpse of this problem in 2000, when, as the head of the Center for Millennial Studies, I sat on a panel with three rappers and a black academic colleague, discussing the apocalyptic themes in Hip-hop. The AIDS conspiracy came up repeatedly. Finally, a member of the audience asked, "How many on the panel believe these AIDS conspiracies?" The three rap artists all said they did. I said I did not. The African American professor said:I don't want to answer that, because if I say I do, I'll lose credibility with my colleagues, and if I say I don't, I'll lose credibility with the brothers.
The implications of this reluctance to speak replicate closely the dilemma of Barack Obama...
Yes, but it's a dilemma that is wholly alien to the overwhelming majority of American voters. Liberals love to play these games with social conservatives, asking Republican candidates whether they think the Book of Genesis is the literal truth, or they believe in the Rapture. But there's wiggle room in stuff that hasn't yet happened or was all a long time ago. When you're questioned about whether the US government cooked up Aids in a laboratory in the late Seventies to kill black people, you're being asked whether you accept the objective reality of the world we live in. That's not a good thing to make a "dilemma" of.
The Reverend Wright is, to modify Cole Porter, not "dilemma" but "da limit" - a point beyond which Americans will willingly accompany Obama. So the simple fact that an absurd proposition for most people is a painful dilemma for the Senator has the effect of distancing him from those whose votes he needs. Rather than disown the kook he's spent 20 years listening to, Obama made his gran'ma the issue. Judith Apter Klinghoffer writes:
Does he have any reason to believe she was a "typical" prejudiced "white person?" No. The opposite is true. Unlike Barack himself, his grandparents were active anti-racist. So much so, that they had difficulty fitting into Texas' racist society of the early 1960s. He writes(pp.18-21):. . . At a bank where she worked, Toot (his grandmother's nickname)made the acquaintance of the janitor, a tall and dignified black World War II vet she remembers only as Mr. Reed. While the two of them chatted in the hallways one day, a secretary in the office stormed up and hissed that Tood should never, ever, "call no nigger 'Mister.'" Not long afterworlds, Toot would find Mr. Reed in a corner of the building weeping quietly to himself. . . .
They (grandparents) decided Toot would keep calling Mr. Reed "Mister," . . . . Grams began to decline invitations from coworkers to go out for a beer, telling them he had to get home to keep the wife happy.
He goes on to tell a story about his 11 year old mother who played in the front yard with a young Black girl. Neighborhood Children gathered outside the picket fence shouting: "Nigger lover!" and "Dirty Yankee!" The grandmother tried to get them into the house. The grandfather went further:Gramps was beside himself when he heard what had happened. He interrogated my mother, wrote down names. The next day he took the morning off from work to visit the school principal. He personally called the parents of some of the offending children to give them a piece of his mind.
No, his grandfather did not say that he could no more disown racist whites than disown the white community.
Obama's gran'ma was consistently better than the times required. Jeremiah Wright is a lot worse than the times require. There is, in Gran'ma's conduct, the hope of change (as Obama would say). In Wright's, there is none. It's not difficult and all the portentous self-regarding rhetoric in the world can't make it so.
Source
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