There are mosques that preach Radical Islam. There are churches that preach Radical Christianity. Unfortunately, the leading Democratic nominee for president attends such a church. Unfortunately, its really not a surprise.... Here are a few of those lines again from Jeremiah Wright's more famous sermons:
"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing `God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people... God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye."
"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
As noted earlier, Jeremiah Wright is no casual aquaintance of the Obama's. Jeremiah Wright helps keep Obama's "priorities straight and his moral compass calibrated." Sweetness and Light and The Chicago Tribune reported last year:
Obama says that rather than advising him on strategy, Wright helps keep his priorities straight and his moral compass calibrated.
"What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice," Obama said. "He's much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I'm not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that's involved in national politics." .
In his 1993 memoir "Dreams from My Father," Obama recounts in vivid detail his first meeting with Wright in 1985. The pastor warned the community activist that getting involved with Trinity might turn off other black clergy because of the church's radical reputation.
When Obama sought his own church community, he felt increasingly at home at Trinity... Later he would base his 2004 keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention on a Wright sermon called "Audacity to Hope," -also the inspiration for Obama's second memoir, "The Audacity of Hope." Though Wright and Obama do not often talk one-on-one often, the senator does check with his pastor before making any bold political moves.
Last fall, Obama approached Wright to broach the possibility of running for president. Wright cautioned Obama not to let politics change him, but he also encouraged Obama, win or lose...
On the attacks on 9-11, the good reverend said it was a wakeup call for whites.
Here are a few lines from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's newsletter, linked at Sweetness and Light:
When it comes to Israel and divesting from banks and businesses that are heavily invested in Israel, until the Palestinian problem has been resolved amicably for both sides, you can throw that out of your mind! Nobody is trying to hear what we are saying in terms of divestment from Israel.
In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. 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.
More here
Obama pastor: Not God bless, but God d--- America!
Rev. Jeremiah Wright also blames U.S. for 9/11
First he praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, giving him a humanitarian award and traveling with him to Libya to meet Moammar Gadhafi. Then he turned his Trinity United Church of Christ into an institution that had all the earmarkings of a black separatist congregation. And now he, it turns out, he has damned America in God's name and blamed the U.S. for provoking the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by dropping nuclear weapons on Japan in World War II and supporting Israel since 1947.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor for the last 20 years, the man who married he and his wife, Michelle, and baptized their two daughters and is credited with providing the title of Obama's book, "The Audacity of Hope," has a long history of "inflammatory rhetoric."
But those discovered by an ABC News investigation may be the toppers. ABC News reviewed dozens of Wright's sermons, finding repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans. "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God d--- America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God d--- America for treating our citizens as less than human. God d--- America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the U.S. had brought on al-Qaida's attacks because of its own terrorism, ABC News reports. "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Wright said in a sermon Sept. 16, 2001. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.
Obama declined to comment on Wright's denunciations of the U.S., but a campaign religious adviser, Shaun Casey, appearing on "Good Morning America" today, said Obama "had repudiated" those comments. In a statement to ABC News, Obama's press spokesman Bill Burton said, "Sen. Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they're offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Sen. Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Sen. Obama deeply disagrees. But now that he is retired, that doesn't detract from Sen. Obama's affection for Rev. Wright or his appreciation for the good works he has done."
Source
One of Obama's Earmarks Went to Hospital That Employs Michelle Obama
Post below lifted from NRO. See the original for links
Dan Riehl notes, via Amanda Carpenter, that in the list of earmarks he requested, $1 Million was requested for the construction of a new hospital pavilion at the University Of Chicago. The request was put in in 2006.
You know who works for the University of Chicago Hospital? Michelle Obama. She's vice president of community affairs.
As Byron noted, "In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama's compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office."
Looks like that raise was worth it.
Atlas has more
Obama slightly better on disastrous housing "solutions"
Why don't these hot-air merchants ever listen to economists? I guess they just don't care about the wreckage they will create as long as it sounds good to the voters
The Democratic presidential race is still going strong and both candidates have latched on to the housing market as a key issue. Both want to bail out mortgage holders, but the news media have given little in-depth attention to concerns about either plan. Warnings that Hillary Clinton's proposals could devastate the economy have gone almost unnoticed.
Clinton (D- N.Y.) has proposed a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures and a five-year interest rate freeze. "On the nation's credit crunch, she [Clinton] stood by her proposal to declare a 90-day moratorium on mortgage foreclosures and a five-year interest rate freeze on existing, adjustable-rate mortgages, despite withering criticism from economists - and from Obama - that the plan would wreck the housing market and send new mortgage rates into the stratosphere," The Washington Post reported February 22.
That "withering criticism" could have come from Jerry Bowyer, chief economist of Benchmark Financial Network. "It would be a trigger event which would set off chaos in every financial market of consequence on planet Earth and would be a disaster for the U.S. economy," Bowyer told the Business & Media Institute. Yet when NBC's Tim Russert interviewed Clinton for "Meet the Press" January 13, he did not challenge the senator's claim that "What I have proposed would begin to stabilize the situation as it is today."
The Economist magazine termed Clinton's plan "deeply unsound" in its March 1-7 issue and said it "would surely result in higher rates and scarcer credit for future borrowers." Even Washington Post business columnist David Ignatius called the moratorium "one of the truly bad ideas of our time" in a piece on February 21.
In contrast, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has said he wants to offer $10 billion in bonds to homeowners and give them a tax credit. While both plans have been mentioned by many news print and broadcast outlets, there has been little explanation of the potential economic consequences. "This seems to be the only area where Obama is not as far to the left as Hillary," said Bowyer. "The downsides are still there, though: bailing out people for high-risk behavior encourages them to do it again - economists refer to this as `moral hazard.' Also, of course, this is tax money taken from productive uses in the private sector to buy votes from people who don't like to pay their debts. So, not a very good idea, but nothing like the disruption to capital market transactions under the Hillary plan."
The Washington Post highlighted the candidates' "protections" for "struggling working-class voters," including tax increases on others, on February 24. "Especially important in Ohio, both Democrats have foreclosure relief plans. Obama's offers $10 billion in bonds to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. He also would give a tax credit to struggling homeowners to cover 10 percent of the interest on their mortgages each year. Clinton would temporarily freeze foreclosures and interest rates on adjustable rate mortgages," wrote the Post's Michael Fletcher. The article didn't include any questions about the plans.
The New York Times reported from the campaign trail in Ohio on March 4. "Their [Clinton and Obama] speeches are also brimming with pledges to revive industry and halt foreclosures ." wrote Andrew Jacobs. Jacobs's story didn't explain what Clinton or Obama planned to do in order to "halt foreclosures," or offer any analysis or criticism of the plans.
Dr. Gary Wolfram, a professor of political economy at Hillsdale College and a BMI adviser, was critical of both plans. Clinton's plan, he explained, would dry up credit and "put downward pressure on housing prices which is exactly what they don't want to." Obama's plan wasn't quite as bad, "so he would just steal from us," said Wolfram sarcastically. "I saved and paid my mortgage off. So now I would be taxed" to pay for people who couldn't afford their houses, he continued. "That's fair."
The Obama plan was also criticized in the Los Angeles Times as "too marginal." The newspaper wrote on February 21, "Economists question whether Obama's $10-billion `foreclosure prevention fund' would cover the thousands of Americans who already have lost homes and the thousands more who are in danger." Then the LA Times quoted economist L. Josh Bivens of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, who called Obama's plan "a drop in the bucket." But at least the paper included Obama's criticism of Clinton's plan, which he termed "disastrous." Obama's criticism was that it would benefit "people who made this problem worse" - banks and lenders.
According to Austan Goolsbee, the lead economic advisor to the Obama presidential campaign, the senator "has not opposed freezes on rates or freezes on foreclosures . He has, however, emphasized that we should not give blanket freezes to everyone such as to the people who have made this problem worse."
But Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, said freezes have the opposite problem. In the January 21 International Edition of Newsweek, he said mortgage freezes don't benefit lenders; rather, they "unilaterally shift the financial pain to lenders." Schiff was specifically criticizing the Bush administration's freeze, but concluded that "damaging as the plan may be, it is nothing compared with what some presidential candidates and members of Congress are cooking up."
Prominent economist and columnist Walter Williams agreed. "President Bush's plan to deal with the subprime crisis is to freeze interest rates on adjustable rate mortgages. Freezing interest rates would stop people's mortgage payments from increasing. That is a gross violation of basic contract rights and would appear to be a Fifth Amendment violation," Williams wrote in a January 23 column. "The long run effect of the Bush plan is to make lending institutions even more selective in choosing borrowers," Williams wrote. "Then there's the question: If government can invalidate the terms of one kind of contractual agreement where the borrowers can't pay, what's to say that it won't invalidate other contractual agreements where the borrowers encounter hardship and what will that do to financial markets?"
Williams was talking about Bush's plan, which was a voluntary agreement with lenders. A mandatory rate freeze, like Clinton's proposal, merits even more scrutiny. "A mandatory program would have some real constitutional problems," said Ted Frank, an attorney who directs the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute. He said Clinton's proposals sounded like "rewriting contracts after the fact," which would "damage the credibility of American financial markets." "The Clinton plan rewrites contracts that would not have been offered at all had the lenders known that the government would be dictating the interest rate later," Frank said.
Wolfram added that undermining contracts could have economic consequences. "Markets don't work real well when you don't have contracts," Wolfram said. "Sanctity of contract is really what came out of the Middle Ages. That's why England became the center of the Industrial Revolution because it had rule of law and it had contract law. That's why people wanted to trade in England. This little island in the middle of nowhere becomes the center of world commerce. People liked to trade there because they knew they would protect their contract."
That would become an ongoing problem, he said. "Once you set the precedent, how do I know you're not going to come along and violate other contracts? If you want to do it that way - that's fine. The market will respond, housing prices will go down, people will be foreclosed on - they can't sell their house. And all the people that thought they were going to be better off are going to find out that they're worse off."
Source
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