About Politics

Scott asked:


I don’t know much about politics currently and I would like to be able to keep up with and contribute to political conversations.

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Flower asked:


I am an upcoming senior, and I love love history and politics. I’d like to get an idea of the type of career I want to pursue so that I can better decide on a college.

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METme? asked:


What if next week, Obama institutes (this is just hypothetical) that the US align with EU or something of that nature and more or less abandon everything America stands for….Would you fight or accept?

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Jeremy James asked:


Many thought the day would never come. A day that all Americans could prove to their children that they could become whatever they want in life no matter what their background is. A day that Americans could put aside their differences and see their neighbors for the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

Barack Obama’s stunning victory at the Iowa Caucus ignited a spark among Democratic voters, reminiscent of the days of Camelot and John F. Kennedy. Many believed that a state like Iowa, with a miniscule Black population, would never elect an African American to such a high position, but Obama’s message of change resonated in the Hawkeye State, as 37.6 percent of Iowa voters selected him to represent the Democratic party in November.

More shocking was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s third place finish with 29.5 percent of Iowa Democrats supporting the New York Senator.

According to the Associated Press, Obama’s victory marked the first time an African American candidate has won such a vital caucus or primary.

“Years from now you’ll be able to say, ‘This was the moment when it all began.’ This is the moment when we finally beat back the politics of fear and doubt and cynicism,” a victorious Obama told a crowd of supporters at a Des Moines, Iowa sports arena.

Obama dominated the college-age vote and enjoyed enormous success among Blacks in Waterloo, Iowa.

His success among African Americans should assist in his chances in November because many Black voters still believe he is not electable.

Obama’s wife Michelle believes America is ready for a Black president despite the skepticism.

“Ain’t no Black people in Iowa. Something big, something new is happening. Let’s build the future we all know is possible. Let’s show our kids that America is ready for Barack Obama right now,” said Michelle Obama at the Trumpet Awards, a gala celebrating achievement in Black America.

Despite his resounding win in Iowa, and pollsters predicting a double-digit win in the first primary of 2008, Obama finished a close second to Clinton in New Hampshire days later. Surprisingly, Clinton defeated Obama 39 percent to 37 percent in the Granite State. However, the Illinois senator was still upbeat and optimistic in defeat.

“We always knew our climb would be steep. You made it clear that at this moment in this election, there is something happening in America … You can be a new majority,” Obama told his supporters in New Hampshire. Clinton recently won the primary in Michigan and the Nevada caucus also.

According to Allen G. Breed of the A.P., “Obama’s stunning victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Iowa caucuses and strong second in New Hampshire’s primary showed he could win White votes. But some say the South Carolina contest offers a new test of his viability. Can he energize Black voters in places where their numbers could help him win in November?”

On January 26, Obama won the South Carolina primary in a landslide, winning 55 percent of the Democratic vote.

At least half of South Carolina Democrats are Black and they could have been persuaded to distance themselves from Clinton because comments she and her husband Bill Clinton made, which some people view as racially insensitive.

Clinton recently stated that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of racial equality was realized only when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The former president later said that Obama was telling a “fairy tale” about his opposition to the war in Iraq, and that he has received a free pass in this election.

Clinton later went on “Meet the Press” to explain her comments and implied that Obama was injecting race into the election.

“I think it offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King’s role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act. She is free to explain that, but the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous,” Obama replied.

According to the A.P., Clinton’s advisors claim that an Obama staffer has compiled examples of comments by Clinton and her surrogates that could be construed as racially insensitive. The memo later surfaced on some political Web sites.

“To me, as an African American, I am frankly insulted the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think that Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in Black issues-when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood; I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book-when they have been involved,” argued BET founder Bob Johnson in a reference to Obama’s past drug use.

Johnson later said he was talking about Obama’s community activism and not his past drug use.

Former North Carolina senator John Edwards replied, “I must say I was troubled recently to see a suggestion that real change came not through Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King but through a Washington politician. I fundamentally disagree with that.”

Ironically, the change that Dr. King gave his life for could be the same change that gives America its first Black president. As Obama’s campaign slogan says, it is a “change we can all believe in.”



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Peter Menkin asked:


Normal 0

Obama leaves his Church

By Peter Menkin

06/18/08

Considered a man of faith, Barack Obama, the American running for nomination for President of the United States, has left his Church. For reasons of political controversy due to its pastor, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama left membership in Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), Chicago, Illinois after 20 years. (The church website proclaims: “We are a congregation which is unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian…”)

Trinity United Church of Christ occupies a tan brick building on West 95th Street across railroad tracks from a public housing project, reports The Christian Science Monitor.

The Senator said about leaving, “Too much press harassment, people couldn’t’ worship in peace.” That wasn’t his reason for leaving, but a complaint on the news media attention. The reason were politically controversial remarks by Trinity’s pastor, Reverend Wright.

Wright’s comments contradicted one of Obama’s campaign’s central messages — that the candidate can transcend past divisions such as those involving race.

The impediment to the African-American’s campaign is highlighted by Wright’s widely reported sermon remark: “God Damn America” (for its racism}, and blaming the September 11 terrorist attacks on US foreign policy. He has also blamed the U.S. government for the spread of the AIDS virus. Mostly, Wright is seen as anti-white and a racist.

On Bill Moyers Journal, Wright says we are unashamedly Black. His philosophy embodies, “Use the culture of which we are a part.” He preaches there is hope, that life has meaning, and that God is still in control. “We can change. We can do better.” Black Liberation theology is Wright’s UCC message. It is a UCC message he offers, since he is a UCC minister who studied under Martin Marty. Martin E. Marty, distinguished Lutheran Pastor, teacher, and writer who has been on the University of Chicago faculty since 1963.

Grounded in the history of the African-American, Black theology is powerful stuff. He is little sorry about his comments, but in Bill Moyer’s interview, Reverend Wright does appear sorry he made the comment “God damn America” in the Pulpit—if only for a few moments. But it wasn’t one remark, but a string of them that caused the significant distancing between the candidate’s spiritual advisor and candidate.

The press in the United States spends a lot of time and space talking about Senator Obama’s faith, his church, and how he is a Christian—the Senator says he is Christian himself, and that is also news. Religion in the campaign makes news, despite separation of Church and State. Time magazine says more voters see Senator Obama as a strongly religious person than they do every major presidential hopeful but Mitt Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts. Romney’s Mormonism drew extensive news coverage.

U.S. Senator Obama was married in Trinity church. His children were baptized in the church, and also like the wedding, Reverend Wright performed the solemnizations. The Senator said on leaving the church, “Trinity was where I found Jesus Christ, where we were married, where our children were baptized. We have many friends among the 8,000 members…” It is a church where he was moved many times. When Wright preached one Sunday about the sustaining power of hope in the face of poverty and despair, Obama says he found himself in tears.

He says in one speech:



“For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change… Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.”



It is the claim of Reverend Jeremiah Wright that Trinity is a church of Black theology. The Reverend Doctor John Cone, the Harvard Professor and African-American theologian interviewed on American Public Broadcasting System (PBS) by commentator Bill Moyers says on the PBS website:



“As we examine what contemporary theologians are saying, we find that they are silent about the enslaved condition of black people. Evidently they see no relationship between black slavery and the Christian gospel. Consequently there has been no sharp confrontation of the gospel with white racism. There is, then, a desperate need for a black theology, a



theology whose sole purpose is to apply the freeing power of the gospel to black people under white oppression.”

Cone says:



The Cross is the same as the lynching tree for the Black American in a Harvard Speech. The Christian Reverend Cone wants to start a conversation on this subject. He offers that lynching was terrorism that “worked to a certain degree.” This includes spectacle lynchings where 5,000 would gather to watch.

Religion is one place where you have an imagination that no one can control.” Black Churches are a place of the spirit… (even though you are living under the shadow of the lynching tree).” … There were 246 years of slavery, and 100 years of segregation and lynching.

America does not see itself as “not innocent,” according to Cone. “No human being is innocent.”



Reverend Cone is ordained in the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. which is one of the city’s largest black churches and not far from Obama’s home in the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park.

Apparently the Democratic candidate for his party’s nomination is not turning his back on Black theology, per se, since Sunday, June 15, 2008 he spoke from the pulpit at that same mega-church in Chicago, which has 20,000 members and is also considered a Black American church.

It is the history of the African American church in the United States that it is a center of Black community life speaking to the needs of the church and larger community in social and political ways. But not in so partisan a manner as was recently ascribed to the theology and preaching of the Reverend Wright. So the perception became. But he still associates himself with the African American church in general.

Senator Obama spoke of the role of Black fathers and their responsibilities, perhaps more a campaign speech than sermon from a “religious” man whose campaign motto is “Change That Works for You.” After all, he is running for President of the United States—or its Democratic Party nomination more accurately. He gave his talk from the pulpit of the “20,000-member Apostolic Church of God…a short walk from the Obamas’ home. The church’s pastor, Byron Brazier, is an Obama supporter,” reports The New York Times.

It is from the Black Church that Senator Obama learned many things about hope. Can he really take himself out of the African-American church ethos, as he has known it? Perhaps the Reverend Wright thinks not, though he is not saying. His official press release remark on Senator Obama and his family’s leaving was, “…We are saddened by the news …”

END IT

(Appx. 1100 words)



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K.R.SURENDRAN asked:


Barack Obama completes 100 days in office on 30 April 2009. It is a good precedent adopted by many to look back and take stock of the positive as well as the negative aspects and if in need of formulating better policy initiatives, both internal and external in the days to come. The youthful President took charge of affairs at a time when US was (and is) facing uphill tasks on the economic front which is still in doldrums or in a shambles. The financial melt-down is still a looming threat to all nations across the world which had its genesis in US, thanks to the unregulated free market economy adopted by the Republican Party (GoP) and its leaders.

Mr.George W Bush, the former President, a Republican who “carved a niche for himself” in formulating a policy affecting both internal and external affairs (thus he became the beloved of all) handed over power on a platter to Obama. Obama was by then kept abreast of all the developments which were not to his liking and hence was not alarmed or embarrassed.

 

While on his whirlwind tour of US to campaign for his Presidential candidature, he reminded the electorate of gigantic tasks ahead and appealed for their co-operation to surmount the obstacles one by one.

 

“We must throw ourselves up from the deep pit we have fallen in” – was his message to his supporters.

 

“While the Wall Street thrives, we should not allow the main street to suffer”- were also his famous words to the American citizen. Those words indicated his determination to rescue the economy from the deep ditch which found itself in as a result of eight years of misrule by the GoP.

 

With good intentions he proceeded to build up the economy, pumped $787 billion and later pumped more into the economy to bail-out banks, other institutions and for health-care across America. Obama is an advocate of Keynesian theory of economics is not on good terms with free-market economy which is unregulated and it always argues “markets always correct themselves” and there is no need of interference by the government. But that was not to be. The experience proved it with the crumbling down of the economic policies adopted by the former government and its economists like Alan Greenspan.  

 

A man reputed for his coolness, diplomacy and cordiality- Obama is known for these qualities- lost his cool after assuming power, when he came to learn about the huge sums of bonuses sanctioned by the executives of AIG (American International Group)-the World’s largest insurance company which was bailed out with pumping in of tax payers’ money-to themselves. The bureaucrats had no regard for the failing economy and its after-effects like recession and retrenchment were notorious for their selfishness and greed which are characteristics of a capitalist economy. After his scathing attack and with the Government’s decision to impose 90 percent tax on the bonuses they had sanctioned to themselves-some of them returned the amounts in full-not all of them. The bureaucrats of the Citi group also followed suit and they were also forced to remit the bonus back.

Still the damage control exercise is going on but the formidable tasks are still staring in the face of President Obama. Not cowed down by the threats ahead, Obama moves with brimming confidence is a good sign. After the first round of G20 Summit hosted by George Bush to bail-out the global economy in Washington, the then President on 15 November, the second round of the Summit was in London, hosted by Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Britain on April 2-3. Indian Prime Minister ManMohanSingh was also a participant in the Summit. The deliberations adopted there, if implemented in letter and spirit could be of helpful to a certain extent to the nations across the World - all are tasting the bitter fruits of economic down-turn - such as increasing the fund of IMF from $250 billion to $750 billion with the intention of extending help to needy nations to bail-out their economies and to help the member countries to get back huge amounts of unaccounted money stashed in safe havens like Liechenstein Bank in Germany and UBS in Switzerland by the political leaders and industrial tycoons.

 

Something is better than nothing- it is said. Differences there were, like France and Germany joining hands against encouraging bail-outs, instead they advocated for strict regulations and Britain and US on the other side giving more importance to bail-outs.

 

With more and more countries turning to the Left- last week Iceland, which was one of the safe havens for black money also turned to the left- after a colossal financial turmoil, still the apostles of Capitalism are busy deliberating on their next steps to bring back the free-market economy through the backdoor.

 

Obama, after the Summit flew into Germany first, then to France, Czech Republic and his last stop was Turkey. It was a historic tour, he got a chance to display his diplomatic potentials at everywhere he went befriending all without sowing the seeds of animosity, hatred and one-upmanship. The election of Anders Fogh Rasmussen , the former Prime Minister of Denmark as the new Chairman of NATO was a fine example of winning the hearts of everybody in the selection of Rasmussen . As far as Turkey is concerned Rasmussen was a hated figure from the very day a derogatory cartoon of Allah was published in a Danish Newspaper by its cartoonist. But Obama could prevail upon Turkish leaders cajoling them into agreeing for the appointment of Mr. Rasmussen as the NATO Chairman. A defining example of Obama’s statesmanship.

 

Similarly holding out an olive branch to Iran, which was on collision terms with US during the Bush era and the simultaneous reciprocating gesture by the Iranian authorities is also a step forward, though it is not a great leap, in establishing peace after a long gap. Both countries have a lot of ground to cover to establish durable peace in the trouble prone-area.

 

One remarkable step forward anyhow is the fifth historic meeting of the Organisation of American States held at Trinidad-Tobago last week. It was an ideal occasion for Obama and the Latin American countries to forget the past and pave the way for camaraderie. Obama’s moment with Hugo Chavez, the Venezeulan Head must have been an unforgettable experience. Chavez’s presentation of the renowned book by Edwardo Galeano titled- “Open Veins of Latin America”- to Obama was  reported with much prominence by the International media. But Cuba is still elusive and it is for Obama to take initiative to bridge gaps with the Latin American Communist nation, which is still undergoing sanctions slapped by US in 1948. Sixty years of mutual rivalry has to be put an end to, a new era of friendship and co-operation established. Cuba had to endure many a hardship on account of the frequent and indirect efforts by US to undermine the leadership, especially of the greatest revolutionary of our times Comrade Fidel Castro. CIA, US Intelligence agency in the past vainfully tried several times to physically eliminate him from the whole scene.

 

Anyhow past is past, now it is an opportune moment to lift the embargo and pave the way for lasting friendship

 

Keeping in mind all these positive aspects in mind propensity or could we say aspiration for remaining always at the top of the ladder is somewhat puzzling. The dream of a Uni-polar World still remains at the top of any US head’s agenda. A multi-polar World- that is not to any President’s liking. A mystery.

 

The ongoing crisis in Iraq, an exploding situation confronting Afghanistan and Pakistan and Obama’s undesirable interest and pumping of huge sums to Pakistan to tackle terrorism actually belie our expectations of this young leader.

 

He has ample time to learn. It is pertinent here to note, he has taken only a few steps ahead. Let us wish him all success in his endeavour to bring peace and prosperity on the occasion of his completion of hundred days in office.

 

 

 

  

 



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carolynn e asked:


Carrier Killer, Improved missile guidance systems, and not to mention their amazing numbers. What can we expect to see Obama do to react?

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Marcia Wood asked:


First there was Frank, Bill, Jeremiah, Bernadine, Alice  and than came Obama – the spitting image of Frank.  Oops, at least the ears are the same!   Frank was the guy that took little Obama by the hand and started the brain wash job during Barack’s  teenage years.   “In Dreams of My Father.” Obama tells the world that Frank was the strong influence and the man who helped Obama find his lost identity. 

Frank and friends had lived in Chicago for some 20 plus years and knew it was ripe for a young Obama to move in and start his “Chess game.”  Ripe, because Chicago was notorious for its violence and corruption – all Obama needed to do was light the flame and keep agitating the people until a bon fire erupted. 

Chicago was where Obama went from a toddler wrapped in liberalistic paraphernalia to a marathon runner equipped with tools of the extreme liberalist and radicals.  Frank, Ayers and Wright, along with a few women served as Obama’s mentors and prepared their student well – Obama jumped into community activities, analyzed the hot spots of the various communities and strategically started the fires. 

Obama didn’t exactly lead anyone or anything, but he mastered the art of using tax payer’s money to fund his radical channels.   If there’s one thing this man can do adeptly, its raising tons of money, note I didn’t say honest money – I just said money.

Stage left, in comes Mayor Harold Washington and his communist buddies who helped Obama makes his way to the Illinois Senate.  Washington was pretty much a “shoo in” when he ran for the office of mayor, because his campaign was backed by the Unions, many churches and special interest groups and getting Obama into the Illinois Senate was a pretty easy task for Washington and his Chicago gang. 

Remember, truth is not relevant literally non-existent during the radical’s feeding frenzy on the less fortunate.  Knowing how to control the masses is the secret – Obama knows that power comes from convincing those who “have not” that they can take power away from those who “have.”  

So Obama’s job during this Presidential Race is to fuel the fire, create discontent, anger and confusion in the “have nots.”   The “have nots” are much like a flock of geese and their only job is to follow the leader.   Obama keeps the “have nots” hungry, wanting more, dreaming of what may be and he constantly changes the game plan or tactics so the troops don’t experience boredom. 

 The Obama philosophy is “power in numbers,” never letting the right hand know what the left is doing and tearing down the opponent’s defense.   He loves to hit below the belt as we saw with Governor Sarah Palin and Biden was chosen over Hillary for one reason only.  Obama couldn’t control Hillary and frankly was afraid of her, but Biden was somewhat like the stray out on the streets who would sit up and bark or shake hands for a few pats and a pot full of earmarks. 

Now, Senator Obama with the help of Acorn, Project Vote and all his “pet” radical groups are showing Americans their uncanny control over our voting system.  The officials at the polls are overwhelmed, over worked and totally confused, which is exactly what Obama and friends have counted on with their devious tactics.  Obama plays stupid and Acorn just laughs all the way to the bank with their $ 800,000 dollars. 

So America if you want an honest man, a real leader and one who places country first and foremost on his agenda – vote for senator McCain.  If you want a deceitful, smooth talking attorney with lots of money who places radicals first, poor next and completely ignores the “middle class,” then Obama’s your man.

By the way, if you’re interested in Frank – just start surfing for Frank Marshall Davis: he was a great friend of Obama’s grandfather and a mentor to Barack Obama.  

See you later @ http://www.yourannie.com

As Always, Annie



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