TheAgitator.com
Morning Links
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008- Protecting the border by killing babies.
- “Excellent point, sir!”
- StrictlyNoPhotography.com.
- It’s actually a delicacy in the Bronx. I like mine with ketchup.
- And the smears begin. Does it really matter how or why Obama’s parents met and got married? And are we going to get six month of this crap from the right wing?
MORE: HTML gremlins inadvertently ate these links. Sorry!
What a delicacy for $400!! Why ruin it with ketchup?
chsw
There may be areas of concern with Obama’s background, but attacking the legal standing of his parentage is a cheap shot. Moreover, it is playing with fire in the long-term. Today in America, more than half of all black children are born outside of marriage, and over a quarter of white children. Many of these children will run for political office someday. There is no good reason why they be shut out of political life. Furthermore, all of these children will be voters. It is stupid to offend this group for a short-term gain.
chsw
chsw: The modern GOP trades heavily on racism. They aren’t losing anything at all by making silly, purely race-based accusations that Obama might be a bastard or a Communist.
It’s looking more likely that Obama is going to win the Democratic nomination, so the GOP needs to mobilize their base. It’s hard to get people inspired to vote for a flip-flop like McCain. It’s a lot easier to get them inspired to vote *against* a muslim commie bastard nigger. (Pardon the language, I’m simply attempting to capture the most common Obama smears.)
Wow…Obama’s parents might have met via communist sympathetic channels half a century ago…so we should be concerned?
Big deal…my parents met in church, and I grew up to be an atheist. This line of reasoning is just aggressively stupid.
Shit. That poor lady and her baby should have just snuck across the border in a puddle jumper and Half of Congress would have offered to make her a citizen by now. See what you get for following the rules?
The content of his character, not the color of his parents’ skin…
Radley Balko points to this article which questions how Obama’s parents met, based on the low probability of interracial marriages at the time, and suggests they might have met through Communist activism. He blames the appearance of the article on “…
So we’ve gone from Obama is a closet Muslim who will impose Sharia law to Obama is a closet Commie who will:
Make government bigger?
Spend more on social programs?
Create a vast expensive new HealthCare entitlement?
Hmm… come to think of it, I guess Bush is a commie too.
According to the attorney for the parents’ of the deceased child, a lawsuit cannot be filed against the government for six months. In the meantime, would it be unreasonable for Congress to force the official(s) who actually made the decision that killed the baby to testify before Congress for the purpose of being publicly shamed, which is good in and of itself, and for the purpose of deterring future outrages?
http://www.khon2.com/news/local/15574242.html
I can’t see the link. Just looks like text on my Firefox and Safari.
I’ve read it in Firefox and Explorer, no links for me either.
Yup, no links here either…just text.
I followed the other links when they were still links, but now I may never know what’s a delicacy in the Bronx!
(Trying hard not to let my imagination get the better of my good taste here.)
“All the mulattos I know have communist parents, therefore Obama is communist.” Sigh. That’s right up there with “Nobody I knew voted for Nixon.”
chsw,
Look how the Republicans treat veterans that are not loyal party followers. I know many Marine buddies who were disgusted with the band-aid bit the Republicans pulled at their convention.
You think they’ll think twice about smearing parents and kids?
Isn’t American Samoa, er… American?
Once again Balko is showing his ignorance of politics. There is no way any real Republican strategist is behind this. If it is a right winger it’s a fringe nut job, much like the 9/11 conspiracy crowd you party with all the time. It’s more likely Hillary’s bunch is behind this as she has more to gain. If this came from McCain’s people it would cause more harm than anything. Reason is fine, but you also need to THINK!
Also for someone known as the Agitator you have a real thin skin.
Pat,
I realize the link to the Obama ancestry attack is now gone, but I assume it was to Lisa Schiffren’s column on Townhall.com.
Schiffren isn’t exactly David Icke. She is ostensibly mainstream, not a member of the fringe right or left or a conspiracy nut. She is not part of Hillary’s crowd either. She is a mainstream conservative offering ugly/silly suggestions about Obama’s “real” background.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmM2NDQ3ZWQ1YWM0Y2QyZTUxMDdkY2M2OTJlNGE5MWE=
KDW & LEE, most of the damaging facts and innuendos about Obama have come from the Clinton campaign and its fellow travelers. A case in point – the smear using Obama’s elementary school teacher. She said that Obama had written an essay in third grade saying that he might like to be president. HRC presented that as a proof of some sort of campaign duckspeaking by Obama. Case in point – the phone campaign referring to Obama’s middle name – Hussein – in several primaries.
Lastly, what in the world did the previous administration do for veterans? Lee, you refer to Republicans in general. That leads me to think that you are a Democratic party partisan and not capable of separating people from presidencies. Moreover, I doubt that you are a veteran.
chsw
This election, don’t vote for a Jackass.
If you look a little deeper you’ll see Schiffren’s article was inspired by this article at AIM.
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/obamas-communist-mentor/
The idea that a child’s political leanings were inspired by his parents and/or mentors is more likely than not.
I don’t think its too far fetched to suggest Obama leans more to the left than Hillary. It wouldn’t be the first time its been suggested and I don’t think his socialist tendencies are groundless in the least.
I can’t speak to the contents of Lee’s mind, but I would like to point out that being particularly disgusted with one of the two major parties does not mean that one is a partisan of the other.
chsw,
Which one of the candidates is not a Jackass?
Pat, you moron.
The original link went to National Review.
Are you saying Hillary has plants at National Review?
Hey, Bill. Here’s the link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/staffordshire/7253002.stm
But, your imagination might be the preferable option…
Radley, you moron. The original link was http://www.aim.org/aim-column/obamas-communist-mentor/
which was linked to by the national review. Which part of this article do you find not factual? Why would a nominee’s background be off limits? Even better, since your links are not visible, how would us moron’s KNOW what you linked to? So far reading your comments I have found that I hate veterans and am a racist. This really will help with the whole “bringing together” and Hope and whatever else Obama wants to do.
Pat may or may not be a moron, Radley, but on rare occasion — this occasion — you certainly are. So OK the link you put up, or tried to put up, was to NR. No one says Hillary has ties to NR. But it’s pretty clear that most of the Obama bashing is currently coming from Hillary’s camp.
Would the Dems smear Obama over race? Isn’t that a Rep thing to do? Not recently. Think Bobby Jindal in Louisiana two campaigns ago. When he was leading his Dem rival Kathleen Blanco slightly going into the last week, conservative Dem precincts were flooded with mailers bringing attention to Jindal’s, uhhh, un-whiteness. And he lost.
Seems Dems like blacks just fine and even allow a few to attain some status — as long as the rest of them stay in the back of the bus.
Don’t forget where the Klan came from.
Just like the Ford loss in TN last year, if Obama loses repubs will be accused of being racists because the black (D) candidate didn’t win. The fact of the matter is, and the california primary proves, white dems (especially souther dems) will tell the world that they love Obama but when it comes to pulling the lever it’s not going to happen.
#25 —
The original article was by Accuracy in Media, another right wing outfit. Quite a bit righter wing, actually, than National Review.
#26
A southern Democrat is more conservative than most Republicans in any other part of the country. The national GOP has been trying for 30 years to win over latent southern racists — and to much success.
Is Hillary’s camp playing dirty tricks and using racial demagoguery? You bet. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong to point out that the right has already started the same thing. If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you’d know by now that it’s an “a pox on both their houses” kind of place.
Radley, I love the site and am fully in line with your political leanings on most subjects. However, you tend to go pretty far overboard on some issues. The latest examply your failed “link” to the article on the child from American Samoa who died in Immigration control in the Honolulu airport. You titled the link “Protecting the Border by Killing Babies”. That is just over the top. This is a tragedy and it sounds likely that Immigration was at fault and a partial cause of the child’s death and will be held civilly liable. However, there is nothing in the story to indicate that Immigration was trying to harm anyone. There was a slight delay (one hour) in processing the immigration paperwork of one of the adults accompanying the child. This delay may have prevented the baby from being timely transported to the hospital where it would likely have had a better chance at survival.
However, there is nothing to indicate that Immigration knowingly attempted to harm the child, knowingly failed to provide the child with care that it needed, knowingly did anything wrong. Just b/c the delay may have been a contributing factor to the child’s death doesn’t even mean that it is a legal cause of death. What is more disturbing is that the family was apparently locked in a room w/o any immediate supervision such that officials didn’t know the baby was in distress for some 5-10 minutes while the family attempted to get the attention of officials on the other side of a closed door.
These are extraordinary facts which don’t justify the insinuation that Immigration “killed” a child.
I think, as is the case for almost all advocates, you hurt your cause more than you help it when you make overblown claims or complaints about events that, under closer scrutiny don’t really bear out.
Although the article referred to the fact that Obama’s parents were an interracial couple, the reference was not racist. The authors point that Obama has more than a little circumstantial evidence linking him to a leftist upbringing is valid and relevant to his candidacy. Since we can’t know what the political bent of his parents were while he was being raised, we can only go by circumstantial evidence and his political record.
chsw,
Never said I was a veteran, not sure where you got that idea. I was in the Marines from ‘84-’91. Then again I could say I was an astronaught and there is no way to validate either way.
As someone pointed out before, being disgusted with the behavior of one party does not automatically make you a partisan for the other. I was not refering to how an Administration treats veterans generally (this Admin additionally does a pretty bad job of) but how the Republicans treat military members who have a different political opinion than they do.
The people ARE the party. So when I see the delegates of a party behaving badly at their convention, I think it is reasonable to paint with a broad brush and use ‘Republicans’.
On a tangent…
You want to know the president that most of the older military members have the greatest respect for? Carter (of course they had to be in the military during his tenure, so it is a limited number). He pushed to increased pay by about 50% during his Administration as well as implementing many changes that made bases liveable again. Reagan picked up that baton and created the best military in the world from the ashes of the early 70’s.
Lee, the reason why military pay went up during the Carter years was because the Democratic Congress pretty much froze military and civil service pay during the Nixon and Ford years. I know that because my father was a civil servant in DC during those canned tuna years. Even with those increases, US soldiers qualified for welfare benefits in most of the US and Europe by the time Reagan took over because of the Carter-era inflation. It was only after Volcker threw on the monetary brakes that inflation ebbed. That, in turn, meant that the pay increases for the military actually meant something. As far as changes on the bases, my recollection is at odds with yours. Let’s just leave it at that.
Most rank and file Republicans I know treat all veterans well, even those who disagree with them on issues. They do not make the disagreements personal unless the other party makes it personal.
chsw (once a Dem, now a habitual ticket-splitter)
Glenn,
I understand your concern that the headline, “Protecting Border By Killing Babies,” was over the top. It probably was.
However, you said, “However, there is nothing to indicate that Immigration . . . knowingly did anything wrong.” Unless you don’t give any credit to the claims of the parent and nurse, I don’t see how you can say this.
According to Congressman Faleomavaega Eni:
“While detained, Mrs. Futi and the escort nurse made numerous attempts to explain to CBP Officers of the urgency for Michael
to be discharged to local medical faculty who was scheduled to transfer Michael directly to Kapiolani Medical Center upon arrival.”
http://www.pacificmagazine.net/news/2008/02/16/congressman-calls-for-federal-probe-into-babys-death
If this is true, then CBP did knowingly do something very wrong. I very much doubt they wanted anyone to die, but it sounds like they showed extraordinary indifference to the pleas of a mother and a nurse. They could have let the nurse and child go immediately. Only the mother’s papers were (apparently) out of order. As a regular reader of this site, it is not hard for me to believe some law enforcement officials would exhibit this sort of indifference.
Here is a direct link to Congressman Faleomavaega’s letter to Michael Chertoff:
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/as00_faleomavaega/enirequestinvestigationonfutideath.html
“…my recollection is at odds with yours….”
Not my recollections, just what was passed down to me from those in the military (specifically the Marines) during those years.
Unless things have changed in the last few years, the lowest ranks still can qualify for welfare if they have a family.