Obama '08?

Once again, Congress is rushing to pass two massive spending bills that include more than $250 billion in new unfunded spending.

And they are pressing for votes THIS WEEK before they run out of town for their week-long Memorial Day break.

According to the Washington Post, "senior
Democratic aides said [the House spending bill]
could approach $200 billion, most of it unpaid
for by new revenue."

Meanwhile in the Senate, an original request
for $30 billion in emergency war funding has
already doubled and may grow to over $80 billion
if a $23 billion public school teacher bailout
is added as expected.

The two spending bills will total more than $250 billion -- and Congress and the President are once again on a mad-dash to spend, spend, spend.

Sen. Tom Coburn and members of Congress from each side of the political aisle are taking a stand saying that new spending must be offset with corresponding spending cuts.

But even with deep concerns, House and Senate leaders are aggressively pushing for a vote this week calling it "must-pass legislation" and adding it would "shore up support among key constituencies heading into the November elections."

Cycloptichorn wrote:

To put it simply, there is no substance to these allegations at all. It is simply a nakedly political attempt to influence the race in PA by Republicans.

Cycloptichorn

So as has already been pointed out, if there is no substance to these allegations, it should be a simple matter for Sestak and the Whitehouse, including whoever in the whitehouse made the offer, simply come clean and provide all the harmless details. Since there is nothing to the story or no crime involved, it should take just a few minutes to explain it with the facts and make the story go away. After all, Obama promised an open and transparent administration, so simply clearing the air should be a simple matter and a matter that Obama should be extremely anxious to take care of. After all, we all know Obama always does what he promises, and is 100% honest, right everybody? After all, cyclops seems to think so, and if somebody as smart and intellectual from Berkeley as cyclops seems to be, how can anyone doubt it, especially a dumb old okie? How many times do I need to bow at your feet and beg foregiveness for doubting you, cyclops? It should have been obvious to me, that it was a naked political attempt by Republicans that caused this. It is always evil Republicans fault, how did I forget such a basic truth. I beg your firegiveness, cyclops.

By the way, English expert, you are supposed to capitalize proper names.

Carter Calls for 25,000 Armed National Guard to Border

(WASHINGTON, DC) " The only thing President Obama's deployment of 1,200 National Guard to the southern border will accomplish is press coverage for the Administration on border security, according to House Republican Conference Secretary John Carter.

"The President's proposal is about 24,000 men short of what's needed," says Carter. "And they need to be armed with orders to shoot if fired on. Many of our National Guard are combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and they know exactly how to put an end to these killings on our border. The next time a gunman raises a rifle in our direction these guys are ready and able to light ‘em up. Once that happens a couple times we’ll start to see some law and order again.”

The former Texas judge says assigning 1,200 troops to 2,000 miles of lawless border is a non-starter. “6,000 National Guard wasn’t enough when President Bush sent them in 2007, and 1,200 will do nothing other than provide the current Administration with a photo op.”

“President Wilson sent 100,000 National Guard in 1916 when violence spilled across our southern border under his watch, and got the situation back under control,” says Carter. “25,000 is a good number to start with now, but to suggest just 1200 shows a very disingenuous position on securing our border against armed drug gangs shooting our border patrol officers and now even American civilians on their own property. Seems like the only securing going on here is the political security of Presidents Obama and Calderon. We need to start putting the security of the American people back in the picture.”

How Obama got into Harvard
________________________________________
by Jack Cashill for World Net Daily - May 27, 2010
1:00 am Eastern

© 2010
Two years ago I inadvertently began my exploration of the authorship of Barack Obama's 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," with an inquiry into how Obama got into Harvard Law School in 1988.

In the summer of 2008, I was tipped to a story that the media were scrupulously ignoring. It involved the venerable African-American entrepreneur and politico Percy Sutton.

A Manhattan borough president for 12 years and a credible candidate for mayor of New York City in 1977, Sutton had appeared in late March 2008 on a local New York City show called "Inside City Hall."

When asked about Obama by the show's host, Dominic Carter, the octogenarian Sutton calmly and lucidly explained that he had been "introduced to [Obama] by a friend."

The friend's name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about 20 years prior. Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men." The billionaire in question was Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

According to Sutton, al-Mansour had asked him to "please write a letter in support of [Obama] ... a young man that has applied to Harvard." Sutton had friends at Harvard and gladly did so.

Three months before the election it should have mattered that a respected black political figure had publicly announced that a crazed anti-Semite like al-Mansour, backed by an equally bonkers Saudi billionaire, had been guiding Obama's career perhaps for the last 20 years, but the story died a quick and unnatural death.


The definitive documentary on the red-hot eligibility story: "The Question of Eligibility: Is Barack Obama's presidency constitutionally legitimate?"

The books that might have shed some light on this incident have not done so. John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's comprehensive look at the 2008 campaign, "Game Change," does not so much as mention Percy Sutton.

Nor does David Remnick. His new book, "The Bridge," stands as the authoritative book on Obama's "life and rise," but he only inadvertently addresses the question of how Obama got into Harvard Law.

The reader learns from Remnick that Obama was an "unspectacular" student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop before that, going back to grade school.

A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, "I don't think [Obama] did very well in college." As to Obama's LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa's body will be unearthed before those are.

How such an indifferent student got into a law school whose applicants' LSAT scores typically track between 98 to 99 percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.8 and 4.0 is a subject Remnick avoids in the section of his book dealing with Obama's admission.

In his 2007 book, "Obama: From Promise to Power," David Mendell is likewise silent on the mystery admission. This surprises because Mendell, a Chicago Tribune reporter who saw more of Obama than Michelle often did, writes objectively and intimately about Obama's ascendancy.

Mendell traces Obama's sudden itch to become a lawyer to the model of the recently deceased Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, but Washington went to Northwestern's very respectable law school in Evanston, Ill.

The thought doesn't cross Obama's mind. In "Dreams," he limits his choices to "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." Writes Mendell as casually as if the honor were deserved, "Obama would soon be accepted at the most prestigious law school in the nation."

Whether or not Sutton helped Obama get into Harvard, Michelle Obama's experience suggests that he could not have gotten in without that help.

"Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren't good enough for an Ivy League school," writes Christopher Andersen in "Barack and Michelle," "Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway."

Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."

She did not write well, either. Au contraire. One of my correspondents, a college drop-out, found Michelle's senior thesis at Princeton online and concluded, "I could have written it in sophomore English class." Mundy charitably describes it as "dense and turgid."

The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."

Hitchens exaggerates only a little. The following summary statement by Michelle captures her unfamiliarity with many of the rules of grammar and most of logic:
The study inquires about the respondents' motivations to benefit him/herself, and the following social groups: the family, the Black community, the White community, God and church, The U.S. society, the non-White races of the world, and the human species as a whole.
Michelle even typed badly. Still, she was admitted to and graduated from Harvard Law. One almost feels sorry for her. She was in so far over her head that the anxiety had to have been corrosive.

Obama was sufficiently self-deluding " some would say narcissistic " that he felt little of that anxiety. Later in his book, Remnick lets slip into the record a revealing letter Obama had written while president of the Harvard Law Review:
I must say, however, that as someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year, I have not felt stigmatized within the broader law school community or as a staff member of the Review.

Bottom line: Had Obama's father come from Kentucky not Kenya, and been named O'Hara not Obama, there would have been no Harvard Law Review, no Harvard, no Columbia. Barry O'Hara would probably be chasing ambulances in Honolulu and setting his political sights on the Honolulu City Council.

BTW, I do not capitalize her name on purpose: I have no respect for her because she is a hypocrite. I am not a hypocrite.