Govenor Sarah Palin, Mormonism, Post-Mormonism, Politics

[_dartagnan]

Hi brent, I'm curious what your take is on Obama's latest commercial advertising the well known, and well publicized fact that John McCain can't send an email? Of course Obama doesn't explain why he doesn't send emails, he simply leaves it to the reader to assume it has something to do with his age, and nothing to do with his injuries suffered as a POW.

To me that hits rock bottom on the integrity meter.

And as far as earmnarks go, Palin hasn't even begun to abuse earmarks in a manner which Obama has. At least she reduced Alaska's earmark spending by half a billion dollars within her two years in office. That's an amazing accomplishment it itself, and says plenty about her position on abusing earmarks. On the flip side, you have Obama who provided an earmark for his wife's employer, which in turn rewarded her by nearly tripling her salary? Obama's household income was just under a million dollars last year. Why the behind the scene political wheeling and dealing to increase his wife's salary above the 300k range? And why isn't the media all over him for this? Because they are too busy trying to get him elected.

I think these are indisputable examples of dishonesty. What is there to compare with on the McCain/Palin side of the fence?

He said Obama wanted to teach kids about sex? Well, this is a factas I illustrated earlier. By contrast, everything the liberal media manufactures on Palin/McCain is either exagerrated or disputable.

Incidentally, I met an 80 year old man today at my job. He said he appreciated McCain's service but didn't think being a POW made him qualified to be President. He said it as if he thought this was supposed to be news to me. But I couldn't hep but ask, what the hell does Obama have as "qualification" when just a few years ago he said he wasn't interested in taking the job because he couldn't handle it, and earlier this year his own running mate said Obama wasn't ready to lead. Now they're both flipping on their previous positions.

I think Palin has a pretty good excuse. The citation you provided I believe was given before she was governor; before she actually had the chance to look at the financial picture. The fact is she could have built the bridge if she wanted to, but she killed it. Alaska has an 11 billion dollar budget; she could have built it if she really believed it was worth the trouble and the money, but like most reasonable people, she changed her mind in light of the evidence. In light of McCain's arguments against it.

What could possibly be Obama and Biden's excuse for flipping on their previously held positions, other than personal ambition? Is Obama unqualified or isn't he? Well, it depends on when you ask them apparently.

Anyway, I got a kick out of this old man because he started telling me Palin was a crook because he saw on CNN that her husband is "under investigation."

[Analytics]

Great--yet another year of "which candidate do I hate least?"

Speaking of that, sometimes I wonder if the only reason some of us voted for Heavenly Father's plan was because Satan's plan was worse.

[_Trevor]

I'm curious what your take is on Obama's latest commercial advertising the well known, and well publicized fact that John McCain can't send an email?

I think it is a pathetic appeal to the handful of nerds who might care.

[_Trevor]

Great, yet another year of "which candidate do I hate least".

Amen to that.

[_aussieguy55]

Arn't YOU just being a sexist in mentioning the raise Michelle Obama got. Couldn't she have got it for her standard of work or do you still think blacks should be out picking cotton/


"The request for $1 million for the University of Chicago Medical Center was to help pay for construction of a new pavilion.

“I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that Michelle Obama was not part of our lobbying over the request, not in any way,” Kelly Sullivan, another vice president at the medical center, told the New York Times. "
http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/obam ... 80393.html

USA Today reports that officials at the University of Chicago Hospitals told the Chicago Tribune that Michelle is "worth her weight in gold."

"She's terrific," added Michael Riordan, who was president of the hospital in March 2005, when Michelle Obama was promoted to vice president for external affairs and had her annual salary increased from $121,910 to $316,962.

Hospitals spokesman John Easton told the Tribune that Michelle Obama's salary is in li"ne with those of the 16 other vice presidents at the not-for-profit medical center. "

So if anyone employs someone related to a Pres Candidate they will hinder their efforts for money from Government.

[_dartagnan]

Now you're just insulting everyone's intelligence.

Do you really expect the hospital to just come right out with it and say, "Well, she got a huge raise but she really isn't worth it. Thanks for the pavillion though"?

Give us a break. A raise like that is not the norm in hospitals unless you're a freakin surgeon, and it is beyond stupid to sit there and say her husband's earmark was not self serving. How many other hospitals did he help get pavilions? Of all the hospitals in the country, he just happens to focus on the one where his wife works? And you think this has nothing to do with her employment there? And she just happens to benefit from it financially?

To accuse me of sexism is just a desperate way to derail the focus off the facts. Picking cotton?

This is the kind of pathetic race-baiting and "poor me" attitude that keeps the black community down.

[_antishock8]

Well, if being on this forum has taught me at least one thing, that very few people understand what a conflict of interest is, and thus political, business, and other institutional mechanisms designed to enrich their people at the expense of The People roll on...

Unless, of course, you are Dick Cheney then people are all over it. Rightfully so, I might add.

[_aussieguy55]

She might just have got it through her own ability? White working class want someone to pee on so some uppity black who through hisher own effort & makes a go of it needs to be brought down a peg or to. Obama was and is faithful to his wife, McCain, Murdoch, Ginrich, Guiliani, Foley, etc etc were not. According to the book The Real McCain he called his wife Cindy a c---t after she teased him about his bald spot. McCain is well known for his temper. I would be afraid of his encounter with Putin. Do you want such a man with his finger on the button?

[_dartagnan]

LOL.. you're a trip aussie. You're completely swamped in confirmation bias because you know that if any of this pertained to Palin or even Palin's second cousin, this would be front page news and beamed everywhere as evidence that she is a liar and a crooked politician.

Why is the media lying about Palin left and right while bypassing obvious lies by and problems with Obama?

A few days ago CNN started a segment bashing Palin, claiming she never visited Iraq. I watched it. The commentators were riled up. The impression was that Palin must have said she went to Iraq when in fact she didn't. It got me thinking. Did Palin really say that? I thought to myself, what an idiot! How could she have claimed to have visited Iraq when it is easily falsifiable? Well, after a few minutes searching this out on the web, I found out that the whole thing was just a scandal conjured up by CNN. Palin never said she visited Iraq! (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladni ... -never-was)

This is just one of many fabrications the media has conjured up to deflect the impact Palin has had on the race. The sad thing is, people believe this crap. Like the old man I referred to before.

But what bothers me more than anything is that there is so much about Obama that the media refuses to advertise. They'll air-drop dozens of investigators and lawyers in Wasilla and try to dig up any kind of "story" they can, but when people who worked with Obama as a "community organizer" come forward and point out the numerous lies in his biography, the media is silent. I mean they don't even have to hired an army of investigators and pay for their flights to Alaska. They have these guys offering their information for free, but nobody is interested. Why?

I had mentioned earlier that Barack Obama is where he is because he is black. The media made a huge deal of the fact that he was the first black man to do this and that. That was the notoreity he had earned, for being an educated black man. Now it seems that even his "community organizer" job had everything to do with the fact that he was black:

Many years later, when Obama arrived here, he came from a different perspective.

“Barack had been very inspired by the civil-rights movement,” Jerry Kellman, the organizer who hired Obama, told me recently. “I felt that he wanted to work in the civil-rights movement, but he was ten years too late, and this was the closest he could find to it at the time.” Obama, in his memoir, put it more simply when he said he went to Chicago to “organize black folks.” …

Kellman, a New Yorker who had gotten into organizing in the 1960s, was trying to help laid-off factory workers on the far South Side of Chicago. He led a group, the Calumet Community Religious Conference, that had been created by several local Catholic churches…

Lloyd and another leader, Loretta Augustine-Herron, insisted that Kellman hire a black organizer for a new spinoff from CCRC to be called the Developing Communities Project, which would focus solely on the Chicago part of the area.

So Kellman set out to find a black organizer. He ran an ad in some trade publications, and Obama responded…

But Kellman had to sell Obama to the leaders. “Jerry introduces Barack, and Barack is so young, it’s like, ‘Oh my God,’” Loretta Augustine-Herron remembered. Obama was obviously smart, and he wanted to be an organizer, but he was, in fact, quite young (24) and he didn’t actually know much about the job…(http://sweetness-light.com/archive/byro ... organizing)

A few weeks ago the Washington Post ran a story about Obama's the "Perfect Stranger":

Barack Obama is an immensely talented man whose talents have been largely devoted to crafting, and chronicling, his own life. Not things. Not ideas. Not institutions. But himself.

Nothing wrong or even terribly odd about that, except that he is laying claim to the job of crafting the coming history of the United States. A leap of such audacity is odd. The air of unease at the Democratic convention this week was not just a result of the Clinton psychodrama. The deeper anxiety was that the party was nominating a man of many gifts but precious few accomplishments --bearing even fewer witnesses...

Eerily missing at the Democratic convention this year were people of stature who were seriously involved at some point in Obama's life standing up to say: I know Barack Obama. I've been with Barack Obama. We've toiled/endured together. You can trust him. I do.
Hillary Clinton could have said something like that.

She and Obama had, after all, engaged in a historic, utterly compelling contest for the nomination. During her convention speech, you kept waiting for her to offer just one line of testimony: I have come to know this man, to admire this man, to see his character, his courage, his wisdom, his judgment. Whatever. Anything. ..So where are the colleagues? The buddies? The political or spiritual soul mates? His most important spiritual adviser and mentor was Jeremiah Wright. But he's out. Then there's William Ayers, with whom he served on a board. He's out. Where are the others?

The oddity of this convention is that its central figure is the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby. The palpable apprehension is that the anointed is a stranger -- a deeply engaging, elegant, brilliant stranger with whom the Democrats had a torrid affair. Having slowly woken up, they see the ring and wonder who exactly they married last night.

I didn't question Obama's integrity with respect to his former jobs, but since he uses these as evidence that he is qualified to become the most power figure in the free world, I think his resume bears a little scrutiny, especially if the GOP VP pick is deserving of such criticism.

So it seems that three years ago one of Obama's former co-workers, Dan Armstrong, came out and said that, although he supports Obama, he couldn't sit by and watch him lie about his job and what it entailed. Below is the article, and the italicized portion will be a citation from Obama's book, followed by Armstrong's comments:

Barack Obama Embellishes His Resume

July 9th, 2005

Don’t get me wrong - I’m a big fan of Barack Obama, the Illinois freshman senator and hot young Democratic Party star. But after reading his autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s. I know because I sat down the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can’t say I was particularly close to Barack - he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers - but I was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book.

Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool.

First, it wasn’t a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I’m sure we all wished that we were high-priced consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low salaries and heavy workload.

Barack worked on one of the company’s reference publications. Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country, punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack’s job was to get copy from the country correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some research involved as well, since correspondents usually don’t send exactly what you ask for, and you can’t always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting.

It’s also not true that Barack was the only black man in the company. He was the only black professional man. Fred was an African-American who worked in the mailroom with his son. My boss and I used to join them on Friday afternoons to drink beer behind the stacks of office supplies. That’s not the kind of thing that Barack would do. Like I said, he was somewhat aloof.

… as the months passed, I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary; money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.

If Barack was promoted, his new job responsibilities were more of the same - rewriting other people’s copy. As far as I know, he always had a small office, and the idea that he had a secretary is laughable. Only the company president had a secretary. Barack never left the office, never wore a tie, and had neither reason nor opportunity to interview Japanese financiers or German bond traders.

Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected happened…. I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently. …[several pages on his suffering half-sister] …a few months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in earnest for an organizing job.

What Barack means here is that he got copy from a correspondent who didn’t understand interest rate swaps, and he was trying to make sense out of it.

All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people.

Like I said, I’m a fan. His famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention moved me to tears. The Democrats - not to mention America - need a mixed-race spokesperson who can connect to both urban blacks and rural whites, who has the credibility to challenge the status quo on issues ranging from misogynistic rap to unfair school funding.

And yet I’m disappointed. Barack’s story may be true, but many of the facts are not. His larger narrative purpose requires him to embellish his role. I don’t buy it. Just as I can’t be inspired by Steve Jobs now that I know how dishonest he is, I can’t listen uncritically to Barack Obama now that I know he’s willing to bend the facts to his purpose.

Once, when I applied for a marketing job at a big accounting firm, my then-supervisor called HR to say that I had exaggerated something on my resume. I didn’t agree, but I also didn’t get the job. But when Barack Obama invents facts in a book ranked No. 8 on the NY Times nonfiction list, it not only fails to be noticed but it helps elevate him into the national political pantheon.

I thought Oprah was Obama's biggest fan, but it seems like Obama is his own biggest fan. The guy writes about himself like he is MLK or Jesus Christ. This tells me the guy is way too full of himself, and he is no stranger to lies and deception when it suits his purposes.

And last October there was this by Bill Millar:

October 30, 2007

Cathy Lazere [another commentor] calls Barack self-assured? That’s putting a nice spin on it. I found him arrogant and condescending.
The thing is, I worked next to Barack nearly every day he was at Business International –- on many days angling for possession of the best Wang word processing terminal.

I had MANY discussions with Barack.

I can tell you this: even though I was an assistant editor (big doings at this “consulting firm”) and he was, well, he was doing something there, he certainly treated me like something less than an equal.

Funny thing… A journalism/political science major… Writing about finance… Pretending in his book to be an expert on interest rate swaps.

I remember trying to explain the nuance of these instruments to him in the cramped three Wang terminal space we called the bull pen. In contrast to his his liberal arts background, I had a degree in finance and Wall Street experience, so I knew what I was talking about.
But rather than learn from a City College kid, the Ivy Leaguer just sort of rolled his eyes. Condescendingly. I’ll never forget it. God forbid he leave the impression that a mere editor like myself knew more about something than did Barack.

He was like that…

But know what? I can forgive him for being immature–which is probably all that was at the time. Don’t we all believe we know everything at just around that age?

That said…he was a lot older when he wrote his book. Mature enough by this time to realize that his account of his time at Business International could be described as embellishment…(http://sweetness-light.com/archive/did- ... eet-career)

So does Obama have balls carved from granite or what?

And it appears Biden has a documented history of plagiarism and even admitting to lying about his own resume: (http://sweetness-light.com/archive/bide ... law-school )

So why isn't the media all over this? Obama is the Presidential candidate whereas Palin is just an underdog VP pick. If Palin misspeaks on any fact or figure, she is lambasted from all corners of the journalistic universe. But when Obama accidentally refers to "my own Muslim faith," the journalist interviewing him (instead of taking the advantage of the moment and building a national scandal about Obama's ignorance on his own faith) helps him out and kindly points out he misspoke and meant to say "Christian faith." Sorry folks, no story to report herehat. When Obama misspeaks, it is an accident, and when Palin does it, it is vile and disgusting dishonesty of the worst kind.

[_dartagnan]

The audacity of resume-padding (or, why Obama makes things up)
By ABRAHAM KATSMAN AND KORY BARDASH

Aug 17, 2008

One of the knocks on Barack Obama is that his résumé is, so to speak, paper-thin. But that is not entirely accurate. Obama, in fact, has held some major job titles which are noteworthy all by themselves: United States Senator, Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Harvard Law Review President-each of these titles puts him in rarefied company. Tack on a few Illinois State Senate terms, and his resume actually appears solid. Yet, in spite of these prestigious positions, Obama has increasingly resorted to making claims of accomplishment that are so patently inflated that even his cheerleaders at CNN and the New York Times are taking notice. Why?

It seems that Obama recognizes that while his résumé titles are impressive, his actual accomplishments are weak. It’s as if he were jockeying to be the next company CEO with little to show for his prior high-profile management positions. So, he does what anyone else does who has spent years coasting on charisma without doing any heavy work: he pads his résumé–stretching the truth here, stealing credit there, and creating the illusion of achievement during his lackadaisical, undistinguished tenure in previous jobs.

A few examples? Take Obama’s first general election ad. We are told that Obama “passed laws” that “extended healthcare for wounded troops who’d been neglected,” with a citation at the bottom to only one Senate bill: The 2008 Defense Authorization Bill, which passed the Senate by a 91-3 vote. Six Senators did not vote-including Obama. Nor is there evidence that he contributed to its passage in any material way. So, his claim to have “passed laws” amounts to citing a bill that was largely unopposed, that he didn’t vote for, and whose passage he didn’t impact. Even his hometown Chicago Tribune caught this false claim. It’s classic résumé-padding–falsely taking credit for the work of others.

Or take one of Obama’s standard lines: his claim of “twenty years of public service.” As pundit Michael Medved has pointed out, the numbers don’t add up. Shall we count? Three years in the US Senate (two of which he’s spent running for President), plus seven years in the Illinois State Senate (a part-time gig, during which time he also served as a law professor) equals, at most, ten. Even if we generously throw in his three years as a “community organizer” (whatever that means, let’s count it as public service), that still adds up to just thirteen.

Obama’s other activities since 1985 have included Harvard Law School, writing two autobiographies (including several months writing in Bali), prestigious summer law firm jobs, three years as an associate at a Chicago law firm, and twelve years part-time on the University of Chicago Law School faculty. As Medved notes, it takes quite the ego to consider any of those stints “public service.” Which of them is Obama including?

Obama made yet another inflated boast last month during his visit to Israel. At his press conference in Hamas rocket-bombarded Sderot, Obama talked up “his” efforts to protect Israel from Iran:

“Just this past week, we passed out of the US Senate Banking Committee - which is my committee - a bill to call for divestment from Iran as way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.” (Emphasis added.)

Nice try. But as even CNN noted, Obama is not even on that committee. That is one peculiar “mistake” to simply have made by accident. Again, his claiming credit for the work of others just looks like clumsy, transparent résumé embellishment.

Would someone with Obama’s stellar list of job titles resort to making stuff up? He seems to think he has to. In spite of the many impressive positions he’s held, he’s done almost nothing with them. If he wants to claim specific, relevant accomplishments, his only resort is to stretching the truth.

Look at his record: he’s now completed over half of a Senate term; yet, is there even one signature issue he has taken hold of, other than his own presidential run? Similarly, as the New York Times recently pointed out, Obama spent twelve years on the University of Chicago Law School faculty–singularly famous for its intellectual ferment and incubator of scholarship–and produced not even a single scholarly paper. He was President of Harvard Law Review, but wrote nothing himself. Even as a state legislator for seven years-or community organizer for three years, there is little that shows his imprint. OK, to be fair, he did write two books. About himself.

For all his glowing job titles, Obama has never gotten much done. Is it any wonder that his spokesmen respond with sweeping generalities when asked what Obama has actually accomplished relevant to the presidency?

Obama has held several serious positions from which a serious man could have made a serious impact. But Obama made none. He remains a man of proven charisma, but unproven skill–and not for lack of opportunity. He’s treated his offices as if they were high school student council positions-fun to run for, fun to win, affirmations of popularity, heady recognition from superiors, good resume-builders for stepping up to the next position of power, and…well, that’s about it-actual accomplishments are not expected; heavy lifting is never on the agenda.

Obama’s record of accomplishment is thin not because of lack of opportunity, but in spite of it. For twenty years, Obama has walked the floors of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, but has left no footprints other than those from his runs for whatever office came next.

It’s been said that some people want to be President so they can do something; and some want to be President so they can be something. Obama has accomplished nothing noteworthy despite the golden opportunities and positions he’s had; why should we believe he’d be a different man in the White House?

No company would hire anyone with Obama’s empty track record, pattern of underachievement and padded résumé to be CEO. Is America really ready to hire him as President?

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/the- ... dded-resum