US News
Obama's passport file breached at State Department (Roundup)
Mar 21, 2008, 2:57 GMT

Three contractors at the US State Department have been disciplined for looking at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama\'s passport file, the department said Thursday. EPA/RANDY SNYDER
Washington - Three contractors at the US State Department have been disciplined for looking at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's passport file, the department said Thursday.
Two contract employees were fired for looking at the records without authorization and a third was disciplined.
The breaches occurred in three separate incidents over the past three months, but there was no evidence the incidents were politically motivated, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Senior officials were only notified of the breach earlier in the day, and the department said it would conduct an investigation.
The Obama campaign was not notified of the security breach until Thursday.
COMMENT
blog comments powered by DisqusLatest Headlines in US
- 1. Mitt Romney Addresses Tea Party Summit Pictures
- 2. Seven injured as US Navy plane crashes into apartments
- 3. At least three injured in US Navy plane crash
- 4. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, others to face death penalty trial
- 5. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, four others to face death penalty trial
Older Talkback
page: 1
In an interview earlier today, Barack Obama referred to his grandmother--the one he slandered in his speech on Tuesday--as a 'typical white person.'
Think about it: can you imagine any Presidential candidate, in any context, describing anyone as a 'typical black person?' Or a 'typical Asian person?' Worse, what Obama said was that the 'typical white person' views others of different races with fear and suspicion. Obama appears to be digging himself in deeper and deeper.
www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dc/2008/03/typical-white-person.html
'TYPICAL WHITE PERSON'
This has turned into a pretty poor day for Barack Obama, capped by him saying his grandmother is afraid of black people not out of racial animosity, but because she is a “typical white person.”
Here’s the quote to Philadelphia sports station WIP, after he was asked if his grandmother — who he mentioned unflatteringly in his landmark speech on race Tuesday — was proud of him:
'The point I was making was not that grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.'
So the 'typical white person' is racist... and they can overcome that by voting for Obama. See, it is so simple.
Obama's Minister's Remarks Won't Fade
By CHARLES BABINGTON – 6 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Even if Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides do not mention Barack Obama's fiery-tongued spiritual mentor, don't expect the Illinois senator's well-publicized speech Tuesday to make the controversy disappear, political strategists said this week.
Reporters, talk-show hosts and others will keep asking about Obama's close and long-standing relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose most bombastic comments came to dominate the Democratic presidential contest recently, the strategists predicted in interviews. In video clips playing on Internet sites, Wright can be heard arguing that HIV-AIDS was a U.S. government plot to wipe out 'people of color,' and that God should 'damn' the United States for its racist policies.
Should Obama become the Democratic nominee, conservative activists are virtually certain to remind voters of Obama's ties to Wright, perhaps by using the videos in TV ads, several strategists said.
ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gRloD01UY7O-mlm7HkoTEgFcoPJgD8VHCVUO0
Obama: Typical White People are Racist
So, some people were upset because, the other day, Obama essentially claimed that his Grandmother being afraid of an aggressive black panhandler and the deranged ravings of the Rev. Wright were morally equivalent. Now, trying to back-pedal from that position, he's said something far, far dumber than that.
He said that the point he was making, in drawing such a comparison, is that his Grandmother is a 'typical white person.' To be clear, here's what he said about his Grandmother (who, by the way, raised him and is still alive). He described her as:
...a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
In other words, in Obama's world, all white people are afraid of black people and go around spitting out ethnic and racial stereotypes. Good to know.
westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2008/03/obama-typical-w.html
who are in all likelyhood one and the same person, precisely what does any of what you say have to do with the topic? Or do you just like filling space with crap that belongs in the toilet? Did your biffy plug up and over-flow?
Hat tip: Sweetness & Light
'[H]er fear of black men who passed by her on the street”?
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
That’s not how the incident is described in Mr. Obama’s first autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” p 46:
I took her into the other room and asked her what had happened.
“A man asked me for money yesterday. While I was waiting for the bus.”
“That’s all?”
Her lips pursed with irritation. “He was very aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn’t come, I think he might have hit me over the head.”
If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were, in effect, breaking into the home of every citizen.
Sam Ervin
I smell a rat-
PulSamsara
Barack Obama FEAR SMEAR?
Barack Obama
STAND WITH
Ralph Nader
Ron Paul
Dennis Kucinich
Mike Gravel
NOT
DNC Hillary Clinton
RNC John McCain
Eyes wide open
Testify
Racism is a scalpel that cuts in every direction. None of us are ever spared by it. None of us are free from it. It terrorizes us all today just as it did prior to written history.
Useful reading;
www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JC18Aa01.html
..it doesn't have a thing to do with the campaign.
Key Questions Still Left After Obama Speech
The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. 'Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes.' So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.
An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which 'controversial' remarks?
Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus 'as a means of genocide against people of color'? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for 9/11 — 'chickens coming home to roost' — because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
(Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?)
What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?
Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: 'There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?'
But that is not the question. The question is, Why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave — why doesn't he leave even today — a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) 'God damn America'?
Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.
His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence, and (b) white guilt.
(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other 'end of the spectrum' there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, 'who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.' But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?
'I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother.' What exactly was grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street.
And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus' time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did grandma.
Yet Obama compares her to Wright.
Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?
(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, 'We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country,' and then proceeds to do precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination?
Jeremiah Wright, of course.
This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance.
That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.
But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor.
Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign.
Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness?
This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero.
It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well.
Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?
'Barack Obama FEAR SMEAR?'
How can it be a 'smear if it is the truth?
'Barack Obama
STAND WITH
Ralph Nader
Ron Paul
Dennis Kucinich
Mike Gravel'
LOL! Indeed, stand with them in the loser line for the exit.
I see the long predicted republican smear campaign has started.Keep on throwing mud neocons,your days arenumbered.Sooner or later the USA is bound to wake up and get rid of this kind of methods of conducting politics .There is never anything substantial in these alegations,it reminds me of the swiftboat campaign against Jogn Kerry,organized by the republicans but in such a manner that it could not be pinpointed directly to Bush and Cheney .Look at what those tactics have cost you:eight years of the most stupid president ever ....And now the neocon machine is at work again,rather than focussing on the program of McCain they focus on some obscure preacher ,hoping to tie his flaws to Obama .Nothing better to do.Why not focus on McCain then ?After all you are defending him,unfortunately you don't have anything substantial to say about his program.Let me guess why ?Another term for Bush through the next republican warmonger ?
Having seen Bush be the victim of every kind of attack, I can personally empathize with poor Barak...standing there...petting the Culture of Grievance on the back...perpetuating the stereotype of the American black man as the perpetual victim...all while he stands as testimony to the fact that, in America, you can rise, regardless of race, to the highest office in the land...unless the Clinton's deal him out in a smoke filled room at the end.
Let's take a trip down memory lane:
Bush the dumb - trotted out by the libnazi war machine this went on until he beat two of the so called 'intellectual' libnazi standard bearers. I guess they voted FOR dumb before the voted against it.
Bush the crazy - trotted out by the same libnazi propaganda machine. never flew because the guy is so gracious and normal, it's just hard to sell.
Bush the religious fanatic - another run by the libnazi slime boat veterans. Just look now!...my...how the chickens come home to roost, eh Tonny!?
Bush the draft dodger. My favorite, piled on in a moment of an utter mouth-foaming libnazi slime-orgy perpetrated by the all-time libnazi slime bearer, Dan Rather. The guy even lost his job over it. Even then, the libal bigots were so narrow minded, they actually said the story was true, even if the evidence was false. Glad they are not jurors, eh?
Bush the devious - Somehow, ol GW shook his dumbness, (see above) momentarily, when he fooled several hundred legislators into thinking Saddam had WMD's. I guess he was only dumb when he wanted to be...eh Tonny!
Bush the Radical - After the Libnazi church failed at dumb and crazy, this was their last hope. This has failed, too, because, after half the dems greenlighted the war, and everyone now gets to watch the crazy crap the dems are doing, like some kind of circus act, ol GW looks pretty sedate.
Tonny, believe me, no one what it means to see a politician slimed, more than a republican. After seven years of this, watching Barak field a few qustions about a preacher, who was never taken out of context, who he plainly never disagreed with until the moment he was called out on it, doesn't even raise my eyebrows. These are legitimate questions about what a candidate believes. Libnazis and their attack dog -drive-by media propaganda arm are like assasins Tonny: they eventually will assasinate their masters too! Too bad you folks never thought of that, eh?
My...how the chickens come home to roost!
to believe that you are dumber than yesterday. You know better, but your mouth just keeps flapping.
..but your insulting comment, borne from the mind of a simple dildo, still does not make me wrong, either.
page: 1


How gullible does he think we are?Mar 21st, 2008 - 03:44:24
Barack Obama has been significantly damaged by the controversy over his pastor’s inflammatory remarks and the issue has become a serious threat to his presidential ambitions, polls suggest.
The surveys released yesterday point to an erosion of Mr Obama’s support among independents, a bloc that has previously backed him in overwhelming numbers, and particular alienation among white, working-class voters who will be critical to the general election in November.
They appear disturbed by the Illinois senator’s refusal to disown the Rev Jeremiah Wright in a keynote speech he delivered on Tuesday — an address that he was forced to give to try to defuse the outrage caused by the emergence of his former pastor’s videotaped, incendiary sermons.
A new national Gallup tracking poll shows Hillary Clinton regaining her lead over Mr Obama for the first time in a month, now leading 49 per cent to 42, a 13-point shift to the former First Lady in less than a fortnight.
Mrs Clinton also holds a 16-point lead over Mr Obama in Pennsylvania, their next contest on April 22. In addition, Mr Obama has lost his once-commanding lead among independent voters to John McCain, the Republican nominee, in a new CBS poll. The survey shows Mr McCain with leads over both Democrats, a sign of how their protracted battle threatens to damage the eventual nominee.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/artic le3591359.ece
Two Questions for Senator Obama
By Lanny Davis
These two questions are:
1. If a white minister preached sermons to his congregation and had used the 'N' word and used rhetoric and words similar to members of the KKK, would you support a Democratic presidential candidate who decided to continue to be a member of that congregation?
2. Would you support that candidate if, after knowing of or hearing those sermons, he or she still appointed that minister to serve on his or her 'Religious Advisory Committee' of his or her presidential campaign?
www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/two_questions_for_senator_ob am.html
Report this comment