Note to self: The Birthers got beat by the first Black President’s VP and the first Black woman to be VP. Have a glorious day!☀️
— Maya Harris (@mayaharris_) November 9, 2020
Posts Tagged ‘birthers
27
Aug
12
This and That
Hey, don’t forget to press this emergency button when stressed 😉
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Tuesday:
10:30: President Obama departs the White House en route Joint Base Andrews
10:45: Departs Joint Base Andrews
1:05: Arrives in Des Moines, Iowa
2:05: Delivers remarks at a campaign event at Iowa State University
4:40: Departs Des Moines en route Fort Collins, Colorado
Later (will check time tomorrow): Delivers remarks at a campaign event at Colorado State University
The President will remain overnight in Colorado
Wednesday: The President will travel to Charlottesville, Virginia for campaign events. He will return to the White House in the evening.
Thursday: The President will attend meetings at the White House
Friday: President Obama will visit Fort Bliss, Texas … A White House official said the president will speak with troops and have a roundtable discussion with service-members and military families (Denver Post). Thanks Jovie.
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‘America’s dark night of the soul’ by Liberal Librarian
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George Clooney and Geneva-based American lawyer and co-president of Democrats Abroad Charles C. Adams arrive for a dinner to raise funds for the re-election of President Barack Obama, in Geneva, Switzerland, August 27
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I really, really want this umbrella …. as owned by Lynne David, an anti-GOP protester in Tampa, August 27
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Kathleen Parker (Daily Beast)
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a4alice * Alycee * BWD * CollegeKay * Cookemom * DonnaDem4Obama
Hgerhard * HZ * Judith Fardig * Mae Who Love Our CIC
Marlz * Meta * Pamela *prettyfoot58 * proudmemberofglobalzero * Rita * Theo67 * The Obama Diary
If any other TOD visitor has an OFA fundraiser please let me know and I’ll add it to the list – thanks.
27
Aug
12
‘Racial air-raid sirens’
Charles Pierce: …. Chris Matthews got all up in the slick, smug little grill of obvious anagram Reince Priebus this morning on Morning Joe’s Playhouse over the obvious racial air-raid sirens that have echoed through Republican politics only since about half-past 1964, and which have grown especially loud these past few weeks as Willard Romney made his little fun-fun about birth certificates last week, and his campaign released an ad falsely accusing the president of “gutting welfare reform” …
If you can tear yourself away from the attempts of the hosts to tut-tut-my-good-man the whole thing to death – and poor Tom Brokaw, who freaking covered the civil-rights movement and knows good and well which party latched on to the wrong side of those events and rode them to glory, looks as though he might have a stroke – listen carefully to what Matthews says. He links the birther joke to the welfare commercials, which any thinking analyst would do, since they came hard, one upon the other….
…. What we have in this campaign is a joining of old Republican money with the modern American financial universe, and its power applied to advance ideas straight out of the swamps of the Wallace campaign 50 years ago. It is an unholy mess, and it is precisely the unholy mess over which Reince Priebus wants to preside, and if Mika wants the tone to change, maybe she should start there.
I predict Matthews will be disciplined. I, for one, am willing to go his bail on this one.
Full post here
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Michael Tomasky: …. Tom Edsall said it without quite saying it this morning in the Times (link), that this Romney-Ryan campaign is becoming among the most racist we’ve ever seen. The two key lies so far are totally about race – that Obama is soft on welfare recipients, and that he’s “robbing” $716 billion from Medicare (77 percent of recipients are white) to “pay for Obamacare” (that is, to extend health care to black and brown people who don’t deserve it, haven’t earned it, etc.).
… We’re going to be hearing a lot of those lies this week, and a lot of quasi-racist dog-whistling about how Obama doesn’t feel the same way about America as “we” do. So no – still not sure what I should find non-loathsome about that.
Full post here
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Read Thomas Edsall’s ‘Making the Election About Race’ piece here
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Ed Kilgore: … It’s clear by now that the Romney campaign is going to shrug off the almost universal denunciation of his welfare ads (and to only a lesser extent, his Medicare ads that show a white senior frowning as the narrator says ObamaCare is “not for you”) as a pack of despicable, race-baiting lies ….
… If nothing else, his wizards probably figured out some time ago that the “welfare” crap offered a rare opportunity to hit notes equally effective with “the base” and the non-college educated white voters who make up a high percentage of this election’s “swing”. Add in the thick armor conservatives have built for themselves against any accusations of racism — now, almost by definition, they believe only liberals are racists, and only white people are targets of racism – and it was probably an easy call for Team Mitt, particularly since truthfulness is not a factor at all.
…. Romney’s not going to be shamed out of his unsavory tactics. But on the other hand, if his gambit fails, not only will his presidential ambitions perish once and for all, but just maybe the kind of politics he has come to exemplify – rich people encouraging the middle class to “kick down” at “those people” – will take a hit as well.
Full post here
27
Aug
12
Chris Matthews v Reince Priebus
David Corn (Mother Jones): …..Mitt Romney … is still playing footsie with a popular conservative meme: Obama’s not really one of us …. (he) made a fierce pronouncement: The Obama Administration fundamentally does not believe in the American Experiment.…here was Romney saying that the president doesn’t understand the country he governs.
…Romney was engaging in what can be called otherism, a big cousin to birtherism. Otherism can be more virulent than birtherism (Obama is a secret Muslim socialist!) or more subtle (Hey, this Obama guy just doesn’t get America), but the main contention is that somehow he’s not a true American. It’s not a matter of his birth records, but of his attitude.
Newt Gingrich has helped set a benchmark for otherism … Mike Huckabee said Obama’s “worldview is dramatically different than any president, Republican or Democrat, we’ve had… He grew up more as a globalist than an American.”
…Romney slammed Obama for apologizing for “American misdeeds, both real and imagined.” (Romney didn’t explain what was wrong with apologizing for real misdeeds.) His bottom-line message: Real Americans don’t apologize. And the obvious conclusion is that if Obama does apologize, he’s not a you-know-what.
…Birtherism is (was?) fundamentally about delegitimizing Barack Obama – proving him a complete fraud … Yet the birthers, dependent on conspiracy theories, were easily done in by basic facts…..
Yet otherism continues and thrives … The strategy is to fuel suspicion, not prove a conspiracy. But the goal is the same: to encourage voters to believe Obama is not a real American …Unlike birtherism, otherism remains quite useful to the Republicans. Not even the adults of the party can resist its ugly temptations.
Full article here – really worth reading
Justin Elliott (Salon): If the release of President Obama’s birth certificate last month was the denouement of the birther saga, the release of Terrence Lakin from prison will be its bizarre coda. Lakin is the veteran Army doctor who refused orders to redeploy to Afghanistan because he believed Obama was born abroad, not a legitimate president, and therefore that military orders were invalid.
Last December, Lakin … was dismissed from the Army and sentenced to six months in prison … In what promises to be one of the stranger political spectacles of the year, a homecoming event is planned Saturday at the Southwest Airlines baggage claim area of Baltimore Washington International Airport. The website set up to support Lakin … suggests:
All we ask you to do is bring a home-made poster that says, “Welcome Home Terry.” or “Thank You Terry” or any appropriate messages about the issue. Bring a small US flag if you have one. We will text the coordinators when we deplane so you can all get ready to greet Terry as he descends on the escalator to baggage claim. We need a big hurray and lots of applause (of course). He may say a few words…
Unlike the folks over at WorldNetDaily, who have been enriched by years of pumping up birtherism, Lakin’s commitment to the conspiracy both torpedoed his career and put his family in financial peril. His website notes: “Please consider making a special gift at this critical time. We have been able to provide for the family’s monthly expenses, but contributions have dropped off since the release of the proposed birth document by the Obama administration.”
Can anyone imagine a more tragic story emerging from the birther carnival?
Full article here
08
May
11
blown away…
CBS: Colin Powell told graduates of South Carolina’s premier historically black university that they were graduating during a tumultuous time that saw a royal wedding, the beatification of a pope, and a U.S. military assault that killed Osama bin Laden, “the worst person on earth”.
But the former secretary of state and Joint Chiefs chairman told the 400 graduates of South Carolina State University that he particularly enjoyed another event of the past week: “That was when President Obama took out his birth certificate and blew away Donald Trump and all the birthers!”
The stadium and its 400 graduates roared in appreciation of Powell’s comments on the president’s move last week to quell the doubts expressed by those who haven’t believed that he was born in Hawaii…..
New York Times editorial: President Obama’s display of leadership in directing the killing of Osama bin Laden raises the prospect that American politics can move away from mindless debates over the president’s loyalties and fortitude…
The baseless critique of Mr. Obama as a frightened lamb among the world’s wolves was started in the 2008 campaign when Senators John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton derided his ability to manage world affairs….
The myth that he was a naïve hand-wringer persisted, despite his decisions to reduce troops in Iraq, strengthen them in Afghanistan and join a coalition to halt the Qaddafi regime’s bloodshed in Libya. His administration took too long to find its footing on Egypt’s transition and in Libya, but it was not because, as the popular conservative blog RedState said, he is a “trainee president.”
The blog accused Mr. Obama of basing his foreign policy on an “effete, pampered background” and a delight in consensus, and Republican presidential candidates quickly got the idea … just a few weeks ago, Mitt Romney accused him of being timid, tentative, and apologetic, all qualities stemming from “his fundamental disbelief in American exceptionalism.”
One of the subtexts to this argument is that Mr. Obama is not a true American, a thread soaked in the politics of fear and racial intolerance that runs through so much of the anti-Obama right. Donald Trump’s nativist claim that the president is not a citizen had its foreign-policy equivalent last year in Newt Gingrich’s repellent remark that Mr. Obama exhibits “Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”
But just as releasing a birth certificate marginalized one falsehood, Mr. Obama’s risky and audacious decision to attack the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan has demolished the notion that he cannot make tough decisions or cares primarily about the nation’s image abroad….
Full editorial here
Matthew Norman (The UK Independent): He is not the Messiah, but he deserves to sleep easy in his bed, and leave the 3am angst to malevolent midgets like Donald Trump who will never trouble him again
…Obama is said to be a strong player in the tight-aggressive style, which means that he doesn’t play a lot of hands or bluff much; but that when the potential return justifies the risk, he isn’t scared to push all his chips in … This is what he did in Abbottabad…
He bet the lot – his presidency, re-election chances, and place in history … had it gone wrong, Obama would by now have been measured up for the Jimmy Carter One Term Memorial Shroud…
It did not go wrong, and so he finally became the President of the United States of America, rather than President of That Chunk Of America That Doesn’t Regard A Black Man In The Oval Office As The Cleaner Or An Imposter.
… Obama did more than quell the screechings of the wingnuts, chat-show rabble-rousers, the Birthers and those we should term the Placentas (the After-Birthers who have now progressed to post-certificate conspiracy theories to question his legitimacy). He reminded the world why it fell in love with him in the first place.
…People have criticised him for being “professorial” as well as arrogant. They will do so no longer. He pondered for months, studied the research, weighed up the evidence, and reached the right conclusion. This is one cool, tough prof, and the lesson he has taught by example won’t quickly be unlearnt. In asymmetric warfare against a stateless enemy, invading sovereign states and slaughtering civilians is not the way to go. You don’t punish the guilty by killing the innocent. You do so by killing the guilty.
….Let no one hear attempts to share Obama’s credit with Dubya without revulsion. He failed pitifully in this, as in almost every thing else … Obama hasn’t honoured on every promise, nor will. He is not the Messiah, although if the Kool Aid truck has redelivered at last, make mine an octuple. For tempering vengeance with mercy, by refusing to reckon countless civilian lives a price worth paying to safeguard himself, hedeserves to sleep easy in his bed, and leave all the sweaty 3am angst to Donald Trump and the other malevolent midgets who will never trouble him again.
Full article here
The Obama Diary 
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