~~ Ronald Reagan ~~
Monday, September 29, 2008
Monday Morning Link Roundup
With the debate on Friday night and the financial crisis and negotiations in Congress dominating the news all weekend, we’ve accumulated articles that never made it into a blog post. Here is a link roundup to catch up.
First on the subject of stem cells is what looks like the most promising breakthrough yet.
Harvard researchers have improved a technique for converting adult cells into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Pluripotent stem cells can become all other cell types in the body.
[...]
“This is certainly a major stem cell milestone,” said Advanced Cell Technologies chief scientific officer Bob Lanza, who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first ray of light that iPS cells could soon be used to treat patients.”
These iPS cells—short for induced pluripotent stem cell—debuted less than a year ago: By using viruses to insert key developmental genes, researchers coaxed human skin cells into an embryonic state, capable of growing into almost any other type of tissue.
You are going to be hearing more and more about the group known as ACORN. ACORN is primarily known for the number of voter fraud cases brought against them, but did you know that Barack Obama was their attorney?
Today we find out that not only did Obama train ACORN workers in his past, but he represented the scandal-plagued socialist organization in court:
In 1995, former Republican Gov. Jim Edgar refused to implement the federal “Motor Voter” law, which Republicans argued could invite fraud and which some Republicans feared could swell the ranks of Democratic voters.
The law mandated people be allowed to register to vote in government offices such as driver’s license renewal centers.Obama sued on behalf of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. The League of Women Voters and other public-interest groups joined in.
“He and his client were the ones who filed the original case—they blazed the trail,” said Paul Mollica, who represented the League.Transcripts show that at court hearings, Obama identified himself, then let Mollica begin speaking. Maria Valdez of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund sometimes spoke.
ACORN has a long, long history of voter fraud and scandal.
Obama also worked against banks who denied mortgage loans to minorities:
In today’s New York Post Stanley Kurtz explains what community organizers do, and what Barack Obama did. Kurtz delves into Obama’s work with Chicago ACORN. Every paragraph of Kurtz’s article is important information, it is hard to pick and choose, so please go read the whole thing.
WHAT exactly does a “community organizer” do? Barack Obama’s rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here’s a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.
[...]
In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.
In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.
THE seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.
Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA - and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.
In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America’s financial institutions.
[...]
IT would be tough to find an “on the ground” community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.
When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.
He returned to Chicago in the early ‘90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama’s legal services for a “motor voter” case and partnered with him on his 1992 “Project VOTE” registration drive.
In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN’s up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott’s drive against Chicago’s banks.
More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago’s Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation’s board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.
That committee’s report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama’s organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott’s ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.
MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report acknowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN - whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.
Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public’s eye. The Woods Fund’s claim to be “nonideological,” it says, has “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship.”
Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?
The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott in her pioneering efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards. Yet he supported Talbott in every conceivable way. He trained her personal staff and other aspiring ACORN leaders, he consulted with her extensively, and he arranged a major boost in foundation funding for her efforts.
And, as the leader of another charity, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama channeled more funding Talbott’s way - ostensibly for education projects but surely supportive of ACORN’s overall efforts.
In return, Talbott proudly announced her support of Obama’s first campaign for state Senate, saying, “We accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.”
Boomers have revolutionized every area of society by virtue of the size of the group, so why their influence on “senior centers” should come as a surprise to anyone is strange. This article, at least, makes it sound like some in the industry are preparing.
Changing food preferences are among many adjustments that senior center directors nationwide, including Lather, expect to make in the next decade as they balance the wishes of their elderly stalwarts with those of baby boomer newcomers.
Some even have taken “senior” out of their names, christening the facilities “community centers.” It’s a nod to boomers who acknowledge they are aging but bristle at the term “senior” and the stereotypes of fragility or dependency.
The first of the 78 million boomers started receiving Social Security retirement benefits this year, and the Census Bureau estimates almost 8,000 of them are turning 60 every day.
“The boomers are going to have the same impact in senior centers that they had as babies when they were born, in schools, in the work force and in society in general,” said Jay Morgan, manager of the Office on Aging in St. Petersburg, Fla.
“You really can’t underestimate that impact,” he said.
Morgan moderates a National Council on Aging online discussion group for senior center directors and said they voice common concerns about serving boomers.
Some examples: offering programs to fit the schedules of boomers working well into their 60s and making them diverse and intellectually appealing, and ensuring that longtime older visitors aren’t alienated by the changes.
None expect it to be easy. Even those who’ve planned in advance say baby boomers will be unlike any generation that has ever passed through senior centers.
In Enfield, traditional activities - bingo and cribbage, blood pressure clinics, bereavement support - are now joined by high-energy Zumba exercise classes, Nintendo Wii video game tournaments and investment clubs.
Lather said she may even launch a motorcycle club for the many “young” seniors arriving at the northern Connecticut center on two wheels. ... More
I find this study not only offensive and insulting, but downright dumb. It starts with the false premise that aging adults were all racists to begin with so as their brains become “diseased” they revert to preconditioning. It is just one more excuse to explain an Obama loss and try to lay it at the feet head of racism rather than the true reason that America doesn’t want a far left radical socialist in the White House, especially one who is an empty suit. The whole study is offensive and extremely insulting. Everything is always about race/racism with the left, it is the excuse to cover every sin.
Chicago Tribune correspondent, Howard Witt, seems to have found the villain to blame in case Barack Obama loses in November: elderly prejudiced white people. However, such “prejudice” is not their fault, Witt “generously” allows, since they suffer from atrophied frontal brain lobes. Witt’s article claims that such people will be more likely to vote against Obama due to the prejudice induced by these diseased frontal lobes (emphasis mine):
The personality is familiar to us all: the sweet old aunt, the loving grandfather or the generous widow down the street, each of them unfailingly kind toward friends and family but given to flights of shocking prejudice when the conversation turns toward ethnic groups to which they don’t belong.
Often the response is a nervous laugh, a wan smile or a hasty effort to change the subject. We assume that old people are the products of less-enlightened times, they’re unlikely to change and their comments, however ugly, are largely innocuous.
Now, though, in the midst of the nation’s first presidential campaign between a black candidate and a white one, a convergence of new political and scientific research suggests that prejudice and stereotyping among elderly white Americans in particular may not be so innocuous after all.
Older white voters heavily favored Sen. Hillary Clinton over Sen. Barack Obama during the Democratic primary season, and national polls indicate that group now leans toward Sen. John McCain by 10 percentage points or more.
Pollsters and political scientists cannot pinpoint how much of that anti-Obama sentiment may be related to racial prejudice. But sociologists say their research indicates that implicit racial biases influence the voting decisions of many Americans of all ages—and that, for very basic physiological reasons related to the aging of their brains, many older citizens may be unable to suppress their prejudicial impulses, whether at the family dinner table or in the privacy of a voting booth.
In other words, Grandma’s biased outbursts may not be her fault. And Obama’s election strategists may want to schedule more campaign stops at nursing homes.
Obama’s ideas are so early last century. They’ve been tried and found wanting. Ask the old Soviets or the Cubans. Communism/socialism does not work, yet Obama has repackaged these obsolete ideas and presents them as if they represent hope and change. Don’t be fooled.
The conventional wisdom is that Obama is the man of the future. It’s argued that he represents what the younger generation desires. But what if, on the contrary, Obama actually represented the last gasp of the past? When Thomas Sowell writes about Obama’s “worn-out economic ideas” can he really be serious? Michael Ledeen argues in dead earnest that BHO’s ideas are mostly obsolete.
“Paradoxically, Obama is in some ways more a victim of age than McCain, although of a different sort. Obama is an advocate of ideas that have aged to the point of dementia. He’s an old-fashioned radical, and the leftist ideas that inspire him are no longer relevant to our world. As Hegel used to say, the world changes, and the ideas that once described reality, and could be used to effectively change it when necessary, no longer apply to the changed world. Obama’s political ideas have aged, which is why they have no policy saliency. They’re just words, fossilized remnants of a civilization that no longer exists.”
… More
To me this is one of the most disturbing things about Obama and his campaign.
No words better sum up the fashion by which Barack Obama’s campaign handles criticism than “the politics of personal destruction.” Although popularized by Bill Clinton, the phrase embodies the political left’s timeless approach to securing victory in elections. Destroy your foe and hope that his ideas never become the issue, as ideological debate is not something at which they excel. Yet this year was supposed to be different. The junior senator from Illinois promised an end to divisiveness, partisanship, and “politics as usual.” Recent events illustrate the emptiness of these platitudes. Since August, Team Obama has fought a covert war against their opposition and muzzled them by any means available.
Legal methods appear to be their response of choice. When a commercial from the American Issues Project linked Obama to former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the campaign filed a complaint with the Department of Justice requesting that the 527 be criminally investigated. Simultaneously, they contacted “stations running American Issues Project’s ad in an unsuccessful attempt to compel them to pull the spot.” The same tactic was used in the primaries in regard to Hillary Clinton. Luckily, the Department of Justice does not — as of yet — deem the free expression of speech a felony or a misdemeanor. ... More
In another act of intimidation, the Obama camp is threatening the NRA for telling the truth and wants ads like these banned:
“The Obama camp has been threatening television and radio stations to keep them from airing anti-Obama ads. The latest target is the NRA and stations in Pennsylvania.
Earlier this week, the National Rifle Association’s Political Victory Fund released a series of radio and television spots to educate gun owners and sportsmen about Barack Obama’s longstanding anti-gun record. In response to the NRA-PVF ads, a clearly panicked Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are doing everything they can to hide Obama’s real record by mounting a coordinated assault on the First Amendment.
They have gone to desperate and outrageous lengths to try to silence your NRA by bullying media outlets with threats of lawsuits if they run NRA-PVF’s ads. The Obama camp is particularly angry with an NRA ad entitled “Hunter” which lays out Obama’s record on gun control.
The NRA charged that “Obama and the DNC have been using strong-arm tactics reminiscent of Chicago machine politics to try and cover up the truth and silence NRA by forcing the stations to assist them in hiding Obama’s radical anti-gun record.” ... The NRA has set up a web site detailing its position on Obama at http://www.gunbanobama.com.
The right to food, housing, education, etc.
Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery.
--- Rocco ---
Posted by Sara
on 09/29/2008 at 07:11 AM in Legal - Seasoned Citizens - Civil Rights - PACs - Obama -
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