Siddiqi offered the most expansive account of Obama as a young man.
"We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay," said Siddiqi, who at the time worked as a waiter and as a salesman at a boutique ..
In about 1982, Siddiqi and Obama got an apartment at a sixth-floor walkup on East 94th Street. Siddiqi managed to get the apartment thanks to subterfuge.
"We didn't have a chance in hell of getting this apartment unless we fabricated the lease application," Siddiqi said.
Siddiqi fudged his credentials, saying he had a high-paying job at a catering company, but Obama "wanted no part of it. He put down the truth."
The apartment was "a slum of a place" in a drug-ridden neighborhood filled with gunshots, he said. "It wasn't a comfortable existence. We were slumming it." What little furniture they had was found on the street, and guests would have to hold their dinner plates in their laps.
While Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine during high school in Hawaii, he writes in the memoir that he stopped using soon after his arrival in New York. His roommate had no such scruples.
But Siddiqi says that during their time together here, Obama always refused his offers of drugs.
In his memoir and in interviews, Obama has said he got serious and buckled down in New York. "I didn't socialize that much. I was like a monk," he said in a 2005 Columbia alumni magazine interview. He told biographer David Mendell: "For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot."
In his memoir, Obama recalls fasting on Sunday; Siddiqi says Obama was a follower of comedian-activist Dick Gregory's vegetarian diet. "I think self-deprivation was his schtick, denying himself pleasure, good food and all of that."
But it wasn't exactly an ascetic life. There was plenty of time for reading (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul) and listening to music (Van Morrison, the Ohio Players, Bob Dylan). The two, along with others, went out for nights on the town. "He wasn't entirely a hermit," Siddiqi said.
Siddiqi said his female friends thought Obama was "a hunk."
"We were always competing," he said. "You know how it is. You go to a bar and you try hitting on the girls. He had a lot more success. I wouldn't out-compete him in picking up girls, that's for sure."
Obama was a tolerant roommate. Siddiqi's mother, who had never been around a black man, came to visit and she was rude; Obama was nothing but polite. Siddiqi himself could be intemperate -- he called Obama an Uncle Tom, but "he was really patient. I'm surprised he suffered me."
Finally, their relationship started to fray. "I was partying all the time. I was disrupting his studies," Siddiqi said. Obama moved out.
But count this as a score for Gov. Schwarzenegger. His lone appointment on the court broke with the Republican dominated majority, writing:
"The principle of judicial restraint is a covenant between judges and the people from whom their power derives.... It is no answer to say that judges can break the covenant so long as they are enlightened or well-meaning.... If there is to be a new understanding of the meaning of marriage in California, it should develop among the people of our state and find its expression at the ballot box."
UPDATE: When you are talking legal interpretation, a "slippery slope" argument is no fallacy, it's close to an empirical law.
It is Obama's biography, we are told, that will govern his behavior. He was raised by a mother who supposedly didn't see color, so he doesn't see color. He was born into tolerance and multi-racial understanding, so he will practice tolerance and multi-racial understanding. Except, that is, when it's not useful to him.
Which brings me to South Carolina, where I was born and raised. I was there before and during the primary. Recall the moment. Obama was gaining on Clinton--but had also just lost New Hampshire and Nevada. A loss in South Carolina, and he would have been done for.
It's worth remembering that the majority of blacks still think O.J. Simpson is innocent. And, in times like these, when a black man is out front in the public eye, black people feel both proud and vulnerable and, as a result, scour the earth for evidence of racists plotting to bring him down, like an advance team ready to sound an alarm. Barack needed only a gesture, a quick sneer or nod in the direction of the Clintons' hidden racism to avail himself of the twisted love that rescued O.J. and others like him and to smooth his path to victory, and, therefore, to salvage his candidacy. After Donna Brazile and James Clyburn started to cry racism, Barack was repeatedly asked his thoughts. He declined to answer, allowing the charge to grow for days (in sharp contrast to how he leapt to Joe Biden's defense a month earlier). But, while he remained silent about the allegations of racism, he gave speeches across South Carolina that warned against being "hoodwinked" and "bamboozled" by the Clintons. His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of "the White Man" masquerading as a smiling politician: "Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us," he says. "You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled."
By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist. As soon as I heard that Obama had quoted from Malcolm X like this, I knew that Obama would win South Carolina by a massive margin.
At present, polar bear populations are robust and, according to native people, are considerably larger than they were in previous decades. Predictions of polar bear endangerment are based on two sets of computer models: one set predicts how much Arctic sea ice will melt as a result of global warming, and the other predicts how polar bear populations will respond. But computer models of climate are known to be fraught with problems, and the ecological models used to predict polar bear response are equally limited.
Because of extreme limitations in data, it is essentially impossible to decide whether polar bears are endangered and whether their habitat is threatened by man-made global warming or other natural climate cycles. This is acknowledged by the experts themselves-the actual IUCN/SSC report is more broad in naming causes and more conservative about estimating their effects.
What we do know about polar bears is that, contrary to media portrayals, they are not fragile "canary in the coal mine" animals, but are robust creatures that have survived past periods of extensive deglaciation. Polar bear fossils have been dated to over one hundred thousand years, which means that polar bears have already survived an interglacial period when temperatures were considerably warmer than they are at present and when, quite probably, levels of summertime Arctic sea ice were correspondingly low.
More details on the polar bear population explosion here. Yes, that's right. The polar bear population explosion.
UPDATE: Mark Levin takes on Gerson.
"Nothing personal, but it is dispiriting to me to know that Gerson was a major player in the Bush White House."More on Gerson here.
The West Virginia exit polls indicate that he lost white voters 69-28. Astounding? Not really. In Ohio, Clinton won white voters 64-34. In Pennsylvania, Clinton won whites 63-37. Indiana? Whites went for Clinton 60-40. Massachusetts? Whites went for Clinton 58-40. Rhode Island? 63-31 for Clinton. North Carolina? 61-37. And the same in Arkansas, Tennessee, Maryland, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma, Arizona, Missouri and so on.The outlier -- Obama does well with leftist white voters West of the Mississippi. Discuss among yourselves.
-- Culture and values matter in West Virginia, and it turns out that West Virginians don't much value Barack Obama's culture of bullshit and lies. A majority of West Virginia Democrats -- 51% -- believe that Barack Obama is _not_ honest and trustworthy, and 87% of these folks voted for Hillary Clinton. By contrast, a full 63% believe that Hillary is honest and trustworthy, and 83% of these Democrats voted for Clinton. Remarkably, 35% of West Virginia Democrats believe that among Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, only Hillary is honest and trustworthy. 98% of these folks voted for Hillary Clinton. Imagine being considered less honest and trustworthy than Hillary Clinton.
-- If it came down to a vote between Barack Obama and John McCain in November, 28% said they would vote for McCain, 17% said they would not vote at all -- leaving 51% of Democrat primary voters who said they would vote for Barack Obama in the fall. Hillary Clinton voters split a dead heat 36% - 35% between Obama and McCain if forced to chose between the two in November.
-- A mere 1 voter in 4 said that Barack Obama doesn't hold any views at all in common with his pastor of 20 years Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In other words, 3 out of 4 voters believe that Obama's choice to spend 20 years with Rev. Wright does tell us something of Obama's own views of the world.
-- 44% of Democrat primary voters said they would be satisfied with the outcome of the process only if Hillary Clinton won the nomination. 53% said they would not be satisfied with an Obama candidacy for Presidency as the Democrat nominee.
-- 52% of voters said that Obama does not share their values.
-- Clinton took 69% of the union vote, 75% of the vote among those with no college education, and 69% of the vote among those making less than $50,000 a year.
-- Obama did well among highly educated, very wealthy voters who subscribe to The Nation and look down at working class hicks who cling to their guns, their religion, and their flag pins (O.K., I'm extrapolating here, but only a bit).
UPDATE: Here's CNN's take on the exit polls.
The guy doesn't take responsibility for the work of his staff, he doesn't take responsibility for his choice of a church and pastor, he doesn't take responsibility for his choice of political associates, and he doesn't take responsibility for the political deals which put cash in his pocket and his family on millionaire's row. Barack Obama -- being full of bullshit means never having to say you're sorry:
In a March 2008 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times to answer questions about Tony Rezko, Obama was asked about the fact that Obama had told the newspaper in November 2006 that he had never been asked to do anything to advance Rezko's business interests. But the Sun-Times had subsequently learned about a October 28, 1998 letter Obama wrote to city and state housing officials on behalf of a housing project for seniors that Rezko was working on.The letter, Obama said, "was essentially a form letter of the sort that I did all time. And that I wasn't, by the way, aware of."
A reporter asked: You weren't aware that he was associated with the project?
Responded Obama: "I wasn't even aware that we wrote the letter. The answer that I gave at the time was accurate as far as I knew...This was one of many form letters, or letters of recommendation we would send out constantly for all sorts of projects. And my understanding is that our letter was just one of many. And I wasn't a decision maker in any of this process."
The Sun-Times also pointed out that in November 2006 Obama estimated that Rezko had raised somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000 for him during his political career.
But since that answer, Obama has given back almost $160,000 in Rezko-related contributions.
"The original estimate was based on, I asked my staff to find what monies they attributed to Rezko, and this was the figure given to me," Obama said.
Racial myth-making is a Chicago leadership method Obama criticizes in his memoir:
Black politicians less gifted than Harold discovered what white politicians had known for a very long time: that race-baiting could make up for a host of limitations. Younger leaders, eager to make a name for themselves, upped the ante, peddling conspiracy theories all over town-the Koreans were funding the Klan, Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with the AIDS virus. It was a shortcut to fame, if not always fortune; like sex or violence on TV, black rage always found a ready market.But racial myth-making is a technique Obama himself uses to advance his weak on crime agenda. Heather MacDonald:
Nobody I spoke with in the neighborhood seemed to take such talk very seriously. As it was, many had already given up the hope that politics could actually improve their lives, much less make demands on them; to them, a ballot, if cast at all, was simply a ticket to a good show. Blacks had no real power to act on the occasional slips into anti-Semitism or Asian-bashing, people would tell me; and anyway, black folks needed a chance to let off a little steam every once in a while-man, what do you think those folks say about us behind our backs?
Just talk. Yet what concerned me wasn't just the damage loose talk caused efforts at coalition building, or the emotional pain it caused others. It was the distance between our talk and our action, the effect it was having on us as individuals and as a people. That gap corrupted both language and thought; it made us forgetful and encouraged fabrication; it eventually eroded our ability to hold either ourselves or each other accountable. And while none of this was unique to black politicians or to black nationalists-Ronald Reagan was doing quite well with his brand of verbal legerdemain, and white America seemed ever willing to spend vast sums of money on suburban parcels and private security forces to deny the indissoluble link between black and white-it was blacks who could least afford such make- believe. Black survival in this country had always been premised on a minimum of delusions; it was such an absence of delusions that continued to operate in the daily lives of most black people I met. Instead of adopting such unwavering honesty in our public business, we seemed to be loosening our grip, letting our collective psyche go where it pleased, even as we sank into further despair.
The race industry and its elite enablers take it as self-evident that high black incarceration rates result from discrimination. At a presidential primary debate this Martin Luther King Day, for instance, Senator Barack Obama charged that blacks and whites "are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, [and] receive very different sentences . . . for the same crime." ..
If a listener didn't know anything about crime, such charges of disparate treatment might seem plausible. After all, in 2006, blacks were 37.5 percent of all state and federal prisoners, though they're under 13 percent of the national population. About one in 33 black men was in prison in 2006, compared with one in 205 white men and one in 79 Hispanic men. Eleven percent of all black males between the ages of 20 and 34 are in prison or jail. The dramatic rise in the prison and jail population over the last three decades--to 2.3 million people at the end of 2007 --has only amplified the racial accusations against the criminal-justice system.The favorite culprits for high black prison rates include a biased legal system, draconian drug enforcement, and even prison itself.
None of these explanations stands up to scrutiny. The black incarceration rate is overwhelmingly a function of black crime. Insisting otherwise only worsens black alienation and further defers a real solution to the black crime problem.
Everyone seems to think they know who Barack Obama is from having seen the man speak on television. But those of us who have taken the time to look at what the man has done and what the man has written, have come to know a very different man.
Powerline:
It's no surprise that the media are in the tank for Barack Obama, but the willingness of the New York Times to simply misrepresent the facts--while pretending to act as a fact-checker!--is pretty breathtaking. You may think the Times is an outlier, if not a joke, but I suspect that many more news outlets are prepared to follow the Times's lead in flat-out misreporting the facts, if that's what it takes to get Obama elected ..
I think we are about to witness a level of partisanship in the "mainstream" media that has not been seen since the era of professional news media began a little over a century ago. In the past, when newspapers like the Times have misreported facts, people have generally assumed it was, even if the result of bias, inadvertent. No longer. We have entered an era in which leading news organs will intentionally and persistently misinform their readers in order to achieve a political objective--the election of Barack Obama.
The problem with Obama is that his positions on Iraq were the wrong ones to embrace based on the facts on the ground at the time.Notice that once again -- and we're discovering this with issues both big and small -- we can find Obama lying, b*llsh*tt*ng his way around his past history and his past mistakes. We've got more than a trend here, folks, we've got this man's character in the cross hairs.
To be specific: When the Bush administration had the wrong counterinsurgency plan in place, Obama was supportive of it. He told the Chicago Tribune in July 2004, "There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage." While John McCain was calling for more troops and a different counterinsurgency strategy in 2003, 2004, and 2005, Obama was not.
In late 2006, when the situation in Iraq was dire, Obama declared it was time to "execute a serious change of course in Iraq" -- but rather than advocating a "surge" in troops, he was advocating a "phased withdrawal." His predictive judgment was this: "We cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve."
In January 2007, when President Bush announced the administration's change in strategy in Iraq -- which included tens of thousands of additional troops and a new COIN strategy led by David Petraeus, Obama declared that nothing in the plan would "make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that's taking place there."
Then, in May 2007, Obama did what he had never done previously: He voted against funding for combat operations, claiming as a reason the fact that the bill included no timeline for troop withdrawal. And in September, just three months after the final elements of the 30,000-strong surge forces had landed in Iraq and fairly substantial security progress was discernible, Obama declared that we needed to withdraw combat troops "immediately." "Not in six months or a year -- now."
It got so bad that Obama at first denied progress was being made, then denied that the surge had anything to do with the progress, and even insisted (in a debate in January 2008) that the reduction in violence was due not to the work of the American military but to the results of the 2006 midterm election in America. Finally Obama was forced by the overwhelming evidence to concede the surge had made progress -- yet in the process Obama misrepresented his past position, insisting that when the surge was announced, he had "no doubt" that "if we place 30,000 more troops in there, then we would see an improvement in the security situation and we would see a reduction in violence."
It would have been impossible to be a member of Wright's congregation for twenty years and not be completely familiar with the full extent of his radicalism.And what was Obama completely familiar with concerning Wright and his publication The Trumpet?
Wright and his fellow Trumpet writers tend to speak of "Africans" or "Africans in the Western diaspora" even more often than they speak of "African-Americans. When combined with the direct attacks on America and on expressions of American patriotism, the overall effect is to make American blacks appear as strangers in a foreign land.Recall that of all the churches in Chicago it was this church which attracted Obama, and it was this church which Obama bankrolled. Obama -- the boy who grew up not in America, but in Indonesia. The young man who called Kenya "home", and not the United States. Do I have to figure this all out for you folks?
Every time I read that the NY Times has lost another chunk of its readers or that another crop of NY Times reporters have lost their jobs, its hard not to think that no group of people better deserves it.
BONUS: A picture of Obama teaching the political physics of Saul Alinsky.
"I know there are those like John Kass who would like me to decry Chicago politics more frequently, and I'll leave that to his editorial commentary," Obama said.
Not the politics, just the corruption, I said then, wishing silently that he had decried it all, that he'd stood up years ago and pointed to the list of sleazy deals, pointed an angry finger at the Duffs, the white, Outfit-connected drinking buddies of Daley who received $100 million in affirmative action contracts through City Hall ..
Obama had nothing to do with the Duff deal. But he kept mum. He has endorsed Daley, endorsed Daley's hapless stooge Todd Stroger for president of the Cook County Board. These are not the acts of a reformer, but of a guy who, as we say in Chicago, won't make no waves and won't back no losers.
Obama the reformer is backed by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Daley boys. He is spoken for by Daley's own spokesman, David Axelrod. He was launched into his U.S. Senate by machine power broker and state Senate President Emil Jones (D-ComEd) ..
As a candidate, Obama will do what he has to do to win. My argument is not with him -- but with the national political media pack that refuses to look closely at what Chicago is. They're fixated on what it was, and they think it's clean now.
And they've spent years crafting, then cleaving to their eager and trembling Obama narrative, a tale of great yearning, almost mythic and ardently adolescent, a tale in which Obama is portrayed as a reformer, a dynamic change agent about to do away with the old thuggish politics.
It's as if Axelrod channeled it, wearing a peaked Merlin hat. Obama is a South Sider and does not hail from Camelot or Mt. Olympus or the lush forests of mythical Narnia.
I've joked that reporters feel compelled to hug him, in their copy, as if he were the cuddly faun, the Mr. Tumnus of American politics. But I was only kidding. The real Mr. Tumnus never had Billy Daley or Ted Kennedy carving up Cabinet appointments.
So why the disconnect? Why is Obama allowed to campaign as a reformer, virtually unchallenged by the media, though he's a product of Chicago politics and has never condemned the wholesale political corruption in his home town the way he condemns those darn Washington lobbyists.
For an answer as to when pundits will ever put Illinois corruption in context, I called on Tom Bevan, executive director of the popular political Web site Real Clear Politics (which directs readers to my column on occasion) and a Chicagoan.
"To a large degree, the media has accepted much of the Obama narrative thus far," Bevan told me. "He's risen so quickly, but his history hasn't been bogged down with an association of Chicago politics and I can't tell you why exactly, except perhaps that some may have bought into the established narrative and can't separate themselves from it."
"And I don't know if the country understands just how corrupt the system is in Illinois. People don't see it. They're flying over us, cruising at 30,000 feet," Bevan said.
What's so stupid about all this is that these questions have such easy answers. It's as if Kass is stuck in a George Orwell novel -- or the Soviet Union -- and can't publicly print the answers everyone knows, but no journalist dares speak. Pathetic.
SOMETHING WORTH CONSIDERING is the fact that Barack Obama paid for this Jeremiah Wright microphone -- contributing tens of thousands of dollars to bankroll Wright and his activities. When you pay for something year after year knowing what you're paying for, guess what, you own it, like anything else you've paid for, it's yours. And Stanley Kurtz in his article is right, there is no doubting the Obama's knew exactly what they were buying, in ever sense of the term. And don't think the Obama money and support didn't matter. The Obama's have been some of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's richest bankrollers, and from the Obama tax returns you have to imagine that they have been among his largest contributors. They have also been the most famous and politically powerful of Wright's flock.
A man who's bankrolled such filth shouldn't be President, and you have every right to tell you neighbors the same.
Obama Jr. has actually drawn useful lessons from his father's failure -- he's abstemious, cautious, and, while he talks a lot, he seldom says anything that anybody who disagrees with him can understand.
UPDATE: Larry Johnson says it wasn't me.
From the comments:
"When did we start getting our news reported by giddy schoolgirls?"Via Malkin.
Obama spent a good deal of his high school years and his first two years of college high or intoxicated (source -- Obama in his memoir). Someone who spends his time getting stoned and drunk isn't someone retaining a lot about American history, economics, biology, logic, geology, etc. And what course did Obama take? What was the intellectual environment he put himself in? He says he sought out Marxist professors and hard left friends, studied neocolonialism, and took literature classes with such people as Israel hating Palestinian radical Edward Said. In Chicago he spent every Sunday (he claims he attended church on a regular and constant basis) listening to the history lessons and cultural critique of Rev. Jeremiah Wright (whom in Obama's eyes is a deeply learned man, or so he repeatedly says). In New York Obama spent his time reading the Village Voice and going to socialist conferences (source: Obama's memoir) -- a diet of which inevitably leads to a loss of intelligence and IQ.
So here's the challenge. If Obama is such a smart and learned man, why is he so ignorant of American history? Maybe he didn't write the words himself, but why did he read them?
UPDATE: The best evidence of Obama's intelligence, if not the quality of his understanding of things, can be found in the 3 or 4 comment posted here.
"[Feith] criticizes Bush for not defending the main rationale for invasion -- protecting Americans from a genuine threat -- and instead emphasizing the subsidiary and iffy goal of establishing democracy."It's a great misfortune of history that Bush's Presidential role models in Iraq were Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson rather than TR and FDR.
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