Recently in Obama Category

HOW OBAMA USED RACIST CODE against whites to defeat Hillary Clinton in South Carolina.

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.

YOUTUBE BRINGS YOU ANOTHER Barack Obama bullshit moment.  What the truth of the matter is doesn't much concern Obama.  What matters to Obama is the effect his words have on the audience.  This is philosopher Harry Frankfurt's definition of a bullshitter, and the account fits Obama to a T.  Here's the clip:

OUT WITH THE "FRIENDS OF BILL" In with the "Friends of Obama".

CLINTON AND OBAMA HAVE RACIALLY DIVIDED THE DEMOCRAT PARTY, with Obama taking more than 9 of every 10 black voters, and Clinton taking a commanding majority of white voters in nearly every state East of the Mississippi:

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.

WEST VIRGINIA -- THE EXIT POLL from CNN.  Some bullet points.

-- 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.

WITH BARACK OBAMA it's always someone else's fault -- 14 times and counting.

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.

OBAMA IS RUNNING WITHOUT APOLOGY as the Christian candidate for President.  (He did the same in Iowa, Ohio, and a dozen other states).  And the MSM does the Obama campaign one better -- they're running Obama as the Son of God himself.

BARACK OBAMA -- THE HAPPY BULLSHITTER -- lies about everything, but for the most part all of his lies have done little to change public policy.  The great exception is in the protection of the public from violent criminals.  Obama in Illinois was successful in a variety of efforts to hamstring the hands of the justice system in dealing with violent gangs and criminals.  Those who are paying attention shouldn't be surprised to learn that Obama's efforts against the public safety system are based on a race lie he's used to advance his political career.

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.
  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.

But racial myth-making is a technique Obama himself uses to advance his weak on crime agenda.  Heather MacDonald:

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.

THE QUOTE OF THE DAY

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.

BARACK OBAMA IS LYING about who he is and what attracted him to Trinity Church in Chicago.  Stanley Kurtz:

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?

WHO WOULD YOU GUESS KNOWS MORE about Obama's relationships with Bill Ayers -- reporters at the NY Times who are paid to report such things, or a blogger?  At this late date, we all know we can count on it that the blogger knows more, and generally has a superior talent for searching documents, reading texts, and providing an analysis of events. 

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.

POLITICIANS DON'T COME ANY MORE CYNICAL than this --  in his own memoir Obama embraces racism and America hate, justifying these revolting means because of their promise to produce Obama's own radical and race-centered political ends.  Let me suggest this.  You'd have to go overseas to find a more disturbing major political personality in my adult life time.  There's a difference in kind here from the long-ago adolescent middle class radical posing of the Clintons and their gross but pathetic little crimes, corruptions and political compromises.  Obama is a true cradle to manhood radical with a racist and Marxist understanding of the world, literally schooled in the art of producing radical results (Google:  Obama & Saul Alinsky) -- and in it for the long haul and the big score.

BONUS:  A picture of Obama teaching the political physics of Saul Alinsky.

WHO IS BARACK OBAMA? A diagnosis using clips from a NY Times story on Obama's Chicago years.  Via No Quarter.  Read also John Kass's article on Obama and The Chicago Way.  Worth quoting at length:

"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.

IS BARACK OBAMA THE MOST DISHONEST MAN in America?  An investigation of Jeremiah Wright's The Trumpet makes it clear that "Obama knew everything, and he's known it for ages" about Wright's race hate and anti-Americanism.  A look at Rev. Wright's The Trumpet,"leaves no doubt that his religion is political, his attitude toward America is bitterly hostile, and he has fundamental problems with capitalism, white people, and "assimilationist" blacks."  Read the whole thing.

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.

THE QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from Steve Sailer:

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.

MATT STEARNS at McClatchy Newspapers claims that efforts to bring to public attention Barack Obama's childhood years spent attending weekly Islamic services and instruction is part of a plot hatched by an former clandestine CIA officer.  If I was conspiracy minded I might suspect that Matt himself has hatched his own fantastic plot to hide the true facts of Obama's childhood religion from the voting public.

UPDATE:  Larry Johnson says it wasn't me.

OBAMA SHOWS OFF HIS PACKAGE for the press corp his female fans.  I haven't seen a man show off his private parts in tight pants since seeing my loser history teacher do this move in the front of the class for the "benefit" of 8th grade girls. The maturity level of this man astounds.  I was stunned to see this then and I'm stunned to see it now.

From the comments:

"When did we start getting our news reported by giddy schoolgirls?"

Via Malkin.

YOU DON'T THINK OBAMA is a radical?  Is this radical enough for you?  The central aim of every radical tract is the undermining of established universal principles and law in favor of temporary ad hoc expediencies and arbitrary feelings of "social justice".  You can find the plea for expediency and against principles in the name of "social justice" in any radical you want to name -- and likewise you can find the case against this sort of radicalism in every conservative thinker you can name, from Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell to Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and David Hume.  Obama is on the side of a long list of radicals and against Smith, Sowell, Hume, Burke and Hayek.

OBAMA CALLS REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT his "former pastor".  Time to meet Barack Obama's current pastor.

FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE takes a trip to Chicago to investigate "Obama's World".  Here is Part 1 and here is Part 2.

UPDATE:  Now Part 3.

I'VE TOLD YOU BARACK OBAMA DOESN'T TELL THE TRUTH and now Nice Deb takes a first step in documenting it case after case after case. I've got reams more to add to that list, and will as time permits.

A JOURNALISM PROFESSOR rips the Main Stream Media for journalistic malpractice in its failure to do investigative reporting on Barack Obama.  Actually, give the journalistic malpractice of the 2004 race, this isn't so much a news story as a developing long-term trend.  Every case of investigative journalism cited by the good professor is at least two or more decades in the past.

UPDATE:  John Hawkins:

There are a lot of great lines in [in the professors article on Obama], but no answer to the very obvious question; "What took so long?"

Well, we could just as easily ask, "What took the press so long to cover the allegations by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth back in 2004?"

After all, the Swifties formed before Kerry captured the nomination and his anti-war protesting wasn't exactly a secret. Moreover, the Swift Boat Vets were veterans, many of them had served with Kerry, they were credible -- more so than Kerry himself -- and they actually blew huge holes in some of Kerry's stories.

Yet, despite the fact that they were getting enormous coverage on talk radio and in the blogosphere, the mainstream media almost completely ignored them until Kerry responded to them publicly and then they simply aped the Democratic line, "Their allegations have been disproven," without ever giving their arguments a serious looksie.

Another clue that may help answer Don Campbell's question was the huge outcry on the Left after the ABC debate, where Obama bombed when he had to actually had to answer some tough questions about Jeremiah Wright, his refusal to wear a flag pin, and his connections to terrorist William Ayers.

So, why didn't the media hit Obama on Wright earlier? Why didn't they cover the Swift Boat Vets for Truth earlier? Why was their such a protest over Barack Obama being asked tough questions in a debate?

It's the same answer to every question; the mainstream media is mostly comprised of liberals, they do what they can to try to help their candidate win, and they generally think it helps to give Democrats a pass on tough issues.

WHAT DO SENIORS HAVE AGAINST Barack Obama?   They're voting Clinton over Obama by huge margins.  Perhaps it's his wife.  When folks over 60 were growing up a kid actually got a history education, and in a long life time of experience built on that foundation, they've seen enough of the world to know how offensive Obama's bitter half is saying things like this:

Barack Obama, the missus explains, is Everyman who has ever been put down by The Man. And "understand this" .. Mrs. Obama is here to make sure you feel their pain. Which is really your pain. Because the hardships of a privileged Ivy League couple are "exactly" the same as the travails of miners or service workers or small-business owners: "So the bar has been shifting and moving in this race," she grumbles, "but the irony is, the sad irony is, that's exactly what is happening to most Americans in this country."

Don't tell Michelle about the Great Depression or the Carter Malaise. "Folks are struggling like never before," she seethes.

We know Barack Obama shares a similar world view -- because we've read his memoir and we know his working associates and we know his church and we know his college studies and we know his wife and they are all of a ungrateful, bitter, condescending and anti-American piece.  (The word "anger" shows up in Obama's own memoir nearly 100 times, despite a lifetime of privileges and wealth unheard of in most of the world, and even in much of America -- privided to him by loving and sacrificing grandparents whom he's repeatedly trashed in print and on the campaign trail.)  So don't tell me that Obama understands what is great about America or that he loves this country the way average Americans do.  He doesn't and he's let us know it in every way he can -- and calculated campaign speeches written by others can't change that fact.

And note well -- Barack Obama seems to be as ignorant of American history as his wife.

THE INDIANA EXIT POLLS.  Some numbers that jump out at me.

-- White Democrats voted 65% to 35% in favor of Clinton over Obama.

Comment:  Without the black vote Obama would have been blown out in Indiana.

-- Obama defeated Clinton 57% to 43% among college graduates with post-graduate experience.

Comment:  Outside of the black population, Americans with multiple years of left wing college studies under their belt are Barack Obama's strongest voting block.

-- "Very liberal" voters voted 73% - 27% Obama.

Comment:  Lefties know their man, and easily see past Obama's non-ideological rhetoric.

-- "Conservative" voters voted 65%-35% Clinton; moderate" voters voted 55%-45% Clinton.

Comment:  The fact that Obama is a member of the far left with a radical background hostile to American power and traditional American values is beginning to turn up on the radar screen of even politically uninformed moderate Democrats.

-- People who decided on election day or in the last three days voted 59%- 41% for Clinton.  Early deciders split 50-50.

Comment:  The facts surrounding Obama's relationship with Rev. Wright have begun to cut the legs out from under the Obama bandwagon.

-- White voters 60 and up chose Clinton over Obama 71% to 29% percent.

Comment:  These voters would have been at least in their 20s when Obama's close associate William Ayers was bombing police stations in New York.  They would have been at least in there teens when Martin Luther King dreamed a very different civic dream from the dreams of Black Liberation Theology that church members like Barack Obama were required to confess at Trinity in Chicago.

-- Clinton took 60% of the Protestant and Catholic vote.  Obama took 58% of the "none" vote and 60% of the 7% of voters who are something other than Christian, Mormon, Muslim, Jewish or non-religious (the Buddhist, Sikh and Wiccan vote?).

Comment:  Christians tend not to be big Obama fans.  Without atheists and non-Christians, Obama would have been a huge loser in Indiana.

-- 37% of voters thought both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are honest and trustworthy.

Comment:  Maybe it's time to start calling the Democrat party the stupid party.

-- 29% of voters in the Democrat primary say they would vote for John McCain or they would not vote it Barack Obama is the Democrat nominee for President.

Comment:  Democrat primary voters are more intelligent perhaps than I give them credit for.  The only tough call here is between John McCain and not voting.  Good thing all three options were listed.

Well, enough for now.

UPDATE:  Marc Ambinder sees a Democrat crack up:

Forget the horse race numbers for a moment: if the surveys are accurate, the polarization within the Democratic Party has reached critical levels ..

In both IN and NC, two thirds of Clinton supporters say they'd be dissatisfied if Obama were the nominee  ..

The percentage of Clinton voters who say they'd choose McCain over Obama in a general election is approaching 40% in Indiana. Put it another way: in North Carolina, less than HALF of folks who voted today for Hillary Clinton are ready to say today that they'd definitely vote for Obama in a general election.

WHEN YOU'VE BEEN FIRE-BOMBED  it tends to concentrate the mind.  It also provides the sort of incentive our leftist press corp lacks when it comes to digging out the specifics of Barack Obama's 20+ year close working relationship with terrorist bomber Bill Ayers.  And if you don't think Obama is a brass-balled b*llsh*tt*er, consider again Obama's Ted Kennedy size lie that Ayer is an "English" professor and a mere neighbor.  Obama's campaign has also put out the lie that Ayers' adult age children go to school with Obama's elementary school aged children -- a lie widely circulated in the left-o-sphere and the MSM.

THE STATE OF THE ART -- Michelle Obama comes up with a politicallly correct victimology for millionaires and front running Democrat party nominees.  Could there be a conspiracy to hold Michelle Obama down and block her husbands ambition?  Watch the video to get a sense for the full scope of the conspiracy, or listen to the Hugh Hewitt's audio outtakes from the speech.

Identifying a national conspiracy against a black man and his black wife -- with the thick suggestion that it's a white conspiracy -- that's what we need to unite the country.  Bring us together Barack and Michelle!

UPDATE:  Here's the text of Michelle Obama's speech.

BARACK OBAMA tells us he had a Muslim upbringing, but he covers up much more than he acknowledges.

THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN is making a PDF copy of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father available free on the web -- you can download it by clicking here. 

ALSO -- Steve Sailer has posted the portion of Obama's book dealing with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on his web site, with a small bit of helpful annotation, for those who don't care to read the whole book.

THE OBAMA BS works like sorcery with left wing journalists, who see a magic pony in every steaming Obama speech.   But when you move from Democrats with bylines to actual voters, you find people in the post-Wright world are no longer mis-directed by the Obama's slight of hand, and see Obama for what he is, another politician piling the rhetoric higher and wider as his needs change from here to there.  So says Mark Steyn.  Worth quoting:

[Obama's] Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap - indeed, full-sized canyon - that's opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That's the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama's adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the senator's speechifying "magic" came from Jeremiah Wright himself. "He's a politician," said the reverend. "He says what he has to say as a politician. ... He does what politicians do."

The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician doing what politicians do seems to have affronted the senator more than any of the stuff about America being no different from al-Qaida and the government inventing AIDS to kill black people. In his belated "disowning" of Wright, Obama said, "What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that - that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the - the commonality in all people."

Funny how tinny and generic the sonorous uplift rings when it's suddenly juxtaposed against something real and messy and human. As he chugged on, the senator couldn't find his groove and couldn't prevent himself from returning to pick at the same old bone: "If what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough. That's - that's a show of disrespect to me."

WHAT UPSET OBAMA? It clearly wasn't what Rev. Wright said about America, or about racially different brains, or about AIDS, or about Farrakhan, or about the white people, etc., etc.  Wright has said those things time and time again.  And Obama has heard or read these things time and time again for more than a year (for certain) and very likely in most every case for going on 20 years.  No, it wasn't what Rev. Wright said about America and race which offended Obama, it was what Rev. Wright said about Obama that finally caused Obama to object to the views of his one time political and spiritual mentor ("political" and "spiritual" mentor are Obama's own words used to describe his relationship with Rev. Wright).

So when Obama decided to break from Rev. Wright he did so not because of the loathsome ideas Wright has about America, white people, racial biology, etc., but because of Rev. Wright's personal attack on himself.  As a study in character and judgment this is not uplifting, this is not "bigger than himself", this is all about himself.  And it reveals a very small man who failed to rise to the circumstances presented by events.

UPDATE:  Ann Althouse has more on the same topic.