DAY 149: PLUTO HELD HOSTAGE.

AFP: US space probe speeds toward Jupiter, en route to Pluto
The US spacecraft New Horizons is expected to pick up added momentum when it passes Jupiter next month, enabling it to hurtle toward the Pluto system for a July 2015 arrival.


February 4, 2007 is International Save Pluto Day!

Meanwhile, back in Sri Lanka...

Roto-Reuters: Sri Lanka captures rebel town as thousands flee
Columbo - Sri Lanka's military captured a strategic rebel-held town in the island's restive east on Friday as more than 10,000 refugees fled the area and Tamil Tiger rebels cut a retreat after weeks under siege.

The capture of Vakarai -- a town around 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Colombo that belongs to the rebels under the terms of a tattered 2002 ceasefire -- comes after weeks of fierce fighting between the Tigers and the military, who have vowed to evict them from the east altogether.

Meanwhile, back in Somalia...

AP: President's palace attacked
Mogadishu - Government troops battled gunmen who attacked the Somali president's palace in central Mogadishu Friday night, spreading panic around the capital.

Quick, Nancy, hold hearings! Just don't blame the government schools.

Time Magazine: Cause of Death: Sloppy Doctors
Physicians' bad handwriting kills more than 7,000 people a year.

From The Reasonable Precautions During Wartime Department:

My Way News: Pentagon Sets Rules for Detainee Trials

The Pentagon has drafted a manual for upcoming detainee trials that would allow suspected terrorists to be convicted on hearsay evidence and coerced testimony and imprisoned or put to death.

According to a copy of the manual obtained by The Associated Press, a terror suspect's defense lawyer cannot reveal classified evidence in the person's defense until the government has a chance to review it.

The manual, sent to Capitol Hill on Thursday and scheduled to be released later by the Pentagon, is intended to track a law passed last fall by Congress restoring President Bush's plans to have special military commissions try terror-war prisoners. Those commissions had been struck down earlier in the year by the Supreme Court.

The Pelosi/Reid Era of Sunshine and Gumdrops continues apace.

When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun?
When the law break in
How you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement
Or waiting on death row?
(From The Guns of Brixton by The Clash)

Pelosi: U.S. Not Obliged to Stay in Iraq...

Dems Seek to Bar U.S. Attacks on Iran...

PELOSI ANNOUNCES 'GLOBAL WARMING' PANEL

It's official! Conservatism is a mental disorder. (And, as if you didn't know, homosexuality is NOT.)

Did you ever wonder why psychology is not real science?

No, it's not just because Freud had to make something up to rationalize his desires to get into his sister-in-law's bloomers.

Here are five pages of gibberish that the next Mengele or Lysenko will surely find useful in his campaign to slaughter all those who buck The Party's line.

Psychology Today: The Ideological Animal
We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we're easily manipulated and surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death. Call it the 9/11 effect.
by Jay Dixit


Cinnamon Stillwell never thought she'd be the founder of a political organization. She certainly never expected to start a group for conservatives, most of whom became conservatives on the same day—September 11, 2001. She organized the group, the 911 Neocons, as a haven for people like her—"former lefties" who did political 180s after 9/11.

Stillwell, now a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, had been a liberal her whole life, writing off all Republicans as "ignorant, intolerant yahoos." Yet on 9/11, everything changed for her, as it did for so many. In the days after the attacks, the world seemed "topsy-turvy." On the political left, she wrote, "There was little sympathy for the victims," and it seemed to her that progressives were "consumed with hatred for this country" and had "extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists."

Disgusted, she looked elsewhere. She found solace among conservative talk-show hosts and columnists. At first, she felt resonance with the right about the war on terror. But soon she found herself concurring about "smaller government, traditional societal structures, respect and reverence for life, the importance of family, personal responsibility, national unity over identity politics." She embraced gun rights for the first time, drawn to "the idea of self-preservation in perilous times." Her marriage broke up due in part to political differences. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, she began going to pro-war rallies.

In 2005, she wrote a column called "The Making of a 9/11 Republican." Over the year that followed, she received thousands of e-mails from people who'd had similar experiences. There were so many of them that she decided to form a group. And so the 911 Neocons were born.

We tend to believe our political views have evolved by a process of rational thought, as we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions. But the truth is more complicated. Our political preferences are equally the result of factors we're not aware of—such as how educated we are, how scary the world seems at a given moment, and personality traits that are first apparent in early childhood. Among the most potent motivators, it turns out, is fear. How the United States should confront the threat of terrorism remains a subject of endless political debate. But Americans' response to threats of attack is now more clear-cut than ever. The fear of death alone is surprisingly effective in shaping our political decisions—more powerful, often, than thought itself.

Abstract Art vs. Talk Radio: The Political Personality Standoff

Most people are surprised to learn that there are real, stable differences in personality between conservatives and liberals—not just different views or values, but underlying differences in temperament. Psychologists John Jost of New York University, Dana Carney of Harvard, and Sam Gosling of the University of Texas have demonstrated that conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics. And that's just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.


"All people are born alike—except Republicans and Democrats," quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments. They weren't even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

The most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date is a 2003 meta-analysis of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants. The researchers—John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley—found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.

The study's authors also concluded that conservatives have less tolerance for ambiguity, a trait they say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, "Look, my job isn't to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think," and "I'm the decider." Those who think the world is highly dangerous and those with the greatest fear of death are the most likely to be conservative.

Liberals, on the other hand, are "more likely to see gray areas and reconcile seemingly conflicting information," says Jost. As a result, liberals like John Kerry, who see many sides to every issue, are portrayed as flip-floppers. "Whatever the cause, Bush and Kerry exemplify the cognitive styles we see in the research," says Jack Glaser, one of the study's authors, "Bush in appearing more rigid in his thinking and intolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity, and Kerry in appearing more open to ambiguity and to considering alternative positions."

Jost's meta-analysis sparked furious controversy. The House Republican Study Committee complained that the study's authors had received federal funds. George Will satirized it in his Washington Post column, and The National Review called it the "Conservatives Are Crazy" study. Jost and his colleagues point to the study's rigorous methodology. The study used political orientation as a dependent variable, meaning that where subjects fall on the political scale is computed from their own answers about whether they're liberal or conservative. Psychologists then compare factors such as fear of death and openness to new experiences, and seek statistically significant correlations. The findings are quintessentially empirical and difficult to dismiss as false.

Yet critics retort that the research draws negative conclusions about conservatives while the researchers themselves are liberal. And it's true that over the decades, a disproportionate amount of the research has focused on figuring out what's behind conservative behavior. Right shift is likewise more studied than left shift, largely because most of that research has been since 9/11, and aimed at trying to explain the conservative conversions of people like Cinnamon Stillwell.

Barbra Bain's character on Mission: Impossible was named Cinnamon. She was really hot.


Even with impeccable methodology, bias may creep into the choice of which phenomena to study. "There is a bias among social scientists," admits Glaser. "They look for the variables that are unflattering. There probably are other nice personality traits associated with conservatism, but they haven't shown up in the research because it's not as well studied."

"There are differences between liberals and conservatives, and people can value them however they like," Jost points out. "There is nothing inherently good or bad about being high or low on the need for closure or structure. Some may see religiosity as a positive, whereas others may see it more neutrally, and so on."

Red Shift

By 2004, as the presidential election drew near, researchers saw a chance to study the Jost results against the backdrop of unfolding events. Psychologists Mark Landau of the University of Arizona and Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore sought to explain how President Bush's approval rating went from around 51 percent before 9/11 to 90 percent immediately afterward. In one study, they exposed some participants to the letters WTC or the numbers 9/11 in an image flashed too quickly to register at the conscious level. They exposed other participants to familiar but random combinations of letters and numbers, such as area codes. Then they gave them words like coff__, sk_ll, and gr_ve, and asked them to fill in the blanks. People who'd seen random combinations were more likely to fill in coffee, skill, and grove. But people exposed to subliminal terrorism primes more often filled in coffin, skull, and grave. "The mere mention of September 11 or WTC is the same as reminding Americans of death," explains Solomon.

As a follow-up, Solomon primed one group of subjects to think about death, a state of mind called "mortality salience." A second group was primed to think about 9/11. And a third was induced to think about pain—something unpleasant but non-deadly. When people were in a benign state of mind, they tended to oppose Bush and his policies in Iraq. But after thinking about either death or 9/11, they tended to favor him. Such findings were further corroborated by Cornell sociologist Robert Willer, who found that whenever the color-coded terror alert level was raised, support for Bush increased significantly, not only on domestic security but also in unrelated domains, such as the economy.

University of Arizona psychologist Jeff Greenberg argues that some ideological shifts can be explained by terror management theory (TMT), which holds that heightened fear of death motivates people to defend their world views. TMT predicts that images like the destruction of the World Trade Center should make liberals more liberal and conservatives more conservative. "In the United States, political conservatism does seem to be the preferred ideology when people are feeling insecure," concedes Greenberg. "But in China or another communist country, reminding people of their own mortality would lead them to cling more tightly to communism."

Jost believes it's more complex. After all, Cinnamon Stillwell and others in the 911 Neocons didn't become more liberal. Like so many other Democrats after 9/11, they made a hard right turn. The reason thoughts of death make people more conservative, Jost says, is that they awaken a deep desire to see the world as fair and just, to believe that people get what they deserve, and to accept the existing social order as valid, rather than in need of change. When these natural desires are primed by thoughts of death and a barrage of mortal fear, people gravitate toward conservatism because it's more certain about the answers it provides—right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, us vs. them—and because conservative leaders are more likely to advocate a return to traditional values, allowing people to stick with what's familiar and known. "Conservatism is a more black and white ideology than liberalism," explains Jost. "It emphasizes tradition and authority, which are reassuring during periods of threat."


To test the theory, Jost prompted people to think about either pain—by looking at things like an ambulance, a dentist's chair, and a bee sting—or death, by looking at things like a funeral hearse, the grim reaper, and a dead-end sign. Across the political spectrum, people who had been primed to think about death were more conservative on issues like immigration, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage than those who had merely thought about pain, although the effect size was relatively small. The implication is clear: For liberals, conservatives, and independents alike, thinking about death actually makes people more conservative—at least temporarily.

Fear and Voting In America

Campaign strategists in both parties have never hesitated to use scare tactics. In 1964, a Lyndon Johnson commercial called "Daisy" juxtaposed footage of a little girl plucking a flower with footage of an atomic blast. In 1984, Ronald Reagan ran a spot that played on Cold War panic, in which the Soviet threat was symbolized by a grizzly lumbering across a stark landscape as a human heart pounds faster and faster and an off-screen voice warns, "There is a bear in the woods!" In 2004, Bush sparked furor for running a fear-mongering ad that used wolves gathering in the woods as symbols for terrorists plotting against America. And last fall, Congressional Republicans drew fire with an ad that featured bin Laden and other terrorists threatening Americans; over the sound of a ticking clock, a voice warned, "These are the stakes."

"At least some of the President's support is the result of constant and relentless reminders of death, some of which is just what's happening in the world, but much of which is carefully cultivated and calculated as an electoral strategy," says Solomon. "In politics these days, there's a dose of reason, and there's a dose of irrationality driven by psychological terror that may very well be swinging elections."

Solomon demonstrated that thinking about 9/11 made people go from preferring Kerry to preferring Bush. "Very subtle manipulations of psychological conditions profoundly affect political preferences," Solomon concludes. "In difficult moments, people don't want complex, nuanced, John Kerry-like waffling or sophisticated cogitation. They want somebody charismatic to step up and say, 'I know where our problem is and God has given me the clout to kick those people's asses.'"

I'll bet they think that is how Hitler won that election.

Into The Blue

Studies show that people who study abroad become more liberal than those who stay home.

People who venture from the strictures of their limited social class are less likely to stereotype and more likely to embrace other cultures. Education goes hand-in-hand with tolerance, and often, the more the better:

Professors at major universities are more liberal than their counterparts at less acclaimed institutions. What travel and education have in common is that they make the differences between people seem less threatening. "You become less bothered by the idea that there is uncertainty in the world," explains Jost.

That's why the more educated people are, the more liberal they become—but only to a point. Once people begin pursuing certain types of graduate degrees, the curve flattens. Business students, for instance, become more conservative in their views toward minorities. As they become more established, doctors and lawyers tend to protect their economic interests by moving to the right. The findings demonstrate that conservative conversions are fueled not only by fear, but by other factors as well. And if the November election was any indicator, the pendulum that swung so forcefully to the right after 9/11 may be swinging back.

...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Tipping The Balance

Political conversions that are emotionally induced can be very subtle: A shift in support for a given issue or politician is not the same as a radical conversion or deep philosophical change. While views may be manipulated, the impact may or may not translate in the voting booth. Following 9/11, most lifelong liberals did not go through outright conversion or shift their preferred candidate. Yet many liberals who didn't become all-out conservatives found themselves nonetheless sympathizing more with conservative positions, craving the comfort of a strong leader, or feeling the need to punish or avenge. Many in the political center moved to the right, too. In aggregate, over an electorate of millions—a large proportion of whom were swing voters waiting to be swayed one way or the other—even a subtle shift was enough to tip the balance of the Presidential election, and the direction the country took for years. "Without 9/11 we would have a different president," says Solomon. "I would even say that the Osama bin Laden tape that was released the Thursday before the election was sufficient to swing the election. It was basically a giant mortality salience induction."

If we are so suggestible that thoughts of death make us uncomfortable defaming the American flag and cause us to sit farther away from foreigners, is there any way we can overcome our easily manipulated fears and become the informed and rational thinkers democracy demands?

To test this, Solomon and his colleagues prompted two groups to think about death and then give opinions about a pro-American author and an anti-American one. As expected, the group that thought about death was more pro-American than the other. But the second time, one group was asked to make gut-level decisions about the two authors, while the other group was asked to consider carefully and be as rational as possible. The results were astonishing. In the rational group, the effects of mortality salience were entirely eliminated. Asking people to be rational was enough to neutralize the effects of reminders of death. Preliminary research shows that reminding people that as human beings, the things we have in common eclipse our differences—what psychologists call a "common humanity prime"—has the same effect.

"People have two modes of thought," concludes Solomon. "There's the intuitive gut-level mode, which is what most of us are in most of the time. And then there's a rational analytic mode, which takes effort and attention."

The solution, then, is remarkably simple. The effects of psychological terror on political decision making can be eliminated just by asking people to think rationally. Simply reminding us to use our heads, it turns out, can be enough to make us do it.

Obviously, Hollyweirdos and their leftist enablers think movie rape and incest involving a 12 year old is really, really, cool.

Miami Herald: Fanning movie with rape scene is stirring praise, controversy
If there's a powder keg at this month's Sundance Film Festival, it's the untitled drama that features 12-year-old Dakota Fanning, whose character is raped by a small-town bully, and costars Afemo Omilami, the Atlanta-based actor who plays the soft-spoken mentor who helps her.

The Untitled Dakota Fanning Project (aka Hounddog), as the low-budget film is known in indie circles, will debut at Sundance in Park City, Utah, on Jan. 22 and will screen for five consecutive days. Filmed in North Carolina last summer by writer-director Deborah Kampmeier (Virgin), it's about a young girl in the early 1960s who is reaching puberty and becoming obsessed with Elvis Presley's music when tragedy strikes.

Among this year's crop of Sundance features, ''it's an absolute priority film to see,'' says Tom Quinn, head of acquisitions for New York-based Magnolia Pictures. 'As a buyer, I am definitely excited, and as an audience member, I think the public can handle it. It's a definite `A' title.''

Hollywood has a long history of controversial movies involving young girls in violent and/or sexual situations: Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Linda Blair in The Exorcist. And the Fanning film, which few people have seen, has already ignited protests.

The child advocacy group A Minor Consideration, founded by former Donna Reed Show and Micky Mouse Club actor Paul Petersen, has published a lengthy article on its website (www. minorcon.org) attacking the movie. ''An insidious evil is spreading throughout Hollywood,'' Petersen writes in reference to its rape scene, declaring that the Fanning movie ``has sunk to another mindless low point.''

Omilami begs to differ.

''I don't know what people are so upset about,'' the 56-year-old actor said. ``Believe me, Deborah is going to be so tasteful. She's handling this in such an artistic way, so delicately that I'm sure people will appreciate that.''

The director uses shadows and cut-away imagery to depict parts of the sexual assault, Omilami says.


Contra Costa Times: Dakota's brutal role stirs debate
Consider this your early warning Sundance Film Festival controversy alert: Cute little Dakota Fanning plays a precocious child-sex-abuse and rape victim in Full Moon Films' upcoming "Hounddog."

The issue: Fanning, who turns 13 next month, is reportedly depicted in the film nude or scantily clad during compromising scenes, and her face is shown in close-up during a rape scene.

Early reports of the film's contents have stirred a minor Internet storm concerning whether Fanning's mother, Joy, and the girl's agent, Cindy Osbrink, are exploiting the girl in hopes of an Oscar nomination. A spokesman for Osbrink and the filmmakers did not return a message seeking comment.

Due to time constraints, we now move to further action.

Among the outraged is Ted Baehr of the Christian Film & Television Commission.

Baehr, whose advocacy group runs the movie.org Web site, which ranks films based on Christian themes and family appeal, said that he hadn't seen the film but that he was calling on movie distributors to reject the film and report the filmmakers to legal authorities. The movie has its first Sundance screening Jan. 22.

"It's pedophilia," Baehr said last week. "There should be a sense of outrage about it."

Senator Token Update.

You can take the girl out of the fever swamp that is Arkansas politics, but you can't cure her fever.

Insight Magazine: Hillary's team has questions about Obama's Muslim background

Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?

This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama.

An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.

"He was a Muslim, but he concealed it," the source said. "His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign."

When contacted by Insight, Mr. Obama’s press secretary said he would consult with “his boss” and call back. He did not.

Sources said the background check, conducted by researchers connected to Senator Clinton, disclosed details of Mr. Obama's Muslim past. The sources said the Clinton camp concluded the Illinois Democrat concealed his prior Muslim faith and education.

"The background investigation will provide major ammunition to his opponents," the source said. "The idea is to show Obama as deceptive."

In two best-selling autobiographies—"The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" and "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance"—Mr. Obama, born in Honolulu where his parents met, mentions but does not expand on his Muslim background, alluding only to his attendance at a "predominantly Muslim school."

The sources said the young Obama was given the name Hussein by his Muslim father, which the Illinois Democrat rarely uses in public.

His father was black and came from Kenya. Mr. Obama’s mother, the daughter of a farmer, came from Wichita, Kansas. Mr. Obama's parents divorced when he was two years old. His father returned to Kenya.

Later, Mr. Obama's mother married an Indonesian student and the family moved to Jakarta. Mr. Obama returned to Hawaii when he was 10 to live with his maternal grandparents.

The sources said the background check concerned Mr. Obama's years in Jakarta. In Indonesia, the young Obama was enrolled in a Madrassa and was raised and educated as a Muslim. Although Indonesia is regarded as a moderate Muslim state, the U.S. intelligence community has determined that today most of these schools are financed by the Saudi Arabian government and they teach a Wahhabi doctrine that denies the rights of non-Muslims.

Although the background check has not confirmed that the specific Madrassa Mr. Obama attended was espousing Wahhabism, the sources said his Democratic opponents believe this to be the case—and are seeking to prove it. The sources said the opponents are searching for evidence that Mr. Obama is still a Muslim or has ties to Islam.

Mr. Obama attends services at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago’s South Side. However, he is not known to be a regular parishioner.

"Obama's education began a life-long relationship with Islam as a faith and Muslims as a community," the source said. "This has been a relationship that contains numerous question marks."

The sources said Mr. Obama spent at least four years in a Muslim school in Indonesia. They said when Mr. Obama was 10, his mother and her second husband separated. She and her son returned to Hawaii.

"Then the official biography begins," the source said. "Obama never returned to Kenya to see relatives or family until it became politically expedient."

In both of his autobiographies, Mr. Obama characterizes himself as a Christian—although he describes his upbringing as mostly secular.

In “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama says, "I was not raised in a religious household." He describes his mother as secular, but says she had copies of the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita in their home.

Mr. Obama says his father was "raised a Muslim, but by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist...." Mr. Obama also describes his father as largely absent from his life. He says his Indonesian stepfather was "skeptical" about religion and "saw religion as not particularly useful in the practical business of making one's way in the world ...."

In the book, Mr. Obama briefly addresses his education in Indonesia. "During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in both cases, my mother was less concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin's call to evening prayer than she was with whether I was properly learning my multiplication tables."

Mr. Obama graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School; he became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. He later settled in Chicago, joined a law firm and began attending and helping local churches.

Mr. Obama is married to Michelle Robinson and they have two daughters, Malia and Sasha. In 1996, he was elected to the Illinois state Senate. Eight years later, he became a U.S. senator from Illinois.

The sources said Ms. Clinton regards Mr. Obama as her most formidable opponent and the biggest obstacle to the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination. They said Ms. Clinton has been angered by Mr. Obama's efforts to tap her supporters for donations.

In late 2006, when the Illinois senator demonstrated his intention to run for president, the Clinton campaign ordered a background check on Mr. Obama, the sources said. Earlier this week, Mr. Obama established an exploratory committee, the first step toward a formal race.

Ol' Big Ears doesn't know anything about Christianity or mohammedism. That is not surprising because he is a leftist stooge first, last, and always.

Real Clear Politics Blog: Obama's Religion
Posted by TOM BEVAN

Barack Obama says he's a Christian who came to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in his mid-20's. But does he consider himself "evangelical?" That question was posed to him recently by Cathleen Falsani, the religion reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Here is Obama's reponse:

"Gosh, I'm not sure if labels are helpful here because the definition of an evangelical is so loose and subject to so many different interpretations. I came to Christianity through the black church tradition where the line between evangelical and non-evangelical is completely blurred. Nobody knows exactly what
it means.

"Does it mean that you feel you've got a personal relationship with Christ the savior? Then that's directly part of the black church experience. Does it mean you're born-again in a classic sense, with all the accoutrements that go along with that, as it's understood by some other tradition? I'm not sure."

He continued his answer: "My faith is complicated by the fact that I didn't grow up in a particular religious tradition. And so what that means is when you come at it as an adult, your brain mediates a lot, and you ask a lot of questions.

"There are aspects of Christian tradition that I'm comfortable with and aspects that I'm not. There are passages of the Bible that make perfect sense to
me and others that I go, 'Ya know, I'm not sure about that,'" he said, shrugging and stammering slightly.

Obama's response doesn't bother me at all, and probably won't bother most people. But some on the right have already made some repugnant insinuations about his religious beliefs and how they may affect his "loyalties," and I suspect his comments about not growing up in a particular religious tradition and not being comfortable with certain "aspects" of the Christian tradition will, unfortunately, only serve to keep those dark innuendos circulating.

Here's an update from the previous post, in which Debbie Schlussel crows about being in the same league with Hitlery and Goober II:

Hillary Clinton Agrees With Schlussel: Obama Suspicious, Deceptive on Muslim Background

It Takes A Village To Staff A Gestapo Unit Update...

...or, It Takes A Gestapo Unit To Make Your Opponent Look Like A Goat Rapist...

...or, The Empress Strikes Back!

This smells like a classic Clintonista whispering campaign. What better place to whisper "non-moderate mohammedan" than in the ears of xenophobes?

Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always A Muslim
by Debbie Schlussel

Many months ago, readers began asking me whether Barack Obama is Muslim. Since he identifies as a Christian, I said, "no," and responded that he was not raised by his Kenyan father.

But, then, I decided to look further into Obama's background. His full name--as by now you have probably heard--is Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Hussein is a Muslim name, which comes from the name of Ali's son--Hussein Ibn Ali. And Obama is named after his late Kenyan father, the late Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., apparently a Muslim.

And while Obama may not identify as a Muslim, that's not how the Arab and Muslim Streets see it. In Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you. And once a Muslim, always a Muslim. You cannot go back. In Islamic eyes, Obama is certainly a Muslim. He may think he's a Christian, but they do not.

On the other hand, it seems too early in the game for Senatrix Hiterly Schicklgruber (N-NY) to be pulling this particular weapon from her arsenal. (Unless she is panicky, and I doubt that. Sociopaths rarely panic.) Perhaps Senator Token's apparatchicks are pushing this bad news in an attempt to get the media tired of it before most people are paying attention to the campaign.

Then, there are the other items in his background. As best-selling author Scott Turow wrote in Salon, Obama went to a Muslim school for two years in Indonesia. His mother, Anna, married an Indonesian man (likely another Muslim, as Indonesia is Muslim-dominated and has the largest Islamic population in the world).

And Obama has a "born-again" affinity for the nation of his Muslim father, Kenya, and his Kenyan sister. (Although Kenya is largely Christian, it has a fast-growing Muslim population that has engaged in a good deal of religious violence and riots against Christians. And Kenyan courts will apply Sharia law, when the participants are Muslim.) Wrote Turow:

Obama's father died in a traffic accident in Nairobi in 1982, but while Obama was working in Chicago, he met his Kenyan sister, Auma, a linguist educated in
Germany who was visiting the United States. When she returned to Kenya in 1986 to teach for a year at the University of Nairobi, Obama finally made the trip to
his father's homeland he had long promised himself. There, he managed to fully embrace a heritage and a family he'd never fully known and come to terms with
his father, whom he'd long regarded as an august foreign prince, but now realized was a human being burdened by his own illusions and vulnerabilities.

So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father's heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?

Is that even the man we'd want to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, if Hillary Clinton offers him the Vice Presidential candidacy on her ticket (which he certainly wouldn't turn down)?
NO WAY, JOSE . . . Or, is that, HUSSEIN?

Posted by Debbie at December 18, 2006 04:01 PM

Comments

Barack Obama was originally named “Baraka.” It is not an African name. It's an Arabic word meaning “blessed” and comes directly from the Koran.

BTW, Obama lied about his father's religious denomination during the DNC Convention in 2004. He said his father was a non-practicing Christian. Let's see how the LIBERAL media uncovers this lie, as well. Don't hold your breath.

There's a whole BOATLOAD of info about Obama's father and how it runs totally opposite of what he's telling people.

Posted by: Thee_Bruno at December 18, 2006 04:46 PM


BTW, notice how Obama's father abandoned him and his mother when he was just a kid (he used Islam's Sharia Law and its tenets about divorce), yet he feels compelled to follow his father's roots while totally neglecting his white mother's heritage and religion. His mother was responsible for who he is today, yet not a peep about her. Not a peep from the LIBERAL media, neither. What a typical, LIBERAL piece of s*** he is!

BTW, check out his voting record in the U.S. Senate. The ADA rated him to the left of Kennedy and Hillary. Yet, the media makes no mention of this.

Posted by: Thee_Bruno at December 18, 2006 04:51 PM


Debbie: can you remove some of these "off-topic" posts, if possible, such as the one before mine.

Obama recently apologized for a sweetheart Chicago real estate deal where he bought a house at a big discount and also bought a neighboring lot for a very small amount. The deal was done with a shady Syrian businessman now under indictment (the Syrian bought the house next door), who brokered the cut-rate deal on Obama's house).

What's even more interesting is that the Syrian is business partners with Elijah Mohammad's son. Is Obama involved with the Nation of Islam in some way?

Obama's mother was a Muslim-loving and highly unstable wackjob who couldn't care for her son. His half-sister is a very, very lefty high school and university teacher here in Hawaii. She really goes for the multiculti and feminist stuff.

At best, Obama as President will give you extreme Muslim pandering and Carteresque hostility to Israel. Given the choice (and I'm a Republican) I'd rather take the Jew-hater that I know in Clinton than the Muslim lefty I don't in Obama.

Posted by: sonomaca at December 18, 2006 05:48 PM

Show Big Babykilling that real Americans don't kill kids.

The annual March For Life is Monday, January 22.

If you can get to Washington, D.C. on Monday, please do so. Now, more than ever, we must show the babykilling elites of the Democrass and Repansycan parties (as well as the dozens of millions of Americans who believe murdering children can come in handy) that we shall act as their consciences and the voices of the defenseless victims of this unspeakable horror.


Late in October 1973, grassroots prolife leaders became concerned that January 22, 1974, might come and go without properly memorializing the Supreme Court's infamous abortion decisions, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, and without petitioning Congress for redress.

More About the March
View / Print 2007 March Information (PDF, 1MB)


Theme for March for Life 2007:

"Thou Shalt Protect the Equal Right to Life of Each
Innocent Human in Existence at Fertilization.
No Exception! No Compromise!"

Amen to that, my Brothers and Sisters.

Dear Marchers for Life,
With this theme, we call all Americans to free ourselves from the evils of abortion. Please join us in Washington for this year's 34th Annual March for Life.

This Year's March

Fyodor's Pro Football Playoff Picks of the Week.

1) The guys who set the lines are professionals. Their job is to make each game look as attractive as possible to everyone. That way they even out the amount of money bet on each side.

Instant translation: The house wins no matter who wins. That's why people get into the gambling business.

2) I am just a fan. I won't even keep track of these picks week to week if it gets too embarrassing.

3) There is no such thing as "inside information". Especially in the pros.

4) If those idiot touts on tv and in the paper were any good, they wouldn't go public with their genius. They'd sit at Harrah's sports book from open to close and then go out and buy $2,000 an hour hookers who dress like high school girls.

5) Gambling is stupid. You cannot win.

That being said, here are my NFL picks for this week.


Sunday 1/21


NFC Championship Game

New Orleans (+3) at Chicago
The Saints have the better team. Chicago's D is a mere shadowof its former self and Rex Grossman is bad more often than not. If New Orleans can hold onto the ball in the cold Chicago wind (No pitchouts to the rookie RB, Coach!) they will win easily. Take New Orleans and the points.
FINAL: Bears 34 Saints 14 - Fyodor loses! (The Saints couldn't hold onto the ball, couldn't tackle, and couldn't cover anyone. But does it make sense to bet on Rex in the Super Bowl?)


AFC Championship Game


New England (+3) at Indianapolis
It is time for the Colts to step up and end the Patriots' dynasty. Manning outduels Brady in a wild one. Take the Colts to cover at home.
FINAL: Colts 38 Patriots 34 - Fyodor wins! (Behold! Dungy and Manning are now geniuses! Quick! Everyone hire a Melanin-American head coach!)

99 views of Christina Milian.

From the pages of The King Abdullah Gazette:

The photo above merely proves that even a beautiful woman may be made ugly if she makes the wrong choices.