Category: 2008 Presidential campaign

Obama the community organizer

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Today all the talk on radio and TV is about John McCain’s pick of  Governor Sarah Palin for his Vice President and the zingers she sent last night attacking Democratic nominee, Barack Obama.   What is a community organizer everyone is asking?   Community organizer is a fancy name for someone building a political base among a certain clientele, in this case it is the multi-ethnic organizations active in Chicago.  They say they do good things for people (immigrants especially) and poverty, but Obama’s job was really a veiled cheerleading routine to bring multiculturalism’s goals into the political process by empowering various immigrant groups.

I know it’s kind of tough to follow, but here is the post I did back in March about how the money flows back and forth between government, private foundations (including the one where Obama and Ayers worked) and the immigrant groups (note the Arab ones) in Chicago.  You will see that some of the money is flowing through refugee groups as well—groups that are fostering continued ethnic separation instead of assimilation into the greater American community.   

Believe me community organizers are not promoting special assimilation programs for immigrants about American history or holiday traditions in America, or how to be polite in supermarkets or on the highway.  This is flat-out political organizing paid for by you, the taxpayer.

Endnote:  Just this week a Saudi newspaper reported that they (Shariah government proponents) are pinning their hopes on Obama, the (Arab) community organizer.

Update:  More on Obama’s Saudi connections from Ken Timmerman here.

Update September 5th:  Iranians go ga-ga over Obama here.

Second day of convention: report

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m off-topic again, and late to boot. This is about yesterday, but I didn’t get a chance to post it before this.

RNC report from Minneapolis-St. Paul

September 2, 2008

 

 

Yesterday we had nothing to do after the breakfast because everything was canceled. It turned out that Laura Bush and Cindy McCain spoke in the evening, but it was just about the hurricane relief efforts and we didn’t go. In the evening we met a woman from Alaska who was there with her 20-year-old homeschooled daughter, a page at the convention. She said everyone was amazed when Palin was picked. Nobody has said anything negative yet about Bristol’s pregnancy, but people have said a lot about the media.

 

This morning we went to the breakfast for the Texas delegation, which was a lot bigger than the Arkansas one. Governor Rick Perry had stayed in Texas, so he spoke over the phone. John McCain’s mother then said a few words. She is 96 and just remarkable. She seems to have all her marbles, stands up straight and doesn’t wear glasses. She doesn’t look a day older than 80.

 

Mike Huckabee was the next speaker. When the group of us had entered the room the delegation had given him a standing ovation, and they reacted like that to almost everything he uttered. He’s a good speaker, no question about it, with ready jokes. The biggest ovations came when he said anything about Sarah Palin. People are really excited about her. He pointed out (or claimed) that Palin got more votes for mayor of Wasilla than Joe Biden got in two quests for the presidency.

 

Gary Bauer gave a stemwinder. His best line, commenting on the tallness of the Texans in the room (He’s about 5 foot five at most): “When I first went to Washington I was six foot three. And this is all that’s left of me.” He said the Republicans have put together a really good platform. You know it’s good because the media aren’t talking about it.

 

Congressman Henry Bonilla spoke; nothing remarkable, but he is a nice guy. He was in the car with us going and coming. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a Texan, was next. She said she was the first mother with a child to have her job, so she identifies with Gov. Palin.

 

Jim was up next and gave pretty much the same speech as yesterday. He added a part at the beginning about Obama being embarrassed because Americans don’t speak foreign languages. He then greeted the crowed in German, Spanish, French and Hebrew.  Again there was a strong reaction to his speech and lots of people had their picture taken with him.

 

Our driver took us back along the scenic route along the Mississippi river. I’m at the Hilton now, in the Friends and Family room. There are a lot of campaign people here – young folks, doing things on their phones and their laptops. Some of them take care of us – Regan Wilson, who is in charge of vets, Scott Gunn, his deputy, who arranges things for us, and Nick Garcia, who is our minder when we go to the breakfasts.

11:50pm 

The evening session had a few exciting moments surrounded by hours of tedium. The theme is Country Above Self, or Above All, or above something. (Actually, Country First.) This was in lights around the stadium. There were cards on the delegates’ chairs saying Service in colors and typeface that reminded me of a Hershey bar.

 

We had reserved seats in the level above the ring of media. We were in the first row. But Jim was supposed at 6:30 to go to a room somewhere with the POWs who were there so they could go somewhere in the place to be recognized at 8:00. And there was hardly a soul in our section so the air conditioning blew through like a winter gale with no body heat to mitigate it. So another wife and I went up to the top of our section where there were stools and a kind of bar at the back row. It was marginally warmer.

 

I’ve never watched a convention evening all the way through, so I had no idea how silly it could be. Unknown person after unknown person took the stage, one to tell us about a foundation she had started to renovate houses for poor people, another to tell us about his foundation to help do the work for farmers who had personal crises, yet another to tell us about her rare blood disease and how it made her a better person – and yet more whom I can’t remember. An unknown singer-songwriter belted out a couple of songs whose words were incomprehensible, so I have no idea if they had anything to do with the convention or John McCain.

 

A couple of preachers said words about God and character and other things. One of them ended with a prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, which was more than the Episcopalian priest who gave the invocation managed to do.

 

There were videos about past Republican presidents – Teddy Roosevelt, who approved of service and putting one’s country ahead of oneself, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, and especially Ronald Reagan, whose segment elicited great applause and cheers. I wondered what Bush the elder thought about that; he and Barbara were sitting near Cindy McCain. I don’t think that Bush ever thought much of Ronald Reagan. At any rate he fired all of Reagan’s employees on the day before his inauguration, and never hired any that I know of.  No, he hired Peggy Noonan.

 

John McCain’s great friend and advisor, Orson Swindle, spoke about vets and service. He recognized the several Medal of Honor recipients in the audience, and then the big moment for which Jim had been absent for a couple of hours – recognizing that there were some number of John McCain’s fellow POWs there. A shot of the couple of rows of men appeared on the screen for a few seconds – I couldn’t make out Jim – and that was that. Jim and his friend came back upstairs.

 

And there were the speakers we wanted to hear – Laura Bush, and President Bush on video, way larger than life on the big screen; Fred Thompson, who gave the crowd what we were looking for,  some trenchant words of criticism of Barack Obama. President Bush had said John McCain would not be intimidated by the angry left. Later I saw some Democrats on CNN comment with horror on his use of the words “angry left” and express doubt that anybody would know what he meant. The crowd at the convention knew what he meant.

 

We left after Fred Thompson, before Joe Lieberman. A guy who came back on the shuttle bus with us said he talked about independents and Democrats voting for McCain. He said that when Lieberman talked about unity you could have heard a cricket chirp. That’s good, since I hate unity. That’s just another way to describe the strong overpowering the weak.

 

I’m sure I am forgetting someone important. The TV will remind me.

 

I was overstuffed with the great good of serving others, above all other goods. I longed for an entrepreneur to be honored, or for the president of Shell Oil to be introduced to tell the audience how his company has discovered how to get the oil out of the shale cheaply. I felt my long-lost interest in Ayn Rand surfacing and had a strange urge to re-read The Fountainhead. Or, alternatively, to sit down and finish reading my book on Hildegarde Von Bingen.

 

The guy on the shuttle bus is running for auditor of Rockford, Illinois. We had a beer with him. It is one of the benefits of being married to Jim that he attracts fans who buy him beers and are thrilled to be sitting talking to someone who not only was in prison with John McCain but worked for Ronald Reagan. We tell our war stories. I guess it’s like tribal elders passing on the lore.

 

Environmentalists freak about global warming but ignore immigration—opportunity for McCain

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies was featured in the Washington Post opinion pages with a piece entitled “How Many Americans?”   His article is a reminder that from the environmental point of view immigration presents a more clear and present danger then does so-called global warming.

I’ve said it before!  In 1974 I was at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and everyone was freaked about global COOLING—a new ice age was coming and its arrival was featured on the front cover of Time magazine.   Notice the crazy lefties (the Al Gore gang) aren’t even saying ‘global warming’ anymore, it’s ‘climate change’ because they know that actually the planet has started to cool in the last few years.

We should be getting freaked over the numbers that Camarota is telling us about.  Think about where you live now and the impact 135 million more people will make in this country.  Are you having political battles over growth?  Too many houses?  Too much pollution?  Losing farmland?  Traffic?   If you live in the west, how is your water supply?  Is your local park overrun by unemployed immigrants?  And, what about the demand for energy?

And what these numbers also tell us is that this is coming really fast!   Here is what Camarota had to say:

When the Census Bureau released its new population projections last month, most of the media focused on the country’s changing racial composition. But this was almost certainly not the most important finding. The projections show that the U.S. population will grow by 135 million in just 42 years — a 44 percent increase. Such growth would have profound implications for our environment and quality of life. Most of the increase would be a direct result of one federal policy — immigration. If we reduced the level of immigration, the projections would be much lower. The question we have to ask ourselves is: Do we want to be a much more densely settled country?

Native-born Americans have only about two children on average, which makes for a roughly stable population over time. But with an estimated 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants settling in the country each year, and about 900,000 births to these immigrants each year, immigration directly and indirectly accounts for at least three-fourths of U.S. population growth.

We, Americans without immigrants in the equation, are just replacing ourselves.    Many many immigrants, especially those from Muslim countries, are having large families with 4, 5, 6 kids and on up.   Islam dictates they have large families so that they might spread out across the world.  No where have I ever read that proponents of Shariah law are concerned for protecting the environment, or for science at all, for that matter.

If I were Presidential candidate McCain, and knowing the major environmental groups do nothing on immigration, I would make immigration my number one environmental priority for the Republican party.   Conservatives especially are loathe to get on any alarmist bandwagon, but I am a conservative ready to climb on this wagon.   Imagine even the loss of liberty that is inevitable with a growing population. 

If I were McCain I would begin admitting I was wrong on the issue of amnesty,  not just the closing the borders part.  I would make reforming immigration (LEGAL and illegal) my number one environmental priority, forget the global warming bandwagon.  If you can’t let go of the premise of global warming notice it too (if it were true) is directly related to too many people in America.    It is so clear it is maddening.   And, to make the point again here is another paragraph from Camarota:

An increase of 135 million people by 2050 is equivalent to the entire populations of Mexico and Canada moving here. Assuming the same ratio of population to infrastructure that exists today, the United States would need to build and pay for 36,000 schools. We would need to develop enough land to accommodate 52 million new housing units, along with places for the people who lived in them to shop and work. We would also have to construct enough roads to handle 106 million more vehicles.

By continuing our present rate of immigration, in America and other western countries, there is no incentive for countries, say in Africa, or Mexico for that matter, to begin to get themselves under control.  We are their safety valve—the overflow is coming here, or Canada or to Europe or New Zealand or Australia.

Read the rest of Camarota’s piece where he addresses the aging population issue and the poverty issue.

And now is probably a good time to re-visit the Numbers USA link at the top of our blog and WATCH the video.

Iraqis in America weigh in on McCain v. Obama

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Something called Inter Press Service News Agency published an article late last week about the views of Iraqi refugees and immigrants on the Presidential campaign and asked which of the candidates would be better for Iraq.  The article is a bit confusing because first they cite polls in Iraq where Iraqis by very large margins supposedly want America out, but then Iraqis interviewed here seem to be mostly for McCain, at least on issues relating to their homeland.

“I am so sad to say it, but I think that McCain would be better for the future of Iraq, especially since my family and friends are still living there,” Bassam Sebti, a 28-year-old Iraqi who has lived in the United States for two years, told IPS.

“I’m a taxpayer now. Obama is better for the U.S., but not for Iraq,” said Sebti, who is an editor at the International Centre for Journalists and lives in Washington. 

Naseer Nori, 51, came with his family to the U.S. in May under the Iraqi refugee resettlement programme. “Iraqis back home prefer McCain — they do not want an early withdrawal, which will only leave the country in the hands of militias and political parties that will fight with each other,” he told IPS. “We do not have a strong military to stop that.”

Then here is another Iraqi interviewed who sees it completely differently, but keep in mind that Saddam was a Sunni and this fellow was a part of the favored sect in Iraq prior to our arrival:

Other Iraqis here believe that Obama would be better on U.S. domestic policy, especially treatment of immigrants and refugees, and have no confidence in McCain’s policies toward their homeland.

Suhail Ahmed, a 55-year-old Sunni translator, also moved here with his family in May. Asked to assess the candidates, he responded wryly: “A milkmaid will never tell you that her yogurt is sour.”

Ahmed noted that the Republicans have never admitted that they made mistakes in Iraq. “People back home are tired, and the Republicans will follow the same footsteps of Bush — nothing good will happen to Iraq if McCain wins,” he said.

Bottomline, there is no consensus.  But, this article does give us some useful statistics:

At the time of the 2000 census, about 89,000 Iraqis lived in the Unites States. That number represented only 0.3 percent of all foreign-born people living here. According to Refugee International, 13,754 Iraqi refugees have come to the U.S. from 2001 to 2008.

Alaska not a big refugee resettlement state

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In light of Senator John McCain’s choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a running mate, and out of curiosity, I just checked to see how many refugees have gone to Alaska since 1983 and the number is relatively small—just under a thousand.   Go here to check the numbers in your state.    The refugees who went to Alaska came from Iran, Afghanistan, and the former Soviet Union among a smattering of other countries. 

Compared to states like California, New York and Florida all of which have resettled hundreds of thousands,  Alaska’s numbers are tiny.

But, of course, smaller still are Deleware’s!   Just a reminder that Senator Biden, Obama’s VP, is one of the primary Senators who for 28 years has pushed for more refugees to come to the US, yet his state has taken only 771 of the millions who have come (on the taxpayers’ dime) here.