All I can hope is the Obama campaign picks up this mantra...

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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) - Barack Obama partied with Hollywood celebrities Tuesday night and with the help of Oscar-winning singer and actress Barbra Streisand raised an eye-popping $9 million for his presidential campaign and the Democratic Party.

The night was split into two glitzy events, a reception and dinner costing $28,500 each at the Greystone Mansion, followed by entertainment by Streisand at the nearby Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. About 250 people were expected at the dinner and about 800 at the entertainment, which cost $2,500 a ticket.

It was a day of contrasts for Obama. Earlier in the day, the Democratic presidential candidate spoke about the public's deepening economic anxieties and portrayed Republican challenger John McCain as out of touch with the needs of hardworking people.

McCain groused about Obama mixing it up with celebrities. He told a rally in Vienna, Ohio on Tuesday that Obama "talks about siding with the people, siding with the people just before he flies off to Hollywood for a fundraiser with Barbra Streisand and his celebrity friends. Let me tell you my friends, there's no place I'd rather be than here with the working men and women of Ohio."

A night earlier, McCain was with deep-pocketed donors in Florida and raised $5 million, a fact noted by Obama's campaign.

"I don't know who showed up down in Florida where he raised $5 million but my guess is that it wasn't a lot of nurses, firefighters and police officers," Obama's senior strategist, David Axelrod, told reporters. "The whole corporate lobbying community is rallying to his side. We're going to have to struggle to keep pace. You can't challenge that group and not expect them to have a lot of money."

While the final total was not determined, Obama's campaign did not dispute estimates that the twin events would bring in $9 million for Obama and the Democratic Party. That would be his second-biggest, fundraising day. Obama received $10 million from online donors the day after McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, delivered her speech at the Republican convention.

On another big fundraising night in California, Obama raised $7 million in August in San Francisco.
Obama is financing his presidential race with private contributions after abandoning a pledge to take public financing capped at $84 million. His campaign announced Sunday it had collected $66 million in August, a fundraising record for any presidential candidate in a monthlong period.

By comparison, McCain raised $47 million in August, a personal best for his campaign as well. After claiming the GOP nomination, McCain accepted the $84 million in taxpayer funds allotted by the public financing system for the race.

May 26, 2009, 8:15 am
Obama Chooses Sotomayor for Supreme Court Nominee
By Jeff Zeleny

Ron Jordan Natoli Studio/U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, via Associated Press

U.S. Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor. President Obama will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court, officials said Tuesday, and has scheduled an announcement for 10:15 a.m. at the White House.

If confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, Judge Sotomayor, 54, would replace Justice David H. Souter to become the second woman on the court and only the third female justice in the history of the Supreme Court. She also would be the first Hispanic justice to serve on the Supreme Court.

Conservative groups reacted with sharp criticism on Tuesday morning. �Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written,� said Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network. �She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one�s sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.�

The president reached his decision over the long Memorial Day weekend, aides said, but it was not disclosed until Tuesday morning when he informed his advisers of his choice less than three hours before the announcement was scheduled to take place.

Mr. Obama telephoned Judge Sotomayor at 9 p.m. on Monday, officials said, advising her that she was his choice to fill the Supreme Court vacancy. Later Monday night, Mr. Obama called the three other finalists � Judge Diane P. Wood of Chicago, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Solicitor General Elena Kagan � to inform them that he had selected Judge Sotomayor.

White House officials worked into the night to prepare for the announcement, without knowing who it would be.

Judge Sotomayor has sat for the last 11 years on the federal appeals bench in Manhattan. As the top federal appeals court in the nation�s commercial center, the court is known in particular for its expertise in corporate and securities law. For six years before that, she was a federal district judge in New York.

In what may be her best-known ruling, Judge Sotomayor issued an injunction against major league baseball owners in April 1995, effectively ending a baseball strike of nearly eight months, the longest work stoppage in professional sports history, which had led to the cancellation of the World Series for the first time in 90 years.

Born in the Bronx on June 23, 1954, she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 8. Her father, a factory worker, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse at a methadone clinic, raised her daughter and a younger son on a modest salary.

Judge Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and and attended Yale Law School, where she was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney�s office before entering private practice.

But she longed to return to public service, she said, inspired by the �Perry Mason� series she watched as a child. In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended the politically centrist lawyer to President George H. W. Bush, making good on a longstanding promise to appoint a Hispanic judge in New York.

On the Circuit Court, she has been involved in few controversial issues like abortion. Some of her most notable decisions came in child custody and complex business cases. Her most high-profile case involved New Haven�s decision to toss out tests used to evaluate candidates for promotion in the fire department because there were no minority candidates at the top of the list.

She was part of a panel that rejected the challenge brought by white firefighters who scored high but were denied promotion. Frank Ricci, the lead plaintiff, argued that it was unfair he was denied promotion after he had studied intensively for the exam and even paid for special coaching to overcome his dyslexia.

The case produced a heated split in the Circuit Court and is now before the Supreme Court.

Does anyone else find it kind of creepy that Obama is paying to imbed ads in video games?

Or that Major League Baseball has agreed to postpost game 6 of the World Series so Obama can air a 30-minute informercial on all three major stations? (He already wants to kill the American Dream. Now he wants to postpone the American pasttime?)

Or that Obama is outspending McCain 8-to-1? And we're supposed to buy that he's going to cut back spending and balance the budget?

It seems like O's answer to everything is to throw more money at the problem. Tax, tax, tax. Spend, spend, spend.

It looks like we'll finally find out how much it costs to buy an election in America.

ACTION ALWAYS SPEAK LOUDER THAT WORDS, and what transpired this June 30 for the Obama presidential campaign speak volumes for anyone who knows a mote about USA politics! Even though Obama has not and will not accept a single dime from any high-powerful, super rich and corrupting lobbyist; and even though his support base include many ordinary common people of all races and poor small contributors, still he managed to set an ALL TIME record for the most money that a democrat has ever raise in a six month period - not to mention that he is black, a person with Muslim roots, a upstart first term Senator, and an opposer to the Iraq war!
This indeed is phenomenal, and a sign that indeed Obama�s campaign is a force to be reckoned with. He said that he has the largest grassroots campaign in history and now, few can muster the courage to try to dispel or argue against his claim.

By Matthew Mosk
The campaign of Sen. Barack Obama will refund a small number of contributions made by Obama's aunt, who has been living in the United States illegally, according to a published report.

The woman, Zeituni Onyango, lives in public housing in Boston and is the half-sister of Obama's late father.

The Associated Press reported today that Obama's aunt had been instructed to leave the country four years ago by an immigration judge who rejected her request for asylum from her native Kenya.

Obama campaign reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show Onyango gave $265 to the campaign. Foreign nationals are not permitted to donate to American presidential campaigns.

"Given the information that has been brought to our attention, the contributions are being refunded," Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, told The Washington Post this morning.

The campaign told the AP that Obama was not aware that questions had been raised about his aunt's legal status.

"Senator Obama has no knowledge of her status but obviously believes that any and all appropriate laws be followed," the statement said, according to the AP.

"No knowledge of her status." Why does that not surprise me? A man who is so "family oriented" and has such a wonderful extended family with which he goes to Kenya to visit and strengthen his roots with, yet he has no clue as to what their "status" is.

By Phil Kerpen

Lie Number 1: I Won�t Tax Your Health Benefits

What Obama said on the campaign trail (Newport News, Va., October 4, 2008):

�So here�s John McCain�s radical plan in a nutshell: he taxes health care benefits for the first time in history� Well, I don�t think that�s right.�

What Obama says now:

Obama ally Sen. Max Baucus told the Washington Post that Obama is now willing to tax employer-provided health benefits. Baucus said: �Yeah, it�s something that he might consider. That was discussed. It�s on the table.�

Limiting or ending the tax-free status of health benefits makes sense if it�s used to cut other taxes and put all health insurance�employer-provided or not�on a level playing field. The existing benefit is an artifact of World War II-era price controls and creates a tax penalty for people who buy their own insurance.

But unlike the McCain plan, which would have taxed employer-provided health benefits and used the money to pay for a new health care tax credit, the plan now being considered by Democrats, including Obama, would tax employer-health benefits to fund increased government health care spending. For the 250 million-plus Americans who already have health insurance, this is a raw deal�they pay more taxes and get nothing in return.

Lie Number 2: I Won�t Force You to Buy Health Insurance

What Obama said on the campaign trail (Janesville, Wis., February 13, 2008):

�The main difference between my plan and Senator Clinton�s plan is that she�d require the government to force you to buy health insurance and she said she�d �go after� your wages if you don�t.�

What Obama says now:

President Obama sent a letter to Democratic Senators Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus yesterday that says�using the new code word �responsibility� to refer to the same kind of mandate he slammed in Hillary�s plan:

�I understand the Committees are moving towards a principle of shared responsibility � making every American responsible for having health insurance coverage, and asking that employers share in the cost. I share the goal of ending lapses and gaps in coverage that make us less healthy and drive up everyone�s costs, and I am open to your ideas on shared responsibility.�

While President Obama did say he would like a waiver process in hardship cases, there is no reason to have a mandate other than to force people to buy insurance who don�t want to, mostly young people who are healthy and want to spend their limited income on their young careers and families. According to the Census Bureau, about 60 percent of the uninsured are under age 35, with the highest rates in the 18-24 bracket (28.1 percent uninsured) and the 25-34 (25.7 percent uninsured) bracket. This is about forcing some people who don�t want health insurance to pay for other people through a new government program. It�s more spreading the wealth around.

President Obama is poised to accept this provision for the same reason Sen. Clinton proposed it�to buy off insurance companies. Democrats learned a lesson from the 1993 HillaryCare fight when the insurance companies stopped a Washington health care takeover. The mandate is a giveaway to insurance companies to buy their support this time by forcing healthy young people who use less health care to pay insurance premiums.

Lie Number 3: If You Aren�t Rich, I Won�t Raise Your Taxes

What Obama said on the campaign trail (September 12, 2008, Dover, N.H.):

�I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.�

What Obama says now:

Well, it�s hard to keep up because new ideas are floated every day, but they all would involve taxing people who make less than $250,000. In fact, even his income tax hikes for the rich have now been dropped down to start at $235,000. Then there�s the soft drink excise tax, the cap-and-trade energy taxes, and most recently the VAT, a form of national sales tax. And of course the tax on health benefits I mentioned above would also break the only-tax-the-rich pledge.

What all these proposals have in common: we all pay, big-time, likely trillions of dollars in higher taxes for �free� government health care. In fact, that�s probably the biggest lie of all�that government health care is free.

http://larrysinclair-0926.blogspot.com/2008/09/obama-campaign-launches-voter-fraud-web.html

Keep a close eye on your credit card bills this election season lest you end up paying for a contribution you didn�t approve to a political candidate you don�t support

A North Kansas City couple has been left scratching their heads after they became the victims of a political scam

Steve and Rachel Larman say a strange credit card charge appeared on their statement this month ? a $2300 donation to Barack Obama?s presidential campaign. The Larman?s say they don?t want this to be about their political affiliation, but they say they?re not about to give the Obama campaign any help from their pocketbook

They said they notified Chase, their credit card bank, to report the fraud

?(They) said that they had seen-they were familiar with this,? said Steve Larman. ?It was fraud, they believe through telemarketing but they were going to be doing some more investigations.?
The Larman?s don?t want their politics to enter into what is essentially just a fraudulent charge. But they say that the charge involves the Obama campaign adds insult to injury for the registered Republicans

?They (Chase) kept on asking me ?are you sure you wouldnt have gone to a site in support of Obama?,? said Rachel Larman. ?And I repeatedly said ?Im voting for McCain - I would not be going to an Obama site?.?

Chase dropped the charge from the Larman?s card. The couple is thankful thay they caught the charge on the card, but worried that others may not see that type of fraud on their own credit cards before it?s too late.

This wasn�t just some random prankster. $2,300 is the exact amount of the maximum any individual can give to a federal candidate for office

Change into what? I'm sorry, but the only change that we will see with Barrack Obama in office is a bigger government with enough power to take away our liberty. Yes, people have already lost their jobs and they will continue to lose their jobs especially if Obama raises taxes on businesses. This promise of change and you all assume that it is a change for the good. Obama has done nothing but step on people and use radical associations to boost his political career.

And you know what....I hope to God that I am wrong about Barrack Obama because if I'm not.....we, including you, will be singing a different tune about Barrack Obama and it won't be a song about how great he is....that is unless he makes us sing a song about how great he is.

As for the gun thing....this is a legit concern. It may not be one of yours, but don't give people crap when they feel that it is. Every dictator takes away the weapons from the people so they have nothing to use in their defense. Look throughout history. How many times has a dictator come into power and the people praised him and thought he was great until he flipped the switch and took total control of everything.

It was inadvertent, but still funny that he is such a dodo. Was going to post the link on Wonkette, but there was a curse word on that page, and did not want the 3 Bush supporters over on the other board to get their undies in a knot.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iVg2jiaBA1jwVfCdsisXI0FbZD0AD965BKCG0