While American Sanya Richards-Ross was accepting the gold medal for winning the 400-meter dash, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt was giving an interview.
The world’s fastest man, a Jamaican who won the 100-meter dash, stopped what he was doing to listen to the Star-Spangled Banner.
Instead of continuing to talk to the interviewer, he turned around, pointed at the flag, and indicated to the reporter that he would like to watch in silence.
Video of Bolt’s interview has gone viral.
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Of course, not everybody feels the same way about the American National Anthem.
The President of the United States bows before the Emperor of Japan
The LA Times reports that the Chosen One bent low again, this time to Akihito, 125th Emperor of Japan.
Obama’s bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia last April produced widespread criticism as a violation of American Republican principle and protocol. Many Americans believe it is profoundly inappropriate for the President of the United States to render honors acknowledging the superiority of any monarch since the American Republic by its Declaration of Independence rejected monarchy and the claim of unelected rulers to reign on the basis of divine authority.
Oddly enough, Obama reserves, it seems, his gestures of supreme respect for Worthy Oriental Gentlemens. He merely nodded to Queen Elizabeth. In the case of Queen Elizabeth, Michelle Obama made gestures in quite the opposite direction, hugging the Queen and later even patting her affectionately on the back.
Last April’s obeisance to the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”
(W)hat is happening is that through the “economic emergency,” Obama is trying to implement Rand’s fictitious “Directive 10-289,” which is what the the combination of “stimulus package,” unsupervised TARP bailouts, “Cap and Trade,” and “Health Care Reform” equal when they are rammed down your throats without discussion (or even the reading of the details) by your supposed “representatives” in the national government.
He quotes none other than Michelle Obama herself, telling an audience at UCLA last year:
Barack, as Oprah said, is one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime.
Barack is more than ready. He’ll be ready today, he’ll be ready on day one, he’ll be ready in a year from now, five years from now – he is ready.
That is not the question. The question is: What are we ready for?
Wait, wait, wait – because we say we’re ready for change, we say we’re ready for change, butcha see, change is HARD.
Change will always be hard, and it doesn’t happen from the top down.
We do not get universal health care, we don’t get better schools because somebody else is in the White House. We get change because folks from the grass roots up decide they are sick and tired of other people telling them how their lives will be – when they decide to roll up their sleeves and work.
And Barack Obama will require you to work.
He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourselves to be better, and that you engage.
Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual – uninvolved, uninformed…
Who knows? Like the Khmer Rouge, he may decide to march urban populations out of energy consuming cities for resettlement at collective farm settlements in the countryside, too.
After Barack Obama became an Illinois state legislator, his wife moved up as well, scoring a job as ‘vice president of community relations’ at the University Of Chicago Hospital for a very generous salary of $121,910. When Obama became a senator in 2005, her ‘salary’ leapfrogged to $$316,962 for the same job…and one of Senator Obama’s first acts in office was to see to it that the hospital received over a million dollars of your tax dollars as an earmark.
And Steve Gilbert notes Michelle Obama recently resigned her job to take on the role of First Lady, having been on a leave of absence since May of 2007 to participate in the presidential campaign.
Despite being on leave of absence, Michelle Obama received $62,709 in compensation from University of Chicago Hospitals last year. Less than her full salary, but not bad for a no-show job.
Now that Michelle has moved on to bigger things, the University of Chicago Hospitals has found that it doesn’t really need a vice president of community relations after all, and has simply eliminated the position.
Isn’t it wonderful that we have such noble and disinterested people rising to the top in American public life?
The July 21, 2008 issue of the New Yorker features a cover cartoon of B. Hussein Obama and his wife Michelle in the Oval Office looking more or less the way some of us are prone to imagine they might some day.
The New Yorker’s intention was to satirize right wing images of the Obamas, but some people in politics have no sense of humor, and both campaigns were quick to get all pious and sanctimonious about it.
The Obama campaign, as well as the campaign of Republican rival John McCain, slammed the cover as offensive:
“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement, reported by Politico. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”
“We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it’s tasteless and offensive,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement.
Transgressing the boundaries of convention is precisely what makes a lot of the best kind of humor funny. Besides, cartoonist Barry Blitt isn’t really endorsing the viewpoint of the Obamas depicted in the cartoon. He’s mocking it, and poking fun at people like me who think that image isn’t so very far off the mark.
Conservatives do have a sense of humor, though, so I am able to find it funny, even if I am one of the targets of the satire. Kudos, Barry Blitt.
Those looking for more laughs this morning need only to scan the Comments section of this posting over at HuffPo. A lot of the lefties are, as the saying goes, having a cow.
The Chicago Tribune is attempting to innoculate readers against the possibility that the rumor published by Larry Johnson of a tape of Michelle Obama ranting about “Whitey” may turn out to be true.
It’s hard to come up with an ethnic slur that has less of a sting than “whitey.”
A prevalent yet unsubstantiated Internet rumor has it that Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, used this term at some point in a speech, and the Obama campaign is concerned enough to have posted an online rebuttal.
I’ve got to ask, though. Are there really white people out there so ignorant of history, so unaware of the nuances of language and so threatened by minority grievances that they take genuine umbrage at the term “whitey”?
More a taunt than a threat, the word has no ugly history and hints at no particular stereotypes. It may have been hurled in a menacing fashion in ugly personal confrontations from time to time, but it’s never been used to keep a people down, to put them in their place, to rank them as subhuman.
To be truly offensive, a derogatory term needs to have an ominous context that “whitey” lacks.
Those who take offense are confusing prejudice—which is making negative assumptions about people based solely on external characteristics, of which all races and ethnicities are guilty—with racism, which is prejudice in action.
It requires them to imagine that “whitey” marginalizes, diminishes and therefore harms white people.
And if they’re really that dumb, then I guess they deserve to be insulted.
So there!
They really lit Jeff Goldstein’s fuse with this one. Jeff retorts:
So yeah. It looks like an Obama presidency will give us a frank discussion on the issue of race. If by “frank” we mean, “shut up and quit you’re bitching, whitey. We’ll tell you what racism is.”
Larry Johnson puts his hand on a stack of bibles, swears he is telling the truth about the “Whitey tape,” and then issues a warning to democrats.
I now appreciate somewhat how Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center, must have felt as he tried to warn Condaleeza Rice and the Bush White House about a brewing terrorist attack in the days leading up to September 11th.
John Cole responds with a link to a mocking YouTube spoof video, which is unfortunately lame. Lots of left-side blogs are linking it and pretending that it is terribly amusing.
Ben Smith (who’s obviously in the tank for Obama) credits the candidate with successfully dismissing the question, and links a Reason piece by David Weigel, wittily titled Everything’s Gonna Be All White, which pooh pooh’s it.
Sen. Barack Obama on Thursday batted down rumors circulating on the Internet and mentioned on some cable news shows of the existence of a video of his wife using a derogatory term for white people, and criticized a reporter for asking him about the rumor, which has not a shred of evidence to support it.
“We have seen this before. There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it,” Obama said to the McClatchy reporter during a press conference aboard his campaign plane. “That gives legs to the story. If somebody has evidence that myself or Michelle or anybody has said something inappropriate, let them do it.”
Asked whether he knew it not to be true, Obama said he had answered the question.
But the rumor’s chief source, leftwing retired-Spook and Plamegame team member Larry Johnson retorts:
When a politician tap dances on nuance–Baby it is true. My sources have not backed off. They maintain they have a tape and will drop it on the Dems in the fall. Now if Barack said, “No, and hell no” I would be wondering about my sources. But he punted. He went for the weasel word. The non-denial denial.
Time will tell.
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The word is that one of the Republican candidates no longer in the race (Rudy) acquired the tape. Republicans will most likely hold the tape until the fall. Because if Hillary had it, she’d let it out now to get rid of Obama.
Things will only get more interesting. Either way, Michelle Obama has using her own mouth, put her husband’s foot in it.
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CAPTION: Picture 11, Rev. Willie T. Barrow, chairman emerita, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, enjoys the Women’s Luncheon with Michelle Obama, wife of U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama of Illinois and executive director of community affairs, University of Chicago Hospital, Shoshana Johnson, the nation’s first Black female POW and former Iraqi captive, and Mrs. Jamell Meeks, wife of the Rev. James Meeks, vice president, Rainbow/PUSH, and Rev. Dr. Barbara King, Mother Khadijah Farrakhan, wife of Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, and Judge Arnette Hubbard.
HillBuzz suggests the devastating tape containing Michelle Obama’s “Whitey” speech wasn’t terribly hard to lay hands on. Trinity Church was selling it on DVD up until this last March!
Here’s what’s known so far:
The Michelle Obama Rant Tape was filmed between June 26th – July 1st 2004 in Chicago, IL at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Conference at Trinity United Church: specifically the Women’s Event.
Michelle Obama appeared as a panelist alongside Mrs. Khadijah Farrakhan and Mrs. James Meeks.
Bill Clinton spoke during the Conference, as did Bill Cosby and other speakers, but not at the panel Michelle attended.
Michelle Obama spoke at the Women’s Event, but referenced Bill Clinton in her rant—- his presence at the conference was the impetus for her raving, it seems.
For about 30 minutes, Michelle Obama launched into a rant about the evils of America, and how America is to blame for the problems of Africa. Michelle personally blamed President Clinton for the deaths of millions of Africans and said America is responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis and other ethnic groups. She then launched into an attack on “whitey”, and talked about solutions to black on black crime in the realm of diverting those actions onto white America. Her rant was fueled by the crowd: they reacted strongly to what she said, so she got more passionate and enraged, and that’s when she completely loses it and says things that have made the mouths drop of everyone who’s seen this.
The “tape” is a DVD that Trinity United sold on its website, and possibly offered free for download up until March 2008 when Trinity’s site was scrubbed and the DVDs were no longer offered for sale.
This outburst happened just one month before the 2004 Democratic Convention, when Barack Obama delivered the keynote address.
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BooMan (whose server was swamped yesterday, and inaccessible all afternoon) attempted some preemptive damage control concerning the alleged still-unreleased Michelle Obama “Whitey” tape.
From what I understand, it is a tape of Michelle Obama criticizing the Bush administration.
Why’d he cut folks off medicaid?
Why’d he let New Orleans drown?
Why’d he do nothing about Jena?
Why’d he put us in Iraq for no reason?
How Larry Johnson wants you to hear it:
Whitie cut folks off medicaid?
Whitie let New Orleans drown?
Whitie do nothing about Jena?
Whitie put us in Iraq for no reason?
The Obama campaign is telling reporters from major news organizations that the videotape of Michelle Obama railing against “whitey” at a panel alongside Nation of Islam maximum leader Louis Farrakhan is nothing but a “scurrilous lie,” according to one of those reporters who called for an answer.
But at the same time the Obama campaign has disseminated either a doctored or concocted transcript of the supposedly nonexistent videotape. Major Obama donors went to the campaign demanding explanations after the posting of my story on No Quarter about the contents of the videotape confirmed to me by several reliable sources, all Republicans with access to knowledge but who do not know each other.
So the campaign created a would-be transcript of the video it says doesn’t exist. In the Obama campaign produced transcript Michelle says “why’d he” instead of “whitey.” Very clever. Then the campaign sent this transcript to key Obamaton bloggers to circulate. And the campaign sent it to the donors to prevent them from having a nervous breakdown.
I’ve had several Obama supporters admit to its existence and say what was on it. I also have an email I was sent last night that had some potential verbiage.
Well this is total rumor and I have no idea if this is accurate or not, but I was sent an email with part of the alleged speech of the reported Michelle Obama words where she mentioned Whitey. ...
Reported verbiage from Michelle Obama’s tape
“Once again, the white man keeps us down, what’s up with Whitey, Why’d he attack Iraq, Why’d he let Katrina happen, Why’d he leave millions of children behind. This is the legacy the white man gives us”
Larry Johnson describes the alleged tape which, if it really exists, will, sooner or later, put paid to the Obama candidacy by revealing unpalatable truths about Barack Obama’s real opinions and ties.
I learned over the weekend why the Republicans who have seen the tape of Michelle Obama ranting about “whitey” describe it as “STUNNING.” I have not seen it but I have heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape. It features Michelle Obama and Louis Farrakhan. They are sitting on a panel at Jeremiah Wright’s Church when Michelle makes her intemperate remarks. Whoops!! When that image comes out it will enter the political ads hall of fame. It will be right up there with the little girl plucking daisy petals in the famous 1964 ad LBJ used against Barry Goldwater.
Barack may have quit his church but his religious problems are not over. Barack Obama has a Nation of Islam problem that will receive more attention in the coming days. Before Barack came on the scene, THE MAN in his political district was Louis Farrakhan. No one could take Alice Palmer’s seat without Farrakhan’s blessing. No one. I do not fault Barack Obama for seeking out the blessing of Farrakhan, but the story of what was done behind the scenes to get rid of Barack’s predecessor—Alice Palmer—has not been told. A knowledgeable source tells me that Tony Rezko played a direct role in this feat. And Rezko has been tight with Farrakhan.
It also should come as no surprise that Barack hired two members of the Nation of Islam to work on his staff. ..
In probing those matters we begin to understand that the Nation of Islam has been a critical component of Barack Obama’s base of support. And, I am told, Louis Farrakhan has been careful to use Tony Rezko as the intermediary in his relationship with Barack. This is not guilt by association, this is guilt because of actual relationship. Farrakhan, Wright, and Pfleger are each on tape in various settings spewing the most vile racists garbage in the guise of preaching. Barack Obama, up to this point, has tried to pretend he had no idea that these men had these thoughts or said these things.
NONSENSE!! He knew and he knows. And the gig will be up when the Michelle tape hits the airwaves. One source described how this tape was acquired. Let’s just say that one of the republican candidates who is no longer in the race, but had a dandy oppo research capability, uncovered this gem. If Republican poohbahs have their way the tape will remain on ice until October. But when it comes out, Barack will be permanently branded with the Nation of Islam. That’s not a winning platform in November.
Larry Johnson is a friend of Valerie Plame’s and an active participant in the Pouting Spooks’ anti-Bush Administration fun and games. In other words, Larry is not above prevarication and dirty tricks.
But, he’s certainly sticking his neck out very far, and putting whatever credibility he’s got on the line, on this one. If he’s telling the truth, and it sounds like he is, that’s the old ball game for Obama. Those democrat superdelegates had better run, not walk, over to kiss Hillary’s ring.
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Pouting Spook Larry Johnson is a Hillary supporter, and he reveals today the existence of a videotape of Michelle Obama in action likely to make something of an impact on the Obama campaign.
Today, on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Barack Obama lost his cool, calling names and making unspecified threats. Why? Ostensibly, it’s because the Tennessee Republican Party issued an Internet video featuring Michelle Obama saying she’s proud of being an American only because her husband is running for president. Well, yes, we all heard that awhile ago.
But the real reason for Obama’s extraordinary freakout is that he fears the release of the videotape, reported here, of Michelle Obama in the pulpit of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church railing against “whitey.” And we don’t mean Whitey Ford. Four Republican sources have told me that the tape exists. I’ve also been informed that Karl Rove and his allies have a copy of it and are using it to raise funds for independent expenditure groups. The tape, I’m told, will be disclosed as the GOP October Surprise. It’s a ticking time bomb.
And I’ve learned that a right-wing Republican billionaire has put a $1 million bounty on the video. He doesn’t want John McCain to win, like a number of conservatives, and thinks Obama is a pathetically weak candidate. The billionaire wants that video released now.
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