Commenter, NMJune in the The DNC Reveals “Major Announcement” thread gave me the idea:
I love their new logo. It lends itself so nicely to interpretation as “D for Dumb”. Actually it looks like a good logo for a diaper brand and the tag line “Change That Matters” would actually be meaningful.
For more photoshops and commentary, see:
This is the “interesting audio” Andrew Breitbart promised earlier this week. It’s a copy of a voicemail message made by House Member Eleanor Holmes Norton during a fund-raising call to an unnamed lobbyist.
Capitol Confidential at Big Government notes several concerns with the call:
1. At the very beginning of the message, Holmes Norton notes that the lobbyist:
ha[s] given to other colleagues of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
Beyond being a bit heavy-handed, where did she get this information? Such donations are listed in FEC reports, but it is a violation to use that information to solicit campaign donations.
2. More serious, however, is her frequent mention of her seniority and her Chairmanship of a subcommittee. She is attempting to solicit funds based on her past actions taken in her official capacity in Congress. She is implying to the lobbyist that, should he decline to donate, he will be turning down a senior member of Congress who Chairs a subcommittee highly relevant to his “sector”.
3. Worse than that, she details her role overseeing a large economic development project in the District, funded by “stimulus” funds. It would appear that either the lobbyist has an interest in this project, or the Congresswoman thinks he does, as she states she is “frankly surprised” the lobbyist hasn’t given to her. Especially, she notes, because of her
long and deep work …in fact it has been by major work on the committee and subcommittee it’s been essentially in your sector
“In your sector.” This raises additional concerns, and we note potentially relevant laws here:
Finish reading at Big Government.
Norton is running for reelection in the District of Columbia.
Hat tip: Weasel Zippers
Linked by Michelle Malkin, Buzzworthy, thanks!
DNC chief, Tim Kaine teased America yesterday, with hints of an announcement that would “excite Democrats across the country”. Well, considering the DNC’s track record, I have been on pins and needles wondering what this momentous announcement could be.
Well the exciting moment has arrived. Are you ready? Are you sitting down?
The GOP Oversight and Government Reform Committee is urging people to be “citizen watchdogs”:
This project harnesses the American public’s help in getting answers about why the Administration has insisted on wasting potentially $192 million taxpayer dollars on pro-stimulus advertising even as the spending splurge has failed to meet the President’s own sales pitches: that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8% and generate more than 4 million private sector jobs by the end of 2010. Today, unemployment stands at 9.6%, 14.9 million Americans cannot find work and more than 2.5 million people have lost their jobs since the stimulus became law.
Seen a sign? Take a picture and send it with the address and location to stimulussigns@mail.house.gov.
Interactive map, here.
Jack Cashill, who has written extensively on Obama’s background, is taking issue with the much discussed Dinesh D’Souza piece in Forbes , in which he argues that Obama’s anti-colonial attitudes were inherited from his father. As you are probably aware, Cashill has argued convincingly that Bill Ayers is the author of Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
He takes the position that Obama was influenced much more by his mother, than his father.
In the article, D’Souza argues that President Obama has absorbed much of his governing philosophy from his socialist, “anticolonial” father, Barack Obama Sr. “According to Obama,” writes D’Souza, “his dream is his father’s dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My FatherAs much as I admire D’Souza, however, I must take issue with his argument.–Yes, Obama does seem to espouse a certain inchoate anticolonialism, but the “dreams” do not come so much from his father as from his mother, and they have been given voice by Obama’s muse, terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers. As a result, Obama’s ideology is less coherent and more malleable than D’Souza would have the reader believe.–D’Souza, like most commentators in the more respectable reaches of the conservative media, goes wrong by denying himself the information unearthed in the blogosphere. He writes of Obama, for instance, “Here is a man who spent his formative years–the first 17 years of his life–off the American mainland.”–Not true. As has now been proved beyond contention, Obama spent the first year of his life in Seattle with his mother, the cruelly named Stanley Ann Dunham, henceforth “Ann.” This is no minor point. Ann left Hawaii within two weeks of Obama’s birth. Barack Obama Sr. may not have seen the boy until he was ten.–***In a critical but overlooked scene in Dreams, when Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, asks his wife to meet some of “her own people” at the American oil company where he worked, she snaps at him, “They are not my people.” Mom raised the young Obama to be wary of the “ugly Americans” in their midst. The only thing exceptional about America, she taught him, was Barry Obama himself.–After returning to Hawaii at the age of ten, Obama was mentored by people who shared his mother’s biases, most critically the communist poet and pornographer, Frank Marshall Davis. Upon hitting the mainland as a college freshman, Obama surrounded himself with like-minded souls. “I chose my friends carefully,” he writes in Dreams, “The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”–In the shaping of the worldview on display in Dreams, no mentor would be more influential than Ayers. In the Forbes article, D’Souza ignores Ayers completely. This is a grave oversight. As I have contested in these pages and will prove beyond doubt in my forthcoming book, Deconstructing Obama, Ayers provided the structure for Dreams, much of its content and all of its style.
Read the entire piece.
I tend to agree with Cashill that Obama inherited more of his muddled anti-colonial, anti-American, anti-capitalist, and far left attitudes from his mother’s side of the family.
Baldilocks is a staunch conservative whose family background on her father’s side bears an uncanny resemblance to Obama’s. Why did she turn out to be Obama’s polar opposite? She notes that the difference for her, was her mother’s side of the family.
Most readers know that my origin and life circumstances are a mirror image of the president’s—some things are frighteningly similar; others radically dissimilar in obvious areas. However, for continuity’s sake, here it is again: courtesy of the Mboya Airlift, our Kenyan Luo fathers arrived in America in 1959 to receive an American education, married and produced children with American women, divorced them, and, upon graduation, returned to their homeland.
Both of us were partially raised by the generation prior to that of our parents–in his case, his maternal grandparents; in my case, my maternal grandmother’s sister and her husband.
When Philip Ochieng and Barack Obama, Sr. arrived in America, their mentors were people like radical Progressives Cora and Peter Weiss, who—via the innocuously coined African American Student Foundation— funded much of the tuition, travel, care and feeding of the Kenyan students selected for the Airlift. (My mother says that when she and my father were in college, their non-African–read: white–social circle included nothing but communists and socialists.)
And herein lies a crucial difference as to the reason that my life turned out differently than Obama’s: both of our biological fathers are socialists and atheists. However, in Obama’s case, his mother’s immediate family consisted of socialists and atheists as well. Mine does not.
Here’s another difference: neither my great-aunt, great-uncle, mother nor American father ever implicated that I was so innately different—so alien– from them, that it was necessary to turn me over to a monster like Frank Marshall Davis for “parenting.” By that very act, the Dunhams indicated to their grandson that they believed him to be inferior because of his black African heritage. It is unbearable even to imagine the things instilled into young Obama’s spirit under such tutelage.
I think we see a clearer picture of Obama when we view his background in it’s entirety.
And it ain’t a pretty picture.
Nice Deb 
