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BERLIN, Nov. 19 — Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command used a racially demeaning term to refer to President-elect Barack Obama in a videotape released Wednesday, and said Obama’s election represented “the American people’s admission of defeat in Iraq.”
In the 11-minute video, posted on the Internet, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, repeatedly and unfavorably compared the first black U.S. president-elect to Malcolm X, the black Muslim leader and activist who was assassinated 43 years ago.
“You represent the direct opposite of honorable black Americans like Malik al-Shabazz, or Malcolm X,” Zawahiri said, according to English subtitles of his Arabic remarks provided by al-Qaeda’s propaganda arm. “You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian, in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America.”
Zawahiri said Obama, Colin Powell and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “confirmed” Malcolm X’s definition of a “house negro,” a term the militant black leader often used to describe black leaders who were subservient to white interests.
The biting comments were the first time al-Qaeda’s leadership has reacted publicly to Obama’s election since he defeated Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) two weeks ago. Some analysts said the delayed response reflected uncertainty within al-Qaeda’s ranks over how to respond, given that Obama is widely seen in the Muslim world as the mirror opposite of the group’s longtime archenemy, President Bush.
“Zawahiri and others in al-Qaeda recognize that Obama has a certain appeal, not just to Americans but to people in the developing world,” said Evan F. Kohlmann, a terrorism analyst and senior investigator for the Nine/Eleven Finding Answers Foundation. “They feel a need to dampen this sense and enthusiasm and excitement for Obama.”
Zawahiri, 57, an Egyptian physician, is the second-ranking leader of al-Qaeda, behind only Osama bin Laden. According to U.S. intelligence officials, he is believed to be hiding somewhere in Pakistan. He has distributed dozens of video and audio recordings in recent years, eluding capture despite a $25 million reward offer posted by the U.S. government.
In Wednesday’s video recording, Zawahiri welcomed the pending withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq but warned Obama not to send additional forces to Afghanistan, as the president-elect has pledged to do.
“If you still want to be stubborn about America’s failure in Afghanistan, then remember the fate of Bush and Pervez Musharraf, and the fate of the Soviets and British before them,” Zawahiri said, referring to the former president of Pakistan, who resigned under pressure this year. “And be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them.”
The video consisted of an audio recording of Zawahiri’s remarks in Arabic, with English subtitles scrolling underneath a still photo of the bespectacled doctor, dressed in white in front of a bookcase.
On the tape, Zawahiri is flanked by two separate photographs of Obama and Malcolm X. In his picture, Obama is wearing a skullcap and surrounded by Jewish leaders as he visits the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site. Malcolm X is shown on his knees, praying in a mosque.
There’s been a lot of speculation that Michelle Obama’s 71-year-old mother, Marian Robinson, will be moving to the White House with her family in January. It would certainly be practical: Mrs. Robinson helped care for granddaughters Sasha and Malia while their parents were on the campaign trail, and the first couple’s new schedule will be no less punishing. Below is an introduction to the woman America now knows as ‘First Granny.’
Watch the documentary that played before Michelle Obama’s DNC speech, which Marian narrated:
Palin does interview with Greta at Fox News
The governor also lashed out at bloggers “sitting in their parents’ basement, wearing their pajamas” for some of the questions that were raised about her record and credibility. She was particularly incensed at the questions that were floated about whether or not she was the mother of her youngest son, Trig.
A gift for Sarah Palin as winking and nodding may not always be enough!
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Faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator’s hands – this is what I always do. I’m like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it’s cracked up a little bit, maybe I’ll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don’t let me miss an open door. And if there is an open door in (20)12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plow through that door.
Palin puts faith in God for 2012
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Fox News Greta Van Susteren interviews Sarah Palin Part 1
Fox News Greta Van Susteren interviews Sarah Palin Part 2
Fox News Greta Van Susteren interviews Sarah Palin Part 3
Source: HP
British journalist covering Barack Obama caught on camera in drunk, plagiarism rant, Adam Smith, of Birmingham Mail, is YouTube sensation after drunken
A British reporter covering the 2008 Presidential election for the Birmingham Mail was caught on tape in a drunk rant, admitting plagiarism and acknowledging that he was writing his story while “pissed” drunk.
Adam Smith, also known as Steve Zacharanda, came to Miami last week to cover the election because, as he put it, “I aint going to go to Ohio, am I? I go to Miami, because that’s where the party is.”
Smith said, “I wanted to be here because I’m here for history. The trouble is, the readers of the Birmingham Mail are going to get my version of history. And I’m just a little bit pissed.”
He then said, “Thank God for the BBC, because I’m cutting and pasting, baby!”
Smith ended his rant with a “fuck you” resignation from the Birmingham Mail, saying, “My name is Adam Smith, also known as Steve Zacharanda, who has just resigned from the Birmingham Mail, the Birmingham Post and the Birmingham Sunday Mercury, to set up my own magazine…Fuckk you, I’m doing what I want.”
Watch:
The Times reports that Smith’s employment status is now very much up in the air:
Steve Dyson, editor of the Birmingham Mail, said: “This is an internal matter, so we cannot discuss it.”
Asked about the company’s attitude towards plagarism, he added: “Whilst we cannot discuss internal matters, plagarism will not be tolerated in any form by BTM Media Limited – although we do not believe that any has been taking place.”
In a further comment left the next morning by Mr Smith on the YouTube page, he appeared to have sobered up significantly.
“Right, the thing is, right I’ve just woke up. And seen this video, which I don’t really remember. I’ve been told to phone the Birmingham Mail because I am in trouble.
“I was off duty, I am on official holiday working at the South Beach Miami Barack Obama campaign where I had just done a 18-hour shift trying to make the world a better place. Please check every BBC News outlet and see if I have cut and pasted anything. I have not, it was a joke and should be taken in the spirit it was said.”
Source: HP
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Madelyn Dunham, who watched from afar as her only grandson rapidly ascended the ranks of American politics to the brink of the presidency, did not live to see whether he was elected.
Mrs. Dunham, 86, Senator Barack Obama’s grandmother, died late Sunday in Hawaii after battling cancer, which Mr. Obama announced upon arriving here on Monday for a campaign stop on the eve of Election Day.
“She has gone home,” said Mr. Obama, his voice tinged with emotion as he briefly spoke of her death at a campaign rally here. “She died peacefully in her sleep with my sister at her side, so there’s great joy instead of tears.”
Mr. Obama learned of his grandmother’s death at 8 a.m. on Monday, aides said, but appeared at a morning rally in Florida without making an announcement. A written statement was issued around 4:30 p.m., in the name of Mr. Obama and his sister, before he spoke at an evening rally in Charlotte. The delay was intended to allow his sister, who was six hours behind in Hawaii, time to take care of a few details before the death became public.
Mrs. Dunham was the final remaining immediate family member who helped raise Mr. Obama during his teenage years in Hawaii. He called her Toot, his shorthand for “tutu,” a Hawaiian term for grandparent.
Mr. Obama left the campaign trail late last month to travel to Honolulu to bid his grandmother farewell. He spent part of two days with her, as she lay gravely ill in the small apartment where he lived from age 10 to 18.
While Mrs. Dunham was too sick to travel to see her grandson on the campaign trail, Mr. Obama and other family members said that she closely followed his bid for the presidency through cable television. Yet she became a figure in his campaign, seen through images in television commercials intended to give him a biographical anchor.
Mrs. Dunham, who grew up near Augusta, Kan., moved with her husband, Stanley Dunham, to Hawaii.
In the early stages of his candidacy, Mr. Obama spoke wistfully about his grandparents, whose all-American biography was suddenly critical to establishing his own American story. He spoke of how his grandmother worked on B-29s at a Boeing plant in Wichita.
For Mr. Obama, the loss came on the final full day of his presidential campaign against Senator John McCain. Campaigning in New Mexico, Mr. McCain offered his condolences and said: “He is in our thoughts and prayers. We mourn his loss, and we are with him and his family today.”
The illness of Mr. Obama’s grandmother had been weighing on him in recent weeks, friends said, which is why he insisted on interrupting his schedule to visit her late last month. While she was gravely ill, aides said, he carried on a limited conversation with her. He kept the visit to one day, advisers said, partly out of her own insistence that people not create a fuss.
“She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America,” Mr. Obama said. “They’re not famous. Their names are not in the newspapers, but each and every day they work hard.
“They aren’t seeking the limelight. All they try to do is just do the right thing. In this crowd there are a lot of quiet heroes like that.”
What was Fox News thinking – there were two men recently arrested in a foiled plot to assassinate Obama -somehow you get the impression that Fox News is almost detached from the real news – only the news they try to generate. To place Obama on a shooting range – after there have repeated calls for his death at Palin and McCain rallies is irresponsible – and dangerous. This crosses the line on commonsense.
Joe Plumber: Angry but at what....
The all-out effort from John McCain’s presidential campaign to scare voters into backing the Republican candidate continued apace on Tuesday as McCain surrogate Joe the Plumber agreed that a Barack Obama presidency would mean the “death of Israel” and end democracy in America.
The Ohio plumber, who has no license and is actually named Samuel Wurzelbacher, spoke at a McCain campaign event in Columbus Monday. A McCain supporter asked if “a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel.” JTP hardly batted an eye.
“I’ll go ahead and agree with you on that,” Wurzelbacher said.
The push-back against Wurzelbacher’s comments began, somewhat unexpectedly, at Fox News.
The network noted that the McCain campaign seemed hesitant to distance itself from Wurzelbacher. Correspondent Carl Cameron said that the McCain campaign was going to put out an ad today criticizing Obama policies on Israel.
“Just a coincidence?” he asked. “We report you decide.”
Later Tuesday afternoon, Shepard Smith pressed Wurzelbacher on his comments, reminding the woefully misinformed McCain backer that Obama has consistently voiced support for Israel. Pressed several times to explain how he could agree with the conclusion that Obama would lead to the death of the Jewish state, Wurzelbacher was unable to come up with any good reasons aside from Obama’s position in favor of negotiating with rogue regimes such as Iran.
“You don’t want my opinion on foreign policy,” Wurzelbacher said. “I know just enough to kind of be dangerous.”
Smith seemed to agree with that assessment, implying that the only source for Wurzelbacher and the supporter’s concern was “hateful things spread on the Internet.” The host clearly worried that Wurzelbacher’s endorsement of such a view might inspire violence against the candidate.
Losing control and loving it !! McCain's swashbuckling camp.
Why, Smith asked, would Wurzelbacher believe Obama was lying when he spoke of the importance of Israel’s relationship with the United States.
Wurzelbacher was flummoxed. All he could offer was an appeal for people to “go out and find their own reasons … go out and get informed.”
If only the “plumber” had bothered to take his own advice before jumping onto the national stage. Smith, for his part, made sure to set his audience straight on the facts.
“I just want to make this 100 percent perfectly clear, Barack Obama has said repeatedly and demonstrated repeatedly that Israel will always be a friend of the United States, no matter what happens once he becomes President of the United States, his words,” Smith said after the interview ended. “The rest of it, man, it just gets frightening sometimes.”
Unvetted Joe the Plumber: Vote for Obama ‘death to Israel’
In Ohio, Wurzelbacher went on to reiterate McCain’s attempts to paint Obama as a socialist, The Associated Press reports.
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“I’m honestly scared for America,” Wurzelbacher said.
He later said Obama would end the democracy that the U.S. military had defended during wars.
“I love America. I hope it remains a democracy, not a socialist society. … If you look at spreading the wealth, that’s honestly right out of Karl Marx’s mouth,” Wurzelbacher said.
“No one can debate that. That’s not my opinion. That’s fact.”
McCain’s campaign has used the “spread the wealth” line to attack Obama ever since the Democratic candidate used it to inartfully describe his tax proposals.
The attempts to compare Obama’s relatively modest restructuring of the progressive tax system to Marxism strikes most reasonable observers as patently absurd, but the attack seems to be all the foundering McCain campaign has left. Obama’s proposal would raise the tax rate on income above $250,000 from 36 to 39 percent and lower taxes for middle-class Americans.
McCain’s campaign also has heavily courted Jewish voters, who will be a crucial voting bloc in Florida and other swing states.
Wurzelbacher’s agreement that Obama would portend the death of Israel, though, seems to go beyond rhetoric the McCain campaign has employed so far. Until Tuesday, that kind of fear-mongering was mostly limited to right-wing blogs.
The McCain campaign said Wurzelbacher and the supporter’s views were there own regarding Israel, but they did not forcefully repudiate the attack, Fox News’s Carl Cameron reported just after the rally.
A Republican National Committee spokesman later gave Fox a longer statement that largely skirted the issue.
“While he’s clearly his own man, so far Joe has offered some penetrating and clear analysis that cuts to the core of many of the concerns that people have with Barack Obama’s statements and policies,” RNC spokesman Jeff Sadosky said. “Whether it is Obama’s willingness to sit down unconditionally with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or his plans to redistribute the paychecks of hardworking Americans, there is good reason to question the judgment that Obama would bring to the Oval Office.”
Cameron noted the statement “doesn’t say whether or not McCain agrees” with Wurzelbacher and the supporter and said McCain “won’t go too far” to distance himself from the man who’s become a campaign centerpiece.
Source: Raw Story
Your Daily Politics Video Blog: Most of the attention is on the presidential race. But there’s also that question of whether the Democrats are going to put together that 60 vote majority in the senate. In today’s episode we look at the 12 top senate races that will determine whether the Democrats will go into 2009 with that filibuster-proof majority.
I can feel it coming in the Ayers tonight, oh Lord !!
McCain’s meant to kick some butt – at tonight the last debate – which is to cover domestic and economic polity – though I’m not sure how convincing the average voter that a tax cut for the very wealthy is going to help them – especially since the last one didn’t work.
Tonight is the last presidential debate, and the stakes are highest for John McCain — he’s on track to finish off the season with three strikes. The Arizona Republican has been heightening expectations for a fight. Before last Tuesday’s debate he made a similar move, suggesting to a crowd that he would “take the gloves off.” (He didn’t, and by many accounts the debate was not only “boring” but another win for Obama.) Tonight is McCain’s last chance to close the widening gap between him and Senator Obama. By McCain’s own predictions, it would seem that only a knockout win will do the trick. Read below for McCain’s two major pronouncements: that he’ll “‘whip’ Obama’s “you-know-what” and that it’s “probably ensured” he’ll bring up William Ayers tonight.
Source: HP
The state of the McCain campaign is drawing fire from its own ostensible allies. At the head of the line of Republicans looking to be the first to flick dirt on McCain’s grave is Bill Kristol, who says in today’s New York Times, that if “the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.” Since that’s coming from a guy who, through his own bad advice, has contributed mightily to the grave McCain is measuring, it makes sense that he be given the first shovel of dirt.
“We have him right where we want him.” McCain’s moves to the “denial” stage of grief.
But didn’t Kristol get the message? Today, the key line of John McCain’s rebooted stump speech is directed at his rival, Barack Obama, and it goes a little something like, “We have him right where we want him.” That was the plan, all along, you see! Be down double digits in the polls, possessed of the necessity of campaigning in West Virginia, and in need of tempering your supporters’ passions because they have suddenly veered wildly in the direction of psychosis. I love it when a plan comes together, even if that plan is only indicative of the fact that McCain’s moved to the “denial” stage of grief. Brace yourself, because anger and depression are still to come!
Amid this turmoil, McCain’s attempts to relaunch his campaign have encountered a new obstacle: his fellow Republicans, who, like Kristol, are prepping themselves for an old-fashioned circular firing squad. Over the weekend, the New York Times noted that party leaders “were worried Mr. McCain was heading for defeat unless he brought stability to his presidential candidacy and settled on a clear message” for his campaign. And in today’s edition of The Hill, a chorus of disapproval weighs in on McCain’s muffed punt of the Paulson bailout package.
But leading that particular pack of wolves is Kristol, who says that the “McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic.”
Of course, a smart observer might have suggested that the incompetence-slash-incoherence was extant at the moment McCain selected Sarah Palin (inexperienced, embroiled in abuse-of-power scandal, earmark lover) as his running mate, and the toxicity was apparent after a week of all-Ayers-all-the-time campaigning. And we’d remind you that both the Palin selection and the Ayers-bashing had few supporters as frenzied as Kristol. But hey! If the Times was interested in good sense or accountability or even intellectual consistency from their columnists, they wouldn’t have hired Kristol in the first place.
Kristol, “worried Mr. McCain was heading for defeat” — “McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional.”
Naturally, McCain’s responded through Nancy Pfotenhauer, who’s accused Kristol of “buying into the Obama campaign’s party line.” These sentiments were similarly voiced by the ubiquitous Tucker Bounds later in the day:
So what’s the new party line from John McCain? In the first place, McCain is now saying, “What America needs in this hour is a fighter.” Doesn’t that mess up Sarah Palin’s constant contention that McCain being “the only man in the race who has ever really fought for you” was something that she had to say because McCain was too modest to admit it? More to the point, doesn’t this mess up the Sarah Palin Stump Speech Drinking Game? Ever since she dropped the “I sold it on eBay” line I’ve been practically teetotaling!
McCain is now saying, “What America needs in this hour is a fighter.” — “I come from a long line of McCains”
But the crux of McCain’s case seems to be this line:
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I come from a long line of McCains who believed that to love America is to fight for her.
So there you have it! Vote for McCain! He’s the McCainiest!
Source: HP
Palin’s hostile charm offensive – against the meedya !
Appearing on a friendlier news outlet, Gov. Sarah Palin said she was “annoyed” with the way Katie Couric handled their interview and complained that the CBS Evening News host failed to give her the opportunity to take a proverbial axe to Barack Obama.
In a portion of her sit-down with Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron, Palin claimed that Couric’s questions — which produced a series of staggeringly embarrassing responses — put her in a lose-lose position.
“The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed,” she said. “It’s like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too.”
For the record, Couric asked her, among other things, what type of news sources she turns to for information, which Supreme Court decisions she disagreed with, why Alaska’s proximity to Russia gave her foreign policy experience, her opinion of the bailout package for Wall Street, and where she thought Vice President Dick Cheney erred. Which one of those questions was designed to trip her up (as opposed to, say, give viewers a better sense of her character and views) is tough to ascertain.
Later in her interview with Cameron, Palin offered a sense of what she thinks would have been a fairer set of questions. Unsurprisingly, they all would have provided her the opportunity to rail against Obama.
Source: HP
Out Foxing Karl Rove 
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