More Ramblings

Some of these you really need to read, especially in light of the DC Recruiting Station incident

First is this tidbit on Obama's past from FSM on Obama's connections to SDS/WeatherUnderground members William Ayers and Berandine Dohrn:

I am talking about the extent of the candidate’s ties to domestic terrorists from the 1960s and how the American people might feel about their future president palling around with someone who set off bombs as a member of the group Weather Underground and who, to this day, refuses to apologize for it.
William Ayers told his followers back then:
“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” This earns Ayers at least some spiritual kinship to Osama Bin Laden. (In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, which of course went to press before Sept. 11, Ayers maintains that this was “a joke.” In a more serious vein, Ayers was quoted by another Times interviewer as saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

The earliest known contact between Obama and Ayers was a “meet and greet” at Ayers’ house in Hyde Park – an upper middle class neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. Ben Smith at Politico gives an overview of the time and circumstance of the meeting:
In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious – and unrepentant – figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.
Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the democratic nomination for president.

Next is from Asia Times, which examines the women in Obama's life, and the legacy of his mother's communist affiliations:

"Cherchez la femme," advised Alexander Dumas in: "When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman." In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama's women reveal his secret: he hates America. We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man - least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father - can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama's campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. "I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There's Barack Obama the phenomenon. He's an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there's the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy's a little less impressive," she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

Last is this article, also from FSM, about progress in Iraq, from Army Col. Tom James, commander of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, a component of the Fort Stewart, Ga.-based 3rd Infantry Division. The Iraq veteran and his unit deployed to Iraq in December.

Violence is down across his area of responsibility, James said. “Sunni extremists are severely disrupted; they no longer find sanctuary and support from the (Iraqi) population,” he noted.

James attributed the improved security situation to the effects of the surge, improved Iraqi security force capabilities, and the contributions of the Sons of Iraq and other concerned local citizens’ groups.

“The five-brigade surge gave coalition forces the resources required to concentrate combat power in extremist-dominated areas, that allowed us to occupy key terrain in these areas to avoid enemy re-occupation,” James explained. Today, U.S. forces and Iraqi soldiers and police work together to expand upon those security gains and to
keep the peace, he added.