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Barack Obama and Me
It was the year 2000 and I was a young hungry reporter in Chicago covering a young hungry state legislator
By Todd Spivak
Published on February 26, 2008 at 2:41pm

It's not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

*
During his seven-year tenure in the Illinois Legislature, Obama wrote an occasional column for the Lakefront Outlook community newspaper where I worked. In 2004, during his U.S. Senate bid, I profiled Obama for the Illinois Times.
During his seven-year tenure in the Illinois Legislature, Obama wrote an occasional column for the Lakefront Outlook community newspaper where I worked. In 2004, during his U.S. Senate bid, I profiled Obama for the Illinois Times.
*
Nick Steinkamp
Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr. was Obama's kingmaker.
Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr. was Obama's kingmaker.

Subject(s):
Barack Obama, Chicago politics, Illinois journalism, U.S. presidential race

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an ******* at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn't yet hit local newsstands.

It's the first time I ever heard him yell, and I'm trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

This is before Obama Girl, before the secret service detail, before he becomes a best-selling author. His book Dreams From My Father has been out of print for years.

I often see Obama smoking cigarettes on brisk Chicago mornings in front of his condominium high-rise along Lake Michigan, or getting his hair buzzed at the corner barbershop on 53rd and Harper in his Hyde Park neighborhood.

This is before he becomes a U.S. senator, before Oprah starts stumping for him, before he positions himself to become the country's first black president.

He is just a rank-and-file state senator in Illinois and I work for a string of small, scrappy newspapers there.
_____________________

The other day, while stuck in traffic on Houston's Southwest Freeway, I was flipping through right-wing rants on AM radio. Dennis Praeger was railing against Michelle Obama for her clumsy comment on being proud of her country for the first time.

Praeger went on to call her husband a blank slate. There's no record to look at, he complained, unless you lived in Barack Obama's old state Senate district.

Well, I lived and worked in that district for three years "” nearly half Obama's tenure in the Illinois Legislature. D-13, the district was called, and it spanned a large swath of the city's poor, black, crime-­ridden South Side.

It was 2000 and I was a young, hungry reporter at the Hyde Park Herald and Lakefront Outlook community newspapers earning $19,000 a year covering politics and crime.

I talked with Obama on a regular basis "” a couple times a month, at least. I'd ask him about his campaign-finance reports, legislation he was sponsoring and various local issues. He wrote an occasional column published in our papers. It ran with a headshot that made him look about 14 years old.

Spinning through my old Rolodex, I see that I had two cell phone numbers for Obama. Both have since been ­disconnected.

I also had cell phone numbers for Jesse Jackson, his son Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., and David Axelrod, who now serves as Obama's senior presidential campaign adviser.

Axelrod, too, had begun his journalism career at the Hyde Park Herald before joining the Chicago Tribune as a political reporter then starting a political consulting firm. Another Hyde Park Herald alum was Seymour Hersh, the legendary investigative reporter who uncovered the My Lai massacre for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal for The New Yorker.

My view of Obama then wasn't all that different from the image he projects now. He was smart, confident, charismatic and liberal. One thing I can say is, I never heard him launch into the preacher-man voice he now employs during speeches. He sounded vanilla, and activists in his mostly black district often chided him for it.

I was 25 and had no problem interviewing big-wig politicians. But I always had to steel my nerves when calling Obama. His intelligence was intimidating, and my hands inevitably shook with sweat.

It was serendipity that I ever came to know Obama at all. Looking back, I think of it as a Forrest Gump moment: History was unfolding and I was at the center of it, clueless. It's a huge bummer to me that I never taped our interviews.

I moved to Chicago from the East Coast after a bad breakup. I had just one year of newspaper experience under my belt, working the courts beat for a small Vermont daily.

I picked Chicago because I had friends there. Plus, it was one of the few American cities left with two competing dailies, upping my chances of landing a gig.

I arrived determined to work for one of the big papers. I once spent an entire day dressed up in my only suit and tie "” the one I wore to my brother's wedding, where I ripped a hole in the knee while dancing with my niece "” and stood, résumé in hand, outside the newsroom at the dumpy old Chicago Sun-Times building.

Columnist Neil Steinberg was gracious enough to accept my folder and even gave me his home number to call later that night. Unimpressed by my clips, Steinberg said most new recruits graduated from top journalism schools such as Northwestern or Columbia "” or their mommies or daddies worked at the paper or knew somebody who did.

His advice: To work in Chicago, you have to leave Chicago. Go prove yourself someplace else, kid.

I had a friend at one of the local journalism schools who let me tag along for a school-sponsored tour of the Chicago Tribune building. After the tour, page-two columnist John Kass told us about how he got picked up by the Tribune while in his early 20s after breaking a big story at a little South Side paper.
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please click on link for rest of story.

Barriers Broken?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/barriers-broken.html
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.



Among those who are bemoaning the election results, one must ask supporters of liberty: given the choices, what would have been a good outcome? We've lived through eight years of what might possibly be the worst executive-driven meltdown of human liberty outside civil or world war in American history, and this is true regarding domestic policy and foreign policy.

A McCain victory would have been perceived at home and abroad as a ratification of the past eight years, and it is hard to imagine a worse course of events than that. The Obama victory symbolizes a well-deserved repudiation of this ghastly experience.

Of course, the Obama victory elicits its own spin, which is also highly dangerous. The main message concerns race. All the headlines blared that a racial barrier had been broken. The subtext here is impossible to miss: heretofore America has been a hopelessly racist country that put up barriers to the advance of people of color.

But why should politics be the standard for what constitutes a barrier or a barrier broken? The ability of individuals in a group to navigate the murky and treacherous waters of electoral politics has no necessary connection to the status of the group as a whole.

A much better indicator concerning the status of any group – racial, religious, sexual, or otherwise – is commerce, which is the real engine that makes society work. And here we see that there are no such barriers in existence. We need only look at the status of black-owned businesses to see that there are more than one million in the United States, generating revenue of some $89 billion per year, which is more than the GDP of 140 countries around the world, and growing (according to most recent data) at a faster pace than all businesses.

Tragically, Obama does not seem to see that expanding this trend is a pathway forward. For him, the answer is the failed politics of redistribution, a pathway that can only exacerbate racial tension. Far from being a healing force in American life, his success at taking from one group to give to another will only increase conflict.

Conflict is the critical word here, for the conflict view of society is what is really behind the hysterical claims that Obama's real contribution is to have broken through barriers. To understand this view, we must examine the implicit social philosophy held by those who write the headlines and put the political spin on all important events.

Lacking any kind of serious training in economics or liberal political philosophy, these people assume a soft-Marxist approach to social observation, believing that all important steps forward grow out of great clashes between intrinsically antagonistic groups.

Step back in history and try to understand how the Marxists came to understand the Industrial Revolution and all subsequent steps forward in economic development. There were ever more people benefiting from economic exchange and investment, and the standards of living of the working class were rising year after year, while the population was living longer and better. But the Marxists refused to see this or understand its meaning. All they could see came from their fixed frame of mind that posited a conflict between capital and labor. All the gains of one came at the expense of the other. If there were rich capitalists living luxuriously it could only be due to their having robbed surplus value from labor. The only way forward was to turn the tables: to expropriate the expropriators.

Now, this old-fashioned mindset is not much on display today, but other versions of the conflict view of society are all around us. There is the view that the relationship between men and women is inherently antagonistic, and the only way to overturn this and push history forward is to unseat the economically dominant group and exalt via state intervention the economically weaker group. (In case you are wondering which is which, the convention asserts that women are the exploited group.)

So it is with religion. The conflict view asserts that only one strain of doctrine can assume the commanding heights, and so all the progress of groups lower on the faith chain depends on unseating others from power. Secular groups can hold this view, believing that religion must be vanquished from the earth, and so too with religious groups that believe secularism must be destroyed.

You can go through the list here: age, ability, education level, class, region – really there is an infinite number of directions you can take this conflict view of society. One of them is race, and this one has been around a very long time and has its roots in America in genuine exploitation as represented by actual physical slavery. And yet under the conflict view, a form of slavery persists in all relations between black and white. They see only exploitation and antagonism while ignoring all contrary evidence. The path to advancement for blacks, in this view, comes only through taking power and wealth from whites, and the surest way to do that is to empower the state.

These are the underlying assumptions behind much of the media celebration of the Obama victory. It stems from the belief that the "tables must turn" – the strong must be made weak and the weak made strong – in order for history to move forward on its path toward some imagined social ideal. Again, evidence of progress that conflicts with this agenda is routinely ignored, which is why you don't often hear about peaceful, productive, commercial associations among blacks and whites at all levels of society.

This is why we hear about "breaking barriers" rather than encouraging opportunity, about policies rather than freedom, about power rather than entrepreneurship. For the media writing about all this, it is the only intellectual model they have in mind. The conflict view of society was taught to them in college and is reinforced daily in the press. Also, unless you have some clear filter in mind, it seems like the conflict view is supported by plenty of evidence, given that the rise of the state has actually generated social antagonism where none should exist.

The workplace is a good example. The legal minefield that has replaced free contract has increased tension. So too with a discriminatory welfare state. It creates the impression that some people are looting others and benefiting from it.

What is the alternative to the conflict view? It is the old liberal view of how the social order works. There is a harmony of interests in society in which people cooperate and exchange without the aid of an outside, all-controlling, leviathan state. Society contains within itself the capacity for self-management. Another way to put this view is that the free society works. Sadly, this view is not held by either the right or the left in our political culture.

To the extent that there is truth in the conflict view of society, it concerns the real issue: that the state always and everywhere exists in an antagonistic relationship to the rest of society. For this reason, the true liberal could find himself loathing the Obama administration as much as he did the Bush administration. As I've said many times, the real problem is not the person; it is the institution.

November 6, 2008

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of Speaking of Liberty.

Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com

Obama simply put is a meglomaniacal marxist.

Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is the son of a Zionist terrorist.

Personal life

Rahm Emanuel (Hebrew: רם עמנואל"Ž) was born in Chicago, Illinois. His first name, Rahm, means "high" or "lofty" in Hebrew[8], while his last name, Emanuel, means "God is with us." His father, the Jerusalem-born Benjamin M. Emanuel, is a pediatrician and former member of the Irgun[9][10] (Irgun Zeva'i Le'ummi), a militant Zionist group treated as a terrorist organization during British rule. His mother, Martha Smulevitz, worked as an X-ray technician and was the daughter of a local union organizer.[2] She became a civil rights activist; she was also once the owner of a Chicago-area rock and roll club.[11] The two met in Chicago in the 1950s.[12] Emanuel's older brother, Ezekiel, is an oncologist and bioethicist, and his brother Ari is a talent agent in Los Angeles who inspired Jeremy Piven's character Ari Gold on the HBO series Entourage.[2] Emanuel himself is the inspiration for the character Josh Lyman on The West Wing.[2] He also has a younger sister named Shoshanna, 14 years his junior.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahm_Emanuel

Irgun (Hebrew: ארגון"Ž; shorthand for HaIrgun HaTzva'i HaLe'umi BeEretz Yisra'el, הארגון הצבאי הלאומי בארץ ישראל, "National Military Organization in the Land of Israel") was a militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948. It was established as a militant offshoot of the earlier and larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah (Hebrew: "The Defense", ×”×”×’× ×”). For secrecy reasons, people often referred to the Irgun, during that time, as Haganah Bet (Hebrew: literally "Defense 'B' " or "Second Defense", ×”×’× ×” ב), or alternatively as Haganah Ha'leumit (×”×”×’× ×” הלאומית) or Ha'ma'amad (המעמד). In present-day Israel, Irgun is commonly referred to as Etzel (אצ"ל), an acronym of the Hebrew initials.

The Irgun was the armed expression of the nascent ideology of Revisionist Zionism founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky. He expressed this ideology as "every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state".[1] Initially, a central part of their efforts included defense against the Arabs who constantly instigated attack on the Jews. |title=Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History |pages=294 |first=Joseph |last=Telushkin |year=1991 |publisher=Harper Collins |isbn=0688085067}} but it increasingly shifted to attacks against the British. Some of the better-known attacks by Irgun were the then British head-quater bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 and the Deir Yassin military action (accomplished together with the Stern Gang) on 9 April 1948. In the West, Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by The New York Times newspaper,[2][3] and by the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry.[4] Irgun attacks prompted a formal declaration from the World Zionist Congress in 1946, which strongly condemned "the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare".[5]

Irgun was a political predecessor to Israel's right-wing Herut (or "Freedom") party, which led to today's Likud party. Likud has led or been part of most Israeli governments since 1977.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun

BONUS believes that racial pride should never trump the character and beliefs of the candidate running. Simply put, if I am an Afrocentrist and a black philanderer, liar and thief is running against an honest Indo, it is my duty to support the Indo. Likewise if I am a proud Indo and a commie socialist lying thief is running against an honest black man, it is my duty to support the honest black man.

So that is why you supported Burnham and Hoyte and now corbin and the "Freedom fighters"?????????????

A picture is more than a thousand words

quote:

Originally posted by BONUS:
BONUS believes that racial pride should never trump the character and beliefs of the candidate running. Simply put, if I am an Afrocentrist and a black philanderer, liar and thief is running against an honest Indo, it is my duty to support the Indo. Likewise if I am a proud Indo and a commie socialist lying thief is running against an honest black man, it is my duty to support the honest black man.

I am extremely happy that an african american is fninally president of the USA. Like many it brought tears my eyes.

However, must admit I am more than a bit apprehensive about Obama's abilities to actually deliver. Obama has no prior experience in this area. He has demonstrated that he is a truly inspirational and charismatic ORATOR thus far.

Memories of another day
By Sharief Khan
TUESDAY November 4, 2008 will rank for me not just as the day that presaged a sea change in the United States wrought by a `skinny man with a funny name'.

Barack Obama

With his searing victory U.S. President-elect Barack Obama, 47, has already carved his name in his nation's history, regardless of how he fares in trying to get it out of its cataclysmic financial and economic crisis and in preserving its ideals of democracy and other founding fundamentals of America.

The hardened cynic I have become as a journalist has often placed me on the fence to watch and chronicle events unfolding around me – some of just passing interest and others of sometimes relative tsunami or earthquake like proportions.


But I couldn't help being deeply moved as I watched with the rest of the world Tuesday as history unfolded before our eyes in a giant of a nation trying to come to terms with itself and stark naked reality.


It was momentous -- at times moving and tender, watching American icons like the Rev. Jessie Jackson and Oprah Winfrey and ordinary people of all colours and races trying to hold back the tears in the awesome wonder of it all.


It was a day and night to remember.

Tuesday morphed for me into more than just a Barack Obama watershed.

I had lunch with someone close to me and then I headed off to the Office of the President for an appointment with President Bharrat Jagdeo.


In the waiting room were diplomats, businessmen, government officials and others with appointments to see the President.


Among them was a boyhood hero of mine and so many thousands of other cricket fans here and around the world – the iconic, legendary Rohan Kanhai, a batsman of no mean order and a former captain of the West Indies cricket team.


He is a little man who often put feared fast bowlers to the sword – most famously by dropping on his backside while hitting them for six. He is also gracious and charming -- a velvet mask concealing the iron armour of a fighter.


I shook his hand; he left and I pondered on little men, including the skinny Black man with a funny name about to cross the threshold of history and shake the bulwark of White America by heading for the White House.


That night on television screens around the world there were the tender and moving moments of tears and other deep emotions.


But then there were vignettes that sharply threw up the pain and agony of it all for some.

I like the BBC for its thorough, professional approach in covering and presenting news and it on Tuesday night, in its usual measured manner, had some Republicans and others squirming and getting all red-faced in the unaccustomed glare they were under from the rest of the world as they went through something akin to labour pains.


When the writing was finally on the wall and the script of the Obama victory was inscribed in words so big that nobody could ignore, reality sunk in and the reflections were deep.


Voter turnout in the U.S. has traditionally been low – but not this time. There were record numbers and the queues were long with millions eager to make their mark and be part of the sea change engulfing the land.


I watched and I remembered October 5, 1992 here – a day the earth also shook on the Guyana political landscape.


It was also a day of long lines of voters of all descriptions waiting patiently for hours to make their mark on history by voting for a new day, a new dawn.


I voted early so that I could get to work early and begin coverage of the first free and fair elections in Guyana in 28 years.


I had voted once before and never bothered again until October 5, 1992 because I knew my ballot did not count in the entrenched fraudulent polls masqueraded as elections.


An official at my polling station saw my hand tremble as I went to get my index finger stained after voting and quietly wondered at my nervousness. I confessed that it was the awesomeness of the moment – finally being able to cast a ballot I was assured would count.

Those are among memories that will never fade and I empathized with the millions of Americans who in a real sense felt they were helping to create history in the U.S. Tuesday.


Dr. Cheddi Jagan cruised to victory on a ticket of national unity on that October day in Guyana in an election supervised and sanctioned by international observer teams led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.


It was also a victory for Dr. Jagan to savour – a little man of giant proportions ousted from government in the 1960s by the machinations of the Kennedy administration in the U.S. and returned to office with the help of a former American President.


Cheddi rose from poor, working class roots in a sugar community in Port Mourant, Berbice, studied in the U.S. before returning home to lead an epic struggle for his nation – an ordinary little man with big dreams that he brought to reality and in so doing etched his name in national and world history.


Obama faces a tough task ahead and Guyana , like the rest of the world, will be watching him closely. His honeymoon in the White House will soon be over and he will have a massive task in walking the talk.


But with the examples of people like Cheddi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jnr., and Mahatma Gandhi before him, he can prove skinny little guys with funny names can also walk tall.

The world awaits his innings at the batting crease.

If Sharief says so is so!

Bonus, you have the right to remain silent and need not explain your self for not supporting Obama. They are millions like you who didn't and that's the Amreican way. Voting is not about making history, it is about issues and policies that matters most. Obama ran on a good platform on those policies and issues and he is now the President of all people including me.

quote:

Originally posted by BLACKBEARD:

However, must admit I am more than a bit apprehensive about Obama's abilities to actually deliver. Obama has no prior experience in this area. He has demonstrated that he is a truly inspirational and charismatic ORATOR thus far.

this is why you had ought not to have voted for him. Oratory skills is one thing, experience another. In addition to lack of experience Obama is a liberal marxist ideologue. Because of this no amount of black pride in me would have allowed me to support him.

Bonus
not to get off the topic, but I see you are acquaintibg yourself with austrian economics.
Good for you.

quote:

Originally posted by Prince Juno:
Bonus, you have the right to remain silent and need not explain your self for not supporting Obama. They are millions like you who didn't and that's the Amreican way. Voting is not about making history, it is about issues and policies that matters most. Obama ran on a good platform on those policies and issues and he is now the President of all people including me.

Bonus has the right to support and vote for any candidate he wants, regardless of colour or creed.

Just like all you indos here have the right to criticize the Indo led government of Guyana...

Bonus,

As a Republican backer since the days of Ronald Reagan (actually, I became a great admirer of Reagan in October 1983 when he invaded Grenada and Forbes Burnham hurriedly called an emergency meeting of big wigs from thePNC and public and civil service at Sophia to express fear that Guyana might be next), I started breaking from John McCain after he picked Sarah Palin.

Though I was growing to like Barack Obama, I stuck with McCain out of loyalty to the Republican Party. So I do understand how you feel, but while I respect your right to disagree with Obama days after the fact he was elected, I still wonder whether you don't think Obama deserves some breathing space given he had to prove himself against nine other Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton, and against McCain.

When Dubya Bush got relected, a British tabloid had a headline: "How can 58 million Americans be so dumb?" And for the remainder of his lame duck tenure, Dubya was the object of ridicule and roastings.

Obama is not even sworn in and he is being roasted? It is now up to Obama to deliver and prove the Bonuses (and myself) wrong or right! I included myself because Obama's resume is actually thin, but if he can convince 62 million Americans he is the real deal, then let's give him some space to prove himself. Or "Can 62 million Americans be this dumb?"

He says he is a unifier and healer, and God knows America needs this more than ever! Let's see what his cabinet will look like and that will give us an idea where he is heading!

Let's end attacking him before he even stumbles (if or when he does).

With the way blacks are lashing out at indos for supporting Obama, the US president elect who happened to be both white and black, there would be no unity.

56 million americans didn't vote for Obama. 99% white. Are you going to hate them too?