The conservative blogosphere couldn’t stop talking about it for months. Flag pin, flag pin, flag pin, flag pin, flag pin.

So surely Michelle Malkin, Pamela Gellar, FOX News and the gang will be rolling out their front-page mockery of Mitt Romney’s patriotism any day now. I mean, just look at
Mitt Romney in West Virginia:

Any day now… waiting for it…

The Boston Globe writes that, “the campaign’s internal conversations on the issue focus instead on how to energize gay and lesbian voters in spite of Obama’s lack of clarity on the issue.”

“Lack of clarity” is a generous term for what President Obama is doing to gays and lesbians. Obama is allowing discrimination to go on, and is refusing to speak out against it. Instead, Obama is allowing his previous statements of opposition to marriage equality for lesbians and gays to stand.

Obama won’t even speak on the issue of marriage equality, but his aides expect GLBT voters to believe that he secretly supports their right to marriage equality, and is merely biding his time before he actually does anything about it because he’s afraid of what people will say. What we know of Obama makes it difficult to trust his aides in this suggestion. In the 2008 presidential election, we were told by Obama’s aides that many of the odious policies he embraced on the campaign trail were temporary feints, and Obama would reverse course and do the right thing once he was elected. Obama didn’t change after the election. He went ahead and really did those nasty things he said he’d do if he was elected.

What’s more, Obama added on some new rotten policies after he became President. The campaign promises Barack Obama kept were the ones he made to conservatives. The campaign promises he broke were the ones he made to liberals. The idea that Barack Obama is going to turn around and become a different kind of President if he’s re-elected is not credible.

The time for Barack Obama to support marriage equality is now, not after the 2012 election. Obama keeps on trying to placate gays and lesbians, who are upset that he’s helping to deny them their legal equality, by saying that his ideas are “evolving”. So evolve, already, Obama, or get off the pot! You either support marriage equality or you don’t – and right now, Barack Obama does not support marriage equality.

Barack Obama expects gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender Americans to believe that he’s their friend, in secret. Obama just doesn’t want to be seen in public with them, and he won’t stick out his neck to help them. Obama wants gays and lesbians to hush up, and sends his aides out to make promises that they’ll be rewarded, if they just disappear.

What kind of friend is that?

Well, think again.

According to federal law, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AOUSC) is supposed to report on the uses of the Patriot Act power for the government to engage in “sneak and peek” searches of Americans’ homes, offices, and other personal property without letting the subject of the search know about it.

Did you think that under President Barack Obama these searches would decline?
Did you think that this Patriot Act power was being used in order to stop terrorism?

Thanks to WTAE of Pittsburgh for digging up these annual reports (FY 2007 | FY 2008 | FY 2009 | FY 2010), which show very clearly that under Barack Obama’s administration the use of sneak-and-peek powers have accelerated, not declined, and which also show very clearly that the overwhelming majority of the time, sneak-and-peek Patriot Act powers are used for the Drug War. Less than 1% of Patriot Act sneak-and-peeks are actually used to try and find terrorists.

No thanks are due to the administration of President Barack Obama, who promised the nation he’d be a leader in transparency but which has not published these reports for public view, not even on the web page of the very Administrative Office of the United States Courts that produces the report. No thanks are due to the House of Representatives, which receives the report every year but does not publish it. No thanks are due to the U.S. Senate, which receives the report every year but does not publish it. They’d rather you didn’t know the truth these reports tell.

“Did you know that 99% of American voters have NO say in who is picked to run for president on the party tickets? Unless you live in Iowa or New Hampshire, you’re left out in the cold. And everyone knows, these two races (and how filled the campaign coffers are) dictates what happens in the rest of the country.”

and this one:

In the past, by the time Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina voted, it was over — and 99% of the country has been shut out.

This was supposed to stand in contrast this to the Unity08 would-be “convention,” at which 10 million people were supposed to gather online and vote for a nominee.

Problem was:

1) Unity08 turned out to be a stalking horse for a Draft Michael Bloomberg campaign, not a neutral entity. Unity08 registered the web domain draftmichaelbloomberg.com back in July 2007. The Draft Michael Bloomberg Committee had the same mailing address as Unity08, the leaders of the two efforts were the same, and on top of that Unity08 gave the Draft Bloomberg Committee a contribution.

2) The trend that Unity08 referred to in its promotional materials doesn’t exist. Rather, presidential nominations are littered with Iowa and New Hampshire victors who didn’t get their party’s nomination. In 2000, John McCain won New Hampshire. He didn’t win the nomination, and the nomination battle between Bush and McCain lasted past Iowa and New Hampshire. In 2008, Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire. She didn’t win the nomination, and the nomination battle between Clinton and Obama lasted so darned long that by the end people were complaining about the number of contests they had to pay attention to. Only 4 out of the 7 New Hampshire Democratic victors in the past thirty years became the eventual nominee. Only 3 out of the 5 New Hampshire Republican victors in the past twenty years became the eventual nominee. These early contests are not a guarantee of sealing the deal.

When Republican and Democratic parties changed the primary schedule around to create a number of early contests, negating Unity08′s stated reasons for attempting its own presidential bid, what did Unity08 do? Change its reason, of course. Unity08 Chief Douglas Bailey explained the new reason for Unity08 to run its own candidate: too many early contests:

“I think, frankly, that the American public is just fed up with the game-playing of both political parties, and this is just another example of it. How stupid can you get? You don’t even have a very good sense of what the issues will be in the (general) election when you pick the nominee this early. This just feeds the public frustration.”

Push to the Present: As Americans Elect, Unity08 Brings Up Big Bad Iowa & New Hampshire All Over Again
Unity08 failed to attract enough supporters to do much of anything in 2008. But it morphed itself into a new entity named Americans Elect, sharing the old posh offices and many of the old posh leaders of Unity08 and pushing forward its goal of running a privatized online-only presidential nomination into the new 2012 election season. This time, Unity08 Americans Elect doesn’t need big numbers of supporters — it has a small number of very big donors to fund its operations, the names of which it keeps a tight secret. But oddly enough, Americans Elect is issuing communications as if it has the advantage of a large number of supporters, even as evidence of broad support fails to materialize.

Just like its direct predecessor, Americans Elect says in a January 16 2012 press release that we should participate in its privatized presidential nomination because it’s not right that nearly four hundred thousand Iowa and New Hampshire voters bully their way into picking the president for the rest of us:

After Only 369,448 Votes, Half of the Presidential Field is Gone

Jon Huntsman is leaving the GOP primary race, after fewer than 400,000 Americans have had a chance to cast a vote. And Huntsman isn’t the first:

Abandoned bids for GOP nomination before a single vote was cast: CEO Herman Cain, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, Gov. Gary Johnson, Gov. Tim Pawlenty

After 122,225 voted in the Iowa caucus: Rep. Michelle Bachmann

After 247,223 voted in the New Hampshire primary: Gov. Jon Huntsman

Still standing: Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Barack Obama, Rep. Ron Paul, Gov. Rick Perry, Gov. Mitt Romney, Sen. Rick Santorum

Is this really the best way to pick a president? Are you ready to settle?

The stats are a bit fudgy here: lots of presidential contenders always drop by the wayside before the first caucus or primary because they can’t attract supporters, just like the five contenders listed here. Heck, Thaddeus McCotter never really ever started his presidential campaign, at least not seriously. If you count just the presidential contenders who were still competing when the Iowa and New Hampshire contests started in 2012, a majority were still in the race after voting was done in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina.

On the 17th of January 2012, Americans Elect sent a similar message by e-mail:

Wait, is that it?

Only two states have cast their primary votes and already the parties and the media are sending us a message: like ‘em or not, these are your choices.

But actual events have intervened to once again trample on Americans Elect’s narrative. It turns out that in the first three contests for the Republican nomination, a different politician has won each contest. Iowa went to Rick Santorum, New Hampshire went to Mitt Romney, and South Carolina went for Newt Gingrich. The race is actually wide open, a message that party voters and the media are actually communicating pretty clearly.

Participation is Americans Elect’s very own problem.
As for the numbers, the 369,448 votes in Republican elections have gone up to 970,401 with the addition of 600,953 voters in South Carolina. That’s for the less than ten candidates in contention for the Republican nomination. Meanwhile, the number of people tracking the 10 most popular politicians in the Americans Elect system…

1st place: Ron Paul
2nd place: Barack Obama
3rd place: Jon Huntsman
4th place: Bernie Sanders
5th place: Buddy Roemer
6th place: Gary Johnson
7th place: Dennis Kucinich
8th place: Al Franken
9th place: Mitt Romney
10th place: Newt Gingrich

… adds up to just 31,218. That’s just 3.2% of the number of people who’ve participated in the Republican process so far. Over the last five days, Americans Elect has been adding 235 new tracks a day. That’s nice, but at that rate it will take eleven years for Americans Elect tracking numbers to make it up to the level of participation reached in the Republican nomination race so far. If you want to identify a process that’s generating low numbers in participation, Americans Elect would be the process to pick on.

As the number of people participating in the presidential nominating process continues to grow, don’t be surprised to see Americans Elect follow the path that it did as Unity08, ignoring the fact that its old reason for being turned out to be false, then plowing right on, fashioning some new reason that fits the moment.

I’m becoming less convinced as the days roll on that the American people will actually swallow whatever that new message might be. After all, to sell a presidential nomination process you have to actually have a presidential nomination process to sell. Americans Elect has blown 2 months and 16 days past the original date when Americans would be able to start drafting candidates to appear on the ballot for Americans Elect. The first ballot in the nominating process is just 2 months and 26 days from now, and still, as it has for 3 months now, Americans Elect reports that its system will be up and running “very soon.” How can a real, viable grassroots movement to draft a presidential candidate start up, organize itself and succeed on the ballot in just 2 months and 26 days — or in 2 months and 25 days come tomorrow? A real, viable grassroots movement can’t. With Americans Elect’s delays, only big money will be able to pull off such an effort now. Whatever legitimacy Americans Elect might have earned with a significant campaign period and openness about its funding seems impossible now. I expect what we’ll see now is a long, variably messy implosion.

The lesson that I don’t expect Americans Elect leaders to absorb: you can have gobs and gobs of secret dollars from hedge fund pals, and you get your public relations people to book you on all the right talk shows, but if you don’t actually engage with and really empower the American people, you’ll be only a paper moon flying over a cardboard sea.

We will lead by having the highest standards, by setting an example of human rights and civil rights, due process and rule of law, which is why I will close Guantanamo. I will restore habeas corpus. And we will end torture and rendition because you will have elected a president who has taught the Constitution and believes in the Constitution and will obey the Constitution of the United States of America.

All these things are possible if you are ready for change. But you can’t just sit back and wait for it. You’ve got to want it. You’ve got to work for it. You’ve got to go out and vote for it. There are people who are now saying, “Well, Obama may talk a good game, but he hasn’t been in Washington long enough.” That’s what they’ll tell you. And I’ve got to remind them, to remind them that I know they want to season and stew me a little while longer, boil all the hope out of me, but the American people understand we don’t need the same old folks doing the same old things, playing the same old games over and over again. We need something different.

President Barack Obama, Updated for 2012:

We will lead by having the highest standards, by setting an example of human rights and civil rights, due process and rule of law, which is why I will close Guantanamo I will not close Guantanamo. I will restore habeas corpus I will not restore habeas corpus. And we will end torture put the power-drill interrogator in charge of procedural compliance and rendition while rendition will continue because you will have elected a president who has taught the Constitution and believes in the Constitution and will obey the Constitution of the United States of America.

All these things are possible if you are ready for change. But you can’t just sit back and wait for it. You’ve got to want it. You’ve got to work for it. You’ve got to go out and vote for it. There are people who are now saying, “Well, Obama may talk a good game, but he hasn’t been in Washington long enough.” That’s what they’ll tell you. And I’ve got to remind them, to remind them that I know they want to season and stew me a little while longer, boil all the hope out of me, but the American people understand we don’t need the same old folks doing the same old things, playing the same old games over and over again. We need something different.

All these things are not going to happen. Never mind.

That’s often not to the benefit of Barack Obama, who as President has taken the support of progressive Americans for granted. Rocky Anderson is more than happy to point out the many ways in which Obama has proven to be a terrible fit with Democratic voters’ political ideals.

In a recent interview with Wikinews reporter William Saturn, Rocky Anderson brought a harsh and clear focus on Barack Obama’s terrible record on civil liberties and the rule of law. Anderson told Saturn:

“He never stood up against torture or the other human rights abuses that were occurring during that time. He promised us before he received the Democratic nomination that he would join the filibuster in opposition to Congress providing retroactive immunity for the telecom companies for their illegal participation in the Bush surveillance program. And by the way, not all the telecom companies participated in that, they recognized that it was illegal so it wasn’t a matter of people were fooled about whether it was legal or not. But for those telecom companies that did violate the law, they should have been held accountable. But in the classic American way, the corrupt way that has developed in our system of government, three telecom companies spend some twelve million dollars on lobbyists during the course of three months they put on the press, Congress passed legislation providing for the retroactive immunity and among those voting for the immunity, now after he received the Democratic nomination was then-Senator Obama, completely betraying those that he had promised to join the filibuster. But it was just a sign of things to come, they always talked about the rule of law, he has greater contempt for the rule of law, I think, than George W. Bush. He comes into office, says, ‘oh, we’re going to look forward, not backwards’ in terms of holding accountable war criminals? And those were criminals not only under international law, the Geneva Convention, the Convention Against Torture, but under our own laws passed by Congress: War Crimes Act of 1996 and the federal torture statute. Clearly, an illegal act, and he says, lets just look forward, not backwards.’”

This statement brings back memories for me. Rocky Anderson reminds me that Obama’s troubling disregard for America’s constitutional rights was made quite clear during the 2008 presidential election. We spent a great deal of time here at Irregular Times during the summer and autumn of 2008 discussing Barack Obama’s support for the terrible FISA Amendments Act – a law that gave immunity to telecommunications corporations for breaking federal law by providing government spies with information about millions of Americans’ private communications data.

During the 2008 presidential election, Democratic apologists depicted Obama’s support for Big Brother government spying in the form of the FISA Amendments Act as a temporary aberration, a compromise made necessary by the election. They promised that, after Obama became President, he would reform the FISA Amendments Act. That didn’t happen. It turned out that Obama’s vote for the FISA Amendments Act was just a precursor of more compromises of constitutional rights to come.

Barack Obama has not brought the change that voters were looking for in 2008. He won’t bring us that change if he’s re-elected in 2012, either. Obama has continued and expanded George W. Bush’s attack on the Constitution, and there’s no reason to believe that he’s going to change his ways.

If you’re looking for real change, help Rocky Anderson get on the ballot in the coming year’s presidential election.

Now, during the 2012 presidential campaign, Bill McKibben has this to say about President Obama’s environmental policies: “It stinks. I don’t think you could conceive a more elaborate way to disrespect not just the environmental community but also Occupy Wall Street, because this is simply a reminder of the way that corporate lobbyists dominate our politics. Forget ‘Hope and Change’ — it’s like they want their new slogan to be ‘Business as Usual’.”

McKibben was specifically responding to the news that Obama has decided to hire Broderick Johnson, a lobbyist who worked trying to help TransCanada Corporation push through a special exemption from environmental regulations for the XL pipeline proposed to take fossil fuels from the Alberta tar sands, across the Ogllala Aquifer, all the way down to Texas. Johnson will become a major advisor on the Obama 2012 re-election campaign.

As McKibben explained, it’s not just environmentalists who are outraged at Obama’s close new relationship with Broderick Johnson. Occupy Wall Street protesters may also be interested in the fact that Johnson served Bank of America as a lobbyist not long before before the Wall Street bailout.

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20. false pregnancy test ]]> http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2011/06/21/obama-states-futon-sale-mccain-states-toddler-cowboy-boots/feed/ 0 http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2011/05/17/first-stop-chinatown-next-stop-the-white-house/ http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2011/05/17/first-stop-chinatown-next-stop-the-white-house/#comments Tue, 17 May 2011 13:32:49 +0000 Jim Cook http://irregulartimes.com/?p=27311 read more]]> In 2008, Christopher Popham Smith ran for President of the United States under the auspices of his self-declared One America Party, and is promoting himself again to help “conservatives gain ground”, “to stop the liberals, progressives, socialists, communists”, and to “not let the far left, progressive and socialistic element of this country destroy our moral, social, religious and economic way of life.”

Fiercely proud of a proper blood lineage he traces back to the Mayflower and Queen Elizabeth’s court, Popham Smith dropped by Irregular Times last night to defend the nonsense notion that in two decades there will be enough Muslims in to elect their very own President of the United States. His explanation is that they’ll take over this country by starting in neighborhoods:

We are thinking that for the past 35 years, due to lax immigration laws and political correctness, there are many places in Europe that are predominantly Muslim, mostly ghetto-like communities. The Muslim populations have exploded in Europe, and in a scant few years, they will indeed be in a position to vote into office their own kind at the local and state levels. In twenty years, as the Muslim population of the U.S. grows, we too will be seeing Islamists elected to office more frequently. After all, there is a Muslim Congressman, and an appointee in the White House right now. Be very careful America. The European Muslim phenomenon will be here soon enough for your children and grandchildren to witness.
GOOD LUCK, AMERICA.

There are actually two Muslim members of Congress out of the 535 currently seated, less than is proportional to their 0.6% share of the U.S. population. But who’s counting? Popham Smith is counting, and he’s counted…

over 119,000 radical Muslim men and women throughout the United States, just waiting for the word to come down – to attack our cities and reduce our economy, possibly back to the 1950’s. We do not have the resources or manpower to address this dilemma. Out of the 119,000 only 12 have been deported!

And really, who wants to watch Leave It To Beaver reruns again? Or (I shudder) Father Knows Best?

But back to domination from ghetto: you know, that’s just how the Chinese and Koreans started off. They all aggregated in ghetto-like communities, and they elected local and state representatives, and now as you’re aware the Chinese and Koreans run everything in this country. The Jews also did that, and now they run everything too. Also, the Italians and Irish, Catholics hid sneakily among them, running all over the place, running out of their neighborhoods to live among us, running, running, running things, running everything. The blacks and the browns from the slave quarters and the barrios, the reds from the reservations. All of them starting off in segregated communities. All of them voting, fingering their social security cards like non-Protestant strings of prayer beads, touching the ballot with their roughened hands. None of them from Elizabeth’s court. None descended from the Mayflower. All of them running America.

But it’s harder to understand how President Obama could have just stumbled inadvertently into the establishment of an entirely new series of secret jails in which people are being held indefinitely, incommunicado and without charges. I mean, heck, the military has their gulags set up so that the President personally approves the indefinite detention of some of these people. He can’t say he wasn’t aware of all this.

I know, it’s hard to accept that Barack Obama could be turning his back on his promises to the American people. I mean, I personally saw him lifting his chin to gaze over America’s horizon on the campaign trail three years ago. You could see the dawning rays of a new tomorrow reflected in his eyes. They were kind of a mix of orange and goldish. But how could Mr. Obama’s aides have misheard this one? There’s really not much that rhymes with “Open up a new indefinite detention system,” except “Open up that ewe’s intestinal digestive system,” and Barack Obama is not trained as a veterinarian.