Obama Thanksgiving address: Calls to unite behind Whitehouse, doesn’t thank God
by Christopher Bedford
November 23, 2012
During his fourth Thanksgiving presidential address, President Barack Obama referenced the recent, long and bruising campaign season, urged the country to unite behind his administration and, for the fourth year running, neglected to offer verbal thanks to God.
“As a nation, we’ve just emerged from a campaign season that was passionate, noisy, and vital to our democracy,” Obama said. “But it also required us to make choices – and sometimes those choices led us to focus on what sets us apart instead of what ties us together; on what candidate we support instead of what country we belong to.”
“Thanksgiving,” he continued, “is a chance to put it all in perspective – to remember that, despite our differences, we are, and always will be, Americans first and foremost.”
The president’s call to unite behind his administration follows a bitter election, in which his opponent, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, won independents 50 to 45 percent, and whites 59 to 39 percent.
At the same time, while Democrats made gains in both the House and the Senate, the GOP held control of Congress. Speaker of the House John Boehner has since indicated that he is willing to work with the president, especially regarding the Jan. 1, 2013 fiscal cliff, when a combination of draconian spending cuts and massive tax hikes will hit the sluggish U.S. economy.
Additionally, for the fourth year in a row, the president did not explicitly thank God, raising the ire of conservatives.
“Today we give thanks for blessings that are all too rare in this world,” Obama said. “The ability to spend time with the ones we love; to say what we want; to worship as we please; to know that there are brave men and women defending our freedom around the globe; and to look our children in the eye and tell them that, here in America, no dream is too big if they’re willing to work for it.”
The president’s mention of the freedom “to worship as we please” could be seen as a challenge to conservatives and the Catholic Church, both of which have accused his administration of waging a war on religious freedom. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — an organization that has often angered conservative Catholics for its left-wing rhetoric — held a week of Masses, culminating in a Wednesday afternoon, July 4 Mass at the National Basilica, where 5,000 Catholics overflowed the 3,500-seat basilica.
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BREITBART
Rush Limbaugh: GOP Consultants Get Rich 'No Matter Who Wins Or Loses'
by Tony Lee
November 24, 2012
Rush Limbaugh last week blistered Republican establishment consultants like Mike Murphy and Steve Schmidt for getting "rich no matter who wins or loses" and enhancing their profiles with the mainstream media and the permanent political class by publicly denigrating conservatives.
Murphy and Schmidt have torn into Limbaugh after the election as being "poisonous" but, as Limbaugh said, these establishment consultants are really attacking conservative voters and a movement they have loathed, never understood, and been ashamed of in their elitist social circles.
Pat Caddell has also railed against this Republican "Consultant-Lobbyist-Establishment" complex for not ever putting the candidate's interests ahead of their own.
Limbaugh quoted establishment Republican consulted Mike Murphy, who said:
The biggest problem that Romney had was the Republican primary. That's what's driving the Republican brand right now to a disaster, and we've got to get, kind of, a party view of America that's not right out of Rush Limbaugh's dream journal.Rush asked, "Did not Murphy get the candidate he wanted?"
"We need to get rid of conservatism, is what is he's saying," Limbaugh said. "We need to get rid of all these people shouting stupid conservative stuff."
He then quoted failed Republican consultant Steve Schmidt:
We would have been much better off running against the real President Obama as opposed to the sinister pretend President Obama. And the total lack of credibility with some of this stuff, I think is just absolutely repellent to the middle of the electorate. And then when you look at the demographics, who is Rush Limbaugh talking to? He is talking to a demographic that's white, 65 plus, and rural. It's not what the country looks like anymore. So you have these talk radio hosts making millions and millions and millions of dollars a year driving a message of complete and total ludicrous nonsense into the electorate, a lot of it poisonous.Schmidt mismanaged the McCain 2008 presidential campaign by suspending McCain's campaign during the financial crisis and then tried to rewrite history afterward in order to falsely blame everyone -- especially Sarah Palin -- for McCain's loss, except himself.
Limbaugh then railed against Schmidt's failed record as a consultant for moderate candidates:
Steve Schmidt, in addition to running the losing campaign of John McCain, Steve Schmidt managed the losing campaign for Kentucky Attorney General Will T. Scott. Schmidt also ran California state Senator Tim Leslie's unsuccessful race for lieutenant governor of California. Steve Schmidt was the communications director for California State Treasurer Matt Fong's unsuccessful campaign to unseat Barbara Boxer, and in 1999 he was the communications director for Lamar Alexander's unsuccessful presidential run. I don't know if there are any victories in there. This is just what I have found. We know Schmidt knows how to lose and we know that Murphy knows how to lose. And so it's quite natural to blame somebody else.Limbaugh said Murphy spent a hundred million dollars to run Meg Whitman's failed campaign for governor of California in 2012. And yet, Limbaugh said these consultants continue to push "these squishy candidates" because it enables to them make money while also being liked by the mainstream media.
According to Limbaugh, these moderate consultants "go to every Republican candidate and they say, 'I'm the guy that can get you the independents. I'm the guy who can run your campaign and get you the moderates so that you will win.' And they do not win. They lose."
What is worse, even if such candidates were to ever win an election, Limbaugh said they would be "disasters:"
"They end up with these candidates that have no chance of winning, and even if they would win, they would be disasters because they're Democrat-lite, and then after they lose and lose and lose, what do they do? Blame a guy on the radio," Limbaugh said. "They think they have the strategy, they have the blueprint, they know how to win, though none of them ever do. But then I come along, and I get the public so riled up that I end up getting people to vote in ways against what the strategists have convinced their candidates they can make happen. So it's my fault."
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Minorities Disproportionately Worse Off Under Obama
by Rachel Alexander
November 25, 2012
It is puzzling that so many minorities voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney considering how disproportionately they have suffered economically during Obama's presidency. Black unemployment under Obama increased at a higher pace than whites, from 12.7% to 14.1%, ending at almost twice the unemployment rate of whites. Now, one out of every seven blacks is unemployed. White unemployment barely increased under Obama, from 7.1% to 7.4%.
Blacks' median income has fallen 11.1% under Obama, more than twice as much as whites. The disparity in wealth between whites and blacks nearly doubled during Obama's tenure. According to CNN, the median net worth of the average white person is now 22 times as much as the the average black person's wealth, $110,729 to $4,995. The disparity between white and Hispanic wealth increased to a 15 to 1 ratio.
Despite these facts, a recent Pew survey found that the number of blacks who thought they were better off now than they were five years earlier almost doubled since 2007. Minorities put Obama over the top in the election. More Latinos voted for Obama in 2012 than in 2008.
It's not that Obama has deliberately targeted minorities. It's that his redistributionist schemes disproportionately hurt minorities more than whites. In part, this is because the net worth of minorities tends to be located morethan whites in home equity. Minorities lost much of that equity when the housing bubble burst. Last year, foreclosure rates for blacks were almost twice as high as for whites, 9.8% versus 5.0% for whites.
The Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver (D-MO), admits Obama is getting special treatment due to his race, "With 14% unemployment, if we had a white president we'd be marching around the White House. The president knows we are going to act in deference to him in a way we wouldn't to someone white." Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) goes even further, explaining that her black constituents don't want their leadership to criticize Obama, “If we go after the president too hard, you're going after us,” she told her constituency.
Obama essentially gets a free pass from black voters due to one-half of his skin color, even though he has made them worse off. Why is this? It could be because they perceive that he has helped them in his ground-breaking role as the first black man to be president. Yet how valid is this? Racial segregation ended approximately 45 years ago. Minorities are now represented in every echelon of American society, from scientists to CEOs to actors and members of Congress.
Perhaps the real answer to this paradox is that Obama has artificially created a reason for minorities to like him. Obama has stoked the racial divide since taking office in order to make minorities think racism is prevalent, and that he is speaking out about it because he cares. The truth is the opposite. Obama goes out of his way to strategically create and heighten racial controversies. After Hispanic George Zimmerman shot 17-year old black Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012, Obama could have given a speech to the country assuring Americans that the shooting was not likely a result of racism, and if it was, it was an isolated incident that should be used to heal race relations.
Instead, Obama had Attorney General Eric Holder deliver a public statement on April 11, 2012 to the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network before many of the facts had come out and before the prosecution had commenced. He said, “Many of you are greatly — and rightly — concerned about the recent shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a young man whose future has been lost to the ages. If we find evidence of a potential federal criminal civil rights crime, we will take appropriate action, and at every step, the facts and law will guide us forward.”
A month after the shooting, Obama heightened racial tensions even more, saying during an appearance in the Rose Garden, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." Considering it has never been clear who was the real victim in the shooting, for Obama to take sides and allude to Martin being a part of his own family sent a strong message to both blacks and whites – blacks should defend blacks against whites, even if they might be guilty.
After black Harvard law professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested for breaking into his own house after being locked out, Obama told reporters that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly” in arresting Gates. The police reported a different version of events than the account from Gates, stating that Gates refused to speak to police when they asked what he was doing, and initially refused to even provide identification. Obama should have avoided saying anything about the incident, or said something to bring people together instead of blaming the police. Even the liberal New York Times admitted that Obama's response “represented an extraordinary plunge by a president into a local law-enforcement dispute.“
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