Obama for President 2008

“An Indie rock group drew 1/7 of the city's population? You don't see the humor? It has to be satire.”

“Call me crazy, but probably the city isn't gated and allows people from other cities??”

“I think the big appeal was the glorious beautiful day in Portland (supposedly quite rare) combined with a popular presidential candidate and a Local band that is growing in popularity around the country (my son's care worker is a fan)

someone probably posted this already but....
“Free Concert by Popular Band Preceded Obama�s Big Rally

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/robert-knight/2008/05/20/free-concert-popular-band-preceded-obama-s-big-rally”
Nonconformist
12:25:10 PM
5/21/08

The band is called The Decembrist. They are from Portland. I thought these two comment posts from that story were interesting ...

these Decemberists are a bit out there
May 21, 2008 - 08:54 ET by chumpo

according to wikipedia (fwiw) , they often open concerts with the Soviet National Anthem. check out a youtube clip of the soviet anthem playing at one of their concerts.

a further youtube search (search terms "decemberists obama") includes the frontman's obama endorsement lamenting 'the bourgeosie'--you know that annoying middle class.

did obama know the loony nature of this band? or was a big crowd photo op more important?

and this one

Decemberists use Soviet anthem
May 21, 2008 - 10:55 ET by Robert Knight

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Here are the lyrics, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics,
Great Russia has welded forever to stand.
Created in struggle by will of the people,
United and mighty, our Soviet land!CHORUS:Sing to the Fatherland, home of the free, Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong. O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people, To Communism's triumph lead us on! 2.
Through tempests the sunrays of freedom have cheered us,
Along the new path where great Lenin did lead.
To a righteous cause he raised up the peoples,
Inspired them to labour and valourous deed.CHORUS 3.
In the victory of Communism's deathless ideal,
We see the future of our dear land.
And to her fluttering scarlet banner,
Selflessly true we always shall stand!
last edited: 5/22/08 5:03:24 AM”

“Wingnuts are so cute when they get desperate.”

“Obama Campaign Workers Display Che Guevara Flag!!! Now this!! Sir you are in denial.”

“Do you not find it amusing that Obama opening act plays the Soviet National Anthem at their concerts, has a lead member that refers to the majority of American's as "the bourgeosie'" and named there band after an attempted communist revolution.”

“Yes I do.

From Billboard: Indie rock titans the Decemberists are gearing up for a spring trek that will hit 1,500- to 3,000-capacity venues across the United States. The outing follows the success of the act's Capitol debut, "The Crane Wife," which has sold 151,000 copies in the United States since its October release, according to Nielsen SoundScan.


So they go from drawing 1,500 - 3,000 to 75,000? Half of their fans (based on record sales) made their way to Oregon to see them?

You guys rock!”

“Reverend Truth V Wicked are you a admitted communist?”

“So you instead assume Obama's crowd suddenly exploded in number on it's own? You rock! lol”

“Yah! youtube.com/watch?v=-YT4UUVzxG8
last edited: 5/22/08 5:22:15 AM”

“LMAO!! N square minus one.”

“The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming!!!

Dig up your weapons and hide under you beds!!”

“I don't care which of them drew the crowd, I just think its amazing that a presidential candidate could have an opening act that is nostalgic for dead communist ideals and the media totally ignore, 1) that they even were at the Rally, and 2) that they sing communist lyrics.

No other politician gets a complete pass on their whacked out supporters the way Obama does.”

“No other politician gets a complete pass on their whacked out supporters the way Obama does.�
hyway
5:49:49 AM
5/22/08

witness !!!!”

“Yah! I'd look good under a ridgerestwith my slingshot.”

“Wow, the country is crumbling and you guys are having fantasy delusions that Obama is some sort of Communist looking to apply subversive techniques to the American electorate. Amazing. This is why the Republican party is going down in flames: no sense of priorities.”

“The tall skinny dude has changed into a fitted suit, unlike the that elderly tent dweller that's still telling Grand Canyon snake tales over and over and...”

“I have never said that Obama was a communist. I said many of his supporters are communist, racists and many other things that he will have to appease if he is elected.”

“So, I should vote for the POW that has been a POC (C=Congress) ever since?”

“Time for a major third party to get started up.”

“Wow, the country is crumbling
roseymonster
11:10:11 AM
5/22/08



”

“yes, because Obama has the potential to do more harm to the US than McCain does.”

“Well aren't you just the Nostradamus of the second, hyway.”

“Actually, Liberation Theology, of which Obaba has committed himself to, DOES embrace Marxist/Communist theology.”

“2008-1865= 145 years, yes, 145 years.”

“I didn't realize the civil war was about communism.”

“Nothing new you communist have been here for years.”
minish223
6:42:15 AM
5/22/08

That's what the K.K.K. has been saying for years.”

“here we are talking about an actual case of communist thinkers supporting a candidate and you throw out generalities. Name one time when a consservative politician had a KKK supporter that the media didn't perform a hack job on. heck, just look at what happened to Ron Paul. Obama gets a pass by the media on his communist supporters, that is a fact that is beyond dispute.”

“Hyway, did it ever occur to you that maybe no one gives a #&%!$?”

“It has occurred to me that no one in the media gives a #&%!$.”

“Too many commies , not enough Bushs.”

“The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States. For approximately the first half of the 20th Century it was the largest and most widely influential communist party in the country, and played a defining role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, originating or helping to originate most of the country's major industrial unions (which would later cleanse themselves of communists with the Smith Act) and pursuing intense anti-racist activity in workplaces and city communities throughout this first part of its existence. Simultaneously the CPUSA survived the Palmer Raids, the first Red Scare, and many similar attempts at suppression of communist activity by the Government of the United States through the end of World War II.

By the 1950s, however, the combined effects of the second Red Scare, McCarthyism, the Secret Speech, and the Cold War began to break apart the party's internal structure and confidence.[citation needed] Revelations that the CPUSA had become heavily involved in recruitment and espionage activities for the Soviet KGB and GRU also contributed heavily to government prosecution efforts, because it cast the Party not only as subversive, but also as a "foreign" agent. Members who did not end up in prison for party activities tended either to disappear quietly from its ranks or to adopt more moderate political positions that were at odds with the CPUSA's party line.

This pattern meant that the CPUSA had, by the end of that decade, effectively been eliminated as a revolutionary opposition force; it had transformed its militant revolutionary line into a more evolutionary one, partly as self-defense from persecution but also echoing "peaceful coexistence". By the early 1960s this conciliatory shift led to dozens of angry breakaways by more militant CP members who, as the New Left, continued to follow the idea of armed class war and generally turned to Mao Zedong for inspiration. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 led to further disillusionment and defections.

Although still proclaiming themselves advocates of a socialist revolution, the party today continues to call for a "peaceful transition to socialism" in the U.S. "wherever possible." The party's constitution makes "advocacy of� force and violence or terrorism" a reason for expulsion from the party.[1]

The major leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement were very careful to keep communists at arm's length for fear of also being branded communist, and the peace movement and the New Left also continued their rejections of the CPUSA for what they saw as the party's bureaucratic rigidity and for its steadfastly close association with the Soviet Union.

With continued erosion of what little mass support remained, in the late 1980s the party finally became estranged even from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself. Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika was unpopular with the CPUSA, leading to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union cutting off its support of the CPUSA in 1989.[citation needed] The CPUSA's 1991 convention was consumed by whether the collapse of the Soviet Union should mean that the Party reject Leninism, and after the Party majority reasserted its classic Marxist-Leninist line, the faction urging social democracy left and established itself as the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

The CPUSA has never regained the influence it wielded before the McCarthy period and no longer espouses the ideology of its earlier days. However, it continues to exist as an organization under the leadership of Sam Webb, who asserts that the number of registered members is over 15,000.[1] The CPUSA is based in New York City, its newspaper is the People's Weekly World, and its monthly magazine is Political Affairs Magazine. The Party's stated goal is to achieve a free, prosperous, and peaceful society free of racism, sexism, homophobia, and exploitation, in which all people have the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential. Members from Gus Hall's period still remain within the party's ranks. It is heavily believed that the party has been gaining some social acceptance after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990's, mainly because the party was no longer being branded as a "Soviet"-run party.”

“In his biography of Barack Obama, David Mendell writes about Obama's life as a "secret smoker" and how he "went to great lengths to conceal the habit." But what about Obama's secret political life? It turns out that Obama's childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist.

In his books, Obama admits attending "socialist conferences" and coming into contact with Marxist literature. But he ridicules the charge of being a "hard-core academic Marxist," which was made by his colorful and outspoken 2004 U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes.

However, through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his "poetry" and getting advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just "Frank."

The reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist who belonged to a party subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a CPUSA member. What's more, anti-communist congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations.

Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand-based libertarian activist, researcher and blogger, noted evidence that "Frank" was Frank Marshall Davis in a posting in March of 2007.

Obama's communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S. presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.

AIM recently disclosed that Obama has well-documented socialist connections, which help explain why he sponsored a "Global Poverty Act" designed to send hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.

But the Communist Party connection through Davis is even more ominous. Decades ago, the CPUSA had tens of thousands of members, some of them covert agents who had penetrated the U.S. Government. It received secret subsidies from the old Soviet Union.

You won't find any of this discussed in the David Mendell book, Obama: From Promise to Power. It is typical of the superficial biographies of Obama now on the market. Secret smoking seems to be Obama's most controversial activity. At best, Mendell and the liberal media describe Obama as "left-leaning."

But you will find it briefly discussed, sort of, in Obama's own book, Dreams From My Father. He writes about "a poet named Frank," who visited them in Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of "hard-earned knowledge" and advice. Who was Frank? Obama only says that he had "some modest notoriety once," was "a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago..." but was now "pushing eighty." He writes about "Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self" giving him advice before he left for Occidental College in 1979 at the age of 18.

This "Frank" is none other than Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist writer now considered by some to be in the same category of prominence as Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. In the summer/fall 2003 issue of African American Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University reviews a book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas, about Davis's career, and notes, "In Davis's case, his political commitments led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War II-even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership." Tidwell is an expert on the life and writings of Davis.

Is it possible that Obama did not know who Davis was when he wrote his book, Dreams From My Father, first published in 1995? That's not plausible since Obama refers to him as a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes and says he saw a book of his black poetry.

The communists knew who "Frank" was, and they know who Obama is. In fact, one academic who travels in communist circles understands the significance of the Davis-Obama relationship.

Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, talked about it during a speech last March at the reception of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University. The remarks are posted online under the headline, "Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party."

Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 "at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson," came into contact with Barack Obama and his family and became the young man's mentor, influencing Obama's sense of identity and career moves. Robeson, of course, was the well-known black actor and singer who served as a member of the CPUSA and apologist for the old Soviet Union. Davis had known Robeson from his time in Chicago.

As Horne describes it, Davis "befriended" a "Euro-American family" that had "migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago."

It was in Chicago that Obama became a "community organizer" and came into contact with more far-left political forces, including the Democratic Socialists of America, which maintains close ties to European socialist groups and parties through the Socialist International (SI), and two former members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), William Ayers and Carl Davidson.

The SDS laid siege to college campuses across America in the 1960s, mostly in order to protest the Vietnam War, and spawned the terrorist Weather Underground organization. Ayers was a member of the terrorist group and turned himself in to authorities in 1981. He is now a college professor and served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago. Davidson is now a figure in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an offshoot of the old Moscow-controlled CPUSA, and helped organize the 2002 rally where Obama came out against the Iraq War.

Both communism and socialism trace their roots to Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, who endorsed the first meeting of the Socialist International, then called the "First International." According to Pierre Mauroy, president of the SI from 1992-1996, "It was he [Marx] who formally launched it, gave the inaugural address and devised its structure..."

Apparently unaware that Davis had been publicly named as a CPUSA member, Horne said only that Davis "was certainly in the orbit of the CP [Communist Party]-if not a member..."

In addition to Tidwell's book, Black Moods: Collected Poems of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis's Communist Party membership, another book, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946, names Davis as one of several black poets who continued to publish in CPUSA-supported publications after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. The author, James Edward Smethurst, associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says that Davis, however, would later claim that he was "deeply troubled" by the pact.

While blacks such as Richard Wright left the CPUSA, it is not clear if or when Davis ever left the party.

However, Obama writes in Dreams From My Father that he saw "Frank" only a few days before he left Hawaii for college, and that Davis seemed just as radical as ever. Davis called college "An advanced degree in compromise" and warned Obama not to forget his "people" and not to "start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that ####." Davis also complained about foot problems, the result of "trying to force African feet into European shoes," Obama wrote.

For his part, Horne says that Obama's giving of credit to Davis will be important in history. "At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack's memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis' equally affecting memoir, Living the Blues and when that day comes, I'm sure a future student will not only examine critically the Frankenstein monsters that US imperialism created in order to subdue Communist parties but will also be moved to come to this historic and wonderful archive in order to gain insight on what has befallen this complex and intriguing planet on which we reside," he said.

Dr. Kathryn Takara, a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who also confirms that Davis is the "Frank" in Obama's book, did her dissertation on Davis and spent much time with him between 1972 until he passed away in 1987.

In an analysis posted online, she notes that Davis, who was a columnist for the Honolulu Record, brought "an acute sense of race relations and class struggle throughout America and the world" and that he openly discussed subjects such as American imperialism, colonialism and exploitation. She described him as a "socialist realist" who attacked the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Davis, in his own writings, had said that Robeson and Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and a secret member of the CPUSA, had suggested that he take a job as a columnist with the Honolulu Record "and see if I could do something for them." The ILWU was organizing workers there and Robeson's contacts were "passed on" to Davis, Takara writes.

Takara says that Davis "espoused freedom, radicalism, solidarity, labor unions, due process, peace, affirmative action, civil rights, Negro History week, and true Democracy to fight imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. He urged coalition politics."

Is "coalition politics" at work in Obama's rise to power?

Trevor Loudon, the New Zealand-based blogger who has been analyzing the political forces behind Obama and specializes in studying the impact of Marxist and leftist political organizations, notes that Frank Chapman, a CPUSA supporter, has written a letter to the party newspaper hailing the Illinois senator's victory in the Iowa caucuses.

"Obama's victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle," Chapman wrote. "Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary �mole,' not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through."

Let's challenge the liberal media to report on this. Will they have the honesty and integrity to do so?”

“Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org”

“Don't forget to check behind the woodpile for them commies before you crawl into bed clutching your 5.56.”

“7.62”

“8.8 cm”

“I Don't have any of those.”

“I have one of those on my Panzer.”

“Those commies are everywhere! I need to get a can of Commie Raid!”

“Dang, you oughta see all the furrinners here!!

Scary, I tell ya!!

I think they are all commies.........................except the middle easterners, they all wanna cut sumbuddy's head off.”

“I should save all these quotes to use when you guys start yapping about what some white supremacist (an organization with zero political power) did or didn't do for a conservative.”

“Which quotes Hyway, the ones about Obama being a "communist"??

Or do you mean the quotes about me having a Panzer with an 88mm.

Boom-Boom, out go the lights!!”

“I don't care what you have in your pants”

“Rev up your swift boats, boys!!

Perhaps it's a lack of character that compels some of these guys to engage in character assassination.


”