Saturday, November 8, 2008

One press conference, one gaffe.


President-elect Obama held his first press conference and took about a half dozen softball questions. He was likable and cool. I liked his self-deprecating attitude and humility. What I didn't like was his comment about Nancy Reagan having seances when asked about conferring with living Presidents (vs. dead ones). It was actually Hillary Clinton "channelling" Eleanor Roosevelt that he was referring to. I do appreciate that he called Mrs. Reagan and apologized for his offhand and careless remark. What's amazing to me, is how the media just lets it go. I made the mistake of tuning into Bill Maher last night and he was STILL lambasting Pelin three days after the election about her "Africa" comment. I'm sure Obama's plethora of advisers have informed him of how many states are in the United States of America by now. At least I hope so.

8 comments:

Mike West said...

Nothing surprises me anymore when it comes to the press and BO.

vwatt said...

It's gonna be a long eight years for you guys at this pace! Welcome to my world from 2000-2008! :-) This little gem from Snopes.com will make your day:

Claim: The numbers 6-6-6 were the winning combination in an Illinois lottery the day after Election Day 2008.
Status: TRUE!

Following the election, the winning pick 3 lotto numbers in Illinois (Obama's home state) for 11/5/08 were 666
Origins: Human beings have an innate tendency to find patterns in randomness and ascribe meanings to those patterns — a phenomenon whose most basic manifestation is something we call "coincidence": A sequence of events that, although accidental and unrelated, seems to have been planned or arranged.
One of the more amusing (if obscure) coincidences connected with the 2008 U.S. presidential election had to do with lottery numbers in Illinois. On 5 November 2008, the day after Election Day, the winning numbers in that state's Evening Pick 3 lottery draw were 6-6-6 — a string of digits traditionally held to represent the "Number of the Beast" as described in the New Testament's Book of Revelation. When one considers that the winner of the previous day's presidential election was Barack Obama, who began his political career in Illinois and represents that state in the U.S. Senate, and who was the subject of a spurious election year rumor positing that he matched the Book of Revelation's description of the anti-Christ, well ... it might all seem a bit spooky.

Last updated: 9 November 2008

vwatt said...

Oh boy..the gloves come off..this is gonna be fun to watch.


Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 9, 2008; Page A16

Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

*
A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.

vwatt said...

Wow - "the week they reclaimed their country";

It Still Felt Good the Morning After


By FRANK RICH(communist)
Published: November 9, 2008, NYT(liberal rag)

ON the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy.

Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.

For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.

So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.

The most conspicuous clichés to fall, of course, were the twin suppositions that a decisive number of white Americans wouldn’t vote for a black presidential candidate — and that they were lying to pollsters about their rampant racism. But the polls were accurate. There was no “Bradley effect.” A higher percentage of white men voted for Obama than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton included.

Obama also won all four of those hunting-and-Hillary-loving Rust Belt states that became 2008’s obsession among slumming upper-middle-class white journalists: Pennsylvania and Michigan by double digits, as well as Ohio and even Indiana, which has gone Democratic only once (1964) since 1936. The solid Republican South, led by Virginia and North Carolina, started to turn blue as well. While there are still bigots in America, they are in unambiguous retreat.

And what about all those terrified Jews who reportedly abandoned their progressive heritage to buy into the smears libeling Obama as an Israel-hating terrorist? Obama drew a larger percentage of Jews nationally (78) than Kerry had (74) and — mazel tov, Sarah Silverman! — won Florida.

Let’s defend Hispanic-Americans, too, while we’re at it. In one of the more notorious observations of the campaign year, a Clinton pollster, Sergio Bendixen, told The New Yorker in January that “the Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Let us say very carefully that a black presidential candidate won Latinos — the fastest-growing demographic in the electorate — 67 percent to 31 (up from Kerry’s 53-to-44 edge and Gore’s 62-to-35).

Young voters also triumphed over the condescension of the experts. “Are they going to show up?” Cokie Roberts of ABC News asked in February. “Probably not. They never have before. By the time November comes, they’ll be tired.” In fact they turned up in larger numbers than in 2004, and their disproportionate Democratic margin made a serious difference, as did their hard work on the ground. They’re not the ones who need Geritol.

The same commentators who dismissed every conceivable American demographic as racist, lazy or both got Sarah Palin wrong too. When she made her debut in St. Paul, the punditocracy was nearly uniform in declaring her selection a brilliant coup. There hadn’t been so much instant over-the-top praise by the press for a cynical political stunt since President Bush “landed” a jet on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in that short-lived triumph “Mission Accomplished.”

The rave reviews for Palin were completely disingenuous. Anyone paying attention (with the possible exception of John McCain) could see she was woefully ill-equipped to serve half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. The conservatives Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy said so on MSNBC when they didn’t know their mikes were on. But, hey, she was a dazzling TV presence, the thinking went, so surely doltish Americans would rally around her anyway. “She killed!” cheered Noonan about the vice-presidential debate, revising her opinion upward and marveling at Palin’s gift for talking “over the heads of the media straight to the people.” Many talking heads thought she tied or beat Joe Biden.

The people, however, were reaching a less charitable conclusion and were well ahead of the Beltway curve in fleeing Palin. Only after polls confirmed that she was costing McCain votes did conventional wisdom in Washington finally change, demoting her from Republican savior to scapegoat overnight.

But Palin’s appeal wasn’t overestimated only because of her kitschy “American Idol” star quality. Her fierce embrace of the old Karl Rove wedge politics, the divisive pitting of the “real America” against the secular “other” America, was also regarded as a sure-fire winner. The second most persistent assumption by both pundits and the McCain campaign this year — after the likely triumph of racism — was that the culture war battlegrounds from 2000 and 2004 would remain intact.

This is true in exactly one instance: gay civil rights. Though Rove’s promised “permanent Republican majority” lies in humiliating ruins, his and Bush’s one secure legacy will be their demagogic exploitation of homophobia. The success of the four state initiatives banning either same-sex marriage or same-sex adoptions was the sole retro trend on Tuesday. And Obama, who largely soft-pedaled the issue this year, was little help. In California, where other races split more or less evenly on a same-sex marriage ban, some 70 percent of black voters contributed to its narrow victory.

That lagging indicator aside, nearly every other result on Tuesday suggests that while the right wants to keep fighting the old boomer culture wars, no one else does. Three state initiatives restricting abortion failed. Bill Ayers proved a lame villain, scaring no one. Americans do not want to revisit Vietnam (including in Iraq). For all the attention paid by the news media and McCain-Palin to rancorous remembrances of things past, I sometimes wondered whether most Americans thought the Weather Underground was a reunion band and the Hanoi Hilton a chain hotel. Socialism, the evil empire and even Ronald Reagan may be half-forgotten blurs too.

If there were any doubts the 1960s are over, they were put to rest Tuesday night when our new first family won the hearts of the world as it emerged on that vast blue stage to join the celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. The bloody skirmishes that took place on that same spot during the Democratic convention 40 years ago — young vs. old, students vs. cops, white vs. black — seemed as remote as the moon. This is another America — hardly a perfect or prejudice-free America, but a union that can change and does, aspiring to perfection even if it can never achieve it.

Still, change may come slowly to the undying myths bequeathed to us by the Bush decade. “Don’t think for a minute that power concedes,” Obama is fond of saying. Neither does groupthink. We now keep hearing, for instance, that America is “a center-right nation” — apparently because the percentages of Americans who call themselves conservative (34), moderate (44) and liberal (22) remain virtually unchanged from four years ago. But if we’ve learned anything this year, surely it’s that labels are overrated. Those same polls find that more and more self-described conservatives no longer consider themselves Republicans. Americans now say they favor government doing more (51 percent), not less (43) — an 11-point swing since 2004 — and they still overwhelmingly reject the Iraq war. That’s a centrist country tilting center-left, and that’s the majority who voted for Obama.

The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.

Mike West said...

Hey Vance...we made it through the Clinton years; we'll make it through the next 4. Here's an interesting perspective for you to chew on. I have studied the Old Testament. This perspective is not as far-fetched as you may think. BTW - Dr. David Reagan is no fool. Enjoy.
"A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education." Theodore Roosevelt.
_______

Dr David R Reagan
Our nation has just elected the most pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, anti-Capitalist, and anti-Israel president in our history. In short, God has given us the kind of leader that we deserve — the kind we have been begging for. The new President now has the power to put his radical secular imprint upon this nation for decades to come through the appointment of activist liberals to the Supreme Court. I fear that our nation has been irrevocably changed for the worse.

Two factors in this election were particularly disappointing to me. First was the fact that only 59% of eligible voters bothered to vote. That was less than in the last presidential election. How could people be so apathetic in an election so important? The second voting statistic that hit me hard was the revelation that even among self-identified Evangelicals, the majority voted according to economic considerations rather than moral ones.

The financial woes of our nation are not going to be solved by any economic strategy, for they are rooted in our spiritual rebellion against God. We cannot kill babies in their mother's wombs, promote same-sex marriage, produce filthy movies and TV programs, worship the dollar, and pressure Israel to give up its heartland, and expect God to bless our economy. Our economy will be healed only when we as a nation get right with God.

Our Recent Financial Collapse

In 2003 I wrote a book about the United States in Bible prophecy. It was entitled, America the Beautiful? In that book I presented several scenarios to explain why the United States was not mentioned in end time Bible prophecy. I stated at the time that the one I thought would be most likely would be a catastrophic financial collapse. That conclusion was based on the fact that the god of our nation has become money, and the true God of this world is a jealous God. I felt like our Creator would sooner or later touch our false god and destroy it if we did not repent.

On September 29th when the stock market dropped 777 points on the eve of Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year), I could see the hand of God all over the event.

The number of points the stock market fell is significant. Seven is the number of perfection and completion. It was on the seventh day that God rested from His creation activities. Six is the number of Man, for it was on the sixth day that Man was created. 666 is the Satanic symbol of Man exalted. 777 is the spiritual symbol of the Trinity.

The timing of the stock market crash was also significant since it fell on the eve of an important Jewish holiday. George W. Bush was the first President to call for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the heartland of Israel. Joel 3:2 says that God will severely judge any nation in the end times that attempts to divide the land of Israel.

How God Deals With Nations

As I pointed out in my book about the U.S. in prophecy, the Bible reveals that God has a pattern for dealing with nations. He is the one who creates them, and He is the one who decides when they are to cease to exist. He blesses as they are obedient to His Word, and He disciplines when they stray from His Word. His discipline will first of all take the form of raising up prophetic voices to call the nation to repentance. If this fails, He will resort to remedial judgments. Those judgments can take many forms, such as natural disasters, economic calamities, and defeat in wars. And sometimes a remedial judgment can take the form of giving to a nation the kind of evil leadership it deserves. If the nation still refuses to repent, God will deliver it from judgment to destruction.

God began to call this nation to repentance following the cultural revolution of the 1960's. He raised up prophetic voices like David Wilkerson, and when we paid no attention, He began to place remedial judgments upon our nation. The attacks of 9/11 were a major wake-up call. It is no accident that those attacks were against the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. — the symbols of American wealth and power. But like a sleepy person who is too groggy to wake-up, we simply turned off the alarm clock, rolled over and went back to sleep. Hurricane Katrina was another national wake-up call, in response to our forcing Israel to withdraw from Gaza.

And now, God has touched our god, and our economy is in shambles. The prospect for it improving is very slim. The newly elected President has promised higher taxes and protective tariffs. The last time a President resorted to such measures in response to a financial crisis, the result was the Great Depression.

The Christian Response

What are we as Christians to do in the face of such set-backs for our nation? We are to pray and stand for righteousness. We must pray for national revival, and at the same time, we must be willing to take a stand for righteousness by speaking out boldly about the moral rot that has infected the soul of our country. We need to pray that God will frustrate, confuse, and defeat all the efforts to further secularize our nation and promote immorality.

We also need to pray for the salvation of our new President and all his family members. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Barack Obama is not a Christian, nor has he ever been. I can say that with confidence because he is a member of the most liberal Christian denomination, the United Church of Christ. This is a church that denies the divinity of Jesus and denies His statement in John 14:6 that He is the only way to God. No one can be saved apart from Jesus, and no one can be saved by putting their faith in a false Jesus.

Another prayer priority should be Israel. Let us pray that God will raise up a new leader in Israel who will have the strength to stand against American pressure to surrender the heartland of the country to the enemies of God.

Repentance or Destruction?

Some of the saddest verses in the Bible are the ones concerning the fate of the nation of Judah. They are recorded in 2 Chronicles 36:15-17:

15 ) And the LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to them again and again by His messengers, because He had compassion on His people and on His dwelling place;

16) but they continually mocked the messengers of God, despised His words and scoffed at His prophets, until the wrath of the LORD arose against His people, until there was no remedy.

17) Therefore He brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans who slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no compassion on young man or virgin, old man or infirm; He gave them all into his hand.

This will be our fate as a nation if we continue with our rebellion against God and His Word. Keep in mind that, just like Judah, our fate will be a severe one if we refuse to repent, because to those to whom much is given, much is expected (Luke 12:48). Also, we are told that God repays double for the sins of those who are richly blessed (Isaiah 40:2).

Facing the Future

Should we face the future with despair? No! We are living in the most significant era since the First Coming of the Messiah. We are living in the season of the Lord's return. We are privileged to be witnessing the fulfillment of end time prophecies all around us, prophecies that point to the soon return of our Lord.

There are dark days ahead for our nation and the world. Christians in particular are facing increasing persecution. We need to steel our minds and fasten our hope on things eternal, just as the prophet Daniel did when he was forced to live in a wicked society. We need to strengthen our spiritual armor through prayer and immersion in the Scriptures.

And we need to remember that Psalm 2 says that God sits in the heavens and laughs at all the machinations of the world's political leaders. He isn't laughing because He doesn't care. He is laughing because He has the wisdom and power to orchestrate all the evil of Man and Satan to the triumph of His perfect will in history. And that will is that Jesus Christ will reign in glory and majesty from Mount Zion in Israel, and the whole world will be flooded with peace and righteousness, as the waters cover the seas.

Brodad Unkabuddy said...

EIGHT years?!! Talkin' about countin' your chickens before "they come home to roost"! The most worthless Congress in modern history has increased their numbers and there's STILL a lot to learn about the President-elect. I would advise the Dems to show us how to FIX things before you start thinking about next term. It's obvious that America is ready for change. It's up to the new administration to produce - for the better, if they can.

vwatt said...

Debating politics AND religion is a dangerous combination so I will limit my remarks. My preference is to never use politics and religion in the same sentence-otherwise we risk being no better than the religious theocracies of the Middle East(and that's working well over there!). Dr. Reagan is a nationaly known evangelical figure and I respect those who follow his teachings and make no judgement.
However, since I am a non-evangelical, non-rapture believing, member of the Episcopal church who wants a President and not a Pastor, I doubt that Dr. Reagan would reciprocate. If Obama is not a Christian by virtue of being a member of the United church of Christ, then Dr. Reagan must have no hope for salvation of Catholics(who, ironically, believe that ONLY Catholics will be saved), Mormons, Jews, etc. Again , a very slippery slope. As a famous member of the now almost defunct Irish Republican Army said(concerning the mixing of politics and religion), "It took us almost 500 years of fighting to figure that one out!"

Mike West said...

Hey Vance,
I happen to agree with you regarding Dr. Regan's judgment call regarding whether or not BO is saved. I do agree with Dr. Regan however there is only 1 way to salvation and that is through the Jesus Christ of the Bible. The church/building you attend has nothing to do with it but you can draw assumptions (not conclusions) of someone's faith based on the church they attend. I believe as long as one confesses that the Jesus of the Bible is who He said He was (The Messiah) than you are saved. That confession will change your life as you come to know who Jesus really is.
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:6
I guess someone should have told the founders of our country about the mixing of religion and politics. If God is all powerful, who do we think we are to say we're kicking Him out of politics? Separation of church & state? Impossible as far as I can tell. It's a myth perpetuated by those who fear the truth and wisdom God offers through His Word. It amazes me how many draw conclusions regarding the Bible but have never truly studied it. It's an amazing book and I challenge anyone who is curious to study it and find out for themselves.
I thought you might get a kick out of Dr. Regan's outlook. He certainly doesn't pull any punches and his perspective really makes us think about all of this in a different light. I do believe God is in control and that's why BO's election doesn't concern me as much as it disappoints me. Just curious, if the founders of the Episcopal church weren't evangelical; how did the church grow to where it is today? It's not bad to say you're evangelical just because the word has been demonized. I would say if you ever invited someone to your church, than you're evangelical.