Blagojevich asks for President Obama to testify
Rod Blagojevich’s attorneys have asked for President Barack Obama to testify at the former Illinois governor’s corruption trial, saying he would be “a critical witness.”
In an apparent mechanical error, blacked-out portions of the defense’s request were visible for some time online, and were subsequently published on the websites of Chicago’s daily newspapers.
Among the disclosures in the redacted portions of the defense motion were that Obama spoke to Blagojevich on December 1, 2008, eight days before Blagojevich was arrested by FBI agents.
Blagojevich has been charged with trying to sell Obama’s former Senate seat and trying to leverage official acts for money or jobs, including a position as a Cabinet Secretary in Obama’s administration.
“President Obama is a witness to the conduct alleged as well as an impeachment witness to at least two of the government’s critical witnesses,” defense lawyers said in a court filing in U.S. District Court in Chicago.
“The defense does not take lightly the overwhelming schedule the President has and the security constraints surrounding his testimony. A videotape deposition will remedy both of those legitimate concerns.”
Obama could shed light on potential witnesses Tony Rezko, the convicted fund-raiser for Obama and Blagojevich, and an unnamed union official who met with Blagojevich about the Senate seat.
Bristol Palin says she got calls after Mom’s e-mail hacked
By Robby O’Daniel
A Tennessee college student on trial for hacking into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account and posting it on the Web during the 2008 presidential campaign heard from Palin’s daughter, Bristol, who testified she was flooded with phone calls as a result.
One call to the then-17-year-old’s cell phone came in the middle of the night at the family home in Wasilla, Alaska, from “a bunch of boys” who claimed to be outside the house and wanted to be let in.
“That was scary because we lived in the middle of nowhere,” Bristol Palin told the jury at the trial of David Kernell, the 22-year-old son of a Democratic state legislator. Kernell faces several years in prison if convicted of fraud, identity theft and other charges.
Prosecutors say Kernell was angling for information to damage Sarah Palin, Republican John McCain’s running mate in the campaign.
Kernell has pleaded not guilty to what his lawyer said amounted to a misguided prank. Kernell had been intrigued by published reports that Palin used the e-mail account for state business as governor of Alaska, and he had managed to guess the answers to the account’s security questions and changed the password.
Some of the e-mails Kernell made accessible on the Web included Bristol Palin’s cell phone number, and others had photographs of Palin’s children.
Sarah Palin got hacked. Google got hacked. TopWorldWebsite.com got hacked! What chance has the average Joe & Jane got? Every chance if you just protect yourself and be vigilant when you go online. Read my daily blogs for more help and advice: http://www.TopTorldWebsite.com/blog/twwe ditorsblog
McCain praises Palin…but calls her “irrelevant”
How’s this for faint praise?
Former Repubican presidential nominee John McCain talked up Sarah Palin — his 2008 vice presidential partner — on Sunday, saying she had earned an important place in the Republican party.
But he also called the former Alaska governor ”irrelevant.”
Huh?
“I think that Sarah Palin … has earned herself a very big place in the Republican political scene,” McCain said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.”
“I am entertained every time I see these people attack her and attack her and attack her. She’s irrelevant, but they continue to attack her. I am so proud of her and the work that she is doing,” he said.
Right.
A recent poll showed that 53% of Republicans would like to see Sarah Palin to run for President in 2012.
That same poll also showed that 100% of Democrats would like to see that too. 
Clinton open to coffee with Palin
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is open to having coffee with former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, whose new book about the 2008 presidential campaign is stirring controversy.
“I absolutely would look forward to having coffee,” Clinton said from Singapore Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Clinton told ABC’s “This Week” that she would look forward to having a chance to actually get to meet Palin.
Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, gives a nod to Clinton in her book, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” Clinton lost the race for the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama.
Palin, a popular conservative firebrand who has been communicating mostly via Facebook since quitting as governor, opens a campaign-style book tour on Tuesday that will hit a dozen states.
Is she laying the groundwork for a 2012 presidential campaign, or simply selling her book, which currently sits atop the Amazon.com Top 100 Books list?
“I don’t want a religious nut making hard decisions”
Yeah. Me too. The IslamoMarxist that is currently residing in the White House really makes me angry!
“I would move if ..”
I hear that Hugo Chavez’s country is just lovely this time of year. It sounds, M. Anderson, that he is your kind of leader. Have a nice one-way trip and be sure to take a couple of illegals with you.
What rift? White House says Obama and Clinton close
The White House is tired of seeing stories that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are not getting along.
“The notion that there’s some rift or disagreement is nothing more than silly Washington games,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Wednesday when asked about the relationship between the president and his secretary of state.
Clinton, who joined Obama’s team despite their bitter rivalry for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, has weathered several reports that her influence as chief diplomat is hampered by other foreign policy heavyweights in the administration and her own history with Obama.
Gibbs said stories about tricky relations between the former rivals were false.
“They enjoy a very close relationship,” Gibbs said.
“The Secretary of State is somebody who the president relies on greatly. She has an enormously important role in the development of and the execution of a foreign policy that changes our image in the world.”
You don’t time major admimistration speeches together unless you want to drown out the other guy.
from FaithWorld:
Almost two million vanish from Obama’s estimate of U.S. Muslims
Almost two million people have inexplicably disappeared from the estimates of the U.S. Muslim population that President Barack Obama has given recently. In his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, he spoke about "nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today." On Sunday, the Karachi daily Dawn published an interview with him where he said "we have five million Muslims."
There was no explanation for the change, but his reason for citing the figure seemed to be the same. Shortly before his Cairo speech, Obama told the French television channel Canal Plus that "one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." He cited no figure there but mentioned seven million in Cairo three days later.
Many blogs, FaithWorld included, questioned that figure and noted that estimates of the U.S. Muslim population range from 1.8 to 7-8 million. The U.S. Census Bureau cannot ask about religion on a mandatory basis but refers on its website to a Pew Forum study pegging Muslims at 0.6% of the population. The CIA World Factbook uses the same percentage figure. It translates into about 1.8 million.
Speaking to Dawn, Obama lowered his estimate but made his original point again. He said: "We have Muslim Americans who are doing extraordinary things. In fact, their educational attainment and income is generally above the average here in the United States. We have Muslim members of Congress. And, in fact, we have 5 million Muslims, which would make us larger than many other countries that consider themselves Muslim countries."
The downsizing puts the U.S. even lower on the this Wikipedia list of countries according to the size of their Muslim population, from 32nd place (after Kazakhstan and before the current #32 Tajikistan) to 38th (between Chad and Turkmenistan).
In the interview, Obama also spoke a bit about his visit to Pakistan as a student in 1981 that caused some confusion and speculation in the end phase of the 2008 campaign. Dawn's Washington correspondent Anwar Iqbal asked Obama if he planned to visit Pakistan soon and the president responded:
Palin Strikes Back
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is firing back in a war of words with the the environmental group, Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund, over the group’s new national ad campaign which attacks her for promoting aerial hunting.
Actress, Ashley Judd, narrates the group’s You Tube video which takes direct aim at Palin and the controversial practice of shooting wolves and other animals from low-flying planes or helicopters.
Palin, the failed Republican vice presidential nominee, blasts the ad campaign as attacks by an “extreme fringe group.” She accuses the group of misrepresenting Alaska’s wildlife management programs, which aim to protect vulnerable wildlife from predators.
“It is reprehensible and hypocritical that the Defenders of Wildlife would use Alaska and my administration as a fundraising tool,” Palin says in a statement.
“Shame on the Defenders of Wildlife for twisting the truth in an effort to raise funds from innocent and hard-pressed Americans struggling with these rough economic times.”
Defenders of Wildlife, a Washington-based conservation group, first took on Palin during the presidential race, running television ads in battleground states.
Yes, I got a tax break and I’m not even rich (whatever the definition of rich is).
It isn’t just a middle of road issue. I cannot support the progressive liberal democratic agenda, or just democratic agenda. It is all about social issues for me and I have serious problems with what democrats, on the whole, believe in. Not talking economy, not talking foreign affairs right now. Although I have opinions there too, like everyone else.
Like her or not, Sarah Palin kept her downs syndrome baby rather than abort it. If you don’t agree with her on anything else, she should be commended and admired for that one thing alone.
Oh sure, Sarah Palin isn’t perfect, no one is, but she supports values I believe in. It doesn’t matter to me if she runs for president or not. I have others who are more appealing as presidential prospects, so I have no dog in this fight about her qualifications. Even though I believe she could do as well as Obama, which currently wouldn’t require a very high bar.
Palin is a decent and good person who also happens to be ambitious. It is obvious her family is close and all in all, they are doing as well as any other family in America. If anyone can say they have a perfect family, then say so now. Otherwise, stop throwing stones at her.
As for all the fuss about the hunting issues. All that was happening in Alaska long before she became governor. Not only that, unless you live in Alaska, you don’t understand the culture in Alaska. Look within your own state, I am sure there is plenty to criticize, but your governor isn’t on the media hot seat because like she is becuase she is a threat to the democrats. So stop the attacks on her if you think she is so dumb and stupid. You don’t keep giving attention to something that isn’t a threat to you.
Palin says she was “exploited” by Fey, Couric
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says TV doppelganger Tina Fey and CBS News anchor Katie Couric have her to thank for the career boost they are getting.
In fact, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee says, the pair of TV stars exploited her.
Fey, who has an uncanny resemblance to Palin, played a loopy version of the Alaska governor in “Saturday Night Live” skits on NBC during the campaign season.
And an interview Palin gave to Couric was damaging to Palin while also giving a ratings shot to Couric’s CBS Evening News, which generally is the No. 3 major broadcast news show behind NBC and ABC.
“I did see that Tina Fey was named entertainer of the year and Katie Couric’s ratings have risen,” Palin told documentary filmmaker John Ziegler on Monday.
“And I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration. That’s a little bit perplexing, but it also says a great deal about our society,” she said.
sarah palin was “picked on” by the media because they, and the vast majority of americans, saw that she was completely unfit to serve in the oval office. please – her interview with katie couric simply exposed her ingnorance on many – most issues. Not saying she might not be ready in 10-15 years, but McCain chose an inexperienced running mate to try to get the female vote, and it backfired for him, and must have been embarrassing for Palin to be so exposed.
from FaithWorld:
U.S. ideology stable, “culture trench warfare” ahead?
The U.S. Democratic Party has gained a larger following over the past two decades but America's ideological landscape has remained largely unchanged over the past two decades, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. You can see the analysis here.
What is of interest for readers of this blog may be the implications of this "cultural trench warfare" -- with neither side gaining much ground from the other -- for red-hot social issues such as abortion rights and the future prospects for both the Republicans and the Democrats.
"The Democratic Party's advantage in party identification has widened over the past two decades, but the share of Americans who describe their political views as liberal, conservative or moderate has remained stable during the same period. Only about one-in-five Americans currently call themselves liberal (21 percent), while 38 percent say they are conservative and 36 percent describe themselves as moderate. This is virtually unchanged from recent years; when George W. Bush was first elected president, 18 percent of Americans said they were liberal, 36 percent were conservative and 38 percent considered themselves moderate," the report, released late on Tuesday, says.
On the divisive issue of abortion rights, the report, using survey data from October, said 57 percent of Americans believed it should be legal. Breaking opinion up by ideology, it found that 43 percent of conservatives were in favour of it being legal while 77 percent of self-described liberals held that view.
This is not surprising -- there are many Americans who regard themselves as economic or "tough on crime" or national security conservatives who still support abortion rights. What may surprise some is that 19 percent of liberals feel it should be illegal. These could be people influenced by Catholic social teaching or other trends who regard themselves as liberal on most issues but not this one.
For all the talk of an emerging evangelical center, the report says that: "White evangelical Protestants are the most conservative Republicans: 79 percent describe their political views as conservative, compared with 17 percent who say they are moderate and just two percent who call themselves liberal."
from FaithWorld:
A new twist on the “Is Obama a Christian?” debate
The "Is Obama a Christian?" discussion is starting up again, this time not by people who suspect he's a Muslim but those who think he's a phony follower of Jesus Christ. The occasion for this is the posting on Beliefnet of an interview he gave to the Chicago Sun Times in 2004, while he was still an Illinois state senator. Conservative Christians have taken his religious views as proof he's not a real Christian, but there's support from a more liberal corner for his views.
That there is disagreement isn't really a surprise. Theologians have been debating who is a Christian almost since the dawn of the faith and still dispute where the dividing lines lie. What is more interesting is that critics are picking apart his views -- or purported views -- on theological issues that have no obvious importance for his job as president.
Bloggers Joe Carter and Rod Dreher read in Obama's interview a denial of the Nicene Creed since he called Jesus "a bridge between God and man" rather than clearly saying he is the Son of God (hat tip to Steve Waldman). "Unless Obama was being incredibly and uncharacteristically inarticulate, this is heterodox. You cannot be a Christian in any meaningful sense and deny the divinity of Jesus Christ. You just can't," Dreher writes. Has Obama denied the divinity of Jesus Christ here? That's not clear here. Another point that Carter notes is that he doesn't believe that people who have not embraced Jesus as their personal saviour will automatically go to hell. "I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity. That’s just not part of my religious makeup," he said.
Elsewhere on its site, Beliefnet quotes a prominent Catholic theologian saying the same thing: "...Everything we believe about God, and everything we know about man, prevents us from accepting that beyond the limits of the Church there is no more salvation ... We are no longer ready and able to think that our neighbor, who is a decent and respectable man and in many ways better than we are, should be eternally damned simply because he is not a Catholic. We are no longer ready, no longer willing, to think that eternal corruption should be inflicted on people in Asia, in Africa, or wherever it may be, merely on account of their not having "Catholic" marked in their passport." This came from none other than a certain Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI. The quote is from 1964, from the young Ratzinger, and is not what he would say today. But even he said it back then and many theologians would agree with Obama's view today.
As Waldman points out, it's a view that George Bush would also agree with. And apparently with him many Christians as well:"millions and millions of people call themselves Christian, worship at Christian churches and believe that acceptance of Christ is not required for entry into heaven. In a recent Pew poll, 70% said 'many religions can lead to eternal life.' 66% of Protestants and 79% of Catholics said they agreed with that idea."
Over at the Episcopal Café blog The Lead, blogger JB Chilton reprints reprints Obama's answer about his suspicion of dogma and cautious turn towards faith and says: "Sounds like a good Episcopalian. The Episcopal Church welcomes you."
Do you think it's important to know exactly which Christian teachings the president-elect embraces and which ones he doesn't, even if they have no relevance to his performance in the White House?
To Brian in Middle River — the Nicene Creed is not only Roman Catholic. I don’t have a full list but a quick look at Wikipedia shows the following: “The Nicene Creed is an ecumenical Christian statement of faith accepted in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Assyrian Church of the East, Oriental Orthodox churches, the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Anglican Communion, and almost all branches of Protestantism, including the Reformed churches, the Presbyterian Church, and the Methodist Church.”
Those lawyers will have their work cut out for them.