From Karen, the Lonely Conservative:
Dems Swear They Will Fill Stadium for Final Night of Convention
September 1, 2012
According to The Hill, people working on the Obama campaign say they have no doubt they will fill the stadium in Charlotte, NC for President Obama’s big speech Thursday night.
Team Obama promises it will fill every one of the seats in Charlotte’s mammoth football stadium Thursday night when President Obama closes the Democratic National Convention with a speech accepting his party’s nomination.
For weeks, Democrats have been concerned about filling Bank of America Stadium, home to the NFL’s Carolina Panthers. They feared a devastating image of an enthusiasm gap if Obama spoke to empty upper decks at the venue.
But the Obama campaign says it’s got it covered, and that all 73,778 of the stadium’s seats will be spoken for. The campaign also insists this success will showcase a ground operation that will help Obama win North Carolina for a second cycle in a row this November.
“We’re confident we’ll be full,” Jen Psaki, the traveling Obama press secretary, told The Hill late last week. “We have a great ground operation in North Carolina and we’ve registered more voters than any other state.
The article goes on to note that they were giving tickets to people who volunteered and worked on the campaign. I guess that didn’t work out so well, because yesterday they were handing out free tickets at bars.
In addition to worrying about filling seats, they also must be a little concerned about the weather. There’s at least a 30% chance of thunderstorms every day of the convention. Boy, wouldn’t that be a shame?
I’m sure that they will fill that stadium, even if they have to truck in illegal immigrants to fill the stands. But, let’s face facts: Barack Hussein Obama is the President of the United States, and he will get over 60,000,000 votes this November; more than sixty million Americans, living and dead, will be foolish enough to cast their votes to re-elect the President. Absent something truly unexpected, this election will be very close, and it is certainly possible that Mr Obama will be re-elected.
But one thing we won’t see is a repeat of the 2008 Greek columns background. Thomas Fitzgerald, a politics writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote:
Democrats have not yet unveiled the stage design for the football stadium in Charlotte, where President Obama will accept the party’s nomination Thursday for a second term, but you can take one thing to the bank: no Greek columns.
Those trappings of the 2008 convention in Denver were mocked then, but similar grandiosity now would just look cruel, with both the country and Obama in a difficult place.
The public mood is somber, with supermajorities of Americans telling pollsters they think the nation is on the wrong track. The tingle, that sense of being part of a historic movement that propelled Obama four years ago, has dissipated.
Now, he seems an ordinary politician, less the superman of “hope and change” who promised he was going to begin to save the planet from climate change, heal partisan divisions, and make America a proud world leader again.
More realistically, it’s because the Democrats don’t want to remind Americans that under President Obama’s fine leadership and economic stewardship, the United States is marching steadily down the road the Greeks took in their brave march toward bankruptcy and (multiple) bailouts. Mr Fitzgerald continued that the President has to try to “make the case that the economy would have been worse without his policies, and to ask for more time.” In other words, he is going to try to redefine failure as success, and hope that actually works. Since a major part of the Democratic coalition consists of the least intelligent and least educated among the population, maybe he figures that can actually work.
From William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove:
Troops Give Obama The Cricket Treatment
September 1, 2012 – 11:00 am
Caught this one earlier on the Daily Caller, didn’t want to post back to back posts from same source.
President Barack Obama was greeted with fleeting applause and extended periods of silence as he offered profuse praise to soldiers and their families during an Aug. 31 speech in Fort Bliss, Texas.
His praise for the soldiers —and for his own national-security policies —won cheers from only a small proportion of the soldiers and families in the cavernous aircraft-hanger.
The audience remains quiet even when the commander-in-chief thanked the soldiers’ families, and cited the 198 deaths of their comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The audience’s reaction was so flat that the president tried twice to elicit a reaction from the crowd.
Perhaps they’re a bit put out by Obama’s policies towards the military and that Obama keeps talking about himself, as well as giving himself pats on the back? Naa, they’re probably all just raaaaacists.
Similarly, his declaration that “around the world there’s a new attitude toward America, a new confidence in our leadership” yielded only silence, while his next sentence —“When people are asked ‘Which country do you admire most?’ one nation always comes out on top, the United States of America” —prompted relative enthusiasm.
So, the soldiers and their families weren’t particularly impressed with Obama’s “leadership”. Surprise! Unsurprisingly, several media outlets cut their coverage early, as did the White House feed. Nice Deb has a few thoughts, as well as video.
More: it could be also that Obama did his standard “it’s not my fault/blamestorming” schtick.
For whatever reasons the troops have, it seems as though the troops have a bit less respect for their Commander-in-Chief than he might have hoped. Of course, part of the reason might be as Hube noted on The Colossus of Rhodey:
Let’s see … they only put their lives on the line for our country
Just like the Al Gore campaign attempted to disqualify military ballots in Florida in 2000, the Boss Obama campaign in 2012 has won the first round in nixing early voting for military personnel in Ohio. (Or, as Boss Obama spells it, “O-I-H-O”)
Via ALa at Blonde Sagacity, I found this article:
Obama cancelled three operations to kill Osama until Hillary Clinton ‘settled issue’
US President Barack Obama cancelled three operations to kill Osama bin Laden before finally going ahead with the mission at the insistence of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a new book has claimed.
The damning allegations are mentioned in a new book: ‘Leading from Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him’, written by journalist Rich Miniter.1 Miniter has cited an unnamed source within the Joint Special Operations Command who revealed that three ‘kill’ missions were cancelled by Obama in January, February and March 2011.
According to the Daily Mail, Bin Laden was eventually killed by US Navy SEALs inside his compound in Abbotobad, Pakistan in May 2011. According to the report, Obama has already come under fire from former SEALs for boasting of his role in the raid. In his book, Miniter has portrayed Clinton as the main force behind killing bin Laden. Miniter has claimed that it was top adviser Valerie Jarrett, a long-time Chicago ally, who urged Obama to cancel the first three operations to kill bin Laden, the report said.
Miniter said that Clinton’s alliances with Leon Panetta, then CIA director and now Pentagon chief, and David Petraeus, then head of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and now at the helm at the CIA, played critical roles in bringing bin Laden to justice. Minister, in his book, said that Obama was ‘studiously undecided’ about whether to kill the mastermind of 9/11.
“He refused to weigh in or commit himself on even small matters related to a possible strike on bin Laden,” the book said. “Obama feared taking responsibility for a risky raid that might go tragically wrong,” Miniter wrote in his book. Miniter said that even the day before bin Laden’s demise, Obama was seized by a ‘fourth moment of indecision’, the report said.
Naturally, the White House stated that Mr Miniter’s reporting is just plain wrong, but they would naturally issue such a denial even if the story is true, and the reporter’s curriculum vitae is very strong.
Is it true? Well, who knows: Mr Miniter’s unnamed source inside the Joint Special Operations Command could have been misinformed, could have had a personal axe to grind, or could have been completely accurate. It is very reminiscent of President Clinton’s reluctance to kill Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, or take him into custody when the Sudan offered because he was concerned that we couldn’t try and convict him in federal District Court.
Your Editor does not know if Mr Miniter’s account is accurate, though he would prefer to believe it. President Obama’s leadership has been so poor in everything else that it is an easy story to believe, but the decision go or no go is actually a very simple one, simple enough that even a Chicago community organizer could have taken it.
Robert Stacy McCain writes on The Other McCain:
Hide Your Kids! Hide Your Wife!
Posted on | September 1, 2012 |
As Antoine Dodson might say, “They be snatchin’ people up out here and raping ‘em” — Democrat congressional staffers, that is:
A former senior congressional aide was indicted this week in D.C. Superior Court on charges that he sexually assaulted two women after drugging them with a sedative that he allegedly put in their drinks.
Donny Ray Williams Jr., 36, who served as staff director for a Senate subcommittee and worked in the offices of several members of Congress, gave at least one woman Ambien and assaulted her while she was unconscious, according to court papers.
Williams was charged with 10 counts of first- and second-degree sexual abuse and related charges in connection with attacks that authorities said occurred between July and December 2010. During that time, according to his profile on the LinkedIn Web site, Williams was staff director of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee.Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard reports that Williams worked for multiple Democrats, including Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu and Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, and also worked a year and a half (April 2009-October 2010) in the Obama administration.
(Hat-tip: Donald Douglas at American Power.)
Is there any doubt that this would have been a screaming page 1 headline if the accused had been a congressional staffer working for Republicans?
Finally, Sister Toldjah has several articles up concerning the protests getting ready to form around the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. Sis lives in Charlotte, and North Carolina’s most beautiful blogger — sorry, William Teach, but you’d be worried if I thought you were cuter than Sis anyway! 
— and she’s planning on keeping us all informed about the shenanigans around the convention.
@dana_tfsj yes.— Sister Toldjah (@sistertoldjah) September 1, 2012
If I can figure out how, I’ll embed Sis’ Twitter feed in the sidebar for the duration of the convention. But I’d strongly recommend keeping track on her blog during this coming week.
_________________________________________
- Link to the book was not part of the Indian Express original, but was added by the Editor. ↩
[...] day of the convention. Boy, wouldn’t that be a shame?H/T Weasel ZippersUpdate: Linked by The First Street Journal – thanks!google_ad_client = "ca-pub-1395656889568144"; /* 300×250, created 8/11/08 */ [...]
Things that make you go hummm!
Wynton Hall at Breithart posted the following 7 points on 9/2/2012
Exactly, zero percent support for Romney and his Republican extremist racist compatriots. With all that African-Americans have suffered in this Bush/Republican induced Great Recession, and the racist heritage especially obvious in todays’ Republican Party, one would normally expect this reaction, so yes, these folks know which party attempts to understand their suffering and to respond by extending to them a helping hand.
They also understand quite well that todays’ Republicans have a long heritage of hostile and racial antagonisms against them, a history which Republicans have yet to step up to and away from.
Take Republican voter suppression efforts as just one example, and for another, their segregationist views toward inner-city education efforts. Republican favor school choice, instead of focusing efforts on improving inner-city schools. In fact, they favor cutting federal education assistance to inner city schools, where it is so badly needed.
Republicans, especially, wear their racism on their sleeves, in full view of African-Americans. Moreover, Republican actions do not flow from their rhetoric, which, and all of the above, is why the polls indicate zero support for Republicans by African-Americans. That polling statistic is rather extraordinary, yet what is the response of Republicans? More of the same!
There is so much untoward in our Editor’s topic post, I hardly know where to begin.
The piece on the size of the crowd to hear our President speak is just one example, by The Lonely Conservative in this case, to try to undermine the DNC before it even starts. Interestingly, no one undermined the RNC convention last week, they did a fine job of undermining their own convention on their own. From the lopsided attendee demographics being over 90% white in a country which contains just over 50% white citizens, to a disrespectful improv rendition by Cling Eastwood, to the pathological liar we saw in Paul Ryan, to a mundane and boring speech by Romney, the convention was an utter failure. Thus, Republicans are intent on undermining the DNC Convention even before it starts. That is really weak.
Just go back to President Bush’s words in September 2008 when he addressed the nation about this pending huge financial collapse, which required an unprecedented Bank bailout known as TARP. By January of 2009, although a massive bank collapse was avoided, we were losing 800,000 jobs per month and GDP was digging deep into negative territory. It was President Obama who led this nation out of this abyss, creating 4.3 million new jobs, doubling the Dow-Jones index of stocks, and producing the strongest economy on the globe. Sure, this is not total success, but if you ask yourself the question whether you are better off now than 4 years ago, the answer is ‘yes’, although we still have a long way to go.
“Least intelligent” did you say. What evidence do you have for that statement, other than your latent racism, Mr Editor. You see, racism peeks out no matter how much you try to shield it from view!
This lack of respect, assuming that it actually exists, comes from Republican right-wing partisans, who have exhibited a lack of respect for a President who happens to be blackm for almost four years already. This has been your meme, Mr Editor; therefore, is it any wonder that you and yours would not continue said meme in a continuing attempt to tear this good man down? Of course, you are all alike in your disrespect, so that citing a fellow wingnut is to be expected. It has to do with lingering robust racism, in my view. See Clint Eastwood.
You folks are even intent in taking away a success story about finally getting ObL after GW Bush literally gave up, in spite of his promises. Perhaps the three attempts turned down were with good reason. This was neocon Condie Rice’s contention, that President Obama leads from behind. The foreign policy successes of our President put disgraced Condie Rice’s hogwash to the lie one more time. It’s no wonder, with all her baggage, that she was not chosen to be the VP Candidate. The fact is that President Obama gave the orders which the Navy Seals carried out superbly. End of story!!!
No, Mr Editor, Hube is wrong. The Obama campaign is attempting to get early voting privileges for ALL voters, which the Ohio legislature attempted to eliminate early voting, except for the military. You ought to check the cites before going off half cocked, like Hube does all the time!
The Williams sexual abuse case has nothing to do with Dems, but everything to do with an errant individual, so your insertion of this into your anti-Dem screed is politically a non-starter. However, shall I go ahead and dredge up all the Republican sexual deviants as a counter?
Finally, are we to assume that Sister Toldjah will give us some unbiased reporting. I say “no way”!
In conclusion, Mr Editor, your attempts to gin up ugliness from the DNC Convention before it even starts is mighty feeble, especially considering the failed practically all-white convention you folks just concluded. Contrary to tradition, your RNC Convention gave you no statistically significant bump, meaning that at best you’ve held your base, which is probably not enough for a win, in my view.
No, Hube is 100% correct — the Dictator Obama administration wanted to nix early voting for military personnel. What, precisely, is wrong with allowing extra time only for them, considering the nature of their job? Why should civilians who live and work near the polling places have the same status, pray tell?
Hube is right — this is just like Al Gore trying to get the military ballots disqualified in Florida 2000 due to improper postage. That’s anti-American.
Says the “man” who says people who believe in voter ID “don’t understand the issue,” not to mention that those supposedly “adversely” affected by the laws are just too plain dumb to go out and get the needed ID.
Good luck in the SCOTUS w/that argument.
It’s official: The term “racism” no longer has any meaning. Because it is everywhere and means everything. Therefore, all meaning is gone. And you can thank racial hucksters like Perry and his compatriots in the mainstream media like Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Ed Schultz.
The DEMS are praying for rain Thursday night
From my little tablet!
Koolo is right. Yesterday Democrats enforced their version of racism with whips and chains, lynching, Jim Crow laws, fire hoses, and axe handles. Racism was real and it resulted in slavery.
But today’s Democrat practitioners absolve themselves of their crimes against humanity, they deny their own history, and now define racism as disagreeing with collectivist public policy preferences even as they project their own guilt onto the GOP which was born in opposition to Democrat slaveholders.
This is a laugh coming from one who’s parents fled the inner city and whose son has never moved back.
And you want to keep blacks in the same crappy public schools rather than give them a choice. And all this just to appease the teacher unions.
WW complained:
The Democrats traditionally carry those who failed to complete high school. While there are some exceptions, those people are, for the most part, less intelligent than average. If they were smart, they’d have stayed in school!
I’ll say it very plainly: absent some relatively rare circumstances, if you drop out of school these days, you are just plain stupid.
WW wrote:
That’s actually kind of funny. School choice allows the students in the inner-city schools an option to escape those disasters; in many cases, that means black students have a chance to attend private schools with white students.
And your “solution,” spending more money on inner city schools, promotes segregation, because so many of the inner city schools are now very heavily black. Unless your “solution” also includes forced busing of white students from the suburbs into inner city, primarily black schools, your solution does nothing to promote integration.
You live in Delaware now, so perhaps you’ve heard of what the forced busing order did to the New Castle County public schools. At least when I lived there, there wasn’t a single public high school in the city of Wilmington, and the black students were bused out to suburban high schools. On the other hand, suburban white students were bused into the city for elementary and middle schools.
I remember one article, from 2001 or 2002, that I can’t cite now, from the News-Journal. It said that, if the city were it’s own school district, it would be 78% black, 13% Hispanic, and 9% white and Asian. (Those numbers aren’t guesses; I remember them, exactly.) That’s because people chose to live elsewhere, and if you ever had to drive up West Second Street (Route 48) on your way home, you’d lock your windows and doors and send your kids someplace other than the public schools, too. (As I was moving away from New Castle County, there was some “gentrification” of some neighborhoods starting, just west of the downtown courthouse and business district.)
The result? Delaware had the highest rate of private school attendance in the nation, with private and parochial schools all over the place. Corpus Christi School in Elsmere had 32 and 33 and 34 students per class, and they had waiting lists to get in. The diocesan parochial high schools, in 2002, had tuition rates of about $7,000 a year, and waiting lists because they couldn’t take everybody. (St Mark’s might not have had a waiting list.) Had we not moved here, my older daughter would have gone to Padua Academy; both of my daughters went to Corpus Christi. There were also non-diocesan parochial high schools, like Ursaline and Archmere (I think that there were four of them), and the tuition at those schools was over $12,000 a year . . . and they were full! There were plenty of non-Catholic private schools as well, some of which cost more than Penn State does!
It’s pretty simple: parents don’t like seeing their own children used as guinea pigs in some bovine feces social engineering experiment. Well, virtually everybody in New Castle County who could in any way afford to send their kids to private school did. Then, when the public schools need more money, and have to pass a bond measure to get a tax increase, it gets voted down, because so many people are paying property taxes for the public schools which have been so badly destroyed that they can’t use them, and are paying private school tuition as well.