Obama LOCKING OUT the Public When He Speaks in St. Louis

Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” – Image Courtesy of Norman Rockwell Museum

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Obama’s itinerary: Afternoon in St. Charles, evening at the Renaissance
ST. LOUIS
Barack Obama will continue to pressure Congress to pass his health care reform package in a speech Wednesday at St. Charles High, the White House announced over the weekend.
Obama’s speech in St. Charles — his second trip to a suburban St. Louis high school within the last twelve months — is set to begin around 4 p.m. Unlike previous events here and around the country, the event is not being billed as a townhall forum — in other words, no questions please.

The event will be by “invitation only” — meaning the stands will likely be filled with guests of the school and local party officials.

Brace for rush hour highway closures as the president travels from St. Charles to downtown, where he will headline a 6 p.m. fundraiser for U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill — a key ally on Capitol Hill — at the Renaissance Grand hotel.
Air Force One is schedule to leave the area later Wednesday night.

Wild Thing’s comment…….
He is locking the doors on the public in St. Louis! Sheesh!
The facility where Obama will speak is tax payer supported. I see no reason why it is not open to the public. If he wants a private meeting than have it in a hotel. He is showing how afraid he is of getting any questions about his socialized medicine. He really is a dictator!
There are Tea Parties planned which is great, but they won’t be able to attend, like they did last summer at the Townhall meetings. No publilc allowed, no questions allowed, not in Obama’s America.
Did you know what inspired Rockwell to paint the illustration above?
The story behind the story? Rockwell’s dear friend and next door neighbor in West Arlington, Vermont, James A. “Buddy” Edgerton, who along with co-author Nan O’Brien has recently written Buddy’s memoirs, has the answer:

“Norman himself used to tell the story that one night in the darkness after midnight, he had bolted upright in bed and thought about my father – and he was so excited at the thought, he wanted to call his best friend, Mead Schaeffer, another Post illustrator who had moved with his wife, Elizabeth, to Arlington just a year before. And he would have called, Mead, too, except that he didn’t want to disturb all the other folks along Mead’s party line.

The thought that had energized him in the night was the image of seeing my father more than a year before, as my dad had stood up in the town meeting to debate whether or not the Arlington High School – the very school I would be attending in just a few short months – should be rebuilt after burning down. Norman, a relative newcomer to Arlington at the time, had attended the meeting because it would have an influence on the schooling of his own three sons, Jarvis (we called him Jerry), Tommy, and Peter. But now, in the middle of the night, with the issue of to build or not to build long gone, the memory of how everyone in that room had listened to my father, his passion, his eloquence, and his minority point of view with such respect and appreciation, struck the creative chord in Norman that set off a firestorm of inspiration. This was freedom of speech; and this was what America was all about….” Page 44, The Unknown Rockwell: A Portrait Of Two American Families.