Theodore's World

Commission on Human Rights rules Geno’s postings do not discriminate
msnbc for complete article
PHILADELPHIA
The owner of a famous cheesesteak shop did not discriminate when he posted signs asking customers to speak English, a city panel ruled Wednesday.
In a 2-1 vote, a Commission on Human Relations panel found that two signs at Geno’s Steaks telling customers, “This is America: WHEN ORDERING ‘PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH,'” do not violate the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance.
Shop owner Joe Vento has said he posted the signs in October 2005 because of concerns over immigration reform and an increasing number of people in the area who could not order in English.

Vento has said he never refused service to anyone because they couldn’t speak English. But critics argued that the signs discourage customers of certain backgrounds from eating at the shop.

Commissioners Roxanne E. Covington and Burt Siegel voted to dismiss the complaint, finding that the sign does not communicate that business will be “refused, withheld or denied.”

Wild Thing’s comment……
Yipee about time!
This is a great update to a psot about this that I did about Joe Vento’s place and how it was getting pro and con reactions.
I heard Joe Vento on one of the talk radio shows and he said what he does if a person does not speak English he will give them whatever is at the top of the menu. LOL I love the idea. He is still serving them and they get food, just not what they ordered if they won’t order in English.

….Thank you Lynn for sending this link to me.

Philip “Moki” Martin of Coronado received a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with a combat “V” for valor at a ceremony yesterday at Coronado Naval Amphibious Base. A bicycle accident in 1983 left him a quadriplegic.

Martin (center) received congratulations from fellow Vietnam veterans Frank Sayle (left) and Eric Knudson (right). Recognition was delayed because the mission was so secret.

Secret peril rewarded
San Diego.com
CORONADO
As he plunged through the darkness and into the stormy waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, Navy SEAL Philip “Moki” Martin knew he and his buddies were in trouble.
Of the 700 or so jumps Martin had made from Navy helicopters as a SEAL in training and during the Vietnam War, he could hardly remember one with such nasty conditions.
This mission – deep in enemy territory on June 5, 1972 – was, quite literally, a leap of faith: The pilot wasn’t sure how high they were or whether the Grayback, the submarine they were supposed to meet, actually was there.

“I counted one thousand, two thousand, three thousand. Then I said, ‘Oh no, that’s too long. We’re too high!’ ” recalled Martin, 65, now retired from the Navy and living in Coronado. “I hit (the water) like a ton of you know what.”

Martin suffered a twisted knee when he hit the water. His commander, Lt. Melvin “Spence” Dry, died upon impact. A third SEAL, Fireman Thomas Edwards, was badly hurt.
Yesterday, many of Martin’s old platoon mates watched as he received a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with a combat “V” for valor. The ceremony took place at Coronado Naval Amphibious Base, near the headquarters of the Navy’s Special Warfare Command.
Martin’s wife, Cindy, and daughter, Callie, watched as Rear Adm. Joseph Kernan, the unit’s commander, handed Martin a framed plaque containing the medal.

“It’s been a long, long time coming,” Kernan said. “Thanks for waiting for your celebration, so this generation could share in it.”

Two weeks earlier, Dry’s family had received his Bronze Star with combat “V” posthumously in a similar ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
The recognition had been long delayed because the mission, Operation Thunderhead, was kept so secret that few of the sailors and SEALs aboard the Grayback knew how significant and perilous it was.

“We saw people leave, and nobody ever came back,” said Frank Sayle, 58, of Houston, a SEAL who served aboard the Grayback at the time.

Only Martin and a handful of others knew that the platoon’s job was to rescue two prisoners of war who had hatched a plot to escape from the infamous Vietnamese prison camp known as the Hanoi Hilton.
After a 2005 magazine article about the mission revealed that neither Martin nor Dry had been decorated for their actions, the Grayback’s then-skipper, John Chamberlain, nominated them for the awards.
That the Thunderhead mission failed at every turn doesn’t diminish its importance, said several of the men involved in it. Its lessons are still taught in SEAL training, some of them by Martin himself.
“It’s a bit of closure for us,” said Eric Knudson, 59, of Vacaville, who was a yeoman third class in the platoon.
The Grayback was to slip into North Vietnamese waters and let out several four-man SEAL teams in small, submersible vehicles just offshore on June 3. The teams were to rendezvous with the two prisoners – who had communicated their plans through a method that today remains secret – on an offshore island.
But the currents proved unexpectedly strong. Martin, Dry and their teammates couldn’t reach shore or make it back to the sub. They stayed in the water, praying the North Vietnamese wouldn’t discover them during the eight hours before a rescue helicopter was supposed to pick them up and take them to the Navy cruiser Long Beach.
Aboard the Long Beach, Martin said, the SEALs knew they had to get back to the Grayback to warn other SEAL teams about the currents. So they made plans to return the following night.
The sub couldn’t communicate directly with Dry’s team, but it would use an infrared beacon to guide the helicopter to its location.
The helicopter crew had great difficulty spotting that beacon, said John Wilson of Maui, Hawaii, 67, a crew chief aboard the helicopter that dropped off Dry’s team.
The helicopter finally found a signal at sea and then sent the team on its fateful jump. It turned out to be a distress signal from a second four-man SEAL team. The Grayback had aborted the drop because of North Vietnamese patrol boats in the area, but the message didn’t reach the Long Beach in time.
Wilson’s crew returned the next morning to pick up the seven survivors, as well as Dry’s body. Operation Thunderhead was called off days later after commanders learned that the POW escape also had been aborted.

“You just had no idea what was going on, because no one was allowed to know,” Sayle said. “We never talked about it again. We never saw each other again.”

Martin stayed in the Navy until 1983, shortly after a bicycle accident while riding to the Coronado base left him a quadriplegic. He later earned a degree in painting and photography at San Diego State University. He has won awards for his artwork.
Yesterday, he was moved by the turnout among his platoon mates.

“I wanted this to be about them, more than me,” Martin said. “The medal is just a piece of hardware they give you.”

Wild Thing’s comment……..
It is such an honor to read stories of our Veterans, America’s heroes one and all. America is so blessed that men and women have been willing to serve our country, we owe them all so very much, more then we can ever repay.
I am sorry about the small size of the photos, I didn’t want to enlarge them since it would make them very blurry to see. These small size photos were at the article.
You can also go to THIS WEBSITE …..To learn about Operation Thunderhead and Lt. Philip “Moki” Martin. It is a great site and has photos, write ups and biographies

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda being interviewed after their return from North Vietnam.

Hayden’s Hell
FrontPageMagazine.com
By Kathy Shaidle
It is a disgraceful and shameful name for all those who opposed communism with honor in Southeast Asia four decades ago.

Tom Hayden
The superstar anti-Vietnam War activist, one of the infamous “Chicago 7” defendants, is still making sure that name of shame is connected with Vietnam — the tragic nation he helped destroy in the 1960s and ’70s through his collaboration with the North Vietnamese Communists. After having made a lucrative career out of hating his own country and the free economy on which it is based, Hayden, now aged 67, is evidently going strong.
Unsurprisingly, the latest utterance of the one-time president of the radical Students for a Democratic Society will do little to enhance his already fading and self-created reputation as a supposed forward-thinking visionary.
The March 10, 2008, issue of Nation magazine carried a long essay by Hayden entitled “The Old Revolutionaries of Vietnam.” A poorly written, passive-voice exercise in self-pity, Hayden’s essay recounts his return to the Southeast Asian country he visited throughout the 1960s and ’70s. As detailed in DiscovertheNetworks.com:

Among the most visible and outspoken mouthpieces of the pro-Communist camp during the Vietnam War era, in the early 1970s Hayden organized — along with his wife Jane Fonda, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy — an ‘Indo-China Peace Campaign’ (IPC) to cut off American aid to the regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. The IPC worked tirelessly to help the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge (led by Pol Pot) emerge victorious.

“Hayden and Fonda took a camera crew to Hanoi and to the ‘liberated’ regions of South Vietnam to make a propaganda film titled Introduction to the Enemy (1974) whose purpose was to persuade viewers that the Communists were going to create an ideal new society based on justice and equality.

That “new society based on justice and equality” ultimately witnessed the murder of 2.5-million Indochinese peasants by Hayden’s revolutionary heroes. But the author of the hippie manifesto, “The Port Huron Statement,” is not about to let all those corpses get in the way of his narcissistic nostalgia trip for the Nation:

During Christmas 2007 I traveled back in time with my family, to Vietnam, for the first time in thirty-two years,” Hayden writes. “I was feeling a deep need to see the place once more, a regret at having withdrawn from a country I had visited four times during the war. I wanted to understand the long-term lessons and, on a personal basis, track down the Vietnamese guides and translators, men and women, who assumed an ideological faith in the American ‘people’ they escorted through ruins inflicted by the American ‘enemy.’ (…) Most were survivors of the French and American wars and would be in their 80s by now. Were they still alive? How had they suffered? After the exuberance at their victory and reunification after 1975, how had they adjusted to a Vietnam without war?

That opening paragraph sets the tone for the rest: oddly chosen scare quotes, plenty of question marks, and plenty of self-obsession.
Those first-person pronouns are real. Musing upon an old photo of himself, Hayden can’t resist claiming, for example, that he’s gained a mere ten pounds in the intervening thirty-five years. But Hayden’s questions are mostly rhetorical. He still subscribes to the stale Marxist theory he first swallowed whole in his early twenties. As he finds out to his dismay, however, most Vietnamese don’t.

“Not even Vietnam [itself] can shake him,” writes Robert Fulford, in a scathing takedown of Hayden’s preening travelogue. “Its economy grows swiftly and so does its per capita GDP. It’s a single-party state, still using the name Communist Party, and it has economic freedom without the other kinds of liberty. During his trip, a leading Vietnamese novelist told him, ‘Some Americans may sympathize with communism, but I lived under it and couldn’t stand it.’ The novelist has a son making millions traveling for a high-tech corporation.”

The only resident of Vietnam more distressed than Hayden by all this prosperity is – not surprisingly – another former American anti-war activist turned ex-patriot and capitalist: Gerry Herman is a now successful film distributor, and even he just seems irritated because China is getting better trade deals than his adopted country.

“Far be it from me,” says Hayden, “to question the desire of the Vietnamese to share our globalized consumer culture like everyone else.”

But of course, Hayden does just that, for thousands of workmanlike words. What else can he do, having devoted his entire adult life to fighting American capitalism and “imperialism” in book after book, and demonstration after demonstration? Unlike those of many of his contemporaries, Hayden’s Communist sympathies were no mere fashionable pose.
As his former fellow radical David Horowitz recalled:

Hayden and I were deadly serious about our revolutionary agendas. During the Vietnam War, Tom traveled many times to North Vietnam, Czechoslovakia and Paris to meet communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders. He came back from Hanoi proclaiming he had seen “rice roots democracy at work.” (…) Hayden offered tips on conducting psychological warfare against the U.S. He arranged trips to Hanoi for Americans perceived as friendly to the Communists and blocked entry to those seen as unfriendly, like the sociologist Christopher Jencks. He attacked as “propaganda’ stories of torture and labeled American POWs returning home with such stories as “liars.”

And Hayden’s “revolutionary” activities were not confined to traitorous oversees excursions:

On the domestic front, Hayden advocated urban rebellions and called for the creation of “guerrilla focos” to resist police and other law enforcement agencies. For a while he led a Berkeley commune called the “Red Family,” whose “Minister of Defense” trained commune members at firing ranges and instructed high school students in the use of explosives. He was also an outspoken supporter of the violence-prone Black Panther Party.

Today, Hayden allows himself to wonder – in only the most tentative manner, of course, with the usual disingenuous rhetorical questions – whether or not he and his radical comrades might have been wrong all along:

“The question,” Hayden writes, “is whether the future, aside from the obvious advantages of peace, will be worth the sacrifices of the past. Is the period of anticolonial revolution–which Vietnam symbolized and so dominated our thinking in the ’60s and beyond–becoming an obsolete memory in the era of globalization? Has the promise of those inspiring revolutions faded with the decline of naked colonialism and the emergence of so many corrupt authoritarianisms in the Third World? Or are the supposedly scientific models of history long embraced by the left being replaced with a kind of chaos theory of unpredictability? Is this all that was ever possible?”

The natural desires of ordinary people, be they American or Vietnamese, to trade in goods and services, to enjoy decent food and housing and to exercise their basic human rights, are summarily dismissed as “chaotic” and “unpredictable” by an obviously shaken Tom Hayden. (No doubt Adam Smith would be mystified and perhaps amused to hear capitalism compared to quantum physics.)
Hayden’s only hope of achieving equilibrium is to do the unthinkable: humbly renounce his delusions. Fortunately, he has a couple of timely examples to imitate should he care to do so.
Robert Fulford noted the delightful coincidence of Hayden’s Nation essay appearing at the same time as a Village Voice column by the acclaimed playwright David Mamet, entitled “Why I Am No Longer A ‘Brain Dead Liberal.’” Mamet chronicles his somewhat reluctant journey from Left to Right, such as his newfound respect for corporations and limited government.

“It may seem odd,” Fulford remarks, “that a much-admired writer makes such a noise about the banal fact that he thinks the society he’s always lived in is grounded in sound principles and operates reasonably well. But in his milieu, that opinion remains big news.”

More “big news” was made shortly thereafter by another playwright. Writing in the Sunday Times of London, Tom Stoppard issued a remarkably similar declaration. Even in its soixante-neuf heyday, admits Stoppard, he considered the Left “politically dubious,” writing that he “was embarrassed by the slogans and postures of rebellion in a society which, in London as in Paris [in 1968]. . . seemed to me to be the least worst system into which one might have been born — the open liberal democracy whose very essence was the toleration of dissent.”
The way it looks now, Tom Hayden will resist joining Stoppard and Mamet to his dying day. And when all is said and done, he can never undo the enormous damage he helped perpetrate upon millions of Indo-Chinese people. Longing for a Vietnam that now mirrrors everything he wished to destroy, the anti-war activist now faces his destiny: going down in history as, at best, a pathetic footnote or a cryptic joke, and at worst, an accessory to mass murder and oppression ultimately repudiated even by the oppressors.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
For me Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, John Kerry, and the others that all stood on the side of the enemy during the Vietnam War have blood on their hands for LIFE and beyond. There is no place even in hell that would do justice for the deaths they caused of our soldiers, and contributing their propaganda to the horrendous treatment of our POW’s.
This is an excellent article about Tom Hayden and how he is less then nothing then ever before.

….Thank you Mark for sending this article to me.

With Extreme Prejudice
The Wallstreet Journal
Kerry recently endorsed Barack Obama, and earlier this week he sat down with the editorial board of the Standard-Times (New Bedford, Mass.) to make the case for his candidate.

Kerry said that a President Obama would help the US, in relations with Muslim countries, “in some cases go around their dictator leaders to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can’t otherwise.”

“He has the ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism,” Kerry said. “To maybe even give power to moderate Islam to be able to stand up against this radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion.”
Kerry was asked what gives Obama that credibility.

“Because he’s African-American. Because he’s a black man. Who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country.”

An African-American president would be “a symbol of empowerment” for those who have been disenfranchised around the world, Kerry said, “an important lesson for America to show Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, other places in the world where disenfranchised people don’t get anything.”

One obvious question: What do the events of this week, involving Obama’s own church, tell us about his ability to “stand up against” a “radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion”? Nothing very encouraging in this columnist’s view, but many observers view Obama much more charitably in this regard than we do.
What is really striking about Kerry’s case for Obama, though, is that it rests on what may be the crudest stereotyping we have ever observed. Commentary’s Abe Greenwald has a chuckle over Kerry’s racial stereotyping of Obama:
Where is this “place of oppression and repression” in which Obama has suffered “through the years”? Hawaii? Harvard? The Senate? We should find out immediately and do something about this horrific crisis.
But Kerry isn’t just stereotyping blacks. He is stereotyping Muslims too. And he is drawing an equivalence between American blacks, a racial minority in one country, and Middle Eastern Muslims, a religious majority in a whole region.
Never mind that, as Greenwald points out, “Arab Muslims [are] none too happy with their black countrymen in northern Africa.” Never mind that in some African countries, notably Sudan and Mauritania, Arab Muslims still enslave blacks.
To Kerry, it seems, all “oppressed peoples” look alike. The man has all the intellectual subtlety of a third-rate ethnic studies professor.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
“Where is this “place of oppression and repression” in which Obama has suffered “through the years”? Hawaii? Harvard? The Senate? “
Well my gosh, we should find out immediately and do something about this horrific crisis. heh heh
LOL I love what Rush said about this…….

“RUSH: …Man, this is what I mean. When you got guys like this speaking for you, you have no control over. Do you realize what you just heard? This is the former Democrat presidential nominee, and he has just encapsulated here the liberal Democrat view of this country where it comes to race: “We are guilty!” Whatever anybody, particularly our enemies — whatever radical Islam thinks of us — they’re right. We are guilty, because we are racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes and all that. And we need to elect an African-American president, a young leader, obviously visionary, to show the rest of the world that we are who we say we are as a people. To bridge the divide of religious extremism? (laughing) Kerry said this on Monday. I don’t think Jeremiah Wright was a common household name at that time. (laughing) Bridge the divide.? He has created the divide! He’s widening the divide! He’s dredging the divide! He’s dumping the sand of the divide on both sides of the shore. “

All three presidential candidates had passport files breached
The Sacramento Bee
WASHINGTON — State Department employees inappropriately examined the passport files of Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican candidate Sen. John McCain, a security breach that forced Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to apologize to Obama.
Rice said Friday she apologized to Obama for a security breach in which three State Department contractors reviewed his file on three occasions earlier this year. Two of the employees were fired and a third disciplined.
“I told him that I was sorry, and I told him that I myself would be very disturbed,” Rice told reporters.
Separately, Clinton issued a statement saying Rice told her that her passport file was breached in 2007.
The State Department said the same contract employee who examined Barack Obama?s file also looked at McCain?s.
The State Department’s inspector general is investigating the Obama passport breach, which occurred on three separate occasions — Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and as recently as last week, on March 14. On Friday, the department announced that the Justice Department would be monitoring the probe in case it needs to get involved.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday that the State Department would make results of the investigation available to congressional oversight committees and to Obama’s office.
Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama’s presidential campaign, has called the incident “an outrageous breach of security and privacy.”
Aside from the file, the information could allow Obama’s critics to dig deeper into his private life. While the file includes his date and place of birth, address at time of application and the countries he’s traveled to, the most important detail would be his Social Security number, which can be used to pull credit reports and other personal information.
“This is a serious matter that merits a complete investigation, and we demand to know who looked at Senator Obama’s passport file, for what purpose and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach,” Burton said on Thursday.
McCormack said the breaches occurred were detected by internal State Department computer checks. The department’s top management officer, Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy, said certain records, including those of high-profile people, are “flagged” with a computer tag that tips off supervisors when someone tries to view the records without a proper reason.
The firings and unspecified discipline of the third employee already had occurred when senior State Department officials learned of the breaches. Kennedy called that a failing. Rice only learned about the breaches Thursday.
“I will fully acknowledge this information should have been passed up the line,” Kennedy told reporters in a conference call Thursday night. “It was dealt with at the office level.”
In answer to a question, Kennedy said the department doesn’t look into political affiliation in doing background checks on passport workers. “Now that this has arisen, this becomes a germane question, and that will be something for the appropriate investigation to look into,” he said.
The department informed Obama’s Senate office of the breach on Thursday. Kennedy said that at the office’s request, he will provide a personal briefing for the senator’s staff on Friday.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
Clinton’s file is improperly viewed. No outrage
McCain’s file is improperly viewed. No outrage
Obama’s file is improperly viewed. Yes outrage and media pushing for Obama go nuts. Oberman on MSNBC went balistic last nighit. And other networks pulling for him as well. LOL
Don’t we have a right to know where they travel? I mean we pay their salaries, they work for us. If a public figure travels on MY TAX MONEY, I have a right to know it. It’s part of the public record. Senators are not undercover CIA operatives. LOL
I am really curious who did this. haha Maybe Clinton probably did it to herself so that she could use it as cover when her own people eventually got caught. Or omaybe it is just because of my thinking of the 900 FBI Files collected by the Clinton’s. Just a thought heh heh I would love to see the media compare the breach of a passport file to 900 FBI files.Keep those Clinton gates in the news too.
I am not sure, but I think the Passport thing would only be dangerous in regards to knowing a person’s social security number and probably their home address. That IS bad but that cant be the reason this breach happened. Who cares about where these idiots live or their SS#. What the Clinton’s did with the 9090 FBI files was horrendous and personal and private information on anyone they considered and enemy real or imagined.
From MSNBC
There Were Three Types of Breaches
“(1) Fall 2007. A training exercise last fall involved somebody typing in Hillary Clinton’s name… The person involved was not fired.
(2-a) January 9, 2008. A contractor looked at the passport file of Barack Obama. The supervisor felt it was a firing offense. The contractor was fired. But the immediate supervisor didn’t notify officials outside office of consular affairs.
(2-b) February 21, 2008. Another contractor looked at Obama’s passport file. Supervisor felt it was a firing offense. The contractor was fired. The immediate supervisor didn’t notify officials outside office of consular affairs.
(3) March 14, 2008. A third contractor accessed Obama’s passport file and McCain’s passport file. Supervisor felt it was not a firing offense. The contractor suspended. The immediate supervisor didn’t notify officials outside office of consular affairs.
Key questions: What made the Jan. 9 and Feb. 21 breaches of Obama more serious than the fall ’07 breach of Clinton and the March 14 breaches of Obama/McCain? “

Obama passport files violated; 2 workers at State fired; 1 rebuked
The Washington Times
Two State Department employees were fired recently and a third disciplined for improperly accessing electronic personal data on Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, Bush administration officials said today.

The officials, all contract workers, used their authorized computer network access to look up files within the department’s consular affairs section, which processes and stores passport information, and read Mr. Obama’s passport application and other records, in violation of department privacy rules, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was notified of the security breach today, and responded by saying security measures used to monitor records of high-profile Americans worked properly in detecting the breaches.

Mr. McCormack said the officials did not appear to be seeking information on behalf of any political candidate or party.

“As far as we can tell, in each of the three cases, it was imprudent curiosity,” Mr. McCormack told The Washington Times.

A similar data breach took place in 1992 when State Department officials looked up data on presidential candidate Bill Clinton, in an attempt to find out information from the late 1960s, amid unfounded political campaign rumors that Mr. Clinton had sought to renounce his citizenship to dodge the draft during the Vietnam War while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
That incident triggered a three-year investigation by a special prosecutor, who found that no laws were violated but officials exercised poor judgment. The 1992 search of Mr. Clinton’s passport records was part of an effort to speed up Freedom of Information Act requests.

The Obama campaign denounced the accessing as “an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an Administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years.”

Spokesman Bill Burton said “our government’s duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes. This is a serious matter that merits a complete investigation, and we demand to know who looked at Senator Obama’s passport file, for what purpose, and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach.”

One administration official said the FBI is conducting a preliminary inquiry into the officials involved in the unauthorized access incidents related to Mr. Obama, Illinois Democrat. An FBI spokesman could not be reached for comment.
Government records of political candidates are tightly restricted because of concerns they could be used against candidates or the data could be altered as part of campaign dirty tricks.
In this case, it does not appear that records were copied or altered, Mr. McCormack said.
Passport application data includes such details as date and place of birth, e-mail address, mailing address, Social Security number, former names and travel plans. Mr. Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961 to a Kenyan father and American mother. He lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, from age six to 10.
Computer-monitoring equipment detected the activities by the three employees on Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14, triggering alarms in each case, Mr. McCormack said.
Mr. McCormack said the officials accessed Mr. Obama’s records “without a need to do so.”

“In each case, we immediately contacted our contractors, their employer, and two were fired and one was disciplined,” he said.

“We have strict rules restricting access to passport records,” Mr. McCormack said.

Each time an employee logs on to the passport-records network, they are informed that the records are protected by the Privacy Act and are “available only on a need-to-know basis,” he said. But no technical bar prevents a person, once he is in the system, from gaining access to Privacy Act-protected records to which he has no “need-to-know” rights.
But the network has an electronic monitoring system that is tripped when an employee accesses a record of a prominent person, like Mr. Obama. The alarm then triggers an inquiry into the incident, and “when the answer is not satisfactory, a supervisor is notified.”
Such records can be accessed when it is part of an official inquiry, but in the case of Mr. Obama, it was not, Mr. McCormack said.
Asked whether a political candidate or party is behind the incidents, Mr. McCormack said: “None at this point in time that we have determined.”
Mr. McCormack declined to provide the names of the employees or the contract, but he said they were hired by the contractor involved in producing, processing and approving passports.

“This is supposed to be a transaction between an individual and the government, and this is private information that we take a lot of steps to protect, and we take that responsibility seriously, not only for high profile individuals but for everybody,” he said.

Mr. McCormack said the incidents took place at consular affairs facilities in the Washington area.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
Anyone check Sandy Berger’s pants? He lilkes to mess with top security files. LOL
I bet Obama will be trying to push for an investigation to get the focus off his pastor. LOL This is serious and shouldn’t happen to anyone on either side. But it is funny and the timing is just soooo perfect to get the subject to change in the media and blogs and talk radio….the American people. hahaha
Obama campaign says it’s outrageous breech of security.
They are EATING this up…talk about a subject-changer. They went nuts on the various networks. Knowing the Clinton’s and their padt FBI files on one and all, it sure seems like a set up by either Clintonistas at State Department..or Obama himself to get Preachergate off the news!
Well, I guess Obama will release his passport records when Hillary releases her tax records.

Obama Website Yanks ‘Black Panthers’ Plug
wnd ….for complete article
‘It’s part of the game,’ says anti-white, anti-Jew leader

The removal by the Barack Obama campaign from its official website of an endorsement from the black supremacist New Black Panther Party, or NBPP, was decided upon for “understandable political reasons,” according to the party’s national chairman.
“It’s the game of politics,” the NBPP’s Malik Zulu Shabazz told WND. “The Obama camp’s move to remove our blog doesn’t mean much because I understand politics. We still completely support Obama as the best candidate.”
Shabbaz, who has given scores of speeches condemning “white men” and Jews, said today Obama “is the best guy to bring the kinds of racial changes supported by our community at the New Black Panthers.”
The NBPP, which inherited its name from the Black Panther Party of the 1960s, is a controversial black extremist party whose leaders are notorious for their racist statements and anti-white activism. The organization’s own website also was taken down today too.

And from Fox News
Fox News
Obama Camp Rejects New Black Panther Party Endorsement After Removing Web Posting
Barack Obama’s campaign has rejected the support of the New Black Panther Party, after removing an endorsement by the group from its Web site Wednesday.
Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor issued a statement rejecting the Panther backing, and told FOXNews.com: “The page in question has been removed from our campaign Web site. It’s our policy with any content generated by a group that advocates violence.”
The blogosphere was buzzing Wednesday about whether his campaign planned to remove the Panther posting, just one day after the Illinois senator delivered a speech calling for improved race relations in America.
Malik Zulu Shabazz, who has led the group since 2001, told FOX News the Obama campaign’s reaction to the endorsement was understandable.
The NBPP is identified as an extremist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a tolerance education organization. The Anti-Defamation League calls NBPP “the largest organized anti-Semitic black militant group in America. … Under Shabazz, the group continues to organize demonstrations across the country that blend inflammatory bigotry with calls for black empowerment and civil rights.”

After the death of Black Panther Party’s former leader Dr. Khallid Muhammad in February 2001, Malik Zulu Shabazz, a Washington D.C.-based attorney, took over leadership of the group.
Here is a video of Dr. Khallid Muhammad, the man that the new leader Malik Zulu Shabazz said at the Dr.’s funeral was “one of the greatest Black leaders to ever live.”

ALERT: This video contains the most extreme hate speech I ever knew existed in my life. I just want to make you aware of it if you decide to watch this. I had to watch part of it then try again to see the entire thing. It is very upsetting, very scary.

.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
The image at the top of this post was posted directly on the “Obama for America” website which is controlled by Obama’s campaign and if it was that easy to pull it off by the campaign then it had to have gone through the campaign in the first place to be posted.
Also notice the dates that I circled in red, this was put on his site back in January. Obama and his campaign team only now this last Wednesday decided to take it off the site. They were not noticed or at least ignored for 2+ months. Yep, the MSM is on top of their jobs. NOT!
All of this has been a real education for me. I guess I have lived a pretty protected life when it comes to how some groups feel. I know the terrorists hate us and want us dead. I knew about the Black Panthers and what they did a long time ago. But I never heard their words in your face kind of thing, like in the video.
Here is what I do not understand.
Obama wants to be President, he is not stupid or is he. He had to know that these people hate ALL white people. He knows to be President it means of all America not just President of the black communities. He had to know that he could not have connections to radical groups, hate groups, hate filled preachers screaming of their hate for the very country he ( Obama) wants to reside over as President.
And yet he has done just that, allowed their endorsement at his campaign website, stuck by his pastor until confronted by the LIBERAL media asking about it, and still he has not separated himself completely from any of this.
So my question is does he think the citizens of this country are stupid? He has to know he will not get elected if he only counts on the black vote. He has to know that even Democrats if enough hate the white guy is in their face even they will be offended sooner or later. The old time Democrats at least would be offended, the kind like Zell Miller etc. He has to know that the most racists white people in the USA have always been Democrats.
I just don’t get it, maybe he is that stupid or maybe he is self destructive.

…. Thank you RAC for sending the link to the article and the video link to me.

Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook

Compares charter calling for murder of Jews to Declaration of Independence
WND
JERUSALEM
Sen. Barack Obama’s Chicago church reprinted a manifesto by Hamas that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group’s official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America’s Declaration of Independence.
The Hamas piece was published on the “Pastor’s Page” of the Trinity United Church of Christ newsletter reserved for Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whose anti-American, anti-Israel remarks landed Obama in hot water, prompting the presidential candidate to deliver a major race speech earlier this week.
Hamas, responsible for scores of shootings, suicide bombings and rocket launchings against civilian population centers, is listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department.
The revelation follows a recent WND article quoting Israeli security officials who expressed “concern” about Robert Malley, an adviser to Obama who has advocated negotiations with Hamas and providing international assistance to the terrorist group.
In his July 22, 2007, church bulletin, Wright reprinted an article by Mousa Abu Marzook, identified in the newsletter as a “deputy of the political bureau of Hamas.” A photo image of the newsletter was captured and posted today by the business blog BizzyBlog. The Hamas piece was first published by the Los Angeles Times, garnering the newspaper much criticism.
According to senior Israeli security officials, Marzook, who resides in Syria alongside Hamas chieftain Khaled Meshaal, is considered the “brains” behind Hamas, designing much of the terror group’s policies and ideology. Israel possesses what it says is a large volume of specific evidence that Marzook has been directly involved in calling for or planning scores of Hamas terrorist offensives, including deadly suicide bombings. He was also accused of attempting to set up a Hamas network in the U.S.
Marzook’s original piece was titled, “Hamas’ stand” but was re-titled “A Fresh View of the Palestinian Struggle” by Obama’s church newsletter. The newsletter also referred to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement,” and added in its introduction that Marzook was addressing Hamas’ goals for “all of Palestine.”

In the manifesto, Marzook refers to Hamas’ “resistance” – the group’s perpetuation of anti-Israel terrorism targeting civilians – as “legal resistance,” which, he argues, is “explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

The Convention, which refers to the rights of people living under occupation, does not support suicide bombings or rocket attacks against civilian population centers, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America noted.

Marzook refers to Hamas’ official charter as “an essentially revolutionary document” and compares the violent creed to the Declaration of Independence, which, Marzook states, “simply did not countenance any such status for the 700,000 African slaves at that time.”

Hamas’ charter calls for the murder of Jews. Among its platforms is a statement that the “[resurrection] will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, and the rock and the tree will say: ‘Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, kill him!'”

In his piece, Marzook says Hamas only targets Israel and denies that Hamas’ war is meant to be waged against the U.S., even though Hamas officials have threatened America, and Hamas’ charter calls for Muslims to “pursue the cause of the Movement (Hamas), all over the globe.”
Trinity Church did not respond to a phone message requesting comment.
Obama’s campaign also did not reply to phone and e-mail requests today for comment.
Obama aide wants talks with terrorists
WND reported in January that Malley, an Obama foreign policy adviser, has penned numerous opinion articles, many of them co-written with a former adviser to the late Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, petitioning for dialogue with Hamas and blasting Israel for policies he says harm the Palestinian cause.
Malley also previously penned a well-circulated New York Review of Books piece largely blaming Israel for the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in 2000 when Arafat turned down a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and eastern sections of Jerusalem and instead returned to the Middle East to launch an intifada, or terrorist campaign, against the Jewish state.
Malley’s contentions have been strongly refuted by key participants at Camp David, including President Clinton, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and primary U.S. envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross, all of whom squarely blamed Arafat’s refusal to make peace for the talks’ failure.
In February 2006, after Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament and amid a U.S. and Israeli attempt to isolate the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority, Malley wrote an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun advocating international aid to the terror group’s newly formed government.

“The Islamists (Hamas) ran on a campaign of effective government and promised to improve Palestinians’ lives; they cannot do that if the international community turns its back,” wrote Malley in a piece entitled, “Making the Best of Hamas’ Victory.”

Malley contended the election of Hamas expressed Palestinian “anger at years of humiliation and loss of self-respect because of Israeli settlement expansion, Arafat’s imprisonment, Israel’s incursions, Western lecturing and, most recently and tellingly, the threat of an aid cutoff in the event of an Islamist success.”
Malley said the U.S. should not “discourage third-party unofficial contacts with [Hamas] in an attempt to moderate it.”
In an op-ed in the Washington Post in January coauthored by Arafat adviser Hussein Agha, Malley – using what could be perceived as anti-Israel language – urged Israel’s negotiating partner, Abbas, to reunite with Hamas.

“A renewed national compact and the return of Hamas to the political fold would upset Israel’s strategy of perpetuating Palestinian geographic and political division,” wrote Malley.

He further petitioned Israel to hold talks with Hamas.

“An arrangement between Israel and Hamas could advance both sides’ interests,” Malley wrote.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
The Obama bus continues over the cliff.
I’m glad this is coming out because Obama’s advisors are all socialists that believe Israel and America are at fault for every hardship in the world, and terrorism is justified against us. Hopefully this will start to shed more and more light on the people around him and their sympathy for terrorists.
The left and their support for terrorists, add in to that their hate for our military they all go together.

….Thank you Mark for this article.

McCain Aide Suspended Over Twitter (Sent out Obama video)

CNN Time Blog
The ongoing saga of the McCain Campaign’s effort to keep the political discourse respectful added another chapter today. As reported by Jon Martin, the campaign has suspended a junior staffer, Soren Dayton, a conservative blogger/consultant who worked in McCain’s political department.
His crime: Distributing, via Twitter, a smarmy Youtube video that mashes together the words of Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, a photograph of the 1968 Olympics black power salute and a Public Enemy song, among other things. The video suggests, in a rather crude fashion, what conservative commentators have long held: That Wright’s inflammatory rhetoric is a key window on the secret radical agenda of Obama.
But the McCain campaign still ain’t gonna playing that game. As Communications Director Jill Hazelbaker told Martin,

“We have been very clear on the type of campaign we intend to run and this staffer acted in violation of our policy.”

Dayton’s suspension comes just a week after the McCain campaign sent reporters a opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal suggesting that Obama’s relationship with Wright showed his radical agenda. The McCain campaign later said that the article was sent out in error, and McCain told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that he does not hold Wright’s inflammatory statements against Obama…

“I do know Senator Obama,” McCain said. “He does not share those views.”

And for those who are counting, the smarmy YouTube attack on Obama has yet to get many viewers. As of this posting, it has only been watched 53,694 times.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
I wonder if McCain thinks Obama would make a “good president”, like he thinks Hillary would. This is funny to me because it is one of the videos I posted on March 18th.
B.Hussein and Michell Obama and Wright Being Wrong
I understand what McCain is trying to do, take the high road and all. But one can go too far in that direction when trying to win a battle.
Thing is, he’s never missing an opportunity to dis a supporter and make gratuitous statements defending his opponents. Hmmmmm like this for instance…..My good friend Obama, my good friend Kerry, my good friend Teddy, my good friend Liebermann, my good friend Hillary and on and on.

The revolt of the Vietnam veterans
San Diego Union Tribune
By Bruce Kesler
December 19, 2004
Post mortems in the liberal press on the role that Vietnam veterans played in presidential candidate John Kerry’s defeat mask the key role of the liberal press, which tried to suppress the vets’ story and is distorting it now. I was there at the creation of a veterans group and all along, and know better. The American people deserve to know better too.
In 1971 I organized Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. John O’Neill enlisted to counter the smears of American servicemen in Vietnam. No one else spoke up for us, so we had to. The mainstream press was more diverse than today and we got a spotty but honest hearing.
Kerry’s light dimmed then. Americans got the message that a motley crew of exaggerators and frauds didn’t speak for Vietnam veterans. We said our piece and went home, back to our diverse, nonpolitical lives.
Meanwhile, anti-Vietnam war protesters of the 1960s marched through academia and the media to claim its power as their own. In 2004, they fought to defend their self-image by defaming that of anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans.
In February 2004, anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans were shocked that he won the Democratic nomination. The mainstream media blessed this coronation. No one except Kerry and his advisers really wanted to revisit Vietnam, but they saw it as a way to appeal to anti and pro-war voters.
Kerry’s Vietnam veteran opponents hadn’t been in contact for over 30 years, so we searched each other out. Scott Swett, creator of wintersoldier.com that collected research on Kerry’s protest activities, was an invaluable connector among us, creating an Internet political network that bound us together.
While we knew all too well about Kerry’s anti-Vietnam protest period, we compared notes and surprised ourselves at the extent of deceptions in Kerry’s self-hagiography about being a sterling war hero. It was intolerable that John Kerry brazenly glorified this suspect record to centerpiece his few months as a junior officer 35 years ago as qualification to lead the United States in this most challenging time since the Cold War.
The liberal media portrayed anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans as a long-planned, far-right funded conspiracy of liars. That’s far, far from the truth. The real story is like the Minutemen, rising from peaceful lives to spontaneously come together to again fight for the America we so deeply love.
There was little or no coordination, just mutual support, with each volunteer shooting from behind his own tree in the same direction. We came to know each other on the field of our revolt against the false image created by Kerry of himself in the media and the false image Kerry was instrumental in painting of us and America.
John O’Neill got off his sickbed. He asked me whether I had the contacts and resources to lead as I did in 1971, which I didn’t, and he dug in his own pocket to get the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth started. Vietnam veterans from every service, and Americans from every walk of life, joined in and followed O’Neill into political combat.
Early in the year a friend with access to the Kerry campaign warned me it was digging for any kind of dirt to destroy us. Contrary to the liberal media’s story that we surprised Kerry in August, he thought the mainstream media could succeed in ignoring and stifling the Swift Boat veterans, and he had long planned a new smear campaign against us.
The surprise to the Kerry camp and liberal press was that the new media did break through and that Vietnam veterans could not be intimidated. In August, as reported by Newsweek, Kerry operatives fed negative documents and talking points to the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe. Subsequent articles in those newspapers reflected negatively on the Swiftees.
With only one halting exception, the mainstream media refused to investigate the sworn affidavits of 60 credible witnesses to Kerry’s behavior, or to follow up on the abundance of additional information given them. The New York Times repeatedly used “unsubstantiated” as its adjective describing the Swift Boat veterans’ allegations without ever exerting its considerable power to investigate.
Kerry wasn’t pressured by the mainstream media to reveal his full military records to resolve issues, nor questioned as to what he was hiding. The mainstream media’s zeal in chasing down every scrap of trivia about Bush’s service stands in sharp contrast. That alone strongly suggested a liberal bias.
This behavior by some of the liberal media was purposeful. The survival of their favored candidate was endangered by our truth and facts. As important, the self-image of many reporters was endangered. Their myths of our pervasive evils in defending Vietnamese freedom, and of their valiant memories of mounting school libraries’ ramparts, could not take the incongruence of exposure.
In the campaign to discredit anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans, some charged that we were reviving an old vendetta. Actually, we had ignored Kerry until last February. Some charged that we were refighting a cultural war from the ’60s. Again, untrue. Many of us smoked marijuana, rocked to the same songs, grew the same long hair. We’re Democrats, independents and Republicans.
The true post mortem of Kerry’s defeat is simply the last hurrah of simple patriots, amateurishly but fervently rising up and banding together, with few resources, to defeat the mainstream media’s boy and juggernaut. Polls and the election show we succeeded.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
This is a great article and what a time that was too. Vietnam Veterans gathering together at the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth website and all across the internet at various forums. Posting their hearts out as they did all they could do to counter John Kerry’s lies and bring the truth to the media and to all of America and the entire world.
During that time I did not have a blog, but I did have my website and what an honor it was to meet (online) some of the Swift Boat Veterans. I still have my emails from John O’Neil and Tom Forrest (when he was President of the “Swift Boat Sailors Association” (SBSA). Tom passed away May 1, 2006 . My last email from him was in March of 2006 and I am so glad I was able to tell him how grateful America was for all that Swift Boat Veterans had done.
The reason we do not have John Kerry for President is due to the hard work of the Vietnam Veterans and yes their revolt which was a great success.
You can see Tom’s photos and a small write up at my Tribute to Vietnam Vets page.
When a person serves their country it has always been my hope that they could know their fight was done and they could come home and enjoy the freedoms that they fought for and served our country to preserve. But when John Kerry entered the race they all went right back into the most amazing fight for our country.
Thank you.

….Thank you Mark for sending this article to me.