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The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elas­tic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain...

Stanley Ann Dunham, better known as President Barack Obama's mother, passed away in 1995 before seeing her son become the most powerful man in the world. In this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Dunham gets a long profile adapted from Janny Scott's forthcoming book, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. The article paints a portrait of a complex woman who traveled to Indonesia with her second husband, battled the customs while raising her son and new daughter, and eventually returned to Hawaii. As Scott writes, "To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out...

Vladimir Lenin said that westerners too dumb to recognize his plans to "hang them" would "sell me the rope -- on credit." And they did, engaging in decades of excuse-making for Communist totalitarianism. But without the Soviets around, the American left needed new anti-western totalitarians to mollify, and the leaders of militant Islam satisfied that itch... Today's American left displays its useful idiocy by insisting after each new act of Islamic terrorism that "Islam is a religion of peace." MSNBC is the unofficial headquarters for these useful idiots ..."Republican" lightweight Joe Scarborough is a member in good standing. In between...

BOGOTA — Colombia's inspector general ousted an outspoken opposition senator Monday, barring her from public service for 18 years for allegedly "promoting and collaborating" with Latin America's last remaining rebel army. Sen. Piedad Cordoba gained international notice by brokering the release of more than a dozen hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. A flamboyant Afro-Colombian known for her trademark turban, Cordoba has been a polarizing force in domestic politics and is a close ally of Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez.... Ordonez said in a statement that he dismissed Cordoba based on electronic documents found in...

Ohio Secretary of State Linked to ACORN, Project Vote The national development director for Project Vote, an affiliated organization of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, has been linked to embattled Ohio Secretary of State, Democrat Jennifer Brunner. Karyn Gillette of Project Vote was a campaign consultant for the Brunner campaign, according to information found in a post made by Rick Brunner on April 11, 2006 on the secretary of state’s own blog. “Our candidate had gone earlier in the day to have some meetings and work out of Karyn Gillette's office, but when your correspondent...

O'Reilly hammers Obama about Ayers

The McCain campaign went looking for a major anchor to be awarded the blessing and the curse of the first Sarah Palin interview -- a blessing for ratings and a curse from all the competitors who would accuse the winners of being soft on Republicans. At CBS, Katie Couric had wallowed in fan-club-president questions to Hillary Clinton about her "pure stamina," so she couldn't be first. NBC's Brian Williams kept asking Barack Obama those hardballs about how his late mother would swoon over the latest glowingly positive "news" magazine cover. How hard was it to pick Charlie Gibson on ABC?...

t-shirt reads: "Our new weapon in the war against terrorism" - a peace sign(!)Sweatshirt reads "War is not the answer". (I guess, by the looks of it, Krispy Kremes are?)

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Add another name to the list of political observers who think a Clinton-Obama ticket would be unbeatable: Cuban leader Fidel Castro. In an editorial in Cuba's communist party newspaper, Granma, the ailing dictator said the pairing of the two White House hopefuls seemed "invincible," according to an English translation on the paper's Web site.

The Bush administration's anti-terrorist surveillance efforts are more extensive than top officials have acknowledged, going beyond the controversial no-warrant eavesdropping program, the U.S. intelligence chief said Tuesday. President Bush acknowledged a program allowing the government to wiretap phone calls without obtaining a warrant in 2005. The program, run by the National Security Agency, is at the center of disputed congressional testimony by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales is defending himself against allegations that he lied to Congress about a 2004 dispute between the White House and Justice Department over the legality of the eavesdropping program. In a letter defending the...

Communist Re-education in Action by: Matt Hadro, June 18, 2007 Communism may be dead in Eastern Europe, but its influence is alive and well in various areas of the world, even though intellectuals in and out of the Ivory Tower would rather not talk about it. “Why do they kill so much?” Dr. Richard Pipes, Professor of History at Harvard University, asked the audience at the Heritage Foundation. “Yes, they desire to stay in power, but they also have no value of human life.” “Real humans are created by the Communist society.” On the same panel with Dr. Pipes, Tran...

It's a David versus Goliath battle heating up in the Hill Country — a group of nuns from Boerne is taking a stand against Wal-Mart. The corporate giant reportedly labeled the nuns a security threat after they raised questions about Wal-Mart's business practices. Sister Susan Mika is part of the Benedectine Sisters, which is part of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. The center has been questioning Wal-Mart's business practices for years. "We've been raising questions with them for about 17 years, so it's not like they don't know it," Sister Mika said. Now, the sisters find themselves on Wal-Mart's...

For most Americans, the Iraq war is both distant and never ending. For Private Matthew Zeimer, it was neither. Shortly after midnight on Feb. 2, Zeimer had his first taste of combat as he scrambled to the roof of the 3rd Infantry Division's Combat Outpost Grant in central Ramadi. Under cover of darkness, Sunni insurgents were attacking his new post from nearby buildings. Amid the smoke, noise and confusion, a blast suddenly ripped through the 3-ft. concrete wall shielding Zeimer and a fellow soldier, killing them both. Zeimer had been in Iraq for a week. He had been at his...

Muslims played a critical role in some key elections this year. But elected officials won't take them seriously if they don't continue to organize and turn out Muslim voters, two politically active Muslims said Saturday at a convention in Dearborn. If there are efforts to register Muslims to vote, educate them about the candidates and get them to the polls to vote for one candidate, politicians will court their support, Jameel Johnson, an aide to U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., said at the Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America convention. "It is our job to make the...

Federal officials were "outrageously obstructive" during a congressional probe examining possible Islamic terrorist and foreign ties to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, according to a congressman who disclosed to WND some of the highlights of a subcommittee report scheduled for release next week.

What did you do in the war, UNIFIL? You broadcast Israeli troop movements. by Lori Lowenthal Marcus 09/04/2006, Volume 011, Issue 47 DURING THE RECENT month-long war between Hezbollah and Israel , U.N. "peacekeeping" forces made a startling contribution: They openly published daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon . UNIFIL--the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon , a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978--is officially neutral. Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for all...

U.S. District Judge Who Presided Over Government Wiretapping Case May Have Had Conflict of Interest (Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and judicial abuse, announced today that Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who last week ruled the government’s warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional, serves as a Secretary and Trustee for a foundation that donated funds to the ACLU of Michigan, a plaintiff in the case (ACLU et. al v. National Security Agency). Judicial Watch discovered the potential conflict of interest after reviewing Judge Diggs Taylor’s financial disclosure statements. According to her 2003 and 2004...

2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wasted no time last Thursday denouncing Hamas after the terror group's big win in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. But as noted terrorism expert Steven Emerson pointed out when Mrs. Clinton first ran for the Senate, relations between the top Democrat and supporters of the notorious anti-Israeli organization haven't always been so chilly. In fact, in a November 2000 report on OpinionJournal.com headlined "Hillary and Hamas," Emerson noted that Mrs. Clinton "has met repeatedly" over the years with "groups that had openly supported Hamas, Hezbollah and other foreign terrorist organizations." Hillary launched her outreach program to...

How To Fight The Religious Righthttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/26/opinion/main1837172.shtml http://tinyurl.com/jhs6f July 26, 2006 --------------------------------------------------------------------- (The American Prospect) This article was written by Adele M. Stan. --------------------------------------------------------------------- It was a modest and, I thought, obvious proposal that I put forward two weeks ago on this page: That liberals give up the notion of creating a cohesive religious left movement that could act as an effective counterforce to the animus of the religious right. Instead, I argued, liberals would do well to claim our own moral agency by virtue of our own humanity and the essential values of liberalism, which encompass the most admirable tenets...

Fellow TravelersBy David HorowitzFrontPageMagazine.com | July 18, 2006 It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying – and not only to others but first of all to themselves – a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically. For their loyalty is to something other than the truth....