By Alex Millson

‘Plot to assassinate Barack Obama’ uncovered as police find weapons haul during routine traffic stop

Four people are have been arrested in connection with a possible plot to kill U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama.

   Arrested: Nathan Johnson & Tharin Gartrell

One of the suspects told authorities they were ‘going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a rifle sighted at 750 yards’.

Police arrested 28-year-old Tharin Gartrell after he was spotted driving erratically near Denver, where Mr Obama is due to speak at the Democratic Party convention later today.

Officers recovered two high-powered rifles with scopes, camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, wigs, a bulletproof vest, a spotting scope, licenses in the names of other people and 44 grams of the drug methamphetamine.

Police alerted federal officials because of heightened security surrounding the Democratic convention, Dudley said.

‘Clearly we found there are federal implications - otherwise we would not have notified them,’ Detective Marcus Dudley said. ‘The weapons clearly would cause great concern.’

Police went to a nearby hotel to contact an associate of Gartrell. But that man, identified as 33-year-old Shawn Robert Adolph, jumped out of a sixth floor window to escape detectives.

Adolph broke an ankle in the fall and was captured moments later.

Sources say he had a handcuff ring and was wearing a swastika, and is thought to have ties to white supremacist organisations.

A third man - an associate of Gartrell and Adolph - Nathan Johnson, 32, was also arrested. He told authorities that the two men ‘planned to kill Barack Obama at his acceptance speech’.

Johnson, along with his girlfriend, Natasha Gromek, are also under arrest on drug charges.

The Secret Service, FBI, ATF and the joint terrorism task force are all investigating the alleged plot.

The U.S. Attorneys Office has scheduled a news conference for later today. The U.S. Attorney in Denver said it does not believe there is a credible threat to Obama or the convention.

‘It’s premature to say that it was a valid threat or that these folks have the ability to carry it out,’ said a U.S. government official familiar with the investigation.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said the case was under investigation.

‘We’re absolutely confident there is no credible threat to the candidate, the Democratic National Convention, or the people of Colorado,’ Mr Eid said in a prepared statement.

Popularity: 4% [?]

When Senator Barack Obama steps onto the stage on Thursday, next to Berlin’s Victory column, the world will be expecting a momentous speech.

   Great speakers: Enoch Powell, Mikhail Gorbachev, Barack Obama

   Great speakers: John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher

A team of Telegraph writers has compiled what they believe are the most significant addresses of the 20th and 21st centuries. The first tranche, speeches 25-13, can be viewed here. The top 12 are published here.

They limited the list to one speech per historical figure – otherwise, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King would have appeared more than once…….and, I think Obama’s speech on race relations delivered in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, deserves to be in this list.

Notes: Video and Transcript of Senator Barack Obama’s Speech on Race - in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008

Popularity: 11% [?]

From The NBRA:

…..therefore Black People, please vote Republican — because Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican. Meanwhile WE of the NBRA have launched Racial Anti-Obama Ads — like the ones below:

[MORE >>]

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What can I say, other than repeat what I have posted in this blog a thousand times: Black ReTHUGliTOMS demean blackness, hopelessly.

Today, it is pretty clear that African American interests are “better” served by the Democrats than the Republicans.

It is also true that Democrats have supported vicious confederate slavery in the yester years, but they, to a large extent rectified this in the sixties, beginning with the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Some Democratic legislators from the southern epicenters of White Racism opposed President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, due to “KKK Hangover,” but most did support it. This Act drove a significant number of white voters away from the Democratic Party, and the Republicans instead of joining with the Democrats to reform America, pounced on the opportunity — grabbing the “Southern Vote” a.k.a the “Bigot-Vote.”

Up to date, the Democratic Party has a far much better Civil Rights record than the Republican Party, for without the “Bigot-Vote,” the Republican party has no footing.

Consequently, race-baiting smothered in fear-mongering became a staple of the modern Republican Party.

Republicans, and in this instance ReTHUGliTOMS like “re-living the past,” oblivious of the fact that modern Republicanism is just a new name for pre-sixties “Dixie-Cratism,” ….spun around, modernized and “Stealthified.”

The “Bigot-Vote” is the main-stay of the Republican Party, and they pander to it incessantly, with the help of the “putrid dung” excreted by Talk-Radio (Rush Limbaugh and Co.) and Fox News (O’reilly, Hannity and Co.)….to name a few of these vicious hyenas.

Hillary Clinton tried to dip her filthy finger into the “Bigot-Pot,” failed and got beaten by a “Black Man,” called Barack Obama.

And why is Obama “Black” and NOT “White” — for he is an offspring of the union of a white mother and a black father.

Simple answer: RACISM — perpetrated by “some” Democrats and a “large majority” of Republicans.

Evolutionary Scientist Richard Dawkins states: “It is the height of injustice to think of a person as “black” just because his blood is “tainted” with “black,” whereas, if “taint” is what it is, then his blood is equally tainted with “white,” in which case, he equally qualifies also as white. Philip Ochieng, a prominent Kenyan intellectual examines Dawkins’ assertion very thoroughly in this piece titled: Why Obama is Black, not White. — Excellent Read!

True, some white Democrats are Racist too — as evidenced in the 15 month Clinton/Obama duel (see text and video postings elsewhere)

Depending on your view, it could be a matter of who is the “lesser of two evils.” ….Republicans or Democrats?

To me the Republican party is “super-evil.”

I won’t pen the language I am tempted to use, because someone else offers a more eloquent and “tighter summary” of what the ReTHUGlican Party represents:

From EvilGOPBastards.com

Click here for more: 41 things you have to believe to be a Republican today

Back to my Black Brothers & Sisters — The National Black Republican Association.

The late Khalid Abdul Muhammad was blunt and dramatic about you: “When white folks can’t defeat you, they’ll always find some Negro, some boot-licking, butt-licking, bamboozled, half-baked, half-fried, sissified, punkified, pasteurized, homogenized Nigger that they can trot out in front of you.”

Not to be outdone, movie director Spike Lee called people like you: “Handkerchief-heads, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Toms.” — a statement I have “Pluralized,” from the original that was directed by Mr. Lee at the “Big Kahuna” Uncle Tom — The one and only “Long John Silver” Justice Clarence Thomas — A ReTHUGliTOM Smothered In “Uppity Niggerdom” a.k.a “NegroPhobia Syndrome.”

That said, the National Black Republican Association is just but a congregation of frustrated slaves crawling back to the plantation, so to speak! “Virulent Oreo Phenomenons,” “Punk-Asses,” and “Uncle Tom Calamities.” — Thanks to Historian John Henrik Clarke and Author June Jordan.

Your ADs above are a big joke — and an insult to the black community!

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SPECIAL TREAT: How the Right Uses People of Color to Foster Racism

For your consumption:

   This cartoon was drawn by a White Republican Student - At The University Florida

It caused an uproar.

LOL! …only in America.

Popularity: 23% [?]

By: KEVIN J KELLEY

Right-wing Christian Activists in the United States are attempting to use Senator Barack Obama’s Kenyan links to discredit him.

Sen. Barrack Obama [L] & Prime Minister Raila Odinga [R]
The activists, most of them conseervative Christians, claim that Mr Obama is a relative of Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whom they describe as a “socialist who plans to introduce Sharia Law in Kenya“.

Mr Obama is leading his party’s presidential nominations and is almost certain to win against Senator Hillary Clinton.

He also stands a good chance against Senator John McCain of the rival Republican Party, thus making history as the first non-white to become a US president.

For the past two decades, American presidential campaigns have been conducted with every aspect of a candidate’s life placed under the microscope.

Analysts expect the Republicans to scour Mr Obama’s Kenyan links to find anything that they can use against him.

Some of the most widely circulated allegations originated last month in a chain e-mail from Celeste Davis, an American Christian missionary who, together with her husband Loren Davis, claims to have worked in Kenya for 12 years.

The Davises allege that Senator Obama donated nearly $1 million (approximately Ksh61 million) to the Orange Democratic Movement’s campaign last year. “Obama and Raila speak daily,” the Davises add, claiming that the two men are cousins.

Bizarre and discredited

Mr Odinga’s spokesman, Mr. Salim Lone, dismissed the allegations as bizarre and discredited.

“These are bizarre accusations that lack credibility. The allegations that the Prime Minister has socialist and pro-Mulism leanings were discussed and discredited in the last campaign,” he said.

“This is the work of right-wing activists who are trying to puncture holes in Senator Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House by attempting to resurrect allegations that were discredited in Kenya during the campaign,” he said.

Nairobi-based political scientist, Tom Wolf, an American, said that the Internet smear campaign against Mr Obama was an act of desperation.

“It just shows how desperate the Republicans are that Obama is viewed as a serious threat that they would have to use such irrelevant campaign tactics. If the Americans were worried, would they be so close to him? You recall that someone tried to use the Somali robes to discredit him,” he said.

If the Cold War were still on and communism were still alive, and Raila had spent a weekend with some communist leader like Fidel Castro, he said, it would be much more of an issue.

“But if you criticise Obama because he is related to a Kenyan leader who arrived at a compromise over the disputed election to save his nation, how would that hurt him?” Mr Wolf asked.

Mr Lone described the e-mail campaign as one of the last gasp efforts by right-wing activists in the US to dent Senator Obama’s campaign to become the Democratic Party’s standard bearer in the race to the White House.

Mr Lone, however, claimed that Mr Odinga and Senator Obama were related by blood and came from the same clan.

“It is true that the Prime Minister and the senator are related. Senator Obama comes from a family and clan to which the Prime Minister’s mother belongs, and they are cousins,” he said.

In the American sense, a cousin is the child of your parents’ siblings. But in Luo culture, the members of your father’s or mother’s clans are your cousins.

A clan would typically have hundreds of thousands of members, and the relationship is more social than biological.

Mr Obama is the son of Barack Obama Sr of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas.

He was raised by his maternal grandparents. In October last year, Mrs Lynne Cheney, wife of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, announced that she had discovered, while researching a book on their family, that Mr Cheney and Mr Obama were blood relatives.

They were eighth cousins, she said, with a common ancestor, a 17th-century immigrant from France.

The Illinois senator is acknowledged as perhaps the most charismatic American politician since John F Kennedy.

December election

Mr Davis and his wife, noting Mr Odinga’s contention that the December 27 presidential voting was rigged, said in their message, “As we watch Obama rise in the US we are sure that whatever happens, he will use the same tactic, crying rigged election if he doesn’t win and possibly cause a race war in America.”

A conservative Internet commentator, Michael Gaynor, speculated earlier this month that Senator Clinton’s campaign might play “the Kenya card” against Mr Obama.

Mr Gaynor says “the Kenya card” involves unspecified connections between the Kenyan-American senator and “the radical Kenyan prime minister.”

An author who succeeded in smearing Democratic Senator John Kerry in the 2004 US presidential race may also make negative use of Senator Obama’s Kenyan heritage.

A February 27 report by the McClatchy-Tribune News Service in the US says that author Jerome Corsi intends to research “Obama’s connections to Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga and Odinga’s ties to Muslim groups.”

Mr Corsi wrote Unfit for Command, a text effectively used by Republican Party partisans seeking to discredit Senator Kerry’s service in the US military during the Vietnam war.

Evidence assembled by Mr Kerry and his supporters showed that these charges were either exaggerated or flatly false.

The Davises’ allegations concerning Senator Obama and Mr Odinga “are all kinds of false,” states an online commentator for The New Republic, a respected US political magazine.

But one effect of the response to the Davises’ lies by so prestigious a magazine will be to call further attention to those lies.

Politifact, a political accuracy check maintained by two reputable and non-partisan publications – The St Petersburg (Florida) Times and Congressional Quarterly – published a detailed rebuttal of the Davises’ claims in a May 2 analysis by researcher Amy Hollyfield.

She quoted Mr Lone as saying: “This is absolutely ridiculous” in regard to the Davises’ claim that a group associated with Senator Obama donated nearly $1 million (Sh62 million) to the ODM campaign. “Mr Obama did not donate a single cent to Mr Odinga’s campaign,” Mr Lone told Politifact.

He said the group the Davises say gave the money to ODM does not exist, Politifact reports, citing several US election campaign monitoring organisations, including one sponsored by the US government.

Politifact also investigated the Davises’ claim that Mr Obama is a cousin of Mr Odinga.

That assertion is based on a BBC interview in January in which Mr Odinga said, “Barack Obama’s father is my maternal uncle.”

The BBC then asked, “You’re related to him?” Mr Odinga replied: “Yes, I am.”

The Obama campaign denies that the senator and Mr Odinga are cousins. And three Kenya experts interviewed by Politifact also dismissed this claim, Ms Hollyfield reports.

Normal sense

“To my knowledge, they are not first cousins in the normal sense,” Kenya election expert Joel Barkan, a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, told Politifact.

“To my knowledge, there’s absolutely no relationship at all.”

Prof Barkan also took issue with the Davises’ characterisation of Mr Odinga as a “socialist.”

Such a charge is intended to incite still-virulent anti-communist sentiments among many Americans and to suggest that Senator Obama has a sinister, far-left agenda that he is concealing from US voters.

“He’s a populist politician,” Prof Barkan says of Mr Odinga, “but he’s no socialist.”

Because the Davises’ e-mail was written by missionaries long active in Kenya, “it somehow carries more credence than your average blog posting — and it’s spreading rapidly,” Politifact commented.

“But even with the credibility of a real author, the claims in this e-mail are as baseless as anything you’ve read from an anonymous blogger.”

Speaking to the Sunday Nation Saturday, Mr Lone said Mr Odinga and Mr Obama enjoy good relations.

However, Mr Lone was categorical that Senator Obama and the PM have never sat down to discuss their ideological commitments owing to the fact they play politics in different environments.

“Claims that the two have discussed their ideological commitments are completely far-fetched. The senator has Kenyan roots, but he is an American first and foremost,” he said. He further dismissed claims that Senator Obama, or groups connected to him, contributed to Mr Odinga’s campaign kitty, stating that they never received a cent from the Illinois senator.

Mr Davis and his wife claim to have preached among Muslims for 20 years, 12 of them in Kenya.

Their ministry is said to be based in Meru.

The Sunday Nation’s efforts to track them or their Kenyan ministry down Saturday were fruitless by the time of going to press.

REFERENCES:

1. Odinga says Obama is his cousin — Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga has said he is a cousin of US presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
2. Could US elect a Luo before Kenya? — It is said there is a bitter joke among Kenya’s Luo community that the United States of America will elect a member of their tribe as president before the East African country does.

Popularity: 36% [?]

By: Prof. Ken Bode

Prof. Ken Bode
Today, 80 percent of Americans think our country is on the wrong track.

With a cratering economy, an endless war in Iraq and an uncomprehending president, that is understandable. Rarely has there been a moment when clarity of choice and opportunity for change has been so clear.

On Tuesday, Indiana voters have a monumental opportunity to help set our country on a new course.

I have cast an early vote for Sen. Barack Obama, and I’ll tell you why.

In the Democratic primary, the choice is between experience and judgment. For all the experience she extols, Hillary Clinton still carries the albatross of her opportunistic vote favoring the Iraq war. She explains lamely that she didn’t realize President Bush would take her blank check and cash it. Obama rightly opposed the war from the start.

Both candidates say they would get out of Iraq, but Obama would approach the necessary regional security arrangements in the Middle East by opening a dialogue with states like Syria and Iran, abandoning the stubborn silence of the Bush policies. Clinton approaches the problem with threats to obliterate Iran with “massive retaliation.” Her rhetoric is drawn from the Cold War past, revealing the “bring-them-on” mentality of Bush.

Overall, Obama represents the best chance we have to address the greatest threat facing America, the stateless terrorism of the Islamic world. As The Atlantic magazine’s Andrew Sullivan said, if you seek the simplest and most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about America in ways no words can. Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office would help defuse anti-American passions around the world.

The electorate also is hungry for change in the way our government does business at home. Clinton has more experience in Washington, but that has not helped her to understand its problems. She solicits money from special interests and picked a major lobbyist to run her campaign. Judging by their different policies, Obama’s shorter time in Washington is more an asset than a handicap.

The most important reason that Indiana voters should support Obama on Tuesday is that he represents America’s greatest opportunity to pivot away from the past. While Clinton talks about change, Obama embodies it. He radiates a sense of possibility and has a proven ability to engage and inspire young people to public service like no candidate since John F. Kennedy. He has produced a nationwide surge of new voters, in itself an expression of the nation’s hunger for change. For the past 20 years, two families, the Bushes and Clintons, have run the country, longer than the newest voters — and many serving in Iraq — have been alive. Obama would change that.

Too late for many, Obama finally and firmly denounced the pronouncements of his preacher. Rev. Jeremiah Wright now takes his place in the pantheon of pastors who bring strange ideas from the pulpit to politics.

Bush supporter Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed the 9/11 attacks occurred because American secularism had forfeited God’s protection.

Rudy Giuliani backer Pat Robertson claimed that accepting homosexuality could result in earthquakes, tornados and a possible meteor. And John McCain’s supporter, televangelist John Hagee, said Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for a New Orleans gay rights parade. Politicians cannot be held responsible for the crazy rantings of preachers.

Voters also must remember that the Clintons represent a partnership of endless uncertainty. Bill Clinton squandered the last two years of his presidency by recklessly dallying with Monica Lewinsky, producing impeachment, and jeopardizing the election of Al Gore. Had that not happened, America would not be in Iraq today. In our choice on Tuesday, Hillary and Bill Clinton clearly represent the past, a page turned backward, and Barack Obama represents the future.

While endorsing Obama, a former Clinton administration official put it this way: “I don’t think I’m ready for the circus to come back to town.”

About The Author: Ken A. Bode is the Pulliam Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and a Hudson adjunct fellow. His academic career includes being the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism as well as the Dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1998 to 2002; a John L. Hughes University Professor and Director of the Center for Contemporary Media at DePauw University from 1989 1997; and an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University from 1965 to 1969 and at SUNY Binghamton from 1969 to 1970. Bode received his B.A. (cum laude) from the University of South Dakota in 1961 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina.

Popularity: 30% [?]