Tea Party for Obama support has grown 200% in last two weeks

Tea Party For Obama

by jihobr
inShare2
20% of Republicans are leaning toward Obama

photo courtesey of bowenmurphy

While most folks are scratching their heads wondering how on earth conservatives can be for Obama, here is something we the people find interesting.

FLASH: 20% of republicans are leaning towards Obama. According to WND.com a recent poll conducted with Wenzel Strategies In every case except the match-up against Ron Paul, more than 20 percent of Republican voters said they are more likely to support Obama than the Republican challenger. And Ron Paul is close, as 19 percent of Republicans said they are more likely to support Obama than Paul.

Making the situation more bleak for opponents of Obama, independent voters are apparently quite put off with the Republican nomination fight. While polls last fall showed them leaning Republican by roughly a two-to-one margin, they are now either split evenly or favoring Obama.

Did you think we the people were out there alone?

Read the entire story here WND.com.

And you can also read about CPAC Buzz Reflects Disenchantment With GOP Field

http://teapartyforobama.com/2012/02/10/tea-party-for-obama-support-has-grown-200-in-last-two-weeks/

HUH?

LOL

Faux news story eh?

Did we foolishly believe that we are the only ones in the world who should have drones? How arrogant of us.

We sell most of our military stuff all over the world, what would make this drone any different?

No matter what bull larky is said about working to keep the ONLY PLACE WE HAVE TO LIVE livable. It would be foolish to not be environmentally aware and active to stop the poisoning of this planet that we all NEED TO LIVE.

That is what earth day is about and for and every living human should be on board with keeping WHAT WE NEED TO LIVE livable.

From my experience there are those who will not tolerate in all walks of life and religion.

And there are those who believe they are tolerating when in reality they are trying to change others to their way.

And there are those who are tolerant, or respectful of others. Usually because they believe the good in humanity and trust no matter what it will win out in each person. I prefer this place and stay there as much as I can.

The fact that I heard this story on two different news stations local here and didn't hear a race to either party actually makes me proud of our news here.

Shows they are finally getting more intelligent and I like smart it is a good thing.

Bullshyte! Oh bless me.

I had a guy from another site get angry and almost cuss me out because after he wrote me a couple of times, I let him know that I was conversating with other men by mail.

He did me a favor that is for sure.

There is no way I want to shut all men down just because I met one or am emailing one. So many do not pan out into anything that even ends in a friendship let alone a romance.

I am picky these days it seems

Well until it kills them they can charge more for food and water to any who survive that long. But they will die and then money won't matter to them anymore.

Like I said a woman out of her mind takes a baby and kills the mother in the process. What a terrible event.

Obvious difference in what? The fact that it would normally be a white woman doing it instead? That black/which is actually brown/is different from white/which is actually a peach color are different skin colors?

What?

They won't be happy until all life is not living anymore on this planet.

How come this is the first time I am hearing she was black? What does that have to do with anything anyway.

A woman out of her damn mind did a terrible thing.

Well, no offense to fellow rockers but it is obvious that it doesn't take much brains to be a rocker. Or he is showing his lack of them here for sure at least.

I know it has some big words in it but it hits straight home.

Something I have been working on for years now.

Andrew Bowen, Man Who Spends 12 Months Practicing 12 Different Religions, Finds Peace

Posted: 04/15/2012 8:27 am Updated: 04/15/2012 8:27 am
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By Amanda Greene
Religion News Service

LUMBERTON, N.C. (RNS) Andrew Bowen sat yoga-style in his armchair, absent-mindedly fingering a set of Muslim prayer beads in his left hand as he talked about 2011 -- his year of conversion.

But he's not Muslim. In fact, the 29-year-old Lumberton resident doesn't call himself by any of the 12 faiths he practiced for a month at a time last year.

Not Hindu (January). Not Baha'i (February). Not Zoroastrian (March). Not Jewish (April). Not Buddhist (May). Not agnostic (June). Not Mormon (July). Not Muslim (August). Not Sikh (September). Not Wiccan (October). Not Jain (November). And not Catholic (December).

Finding faith in God again was not Bowen's aim. This young father of two was looking for faith in humanity.

Bowen became a Christian in high school and took "a nose dive into fundamentalism," he said. "It just ignited a furnace in me."

As a teen, Bowen said he was extremely critical of faiths different from his own. Once when a pair of male Mormon missionaries visited his home, Bowen said he chased them down the street as they retreated on their bicycles.

After high school, Bowen met his wife, Heather, at East Carolina University.

The Bowens had two girls, Shaylie and Nevaeh, and thought their family was complete. But in 2008, Heather's tubal ligation failed, and she was pregnant with their "miracle baby."

But the doctors discovered the baby was behind her ovaries, an ectopic pregnancy that threatened Heather's life.

The couple had to choose to abort the baby, something they never dreamed they would do. They were devastated.

"It was a really dark time. I went into a very deep state of depression," Heather recalled.

But Heather and her husband dealt with the baby's death in polar opposite ways.

She bought a devotional Bible and was baptized at a local Baptist church. He plunged into a "two-year stint of just seething hatred toward God."

The couple fought each time Heather wanted to talk about her growing faith. Still, deep down, Bowen worried his hatred would consume him.

"The best way I can describe it was flying down the road like a bat out of hell toward a wall," Bowen said. "With any transformation, there's a fire that has to be applied."

So Project Conversion was born. He would study and practice one faith each month, guided by a mentor from each belief system. But this was no reality TV stunt.

It was an obsession -- his personal intervention.

"It was 110 percent balls to the wall for me," Bowen said, describing his dedication to the project.

To find his mentors in late 2010, he had to look outside his tiny, mostly Baptist farm town. His Zoroastrian mentor lives in Chicago. His Muslim mentor lives in Fayetteville.

Truthfully, Heather was skeptical about Project Conversion at first.

But she "saw changes in him. He was more patient. There was more of a sense of peace about him," she said.

His first two weeks each month were spent intensely reading and learning a faith's tenets and the last half was spent exploring the faith's practices and rituals and visiting nearby congregations. For his Sikh month, he spent five hours watching YouTube videos on how to tie a turban. During his Jewish month, he spent a weekend visiting temples with his Jewish mentor, journalist Michael Solender in Charlotte. He's filled an entire bookshelf with holy books from his research.

Now as he's writing a book, speaking about Project Conversion and blogging about the experience for Beliefnet.com, Bowen is still exploring all he's learned. On Facebook, Project Conversion already has its own tribe, with nearly 1,000 likes.

"The most important thing I learned in Buddhism was how to wash dishes. Like there is nothing but this dish. It taught me finally to be quiet," he said. "With the Mormons, the first thing I did was apologize. It was about humility and being one of them and serving them."

Islam "showed me how much I was wasting in my life from food to activity. Bowing with the men in the mosque was astounding," he said.

Catholicism was "a wellspring of expression and arts in worship. It was an ocean I could bury myself in for days and not come up for breath."

The project also touched the lives of his mentors.

"It was energizing in that it allowed us to really put on the table and discuss conversations my wife and I wouldn't normally have had with other people," Solender said.

Bowen was one of the best students of Wicca Greenville resident Melissa Barnhurst has had.

"He gave it a lot more than some students who've come to me wanting to become Wiccan," she said.

Meanwhile, his wife worked as a labor and delivery nurse at a local hospital. Things were hard financially, at times, because Bowen wasn't working.

And then there was November, Jainism -- and Heather's least favorite month. Bowen loved becoming a monk, meditating wrapped in his grandmother's sheets, not bathing and walking with a broom to whisk away creatures in the Jain tradition of respecting all life.

"It was the not bathing or washing your hands," she said. "The nurse in me was beginning to have a fit."

Though he admits his experiment caused hardship, the couple had a deal. Bowen put his wife through nursing school. She carried the financial burdens through Project Conversion.

"We argued more than we ever did, but my kids participated in celebrations, and my wife's Christianity opened up a whole lot more," Bowen said.

His wife agrees.

"Faith has become a constant topic in our house," Heather said. "We may not share a faith. We may never share a faith, but there's definitely a respect there."

And now?

Bowen still meditates daily using various prayer books, and he attends Mass occasionally at a Catholic church.

At its essence, Project Conversion was about burying his hatred and learning tolerance.

"For so long, I suffered with ego. So now I'm just going to make the faiths of others more beautiful to themselves," he said. "I don't think about God now. I just participate."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/15/andrew-bowen-12-religions_n_1425009.html?ref=religion&icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl20|sec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D152886

I guess he would have been just as mad at god if he had chosen not to let her have the abortion and she died, eh?

I found this interesting because not many Christians would be bold enough to do this. Respecting, recognizing and validating other religions is really not part of the indoctrination.

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america's screaming conscience
By Mobutu Sese Seko
Apr 5, 2012 12:57 PM
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The Dog Whistle Has Sounded: How the Right Talks About ‘Thugs’ Like Trayvon Martin

On Sunday, Bill Kristol, chronically incorrect steward of his daddy's magazine movement, dismissed liberals' and black activists' outraged response to the Trayvon Martin killing as "just demagoguery... mostly on the side of those who want to indict the whole society for this death." The following day, Rush Limbaugh said the response was "doing more harm to the black community than anything else." How blessed the black community must feel to have their best interests overseen by the living embodiment of everything wrong with white people.

Thus we've reached the inevitable conservative endpoint of any race conversation in the United States. Racism, violence, the horror of an entire community—these are mere emotional reactions cynically drummed up by "race hustlers," marshaled against a demonized white society. If black people are upset about black people getting shot, they have only themselves to blame for their unwillingness to forget about it. And if they're still so upset after so much time, they must have an agenda. After all, the victim was only a black boy.

Our own Max Read posted a detailed breakdown of the white, conservative backlash against the Trayvon Martin coverage (and both Mediaite and Alex Pareene have added yet more). But what's interesting about the unfolding conservative commentary is that Trayvon's irrevocable silence re-defines ghoulish conservative blame-shifting. Trayvon is dead, and he can't speak or act to drive the news cycle. The right must walk its disingenuous path alone—spurred on by habitual loathing that any black man, even a dead one, might cast light on their boundless twilight ethnocalypse.

Conservative race-baiters set their clocks by the dog-whistle. They can't dismiss Trayvon outright: blaming him explicitly because he is black goes nowhere. That would just shift the conversation onto the accuser. Nobody illustrated this principle better than former Reagan and Bush I strategist and Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater, in a kind of "Come to Jesus" moment shortly before his death (emphases mine):

You start out in 1954 by saying, "******, ******, ******." By 1968 you can't say "******"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "******, ******."

Atwater addresses national policy, particularly the linguistic erosions that allow us to arrive at "entitlements" as code words for "welfare queens cashing lavish checks while rutting like animals on the whites' dime." But this is just the Trayvon treatment writ large, on a national scale: the same linguistic counterrevolution has been imposed on blacks on the personal level as well. Look to the frequent application of "street thug" to Obama, invoking images of saggy-pants gangbangers, chugging 40s. Look to Newt Gingrich calling him "the food stamp president," hammering that point home in the South Carolina and Florida debates. There's no value for Gingrich in citing food stamps as a program: the plurality of Americans on assistance are white, not black. But to an audience reared on the Southern Strategy since 1968, calling Obama the president of food stamps sends a familiar mute signal to those meant to hear it: the danger isn't that the president is black—which we know—but rather that his economics will complete the ghettoization of America. Why, if you had to go on food stamps, you'd be just as shameful as him—as them.

The dog-whistling tweets and rants against Trayvon were inevitable. As Read pointed out, the right lustily impugned his character for his having a screwdriver, an impulse of vandalism and some loose (though not dispositive) association with someone who had possessed marijuana—all of which qualified him for nothing more than being an American boy. Right-wing blogs ran pictures of him flipping the bird, which also qualified him for being an American boy. Most damning of all, there were pictures of him wearing fake gold in his grill—a gangster signifier shared by me at a party once and probably 10% of all white kids at American colleges goofing around with a roll of Reynold's Wrap. Trayvon Martin is a boy in the worst possible way.

This thin characterization is all they need. The right-wing audience only needs a few traits from the bad novelist's toolbox. Like the big-titted blonde used and murdered by a Japanese man in Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, whose sacred American vagina serves as both metaphor and explanation for that tiny, vengeful people's plunder of America, all you need are one or two red flags. They first say that Trayvon was black, and then they reference vandalism and "marijuana residue." A fake grill, tattoos and the word "thug" do the rest of the heavy social code-wording. By the end of that four-phrase personal inventory, anyone predisposed against blacks wants to know if the coroner shaved Trayvon's eyebrows to reveal hidden left-to-right "****" and "WHITEY" tats. These people are already on board. You just have to punch their ticket.

The most important effect of race-baiting through the dog whistle, however, is that it really does function as bait. When you conspicuously label black kids as "thugs" and white kids as "unruly teens," you bait someone else into noticing it and responding. In this respect, conservative commentators for the last 20 years have been nothing short of masterful. They've turned unregenerate racism into a thought exercise you might as well call "Schrödinger's Black."

A classic (oversimplified) version of the Schrodinger's Cat thought-experiment describes how a cat in a box, with a given atomic particle, can be alive or dead up until the moment you open the box and check on the cat. The act of observation ineluctably helps determine the outcome. Until you looked at it, everything was up in the air. You, the observer, are at fault for the result.

Placing the burden of racism on its observer is the natural, cynical result of decades of conservative dog-whistle racism. Commentators throw out deliberately "ambiguous" statements intended to motivate racists willing to read into them what they want to hear. They make repeated references to Obama and watermelons. They talk about "strapping young bucks" with t-bone steaks. Then, when black or liberal commentators denounce those statements, conservative pundits label them as the racists. After all, you'd have to be a racist to think there was racist commentary there; the only people who think about racism are racists. You have to be importing your own racial hangups to the exchange: you altered the outcome of the reaction when your gaze introduced a racial force to the social reaction.

This is largely how the American right wing created "reverse racism."

In the realm of Limbaughean physics, racism is something generated by race hustlers. These rabble rousers alter the dynamic of natural social interactions by injecting wacky racism particles into a totally innocuous discussion about the natural laziness of young black people who just want to own guns and steal buckets of Popeye's fried chicken. A noble white truth teller merely means to pull back the curtain on the inequities demanded by an indolent black class, and when he's called racist, it's someone else's fault for noticing it. People then victimize that noble soul for telling a hard truth, like Jesus.

In any physical exchange, this reversal of causation or responsibility would inspire laughter and contempt. If, to take a random example, some radio-show-hosting triple-chinned drug-addicted serial-divorcé and bloviator stabbed you repeatedly in the stomach, and you complained that you had "lots of knife-holes" in you, nobody could reasonably claim that you were a "stabbing hustler" who was "condemning mere knife enthusiasts" in a cynical ploy to" gain sympathy via stabbism." But this is the state of right-wing racism in America: it exists only on its moment of detection. Until then, it's merely an amorphous cloud of words. The people who are targeted by it are the real racists, because they have the insufferable gall to notice it and then divisively, unrepentantly point it out. They are malcontents operating without the privilege to speak freely.

This is how you get people like Bill Kristol accusing you of "demagoguery" and trying to "indict the whole society," which is not only paternalistically dismissive but shows their powerful white privilege in being able to decide what is our whole society. The act of creating it allows them to define its terms, drawing the line between a reasonable thought and a paranoid hippie/activist fantasy. Thus advocating mandatory sentencing laws for drug possession busts that disproportionately affect black youths is just smart business and safe policy. (Never mind if the advocate is invested in a privatized prison system whose profits are bolstered by a continual flow of inmates. Sure, he's breaking the whole society, but, hey—investors!—free enterprise!) Meanwhile, saying that the criminal-justice system and the industrial-prison complex disproportionately incarcerates and profits off targeting young blacks makes you a demagogue and a rabble-rouser.

When you cite The Bell Curve after a black youth shoots a suburban homeowner, you are a sober, reasoned sage. When you cite centuries of slavery, decades of Jim Crow, decades of exclusionary lending, predatory lending, white flight, inequitable distribution of tax monies, voter suppression, regressive voter-registration laws, regressive taxation, dog-whistle racism, spooky attack ads featuring menacing black figures and NRA-sponsored legislation that all but screams "a big negro might break into your daughter's hymen"—well, then you're just some kinda whackjob race-obsessive. Works like The Bell Curve merely update the Jim Crow quackery of phrenology and the simian negroid skull with the soft bigotry of inconclusive or incomplete statistical data interpreted in bad faith. They feed a pundit circus and a criminal justice system that reduces a race of people to a collection of ungovernable animal impulses. They lend a patina of rationality to the automatic presumption that Trayvon Martin was a rebellious addict who attacked a stand-up citizen.

This is what Limbaugh meant when he said that the Trayvon Martin murder was "doing more harm to the black community than anything else." It's counterproductive to get these sorts of people angry, because their emotionalism has already retarded their development. It's the same reversal of responsibility employed by anti-abolitionists, anti-unionists, anti-suffragettes and anti-civil-rights types: "Irrationally ranting and raving distracts you people from your own advancement, and your clamoring about the normative, accepted levels of social hate are rending the fabric of our society. It's all on you." You victimize me by complaining about my actions; your truth is less valuable than, and antagonistic to, my peace of mind.

The act of describing fundamental fractures in our society only exacerbates them. Sure, even in 1787, there were those opposed to slavery, but nearly 80 years later, we eradicated it. And only 100 years later, we gave blacks a full franchise. Any day now, woman will be equal, too, and we'll get around to finalizing that whole black thing. But dislocation is your responsibility when you demand that ice be cracked instead of rolled back glacially. You dishonor Trayvon Martin when you make him a "black victim" and not part of the process, where we all grow, like a nation of stalagmites.

The real racists, the real life-hating agitators, are those who reject the tranquilizing powers of gradualism, who rock the boat. Because the rising tide will lift all those boats. Now shut the **** up about income inequality.

http://gawker.com/5899322/the-dog-whistle-has-sounded-how-the-right-talks-about-thugs-like-trayvon-martin?tag=america.s-screaming-conscience

Hard core.
Good piece.

Truthful.

Considering there is no challenge for Obama he should and will be reelected.

I hope he is able to do more of what he wanted to do.

Hopefully that will stop those who keep doing it then.

It is difficult to address the residual issues in a community that is recovering from oppression when the oppression still happens. Not as much granted but the oppressors were left in power and were not smart enough to let go of their stupid ignorant racist ideals so they continue to repress the oppressed with their stupidity.

There are many many well adjusted functioning productive black folks out there who have chosen to disregard the difficulties caused by the ignorant whites actions that restrict them. They do not make the news because they are living by the laws and away from the extremely poor areas that noone NOONE wants to live in. And they survive despite all the bull shyte they have to deal with.