I was reading Memeorandum and found The Foundry’s post, Obama’s Team Crosses the Rhetorical Line
Today, President Obama’s campaign organization “Organizing for America” sent out a notice to its “grassroots” supporters. It asked them to wage a coordinated phone campaign for health care by calling their U.S. Senators on September 11 – also known as Patriot Day in honor of the thousands of Americans killed by Al Qaeda terrorists eight years ago. It goes on: “All 50 States are coordinating in this – as we fight back against our own Right-Wing Domestic Terrorists who are subverting the American Democratic Process, whipped to a frenzy by their Fox Propaganda Network ceaselessly re-seizing power for their treacherous leaders.” Please read that again.
As it is, barackobama.com took down the page, but The Foundry saved the screen shot.
The text of the page is profoundly disturbing, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Marxist ideology:
First,
“as we fight back against our own Right-Wing Domestic terrorists who are subverting the American Democratic Process, whipped to a frenzy by their Fox Propaganda Network ceaselessly re-seizing power for their treacherous leaders”
Which in plain language means that anyone opposing the healthcare bills is a. a terrorist, b. who can’t think for themselves and c. is acting on behalf of traitors.
Then comes the Marxist punchline,
“DEFEAT ANTI-DEMOCRATIC FORCES OF HATE WHO CONSPIRE TO REMAIN HEALTHY + WEALTHY”
We’re looking at a campaign website of the President of the United States, inciting class hatred, on September 11, no less.
But that’s not all. Nice Deb posts on Obama’s Speech To Nation’s School Children September 8 (which I had mentioned in yesterday’s roundup. Deb links to Pre-K to 6 menu of classroom activities
• As the President speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note-taking graphic organizer such as a Cluster Web, or students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children can draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following:
What is the President trying to tell me?
What is the President asking me to do?
What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?
• Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?
Because it’s not for to ask what your country can do for you, or what you can do for your country, it’s all about what you can do for Obama.
And now for a side note,
Doug Ross posts on a Request for Quote for technology vendors to capture data from social networking sites. While you may find this outrageous, do note that the White House is required to by law to keep that data:
The Presidential Records Act (PRA) essentially requires each administration to keep every pixel and keystroke ever published for later review by Congress or investigators, in case illegal activity takes place. We have seen this invoked ex post facto to the Clinton and Bush administrations, in the latter over e-mails sent and received outside the White House mail system. At that time, legal experts and investigators insisted that everything produced by an administration for anything remotely concerning official business had to be archived within the EOP.
That’s what happens when the people continue to grant the government too much power. Once that power is ceded to the government, it can’t be taken back.
Or can it?
UPDATE
Jim Lindgren:
I think Morrissey is right about the purpose of the contract bid — to collect comments to and from the White House on social networking websites (particularly pages set up and run by the White House). It would not be fair to say that the White House has a plan to harvest private information in a general way from social networking sites. Yet the National Legal and Policy Center is also partly right because the proposal seems to require the vendor to be able to “Capture all comments posted to a list of websites,” not just the ones appropriate to gather.
Of course, requiring a vendor to have the capability to collect all comments on Facebook and Twitter — or a random sample of them — does not mean that the White House will use that power. But it is explicitly seeking to obtain that technological capability.
Update 2
On the other hand,
Is the White House already tracking comments made on Twitter?
