Barack Obama, Columbia College '82, President of the United States
by Timothy Horrigan; last revised October 31, 2012
See Also:
The Democratic side of the 2012 primary race was pretty straightforward. Obama is still massively popular with us progressive types, even if he used up a lot of his political capital in 2010. The hatred from the Teabaggers just makes us love him that much more. The Republicans will have to run someone against him, but who? We now know who: Willard M. Romney.
December 15, 2011: Obama officially ends the Iraq War (an achievement which goes unnoticed by the Republicans)
The Ballot Law Commission's November 2011 decision and Orly Taitz's December 8, 2011 petition to the Supreme Court (none of the candidates listed in the complaint were in fact on the New Hampshire Ballot)
November 25, 2011: the Birthers Implicate Me in Obama's Conspiracy
State Rep. Harry Accornero accuses President Obama of treason (Accornero is a Republican who wasn't going to vote for Obama anyway)
President Obama's May 1, 2011 announcement: Osama bin Laden is finally dead
Get "W. Mitt! Warm! Likeable! Sincere!" items from CafePress.com
Mitt
Romney's modestly-titled book: No Apology: Believe in
America
When I looked through Flickr for an embeddable picture of Socialist Workers USA Presidential nominee Stewart Alexander, I discovered that he toils way out on the front lines of global capitalism. In addition to his political activities, he works (presumably part time) as a Nissan salesman at a little dealership in Hemet, California (a small town in the desert east of Los Angeles and north of San Diego.) I think this makes him the only real capitalist in the whole Presidential field.
Fellow Presidential candidate Darcy Richardson is (or was) Alexander's national policy director, which is a little weird— but not illegal.
November 5, 2010 IndyBay article: "Stewart Alexander Making Big Push for Electric Car Manufacturing" (Yes, Alexander does remember to mention Nissan's electric vehicles.)
Johnson preceded Bill Richardson as Governor of New Mexico. They never ran against each other because Johnson was term-limited. Johnson takes it for granted that he would have defeated Richardson. At some point, he apparently left the Republican party to become a Libertarian. In early May, the Libertarian Party nominated him at its nominating convention, beating out five people you never heard of. (Wayne Allyn Root decided not to run, and Ron Paul continues to be a Republican.)
Dr. Stein is a perennial Green party candidate for state office in Massachusetts, and now she is following in the footsteps of fellow Bay Staters W. Mitt Romney and J. Forbes Kerry.
Mr. Goode is on his third political party: he was a Democrat, then he became a Republican, now he is with the far-right Constitution Party,
Mr. Supreme is the only candidate— aside from Mitt Romney— who openly admits that he is working to subvert America.
John Wolfe is an activist, lawyer, and occasional Congressional candidate from Chattanooga. He was the most serious of the "other" Democrats.
Darcy Richardson is a Jacksonville, Florida-based writer and blogger who for no immediately apparent reason filed to run as a Democrat in the New Hanpshire primary. He was the first Democratic candidate to officially file the paperwork to run against Obama.. His three previous runs for various state offices (in Pennsylvania and Florida) were all on Third Party tickets.
Technically, Sen. Sanders is an Independent, but he is a member of the Democratic Senate caucus.
Cowan was the first Democratic candidate to file his paperwork in person. Even Obama sent Biden over to drop off the paperwork.
For decades, Fred Karger was a mainstream Republican of the type now derided as "RINO" ("Republican in name only") He worked behind the scenes as a political consultant and lobbyist. When he came out of the closet, he decided to become the first openly gay Presidential candidate. At least, he is the first plausible major party contender since President Buchanan (James, not Patrick) to be openly gay.
Karger's June 14, 2011 appearance on Rachel Maddow's show (we learn that he was inspired to run by his desire to stop Mitt Romney, who in addition to being a phoney is an opponent of marriage equality)
Speaker Bill O'Brien endorses Speaker Newt Gingrich for President; December 21, 2011
Steve Vaillancourt's December 12, 2012 commentary: "Newt Gingrich Bastardizes History"
The November 10, 2011 "Losers' Debate": Gingrich vs. Santorum
Newt
Gingrich's modestly-titled book: To Save America:
Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine
My report on his brief 2007 foray into the virtual world Second Life
Perry's extraordinarily bigoted December 2011 ad entitled "Strong"
December 19, 2011 DailyKos diary by Texas gay activist Glen Maxey
Perry's animated October 28 & November 30, 2011 speeches
January 7, 2012 Southern California Public Radio story: "Was Rick Perry actually drunk? A computer says it knows" (USC professor Shri Narayanan's computer says Perry was probably sober.)
Rick
Perry's book On My Honor: Why the American Values of
the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For
It seems odd that Santorum ran again. His 2008 Presidential run was stymied when he lost his 2006 Senate re-election campaign by a disastrous 56%-41% margin. But he made a comeback.
Cain was a successful businessman who semi-retired in his early 50s and became a political commentator. And now he is in in his 60s and running for President.
Video of Herman Cain debating healthcare policy with President Bill Clinton, sometime in 1993. (Cain was the CEO of Godfather's Pizza at the time.)
My late father and I had a long conversation with Vern Wuensche on a street corner in Portsmouth, NH on Boxing Day 2007. We liked him a lot. He is a great guy with some very good ideas (and relatively few bad ones.) He got 36 votes in 2008: ours were not 2 of them.
October 22, 2011 interview with GraniteGrok's Skip Murphy (mp3 format: 24:32, 2.95MB)
Vern Wuensche's book, Overcoming Legal Abuse as an American Entrepreneur
In 2008, he claimed to be the only candidate who could prevent Osama bin Laden from blowing up the Capitol. Osama is now dead, and the Capitol is still standing— and Dr. Cort is still running for President.
He has a web site, entitled "Work More; Keep Less" He also says he "expect[s] to be the least popular president of all time. " Coming just a few years after Bush II, that is an ambitious goal.
He is from the "other" Durham— Durham, NC.
These three total unknowns signed on to "birther" petitions by Orly Taitz, and Mr. Judy allegedly even attended the New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission's near-riotous hearing on November 18, 2011. But they aren't on the New Hampshire ballot, even though it only costs $1000 to file. I don't quite see how they could think they're entitled to demand that Obama be thrown off the ballot when they themselves aren't on it.
(Root was a classmate of Barack Obama's: they were both poli sci majors.)
October 24, 2011 blog post: The Perfect President: 'Herman Paul'"
Slightly bizarre July 21, 2010 rant about Columbia in the early 1980s (He says "My classmates— virtually to a man and woman— hated America and considered capitalism to be evil," which is the exact opposite of what I remember. I am tempted to point out, by the way, that Wayne is not really a capitalist. Sports betting is not capitalism, sorry. He is good at what he does and he makes a good living without seriously harming the rest of humanity— but he doesn't actually produce anything of real value, aside from his books.)
Excerpt from my novel The Forgotten Liars: "Morning in America" (my version of what happened at Columbia the day Reagan was shot differs from Wayne's.)
Wayne
Allyn Root's books on Amazon.com
Root's commentary gives two main reasons why Willard M. Romney shouldn't release his tax returns:
because David Axelrod is Obama's campaign strategist
because Root believes that Obama's Columbia transcript might theoretically prove that:
He [Obama] rarely ever attended class.
His grades were not those typical of what we understand it takes to get into Harvard Law School.
He attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.
He paid little for either undergraduate college or Harvard Law School because of foreign aid and scholarships given to a poor foreign students like this kid Barry Soetoro from Indonesia.
NH Institute of Politics 2012 "Lesser Known Candidates" forum (all of Obama's Democratic opponents are "Lesser Known".)
The campaign officially begins at CPAC, February 11, 2011
Am I That Guy Who made Those Statements?
My take on the war between Rachel Maddow vs. Alex Castellano
My September 30, 2010 Letter to the of the Dover (NH) Foster's Daily Democrat
My June 3, 2011 Letter to the Editor of the Dover (NH) Foster's Daily Democrat
My April 1, 2009 commentary on Traditional Ptolemaic Astronomy
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