[Photos by TIFFANY YOON]
BY GREG ADOMAITIS President Barack Obama came to town this afternoon to attend an invitation only fundraiser for Senator Arlen Specter at the Convention Center. White House press pool reports indicate the haul was hefty. Christopher Nicholas, Specter’s campaign manager, said that they were “within striking distance” of the $2.5 million goal for the two-tiered event. Proceeds were to be split between the Specter campaign and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. Guests dined on steak, crab cakes, potatoes, carrots and green beans. For giving $10,000 or raising $50,000, donors posed for photos with the president and attended the dinner, according to the Inquirer’s Thom Fitzgerald.
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Outside the convention center where a modest gathering of teabaggers and counter-teabaggers had gathered to protest, the mood was a little less cheery. “Yeah, spend another trillion dollars and create another fiasco,” said Don Adams from the Independence Tea Party Association. Adams feels Obama is leading the nation in the wrong direction “with the help of people like Specter.” Even though the crowd totaled no more than 75 people every side wanted to be heard. The big government people, the ones who want health care reform now, the guy with the 8 ½ by 11 piece of printer paper demanding UFO disclosure and the men on the street yelling at the people yelling.? “This is a political thank you to reward Specter for switching parties and voting for the stimulus bill,” said Sean, who lives in the city but declined to provide his last name. Sean held a sign with “We trust Barack and Joe and America” on it while chanting for the public option along with a dozen others. Christine Major was on megaphone duty and walking around handing out pamphlets for Repent America, a Philadelphia based religious organization. Major brought up the “Born Alive” bill which states any infant born is legally considered a person and was opposed by Obama twice as an Illinois senator. “People are so consumed with the American dream and popular culture that allowed the government to step over its limits. We don’t practice our First Amendment anymore,” she said.
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The tempest stayed in the teapot today outside the convention center, but it’s beginning to look like a tipping point has been reached as former President Jimmy Carter added his voice to the choir of major media outlets starting to openly question if thinly-veiled racism is at the center of the angry, over-the-top protests Obama continues to face. “In the last eight years none of y’all were out here saying anything. You were hiding,” said Dee, a South Philadelphia resident. Dee was standing on his parked bicycle shouting at Repent America’s founder and director Michael Marcavage. Dee said the recent increase of political rallies was open racism from biased individuals upset over the election and it was only fanning the flames. “The race card goes both ways. I don’t believe people are opposed to the color of Barack Obama’s skin but to the color of his politics, communist red,” said Marilyn Fox from Mount Laurel, New Jersey. “This is a slender thread of a whole tapestry. This protest is an offshoot of a cultural dilemma,” said Muhammad Abdul Jaleel who refused to be part of the chaos and stood back only listening to the factions. “It’s the history of this country. A people locked out of whatever they define as the American dream.”
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JIMMY CARTER: “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American,” Carter told NBC in an interview. “I live in the South, and I’ve seen the South come a long way, and I’ve seen the rest of the country that shared the South’s attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans…And that racism inclination still exists. . . . It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.” MORE
RELATED: The Teabagging Of DC
HUFFINGTON POST: “Tea Party” leader Mark Williams appeared on a CNN panel on “Anderson Cooper 360” last night and promptly set to work discrediting himself and his movement. Williams denounced those carrying blatantly racist signs against President Obama during the tea parties as “no more part of the mainstream of America than the hippies who wear nipple clips and feather boas in San Francisco streets during so-called peace demonstrations.” Cooper had done his homework, however, and caught Williams blatantly misrepresenting himself: “What you’re saying makes sense to me here when I’m hearing what you say but then I read on your blog, you say, you call the President an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief.” MORE
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/15/tea-party-leader-melts-do_n_286933.html