Obama the Muslim

[USVirgin]

 

 

washingtonpost link

 

Have at it, guys,

 

 

Poll: 1 in 5 Americans thinks Obama is a Muslim

 

The number of Americans who believe -- wrongly -- that President Obama is a Muslim has increased significantly since his inauguration and now account for nearly 20 percent of the nation's population.

 

Those results, from a new Pew Research Center survey, were drawn from interviews done before the president's comments about the construction of an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, and they suggest that there could be serious political danger for the White House as the debate continues.

 

The president's religion, like his place of birth, has been the subject of Internet-spread rumors and falsehoods since before he began his presidential campaign, and the poll indicates that those rumors have gained currency since Obama took office. The number of people who now correctly identify Obama as a Christian has dropped to 34 percent, down from nearly half when he took office.

 

White House officials expressed dismay over the poll results. Faith adviser Joshua DuBois blamed "misinformation campaigns" by the president's opponents.

 

"While the president has been diligent and personally committed to his own Christian faith, there's certainly folks who are intent on spreading falsehoods about the president and his values and beliefs," DuBois said.

 

DuBois said the president's Christian faith plays an "important part" in his daily life. And he pointed to six speeches on faith that the president has given in which he talked about his beliefs. But Dubois said coverage of Obama's Christianity has been scant compared with news about the economic crisis, legislative battles and other issues.

 

Among those who say Obama is a Muslim, 60 percent say they learned about his religion from the media, suggesting that their opinions are fueled by misinformation.

 

But the shifting attitudes about the president's religious beliefs could also be the result of a public growing less enamored of him and increasingly attracted to labels they perceive as negative. In the Pew poll, 41 percent disapprove of Obama's job performance, compared with 26 percent disapproval in its March 2009 poll.

 

More than a third of conservative Republicans now say Obama is a Muslim, nearly double the percentage saying so early last year. Independents, too, are now more apt to see the president as a Muslim: Among independents, 18 percent say he is a Muslim, up eight percentage points.

 

Those numbers come as Obama and other Democrats try to minimize potential fallout from the president's remarks on Friday about the Islamic center in New York.

 

 

[Flashermac]

Obama will say anything he thinks will get him votes. He will tell a group, religious or otherwise, exactly what he thinks they want to hear. My suspicion is he is really an agnostic and only attends church because it is expected of a politician in the US.

 

But Obie has only himself to blame, thanks to his bizarre statements to Islamic groups that Muslims have been a part of American history since the beginning and have contributed many things to America. Except for a few West African Muslims who may have been brought to colonial America among the many slaves, the first Muslim contribution to America I can think of was from the Barbary pirates and the Tripolitan War. Obie can really make a fool of himself over votes.

 

Just take everything his says for what it is worth ... campaign rhetoric.

 

BTW his Kenyan father had been raised a Muslim, but abandoned the religion before he ever set foot in America and met Obie's mama. Barack Senior decided as a young man than Islam made no more sense than the black magic practiced by the local witch doctors. Papa Barack was an avowed atheist. So how could an atheist have raised a Muslim son, especially when he walked out on little Obie when the future prez was an infant?

 

Over to HH.

 

 

 

[robaus]

>>The number of Americans who believe -- wrongly -- that President Obama is a Muslim has increased significantly since his inauguration and now account for nearly 20 percent of the nation's population.

... doesn't say much for the IQ of the average American does it?

 

Is this all part of Fox Noise Republican re-election campaign.. to which owner Murdoch has just contributed $1 million, besides all the free propaganda he already donates on the Beck, Huckabee, and O'Reilly comedy spots.

 

"We give you the facts; you decide"

 

It's a worry that the Republicans concentrate on winning an election with a smear campaign .. this in the most powerful democracy in the world.. frightening really. Where are their alternative policies?

 

Why don't they devote more energy to solutions to problems created by them such as dumping the USA and the world into the biggest financial shitheap since the Depression and involving most of the free world in a futile war looking for non existent weapons of mass destruction with over 3,000 American and allied personnel killed plus a million civilian dead.... and all for nothing. Those sound like more pressing issues to me, than mosque building approvals

 

I though that was why the USA was founded .. to free itself from all this religious crap.

 

Thank Buddha, my PM is a declared atheist... well PM for the rest of the week at least until we have perhaps the abbot Abbott take over or possibly the balance of power held by the gay left.... Advance Australia Fair! yeah!

 

[Nervous God]

What percent of USA people think Obama Muslim?

[Old Hippie]

Who is Pbama?

[Nervous God]

THat's indoneaian spelling

[Flashermac]

Murdoch is one of yours, isn't he? Thanks for sending him to us.

 

Meanswhile, Obie shouldn't feel too bad:

 

Most US students think Beethoven is a dog

 

 

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Most young Americans entering university this year can't write in cursive, think email is too slow, that Beethoven is a dog and Michelangelo a computer virus, according to an annual list compiled by two academics at a US college.

 

To students who will get their bachelor's degrees in 2014, Czechoslovakia has never existed, and Fergie is a pop singer, not a duchess. Clint Eastwood is a sensitive movie director, not Dirty Harry, and John McEnroe stars in TV ads, not on the tennis court, says Beloit College's "Mindset".

 

The Mindset list was first compiled in 1998, for the class of 2002, by Beloit humanities professor Tom McBride and former public affairs director Ron Nief.

 

It was intended as a reminder to faculty at the university that references quickly become dated, but it quickly evolved to become a hugely popular annual list that gives a snapshot of how things have changed, and chronicles key cultural and political events that have shaped a generation.

 

In the first Mindset list, McBride and Nief found that youngsters born in 1980 had ever known only one pope - Polish-born John Paul II, who was elected to the papacy in 1978 and died in 2008.

 

For the class of 2003 -- born in 1981 and featured on the 1999 Mindset list -- Yugoslavia never existed and they were puzzled why Solidarity was sometimes spelled with a capital S.

 

(For you thickies, Solidarity with a capital S was the first and only independent trade union in the Soviet bloc. It was created in 1980 and went on to negotiate in 1989 a peaceful end to communism in Poland, making the country the first to escape Moscow's grip.)

 

Nief and McBride take a year to put the list together, gathering outside contributions and poring over journals, literary works, and the popular media from the year of the incoming university students' birth.

 

"Then we present the ideas to every 18-year-old whose attention we can get and we wait for the 'mindset moment' - the blank stare that comes back at you that makes you realize they have no idea what you're talking about," Nief told AFP.

 

Those moments make it onto the list, alongside interesting historical snippets like the fact that since the class of 2004 was born in 1982, all but one national election in the United States has had a candidate in it named George Bush.

 

The list also chronicles geopolitical changes, and sometimes depressingly highlights how little progress has been made on key issues, such as the fight against AIDS.

 

The class of 2004, for instance, "never referred to Russia and China as 'the Reds'", and in the year they were born, 1982, "AIDS was found to have killed 164 people and finding a cure for the new disease was designated a 'top priority' for government-sponsored research."

 

The class of 2005 -- born in 1983 -- thought of Sarajevo as a war zone, not an Olympic host, and had no idea what carbon paper was.

 

Apartheid never existed in South Africa for the class of 2006, and for the class of 2007, "Banana Republic has always been a store, not a puppet government in Latin America."

 

The list is a mirror of how rapidly perceptions can change: to the class of 2013, boxer Mike Tyson was "always a felon" but to students who graduated five years earlier, Tyson was "always a contender."

 

The list makes some people feel old, like those who remember what Michael Jackson looked like when he was singing in the Jackson Five or recall the days when there were only a handful of channels on television.

 

But they're not the only ones who get the blues over the list.

 

"There are 25- and 26-year-olds that tell us they feel old when they read the list," Nief said.

 

"Just two years ago, there were some students who learned to type on a typewriter," but others in the graduating class of 2012 didn't know that IBM had ever made typewriters, said Nief.

 

Few students in the class of 2009 knew how to tie a tie and most thought Iran and Iraq had never been at war with each other.

 

And for US students who got their bachelor's degrees this year, Germany was never divided, professional athletes have always competed in the Olympics, there have always been reality shows on television and smoking has never been allowed on US airlines.

 

 

 

Lynx

 

 

[Central Scrutinizer]

THat's indoneaian spelling

 

 

 

 

I didn't know you were Indonesian.

[cavanami]

Where's the selection for "I don't know"

[Flashermac]

He isn't! He's indoneaian.

 

Presumably, that must be a planet in distant universe.