Media Matters has a good write up on Tucker Carlson on February 9, stating that Obama’s church “contradicts the basic tenets of Christianity,” and “sounds speratist.”

Trinity United Church of Christ follows a tenant called The Black Value System, which, in essence, tasks members to be hard working, self-reliant, believe in God, and give back to the community. Carlson and others in the Right Wing Media fuss that because the message is aimed at and tailored for the Black community, it is racist. However, Trinity is well within the mainstream of black churches, as The Christian Century explains:

When the first criticisms of Obama’s church came to the senator’s attention, he seemed genuinely perplexed. He converted to Christianity at Trinity, responding to one of Wright’s altar calls, weeping beneath an old wooden cross as he promised to follow Jesus. He told the Chicago Tribune: “I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a document [the Black Value System] that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help.”

Dwight Hopkins, a member of Trinity and a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, argues that the church is within the mainstream of black churches and as such is socially conservative. Its emphasis on education harkens back to the days when black parents worked two and three jobs to educate their children, since schooling was one thing “they can’t take from you.” Moss, noting the church’s tutoring, SAT preparation and scholarship programs, said, “We place more African-American students in college than any other organization in Chicago.” Hopkins pointed to the church’s annual marriage retreat, in which “500 black couples study the Bible’s views on marriage together,” as more evidence of the church’s focus on traditional concerns: the Bible and the family. Obama himself believes that he could explain the Black Value System to people in Iowa and “get a few Amens.”

ABC News: No Disclosure: Presidential Candidates Defy Tradition, Refuse to Release Taxes

The issue here is the above picture, which includes Senator Obama. Why is that an issue? The first paragraph of page 2:

Yet as the 2008 election draws near, the only top-tier candidate who has committed to releasing his 1040 forms is Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who already made public the return he filed this year.

This is hidden “below the fold” and the image is clearly meant to imply that he is in the group of people who refuse to release their returns, when clearly, he is not.

In 2004, Joe Anthony started an unofficial fan page for Obama at http://myspace.com/barackobama . By the time Obama announced for president, there were 30,000 “friends” attached to the MySpace page. By April, it had 160,000 friends.

However, sometime in late April, Obama’s campaign took control of the site. They had tried to work with Anthony, and it was a good relationship for a while, but by accounts, the work load became too much for him, and he asked to be compensated. In addition, Obama’s team was concerned about minor factual errors on the site, and about having the candidate’s name in the hands of someone unaffiliated with the Senator.

The whole story is here. Obama’s campaign responds here.

I’m not sure where the controversy is here. More or less, even though he had good intentions, Anthony was domain squatting. Courts have routinely upheld that the owner of the name gets the domain. It sucks that he feels gilted, and I personally feel he should have been compensated in some way, but them’s the breaks.