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.

Actually, he said “I think that nobody wants to play chicken with our troops on the ground.”

Fox News: We report half of the quote, you decide.

The question was raised way back when his run was all speculation: Will being saddled with the name Barack Hussein Obama hinder his chances? You’ll have no doubt noticed certain members of the right wing noise machine, such as Ann Coulter, refer to him exclusively as B. Hussein Obama in an attempt to conflate him with murderous tyrants. And then there was CNN with this mistake:

Goon Hemogoblin! said it best:

Here’s why the name issue is dead.

1) It’s a name. It’s literally name-calling; racist, baseless, idiotic name-calling. That makes it a really, really crappy smear.

2) Obama is a machine. A smear like that is nothing - he can work around it, and has been his entire career. I absolutely guarantee that he can make the people who put stock in it look like ignorant bigots they are.

3) His 2004 speech. He specifically turned his “goofy name” into the punchline of his speech. You can’t hit back at that.

Seriously - here’s what they have; his middle name is Hussein. Period. That’s a shitty thing to base a smear on, and is exactly the sort of thing that can explode back in your face.

But that won’t stop some people, of course. This same issue came up when he ran for the senate, and Obama’s response is on record:

“(The pundits) said you can’t win in a year like this with a name like Obama. There was quite a bit of confusion at first, but it did get me free airtime on Al Jazeera.”

Sure, there might be people out there that won’t vote for the skinny kid with the funny name, but they probably wouldn’t like his politics, either.

Here we have the tragic tale of Nicklaus Lovelady, a baby faced reporter suffering from terminal lack of mackitude. He demanded a public apology from Senator Obama for “blocking my shot.”

Like a true gentleman, the Senator happily obliged. Do you think George Bush ever apologized for cock-blocking?

I really didn’t think I had to go back and do this one, since it’s been so thoroughly debunked, but since someone just brought it up, again, here goes.

Barack Obama never attended a Madrassa. This story was reported on Fox News, and they were in turn reporting something they’d read in Insight Magazine. They reported without actually doing any investigation at all; they just basically said HEY GUESS WHAT WE READ.

So then CNN actually does some reporting for a change and sends an honest-to-god reporter to the school Obama attended in Indonesia and confirmed that it was not, in fact, a Madrassa.

And while we’re on the subject, “Madrassa” translates literally to “school.” It doesn’t mean “radical bomb-making learn-to-kill-the-Christians school,” even though that’s what we think it means, because we are stupid.

From a poorly written article in the Washington Post.

In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” he recounts a watershed moment of his own — a “revelation,” a “violent” awakening, an incident that “permanently altered” his “vision.” Twice he tells how as a 9-year-old he went to the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia (a country where his mother had taken him to live) and came across a Life magazine article about a black man who had tried to whiten his skin through some sort of chemical process. The result was a disaster.

“I felt my face and neck get hot,” Obama wrote. “My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page.”

The child had, for the first time, confronted racism and its hideous consequences.

Only there is no such issue of Life magazine. So says the Chicago Tribune, which has gone through the Obama memoir with commendable thoroughness.

The Tribune, and the Post writer, are correct. It was not in Life Magazine. It was not in Ebony Magazine, as the Senator, when told no such Life article existed, himself suggested.

No, it was an article in Time Magazine.

Yes yes. He misremembered the name of a magazine he saw as a child. C’mon, guys. It’s not like he wrote A Million Little Pieces.

Edit: A poster at DailyKos suggests it might have been Look magazine, which had a similar article around the same time. However, without the actual article, I’m sticking with Time Magazine.

Black pundits claim that he’s not black enough, too ingratiated to White pundits are crying that he’s too black; he lives in Chicago’s South Side, attends a “black church,” worked with the poor.

These are racial attacks shrouded to look like judgements of his character.

I’m gonna quote fellow Goon Preppy Bastard, who nailed it:

To some people, being “black” is an identity, sort of like being gay, or being Jewish, or whatever. And merely having African-American descent isn’t good enough. In order to be “black” you have to meet certain criteria that go along with that identity.

It reminds me of that episode of South Park where Stan falls in with the Goths who are “non-comformists” and they explain to him everything he has to do be non-comformist, too. The label of “black” as an identity (I keep putting it in quote marks to differentiate it from just plain black, as a race) has many criteria that some people don’t think Obama meets.

This is ludicrous. Would you say someone isn’t “gay enough” because they don’t like musicals or Madonna? Since when did being something require you to have groupthink? Obama is a role model for young blacks in America, in my opinion. He’s a testimony to what hard work and diligence can get you. That, of course, is what attracts him to MAINSTREAM America. Someone like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton–they may be “black enough” but they’re not seen as anything BUT “black.” They’re all about race. There’s nothing to their repertoire but bitterness and anger and what appear to be deep-seated issues towards people who AREN’T black (Jackson has made openly anti-Semitic comments, for example.) Thus they can’t get any support (both have run for president in the past) outside the black community. Obama CAN, and obviously that angers those who cherish identity over substance.

While the pundits prattle on, they seem to either willfully or ignorantly ignore the vast number of people who don’t give two shits about Barack Obama’s skin color, and are instead honestly drawn to the man for the content of his character, for the things he says and the ways he says them. That will be the test for the Senator in this election cycle, not whether he’s up on his Ebonics and down with the 50 Cent, yo.

You may have seen this paradoy of Apple’s 1984 Superbowl commercial.

The Obama camp had nothing to do with it. However, a citizen who worked for the company that designed his web site did. Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, created and uploaded the video and, so as not to give a sense of impropriety, he quit his job when he was outed as the creator.

There’s no controversy here, really, except for a man losing his job for being an independant activist on his own damn time.

This is one of those meme’s that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, refuses to die.

Barack Obama is a Muslim.

No, he’s not. Frankly, I find it rather insulting that because he was not given an Anglo-Saxon name at birth, there’s an assumption that he must be Muslim. Do you know who the only Muslim currently serving in the U.S. Congress is? Keith Ellison.

His father was raised Muslim and his mother was raised Methodist, but by the time they met, they were both agnostics. Obama was not raised with religion; or, rather, he was raised with a plurality of them (From The Audacity of Truth, pages 203 - 204):

For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.

This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. bu I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part — no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.

Recently, the LA Times resurrected this meme, claiming to have talked to former classmates and teachers from Obama’s four years in Indonesia.

His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who were identified by Obama’s grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both of the schools he attended.

That registration meant that during the third and fourth grades, Obama learned about Islam for two hours each week in religion class.

It’s interesting that while acknowledging that he attended both Muslim and Roman Catholic classes, no one is accusing him of being a Roman Catholic. Futher, as regards this registration, the paper continues:

Bugs have eaten Obama’s file in the school’s archive, said Vice Principal Hardi Priyono.

Regardless, Barack Obama chose to be a Christian. He came to Christianity while working as a community organizer in Chicago, in his twenties, stating in The Audacity of Truth (page 208):

It was because of these newfound understandings - that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved - that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.

He’s been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since. His devotion to his chosen religion should not be doubted, and I should think that those who praise President Bush’s born-again Christian status would extend the same respect to Senator Obama’s religion.

Obama’s most serious ethical blunder to date was revealed this week when an in depth report discovered he paid some parking tickets 17 years late.

BOSTON - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama got more than an education when he attended Harvard Law School in the late 1980s. He also got a healthy stack of parking tickets, most of which he never paid.

The Illinois Senator shelled out $375 in January - two weeks before he officially launched his presidential campaign - to finally pay for 15 outstanding parking tickets and their associated late fees.

It’s no under-age congressional page story, but I’m certain that if the news media continues to dig in to the Senator’s past, they’ll find out that under a full moon, he becomes a werewolf.