Thread: Surreal Video: Amidst Angry Cries and Boos, Democrats Re-Insert God, Jerusalem into P

Surreal Video: Amidst Angry Cries and Boos, Democrats Re-Insert God, Jerusalem into Platform

• 
• Guy Benson
  Political Editor, Townhall.com

Sep 05, 2012 07:40 PM EST


We wrote about the extreme 2012 Democratic platform this morning, noting that it excludes God and Jerusalem, yet includes taxpayer-funded late term abortion. Even the media found these decisions slightly unusual, leading to a noisy chorus of criticism that eventually built to a critical mass. The decision was made to uproot the platform and undo the controversial language and omissions. The problem? The platform was formally adopted yesterday. Democratic officials couldn't just quietly tweak the document behind closed doors; they had to put the modified platform up for another vote. When they did so, chaos erupted. In three separate voice votes, delegates were asked whether they supported the inclusion of God and the recognition of Jerusalem in their party's guiding policy document. Three separate times, loud shouts of "no" grew in volume and intensity. A flummoxed Chairman Villaraigosa ultimately just declared that the "ayes" had it -- even though multiple reports indicated that the consensus was nowhere hear the requisite 2/3 majority. As God and Jerusalem were inserted back into the Democratic platform, the hall exploded in boos -- a humiliating disaster for the party. The stunning video:


Are people of faith and Israel supporters listening? Even some DNC delegates were astonished and disturbed by that spectacle, which is guaranteed to find its way into GOP attack ads. Every last Democratic candidate for office -- at every level of government -- should be asked where they stand on these issues, and whether they'll repudiate the large element within their own party whose hostility toward the Almighty and our great Israeli allies was on full display at their national convention. Even consummate Democratic partisan Paul Begala didn't attempt to spin this into anything other than a giant mess:





Team Obama is in full, desperate damage control mode:

President Barack Obama personally intervened to order Democrats to change language in their party platform to add a mention of God and declare that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, campaign officials said Wednesday.

Except...it's the Obama White House's official policy not to recognize the fact that Jerusalem is the capital city of Israel. In fact, the platform committee says it made the eyebrow-raising changes in order to better reflect Obama's views. Delicious:

Changes between the 2008 Democratic Party platform's language on Israel and the 2012 version were due to a deliberate effort to refocus the platform toward President Barack Obama's policies, two officials directly involved in its drafting process told The Cable.

The Romney campaign is demanding answers:

"Mitt Romney has consistently stated his belief that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Although today’s voice vote at the Democratic National Convention was unclear, the Democratic Party has acknowledged Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. President Obama has repeatedly refused to say the same himself. Now is the time for President Obama to state in unequivocal terms whether or not he believes Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.” - Andrea Saul, Romney spokesperson

Parting thought: Will Democrats boo apple pie and baseball during tomorrow's session? Obama 2012: Boo God, No Jobs. Forward!

UPDATE - "Keystone cops."





UPDATE II - Charles Krauthammer reminds us that several important Israel-related elements weren't restored to the DNC platform. The delegates may have burned the joint down if party leaders had tried that.


http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybens..._into_platform

The Alternative Universe and the Media Feedback Loop

By: Erick Erickson (Diary) | September 6th, 2012 at 03:30 AM | 30
RESIZE: AAA

Yesterday in Charlotte the Democratic National Convention began as amateurishly as President Obama’s first term has been. Three times Mayor Villaraigosa of Los Angeles tried to get a majority of Democratic delegates to agree to add God and Jerusalem back into the Democratic Platform. Three times he failed. But on the third time, he declared he heard a two-thirds vote for changing the platform. Debbie Wasserman Schultz lied again saying there was no fight and called it a “technical change”, but the Democratic delegates booed putting God and his holy city back into the Democratic Platform.
If booing God and his holy city is a part of the Democratic Convention happening in this universe, I’ll take the alternative universe Bill Clinton said the GOP lives in. This is why Barack Obama stands a good chance of losing. It is the Democrats who have disconnected from America.
I’m on record repeatedly doubting Mitt Romney’s viability as a candidate, but more and more I think not only is Romney winning, but the polling is not reflecting the strength of his campaign and the media is actually sabotaging the Democrats’ chance of winning. In fact, I dare say if MItt Romney wins he will have the American media to thank for his win. Hear me out and I think you will agree.
First, and I realize you will have to take my word for it, I have a pretty good gut check on winning and losing. My gut tells me Mitt Romney is doing better than I expected and better than the polling is suggesting. Anecdotes are not data, but more and more a steady stream of anecdotes are piling up to suggest Romney is winning.
He is ahead by double digits in most polls with independents. More and more voters say Barack Obama does not deserve a second term. More and more voters think Barack Obama’s handling of the economy has been bad. More and more voters trust Mitt Romney to handle the economy, jobs, and even entitlements than Barack Obama. In many Democratic primaries in places like Pennsylvania the President’s undervote compared to the rest of the Democratic primary ballot was staggering. In Kentucky and Arkansas and Oklahoma — granted they’ll go for the GOP — third parties got to close to 40% of the vote against him in his own supposedly uncontested primaries.
In the past two years the Democrats and certain members of the media have invested a lot of time and energy telling independent voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 that they’d be racists to abandon him. “Racism” is cropping up more and more as a rebuttal to all attacks against Barack Obama. At the same time, the left has used “bigotry” to attack any person who supports marriage.
Poling on marriage has become terribly inaccurate. Ask a person if they favor changing marriage and most will say yes, but in more than 30 states the voters keep rejecting it. Voters do not want to let pollsters think they are bigots anymore than they want pollsters to think them racists. So they ago along to get along.
If, however, a pollster asks voters how they think their neighbors will vote on gay marriage, suddenly polls become a lot more accurate. Voters are happy to tell pollsters that they are sophisticated, but that their neighbors are bigots. In North Carolina, asking voters about their neighbors’ vote on gay marriage rendered a much more accurate poll more closely resembling the final outcome than asking about the voter’s own vote.
I’m beginning to think pollsters need to start asking voters who they think their neighbor will vote for President. Yesterday, we got a startling hint at this.

Eighty-nine percent of Republicans said the president after Obama would be from their camp, and 55 percent of independents agreed. Surprisingly 38 percent of Democrats had the same view (versus 47 percent who said it would be a Democrat). The telephone survey was taken during the last two nights of the GOP convention and got answers from 1,000 voters, meaning it was a typical sample.

With that many independents and Republicans and more than a third of Democrats thinking MItt Romney will win, I think standard polling on the horserace may have the same problems the gay marriage polling has had — the Democrats have done a damn fine job of throwing out racism and bigotry so much that voters are less than honest with pollsters.
So if Mitt Romney is such a bad candidate, why do I think he’s winning and what does the media have to do with it? It’s actually a pretty easy concept to grasp.
The Democrats and most of the mainstream media live in a symbiotic relationship and feedback loop. When Todd Akin says something dumb, the media seizes on it and attacks Todd Akin and the GOP. For the past several weeks the media has fixated on how out of touch the GOP is, its platform is, and its Presidential candidate is.
At the same time, the media has been largely silent on the Democratic Platform except for yesterday’s ridiculousness. Even then, the media mostly failed to point out that the Obama campaign said it had approved the platform removing God and Jerusalem, while going to great lengths to point out Obama intervened to put them back in.
Meanwhile, the Democrats booed God and his holy city the day after claiming we all belong the government as if it is some sort of Rotary Club.
This becomes the fatal problem for the Democrats — the media reinforces that the Democrats are grounded in reality and connected to America when they are not.
The Democrats actually have a very extremist position on abortion. The media that spent so long focused on the GOP’s position has barely dealt with the Democrats. Why? Because most of the mainstream media is in ideological lockstep with the Democrats on this. It’s hard to tell the Democrats they’ve gone too far astray from mainstream America when the mainstream media is over on the lefthand side to begin with.
The Democrats, in other words, overplayed their hand on the War on Women and there is no media voice they listen to saying, “Hold up, you’ve gone too far.” Most of the media is with or to the left of the Democrats on this. For a year now you and I have been hearing about the growing secularization of and atheism in America. I now see that’s no longer a coincidence, but another effort to feed the Democrats’ feedback loop in much the same way polls were being churned out in the press in 2010 showing how popular Obamacare would be despite all objective polling showing it was not.
Consequently, the Democrats turned Sandra Fluke and Elizabeth Warren into cult heroes on feminism and liberal issues. Barack Obama utters, “you didn’t build that” and the Democrats start their convention telling us we all belong to the government. They get rid of God and Jerusalem, give a podium to two disastrous speeches by Fluke and Warren that I’m willing to bet did more harm than good, hand much of the rest of the convention over to abortion rights activists, see MSNBC hosts wear buttons with uteruses on them, and think that they are connecting with middle America because the media is not raising red flags in the way the media does with the GOP.
The feedback loop between the Democrats and the media has pushed the Democrats well outside the mainstream and I believe there is a silent majority looking at this festival of the bizarre in Charlotte in absolute revulsion. They hear “fair share” and cringe. They hear Bill Clinton ask if people are better off than they were four years ago and are shocked the Democrats yell back “yes.”
The Democrats, having so many ideological soul mates from New York City and DC in the media, lack a buffer to their echo chamber and the feedback loop has only accelerated.
I really don’t think Mitt Romney is a strong candidate. And I’ve consistently believed he would lose. But now I think he’s winning and doing so largely because the Democrats have so overplayed their hand on social issues while ignoring the economy with no corrective from the media. The American people are aghast at what they are seeing and will respond accordingly at the polls.
The Democrats have made the one always fatal mistake anyone can make in politics — they’ve believed their own press.

The Alternative Universe and the Media Feedback Loop | RedState

UPDATE II - Charles Krauthammer reminds us that several important Israel-related elements weren't restored to the DNC platform. The delegates may have burned the joint down if party leaders had tried that.

This is all just further confirmation of the level of hypocrisy in the Democrat Party (not that the GOP is never hypocritical, it is just that even the worst of the GOP leaders have never been as blatant as the Dems.) They claim to be for the common man----who is suffering most under Obama's policies?They claim to support Medicare and the elderly---but took 700 billion dollars out of Medicare (which will cost the elderly) to fund coverage for 15 million younger people who don't have insurance primarily because they don't want it, are too cheap to pay for it themselves (Fluke comes to mind), or cannot afford it because they are already on welfare and are getting Medicaid or free emergency room service anyway. The Democrats call all conservatives, and especially Tea Party supporters racists when in fact it is Obama and company that undermined chances for charter schools in predominantly black districts in Washington, DC and Harlem, continue economic policies that not only hurt the nation in general but have resulted in even more unemployment in the black and Hispanic communities, and protect the New Black Muslims by gving them a pass on voter intimidation (Philadelphia 200 and recent rants to kill white people. Dems oppose voter ID but require it for admission to their own convention. They insist upon the rule of law when going after companies such as Gibson Guitar, but break the law everyday by not enforcing immigration laws, running programs like the gunrunner program, and failing to investigate serious security leaks at the White House. And these are only some of the highlights. They push 'Green' energy while killing the oil/gas/coal companies when it is clear they were funneling taxpayer dollars into failing 'Green" companies that were run by supporters, large donors, and intimates of the Democrat elites. Etc Etc.

Speech Switch Sparks Scramble, Disappoints Attendees

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By Jim O'Sullivan and Major Garrett
Updated: September 5, 2012 | 11:18 p.m.
September 5, 2012 | 11:17 p.m.

Liz Lynch
New plan: Stadium will sit empty.


The game was called on account of thunderstorms. Or at least a 30-to-40 percent chance of them.
The decision to relocate President Obama’s acceptance speech tonight from Bank of America Stadium to the Time Warner Cable Arena left thousands of would-be attendees frustrated and hunting for other venues to watch what was expected to be a triumphant sequel to Obama’s outdoor address in Denver four years ago.
Convention officials and Obama aides rejected suggestions, gleefully pushed by Republicans, that fears of disappointing attendance had prompted a political calculation to move to the guaranteed-capacity indoor arena. The weather, organizers said, left them no choice but to cancel. One senior official said the Obama campaign had an overflow list of 19,000 who could not be seated in the stadium.
“Our goal from the very beginning was, how to make this the most open and accessible convention in history, and we decided as late as operationally possible,” Democratic National Convention Committee CEO Steve Kerrigan told Convention Daily, describing the decision as “heartbreaking.”
Instead, delegates and donors will be allowed inside, while the people expected to fill at least 50,000 of the stadium seats that were set aside for those carrying “community credentials,” including supporters from four surrounding states, have been encouraged to join a Thursday pre-speech conference call with Obama and to host watch parties in their homes.
“We spent thousands of dollars to come down here, and we can’t go. That’s really unfair,” said Gwendolyn Clarke, who said she had driven from New York City with her daughter to watch the stadium speech, hoping to defray the cost by selling water bottles outside the arena. “When you give money and time and don’t get in, that’s not fair. If you’re not famous enough, you don’t get in.”
Republicans were quick to impugn Obama’s motives.
“You can’t believe a thing this administration says,” said John Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire and a top Romney surrogate, during a Charlotte press conference. “They promised you, rain or shine, the president would be speaking there. And then when they couldn’t get a crowd, they brought him inside.”
Aside from the obvious optical disadvantages and too-easy metaphors—Obama forced to downsize four arduous years after making history—the reelection effort, more critically, loses tangible electoral tools that will be important in swing states North Carolina and Virginia.
The Obama campaign’s methods were on display in the way tickets were distributed to the now-canceled outdoor event. The so-called community credentials were not handed out at offices and events. Instead, people had to apply for them and then go online to activate them. Campaign officials said that 65,000 had activated their tickets and an additional 19,000 were on what they called “a hard waiting list.”
Kerrigan said that the shut-out spectators were notified on Wednesday by e-mail that they could not attend.
Among those who had been given tickets to the speech were 6,000 North Carolinians who had signed up for the campaign’s “9-3-1” program. That meant they had to volunteer for nine hours over three shifts to get one seat. That represented 54,000 hours of registering new voters, calling other North Carolinians to sign them up.
Top officials made the decision around 8 a.m. Wednesday, after a conference call with Kerrigan, senior campaign strategist David Axelrod, campaign manager Jim Messina, and his deputies Stephanie Cutter and Julianna Smoot. A key organizer speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations said that officials had backup plans in place, but details remained unresolved. “They had the contingency plan; it was all mapped out. Now they have to execute it,” the organizer said.
Kerrigan said that organizers would need to do “a little bit of programmatic shifting,” including a downsized schedule. Stage events will now launch closer to 4 p.m., he said, rather than the previously planned earlier start. The stage, Kerrigan said, will be smaller than the stadium version.
Later Wednesday, convention officials said there would be no balloon drop inside the arena, a traditional staple of conventions’ final nights. Balloons typically are installed before a convention begins.
Until the announcement about 10 a.m. on Wednesday, the campaign had stuck with its full-speed-ahead intentions on keeping tonight’s show outdoors. Campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters on Air Force One during the flight to Charlotte, “There were several weather forecasts that were calling for a 30-to-40 percent chance of thunderstorms tomorrow night—which, just to put that in real terms for you, what it means, we would have had to possibly evacuate the stadium if there were thunderstorms.”
Secret Service agents said that uptown Charlotte’s security and street-closures plan would not change from Wednesday because the Time Warner Arena is already secured. Several road and parking restrictions around the stadium set to take effect starting Wednesday evening and ending on Friday have been canceled because of the venue change.
The level of door security is not expected to change for convention-goers regardless of the venue—none of the prohibited items, including umbrellas, will be allowed into the arena during Obama’s speech. But the crowds are expected to increase dramatically, exacerbating already-clogged streets and long security lines.
“The checkpoints are already established, so what’s here is here,” said one Secret Service agent patrolling the perimeter of the arena on Wednesday morning, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity. But for Obama’s speech, the agent cautioned, “you can probably count on it being three times as busy.”
Catherine Christman, a media consultant leading a group of convention attendees from South Carolina colleges and universities, said she was sorry to lose out on watching the speech in person. “It’s a bit of a scramble, but it doesn’t look like logistically it’s going to work out,” she said. “Of course, we’re all disappointed.”
Whether the complications surrounding the speech muzzle its message or dent Obama’s aura of competence remains an open question. Democratic Sen. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania said, “In Washington, it’s an interesting thing to bat around, I think, but it’s not going to matter. People are going to listen to what he’s going to say.” For Gwendolyn Clarke’s daughter Courtney, though, the disappointment of being denied attendance had turned her off Obama altogether. She did not plan to watch the speech on television, she said, and went further.
“You can rest assured, Courtney will be voting for Ryan and Romney,” Courtney said.
George E. Condon Jr., Amy Harder, Analissa Iverson, and Megan Warner contributed




Speech Switch Sparks Scramble, Disappoints Attendees - NationalJournal.com

Don't forget there a lot of muslim delegates, especially from Michigan......


Dems Actually Boo as Party Reinstates Jerusalem and God Language into DNC Platform

Posted on September 5, 2012 at 4:57pm by

video of the vote:

Democrats Reinstate Jerusalem and God Language into DNC Platform Despite Booing | Video | TheBlaze.com

With heavy booing from dissenters, the Democratic National Convention voted Wednesday to reinstate language supporting Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to restore a reference to God in its party platform.
DNC Chairman and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa conducted a voice vote of the delegates on the proposed platform changes, asking for yeses and nos three times because of how similar the responses sounded. A two-thirds vote was required to adopt the change. Despite clear opposition, Villaraigosa declared the amendment had passed, prompting loud booing.
The changes reinstated language from the 2008 platform that said “we need a government that stands up for the hopes, values and interests of working people and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential” and of Jerusalem, “it is and will remain the capital of Israel.”
According to the Associated Press, President Barack Obama personally intervened to get the platform changed back.
Democrats had been sharply criticized for not including the language, including by fellow party members. Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan said on Fox News that removing the Jerusalem language was “a tragedy” that served to “undermine our nation’s support for Israel.“ Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said omitting God ”suggests a party that is increasingly out of touch with the mainstream of the American people.”

The Jerusalem issue came after the Obama administration’s refusal to say flat-out whether the city is the Jewish state’s capital, then saying it could be through negotiations.
“Mitt Romney has consistently stated his belief that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel,” Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement after Wednesday’s vote. “President Obama has repeatedly refused to say the same himself. Now is the time for President Obama to state in unequivocal terms whether or not he believes Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.”
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said reinstating the platform language reflected “the policy of both Republican and Democratic administrations for decades.”
Noor Ul-Hasan, a Muslim delegate from Salt Lake City, Utah, told the Associated Press she felt the language went against the principle of the separation of church and state.
“There are people who don’t believe in God and you have to respect that as well,” Ul-Hasan said. She also questioned the process by which the platform was amended. “There was no discussion. We didn’t even see it coming. We were blindsided by it.”
Angela Urrea, a delegate from Roy, Utah, was similarly dismayed there was no discussion of amending the platform after it was approved Tuesday.
“The majority spoke last night,” Urrae said, noting the platform was approved Tuesday. “We shouldn’t be declaring Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This post has been updated since it was first published.

Democrats Reinstate Jerusalem and God Language into DNC Platform Despite Booing | Video | TheBlaze.com