Shorter Version Of Tea Bagger Speech: “If Blacks Couldn’t Vote, A Marxist Like Barack Obama Wouldn’t Be President”

Tom Tancredo understands how to play into the paranoid fantasies of the tea baggers. During his opening night speech, Tancredo said:

Every year, the liberal Dems and the RINO Republicans turned up the temperature ever so slightly. It seemed after awhile that we’d all be boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state.

And then something really odd happened — mostly because we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country.

[Applause]

People who cannot even spell the word “vote,” or say it in English — [applause] — put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. Name is Barack Hussein Obama.

Yes, to Tancredo all you need to do is to stop the blacks and foreigners from voting.

Tancredo isn’t the only one who thinks Obama is a Marxist. ABC News also notes that “The convention plans to feature a lecture called, ‘Correlations Between the Current Administration and Marxist dictators in Latin America.'” Not that we should, but if we were ever to keep people from voting due to ignorance, those who know so little about political and economic viewpoints that they believe Obama is a Marxist should be the first to be excluded.

Tancredo also attacked John McCain for not beingĀ  far right enough and suggested that don’t share their view of how America should be ought to leave:

Some things we can deal with in just a political way — which is, you know, by the votes we cast. Other things will require a commitment to passing on our culture — and we really do have one, you know, it is based on Judeo-Christian principles whether people like it or they don’t!

[Applause]

That’s who we are! That is who we are! And if you don’t like it, don’t come here! And if you’re here and you don’t like it, go home! Go someplace else!

Crooks and Liars has the full video, but if you can get a copy it sounds much better in the original German.

Barry Lynn Criticizes Obama For Not Doing Enough To Change Bush Policies On Faith-Based Initatives

This is disappointing. Despite earlier promises to radically change the manner in which faith-based programs are handle, Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State argues that Obama has maintained far too many of George Bush’s policies:

In a July 2008 Zanesville, Ohio, speech, Obama flatly promised to repeal Bush-era rules that let publicly funded faith-based groups discriminate in hiring on religious grounds. He also vowed to make sure that these groups do not proselytize the folks who come to them for help.

Obama could not have been clearer. “If you get a federal grant,” he said, “you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs. And we’ll also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work.”

Encouraging words. Too bad he hasn’t acted on those promises, and billions of dollars in federal funds are still going out every day under Bush-era rules set up to evade long-standing civil rights and civil liberties protections…

Dissatisfaction with Obama’s inaction on this issue is widespread. On Feb. 4, 25 national religious and public policy organizations sent a letter to Obama, urging him to fix the faith-based initiative. The groups range from the American Association of University Women, the Human Rights Campaign and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the American Jewish Committee, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the United Methodist Church, General Board of Church and Society. These groups have grown impatient with Obama, as have I, for leaving the odious Bush faith-based scheme in place unchanged.