Sportsmen should find Barack Obama's stand on gun control to be reprehensible.

Obama gunning to lose in 2008.

Nobody said that winning the Congress with a BlueDog approach would make for an easy honeymoon -- just witness the party's rage over this week's vote (myself included) -- but no-one can challenge that our win in 2006 has begun the change that this nation sorely needed.  But as if right on time to scuttle our success, news comes out that Obama has finally begun to talk about firearms and gun control and frankly, the position he is taking will only mean the loss of BlueDog, rural, libertarian leaning, and gun owning Democrats...

So many of us have been waiting for more clarity on many of Obama's positions and one of those has been his position on American gun ownership.  This month he is making himself clearly heard:

Obama delivers message tough on guns

Just days prior to announcing his urban agenda aimed at combating urban poverty, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama entered Vernon Park Church of God on July 15 to a thunderous applause from a supportive crowd with a message challenging the gun lobby, criticizing the Bush administration and issuing a call to action for Black men.
“Our playgrounds have become battlegrounds. Our streets have become cemeteries. Our schools have become places to mourn the ones we’ve lost,” said the Illinois senator. “I’m sick and tired of seeing our young people gunned down.”

Sen. Obama decried the inaction on the part of the Bush administration to ban assault rifles, mentioning that the nearly three dozen children killed in Chicago this year is higher than the number of Illinois servicemen who have died in Iraq.

The clear implication of this statement is that Obama belives that Chicago's violent crimes are to be solved at a national level -- since Chicago & IL already have VERY tough gun control laws that have not stopped their crime problems--, and to be solved by gun control legislation specifically mentioning the 1994 "Assault Weapons Ban" and blaming Bush for that ban's lack of renewal.

Read more at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/8/6/104556/3837 .

 April 20, 2007

I don't know if there was an attempt to hide the information or if no one else cares. But The Jersey Journal (Healy tells Obama: Need gun controls) informed us that Barack attended the gun grabbers meeting in D.C. last month.

Thanks to Mike, The Gun Guy, for the pointer.

Records Can Be Baggage In Bids for White House

By Shailagh Murray

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 1, 2007; Page A01

The attack ads practically write themselves: Hillary Clinton voted against ethanol! Barack Obama wants to increase taxes!

Such are the perils of running for president as a senator. The two front-runners for the 2008 Democratic nomination are newcomers to the chamber. But in the two years that Clinton and Obama have overlapped, they have taken opposite sides at least 40 times. That's a lot of material to mine, and even misrepresent.

Read more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/31/AR2006123101004.html.

....

Obama's centrist-sounding campaign speeches, inspiring perorations for compromise, unity and bipartisanship, have propelled him to his party's front ranks. He now runs close behind Clinton in some of the Democratic presidential-preference polls.

But his nonpartisan tone belies a far more liberal agenda on a wide range of domestic and national-security issues (he ran against the Iraq war in his 2004 campaign and looks to government as the answer to every ill that confronts us). In the broader scheme, both now head a field of Democratic presidential hopefuls who are pointedly and uniformly more liberal than the nation at large -- raising alarm bells elsewhere in the party.

Read the rest at http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/DonaldLambro/2006/12/28/clinton_and_obama,_keepers_of_the_liberal_flame.

December 22, 2006 -- BARACK Obama isn't a mortal threat to Hillary Clinton's White House hopes - his potential candidacy may be just the gift she needs to assure her of the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Having the right opponent is one of the essentials to electoral success. In a primary, the right foe is someone who is strong enough to keep anybody else from gaining serious traction, but not strong enough to win. Obama seems to fit the bill.

Read more at http://www.nypost.com/seven/12222006/postopinion/opedcolumnists/obamas_gift_to_clinton_opedcolumnists_.htm.

Illinois senator Barack Obama is second with 17 per cent, followed by former North Carolina senator John Edwards with 12 per cent, former vice-president Al Gore with 10 per cent, and Massachusetts senator and 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry with seven per cent. Support is lower for Delaware senator Joseph Biden, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Indiana senator Evan Bayh, retired general Wesley Clark, and Iowa governor Tom Vilsack.

Read more at http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/14109.

If Barack Obama decides to run for president, we're going to hear a lot more about Antoin "Tony" Rezko, the senator's neighbor.

Rezko is the kind of neighbor you want—the absent kind—and he might be absent for a long time—in the federal pen. That move upriver might keep Obama from his own residential upgrade to that big white house he's got his eye on in Washington.

Read more at http://www.slate.com/id/2155501.