Activist Vows Graphic Anti-Abortion Ads During Super Bowl

By DEVIN DWYER

Veteran anti-abortion activist Randall Terry (R-Right wing A-hole) says he's mounting a Democratic primary challenge to President Obama in 2012, in part to be able to run graphic TV ads showing aborted fetuses during next year's Super Bowl.

Terry, who founded Operation Rescue, unveiled a campaign Web site this week, including three prototype 30-second videos he wants to air during the 2012 NFL football championships and throughout the Democratic primary next year. The videos, narrated by Terry, show bloody and dismembered fetuses following abortions.

He plans to formally announce his candidacy Thursday in front of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

"I want to pummel Obama. I despise this presidency. He is the arch child killer of the Western Hemisphere, so I'm going to go head-to-head with him," Terry said in a phone interview.

"My ultimate goal is to make child killing illegal again. And for child killing to be made illegal, there has to be a crisis of conscience; we have to show the victims like we show the Holocaust victims and say never again."

While TV networks occasionally reject ads based on controversial or graphic content, the Federal Communications Act requires broadcasters to provide legally qualified political candidates fair access to ad time and forbids them from censoring ads "in any way, or for any reason." Terry said he's confident he can raise the $2.5 million for a Super Bowl spot and that CBS would broadcast it.

During the 2010 elections, Terry was the campaign manager for Missy Reilly Smith, a virtually unknown candidate running for D.C. delegate to the U.S. House who raised $66,000 to successfully run a graphic anti-abortion ad 235 times on several local broadcast network affiliates across the greater Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

Smith's 30-second ad was deemed so explicit that it was preceded by a 15-second warning that was added by the stations' management.

"We are going to do what Missy did on a scale of 100 times," Terry said. "If I can raise the money, they're [the TV networks] required to sell them to me, they're required to air them."

Terry Seeks to Air Graphic Ad

Terry acknowledged that he has no chance of defeating Obama in the primary, but believes his campaign will "wound" the president politically by turning the anti-abortion lobby against him.

"I can marshal a Democratic, Catholic base against him," he said. "Even if I get 10 or 15 percent of the vote in Iowa or New Hampshire, it will embarrass him."

As for criticism that airing the graphic ads during primetime TV would be inappropriate for children, Terry, a father of four, said he has no qualms.

"What bothers me is that they're murdering small children," he said. "My sons see these images every day. This country is guilty of the blood of 50 million babies and those victims deserve a voice. And if the cost of that justice is it causes a little consternation with some families then that's the price of freedom and that's the price of justice."

Fighting the power Hansen Clarke vs. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick

By Jack Lessenberry

Thirty years ago, there was hope Detroit was poised for a comeback. The population had fallen, but at 1,203,339 people, we were still the nation's sixth largest city. Times were tough, but there was hope. Chrysler had loan guarantees from the government and was about to introduce the K-car, the vehicle on which the corporation was pinning hopes for survival.

GM was breaking ground for the Poletown plant where Dodge Main once stood. Coleman Young, just in his second term, was still full of energy. Michigan had a Republican governor named Bill Milliken who was more committed to the city's survival than many Democrats.

In fact, that summer, for the first time ever, the GOP held its national political convention in Detroit, nominating the most right-wing candidate since Barry Goldwater. When they left town, possibly leaving a few stunned delegates still lost in the Renaissance Center, few experts really expected Ronald Reagan to win.

Virtually nobody had ever heard of freshman state legislator Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, or her 10-year-old son Kwame, who even then had decided he was going to be mayor of Detroit. Fewer still had heard of Hansen Clarke, 23, who had wanted to be an artist, but then, confused, dropped out of college after his parents died. Later, he'd go back to graduate with high honors from Cornell, and then Georgetown law school.

Thirty years later, the once-little boy is in prison; his mother is in Congress; and Hansen Clarke, now a state senator, has a good chance of taking her seat in the Aug. 3 Democratic primary less than two weeks from now. Detroit's battered citizens should hope he wins.

There is little evidence that Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick cares much about her constituents. She does lease, with taxpayer dollars, an expensive vehicle to tool around the district in, true. (Clarke said he would lease a van instead to take seniors grocery shopping.)

What CCK really cares about are Washington power games, as when she helped Nancy Pelosi bounce John Dingell from his position as head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Are you running because the scandals have left CCK vulnerable? I asked Clarke last week. "Oh God, no," he said.

Clarke says he's running because it's the best way he can think of to do something to help one of the nation's poorest districts, and to push his signature issues, which include delaying foreclosures and reforming the auto insurers and banks to limit discrimination against the poor.

Personally, he is more intriguing than the average pol. For one thing, he and his wife are a rainbow coalition in themselves, people for whom there are no simple and easy boxes on the census form.

Hansen had a Muslim father from Bangladesh and a mother who grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Detroit. Hansen was raised Muslim, then converted to Roman Catholicism.

His wife, Choi Palmer-Cohen, was born in South Korea and was adopted by a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. What is she today? By day, a staffer at the Center for Continuing Legal Education in Ann Arbor. When she gets the chance, however, she's an impressive jazz singer, belting out Ella Fitzgerald tunes. Clarke is an artist himself, executing, in his spare time, hauntingly impressionistic oils.

These days, however, neither of them have spare time. They are working energetically to beat Kilpatrick on Aug. 3. And if the latest EPIC/MRA poll is correct, they seem on course to do it. Last week's poll found Clarke ahead, 44 to 31. Granted, the Clarke campaign paid for the poll – but this is a reputable polling firm.

Nobody ought to be too surprised that CCK is in trouble. Two years ago, when her son Kwame was still clinging to the mayor's job, she barely got by Mary Waters, 39 percent to 36 percent, and only made it then because Martha Scott drained off some anti-Kilpatrick votes.

This time there are also four other names on the ballot, but the only one with a chance to put an end to this chapter in Detroit's shame is Hansen Clarke, and most voters appear to know that.

Circumstances have steadily worsened for the Kilpatrick clan over the last two years. These days, Kwame is wearing a jumpsuit, sent back to the state can this spring for parole violations.

Worse, he may eventually trade it in for a federal prison uniform; he was just indicted on 19 felony counts. His mommy, aka the congresswoman, was hauled up before a grand jury this spring, though perhaps only about the prisoner she once called "y'all's boy."

Kwame Kilpatrick once told me he decided to be mayor of Detroit when he was 8 years old. Clarke, now 53, took a little longer to find himself. "What I knew was that I wanted to help people," he told me one sweltering afternoon last week. "How to best do that was the question."

When he was 8, his daddy died, plunging his mom into utter poverty. She and Hansen survived on the pittance she made as a school crossing guard.

He walked the streets with Wayne State law professor and mayoral candidate John Mogk in 1977, learning about the city. Now, he wants the chance to help a few hundred thousand others. He knows it isn't a sure thing; the four lesser-known candidates on the ballot will help drain the anti-CCK vote. But money is coming in now; he has ads on the air.

When he got into the race, one friend was horrified, saying, "Hansen, why are you doing this? She has so much power!" Clarke laughed. He'd gone from food stamps to Georgetown law. He knew about impossible dreams, and he knew something else too.

"Politicians don't have the power. People do."

We'll find out Aug. 3 what that means.

Joe Sestak: Pennsylvania Senate 2010 Election BREAKING News

From Huffy post/Ap U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter on Tuesday was defeated in a Democratic primary in his bid for a sixth term after taking the risky step of switching from the GOP. Voters picked U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak as the party's nominee and rejected the 80-year-old Specter in his first Democratic campaign since his Republican Party defection. With 79 percent of precincts reporting, Sestak received 435,630 votes, or 53 percent; Specter received 384,027 votes, about 47 percent. The vote also was a defeat for President Barack Obama, who supported Specter when he abandoned the Republican Party last year. In speaking to supporters at a downtown Philadelphia hotel after the race was called, Specter thanked Obama for his support. Specter said he had called Sestak to congratulate him and tell him "I think it's vital to keep this seat in the Democratic Party and I will support him." Specter left while holding hands with his wife, Joan. He didn't answer questions from reporters. The moderate Specter had cast his switch as a decision of principle after inflaming the GOP by voting for Obama's economic stimulus bill. But many Democratic voters questioned his motives. Sestak faces Republican Pat Toomey in the fall election. Specter has been a fixture in American politics for three decades and served in the Senate since 1981, and his switch to the Democrats was a theme that dominated the race. Obama and other top Democrats embraced Specter, who used his willingness to cross party lines on key votes to bolster his clout in Congress. Sestak, a retired Navy vice admiral who has represented a suburban Philadelphia district since 2007, accused Specter of switching parties to save his

job. He said Specter couldn't be trusted to support Democratic Party values. In the days before the primary, Specter and Sestak also argued over who had the best chance of beating Toomey in the fall. Specter leaned heavily on Obama's endorsement, repeatedly citing a television ad that used footage from a September rally in Philadelphia at which Obama spoke and get-out-the-vote efforts by the key unions backing him. Sestak tried to harness voter anger over political gridlock and the recession, with Pennsylvania's unemployment rate at 9 percent, its highest in more than a quarter-century.