From Herrin, Illinois (video is also at link):

Last updated 6:38 pm CT March 26, 2008

The Holocaust is a horrible stain on our world history.

Today’s students are normally left to learn about this tragic event by reading their textbooks, but that isn’t the case for students at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic School in Herrin.

They learned about this trying time, from someone who lived through it.

Felicia Graber is a Holocaust Survivor. She talks about her experience as “a miracle, it’s also a duty to go on and to spread the word because I’m one of the youngest survivors. I was born after the war had already started.”

Felicia Graber pushes on and continues to tell her story. It’s a story of survival, luck, and faith.

Graber says, “Out of one million Polish Jewish children, historians estimate, there’s only about 5,000 left. I’m also more fortunate then I’m just alive, that both of my parents survived and I was never separated from them.”

This learning experience is something that few will get to do in the future, because of age and time.

Go here for the rest of the story.

Y’know, I don’t get this.

I told everyone early last week that what I had revealed concerning the contents of the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright’s weekly Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) church bulletins was just the start:

I have in my possession almost 100 other TUCC online bulletins dating as far back as December 2004. Although I haven’t read every issue’s “Pastor’s Pages” word for word, I have seen enough to be confident that July 2007 was not an atypical month — and that Barack and Michelle Obama would have to have been deaf, dumb, and blind on an “ongoing basis” to not have picked up a continual stream of what is, and remains, in Barack Obama’s own words, “completely unacceptable and inexcusable.”

Yet they continued to attend. Draw your own conclusions.

Now I would expect (audaciously hope?) that the candidate I refer to as BOOHOO (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama) would have sent his minions on a mission to comb the contents of TUCC’s bulletins — if not all those issued during the roughly 20 years he has been a member, at least all that have been posted online during the past four years or so — to get in front of the story, and get all the bad news out at once.

But nooooooo.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that others have been busy downloading TUCC church bulletins and circulating some of their contents.

That’s fine; the more the merrier.

So Obama’s managers must have expecting there would be more bulletin bombs coming their way. I’m no campaign genius, but I don’t see how reacting to disclosures one at a time helps the campaign, especially when they contain terrorist apologetics (July 22), or (ahem) explosive stuff like what you’re about to see from the June 10, 2007 bulletin, blogged on by Sweetness & Light, and noted at the Corner (HT to Hot Air headlines for the Corner, and to WorldNetDaily for S&L).

The June 10, 2007 bulletin contains a four-page (!!) “Open Letter to Oprah Winfrey” by one Ali Baghdadi, who is “An Arab-American activist, writer, columnist; worked with several African-American groups on civil and human rights issues since the mid sixties; acted as a Middle East advisor to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad the founder of the Nation of Islam, as well as Minister Louis Farrakhan; visited more than 80 countries throughout the world and met with many of their leaders, including Mandela, Castro, Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad, Qathafi, Abdallah ibn Abdel-Aziz, Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Khamenei, among many others.”

Nice.

If you can stand it (understandable if you can’t), read the whole thing. If you can’t, here’s one of the more incendiary quotes:

I must tell you that Israel was the closest ally to the White Supremacists of South Africa. In fact, South Africa allowed Israel to test its nuclear weapons in the ocean off South Africa. The Israelis were given a blank check: they could test whenever they desired and did not even have to ask permission. Both worked on an ethnic bomb that kills Blacks and Arabs.

You can’t make this stuff up.

In case you have doubts as to the issue’s authenticity, here are pics, in JPEG format, of the four pages involved (I would be grateful if linkers could link to this post, and not to the JPEGs):

Note that July 10, 2007 was “Youth Day” during “Family Month” at TUCC. The jaw, drops.

I would expect that this latest revelation has BOOHOO’s minions scrambling through campaign records to see if their guy was or wasn’t present at TUCC on June 10.

In the interest of saving the Obama campaign precious time, both now and in the future, I have drafted an e-mail they can send to obscure publications, both now and in the future, while they hold their breath hoping that Old Media doesn’t give this and future outrages the wider distribution they deserve (I’ve left certain items blank, in case [or is it when?] new bulletin bombs are revealed):

(Date) ________________

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE to ___________________ (name of obscure publication)

A _______________________________ (describe offensive item) printed in his church’s bulletin is “_____________________ (insert appropriate level of condemnation),” Barack Obama said.

In an issue dated _______________ (insert bulletin date), in a section titled “_____________ (insert bulletin section name),” the church _________________________________________ (describe the offending text and its meaning as vaguely as possible).

The church’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who retired this year, has already stirred controversy for the U.S. senator’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination with earlier statements _________________________ (list all previous offending statements, or consider including an addendum containing a complete list if including the list here will prevent the letter from staying within one page).

“I have already condemned my former pastor’s views on __________________ (name all relevant items, and again consider an addendum as an alternative) in the strongest possible terms, and I certainly __________________ (choose between “wasn’t in church that day” or “was in church that day, but ignored the bulletin’s contents, even though I appeared to be taking notes in the bulletin’s ‘Sermon’s Notes’ section”) when ________ (choose between “that item” or “those items”) were published.

At the rate things are going, this draft should come in pretty handy in the coming months.

______________________________________

UPDATE: By the way, Obama has said that he will keep attending TUCC in the future, even though the new pastor’s views have been described as not fundamentally different from the Rev. Wright’s. As far as I’m concerned, as long as his attendance at TUCC continues, Obama owns this stuff, whether he likes it or not.

Here we go again.

A March 22 Columbus Dispatch report by Catherine Candisky on increased Food Stamp usage in Ohio repeats the tired “$1 per meal for food” canard:

“Food stamps provide only about $1 per person, per meal. Who in the world is buying groceries with that?” asked Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Food Bank.

On average, food stamps are now providing less than two weeks of groceries.

“There’s the presumption that folks have the cash to make up the rest. Well, they don’t” …..

Sigh. As noted time, and time, and time, and time again, the benefits (called “Maximum Allotments” by the government) for families with no other resources are higher (graphic link is to related page at the USDA web site):

That’s more than $1 per person per meal — 34%-78% more, depending on family size.

Any reduction in the benefit amount is arrived at, not based on a “presumption,” but after taking into account resources that beneficiaries are expected to spend on food out of their own income and assets, and is based on an analysis of each person’s or family’s situation. The USDA web site link describes the process in more detail.

Astute observers who go back to previous links will notice that the gross benefit levels above are higher than those at previous posts by 4.4%-5.0%. That’s because Food Stamp benefits, like many other federal program benefits, are indexed for inflation, as are the income eligibility levels. The answer to this FAQ question (#8; “How is each household’s food stamp allotment determined?”) indicates that annual adjustments are based on changes in food costs, and not general inflation.

As to Lisa Hamler-Fugitt’s “Who in the world is buying groceries with that?” — Though there are surely other examples, the most visible answer to her question is Colorado couple Ari and Jennifer Armstrong. Read how they did it, Lisa, and take notes if necessary. They did nothing that the average person would consider heroic or extraordinary, and got through a 31-day month spending $159.04 — roughly 86 cents per person per meal. That’s 14% less than the net benefit, and a whopping 44% less than the gross benefit for a family size of two was at the time.

Those who have a problem with benefit levels need to tell us what, if anything, is wrong with the formulas, and work with federal legislators to change them. But instead of doing that constructive work, politicians and advocates have spent almost a year taking part in media-grandstanding “Food Stamp Challenges” and other silly exercises, all based on the bogus assumption, without providing any proof, that the net benefit is all that participants have for food. By insisting on (excuse the expression) feeding us this garbage, they’ve squandered their credibility. If they really believe that Food Stamp recipients are being shortchanged, they have, by posturing on a false premise, helped to perpetuate that situation, and have done nothing to alleviate it.

It’s also interesting to note that in all of the reporting I’ve seen on this issue in almost a year, I recall no mention of the fact that gross benefits go up automatically every year. But I shouldn’t be surprised; a fact like that gets in the way of an agenda-driven story.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

__________________________________________________

ADDENDUM: Memo to the Dispatch — The unemployment rate in Ohio at the end of January, the latest info available, was really 5.5%, not the 5.3% your paper reported (not excerpted above).

It’s about time someone signaled an intention (HT Gateway Pundit) to end what has been, in effect, a catch-and-release program for violent “demonstrators”:

A judge set bond at $25,000 to $30,000 today for six anti-war protestors following an Easter service disruption at Holy Name Cathedral in the Loop Sunday morning.

Three men and three women were arrested at 735 N. State St. at the 11:40 a.m. service.

Cardinal Francis George was leading services at the Parish Center because of construction at the main Cathedral. The protestors discharged packets of fake blood. Some of it splattered parishioners.

Bond was set at $35,000 for Donte D. Smith, 21 and $25,000 for the five others including: Ephran Ramirez, Jr., 22, and Ryane J. Ziemba, 25, Mercedes Phinaih, 18, Regan Maher, 25, and Angela Haban, 20. Smith has served time in a federal prison in Texas for trespassing on a Native American reservation.

All six protestors were charged with two counts of felony criminal damage to property and two counts of simple battery.

The Chicago or Cook County prosecutors will be under tremendous pressure to go light on those arrested. They should resist it.

__________________________________________

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

….. By all indications, Hillary will likely win almost all of the upcoming contests, with just North Carolina as a potential exception.

The same people who dreamed up the superdelegate structure and who made it impossible for the primaries to select between two evenly-matched candidates want to be let off of the hook for the disaster they created.

….. Hillary is the Democratic Party’s very undemocratic primary system’s chickens coming home to roost.

It’s also part of what has made Rush’s Operation Chaos effective.

_________________________________________

The “Emboldenment Effect”: The antiwar crowd is going to hate this, because it’s true (HT Best of the Web) — their tactics motivate our enemies, have more likely than not prolonged hostilities, and caused more soldiers and civilians to die.

_________________________________________

The “Name that Party” game in Old Media continues in the Detroit Mayor story.

This 400-word report from radio station WWJ’s web site doesn’t mention Kwame Kilpatrick’s party even once. Readers do not need to go through the entire article, based on the useful comment I received yesterday from Ben Keeler:

If you have to read more than 3 paragpraphs to figure out what party someone is from, you already know it is a Democrat.