Right-wing Conservative Whackos Protest Notre Dame Commecement...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/22605

It’s not just the few dozen graduates boycotting Obama’s 20-minute commencement address to protest his support for abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research.

Wow, a few dozen out of a graduating class that probably numbers in the thousands. What a controversy.

Or the bus loads of protestors driving in from Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit, activists who might never have voted for Obama in the first place.

Many of whom probably aren't even Catholic and are just bitter because their guy lost.

His stance helped him win over more religious Catholics, too, who liked his policies on issues such as the economy and health care, and saw him as moderate enough on abortion that they were comfortable supporting him.

Everybody knew where Obama stood on abortion. The Republicans beat that horse to death for almost the entirety of last year.

But some of Obama’s policy decisions and appointments since take office have upset some in the anti-abortion community

Everyone knew that Obama would repeal the Mexico City Policy, if you didn't see that coming you weren't paying attention. The Catholics who voted for him knew what he would do. Most of them are probably pro-choice anyway.

The demonstrations will greet Obama almost as soon as he arrives on campus. Organizers say there will be a picket line near the entrance of Notre Dame, so anybody who gets off the interstate will see it. Already, airplanes have been carrying banners featuring aborted babies, and trucks doubling as billboards targeting Obama on abortion have been doing loops around the campus. Some protestors have been arrested.

Sure, that's a great way to make your point. Show gory pictures of dead fetuses that would make a serial killer blush and disturb the peace of an entire neighborhood. Do they realize that this is why most Americans view them as dangerous extremists and creeps?

“A commencement should not be a political arena,” explained Mary Daly, a Notre Dame graduate who is leading the student boycott. “It’s not the place for a dialogue.”

So instead you're going to hold an alternative commencement that concentrates solely on a political issue? You're the ones politicizing the commencement.

But Obama’s support has dropped among certain groups, including white Catholics who attend mass regularly, according to Greg Smith, a research fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. In February, two-thirds of white Catholics who attend mass every week approved of his job performance, and now less than half do, Smith said.

So if you ignore the huge amount of minority Catholics, and the majority of Catholics who don't attend mass every Sunday, he's hugely unpopular. And if you only poll white Southerners with hoods and Confederate flags in their pickup trucks, Obama is the least popular President since Lincoln.

Obama also comes to Notre Dame as a new Gallup poll found that for the first time, the majority of Americans are anti-abortion.

Everybody's jumping on this poll to suggest that abortion is suddenly unpopular. When you have polls going back years showing general support and then you suddenly have a result that deviates sharply from the statistical norm, you throw away the outlier. That's how statistics works. The question was rigged to get this desired result (if I went out there and asked "do you support laws that would force pregnant women to go to prison, and possibly die, if they seek an abortion" I could get a large majority of respondents to say they support abortion too). Also, considering that the number of Republicans in this country has decreased significantly in the past several years, due to the disaster they have made of this country, it's likely that Gallup oversampled Republicans in their poll since they generally try to get a certain number of Dems and a certain number of Reps for each poll.

16 years after Casey’s father, the former Pennsylvania governor, was denied a convention speech.

I'm getting sick of hearing this same old lie. They've been telling this lie for almost 20 years. He was denied a speech because he refused to endorse Bill Clinton, not because of his position on abortion. Would the Republicans have invited a speaker to their convention who didn't endorse the Republican candidate?

“There’s a lot of buyer’s remorse growing out there,” said Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center

Brent Bozell hardly represents the majority of Catholics. He's a member of a fringe conservative Catholic group. I can guarantee you he didn't vote for Obama in the first place.

“The anger is growing,” he said. “And the sense of outrage is growing because people are seeing the Obama administration picking unnecessary fights and challenging Catholics to political duels.”

It's not picking unnecessary fights, it's doing his job. No group should have a veto on Presidential decisions just so their feelings aren't hurt.

Bozell won’t be voicing his protest at Notre Dame. But for those who are, like Stanek, the more immediate goal is “to make Barack Obama radioactive on any Catholic college campus,” she said.

Despite the media's attempt to portray it otherwise, Obama is still insanely popular among Catholics. According to a poll cited in this very article, 2/3s of respondents who expressed a preference thought Notre Dame was right to invite him. Those Catholics who voted for Obama knew exactly what they were getting and those who didn't don't matter. Obama shouldn't change everything about himself to satisfy a small fringe minority that will never vote for him no matter what he does.