She’s also supportive of gay rights, so, yeah, I’m sure that would offend some people.
And has said that if she were a man she’d have been a drag queen and as a child the woman she chose to emulate was the town slut. So no more Dolly.
Clearly the only musician who can be invited to the White House is the Nuge.
I’m pretty sure we were discussing Common’s opinion, not Obama’s. I don’t know what Obama thinks about the case, if anything, and it’s been a long time since I spent two seconds thinking about the case myself. What’s the point of demanding that every opinion of every person who is invited to the White House be vetted to make sure nobody complains? Or is this different because he supports somebody police don’t like and their opinions are extra important?
Say, Obama gave an award to Paul McCartney last year. Were there complaints? I don’t know how many times McCartney has been busted for drugs, he sang very cheerfully about murder in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and then there was the whole Charles Manson thing. I mean, there’s no reasonable way to conclude that McCartney is to blame, but I have a feeling that if he were a rapper, Fox News might have a different take on that.
Common’s opinion is his own. Inviting him to the WH invites comment by those affected and they did indeed object. The President isn’t expected to research and vet everybody but his office is expected to address concerns when they are brought forward.
This opinion piece summed it up nicely:
"When Mr. Carney was asked during a White House press briefing about the propriety of the invitation, he answered that the president does not embrace the more controversial aspects of Common’s work. If that is so, why invite Common to the White House, thereby sending — at best — a mixed message to youth, law enforcement and the general public?
Invitations to perform at the White House are rare. In bestowing this one, the president should have found someone he could fully embrace and whose body of work unequivocally deserved it."
He already let Dylan perform at the White House. Clearly it doesn’t matter to him if the artist in question had supported killers. Hurricane Carter was almost certainly guilty as well.
Where was the outrage then? Why didn’t anyone care about that?
It’s worth pointing out that the outrage about Common’s invitation had been going for a day or two before I ever heard anything about Assata Shakur. The original outrage focused on a poem he had recited that contained the line “Burn a Bush cos’ for peace he no push no button”. (“A Letter to the Law”)
This was an outrage in search of justification. Unfortunately the “Burn a Bush” line wasn’t good enough because it was too easy to find examples of respected right-wingers wishing horrible fates on Obama. Stirring up the Assata Shakur thing gave it legs for a few more days.
The goal posts in this have been moved so much they’ve had to get new passport inserts. It’s because of what he said about Bush, by which we mean what he said about Assata Shakur, by which we mean the fact he went to visit Assata Shakur, by which we mean it upset cops in NJ who didn’t know about it til it was brought to their attention, by which we mean…
It couldn’t be more obviously racist bullshit trying to kill the “Obama killed Osama” popularity bump (that if they’d wait would go away long before election time) in its origins if it was cooked up live by callers on the RACIST BULLSHIT MISDIRECTION HOUR.
I already addressed that. I don’t know if the FBI has representation capable of voicing a public opinion considering the organization reports to the President but if they did object to Dylan then the WH should not invite him. I don’t know what is so hard to understand about that.
I’m still trying to figure out what’s so hard to understand about the fact that Common has never advocated cop killing - but after three pages of people explaining this to you, you still haven’t figured it out, so apparently it’s a pretty difficult concept.
At Shakur’s trial, two different police officers admitted that they lied on their reports about her involvement in the shooting. GSR tests taken on that day were negative; Shakur never fired a gun on that day. And she was apparently shot while surrendering; the bullet wounds sustained by Shakur could not, according to the testimony of neurologists, have been incurred in ANY way other than with her hands up, in a gesture of surrender.
Now, as far as escaping from prison, I agree that, in the abstract, it’s wrong. But, if I were convicted (wrongly, in my estimation), and some friends broke me out of prison, I’d have a hard time staying to finish out my sentence. I’d go somewhere seeking asylum, myself.
I suppose you and I have a fundamental disagreement about the President bowing to the whim of special interest groups.
Indeed, I pointed it out in post #6 way upthread.
When even Fox News viewers think that O’Reilly’s wrong on the matter, that’s a pretty good indication that we’re seeing some serious fauxrage.
So you did. In that case, it’s worth re-pointing out to show that you were absolutely right. 
I take that poll with a heavy grain of salt. There’s nothing to say Daily Show viewers didn’t descend on the site and skew it heavily in favor of Stewart.
Granted, it’s somewhat impressive that the voting should be so uniform across all states, but it’s difficult to accept it as conclusive evidence.
While I imagine you’re probably correct that Daily Show viewers skewed the results, I doubt they’d be able to do it so decisively on Fox’s own website. Even on the Hannity forums, where everyone blames anything bad on Liberals and everyone tries to “out-Right” everyone else, a lot of the forum members are saying that’s it’s not the huge deal some try to make it out to be. Hell, quite a few of the members there are saying that Stewart handily beat O’Reilly, and he (Stewart) is normally viewed as an “Ultra ultra left wing whacko”.
It’s not really a poll, it’s just a fan site feature designed to let Bill O’Reilly fans tell him he won every altercation with a liberal. I’m sure some Jon Stewart fans probably voted who usually never log on to billoreilly.com, but I doubt it attracted enough non-Fox fans to completely overwhelm and subvert the results to such a degree. I think that a meaningful number of Fox fans probably really did recognize that the Common controversy was transparently contrived, and Stewart really did make a case that was pretty hard to refute by naming all the other artists who have supported people they believed to have been wrongly convicted of cop killing. At least some Fox fans are evidently able to recognize the difference between defending or celebrating an actual crime, and simply beliving the wrong person got convicted for it. O’Reilly was reduced to trying to parse some kind of lame distinction about Common having gone to visit Shakur in Cuba.
I think it’s also possible that some portion of O’Reilly’s audience actually has some familiarity with Common’s work and personality outside of whatever they hear Sean Hannity trying to quote on Fox.
I may be crazy, but I think I’ve sensed a little bit of a shift in general trust for Obama after the bin Laden killing and release of the birth certificate. It’s not a seismic shift, but maybe just a little bit of relaxation in some quarters and acceptance that he’s actually on America’s side and isn’t working for the terrorists. I don’t mean that there’s necessarily a rise in good will, I think there’s just been a little bit of reduction of bad will, and more willingness to see him as a normal human being rather than a cartoon villain.