Camp David. I’m not kidding. The chapel at Camp David. Now he has an excuse to leave DC every weekend, if he wants. So he can go to church. Now, this may come as a shock to some of you, but Washington, DC, actually HAS some churches there. Heck, they even have a big, ol’ cathedral – perhaps you’ve heard of it, the NATIONAL Cathedral? Ahem.

But you know that’s not it. To paraphrase Michael Jackson, “sometimes (he) feels like somebody’s watching (him)…”:

Now, in an unexpected move, Obama has told White House aides that instead of joining a congregation in Washington, D.C., he will follow in George W. Bush’s footsteps and make his primary place of worship Evergreen Chapel, the nondenominational church at Camp David.

A number of factors drove the decision — financial, political, personal — but chief among them was the desire to worship without being on display. Obama was reportedly taken aback by the circus stirred up by his visit to 19th Street Baptist in January. Lines started forming three hours before the morning service, and many longtime members were literally left out in the cold as the church filled with outsiders eager to see the new President. Even at St. John’s, which is so accustomed to presidential visitors that it is known as the “Church of the Presidents,” worshippers couldn’t help themselves from snapping photos of Obama on their camera phones as they walked down the aisle past him to take communion.

And how about that – right there in Time magazine – making the comparison between Bush and Obama! Teehee!

Seriously?? He was taken aback? David Axelrove has done NOTHING but MAKE a circus around Obama. Has he already forgotten his Greek columns in Denver? His plying people with food and drink to come to rallies (which the media conveniently failed to mention – except in Germany), so he could have HUGE gatherings to fawn all over him? C’mon, give me a break. I have never seen a man who wanted sycophants around him at every second – unless they are uncomfortably close. And then we see him getting irritable (”I just want to eat my waffles, okay??” Or whatever it was he said exactly…).

Now, I’ll grant you that it is inappropriate for people to be snapping photos of the Obamas while in church. A sense of decorum and decency would be nice, but sadly, we seem to be far from those days. Still, I have no doubt other presidents have had to endure people staring at them or what have you:

The challenge of not only being part of a church community but also praying in peace has long been a problem for Presidents, according to historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony. “McKinley hated having people staring at him while he read Psalms, sang hymns, put money in the collection plate or took communion,” he writes in America’s First Families. “By the 1920s, getting a presidential family in and out of church was a production. Secret Service agents had to cordon off a clear path from the curb to the church entrance before the Coolidges arrived … [and] they were swiftly escorted to their third-row pew.”

The Clintons attended Foundry United Methodist Church on 16th Street, and were particularly active during the years before Chelsea left for college. But White House aides say that security measures required by the Secret Service have become stricter since 9/11 and would cause significant delays for parishioners — and at significant cost to taxpayers — on Sunday mornings. Given Obama’s popularity within the African-American community, the President also worried that if he chose a local black congregation, church members would find themselves competing with sightseers for space in the pews.

Oh, isn’t that SO thoughty of the president?!? He’s always worried about the little people as he has demonstrated time and time again… Hahahahaha!! I could barely even write that out…Anyway, the Obamas won’t have to deal with the hoi poloi at Camp David:

The First Family won’t have that problem at Camp David, where the 150-seat Evergreen Chapel attracts a congregation of between 50 and 70 people most Sundays. The rustic stone-and-glass octagonal structure was built nearly two decades ago through private funds; President George H.W. Bush dedicated it in 1991. At the ceremony, Christian singer Sandi Patti sang and the late Cardinal James Hickey of Washington delivered a sermon calling the chapel a “witness to our common belief that we need to seek divine guidance in the conduct of our national affairs.”

Each week, regardless of whether the President is on-site, Evergreen Chapel holds nondenominational Christian services open to the nearly 400 military personnel and staff at Camp David, as well as their families. A music director from nearby Hood College coordinates adult and children’s choirs (Clinton sang occasionally with the choir when he visited). In December, the kids in the congregation put on a Christmas pageant and the chapel holds a candlelight service on Christmas Eve. The Bush family enjoyed Christmas at Evergreen Chapel so much that they celebrated the holiday there for all eight years of Bush’s Administration.

Well, you know, poor old Obama has lost his pastor, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, over those little kerflufles at his church. You know the ones – when Wright was preaching his vitriolic, hate mongering sermons? Thus leaving Obama wandering in the desert without his former minister. But he is making do:

(snip)But Barack Obama found himself spiritually isolated upon entering the Oval Office. He famously broke ties last year with Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor, and resigned his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. So, just as he followed Bush’s lead in choosing Evergreen as a church home, the President is taking a page from Clinton’s playbook on this front: Obama has a small group of pastors he contacts for prayer and spiritual support (including two men who played the same role at times for Bush).

Those two, Kirbyjon Caldwell and T.D. Jakes, are both African-American ministers from Texas. Caldwell offered a prayer at Bush’s first inauguration and in 2008 he officiated at Jenna Bush’s wedding. By that point, he was an Obama supporter, even launching the website JamesDobsonDoesntSpeakForMe.com last summer when the Focus on the Family leader accused Obama of “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview.” Obama chose Jakes to preach the sermon at a private prayer service the morning of his inauguration and reached out to him to pray by phone on other occasions.

While the other three leaders Obama turns to are all members of his Faith Advisory Council, when he contacts them it is to talk not on a policy level but a personal one. Otis Moss Jr. is a retired Baptist pastor who once served with Martin Luther King Sr. at Ebeneezer Church. His son is the new pastor — following Jeremiah Wright — at Trinity in Chicago, but Moss is the model of a proper old-school preacher and is the father figure of Obama’s group. His fellow council member, Joel Hunter, is a white evangelical and pastor of a Florida megachurch. And Vashti McKenzie is the first female elected as a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

McKenzie isn’t surprised that Obama has reached out for prayer and guidance. “This President has not shown himself to be a person in isolation — going out on dates, spending time in the community,” she says. “You wouldn’t expect him to isolate himself spiritually. This is a man with a faith center, we’ve heard him give his testimony.” Her advice for how to build a life of faith within the White House? “Everybody needs to just back off and settle down. Let him choose where he’s comfortable, choose where he and his family are going to be spiritually fed, and then let it be his choice.” Amen. (With reporting by Elizabeth Dias)

Hold the phone – didn’t Wright say recently that Obama was like a son to him? Oh, I am pretty sure he did, as American Girl in Italy reported recently in “Reverend Wright Complicit In Murder At Holocaust Museum?“:

“Of course I voted for him; he’s my son. I’m proud of him,” Wright said. “I’ve got five biological kids. They all make mistakes and bad choices. I haven’t stopped loving any of them.

“He made mistakes. He made bad choices. I’ve got kids who listen to their friends. He listened to those around him. I did not disown him.”

Uh huh. I’ll say. But wouldn’t you LOVE to know what Reverend Wright means by that?? Anyhoo, I digress…

As for McKenzie’s claims, you have got to be kidding me. Because Obama takes his wife out on a date to New York on OUR dime, I might add, McKenzie extrapolates Obama likes to be among the people? Hogwash. He likes to be on stage, he likes the sycophants, but I (and others) have reported the numerous times Obama has gotten testy with people. Heck, I’ve never seen Hillary get testy even when men were screaming sat her, “Iron my shirt! Iron my shirt!” But Obama? Please. There was a post I saw the other day about Obama’s glares at world leaders who weren’t following the script, something his own aides pointed out. Here’s a little video of the Primaries to remind you:

Bit I digress again. The point is I think the Right Rev. McKenzie gives Obama way too much credit for wanting to be “sociable” and out with the people. Her statement is contradictory to the whole point of the article – Obama does NOT want to be around a lot of people, hence his desire to go to Camp David for church. And to get out of Washington AWAY from all of those people.

And isn’t it ironic that he has taken yet another page from the Bush playbook? Though this one won’t be destroying a bunch of lives like, say, “prolonged detention.” Perhaps Obama can pray about that while he is at Camp David…

Expediency is the game plan because all Obama does care about is the campaign, the adulatory and fainting fans, and the big “O” he gets from winning, not the dictated drudgery of governance (which is why the incurious man didn’t know that Austrians don’t speak “Austrian”). The “high” is fleeting so he must keep campaigning, and it doesn’t matter if the screaming fans are Czech or American. His enormous ego requires enormous venues with enormous numbers of fans, and for that he requires enormous amounts of money, which come not from little people (myth) but from fat-cats like AIG’s top earners and, perchance, military contractors, perhaps ones with roots in Chicago? (SEE UPDATE BELOW.)

Despite Gitmo Closure and Torture Ban, Obama Admin Converges with Several Bush Policies in So-Called “War on Terror” (Democracy Now with video):

After a month in office, the Obama administration has surprised many of its supporters by embracing or appearing receptive to key parts of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy, from indefinite detention, to kidnapping and rendition, to invoking “state secrets” privileges. Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald joins The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer to discuss. [includes rush transcript]

What’s odd about my friend’s e-mail — I think he’s still my friend although I haven’t heard from him ever since No Quarter declared for Hillary and exposed Barack’s lack of qualifications and experience, as well as his dubious motives for seeking the presidency (actually, he had one motive, which was getting that cool title and perks like AF1) — is that this show aired in February, yet he only now is bringing himself to share this story.

However, this is hardly dated material. After all, yesterday, the hot e-mail circulating among the writers was this story: “Obama follows Bush policy on wiretapping.”

One friend who shared that story, wrote in his Subject title, “did I really read this?” In the body, he added, “i seriously hope i am hallucinating.”

From Democracy Now, here’s JANE MAYER on Obama’s strategy:

UPDATE: Writer Jeremy Scahill, who wrote the bestseller on Blackwater, told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman on April 2nd that:

… I’m starting to call a series of pieces I’m doing “Operation Rebranded,” because what we’re seeing unfold with the Obama administration’s foreign policy is basically continuing many of the worst parts of Bush’s foreign policy and sort of repackaging these policies. So, for instance, the Obama administration has dropped the use of the term “global war on terrorism” and uses phrases like “contingency operations” to describe the US occupation of Iraq. The latest news we have is that the Obama’s administration has decided on its mercenary firm of choice. Clearly, Obama did not want to continue at least a public relationship with Blackwater. …

Scahill describes the company that OBAMA has hired to protect the huge embassy in Baghdad – a company that was founded in Chicago, Illinois:

Obama picked this firm Triple Canopy, which interestingly was founded in Chicago, in the home state of Barack Obama. And then in 2005, they changed their location to Herndon, Virginia, so that they’d be closer to the epicenter of US war contracting, though on the Israeli contract, that I’m going to talk about in a moment, they list their Lincolnshire, Illinois address as their primary address for the contract.

AMY GOODMAN: Who heads up Triple Canopy?

JEREMY SCAHILL: It was founded by former Special Forces operatives from the US Army. They were minor contributors to the Bush/Cheney campaign, but not real big political players. They clearly started the company as a result of the US invasion in Iraq. They started it in 2003. By 2004, they got one of the primary contracts in Iraq.

An interesting fact about Triple Canopy is that it was one of the big three US companies. Triple Canopy, DynCorp, and Blackwater shared this mother contract. Blackwater had the biggest share of it, to guard US officials in the Baghdad area. DynCorp had the north of Iraq. Triple Canopy had the south of Iraq.

Triple Canopy also, though, did a very lucrative business servicing other war contractors like KBR, and Triple Canopy was also known for being the company that brought in the largest number of so-called third country nationals, non-Iraqis, non-Americans. They hired, for instance, former Salvadoran commandos who were veterans of the bloody counterinsurgency war in El Salvador that took the lives of 75,000 Salvadorans, minimum. Chileans—they used the same recruiter, Jose Miguel Pizarro Ovalle, that Blackwater used when they hired Chileans. This was a former Pinochet military officer.

And this company has been around, you know, for five or six years. The Obama administration has hired them in Iraq, and many of the Blackwater guys are believed to be jumping over to Triple Canopy to continue working on in Iraq. Obama, though, is keeping Blackwater on, and the State Department has not ruled out that they’re going to stay on for much longer, the aviation division of Blackwater in Iraq, and also Blackwater is on the US government payroll in Afghanistan, also working for the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The news that I’m breaking on Triple Canopy, though, is that I obtained federal contracts that were signed in February and March by the Obama administration with Triple Canopy to act as a private paramilitary force operating out of Jerusalem. And this is also part of a very secretive State Department program called the Worldwide Personal Protective Service, which was started under the Clinton administration as a privatized wing of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security division. Triple Canopy was paid $5 million in February, March by the Obama administration to provide, quote, “security services” in Israel.

In congressional testimony in 2007, Ambassador David Satterfield, who was an Under Secretary of State, said that he had been guarded by private security companies when he traveled in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. Triple Canopy had the contract, has had this contract since 2005, the Obama administration continuing it.

I think that the Obama administration should be required to explain to US taxpayers, particularly with the atrocious human rights abuses that we’ve been seeing in Israel, why he’s using a US mercenary company to protect US officials when they potentially come in contact with civilians. And we’ve seen how deadly that’s been in Iraq. And before May 7th, his administration should be required to explain to the American people why he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are continuing the Bush administration’s policy of using deadly paramilitary forces in Iraq. …

There’s a point that needs to be made here: Scahill is a leftist who seems to oppose all private contractors, but as Larry Johnson and others have explained to me, the U.S. military hasn’t the manpower to guard all of the State Department’s facilities and personnel around the world. There’s nothing per se “evil” with hiring private contractors. It’s what they do on the job that matters. So President Obama and Secretary Clinton aren’t necessarily implementing “deadly paramilitary forces”; they are hiring people to protect staff and facilities.

THAT said, I am attempting to find out what this company — Triple Canopy — has donated to the Obama campaign.

I’m also looking up who is on the board of Triple Canopy. One recent addition is AOL founder Jim Kimsey.

… more to come …