Obama's State Department passport file breached

by: Pam Spaulding

Thu Mar 20, 2008 at 22:30:00 PM EDT

Barack Obama's campaign tonight is demanding a full investigation of reports that his passport files at the State Department were viewed without authorization.

"This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an Administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years. Our government's duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes. This is a serious matter that merits a complete investigation, and we demand to know who looked at Senator Obama's passport file, for what purpose, and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement.

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In an outrage of a different kind, with the release of Hillary Clinton's (unexplainably highly redacted) papers during he tenure as First Lady, the AP has run a sleazy story mapping her schedule to the precise dates and relative times that her husband was getting blown by Monica Lewisky.

More below the fold.

The AP should be asking why are so many of the meetings Hillary Clinton attended have the other party's name redacted?

Granted, Hillary Clinton's team has been dangling this whole matter of Obama needing to be "fully vetted" for the GOP, opening the door to this kind of gutter journalism, but this is just a taste of what's to come. After all, she still hasn't released her taxes from 2001-the present, and who knows what's in there; if there's no red flags, they would have been out there by now.

Speaking of vetting, it appears that Hillary has a faith-based problem of her own, joining Obama (Rev. Knight) and McCain (Parsley, Hagee). Barbara Ehrenreich reports that she's affiliated with a strange prayer group, in "Hillary's Ties to Religious Fundamentalists."

There's a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the "Fellowship," aka the Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.

Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," but that term applies far more aptly to Clinton's "Family," which is organized into "cells" -- their term -- and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia. In 2002, writer Jeff Sharlet joined the Family's home for young men, foreswearing sex, drugs and alcohol, and participating in endless discussions of Jesus and power. He wasn't undercover; he used his own name and admitted to being a writer. But he wasn't completely out of danger either. When he went outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he was followed. He still gets calls from Family associates asking him to meet them in diners -- alone.