THE Muslim wedding of a seven-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl has been raided by police.
Cops arrested the Muslim cleric conducting the sick ceremony and the children’s parents in Pakistan’s largest city.
The cleric had not yet begun the ceremony of Mohammad Waseem, seven, and his bride Nishain Karachi, five – which was attended by 100 guests.
Pakistan law forbids marriage below the age of 18 – but some Muslim scholars say it is permissible if the bride and groom have reached puberty.
TV footage showed both children in traditional wedding clothes in the laps of policemen after the raid – the girl with tears running down her cheeks.
The parents said the wedding had been arranged to end an eight-year feud between the two families, according to a report on Express News TV.
Mr Mazhar said he had heard about similar cases in rural areas but “it is shocking to have this right in the centre of the city.”
The parents are due to appear in court tomorrow.
A Pakistan Human Rights Commission official Hina Gillani said the maximum possible punishment for the parents was one month in jail and fine of just over $10 (£6)
It seems that the final days of the presidential campaign have made Erica Jong and her friends more than a little anxious.
A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who published excerpts on his Camillo blog. Basically, Jong says she her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an "obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night." She also says that her friends Jane Fonda and Naomi Wolf are extremely worried that Obama will be sabotaged by Republican dirty tricks, and that if an Obama loss indeed comes to pass, the result will be a second American Civil War.
Here's a translation of Jong's more spirited quotes to the Milan-based Corriere, as selected by Rocca.
"The record shows that voting machines in America are rigged."
"My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can't cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves."
"My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium."
"After having stolen the last two elections, the Republican Mafia…"
"If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets."
"Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act." [Oh, that's RICH! --ed.]
She also laments that not all of America's men of letters share her devotion to Obama.
Barack Obama has lived one version of the American Dream that has taken him to the steps of the White House. But a few miles from where the Democratic presidential candidate studied at Harvard, his Kenyan aunt and uncle, immigrants living in modest circumstances in Boston, have a contrasting American story.
Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.
...
The US press has repeatedly rehearsed Mr Obama’s extraordinary odyssey, but the other side of the family’s American experience has only been revealed in parts. Just across town from where Mr Obama made history as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, some of his closest blood relatives have confronted the harshness of immigrant life in America.
In his book Mr Obama writes that “Uncle Omar” had gone missing after moving to Boston in the 1960s – a quarter-century before Mr Obama first visited his family in Kenya. Aunt Zeituni is now also living in Boston, and recently made a $260 campaign contribution to her nephew's presidential bid from a work address in the city.
Speaking outside her home in Flaherty Way, South Boston, on Tuesday, Ms Onyango, 56, confirmed she was the “Auntie Zeituni” in Mr Obama’s memoir. She declined to answer most other questions about her relationship with the presidential contender until after the November 4 election. “I can’t talk about it, I just pray for him, that’s all,” she said, adding: “After the 4th, I can talk to anyone.”
The London Times story of Barack Obama's Aunt Zeituni - like that of his penniless brother and the Kenyan grade school he promised to help - is interesting not only as a reflection on the candidate's belief that "spreading the wealth around" is a centralized government mandate to be imposed on Joe the Plumber rather than a personal act by, say, a wealthy memoirist whose ;books repackage colorful relatives to highly lucrative effect.
But, aside from all that, this detail is lovely:
The Times could not determine their immigration status and an official at Boston City Hall said that Ms Onyango was a resident of Flaherty Way but not registered to vote on the electoral roll. However, that Ms Onyango made a contribution to the Obama campaign would indicate that she is a US citizen.
Of course. By definition, if you donate to Barack the Good, you must be one of his loyal subjects. They should make it a requirement of the citizenship test.
By the way, the argument that giving money to Obama is ipso facto proof of citizenship also clears up any question marks over those donations by "A Hitler" and "S Hussein". Congratulations!
Oh, and if you want to know why The Boston Globe's parent company ( The New York Times) has been downgraded by Moody's to junk status, ask yourself why this story is in a foreign newspaper three thousand miles away rather than the local rag. Congratulations to my old comrade from the Conrad Black trial, James Bone, for doing the job Americans (or at least their media) won't do.
There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.
As the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his great book, "Crowds and Power" (first published in 1960), the crowd is based on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when "distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd." These crowds, in the tens of thousands, who have been turning out for the Democratic standard-bearer in St. Louis and Denver and Portland, are a measure of American distress.
On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen. Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest -- African-Americans and affluent white liberals -- has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking -- Canetti's feeling of equality within the crowd. The day after, the crowd will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama's vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who believe in entitlement and redistribution.
A creature of universities and churches and nonprofit institutions, the Illinois senator, with the blessing and acquiescence of his upscale supporters, has glided past these hard distinctions. On the face of it, it must be surmised that his affluent devotees are ready to foot the bill for the new order, or are convinced that after victory the old ways will endure, and that Mr. Obama will govern from the center. Ambiguity has been a powerful weapon of this gifted candidate: He has been different things to different people, and he was under no obligation to tell this coalition of a thousand discontents, and a thousand visions, the details of his political programs: redistribution for the poor, postracial absolution and "modernity" for the upper end of the scale.
An excellent article by Mr. Ajami. Go read the rest.
Barack Obama has been blaming the current economic crisis on Bush, yet he fails to identify even one specific policy that can rationally be linked to this crisis.[1] Likewise, the New York Times in their endorsement of Obama laid the blame at the feet of Ronald Reagan.[2] If this is so, why don’t they detail the specific causes and effects? Because the hard reality is that the situation can be directly traced to a law passed in the Carter era, regulations imposed by Clinton, and Democratic cronyism at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that incentivized and even forced banks to make high risk loans to people who could not afford them.[3]
To add fuel to this economic fire, the mainstream media, who have donated money to Obama at a rate of 20 to 1 over McCain,[4] have done immeasurable harm to the economy by stoking fear.[5]
TAX INCREASES
Just this year ABC News reported that Obama supported “hundreds of tax increases” in the Illinois Senate.[6] His promise that he will provide a tax cut to 95% of Americans is misleading and mathematically impossible.[7] Remember, Obama also promised he would use public financing for his campaign, and then broke his word without blinking an eye.[8] How many times can people be hoodwinked before they learn this simple lesson? You cannot trust what politicians SAY. You can only observe what they DO.
Speaking of actions versus words, despite Obama’s attempts to portray himself as a moderate, the National Journal looked at 99 key votes in the U.S. Senate during 2007 and found that Obama had the most liberal voting record in the Senate.[9] This is the same Senate inhabited by Ted Kennedy, Diane Feinstein and Bernie Saunders, the only self-avowed Socialist in this body.[10] To vote to the left of these people requires a radically liberal agenda.
RADICAL INNER CIRCLE
Obama’s radicalism goes far beyond his voting record. In his book “Dreams from My Father,” Obama wrote that he chose his friends “carefully” in college. Who were these friends? In his own words, this included “Marxist professors.” [11]
In a 2004 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Obama identified three people by name as his spiritual mentors.[12] The first, Jeremiah Wright, was Obama’s “close confidant,” pastor of twenty years, and the person who married him and baptized his daughters.[13] By now, most everyone has seen videos of Wright preaching that the U.S. government invented AIDS to exterminate black people, referring to our country as the U.S. of KKKA [Ku Klux Klan America], and repeatedly shouting, “G-d damn America!” [14] Despite his close friendship with Wright and the fact that he stated in the 2004 interview that he was a regular attendee at the church, Obama claimed he never heard Wright say these words and would have probably confronted him if he did.[15]
To swallow this requires willful gullibility. These comments were made on multiple occasions before large audiences who enthusiastically applauded his every word. If your pastor was saying such things, do you think you would have heard about it even if you happened to miss church every time he did so? In fact, Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope,” is named after a sermon preached by Wright in which he declared that “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.” [16]
The second mentor he identified was the Reverend Michael Pfleger, who Obama said helps him keep his “moral compass” set.[17] This year, from the pulpit of Obama’s church, Pfleger declared that “we must be honest enough to expose white entitlement and supremacy…” He then proceeded to mock Hillary Clinton by crying and putting these words into her mouth: “I’m white! I’m entitled! There’s a black man stealing my show!” [18]
The third mentor, Reverend James Meeks, starred in a radio commercial for Obama and was visited by Obama the night after his victory in the U.S. Senate primary.[19] This is the same James Meeks, who from the pulpit of his church, declared, “You got some preachers that are house n—gers! You got some elected officials that are house n—gers! … they're gonna fight you to protect that white man!” [20]
These three people were explicitly identified by Obama as part of his religious inner circle only four years ago. It strains credulity to believe he was not aware of and did not share their views. Inner circles are made for this reason.
ABORTION
No matter where you stand on this issue, it used to be a safe assumption that anyone short of Stalin or Hitler drew a line as to where innocent life should be protected by law. Obama refuses to. In his own words, “It’s above my pay grade.” [21] The truth is that he just doesn’t want to say what his voting record clearly shows. Obama voted against a bill requiring that babies born alive as a result of an abortion are treated as a “person.” His oft-repeated excuse that the bill would have undermined Roe v. Wade is deceitful, as the bill specifically stated that it did not apply under any circumstance except when a baby was “born alive.” [22]
His other justification for this vote is equally deceitful. He states that there was already a law that required providing lifesaving treatment,[23] but neglects to mention that this law was unenforceable because it ultimately left all judgment in the hands of the abortionist. This is shown by the text of the law, which is laden with the word “judgment,” [24] and more importantly, by the live birth atrocities that were taking place in Illinois at the time. Two registered nurses described these sickening events in testimony before Congress long before Obama was a national figure.[25] The bill Obama voted against was intended to stop these events, and as such, it contained a simple and straightforward definition of what it means to be “born alive.” [26] Thus, the notion that he voted against this bill because it was redundant with existing law has no objective basis in reality.
In concurrence with this, Obama voted against a ban on partial birth abortion and promised Planned Parenthood that the “first thing” he would do as President is sign an act that overturns the current law banning this brutal procedure.[27] His excuse that such bans must have an exception for a woman’s “life” and “health” rings hollow.[28] The law already has an exception for a woman’s life,[29] and what Obama fails to reveal is that the word “health” can mean practically anything. As spelled out in Roe v. Wade, it even includes the “stigma of unwed motherhood” and the “distress” “associated with the unwanted child.” [30]
In reality, it doesn’t matter what Obama tells the public about his stance on this issue because of the five Supreme Court judges who ruled to uphold the law banning partial birth abortions, Obama voted against the nomination of two of them and identified two of the others as judges he would not have nominated.[31] These are the same judges who ruled that American citizens have an individual right to keep to bear arms.[32] Both of these decisions were decided by a tight 5-4 margin, and if Obama has the chance to replace only a single judge in the majority with one of his nominees, the results will be reversed. If you believe in the right to life or the right to defend yourself, know that in all probability these rights will not be honored by the vast majority of judges that Obama would appoint.
Perhaps worse than all this, Obama voted against and opposes laws that require parents be notified when abortions are performed on their daughters.[33] Thus, if Obama gets his way, anyone (including a rapist as occurred in Obama’s home state) can take your 14 year-old daughter for an abortion and you will never even know about it.[34]
CORRUPTION AND FRAUD
Obama’s campaign has been awash in illegal donations, including those from foreign sources. In fact, his campaign weakened fraud protection measures to the point where they accepted plainly suspect donations from the likes of “Bart Simpson,” “Daffy Duck” and “King Kong.” This, however, is not the worst of it — more than a third of Obama’s war chest comes from donors he refuses to identify.[35] Also, despite Obama’s claim that he rejects corrupt, insider politics of Washington, he has been caught red-handed funneling taxpayer money to his political operatives.[36]
The cartoon celebrities donating to Obama have also been registering to vote. ACORN, a leftist organization of community organizers has submitted untold thousands of voter registration forms that are clearly fraudulent. The number of registered voters in at least one area where this group operates exceeds the voting age population. Documented cases of fraud include registered dead people, numerous voter registration forms in the same handwriting, voter addresses that correspond to vacant lots, and multiple registration forms with names appearing in the same order as a Philadelphia area phone book.[37]
In the most recent debate, Obama shamelessly lied when he stated that his “only involvement” with ACORN was a lawsuit in which he represented them. Furthermore, he shook his head in denial when McCain correctly noted that Obama’s campaign paid $832,000 to this organization.[38] That this occurred is an undeniable fact.[39] Moreover, Obama’s campaign originally mislabeled the money and later filed an amendment to correct the record.[40] Most disturbingly, a 2004 article written by a Chicago ACORN leader reveals that Obama ran their “leadership training session” on “power.” [41] In concurrence with this, a 1995 article states: “Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side.” [42]
The Obama campaign has stated they are “committed to protecting the integrity of the voting process,” but this is pure propaganda. Obama has been a consistent voice against requiring voters to present any form of identification when they vote.[43] In fact, the Democratic Party platform specifically states they “oppose laws that require identification in order to vote or register to vote…” [44]
Newt is clearly partisan, so listen instead to Obama’s running mate Joe Biden, who little more than a year ago stated that Obama was not yet qualified to be president and that “the presidency is not something that lends itself to on the job training.” Biden also stated he would be “honored” to serve with John McCain and that the country would be “well served” with McCain as President. Don’t believe it? See it with your own eyes:
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (AP) ― A Halloween decoration showing a mannequin dressed as vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin hanging by a noose from the roof of a West Hollywood home is drawing giggles from some passers-by and gasps of outrage from others.
The mannequin is dressed in brunet wig, glasses and a red business suit. Another mannequin dressed as John McCain emerges from a flaming chimney.
Chad Michael Morisette, who lives in the house, told CBS 2 News that drivers and bus passengers have been stopping to snap pictures of the macabre scene.
Morisette says the effigy would be out of bounds at any other time of year, but it's within the spirit of Halloween. [Liar. Handy excuse. --ed.]
He says "it should be seen as art, and as within the month of October. It's Halloween, it's time to be scary it's time to be spooky."
Obama effigy found on U. of Kentucky campus (Actual font size)
University of Kentucky authorities were investigating Wednesday who hanged an effigy of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama from a tree on campus.
College spokesman Carl Nathe said the effigy was found Wednesday morning. Police immediately took it down. A faculty member said he saw the effigy with a noose around its neck, hanging from a high tree branch.
University President Lee Todd said he planned to apologize to the Obama family on behalf of the school and that he is "personally offended and deeply embarrassed by this disgusting episode."
Federal authorities have been notified, Todd said. He said the effigy violates the university's code of ethics and won't be tolerated.
"I am outraged because we work very hard, every day, to build bridges across the divides," Todd said. "Diversity and inclusion are among our most precious core values. Episodes like this serve only to erode our confidence in and respect for one another."
Mike Lynch, a faculty member who works in a building near where the effigy was found, said he saw it around 8:40 a.m. He described it as life-sized with a Barack Obama Halloween mask, a suit jacket and sweat pants.
"This, as far as I'm concerned, says nothing _ absolutely nothing _ representative of this university or this community," he said.
After writing twice about the deliberate decision by the Barack Obama campaign to avoid validation checks on credit-card contributions, I’ve heard from a number of people in the credit-card industry on how this works. Two explanations in particular explain the depth of deliberation and deception involved in disregarding address and security-code verification. The first explains that Team Obama probably didn’t just opt out of using these verification processes, but more likely rewrote the code on their site to bypass them, emphases mine:
I have over 30 years of experience in investigating Credit Card Fraud and I can tell you, which you may or may not know, that the merchant acquirer that is conducting the collection of credit / debit card for the Obama campaign are responsible for the actions to be taken regarding the Address Verification System responses. The value of the AVS system is that the issuer of the card being used provides back to the merchant acquirer a response based upon the information provided during the authorization process. This response indicates to the merchant acquirer if the card information was validated as to ownership of the account. It is the merchant acquirer that determines what to do when the authorization response is received. In most cases the transaction that comes back with any negative meaning is denied. However, if the merchant acquirer has adjusted their system to accept any response as acceptable the transaction would be completed.
The value of the AVS system is to deny Card Not Present transactions (CNP) which are suspicious. This protects the merchant against charge backs for bad transactions. What is interesting to me is that the merchant acquirer has knowingly violated a basic CNP fraud prevention technique to accommodate a merchant (Obama Campaign). I think that both the Associations (VISA & MasterCard) would be highly interested in looking at the merchant acquirer that was processing these transactions. The value of ignoring the AVS responses is that multiple invalid transactions may be made without fear of being rejected by the authorization systems. This means that the real owner of the credit card account is willing to allow multiple transactions to be made on the account using different names and addresses that under normal conditions would be denied. The merchant acquirer has a complete listing of all transactions done and it would be very interesting to see how many transactions were conducted on the same account number using different names. I would think that this would be a Federal violation under the current campaign funding laws.
Another fraud-prevention veteran notes that Team Obama has at the least provided a testing ground for thieves looking to validate responses:
You may have mentioned this elsewhere, but disabling the security allows would be credit card thieves to “ping” numbers till they get a hit. The number of “pings” should have raised flags at Visa and MasterCard, don’t you think?
I wonder if they warned the Obama campaign, or worse, ignored it.
In other words, a crook could simply type in random numbers until he found one sequence that worked in some fashion. That could give a thief a starting point for committing credit-card fraud. If all they had to do was type nonsense values for names and addresses, such as Doodad Pro, they could quickly determine which numbers were valid — and they could probably program bots to do that kind of work.
Thanks to Team Obama, millions of people now have to wonder whether they’ve been victimized by credit thieves. Some of us wonder if the thieves aren’t really working at Team Obama in the first place.
By DAVID A. RIDENOUR | Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2008 4:20 PM PT
When our economic bus is teetering at the edge of a cliff, it's a bad time to throw on some extra weight.
Yet government-mandated restrictions on carbon emissions would do precisely that, adding enormous additional weight to an economy already reeling. This additional weight shouldn't just be thrown from the bus — it should be thrown under it.
Most econometric studies agree that restricting greenhouse gas emissions would slow our already sluggish economy.
A study by the National Association of Manufacturers projected that emissions caps, similar to those rejected earlier this year by the U.S. Senate calling for a 63% cut in emissions by 2050, would reduce U.S. gross domestic product by up to $269 billion and cost 850,000 jobs by 2014.
The Heritage Foundation estimated that such restrictions would result in cumulative GDP losses of up to $4.8 trillion and employment losses of more than 500,000 per year by 2030.
Other studies suggest smaller economic costs: Duke University's Nicholas Institute estimates a GDP loss of $245 billion by 2030, while the Environmental Protection Agency forecasts a GDP drop of between $238 billion and $983 billion.
Sharp emissions restrictions would also push the costs of energy and other consumer products higher. According to a study conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the restrictions could raise gasoline prices by 29%, electricity prices by 55% and natural gas prices by 15% by 2015.
The people most vulnerable to such price increases are the poor. A 2007 report by the Congressional Budget Office, examining the costs of cutting carbon emissions just 15%, noted that customers "would face persistently higher prices for products such as electricity and gasoline. Those price increases would be regressive in that poorer households would bear a larger burden relative to their income than wealthier households would."
Indeed, the lowest quintile income group would pay nearly double what the highest quintile income group would pay, as a proportion of income, in increased energy costs.
And it appears that all this economic pain would be an utterly meaningless gesture.
Dr. Patrick Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists, now with the Cato Institute, says reducing U.S. emissions by 63% would prevent a mere 0.013 degree Celsius in warming. With emissions from China, India and other developing nations growing at breakneck speed, even this modest benefit would be completely erased.
Not to mention Anthropogenic Global Warming is rapidly being proven hogwash:
'OBAMA! Inshallah!" - Obama! Allah willing! That slogan, scribbled on walls in Gaza, indicates the hopes that Barack Obama has inspired among Arabs.
While Obama has tried to push his origins into the background, his "Islamic roots" have won him a place in many Arabs' hearts.
One columnist, Mohamed Al-Menshawi, hails Obama as "the candidate with Muslim roots" and as the "harbinger of solidarity between Americans and the Muslim world."
Another, Al-Jazeera's Aala al-Bayoumi, notes: "Had it not been for Obama, Arabs would not even bother to follow the US presidential race." What makes the difference is Obama's "Islamic and African roots."
Marwan Bishara hails Obama's "radical politics": "For the US to vote in an African-American progressive liberal would certainly mark a departure from the hyper and violent conservatism of the Bush-McCain camp," he writes. An Obama presidency "would be better for both the US and the Arab world."
Obama especially appeals to pan-Arab nationalists angry at the United States for having ousted Saddam Hussein. Obama's promise to leave Iraq gives pan-Arabs their only chance (albeit slim) to destroy the new Iraqi democracy.
While radical Arabs, including the Hamas leadership, favor Obama, most Arab officials are wary of him. They fear his inexperience and leftist connections might destroy all that has been gained in Iraq, provoke a bigger mess in Afghanistan, trigger a war with Pakistan and open the way for Khomeinist hegemony in the region.
In truth, the actual quote from Audacity of Hope is:
"Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." (Pg. 261)
Not quite as sinister as some would lead us to believe. I still think that this man has absolutley no business being even *close* to the Whitehouse, but there you have it.
Barack Obama’s trips to Hawaii on a chartered Boeing 757 each cost more than twice the price of Sarah Palin’s new clothes.
Brad Blakeman, who was in charge of scheduling for President Bush, says a Boeing 757 costs about $20,000 an hour for fuel, crew, and maintenance. Since a trip to Hawaii entails 10 hours of flying time from Chicago, the total cost for each round-trip comes to about $400,000.
Obama used the Boeing 757 for trips to Hawaii over the summer for a vacation and again last week to see his failing grandmother. Admirable though that visit was, “By Obama using a private jet to go on a purely personal visit to see his grandma, he’s wasting not only energy, but he’s using the money that his supporters have given him for campaign purposes,” Blakeman says. “It’s a purely personal visit paid for with campaign funds.”
On the other hand, the media are highlighting the Republican National Committee’s purchase of $150,000 in clothes for Palin, even though the dresses will be donated to charities. The New York Times played the story on page one.
“They’re picking on Palin, who was provided a wardrobe by the RNC strictly for political purposes, and it was always intended that these garments would be then given to charity,” Blakeman says. “So there’s a benefit that’s going to charity, not a benefit that Palin will have after the election. There was a need for it because she’s a modest person who didn’t have an extensive wardrobe to do 24/7 campaigning.”
To pick on Palin without going after Obama’s plane trips is “an absolute journalistic abuse,” Blakeman says. “This is the same plane that he took to Hawaii when he went on vacation. In the summertime, when gas was soaring and Americans were having to pinch their pennies, this guy gets on his campaign plane and goes to Hawaii on vacation. He did a couple campaign stops in a state that is not a swing state and is a guaranteed win for Obama. That was clearly to cover the tracks of this vacation.”
"State and local officials are investigating if state and law-enforcement computer systems were illegally accessed when they were tapped for personal information about "Joe the Plumber."
Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher became part of the national political lexicon Oct. 15 when Republican presidential candidate John McCain mentioned him frequently during his final debate with Democrat Barack Obama.
The 34-year-old from the Toledo suburb of Holland is held out by McCain as an example of an American who would be harmed by Obama's tax proposals.
Public records requested by The Dispatch disclose that information on Wurzelbacher's driver's license or his sport-utility vehicle was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database three times shortly after the debate.
Information on Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.
It has not been determined who checked on Wurzelbacher, or why. Direct access to driver's license and vehicle registration information from BMV computers is restricted to legitimate law enforcement and government business.
Paul Lindsay, Ohio spokesman for the McCain campaign, attempted to portray the inquiries as politically motivated. "It's outrageous to see how quickly Barack Obama's allies would abuse government power in an attempt to smear a private citizen who dared to ask a legitimate question," he said.
Isaac Baker, Obama's Ohio spokesman, denounced Lindsay's statement as charges of desperation from a campaign running out of time. "Invasions of privacy should not be tolerated. If these records were accessed inappropriately, it had nothing to do with our campaign and should be investigated fully," he said. [Yeah, right. --ed.]
The attorney general's office is investigating if the access of Wuzelbacher's BMV information through the office's Ohio Law Enforcement Gateway computer system was unauthorized, said spokeswoman Jennifer Brindisi.
"We're trying to pinpoint where it came from," she said. The investigation could become "criminal in nature," she said. Brindisi would not identify the account that pulled the information on Oct. 16.
Records show it was a "test account" assigned to the information technology section of the attorney general's office, said Department of Public Safety spokesman Thomas Hunter.
Brindisi later said investigators have confirmed that Wurzelbacher's information was not accessed within the attorney general's office. She declined to provide details. The office's test accounts are shared with and used by other law enforcement-related agencies, she said.
On Oct. 17, BMV information on Wurzelbacher was obtained through an account used by the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency in Cleveland, records show.
Mary Denihan, spokeswoman for the county agency, said the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services contacted the agency today and requested an investigation of the access to Wurzelbacher's information. Cuyahoga County court records do not show any child-support cases involving Wurzelbacher.
The State Highway Patrol, which administers the Law Enforcement Automated Data System in Ohio, asked Toledo police to explain why it pulled BMV information on Wurzelbacher within 48 hours of the debate, Hunter said.
The LEADS system also can be used to check for warrants and criminal histories, but such checks would not be reflected on the records obtained by The Dispatch.
Sgt. Tim Campbell, a Toledo police spokesman, said he could not provide any information because the department only had learned of the State Highway Patrol inquiry today.
Kathryn & Jay, At least we know what will become of that 25 percent of the Defense budget Barney Frank want to slash from the protection of Americans.
The DC Examiner reminds us that already proposed in the House (HR 808) is the creation of a new, multi-billion dollar, cabinet-level monstrosity: The Department of Peace & Non-Violence. (Thanks to Dr. Andy Bostom for calling this to my attention.)
The DPN-V would house such vital new agencies as The Office of Peace Education & Training, the Office of Domestic Peace Activities, the Office of International Peace Activities, the Office of Technology for Peace, the Office of Arms Control and Disarmament (ACM — notwithstanding that Barnie seems to have that covered already), the Office of Peaceful Co-Existence and Non-Violent Conflict Resolution, and, of course, the Office of Human Rights and Economic Rights. (Emphasis added.)
This, natch, is separate and apart from Wage Insurance (aka "Spreading the Wealth"), Obama's proposed Global Poverty Act (aka Spreading the Wealth to the Globe through the UN), tax relief for oppressed classes such as trial lawyers (aka Spreading More Wealth to Top Democrat Donors); and gasoline subsidies (aka Spreading the Wealth to America's enemies who are hurting now that oil is down to about $60/barrel).
Too bad Sarah Palin is too dumb to come up with an agenda like this — you can see why so many top conservative thinkers are flocking to the Obama ticket.
Are investor concerns about an Obama presidency influencing the stock market? And by "concerns" I mean "existential panic." And by "Obama presidency" I mean "a tax-hiking and regulatory reign of terror." And by "influencing" I mean "eviscerating." At least that's the overwrought take I get from a few of my more skittish E-mailers. Chillax, y'all!
Now a few of my own (more tranquil) observations about a possible jittery Investor Class, the plunging market, and the now famous Obama Discount Theory:
1) I find it hard to believe that fears about a deep recession are suddenly dawning upon investors and thus are solely responsible for kneecapping the market. I've been hearing such dire forecasts for weeks from top Wall Street economists, and I really think they're already baked into the cake. (And credit markets actually look like they are finally picking up a bit—a plus for stocks.) So with that perception locked in, maybe the future political landscape is finally playing a greater role in the minds of investors, especially with polls showing a possible landslide Obama win and big Democratic congressional majorities. Is it really more plausible to suggest no effect whatsoever from a possible once-a-generation, political sea change, especially one that moves away from the winning economic formula of the past 25 years ? Not even a smidgen of worry? C'mon, now.
2) Obama wants to raise capital gains taxes on a good chunk of the money currently in the market. Nearly 80 percent of total stock holdings are held by people who would be subjected to higher investment taxes. Not only does that hurt their future after-tax returns, but it also undercuts the future productivity of the economy, thus crimping the future stream of earnings generated by corporate America. So the whole stock market will suffer from a sort of collective tax punishment. Hey, even potential Obama treasury secretary Jamie Dimon thinks raising taxes right now is a goofy idea.
3) Then there's the Joker Scenario, inspired by one of my favorite schemes concocted by the Clown Prince of Crime. It's the one where he poisons various toiletries like shampoo, deodorant, soap, and toothpaste. But only when used in combination are they deadly. Investors might not be worrying so much about a Democratic president, given the current one-way state of the polls, as they are about the combo of Obama + Nancy Pelosi + Harry Reid. And you can toss Charlie Rangel and Barney Frank into the mix as well. Recall what Frank said the other day: "Yes, I believe later on, there should be tax increases. Speaking personally, I think there are a lot of very rich people out there whom we can tax at a point down the road and recover some of this money." Look for Democrat proposals for a "millionaire's surtax" on top of the higher rates from repeal of the Bush tax cuts in 2009. Or how about this idea to do away with 401(k) plans. Maybe the risk of a deluge of ill-conceived ideas is apparently why, according to my pal Amity Shlaes, split power in D.C. produces an average 9 percent positive return for stocks vs. a negative 8 percent when one party holds Congress and the White House.
4) It's certainly true that recent polls have McCain with only a narrow lead, at best, over Obama among self-described members of the Investor Class. Yet I would hazard a guess that active investors are far more conservative—even libertarian—in their economics than the great mass that is 401(k) nation. (That sure has been my experience.) They are likely the ones selling hard right now.
5) Then there's the Great Experiment of 2009. In 1980, anxious Americans voted for lower taxes and smaller government as the solution to the nation's economic ills. Would the opposite prescription also have led to a 25-year economic boom? With Obamanomics, voters may be about to play a fascinating game of "what if." Except it's for real. When Goldman Sachs ran a sophisticated economic simulation of the effect of a total repeal of the Bush tax cuts, the computer predicted a 3 percentage-point drop in GDP. Maybe investors fear that with perhaps a trillion-dollar budget gap ahead, revenue-hungry Dems will raise taxes further than Team Obama is suggesting—right into the teeth of a weak economy. What if, indeed.
Essential surveillance kit for the new green police: the Energy Saving Partnership has taken out a patent on Heatseekers, thermo-imaging vehicles which, at full potential, have the capacity to identify 1,000 properties an hour, or 5,000 properties a night, that are leaking carbon. "Once the property has been scanned, a dedicated team of energy advisers will visit householders to show them the thermal image scan of their homes," says Inspector Knock-on-the-Door. That'll go down well after midnight.
"...I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."
Absolutely fantastic speech by Michael Crichton. Go read the rest.
We've previously noted the gusher of illegal campaign contributions flowing into the Obama campaign from contributors such as "Doodad Pro" and "Good Will." More recently, incidents have been reported in which people have seen credit card charges surface suggesting they donated to Barack Obama when they did not. Matthew Mosk and Sarah Cohen noted one such incident earlier this week:
Now comes the story of Mary T. Biskup, of Manchester, Missouri. Biskup got a call recently from the Obama campaign, which was trying to figure out why she donated $174,800 to the campaign -- well over the contribution limit of $2,300.
The answer she gave them was simple. "That's an error."
Is the Obama campaign knowingly receiving illegal contributions? Yesterday one of our readers reported the results of an experiment he conducted:
I've read recent reports of the Obama campaign receiving donations from dubious names and foreign locales and it got me wondering: How is this possible?
I run a small Internet business and when I process credit cards I'm required to make sure the name on the card exactly matches the name of the customer making the purchase. Also, the purchaser's address must match that of the cardholders. If these don't match, then the payment isn't approved. Period. So how is it possible that the Obama campaign could receive donations from fictional people and places? Well, I decided to do a little experiment. I went to the Obama campaign website and entered the following:
Name: John Galt Address: 1957 Ayn Rand Lane City: Galts Gulch State: CO Zip: 99999
Then I checked the box next to $15 and entered my actual credit card number and expiration date (it didn't ask for the 3-didgit code on the back of the card) and it took me to the next page and... "Your donation has been processed. Thank you for your generous gift."
This simply should not, and could not, happen in any business or any campaign that is honestly trying to vet it's donors. Also, I don't see how this could possibly happen without the collusion of the credit card companies. They simply wouldn't allow any business to process, potentially, hundreds of millions in credit card transactions where the name on the card doesn't match the purchasers name.
In short, with the system set up as it is by the Obama camp, an individual could donate unlimited amounts of money by simply making up fake names and addresses. And Obama is doing his best to facilitate this fraud. This is truly scandalous.
Our reader was not yet done. He tried the experiment on the McCain site: "I tried the exact same thing at the McCain site and it didn't allow the transaction." He then repeated the experiment at the Obama site:
I went back to the Obama site and made three additional donations using the names Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Bill Ayers, all with different addresses. All the transactions went through using the same credit card. I saved screenshots of the transactions.
Our reader reports, incidentally, that he was using his MasterCard for the contributions. We submit this report in the spirit of inquiry and would especially appreciate hearing from readers who can illuminate how credit card procedures might (or might not) allow this to happen.
UPDATE: Readers have replicated the experiment reported in this post. We will have to revisit the issue tonight or tomorrow and appreciate any information you can provide in the meantime.
CLARIFICATION: Many readers point out that the Obama campaign would exercise some control over the security level required to verify small dollar transactions and that no collusion with the card issuer or bank is therefore required. Mark Steyn elaborates here. Mark explains the question of security settings and then adds:
As the Powerline reader has noted, if "John Galt" of "Ayn Rand Lane" attempts a contribution at the McCain campaign, it gets rejected. Which is just as well. If the Republican candidate's website were intentionally set up to facilitate fraudulent donations, it would be on the front page of The New York Times. But, as it's King Barack the Spreader, we can rest assured the crack investigative units will be too preoccupied with Governor Palin's shoes over the next two weeks.
It is a point that needs making and that could be made every day.
Ask yourself what the media and public reaction would be if this were about Barack Obama.
Seriously.
An artist in New York has set up an exhibit that features cardboard cutouts of Sarah Palin and her youngest daughter. It's of Palin killing a caribou. The caribou is a three dimensional stuffed animal with its guts splattered out of it.
Posted by DJ Drummond Published: October 21, 2008 - 1:39 PM
The polls are wrong this year, very wrong. I have been saying this for months, and I have backed up my claim with both statistical and anecdotal support. The claims I have made have inspired some, caused others to laugh in derision, and brought others to test their assumptions and revisit the hard data. Along the way, there have been a lot of questions about how and why the polls could be wrong. The most common complaint, is that for all of the polls to be wrong, there would need to be some sort of conspiracy, or else an incredibly stupid decision made across the board. Well, I am not a big believer in conspiracies, but I do think that the polling groups have fallen into a groupthink condition. I wrote earlier about the fact that of the major polling groups handling national and state polls, all of them are based deep in pro-Liberal, anti-Conservative territories.
Here's that list of headquarters again, just to punch in that point again:
Poll Headquarters ABC News 77 W 66th St, #13, New York City, New York CBS News 524 W 57th St, New York City, New York FOX News 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York City, New York Gallup 901 F St NW, Washington DC Hotline 88 Pine St, 32nd floor, New York City, New York IBD 12655 Beatrice St. Los Angeles, California The Los Angeles Times 202 W 1st St, Los Angeles California Marist Institute 3399 North Rd, Poughkeepsie, New Jersey York Mason-Dixon 1250 Connecticut Ave #200, Washington DC Newsweek 251 W 57th St, New York City, New York The New York Times 1 City Hall, New York City, New York Pew Research Center 1615 L St NW, #700, Washington DC Quinnipiac 275 Mount Carmel Ave., Hamden Connecticut Rasmussen 625 Cookman, #2, Asbury Park, New Jersey Reuters 3 Times Square, New York City, New York Survey USA 15 Bloomfield Ave., Verona New Jersey TIPP 690 Kinderkamack Rd, Oradell, New Jersey Washington Post 1150 15th St NW, Washington DC Zogby 901 Broad St, Utica, New York
As I wrote then, it needs noting that all of the major polling organizations are based in locations where liberals are strongest and conservatives weakest, where 'democrat' and 'republican' take on meanings wildly different from the rest of the country. The people making the executive decisions at these polls, most likely including the wording and order of polling questions, whether to focus on urban or suburban areas, the weighting of political affiliation, and the definition of 'likely voter', are most likely in regular contact and association with the most liberal factions of politics. It does not mean that they have deliberately skewed their decisions to support Obama, but it is obvious that there is an apparent conflict of interest in their process modality.
I want to stop here and direct the reader back to the ethics of polling. The National Council on Public Polling is, and I got this from their site's welcome page, "an association of polling organizations established in 1969. Its mission is to set the highest professional standards for public opinion pollsters, and to advance the understanding, among politicians, the media and general public, of how polls are conducted and how to interpret poll results."
NCPP members identified on the front page include ABC News, CBS News, Gallup, Hotline, Ipsos, the Los Angeles Times, Marist, NBC News, Pew, Princeton Survey Associates, and Survey USA, along with many others. This effectively promises that the major polls will abide by NCPP rules, something you should consider when matching the principles against the polls' actual statements.
The NCPP has also posted a list of "20 Questions a Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results", which I strongly recommend every one to read and memorize. Those questions include these very important queries, that I fear most people do not often consider:
2. Who paid for the poll? In many cases, the poll we see in the papers and on television, was paid for by an agency known to be biased. For example, does anyone really expect CBS News or the New York Times to be even-handed, especially in light of their behavior since 2002?
7. Who should have been interviewed and was not? Or do response rates matter? This is a sore spot for polling groups, because frankly most people do not have the interest to stop and take an 8-to-10 minute interview, especially from someone they do not know calling them up when they are likely to be busy doing something else. It's been established as well, that democrats in recent years are more willing to take part in polls than republicans, possibly due to perceived bias on the part of the media. But it is quite important to know if the pollsters were getting one person in ten to take the poll, or only one person in fifty, because the people not interviewed matter just as much as those who do participate. Yet I have never yet seen a poll this year that publishes response rates.
14. What questions were asked? This is a big one that a lot of folks miss. I have noticed in the details, that all of the polls are asking about the public's opinion of the economy, and of their opinion of President Bush, even though he is not running this time. Also, I have noticed that many polls ask a question about John McCain just after asking about the voter's opinion of President Bush, subtly linking the two men. For comparison, no questions have been asked about approval of the specific performance of either Majority Leader Reid or Speaker Pelosi, and no other politician is linked to Barack Obama in the same way that polls link President Bush to John McCain. This is a clear violation of the NCPP's guidelines, yet it is done in absolutely every poll I have seen. Further, polls taken since Labor day have not mentioned foreign policy at all. There are no questions regarding Russia's invasion of Georgia, nor of Iran's nuclear weapons programs, nor about China's intentions viz a viz Taiwan, even though these are current events which have great significance in a presidential race, yet all of the polls are ignoring them. Again, the economy-only focus betrays a bias which violates the principles of the NCPP.
I have already written extensively about polling groups manipulation of demographic weights, so I will only summarize here that in addition to party affiliation, various polling groups this year have produced polls out of demographic balance with Census norms for urban/suburban/rural participation, minority race representation, age, employment status, and income range. It should not be difficult to imagine how these manipulations might invalidate the results published by the polling groups.
When people reach this point in the discussion, an obvious question comes up; surely the polls want to be accurate, and they would have to understand that this fiddling with internal data to create a false image would destroy their credibility? And the answer to that can be phrased in a two-word reminder of just how stupid people can be - "New Coke".
In 1985, the Coca-Cola company dominated the beverage industry around the world, and it's flagship product was its first, the Coca-Cola soft drink, literally an icon of Americana. It would seem to be the most obvious of strategic decisions, to leave the base of the company alone. Instead, in a move never explained let alone justified by the company, Coca-Cola announced that they were eliminating Coca-Cola, and replacing their number 1 product with a new formula, called "New Coke". Everything about the promotion was an unmitigated disaster, and later that year Coca-Cola re-introduced what they claimed was the "original formula", named "Coke Classic". The company tried to push "New Coke" on a public that never wanted it, and eventually gave up the next year. The "New Coke" strategy and promotion have become textbook lessons on the worst possible way to listen to customers and meet their expectations. Pretty much everything was done the wrong way, especially the arrogant way that Coca-Cola assumed their customers would accept the elimination of their favorite drink. Near as I can figure it, the essential problem came down to the fact that the company's marketing people made all the key decisions internally, without once stepping out into the real world to test their assumptions. What seemed a great idea in development, failed miserably in Reality. Obviously, Coca-Cola never wanted to enrage its customers, to drive them to Pepsi, or to put a bullet in their stock value, but that all happened because they made an incalculably stupid strategic decision, and they lacked an effective Deming loop to test assumptions and correct the process.
This is actually not all that uncommon in business. So many people saw Enron as a company made up of crooks, that they failed to notice that Enron did have a Code of Ethics; the problem was similar to Coke, in that too many people never tested their assumptions, and by the time they realized something was wrong, it was too late to repair the damage.
This brings us back to the polls. The thing most folks forget about polls which get published in the media, is that the polls' first need is not to accurately reflect the election progress and report on actual support levels; it's about business. A poll needs clients to survive, and the media - always - wants a good story more than they want facts. So polls sell that story, and what would actually be a gradual development of support, with modest changes brought about as the public learned about candidates' records and positions, is instead sold as an exciting roller-coaster race, careening madly all over the place. If a candidate appears to be popular and charismatic, he might be allowed a strong lead, or the poll might tighten things from time to time just to keep attention on the polls. That's where that whole "bounce" thing after the conventions comes from - do you really think republicans or independents got more excited about Obama because of his convention, or that democrats and independents were more likely to vote for McCain because of the GOP convention? When you think about it, it should be obvious that these bumps are artificial unless there is a clear cause to show a change in support. And when you take apart the polls and drill down to the raw data, what you find is a close race with a gradually declining but still large pool of undecided voters, which is consistent with the known facts and actions we see from both campaigns.
Obviously, though, the polls want to finish as close as possible to the actual results, but this year they have a problem. There has been unprecedented manipulation of demographics, corrupting even the raw data to the point where effective resolution of public opinion is doubtful. This might be described as an honest mistake, if one is willing to accept greed as an honest motive. Gallup, for example, who has more experience than any other polling group and who therefore should have known better more than anyone else to fiddle with the weights. In several past elections, Gallup and other polls have learned from operational blunders.
In 1948, Gallup screwed with the weighting, assuming the republicans would turn out much in much larger numbers than the democrats, but they were wrong, and badly miscalled the election. In 1952 Gallup assumed the other way, that the race would be tight and down to the wire, but they blew that call as well. In 1976, Gallup assumed the opposite, that democrats would overwhelm republicans because of Watergate, but when it became obvious that republicans would vote anyway, Gallup had to change its model to show their participation more accurately. In 1980, Gallup called Carter ahead until the very end, when they grudgingly granted Reagan a small lead, yet another case where Gallup's assumptions were well off the mark. In 1996, Gallup overstated Clinton's support and understated Dole's support throughout the campaign, and in 2004 Gallup called the race too close to call. This year, trying to gauge the effects of Barack Obama's 'rock star' charisma, Gallup decided to abandon historical norms and overweight urban and youth voters, and to over-sample democrats all campaign long. This model, dubbed the "expanded voter", has proven a disaster for Gallup, so much so that the group reintroduced a more historically balanced model, which they call the "traditional" model. The problem for Gallup, however, is that their methodology became so skewed throughout the campaign up to now, that it may be impossible for Gallup to correct its procedures before the final election poll. In the light of past blunders, this year missing the call may not be unreasonable at all to expect.
So OK, Gallup is having a bad year, but what about the rest? Well, there the phrase to consider is follow the leader. Gallup has been doing this stuff for longer than anyone else, and the other polls have often fallen into the habit of chasing what they see Gallup do. But for an objective look at their performance, I direct you to another of my past articles, where I noted the NCPP's record on poll accuracy. From what I see here, if Gallup is having problems, it's likely just as bad or worse for everyone else.
So, could I be wrong? I have to be honest and admit that I could. But in that case, we'd have to ask why the polls do not generally agree with each other, why Gallup is trying to spin three different models at the same time to get a grasp of the picture, why McCain and Obama are both so interested in Pennsylvania, yet neither is working very hard in Ohio right now. We'd have to explain why McCain-Palin rallies are now attracting thousands more people than Obama-Biden rallies, why Letterman suddenly found it cool to have McCain on his show and SNL decided they wanted Palin on theirs. We'd have to explain why there are not a lot of Obama signs visible, but we hear about his army of lawyers getting ready. We'd have to explain why McCain and Palin appear to be so relaxed while Obama and Biden look like they're worried.
What I think is happening, is this - the polls' headquarters were based deep in liberal territory, where the assumption was that Obama's candidacy would actually create a groundswell of pro-democrat voters unseen in the country since 1932. That McCain is more experienced with the key issues than Obama was ignored, that the historical significance of the debates shows that the effects appear several weeks later was also ignored. That the economy could be as reasonably blamed on the democrat-controlled Congress as on the republican President was never considered. That character would be a salient factor in the decisions of voters was rejected out of hand.
The polls are wrong. Make your own mind up, because your vote will matter.
Have you considered the impact your coverage of the 2008 election might have on your career? Many of you have gone all out to elect Barack Obama as president, completely oblivious to the long-term impact that advocacy could have.
It's easier than ever for news consumers to do research on specific reporters and see whether they have a habit of lying, misleading, ignoring relevant facts, failing to ask tough questions, or other forms of bias. And, as time goes on that's going to become even easier. Some will help in that effort, such as by publishing lists of reporters who crossed the line into advocacy or who clearly lied in order to support Obama.
Before reading an article, a news consumer might spend just a few seconds doing a little research and be able to quickly find page after page detailing past instances of that reporter's low journalistic ethics.
Now, certainly, papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post have powerful megaphones, but dozens or hundreds of other sites loosely working together can have a major impact. Eventually, a critical mass will be reached, and a media source might decide that a specific reporter is too much of a liability. Why continue publishing news reports from someone when those reports are instantly dismissed by a good portion of their readership?
Thankfully, it's not too late for the media to somewhat redeem themselves by finally asking Obama tough questions, by avoiding lying or misleading on his behalf, and by releasing any information on him that they've assiduously tried to cover up.
The press serves a vital role in the American system, yet too much of the press has abrogated their responsibilities and now simply serves as an arm of the Obama campaign.
Mainstream media reporters should take a longer-term view of the full impact that will have on their careers.
It is increasingly clear that a majority of Americans have little or no idea just how, exactly, this Constitutional Republic of ours works. Terms like "separation of powers" and "checks and balances" are either unknown, blithely ignored, or simply considered outdated. Such ignorance may seem like bliss, but may have far-reaching and frightening ramifications.
Consider the current Congress, in which the Democrats command a majority in both houses. Current polling indicates that the Democrats can expect to keep, and probably expand, their majority, in the November elections. The DNC is currently advertising heavily in the "most vulnerable" districts, salivating at the thought of changing their slim 1-vote majority in the Senate into a filibuster-proof supermajority.
Now imagine the prospect of Barack Obama, whose voting record earned him the dubious title of "most liberal Senator" for 2007, sitting in the White House. Obama, together with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and a supermajority in Congress, will be able to pass virtually any law they can dream up. Obama touts himself as the candidate who can "reach across the aisle", but chances are, he won't have to.
Because of the remarkable foresight of the Founding Fathers, and their vision of checks and balances, there is yet a third branch of governance. The judiciary has the power, under normal circumstances, to quash any significant oversteppings by the other two branches. However, in recent years the federal courts — and especially the ninth district — have shown a shocking trend towards liberal judicial activism. Obama's nominees would clearly extend this trend. Moreover, although the Supreme Court is currently very evenly divided, the average age of the justices is 68 (and that number is skewed down by the two GW Bush nominees); John Paul Stevens is 88, and four others are in their seventies. It's generally expected that at least two justices will be seated in the next four years, but that estimate is probably low, because several justices of the liberal bloc have been postponing retirement until a liberal President comes into office. In particular, if Obama were to replace Reagan appointees Scalia or Kennedy (both 72), he would tilt the court significantly in favor of his policies.
We really don't have to imagine very hard to see how this plays out; it has already played out in dozens of faux democracies around the world. As Fareed Zakaria points out in "The Future of Freedom", the Nazis were elected into power in 1933. Likewise Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong-Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Vladimir Putin, and Slobodan Milošević. Elections don't guarantee a free society when a single party has the overwhelming majority. History shows that when such an ascendance occurs, the party uses the power at its disposal to keep itself in power.
It's no coincidence that the above "democratic dictatorships" are all socialist. Socialism, while noble in intent, in practice necessarily shifts power to the government — power that in theory is supposed to be shifted to the people. This centralization of power covets further power. As Winton Churchill noted, "Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the object worship of the state.... No socialist system can be established without a political police. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance."
The resulting Obama-led government would be able to fully implement the socialist agenda that the DNC has dreamed of for years. Make no mistake about it, Barack Obama is a socialist, steeped in the teachings of Saul Alinsky, proponent of the "reform from within" school of revoution. Obama himself recently admitted — in an unscripted moment of honesty with Joe the Plumber — that he wants to implement a government-operated wealth redistribution program. Single-pay socialized healthcare will be made mandatory for all. And those promised tax cuts? We'll all be paying 40-50% tax (as is now done in "benign" socialist coutries like Denmark and France) to cover all of these government "entitlements". And you won't be able to do a thing about it.
No matter how you feel about Obama and his platform, we should all agree that unchecked power is an extremely dangerous thing. Barack Obama's Presidency paves the way for a government -- all three branches -- dominated by a single ideology. This, in itself, is a very compelling argument to keep Obama out of the White House.
Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation’s $3 trillion 401(k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive.
House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-California, and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Washington, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, are looking at redirecting those tax breaks to a new system of guaranteed retirement accounts to which all workers would be obliged to contribute.
A plan by Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic-policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, contains elements that are being considered. She testified last week before Miller’s Education and Labor Committee on her proposal.
At that hearing, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Peter Orszag, testified that some $2 trillion in retirement savings has been lost over the past 15 months.
Under Ghilarducci’s plan, all workers would receive a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy from the U.S. government but would be required to invest 5 percent of their pay into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the Social Security Administration. The money in turn would be invested in special government bonds that would pay 3 percent a year, adjusted for inflation.
The current system of providing tax breaks on 401(k) contributions and earnings would be eliminated.
“I want to stop the federal subsidy of 401(k)s,” Ghilarducci said in an interview. “401(k)s can continue to exist, but they won’t have the benefit of the subsidy of the tax break.”
Under the current 401(k) system, investors are charged relatively high retail fees, Ghilarducci said.
“I want to spend our nation’s dollar for retirement security better. Everybody would now be covered” if the plan were adopted, Ghilarducci said.
She has been in contact with Miller and McDermott about her plan, and they are interested in pursuing it, she said.
“This [plan] certainly is intriguing,” said Mike DeCesare, press secretary for McDermott.
“That is part of the discussion,” he said.
While Miller stopped short of calling for Ghilarducci’s plan at the hearing last week, he was clearly against continuing tax breaks as they currently exist.
Savings rate “The savings rate isn’t going up for the investment of $80 billion,” he said. “We have to start to think about ... whether or not we want to continue to invest that $80 billion for a policy that’s not generating what we now say it should.”
“From where I sit that’s just crazy,” said John Belluardo, president of Stewardship Financial Services Inc. in Tarrytown, New York. “A lot of people contribute to their 401(k)s because of the match of the employer,” he said. Belluardo’s firm does not manage assets directly.
Higher-income employers provide matching funds to employee plans so that they can qualify for tax benefits for their own defined-contribution plans, he said.
“If the tax deferral goes away, the employers have no reason to do the matches, which primarily help people in the lower income brackets,” Belluardo said.
Set up direct Senate contact for Kenyan opposition leader
Sen. Barack Obama designated a personal aide as his direct contact for the 2007 Kenyan presidential campaign of Raila Odinga, who later was appointed prime minister after his election loss was followed by widespread, deadly violence that destroyed or damaged 800 Christian churches, according to e-mails obtained by WND senior staff writer Jerry Corsi during a trip to Kenya.
Corsi attempted to release this and other information at a Tuesday press conference in Nairobi. The WND reporter and No. 1 New York Times bestselling author was detained by Kenya security officers as soon as he entered the hotel to make his presentation. He was held incommunicado and without food for the entire day before being permitted to board his regularly scheduled flight out of the country to London, where he is currently recuperating from the ordeal.
Odinga called for protests over alleged voter fraud after losing the December 2007 general election. The resulting protest violence left an estimated 1,000 members of the dominant Kikuyu tribe in Kenya dead and an estimated 500,000 displaced from their homes.
The links between Obama and Odinga were documented by copies of two e-mails obtained by Corsi during his meetings in Kenya with various government officials and others.
The e-mails, apparently sent by Obama himself, referenced the senator's aide, Mark Lippert. The e-mails were provided to WND by an insider in Kenya who fled Odinga's Orange Democratic political party and requested anonymity because of the danger of retaliation.
The e-mails, identified as coming from Obama's Senate office, are addressed to "railaaodinga" at a yahoo.com address.
A WND e-mail to the same Obama address generated an automated response and a list of contacts for Obama's offices. A WND e-mail sent to the Odinga e-mail address didn't generate a response.
One e-mail purportedly from Obama, dated Dec. 22, 2006, read, "I will kindly wish that all our correspondence [be] handled by Mr Mark Lippert. I have already instructed him. This will be for my own security both for now and in future."
It is reproduced here with the e-mail address of the person who forwarded it to WND redacted:
Lippert is a long-term Obama Senate staff member identified by the Chicago Sun-Times as a member of Obama's "inner circle of foreign policy experts." The Sun-Times has said if Obama is elected president, his secretary of state and national security advisers are expected to come from this inner circle.
In December 2006 Odinga was in the early stages of planning to run as the Orange Democratic candidate against President Mwai Kibaki.
The e-mails from Obama's office to Odinga's presidential campaign seem to show Obama and Odinga, who once told the BBC he is Obama's cousin, had discussions about Odinga's 2007 campaign.
WND was unable to reach the Obama campaign for a comment, as the campaign telephone system disconnected a WND call three times in a row without any provision to leave a message.
The former Orange Democratic official who provided the e-mails to WND asked for anonymity because of concerns the disclosure of his identity could endanger his life in a volatile political atmosphere in Kenya where Odinga's fellow Luo tribal members staged sometimes violent protests against Kibaki's supporters, who primarily are Kikuyu.
Sen. Obama's relatives in Kenya are Luo.
The former Orange Democratic official reported abandoning the party and opposing Odinga because of concerns Odinga had manipulated tribal violence in Kenya to gain political power.
The document at one point suggests: "It is possible to trigger a class war by painting the Kibaki Government as an insensitive, uncaring group of Muthaiga Golf clubbers. Available research also suggests that this strategy could also resonate with poor kikuyu youth who feel economically marginalized by their own government. As part of this strategy the party should seek to elevate the emotions within all youth constituents who may it successful, be willing to vote for us in the protest. Visible signs of class disparity will provide important fodder for this theme."
WND previously reported Obama was in telephone communications with Odinga on nearly a daily basis during the Democratic primary in New Hampshire in January.
The second e-mail, again from Obama's Senate address to Odinga's e-mail, stated, "Thanks for contacting me about Mr Lippert through email. Contact him through mark_lippert.obama.senate.gov."
Chapter 4 of Corsi's "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," titled "Kenya, Odinga, Communism and Islam," refers to the strategy document, but its authenticity was confirmed by the former Oorange Democratic official during interviews with Corsi in Kenya over the last week.
The document describes an Odinga strategy of exploiting "anti-Kikuyu sentiments," a clearly racial strategy aimed at inflaming long-standing tribal animosity to gain electoral advantage for Odinga.
The last point of the campaign document describes what happened when Odinga lost the December 2007 election: "Ethnic Tensions/Violence as a Last Resort."
Sen. Barack Obama with Raila Odinga
Obama continued to support Odinga's effort to share Kenya's head-of-state with President Kibiki even after the wave of Odinga-prompted violence that followed his defeat.
Some pundits in the U.S. already are suggesting that if Obama is not elected, there could be violence. On CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" show, James Carville said, "But you stop and contemplate this country if Obama goes in and he has a consistent five point lead and loses the election, it would be very, very, very dramatic out there."
According to a Wall Street Journal article posted on the Obama campaign website, Lippert is doing double duty: in civilian life as Obama's chief foreign-policy adviser and in the military as a Lieutenant JG who is planning to serve as an intelligence officer for the Navy SEALS.
The site gives Lippert, 34, credit for helping "hone" Obama's anti-war views.
The website report states: "Over the past two years, Sen. Obama and Lt. Lippert have traveled around the globe together, played one-on-one basketball and shared each other's shoes. Lt. Lippert has continuing email exchanges with the senator's half sister in Africa. Sen. Obama encouraged Lt. Lippert to get engaged. Sen. Obama calls Lt. Lippert, 'one of my favorite people in the world.'"
Lippert previously worked at the State Department and at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Suitland, Md.
The report says Lippert accompanied Obama as an adviser to Russia and then to Kenya.
'Global Poverty Act' to cost each citizen $2,500 or more
The U.S. Senate soon could debate whether you, your spouse and each of your children – as well as your in-laws, parents, grandparents, neighbors and everyone else in America – each will spend $2,500 or more to reduce poverty around the world.
The plan sponsored by Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is estimated to cost the U.S. some $845 billion over the coming few years in an effort to raise the standard of living around the globe.
Barack Obama
S.2433 already has been approved in one form by the U.S. House of Representatives and now has been placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar for pending debate.
WND previously reported the proposal demands the president develop "and implement" a policy to "cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015 through aid, trade, debt relief" and other programs.
Cliff Kincaid at Accuracy in Media has published a critique asserting that while the Global Poverty Act sounds nice, the adoption could "result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States" and would make levels of U.S. foreign aid spending "subservient to the dictates of the United Nations."
He said the legislation, if approved, dedicates 0.7 percent of the U.S. gross national product to foreign aid, which over 13 years, he said, would amount to $845 billion "over and above what the U.S. already spends."
The plan passed the House in 2007 "because most members didn't realize what was in it," Kincaid reported. "Congressional sponsors have been careful not to calculate the amount of foreign aid spending that it would require."
A recent statement from Obama's office noted the support offered by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces," Obama said. "It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking water. As we strive to rebuild America's standing in the world, this important bill will demonstrate our promise and commitment to those in the developing world.
"Our commitment to the global economy must extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing profits than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere," he continued.
Another critic, however, has been commentator Glenn Beck, whose YouTube video critique can be seen here:
"Not one dime would go to fixing America," the commentary said.
Obama has continued to lobby for such massive expenditures on his campaign stops. During an address as recently as last week, he said, "I'll double our foreign assistance to $50 billion by 2012, and use it to support a stable future in failing states, and sustainable growth in Africa; to halve global poverty and to roll back disease."
Beck and Kincaid pointed out that the plan not only commits the U.S. to the anti-poverty spending proposal, it also adopts for the U.S. the United Nations Millennium Development Goal, which includes a variety of treaties and protocols advocated by the U.N.
"On January 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared "all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States." This "all-out war" would last through the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush. We have spent billions of dollars fighting this war, and what have we achieved?"
He continued, "Very little. In 1964, there were 36 million Americans living in poverty, or about 19 percent of the population. In the 40 years between 1964 and 2004: ... poverty never measured less than 11 percent of the population. In 1983, under President Reagan, poverty registered 15.2 percent; in 1993, at the beginning of Bill Clinton's presidency, poverty was measured at 13.7 percent of the population. In 2004, under George W. Bush, a president often accused by the political Left as not caring about the poor, the poverty rate declined to 12.7 percent. Still, some 37 million Americans remain poor."
Despite that performance, "Obama is ready to take the fight global," said Lester.
"In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits nations to banning 'small arms and light weapons' and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child," he wrote.
Tom DeWeese at NewsWithViews said the plan "is very telling" about what Obama would do as president.
DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center, warned the over-arching plan includes the ideals of consolidating all international agencies under the U.N., regulation by the U.N. of all corporate environmental issues, license fees charged by the U.N. to use air, water and natural resources, a restructuring that would give hand-picked non-governmental organizations huge influence, authorize a standing U.N. army and require registration of all arms.
Yeah, I know it's a WND article, but it has it's points...
More than a week ago, a north Kansas City couple blew the whistle on credit card fraud benefiting the Obama campaign.
Investigative journalist Ken Timmerman has uncovered more:
What do Bart Simpson, Family Guy, Daffy Duck, King Kong, O.J. Simpson, and Raela Odinga have in common?
All are celebrities; and with the exception of Odinga and O.J. Simpson, they also are fictional characters. And yet, all of them gave money earlier this month to the campaign of Barack Obama, without any apparent effort by the campaign to screen them out as suspect donors.
…The Obama campaign has turned a blind eye to the possibility of donor fraud. Reportedly, during the heated primary battle with Hillary Clinton, the Obama campaign “turned off” many of the security features on its online donor page, allowing any person with a valid credit card number to donate using any name or address.
Typically, card merchants require a cardholder’s name to match critical personal details, such as an address or, at the least, a ZIP code.
Though in recent months the Obama campaign has tightened up security and restored some of the security features used by merchants to weed out fraud, it still has left open easy ways for potential credit card fraud, including techniques similar to those employed by terrorists and drug traffickers to launder illicit funds.
For example, on Oct. 14, an individual using the name “O.J. Simpson” participated in Obama’s latest small-donor fundraising drive, making a $5 donation through the campaign’s Web site.
Giving a Los Angeles address, he listed his employer as the “State of Nevada” and his occupation as “convict.” The donor used a disposable “gift” credit card to make the donation.
The Obama campaign sent O.J. a thank-you note confirming his contribution, and gave him the name of another donor who had agreed to “match” his contribution.
Four minutes earlier, an individual using the name “Raela Odinga” also made a $5 contribution, using the same credit card.
The real Raela Odinga became prime minister of Kenya in April and has claimed to be a cousin of Obama’s through a maternal uncle…
This past Friday the Supreme Court issued an order setting aside a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals order forcing Ohio’s secretary of state Jennifer Brunner to verify the accuracy of the information provided on applications for voter registration. The Ohio Republican Party had sued to force Brunner to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after widespread reports of voter registration fraud. The Court expressed no opinion on whether Brunner was following HAVA — it threw the case out on the grounds that the Republican party didn’t have the right to sue to force compliance.
As Heritage fellow Hans von Spakovsky notes, he made the exact same argument the Court just made when he worked for the Department of Justice in 2004. Except then it was Democrats asserting that HAVA included a private right of action and Democrats later attacked him for that very position when he was appointed to the Federal Election Commission. Leaving the left’s blatant hypocrisy aside, who can enforce state compliance with HAVA to prevent election fraud? Only the Department of Justice.
We have no idea why DoJ has declined to investigate ACORN’s blatant election fraud in Ohio (and across the country), but this report from The Examiner’s Quin Hillyer might just be relevant: “In all, DOJ lawyers and staff in the metro area have donated at least $150,000 to Obama. No wonder they seem more interested in prosecuting those who warn against vote fraud than enforcing vote-fraud laws.”
If recent polls are to believed, freshman Senator Barack Obama has a better than average chance of becoming America’s 44th President, the Commander-in-Chief of the planet’s most powerful military, and the proverbial leader of the free world. It’s worth mentioning that just four years ago as President Bush and Senator John Kerry were vying for the White House, Obama was still a part-time State Senator representing a liberal district in Chicago. Before that he was an attorney and, famously, a community organizer. In 2008, Obama has positioned himself as a post-partisan, thoughtful moderate with the superior judgment required to lead the country. These are lofty promises from a man with precious little executive experience, and a Senate career that lasted exactly 143 legislative days before he launched yet another campaign for higher office. No one can deny his ambition. In fact, if Obama wins on November 4th—and serves one full term in the Oval Office—the Presidency of the United States would be the longest consecutively held full-time job he has ever held without seeking another.
Barack Obama promises “change,” which is an appealing concept to an American public weary of a beleaguered administration and worried about the future. They are faced with a candidate who promises them everything: Tax cuts for 95% of Americans, universal healthcare, peace, saving the planet, and—according to his wife—the “healing” of Americans’ souls. As the saying goes, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Questions abound: Is this man prepared to be president? Does he hold mainstream values and policy preferences? Who has influenced his thinking, and where does he want to take the country? Has he been honest with the people from whom he seeks votes?
Guess who said the following this morning about Joe Biden's latest gaffe—his statement that America would be faced with a major international crisis within the first six months of an Obama administration as foreign forces seek to test the young new president: "certainly if Sarah Palin had said this, it would be above the fold in most newspapers today."
1. Brent Bozell 2. Rush Limbaugh 3. McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer 4. Dan Rather
If you guessed 1, 2 or 3, you'd be a rational NewsBusters reader . . . but wrong. Yes, the answer is 4, Dan Rather. In true man-bites-MSM mode, Rather made the remark on today's Morning Joe.
The show led with a discussion of Biden's vainglorious gaffe.
WILLIE GEIST: Let's listen to Joe Biden in his own words, and then we can discuss it.
Cut to audio clip of Biden in Seattle, Washington yesterday.
JOE BIDEN: The whole world is waiting, folks. The whole world is waiting. I know almost every one of those major leaders by their first name, not because I'm important, because they were young parliamentarians when I was coming up and we've been hanging around a long time. I'll tell you what, mark my words, within the next, first six months of this administration if we win, you're gonna face a major international challenge, because they are going to want to test him just like they did young John Kennedy. They're going to want to test him, and they are going to find out this guy has got steel in his spine.
After Joe Scarborough reported that the Obama campaign is furious with Biden, Mika Brzezinski noted that there was only spotty coverage of Biden's remarks in the morning's papers.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Well you know it's interesting, because I'm going through the papers. I figure there's got to be, just as you analyzed, Joe, political ramifications to that comment, gaffe, however you want to make it—two in a row, though—but I'm seeing spotty media coverage. I feel like half the media covered this. I'm just going through the papers and seeing if it plays highly, and I'm not finding it in the [Washington] Post so far.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Well, let us just say it's surprising, and I would just throw it back to you-all and tell you what the McCain campaign is saying this morning, and what a lot of Republicans, they're asking really a question: what if Sarah Palin had said electing John McCain would create an international crisis because of his age. Would that be above the fold on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post? Would that be a lead story? We've got somebody who's an expert in the media who I think, Mika, knows a lot better than we do, Dan Rather. Dan, talk about the double standard. Are there times that you would cover this story differently if Sarah Palin said it rather than Joe Biden? Not you, but the media.
DAN RATHER: Well I think the point is well taken, Joe, that certainly if Sarah Palin had said this it would be above the fold in most newspapers today.
Rather expanded on his comment, and while he was putting it in the mouths of "what happens on the internet," he clearly seemed to be adopting it as his own opinion.
RATHER: But let me point out that what happens on the internet may be as important or more important than what's happening in the newspapers. And I'll be surprised, and you know, Joe, I'm frequently surprised, but I'll be surprised if this doesn't have a run on the internet, with among the points two that you raised. Number one, if Sarah Palin had said this, the newspapers would have jumped all over it and so would have the major television outlets. And number two, they can't be happy inside the Obama campaign about this, and let me emphasize I've not spoken with them this morning.
SCARBOROUGH [who clearly had been in touch with the Obama campaign]: They are not.
You live long enough, you see everything. Let me write words I never imagined I would: I'll let Dan Rather's statement speak for me.
Note: I just heard from the McCain campaign that Biden is off the campaign trail, with no scheduled events today. Now why would that be?
Aside: If only Dan would have spiced up his commentary with some of his classic down-home shtick, perhaps something along the lines: "gosh knows if I were still at the Evening News desk, I'd of buried this story deeper than a large-mouthed bass on a Ju-ly afternoon."
Barack Obama prides himself on his career as a community organizer. Back then, he worked for an organization called the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), to which he still has extensive ties. Before digging into Obama's links to ACORN, it's important to understand exactly how corrupt and anti-American this organization truly is.
I've dug around through tons of resources online to come up with this collection of information that reveals the vast corruption perpetrated by ACORN. Take a few moments to read through the reports and learn about the organization that created Barack Obama.
This report focuses on the troubling record of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and its tax-exempt offshoot, the ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC). The ACORN/AHC version of consumer advocacy has consisted of a three-decade assault on free enterprise and a history of extracting resources from financial lenders seeking abatement of ACORN's public relations assaults. Specifically, this report examines ACORN's impact on the housing problem. Documents provided by internal whistleblowers, cross-checked with public records and recorded events, expose hypocritical lending recommendations tied to ACORN Housing Corporation's agreements with major banks--agreements that end up harming consumers.
Media reports, combined with information provided by former ACORN employees, show that:
ACORN leveraged the Community Reinvestment Act in order to attack lenders' reputations and secure financial resources for itself; it has also endorsed loans offered by companies that fund ACORN operations
ACORN's decades of lobbying and publicity seeking have contributed to the current housing crisis by lowering lending standards
Despite raking in a troubling 40 percent of its revenue from taxpayers over the last three years, ACORN Housing Corporation's actions range from controversial to borderline illegal:
AHC has worked to obtain mortgages for undocumented workers
AHC relies on undocumented income, "under the table" money that may not be reported to the Internal Revenue Service
ACORN's "financial justice" operations attack lenders for "exotic" loans, but AHC has recommended ten-year interest-only loans (which deny equity to the buyer) and reverse mortgages (which can be detrimental to senior citizens)
AHC may have violated federal law by failing to maintain a proper distinction between its tax-exempt housing work and the aggressive political activities of ACORN
In 2004 liberal advocacy groups focused their activism on "getting-out-the-vot e." The groups typically urged all Americans to vote, but their real goal was more explicit. They wanted to count as many anti-Bush votes as possible. At what point did voter turnout become voter fraud?
...
ACORN makes a point of asserting that lawsuits brought against it have been rejected or withdrawn. But in 2004 its employees were the subject of numerous reports of registration fraud in Ohio, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico and Wisconsin. Project Vote [a group created by ACORN and led by Barack Obama] denies that it deliberately orchestrated any registration fraud. But a stream of television and newspaper stories reported on the shady practices its workers used to register people to vote.
...
To make matters worse, taxpayers indirectly pay for these shady efforts. ACORN has a number of affiliates providing mortgage financing and counseling for low-income persons. The principal affiliate, the ACORN Housing Corporation, received over $2.6 million in government grants in 2003-2004. Some state-based ACORN housing affiliates receive smaller amounts of government funding. With this base of taxpayer support, ACORN is free to channel its member dues funds and donor gifts to political activities. Despite its claim to nonpartisanship, ACORN ran a minimum wage ballot initiative drive in the 2004 Florida election that, according to an internal memo revealed in a 2005 report by the American Center for Voting Rights, was run "to help defeat George W. Bush and other Republicans by increasing Democratic turnout ..."
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is registered as a non-profit corporation in Arkansas, which does not require public financial disclosure. According to labor activist and scholar Peter Dreier, ACORN's annual operating budget is around $30 million. The New York Times subsequently reported that the figure is closer to $37.5 million, excluding the non-profit research and housing organizations the group runs. Even this estimate likely does not include the vast resources of the ACORN-run unions or reflect election-year resources given to its ostensibly non-partisan get-out-the-vote efforts.
Because it operates a virtual self-contained economy, ACORN entities exchange millions of dollars every year for goods and services. The scant financial documents available for public inspection paint a picture of a spider web of ACORN-run organizations that trade loans, leases, payments, and grants.
...
ACORN's no-holds-barred take on politics originates from its philosophy, which is centered on power. An internal ACORN manual instructed organizers to sign up as many residents as possible because "this is a mass organization directed at political power where might makes right."
...
The frequency with which ACORN employees are caught turning in fraudulent or erroneous documents indicates the group cares less about obeying laws than pushing its political agenda. When it is periodically forced to answer allegations of fraud, ACORN downplays the harm of its crimes or shifts blame to supposedly rogue employees, whom the organization then fires.
ACORN and its affiliates have a multi-decade history of fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds. Recently, the Consumers Rights League released a whistleblower report that uses internal ACORN documents to highlight alleged misuses of taxpayer money by ACORN Housing Corp, which took in 40% of its funds from the government and sent more than a million dollars to ACORN's affiliate, Citizens Consulting.
Now, The New York Times reports ("Funds Misappropriated at 2 Nonprofit Groups," June 9)that ACORN has hid since 2001 the embezzlement of nearly $1 million by the brother of ACORN's founder from that same organization--Citizens Consulting.
Additionally, ACORN is currently under investigation for potential voter fraud all across the nation. With millions of dollars transferred from AHC to these affiliates, it is entirely plausible that taxpayer funds are funding much of this fraud.
...
ACORN and ACORN fraternal organizations' multi-decade record of partisanship and misusing public funds is a prime example of a broken system. They continuously turn in faulty, if not false, voter registration forms that threaten to disenfranchise voters on Election Day. They have repeatedly used taxpayer funds to bolster their own political ends. Eventually, taxpayer money ended up in the pockets of the brother of ACORN's founder and ACORN attempted to hide the truth for years.
My name is James Terry and I am the chief public advocate at the Consumers Rights League, a non-profit education and advocacy organization dedicated to preserving consumer choice in a broad array of issue areas.
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The Consumers Rights League provides an alternative voice from those organizations that argue for reduced consumer choice or increased government intervention as a policy of first choice. CRL supports all aggressive efforts to educate, motivate, register, and assist all citizens in voting so long as those efforts are legal. Unfortunately, there are some groups that do not seem to share this concern.
As part of CRL's mandate, we monitor policy debates, news trends and the activities of organizations that style themselves as consumer advocates. Unfortunately, due to their long track record of questionable or corrupt practices with respect to housing and electoral activities, we are constantly forced to act as a watchdog for abuses by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. To be sure, there are some well-meaning individuals who are a part of ACORN.
Unfortunately, they do not appear to be the ones in control. Firsthand accounts from current and former ACORN employees, major news stories, and court cases across the country, expose corruption at every level of ACORN including embezzlement, cover-ups, misuse of taxpayer funds and voter fraud. While all of the reported allegations noted in my statement are found in the public domain, such reports often go unnoticed by the national media.
Today, the Consumers Rights League (CRL) published a collection of whistleblower documents that suggest the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has reaped substantial financial gains by misusing taxpayer dollars for political ends and by attacking lending corporations for the same "predatory" lending practices it regularly engages in.
The ACORN Housing Association (AHC), an ACORN affiliate that receives over 40% of its funding from government sources, claims to be a consumer advocate. In a newly-released report from CRL, however, a series of documents obtained from a whistleblower source reveals hypocritical and potentially illegal use of taxpayer dollars by ACORN and its related organizations. These documents - which include staff emails and internal organization policies - suggest that ACORN has failed to maintain a proper distinction between its tax-exempt housing work and its aggressive political activities.
EDINBURG — Authorities in South Texas said today that they won't be intimidated by increasingly violent drug smugglers, announcing a larger Border Patrol presence and that more heavily armed deputies will be authorized to return fire across the Mexican border.
Operation "River Freedom Denial" will target areas along the Rio Grande in the southern tip of Texas where violence has risen lately with more ground and air resources, said Border Patrol sector chief Ronald Vitiello.
Standing with a Texas Department of Public Safety captain and the Hidalgo County Sheriff, Vitiello cited an exchange of gunfire between his agents and drug smugglers Monday and another incident this week of a smuggler ramming an agent's truck in making his escape.
Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino said the deputies he will assign to the operation along the river will all be issued fully automatic rifles and authorized to return fire.
"We are not going to be intimidated by the increased aggression," Trevino said.
He recalled an incident in 2006 when more than 300 shots were fired across the river at his deputies and Border Patrol agents. At that time he decided to pull his deputies back from the river for their safety.
Not this time.
"If fired upon we will respond in kind," he said.
Tension along the border has increased this week with a shootout in downtown Matamoros, Mexico across the river from Brownsville, Thursday afternoon and shots fired at or near the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico twice this week. In the first incident, a grenade was lobbed at the consulate that did not explode.
Vitiello and Trevino declined to offer more details about the operation, content with sending a message that law enforcement at all levels along the border is cooperating and will not tolerate violence.
Vitiello attributed the uptick in aggression in part to frustration of drug cartels who are facing a Border Patrol with more manpower and resources.
Cases of violence against Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley sector have increased for three consecutive years. This year there have been more than 130 incidents including assaults and people throwing rocks at agents, said Border Patrol spokesman Dan Doty.
Violence at this end of the Rio Grande pales in comparison to West Texas where more than 1,100 people have been killed in drug cartel violence this year in Juarez, Mexico, across the river from El Paso.
The plot could not be more nefarious. In 2008, Barack Obama decides to go ring doorbells in Toledo, Ohio. A decade earlier, anticipating just such an event, the notorious S&L swindler Charles Keating instructs his son-in-law to move his son-in-law’s cousin, a man named Samuel, into the path of Barack Obama’s eventual walking tour. He further instructs Samuel to a) pretend he is a plumber even though he doesn’t have a license and b) to call himself “Joe” rather than “Sam,” since “Joe the Plumber” sounds better in a nationally televised debate than “Sam the Plumber.” Then, when Obama shows up, Sam aka Joe is to ask Obama about Obama’s tax plan, and focus his eyes on Obama, thereby telepathically forcing the Illinois Senator to say he wants to “spread the wealth around.”
Surely this must be the true story. Otherwise, why would seemingly honorable people in the media, in the Left blogosphere, and a would-be vice president decide to investigate the bona fides of Joe the Plumber in a transparent effort to destroy the credibility, job prospects, and good name of a hard-working single father – when all he did, it would appear to the naked eye, was to live in a house on a block where Barack Obama decided to come calling in pursuit of a nice TV spot on the local news?
Rocket-powered racers received the go-ahead this week from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to soar at over 20 venues across the United States.
This certification marks the first time ever that the FAA has approved a production-scale rocket-powered aircraft for exhibition flights, the Rocket Racing League announced on Tuesday.
The league formed in 2005 to promote aerial NASCAR-style racing, and currently has a roster of six teams under title sponsor DKNY, a New York City-based men's sportswear line that is also backing the Bridenstine Rocket Racing Team headed by former U.S. Navy jet pilot Jim Bridenstine.
An earlier debut of the rocket-powered racers used a liquid oxygen and kerosene engine designed by XCOR Aerospace. However, the DKNY Bridenstine Rocket Racer that received recent FAA approval for public demonstrations is equipped with liquid oxygen and alcohol engines produced by Armadillo Aerospace.
"I would like to personally thank the FAA for their assistance through this process," said Granger Whitelaw, Rocket Racing League co-founder and CEO. "This historic moment was built upon the unprecedented cooperation between our company, Armadillo Aerospace, and the FAA."
He added that the League plans to confirm its venues for the 2009 exhibition season, before kicking off an official race season with 10 rocket racers in 2010.
League officials had once talked of pitting an XCOR-powered racer against an Armadillo-powered racer, but had to wait on the FAA approval for the Armadillo engine. However, the league announced in September that its current fleet of rocket racers would only fly with Armadillo engines.
Whitelaw told SPACE.com then that XCOR engines had not met league standards of "safety, reliability, reusability and performance," although XCOR disputes that its engines have any problems.
Of the 10 rocket racers scheduled to fly in 2010, six are slated to use the Armadillo engine. The other four racer engines remain "up for grabs," according to Whitelaw.
The league is currently working on selecting eight venues from the more than 20 approved by the FAA, including the Reno National Championship Air Races and Air Show in Reno, Nev., where a public demonstration flight took place in September.
Raila Odinga: “No Raila, No Peace” Obama Campaigned for Cousin
Obama’s Greatest Foreign Policy Achievement: Resulted in Muslim-led Ethnic Cleansing Massacre of Hundreds of Christians
Obama Foreign Policy Advisor, “Friends of Obama”: Gave Nearly $1 Million to Odinga
Odinga Supporters Burned Christians Alive in Kenya
Barack Obama has an Odinga problem, and it could be his Achille’s heel, proving that Obama’s only foreign policy achievement to date resulted in massive Muslim-led ethnic cleansing that murdered hundreds of Christians in Western Kenya in the post-election violence of his cousin Raila Odinga’s failed 2007 bid for the Kenyan presidency.
Raila Odinga is the current Prime Minister of Kenya, and Barack Obama’s first cousin. Odinga’s mother was the sister of Barak Obama, Sr, who was also a member of Odinga’s Luo (or Jalou) tribe.
Odinga was never elected Prime Minister, rather he ran as a member of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), and lost a close election to the incumbent President Mwai Kibaki by 250,000 votes.
This loss and the Odinga campaigns subsequent accusations of election fraud sparked horrible violence and ethnic cleansing between Odinga’s Muslim Luo Tribe (13% of the Kenyan population) and Kibaki’s Kikuyu (20 percent of Kenya’s population) tribe, who vowed that without Odinga’s election, there would be no peace, or “No Raila, No Peace”.
In an effort to quell the violence, an agreement was negotiated by Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annon in February 2008 where Kibaki would remain president and Odinga would be awarded the office of Prime Minister, only the second Kenya had ever had, and their cabinet would be staffed equally by both Odinga and Kibaki supporters.
After his appointment as prime minister, the press revealed a contract signed in August 2007 between Odinga and National Muslim Leaders Forum agreeing to several shocking concessions to Islam:
The details of the MOU were shocking. In return for Muslim backing, Mr. Odinga promised to impose a number of measures favored by Muslims if he were elected president. Among these were recognition of “Islam as the only true religion,” Islamic leaders would have an “oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions [emphasis in original],” installation of Shariah courts in every jurisdiction, a ban on Christian preaching, replacement of the police commissioner who “allowed himself to be used by heathens and Zionists,” adoption of a women’s dress code, and bans on alcohol and pork.
Shabbirthat also revealed a shocking series of emails that purported Barack Obama was may have directly advised Odinga during the Muslim on Christian post-election violence in Kenya.
Barack Obama’s participation in his cousin Raila Odinga’s campaign has been widely reported in the European press, but uniformly ignored domestically, perhaps because Barack Obama is not just vulnerable on foreign policy, it is his Achille’s heel.
His greatest foreign policy achievement to date resulted in the Muslim-led ethnic cleansing and massacre of hundreds of Christians.
Georgia state officials have begun an investigation into Primus Industries and the alleged voter fraud committed by one or more of its employees. Jack Justice attends the adult day care provided by Primus for mentally-challenged individuals, and one or more Primus aides took them to an early voting event without permission from their families. Once in the booth, the aide cast the ballot for Barack Obama over Justice’s protestations:
(Video at link)
WALB does a good job in its initial report on the story. If the Tanning Bed Media gets involved, which of these people/entities would get violated by invading their privacy unnecessarily?
Primus Industries’ owners
The aide that stole the vote
Jack Justice
I suspect the answer is #3. Read Michelle’s column today on Operation Destroy Joe the Plumber, and you’ll probably agree. We would probably have to give this the name Operation Destroy Justice.
The aide may have more problems than just a voter-fraud charge, although that’s enough; it’s a felony in most cases. If he or she signed an oath as the report states, then Georgia could also charge the aide with perjury, which will get several years in prison. Maybe the aide will hope for a presidential pardon if he or she steals enough votes …
Yesterday, the Tanning Bed Media discovered unpaid tax liens against Joe Wurzelbacher. Two days ago, we would have said, “Who?” He’s better known this week as Joe the Plumber after his impromptu dialogue with Barack Obama produced a blatantly redistributionist answer from the Democratic presidential candidate.
In their haste to pillory Joe for the audacity of asking a tough question of Obama, the Tanning Bed Media missed a couple of other interesting tax liens. Patterico does the work of the TBM:
You’d think that matters more than the tax liens of Joe the Plumber, wouldn’t you? But good luck finding a Big Media story about Nesbitt’s liens.
If tax liens are such an indicator of character and trustworthiness, wouldn’t it have more significance for the treasurer of a presidential campaign than for a man who just asked a question of the candidate? If the national media has such an interest in investigating a plumber who made a couple of national appearances, why wouldn’t they have at least the same interest in the people running a major party presidential campaign? Of course not. The same people who instruct us that Barack Obama’s 20-year membership in Jeremiah Wright’s church while Wright called 9/11 “chickens coming home to roost” now interrogate Joe the Plumber on national TV about his brief flirtation with the Natural Law Party.
Because, you know, associations matter when choosing a plumber, but apparently not when choosing a President.
Look on the bright side. The media’s finally starting to vet acquaintances of Barack Obama.
Wurzelbacher registered as an apprentice with the Ohio State Apprenticeship Council in November 2003, according to Dennis Evans, spokesman with the Department of Job and Family Services. Records show his training, which was sponsored by A & W Newell Co. of Toledo, should have been wrapped last year.
“We don’t have a record of completion,” Evans said. “All we know is that he registered in the program and has gone through to the point where we should have record of completion, but we don’t.”
And that’s not the only record that’s missing from Wurzelbacher’s file. He doesn’t have a plumbing license required by the city of Toledo to practice, according to a staffer with the Toledo Division of Building Inspection. Wurzelbacher, who now works for Newell Plumbing & Heating Co., said the owner, Al Newell, has a plumbing license and that “because he works for someone else, he doesn’t need a license.”
But even that’s not true, according to the Toledo Division of Building Inspection. Wurzelbacher can’t legally do plumbing work without a license, regardless of his boss’s certification.
A staff person with the Toledo Division of Building Inspection told On Call this afternoon that her division will contact Wurzelbacher to notify him that he can’t work without a license.
“We’re trying to track him down,” she said.
Also revealed: His boss’s business probably doesn’t bring in anywhere near $250,000 a year so he should stop dreaming about turning it into one that does and what that might mean for his taxes. Which should be easy enough; he’ll probably be out of work soon anyway. Should have known better than to ask a media darling a tough question before your affairs were in order, Joe. Exit question: The law’s the law and it is, after all, his own fault for not having the papers he needs. If, say, an illegal alien had asked McCain a tough question and some righty media source responded by bringing his status to light, would the left feel the same way?
How is it that a hard-working plumber is more demonized by the media than an America-bombing terrorist?
The Obamedia is attempting to set yet another false narrative: The narrative of the McCain “mob.” McCain-Palin rallies are out of control, they wheedle. Conservatives are mad! They’re yelling mean things about Obama and calling him names! It’ scaaaaary!
Paul Krugman is trembling: “Something very ugly is taking shape on the political scene: as McCain’s chances fade, the crowds at his rallies are, by all accounts, increasingly gripped by insane rage…What happens when Obama is elected? It will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years. For sure there will be crazy accusations, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some violence.”
Frank Rich decries “Weimar-like rage” and the “violent escalation of rhetoric.”
Please.
Let’s talk about “insane rage” and “violent escalation.”
This is insane rage — Madonna bashing Sarah Palin and shrieking “I will kick her ass:”
This is insane rage — Sandra Bernhard bashing Sarah Palin and cursing her head off with hate warping her crazed face:
This is violent escalation — Palin-hating artwork designating her an “M.I.L.P.” (Mother I’d Like to Punch). Hat tip: Edge of Forever:
This is insane rage and violent escalation — trendy “ABORT Sarah Palin” stickers:
This is insane rage — the Democratic Underground indulging in name-calling the MSM ignores:
Reader Monica M. sent me a link to the Democratic Underground’s latest thread for commenters to come up with nicknames and posters to slime GOP Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — and then to “spread [them] all over the ‘net.” There are now nearly 100 filthy, hate-filled responses and counting. Among the “nicer” entries: “Cruella,” “Gidget,” “Governor Jesus Camp,” “VPILF,” “Fertilla the Huntress,” “Iditabroad,” and “KILLER PYSCHO FUNDIE BITCH FROM HELL!!”
…Peer with me further into the liberal sinkhole again and behold P.D.S. in full bloom. Note that this site is raising money for Barack Obama and that an ad for their fundraiser appears at the top of the thread. Is Obama going to accept their cash? Know your enemy:
…The Photoshop entries getting thumbs up from DU commenters:
And the sickest attack of them all — mocking Palin for being a nursing mom:
This is insane rage — deranged left-wing photographer Jill Greenberg sabotaging an Atlantic magazine photo shoot of John McCain and defacing the pictures on her website:
This is insane rage and violent escalation — pointing a fake gun at the head of a Sarah Palin likeness sitting next to a cardboard cutout of her daughter in a museum display:
The Obamedia diaper-wetters are gripped with fear over a few over-the-line catcalls at McCain-Palin rallies. Ana Marie Cox is even making things up to advance the narrative.
And speaking of violent escalation, let’s revisit the Unhinged: The Mugshot Collection for the violent escalation last election cycle that the Obamedia ignored:
Gainsville, Fla., Democrat David P. McCally was charged with battery after he allegedly barged into a local GOP office, assaulted a cardboard cutout of President Bush, and punched a local Republican chairman in September 2004. (Credit: Alachua County Jail.)
In March 2004, Carol Lang, a campus secretary at City College in New York, reportedly assaulted a police officer trying to arrest unruly anti-war protesters. Police arrested Lang and charged her with second-degree assault, disorderly conduct, and obstructing governmental administration. (Credit: New York Police Department.)
At the same protest at which Carol Lang was arrested, police arrested students Justin Rodriguez, left, and Nicholas Bergreen. They charged Rodriguez with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. They charged Bergreen with assaulting a police officer. (Credit: New York Police Department.)
Police arrested Corey Robert Cooke of Ellicott City, Md., in September 2004 and charged him with malicious destruction of property after he allegedly used a power tool to cut down a Bush-Cheney sign. (Credit: Howard County Police Department.)
Howard County, Md., police arrested Peter Lizon, left, and Stephanie Louise Lizon in October 2004 and charged them with malicious destruction of property. Mr. Lizon allegedly destroyed Bush-Cheney signs with a bayonet. His wife allegedly acted as the lookout. (Credit: Howard County Police.)
Nashville police arrested Andrew Thurman, left, and Frederick Stevenson in Septmeber 2004 and charged them with theft and unlawful weapons possession after they found guns and 71 Bush-Cheney signs in Thurman’s car. Policy say they stole the signs from Nashville, Tenn., yards because Thurman was angry at President Bush for sending his brother to Iraq. (Credit: Nashville Police Department.)
Nathan Winkler of Tampa, Fla., was arrested and charged with aggravated stalking in March 2005 for allegedly terrorizing a mother who had a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker on her car. Click on the video here to listen to an excerpt of the mother’s frantic call to 911. Winkler reportedly had a handmade sign in his window that read, “Never forget Bush’s illegal oil war murdered thousands in Iraq.” (Credit: Tampa Police Department.)
Florida Democrat Barry Seltzer allegedly tried to run down congresswoman Katherine Harris with his Cadillac as she was campaigning in Sarasota, Fla., in October 2004. See the arrest report here. (Credit: Sarasota Police Department via The Smoking Gun.)
In April 2005, Earlham College suspended Josh Medlin after he threw an ice cream pie at Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. Medlin pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor battery charge two weeks ago. (Credit: Indianapolis Police Department.)
In March 2005, Western Michigan University police arrested Samuel Mesick and charged him with a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace after Mesick threw a cup of salad dressing on Pat Buchanan. Buchanan chose not to press felony assault charges. Click here to see video footage of the attack. (Credit: Kalamazoo Police Department.)
Police cited Bruce Charles of Portland for disorderly conduct after Charles threw a shoe at former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle in February 2005. (Credit: Portland Police Department.)
In April 2005, Indianapolis police arrested Joshua Miner of Danville, Ind., on charges of criminal mischief, a felony. Miner allegedly smashed glass panels at a monument to Medal of Honor recipients. (Credit: Indianapolis Police Department.)
In May 2005, police arrested Ajai Raj and charged him with disorderly conduct after he asked a vulgar question and made lewd hand gestures after a speech by conservative author Ann Coulter at the University of Texas at Austin. Read the arrest report here. (Credit: The Smoking Gun.)
Sowande Ajumoke Omokunde, son of congresswoman Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee), was one of five paid Kerry campaign workers in Milwaukee who allegedly slashed the tires of 20 vans that had been rented by Wisconsin Republicans as part of their Election Day 2004 get-out-the-vote effort. (Credit: Milwaukee County Police.)
Michael Pratt, son of former Milwaukee mayor Marvin Pratt, is another alleged tire-slasher. (Credit: Milwaukee County Police.)
Three other alleged tire-slashers: Lewis Caldwell (top-left), Justin Howell (top-right), and Lavelle Mohammed (bottom). (Credit: Milwaukee County Police.)
In March 2004, Claremont McKenna College visiting professor of psychology Kerri Dunn falsely claimed she discovered anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-woman graffiti spray-painted on her 1992 Honda Civic. Dunn was convicted of two felony counts of attemped insurance fraud and one misdemeanor count of filing a false police report. (Credit: Claremont Police Department.)
Phillip Edgar Smith, left, and William Zachary Wolff were arrested after they threw custard cream pies at conservative author Ann Coulter during her speech at the University of Arizona in October 2004. Read the arrest report here. (Credit: Pima County Jail via The Smoking Gun.)
So, let’s give the tongue-clucking and tut-tutting about “insane rage” and “violent escalation of rhetoric” a rest then, shall we? There’s a bottomless well of it in the backyard of the Paul Krugmans and Frank Riches and Ana Marie Coxes of the world. Look in the mirror.
Authorities have arrested two men after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a 4-foot by 8-foot campaign sign for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in a southeast Portland yard.
Karen Scrutton said she was asleep inside her home at 7956 S.E. 17th Ave. in the Sellwood neighborhood when she saw her sign go up in flames after 1 a.m.
“I screamed upstairs to my husband, ‘Jean! Jean!” she said.
A neighbor heard a crash and chased off one of the suspects. Jean Scrutton said his son-in-law found another suspect not far away.
Not long after, investigators picked up Leslie Brockette Leudtke and Kevin Carl Robinson, both 23. After interviewing them, the pair was charged with four counts each of manufacturing and possession of a destructive device. In addition, Leudtke was charged with a single count of reckless burning.
By Michelle Malkin •& nbsp; October 15, 2008 10:46 AM
My first syndicated column of the week builds on my weekend post challenging the Left’s “McCain Mob” narrative. Michael Barone has related observations here.
Fresh rage: Republican campaign signs torched in Charlottesville.
***
The rage that’s not on your front page by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2008
When a few unruly McCain-Palin supporters show their anger at campaign rallies, it’s national news. It’s an epidemic of “Weimar-like rage” and “violent escalation of rhetoric,” according to New York Times columnist Frank Rich. It’s the “reemergence of the far right as a power in American politics,” according to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. It’s a mass movement of GOP crowds “gripped by insane rage,” according to newly-minted Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman.
Too bad they don’t give out global awards for the Blindest Eyes in Punditocracy. We’ve just hit a trifecta.
Are a few activists on the Right getting out of hand? Probably. Between massive ACORN voter fraud, Bill Ayers’ and Jeremiah Wright’s unrepentant hatred of America, and John McCain’s inability to nail Barack Obama on his longtime alliances with all of the above, conservatives have plenty to shout about these days.
But a couple of random catcallers do not a “mob” make. And there’s an overflowing abundance of electoral rage on the Left that won’t make it onto your newspaper’s front page.
Last month on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a small, brave contingent of McCain supporters marched through the streets with campaign signs. They were met by a menacing horde of New Yorkers who displayed their disapproval with a barrage of jeers and vulgar gestures. (“The number of middle fingers in the ‘progressive” crowd’is directly proportional to the number of PhD degrees in the ten-block radius,” one of the witnesses wryly observed.) A YouTube video of the confrontation now has nearly half a million views (link). But don’t expect to find it on the nightly news. It doesn’t fit the Angry Right narrative.
Neither does the near-riotous reaction of Barack Obama supporters to a McCain/Palin sign in Democrat-dominated Prince George’s County, Maryland. Buried in a back local section, the Washington Post reported this week that “pandemonium” broke loose when an unsuspecting businessman erected a “Country First. McCain/Palin” message on the marquee at his Colony South Hotel & Conference Center. “Operators of neighborhood e-mail group lists cried foul to their memberships. The NAACP logged calls. Community leaders demanded boycotts of the hotel, a common venue for Democratic events,” the little-noticed article reported. A black professor called the sign “a stink bomb in the middle of the living room” of Obama land. The poor hotel manager, Alan Vahabzadeh, surrendered. “I didn’t even realize it was going to be like this.”
Can’t blame him for missing the fiery hint from Portland, Oregon – where two deranged vandals were arrested after throwing a Molotov cocktail at a McCain yard sign in the middle of the night. Nope, didn’t make it into the columns of Rich, Dionne, or Krugman. Doesn’t fit the Angry Right narrative.
Speaking of “violent escalation of rhetoric” you never hear about:
*Obama supporters in Philadelphia sported “Sarah Parah is a [disgusting vulgarism referring to female genitalia]” t-shirts and yelled “Let’s stone her, old school” over the weekend.
*An Internet artist has designated Palin an “M.I.L.P” – “Mother I’d Like to Punch” – and published a drawing of a man’s fist knocking a tooth out of the Alaska governor’s mouth and the glasses off her face.
*“ABORT Palin” grafitti has sprouted on the sidewalks of Seattle and “Abort Sarah Palin” bumper stickers are spreading on Web stores.
*Sarah Palin-bashing Madonna performs before an audience of thousands, screeching and threatening to “kick her a**.”
*Getty Images publishes a photo of a man pointing a fake gun at the head of a cardboard cutout of Palin on display at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition building.
And no one blinks. Not a peep from the Obamedia.
But when Sarah Palin simply spotlights Obama’s longtime relationship with Weather Underground bombing terrorist Bill “We Didn’t Do Enough” Ayers?
“Inciting violence,” frets NBC reporter Ron Allen. “Concerned…f or Senator Obama’s safety,” agonizes ABC reporter Terry Moran. “Beyond the pale,” cries Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. As if the no-holds-barred Obama campaign has ever had a rhetorical pale to stake.
All the world’s a Kabuki stage for the selectively outraged over rage.
Thank God we live in a free country, where you can speak your mind on public issues, without fear that those who disagree will respond by exposing anything you've ever done that you regret or that could embarrass your family.
Oh, wait, never mind. We have to know, according to some, about Joe the Plumber's tax lien, and how he doesn't have a license - which, if the smear artists bothered to check the law, he only needs for commercial work, not residential work.
This is the way our opponents operate now. Destroy anyone who stands in your way. Humiliate them. Make sure that anyone else who ever wants to skeptically question Barack Obama knows that every last bit of their dirty laundry will be aired for all the world to see. Bristol Palin, Trig Palin, — hey, it's all fair game. They've got to make an example of them. Show them that this sort of dangerous speech won't be allowed in the New America.
Racism: 1: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race 2: racial prejudice or discrimination
– Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2008
Yes, America is a racist nation – but not in the way Democrat presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama and his cohorts Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Otis Moss III and James Meeks would have us believe. Many of those whites who will cast votes for Obama on Nov. 4 are suffering from negrophilia, an inordinate affinity for blacks (as opposed to antipathy toward them).
For a few decades now, we've been subjected to the message from the news and entertainment media, liberal politicians and activists that people of color are somehow more noble, benevolent and inherently less corruptible than whites. Of course, this assessment is patent nonsense as well as irrational; there are innumerable examples of blacks (and others counted as minorities in America) engaging in monstrous behavior, particularly in the Third World. Nevertheless, these erroneous beliefs have apparently been adopted by millions of white Americans. They're prepared to elect a dangerous fraud president of the United States for largely one reason: Casting a vote for a black man will make them feel good.
Within the paradigm of the fallacy cited, any questionable, nefarious or otherwise antisocial behavior on the part of blacks is put down to legitimate frustration or dysfunction that can usually be traced to having been oppressed by whites somewhere along the way. If blacks in some African nation are dedicatedly hacking each other to pieces with machetes by the hundreds of thousands or necklacing one another, somehow it's the fault of white people. Completely understandable.
In America, minority activists and politicians seize upon any and every flimsy opportunity to play the race card. Everything from bad attitudes to urban poverty to heinous criminal activity on the part of blacks has been put down to their past treatment. Even in an environment that produces one sibling who's an honor student and another who's a spree killer, there'll be a defense attorney arguing that slavery or segregation prompted the behavior.
As if that's not racism.
Inasmuch as the saga of blacks in America is something of a "Rocky" story, it is easy to see how the uniquely American spirit of justice was exploited by the left to compromise pragmatism and the collective intellect. The inequities suffered by blacks in past years were indeed atrocious; who but the mean-spirited, bigoted or self-loathing individuals of color would criticize or condemn a black person for their resentments or "cultural idiosyncrasies"?
When Rev. Jeremiah Wright's tirades from the pulpit were publicized, I had occasion to hear whites take the position that his attitude was "understandable" ; given what he'd likely endured as a black man coming of age in pre-civil rights movement America. For some reason, it didn't matter that Wright's early life was almost what one might consider privileged, all things considered. No, no, no – he's black; he's suffered; he has the right to be a shmuck.
As if that's not racism. Yet, leave it to uninformed, white liberal Democrats to argue the point with a black man.
Consequently, it stands to reason that much of the unwarranted whimsy generated by and surrounding candidate Obama is a result of this syndrome of negrophilia – which may well have some clinical pathology of which I am not yet aware.
Obama was unquestioningly accepted as packaged – someone who was sincere, forthright and amiable in every way. The fact that he doesn't have the ghetto-jabbering syntax of a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton most assuredly did not hurt him. It simply hasn't occurred to whites (or blacks for that matter) that Obama could even approach being the monster a white man has the potential of being. This has been reinforced by a media propaganda campaign the likes of which this nation has never seen. Indeed, if he becomes president, it will have been the press that picked him.
The questionable associations and activities Obama has and in which he has engaged, that alternative media sources have been citing over the past 18 months, are in the dozens. All of these – including his close alliance with ACORN, an organization that has been found criminally liable for instances of voter fraud for far-left (Democrat) candidates and causes – have been ignored, avoided or denied by the establishment press.
Throughout the campaign, despite his claim that he would not make race an issue and doing so anyway, and his opponent refusing to make race an issue, every criticism of Obama has been met with accusations of racism.
That in itself provides one of the best arguments for cries of "racism" going.
The word of the day is “temperament.” On PBS, last night after the final presidential debate, David Brooks was celebrating Barack Obama’s reassuring temperament. He told Charlie Rose that Barack Obama is like a mountain. When you go to bed–he’s there. You wake up–he’s there. You go to bed the next night–he’s there. Wake up–he’s there. It’s true: Obama does bear a striking characterological resemblance to a shapeless heap of non-living matter.
Moreover, he’s accomplished about as much as a massive hump of rock. I think if you look at his Senate record you’ll find that when a vote is called–he’s there. When another vote is called–he’s there. He is, to pick up on a campaign staple, eminently “present.” Mount Obama.
But how merely existing–without volition, cognition, instinct, or resolve–has come to be thought of as a temperament befitting a president, I’ll never know. After all, Mount Obama really is always present, which makes him an intractable obstruction to progress. You want to withdraw immediately from Iraq? Great, Mount Obama is there. But you want to listen to the advice of commanders on the ground and keep troops in theater? Mount Obama is there, too. You want to end new missile defense programs? Mount Obama is there. But you want to expand missile defense? Mount Obama is there, too. You want to allow partial-birth abortions? Mount Obama is there. Oh, but you want to ban partial birth abortions? Mount Obama is there, too. Somehow, this is called leadership.
No matter whom you are, wherever you turn, you’re met with the glassy smile of Mount Obama. You planted bombs to kill American targets? Let Mount Obama blurb your book. “God damn America,” you say? Mount Obama is seated in your pew. You’re a Communist looking for a successor? Look no farther than Mount Obama. Of course Obama said he’d meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions: His omnipresence is itself the only precondition necessary to address each grievance of any and every party on the planet, regardless of how extreme their worldview. Which actually makes him more like another abundance of non-sentient rock: the moon. No matter how many miles you drive, or how many turns you make, you can’t lose the moon. Obama is always there, glowing at some vast remove, the distance conferring a false perfection upon his form. Hovering above at all times, without friends or enemies, Obama, like the moon, is the subject of great systems of mythology. Like the moon, he’ll control the ocean’s tides and regulate the emotions of the world’s people. The cult around this lunar deity knows that his assent to power is inevitable.
Guy de Maupassant was said to take lunch every day at the Eiffel Tower because it was the only spot in Paris from which he didn’t have to look at the Eiffel Tower. If Maupassant were alive today, his best bet would be to bribe NASA and bring a brown bag up to the Sea of Tranquility.
The “Kill Them” claim spread like wildfire across the MSM as evidence of “insane rage” on the Right. Barack Obama mentioned it during the debate.
Now that the Secret Service has investigated and failed to find a single person to corroborate the reporter’s claim, I’m sure you’ll be seeing this on the front pages and nightly news lead stories in all the media outlets that spread it.
The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled “kill him” when presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s name was mentioned during Tuesday’s Sarah Palin rally are unfounded.
The Scranton Times-Tribune first reported the alleged incident on its Web site Tuesday and then again in its print edition Wednesday. The first story, written by reporter David Singleton, appeared with allegations that while congressional candidate Chris Hackett was addressing the crowd and mentioned Oabama’s name a man in the audience shouted “kill him.”
News organizations including ABC, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly and MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann reported the claim, with most attributing the allegations to the Times-Tribune story.
Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers and not one heard the comment.
“I was baffled,” he said after reading the report in Wednesday’s Times-Tribune.
He said the agency conducted an investigation Wednesday, after seeing the story, and could not find one person to corroborate the allegation other than Singleton.
Slavoski said more than 20 non-security agents were interviewed Wednesday, from news media to ordinary citizens in attendance at the rally for the Republican vice presidential candidate held at the Riverfront Sports Complex. He said Singleton was the only one to say he heard someone yell “kill him.”
“We have yet to find someone to back up the story,” Slavoski said. “We had people all over and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it.”
***
Related from Patterico: Nobody Yelled “Kill Him” About Obama at a McCain or Palin Rally.
The disastrously counter-productive strategy of Obama's supporters
Two campaigns are being waged right now for the presidency of the United States. No, I'm not talking about the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign. I'm talking about the real-world campaign and the meta-campaign.
The real-world campaign involves speeches and proposals and facts and scandals and political positions and news events. These details, however, are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and have become subsumed by the meta-campaign, which consists of perceptions, polls, reactions, analyses and summations. Until very recently, elections were decided by real-world facts -- but not anymore. Facts and events in and of themselves are no longer important; what's important is how everyone reacts to them. And how do we find out the public's mood concerning this or that incident? Why, the media tells us, that's how.
Or so we've been led to believe.
We're all part of the campaign now. Every single one of us. Our opinions, our actions, are bundled together as a group and used as weapons in the race for the White House. When the media reports on what people think, either through public-opinion polling or reportage about anecdotal incidents, it becomes an endless feedback loop, in which the media's representation of most people's purported thoughts is supposed to influence everyone else's thoughts. And then they take another poll to determine how effective the first poll was in influencing public opinion, and the cycle starts all over again. Since everyone now knows that any public expression of their political opinions might be reported by the media, even the most innocent activity becomes a calculated campaign action. Saying how you intend to vote is not simply an expression of how you intend to vote, but rather a component of the public barometer of how the majority intends to vote, which is then used by the media and the blogs to influence everyone else. Nothing is done in all innocence anymore.
It's no longer a matter of dispute that the mainstream media, overall, very strongly leans to the left. Over 90% of journalists classify themselves politically as "liberal" to varying degrees, and innumerable instances of left-wing bias on the part of the media have been pointed out by bloggers over the years. Yes, a small subset of media outlets are identifiably conservative, but they are vastly outnumbered, both in sheer numbers and in influence, by the liberal media. This fact takes on intense importance in an era when the "news" becomes (as it has become) a subjective matter. Nearly any fact or incident can be "spun" to Obama's benefit.
Obama's supporters and his official campaign have taken great advantage of this felicitous informational landscape -- first, that the meta-campaign trumps reality, and second, that the media is cooperative and complicit. For example, after presidential debates, the leading left-wing blogs always coordinate massive online opinion-poll-stuffing campaigns. After the Palin-Biden vice-presidential debate, the overwhelming consensus on conservative and centrist blogs was that Palin had won handily, and that Biden spoke mostly in a soporific monotone while spewing a continuous stream of easily debunked falsehoods. And yet readers of DailyKos, the Huffington Post, Democratic Underground and dozens of other top left-wing blogs swarmed en masse to vote (often repeatedly) in mainstream online polls about the debate, so that afterward, CNN (among many others) could run headlines that said "57% Think Biden Won Debate," basing their conclusion on the results of the online polls. And once enough of these articles get published, then they themselves become "proof" of the debate's supposed outcome, and before long (often just a matter of hours) it becomes a "fact" no longer up for discussion that Biden won the debate. This fact is then referenced by pundits, and slips into supposedly neutral news stories.
A long, but excellent read. See the rest at Zombietime.
By Larry JohnsoncloseAuthor: Larry JohnsonName: Larry Johnson Email: larry_johnson@earthlink.net Site:http://NoQuarterUSA.net" title="http://NoQuarterUSA.net" target="_blank"http://NoQuarterUSA.net About: Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm with expertise combating terrorism and investigating money laundering. Mr. Johnson works with US military commands in scripting terrorism exercises, briefs on terrorist trends, and conducts undercover investigations on counterfeiting, smuggling and money laundering. Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management. Mr. Johnson has analyzed terrorist incidents for a variety of media including the Jim Lehrer News Hour, National Public Radio, ABC's Nightline, NBC's Today Show, the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and the BBC. Mr. Johnson has authored several articles for publications, including Security Management Magazine, the New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. He has lectured on terrorism and aviation security around the world, including the Center for Research and Strategic Studies at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France. He represented the U.S. Government at the July 1996 OSCE Terrorism Conference in Vienna, Austria. From 1989 until October 1993, Larry Johnson served as a Deputy Director in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. He managed crisis response operations for terrorist incidents throughout the world and he helped organize and direct the US Government’s debriefing of US citizens held in Kuwait and Iraq, which provided vital intelligence on Iraqi operations following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Mr. Johnson also participated in the investigation of the terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103. Under Mr. Johnson’s leadership the U.S. airlines and pilots agreed to match the US Government’s two million-dollar reward. From 1985 through September 1989 Mr. Johnson worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. During his distinguished career, he received training in paramilitary operations, worked in the Directorate of Operations, served in the CIA’s Operation’s Center, and established himself as a prolific analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence. In his final year with the CIA he received two Exceptional Performance Awards. Mr. Johnson is a member of the American Society for Industrial Security. He taught at The American University’s School of International Service (1979-1983) while working on a Ph.D. in political science. He has a M.S. degree in Community Development from the University of Missouri (1978), where he also received his B.S. degree in Sociology, graduating Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1976.See Authors Posts (824) on October 14, 2008 at 10:01 PM in Acorn, Barack Obama, Campaign Financing,
We broke the story about the Obama Campaign’s mysterious payment of more than $800,000 to Citizen Services Inc. The payments ostensibly were for “STAGING, SOUND, and LIGHTING.” A reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune, David Brown, agreed to look into the matter and was told by the Obama campaign:
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for services the Democrat’s campaign says it mistakenly misrepresented in federal reports.
An Obama spokesman said Federal Election Commission reports would be amended to show Citizens Services Inc. — a subsidiary of ACORN — worked in “get-out-the-vote&r dquo; projects, instead of activities such as polling, advance work and staging major events as stated in FEC finance reports filed during the primary.
But that is a lie. Citizen Services passed the money to ACORN. I know this because the head of Citizen Services told me so. As I reported previously:
Thanks to the internet I finally tracked him down in Minnesota and gave him a call. Mr. Alabi answered the phone and I introduced myself using my real name. But I did tell a white lie–I said I got his name and number from Bob Shrum at the Democratic National Committee. He hesitated. When I repeated that I got his name and number from the DNC he brightened up and became quite chatty. Using the Obama FEC filing as my guide I told Mr. Alabi that I needed to hire Citizen Services to help my campaign with “Staging, Sound, and Lighting.” Without a moments hesitation Mr. Alabi told me, “we don’t do that.” He went on to identify ACORN as the organization that handles those matters and he told me to contact Marc Seiden (he gave me a cell phone number for Mr. Seiden, which is a District of Columbia cell phone).
He made it clear in the conversation that they did not do the work for the Obama campaign, but that the work was done by ACORN. It is incumbent on the FEC to audit this money and see where it went. Why? We are not dealing with just “one” organization. ACORN has erected an elaborate web of front organizations that allow it to hide its influence and reach. I did a quick search of the internet using the New Orleans address of ACORN. Guess what I found? Almost three hundred organizations connected to ACORN. Well, I would like you to look at the following list of ACORN related organizations that share the same address as ACORN. TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY FOUR names. Got that?
This is a tangled web that defies the ability of any one person or organization to figure out who is working for whom. Carnival workers use three cups on a table to trick the public into guessing where they hid the pea. Here ACORN has 290 plus “cups” to use to hide their financial and organizational shenanigans.
Here are the names. The beauty of the internet is that enterprising lone investigators can go to work without having to organize a full blown government investigation.
Will appoint judges who interpret the law not make it
Yes
No
Served in the US Armed Forces
Yes
No
Amount of time served in the US Senate
22 YEARS
173 DAYS
Will institute a socialized national health care plan
No
Yes
Supports abortion throughout the pregnancy
No
Yes
Would pull troops out of Iraq immediately
No
Yes
Supports gun ownership rights
Yes
No
Supports homosexual marriage
No
Yes
Proposed programs will mean a huge tax increase
No
Yes
Voted against making English the official language
No
Yes
Voted to give Social Security benefits to illegals
No
Yes
CAPITAL GAINS TAX
MCCAIN
0% on home sales up to $500,000 per home (couples). McCain does not propose any change in existing home sales income tax.
OBAMA
Up to a 28% capitol gains tax. (How does this affect you? Any capitol gain, outside of an exemption on the first 250K in profit from an initial home sale, will be taxed at up to 28% rate if Obama gets his way.
DIVIDEND TAX
MCCAIN
15% (no change)
OBAMA
39.6% - (How will this affect you? If you have any money invested in stock market, IRA, mutual funds, college funds, life insurance, retirement accounts, or anything that pays or reinvests dividends, you will now be paying nearly 40% of the money earned on taxes if Obama becomes president. The experts predict that 'Higher tax rates on dividends and capital gains would crash the stock market, yet do absolutely nothing to cut the deficit.')
INCOME TAX
MCCAIN
(no changes)
Single making 30K - tax $4,113 Single making 50K - tax $8,930 Single making 75K - tax $15,180 Married making 60K- tax $8,198 Married making 75K - tax $11,604 Married making 125K - tax $23,938
OBAMA (reversion to pre-Bush tax cuts)
Single making 30K - tax $4,988 Single making 50K - tax $10,588 Single making 75K - tax $17,931 Married making 60K - tax $11,100 Married making 75K - tax $15,300 Married making 125K - tax $29,871 Under Obama, all income taxes will rise!
INHERITANCE TAX
MCCAIN
- 0% (No change, Bush repealed this tax)
OBAMA
Restore the inheritance tax
Many families have lost businesses, farms, ranches, and homes that have been in their families for generations because they could not afford the inheritance tax. Those willing their assets to loved ones will only lose them to these taxes.
NEW TAXES PROPOSED BY OBAMA
Higher gasoline taxes (as if gas weren't high enough already) New taxes on natural resources consumption (heating gas, water, electricity) New taxes on retirement accounts, and last but not least....undoubtedly new taxes to pay for socialized medicine so we can receive the same level of medical care as other third-world countries!!!
You can verify the above at the following web sites:
This year’s election is shaping up to be one of the most controversial in history. Just this week, a federal judge ordered Ohio’s top elections official to verify the identity of newly registered voters by matching them with other government documents. The very next day a 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set aside the federal judge’s order on verifying registrations.
Further igniting the voter fraud/voter registration debate was the news that a national community organizing group is being investigated in at least 14 states and several swing states for massive irregularities. This news would make headlines anyway, but what made it worse was that Barack Obama was a key player in this organization, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, in the past. Obama trained its local leaders, represented the organization in court, and worked to funnel funds to the organization. The Obama campaign also donated $800,000 this year to an ACORN affiliate.
What is ACORN?
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a community-based organization that advocates for low and moderate income families founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke and Gary Delgado. Rathke, one of the most powerful hard-Left activists in America, is a former member of a radical 1960s group, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The Weathermen terrorist group split off from the SDS in 1969. ACORN says its priorities include better housing and wages for the poor, more community development investment from banks and governments, and better public schools.
ACORN is also known for its voter registration efforts.
This year alone ACORN has registered 1,315,037 voters.
Although the organization prides itself for its registration efforts, it also has a long history of scandal. In the state of Missouri in 1986, 12 ACORN members were convicted of voter fraud. But that case was not an isolated incident in the state. In December 2004, in St. Louis, six volunteers pleaded guilty of dozens of election law violations for filling out registration cards with names of dead people and other bogus information. Authorities launched an earlier investigation after noticing that among the new voters was longtime St. Louis alderman Albert “Red” Villa, who died in 1990. The volunteers worked for “Operation Big Vote” — a branch of ACORN — in St. Louis.
On February 10, 2005, Nonaresa Montgomery, a paid worker who ran Operation Big Vote during the run-up to the 2001 mayoral primary, was found guilty of vote fraud. Montgomery hired about 30 workers to do fraudulent voter-registration canvassing. Instead of knocking on doors, the volunteers sat at a St. Louis fast food restaurant and wrote out names and information from an outdated voter list. About 1,500 fraudulent voter registration cards were turned in.
In October 2006, St. Louis election officials discovered at least 1,492 “potentially fraudulent” voter registration cards. They were all turned in by ACORN volunteers.
In November 2006, 20,000 to 35,000 questionable voter registration forms were turned in by ACORN officials in Missouri. Most all of these were from St. Louis and Kansas City areas, where ACORN purportedly sought to help empower the “disenfranchised&rd quo; minorities living there. But the ACORN workers weren’t just told to register new voters. The workers =http://gatewaypundit.blogspot...%2C+st+louis"admitted on camera that they were coached to tell registrants to vote for Democrat Claire McCaskill.
In 2007, in Kansas City, Missouri, four ACORN employees were indicted for fraud. In April of this year eight ACORN employees in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting bogus voter registrations.
In the wake of an embezzlement scandal that rocked the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn, two of its board members are seeking a court order to force it to hand over financial documents.
They also are seeking to sever what they describe as continuing ties between Acorn and its founder, Wade Rathke, who resigned after it became public this summer that his brother had embezzled almost $1 million from the organization eight years ago. They contend that Mr. Rathke continues to direct the staff and expenditures.
“Acorn will suffer irreparable harm if the defendants are not restrained from contact with employees, expending and receiving, destroying or prohibiting the review of accounting and other data necessary to fulfill the fiduciary responsibility of the interim management committee,” the board members, Marcel Reid and Karen Inman, stated in the petition. Both serve on a committee established to lead Acorn.
The suit cites their concerns that money is being spent improperly and that important documents are being destroyed. It was filed on behalf of the entire 51-member board, but Acorn executives and some board members say Ms. Reid and Ms. Inman had no authority to file the suit or to claim to represent the board.
Acorn contends that Ms. Reid and Ms. Inman are trying to engineer a takeover, and on Tuesday, it demanded that the petition be withdrawn.
“We found ourselves after the fact having filed a lawsuit against ourselves,” said the Rev. Gloria Swieringa, a board member who leads the Maryland affiliate. “It was not authorized nor did we know anything about it until this firestorm over it erupted.”
The suit is a sign of the turmoil that has rocked Acorn since the embezzlement by Dale Rathke, Wade Rathke’s brother, was revealed to the board in June.
The embezzlement, which Acorn said involved $948,607.50, was discovered in 2000 but concealed by senior executives until a whistle-blower told a foundation leader about it in May.
Wade Rathke was forced to step down as chief organizer, the top executive position, but he remained the chief organizer of Acorn International, which shares offices in Acorn’s headquarters in New Orleans. The Rathke family pledged to repay Acorn.
“Even though his relationship with Acorn has been terminated,” the petition says of Wade Rathke, “he continues to meet with staff members regarding this” — the embezzlement — “and other governance issues which impeded the ability of the interim management committee to perform its function.”
Bertha Lewis, who was appointed interim chief organizer when Mr. Rathke stepped down, said the lawsuit was unnecessary. But Ms. Lewis echoed concerns about Mr. Rathke’s continued involvement, saying Acorn had asked him to leave its offices.
“Mr. Rathke stubbornly refuses to do that, so he sort of haunts that office, tries to talk to folks doing their work,” she said.
Mr. Rathke said he had no role in managing Acorn. “I was with the organization for 38 years, and there are many people I hired and supervised, and I have great relationships with them,” he said. “I haven’t been involved in supervising them. Are they saying that simply because I breathe, I exist, they have a problem?”
The suit put the extent of Dale Rathke’s embezzlement at “an amount that may exceed one million dollars,” more than the amount disclosed this summer.
James Austin Gray II, the lawyer who filed the petition, said the board had passed two resolutions in the summer authorizing the management committee to hire legal counsel. “The board is just trying to do its fiduciary duty,” Mr. Gray said.
Ms. Reid declined to comment, and Ms. Inman did not respond to messages on her mobile phone.
Coya Mobley, a board member representing Ohio, said that she recalled those resolutions and that in her mind, they gave Ms. Inman and Ms. Reid authority to file the petition for the board.
Acorn executives and some board members, however, said the resolutions did not give permission for a lawsuit. Over the last couple of weeks, Ms. Lewis has worked to get board members to withdraw the petition through a process under Acorn’s bylaws that allows polling by phone. She said 35 members had submitted written forms ordering the petition’s withdrawal, while 12 elected to continue seeking court intervention. Three members could not be reached, and one refused to cast a vote.
“I want answers,” said Ms. Mobley, who first opposed the suit but then voted to continue it. “Why are they still negotiating with Wade Rathke? Why are the people on staff who knew about this embezzlement still on the staff?”
Ms. Lewis said that she understood that some board members were impatient but that the committee and board were working as fast as they could.
“I think the people who filed this petition probably had very good intentions,” she said, “and I lay this at the feet of a lawyer who acted precipitously.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 12, 2008 An article on Wednesday about a lawsuit by two board members of the community-organizing group Acorn who are trying in part to sever the group’s ties with its founder, Wade Rathke, misstated the timing of Mr. Rathke’s becoming chief organizer of Acorn International, an affiliate. He assumed that title five years ago, not this year.
While Barack Obama's connection with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has not gone entirely unreported, it has not been fully explained. Most media background pieces simply note Obama's involvement in a 1995 lawsuit on behalf of ACORN. Obama's own website, as well as most major media, fail to reveal the full depth and extent of his relationship with the organization.
Attempts to hide evidence of Obama's involvement with ACORN have included wiping the web clean of potentially damaging articles that had appeared, and were previously publicly accessible. Unfortunately, those behind the attempted cover-up failed to realize that in today's day and age, nothing disappears forever. There also exists another layer of the web, the hidden web, which is full of information included in proprietary scholarly databases where these very same "missing" articles can be easily uncovered.
Obama's campaign website states:
Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.
Is that really a FACT, or just another lie? Let's take a look at a quote from a 2004 article - Case Study: Chicago- The Barack Obama Campaign - written by Toni Foulkes, a Chicago ACORN Leader, which was published in the journal Social Policy. Did we mention that Social Policy recently pulled this particular article from their website, while leaving links to all other articles up?
"Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).
Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends."
Not only does Foulkes boast of Obama's ACORN leadership training, but also makes it clear that Obama's post-law school organizing of "Project VOTE" in 1992 was undertaken in direct partnership with ACORN. The tie between Project VOTE and ACORN is also something that Obama and others have attempted to disprove in recent weeks as ACORN has come under fire for allegations of voter registration fraud.
As recently as March 2008, the Los Angeles Times also made reference to Barack Obama's involvement with ACORN:
"At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor. But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff." (LA Times, March 2, 2008)
All this information was easily pulled up with minimal time investment. It took less than thirty minutes to find, despite attempts by some to bury the truth. If I could find this with little effort, imagine what could be dug up with a serious, in-depth investigation. Scary, isn't it?
Nevertheless, Barack Obama's campaign website continues to lie and deny the truth about his involvement and association with ACORN. No matter how many times you say it, it does not make it true. The facts do not lie, Senator Obama. It's time to come clean and tell the truth, and it's time for the American people to demand it.
Drew Griffin had better watch out. If he continues reporting on Barack Obama like this, pretty soon the Obama campaign will target him as an extremist and a hate-monger. Griffin tells Campbell Brown on CNN how ACORN commits voter fraud, and then explains how Obama is closely tied to the group:
CAMPBELL BROWN: Now, it is officially nonpartisan. But this group works hard to register low-income voters who tend to vote for Democrats. ACORN’s under fire over allegedly phony voter registration in several states, and Drew Griffin of CNN’s Special Investigations Unit is digging into this for us. You’ll be pretty surprised by what he found.
DREW GRIFFIN: There are 5,000 of them.
RUTH ANN HOAGLAND: These?
GRIFFIN: These.
HOAGLAND: These.
GRIFFIN: Those?
HOAGLAND: And these.
GRIFFIN: They are new voter registration applications turned into by the community organizing group, ACORN, which has launched a massive voter registration drive, and with 5,000 applications in this one county dumped on just before the October 6 deadline; it looked like to Elections Board Administrator Ruth Ann Hoagland like ACORN was extremely successful, until her workers began finding problems.
GRIFFIN: A lot of them?
HOAGLAND: 50 percent. We had close to 5,000 total from ACORN, and so far we have identified about 2,100.
GRIFFIN: So roughly half of them are bad.
HOAGLAND: Correct.
GRIFFIN: Registered to a dead person, registered as a person who lives at a fast food shop.
HOAGLAND: Yes.
GRIFFIN: Or just all of them amazingly in the same hand.
HOAGLAND: Yes. Yes. All the signatures look exactly the same. Everything on the card filled out looks just the same.
GRIFFIN: Ruth Ann. Fraud?
HOAGLAND: We have no idea what the motive behind it is. It’s just overwhelming to us.
GRIFFIN: It’s not that some are bad. Once they started going through them, every one they looked at was bad.
HOAGLAND: Right. We’ve run into a lot of the same – we’ll go through ten cards, and the exact — in the exact same hand, the card is filled out the same, the signature is the same. We’ll make telephone calls, and every phone has been disconnected.
GRIFFIN: Hoagland decided to stop the review all together, work on other apparently legitimate registrations and get back to the other half of what she now calls “the fake pile,” later.
HOAGLAND: It’s frustrating. It’s very frustrating.
GRIFFIN: Here is another ACORN filled out registration form. It’s for Jimmy Johns, 10839 Broadway in Crown Pointe. Jimmy Johns. We decided to track him down. Here he is. Is there anybody here that’s actually named Jimmy Johns? Nobody registered to vote here named Jimmy Johns? This could really — I mean, there has been no fraud yet because people haven’t voted yet, right?
HOAGLAND: Correct. We’ll find out on Election Day.
GRIFFIN: But it certainly sets up a potential.
HOAGLAND: The potential, I suppose, is always there. It’s just that the volume — the volume is just incredible.
GRIFFIN: The elections board is run by both Republicans and Democrats. Regardless of whose party, we’ve got a problem with these ballots. These registrations.
SALLY LASOTA: Both sides, Democrats and Republicans. For us, it’s unfortunate. ACORN, with its intent, perhaps, was good to begin with, but unfortunately went awry somewhere.
GRIFFIN: It is fraud, says the Democrat Director, Sally LaSota.
LASOTA: Well, if you look, it’s the same signature for all three voters. It’s as though the one individual tried — did three separate applications but you can tell the signature—we’ re not handwriting experts, but what’s obvious is obvious.
GRIFFIN: ACORN’s voter registration drives are under investigation or suspicion in several states. Just yesterday, local authorities raided this ACORN office in Las Vegas where ACORN workers allegedly registered members of the Dallas Cowboys football team. Over the last four years, a dozen states investigated complaints of fraudulent registrations filed by ACORN, and complaints of fraud by ACORN have exploded nationwide in just the last few weeks. We tried to contact the ACORN director in Gary, Indiana. But when the phone messages went unanswered, we went to the office. It’s abandoned. ACORN told us that the state director for Indiana ACORN is actually based in this office in Milwaukee. But today, we found it empty, too. ACORN’s attorney in Boston told us allegations his organization has committed fraud is a government attempt to keep the disenfranchised from voting.
ACORN LAWYER BRIAN MOLLER: We believe their purpose is to attack ACORN and suppress votes. We think that by attacking ACORN that they are going to discourage people who have may have registered with ACORN from voting.
GRIFFIN: Brian Moller says ACORN has its own quality control, has fired workers in the past, including workers in Gary. Despite its past, the Obama campaign gave $800,000 to ACORN to help fund its primary registration drive, and ACORN has endorsed Barack Obama for president. The Obama campaign reacted this afternoon, saying, it is “committed to protecting the integrity of the voting process and said it has not worked with ACORN during the general election”.
BROWN: Drew Griffin. Drew, though the campaign, or Obama, rather, has worked with ACORN, though, in the past. Is that accurate?
GRIFFIN: That’s accurate. As an attorney, he represented ACORN in a motor voter court case, which, by the way, Barack Obama won for ACORN. But all afternoon long, the campaign has been calling us, trying to distance themselves from ACORN.
BROWN: All right. Drew Griffin for us, tonight. Drew, as always, thanks.
I’m less surprised to see this on Campbell Brown’s show than on Anderson Cooper’s. I’ve appeared a couple of times with Brown, and she seems interested in hearing both sides of a story. When Cooper heard Griffin’s report on Obama and Ayers, Cooper looked like he’d eaten a bug and attempted to water it down somewhat. Brown not only let Griffin’s reporting stand, she gave him the opening to talk about Obama’s ties to ACORN.
How long before Team Obama sends an e-mail asking followers to start flooding CNN with outrage and demands that Griffin be taken off the air?
The greater threat to our nation's security comes not from Dubai and its pro-Western government, but from Venezuela, where software engineers with links to the leftist, anti-American regime of Hugo Chávez are programming electronic voting machines that will soon power U.S. elections.
Congress spent two weeks overreacting to news that Dubai Ports World would operate several American ports, including Miami's, but a better target for their hysteria would be the acquisition by Smartmatic International of California-based Sequoia Voting Systems, whose machines serve millions of U.S. voters. That Smartmatic -- which has been accused by Venezuela's opposition of helping Chávez rig elections in his favor -- now controls a major U.S. e-voting firm should give pause to anybody who thinks that replacing our antiquated butterfly ballots and hanging chads will restore Americans' faith in our electoral process.
Consider the lack of confidence Venezuelans have in their voting system. Anti-Chávez groups have such little faith in Smartmatic's machines that they refuse to run candidates in elections anymore as reports surface of fraud and irregularities from Chávez's 2004 victory in a recall referendum. Yet somehow Smartmatic International and its Venezuelan owners were able to purchase Sequoia last year without the deal receiving any scrutiny from federal regulators -- including the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), which is tasked with determining whether foreign takeovers pose security risks.
CFIUS generally investigates such transactions only when the parties voluntarily submit themselves to review -- which Smartmatic did not do. But it retains the authority to initiate an investigation when it suspects a takeover compromises national security.
Smartmatic has a brief but controversial history. The company was started in Caracas during the late 1990s by engineers Antonio Mugica and Alfredo Anzola. They worked out of downtown Caracas providing small-scale technology services to Latin American banks. Despite having no election experience, the tiny company rocketed from obscurity in 2004 after it was awarded a $100 million contract by the Chávez-dominated National Electoral Council to replace Venezuela's electronic voting machines for the recall vote.
When the council announced the deal, it disingenuously described Smartmatic as a Florida company, though Smartmatic's main operations were in Caracas and the firm had incorporated only a small office in Boca Raton. It then emerged that Smartmatic's ''partner'' in the deal, Bizta Corp., also directed by Anzola and Mugica, was partly owned by the Venezuelan government through a series of intermediary shell corporations. Venezuela initially denied its investment but eventually sold its stake.
When the vote finally came, exit polls by New York's Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates showed Chávez had been defeated 59 to 41 percent; however, when official tallies were announced, the numbers flipped to 58-42 in favor of Chávez. Venezuela's electoral council briefly posted machine-by-machine tallies on the Internet but removed them as mathematicians from MIT, Harvard and other universities began questioning suspicious patterns in the results.
Flush with cash from its Venezuelan adventures, Smartmatic International incorporated in Delaware last year and purchased Sequoia, announcing the deal as a merger between two U.S. companies.
Smartmatic says the recall vote was clean and that it is independent of the Chávez government. Responding to my inquiries, Smartmatic-Sequoias sent a written statement: ``Sequoia's products consist only of voting devices and systems, all of which must be federally and state tested and certified prior to use in an election. As Sequoia's products do not have military, defense or national security applications, they do not fall within the parameters of the matters governed by CFIUS.''
In fact, Smartmatic International is owned by a Netherlands corporation, which is in turn owned by a Curacao corporation, which is in turn held by a number of Curacao trusts controlled by proxy holders who represent unnamed investors, almost certainly among them Venezuelans Mugica and Anzola and possibly others.
Why Smartmatic has chosen yet again to abuse the corporate form apparently to conceal the nationality and identity of its true owners is a question that should worry anyone who votes using one of its machines. Congress panicked upon hearing that our ports would be run by an American ally, Dubai, but never asked whether America's actual enemies in Venezuela have been able to acquire influence in our electoral process.
Back in the early eighties, in an interview with David Horowitz and Peter Collier, Bill Ayers remembered his reaction upon learning that he would not be prosecuted by the government for his bombing spree as a member of the Weather Underground. “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country,” he exulted. Ayers is now a university professor, but he must have been exulting all over again after reading Saturday’s front-page story in the New York Times.
The article explored the putative relationship between Ayers and Barack Obama during the time they worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a five-year philanthropic venture that, starting in 1995, distributed over $160 million in school-improvement grants to the Windy City’s public schools. Ayers wrote the grant proposal that secured seed money for the schools and ran the implementation arm of the project; Obama became chairman of the board that distributed the grants. Not only did the Times exonerate the Democratic presidential candidate of having anything like a “close” relationship with Ayers—their paths merely “crossed” while working on the Challenge, the paper said—but it also bestowed the honorific of “school reformer” on the ex-bomber. “Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform,” the article maintained. On Meet the Press Sunday morning, Tom Brokaw—who will be moderating tomorrow’s debate between the presidential candidates—picked up this now conventional wisdom and described Ayers as “a school reformer.”
Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”
As I have shown in previous articles in City Journal, Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive. As a leader of this growing “reform” movement, Ayers was recently elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of ed school professors and researchers.
Despite the Times story, American voters still don’t have an accurate picture of the relationship between Obama and Ayers during their work on the Annenberg Challenge. The paper’s account quoted several people who worked on the project as saying that they didn’t think Ayers had any role in selecting Obama for his position as chairman. But we haven’t heard a word about the subject from the two principals. For the first time in his life, Ayers seems to be observing Democratic Party discipline and won’t be talking until after November 4. Meanwhile, in one of the Democratic primary debates, Obama said that Ayers was just “a guy I know in the neighborhood”&mdash ;which certainly qualifies as one of the biggest fibs told by any of the candidates so far.
Is it too much to hope that one of the moderators of the two remaining debates will press Obama for a fuller accounting of his work with Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and also ask Obama what he thinks of Ayers’s views on school reform? If the mainstream media deem it important that voters know which newspapers one of the vice presidential candidates reads, they certainly ought to be demanding more information from a presidential candidate about whom he collaborated with in distributing $160 million to the public schools. How about it, Tom Brokaw?
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is the first national candidate ever to hire ACORN, a controversial non-profit accused of voter fraud across the country, for get out the vote activities.
Obama’s campaign paid $800,000 to a subsidiary of the liberally-leaning non-profit Association of Community Organizers for Reform called Citizens Services Incorporated campaign to increase voter turnout.
This information, however, was not properly disclosed to the Federal Election Commission. The Obama campaign said it hired CSI to do “polling, advance work and staging events” according to reports submitted to the FEC during the Democratic primary.
The FEC said the Obama campaign needed to disclose ACORN was engaging in get out the vote activities last August. At the time the Obama campaign called the mistake a “clerical error.”
To date, ACORN has been accused of voter fraud in 15 states this election cycle.
Obama has close ties to the organization. Before becoming a member of the Illinois State Senate, Obama represented ACORN in a lawsuit to help push for “Motor Voter” laws to make it easier for low-income persons to vote.
Later, as director of the Woods Fund and Chairman of the Board of Chicago Annenberg Challenge Obama helped steer funds to ACORN through various grants.
Obama sought ACORN’s endorsement in the Democratic primary telling ACORN members, “Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”
“Project Vote” is the name ACORN’s voter registration drives are called. Obama worked for Project Vote for a period of roughly seven months in 1992.
ACORN endorsed Obama for president in February 2008.
I’m happy to announce that the mainstream news media are beginning to cover the story of rampant voter fraud perpetrated by liberal organizations such as ACORN. I’ve been covering this story for years as part of my overall coverage of illegal aliens and immigration.
While Barack Obama is scolding AIG and corporate America, he’s served as an attorney for ACORN in the past, and has not once mentioned the federal investigation of that organization.
A recent study released by the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation provides proof that illegal aliens and immigrants with green cards are committing rampant voter fraud in the United States.
Reports of ineligible persons registering to vote have raised concerns about state processes for verifying voter registration lists. States usually base voter eligibility on the voter’s age, US citizenship, mental competence, and felon status.
Although individual states run elections, Congress has authority to affect the administration of the elections. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) had set a deadline for states to have a statewide voter registration list and list verification procedures.
For example, the methods used in seven selected states to verify voter eligibility and ensure accuracy of voter registration lists were varied and include relying on registrant self attestation, return mailings, and checking against lists of felony convictions or deceased individuals. Some states, for instance, failed to do any more than ask on their application forms if the registrant was a US citizen. The applicant will merely check off the “Yes” box, but there is no action taken to verify the authenticity of that answer.
“The voter registration officials simply take the word of the registrant with no follow-up,” said conservative political strategist Michael Baker.
“Some states that require some backup documentation merely ask for a utility bill or a driver’s license—neither of which prove citizenship. In other words, legal or illegal aliens can easily register to vote in local and national elections,” warns Baker.
While federal data sources have the potential to help state election officials identify registrants who may be convicted felons or non-citizens, few states communicate with federal agencies such as the Homeland Security Department’s immigration section.
Many government officials—mostly liberals—claim that illegal aliens voting is not a major problem, conservative activists respond that while the potential number identified may be small, an election can be decided by a few votes. In 2004, the presidential race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush was decided by a few hundred votes in Florida.
“While the news media perpetuated the assertion that Bush and the GOP ‘stole’ the election, it could very well have been illegal aliens voting in Florida that made the outcome so close,” said former NYPD cop, now security firm owner, Sid Francis.
“Bush may have beaten Gore by more votes if illegals were excluded, since immigrants tend to vote for Democrats. Or Gore could have won decisively had there been prior screening before people were allowed into the voting booths,” said Det. Francis.
“There was absolutely no mention in the mainstream media regarding suspected voter fraud by illegal or legal aliens. It was much easier for the agenda-driven newspeople to accuse Republicans of stealing the election,” added Baker.
“Florida is not unique. Thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in some states, and tens if not hundreds of thousands in total may be present on the voter rolls nationwide. These numbers are significant: Local elections are often decided by only a handful of votes, and even national elections have likely been within the margin of the number of non-citizens illegally registered to vote,” said Hans A. von Spakovsky, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation.
“There is no reliable method to determine the number of non-citizens registered or actually voting because most laws to ensure that only citizens vote are ignored, are inadequate, or are systematically undermined by government officials. Those who ignore the implications of non-citizen registration and voting either are willfully blind to the problem or may actually favor this form of illegal voting,” said Spakovsky, an expert on the subject of illegal aliens and immigration law, during an interview on Fox News Channel.
As far as felons, US Attorneys are required to notify state election officials of federal felony convictions, but the information is not always easy for election officials to interpret or complete, according to New Jersey GOP strategist Janice Martin.
“Americans would be shocked to discover that hundreds of thousands of general election voters are illegal aliens, green-card immigrants, and criminals who’ve murdered, raped and robbed US citizens. And guess which political party benefits the most from their votes? The one that’s pushing for amnesty and a bag full of free goodies,” said Martin.
Dr. von Spakovsky believes many government officials and politicians are complicit in the voter fraud problem.
“To keep non-citizens from diluting citizens’ votes, immigration and election officials must cooperate far more effectively than they have to date, and state and federal officials must increase their efforts to enforce the laws against non-citizen voting that are already on the books,” he wrote in his Heritage Foundation study on illegal alien voter fraud. (http://www.heritage.org" title="http://www.heritage.org" target="_blank"http://www.heritage.org)
“While the liberal media and the liberal establishment ignore what is a huge scandal, American voters are having their rights violated. When an illegal aliens or felon or other person prohibited by law to vote, their votes cancels out those of American citizens,” warns Baker.
“Liberals want illegal aliens and felons to vote. They benefit from such rampant fraud.”
ACORN is making headlines again for filing voter registrations for the dead, the underage and some showing fictitious signatures in Indiana. Suggestions of a criminal investigation are coming out for ACORN groups getting the vote out for Obama.
ACORN otherwise known as Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has been in the news in multiple cities across America lately for filing voter registrations for people that were dead, underage and in some cases duplicate filings.
Lake County elections officials have confirmed that a "large portion" of 5,000 registration forms turned in from the ACORN group, have been found to have problems and have been rejected.
The job of the county elections board was to weed out invalid registrations and according to Lake County Republican Chairman John Curley, more invalid forms may have been missed and slipped into the voter rolls. Curley is recommending a criminal investigation take place into the matter.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Curley stated "Fraudulent applications are the workings of ACORN groups operating from Milwaukee and Chicago who are getting out the vote for Obama. I'm Republican, but I want everyone who should vote to vote. But I want a clean election.
An ACORN spokesperson couldn't be reached Wednesday for comment. Telephones to ACORN offices in Gary, Indianapolis, Chicago and Milwaukee were reported to be disconnected.
One of the apparent problems according to Elections Board Director Sally LaSota and a county elections board technologist overseeing voter registration Ruthann Hoagland is that ACORN members took names from the phone book, filled out the forms and forged some signatures.
Curley said one registration form was filled out in the name and address of Jimmy John's, a Crown Point fast-food outlet. Another registration, dated in August, is in the name of a Gary man who died Nov. 16, 2007, according to his death certificate.
Hoagland said large numbers of voter registration forms bore signatures all in the same apparent handwriting style.
Not only are the invalid registration forms an issue at this point, but many people that should be able to legitimately vote, might not be able to because ACORN members "delivered incomplete registrations" and the election staff may not have the time to research and complete the process before the middle-of-the-month deadline.
On September 14, 2008, ACORN was in the news for problems with voter registrations from Michigan with fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications. In that case the problem was referred to as "ACORN submitted applications are numerous applications filed in one name, described as a 'huge number,' and some with names that appear to be made up."
In August of 2008, the problem was again in Milwaukee.
As Wikipedia shows, just as a reference about previous problems over the years, ACORN members have been indicted and convicted.
# In Ohio in 2004, four ACORN employees were indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms.
# In January 2005 two Colorado ACORN workers were sentenced to community service for submitting false voter registrations. ACORN's regional director said, "we find it abhorrent and do everything we can to prevent it from happening."
# On November 1, 2006, four part-time ACORN employees were indicted in Kansas City, Missouri for voter registration fraud. Prosecutors said the indictments are part of a national investigation.] ACORN said in a press release that it is in part responsible in these individuals being caught, has fired them, and has cooperated and publicly supported efforts to look into the validity of the allegations.
# ACORN was investigated in 2006 for submitting false voter registrations in St. Louis, Missouri. 1,492 fraudulent voter registrations were identified.
# In 2007, five Washington state ACORN workers were sentenced to jail time. ACORN agreed to pay King County $25 000 for its investigative costs and acknowledged that the national organization could be subject to criminal prosecution if fraud occurs again.
According to King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg, the misconduct was done "as an easy way to get paid [by ACORN], not as an attempt to influence the outcome of elections."
# In 2008, the Michigan Secretary of State office told the Detroit Free Press that ACORN had been submitting a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications to vote.
The Pittsburgh Tribune recently reported the Barack Obama campaign recently amended their Federal Election Commission report to reflect $800,000 to an offshoot of the liberal ACORN group, called Citizens Services Inc., which is a subsidiary of the ACORN group.
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for services the Democrat's campaign says it mistakenly misrepresented in federal reports.
An Obama spokesman said Federal Election Commission reports would be amended to show Citizens Services Inc. -- a subsidiary of ACORN -- worked in "get-out-the-vote&qu ot; projects, instead of activities such as polling, advance work and staging major events as stated in FEC finance reports filed during the primary.
FEC spokeswoman, Mary Brandenberger, says it is not unusual for campaigns to amend reports regarding large sums of money.
The Pittsburgh Tribune article details much more information about ACORN and Obama's prior associations as an organizer for Project Vote, an ACORN offshoot, and represented ACORN in legal actions, which was reported by various media outlets as well as the Associated Press.
The Earth Times provides the RNC fact sheet about Obama, ACORN and more examples of problems with voters registration in 2008, including locations such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada and Florida.
In the fact sheet it is found the Chief Public Advocate of the Consumers Rights League, James Terry, testified before Congress and stated "ACORN's pattern of fraud can no longer be dismissed as a series of unfortunate events."
With the presidential election less than a month away, some wonder why ACORN is allowed to participate in any way with all the legal problems they have encountered over the years and more specifically, over the last few months.
The secret to selling bad ideas is to make sure they are the only ones available. This is how totalitarian regimes take power. Whether it was Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany or Vladimir Lenin in Communist Russia, the pattern is largely the same – totalitarian dictators come to power by enshrining themselves as cults of personality and then creating political monopolies through often less than delicate campaigns of indoctrination and censorship – especially censorship enshrouded in the intimidating aura of state power. Ironically, these cloven-tongued leaders often rise to dominance by preaching power to those they will dominate, provision to those they will impoverish, and liberty to those they will force into state labor. Whether they claim to be left or right, revolutionary or reactionary, communist or fascist, the result is always the same – tyranny.
The great discomfort for many Americans as they watch the current presidential contest is that the scent of such totalitarianism hangs heavy in the air; the pattern so familiar in European dictatorships seems eerily present in Barak Obama’s presidential campaign. Senator Obama, obviously intelligent and gifted with enviable powers of communication, has for all of his eloquence, done very little in the real world other than campaign for office. His supporters can not tell you what he has done that qualifies him to run the most powerful nation the world has ever known, but they know he was born for the job – they were there at the convention; they heard the speech; they felt the magic; chills ran up their legs, and they cried their eyelashes off as Mr. Obama stood tall between the ivory columns of a Greek temple to accept his party’s nomination for President of the United States.
If there was any remaining question of his revolutionary greatness, scattered around the nation are tri-color campaign posters of Mr. Obama, bearing a striking resemblance to the larger than life representations of Lenin, Marx, and Engels used by soviet propagandists in the glory days of Mother Russia. These communist styled knock-offs featuring Mr. Obama staring nobly – if melodramatically – into the distance and emblazoned with one-word utopian mantras such as “Change,” “Progress,” or “Hope,” were designed by Shepard Fairey whose obsession with communist propaganda overflows in his “OBEY” brand website which brandishes a Cyrillic-styled banner that reads “Propaganda Engineering” and boasts the company motto “Manufacturing Quality Dissent Since 1989.”
The nod to Chomsky notwithstanding, Fairey, like any good propagandist, denies the obvious message of the Obama campaign posters. He claims the art is “patriotic” and prefers to let it speak for itself as it joins his growing portfolio of romanticized communist plagiarisms of such other “patriotic” works as Demitry Moor’s famous 1920 Soviet Red Army recruitment poster Have You Volunteered? , Vladimir Kozlinsky’s 1919 poster Meeting , and the 1968 Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution poster Political Power Comes from the Barrel of a Gun . Least the fascists feel slighted, Fairey also produced an exact copy of the Nazi Gestapo “death’s head” logo which he placed on t-shirts and rebranded as a part of his OBEY clothing line.
Whatever else may be said, Mr. Obama’s personality cult campaign has been an unmitigated success, creating, almost ex nihilo , a “beloved leader” out of a largely inexperienced and unknown man, void of business, executive, and foreign policy credentials. This fact alone is cause for substantial concern, but, unfortunately for the American people, what has been true of the form of the Obama campaign is now materializing in its function as individuals cloaked in the appearance of state authority seek to silence dissent and indoctrinate the masses.
The largest portion of the media has progressed in its leftist agenda so overtly in the current presidential race that we are hardly surprised when television news “anchors” swoon at the very mention of Barak Obama while taking every opportunity to belittle Governor Sara Palin, feigning objectivity and savoring superiority all the while. Such private sector propaganda is so common it is almost passé. What is far more troubling is when individuals holding powerful and intimidating public posts – police officers and prosecutors, individuals who, by the very power of their offices, can strip citizens of their liberty – use their positions to intimidate anyone who dares speak against Mr. Obama. When Missouri prosecutor Bob McCulloch takes to the air waives, placing the public on notice that he is a member of Mr. Obama’s “truth squad” and that he and other Missouri prosecutors and law enforcement officials plan to “respond immediately” to any critical speech concerning Mr. Obama that “might violate Missouri ethics laws,” the message, with all of its implications, is crystal clear – “speak out against our beloved leader and all the fury of the state will fall on you.” Mr. McCulloch has since claimed that he was speaking only in his personal capacity – a strange assertion considering that he has no personal capacity to “respond . . .[to] violat[ions] of Missouri ethics laws.” Perhaps Mr. McCulloch and the other members of Mr. Obama’s political police could have clarified their role by exchanging their very official looking lawyer’s suits for a selection of Fairey’s Gestapo t-shirts.
The shocking willingness of the Obama campaign to begin using state power, or at least the appearance of state power, to censor dissent even before Mr. Obama holds the actual power he seeks is doubly troubling when combined with actions of other individuals who use their taxpayer funded positions of power to indoctrinate “the masses” in favor of Mr. Obama and against anyone who opposes him. Only weeks ago, Janna Barber had the courage to expose what is apparently all too common in public universities – professors who are paid with taxpayer funds, using their positions of considerable power and influence to force feed pro-Obama political dogma to their students. Professor Andrew Hallam of Metropolitan State College of Denver, did for the classroom what Shepard Fairey did for political posters. In true Nazi- Reichsführer -school- meets-Communist-Reeducati on- Camp style, Hallam brought rabid party fanaticism and inexcusable psychological abuse to bear on his class, demanding that his English students write a searing anti-Palin position paper, requiring the Republican students to self-identify, and then allowing if not encouraging the enlightened, open-minded, diverse, accepting, and politically correct Democratic students to verbally berate and abuse the handful of Republicans with language that would have made Stalin blush.
Whether it is Kent Higgins, a Chaplin at the University of Massachusetts, attempting to use official University action to directly build Obama’s workforce by providing college credit for Obama campaigners, or PBS ensuring that an open ardent Obama supporter whose own success as an author is dependent on Obama’s victory, moderates the Vice Presidential debates, or Virginia public school teachers coordinating an “Obama Blue [shirt] Day” campaign to indoctrinate the young children they have so much influence over with the conviction that Barak Obama is every authority figure’s leader of choice ( Obama Jugend ?), or Obama’s throngs of attorneys threatening with litigation broadcasters that air unapproved messages, the actions taken together amount to a “forced coordination” – what the Nazis referred to as Gleichschaltung .
If this is the result of an Obama presidential campaign, one can only shudder to think of the impact of an Obama administration . These are not the ways of a free people. They are the ways of those who do by brute force what they can not do by the force of their ideas. Attempts at tyranny have historically struck a sour note in the collective soul of Americans. There is something written on our hearts that says it is wrong to take property that does not belong to you even if you take it for a “good cause;” it is wrong to kill the innocent even if their existence is inconvenient for you; it is wrong to win a contest by intimidating the judges; and it is the honor of the strong to secure justice for the weak. This may be the most important election in recent American history, and we owe it to ourselves and our children to choose leaders who will not tolerate tyranny much less partake in it.
There's a price to pay for conservative politicians like Sarah Palin who don't swath themselves in pantsuits, wear stylish open-toe shoes and refuse to cut their hair into mannish crops. Apparently part of that price is that, on the very day we should be focusing on Sarah Palin's forthcoming vice presidential debate performance, we learn that porn-peddler Larry Flynt has shot an X-rated adult film starring a Sarah Palin lookalike.
This isn't even the most offensive thing I've heard. Yesterday I read about a Chicago tavern that's hanging up nude Palin paintings. And no, painter Bruce Elliot isn't a fan of her political leanings, he just likes Palin's hot bod. If that's not disturbing enough, Elliot's daughter posed naked as his Palin look-alike muse. (SFW: The link is to a story about the painting, there is no image of the painting itself.
Flynt, Elliot and all the rest of their disgusting male friends hiding in their basements who eat up this filth are sick and sad, but I'm not even going to pretend to act surprised this is happening. It happens to lots of conservative women I know, like Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter and the rest. It happened to me in college when a graduate student photoshopped pornography of me and put it on the internet because of the conservative work I was doing on campus. We know it's par for the course. I would hope that all women would be outraged by this, but people seem to care less when this kind of dirt is directed towards conservative women. I bet this causes less uproar than when the Washington Post's Style section discussed Hillary Clinton's cleavage.
Simply put, conservative women who don't hide their femininity are forced to pay a price. Luckily, women like Palin are willing to pay it with a smile to make it easier for all the young women who will follow in her footsteps later.
Here are more signs Sarah Palin could face an uphill battle with PBS host Gwen Ifill. Professor Sherrilyn Ifill of the University of Maryland Law School, whom Gwen Ifill has lauded as "my brilliant baby cousin," has written that black women are not buying Sarah Palin’s "false claims to feminism" and is portrayed as too perfect: "when women who are privileged present as though they have it all together, it’s offensive to black women." (Photo from Soros.com)
The Community Times, a suburban Maryland newspaper, found Professor Ifill was ardently opposed to the Alaska governor when they did an e-mail interview:
"From the first day, Palin presented herself as shooting a bear in the morning, field dressing it, cooking up the breakfast, diapering the babies, passing legislation in the afternoon, cleaning the house, satisfying her husband, etc., etc., etc. And it's just not true," she wrote in an e-mail interview. "It's hard to be an average working mom, really hard. And when women who are privileged present as though they have it all together, it's offensive to black women."
She said, "black women are not easily confused by false claims to feminism. When women like Palin lay claims to ‘representing' average women, I think that black women have a visceral reaction to it."
Ifill added that Palin "missed her opportunity when she announced Bristol's pregnancy to explicitly talk about how painful it was to her as a mother - instead of making it as though this too was also part of her perfect life.
"Hillary has the sympathy of women because of what she went through with Bill in front of the whole country. Michelle [Obama] takes pains to be self-deprecating and to talk about her concerns and fear about her girls. She insists that she couldn't do what she does without the help of her mother. Most importantly, both champion issues that affect the lives of real, average women - universal health care, equal pay, choice, etc. To do so is a recognition that real working women (not political wives or politicians) need policies that will help them maintain their families. What's the point of Palin's brand of feminism if it doesn't translate into real returns for average women?"
It can be noted that the professor is so passionate an Obama supporter that she also denounced Hillary Clinton as a phony feminist: "When she knocked back a shot and a beer in that bar in Pennsylvania, Mrs. Clinton ended any pretense of running as a feminist." She compared it to Michael Dukakis in a tank, a failed "macho stunt."
In the kitchens of the Associated Press, it's almost as if the wire service asked its chief cook -- er, pollster -- GfK Roper Public Affairs and Media, to do the following:
Whip up a tasty, representative poll after the Republican Convention.
Three weeks later, make the same dish, but this time adjust the mix of ingredients by radically oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans, thereby creating a false illusion of momentum in the campaign of Barack Obama, and of decline in John McCain's.
Hope people don't notice the changes in the recipe.
Of course we don't know if the differences between AP-CfK's Sept. 5-10 and Sept. 27-30 results were created deliberately, but the results sure look suspicious (both polls are available at PDF links found at AP-GfK's home page).
The more recent poll shows Obama with a 7-point lead among likely voters, both with and without leaners; the earlier poll showed McCain with a 5-point lead with leaners, and 4 points without.
Almost all of this 12-point swing (11 points with leaners) is more than likely almost completely due to major differences between the two polls' samples:
Channel 73 on the Dish Network is now The Obama Channel.
Obama's media buying strategy has been marked by a willingness to work the angles and to try to pick up a few votes at the margins. The decision to go to everything from extensive radio buys to odd-hour infomercials reflects the fact that the campaign media buyers spend a lot of time thinking about how much persuasion any given dollar can buy, and given a very cheap format — late night cable channels that need filler, for instance — will settle for a thimblefull of persuasion.
The satellite channel is the latest of these marginal gambits: Three readers from different parts of the country email that Channel 073-00 on the Dish Network is now labeled OBAMA. ("What is up with Sen. Obama having his own channel?" asks a St. Louis reader.) The channel plays his two-minute ad laying out his economic plan on a loop, over and over.
The only explanation: The media buyers think they can reach enough people per dollar to make it worth the odd buy.
The channel's appearance has provoked scorn and alarm on conservative blogs, though, and some discussion on a forum for Satellite TV aficionados, where one user writes that a Dish Network executive e-mailed to reassure the user that it "is paid advertising by the Obama campaign and is not an endorsement of Sen. Obama by DISH Network" and will broadcast through Nov. 4.
"DISH Network Channel 73 is paid advertising by the Obama campaign and is not an endorsement of Senator Obama by DISH Network. DISH Network made the same offer to the McCain campaign, an offer that remains open," Dish Network spokesman Parker McConachie emailed Politico.
UPDATE: Thursday, viewers said, the Obama channel started airing a wider variety of Obama content than just his two-minute ad, including other ads and the video that introduced him at the Democratic National Convention.
Would you want to trust your life savings to a group of people who can't even manage their own budget? Would you trust your investments to a stock broker who has a record of consistent failure in the stock market and squandering the investors' money on his personal interests and himself?
That is exactly what is now happening in our government with this gang of congressional incompetents debating the $700 billion federal bailout of Fanny and Freddie. None of them are economic experts; they're just politicians who have been bankrupting the country and demonstrating their inability to grasp the basics of income versus outgo.
According to the latest Rasmussen polling, only 24% of the American people support this bailout. Why aren't our elected officials listening to the people they are supposed to be representing? I strongly suspect that the consequences of not doing this bailout have been grossly over hyped. But whether the bailout works or not is not nearly as important as the question of taking our country on this giant leap into socialism to fix a temporary problem. The Democrat leadership sees it as a great opportunity for them to advance their socialist cause. Is that really what we want?
How much longer must this go on before the taxpayers say enough is enough and take back control of their money from these incompetents in Washington? The Constitution gives Congress the power to levy enough taxes to pay for the basic functions of government as outlined in Article I, Section 8, and to support the other articles of the document. It does not give them the power to use our money in any way they may see fit.
Even if it was done by the government as a loan, it would be a bad loan and never be paid back. And profits from the resale of the sub-prime loans could pay back only a fraction of the investment of our money. No investor in his right mind would touch this deal.
At least one Senator gets it. On the floor of the Senate on Sept. 23, Sen. Tom Coburn made the following statement:
There isn't a family out there who doesn't have to weekly or monthly make hard choices about how they spend their money. We, unfortunately, continue to make decisions on how we spend your children's money and your grandchildren's money on a parochial or political interest that benefits Members of Congress. That is what has to change.
If there is a lesson in what has happened to us in terms of the loss of confidence in the financial system in this country, all I have to say is Congress earned it. We created it. We expend 100 times more effort trying to create new programs and new ways of spending than we do managing the very Government you send us here to put under control.
I take the Constitution literally. It has a section in it called the enumerated powers. It is article I, section 8. It spells out exactly what the role of Congress is. If you look at how we got into this mess, every example of that goes back to the fact that Congress is violating what the Constitution says is our legitimate role, is doing something that is outside the legitimate role, and we rationalized it for the political benefits for either career politicians or party, one side of the aisle or the other. That is why Congress has a 9-percent approval rating, because we are more interested in us than we are the best interests of the country. And it shows.
This is only a portion of Sen. Coburn's lecture to the Senate on Constitutional responsibility and spending.
The more I hear and read about this bailout, the more I am opposed to it. No, there should be no bailout by the government. There are other ways to deal with it through private investors like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, to name a couple. The mortgage bundles now held by Fanny and Freddie could be broken up and divided into good loans and bad loans. The good loans would be bought up by investors. The bad loans could be foreclosed on, and those houses resold to qualified buyers. There is no need for the government to involve itself in this. But then this government has constantly felt the compulsion to involve itself in everything the private sector does lately, and without any constitutional authority.
Those involved in this debacle, including those sub-prime borrowers who took out mortgages they couldn't afford to pay back, and those who bought risky mortgages, should be made to pay the piper, not us the taxpayers. Everyone involved in crafting the policy that lead to this, and everyone who blocked attempts to reform that policy and profited from it - including Bill Clinton, Fanny Mae CEO Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. Charles Schumer, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid, lobbyists for ACORN, professional campaigner Barack Obama, and other Democrats in Congress who brought this on us, should be held liable and accountable. To be fair, Obama only TOOK money from Fanny and Freddie. He didn’t participate in any viable legislation in the 143 days he actually spent on Capitol Hill.
It is truly mind boggling to see Obama criticizing John McCain for returning to Washington, to do his job for the country, and get involved in the bailout debate - while Obama does nothing but continue his campaign and take every opportunity to get in front of the cameras, pretending to be some sort of spokesman for what is going on in Washington. Is anyone really buying this deception? Why should we listen to this spurious blabbermouth when he hasn’t either the interest or patriotism to involve himself in the process?
Ask yourself what the media and public reaction would be if this were about Barack Obama.
JOE BIDEN: The whole world is waiting, folks. The whole world is waiting. I know almost every one of those major leaders by their first name, not because I'm important, because they were young parliamentarians when I was coming up and we've been hanging around a long time. I'll tell you what, mark my words, within the next, first six months of this administration if we win, you're gonna face a major international challenge, because they are going to want to test him just like they did young John Kennedy. They're going to want to test him, and they are going to find out this guy has got steel in his spine.
DAN RATHER: Well I think the point is well taken, Joe, that certainly if Sarah Palin had said this it would be above the fold in most newspapers today.
ACORN's Hypocritical House Of Cards: How One "Community" Group Helped the Housing Crisis Harm Taxpayers (Consumers Rights League):
