The Obama camp has been threatening television and radio stations to keep them from airing anti-Obama ads. The latest target is the NRA and stations in Pennsylvania.
Earlier this week, the National Rifle Association's Political Victory Fund released a series of radio and television spots to educate gun owners and sportsmen about Barack Obama's longstanding anti-gun record. In response to the NRA-PVF ads, a clearly panicked Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are doing everything they can to hide Obama's real record by mounting a coordinated assault on the First Amendment.
They have gone to desperate and outrageous lengths to try to silence your NRA by bullying media outlets with threats of lawsuits if they run NRA-PVF's ads. The Obama camp is particularly angry with an NRA ad entitled "Hunter" which lays out Obama's record on gun control. See below what Obama does not want you to see:
Other NRA ads include "Way of Life" and another focusing on Joe Biden's record, "Defend Freedom, Defeat Obama."
This week, Obama's campaign general counsel Bob Bauer wrote seeking to censor the ads at stations in Pennsylvania. "Unlike federal candidates, independent political organizations do not have a 'right to command the use of broadcast facilities,'" Bauer writes. "Moreover, you have a duty 'to protect the public from false, misleading or deceptive advertising.'" "This advertising is false, misleading, and deceptive," Bauer continued. "We request that you immediately cease airing this advertising."
The NRA says Obama's camp are sending out these "intimidating cease and desist letters" to cable operators and television stations, threatening their FCC licenses if they run the ads. The NRA charged that "Obama and the DNC have been using strong-arm tactics reminiscent of Chicago machine politics to try and cover up the truth and silence NRA by forcing the stations to assist them in hiding Obama's radical anti-gun record."
And now, Obama and the DNC have opened a new front in their assault on your First Amendment rights by calling on their followers to contact these station managers to demand that the stations not run NRA-PVF's ads.
NRA stands behind the accuracy of these ads, and NRA attorneys have responded to the Obama campaign's despicable and abusive attempt to trample on the First Amendment by sending a thorough rebuttal to station managers. This rebuttal clearly and conclusively refutes the Obama campaign's fallacious claims that the ads are inaccurate. The NRA has set up a web site detailing its position on Obama at www.gunbanobama.com. A copy of the NRA's letter to station, written by its counsel Cleta Mitchell, follows below:
MEMORANDUM
CLIENT-MATTER NUMBER 999100-0130
TO: Station Managers
FROM: Cleta Mitchell, Esq., Counsel to National Rifle Association
DATE: September 25, 2008
RE: Documentation for Advertising by National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund ("NRA-PVF")
This firm serves as counsel to the National Rifle Association ("NRA") and the National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund ("NRA-PVF"), which is the federal political action committee of the NRA and the sponsor of certain advertising purchased and soon-to-be purchased on your station. It has come to my clients' attention that the Obama for President campaign is engaging in an effort to prevent or stop the airing of certain ads by NRA-PVF, falsely alleging that the ads are `inaccurate'. The Obama presidential campaign apparently relies on an article appearing in the Washington Post on September 23, 2008 to support its contention hat the NRA-PVF ads should not be aired.
The Washington Post is hardly an objective news source on any subject related to the issues to which the NRA is dedicated, having spent decades attacking not only the NRA but also fighting against the legislation and policies NRA supports to protect the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, as well as supporting every conceivable government proposal or policy any officeholder or candidate suggests to weaken and disrupt the guarantees of the Second Amendment. It is therefore no surprise that the Washington Post would now attack the NRA for advertisements which truthfully disclose the anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment record of Barack Obama, the candidate supported by the Washington Post.
Attached please find the point-by-point refutation of the Washington Post's article about the NRA-PVF ads regarding Obama's record on the Second Amendment, as well as an article disclosing the bias of the decidedly not neutral "FactChecker" on which the Washington Post article is ostensibly based.
The NRA devotes 100% of its time and resources to protecting the Second Amendment and fighting for government policies and legislation furtherance of the rights of the American people to keep and bear arms.
The legislative and policy record of candidates and officeholders such as Barack Obama are well known and documented by the NRA on an ongoing basis. NRA-PVF's advertising during the 2008 election cycle is based on that extensive research and documentation, which is being furnished to you with this Memorandum.
Accordingly, we respectfully request that your station disregard the shamefully false assertions from the Obama campaign and its attorneys regarding the NRA-PVF ads and that the ads run in accordance with the purchase(s) made by NRA-PVF in the media buy.
Much more on the gun record that Obama wants to hide
Guns have become an important issue for Barack Obama's campaign. Starting around the Pennsylvania primary, Obama and his campaign surrogates began strenuously assuring gun owners that he supports gun ownership, and it appears to be paying off. A poll in August showed that John McCain led Obama among hunters by only 14 percentage points, just about half the 27-point lead that President Bush held over John Kerry in 2004. If McCain had a similar lead, he would be ahead in most polls, particularly in many battleground states.
This past weekend, Joe Biden, campaigning in southwest Virginia, called any notion that Obama wanted to take away people's guns "malarkey." Montana's Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, previously told reporters that Obama "Ain't ever going to take your gun away." Obama regularly makes similar statements -- at least about rifles and shotguns.
Yet, the NRA, which has given the voting records of both Obama and Biden an "F" rating, has a quite different view, and has started a $15 million ad campaign to warn people about what it regards as Obama's and Biden's records. One mailer from the NRA says, "Obama would be the most anti-gun president in American history."
Critical news stories have been run on the NRA's ads in the Washington Post, FactCheck.org, CNN, and many other places. ABC's Jake Tapper and CBS's Brian Montopoli posted stories that merely stated what the NRA ads said.
The Washington Post describes its own Fact Checker report as giving the NRA "spot three out of four Pinocchios for its claims that Obama would take away guns and ammunition used by hunters."
The Dallas Morning News describes FactCheck.org as saying that "NRA ads and mailers that say Obama wants to ban handguns, hunting ammo and use of a gun for home defense are false."
CNN labeled the ads as "Misleading" and claimed that "While Obama has supported some measures to limit gun rights, he has backed nothing on the scale suggested in the ad."
Brooks Jackson, who authored the FactCheck.org piece with D'Angelo Gore, was extremely upset about the NRA ads. Jackson told FOX News: "They are lying. This is what they do. This is how they make their money. Do these people have no shame? They are just making this up. I just wish that they would tell the truth." He said that their ads were "one of the worst examples of lying" that he had "ever seen."
But what are the facts? Were the NRA ads this bad? How accurate are the fact checkers? FactCheck.org, which is regularly relied on by FOX News, had the longest critical discussion of the ads. Here is a review of their most critical comments.
"Ban the Manufacture, Sale and Possession of Handguns" -- FactCheck.org writes that this is "false," because of a 2003 statement from Obama that "a complete ban on handguns is not politically practicable." They discount an earlier 1996 candidate survey where Obama says that he supports such a ban primarily because it was older than the 2003 statement. While they don't mention another statement from 1998 where Obama supported a ban on the sale of all semi-automatic guns (a ban that would encompass the vast majority of guns sold in the U.S.), they presumably also discounted that for the same reason.
But Obama has come out for handgun bans as recently as this past February. ABC News' local Washington, D.C., anchor, Leon Harris, asked Obama: "One other issue that's of great importance here in the district as well is gun control ... but you support the D.C. handgun ban." Obama's simple response: "Right." When Harris said "And you've said that it's constitutional," Obama again says "right" and is clearly seen on tape nodding his head "yes."
A statement to the Chicago Tribune by Obama's campaign the previous November stated that, "Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional." It doesn't help that the Democratic Party National Platform this year supports the Chicago gun ban.
Obama also served on the board of the Joyce Foundation, probably the largest private funder of anti-gun and pro-ban groups and research in the country. In total, the foundation gave $18.6 million to approximately 80 anti-gun efforts while he was on the board. For example, $1.5 million went to the Violence Policy Center, which puts out such claims as "Why America Needs to Ban Handguns." During Obama's time with the foundation, not a single donation was made to any group that supported individuals' rights to own guns.
But there is much more evidence that Obama supported handgun bans. As will be discussed below, there is legislation he supported in the Illinois state senate that would have banned over 90 percent of gun stores in the country and eliminated gun stores in most states.
Brooks Jackson told FOX News that "I believe that [Obama] supported striking down the D.C. gun ban. That is what he said that he believed." In addition, he said that the ad was "clearly discussing a national ban, not local bans. The two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It is just an amazing lie."
Regarding Obama's work with the Joyce Foundation, Jackson said, "You are an academic? You are asking about the Joyce Foundation? What does that have to do with anything? You would have failed the freshman college logic test."
"Barack Obama opposes my right to own a handgun for self-defense" -- FactCheck.org rewrites this slightly to read: "Ban use of Firearms for Home Self-Defense" and labels this statement as "false." Their evaluation of this claim focuses solely on a 2004 vote Obama made in the Illinois state senate. An Associated Press article described the vote this way: "He also opposed letting people use a self-defense argument if charged with violating local handgun bans by using weapons in their homes. The bill was a reaction to a Chicago-area man who, after shooting an intruder, was charged with a handgun violation."
FactCheck.org claims that the vote was merely over creating a "loophole" for letting people violate local gun ban ordinances. Yet, it is hard to look at this vote and the facts in the previous section and not see a pattern that Obama favors rules that ban handguns. He voted against any rules that would weaken the Chicago handgun ban, and if you support a handgun ban, it would seem obvious that you oppose those same people using handguns for self-defense.
"Ban Rifle Ammunition Commonly Used for Hunting and Sport Shooting" -- FactCheck.org acknowledges that Obama voted for a bill that would "expand the definition of armor piercing ammunition," but labels this statement as "false." Their evidence is a statement by the bill's sponsor, Sen. Ted Kennedy, that the bill "is not about hunting."
But here is the problem with Kennedy's claim. The bill banned ammunition that "may be used in a handgun" and can penetrate the "minimum," type 1, level of body armor, which only protects against the lowest-powered handgun cartridges. Any center-fire rifle, including those used for hunting or target practice, can penetrate this "minimum" armor. There are handguns that can fire these rifle rounds, so the bill's language of banning ammunition that "may be used in a handgun" would be met.
In addition, FactCheck.org ignores other information. Obama said in a 2003 questionnaire that he "support[ed] banning the sale of ammunition for assault weapons." The rifles banned under the so-called assault weapons ban used such standard ammunition as .223 and .308 caliber bullets, the same ammunition used commonly in hunting rifles.
When asked about these arguments, Jackson told FOX News, "Have you looked at the legislation? You have to look at the legislative history. This is just an amazing lie put out by them."
"Appoint Judges to the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Judiciary Who Share His Views on the Second Amendment" -- FactCheck.org claims that this statement is "unsupported" because Obama hasn't explicitly stated that he would appoint judges using such a litmus test. Indeed, I can find no record of Obama ever being asked if he would use the Second Amendment as a litmus test, but Obama has been very clear about what types of Justices he would and would not appoint to the Supreme Court.
Obama has said that he "profoundly disagree[s] with [Clarence Thomas'] interpretation of a lot of the Constitution." He has also been critical of Antonin Scalia, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Together these four justices provided four of the five votes to strike down the D.C. gun ban, with Scalia writing the majority opinion.
On the other side, Obama has pointed to Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, and Stephen Breyer as models for the type of people he would appoint to the court. Those justices provided three of the four votes that argued that there was no individual right to own a gun, and Breyer wrote one of the dissenting opinions.
When asked about whether Obama's statements about what judges he would appoint could explain the NRA's concerns, Jackson said that it "doesn't inform [Jackson's] view. . . . He hasn't said that he would appoint people who didn't believe in the Second Amendment."
"Mandate a Government-Issued License to Purchase a Firearm" -- FactCheck.org takes Obama's statement when asked about licensing and registration of gun owners that, "I just don't think we can get that done," as evidence that the NRA's claim is "misleading." FactCheck.org concedes that Obama has clearly supported licensing handguns, but argues that there is no evidence that Obama supported licensing for rifles and shotguns. Yet, it fails to mention the Illinois Firearms Owners Identification (FOID) Card that serves as a license that Illinois residents must have to buy any type of firearm.
While a state senator, Obama clearly supported the licensing system. He voted to make it illegal for anyone to possess a firearm without a FOID card even when they were in direct supervision of someone with the card, and he voted against lowering the age for people to be eligible for a FOID card from 21 to 18. To Obama, these votes clearly indicate that the FOID card was a license to use the gun just as much as one needs a driver's license to drive on public roads.
"Increase Federal Taxes on Guns and Ammunition by 500 Percent" and "Close Down 90 Percent of Gun Shops in America" are classified as "uncertain" because even though Obama has indeed supported these policies in the past, FactCheck.org was unable to get the Obama campaign to state what his current position was on these issues. Yet, it is hard to see how FactCheck.org could even raise questions about the NRA ads on these points since Obama clearly held these positions in the past and has never said that he has changed his mind on them. The very fact that the Obama campaign would not issue any statement disowning these previous positions would seem to imply that Obama still supported them.
"Obama would be the most anti-gun president in American history." -- FactCheck.org ends its analysis by questioning whether this "pretty tall statement" is justified and ends with a quote that Obama says that he has "always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms." Yet, this is the same candidate who months earlier supported a ban on guns as constitutional and who refused join the other 55 Senators who signed the friend of the court brief asking the Supreme Court to strike down the D.C. gun ban. While previous candidates, such as Al Gore, have supported licensing and registration, no presidential nominee for a major party has ever supported such widespread bans on guns and ammunition.
Jackson said that "Obama agrees with the NRA on this issue (that the Second Amendment is an individual right). They should just accept it rather than lying about it." He noted that "Obama had to accept all sorts of abuse for coming out and saying this. It was the brave thing for him to do. He had to endure all sorts of abuse - claims of going back and forth on the issue, that he was vague on the issue."
Obama campaign representative Bill Burton told FOX News that "These ads are just complete crap." When Megyn Kelly asked "Has [Obama] ever supported a ban on handguns? . . . And he never has?" Burton said flatly "no." He added that "All the points in these ads are just flatly false."
The Washington Post analysis only discusses two issues: the Kennedy ammunition ban and the 500 percent ammunition tax. On the Kennedy bill, the Post makes the same mistake as FactCheck.org. Regarding the tax, the Post doesn't deny that Obama held that position, but points out that the legislation Obama supported was in 1999 and that it is not clear what guns would have their ammunition taxed. CNN's discussion appears unwilling to admit that Obama has supported large-scale bans on gun ownership.
Family Told Obama NOT To Wear Soldier Son's Bracelet... Where is Media?
What an insensitive prick!
Barack Obama played the "me too" game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.
Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son's name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.
Radio host Glenn Moberg of the show "Route 51" asked Mr. Jopek, a man who believes in the efforts in Iraq and is not in favor of Obama's positions on the war, what he and his ex-wife think of Obama continually using their son's name on the campaign trail. (h/t D. Keith Howington of www.dehavelle.com)
Jopek began by saying that his ex-wife was taken aback, even upset, that Obama has made the death of her son a campaign issue. Jopek says his wife gave Obama the bracelet because "she just wanted Mr. Obama to know Ryan's name." Jopek went on to say that "she wasn't looking to turn it into a big media event" and "just wanted it to be something between Barack Obama and herself." Apparently, they were all shocked it became such a big deal.
But, he also said that his ex-wife has refused further interviews on the matter and that she wanted Obama to stop wearing the reminder of her son's sacrifice that he keeps turning into a campaign soundbyte.
With the economy struggling, at least some people are urging a pro-growth tax cut. Too bad they live in Stockholm. As a recent headline in Agence France-Presse put it: "Sweden Announces Income Tax Cuts to Boost Jobs." The government is planning to cut business taxes and the personal income and payroll tax.
"The corporate tax is one of the taxes which large companies really study when they plan to set up business somewhere," says Jan Bj”rklund, leader of the country's Liberal Party, in promoting the tax cut plan. The corporate tax reduction will bring the Swedish rate down to 26.3% from 28%, continuing its fall from a high of 57% in 1987. This means that Swedes will soon have a corporate tax rate one-third lower than the U.S. average of 39.5% (the 35% federal rate plus the state average).
Sweden remains a high-tax country overall, with individual rates well above 50% plus pension and payroll obligations. Maria Rannka, president of the Swedish think tank Timbro, has reported that entrepreneurship had become such an alien concept that more than half of Sweden's 50 largest companies were founded before World War I and only two after 1970 -- the period when taxes and social welfare programs proliferated.
Now, however, Sweden is discovering that it must cut taxes to compete with Ireland, Eastern Europe and fast-growing Asia. Three years ago Sweden eliminated its inheritance tax. The U.S. death tax rate is still 45%. John McCain cited Ireland's low rate in his Friday debate with Barack Obama, who continues to insist that U.S. business is undertaxed.
If Mr. Obama wins in November, maybe his first foreign trip should be to Stockholm. He could use the tax tutorial.
Good Grief. So this is the result of an AP "investigation":
Though Sarah Palin depicts herself as a pit bull fighting good-old-boy politics, in her years as mayor she and her friends received special benefits more typical of small-town politis as usual, an Associated Press investigation shows.
When Palin needed to sell her house during her last year as Wasilla mayor, she got the city to sign off on a special zoning exception - and did so without keeping a promise to remove a potential fire hazard.
She gladly accepted gifts from merchants: A free "awesome facial" she raved about in a thank-you note to a spa. The "absolutely gorgeous flowers" she received from a welding supply store. Even fresh salmon to take home.
Not that these things are to be excused out of hand, but Palin bends zoning rules - which I'm sure are stringent and a high stakes matter in Wasilla, Alaska - and gets a free facial. Obama gets a freakin' house with help from a someone indicted for money laundering, wire fraud, extortion and corrupt solicitation; has someone raising money for his campaign with well-publicized ties to organized crime; and the Illinois attorney general is currently looking into how Obama earmarked $100,000 for a former campaign volunteer who never spent the money for its intended purpose - and yet, I don't see too many "investigations" decrying Obama's transparently false claims he practices a "new" kind of politics.
And if that doesn't make you angry enough, you can take a look at this L.A. Times story about Palin's religious views, a heaping pile of factual carnage which might be one of the most obviously biased pieces about her yet - and that's really saying something.
Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
Destruction is the prime aim of Leftists. If they cannot achieve it through revolution, any white-anting from within will do
America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.
Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama's connections to his radical mentors -- Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama's radical connections since the beginning.
Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama's life comprise a who's who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.
But even this doesn't fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis
In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress - with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable? Why?
One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.
I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent - the failure is deliberate. Don't laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.
The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:
"Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)
Newsmax rounds out the picture:
Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation's wealth.
In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of "crisis" they were trying to create:
By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.
No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:
The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.
Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their "rights." According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, "one person was on the welfare rolls... for every two working in the city's private economy."
According to another City Journal article titled "Compassion Gone Mad":
The movement's impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay's first two years; spending doubled... The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.
The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO's Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for "an effort at economic sabotage." He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.
Cloward and Piven looked at this strategy as a gold mine of opportunity. Within the newly organized groups, each offensive would find an ample pool of foot soldier recruits willing to advance its radical agenda at little or no pay, and expand its base of reliable voters, legal or otherwise. The radicals' threatening tactics also would accrue an intimidating reputation, providing a wealth of opportunities for extorting monetary and other concessions from the target organizations. In the meantime, successful offensives would create an ever increasing drag on society. As they gleefully observed:
Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.
The next time you drive through one of the many blighted neighborhoods in our cities, or read of the astronomical crime, drug addiction, and out-of-wedlock birth rates, or consider the failed schools, strapped police and fire resources of every major city, remember Cloward and Piven's thrill that "...the drain on local resources persists indefinitely."
ACORN, the new tip of the Cloward-Piven spear
In 1970, one of George Wiley's proteges, Wade Rathke -- like Bill Ayers, a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- was sent to found the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. While NWRO had made a good start, it alone couldn't accomplish the Cloward-Piven goals. Rathke's group broadened the offensive to include a wide array of low income "rights." Shortly thereafter they changed "Arkansas" to "Association of" and ACORN went nationwide.
Today ACORN is involved in a wide array of activities, including housing, voting rights, illegal immigration and other issues. According to ACORN's website: "ACORN is the nation's largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the country," It is perhaps the largest radical group in the U.S. and has been cited for widespread criminal activity on many fronts.
Voting
On voting rights, ACORN and its voter mobilization subsidiary, Project Vote, have been involved nationwide in efforts to grant felons the vote and lobbied heavily for the Motor Voter Act of 1993, a law allowing people to register at motor vehicle departments, schools, libraries and other public places. That law had been sought by Cloward and Piven since the early1980s and they were present, standing behind President Clinton at the signing ceremony. ACORN's voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy:
1. Register as many Democrat voters as possible, legal or otherwise and help them vote, multiple times if possible.
2. Overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of deceased, random names from the phone book, even contrived names.
3. Make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal identification standards.
In this effort, ACORN sets up registration sites all over the country and has been frequently cited for turning in fraudulent registrations, as well as destroying republican applications. In the 2004-2006 election cycles alone, ACORN was accused of widespread voter fraud in 12 states. It may have swung the election for one state governor.
ACORN's website brags: "Since 2004, ACORN has helped more than 1.7 million low- and moderate-income and minority citizens apply to register to vote." Project vote boasts 4 million. I wonder how many of them are dead? For the 2008 cycle, ACORN and Project Vote have pulled out all the stops. Given their furious nationwide effort, it is not inconceivable that this presidential race could be decided by fraudulent votes alone.
Barack Obama ran ACORN's Project Vote in Chicago and his highly successful voter registration drive was credited with getting the disgraced former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun elected. Newsmax reiterates Cloward and Piven's aspirations for ACORN's voter registration efforts:
By advocating massive, no-holds-barred voter registration campaigns, they [Cloward & Piven] sought a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. that would re-distribute the nation's wealth and lead to a totalitarian socialist state.
Mortgage Crisis
And now we have the mortgage crisis, which has sent a shock wave through Wall Street and panicked world financial markets like no other since the stock market crash of 1929. But this is a problem created in Washington long ago. It originated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA was Carter's answer to a grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, and forced banks to make loans to low income, high risk customers. PhD economist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has called it: "a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks."
Answer: Answer: Republican Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri. His press release:
"St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, and Obama and the leader of his Missouri campaign Senator Claire McCaskill have attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.
"What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.
"This abuse of the law for intimidation insults the most sacred principles and ideals of Jefferson. I can think of nothing more offensive to Jefferson's thinking than using the power of the state to deprive Americans of their civil rights. The only conceivable purpose of Messrs. McCulloch, Obama and the others is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.
"Barack Obama needs to grow up. Leftist blogs and others in the press constantly say false things about me and my family. Usually, we ignore false and scurrilous accusations because the purveyors have no credibility. When necessary, we refute them. Enlisting Missouri law enforcement to intimidate people and kill free debate is reminiscent of the Sedition Acts - not a free society."
Grandiosity, more than anything else, is what characterizes Obama's character and campaign. Grandiosity is also, more than anything else, what characterizes narcissism, and Obama's narcissism has become obvious to many. Tony Blankley refers to Obama's posturing as the "height of hubris." Jeffrey Kuhner writes that Obama "is a self-absorbed narcissist who portrays himself as a political messiah -- the anointed one." David Limbaugh writes of the "unspeakably presumptuous extravaganzas as those [that] feted Mr. Obama at Berlin and Invesco Field."
In reference to Obama's narcissism, Charles Krauthammer asks, "[H]as there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?" Sam Vaknin, Ph.D., author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, writes that "Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist," and offers a detailed explanation.
Obama's entire campaign is nothing more than a demand to be recognized as superior without commensurate accomplishments. For individual instances of the undistinguished senator's grandiosity, please see Barack Obama Audacity Watch.
Two other very reliable witnesses to Obama's narcissism are Oprah Winfrey and her guru, Eckhart Tolle, both themselves pathological narcissists. Delusions of grandeur interpersonally connect Obama, Oprah, and her guru. All three believe they can, even that that they must, change the world for the better, and that means garnering for themselves more and more adulation, what the psychologists call "narcissistic supply."
The public record shows this: First, within the minds of Barack and Michelle Obama resides the grandiose, even megalomaniacal notion that they have the power to make the world as-it-is into the world-as-it-should be. Second, the Obamas look to talk-show host, Oprah Winfrey, as their "global role model" to effect this change. Third, as the Obamas' model for change, Oprah relentlessly promotes the grandiose New Age religion of her guru, Eckhart Tolle.
A closer look at these three narcissists and their widely-ignored interconnections is in order
The Malignant Narcissism of Oprah's Guru
Oprah's guru Eckhart Tolle is a troubled and troubling individual. He claims to have experienced "a reincarnation as a spiritual teacher" through a self-admitted psychotic episode. He is a case study in the development of the mental illness of malignant narcissism. Like the original Narcissus, Tolle is obsessed with the two-dimensional reflection of himself. In his The Power of Now, Tolle writes about what he learns from viewing his own image in a mirror:
"If you accept the image, no matter what it is, if you become friendly toward it, it cannot not become friendly toward you. This is how you change the world."
Here, in a nutshell, Tolle expresses the fundamental delusion and extreme grandiosity of his own malignant narcissism. Tolle actually believes that he has become the greatest living spiritual teacher by overcoming "egoic delusion." But a mirror image is not true, but backwards. Tolle is not the greatest spiritual teacher in the world as he imagines, but one of the least competent. Such an enormous gap between presumption and reality is characteristic of malignant narcissism.
After Tolle made friends with his backwards image, his New Age doctrine began to jell, and as we might expect, it stands in stark contrast to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The God of the Old Testament is a mere projection of the human mind. Jesus is not the Son of God, but rather a "rare" human being. "The unconscious majority of the population" must "awaken" (to Tolle's teaching and greatness) and either "evolve or die." The Scriptures are only valid when interpreted by Tolle himself. That belief of his approaches the very ultimate in grandiose imaginings.
Beyond his backwards reflected image, Oprah's guru relies on something even more disturbing to change the world. It is a spirit or a force Tolle calls the "Source" which he claims resides within himself and Oprah, and within all those others who have learned through his teachings to "dissolve" their egos. That "Source" has told Tolle that the word of the God of the Bible is not reliable, that there is no death, and that he and Oprah both are as God, able to say of themselves "I Am That I Am." These things that the "Source" has told Oprah and Tolle are the exact same things the serpent told Eve in the ancient garden (Genesis 3:1-4, New International Version).
"I Am that I Am" is the Self-authenticating affirmation from God to Moses out of the burning bush (Exodus 3:13-15). In Hebrew, this is YHVH, or Yahweh, the sacred name of God that is "to be remembered throughout all generations" (Exodus 3:15). Tolle's appropriation of this Name to himself is the very ultimate in grandiose imaginings.
Oprah's Malignant Narcissism
Oprah welcomes Tolle's preposterous claims with uncritical glee because they justify the adoration of her own backwards and exalted mirror image on her altar of self-worship. That Oprah is self-obsessed should be obvious. Her image has appeared on every cover of her monthly magazine since it was founded eight years ago. She prays to herself, asking how she can be used "to serve the greater calling that is my life?" She gives thanks for "the life that I have created now." Her giving is always a public production, ultimately about herself and the "good" she is doing. Even when she says she doesn't want to make it about her, it's about her.
Like her guru, Oprah mocks the Judeo-Christian tradition, insisting that "God is a feeling experience, not a believing experience. If God for you is still about a belief, then it's not truly God." Spirituality to Oprah is not God-centered, but self-centered. She says that spirituality "is about paying attention to your life -- always asking, in every moment, `What can I learn from this?'" Oprah is as delusional as her guru, believing that by spreading Tolle's doctrine and creating a global "new kind of tribe" which looks to her and her guru as saviors, she is "putting [her] ego in check." In reality, Oprah is doing nothing more than promoting a how-to book for latent narcissists.
In March of this year, Oprah intensified her efforts to make the world as it is the world as it should be by kicking off her ten-week global Internet online class touting Tolle's book, A New Earth, and its importance in raising everyone's "awareness." The interactive Web cast reached 500,000 people in more than 139 countries. Since that time, according to Oprah's Web site, millions more have downloaded Oprah's and Tolle's teachings, helping "human beings, all over the world, bring about a shift in consciousness."
Barack Obama's Malignant Narcissism
On May 20, two months after Oprah's global Internet kickoff, Time magazine published Michelle Obama's tribute to Oprah as part of its 100 most influential people of 2008. It read in part: "Oprah is a wonderful friend and an incredible force. Her friendship and support have meant so much to Barack and me . . . Using her platform to serve as a global role model, she challenges us [Barack and me] to make the world as it is the world as it should be. And she is always the first to show us how it can be done." What else could Michelle be referring to here but Oprah's most focused project, her global Internet campaign promoting the anti-Christian teachings of her pathologically narcissistic guru?
Three months later, in August, the overlooked imperious theme of Michelle Obama's convention speech looped right back to her Oprah tribute. That theme, entwined with much family fluff, was "the world as it should be." Mrs. Obama used that phrase four times, emphasizing that she and Barack are "committed" to "building the world as it should be." Michelle Obama's own carefully considered words, written in Time magazine, tell us that she and her husband imagine that they are going to effect this change by using Oprah Winfrey as their guide, inspiration, and "global role model."
When Barack speaks of himself as "a fellow citizen of the world," is he visualizing world peace becoming a reality through Oprah's expanding tribe? Don't doubt it. Michelle introduced Oprah in Iowa prior to Oprah's introducing Obama, gushing that the talk-show queen "touches the souls of so many of us" and "empowers us all." Michelle's "us" included Barack. In his Berlin speech, pretentiously entitled, "A World that Stands as One," the Oprah-empowered Barack said that the "walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down." That is exactly what Oprah is all about: promoting the lunacy that Tolle's teaching transcends and unites all religions. Once the Christians, Muslims, and Jews join Oprah's tribe and accept Oprah's guru as their chief prophet, then Presto: world peace!
Like Oprah and her guru, Barack Obama also mocks the Judeo-Christian tradition, claiming to be a "committed Christian" all the while welcoming Oprah's global anti-Christian crusade as a model to follow. (For more on Obama's fake Christianity, see "Obama's Faith, Family and Variable Values Tour" by Jan LaRue").
Let's review the connection between the narcissists: Barack Obama looks to Oprah Winfrey as his "global role model" for change. To effect this worldwide change, Oprah, in turn, relies on the "infallible" teachings of her guru, Eckhart Tolle. Tolle, in turn, looks in the mirror and makes friends with the backwards image of himself, thus enabling him, and others who see themselves in the same backwards way (Obama and Oprah), to "change the world." All three mock the Judeo-Christian tradition. All three are determined to remake the world "as it should be."
This is downright insanity, a malignantly narcissistic folie a trois. Counting Michelle Obama, it is a folie a quatre.
Best-selling author Dr. M. Scott Peck referred to malignant narcissists in his book title as The People of the Lie. Lying is what makes Tolle's, Oprah's, and Obama's narcissism malignant, or evil. True and false, right and wrong, do not have the same meaning to malignant narcissists as they do to sane people. What is true and right to the narcissist is whatever brings adoration and respect to his or her backwards, glorious, and depthless image. What is false and wrong is whatever harms that image.
Narcissus was an actor, as are all who succumb to his malady of self-obsession. Obama, Oprah, and even Tolle, are now star players on the world stage. The more grandiose the narcissist's image, the bigger the lies required to protect it. Oprah, her guru, and Obama all tell the same huge, egregiously reprehensible lie in different words. In a Christian nation, they cannot allow themselves to be seen as anti-Christian. That is why Oprah's website introduces her guru's virulently anti-Christian doctrine by asserting that it "is not for or against any religion." Not against Christianity? If the Scriptures appeared in front of Oprah and Tolle on baked clay tablets, they'd be taking sledgehammers to them. Obama would join right in. Referring to himself as a "committed Christian" is essentially the same huge lie Oprah and Tolle tell.
It is significant that Obama, Oprah, and Tolle all mock the Judeo-Christian tradition, because that tradition carries with it a standard of truth and conduct. According to the Ten Commandments, for example, idol worship and lying are wrong. Tolle, Oprah, and Obama, violate those commandments by worshiping their own images and lying to protect the imagined integrity of those images. Malignant narcissists cannot tolerate a spiritual or religious system of absolute standards. All morality must be self-referential. Thus, it wasn't the truth that led Oprah to endorse Obama but rather what she called "my own truth." Eckhart Tolle is Oprah's guru only because his mentally deranged worldview validates Oprah's "own truth."
In their efforts to remake our planet, Obama, Oprah, and Tolle are not looking toward a world that glorifies God or Christ. They look to be part of the reign of a different savior. According to Oprah, not only does Obama always tell the truth, he also knows how "to be the truth," a straightforward messianic reference. Obama's, Oprah's, and Tolle's "world as it should be" will be one that glorifies the two-dimensional, backwards, grandiose, greedy idol-images of themselves.
Within that morally upside-down world, the walls protecting our republican government and our Judeo-Christian values will crumble -- just as Obama said in Berlin that they must -- and our people will be sacrificed to the false god of malignant narcissism. May the True God, our Creator, forbid such a dreadful future!
Investigative reporters from Chicago's Sun Times continue to examine the record of former Illinois State Senator Barack Obama. A new story emerged there yesterday. In a September 25 article entitled "Obama grant being probed," Sun Times' reporters Chris Fusco and Dave McKinney wrote:
A $100,000 state grant for a botanic garden in Englewood that then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign volunteer is now under investigation by the Illinois attorney general amid new questions, prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports, about whether the money might have been misspent.
The garden was never built. And now state records obtained by the Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.
Smith wrote another $20,000 in grant-related checks to K.D. Contractors, a construction company that his wife, Karen D. Smith, created five months after work on the garden was supposed to have begun, records show. K.D. is no longer in business.
The Sun Times uncovered the story when, on August 12, the office of the state's Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FIA) request for information. At that time, a recently "discovered" 52 pages of information was added to a May FIA request from the Sun Times. The article also notes that:
The relationship between Smith and Obama dates to at least 1997, when Obama wrote a letter that Smith used to help the housing association win city funding for an affordable-housing development near the garden site. Plans called for more than 50 homes; a dozen ultimately were built. Smith also has donated $550 to Obama campaign funds.
This story has not so far appeared in the New York Times.
An Obama ad implies that a Pennsylvania plant sent jobs overseas and says that McCain is to blame. That's wrong.
An Obama-Biden ad ties McCain to the closing of a plant in Pennsylvania. Its assertions are misleading and false:
The ad says McCain "sold ... out" workers whose factory closed. But there was nothing McCain, or anyone could have done. The factory was making parts for televisions that are becoming obsolete. The company in question has called the ad "misleading."
It implies jobs were sent to China by saying that workers were paid to "disassemble the plant and ship the equipment to China" and that McCain "supported tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas." But the only things shipped to China were the parts.
It's misleading to imply that McCain's support for the tax code in question is to blame for companies sending jobs overseas, as we've said before. The Obama-Biden campaign refers to a dynamic of U.S. tax code that allows companies to defer paying corporate income taxes on money they earn overseas and leave overseas. But the relationship to lost jobs is tenuous.
The ad says a Corning manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania closed and "hundreds los(t) their jobs. Then the workers are rehired to disassemble the plant and ship the equipment to China." That's all correct. But then the ad goes astray by saying that "Washington sold them out with the help of people like John McCain."
When the plant closed in 2004, it wasn't politicians or trade practices that "sold them out." Rather, the culprit is that unforgiving foe: new technology. The plant was closed because it made cathode ray tubes, which are used in conventional televisions. But the cathode ray tube is a dying technology, and Corning no longer makes it. Conventional TVs are being displaced by new plasma and LCD televisions as the prices of these products decrease.
Comment from a Right-of-center British observer below. Most media comments seem similar
After the extraordinary political and financial drama of the last week it was always unlikely that Friday night's first presidential debate could possibly produce anything to compete. And so it was. The two candidates, both highly experienced debaters, steeled in an unending series of similar verbal contests in their primary campaigns, battled each other to an inconclusive scoreless draw.
There were no obvious gaffes, no clinching moments, nothing memorable that will play on the TV news for the next few days, nothing in fact that would make the average undecided voter suddenly convinced that one or the other was the obvious winner.
But if an inconclusive result can be said to favour anyone then it was, maybe, just Barack Obama's night. The Democrat was playing on away turf in content terms and that alone probably gave him a small advantage. The planned subject of the debate was foreign policy. This was John McCain's home field advantage - a big opportunity to wrest the campaign back in his direction after a couple of weeks of economic mayhem that seemed to push things decisively in Senator Obama's favour.
But the events of this week dictated a change in plans and almost half the debate was taken up instead by timely discussion of the economic crisis. On that, if only by going through the motions of talking about an issue that polls suggest clearly favours the Democrats, Senator Obama had a distinct advantage.
Senator McCain made no effort to explain his controversial decision this week to suspend his campaign briefly and return to Washington to help out in the Great Bailout Negotiation. That gambit - coupled with the suggestion that he might not attend Friday night's debate, an uncertainty not resolved until about eight hours before the scheduled time - was an attempt to show leadership in the economic crisis. But by not talking about the bailout, and not even endorsing it during the debate (neither, by the way, did Senator Obama) Senator McCain will have left voters a little puzzled.
When the subject turned to foreign policy, Senator McCain had a clear edge. He repeatedly emphasised his experience - at times reeling off a long list of foreign leaders he had met and international crises he had helped resolve (although at one point he did mis-state the name of the president of Pakistan).
Senator McCain's strongest moment in fact was probably his final answer, a stirring defence of his decision to support the surge in Iraq and a cutting denunciation of Senator Obama's opposition to it. In general, Senator McCain surely succeeded in sowing further doubts in the public's mind about the Democratic candidate's readiness for the presidency.
Senator Obama's advisers were quick to point out that the two candidates left contrasting impressions that might have helped the Democrat. Senator McCain's constant emphasis on his experience may have reminded voters of just how long he has been around in Washington. Senator Obama, in contrast, talked up his campaign mantra of change. In an election in which voters have said the desire for change dominates their concerns, that was probably better for Senator Obama.
Against that, Senator McCain's staff were clearly pleased that the Democrat didn't have much success in tying the Republican candidate to the unpopular incumbent President Bush - one of Senator McCain's main sources of weakness they had expected Senator Obama to exploit.
But overall, it was not a debate that was likely to have moved many voters one way or another. We may have to wait until the remaining debates - beginning next week with the vice-presidential contest between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, and continuing with two more presidential debates - to know whether these set-pieces are likely to have much effect on the outcome.
It certainly seems safe to say that nothing that happened on Friday night could really compete with events in Wall Street and Washington in the contest for American voters' attention. And with the crisis over the bank bailout likely to take centre stage again almost immediately, the lasting effect of this debate will be small
Barack Obama Is Lying - Lying - About "Equal Pay" For Women
Senator Obama Sinks to New Low in Desperate Attempt to Deceive Swing Voting Block
Through the years, the Center for Individual Freedom's policy disagreements with Senator John McCain have been legion. From McCain/Feingold, to foreign drug importation, to the decisively successful 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, to amnesty for illegal aliens, we have forcefully challenged Senator McCain on many fronts.
Despite these disagreements, however, it is also important that Americans remain fair and objective during this Presidential campaign. More specifically, we cannot stand idle when Senator McCain or any other public figure is subjected to tasteless and meritless attack. And this is one such occasion. On the flashpoint issue of equal pay for women, Senator Obama is simply lying about Senator McCain's record. Not fudging, not slanting, not merely misinterpreting. Lying.
In a recent television advertisement expressly approved by Obama, he contends that John McCain "opposed a law to guarantee women equal pay for equal work." And at a recent campaign appearance in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Senator Obama said, "I'll continue to stand up for equal pay as President. Senator McCain won't, and that's a real difference in this election."
There's only one problem. Equal pay is already well-established law. Indeed, discrimination in pay or any other term or condition of employment on the basis of sex has been illegal under federal law since Senator Obama was a toddler. And as a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former professor of Constitutional law, Senator Obama is well aware of this fact.
For instance, the 1963 Equal Pay Act (EPA) unambiguously prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of sex. This prohibition applies not only to equal pay for the same job, it bars discrimination in pay even for "substantially equal work." Similarly, Title VII of the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as race, color, religion or national origin. As stated on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC's) official website, this protection extends beyond pay, and includes discrimination: "against any employee or applicant in hiring, termination, promotion, compensation, job training, or any other term, condition, or privilege of employment. Title VII also prohibits employment decisions based on stereotypes and assumptions about abilities, traits, or the performance of individuals on the basis of sex. Title VII prohibits both intentional discrimination and neutral job policies that disproportionately exclude individuals on the basis of sex and that are not job-related."
As noted by the EEOC official statement, Title VII's prohibitions against sex discrimination also extend to sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination. This broad swath of protection puts to rest any assertion that unequal pay is remotely permitted under existing law. As yet another example of already-existing federal law prohibiting sex discrimination, Executive Order 11246 prohibits all federal contractors and subcontractors, as well as federally-assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, from discriminating on the basis of sex. Thus, discrimination in pay on the basis of sex is flatly illegal under a myriad of overlapping federal and state laws. And Obama knows it. But he's apparently unwilling to let that stand in the way of a naked attempt to deceive female voters.
Notably, this comes at a particularly embarrassing time for Senator Obama on this very subject. It has been revealed by LegiStorm.com that his own female staffers earn less than his male staffers. Specifically, according to LegiSorm, Senator Obama's female staffers earn only 83 cents for every dollar that his male staffers earn.
Talk about walking the walk. In contrast, according to LegiStorm, Senator McCain's female staffers earn $1.04 for every dollar that his male staffers make. But Senator Obama has the audacity to accuse the McCain campaign of shameless tactics?
This election is shaping up as a tight, emotionally-charged and bitter one, and female voters constitute a critical electoral block. But that doesn't justify outright dishonesty by any candidate. Hopefully, this campaign will not descend to these depths again.
Post below recycled from Discriminations. See the original for links
Since I've waited a few days to discuss it, by now most of you are probably already familiar with the new AP/Yahoo poll on the role race is likely to play in the election. The gist of it, and the nature of most of the coverage it has received, is nicely captured by the Chicago Sun Times headline on this widely read Associated Press article by Ron Fournier and Trevor Thompson, "Bigoted white Dems could doom Obama's effort." That article's lede:
WASHINGTON -- Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks - many calling them ``lazy,'' ``violent'' or responsible for their own troubles. The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 -- about 2.5 percentage points.
The survey itself can be found here, and a longer version of the Fournier/Thompson AP article containing a sidebar with a graphical representation of some of the survey's highlights appears here. On this sidebar responses to questions about "words that describe blacks" are broken down to reflect the views of all whites, white Democrats, white Republicans, and white independents, although curiously that data is not in what was described as the complete results. Obviously the AP writers had access to data that, for some reaon, was not released. Those responses are fascinating, but they reveal, I believe, a number of flaws, or at least questionable assumptions, that characterize the easy "white bigot" conclusions that many commentators have drawn.
Some examples from the sidebar:
First, interestingly, on all the positive adjectives, white Democrats have a more favorable attitude toward blacks than white Republicans or Independents. For example, about 40% of white Dems regard blacks as "Friendly," compared to about 31% of Republicans and only 25% of Independents. Similarly, about 25% of white Dems regard blacks as "Smart at School," compared to about 20% of white Republicans and Independents. (Unreported is whether this means that 75% of white Dems do not regard blacks as "Smart at School," etc., which I think is the logical implication.)
The negative attitudes, however, or rather attitudes about negative characteristics - Violent, Boastful, Complaining, Lazy - are more interesting, especially since they provide the media paydirt here ("white bigots" may rob election, etc.). About 12% of white Dems, for example, regard blacks as both lazy and irresponsible, compared with about 15% of white Republicans and Independents.
By far the most interesting negative attitude, at least to me, is "Complaining," which all categories of whites regarded as the most negative of all their negative attitudes about blacks. About 22% of white Dems thought this term applied to blacks, compared to about 35% of white Republicans and Independents. This was the largest spread on all of the negatives. I think this "Complaining" button was what Rev. Wright pushed, and Michelle Obama re-enforced with her comments about America being a mean country that had made her proud only recently. I also believe that when whites regard blacks as "complaining," what they are primarily responding to is the demand for special treatment, i.e., for racial preferences.
What makes this poll such a hot commodity right now is not simply the numbers of whites who have some negative attitudes about blacks (the positive attitudes aren't newsworthy), but the pollsters' claim that
[s]tatistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.
I don't know what these "statistical models" are, and I wouldn't know if they were persuasive even if did know what they are. But I do know that some of the poll's underlying assumptions can be questioned. For example, the AP article notes that
[t]he pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush's unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does the fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.
As John Hinderaker notes on PowerLine, however,
[o]thers would say that the question requiring investigation is why John McCain is locked in a close race with Barack Obama, when Obama has no discernible qualifications for the office and (as the survey shows) holds views well to the left of the electorate. Occam's razor would suggest that the fact that 47 percent of respondents describe Obama as "inexperienced" accounts more readily for the tight race than the divinations of "racism" derived from the poll.
Some of the attitude questions in the poll, moreover, do not necessarily support the conclusions that the pollsters and most commentators have drawn from them. As Roger Clegg has observed (in an email to me, which I quote with permission):
what are we to make of this kind of sentence: "One finding: More than a quarter of white Democrats agree that `if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.'"
I don't think that agreeing with that statement makes one a bigot, and I don't see how agreeing with it makes it harder to vote for the particular black guy who's running for president. Is the sentiment in that sentence - that too many African Americans are not availing themselves of the opportunities they now have - very far removed from what Bill Cosby has said? Similarly, associating black with "violent" makes Jesse Jackson a bigot, too, I suppose (recall his famous admission that he was relieved when he found that the teenagers walking behind him are white instead of black).
Recognizing that, in 2008 America, African Americans are, statisically speaking, more likely to be underachievers and violent isn't the same thing as saying that they are hardwired to be so. Sheesh.
If 22% of blacks said whites would be better off if they worked harder, would that make them racist? In any event, Roger's reference to "hardwired" raises the question of just what we (and here, for a change, I include pollsters and commentators) mean by "racist," and ultimately by race itself. Is it necessarily racist, that is, to associate blacks with violence if blacks commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime? It certainly may be, if the violent behavior is thought to be genetic, or if it be thought that all blacks are violent. But is the association itself, in answer to a pollster, necessarily evidence of racism? I don't think so, and, as Roger says, even if it is such an attitude would not necessarily mean the respondent would not vote for Obama.
I should add here that not everything in the poll or in the current reports of it are objectionable. It was conducted with the assistance of Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman, who has written widely and well about race and polling about race. (I do not say that simply because I'm a Stanford grad, nor do I know Sniderman. But see here for some of the works to which I refer.) And the AP article does contain some important cautions and qualifiers, such as the following:
Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren't voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn't vote for any Democrat for president - white, black or brown.
Not all whites are prejudiced. Indeed, more whites say good things about blacks than say bad things, the poll shows. And many whites who see blacks in a negative light are still willing or even eager to vote for Obama....
Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.
In my view, however, it remains odd that the poll would find race a powerful explanation for why so many Democrats, but not Republicans, would vote against Obama.
Finally, returning to the "hardwired" issue and assumptions about the meaning of racism, we are constantly told that race is "socially constructed." I think this is largely true (whatever it means exactly), but I also think this truth has some implications that are rarely recognized. Consider, again, the fact that by far the most negative characteristic attributed to blacks is "Complaining," which is also the negative characteristic that most clearly flows from a position on public policy (demanding racial preferences). As I've pointed out several times, no one thinks of Colin Powell as "complaining" about things. As I pointed out here, first quoting the New Republic's Peter Beinart and then criticizing him:
Despite the pervasive racism of the electorate Beinart remains an optimist, "because even racists can be wooed."
Think about it this way [Beinart writes]: Many of the voters who right now won't vote for Obama because he's black would probably vote for Colin Powell even though he's black. That's because they don't see Powell as a racial redistributionist, a guy who would favor his community at their expense.
What Beinart is really saying here is that Powell is not really black, because he's not a "racial redistributionist." It never seems to occur to Beinart that if voters will vote for black candidate P, who does not support racial redistribution, but will not vote for black candidate O, who does (or who they think does) support racial redistribution, the reason they don't support O in greater numbers is not at all because they're racist and he's black but because they disagree with his position on an issue (actually, probably many issues) that are important to them.
When liberal academics, liberal commentators, liberal journalists, et. al. assert knowingly that race is "socially constructed," what they mean is that race is not a biological fact but an arbitrary invention of, in our case, American society, something imposed on blacks by and for the benefit of whites. But by favoring racial preferences, i.e. "complaining" that the demand for official colorblindness is the new racism, perhaps blacks and white liberals like Beinart contribute more than they realize to the "social construction" of what we mean by race.
Why Obama will lose
It is also my prediction that Obama will lose but I think that the writer below overlooks the fact that a huge proportion of the voters these days have no family or other connection to the traditional America he describes. From memory, about 30% of the voters are black or Hispanic so what do Pilgrim tradtions mean to them? And there are many others who are not of early-American ancestry
- When Benjamin Franklin was dispatched to France as ambassador of the United States in 1776, he won the hearts of the French through his authenticity. Rather than take on an affected and phony continental style, Franklin eschewed the powdered wig of the European gentleman and donned the fur cap of an American frontiersman. Original genius and polymath, Franklin understood that the French would see through any false pretension but respect an authenticity that sprang from an unpretentious and naive love of country.
What a contrast there is between Franklin and Barack Obama. Obama is a Harvard lawyer who is a mile wide and an inch deep. He is only the latest in a long line of shallow elites that consider it stylish and intellectual to despise their own culture and heritage.
Nothing exemplifies Obama's antipathy for American culture better than his statement that Americans "cling to" religion and guns out of frustration or bitterness. We only can suppose that Obama regards religion or firearms as aberrations that need to be eradicated.
Of course, both guns and religion are essential aspects of American culture. The United States was founded by people seeking religious freedom. Does the word "Pilgrim" ring a bell with anyone? Our freedom and the right to self-government were won by farmers with guns.
The American Revolution started when the British marched to Concord with the intention of confiscating colonial arms. Both the right to "keep and bear arms," and the right to "free exercise" of religion are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. We have come a long way when the presidential nominee of a major political party regards the exercise of fundamental rights as a mental aberration.
When Obama refers to "my Muslim faith," the verbal gaffe resonates as a Freudian slip because of Obama's thinly veiled hatred for this country's unique culture and institutions. Obama sat for 20 years in a church where the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr preached "goddamn America." He only resigned from the congregation when it became politically expedient to do so. When earlier this year, Michelle Obama said "for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country," can we conclude that her husband disagrees? Is it not remarkable that Michelle Obama can be so small-minded as to find nothing in the history of the United States that merits her admiration but the personal success of her husband?
What is Barack Obama for? His campaign motto is "change." But even a 6-year-old child understands that "change" can be either good or bad. Lacking specifics, the invocation of "change" as policy is completely empty. As we witness Obama's minions mindlessly endorse the meaningless maxim of "change," it only can call to mind the barnyard animals in George Orwell's "Animal Farm" chanting "four legs good, two legs bad!"
The choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate has been devastating for the Obama campaign precisely because she is everything Obama is not. Palin is not ashamed of her culture or country. She is not embarrassed by being an American, but naively embraces her birthright. Unassisted by affirmative action, Palin has risen to national prominence on the basis of her character, intelligence and natural gifts. In a word, she has guts. This is a woman who is proud of her country, not because it has granted her personal success, but because she respects what America stands for: freedom, opportunity, and individualism.
Obama is a vapid demagogue, a hollow man that despises American culture. He is ill-suited to be president of the United States. As the weeks pass, more Americans will come to this realization and elect McCain/Palin in a landslide.
I've written of Obama's heinous Global Poverty Tax before. Barack Obama is a Marxist, a one-world whore, a poverty pimp on steroids, and he is ready to serve up America for the third world to slice and dice. You know, we often speak of the left's fanaticism with redistributing wealth, but that is so misleading. They simply wish to redistribute poverty. They want America's back broken and Obama and his pathetic "disenfranchised hoards" to feast on our corpse.
Obama and his ilk are vile beyond expressing. May the mortal wounds he wishes to deal this country rebound to him and his entire family one hundred fold. He has to be stopped, and I really don't care how that is accomplished, but this little bastard has to be stopped. Aurora at Midnight Sun offers the details. Details that the freaking legacy media won't discuss and details that Obama will never be forced to explain in interviews.
"Those U.N. protocols would make U.S. law on issues ranging from the 2nd Amendment to energy usage and parental rights all subservient to United Nations whims."
"[T]he legislation, if approved, dedicates 0.7 percent of the U.S. gross national product to foreign aid, which over 13 years. 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.' Congressional sponsors have been careful not to calculate the amount of foreign aid spending that it would require."
And, how would the United States pay for this $845 BILLION commitment? According to Kincaid, who published a report on the legislation; "A global tax will clearly be necessary to force American taxpayers to provide the money." And that $845 BILLION global tax is in addition to our nation's current Foreign Aid programs, which, in 2006, cost American taxpayers about $300 BILLION!
It Gets Worse! Here are some of the additional provisions of the Millennium Development Goal:
--a "currency transfer tax," that is, a tax imposed on companies and individuals who must exchange dollars for foreign currency;
--a "tax on the rental value of land and natural resources";
--a "royalty on worldwide fossil energy projection - oil, natural gas, coal";
--"fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for airplane use of the skies, fees for use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees on foreign exchange transactions, and a tax on the carbon content of fuels."
--a "standing peace force," meaning a standing United Nations army that might, in time, be large enough to force us to bend to its will;
--a "UN arms register of all small arms and light weapons," the beginning of the end of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution;
--the "eradication of poverty" by the "redistribution [of] wealth and land"
How do you suppose the United Nations expects to "redistribute" the land and the wealth? And what country do you think the third-world majority will go after first?
--cancellation of "the debts of developing countries,"
--"a fair distribution of the earth's resources."
--and "political control of the global economy."
In other words, it's a blueprint for a world government, owned and operated by the United Nations. One thing is clear: the Millennium Development Goal is a dagger aimed at the heart of America.
While the Global Poverty Act, as presently championed by its Senate supporters, embraces certain aspects of the Millennium Development Goal, one should wonder if some of our legislators also support land and wealth "redistribution."
The Millennium Development Goal is a dagger aimed at the heart of America. May that dagger find it's way back to Obama and every traitorous politician who has sanctioned this nightmare.
Shortly before John McCain suspended his campaign to help with the Wall Street bailout, his generals declared war on The New York Times. In a conference call this week, McCain senior aide Steven Schmidt bellowed: "Whatever The New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day impugns the McCain campaign, attacks Sen. McCain, attacks Gov. (Sarah) Palin. ... Everything that is read in The New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated by the American people from that perspective." ...
One good test of how the Times has been covering the race is to see who is defending it. Liberal pro-Obama columnist E.J. Dionne protested the McCain attack as an attempt to "intimidate reporters and discredit those who try to give an honest account of the campaign."
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen lamented on a left-leaning media site that if the McCain campaign thinks the Times is a "political action committee working for Obama ... then why does the Times have to treat the McCain crew as a Onormal' campaign organization, rather than a bunch of rogue operators willing to say absolutely anything to gain power and lie to the nation once in office?"
The answer should be obvious: The New York Times doesn't owe fairness to McCain, it owes accuracy to its readers. Fairness to McCain would simply be a happy byproduct of that accuracy.
But the most telling defender of the Times was the Obama campaign itself, which leapt to vouch for the Gray Lady's probing investigative integrity. (Note: this is the same campaign that implored the Justice Department to shut down anti-Obama ads it didn't like and encouraged supporters to harass and shout down journalists - including my National Review colleagues David Fredosso and Stanley Kurtz - who've tried to investigate Obama's record with a gusto not to be found at America's "paper of record.")
According to Politico, Obama spokesman Bill Burton called Schmidt's attack on the Times "laughable." Burton released a list of 42 "probing stories" from the Times. Among these allegedly hard-hitting expos‚s were the following headlines: "In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice," "Charisma and a Search for Self in Obama's Hawaii Childhood" and "In Illinois, Obama Proved Pragmatic and Shrewd." It's amazing the Obama campaign survived such an onslaught.
Meanwhile, the Times ran a scurrilous, unsubstantiated story suggesting McCain had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a lobbyist. Its coverage of Palin has been so heinous, Times readers could be forgiven for thinking the Alaska governor is a transvestite in a Klan robe who speaks in tongues.
The New York Times is clearly rooting for Barack Obama (just as it was rooting for McCain against Bush in 2000). As Kurtz has demonstrated, the Times has soft-pedaled Obama's ties to William Ayers, an unrepentant domestic terrorist whose former outfit, The Weathermen, bombed the Pentagon and other American targets.
Times editorials read like Obama press releases. On McCain's controversial ad criticizing Obama's vote for a sex-ed bill in the Illinois legislature, the Times proclaimed that McCain "flat-out lies" and argued that "at most, kindergarteners were to be taught the dangers of sexual predators." A plain reading of the actual bill shows that the Times is flat-out lying.
Attacking the press serves several purposes, not least of which is that it just feels good. It also galvanizes the base and informs swing voters to be more skeptical of what the press tells them. Of course, such griping can backfire, causing the press to become even more hostile, though it's hard to imagine what that would look like. But a good hard smack on the nose can offer some rewards.
For instance, during the Jeremiah Wright controversy, the Times refused to report that Obama's mentor and pastor had ever said "God damn America," even though that exclamation was central to the firestorm. But the day after the McCain campaign declared war on the Times, the quote appeared on the front page, six months late and in a story about McCain's negative campaigning. Such are the meager spoils of war.
Why does Barack Obama play hide the ball with his personal resume, concealing his extreme leftist ideology and denying his damning associations? Question kind of answers itself, wouldn't you say? Be concerned, very concerned.
Obama hides his liberalism for the same reason every other liberal presidential candidate has: The electorate tilts center-right. This isn't just my gut speaking or some self-serving theory I'm propounding. The Battleground poll -- a well-respected bipartisan affair conducted by the Terrance Group, a Republican polling organization -- and Lake Research Partners, a Democratic organization, tells us 60 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives.
But the specifics are even more telling. Twenty percent consider themselves very conservative, 40 percent somewhat conservative, 2 percent moderate, 27 percent liberal, 9 percent very liberal, and 3 percent don't know or didn't answer. So John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 didn't deny they were the most liberal senators because liberalism has become a dirty word through a clever conservative propaganda campaign. They denied it because liberalism is a minority position in reality, albeit an extraordinarily effective vocal minority.
Obama will only come clean about his liberalism when he thinks he is in safe territory, as he did at the San Francisco fundraiser where he trashed small-town Americans, thinking his words wouldn't reach those he was belittling. Nor is Obama upfront about the liberal nature of his policy proposals, choosing instead to mask their liberalism and even disguise them as conservative.
How else do you explain his whopper that he is recommending a tax cut for 95 percent of Americans when we know that the bottom 50 percent of income earners pay very little income tax at all? His plan calls for giving many of these people tax credits, even though they are paying no tax or are paying a small enough amount that the credit would result in them netting money from the government. As others have pointed out, this is welfare, not a tax cut. "Tax cut" resonates well among center-right voters; "welfare" does not.
On foreign policy, suffice it to say that Obama would never want the center-right electorate to know the extent of his appeasement and retreat-and-defeat orientation, his support for the bankrupting and sovereignty-forfeiting Global Poverty Act or his goal of eliminating U.S. nuclear weapons, as reported by The New York Times.
But where Obama is really playing hide the ball is in his past and present associations. His campaign operatives and the mainstream media have done their best to divert any attention from these relationships by saying it's dirty campaigning to smear him through the acts of others. Well, folks, that's not how ordinary people think. In sizing up someone's character, we often consider with whom they associate. Sue us if you wish -- even start a class action -- but it won't change human nature, which leads us, rationally, to consider this factor.
Endless reports and many books have been written documenting Barack Obama's discipleship in the thug tactics of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." For Obama, community organizing was not an innocuous vehicle for assisting the needy. It was and is a cynically dangerous vehicle for the politics of extortion and intimidation and the usurpation of power by socialists, whose ideology and methods more closely resemble those of Josef Stalin than those of Mother Teresa.
These sources also prove beyond any reasonable doubt Obama's close -- not remote, not casual -- relationship with the nihilistic, America-hating, Pentagon-bombing radical William Ayers. Obama glibly dismisses the very idea that he should be blamed for a passing acquaintanceship with a guy who was bombing the Pentagon "when (Obama) was 8 years old."
Enough with the insults to our intelligence, Mr. Obama. You were not 8 when you launched your state Senate campaign in Ayers' home. You were not 8 when you served in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers was instrumental in establishing. You are not 8 today, though you are still Ayers' close friend, while he remains an America-hating radical, wholly unrepentant about his terrorist activities, other than to say he didn't do enough.
The fact that Obama would be seen in the same room with this guy should disqualify him from presidential aspirations. But he's not just in the same room. In many ways, he's on the same page, as evidenced by his default instinct to apologize for America and to blame America first. But Obama will continue striving to hide the ball on this association and many others, including those with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko.
But beware; if anyone dares to expose those relationships and their sordid details, he will open himself up to malicious and fraudulent charges of racism and other Saul Alinsky thug tactics that make Bill Clinton's politics of personal destruction look like child's play.
Missouri Sheriffs & Top Prosecutors Form Obama "Truth Squads" & Threaten Libel Charges Against Obama Critics
More Hope and Change for Missouri... Note that this is in response to an explicit request from the Obama campaign
St. Louis and Missouri Democrat sheriffs and top prosecutors are planning to go after anyone who makes false statements against Obama during his campaign. This is so one sided I can't even begin to describe how wrong this agenda is. It's one thing if they want to keep the campaign fair for both sides, but they clearly only want to enforce the issue for the Obama Camp. KMOV has a video report on the Obama "Truth Squads".
KMOV aired a story last night, that stated that St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, both Obama supporters, are threatening to bring criminal libel charges against anyone who levels what turns out to be false criticisms of their chosen candidate for President.
St. Louis C of CC Blog has more on the Obama Truth Squads.
Seeds of Corruption: Hey, Obama, Where'd That $100,000 in Garden Money Go?
Hmm. Might it be that The Messiah is corrupt? We report, you decide.
A $100,000 state grant for a botanic garden in Englewood that then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign volunteer is now under investigation by the Illinois attorney general amid new questions, prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports, about whether the money might have been misspent.
The garden was never built. And now state records obtained by the Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.
Smith wrote another $20,000 in grant-related checks to K.D. Contractors, a construction company that his wife, Karen D. Smith, created five months after work on the garden was supposed to have begun, records show. K.D. is no longer in business.
Attorney General Lisa Madigan -- a Democrat who is supporting Obama's presidential bid -- is investigating "whether this charitable organization properly used its charitable assets, including the state funds it received," Cara Smith, Madigan's deputy chief of staff, said Wednesday.
In addition to the 2001 grant that Obama directed to the housing association as a "member initiative," the not-for-profit group got a separate $20,000 state grant in 2006.
Oh, so an Obama Democrat is "investigating" this case. Never mind.
Busted!... Obama-Rezko Buddy Blagojevich Caught In Scandal!
More Hope and Change... Federal agents announced today they have the goods on Illinois Governor Blagojevich.
Federal Agents announced today that they have enough evidence to indict longtime Obama friend and close associate Illinois Governor Blagojevich.
WJBC reported:
Sources tell CBS 2 News Chicago that Federal agents claim to have enough evidence to indict Blagojevich on fraud and conspiracy charges. However, the report says the investigators aren't the ones who make the decision to prosecute. That would be up to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and the Justice Department in Washington.
WBBM reported on a possible Rezko connection:
Prosecutors also mentioned Blagojevich in an indictment as the intended beneficiary of at least one extortion attempt by Blagojevich fundraiser and businessmen Antoin "Tony" Rezko.
Rezko was convicted June 4 on 16 of the 24 counts against him. He awaits sentencing in October on mail and wire fraud, aiding and abetting bribery and money laundering convictions. He still faces two more trials.
The Chicago Sun-Times has reported Rezko could cut his prison time significantly by cooperating in investigations of other public figures.
For some reason the mainstream media is not paying much attention to this story?
If a candidate for high office does a spectacularly poor job in managing his own family's finances, why on earth should we trust him in a national leadership position at a time of acute economic crisis? Senator Joe Biden's recently disclosed tax returns display a consistent pattern of poor judgment and shabby values that ought to disqualify him for the vice presidency or any other post of significant responsibility.
Over the course of ten years (1998 through 2007) the Bidens averaged an adjusted gross income of $245,000 - placing them uncomfortably close to that threshold of $250,000 a year that Senator Obama considers "wealthy" and deserving of sharply increased taxes. In several years during the last decade Biden and his educator wife Jill definitely entered into that privileged territory, reporting income of $319,853 last year (and even more in 2005).
Despite this impressive revenue stream (including a recent six-figure advance for his unreadable-and unread - memoir "Promises to Keep"), Senator Biden has managed to save almost nothing for his own retirement or to benefit his children and grandchildren. In 2007, when announcing his second presidential bid, he reported a total net worth of $100,000 to $150,000, making him the least prosperous member of the U.S. Senate. As the Washington Post sympathetically observed: "Biden has spent virtually his whole life in public service and does not have much else aside from a small array of mutual funds and cash accounts." In June of 2008, he even listed significant liabilities including a loan up to $50,000 against his life insurance policy and line of credit indebtedness of more than $100,000 to the Wilmington Savings Fund Society.
At the time of his selection as Senator Obama's running mate, some of his Biden's die-hard fans took perverse pride in his shaky financial situation. But why should any American feel proud of reaching retirement age (Biden will turn 66 this November) without accumulating notable savings, assets or property? A normal, hard-working middle class wage-earner who put away a few thousand dollars a year in a tax-sheltered IRA or 401K would have achieved several times Biden's net worth through the magic of regular investment and compound interest.
What sort of irresponsible flake averages $245,000 in annual income (plus lavish expense allotments from the U.S. Senate) while spending nearly all his compensation and diverting next to nothing to the family's long-term security? What, exactly, did the Senator do with the literally millions of dollars he earned in recent years? The one possible explanation that's easiest to rule out is the notion that he gave away his wealth to charity. Between 1998 and 2007, his adjusted gross income never dipped below $210,797, but his charitable giving never exceeded $995 (while actually dipping as low as $120 - a paltry $10 per month). In other words, the Bidens' charitable contributions always remained well below three-tenths of one percent of their adjusted gross income - or one-thirtieth of the familiar standard of tithing upheld by many people of faith. Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University, author of "Who Really Cares?", astutely observed: "On average, Biden is not giving more than one tenth as much as the average American household, and that is evidence that he doesn't share charitable values with the average American.
In place of individual initiative or communal responsibility for assisting the less fortunate, Biden strongly prefers to rely on governmental compulsion. The Senator recently told Kate Snow of ABC news that he considered raising taxes a form of patriotism. "It's time to be patriotic," he solemnly intoned. "Time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut." Apparently it wasn't "time to be part of the deal" in previous years, or else he considers givings home, willingly to charity inherently less patriotic than involuntary seizure of income by government
In any event, Biden's refusal to help his neighbors without a federal directive to do so puts him at odds with the instinctive generosity of ordinary Americans, as does his ongoing reliance on Washington bureaucracy to provide for his every need. For thirty six years - since his initial election to the Senate at age 29- Biden's been one of 100 members of the "Most Exclusive Club in the World" with all the privileges and prerogatives associated with that status. Senators receive generous travel allowances, the support of lavish, well-paid staffs to cater to your every need both in the Capitol and on visits home, gold-plated family medical benefits and a stunningly lucrative pension program that most corporate executives would envy. Many United States Senators (and other top officials) look with favor on the ideal of a protective "nanny state" because they cherish its indulgent benefits in their own lives.
For Joe Biden, there's been little impetus to build a personal nest-egg or to plan for his retirement because Uncle Sam has always been there to take care of him. He feels no need to devote resources to private charities because he lives in a Beltway bubble where bureaucrats on the federal payroll can salve all guilty consciences by busying themselves with officious projects of cradle-to-grave "compassion."
Still, Biden's inept handling of his personal finances, and his even more pathetic failure to contribute his resources to communal organizations, demonstrate an appalling lack of judgment and maturity. The records shows his emphatic rejection of the American dream of steady, slow economic advancement by restrained spending and regular saving. Americans who've achieved personal wealth seldom reach their goals through winning the lottery, or making sudden millions with a big, dramatic score. Far more commonly, the "millionaires next door" (to borrow a phrase from an influential bestseller) advance the interests of their families and their country through patience, hard-work, and long term planning.
Joe Biden may see his failure to provide for his own future as a point of connection with the vulnerability of many stressed and over-extended Americans but do we really need a Vice President of the United States to serve as a negative role model or warning example? A legislator (and loser) who fails to consider the long-term horizon in his own affairs represents a conspicuously terrible choice to safe-guard the future for 300 million of his fellow citizens.
Barack Obama's campaign has rejected claims by a leading campaigner for undocumented Irish immigrants that the Democratic presidential candidate is giving a cold shoulder to Irish-American activists and has shown little interest in issues of concern to the community.
Ciaran Staunton, deputy chairman of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, told RTE Radio yesterday that Mr Obama's attitude was in marked contrast to that of Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who addressed an Irish American Forum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, this week. "We've had great access to Senator McCain. Every event we've invited him to over the past two years, both in Washington and in the Bronx, he has shown up to," he said. "I spent half an hour talking with him about the issue and other Irish-American issues and he didn't need notes or staff. He gets the issue. This is in contrast to his opponent. We have as yet been unable to get a hold of Barack Obama to turn up to any campaigns," Mr Staunton said.
Denis McDonough, senior foreign policy adviser to Mr Obama, told The Irish Times yesterday that the campaign has been in touch with the Irish American Forum and he hopes to find a suitable date for Mr Obama to address it. "Senator Obama has long made clear the importance he attaches to peace in Northern Ireland, affirming his support for a special envoy and appointing and consulting with an Irish-American 'dream team' whose members have a far more credible record on Irish issues than John McCain, who opposed President Clinton's efforts to launch the peace process and has sadly backed away from his earlier immigration proposals," Mr McDonough said.
Mr Staunton said that, during a meeting with the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform before this week's forum, Mr McCain had reiterated his interest in resolving the issue of the undocumented and said the number one priority during his first year would be to get immigration reform. Mr Staunton complained that the Obama campaign had originally cast doubt on the future of the role of US special envoy for Northern Ireland, and noted that in Pennsylvania, where the race is tied, 20 per cent of the population claims Irish heritage.
"The Obama campaign originally said they wouldn't reappoint an envoy on the North and we've had great difficulty in reaching out and getting a response out of them and I think the McCain campaign has seen this," Mr Staunton said. "We don't endorse candidates but we certainly thank them and as of now there's certainly only one who's shown an interest." Mr McDonough said that Irish-Americans had a high-profile representative at the heart of the Obama team in the person of vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden. "It should be noted that John McCain paid a visit to Scranton, while Senator Obama chose as his running mate an Irish-American from Scranton."
I must confess I did not like Senator Barack Hussein Obama from the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident - a good package. It is so instinctive for most peole to want to see blacks succeed. It is as if all humanity is carrying a collective guilt for what the ancestors of blacks endured. However, I was put off soon, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling. His posture and his body language were loader than his empty words.
It is surreal to see the level of hysteria in his admirers. This phenomenon is unprecedented in American politics. Women scream and swoon during his speeches. They yell and shout to Obama, "I love you." Never George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt. Martin Luther King Jr. or Ronald Reagan aroused so much raw emotions. Despite their achievements, none of them was raised to the rank of Messiah. The Illinois senator has no history of service to the country. He has done nothing outstanding except giving promises of change and hyping his audience with hope. It's only his words, not his achievements that is causing this much uproar.
When cheering for someone turns into adulation, something is wrong. Eexcessive adulation is indicative of personality cult. The cult of personality is often created when the general population is discontent. A charismatic leader can seize the opportunity and project himself as an agent of change and a revolutionary leader. Often, people, tired of the status quo, do not have the patience to examine the nature of the proposed change. All they want is change. During 1979, when the Iranians were tired of the dictatorial regime of the late Shah, they embraced Khomeini, not because they wanted Islam, but because he promised them change. The word in the street was, "anything is better than the Shah." They found their error when it was too late.
Khomeini promised there would be separation between religion and state. He lied and they did not care to look into his past to see whether he actually meant what he said. Had they done that they would have seen that he always believed in caliphate and the rule of Islam. People gobbled everything he told them uncritically. They wanted to believe and therefore closed their eyes so they don't see what they did not want to see. Eyes welled when he spoke. Masses poured into the streets by the millions, screamed and shouted to greet him. People kissed his pictures. Some saw his portrait reflected on the Moon.
Listening to Obama ... it harkens back to when I was younger and I used to watch Khomeini, how he would excite the crowd and they'd come to their feet and scream and yell.
I was amused to hear a listener calling Fox News Radio's Tom Sullivan Show, (Feb 11) and saying: "Listening to Obama ... it harkens back to when I was younger and I used to watch those deals with Hitler, how he would excite the crowd and they'd come to their feet and scream and yell." ( Videos of Hitler's speeches are available on Youtube. They are worth a look.)
Equating anyone to Hitler by highlighting the similarities between the two is a logical fallacy. This fallacy, known as reductio ad Hitlerum is a variety of both questionable cause and association fallacy. I believe it is wrong to trivialize the holocaust and the horrors of Nazism by comparing our opponents to Hitler.
However, Hitler, prior to coming to power had not killed anyone. He was insane, but few could see that. Far from it, he was seen as a gifted man and hailed as the savior of Germany. He was admired throughout the world. He appealed to the masses of people - the working class and particularly to women, and did not just inspire them, he "elevated" them. Thousands rallied to listen to his passionate speeches. He gave them promises of change and instilled in them hope. They shed tears when he spoke. Women fainted during his speeches. To Germans, he was not a politician, but a demigod, a messiah. They envisioned him as truly a magical figure of majestic wisdom and glory. They worshiped him. They surrendered their wills to him. He restored their national pride. He projected himself as their savior. He ran on the platform of change and hope. Change he delivered all right, but hopes he shattered.
I think it is fair to say that the Illinois senator puts the same passion in his speeches that Hitler used to put in his, and he evokes similar raw emotions in his audience. This much we can agree. Okay, we can also agree that both Hitler and Charlie Chaplin wore square moustaches. So what?
Typical Democrat elitist behavior: Someone else will pay
Barack Obama's Wisconsin Campaign for Change left no change in Waupun last week. The presidential candidate's campaign staff arrived at the Chit Chat Cafe at 324 E. Main St., last Tuesday to hold a round table discussion about Obama and his positions. More than 40 people crowded the family restaurant.
But when it came time to leave, the campaign staff got up and left, refusing to pay the tab for coffee. "When they came the place was full and they started talking," said the waitress Amanda, who didn't want to use her last name. "Then some people said they couldn't hear, and so they stood up and started giving a speech, talking loud enough for everyone to hear. "We didn't even know they were having a meeting here."
Amanda said it started last week when two men came in to eat. "After they ate they asked if we could reserve a table for 10 people for next week. We said sure. We didn't know it was for a meeting. "We didn't know what was going on Tuesday. I didn't know anything about this. They never told us, but they had press releases, and were on the radio, and called people to come."
As the campaign staff started walking out, a startled Amanda stopped them at the door and asked who was going to pay for the coffee. "One man said he only had $10, and another said they had to hurry on to the next meeting in Watertown," Amanda said. About 20 cups of coffee weren't paid for but that small amount didn't concern Chit Chat owner Debbie Vanden Boom.
"It's the principle of the matter. Had they said they were having a meeting and many people would be coming and could the coffee be complimentary, it wouldn't have been a problem," she said. "On top of that, Amanda never even got a tip."
FactCheck.org doesn't think much of the NRA's ads criticizing Obama. They are, sadly, way off base. This is, presumably,one of the reasons why Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National Journal declared he "no longer trust the major newspapers or television networks to provide consistently accurate and fair reporting and analysis of all the charges and countercharges." He's got good reason.
For starters, FactCheck.org takes Obama at his word that he "believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms." Many gun owners are not so willing to give the benefit of the doubt, as Obama spent most of his adult life in a city with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, and, according to every record of the past 20 years, never uttered a word of objection. If a candidate claimed that he strongly opposed legal gambling, and yet lived in Las Vegas for 20 years, voters would be understandably skeptical.
Obama voted against a bill that declared that "in any Illinois municipality where gun registration is required it shall be an "affirmative defense" if the person accused of violating the registration requirement can show that the weapon was used "in an act of self-defense or defense of another ... when on his or her land or in his or her abode or fixed place of business." FactCheck says, "Letting the owner of an unregistered firearm escape the penalty for failing to register is one thing, but it's another thing entirely to make it a crime to use any firearm - registered or not - in self-defense."
No, that's precisely it - local law had already made it illegal for Hale DeMar to own and use the handgun that he used to protect himself from a burglar. State lawmakers sought to change that; Obama opposed them. If you see that vote as supporting "a right to own a handgun in self-defense", then you can see any position in any vote.
FactCheck is particularly sloppy by taking Kennedy at his word that an amendment offered in 2005 that would ban "armor piercing" bullets, but was not meant to ban hunting ammunition. As Dave Kopel laid out in detail, the amendment changed an existing ban on "armor piercing bullets" measured by the content of the bullet to a penetration standard.
Instead of a penetration standard (which would ban most rifle ammunition), a content standard was adopted. The sale or import of handgun ammunition with a significant amount of steel, titanium, or other metal core was outlawed. The Kennedy amendment refers to rifle ammunition that has more penetrating capability than "standard" ammunition of the same caliber. In other words, a bureaucrat could decide that "standard" ammunition in a certain caliber has a certain weight and velocity, and any round with a greater weight or velocity could be administratively prohibited.
Existing law is designed to ban armor-piercing bullets while ensuring that hunting ammunition was kept legal; Kennedy's amendment, despite his claims of what he meant to do, would have opened the door, and perhaps even required banning most rifle ammunition.
On the third charge, that Obama supports a ban on handguns, FactCheck writes:
The NRA bases its claim on a disputed 1996 questionnaire that Obama's Illinois state Senate campaign filled out for the nonprofit voting group, Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization. On it, somebody filled in the word "yes" in response to the question, "Do you support legislation to ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns?" But the Obama campaign said that the survey was actually filled out by his then-campaign manager who "unintentionally mischaracterized his position," adding that Obama never saw the survey.
As we wrote previously, an amended version of the questionnaire was later submitted to the group, with Obama's handwritten notes on it providing more detail on some of the answers. Obama clearly saw and handled this version personally and did not alter the question about banning the sale and manufacturing of guns. Nevertheless, his aides maintain that the gun-ban answer was a mistake and didn't reflect Obama's true position.
Nonetheless, FactCheck.org deems the charge that Obama supports a ban on handguns false. Apparently like the Boston Globe and the Washington Post in their fact-checking features, FactCheck.org has decided that their own previous research is no longer reliable.
FactCheck says that the NRA is "misleading" when they state that Obama would "mandate a government-issued license to purchase a firearm." They say that he has only called for licensing handguns, and because he said a national gun registration law isn't politically possible: "I just don't think we can get that done." That's a thin reed to argue that Obama opposes the idea, or wouldn't push for it if it were politically possible (in a Congress that is likely to be significantly more Democratic next year). Finally, FactCheck.org concludes:
At a campaign stop in Duryea, Pa., in early September, Obama again attempted to reassure gun owners that he doesn't intend to take away their guns, and couldn't even if he wanted to:
Obama (Sept. 5): The bottom line is this. If you've got a rifle, you've got a shotgun, you've got a gun in your house, I'm not taking it away. Alright? So they can keep on talking about it but this is just not true. And by the way, here's another thing you've got to understand. Even if I wanted to take it away, I couldn't get it done. I don't have the votes in Congress.
The fact that FactCheck thinks this reinforces the argument that Obama respects the Second Amendment speak volumes. Pro-Second Amendment lawmakers just don't talk this way.
By the way, since 1980, the ratio of NRA endorsed-Republican presidential candidates to winning Republican presidential candidates has been 1:1 - Reagan twice, Bush in 1988 but not 1992, Bush twice. So far, they have not officially endorsed a candidate, even though. I know the NRA is generally positive on McCain, but had some major beefs with him in the past (campaign finance reform and restrictions on sales at gun shows). Will the addition of lifetime NRA member Sarah Palin be enough to get the organization to make an official endorsement?
UPDATE: Bob Owens is similarly unimpressed with FactCheck. And the Washington Post looks at the NRA ad and, to the surprise of no one, makes all of the same errors as FactCheck - i.e., because Obama hasn't said since 1999 that he supports increasing taxes on guns and ammunition by 500 percent, he must not support it now. One of the really surprising developments in this election has been how the "fact-checking" features of major news organizations have been sloppy and vague with large omissions... just about always to the benefit of of Obama.
Our Monday item on the so-called Bradley effect prompted an email from reader Bill Saracino, who fills in some of the details lost in the standard liberal narrative of the 1982 California governor's campaign:
In 1982, I was executive director of Gun Owners of California, which at the time was one of the five largest non-party-controlled political action committees in California.
The gun-phobics qualified an initiative for the '82 fall ballot that would have essentially banned all handguns. It became Proposition 15. Gun Owners of California, in partnership with the National Rifle Association, assembled a broad coalition of gun, hunting and outdoor sport groups to oppose Proposition 15. I was chosen to be the chairman of the official No on 15 committee. After being far ahead in surveys in the spring and early summer, Proposition 15 failed in November by about 65% to 35%. George Deukmejian opposed Proposition 15; Tom Bradley supported it. With that background, I make the following points:
* Proposition 15 was enormously unpopular with Reagan Democrats and rural voters of all stripes.
* We tried to include Bradley vs. Deukmejian comparisons in as much of our anti-15 advertising as possible, and we outspent Yes on 15 by about 5 to 1 in the fall campaign (largely on the NRA's money).
* Because of Proposition 15, turnout in our rural areas was unprecedented, reaching 85% to 90% in some Central Valley and Sierra foothill counties.
* Deukmejian ran ahead of even Reagan (and usually even or just slightly behind "No on 15") in some rural, usually Democratic counties. The one county I remember off the top of my head is Modoc, a small county in the northeast corner of the state, bordering Nevada and Oregon. "No on 15" got 88%, Deukmejian in the low 70s. This trend was repeated--basically without exception--in large and small rural counties throughout the state.
* At a think-tank sponsored event a month or so after the election, Bradley's manager stated he thought that the presence of Proposition 15 on the ballot had cost his guy the election.
* The absentee-ballot factor is totally overlooked by folks trying to ascribe a racial component to Bradley's defeat and the surveys missing the final outcome. The final pre-election surveys weren't all that far off the mark. They showed a small to middling Bradley lead--which in fact materialized at the polls on election day. Bradley won the vote cast at the ballot boxes, but because of an aggressive absentee-ballot effort by the Deukmejian campaign (and our separate effort for No on 15), an unprecedented percentage of total turnout was represented by absentees. Deukmajian won a large majority of the absentee ballots
The pollsters totally missed this factor leading up to election day, as did the exit polls. In a still-memorable tableau Mervin Field, director of the almost-always-liberal-slanted Field poll, was on television at midnight insisting that Bradley was going to win as the tote boards showed a 50,000 vote Deukmejian lead with 99% of the vote counted.
That's a long way of saying what I wanted to, which is not that there wasn't anybody in California in 1982 who lied to pollsters about voting for Bradley and then voted against him because he was black. I suspect there were. But my firsthand experience tells me that the "No on 15"-driven turnout among pro-gun conservative Democrats, combined with the very wily absentee ballot campaigns conducted by Deukmejian and No on 15, had much more to do with Bradley losing than did any hidden racial factor.
To confirm this, we went in search of contemporaneous press accounts. We found a February 1983 column by Tom Wicker, a liberal New York Times columnist. Wicker's column--based on an analysis by Mervin Field, the pollster Saracino cites in his email to us--acknowledges the role of absentee ballots (California had just passed a law allowing anyone to vote absentee) and of Proposition 15:
Another major factor was the overwhelming defeat of Proposition 15, a strong handgun-control initiative. A $6 million opposition campaign reversed a majority originally favoring the initiative, to a 63-to-37-percent defeat. Mr. Field measured a 32-point turnaround in the last month alone. Since Mr. Bradley favored Proposition 15, the late tide against it obviously hurt him, too; 60 percent of ''no'' voters said in exit polls that they voted for Mr. Deukmejian.
But it wasn't just that $6 million campaign that defeated Proposition 15 and maybe Tom Bradley too. Mervin Field's exit polls showed that 48 percent of all voters said they kept a gun in their households; factoring in the absentees, that means that more than half of California's voters had a gun in their households on Election Day.
It should be noted that none of this implicates the Bradley effect, which posits a discrepancy between what people tell pollsters and how they actually vote. Field's analysis deals entirely with what people did tell pollsters.
This story has been around for a while. Let's see the media treat it the way they treat any story about Sarah Palin
Is a Barack Obama bombshell lurking in the shadows, waiting to derail one of the biggest Cinderella stories in recent history? The bombshell may involve the murder of Donald Young, a 47-year-old choir master at former Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ-the same congregation that Obama has attended for the past 20 years. Two other young black men that attended the same church-Larry Bland and Nate Spencer-were also murdered execution style with bullets to the backs of their heads-all within 40 days of each other, beginning in November 2007. All three were openly homosexual.
What links this story to Barack Obama is that, according to an acquaintance of Obama, Larry Sinclair, Obama is a closet bisexual with whom he had sexual and drug-related encounters in November 1999. Further, Sinclair claims that Obama was friendly with at least two of these deceased parishioners, and that choir director Donald had contacted him shortly before being murdered from multiple gunshot wounds on December 23, 2007.
These killings are receiving a number of different reactions. Mike Parker, reporting for CBS in Chicago, wrote, "Activists fear gay African-Americans are being targeted for murder," while Marc Loveless of the Coalition for Justice and Respect queries, "Are we under attack? Is this a serial killer?"
An even more sinister aspect of this case is being investigated. According to Sinclair in an affidavit to the Chicago Police Department, Donald Young had informed him that he and Barack Obama were "intimate" with each other. Sinclair, it should be noted, declared on a January 18, 2008, YouTube video that on two separate occasions in November 1999, he engaged in sexual acts with Obama, and that Obama smoked crack cocaine-once in a limousine and the other time at a hotel in Gurnee, Ill.
Sinclair has also asked: why would Young-whom he had never met-initiate these calls by contacting him on cell phone numbers known only in the Obama camp? Further, a private investigator connected to the Chicago Police Department told the Globe, "Donald Young was silenced because of something he knew about Obama. Donald was in a position where he heard a lot of things and saw a lot of things concerning Barack."
Another questionable Obama associate is openly homosexual. That person is Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who was listed during the 2008 campaign as being part of Obama's "technology initiative."
In April, Lessig showed a video at a Google seminar entitled Jesus Christ: The Musical where "Jesus Christ lip-syncs Gloria Gaynor's late 1970s disco hit I Will Survive during which he strips down to just a diaper, effeminately struts along a city street, and finally gets run over by a speeding bus."
Are three murders within the span of 40 days among members of America's most discussed church-one run by the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright-enough to arouse the suspicions of Chicago law enforcement officials and members of the national media? Or, as Sinclair wrote in a May 18 email, was the murder of Young "made to look similar to other recent murders as to make it look as if it were a hate crime" because he had become a political liability?
One can only hope that this isn't the beginning of another body count eerily reminiscent of that associated with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Democrat Barack Obama said he does not look like all his fellow presidents on the currency. His new coin proves it. The One has his own one. Obama contracted with a British firm in Birmingham, England, to mint the new coin of the realm: The One. To go along with the Seal of the Perfect Presidency.
The Coin of the Realm will be 300 pieces of silver under a 100,000 pound ($200,000) contact with a British company. The Birmingham Post reported:
And if the Democratic candidate is elected to become the most powerful man in the world on November 4, it could open the floodgates for millions of pounds worth of business for the firm. Windsor, Elizabeth & Windsor has already sold more than 300 limited edition commemorative silver coins to the Democratic Party to hand out to key members of the campaign to elect Obama.
If? If? Infidels. He is inevitable. All hail Barack the Magnificent! He won't be president; he'll be emperor. Why, he'll have his own money to prove it.
One can only hope that every one of President Obama's cabinet picks will bring the same experience and gravitas to his team as his shrewd and far-sighted vice-presidential selection:
"If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me," Biden said. "Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are..."
Biden said he would ask Palin about "The superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan where my helicopter was forced down...John McCain wants to know where Bin Laden and the gates of Hell are? I can tell him where..."
In February 2008, Biden - along with Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. - was on a chopper that made an emergency landing in the mountains of Afghanistan. A snowstorm had forced them down.
In fairness, in the weeks after 9/11, many experts cowered in terror before the soi-disant "brutal Afghan winter". But I believe Senator Biden is the first to assert it's under the direct control of Osama bin Laden.
Obama's In Good Shape in Pennsylvania, As Long As 53 Percent of the Voters are Democrats
ARG puts Obama ahead of McCain, 50 percent to 46 percent. And I'm usually willing to cut a pollster some slack on the partisan breakdown of their sample. But for this poll, the sample was 53 percent Democrat and 39 percent Republican. And the 8 percent of independents break for McCain, 51 percent to 41 percent.
A reader notes that on Election Day 2006, exit polls found the voter pool in Pennsylvania to be 43 percent Democrat, 38 percent Republican, and 19 percent independent. In 2004, it was 41 percent Democrat, 39 percent Republican, and 20 percent independent.
If you plug in the same ARG results with the voter makeup of 2006, you get, by my calculations, McCain 49.1 percent, Obama 46.19 percent.
Obama Loses 10 Points on 'Handling The Economy' In a Week
Today's Hotline Diageo tracking poll has Obama ahead of McCain, 47 percent to 43 percent. But take a look at the question on who would be better handing the economy:
McCain continues to close in on Obama's lead, which has decreased from a 5-point lead in the September 20 Poll, to a 1-point advantage in today's Poll, (43% - 42%).
In fact, on September 16, the Diageo-Hotline poll, a tracking poll, had Obama ahead, 47 percent to 36 percent, on which candidate would do the best job of handling the economy. So Obama has lost 10 points on that question in a week.
A reader asked how I thought the financial crisis was affecting the campaign. I responded that it's scrambling the race, and clearly is creating divisions within the parties, as Bush, Paulson, and the Democratic Congressional leadership seem on board with it, (or generally on board with it), along with Dodd and Frank, but the rank-and-file are skeptical. My readers are basically split - if they're in finance, they see it as a necessary evil to avoid a serious economic crisis; my non-finance readers think this is horsepuckey (or other words) and that reckless Wall Street managers are getting a "get out of jail free" card and pillaging the U.S. Treasury.
From where I sit, McCain's response has been hot and cold. The "Resolution Trust Corporation 2.0" idea seems to be popular with Wall Street, and he deserves a bit of credit for getting ahead of the curve; on the ther hand, calling for Cox to be fired left a lot of traditional allies unimpressed, and the Andrew Cuomo idea is arguably the dumbest McCain has ever come up with. Obama seems to think that by hanging back and saying little he'll look wise; maybe, or maybe he looks like he's in way over his head.
Biden, by comparison, blaming tax cuts and talking about President Roosevelt going on television in 1929 sounds unhinged.
Neither McCain's nor Obama's instincts and background are suited to this problem, nor is Biden or Palin. If I were either of the candidates, I would make Mitt Romney and Robert Rubin my de-facto "other running mates' until further notice, attending each event and explaining, with charts if necessary, what happened, how it happened, and how to address the problem, and the consequences of action and inaction... I understand the temptation for populist drum-beating, but this seems like a time to talk to the public like they're grownups.
UPDATE: A reader urges skepticism about the Hotline poll, pointing to this post, arguing that
If you look at the daily results... you see... incredible volatility.... [If they reported the daily samples] people could see that this is basically statistical noise in a stable race... . But Gallup doesn't report its daily results, they report a... three day rolling average, [and] you get these pleasant looking peaks and valleys in the race. The change over time here is large enough in magnitude... but also slow enough in pace (unlike on the one day chart) to be plausibly interpreted as public opinion shifting in response to events.
I hear that argument, but even if you don't like the particular numbers, the trend over the past seven days (seven separate daily samples) has been pretty consistent - McCain up or even, Obama down or even.
A supporter: "As much as I hate to admit it, there's a lot of truth to the `He's all about speeches, not ideas' critique." Blogger John Althouse Cohen still supports Democrat Barack Obama. But Cohen has gone from excited to tepid. Cohen listed some reasons:
1. Obama's clinging to guns and religion speech to San Francisco elites.
2. Obama's refusal to call evil "evil."
3. Saying he'd meet with dictators in his first year in office.
4. Not timing his flip-flops well.
5. Republican Sarah Palin caught them off guard.
6. Not specific.
7. "As much as I hate to admit it, there's a lot of truth to the `He's all about speeches, not ideas' critique."
8. His take on race is disappointing.
Cohen still will vote for Obama and he gives fuller explanations. Also while the first 4 and No. 7 are things that deal with who Obama is, Nos. 5, 6 and 8 are political. If we are going to ding candidates for inept campaigning, no one will get elected.
Hmm, not a bad idea. The clock is nearing midnight and someone is looking more and more like a pumpkin pulled by mice.
In a conference call underway now to highlight the new "Chicago Machine" ad, McCain Palin campaign manager Rick Davis blasted the "very negative" campaign run by Obama since the convention, and notes he is "amazed by the level of personal attacks" launched by the self-declared new kind of candidate.
In response to a question about a story in this morning's New York Times having to do with Davis' past work for the Homeownership Alliance, senior strategist Steve Schmidt also unloaded on the New York Times for having abandoned its journalistic traditions and becoming an extension of the Obama campaign. Chris Cillizza has the details here.
In response to my question about this morning's story about the possible source of attacks on Sarah Palin and the past attacks on Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso, Schmidt noted the "fierce campaign of intimidation waged against any critic of Obama," and promised to look into the new story closely though he challenged the MSM to investigate the ties between David Axelrod and the Winner firm and whether the internet smear campaign was being run de facto by the Obama campaign. Schmidt also used the question to demand increased scrutiny of the Obama-Ayers relationship
If you enjoy life, I think this tells you which way to vote. And if you don't, likewise.
The Key To The 60 Minutes Interviews
I watched 60 Minutes last night so my readers didn't have to. The key moment was when Obama tried to define what would make him a good President. Careful observers will have to concede that he wasn't actually describing himself, except perhaps as how his ego causes him to see it. But he was most certainly describing John McCain.
Yes, I too cringed when McCain suggested Andrew Cuomo for the SEC. But significantly less than I did when Lawrence Taylor decimated Joe Theisman's leg on national television figuring it was chiefly for the benefit of Ohio and Pennsylvania Democrats who may hold the key to putting victory out of reach for Barack Obama. As the saying goes, you go to war with the army they gave you. But the pivotal point for me was a question to Obama.
In essence, "Why are you the guy to be elected President?" I've heard Obama's answer in any number of interviews I've conducted over the years and always from people I eventually didn't hire. It was, "I'm the guy (or gal) who can ..." It was not, I'm the guy who did. Obama's entreaty was along the lines of I'm the guy who can get people who strongly disagree in a room and mediate to find some common ground. What was totally lacking in Obama's answer was, I'm the guy who did ... not much of anything, for that matter.
Some people, likely driven by ego, have a sort of magical view of themselves. They believe that if they just get the chance they know they are the right person to make certain things happen, to make a difference somehow. Yet, at every step of their lives they mostly avoid any opportunity to prove the point. Just think about Obama's argument juxtaposed to John McCain.
When has Obama ever gotten people who "almost violently" disagreed politically into a room to reach consensus? He certainly never did it in the US Senate, though he might have had he ever shown up as opposed to immediately launching his Presidential bid.
Were there people who disagreed when Obama was state Senator back in Illinois? Sure, most likely about how much to raise taxes, how much to regulate - absolutely nothing as compared to what he would find as President in Washington, DC.
Let me guess, he sorted out some neighborhood skirmishes as a community organizer and based on that he professes himself qualified to be King? When I'm interviewing to hire someone that's the point at which I start thinking - Next!
As best I can tell, in role after role when Obama had a chance to step up and actually lead, he voted present and preserved his political ambition over everything else.
Disagree with him or not, cantankerous as he might be, John McCain is a man who has done that very thing. He doesn't live in some magical world where he simply believes he can. Yes, he has angered the Right because of McCain - Feingold, McCain - Kennedy, etc. But isn't that the proof in the pudding of someone who can get people who disagree in a room and bring about some consensus? I'd argue it is.
Obama did define what America likely wants in a next President for 60 Minutes. But for me, in doing so he betrayed both his inexperience and his arrogance and actually made the argument to elect John McCain.
In a campaign speech given in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and broadcast in part on MSNBC, Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama told the audience that 'when Bill Clinton left office, we had a surplus. We now have $9 trillion in debt, soon to be $11 trillion.'
This is false, and purposely misleading. While it's true that there were four straight annual surpluses in the Clinton Administration from FY 1998-2001, President Clinton did not leave a net surplus when he left office. In fact, when President Clinton left office in January, 2001, the total federal debt was $5.7 trillion. On October 1, 2001, the beginning of FY 2002, and the end of FY 2001, which was the last FY for which the Clinton Administration was responsible, total federal debt was about $5.8 trillion. The data can be found here.
This kind of false conflation between an annual surplus and total debt or surplus has been a common rhetorical tactic used by the Democrats since 2001, outdone only by the oft-repeated claim that 'there was a $5.6 trillion surplus' at the end of the Clinton Administration. It is dishonest rhetoric. If Sen. Barack Obama represents change as he says, why does he use such misleading -- or plainly false -- rhetoric? Someone needs to find the link to this speech, which was filled with more economic populism than usual.
The Weather Underground terrorist was not just a guy in the 'neighborhood.'
Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.
The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.
The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.
In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).
Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.
The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.
The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place.
Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.
Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
Jennifer Rubin notes a classic Biden moment in his interview with Katie Couric today, talking about the tone of the campaign:
Couric: And you guys haven't been completely guilt-free, making fun of John McCain's inability to use a computer.
Biden: I thought that was terrible, by the way.
Couric: Why'd you do it then?
Biden: I didn't know we did it, if I'd have known we did we'd have never done it, I don't think Barack, you know, I just think that was, ah
Couric: Did Barack Obama approve that ad? He said he did, right?
Biden: Yeah, the answer is, I don't, I don't think anything was intentional about that, they were trying to make another point.
He seems to be suggesting the Obama campaign needs adult supervision, and if only he had known what Obama was up to it never would have happened. Not quite the message the campaign is looking to push these days.
Barack Obama wants to tell a tale about turbulence in the financial markets, and like any good melodrama this story needs a villain. Sen. Obama believes he has found his mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash in the person of Phil Gramm, the candid-to-a-fault former senator from Texas who presided over a major reform of American banking laws a decade ago. Obama here displays a signal failure to understand the convulsions in the markets. And he also fails to identify the guilty parties - which is odd, since some of them used to sign his paycheck back in his community-organizing days and others are among his most important political donors
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 passed the Senate with 90 votes (8 against, 1 absence: John McCain, who supported the legislation) and was signed into law by Bill Clinton. It had little to do with the issues at play in the current crisis: lending standards and the amount of debt banks can take on relative to their equity. The upshot of the Gramm legislation is that it allows financial services companies to diversify their lines of business: Commercial banks can engage in investment banking, banks can offer brokerage services, and you can have an IRA at the same place you have your checking account.
What we have here is a case of what economist Paul H. Rubin calls "folk economics" - value-laden myths that do not reflect financial realities.
It is not at all clear what, if anything, Gramm's legislation has to do with the current difficulties in the market, other than the fact that Democrats instinctively recoil when they hear the word "deregulation."
Gramm-Leach-Bliley did not create securitization and collateralized debt obligations. It did not change the rules for banks' leverage ratios. If anything, Gramm-Leach-Bliley mitigated some risks by allowing financial companies to diversify their businesses, and it is the most diversified firms that are best weathering the storm. Which makes sense: An investment portfolio is more stable the more diversified it is. The firms that have spectacularly imploded have mostly been non-diversified commercial banks, like Countrywide, or pure investment banks, like Lehman Brothers. But the broadly diversified megabanks are enduring - taking a hit from housing, sure, but they have other lines of business to sustain them. And we should not forget: Without the Gramm-Leach-Bliley reforms, Bank of America would have been legally forbidden to take over Merrill Lynch - very possibly leaving taxpayers on the hook for that one, too. Morgan would not have been able to buy Bear Stearns without Gramm's reforms.
Much more problematic than Gramm-Leach-Bliley is the Community Reinvestment Act, a bit of legislative arm-twisting much beloved by Sen. Obama and his fellow Democrats. One of the reasons so many bad mortgage loans were made in the first place is that Barack Obama's celebrated community organizers make their careers out of forcing banks to do so. ACORN, for which Obama worked, is one of many left-wing organizations that spent decades pressuring banks and bank regulators to do more to make mortgages available to people without much in the way of income, assets, or credit. These campaigns often were couched in racially inflammatory terms. The result was the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA empowers the FDIC and other banking regulators to punish those banks which do not lend to the poor and minorities at the level that Obama's fellow community organizers would like. Among other things, mergers and acquisitions can be blocked if CRA inquisitors are not satisfied that their demands - which are political demands - have been met. There is a name for loans made to people who do not have the credit, assets, income, or down payment to qualify for a normal mortgage: subprime.
The bankers cannot blame CRA entirely; they made a lot of bad bets on rising home prices. But CRA did influence lending standards across the banking industry, even in those institutions that are not strictly liable to its jurisdiction. The subprime debacle is in no trivial part the result of lending decisions in which political extortion trumped businesses' normal bottom-line concerns.
Along with these bad loans, the underlying problem is that there was a bubble in the price of housing - a bubble caused in no small part by politics, in the form of an easy-money/easy-credit policy from the Fed.
It was politics, too, that created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, enabled them to dominate the mortgage market, and implicitly took upon American taxpayers the risks of those business while the rewards were enjoyed, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, by largely Democratic political opportunists, who then gave generously to Democrats, the top recipients of their largesse being: Chris Dodd, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama. And it was politics that unwisely nationalized Fannie and Freddie without resolving the underlying moral hazard - private profit, public risk - that makes those institutions problematic. From this Senator Obama takes away the lesson that there has been a failure of the market, and that what is needed is more politics. In this analysis Obama is as wrong as it is possible to be.
The only reason there are returns on investments is that there is risk involved. Obama talks as though the government can create new regulations that will remove risk from the markets. It cannot. Investors sometimes make bad decisions. Businesses sometimes borrow too much money. "Some of these investment banks look like hedge funds, they're so leveraged," says one longtime Wall Street hand. But the markets are addressing that problem, too, in their own brutally Darwinian way: That's why Bank of America is acquiring Merrill Lynch on the cheap.
Phil Gramm is a fine foil for Obama: a conservative Texan with a furry accent and an unsympathetic demeanor. He's the perfect symbol - and Obama's campaign is rooted in nothing but symbolism. The reality is the thousands of dollars in donations from Fannie Mae executives sitting in Obama's campaign coffers. If Obama wants a villain, he doesn't have far to look.
Democrats' reintroduction of militant Michelle Obama in Denver was supposed to show her softer side. But it only highlighted a radical part of her resume: Public Allies
Barack Obama was a founding member of the board of Public Allies in 1992, resigning before his wife became executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies in 1993. Obama plans to use the nonprofit group, which he features on his campaign Web site, as the model for a national service corps. He calls his Orwellian program, "Universal Voluntary Public Service."
Big Brother had nothing on the Obamas. They plan to herd American youth into government-funded reeducation camps where they'll be brainwashed into thinking America is a racist, oppressive place in need of "social change."
The pitch Public Allies makes on its Web site doesn't seem all that radical. It promises to place young adults (18-30) in paid one-year "community leadership" positions with nonprofit or government agencies. They'll also be required to attend weekly training workshops and three retreats.
In exchange, they'll get a monthly stipend of up to $1,800, plus paid health and child care. They also get a post-service education award of $4,725 that can be used to pay off past student loans or fund future education.
But its real mission is to radicalize American youth and use them to bring about "social change" through threats, pressure, tension and confrontation - the tactics used by the father of community organizing, Saul "The Red" Alinsky.
"Our alumni are more than twice as likely as 18-34 year olds to . . . engage in protest activities," Public Allies boasts in a document found with its tax filings. It has already deployed an army of 2,200 community organizers like Obama to agitate for "justice" and "equality" in his hometown of Chicago and other U.S. cities, including Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Washington. "I get to practice being an activist," and get paid for it, gushed Cincinnati recruit Amy Vincent.
Public Allies promotes "diversity and inclusion," a program paper says. More than 70% of its recruits are "people of color." When they're not protesting, they're staffing AIDS clinics, handing out condoms, bailing criminals out of jail and helping illegal aliens and the homeless obtain food stamps and other welfare.
Public Allies brags that more than 80% of graduates have continued working in nonprofit or government jobs. It's training the "next generation of nonprofit leaders" - future "social entrepreneurs."
The Obamas discourage work in the private sector. "Don't go into corporate America," Michelle has exhorted youth. "Work for the community. Be social workers." Shun the "money culture," Barack added. "Individual salvation depends on collective salvation."
"If you commit to serving your community," he pledged in his Denver acceptance speech, "we will make sure you can afford a college education." So, go through government to go to college, and then go back into government.
Many of today's youth find the pitch attractive. "I may spend the rest of my life trying to create social movement," said Brian Coovert of the Cincinnati chapter. "There is always going to be work to do. Until we have a perfect country, I'll have a job."
Not all the recruits appreciate the PC indoctrination. "It was too touchy-feely," said Nelly Nieblas, 29, of the 2005 Los Angeles class. "It's a lot of talk about race, a lot of talk about sexism, a lot of talk about homophobia, talk about -isms and phobias."
One of those -isms is "heterosexism," which a Public Allies training seminar in Chicago describes as a negative byproduct of "capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and male-dominated privilege."
The government now funds about half of Public Allies' expenses through Clinton's AmeriCorps. Obama wants to fully fund it and expand it into a national program that some see costing $500 billion. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military, he said.
The gall of it: The Obamas want to create a boot camp for radicals who hate the military - and stick American taxpayers with the bill.
Just who are the 'Elites' in America? Mostly they self-identify into a few broad classes: Political, Media, Business and Military. They are the self-important 'know-it-alls' who are willing to sacrifice liberty, freedom and the Nation to their beliefs that they are the best ones suited to run the world. They are the wannabe ruling class who are always ready to tell you what is good for you, and then use the power they have at hand to try and force that to come to pass. You see they 'know' things and are way smarter and more powerful than you, and they... they 'know' what you want... if you would just let them give it to you.
Take Yuval Levin's link to ABC News and a video clip of Sen. Obama at a Planned Parenthood meeting answering a question on sexual education for children. I'll point out what struck Yuval at The Corner at NRO, and it is extremely telling about Sen. Obama in that portion of the video at about the 3:10 mark:
The one thing that I want to insist on is that, as I travel around the country, the American people are a decent people. Now they get confused sometimes. You know, they listen to the wrong talk radio shows or watch the wrong TV networks, um, but they're, they're basically decent, they're basically sound.
- Sen. Barack Obama, 18 JUL 2007
What that leaves out are the appreciative audience twitters and scattered laughs after 'they get confused sometimes' and 'listen to the wrong talk radio shows'. The audience likes those remarks and do believe that *you* are confused and that *you* listen to the wrong talk radio programs. Way to be for the 'little guy'... the 'they' out there, Sen. Obama, that you talk about as if it is a microbial colony that you are not apart of. Come on in and join the gene pool, Senator. That passage is *not* something that demonstrates that he wants to reach out to the American people, and, just before that, he tells you how he sees the President's role in this just before that excerpt:
You know I... eh...eh... the longer I'm in this race for the Presidency, the more I realize that so much of leadership is about using the bully pulpit to frame the issues in a way that allows us to draw on the best impulses of the American people.
Obama seems happier these days. It is almost as if the disembodied spirit of his mentor, Saul Alinsky, is watching and smiling. Americans are suffering. Losses in the stock market, panic in the financial market, pain at the gas pump and in the grocery -- all these miseries of average Americans are a delicious narcotic to socialists like Barack Obama.
What was the historic maxim of the Left? "The worse, the better." Alinsky said that if there was an afterlife, "I will unreservedly choose to go to hell." This is the man whose mind guides Obama's thoughts.
Americans ought to ponder that before electing a man who thrives politically -- the sphere of his life that really matter to him -- on the unhappiness, helplessness, and hopelessness of his fellow citizens. When his voice promises "hope," as it so often does, we should recall that what he is promising is communal "hope." Our experiences, our lives, our souls, to Obama, belong to society. We cannot have hope by ourselves. We can only have hope as part of a vast mass of humanity.
The "change" he promises is also collective change, enforced by the rod of government. Hope and change, in a free world, are the private possessions of motivated individuals. Political leaders bring benefits like honest government, national security, sensible and moderate programs to accomplish the broad purposes of the Constitution, and blind justice. But in a free world, in a free country, politicians do not complete our personal dreams or our private hopes.
It takes much to separate Americans from ownership of their lives. The means of rendering people from their lives is misery. Let the mortgage giants collapse. Let refineries and oil exploration stop. Let food prices spike. Let individual lives drown in worries and in troubles created by the state. Then make those individuals turn to the state for release from pain. Long ago, the formula was written: "The worse, the better."
Existence ordered by free hearts and minds is chaos to the Left. We cannot find happiness in our own, unorganized and unregulated pursuits. We cannot have meaningful lives separate from the dogma of the Party and, as Obama put in it the closed doors of San Francisco elites, "clinging to our religion."
No, it is not our religion which we must cling to. It is his religion, the religion of collectivism, the faith in the coercive power of the state, that must become our passionate system of belief. But men do not chain themselves willingly. There must be a pressure cooker, an artificial creation of unbearable forces, before men place manacles on their wrists and feet and smile. Men must be made to believe inwardly what the Left whispers quietly: The worse, the better.
Do not doubt that Barack Obama is just as thrilled with the panic in our economic markets as Adolph Hitler was seventy-five years ago in Germany by the heartbreak of the German middle class. Obama is a much more humane, sane, and placid man than Hitler, but the basic principle of all radical Leftists -- Hitler or Obama -- is identical. A happy society is a society that does not need them. A desperate society, alone, will grant them the power they crave, and "The worse, the better" is the unstated goal of men who want power above all else.
It is not coincidence that the rhetoric of Obama is so blank that almost anyone could put almost any wish within the womb of his words. Barack Obama does not intend to really say anything. He seeks, instead, to promise vague emotional fulfillment to unhappy people. He whispers undefined action which will make the dreariness of life go away. He needs your sadness to grant his dreams. If Americans are doing well, Barack Obama cannot do well. He grasps at every level the grim truth of the Left: The worse, the better.
So what do we think will happen if we choose a man so fixed upon our wretchedness? Do we assume that he will solve our problems? When, if ever, has that happened in human history? True saviors are men like Churchill, who do not promise hope but rather blood, toil, sweat, and tears. True saviors are men like Washington, who told his countrymen as often as he could that they did not need him. True saviors are men like Reagan, who did not make his fame or fortune in politics, but entered politics to liberate us all. None of those great men ever relished a single pain of their countrymen.
The hungry Left always imagines that the end, truly, justifies the means. It holds (it thinks) the key to secular heaven and the suffering of ordinary people feeds the bonfires of its march to power. History is the lesson book of man. We do not have to guess about what happens when the people, without hope, give power to those who thrive on suffering. "The worse, the better" always leads to things much worse than the causes that made men barter their rights for promises.
NYT trashing truth-tellers on Obama's abortion record
The New York Times published an editorial "The Right to Smear" praising a federal judge in Virginia who has blocked a group from running ads on Barack Obama's positions on abortion. The Times disparages this groups ad and claims it:
...trashes the candidate's nuanced position. It even employs an Obama-like voice pledging to make taxpayers pay for abortions, help minors conceal abortions from their parents, and legalize late-term abortions.
"Nuanced"- I guess that is an intellectual way to describe and cover "lying". The Times editorial board are well-versed in such "nuance" for they are lying about Barack Obama (and Joe Biden's) record on policy proposals. Barack Obama would allow taxpayer's funding for abortion, would help minors conceal abortions from their parents and legalize late-term abortions. Fact-checking the Times:
... in 2007, Biden voted in favor of taxpayer funding for abortions. According to the National Right to Life Committee, Biden has not voted to restrict funding for abortion since 1999. Barack Obama has said that that the Freedom of Choice Act is the first bill he would sign upon entering the White House. That bill would strike down all federal and state restrictions on abortion, including the Hyde Amendment which prevents federal tax dollars from paying for abortions.
In a 2004 Zogby poll commissioned by the NRLC, voters opposed taxpayer funding for abortion 74 percent to 22 percent. I'm willing to bet that most voters don't know that an Obama-Biden administration plans on spending their taxes on abortions. The McCain campaign might want to inform them.
More on The Freedom of Choice Act: here is Obama in his own words promising to sign the act as the first step he will take as President. David Freddoso (The Case Against Barack Obama) elaborates on what this bill entails:
This bill would effectively cancel every state, federal, and local regulation of abortion, no matter how modest or reasonable. It would even, according to the National Organization of Women, abolish all state restrictions on government funding for abortions. If Obama becomes president and lives up to this promise, then everyone who pays income tax will be paying an abortionist to perform an abortion.
In making this promise, Freddoso writes, Obama is promising:
...to abolish state laws that protect doctors and nurses from losing their jobs if they refuse to participate in abortions .. to abolish requirements for parental notification and informed consent for mothers who consider the procedure
Freddoso also notes:
Obama is one of the very few pro-choice advocates who accepts no restrictions on late-term abortions, or any kind of abortions. I could find no instance in his entire career in which he voted for any regulation or restriction on the practice of abortion.
The Times clearly has an agenda: elect Barack Obama even at the cost of violating basic journalism 101: print the objective truth. Even editorial page writers should abide by this basic tenet of journalism and public responsibility.
Media Not Reporting Failed Financial Agencies Are Big Donors to Obama
A 2005 Video of Fannie Mae CEO Shown Affirming his Connection to Congressional Black Caucus and Barack Obama, Where is the Media?
In a 2005 video Daniel Mudd, at the time the interim CEO of the catastrophically failed mortgage lender Fannie Mae, affirmed his fealty and that of Fannie Mae to the Congressional Black Caucus. The top three campaign donation recipients were Democrats, number two of which was Barack Obama, yet the media is laying mum on these facts. One wonders what would be going on in the media if John McCain were a top recipient of campaign donations from a market crashing, government bail-out getting organization like Fannie Mae?
The three top campaign donation recipients from Fannie Mae were all Democrats. Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) got $165,000, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) was given $126,349, and failed presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) took $111,000 from the folks at Fannie Mae. Is this information getting out there?
Most of the top Fannie executives were also Democrats each of whom worked closely with Democratic presidents and Barack Obama. Franklin Raines, Clinton White House budget director, ran Fannie Mae and pocketed $50 million. Jamie Gorelick was a Clinton Justice Department Official (famous for adding to our intelligence failures helping cause the attacks on 9/11) was paid $26 million. Jim Johnson, who most recently served on Obama's VP search committee, was the CEO of Fannie Mae and has also made millions. These Clinton/Obama associates sat at the head of a failing financial agency all the while raking in millions and donating hundreds of thousands to top Democrats.
So what, you may ask? Well, there is a reason that these Fannie Mae officials donated to Democrats. It was because Democrats continued to stymie Republican efforts to fix these failing lending agencies. Democrats protected these rotten lending practices and the Fannie Mae executives knew who were the sugar daddies that needed greasing.
The worldwide left is clearly alarmed that Barack Obama's campaign appeared derailed by Sarah Palin's emergence as a cultural icon representing all that they despise. As a result, they are pulling out all the stops to celebrate Obama and denigrate the opposition.
Woody Allen, still embraced by many on the left despite disgracing himself with his step-daughter, now instructs the world that "It would be a disgrace and a humiliation if Barack Obama does not win." Of course, he said this in a chi-chi European resort, San Sebastian.
Barack Obama is to become the source of a musical play in London's West End. I am relieved to know that the Styrofoam columns from Invesco Field may be recycled as stage settings overseas. I have argued, in fact, that Obama is best understood as a showman - someone who creates the appearance of being intelligent, charismatic, attractive, caring, etc. But like other showmen, when he doesn't have a good script on the teleprompter, he falters.
Meanwhile, a sculptor named Daniel Edwards, previously known for a 25 foot bust of Fidel Castro and a sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth, has taken upon himself the task of sculpting a bust of Michelle Obama in a style reminiscent of African sculpture, complete with exposed breasts (cropped from the picture below -- original is viewable here).
I find Edwards' choice of subject matter most revealing. In fact I remember quite a bit of criticism when a McCain ad likened Obama's celebrity to that of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Castro as an object of adoration by Edwards tells us a lot, too.
I am more convinced than ever that the cultural left's adoration of Obama will backfire with American voters, sick of the drumbeat of hatred for America by those showmen and artists who fashion themselves of superior intellect.
Big PR firm of Ethan S. Winner paid to produce lying videos about Palin
Extensive research was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine the source of smears directed toward Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Those smears included false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views.
Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.
It is also likely that the PR firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign. Namely:
* Evidence suggests that a YouTube video with false claims about Palin was uploaded and promoted by members of a professional PR firm.
* The family that runs the PR firm has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.
* Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in a concerted effort to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. Yet this effort took place on company time.
* Evidence suggests that these distribution efforts included actions by at least one employee of the firm who is unconnected with the family running the company.
* The voice-over artist used in this supposedly amateur video is a professional.
* This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David Axelrod's firm, which has a history of engaging in phony grassroots efforts, otherwise known as "astroturfing."
* David Axelrod is Barack Obama's chief media strategist.
* The same voice-over artist has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign.
This suggests that false rumors and outright lies about Sarah Palin and John McCain being spread on the internet are being orchestrated by political partisans and are not an organic grassroots phenomenon led by the left wing fringe. Our findings follow.
WHO PRODUCED THE VIDEO?
[UPDATE: Within 1 hour of posting, "eswinner" has removed all videos from YouTube and began removing any traces of his activities. But we have the video and all relevant websites backed up.
If "eswinner" isn't Ethan Winner of the Publicis Groupe, then why did "eswinner" yank the video so quickly? Or if this was just an innocent homemade ad, then what does he have to hide? You'd think he'd want more attention for it.
I uploaded it to my YouTube acount from the original unwatermarked Google version (see below for explanation) and that is the version you now see embedded below. Here's an image that show's he had the videos in question just moments ago. Click for bigger. I'll be able to provide a backup of the original YouTube page in the morning. For now, this will have to do.]
Who is behind this video against Sarah Palin? It alleges:
Sarah Palin was a member of an Anti-American separatist organization.
It claims that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party and cites The New York Times for that source. Then it quotes the founder of that Party with some pretty outrageous statements.
[Sarah Palin] was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, a group that wants Alaskans to vote on whether they wish to secede from the United States. She's been registered as a Republican since May 1982.
And The New York Times was forced to retract their earlier claim that Palin was a member of the party, blaming the error on the party's chair. That retraction was published Sept. 3rd, 8 days before the video was first made publicly available.
Sarah Palin wasn't even physically at the party's convention. The clip you see is part of Palin's videotaped welcome for the convention's opening in which she gives some general remarks about the need for party competition and then tries to draw some common ground on the need to reel in government spending. Hardly evidence of extremism or anti-American sentiment.
In our opinion the Palin smear video appears professionally produced. Especially revealing is the voice over, which has a ring of familiarity to it and which also sounds professional.
If we are correct, that means that someone paid for the ad and for the talent behind it. Yet no one identifies themselves as being behind the video.
Using techniques that we've used in the past to find the identity of online terrorist supporters, the Jawa team went to work trying to figure out who was behind what appeared, in our opinion, to be a professionally orchestrated smear campaign aimed at Sarah Palin with the ultimate goal of electing Barack Obama.
PR FIRM BEHIND THE VIDEO?
The YouTube poster who uploaded the video did so under the account name "eswinner". He names his channel "AGroupofConcernedAmericans". The goal of his channel, says "eswinner", is:
Offering a fair and unbiased view towards life and politics...
I try to give an unbiased account of all things American.
The video was uploaded four times under the "eswinner" account, using different titles for each video. The video was also uploaded to Google Video on the same day and with the same title.
A Google search of other people using the nickname or account name "eswinner" reveals that someone very interested in yachts also goes by that name. There is, for example, a Picasa page under the account name "eswinner". I won't link to that page because it also has pictures of his family, but I will include a screenshot here.
That Picasa page of "eswinner" is used by an "Ethan" advertising on Craig's List that he will rent out his yacht to interested parties. But "Ethan" also leaves his e-mail account: ewinner@winnr.com.
And just what is winnr.com? An alternate dns designation for Winner & Associates. A firm that employs one Ethan S. Winner.
Hundreds of pictures on the Picassa page belonging to "eswinner" show that the page belongs to the same Ethan S. Winner that is employed by the public relations firm of Winner & Associates. Other instances of an "eswinner" or "ewinner" posting on the internet are found sprinkled here and there. All of those postings seem to fit the profile of Ethan S. Winner and suggest that eswinner and Ethan Winner are one and the same.
The company he works for, Winner & Associates, is one of the largest PR firms in the country and part of an even larger international conglomerate Publicis Groupe, which is, "one the world's top 10 advertising and communications firms."
A firm that specializes in "helping companies survive and succeed" a "controversial issue such as a lawsuit, a government investigation, a political protest, a labor dispute, or a defective product or recall."
A firm that also happens to produce TV ads. And owns a number of affiliated firms which do similar work.
These people are professional guns for hire. Looking at their portfolio makes that clear. And they only work for big clients. The kind of clients that pay big bucks. The kind of people hired by Exxon to convince people that the effects of the Valdez spill were over. The kind of people hired to help push through oil fields in Chad and Cameroon or help companies respond to boycott threats over the Beijing Olympics....
A revered political consultant, Winner began his career working for California Gov. Pat Brown in 1958; he later worked for President John F. Kennedy. Winner is frequently called upon by a wide range of political groups, candidates and organizations for his unparalleled skills as an adviser, planner and strategic thinker.
Chuck owns $23,000 court-side seats for UCLA basketball. He's the type of guy who own horses that have raced at the Kentucky Derby.
He is a Barack Obama contributor. As are the rest of the Winner & Associate employees who share the family name. Chuck Winner contributed to Obama as early as February of 2007, which means he was a supporter from the beginning.
The Diageo/Hotline poll offers not only a daily tracking number but more detailed questions asked on a daily basis. It shows, not surprisingly, that the importance of economic concerns has been going up steadily over the past week (the portion of respondents describing it as the top issue was 39% on Tuesday and 47% on Friday, dwarfing all other issues). But (as Jim Geraghty notes) Barack Obama's advantage on the economy has eroded in the same period:
Which candidate do you think would do the best job handling the nation's economy?
September 16: Obama 47%, McCain 36%
September 19: Obama 44%, McCain 41%
Both candidates started the week pretty poorly on the economic crisis, but McCain seemed to gain his footing by week's end while Obama didn't. Perhaps voters noticed, though we will need to see a few more days of data to know if there's a real trend here.
Barack Obama is out on the campaign trail stoking fears that another Great Depression, complete with bread lines and high unemployment, is just around the bend. While the financial crisis is indeed serious, the differences between the economy of the 1930s and today are vast.
In a piece earlier this year for the Business and Media Institute, Nathan Burchfiel highlighted statements commentator Andy Rooney made about lines during the Jan. 27 edition of 60 Minutes on CBS:
"Big bakeries gave away their bread when it was three or four days old, and people who were out of work and hungry lined up to get it," Rooney said. "We don't have anything like that now."
Unlike Rooney, who was a teenager during much of the Great Depression, today's teenagers are far more likely to find themselves in line outside of a Best Buy, Circuit City or Apple Store, hoping to get their hands on the latest iPod or iPhone.
According to the folks at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, 24.9 percent of the total work force or 11,385,000 people were unemployed at the height of the Depression in 1933. Last month, the unemployment rate in the United States was only 6.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
According to Fox Business Channel's Neal Cavuto this morning, only one in four American families owned their own homes during the height of the Great Depression. Today, some 65 percent of Americans are homeowners.
As you watch the news coverage of the ongoing financial crisis, it might serve you well to adopt the mindset of super-salesman Zig Ziglar. He said something to this effect:
"The media has accurately predicted ten of the last two recessions."
In other words, he's saying those in the news media don't always get things right - especially during a Republican administration.
In the increasing flurry of this election season's negative political ads, the Barack Obama campaign produced a TV commercial that not only attacks Republican rival John McCain, but also takes aim at an unusual target: a 31-year-old woman who was born alive after her mother's botched abortion.
Obama's commercial predictably takes shots at the GOP campaign, calling McCain's ads "the sleaziest ever, truly vile." But when the screen shows clips of abortion survivor Gianna Jessen and the ad she made asking Obama to reverse his stance on born alive infant protection legislation, the Obama ad calls Jessen's appeal "a despicable lie."
The attack on Jessen has angered pro-life advocates. "It is despicable, repulsive and beneath contempt that Barack Obama would attack Gianna Jessen," says Jill Stanek, a pro-life columnist who testified before Congress in support of the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act, in a statement on Jessen's website. "She is a courageous abortion survivor and living miracle who would not be with us today if Obama's policies had been in place when she was born."
Jessen herself released a statement saying, "Mr. Obama is clearly blinded by political ambition given his attack on me this week. All I asked of him was to do the right thing: support medical care and protection for babies who survive abortion - as I did."
Jessen was born in a Los Angeles abortion clinic 31 years ago after her birth mother's saline solution abortion failed. "The abortionist was not on duty the moment I came into this world," Jessen said in a recent Fox News Channel "Hannity & Colmes" interview. "Had he been there, he would have ended my life." "He wasn't there, so a nurse called an ambulance, had me transferred to a hospital where I was placed in an incubator, weighing two pounds," she said. Lack of oxygen to Jessen's brain resulted in cerebral palsy, and her doctor said she'd never be able to hold her head up, sit, walk or talk.
She has since, "by the grace of God" according to her testimony, been able to run marathons. She has also been an eloquent advocate for babies like her - who are born following failed abortions - through her organization, BornAliveTruth.org. Jessen first drew the Obama campaign's ire for producing an advertisement that points to the senator's record of voting against born alive infant protection laws as an Illinois state legislator.
In the response ad from the Obama campaign, the video shows clips of Jessen's advertisement with a female voice saying, "Now, votes taken out of context accusing Obama of letting infants die. It's a despicable lie." Obama did, however, vote against Illinois born-alive infant-protection bills four times, as Jessen's ad claims.
Obama has often said, and his own website repeats, that he would have supported the Illinois state law protecting those born-alive infants if it had had a "neutrality" clause like the federal version, which states the law specifically is not intended to impact the status of babies before birth. As WND reported earlier, however, documentation uncovered by Doug Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee reveals Obama did vote against a version of the Illinois law that was the same as the federal law, contrary to what the candidate has stated.
Time magazine's Karen Tumulty accuses this campaign of racism for launching this ad targeting Senator Obama's ties to Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines. Why? Tumulty writes:
Obama's Fannie Mae connections are completely fair game. But this ad doesn't even mention a far more significant tie--that of Jim Johnson, the former Fannie Mae chairman who had to resign as head of Obama's vice presidential search team after it was revealed he got a sweetheart deal on a mortgage from Countrywide Financial. Instead, it relies on a fleeting and tenuous reference in a Washington Post Style section story to suggest that Obama's principal economic adviser is former Fannie Mae Chairman Frank Raines. Why? One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black.
The only problem with Ms. Tumulty's story is that we also released an ad today targeting Senator Obama's extensive ties to Jim Johnson. The ad is called.Jim Johnson. And Ms. Tumulty might have been aware of its existence if she'd bothered to call this campaign to find out the facts (reporting) before indicting us for racism in a half-baked, late night rant. Tumulty also takes Obama's response, signed by Mr. Raines, at face value. The Obama campaign says Raines didn't advise the campaign, and Tumulty apparently wasn't interested in getting to the bottom of that either. So we contacted Ms. Tumulty and told her of the multiple sources that tie Raines to Obama, including three separate instances in the Washington Post, none of which was ever challenged by Raines or the Obama campaign until yesterday.
Tumulty did not correct her post, she simply responded "I grew up in Texas. I know what this stuff looks like." Well, now we all know what hysterical liberal bias looks like as well.
After all, isn't what the left has been telling us when we rightly questioned their patriotism as they called for early withdrawal from Iraq? They've been telling us that critizing the war, the tactics, methods is the epitomy of patriotism. Well touche! I would say it's exactly the same principal applied. Criticising Obama is too an exercise of one's patriotism.
It's therefore patriotic and not racist to question a presidential candidate's platform and message regardless of the color of his skin. Isn't that what Martin Luther King said, that he dreamed of the day when a man wouldn't be judged on the color of his skin, but on the content of his character?
This is of course the exact opposite of the beliefs of many on the left. They talk of nothing else except the color of one's skin over the content of character. In fact character means noting so long as the color is "right". Take the left's view of convicted and now executed murderer Tookie Williams. Would there have been such a call for his release had he been white?
Very definitely no. Yet it wasn't with William's skin that the judge sentenced him to die, but for his actions - his words and deeds. Obama isn't Williams or even close. But we are seeing the very same type of "hands off" being commanded by the left simply because of the color of his skin. It's with Obama's character and words, and connections, that we have issue with and that isn't racist, it's patriotic in every sense of the word.
Obama Tells Supporters to Confront Unbelievers, `Get in Their Face' He Says
Well, so much for the kinder, gentler Obamessiah we all kept hearing about. Now he is telling his supporters to belligerently impose their views on anyone not falling under The One's spell. In a Nevada campaign stop as he was on his way to the adulation that Hollyweird was to bestow upon him later that night, Obama told his supporters to "get in the face" of people who doubt his word from on high.
"I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face."
Wow. That is pretty aggressive and mean, isn't it? Obama just told his automatons to almost physically attack people who don't agree with him. After all, that's what "get in their face" means. It is a loud, petulant action, a forceful, aggressive tactic. It is usually done by one who is overly emotional, filled with hate, pushy, and unhinged.
Screaming gay activists, anti-war outcasts, and half sentient loons engage in this sort of behavior. Is this the new "face" of the Obama campaign? Is this that "new tone" we keep hearing about? Will the media portray this ignorant tactic for what it is? Where oh where did that Barack "the light worker" Obama go, anyway?
"A new television ad released Wednesday by Sen. Barack Obama's campaign highlights the closure of Corning Inc.'s plant in State College, Pa., and accuses Washington with Sen. John McCain's help of selling out the workers," the Associated Press reports. So what did Corning make at the plant? The ad, which you can see here, does not say, but the AP story does: "glass tubes for television sets and computer monitors."
It's hard to remember now, but in the olden days TV sets and computer monitors used a technology called cathode ray tubes. A CRT consisted of an electron gun that projects an image onto a fluorescent screen. In most cases the gun had to be some distance from the screen, with the entire assembly enclosed in glass, which meant that TVs were bulky and boxy (hence the term "idiot box").
In modern times, the CRT has given way to superior technologies such as plasma and liquid crystal, which take up less space and provide superior picture quality. This is an enormous blessing to all Americans who watch TV or use computers.
It's hard to imagine a more backward-looking position than mourning the decline of the picture-tube industry. What'll Obama do next, promise to restore American supremacy in the manufacture of buggy whips, iron lungs and floppy disks?
Journalists race to 'check' Palin claims, ignore Democrats' billion dollars in earmarks
When Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin claimed she defeated the infamous Alaskan "Bridge to Nowhere" earmark, the Democratic nominees and network, cable and print journalists rushed to "fact check" her statement.
Journalists across the media spectrum carried Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama's argument portraying Palin as an exaggerator at best, a liar at worst. Reports often failed to fully explain Palin's handling of the "Bridge to Nowhere" earmark and mostly ignored budget watchdogs that still defended her record of reform. Obama's nearly $1 billion in earmark requests, as well as Sen. Joe Biden's $323 million were not mentioned by network reporters either. The assault stemmed from Palin's remarks in her acceptance speech and on the campaign trail since September 3 about earmarks and specifically the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere."
USA Today said on September 10 that her claim about the bridge was "barely half true." A Washington Post front-page headline hit harder: "As Campaign Heats Up, Untruths Can Become Facts Before They're Undone." CBS "Evening News" ran three separate "Reality Checks" criticizing her statements.
Obama's shots against Palin on the campaign trail also resonated with media eager to discredit her. Obama's sound bite on the issue made its way into four network stories in four days and seven CNN reports in six days. Recent stories aired by ABC's "Nightline," "World News with Charles Gibson," and "Good Morning America" all repeated Obama's criticism of Palin without rebuttal from her or the McCain campaign. "When you've been taking all these earmarks when it's convenient and then suddenly you're the champion anti-earmark person that's not change. Come on! Words mean something. You can't just make stuff up," Obama said.
Obama attacked Palin's "self-styled record of reform," according to ABC's Jake Tapper, who quoted a portion of those remarks in a "Nightline" story without including a rebuttal from the McCain campaign.
Reporters didn't include groups that have praised Palin's reforms, including Citizens Against Government Waste and Americans for Prosperity (AFP). AFP has said unequivocally that she did kill the "Bridge to Nowhere."
The national media focused on minutiae: berating Palin for claiming to have killed the "Bridge to Nowhere" - instead of laying out her record of support for earmark transparency, fewer earmark requests and charge to Alaska to grow up economically.
Journalists could have taken the opportunity to dissect the earmarks and wasteful spending of both sides, but instead mostly ignored Obama and Sen. Joe Biden's millions in earmarks for their respective home states.....
The Washington Post article headlined: "As Campaign Heats Up, Untruths Can Become Facts Before They're Undone," written by Jonathan Weisman, said that Palin's repeated mentions of the bridge were "one example of a candidate staying on message even when that message has been publicly discredited." But Ed Frank, vice president of public affairs for Americans for Prosperity, disagreed. In a "Memo to National Media" Frank said, "Publicly discredited? The simple, undeniable fact is Sarah Palin killed the Bridge to Nowhere, no matter how much Jonathan Weisman and the rest of the national media wish it weren't so or how hard they try to `undo' it." ....
Phil Kerpen, AFP's director of policy, wrote on the AFP Web site September 11, "Palin stood up to [Sen. Ted] Stevens and pulled the plug on the bridge on September 21, 2007." Anchorage Daily News backs up Kerpen's claim. The newspaper reported on Sept. 21, 2007 that Alaska had "officially abandoned" the project. Palin was quoted in that story saying the bridge was $329 million short of complete funding and "It's clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island."
According to Kerpen, "[T]he facts are plain. When it mattered, Gov. Palin stood up to Sen. Stevens and dealt the Bridge to Nowhere its death blow." But Kerpen also called attention to something the national news media was ignoring: Obama and Biden's support for the bridge to nowhere. "Let the record show that Barack Obama himself voted for the bridge at least twice, as did his running mate Joe Biden," Kerpen said....
As for the Democratic nominee for vice president, Biden's made 119 earmark requests for 2009 totaling $323 million. Republicans are pressuring Biden to release records of his earmark requests for the past 35 years.
As Time magazine's Mark Halperin said on ABC "World News" September 9, "There's almost no politician in America with a clean record on earmarks." Halperin then credited McCain for being one of the few exceptions. ABC's Ron Claiborne responded, saying. "In his 26 years, in Congress, McCain has never asked for an earmark
I understand the rough and tumble of politics. But Barack Obama -- the supposedly postpartisan, postracial candidate of hope and change -- has gone where few modern candidates have gone before. Mr. Obama's campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering.
Here's the relevant part of the Spanish-language television commercial Mr. Obama is running in Hispanic communities: "They want us to forget the insults we've put up with . . . the intolerance . . . they made us feel marginalized in this country we love so much." Then the commercial flashes two quotes from me: ". . . stupid and unskilled Mexicans" and "You shut your mouth or you get out!" And then a voice says, "John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote . . . and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families. John McCain . . . more of the same old Republican tricks."
Much of the media that is uninterested in Mr. Obama's connections to unrepentant 1970s Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright have so far gone along with the attempt to tie me to Mr. McCain. But Mr. McCain and I have not agreed on how to address illegal immigration. While I am heartened by his willingness to start by securing the borders, it is no secret that we have fundamental differences on illegal immigration.
And more to the point, these sound bites are a deception, and Mr. Obama knows it. The first sound bite was extracted from a 1993 humorous monologue poking fun at the arguments against the North American Free Trade Agreement. Here's the context: "If you are unskilled and uneducated, your job is going south. Skilled workers, educated people are going to do fine 'cause those are the kinds of jobs Nafta is going to create. If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people, I'm serious, let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do -- let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work."
My point, which is obvious, was that the people who were criticizing Nafta were demeaning workers, particularly low-skilled workers. I was criticizing the mind-set of the protectionists who opposed the treaty. There was no racial connotation to it and no one thought there was at the time. I was demeaning the arguments of the opponents. As for the second sound bite, I was mocking the Mexican government's double standard -- i.e., urging open borders in this country while imposing draconian immigration requirements within its own borders. Thus, I took the restrictions Mexico imposes on immigrants and appropriated them as my own suggestions for a new immigration law.
Here's the context for that sound bite: "And another thing: You don't have the right to protest. You're allowed no demonstrations, no foreign flag waving, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his policies. You're a foreigner: shut your mouth or get out! And if you come here illegally, you're going to jail."
At the time, I made abundantly clear that this was a parody on the Mexican government's hypocrisy and nobody took it otherwise. The malignant aspect of this is that Mr. Obama and his advisers know exactly what they are doing. They had to listen to both monologues or read the transcripts. They then had to pick the particular excerpts they used in order to create a commercial of distortions. Their hoped-for result is to inflame racial tensions. In doing this, Mr. Obama and his advisers have demonstrated a pernicious contempt for American society.
We've made much racial progress in this country. Any candidate who employs the tactics of the old segregationists is unworthy of the presidency.
Shhh ... Don't call Obama's national service scheme a 'draft'
Both Barack Obama and John McCain have long supported some sort of "national service" that involves large-scale participation by Americans in projects deemed worthy by a government agency. It may mean building housing, assisting with the provision of medical care or patrolling the border, but overall it involves putting aside personal preferences for, as McCain puts it, "a cause greater than yourself."
Obama devotes an entire section of his campaign Website to national service; McCain does the same and penned a column back in 2001 praising AmeriCorps and calling for expanded opportunities for government-sanctioned service. Both candidates recently appeared at a national service forum sponsored by Time magazine, which has made the issue its house hobbyhorse. McCain and Obama each have praised local volunteerism, but seem to think that donating your time to a soup kitchen, a clinic or a church is less valuable than participation in a grand-scale scheme managed by the state.
I have a lot of thoughts about politicians who deem hours spent in grassroots service to causes chosen freely by volunteers to be inferior to government programs run from D.C., but I'll hold my tongue -- for now. What does interest me, though, is whether all of this talk of "national service" means that the grand old days of conscription are about to return, though now with draftees stuffed into hospital scrubs and denim as often as they're required to don camouflage.
McCain was once an advocate of the draft, though, as far as I can tell, he's uttered nary a word in favor of conscription since he started pursuing residency in the White House. The national service section of his Website is full of talk of opportunities and incentives -- lots of carrot, but no stick. Whatever his personal feelings, he seems to understand that draft boards are no longer compatible with presidential ambitions.
At first glance, Obama's scheme is similar. His proposal even specifically refers to "universal voluntary citizen service." It's all very touchy-feelly. But, as Michael Kinsley put it so well in the pages of Time: "Problem number one with grand schemes for universal voluntary public service is that they can't be both universal and voluntary. If everybody has to do it, then it's not voluntary, is it? And if it's truly up to the individual, then it won't be universal."
Of course, Barack Obama could be playing the usual politician's game of throwing empty words at an audience, without worrying overly much about their meaning. But his campaign has put forward a detailed plan for national service, and on close inspection, it's clear that he really does mean "universal." And while there's no call for old-fashioned conscription, his national service carrots are matched by very modern sticks that introduce almost as much compulsion as the old kind.
In fact, Obama's national service plan is "voluntary" in a technical sense -- nobody will be arrested for declining to participate. But non-participants also won't be allowed to graduate from high school, and without those diplomas, life could get a bit rough. Obama's national service plan (PDF) says:
Schools that require service as part of the educational experience create improved learning environments and serve as resources for their communities. The Obama-Biden plan sets a goal for all students to engage in service, with middle and high school students performing 50 hours of service each year, and college students performing 100 hours of service each year. Under this plan, students would graduate college with as many as 17 weeks of public service experience under their belts.
But schools set their own policies, don't they? Well ... sort of. You see, as the saying goes, "he who takes the king's coin becomes the king's man." And most public schools depend on federal dollars. As Obama elaborated in a speech last December, "At the middle and high school level, we'll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs, and give schools resources to offer new service opportunities."
So, it won't be the nasty federal government forcing your kids to donate their time to government-approved service, it'll be the local schools -- but that requirement will be the among the strings attached to federal money.
This is a very modern way of imposing mandates from the top down. The uniform 21-year-old national drinking age, for instance, is nominally the choice of each state government, not a federal law. But the states set the age at 21 as a condition of continuing to receive a full measure of federal highway funds. The same goes for the late, unlamented 55mph speed limit.
Of course, state and local agencies could choose to give up the checks from D.C., but they almost never do. And so, violations of federal policies get punished by state and local authorities.
Under Barack Obama's plan, a refusal to participate in a national service program touted at the federal level will be punished by the withholding of high school diplomas by the school district in your town. And without that diploma, few colleges or employers will even bother to look at your application.
It's a softer sort of authoritarianism which requires no draft boards, muddles the identity of the "bad guy" and produces no martyrs i handcuffs for the evening news. You just can't get a job if you don't do as you're told.
Such "soft" mandates are easier to escape than the old draft. Private schools will still be able to set their own criteria for graduation, as will homeschoolers. At least, they will so long as they can resist social pressure to conform to the requirements imposed by public schools.
And 50 hours of service isn't exactly a tour in the rice paddies. Most people will just roll their eyes and do what it takes to get that diploma. (The 100 hours required of college students will be in return for a $4,000 grant, which amounts less to conscription than to the world's most expensive work-study scheme.) But make no mistake: Barack Obama wants your kids. And he's willing to draft them, in a plausibly deniable way.
More, as promised, on Senator Joe Biden (why should Sarah Palin get all the coverage?). Remember, you read it here first: on September 11 this blog reported a mounting backlash from Catholic bishops against Biden, Barack Obama's "Catholic" pro-abortion running mate. At that time I estimated eight bishops had come out to denounce Biden; the total is now 55. Beyond that, Biden is being trashed across every state of the Union by Catholic newspapers, TV and radio stations, and blogs. It is a tsunami of rejection.
The story has now hit the secular media. Last Saturday Time magazine asked: "Does Biden Have a Catholic Problem?" By Wednesday the issue had moved onto the front page of the New York Times. Joe the Jinx has blown it, big time. Biden has only himself to blame: he started this war, with his notoriously undisciplined mouth. He knew the dangers. Last August, Archbishop Raymond Burke, former Archbishop of St Louis and now Prefect of the Apostolic Segnatura in Rome, said communion should be denied to pro-abortion politicians "until they have reformed their lives".
Archbishop Chaput of Denver had already announced Biden should not receive communion because of his pro-abortion views. Defiantly, Biden took communion in his home parish in Delaware in late August. On September 2 the Bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania (a crucial swing state) banned him from communion in his diocese. That is effective excommunication. Then came the crucial provocation. On NBC's Meet the Press programme on September 7 Biden grossly misrepresented the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion and audaciously cited St Thomas Aquinas in his own cause.
That did it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had already done the same thing on the same programme, in her instance citing St Augustine. Even the torpid US bishops could not have false doctrine glibly broadcast by public figures, misleading their flock. So the counterattack described here last week began, culminating in a statement from the US Bishops' Conference. The bishops of Kansas City have also issued a pastoral letter on the subject. It is open season on Biden.
There are 47 million Catholic voters in the United States. One quarter of all registered voters are Catholics. At every presidential election in the past 30 years the Catholic vote has gone to the winning candidate, except for Al Gore in 2000. This year 41 per cent of Catholics are independents - up from 30 per cent in 2004. Psephologists claim practising Catholics were the decisive factor in the crucial swing states in 2004: in Ohio 65 per cent of Catholics voted for Bush, in Florida 66 per cent. They were drifting away in disillusionment from the Republicans and split 50-50, until Joe Biden worked his magic. This is electoral suicide by the Democrats.
Why does Joe Biden lie about a 'drunk driver' killing his 1st wife?
It is terrible to lose family members to a traffic accident. But why on earth would a United States Senator fabricate an embellishment and claim that it was a drunk driver's fault, when the record clearly indicates it was not? Delaware Online reports:
Since his vice presidential nomination, Joe Biden's 2007 statement that a "guy who allegedly ... drank his lunch" and drove the truck that struck and killed his first wife and daughter has gained national media traction.
Alcohol didn't play a role in the 1972 crash, investigators found. But as recently as last week, the syndicated TV show Inside Edition aired a clip from 2001 of Biden describing the accident to an audience at the University of Delaware and saying the truck driver "stopped to drink instead of drive." The senator's statements don't jibe with news and law enforcement reports from the time, which cleared driver Curtis C. Dunn, who died in 1999, of wrongdoing.
"To see it coming from [Biden's] mouth, I just burst into tears," Dunn's daughter, Glasgow resident Pamela Hamill, 44, said Wednesday. "My dad was always there for us. Now we feel like we should be there for him because he's not here to defend himself."
Biden has embellished his supposed "working class" origins in Scranton, PA, when in fact his father was successful sales professional for substantial companies, and he attended a very expensive private school.
Is this an attempt to exploit the death of his first wife for political gain? The thought is sickening. Even if Biden was inititially misinformed, he and his campaign have allowed a lie to propagate throughout the media. The news report above mentions:
"...since Barack Obama tapped Biden to be his running mate on Aug. 23, The New York Times, National Public Radio and The Economist have run stories that characterized Dunn as a drunken driver."
Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius said on Tuesday that she believes race could be a factor in this election. "I think that the notion that, 'By the way, have any of you noticed that Barack Obama is part African American?' I think that is for a number of people difficult... I think we need to talk about the fact that that is a real issue." According the AP's original report, she also attacked Republicans for injecting "code language" to convince Midwesterners that Democrat Barack Obama is different from them. The terms "working class" and "blue collar" are "code" for "white."
One could reasonably ask who is injecting what into this campaign in Spanish, English, in reference to dollar bills and Bradley Effects. But, I will leave that, and all that "talk" the governor believes we need to have, to another post.
What I find more interesting - well, no, actually, incredibly crude - is the "code" language theory that "blue collar" and "working class" really means "white." Let's see. Obama has attracted millions of white voters. White Iowans put his campaign on track in the primaries. White Iowans convinced black South Carolinians to dump Hillary and move over to Obama. White college students and white professionals, along side of black voters, held Obama's candidacy aloft to the nomination. Blue collar and working class voters, however, stubbornly remain immune to the Obama magic. Those voters are overwhlemingly white. So, the logic goes, it must be race. Huh? Does that make any sense?
Let's try this again. If blue collar democrats are white, and upper income, college educated democrats are white, then race alone, obviously, does not account for the discrepancy in their voting preferences. As has been noted by many, many people here in "The Corner" and elsewhere, it's a culture thing.
What the "code language" camp really seems to be saying is that white, upper income, college educated democrats who have flocked to Obama's candidacy are not really white, or kinda white, but not that white, or not that kind of white. "White" is really "code" for "racist." And that, I believe, is the not-so-coded language that is being injected into this campaign.
I have reproduced a Reuters article below as written. Reuters are the people who think that terrorists are just misunderstood patriots. It's not a bad article as far as it goes. Good for Reuters anyway. But note their quite false assertion that Republicans killed the amnesty bill. Since Republicans don't have a majority in either house, how could they? Both Republicans AND Democrats voted against the bill. And a Republican President supported it! And Limbaugh is apparently a suspect character for "cigar chomping"! No doubt Democrat cigar-smokers are OK, however. Or is this just bigotry against cigar-smokers?
Immigration has been absent from the presidential campaign for months, but it came to the front again this week in a controversial television spot for Barack Obama. The Democratic presidential candidate sought to cast Republican rival John McCain as an anti-Hispanic hard-liner and link him to talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.
The Spanish language TV ad - dubbed "Dos Caras," or "Two Faces" - aired on Wednesday. It courted Hispanic voters who make up 9 percent of the electorate and who could help swing the outcome in battleground states in the U.S. southwest as well as in Florida on Nov. 4.
The 30-second spot begins with a voice-over attacking the Republicans: "They want us to forget the insults we've put up with, the intolerance . they made us feel marginalized in the country that we love so much." The screen then shows two quotes from widely syndicated radio host Limbaugh, one reads "stupid and unskilled Mexicans," the other, "You shut your mouth or you get out!"
The paid spot then says: "John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote . and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush, which puts special interests ahead of working families." It closes with the line "more of the same Republican lies."
The advertisement is a stretch. McCain was the co-author of a bi-partisan bill that sought a path to citizenship for millions of mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants living in the United States. It was backed by President George W. Bush, but was ultimately killed by Senate Republicans last year.
His support for the measure brought McCain the ire of many immigration hard-liners in his own party, and met with scorn from cigar-chomping Limbaugh, who was outspoken in his opposition to the veteran Arizona senator during the primary election process.The McCain campaign shot back on Thursday with a rebuttal of the television spot. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican, calling the immigration ad "offensive and dishonest." "Instead of making false ads with baseless attacks, Barack Obama should be apologizing to the Latino community," he said.
Race-Baiting -- by the Obama camp. Shocking, I know. Spanish campaign ads twist Rush Limbaugh's words to P.O. Hispanics:
The commercial, to air in Limbaugh's home state of Florida as well as Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, features a picture of the conservative talk show host and shows his words on the screen: "Mexicans are stupid and unqualified" and "Shut your mouth or get out." It was first reported by the Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe. "Obama is now stoking racism in the country," Limbaugh wrote in an email. "Obama is a disgrace - he wants the public to think he is Mr. Nice Guy while his thugs are in Alaska looking for dirt on Palin and he runs race-baiting ads and lies about what he has done and what McCain has done." As for the quotes, Limbaugh said they were taken out of context.
Stock response, right? They always say its out of context.
The first, "stupid and unqualified," was from the NAFTA debate of the mid-90s, he recalled. Limbaugh, a NAFTA proponent, said in the fall of 1993 he got a call from a listener who was upset at the potential loss of American jobs. In response he said, "If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people-I'm serious, let the unskilled jobs, let the kinds of jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do-let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work."
Hey, that doesn't say "Mexicans are stupid and unqualified." It just says the ones that are should be entitled to jobs, too.
On "shut your mouth," Limbaugh produced an April 2006 transcript from what he described as a parody of Mexican immigration laws. The talk show host read a list of stringent rules, adding "shut your mouth and get out," before revealing to listeners that the guidelines were those set by the Mexican government for immigrants.
So it turns out the ad is a big fat sleazy lie. Vile and stupid, too, says Surber, noting the absurdity of trying to paint amnesty-backer McCain as anti-immigrant. Awaiting widespread outrage and condemnation? Don't worry, I won't be staying up too late. But is this what Obamists mean when they say they want their guy to get tougher? Now, when he says he's "a leap for the American people" .
"We always knew this was going to be hard, and this is a leap for the American people," Obama said. "And we're running against somebody who has a formidable biography, a compelling biography. He's a genuine American hero, somebody who served in uniform and suffered through some things that very few of us can imagine."
. Does he mean because he's a black guy and the American people are bigots, or does he mean the experience thing, the long history of hanging out with weird radicals, and all the dangerously bad ideas?
The Obamas Look to Oprah as Their "Global Role Model". Oprah Looks to Her Mentally Deranged Guru, Eckhart Tolle. Tolle Looks to His "Source," an Exact Match for Satan
The overlooked imperious theme of Michelle Obama's convention speech was "the world as it should be." She used the phrase four times, emphasizing that she and Barack are "committed" to "building the world as it should be." Mrs. Obama often speaks about remaking the world, as she did at the end of her UCLA speech: "We can change the world. Yes we can." But how do she and her husband imagine that they are going to effect this change? Michelle's own carefully considered written words give us a frightening clue, suggesting that the Obamas look to television personality, Oprah Winfrey, as their guide and inspiration in world affairs. What is doubly frightening is that Oprah looks, in turn, to her mentally deranged guru, Eckhart Tolle, and Tolle looks, in turn, to his inner "Source," an exact match for Satan.
On May 20, Time magazine published Mrs. Obama's tribute to Oprah as part of its 100 most influential people of 2008. It read in part: "Oprah is a wonderful friend and an incredible force. Her friendship and support have meant so much to Barack and me . . . Using her platform to serve as a global role model, she challenges us [Barack and me] to make the world as it is, the world as it should be. And she is always the first to show us how it can be done." The Obamas' vision of the "world as it should be" jibes with Oprah's.
Oprah's Obama-admired remake of the world is well underway. There is "a new kind of tribe emerging - a global community of seekers learning from and teaching each other how to be with our humanity," Oprah says. This new "global community" is made up of the millions who have responded favorably to her relentless promotion of her pathologically narcissistic, anti-Christian guru, Eckhart Tolle.
In March of this year, Oprah kicked off her ten-week global Internet online class touting Tolle's book, A New Earth, and its importance in raising everyone's "consciousness." The interactive webcast reached 500,000 people in more than 139 countries. Since that time, according to Oprah's Web site, millions more have downloaded Oprah's and Tolle's teachings. When Michelle Obama, two months after the Tolle kick-off, lauded Oprah as being "a global role model . . . show[ing] us how it can be done," to what was she referring, if not this most focused effort on Oprah's part to "benefit" humanity by building a one-world multi-cultural tribe?
When Barack speaks of himself as "a fellow citizen of the world," is he visualizing world peace becoming a reality through Oprah's expanding tribe? Don't doubt it. Michelle introduced Oprah in Iowa prior to Oprah's introducing Obama, gushing that the talk-show queen "touches the souls of so many of us" and "empowers us all." Michelle's "us" includes Barack. In his Berlin speech entitled, "A World that Stands as One," the Oprah-empowered Barack said that the "walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down." That's exactly what Oprah is all about, promoting the lunacy that Tolle's teaching transcends and unites all religions. Once the Christians, Muslims, and Jews join Oprah's tribe and accept Oprah's guru as their chief prophet, then Presto: world peace!
Oprah's guru, Eckhart Tolle, is a troubled and troubling individual. He claims to have experienced "a reincarnation as a spiritual teacher" through a self-admitted psychotic episode. He is a case study in the development of the mental illness of malignant narcissism. Like the original Narcissus, Tolle is obsessed with the two-dimensional reflection of his image. In his The Power of Now, Tolle writes about what he learns from viewing his own image in a mirror: "If you accept the image, no matter what it is, if you become friendly toward it, it cannot not become friendly toward you. This is how you change the world."
Here, in a nutshell, Tolle expresses the fundamental delusion and extreme grandiosity of his own malignant narcissism. A mirror image is not true, but backwards. Tolle is not the greatest spiritual teacher in the world as he imagines, but one of the least competent. Oprah welcomes Tolle's preposterous claims with uncritical glee because they justify the adoration of her own backwards and exalted mirror image of herself. Obama also exhibits the characteristics of malignant narcissism, most notably the delusions of grandeur that lie at the heart of the complex. His entire campaign is nothing more than a demand to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements.
To review: Barack and Michelle Obama look to Oprah Winfrey as their "global role model" for change. To effect this worldwide change, Oprah, in turn, relies on the "infallible" teachings of her guru, Eckhart Tolle. Tolle, in turn, looks in the mirror and makes friends with the backwards image of himself, thus enabling him to "change the world."
Beyond his backwards reflected image, Oprah's guru relies on something even more disturbing to change the world. It is a spirit or a force Tolle calls the "Source" which he claims resides within himself and Oprah, and within all those others who have learned through his teachings to "dissolve" their egos. That "Source" has told Tolle that the word of the God of the Bible is not reliable, that there is no death, and that he and Oprah both are as God, able to say of themselves "I Am That I Am." These things that the "Source" has told Oprah and Tolle are the exact same things the serpent told Eve in the ancient garden.
Let's review one more time: To change the world, the Obamas look to the New Age babblings of a self-adoring talk-show host, she looks to her mentally deranged guru, he looks to a friendly, backwards image of himself and relies upon the utterances of a "Source" that Christians, Jews, and Muslims recognize immediately as the deluding "wisdom" of the Genesis serpent.
But to Oprah, in her morally backwards narcissistic state, Tolle's recycled serpent's "wisdom" does not seem delusive, but true. Oprah goes on to attribute that same "wisdom" to Barack Obama. She praises his "intelligence" and calls him "brilliant." She says he has the "gift of wisdom," and a "tongue dipped in unvarnished truth." According to Oprah, not only does Obama always tell the truth, but also knows how "to be the truth," a straightforward messianic reference.
Oprah has said, "I don't think there's anything more important than awakening and also knowing what your purpose is." To her, awakening means embracing and spreading the ludicrous, grandiose notions of her guru, as she shamelessly tries to reconcile all of humanity to her and Tolle's "Source." Oprah and Tolle believe that "the transformation of human consciousness" is an "urgent task." We must "evolve" or perish. Oprah refers to Obama as an "evolved leader." After Obama's convention speech, before meeting with him, Oprah said, "We have to do whatever it takes to get [Obama] in office." Oprah's purpose is to expand her mutually parasitic coupling with her guru into a politically powerful triumvirate, getting Obama elected president so he will help her "save" the world, on behalf of her and Tolle's "Source." The most horrifying part is that Obama actually believes he can do it through the Obama-Oprah-Tolle-Satan School of International Relations.
Revelation 12:9 refers to "the ancient serpent called Adversary and Satan, who is deceiving the whole inhabited earth." Oprah Winfrey leads a global tribe that is part of that sinister process. She is backing a man for president who has become part of that sinister process, as well. Now we have a better understanding of what the Obamas and Oprah mean by "the world as it should be," and what their guru really means when he says, "This is how you change the world."
Today wasn't the first time Barack Obama asked his supporters to "get in the face" of people who disagree with Sen. Obama. In fact, yesterday's Chicago Tribune carried an illuminating story on the "Obama Action Wire"--Obama's flash-mob tool designed to disrupt media criticism of the candidate in real time. (h/t Steve Sailer)
Here's how the Obama Action Wire Works: The campaign has a large database of supporters. When the campaign gets wind of something in the media it doesn't like, for instance, a radio interview with an Obama critic or a TV ad being run critical of Obama, the Action Wire directs people in the database to flood the offending media outlet with phone calls and emails. Many times, this is done while the interview is being conducted on air.
It did so as recently as Monday night, when it orchestrated a massive stream of complaints on the phone lines of Tribune Co.-owned WGN-AM in Chicago when the radio station hosted author David Freddoso, who has written a controversial book about the Illinois Democrat. . . . Zack Christenson, executive producer of "Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg," said the response was about the same. "It's just constant, constant phone calls, and the e-mails are pouring in," he said, adding that the extra volume of calls made it more difficult to run the show.
The effect of the Action Wire seems to be to create something like a Denial of Service Attack. Now, DoS attacks aren't illegal (at least not in the United States; they are in the U.K.).
But surely it says something about the Obama campaign's commitment to free and fair exchange of ideas that his campaign actively prods people into disrupting the airing of views it finds displeasing. It wasn't always that way. During the primaries, part of Obama's stump speech was about the need to listen to your political opponents and to interact with them politely. Obama didn't mean for this dialogue to result in the compromise of liberal ideals, of course. He explicitly meant that in order to achieve liberal political ends it would be necessary to appear collegial and open-minded in order to persuade independents to join the movement. Here's how he put it in New Hampshire:
[I]n my own life, I've discovered that if you really know what you stand for, if you know what you believe in, if you know who you are fighting for, if you know what you care about and cannot be compromised--then you can afford to reach out across the aisle. You can talk to people who don't agree with you. And you do so not just because you think that you're always going to persuade them, but because people out in America, outside of Washington, are listening.
And they want to see that we can--that we don't have to agree on everything to work on something. That we can disagree without being disagreeable. That's how we can attract independents [to the] change agenda. That's how we can attract some Republicans. That's how we build a working majority for change. .. And you can afford to be courteous. And you can say, "Yes, sir." And "No, sir." "Yes, ma'am." "No, ma'am." But if you're going to be in the way of change, get out of the way--we're pushing you aside. Very politely of course.
As the Action Wire show's Obama is still all for pushing people aside. But he no longer sees the necessity for politeness. Exit Question: I suppose it's one thing for a candidate to issue orders for what amounts to a DoS attack on media he dislikes. But would President Obama keep the Action Wire up and running?
Radical leftist's son: 'Obama learned his lesson well'
Alleged Child of Saul Alinsky sees Democratic Party using his father's methods. The depiction of Alinsky's ideas is certainly accurate and so is the similarity between the Obama and Alinsky methods
In a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, the son of radical socialist community organizer Saul Alinsky praised Barack Obama for stirring up the masses at the Democratic National Convention "Saul Alinsky style," saying, "Obama learned his lesson well." The letter signed L. David Alinsky closed by saying, "I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully. . It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday."
Saul Alinsky was a social revolutionist who advocated going beyond leftist approaches to the point of stirring mass organizations of "Have-nots" that would rise up and seize power from the "Haves." Alinsky's radical methods were often controversial, as were his words, such as the dedication of his book "Rules for Radicals": "To the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer."
Alinsky founded and trained community organizations to follow his methods, including organizations in South Chicago, where Barack Obama credits his political beginnings. As the Washington Post reported last year, Obama was hired shortly after graduating from college by a group of Alinsky's disciples to be community organizer.
"Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness," wrote L. David Alinsky.
How deeply the radical leftist Alinsky actually influenced Obama remains a point of controversy in the public eye, as demonstrated by the stir caused after his wife's alleged use of Alinsky's words at the Democratic National Convention and by the war of words between the Obama campaign and authors like Jerome Corsi, who have pointed to Obama's connections with radical socialists and communists in his early years.
If the Obama campaign was hoping to distance itself from connections to Saul Alinsky, however, the younger Alinsky's letter to the editor isn't going to help.
"All the elements were present," wrote L. David Alinsky, referring to the Democratic National Convention at which Obama was nominated, "the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd's chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people. The Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style.
"Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well."
A top Hillary Clinton fund-raiser threw her support behind Republican candidate John McCain on Wednesday, saying he would lead the country in a centrist fashion and accusing the Democrats of becoming too extreme. Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who splits her time between living in London and New York, said she believed that the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, and other prominent Democratic officials such as the head of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean, would take the party "too far to the left".
Mrs Rothschild, who is a member of the DNC's Democrats Abroad organisation, praised Senator McCain for working with Democrats to pass legislation and for standing up to President George Bush on the Iraq war strategy. She also disputed Senator Obama's argument that a McCain administration would be an extension of Mr Bush's presidency. Democrats cite Senator McCain's own account of having voted in support of Mr Bush's policies 90 per cent of the time. She said the Arizona senator had broken with Mr Bush to support funding for stem cell research and to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
She said she was also excited by the prospect of a woman being elected to the vice-presidency, even though she and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin disagree on issues. The Alaska Governor opposes abortion except in the case of a threat to the mother's life. Mrs Rothschild said she supported abortion rights.
She was one of Senator Clinton's top fund-raisers, bringing in more than $US100,000 ($126,000) for her presidential campaign. She built a multimillion-dollar telecommunications company before marrying international banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.
Video of Fannie Mae CEO in 2005 Explaining the "FAMILY" Connection with Dems & Obama
In 2005-- Senator John McCain partnered with three other Senate Republicans to reform the government's involvement in lending, after an attempt by the Bush administration died in Congress two years earlier. Democrats blocked the reform.
In 2005-- Barack Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus met with Fannie Mae for a "family" event. In 2005 Democrats also blocked reform of Fannie Mae:
This was before Fannie Mae started filling the pockets of Barack Obama with political donations. The junior Illinois senator collected more money from Fannie Mae than any other Washington politician except Senator Dodd in the last decade. Obama was able to accomplish this feat in just 3 years. This video shows Fannie Mae CEO talking to members of the Congressional Black Caucus:
The Democrats have been taking PAYOFFS from Fannie and Freddie and have looked the other way FOR DECADES! They've blocked reform.
Now there's NEW VIDEO of the CEO of Fannie Mae in 2005 explaining the "FAMILY" connection with Democrats and specifically Barack Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus. It looks like Michelle Obama was at the event, too. This was before Barack Obama started collecting tens of thousands from the failed lender.
The Siena poll, one of the two key polls of New York state voters, has come out with its monthly snapshot of the presidential race in the Empire State. And it's stunning. It is remarkable, though not eye-opening, that John McCain is now only 5 points behind Barack Obama, 46-41 - not shocking because polls have narrowed to similar margins in New Jersey. (It should be noted, however, that according to a Rasmussen poll released yesterday, Obama is leading in New York by 55-42.)
No, the shocking detail has to do with a wild, 35-point swing toward McCain among Jewish voters. Obama led among them by a margin of 50-37 in August. This month, McCain is actually leading Obama by a margin of 54 percent to 32 percent.
Siena polled 626 likely voters this month. Of those, according to Steve Greenberg, the spokesman for the Siena poll, 77 were Jews, or 12 percent of the sample. That is Siena's best guess of the size of the Jewish vote in New York state in November. With a sample size that small, the margin of error for the Jewish voter sample is plus-or-minus 11 points.
That means the poll could be off by as many as 11 points in either direction - i.e., McCain could be leading by as little as 11 points or by as many as 33.
The only difference between the September poll and the August poll as a matter of methodology is that in September, Siena polled likely voters, whereas in August it only polled registered voters.
The poll could, of course, be an outlier. But if it even begins to approximate the truth, it is huge news. No Republican has scored more than 39 percent of the Jewish vote in modern times, and that was Ronald Reagan in 1980, following a series of missteps by the Carter administration. These sorts of numbers for McCain have implications in two other states particularly - Florida and Pennsylvania.
In Florida, the implications are obvious. Obama's own Jewish organizers in Florida are telling the campaign they are finding profound resistance to him, particularly in South Florida. The polling overall there seems to be moving inexorably in McCain's direction, which is necessary for him; it is nearly impossible to see how he can win the election if he loses Florida.
But what about Pennsylvania? That is a state it appears Obama must win. There are, it is estimated, more than 200,000 Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, a state John Kerry won by 140,000 votes. If we assume Pennsylvania's 200,000 voting Jews voted in the same way as Jews nationwide in 2004 and went 76-24 for Kerry, we can attribute 150,000 Jewish votes to Kerry, his entire margin of victory plus seven percent. Now imagine if that number had been closer to 50-50. Kerry would have received 100,000 Jewish votes rather than 150,000. Bush would have received 100,000 Jewish votes rather than 50,000. Kerry's margin of victory would then have shrunk to 40,000 votes.
It appears Obama may have a tougher time in Pennsylvania than Kerry did because of his difficulty attracting the ethnic white vote in the western part of the state. If there is a Jewish swing away from him as well, he really could lose there. And if he loses there and loses Ohio, he is sunk. Ohio has approximately 80,000 Jewish voters, so a swing away from Obama to a 50-50 race would cost him 25,000 votes Kerry presumably received in 2004 - and in a state that Bush won by 121,000 votes.
We'll need more data from two other states with a significant Jewish population to allow for a measurable sample size in a poll - Florida and California - and a polling firm willing to break out the Jewish vote as Siena has, to see whether this is just statistical smoke or whether Obama has a brushfire he needs to put out somehow before it consumes him.
It's another election season, so that means it's time for Democrats to start uttering wild malapropisms about the Bible to pretend they believe in God! In 2000, we had Al Gore inverting a Christian parable into something nearly satanic. Defending his nutty ideas about the Earth during one of the debates, Gore said: "In my faith tradition, it's written in the book of Matthew, where your heart is, there is your treasure also." And that, he said, is why we should treasure the environment.
First of all, people who say "faith tradition" instead of "religion" are always phony-baloney, "Christmas and Easter"-type believers. Second, Jesus was making almost the exact opposite point, saying: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth," where there are moths, rust and thieves, but in heaven, because, Jesus said, "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." I guess that's the kind of mix-up that can happen when your theological adviser is Naomi Wolf.
Then in 2004, Democratic presidential candidate and future Trivial Pursuit answer Howard Dean told an interviewer that his favorite part of the New Testament was the book of Job. The reporter should have asked him if that was his favorite book in all three testaments. And now in 2008, we have Democrats attacking Sarah Palin for being a Christian, while comparing Obama to Jesus Christ (and not in the sarcastic way the rest of us do).
Liberals have indignantly claimed that Palin thinks the Founding Fathers wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which is Olbmermannic in the sense that a) if it were true, it's trivial, and b) it's not true. Their claim is based on a questionnaire Palin filled out when she was running for governor of Alaska in 2006, which asked the candidates if they were "offended by the phrase 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance." Palin answered: "Not on your life. If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it's good enough for me, and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance." As anyone can see, Palin was not suggesting that the Founding Fathers "wrote" the Pledge of Allegiance: She said the Founding Fathers believed this was a country "under God." Which, um, it is.
For the benefit of MSNBC viewers who aren't watching it as a joke, the whole point of the Declaration of Independence was to lay out the Founders' breathtaking new argument that rights came not from the king, but from God or, as the Declaration said, "Nature's God," the "Creator." That summer, in 1776, Gen. George Washington - a charter member of the Founding Fathers - rallied his troops, saying: "The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves. ... The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of the army." So Washington not only used the phrase "under God," but gave us one of the earliest known references to the rights of the "unborn." That's right! George Washington was a "pro-life extremist," just like Sarah Palin. There is no disputing that a nation "under God" was "good enough" for the Founding Fathers, exactly as Palin said.
Meanwhile, on the House floor last week, Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee compared Palin to Pontius Pilate - and Obama to Jesus. Cohen said: "Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus, who our minister prayed about. Pontius Pilate was a governor." Yes, who can forget the biblical account of how Jesus got the homeless Samaritan to register as a Democrat in exchange for a carton of smokes!
Rep. Cohen would be well-advised to stay away from New Testament references. As anyone familiar with the New Testament can confirm for him, there are no parables about Jesus passing out cigarettes for votes, lobbying the Romans for less restrictive workfare rules or filing for grants under the Community Redevelopment Act. "No time for soul-saving now! First, we lobby Fannie Mae to ease off those lending standards and demand a windfall profits tax on the money-changers in the temple".
David Freddoso's magnificent new book, "The Case Against Barack Obama," describes the forefather to "community organizers" like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton - the famed Saul Alinsky. Alinsky is sort of the George Washington of "community organizers." If there were an America-hater's Mount Rushmore, Saul Alinsky would be on it. He tried to hire Hillary to work for him right out of Wellesley. A generation later, those who had trained with Alinsky did hire Obama as a community organizer.
In Freddoso's book, he quotes from the dedication in the first edition of Alinsky's seminal book, "Rules for Radicals," where Alinsky wrote: "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: From all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins - or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer." I suppose it could have been worse. He could have dedicated his book to George Soros.
Even liberals eventually figured out that they shouldn't be praising Satan in public, so the Lucifer-as-inspiration paragraph was cut from later editions of Alinsky's book. (But on the bright side, MSNBC adopted as its motto: "Who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins - or which is which.")
That's exactly what happens to most Democratic ideas - as soon as they are said out loud, normal people react with revulsion, so Democrats learn to pretend they never said them: "I was NOT comparing Palin to a pig! I did not play the race card! I did not say I would meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions!"
Sarah Palin might be just the lucky break the Democrats need. As a staunch pro-lifer, Palin could give Democrats an excuse to steer away from topics they know nothing about, like the Bible, and onto a subject they know chapter and verse, like abortion.
Obama Undermines Own Country, Media Ignores It; Why? They Want What He Wants
Once again, the mainstream media's behavior is being called into question - and once again, the reasons for it are obvious. It is now becoming abundantly clear that Barack Obama, in a meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, tried to undermine his own country's negotiations with Iraq during his July visit to Baghdad. Even the Obama campaign can't deny it because there were multiple witnesses to the exchange.
So once again, conservatives begin raising the question: Why is the mainstream media ignoring this story? They're treating it like they treated the John Edwards affair story, which they ignored until they no longer could. But this is much more serious. The Democratic nominee for president of the United States attempted to scuttle a crucial status-of-forces agreement between the U.S. and the government of Iraq. He blatantly urged the Iraqis to stop negotiating with the Bush Administration and wait until the next president - presumably him, at least as far as he's concerned - takes office.
While the media desperately seeks a relevant angle on the so-called "Troopergate" non-story out of Alaska, or perhaps investigates who paid for Sarah Palin's tanning bed, a U.S. senator who has not been elected president attempts to undermine legitimate negotiations between the man who has and the government of the nation we would like to stop occupying as soon as possible. And he does not even deny doing so, not because he wouldn't like to, but because he can't.
Why is the mainstream media ignoring the story? Well, first and foremost, because they want Obama to win the election. But it goes deeper than that. They're ignoring the story because they don't see anything wrong with what Obama did.
If you're a conservative and you're sitting there thinking Obama has no right to undermine our current president when dealing with a foreign government in a time of war, I agree with you, but they don't. The quaint notion that we support our president as commander in chief, and that he and he alone has the right to make foreign policy, carries no weight with the media. They look at Bush's poor approval ratings. They look at the unpopularity of the war. They look at the fact that Bush has only four months remaining in office.
And they ask, "Well, why should Bush get to negotiate anything? He's leaving soon, we don't like him and neither does anyone else. So what's the problem?" The problem, of course, is that Bush is the president, and that undermining him puts both the war effort and the troops at risk - not to mention the potential long-term stability of Iraq. There is also the matter of respecting the office of the president and the electoral process that put Bush in that office. The press doesn't care about any of that. They only care that they're tired of Bush and want him gone.
The other reason the press is giving Obama a pass on this is that they agree with what he was trying to do. Undermine Bush and the war effort? They've been trying to do that for years. Trumpeting bad news while ignoring the good? Screaming headlines about roadside bombs and troop-death "milestones" while ignoring yet another province we get under control? They've been at it since before the 2004 election. Any reporter who was in that room with Obama probably would have asked Zebari much the same question: "Why are you even talking to Bush? He sucks and we hate him!"
Obama's actions, while probably not treasonous, are beyond reprehensible in a time of war. The McCain campaign should take Obama to task in the most severe manner possible, but they will have to do it through ads and other forms of persuasion. They will have to take it upon themselves to explain to the voters why Obama's actions were wrong - and why, even if you don't like President Bush, you should be horrified at the idea of a U.S. senator undermining his dealings with a foreign government in a time of war.
The mainstream media will continue to ignore this, unless the pressure and the groundswell of public sentiment becomes so great that they can no longer do so. They think Obama is a hero for trying to undermine Bush. And they will continue to cover for him, unless and until they become afraid that protecting him will bring them down as well.
By Ruben Navarrette Jr. Ruben is no conservative but is not shy of criticizing Leftist hysteria. The vast misrepresentation of the pro-immigration McCain as another anti-immigration Tancredo is just too much for him in the excellent article below.
As they recall the failure of immigration reform in Congress, Democrats want to come off as the good guys. This means burying the fact that their patrons in organized labor instructed them to kill any compromise that included guest workers -- a concept AFL-CIO President John Sweeney termed "a bad idea (that) harms all workers." And it means trying to refute a new Spanish-language television ad from the McCain-Palin campaign that blames Barack Obama and other Senate Democrats for undermining immigration reform in 2007 with procedural delays and "poison pill" amendments intended to make the legislation unpalatable to Republicans.
Translated, the ad says: "Obama and his congressional allies say they are on the side of immigrants. But are they? The press reports that their efforts were 'poison pills' that made immigration reform fail. The result: No guest worker program. No path to citizenship. No secure borders. No reform. Is that being on our side? Obama and his congressional allies: Ready to block immigration reform, but not ready to lead."
That is exactly what happened. It was smart but cynical politics. Led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrats were able to please the unions and deny a Republican president a huge legislative victory, all the while making it look as if the opposing party was to blame for the debacle.
Luckily, some members of the media kept their eye on the ball and put the blame where it belonged: on Reid and the Democrats. The Washington Post's David Broder, in a column published in June 2007, blasted Reid for going "out of his way to rewrite (the immigration bill) to meet the demands of organized labor."
Now, in response to the McCain-Palin ad, Democrats are practicing revisionist history. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey said in a statement released by the Obama campaign: "To say that Barack Obama and Senate Democrats blocked the bill that Republicans filibustered is hypocritical and not true. John McCain has lost his credibility when it comes to the immigration issue ... (He) cannot attack Democrats on immigration in Spanish while pandering to the extreme right Tancredo wing of the Republican Party in English."
I understand that Menendez is trying to earn Obama's good graces after being a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton in the primaries. But did he really compare McCain to Tom Tancredo, the nativist congressman who also sought the GOP nomination in this year's primaries? Senator, I know Tom Tancredo. I've written about Tom Tancredo. And John McCain is no Tom Tancredo. One of the few things that these men share is a strong dislike for one another. In one debate, McCain described Tancredo's explanation of what makes someone an American as "beyond my realm of thinking."
Others on the left are also lending a hand to Democratic efforts at damage control. They include groups dedicated to the admirable goal of achieving comprehensive immigration reform. What is not so admirable is the way that these groups have turned on McCain, whom not long ago they praised for fighting the good fight on the immigration issue. Now they claim that McCain has flip-flopped. Baloney. They're the ones who flip-flopped, and for no grander reason than because we're in an election year.
"We are stunned," declared Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a Washington-based liberal-leaning organization in a statement. "A Spanish-language ad approved by Sen. John McCain accuses Sen. Obama and the Democrats of derailing immigration reform? He knows better. The whole political world knows better. Comprehensive immigration reform was blocked not by Democrats but by Republicans. ... Immigrants and Latinos are intelligent. They know the difference between fact and fiction."
I always appreciate it when non-Latinos are patronizing and tell me what I should or shouldn't know. I know this much: Some folks inside the Beltway are so eager to put a Democrat in the White House that they're putting party before truth. They include Latino groups such as the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund who, as Sharry said, should know better.
During a conference call this week with reporters, NCLR Vice President Cecilia Munoz also criticized the ad and called immigration an issue that "tends to determine who the good guys are and the bad guys are for Latinos." That implies that these advocacy groups can tell the difference. That's the point. Blinded by partisanship, they haven't a clue.
Won't leave home without his teleprompter. Spontaneity is dangerous for him. He might say what he really thinks!
CNN's Political Ticker reports that Obama is now using his teleprompter even for campaign rallies, as in this one held in a bull ring (how appropriate is that!) yesterday in Pueblo, CO.
The Democratic presidential nominee has never tried to hide the fact he delivers speeches off the device, though normally he doesn't use one at standard campaign rallies and town hall events. But the Illinois senator used a teleprompter at both his Colorado events Monday - making for a particularly peculiar scene in Pueblo, where the prompter was set up in the middle of what is normally a rodeo ring.
Too bad we have only one major party candidate for the Oval Office capable of speaking without a prepared script. It raises questions about his authenticity when Obama is afraid to speak without a script. This disability of Obama should give pause to all those who think he is so well-prepared for our nation's highest office.
Obama Flat-Out Lies About Inventing the Stimulus Package
He's a fabulist -- his fantasies are like reality to him
Even his fellow Democrats, asked if it were true that Obama had taken the lead in crafting the stimulus bill, answered simply, "No."
In Golden, Colo., today, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., took credit for the stimulus package that passed earlier this year. "In January, I outlined a plan to help revive our faltering economy," Obama said, "which formed the basis for a bipartisan stimulus package that passed the Congress."
Is that true? Democrats on Capitol Hill who support Obama say no. Wanting Obama to win, however, none will say so on the record.
When you've done nothing at all -- except for the writing (ghostwriting?) of two memoirs telling the world how you'd done nothing at all for forty years of your life -- you're required to claim credit for things that sort of happened nearby you.
Pure Bankum: Obama claiming to have been on the Banking Committee.
Punchline? Of course he wasn't on it. He just was sort of in the vicinity of the Banking Committee at certain times, and once again, that's what Obama calls a "credential." If Obama's so scary-qualified, why is he unable to list any real accomplishments and achievements?
Bart--
Obama told Mike Shanahan to go for the two-point conversion near the end of the game for the victory over the Chargers. When asked about it Obama quipped, "I know it was a big risk, but I felt that the time was right for decisive action. So I called Coach Shanahan and told him to go for two." Biden added, "Yeah, me too."
As a Concerned Christian Conservative -- much like all of you -- I have to say that while I appreciate that Sarah Palin has done remarkably well for a brain-damaged meth-addicted chillbilly snow-whore, I like Obama's gutsy "Let's go for it" attitude.
These days, there is an outbreak of artificial indignation over the "lies" of Republicans. John McCain, claims Barack Obama's national press secretary Bill Burton, has run the "sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history."
Ouch. We can attribute one of the following to this claim: 1) Burton has just landed on the planet Earth; 2) Burton is attempting to manipulate the media; 3) Burton is "lying."
I pick 2. After all, we've all heard the self-serving myth that pits helpless, meek, high-minded, issue-oriented Democrats against mendacious and mean Republicans, who not only detest America - especially children and small vulnerable creatures - but will lie and cheat to keep all oppressed.
The facts betray a more equitable story. And it starts with Sarah Palin's assertion that she said "thanks, but no thanks" to the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" and opposed earmarks. This is an elastic political truth.
Technically, she did stop the project after initially supporting it. She has taken earmarks - even lobbied for them while mayor of Wasilla. As governor, though, Palin also vetoed over 300 wasteful projects and made an attempt to reform the process. Her record on earmarks is mixed, but by any measure, it's far superior to either Democratic candidate.
Moreover, if this Palin claim can be classified as an untruth, Obama can be called a "liar" just as easily. Take, if you will, the foundational assertion of Obama's entire campaign that he is the candidate of post-partisan change. Obama, meanwhile, voted with fellow Democrats 96 percent of the time in Washington. And the bipartisan achievement he most often cites, an ethics reform bill, was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate.
Unanimous: ". . . being in complete harmony or accord." So, then, "Unity" should be referred to as a poetic truth.
And when much of the media acts as if it is personally offended by a questionable McCain ad accusing Obama of voting for a bill that would have provided sex education to kindergartners, you feel the pain. It was, indeed, a massive stretch.
It reminds me of the Obama ad that accuses McCain of having "voted to cut education funding" and "proposed" the abolishment of the Department of Education despite neither being true. Not much anger at that one. Just a lot of talk about the media's responsibility to keep candidates honest. And absolutely, journalists have a responsibility to put every single candidate through the wringer....
So maybe, when ABC's Charlie Gibson has the chance to chit-chat with Obama, he can ask him - twice - how, with his dearth of experience and his own 2004 "lie" that he would "serve out my full six-year term" in the Senate - whether he really, truly, actually believes he is ready for the job of the presidency. Or did he blink? Ever? ...
If perchance Gibson did ask such a question, will he have his Russert like video tape where Obama admitted he was not ready. There are several out there. The fact is that some literal truth can be found in all the McCain ads. What is omitted are the explanatory footnotes that Obama would like included. The same thing happens even more often in Democrat ads and sound bites. Until election laws outlaw the "material failure to disclose" as the securities laws do, you will always have this in politics.
The sudden change in the polls the last 10 days, even though it may be temporary, has prompted a furor in the media that has no parallel in modern election history. Vicious words like "treason", "abasement", "liar", and "lying" are in the air now in an unheralded attack on McCain, often in association with the sex education ad, and the lipstick identification with Palin as a pig. (cf. e.g., Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today). But as Byron York has shown, that ad alleging that Obama supported detailed information about matters of sex to be disseminated to younger children (for a variety of educational reasons), while tough and unnecessary, was nevertheless not a lie.
And as far as the silly lipstick moment, if one studies the tape carefully as Obama lets go with his similes, it is clear that the hooting audience at least seemed to make the association with Palin, and the further elaboration on a stinky old fish seemed to cement the allusion to McCain.
What otherwise are we to think of this silly controversy?- (a) a candidate is complaining about McCain and Palin; (b) in his exasperation the candidate next uses two metaphors (not 1, not 3) - (c) one to a pig with lipstick (after Palin had famously just used a lipstick/animal metaphor in her speech), and (d) a second one to an old fish - a theme of the Obama campaigning has been to suggest McCain is "losing his bearings", "confused", has "lost track", and "couldn't remember."
But from anger at those two inconsequential ads, and the selection of Palin, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, for example, makes a rather large leap to this conclusion:
... the lies of Vietnam and Watergate and Iraq. So many lies. Who believes that in Afghanistan last month only five civilians were killed by the American military, instead of the approximately 90 claimed by the Afghan government? Not me. I first gave up on the military during Vietnam and then again when it covered up the death of Pat Tillman, the Army Ranger and former NFL player who was killed in 2004 by friendly fire.
What does "give up on the military" mean, and what does it have to do with a McCain ad reminding voters of the difference between Obama and himself on the appropriate age to introduce children to sex education learning materials?
What we are seeing is a sort of meltdown in which the selection of Palin is associated with the first real possibility all summer that the messianic Obama may not necessarily ascend; that triggers a certain repulsion toward her in particular, and a general furor at the once likeable McCain (once likeable to present-day Obama's supporters in the past sense that in 2000 he was going to lose, perhaps divide Republicans, and was not George Bush), which, in turn, can conjure up all sorts of no longer latent demons, going back to Vietnam onto to Iraq and the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
The problem (inter alia) with this vicious, loose use of "traitor" and "lie/liar/lying" and blanket condemnations of the US military is that it achieves the opposite of what the authors intend - and repelling most readers to such a degree that they are scared off from anything the writer seems to be advocating.
We've seen that with the Atlantic Monthly pictures and blog rumors about Palin's recent Down Syndrome pregnancy, the unhinged hatred columns of the sort of a Salon's Cintra Wilson or those suggesting riots or global hatred of the U.S. if Obama loses, the Matthews/Olbermann rants, the daily salvos from the NY Times columnists,and the hourly Palin rage from spoiled Hollywood prima donnas.
Do they have any idea of how they sound or where this leads? Despite an unpopular incumbent, economic upheaval, unpopular wars, and a charismatic Democratic candidate, the media, hand in glove with Obama's messianic sense of self, are doing all they can to lose a once sure election by the sheer repugnance of the way in which their anger is expressed and expressed and expressed . . . And again, it seems uncontrollable. Didn't anyone learn from the General Betray-Us ads?
Joe Biden: Barack Obama Is Too Smart & Educated For Small Town America
Senator Joe Biden told small town America yesterday that Barack Obama was too smart for you. And, Barack's too well educated for you, too. At his rally in Flat Rock, Michigan, Biden slams small town America:
Joe Biden tells small town Americans, Barack Obama is too smart for your neighborhood, and you're just not used to somebody really smart or well educated. Nice:
"All this stuff about how different Barack Obama is, they're not just used to somebody really smart. They're just not used to somebody who's really well educated. They just don't know quite how to handle it. Cause if he's as smart as Barack is he must not be from my neighborhood." Oh, and the woman introducing Joe Biden calls Sarah Palin, "A bucket of fluff," Biden laughs and pumps fists at the crowd in support.
Obama's Immigration Bill Includes Funding For Leftist Groups to Organize Immigrant Communities
The Citizenship Promotion Act, S. 795's, primary goal is "to assist aliens who have been lawfully admitted to becoming citizens of the United States." It does not provide funding to secure the borders or assist in the USCIS's quest towards efficiency or its capabilities to root out corruption. Instead, Obama's bill will organize the immigrant community by allotting U.S. $80 million for outreach programs targeted at immigrants and future voters.
In Section 6 of Obama's bill, costing U.S. $80 million, the Secretary of Homeland Security would "award grants," to "not for profit organizations" with "experience working with immigrant communities" to "carry out outreach activities," including teaching English, providing education and citizenship classes, plus provide legal assistance" to applicable aliens towards citizenship and the right to vote. Typically, studies show that immigrant voters vote Democrat.
If passed into law, organizations seeking Obama's grant eligibility must show, how they plan "to leverage available private and State and local government resources;" their experience "in carrying out the activities, including the number of aliens and geographic regions served; and, .[how] to employ best practices developed by adult educators, State and local governments, and community organizations." The Secretary of Homeland Security would also "develop outreach materials" such as "public service announcements; advertisements.other media." to "encourage" applicable aliens to become U.S. citizens.
The Secretary of Homeland Security serves at the pleasure of the President; if elected that would be Obama.
The gaffemeister 'Brags' About 'Negative Ads That Are Completely Unrelated to the Issues at Hand'
Ha!
"If we're going to ask questions about, you know, who has been promulgating negative ads that are completely unrelated to the issues at hand, I think I win that contest pretty handily," Obama said.
Just note that if McCain had said that, it would be seen as a sign of age and dementia. If Palin had said that, it would be a sign she's not ready for prime time. If Biden said that... well, that scenario presumes that a reporter would be around to notice, but if he did, it would mean that it's a Monday.
WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence. According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July. "He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.
Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion." "However, as an Iraqi, I prefer to have a security agreement that regulates the activities of foreign troops, rather than keeping the matter open." Zebari says.
Though Obama claims the US presence is "illegal," he suddenly remembered that Americans troops were in Iraq within the legal framework of a UN mandate. His advice was that, rather than reach an accord with the "weakened Bush administration," Iraq should seek an extension of the UN mandate. While in Iraq, Obama also tried to persuade the US commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, to suggest a "realistic withdrawal date." They declined.
Obama has made many contradictory statements with regard to Iraq. His latest position is that US combat troops should be out by 2010. Yet his effort to delay an agreement would make that withdrawal deadline impossible to meet. Supposing he wins, Obama's administration wouldn't be fully operational before February - and naming a new ambassador to Baghdad and forming a new negotiation team might take longer still.
By then, Iraq will be in the throes of its own campaign season. Judging by the past two elections, forming a new coalition government may then take three months. So the Iraqi negotiating team might not be in place until next June. Then, judging by how long the current talks have taken, restarting the process from scratch would leave the two sides needing at least six months to come up with a draft accord. That puts us at May 2010 for when the draft might be submitted to the Iraqi parliament - which might well need another six months to pass it into law.
McCain Camp Demands Answers on Obama's Illegal Interference with US Foreign Policy
As CJ says, the media can't ignore this as they'd like. If McCain makes an issue out of it, it is an issue, whether they like it or not.*
At this point, it is not yet clear what official American negotiations Senator Obama tried to undermine with Iraqi leaders, but the possibility of such actions is unprecedented. It should be concerning to all that he reportedly urged that the democratically-elected Iraqi government listen to him rather than the US administration in power. If news reports are accurate, this is an egregious act of political interference by a presidential candidate seeking political advantage overseas. Senator Obama needs to reveal what he said to Iraq's Foreign Minister during their closed door meeting. The charge that he sought to delay the withdrawal of Americans from Iraq raises serious questions about Senator Obama's judgment and it demands an explanation.
* By the way, this dynamic mitigates McCain's sorta-annoying playing of the victim card of late. The MSM simply will not report on this stuff unless McCain pushes it out there. They will do all of Obama's dirty work without prompting (allowing Obama to sail above it), but they won't do the same for McCain.
Indeed, all the press wants to do now is dig up derogatory rumors about Sarah Palin. It's only by injecting other storylines into the media directly he can even hope to push the MSM off its singleminded focus on getting Palin.
Is McCain pushing some kinda silly stuff about lipstick and pigs of late? Yes. But it's not as if he's "distracting" the media from important issues. If they weren't covering silly shit like the lipstick thing (which was deliberate, but is still silly), the MSM would just be pushing others silly shit, like Sarah Palin taking expense per diems to which she was legally entitled, or somehow "misleading" the public into thinking she visited Iraq by consistently stating she'd visited Kuwait.
For those of you who want a debate on the "real issues" -- it's simply not possible right now. The MSM is on a Palin hunt and no story is too silly to smear her with.
Now this -- Obama directly and deliberately interfering with the foreign policy power entrusted by the Constitution to the sitting president only (with the advice and consent, and not interference and sabotage, of the Senate) -- is a very serious issue indeed.
Obama has two new ads up, both highlighting McCain advisers who have been employed as lobbyists.
If having a staffer who has worked as a lobbyist makes you "on the take," I wonder what it means when you take more money from companies like Fannie and Freddie than anybody except Chris Dodd. More than, say, 352 other lawmakers, going back to 1989. Seems like time for a response ad.
"When the highly-paid CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac felt reformers closing in, they needed a defender. They knew where to send their money. The Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd... and Barack Obama. They gave Obama more than $126,000, in less than four years. While Fannie and Freddie was running aground, Dodd, Obama, and Congress looked elsewhere. Ask yourself who can really bring change to Washington, and keep our financial system from running aground."
His "computer" error continues a troubling pattern.
By JAMES TARANTO
"John McCain is mocked as an out-of-touch, out-of-date computer illiterate in a television commercial out Friday from Barack Obama as the Democrat begins his sharpest barrage yet on McCain's long Washington career," the Associated Pressreports. You can see the ad here. "He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer," the narrator sneers. "Can't send an email."
There's just one problem: As the Boston Globereported in 2000 (hat tip: Jonah Goldberg), "McCain's severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes." Obama presumably did not intend to mock McCain for having his arms repeatedly broken by his communist captors in Vietnam. Chalk it up to carelessness--but it isn't the only example of such carelessness.
Consider the "lipstick on a pig" line last week. True, Obama did not explicitly call Sarah Palin porcine, as we noted Wednesday. It is quite possible his use of the idiom was totally innocent, as he claims. But any sensitive adult should have realized that a reference to a pig in connection with a woman might strike others as unchivalrous or sexist (interesting how much those two categories overlap, but that's a topic for another column).
Blogger "Jim Treacher" complies a list of other instances in which Obama has acted like--Treacher's word--a "jerk." He leaves out perhaps the costliest example: the New Hampshire debate in which Obama said to Hillary Clinton: "You're likable enough, Hillary." Karl Rove argued that this show of arrogance helped cost Obama the New Hampshire primary.
Does it matter? Remember when President Bush got pilloried when he referred to the war on terror as a "crusade"? He obviously did not mean to suggest that his goal was to impose Christianity on the Muslim world, but his critics were right to be concerned that he might have conveyed the wrong message internationally.
One of Obama's biggest selling points is if we elect him, the world will like America again. He also promises to meet directly, without preconditions, with adversaries of America such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez. It appears that he has a tendency to make foolish and aggressive statements--a weakness that now endangers only his campaign, but that could, if he were president, have serious consequences for U.S. foreign policy.
It is true, as Obama's defenders contend in rather harsher language than is warranted, that the McCain campaign and Obama's critics have interpreted Obama's various miscues in the harshest possible light. But would America's adversaries be any more charitable in responding to the words of a U.S. president?
Obama wants to turn the whole nation into government employees
Both John McCain and Barack Obama exhorted Americans to dedicate themselves to public service in an appearance at Columbia University on Thursday, to mark the seventh anniversary of 9/11. But Americans need no lectures from politicians to participate in their nation's civic life. They need them to stay out of the way. Between the two, Sen. Obama is far less likely to do so.
At first blush, the two candidates appear indistinguishable on the subject. Both have urged Americans to look beyond their individual, material pursuits and commit themselves to causes greater than themselves -- Sen. McCain arguably even more aggressively than Mr. Obama. The difference is that for Mr. McCain this is a moral ideal. For Mr. Obama, it is a governing mission. "Making that call to service will be a central cause of my presidency," he declared in an Independence Day address at the University of Colorado and elsewhere.
Mr. McCain certainly uses his bully pulpit to proselytize Americans about public service. But he more or less stops there, even repeatedly cautioning during the Columbia forum against federalizing public service, although that doesn't mean that he wouldn't throw taxpayer money at some of his pet service projects. However, his Web site offers nothing near what Mr. Obama is proposing.
Mr. Obama has laid out a 10-page vision statement that includes virtually every program proposed by the left and the right in recent memory and then some. President Bush's controversial faith-based initiative? He'll keep it. President Kennedy's Peace Corps? He'll double it. Even Mr. McCain's seven-year-old plan to raise a domestic civilian force to fight terrorism and triple enrollment in AmeriCorps gets a plug.
In addition, Mr. Obama would create several new corps of his own: a Classroom Corps to help teachers and students in underperforming schools; a Health Corps for underserved areas; a Clean Energy Corps to weatherize homes and promote energy independence. The last is separate from his Global Energy Corps, to promote low-carbon energy solutions in developing countries.
Mr. Obama calls all this his "Plan for Universal and Voluntary Citizen Service." It might live up to its "universal" billing, given that it would prod Americans of all age groups -- from preteens to retirees -- to sign up. But as to its voluntariness, the plan will make generous use of Uncle Sam's money -- and muscle.
By Mr. Obama's account, he will make federal education aid conditional on schools requiring that high-school and even middle-school students perform 50 hours of service each year. He will also offer college students $4,000 every year for doing 100 hours of public service. That works out to $40 an hour -- a deal that only the very wealthy could refuse. (The Obama campaign puts the price tag for this alone at $10 billion.) He promises to provide older Americans who perform civic service with "additional income security, including assistance with retirement and family-related costs, and continuation of health-care coverage." But a government that links benefits to service can take away benefits for nonservice.
The real issue is why Mr. Obama thinks it is necessary to take such extraordinary steps to push all Americans into service. Americans every year contribute close to $300 billion out of their own pockets to charities at home and abroad. This is the highest of any nation -- seven times more than Germans and 14 times more than Italians per capita. Americans are equally generous with their time. According to the Corporation for National and Community Service -- a federal agency -- last year Americans volunteered 8.1 billion hours of service valued at $150 billion to community organizations.
Mr. Obama doesn't think this kind of voluntary effort is sufficient, because it can't deliver social justice. In his memoirs and elsewhere, he distinguishes between community service and organization. Community service, he believes, can offer short-term relief to those temporarily down-and-out, through things like church food pantries or homeless shelters. It can also address concrete problems such as vandalism or crime through neighborhood watches.
However, Mr. Obama believes -- as he wrote in a 1990 anthology, "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois" -- that this kind of service plays into the "individualistic bootstrap myth." It doesn't by itself help the disenfranchised trapped in inner cities.
For that, Mr. Obama wants collective political action, i.e., bottom-up mobilization, to help the disaffected extract resources from the powers-that-be to remake their communities. This is what Mr. Obama attempted to do during his years as a community organizer. And that's what he hopes all his cadres of social workers would also do.
Mr. Obama's moral vision presupposes that the key to individual advancement is securing a larger share of a fixed social pie from those who control it. This posture, relevant in premodern patronage systems, is profoundly at odds with the modern, market economy in which individuals don't have to wrest resources from others to prosper; they have opportunities to create their own. That requires a morality of independence and self-reliance -- precisely what Mr. Obama downplays with his comments about the "individualistic bootstrap myth."
Bolstering this morality is a complex task that will involve addressing social policies that have contributed to the breakdown of families, sapping crucial psychological resources from inner-city communities -- as Mr. Obama himself has acknowledged on occasion. It won't be accomplished by deploying federally funded armies of self-righteousness.
In his first memoir, "Dreams from My Father," Mr. Obama tells how he mobilized residents of a housing project to get the Chicago Housing Authority to clean up asbestos in their walls. The agency did, then ran out of funds for even more pressing problems like repairing leaky roofs, leaving residents even worse off.
Mr. Obama's take-away: more activism for more funds. One fellow activist, a diminutive, married woman, demurred. "Ain't nothing going to change, Mr. Obama," she told him. "We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can." She is the one who learned the right lesson.
Obama misrepresents his past -- to make it seem more successful and prestigious than it was
Typical psychopathic lies
It has been noted by Charles Krauthammer and others that very few people have stepped forward to vouch for Barack Obama. Indeed, there would seem to be an especially conspicuous absence of witnesses to the years after graduated from Columbia and before he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer.
Well, it turns out that one of his co-workers has in fact written about Mr. Obama during those days. And while he is an admitted fan of Obama’s, he claims that he has inflated his resume considerably. Others who worked with Obama at Business International have subsequently chimed in.
… And so, in the months leading up to graduation, I wrote to every civil rights organization I could think of, to any black elected official in the country with a progressive agenda, to neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups. When no one wrote back, I wasn't discouraged. I decided to find more conventional work for a year, to pay off my student loans and maybe even save a little bit. I would need the money later, I told myself. Organizers didn't make any money; their poverty was proof of their integrity.
Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company's secretarial pool. They treated me like a son, those black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day…
Nevertheless, as the months passed, I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand-and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.
Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected happened. Auma called. I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently… [A] few months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in earnest for an organizing job…
We are supposed to believe that “something happened” and the rest is history. Here, however, is a somewhat different perspective on Obama’s halcyon days as a “spy behind enemy lines,” from a site called Analyze This:
Barack Obama Embellishes His Resume
July 9th, 2005
Dan Armstrong
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of Barack Obama, the Illinois freshman senator and hot young Democratic Party star. But after reading his autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s. I know because I sat down the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can't say I was particularly close to Barack - he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers - but I was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book. Here's Barack's account:
Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company's secretarial pool.
First, it wasn't a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I'm sure we all wished that we were high-priced consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low salaries and heavy workload.
Barack worked on one of the company's reference publications. Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country, punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack's job was to get copy from the country correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some research involved as well, since correspondents usually don't send exactly what you ask for, and you can't always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting.
It's also not true that Barack was the only black man in the company. He was the only black professional man. Fred was an African-American who worked in the mailroom with his son. My boss and I used to join them on Friday afternoons to drink beer behind the stacks of office supplies. That's not the kind of thing that Barack would do. Like I said, he was somewhat aloof.
. as the months passed, I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary; money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand-and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.
If Barack was promoted, his new job responsibilities were more of the same - rewriting other people's copy. As far as I know, he always had a small office, and the idea that he had a secretary is laughable. Only the company president had a secretary. Barack never left the office, never wore a tie, and had neither reason nor opportunity to interview Japanese financiers or German bond traders.
Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected happened…. I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently. .[several pages on his suffering half-sister] .a few months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in earnest for an organizing job.
What Barack means here is that he got copy from a correspondent who didn't understand interest rate swaps, and he was trying to make sense out of it.
All of Barack's embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ's temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people.
Like I said, I'm a fan. His famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention moved me to tears. The Democrats - not to mention America - need a mixed-race spokesperson who can connect to both urban blacks and rural whites, who has the credibility to challenge the status quo on issues ranging from misogynistic rap to unfair school funding.
And yet I'm disappointed. Barack's story may be true, but many of the facts are not. His larger narrative purpose requires him to embellish his role. I don't buy it. Just as I can't be inspired by Steve Jobs now that I know how dishonest he is, I can't listen uncritically to Barack Obama now that I know he's willing to bend the facts to his purpose.
Once, when I applied for a marketing job at a big accounting firm, my then-supervisor called HR to say that I had exaggerated something on my resume. I didn't agree, but I also didn't get the job. But when Barack Obama invents facts in a book ranked No. 8 on the NY Times nonfiction list, it not only fails to be noticed but it helps elevate him into the national political pantheon.
As Mr. Armstrong suggests, if Obama would exaggerate about such things as this, what else has he exaggerated or made up out of whole cloth? The comments to this post are also quite intriguing:
Comment from Bill Millar
Time: October 30, 2007, 8:17 am
Cathy Lazere [another commentor] calls Barack self-assured? That's putting a nice spin on it. I found him arrogant and condescending. The thing is, I worked next to Barack nearly every day he was at Business International-on many days angling for possession of the best Wang word processing terminal. I had MANY discussions with Barack. I can tell you this: even though I was an assistant editor (big doings at this "consulting firm") and he was, well, he was doing something there, he certainly treated me like something less than an equal.
Funny thing. A journalism/political science major. Writing about finance. Pretending in his book to be an expert on interest rate swaps. I remember trying to explain the nuance of these instruments to him in the cramped three Wang terminal space we called the bull pen. In contrast to his his liberal arts background, I had a degree in finance and Wall Street experience, so I knew what I was talking about.
But rather than learn from a City College kid, the Ivy Leaguer just sort of rolled his eyes. Condescendingly. I'll never forget it. God forbid he leave the impression that a mere editor like myself knew more about something than did Barack. He was like that.
But know what? I can forgive him for being immature-which is probably all that was at the time. Don't we all believe we know everything at just around that age?
That said.he was a lot older when he wrote his book. Mature enough by this time to realize that his account of his time at Business International could be described as embellishment…
By the way, there should be no doubt as to Mr. Armstrong’s bona fides on this subject. Even the New York Times has cited him as an authority for an article on this period of Mr. Obama’s storied life.
Michigan: Obama's old firm deep into voter fraud again
One of Obama's first jobs out of college as a "communitay organizer" was for ......... ACORN!
Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families. The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has a large voter registration program among its many social service programs. ACORN's Michigan branch, based in Detroit, has enrolled 200,000 voters statewide in recent months, mostly with the use of paid, part-time employees.
"There appears to be a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications," said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State's Office. "And it appears to be widespread." Chesney said her office has had discussions with ACORN officials after local clerks reported the questionable applications to the state. Chesney said some of the applications are duplicates and some appear to be names that have been made up. The Secretary of State's Office has turned over several of the applications to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The U.S. Attorney's Office on Friday declined to confirm whether an investigation was taking place.
In recent years, ACORN's voter registration programs have come under investigation in Ohio, Colorado, Missouri and Washington, with some employees convicted of voter fraud. ACORN officials said they were looking into the problem. "We'll do an investigation to see what's happening," said David Lagstein, a spokesman for the Detroit office. "If it's really as many as that, it warrants further investigation."
In Pontiac, where several thousand applications have been submitted by ACORN in the last few weeks for the November election, the clerk's office is finding that numerous applications are sometimes filed under one name. "What it causes is a slowdown of our operations," said Pontiac City Clerk Yvette Talley. "They're steadily coming in, and we are finding a huge number of duplications." Talley said she could not provide an exact number.
Clerks are required to check their records against a statewide database of all registered voters within their jurisdiction, so it would be unlikely that duplications would allow voters to cast their votes more than once, Talley said. "We catch them all, but it's taking up a lot of our time," she said.
In Oak Park, clerk Sandra Gadd said they have been seeing "lots of duplication" from ACORN in recent months but were reassured by ACORN officials that the group was working to correct the problem. "They've been very cooperative," Gadd said. "I spoke with them this week. They called me, and they're willing to go door-to-door to do whatever they have to do to take care of this."
ACORN is the nation's largest community organization for low- and moderate-income families. Created more than 30 years ago, it has branches in 100 cities and claims 350,000 families as members. It works to help create affordable housing and health care, and to improve job conditions and neighborhood schools.
Lagstein said ACORN's Detroit office has hired dozens of employees for the voter registration program and that any problems likely stem from sloppiness or incompetence -- not an intent to let people vote more than once. "We're proud of our efforts to increase voter registration, and we have aggressive training for our staff to make sure the cards are filled out appropriately," he said. ACORN has a method to track the workers who filled out individual registration cards, which will allow investigators to question the workers, Lagstein said. "We certainly do our best to keep the duplications as low as possible, so we'll have to evaluate what's happening here," he said.
Source. (ACORN regularly use the "rogue employee" excuse)
Stasi tactics from Camp Obama
Andrew Bolt in Australia's HeraldSun entertainingly fisks the media's attempt to destroy Sarah Palin by pouncing upon her first TV interview on foreign affairs to find out whether she knows who Putin is. As Bolt shows, the joke however is on them.
As James Taranto writes on the WSJ blog, the Obamasphere is descending from hysteria to depravity by using Palin's decision actually to give birth to her son Trig as apparent proof of her unfitness for office. When they look at Trig, they don't see a small and vulnerable human being; they don't see the power of love triumphing over adversity; all they see is a handicapped thing that should never have been allowed to live.
Offensive and disgusting, indeed - and how revealing about the `liberal' conscience -- but what it also shows is that the chattering classes have understood that this election might just call a halt to the agenda of social and moral nihilism that masquerades as progressive politics. Hence the weeping and wailing and rending of garments, in between firing the poisoned darts at Sarah Palin, on both sides of the Atlantic. And that's why social conservatives everywhere - aka people who prefer truth over lies, right over wrong, morality over anarchy and the continuation of western civilisation over the forces of totalitarianism that threaten it - have suddenly raised their heads above the sandbags and seen a sign they never thought they'd see: that civilisation might just be fighting back.
Meanwhile Camp Obama, it seems, is in imminent danger of having a collective nervous breakdown. They've totally forgotten that The One is actually running against John McCain and have allowed themselves to become fixated instead by his running-mate. Obama looks and sounds rattled and knocked off his stride, a fact which in itself is deeply damaging: if he falls to pieces on account of a hockey mom from Alaska, what the hell would he be like faced with Ahmadinejad? Is Obama a man or a moose?
Apparently Camp Obama has parachuted dozens of operatives into Alaska to find the skeletons in the Palin closet that it just knows must exist. Unable to process the fact that the left might not come into its rightful inheritance of power, which as we all know is the natural order of the universe, it is behaving like an American Stasi.
And the more it behaves in this grotesque manner, the more counter-productive it all is. Palin is a kind of barium meal for the US body politic: as she is ingested deeper into the system, the nastiness and sheer malevolence of the Democratic party and its bullying cheerleaders in the media are being sickeningly illuminated all around her. As a result, the media and the Democrats are merely doing untold damage to themselves, particularly since the blogosphere is shredding the smears being hurled at Palin as fast as they are being produced.
But hey - this is the only way left-wingers know of dealing with `the right'. They characteristically flinch from engaging in proper argument with their political opponents by debating the issues. No, what they invariably do instead is to reach for the insult and the smear, the character assassination, the career-ending labels of `racist', `sexist', `homophobe', `Islamophobe', 'hard right', `fundamentalist' and all the rest of it. Because their aim is not to discuss but to destroy their opponent altogether and thus to shut down the argument before it can get going.
What does that tell us? That the totalitarian left is terrified of argument because it knows itself to be on very weak ground. It does not have the confidence of its own supposed convictions. For sure, it is fearful that its opponents might win the electoral battle; but much more urgently, it is absolutely terrified that they might be right. That's really why the left never wants to have the argument - in case it exposes the vacuity of its own position to itself.
A vital part of leftist thinking is the assumption that to be on the left is the only sensible/decent/principled position to hold and therefore cannot ever be wrong; and that is because to differ from the left is to be of `the right', and the right is irredeemably evil. (The idea that to be opposed to the left is not necessarily to be on `the right' or indeed to take any position other than to oppose ideology and its brutal effects is something that the left simply cannot get its head round). And so the true nightmare is that if `the right' turns out to be actually right on anything and the left to be wrong, by accepting this fact the left-winger will by his own definition turn into an evil right-winger. His entire moral and political identity will crumble and he will grow horns and a tail. So to prevent any possibility of this catastrophe occurring, the opponent has to be eliminated.
That is what is being done to Sarah Palin. That is why her interview is at this very moment being misreported and distorted even though millions of people watched and heard it. That is why she is being attacked with a fresh smear every second minute. That is why her entire family is being turned over while the media is totally silent on the genuinely disturbing questions about Obama's connections and views. This is fast becoming an election about the gross abuse of power. McCain should take this issue and run with it as loudly and as furiously as he can.
All through the spring and summer, opinion polls tracked a growing confidence that Barack Obama could handle the economy better than John McCain. Just before the Democratic convention in August, Gallup had Obama leading McCain on the economy, 54-38 -- a 16-point margin. But now Obama's lead has nearly vanished. Gallup's latest numbers, released Sept. 10, show the candidates nearly tied. Just 48 percent say Obama would be more adept at superintending the economy; 45 percent choose McCain.
Looks like voters have started paying attention to Obama's economics. On Sept. 8, Fox News broadcast an interview between Obama and Bill O'Reilly that focused on taxation and the economy. Obama repeated his pledge to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, while raising taxes on the tiny fraction who earn more than $250,000. "That's class warfare," O'Reilly objected. "You're taking the wealthy in America, the big earners . . . you're taking money away from them and you're giving it to people who don't. That's called income redistribution. It's a socialist tenet. Come on, you know that."
"Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill," Obama replied. "Teddy Roosevelt supported a progressive income tax." He acknowledged that he doesn't enjoy paying taxes either -- "you think I like writing the check?" -- but that "there are certain things we've got to do." His tax proposal, he explained, was really a matter of . civility: "If I am sitting pretty and you've got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can't, what's the big deal for me to say, I'm going to pay a little bit more? That's neighborliness."
If that is Obama's rationale for making the tax code even more steeply progressive than it already is, it's no wonder voters are having second thoughts about his economic aptitude.
"Neighborliness." Perhaps that word has a nonstandard meaning to someone whose home adjoined the property of convicted swindler Tony Rezko, but extracting money by force from someone who earned it in order to give it to someone who didn't is not usually spoken of as *neighborly.* If Citizen Obama, "sitting pretty," reaches into his own pocket and helps out the waitress with a large tip, he has shown a neighborly spirit. But there is nothing neighborly about using the tax code to compel someone else to pay the waitress that tip. Taxation is not generosity, it is confiscation at gunpoint. Does Obama not understand the difference?
Perhaps he doesn't. Eager though he may be to compel "neighborliness" in others, he has not been nearly so avid about demonstrating it himself. Barack and Michelle Obama's tax returns show that from 2000 through 2004, when their adjusted gross income averaged nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year, their annual charitable donations amounted to just $2,154 -- less than nine-tenths of 1 percent. Not until he entered the US Senate in 2005 and began to be spoken of as a presidential possibility did the Obamas' "neighborliness" become more evident. (In 2005-2007, they gave 5.5 percent of their income to charity.)
Obama claims his proposal would lower taxes for 95 percent of Americans, but well over 43 million tax returns, one-third of all those filed, already reflect an income tax liability of zero. In fact, Obama says, his plan would eliminate income taxes for an additional 10 million taxpayers. What he is really proposing, therefore, is not tax relief but a bald transfer of cash -- $1,000 per family, he pledges -- from the wealthiest Americans to everyone else. In 1972, George McGovern advocated something similar -- a $1,000 "demogrant" for every US citizen. Just last year, Hillary Clinton suggested that the government start off every new baby with a $5,000 savings account. Voters didn't take the bait when McGovern and Clinton offered it. Here's betting they won't take it now.
Why not? Because you don't have to be rich to be skeptical when a candidate argues that the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who earn 22 percent of the income in this country but pay 40 percent of the income taxes, aren't being taxed enough. Nor do you have to be an economist to wonder about the grasp of a nominee who tells 95 percent of the public that they can have something for nothing. Obamanomics may look pretty at first glance. But voters are focusing more closely now, and they can see beyond the lipstick.
Tax Cuts, Real and Imaginary: Obama's spending programs in disguise
by Newt Gingrich & Peter Ferrara
Thirty years of Republican tax policy have now completely eliminated federal income taxes on the poor and lower middle-income Americans, and almost eliminated them on middle America.
The latest data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Internal Revenue Service show that the lowest 40 percent of income earners as a group actually receive net payments from the federal income tax system. (They get 3.8 percent of total federal income tax revenues instead of paying any income taxes.) The middle 20 percent of income earners pay 4.4 percent of federal income taxes. Thus the bottom 60 percent of income earners together, on net, pay less than 1 percent of all federal income taxes. (These workers earn 26 percent of national income.)
The data show that the top 1 percent of income earners now pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, which is almost double their share of the national income. The top 10 percent pay 71 percent of federal income taxes, though they earn just 39 percent of the nation's pretax income.
This is a result of the across the board income tax rate cuts adopted by Ronald Reagan and the current President Bush, plus the Earned Income Tax Credit first proposed by Reagan in the 1970s, and the child tax credit enacted into law as part of the 1994 Contract With America.
Barack Obama claims to be proposing income tax cuts for low and moderate income and middle class workers, but Reagan Republicans have already eliminated most of their income tax liability. What
Obama is calling tax cuts for the middle class is really a slew of refundable federal income tax credits that would primarily go to those who are paying little or no federal income taxes now. Such credits would primarily not reduce tax liability, but instead be checks from the federal government for child care, education, housing, retirement, health care, even outright giveaways. These are not tax cuts. They are new federal spending programs hidden in the tax code.
When Obama says that he will cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, he is talking about his proposal for a $500 refundable income tax credit for all but the top 5 percent of income earners. For the bottom 40 percent of income earners, this will be just another check from the federal government rather than a reduction in tax liability. It is another sharp increase in government spending rather than any sort of tax cut. An arbitrary cash grant does not, moreover, do anything to improve the economy or incentivize productive business. That only comes from cutting tax rates. What Obama is proposing here is really quite similar to George McGovern's 1972 plan to send everyone a $1,000 check, which voters rightly saw as a crass vote-buying scheme rather than serious policy.
Obama also proposes to increase the top marginal tax rates for virtually every major federal tax. These increases would not come remotely close to financing the trillion dollars of increased direct federal spending Obama is promising--including a new national health insurance entitlement that would be bigger than any of the massive entitlement programs we already have and already have trouble paying for. Indeed, if the tax rate increases cause a serious enough economic decline, they will lose revenue on net.
Independent voters - the largest and fastest-growing segment of the American electorate - were always going to determine the winner of this election. And in contrast to past contests like 2004, where independents viewed the choice between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry as a vote for the candidate they disliked least, independents had a dream campaign in `08: two compelling nominees who ran against the polarizing establishments of their own parties with explicitly post-partisan appeals. It was a year in which Karl Rove's play-to-the-base politics seemed to be on the ash heap of history.
In the wake of Sarah Palin, John McCain has opened up a 15-point lead among independents, according to a new Gallup Poll - and Barack Obama has a real problem.
Since the GOP convention and his selection of the Alaska governor as his running mate, McCain has changed a months-long tie among independents into a 52 to 37 percent advantage. Support for McCain among self-described "conservative Democrats" has jumped 10 points, to 25 percent, signaling the shift among swing voters to McCain.
The candidate's surge tracks the script the campaign had written for the party convention. Joe Lieberman's sleepy but substantively centrist speech was the preamble to McCain reframing the Republican Party around national security, fiscal conservatism and corruption reform. The result: he elevation of the independent maverick.
This is more good news for McCain, but you would think it would result in a larger lead, which is now hovering around three to four points. I think the problem is that the polls are still reflecting part identification numbers that are out of sync with the current alignment which has been moving toward the GOP ever since the convention. That is why the likely voter totals give McCain a larger lead.
If You Like Michigan's Economy, You'll Love Obama's
Despite the federal government's growing economic dominance, individual states still exercise substantial freedom in pursuing their own economic fortune -- or misfortune. As a result, the states provide a laboratory for testing various policies.
In this election year, the experience of the states gives us some ability to look at the economic policies of the two presidential candidates in action. If a program is not playing in Peoria, it probably won't work elsewhere. Americans have voted with their feet by moving to states with greater opportunities, but federal adoption of failed state programs would take away our ability to walk away from bad government.
Growth in jobs, income and population are proof that a state is prospering. But figuring out why one state does well while another struggles requires in-depth analysis. In an effort to explain differences in performance, think tanks have generated state-based economic freedom indices modeled on the World Economic Freedom Index published by The Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation.
The Competitiveness Index created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) identifies "16 policy variables that have a proven impact on the migration of capital -- both investment capital and human capital -- into and out of states." Its analysis shows that "generally speaking, states that spend less, especially on income transfer programs, and states that tax less, particularly on productive activities such as working or investing, experience higher growth rates than states that tax and spend more."
Ranking states by domestic migration, per-capita income growth and employment growth, ALEC found that from 1996 through 2006, Texas, Florida and Arizona were the three most successful states. Illinois, Ohio and Michigan were the three least successful.
The rewards for success were huge. Texas gained 1.7 million net new jobs, Florida gained 1.4 million and Arizona gained 600,000. While the U.S. average job growth percentage was 9.9%, Texas, Florida and Arizona had job growth of 18.5%, 21.4% and 28.9%, respectively.
Remarkably, a third of all the jobs in the U.S. in the last 10 years were created in these three states. While the population of the three highest-performing states grew twice as fast as the national average, per-capita real income still grew by $6,563 or 21.4% in Texas, Florida and Arizona. That's a $26,252 increase for a typical family of four.
By comparison, Illinois gained only 122,000 jobs, Ohio lost 62,900 and Michigan lost 318,000. Population growth in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois was only 4.2%, a third the national average, and real income per capita rose by only $3,466, just 58% of the national average. Workers in the three least successful states had to contend with a quarter-million fewer jobs rather than taking their pick of the 3.7 million new jobs that were available in the three fastest-growing states.
In Michigan, the average family of four had to make ends meet without an extra $8,672 had their state matched the real income growth of the three most successful states. Families in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois struggled not because they didn't work hard enough, long enough or smart enough. They struggled because too many of their elected leaders represented special interests rather than their interests.
What explains this relative performance over the last 10 years? The simple answer is that governance, taxes and regulatory policy matter. The playing field among the states was not flat. Business conditions were better in the successful states than in the lagging ones. Capital and labor gravitated to where the burdens were smaller and the opportunities greater.
It costs state taxpayers far less to succeed than to fail. In the three most successful states, state spending averaged $5,519 per capita. In the three least successful states, state spending averaged $6,484 per capita. Per capita taxes were $7,063 versus $8,342.
There also appears to be a clear difference between union interests and the worker interests. Texas, Florida and Arizona are right-to-work states, while Michigan, Ohio and Illinois are not. Michigan, Ohio and Illinois impose significantly higher minimum wages than Texas, Florida and Arizona. Yet with all the proclaimed benefits of unionism and higher minimum wages, Texas, Florida and Arizona workers saw their real income grow more than twice as fast as workers in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.
Incredibly, the business climate in Michigan is now so unfavorable that it has overwhelmed the considerable comparative advantage in auto production that Michigan spent a century building up. No one should let Michigan politicians blame their problems solely on the decline of the U.S. auto industry. Yes, Michigan lost 83,000 auto manufacturing jobs during the past decade and a half, but more than 91,000 new auto manufacturing jobs sprung up in Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Texas.
So what do the state laboratories tell us about the potential success of the economic programs presented by Barack Obama and John McCain? Mr. McCain will lower taxes. Mr. Obama will raise them, especially on small businesses. To understand why, you need to know something about the "infamous" top 1% of income tax filers: In order to avoid high corporate tax rates and the double taxation of dividends, small business owners have increasingly filed as individuals rather than corporations. When Democrats talk about soaking the rich, it isn't the Rockefellers they're talking about; it's the companies where most Americans work. Three out of four individual income tax filers in the top 1% are, in fact, small businesses.
In the name of taxing the rich, Mr. Obama would raise the marginal tax rates to over 50% on millions of small businesses that provide 75% of all new jobs in America. Investors and corporations will also pay higher taxes under the Obama program, but, as the Michigan-Ohio-Illinois experience painfully demonstrates, workers ultimately pay for higher taxes in lower wages and fewer jobs.
Mr. Obama would spend all the savings from walking out of Iraq to expand the government. Mr. McCain would reserve all the savings from our success in Iraq to shrink the deficit, as part of a credible and internally consistent program to balance the budget by the end of his first term. Mr. Obama's program offers no hope, or even a promise, of ever achieving a balanced budget.
Mr. Obama would stimulate the economy by increasing federal spending. Mr. McCain would stimulate the economy by cutting the corporate tax rate. Mr. Obama would expand unionism by denying workers the right to a secret ballot on the decision to form a union, and would dramatically increase the minimum wage. Mr. Obama would also expand the role of government in the economy, and stop reforms in areas like tort abuse.
The states have already tested the McCain and Obama programs, and the results are clear. We now face a national choice to determine if everything that has failed the families of Michigan, Ohio and Illinois will be imposed on a grander scale across the nation. In an appropriate twist of fate, Michigan and Ohio, the two states that have suffered the most from the policies that Mr. Obama proposes, have it within their power not only to reverse their own misfortunes but to spare the nation from a similar fate.
Barack Obama under fire for ignoring advice on how to beat John McCain
Barack Obama and his senior advisers are under fire for ignoring the advice of Democratic senators and governors who are concerned that they do not know how to beat John McCain
The Democratic presidential candidate's slump in the polls has sparked pointed private criticism that he is squandering a once-in-a-generation chance to win back the White House. Party elders also believe the Obama camp is in denial about warnings from Democratic pollsters that his true standing is four to six points lower than that in published polls because of hidden racism from voters - something that would put him a long way behind Mr McCain.
The Sunday Telegraph has learned that senators, governors and union leaders who have experience of winning hard-fought races in swing states have been bombarding Obama's campaign headquarters with telephone calls offering advice. But many of those calls have not been returned. A senior Democratic strategist, who has played a prominent role in two presidential campaigns, told The Sunday Telegraph: "These guys are on the verge of blowing the greatest gimme in the history of American politics. They're the most arrogant bunch Ive ever seen. They won't accept that they are losing and they won't listen." After leading throughout the year, Mr Obama now trails Mr McCain by two to three points in national polls.
Party leaders and commentators say that the Democrat candidate spent too much of the summer enjoying his own popularity and not enough defining his positions on the economy - the number one issue for voters - or reaching out to those blue collar workers whose votes he needs if he is to beat Mr McCain. Others concede that his trip to Europe was a distraction that enhanced his celebrity status rather than his electability on Main Street, USA.
Since Sarah Palin was unveiled as Mr McCain's running mate, the Obama camp has faced accusations that it has been pushed off message and has been limp in responding to attacks. A Democratic National Committee official told The Sunday Telegraph: "I really find it offensive when Democrats ask the Republicans not to be nasty to us, which is effectively what Obama keeps doing. They know thats how the game is played."
Mr Obama tried to answer that critique on Friday when he responded in kind, issuing an attack advert depicting his Republican opponent as out of touch and mocking the 72-year-old Mr McCain's confession that he does not know how to use email. He rammed home the point during a rally in New Hampshire, pointing out Mr McCains recent admission that he was divorced from some of the challenges of ordinary Americans. Mr Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, called it the first day of the rest of the campaign.
But that was the fourth time in the last nine months that Mr Obamas team have been forced to declare that the gloves are coming off. And Mr Plouffe's dismissal of Democratic doubts as hand-wringing and bed-wetting only served to reinforce the growing doubts about what some see as a bunker mentality among Obama's inner circle - where outside advice, even from highly experienced people, is not welcomed. The Democratic strategist told The Sunday Telegraph: "They think they know best. They don't return calls. There are governors and senators calling them up with ideas. They don't get back to them. "These are senior people from the border states and the South who know how to beat Republicans, and they're being ignored. They ignored everyone during the primaries and they came through it, so they think they can do the same again."
Mr Obama has never won an electoral contest against a strong Republican candidate. David Axelrod, his chief strategist has been hailed as a political genius for beating the Clinton machine, but Democrats now point out that he has never run a successful campaign in the heartland states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Virginia, which will decide the election. His expertise is in mobilising young, educated and black voters in urban areas.
Mark Cunningham of the New York Post summed up the private views of many: "If it suddenly seems like the Obama campaign doesn't have any idea what it's doing, maybe that's because it doesn't."
Party elders are also studying internal polling material which warns the Obama camp that his true standing is worse than it appears in polls because voters lie to polling companies about their reluctance to vote for a black candidate. The phenomenon is known in the US as the Bradley effect, after Tom Bradley, a black candidate for governor of California who lost after leading comfortably in polls. The strategist said: "I've seen memos where they've been told to factor in four to six points for the Bradley effect, but they're in denial about it. They say the polls also underestimate the enthusiasm of young voters and African Americans and they believe that balances things out. But that's a wing and a prayer stuff. There's previous evidence for the Bradley effect."
Other Democrats are openly mocking of Mr Obama's much vaunted "50-state strategy", in which he spends money campaigning throughout the US in the hope that it will force Mr McCain to divert funds to previously safe states. Critics say a utopian belief in bringing the nation together has trumped the cold electoral calculus that is necessary to triumph in November. Doug Schoen, a former pollster for Bill Clinton, last week declared it insanity not to concentrate resources on the swing states. The Democratic strategist said: "My Republican friends think its mad. Before Sarah Palin came along we were investing money in Alaska, for Christ's sake, that could have been spent in Ohio and Pennsylvania. "It assumes Republicans are stupid and, when it comes to winning elections, they're not."
The one thing everyone agrees the Obama camp have woken up to is the toxic effect on their chances of Mrs Palin's arrival on the national scene. Polls show that white women voters, attracted to her down home virtues, now support Mr McCain by a margin of 12 points, the same lead among white women that George W. Bush enjoyed over John Kerry in 2004. Until recently, Mr Obama led among that group of voters by six points.
A senior aide to one of the most powerful Democrats in the House of Representatives voiced the fears of many: "Palin doesn't just play to the Republican base. She has much broader appeal." The aide said that her repeated mockery of Mr Obama's boasts about his time as a community organiser in Chicago are "the most effective criticisms of Barack Obama we have yet seen." He said: "Americans in small and medium size towns dont know what the hell a community organiser is. Real Americans graduate from high school or college and get a job that pays a wage. Campus radicals go off and organise a community."
Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan speechwriter, blamed the defection of women voters from Mr Obama on the atom bomb of ritual abuse by left-wing bloggers and Democratic officials, painting Mrs Palin as a bad mother and religious weirdo. Ms Noonan wrote: "The snobbery of it, the meanness of it, reminded the entire country, for the first time in a decade, what it is they don't like about the Left."
The Republican strategist Dan Schnur said that the effect was to repel blue collar, family-oriented voters. "They didn't like Obama in the primaries and voted for Hillary. And they still don't like him now so they're voting for Palin. "Obama can still win these voters over, but his difficulty in establishing an emotional connection with them is probably his greatest challenge between now and election day."
On Thursday Mr Obama did take advice from Bill Clinton, who is understood to have suggested ways to show those workers that he cares, an area where the former president excelled. But it is a measure of his plight that the man who derailed the ambitions of Mrs Clinton, the most powerful woman in Democratic politics, now needs help from her husband to overcome the popularity of another alpha female who may be an even greater risk to his White House ambitions.
Barack Obama could be on the verge of falling out of contention in Florida. Despite spending an estimated $8-million on campaign ads in America's biggest battleground state and putting in place the largest Democratic campaign organization ever in Florida, Obama has lost ground over the summer. Florida has moved from a toss-up state to one that clearly leans toward John McCain, fueling speculation about how much longer the Democratic nominee will continue investing so heavily in the state.
... Obama allies say he has about 350 paid staffers in the state and about 50 field offices, including in places not known as fertile ground for Democrats, such as Sun City Center, Lake City and Sebring.
But for all the attention to Florida from the Obama campaign, there's little tangible evidence it's paying off. He is farther behind in the state than John Kerry was at this point in 2004, even though McCain began buying Florida TV ads only last week. By this time in 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign had spent $13-million on Florida TV. In the rolling average of Florida polls compiled by the Web site RealClearPolitics.com, Obama has never taken the lead over McCain in Florida, and the latest average shows him behind by 5 percentage points. They were tied in early August. Four Florida polls came out this week, with one showing a tied race, the others showing McCain leading by 5 to 8 percentage points.
"They've had everything going for them - momentum, enthusiasm, money, a complicit national press, a stiff wind at his back for a long time, and he hasn't been able pull ahead in Florida,'' said Republican strategist Alberto Martinez of Tallahassee. "I think Florida is one of those states that's taken off the board pretty soon, as they start focusing resources on states they can win."...
Democrats are still whistling past the graveyard putting on a competitive face on a bad situation. In some ways Florida is like a lot of states where Obama spent a lot of money and still lost in the primaries. His ads are not buying votes. With McCain finally devoting some resources in Florida he should be able to plant his flag there in November.
The latest polls in Ohio show that John McCain is establishing a consistent lead in the state. Ohio is a bellwether; no Republican has won the White House without it. If McCain can take Ohio, as well as Florida (where he also leads), he probably comes very close to re-creating the winning Bush map of 2004.
Beyond the poll numbers, former Democratic House and Senate candidate Paul Hackett thinks Obama may already have lost the state. The reason? Racism:
While the polling is close I believe it is far worse than the numbers reflect given social apprehension of middle of the road uncommitted respondents to appear racist by not supporting Obama. There has been much speculation across America regarding this phenomenon and as such can impact the accuracy of polling by at least 5 points. Thus instead of being down in Ohio by 3 or 4 points I would argue that for planning purposes the working assumption should indicate that Obama is down in Ohio by roughly 10 points. That's a lot of ground to make up in less than 60 days, and as such there must be an aggressive offense to cover such a distance.
If you think that Hackett isn't doing the Obama campaign any favors by accusing Ohio voters of racism, wait until you hear his advice for turning the race around:
The solution rests with local surrogates on the ground spreading the attack face to face coupled with an air campaign via radio and TV. The message is simple and the professionals can refine it but essentially it should contain these elements:
"Sarah Palin? Can't keep her solemn oath of devotion to her husband and had sex with his employee. Sarah Palin? Accidentally got pregnant at age 43 and the tax payers of Alaska have to pay for the care of her disabled child. Sarah Palin? Unable to teach her 16 year old daughter right from wrong and now another teenager is pregnant. Sarah Palin? Can you trust Sarah Palin and her values with America's future? John McCain? Divorced from his first wife one month and marries a billionaire influence peddler and convicted felon. John McCain, a record of rash and impulsive decisions. That's not change that's more of the same."
Stay classy, Democrats. It's clearly working great so far.
Obama locked into past while McCain sprints by him
Barack Obama knows it. The election he had in the bag is slipping away. The selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate has so thrown him off stride, as it has most other Democrats, that all the momentum he had has vanished. He's getting panicky advice from everywhere. He intends to launch more and sharper attacks, abandoning any pretense of a new and different, more civil campaign.
Democrats know something, and desperation is setting in. They have a novice campaigner who wanders off message. With every advantage in the primaries, Obama couldn't win the big states - New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania - against Hillary Clinton, even when he got to define the rules for running against him. She could never risk alienating the base she'll need in 2012; John McCain and Sarah Palin have no such constraints - hence the panic.
For a "change" candidate, Obama appears to be a man locked in time, unable to move past criticism, unable to move from the grip of the Democratic left, unable to adapt to the changed reality that the campaign is not the referendum on the war in Iraq or on the administration of George W. Bush that he'd envisioned.
He's begun to sound dated. Last week, for example, he devoted valuable campaign days - less than two months remain - into explaining a silly "lipstick on a pig" line. The McCain campaign had reacted, accusing him of making the reference to Palin. "I don't care what they say about me," Obama responded. "But I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and `Swiftboat politics.' Enough is enough," he said. (The Swiftboat reference is from the 2004 campaign of John Kerry).
The Democratic left is still seething from the Kerry campaign's loss and is determined to see Bush expelled from the White House in disgrace - the reason it is locked in to making this a referendum on the administration now ending.
It barely worked when the maverick McCain, no darling of the Bushites, got the nomination. With Palin, the Washington outsider, the "third term" argument is plainly absurd. But Obama can't let go, just as the lefties can't let go of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth defeat of Kerry. He can't move on.
Obama has the habit, too, of reminding voters of their doubts about him, as he did in reminding a Detroit audience that he's been accused of being less interested in protecting you from terrorists than reading them their rights. And, when he professes love of country as his basis for refusing to allow the McCain campaign to attack his words, he raises questions about why he finds the affirmation of love necessary....
Obama got this far by winning small states and Southern states he has no chance of carrying in November. In Georgia, for example, the latest Insider Advantage poll has McCain pulling 56 percent of the vote to 38 percent for Obama, numbers that are not likely to change more than 4 percentage points in November. The undecideds and those who intend to vote for third-party campaigns are at 6 percent....
The MoveOn Democrats who gave Obama the nomination are also locked into the past on Swiftboating and on Iraq. It is the latter problem that has cost Obama his credibility on the war issue and not some perceived slight to his patriotism. He was dead wrong on one of the central issues of our time and he is trying to win an election based on his superior judgment.
There is a recent trend in the mainstream media now that it is clear that we are winning in Iraq to say that the surge was not that important to our success. Here is Tim Rutton in the LA Times:
The Times' story confirms the most sensational revelation contained in Bob Woodward's new book, "The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2007," which was published this week. Woodward revealed the technology's existence but, heeding requests from intelligence officials, declined to describe its operations except to say that it had allowed U.S. forces to locate and kill decisive numbers of senior Al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi insurgents. In what may be the book's most controversial claim, Woodward argues that the secret technology and the so-called Anbar Awakening -- in which counterinsurgency techniques developed by the Marines won over tribal leaders in that crucial Sunni-dominated province -- had as much or more to do with stabilizing Iraq as the "surge" in U.S. troop numbers.
Beyond the purely military considerations, there are potentially significant political implications. First and most obvious is the question of the surge's efficacy. The answer matters, particularly to John McCain, who has been one of the surge's most resolute supporters. If it turns out that it was only one -- and, perhaps, the least consequential -- in a confluence of successful American initiatives, then McCain could go from steadfast to stubborn in voters' minds.
This is liberal rationalization to try to cover the fact that McCain was right about the surge and Obama was dead wrong. The surge was just one aspect of a policy that Obama and most liberals opposed in Iraq--winning. The liberal alternative was not to introduce high tech efficiency to the Predators, it was to cut and run--retreat. This new narrative of the left on the surge falls on its face when you compare it to the liberal insistence on withdrawing forces.
Of all the advantages Gov. Sarah Palin has brought to the GOP ticket, the most important may be that she has gotten into Barack Obama's head. How else to explain Sen. Obama's decision to go one-on-one against "Sarah Barracuda," captain of the Wasilla High state basketball champs? It's a matchup he'll lose. If Mr. Obama wants to win, he needs to remember he's running against John McCain for president, not Mrs. Palin for vice president.
Michael Dukakis spent the last months of the 1988 campaign calling his opponent's running mate, Dan Quayle, a risky choice and even ran a TV ad blasting Mr. Quayle. The Bush/Quayle ticket carried 40 states. Adlai Stevenson spent the fall of 1952 bashing Dwight Eisenhower's running mate, Richard Nixon, calling him "the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, and then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation." The Republican ticket carried 39 of 48 states.If Mr. Obama keeps attacking Mrs. Palin, he could suffer the fate of his Democratic predecessors. These assaults highlight his own tissue-thin resume, waste precious time better spent reassuring voters he is up for the job, and diminish him -- not her.
Consider Mr. Obama's response to CNN's Anderson Cooper, who asked him about Republican claims that Mrs. Palin beats him on executive experience. Mr. Obama responded by comparing Wasilla's 50 city workers with his campaign's 2,500 employees and dismissed its budget of about $12 million a year by saying "we have a budget of about three times that just for the month." He claimed his campaign "made clear" his "ability to manage large systems and to execute." Of course, this ignores the fact that Mrs. Palin is now governor. She manages an $11 billion operating budget, a $1.7 billion capital expenditure budget, and nearly 29,000 full- and part-time state employees. In two years as governor, she's vetoed over $499 million from Alaska's capital budget -- more money than Mr. Obama is likely to spend on his entire campaign.
And Mr. Obama is not running his campaign's day-to-day operation. His manager, David Plouffe, assisted by others, makes the decisions about the $335 million the campaign has spent. Even if Mr. Obama is his own campaign manager, does that qualify him for president? A debate between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Palin over executive experience also isn't smart politics for Democrats. As Mr. Obama talks down Mrs. Palin's record, voters may start comparing backgrounds. He won't come off well.
Then there was Mr. Obama's blast Saturday about Mrs. Palin's record on earmarks. He went at her personally, saying, "you been taking all these earmarks when it is convenient and then suddenly you are the champion anti-earmark person." It's true. Mrs. Palin did seek earmarks as Wasilla's mayor. But as governor, she ratcheted down the state's requests for federal dollars, telling the legislature last year Alaska "cannot and must not rely so heavily on federal government earmarks." Her budget chief directed state agencies to reduce earmark requests to only "the most compelling needs" with "a strong national purpose," explaining to reporters "we really want to skinny it down." Mr. Obama has again started a debate he can't win. As senator, he has requested nearly $936 million in earmarks, ratcheting up his requests each year he's been in the Senate. If voters dislike earmarks -- and they do -- they may conclude Mrs. Palin cut them, while Mr. Obama grabs for more each year.
Mr. Obama may also pay a price for his "lipstick on a pig" comment. The last time the word "lipstick" showed up in this campaign was during Mrs. Palin's memorable ad-lib in her acceptance speech. Mr. Obama says he didn't mean to aim the comment at Mrs. Palin, but he deserves all the negative flashback he gets from the snarky aside.
Sen. Joe Biden has now joined the attack on Mrs. Palin, saying this week that her views on issues show she's "obviously a backwards step for women." This is a mistake. Mr. Obama is already finding it difficult to win over independent women and Hillary Clinton voters. If it looks like he's going out of his way to attack Mrs. Palin, these voters may conclude it's because he has a problem with strong women.
In Denver two weeks ago, Mr. Obama said, "If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from." That's what he's trying to do, only the object of his painting is Sarah Palin, not John McCain.
In Mrs. Palin, Mr. Obama faces a political phenomenon who has altered the election's dynamics. Americans have rarely seen someone who immediately connects with large numbers of voters at such a visceral level. Mrs. Palin may be the first vice presidential candidate since Lyndon B. Johnson to change an election's outcome. If Mr. Obama keeps attacking her, the odds of Gov. Palin becoming Vice President Palin increase significantly.
If Barack Obama loses the presidential election, it may well be the result of a public perception that he is detached and elitist -- a politician whose expressions of empathy for hard-working Americans stem more from abstract solidarity than a real connection to the lives of millions of citizens. Suggestions that Sen. Obama has failed to relate to working- and middle-class voters in swing states have dogged his campaign for months. His choice of Sen. Joseph Biden as his running mate only marginally corrects the problem.
While Obama supporters attempt to dismiss the charges about their candidate's perceived hauteur, they confuse privilege and elitism. Elitism is a state of mind, a view of the world that cannot be measured simply by one's net worth, position or number of houses. Throughout American history, there have been extremely wealthy figures who have devoted themselves to genuinely nonelitist principles. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt is probably the best-known example.) At the same time, many from modest backgrounds, like Harry Truman's foil, Thomas Dewey, personified elitism.
I'm a longtime Democrat. I worked for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and supported Sen. Hillary Clinton in her presidential campaign. But I must face the uncomfortable truth that liberal elitism has been a weakness of the Democratic Party for more than half a century. In 1952 and 1956, for example, Adlai Stevenson emerged as the presidential candidate of the party's "new politics" wing. But while Stevenson's stylish, articulate, high-brow manner thrilled the nation's intellectuals, he could never connect with large numbers of working-class Democrats who found him aloof and aristocratic.
The "new politics" Democrats have found their new, improved Stevenson in Mr. Obama. In spite of his lofty liberal rhetoric, Mr. Obama is not connecting to millions of middle- and working-class voters, as well as women voters of all classes. Not only is his legislative record scant on issues that make a difference in their lives, but his current campaign is based mainly on an assumption of his transcendence.
Despite Mr. Obama's assertions that his campaign is about "you," much of his campaign is, in fact, all about him. In the months since the primaries ended, his creation and display of a mock presidential seal with his name on it, his speech at a mass rally at the Prussian Victory Column in Berlin, and his insistence on delivering his acceptance speech in front of fabricated Greek columns in a stadium holding 80,000 chanting supporters have crossed the thin line that separates galvanizing voters and plain old demagoguery. In this context, it should come as no surprise that Sarah Palin, mother of five, hockey mom turned governor and maverick reformer, would instantly zero in on the inherent weakness in Mr. Obama's candidacy, and contrast it with her own compelling life story.
It is ironic that the candidate who comes from a more privileged background -- John McCain -- can genuinely point to at least one crucial moment in his life when elitism went by the boards. Because John McCain's father was a high-ranking Navy Admiral, he was offered freedom from a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. He refused, saying that he would leave only when every prisoner who had been captured before him was also released. Mr. McCain can truthfully tell the story of when he refused to be treated as special, and stood unflinchingly beside less-privileged Americans. It is a story that suggests the way he would govern as president of the United States.
Mr. Obama cannot point to any analogue to Mr. McCain's service. As he talks of himself, and his supporters talk about the amazing Obamaness of Obama, it is no wonder that millions of Americans, including loyal Democrats, still question whether his presidency would reinforce the splendor of Barack Obama rather than protect them and enhance their lives.
Barack Obama makes his first campaign visit today to his alma mater, Columbia University. Just don't ask the prolific self-diarist to talk about his undergraduate days in Morningside Heights. The Columbia years are a hole in the sprawling Obama hagiography. In his two published memoirs, the 47-year-old Democratic nominee barely mentions his experience there. He refuses to answer questions about Columbia and New York -- which, in this media age, serves only to raise more of them. Why not release his Columbia transcript? Why has his senior essay gone missing?
Now in our view, the college years shouldn't normally be used to judge a politician's fitness for office. We're not sure the transcripts of Al Gore, John Kerry and George W. Bush -- which showed them to be C students -- illuminated much for voters. The McCain campaign won't release his records, but we know he graduated at the bottom of his Naval Academy class.
But Mr. Obama is a case apart. His personal story, as told by him, made possible his rise from obscurity four years ago to possibly the White House. He doesn't have a long track record in government. We mainly have him in his own words. As any autobiographer, Mr. Obama played up certain chapters in his life -- perhaps even exaggerating his drug use in adolescence to drive home his theme of youthful alienation -- and ignored others. What's more, as acknowledged in "Dreams From My Father," Mr. Obama reconstructed conversations and gave some people pseudonyms or created "composite" characters.
Voters and the media are now exercising due diligence before Election Day, and they are meeting resistance from Mr. Obama in checking his past. Earlier this year, the AP tracked down Mr. Obama's New York-era roommate, "Sadik," in Seattle after the campaign refused to reveal his name. Sohale Siddiqi, his real name, confirmed Mr. Obama's account that he turned serious in New York and "stopped getting high." "We were both very lost," Mr. Siddiqi said. "We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay." For some reason the Obama camp wanted this to stay out of public view.
Such caginess is grist for speculation. Some think his transcript, if released, would reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial preference. Yet he later graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude, so he knows how to get good grades. Others speculate about ties to the Black Students Organization, though students active then don't seem to remember him. And on the far reaches of the Web can be found conspiracies about former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who became the candidate's "guru and controller" while at Columbia in the early 1980s. Mr. Brzezinski laughs, and tells us he doesn't "remember meeting him."
What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends. Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him. He had transferred from Occidental College in California after his sophomore year because, he told the Boston Globe in 1990, "I was concerned with urban issues and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities." He got a degree in political science without honors. "For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot," he told his biographer David Mendell. Put that way, his time at Columbia sounds unremarkable. Maybe that's what most pains a young memoirist and an ambitious politician who strains to make his life anything but unremarkable.
Republican vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin has picked at the scars of the Democratic primary fight, saying Barack Obama must now be sorry he did not name Hillary Clinton as his running mate. The Alaska governor, who is trying to enlist vast numbers of women voters to John McCain's Republican ticket, is tilting at history by trying to become America's first female vice-president.
"I think he's regretting not picking her now, I do. What, what determination, and grit, and even grace through some tough shots that were fired her way - she handled those well," Palin told America's ABC News. Palin's comments came after polls in battleground states Ohio and Pennsylvania found that she was winning growing support among the crucial demographic of white women voters. Clinton has so far not overtly attacked Palin on the campaign trail, but will venture out to stump for Obama in the key state of Ohio this weekend.
When McCain sent shockwaves through the political establishment by picking Palin two weeks ago, Clinton issued a statement congratulating her on her "historic" nomination. "While their policies would take America in the wrong direction, governor Palin will add an important new voice to the debate," Clinton said. Later, at the end of the Republican convention, the former first lady issued a new statement amending her one-liner condemning McCain at the Democratic convention. "No way, No How, No McCain-Palin," she said.
Clinton's own historic quest, to become America's first woman president, fell just short after a gruelling six-month coast-to-coast nominating duel with Obama. But the Obama campaign pounced on video footage of Palin in March, when she said Clinton's "perceived whine" during the primary campaign "doesn't do us any good - women in politics, women in general wanting to progress this country". "Sarah Palin should spare us the phony sentiment and respect," Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who vocally backed Clinton during the primaries, said in an Obama campaign statement.
By 5-to-1 Public Thinks Most Journalists Trying to Help Elect Obama
A week after a Rasmussen Reports survey discovered that by a ten-to-one margin the public believes the media are trying to hurt Sarah Palin, a new Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely voters, briefly highlighted Wednesday night on FNC's Hannity & Colmes, determined "69 percent remain convinced that reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and this year by a nearly five-to-one margin voters believe they are trying to help Barack Obama." Specifically, "50 percent of voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama win versus 11 percent who believe they are trying to help his Republican opponent John McCain" with 26 percent saying "reporters offer unbiased coverage."
Even amongst Democrats, more think journalists are aiding Democrat Obama than Republican McCain: "While 83 percent of Republican voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama, 19 percent of Democrats agree, one percentage point higher than the number of Democrats who believe they are trying to help McCain." Most telling, "unaffiliated voters by a 53 percent to 10 percent margin see reporters trying to help Obama."
Matching the overall public perception of a pro-Obama media, "45 percent of Democrats say most reporters are providing unbiased coverage in the current presidential campaign, but only 20 percent of unaffiliateds and nine percent (9%) of Republicans agree." For Rasmussen's full summary of the poll taken on September 8 and released on September 10, see: "69% Say Reporters Try to Help the Candidate They Want to Win." An excerpt with other findings:
....Voters from both parties...are skeptical of media bias in general. Eighty-six percent (86%) of Republicans think reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and a plurality of Democrats (49%) believe that, too. Seventy-four percent (74%) of unaffiliated voters agree. Only 21% of voters overall say reporters try to offer unbiased coverage....
Among all voters, 57% believe Obama has received the best treatment by the media, while 21% say McCain has been treated best. Only nine percent (9%) believe the media has been most favorable to Senator Hillary Clinton, who was Obama's closest rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Forty-two percent (42%) think reporters would hide information that hurts the candidate they want to win, but 34% do not agree. But there's a partisan divide here: While 63% of likely McCain voters believe reporters would hide information harmful to the candidate they favor, 52% of potential Obama voters do not agree....
The new Rasmussen survey echoes two other recent polls, one by Rasmussen and one by Fox News. My September 4 NewsBusters item, "Poll: By 10-to-1 Public Says Reporters 'Trying to Hurt Palin,'" recounted:
"Over half of U.S. voters (51%) think reporters are trying to hurt Sarah Palin with their news coverage, and 24% say those stories make them more likely to vote for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in November," Rasmussen Reports announced Thursday in posting survey results which determined "just five percent (5%) think reporters are trying to help her with their coverage, while 35 percent believe reporters are providing unbiased coverage." In Thursday's "Grapevine" segment, FNC's Brit Hume highlighted the findings from the poll of 1,000 "likely voters."
By wide margins, more Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters see the media as trying to hurt rather than trying to help Palin. For Republicans it's 80 to 6 percent, for Democrats 28 to 4 percent (with 57 percent believing reporting is unbiased) and for unaffiliated voters it's 49 to 5 percent.
And my July 25 posting, "Fox Poll: Two-Thirds Recognize Journalists Want Obama to Win," reported:
Just days after a Rasmussen Reports survey was released showing more than three times as many likely voters "believe most reporters will try to help Obama with their coverage" than help John McCain, a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll taken July 22-23 of 900 registered voters discovered six times as many think "most member of the media" want Obama to win than wish for a McCain victory. On Thursday's Special Report, FNC's Brit Hume relayed: "67 percent of the respondents think most media members want Obama to win. Just 11 percent think most in the media are for McCain."
A FoxNews.com article added this damning finding: "Only about 1 in 10 (11 percent) volunteers the belief that the media is neutral on the race to become the 44th President of the United States." Those polled recognize the tilt in action: "When asked to rate the objectivity of media coverage of the campaigns, Americans feel Obama gets more of a positive spin by a better than 7-to-1 margin (46 percent more positive toward Obama; 6 percent more positive toward McCain)."
The "How the Public Views the Media" section of the MRC's "Media Bias Basics" lists many more surveys of how the public perceive journalists and the news media
Jessica Goral had pretty much made up her mind two weeks ago: she was going to vote for Barack Obama. Then John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running-mate. “She empowers a lot of women,” said Mrs Goral, a mother of two in Macomb County – a national bellwether in the battleground state of Michigan and an area rich in white, working-class swing voters who will play an important role in deciding the election in November.
“I like that she’s a brand new mother, and that she has the courage to stand behind her pregnant daughter. She relates to working women. For all of us who have children at home but have to go to work every day – she has given us a sense that we can still do it and can be an excellent mum,” she said. “Sarah Palin is a role model. She’s made me more likely to vote Republican.”
If Mr Obama should be in any doubt how gravely the vice-presidential nomination of the Governor of Alaska has imperilled his White House ambitions, then a day spent in Macomb County will make this clear: white women who voted for John Kerry in 2004 are suddenly deserting the Democratic Party.
This is Mount Clemens, in the heart of Macomb County, where the pollster Stan Greenberg first identified the phenomenon of the Reagan Democrats – the working-class, socially conservative, traditionally Democratic whites who deserted the party for Ronald Reagan in 1980. It is fair to say that this critical swing group now has a new name: Palin Democrats.
The Times spoke to dozens of women here – perhaps the key demographic in this election – in an area that is 88 per cent white, has one of the highest unemployment and home repossession rates in the country, and will play a big role in determining who wins Michigan in November. It is a crucial swing state that no Republican has won since 1988 but where Mr Obama is particularly vulnerable. Nearly all said that they were still undecided. Yet the disturbing fact for Mr Obama was how many said that they had been leaning towards him – until Mrs Palin entered the race. It lends new credence to a poll last week that showed white women fleeing from Mr Obama to Mr McCain.
Katherine Herman, 45, is a lifelong Democrat who has never voted for a Republican. Until now. “I have a friend who’s a Democrat, and like me, it’s Sarah Palin that’s caused her to lean in favour of McCain. Palin is tenacious. She’s sure of herself and would make good decisions for all Americans,” she said.
Stephanie Parker, 23, a single mother puffing on a Marlboro menthol cigarette in Main Street, Mount Clemens, voted for Mr Kerry and had been drawn to Mr Obama. “Palin’s made a big difference. I think she’ll do us great. What she stands for is fantastic,” she said. What does she stand for? “I couldn’t tell really. But I love her.”
Jennifer Zvara, 22, another single mother who voted for John Kerry, said: “I’m undecided but leaning more towards McCain because of Palin. It’s a women thing. She’s one of us. This race is about the running-mates – it’s not about Obama any more.”....
Michigan has been run into a ditch by Democrat energy policies and by a Democrat governor and legislature trying to tax their way out of a one state recession. There are plenty of reasons to vote against Democrats in Michigan and Palin is just one more for some.
A British commentator says that there is a yawning gulf between what the Democratic candidate says and how he has acted. That's why the race is so close
It's funny how the harder you look at something, the harder it can be to understand it. I can't recall a US presidential election that has attracted more attention. But neither can there have been a time when the world has watched what goes on in America with the nonplussed, horrified incomprehension it has now.
Travelling in Britain this week, I've been asked repeatedly by close followers of US politics if it can really be true that Barack Obama might not win. Thoughtful people cannot get their head around the idea that Mr Obama, exciting new pilot of change, supported by Joseph Biden, experienced navigator of the swamplands of Washington politics, could possibly be defeated.
They look upon John McCain and Sarah Palin and see something out of hag-ridden history: the wizened old warrior, obsessed with finding enemies in every corner of the globe, marching in lockstep with the crackpot, mooseburger-chomping mother from the wilds of Alaska, rifle in one hand, Bible in the other, smiting caribou and conventional science as she goes.
Two patronising explanations are adduced to explain why Americans are going wrong. The first is racism. I've dealt with this before and it has acquired no more merit. White supremacists haven't been big on Democratic candidates, whatever their colour, for a long time, and Mr Obama's race is as likely to generate enthusiasm among blacks and young voters as it is hostility among racists.
In a similarly condescending account, those foolish saps are being conned into voting for Mr McCain because they like his running-mate. Her hockey-mom charm and storybook career appeals to their worst instincts. The race is boiling down to a beauty contest in which a former beauty queen is stealing the show. Believe this if it helps you come to terms with the possibility of a Democratic defeat. But there really are better explanations.
One is a simple political-cultural one. This election is a struggle between the followers of American exceptionalism and the supporters of global universalism. Democrats are more eager than ever to align the US with the rest of the Western world, especially Europe. This is true not just in terms of a commitment to multilateral diplomacy that would restore the United Nations to its rightful place as arbiter of international justice. It is also reflected in the type of place they'd like America to be - a country with higher taxes, more business regulation, a much larger welfare safety net and universal health insurance. The Republicans, who still believe America should follow the beat of its own drum, are pretty much against all of that.
You can argue the merits of each case. But let me try to explain to my fellow non-Americans why Mr Obama's problems go well beyond that. Even if you think that Americans should want to turn their country into a European-style system, there is a perfectly good reason that you might have grave doubts about Mr Obama.
The essential problem coming to light is a profound disconnect between the Barack Obama of the candidate's speeches, and the Barack Obama who has actually been in politics for the past decade or so. Speechmaker Obama has built his campaign on the promise of reform, the need to change the culture of American political life, to take on the special interests that undermine government's effectiveness and erode trust in the system itself.
Politician Obama rose through a Chicago machine that is notoriously the most corrupt in the country. As David Freddoso writes in a brilliantly cogent and measured book, The Case Against Barack Obama, the angel of deliverance from the old politics functioned like an old-time Democratic pol in Illinois. He refused repeatedly to side with those lonely voices that sought to challenge the old corrupt ways of the ruling party.
Speechmaker Obama talks about an era of bipartisanship, He speaks powerfully about the destructive politics of red and blue states. Politician Obama has toed his party's line more reliably than almost any other Democrat in US politics. He has a near-perfect record of voting with his side. He has the most solidly left-wing voting history in the Senate. His one act of bipartisanship, a transparency bill co-sponsored with a Republican senator, was backed by everybody on both sides of the aisle. He has never challenged his party's line on any issue of substance.
Speechmaker Obama talks a lot about finding ways to move beyond the bloody battlegrounds of the "culture wars" in America; the urgent need to establish consensus on the emotive issue of abortion. Politician Obama's support for abortion rights is the most extreme of any Democratic senator. In the Illinois legislature he refused to join Democrats and Republicans in supporting a Bill that would require doctors to provide medical care for babies who survived abortions. No one in the Senate - not the arch feminist Hillary Clinton nor the superliberal Edward Kennedy - opposed this same humane measure.
Here's the real problem with Mr Obama: the jarring gap between his promises of change and his status quo performance. There are just too many contradictions between the eloquent poetry of the man's stirring rhetoric and the dull, familiar prose of his political record.
It's been remarked that the biggest difference between Americans and Europeans is religion: ignorant Americans cling to faith; enlightened Europeans long ago embraced the liberating power of reason. Yet here's an odd thing about this election. Europeans are asking Americans to take a leap of faith, to break the chains of empiricism and embrace the possibility of the imagination.
The fact is that a vote for Mr Obama demands uncritical subservience to the irrational, anti-empirical proposition that the past holds no clues about the future, that promise is wholly detached from experience. The second-greatest story ever told, perhaps.
An Obama ad plays fast and loose with McCain's voting record on education and proposals
A new Obama-Biden ad includes misleading claims about McCain and education spending:
It says McCain "voted to cut education funding" and lists five votes. But one was a vote for increased education funding, although for fewer dollars than what Democrats may have wanted. And three others were votes against additional funding, not votes for funding cuts.
The ad says that "McCain's economic plan gives $200 billion more to special interests while taking money away from public schools." Not exactly. McCain has proposed a one-year freeze on discretionary spending in general. A freeze would mean that funds would not keep pace with inflation and population growth, but no dollars would be "taken away." The $200 billion for "special interests" refers to the cost of McCain's proposal to reduce the tax rate for all business corporations, not just a few "special" ones.
The ad says McCain proposed abolishing the Department of Education. He did once say in an interview that he "would certainly favor" abolishing both the departments of Education and Energy, but he hasn't pushed for either.
Then there was someone named Carol Fowler, who evidentially runs the Democratic Party in South Carolina, opining that Sarah Palin's "primary qualification seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion." For a party trying to appeal suburban women (who according to the most recent Washington Post poll are leaving Obama in droves) I'm not sure Ms.Fowler is going to bring them under the tent. That's a nine on the Biden gaffe-o-meter. She later apologized for the remark, but it owned most of the news cycle today.
But credit Obama for the dumbest play of the day. Evidentially, during a taping with Letterman, he elaborated on his "lipstick on a pig" remark by commenting that Palin was meant to be the lipstick, and McCain's policies the pig. What on earth was he thinking? All he did was extend a bad news cycle for him for another 24 hours, and it's another day where McCain gets a free pass. Truth be told, McCain is the only candidate among the four that looks completely presidential.
It's baffling to see Obama continue to spend energy going after Palin while McCain floats above it all. The news cycle can only handle one or two headlines at a given time, and when candidates go off message it's the "off message" part that owns the coverage. I expected Biden to be off message almost all the time -- he's too long winded and arrogant to do otherwise -- but Obama had been good at staying on message. Not any longer. This Palin thing has really thrown team Obama off their game.
The candidacy of Barack Obama seems to have lost some of its luster of late, and I suspect this has something to do with large questions many Americans still harbor about his view of the dangerous world around us. Those questions were not stilled by the choice of Joe Biden as his running mate.
To be sure, the Delaware senator is a man of unfailing decency and deep legislative experience; and his foreign policy preferences are reflective of the liberal internationalist outlook that once prevailed in the Democratic Party. To his honor and good name, Sen. Biden took a leading role in pushing for the use of American military power in the Balkans when the Muslims of Bosnia were faced with grave dangers a dozen years ago. Patriotism does not embarrass this man in the way it does so many in the liberal elite. But as Bob Woodward is the latest to remind us, it is presidents, not their understudies, who shape the destiny of nations.
So the Obama candidacy must be judged on its own merits, and it can be reckoned as the sharpest break yet with the national consensus over American foreign policy after World War II. This is not only a matter of Sen. Obama's own sensibility; the break with the consensus over American exceptionalism and America's claims and burdens abroad is the choice of the activists and elites of the Democratic Party who propelled Mr. Obama's rise.
Though the staging in Denver was the obligatory attempt to present the Obama Democrats as men and women of the political center, the Illinois senator and his devotees are disaffected with American power. In their view, we can make our way in the world without the encumbrance of "hard" power. We would offer other nations apologies for the way we carried ourselves in the aftermath of 9/11, and the foreign world would be glad for a reprieve from the time of American certitude.
The starkness of the choice now before the country is fully understood when compared to that other allegedly seminal election of 1960. But the legend of Camelot and of the New Frontier exaggerates the differences between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. A bare difference of four years separated the two men (Nixon had been born in 1913, Kennedy in 1917). Both men had seen service in the Navy in World War II. Both were avowed Cold Warriors. After all, Kennedy had campaigned on the missile gap -- in other words the challenger had promised a tougher stance against the Soviet Union. (Never mind the irony: There was a missile gap; the U.S. had 2,000 missiles, the Soviet Union a mere 67.)
The national consensus on America's role abroad, and on the great threats facing it, was firmly implanted. No great cultural gaps had opened in it, arugula was not on the menu, and the elites partook of the dominant culture of the land; the universities were then at one with the dominant national ethos. The "disuniting of America" was years away. American liberalism was still unabashedly tethered to American nationalism.
We are at a great remove from that time and place. Globalization worked its way through the land, postmodernism took hold of the country's intellectual life. The belief in America's "differentness" began to give way, and American liberalism set itself free from the call of nationalism. American identity itself began to mutate.
The celebrated political scientist Samuel Huntington, in "Who Are We?," a controversial book that took up this delicate question of American identity, put forth three big conceptions of America: national, imperial and cosmopolitan. In the first, America remains America. In the second, America remakes the world. In the third, the world remakes America. Back and forth, America oscillated between the nationalist and imperial callings. The standoff between these two ideas now yields to the strength and the claims of cosmopolitanism. It is out of this new conception of America that the Obama phenomenon emerges.
The "aloofness" of Mr. Obama that has become part of the commentary about him is born of this cultural matrix. Mr. Obama did not misspeak when he described union households and poorer Americans as people clinging to their guns and religion; he was overheard sharing these thoughts with a like-minded audience in San Francisco.
Nor was it an accident that, in a speech at Wesleyan University, he spoke of public service but excluded service in the military. The military does not figure prominently in his world and that of his peers. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention, as was the case on the campaign trail, he spoke of his maternal grandfather's service in Patton's army. But that experience had not been part of his own upbringing. When we elect a president, we elect a commander in chief. This remains an imperial republic with military obligations and a military calling. That is why Eisenhower overwhelmed Stevenson, Reagan's swagger swept Carter out of office, Bush senior defeated Dukakis, etc.
The exception was Bill Clinton, with his twin victories over two veterans of World War II. We had taken a holiday from history -- but 9/11 awakened us to history's complications. Is it any wonder that Hillary Clinton feigned the posture of a muscular American warrior, and carried the working class with her?
The warrior's garb sits uneasily on Barack Obama's shoulders: Mr. Obama seeks to reassure Americans that he and his supporters are heirs of Roosevelt and Kennedy; that he, too, could order soldiers to war, stand up to autocracies and rogue regimes. But the widespread skepticism about his ability to do so is warranted.
The crowds in Berlin and Paris that took to him knew their man. He had once presented his willingness to negotiate with Iran as the mark of his diplomacy, the break with the Bush years and the Bush style. But he stepped back from that pledge, and in a blatant echo of President Bush's mantra on Iran, he was to say that "no options would be off the table" when dealing with Iran. The change came on a visit to Israel, the conversion transparent and not particularly convincing.
Mr. Obama truly believes that he can offer the world beyond America's shores his biography, his sympathies with strangers. In the great debate over anti-Americanism and its sources, the two candidates couldn't be more different. Mr. Obama proceeds from the notion of American guilt: We called up the furies, he believes. Our war on terror and our war in Iraq triggered more animus. He proposes to repair for that, and offers himself (again, the biography) as a bridge to the world.
Mr. McCain, well, he's not particularly articulate on this question. But he shares the widespread attitude of broad swaths of the country that are not consumed with worries about America's standing in foreign lands. Mr. McCain is not eager to be loved by foreigners. In November, the country will have a choice between a Republican candidate forged in the verities of the 1950s, and a Democratic rival who walks out of the 1990s.
For Mr. McCain, the race seems a matter of duty and obligation. He is a man taking up this quest after a life of military and public service, the presidency as a capstone of a long career. Mr. McCain could speak with more nuance about the great issues upon us. When it comes to the Islamic world, for example, it's not enough merely to evoke the threat of radical Islamism as the pre-eminent security challenge of our time. But his approach and demeanor have proven their electoral appeal before.
For Mr. Obama, the race is about the claims of modernism. There is "cool," and the confidence of the meritocracy in him. The Obama way is glib: It glides over the world without really taking it in. It has to it that fluency with political and economic matters that can be acquired in a hurry, an impatience with great moral and political complications. The lightning overseas trip, the quick briefing, and above all a breezy knowingness. Mr. Obama's way is the way of his peers among the liberal, professional elite.
Once every four years, ordinary Americans go out and choose the standard-bearer of their nationalism. Liberalism has run away with elite culture. Nationalism may be out of fashion in Silicon Valley. But the state -- and its citadel, the presidency -- is an altogether different calling.
Polls showing John McCain tied or even ahead of Barack Obama are stirring angst and second-guessing among some of the Democratic Party's most experienced operatives, who worry that Obama squandered opportunities over the summer and may still be underestimating his challenges this fall. "It's more than an increased anxiety," said Doug Schoen, who worked as one of Bill Clinton's lead pollsters during his 1996 reelection and has worked for both Democrats and independents in recent years. "It's a palpable frustration. Deep-seated unease in the sense that the message has gotten away from them."
Joe Trippi, a consultant behind Howard Dean's flash-in-the-pan presidential campaign in 2004 and John Edwards' race in 2008, said the Obama campaign was slow to recognize how the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate would change the dynamic of the race. "They were set up to run `experience versus change,' what they had run [against Hillary] Clinton," Trippi said. "And I think Palin clearly moved that to be change [and] reform, versus change. They are adjusting to that and that threw them off balance a little bit."
A major Democratic fundraiser described it a good bit more starkly after digesting the polls of recent days: "I'm so depressed. It's happening again. It's a nightmare."
Adding to Democratic restlessness, McCain has largely neutralized some issue advantages that have long favored Democrats. This week's USA Today/Gallup poll reported a split on which candidate "can better handle the economy"; 48 percent chose Obama while 45 percent said McCain. In late August, Obama had a 16-point edge on the issue. Also this week, an ABC News/Washington Post poll reported that when voters are asked "who can bring about needed change to Washington," McCain still trails Obama by 12 points. But in June, McCain trailed by 32 points.
That shift in the public's perception of the issues, in Democratic pollster Celinda Lake's words, "tremendously concerns me." Lake joined other Democratic veterans, some speaking not for attribution, in emphasizing a classic liberal woe: that the Democrat let the Republican define him. "Obama needed to define himself," Lake said. "I do think that during the Democratic convention we should have done a better job of defining McCain."
Steve Rosenthal, a veteran field organizer for Democrats and organized labor, said that some entrenched Democratic vulnerabilities never receded this year. And in his view, Palin has reawakened those liberal weaknesses. "For some white, working-class voters who don't want to vote for Barack Obama but weren't sure about McCain, Palin gave them a good reason to take another look and consider supporting McCain," Rosenthal said. "On the one hand, it could be a temporary reshuffling of the deck," he added. "And on the other hand, it underscores the deep-seated problems we have in this race with race, class and culture.
Barack Obama spoke on Wednesday night about a subject that often gets short shrift on the 2008 campaign trail: immigration. The Democratic candidate made the speech to a crowd of Hispanic leaders at black-tie dinner capping the end of a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute gathering in Washington. After spending a few minutes talking about his opponent and his other policy proposals, Obama got his loudest cheers with these lines: "This election is about the 12 million people living in the shadows, the communities taking immigration enforcement into their own hand. They are counting on us to stop the hateful rhetoric filling our airwaves, and rise above the fear, and rise above the demagoguery, and finally enact comprehensive immigration reform."
Obama complimented John McCain for championing the comprehensive immigration package that died in the Senate last year - and that helped (temporarily) sink his primary campaign. The bill, which would have created a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, inflamed widespread anti-immigration sentiment. Congress was deluged with calls, emails and faxes expressing opposition.
Since then, most politicians have kept the issue out of the spotlight. McCain has even made a pledge to tackle border security before any other changes - a reversal Obama made sure to point out Wednesday. "Well, I don't know about you, but I think it's time for a president who won't walk away from comprehensive immigration reform when it becomes politically unpopular," he said.
Obama makes frequent mention of his healthcare and energy proposals on the stump, and his aides have said those will be the top priorities in the first year of his administration. A deal on immigration could still be elusive even with bigger Democratic majorities in Congress, given the success of Republican opponents who stopped two previous attempts to get the bill past the Senate in the summer of 2007. Those proposals had the support of President George W. Bush.
Obama pointed out that the Republican Party platform didn't include language on a comprehensive immigration deal, saying McCain didn't "stand up to opponents of reform at his own convention."
The McCain campaign took the unorthodox approach of not forcing his positions into the party's platform this year, but his campaign did make an effort to block one new proposal regarding immigration: a plan to deny U.S. citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.
Obama ended his speech with the words "si se puede," the Spanish version of his campaign chant "yes we can." His words were not so much a translation as much as a return to a native tongue - the phrase was used widely in Spanish before Obama adopted it, most often for protest marches and demonstrations.
Barack Obama was run over as he took to middle of the road
Barack Obama is beginning to resemble the man who turns up to a fancy-dress party in a suit while criticising everyone for what they are wearing: lipstick, fish wrappers or, maybe, the mantle of change. At the end of the Democratic convention in Denver two weeks ago his campaign thought that they were dressed for every occasion. Chastened by the summer's sneers surrounding his celebrity status, they decided it was time to dim his dazzle a little by donning more sober and serious apparel.
Mr Obama chose Joe Biden as his running-mate rather than more exciting alternatives because he expected the Republicans to attack him over a lack of weight and experience. In place of all those glitzy mass rallies, there would be lots of worthy speeches on policy. The Democrats did not see Sarah Palin coming, have been caught badly off-balance and are still struggling to regain their stride. Mr Obama, who had taken it for granted that change is a word that should belong to him, appears bewildered by a turn of events that has left his campaign in danger of being outflanked on home turf.
For all his talk of the "Audacity of Hope", the only really audacious decision he has made was to launch a bid to become America's first black president. Since then his campaign - despite tactical brilliance in the Democratic primaries - has usually been strategically cautious. This tendency has been underlined in recent weeks as Mr Obama tracked back to the centre on policy issues, softened the sharper edges of his own exotic appeal and generally pursued a risk-averse front-running campaign.
In a year when polls indicate that four fifths of voters are yearning for a new direction this has left an enormous hole that Mrs Palin is filling in a way that no vice-presidential candidate has done before. The author and columnist Camille Paglia says that the Alaska Governor represents a "new style of muscular American feminism" with hints of Madonna's "dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich" and Annie "Get Your Gun" Oakley, a brash ambassador from the country's pioneer past. Mr Obama is now locked in the tightest of fights with the Republican self-styled "team of mavericks". By most objective criteria he is still favourite to win and there is little sign that his supporters' enthusiasm has significantly diminished or that this should be anything other than a Democratic year.
The largely synthetic row over whether he called Mrs Palin a pig or Mr McCain an old fish suggests that Mr Obama is not the type you would pick for a scrap. He is more at home pointing the audience towards a slightly emphemeral vision of the future or crafting the reflective paragraphs befitting a former constitutional law professor.
Sometimes he seems no more effective at attacking opponents than he was at pretending to be a man of the people by going to a bowling alley - where his first balls ended up in the gutter. At the very least, the lipstick-on-a-pig comments ensure that another day goes past when Mrs Palin dominates the stage and Mr Obama's efforts to switch the focus of voters to the "real choice" facing them prove to be in vain.
At worst, they may encourage the flight of more white women voters from the columns of undecided into the McCain-Palin ranks - a reason why Democrats were muttering again yesterday that Mr Obama should himself have picked a white woman as his running-mate: Hillary Clinton.
Barack Obama condemned rival John McCain for accusing him of a sexist jab at vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, the latest in a string of increasingly negative attacks. On a campaign stop Wednesday morning, the Illinois senator condemned the McCain campaign: "They seize on innocent remarks, try to throw then out of context," he told the mostly female supporters gathered in a high-school library. "I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and Swift Boat politics. Enough is enough."
His reference was to an outside group in the 2004 campaign, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which derailed John Kerry's run for the White House with controversial claims about the Democratic candidate's Vietnam record.
Sen. Obama has appeared at times flustered on the campaign trail this week as he tries to reclaim his message of change and defend himself against heated Republican attacks, all while trying to maintain his image as a new kind of candidate who takes the high road.
Supporters have hailed Sen. Obama for his cool approach in the face of often unfair criticism, but his critics point to sarcasm and a smugness that may not play well among undecided voters. During a town-hall style event in Farmington Hills, Mich., on Monday, Sen. Obama told the audience that Alaska Gov. Palin had had a compelling biography. "Mother, governor, moose shooter. That's cool," he said to laughter and applause.
During a town-hall style meeting in Lebanon, Va., Tuesday evening, Sen. Obama said-speaking about the economic policies of Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin-"You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig." The comment was interpreted by some to have been a reference to Gov. Palin's quip to the Republican convention last week casting hockey moms as pit bulls with lipstick. But the Obama campaign said the comment had nothing to do with Gov. Palin and noted that Sen. McCain used the expression to refer to Sen. Hillary Clinton's health-care plan in 2007.
The McCain campaign and the Republicans jumped on the lipstick comment, convening its newly formed "Palin Truth Squad" to hold a conference call with reporters. Former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift, the leader of the squad, insisted that "Sen. Obama owes Gov. Palin an apology."
During the prolonged battle for the Democratic nomination against Sen. Clinton, Sen. Obama largely ignored negative attacks. But over the past week he has shown a new urgency on the campaign trail to defend himself and turn the conversation back to Sen. McCain and the Bush Administration's "failed economic policies."
This approach was on full display Wednesday morning after the McCain campaign launched a new ad called "Lipstick" that directly accuses Sen. Obama of sexism. "They'd much rather have the story [be] about phony and foolish diversions than about the future," Sen. Obama said prior to delivering remarks about improving access to college education. "These are serious times and they call for a serious debate about where we need to take the nation."
But some pundits and voters say Sen. Obama will need to get tougher and adopt a more offensive stance if he is to withstand Republican scrutiny. On Wednesday the Obama campaign launched "Alaska Mythbusters," a group led by former Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles and Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein designed to "set the record straight on Gov. Palin's Alaska record."
Going on the offensive could be tricky since Sen. Obama has tried to paint himself as a candidate who will bring a new type of more civil politics to Washington. "His talk of new politics is as empty as his campaign trail promises, and his record of bucking his party and reaching across the aisle simply doesn't exist," says McCain-Palin spokesman Brian Rogers.
During the question and answer session at the Norfolk event, a voter told Sen. Obama he was "scared" that the same tactics that led to Sen. Kerry's 2004 defeat could throw his candidacy off track. He asked Sen. Obama what he would do differently. The Democratic nominee responded by emphasizing issues like the faltering economy, education, health care the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"This whole thing about lipstick. Nobody actually believes that these folks are offended," he said of the Republicans. "Everybody knows it's cynical. Everybody knows it's insincere. This is a game we play. It's a game. It's a sport and maybe if it wasn't such a serious time, that would be okay." Sen. Obama also took aim at the news media for running with the "made up controversy" over the lipstick comment. "It would be funny, but the news media decided would be the lead story yesterday," he said.
Obama aides say they are not adjusting their strategy based on slipping poll numbers and Republican attacks. But there are signs that they are regrouping. On Thursday, Sen. Obama will have a private lunch with President Clinton, the first session between the two Democrats since the primary. Clinton aides say the former president will talk to Sen. Obama about a range of issues including offering campaign advice if asked. Mr. Clinton is the last Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to serve two consecutive terms as president and the only Democrat in recent years to capture the white working-class voters needed to take control of the White House.
The Obama media think that "there's no such thing as right and wrong"
So a lie is as good as truth to them. So why check the truth of what you report? It's only those silly rednecks who think that truth is important. We smart Leftists know better, apparently. Stalin thought so too
A CNN reporter this week didn't seem to know or care that a fake photo showing a bikini-clad, rifle-toting Sarah Palin had been widely debunked days earlier as a fraud, the latest in series of incidents involving apparent misstatements or inaccurate reporting by the news network. "(John) McCain has been really good about painting (Barack) Obama as this lightweight . They don't want that to come back on Sarah Palin, and people say, yes, she looks good in a bikini clutching an AK-47, but is she equipped to run the country?" CNN's Lola Ogunnaike said in response to a question on the network's "Reliable Sources" show, which aired Sunday.
Ogunnaike's remarks, which came in response to a question by host Howard Kurtz about whether Palin's status as a political celebrity might undercut Republican efforts to portray the vice presidential nominee as a serious, reform-minded governor, were posted on CNN's Web site and have since been reported and discussed on numerous other independent sites.
CNN correspondents and analysts have also recently misrepresented Palin's stance on incorporating creationism into Alaska's school curriculum and falsely reported that she cut funds for people with special needs in the state budget. Regarding the doctored "bikini" photo, neither Kurtz, a "Washington Post" columnist, nor anyone else on the "Sources" discussion panel ever corrected Ogunnaike by pointing out that the picture was a fake.
The infamous fake bikini shot first appeared during the early days of the Republican convention. But it was widely debunked within 24 hours, with bloggers and others quickly exposing the fraud by finding the original shot, reportedly taken in 2004 in Athens, Ga., by an amateur photographer of his then-girlfriend. FOXNews.com was among the news outlets to report the fake.
During the show, Ogunnaike went on to compliment Us Weekly's coverage of Palin, which has been widely attacked as unfair by critics and reportedly thousands of Us Weekly readers. "I have to say," Ogunnaike said, "I read the `Us Weekly' story, and they were actually pretty good. They actually did some pretty good journalism there. . And this is a bigger story here. . They can't afford to ignore this story because this story drives magazine sales. And that's the bottom line, that's what they care about. So if you throw Palin on the cover and you have the words `Baby Scandal,' they know that's going to sell magazines."
Ogunnaike's remarks are among several apparent misstatements made recently by CNN reporters. On Monday night, senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said Palin wants "to have creationism taught in public schools." But numerous stories -- including CNN's own reporting from last week - have noted that Palin has made no effort to try and include creationism in the state school curriculum. "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class," Palin has said. "It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."
The morning after Toobin's remarks on creationism, CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin reported that Palin vetoed funds not only for so-called "earmarks," but "even for people with disabilities." This was an apparent reference to a charge discussed during a Sept. 4 interview, in which CNN's Soledad O'Brien pressed a McCain spokeswoman on another accusation brought by Palin critics. O'Brien twice referred to the charge that while governor, Palin cut the state's special needs budget by 62 percent. "Those advocates have said, as a woman who is now a mother of a special-needs child, she's not fighting - she's cut the budget by 62 percent since she came into office, and doesn't that show a contradiction?" O'Brien asked McCain spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace, according to transcript available on CNN's Web site.
But Factcheck.org, a non-partisan group affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, is among those that have reported that Palin "did not cut funding for special needs education in Alaska by 62 percent." In fact, the group said in a posting published on Newsweek's Web site, "She didn't cut it at all. She tripled per-pupil funding over just three years."
"Community organizer" is more sinister than it seems
In her game-changing convention speech, Sarah Palin took a swipe at Obama for having been nothing more in his life than a ‘community organiser’. This prompted the Obama campaign to issue a pained defence of community organisation as a way of promoting social change ‘from the bottom up’. The impression is that community organising is a worthy if woolly and ultimately ineffectual grassroots activity. This is to miss something of the greatest importance: that in the world of Barack Obama, community organisers are a key strategy in a different game altogether; and the name of that game is revolutionary Marxism.
The seditious role of the community organiser was developed by an extreme left intellectual called Saul Alinsky. He was a radical Chicago activist who, by the time he died in 1972, had had a profound influence on the highest levels of the Democratic party. Alinsky was a ‘transformational Marxist’ in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, who promoted the strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions’ by capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society. In similar vein, Alinsky condemned the New Left for alienating the general public by its demonstrations and outlandish appearance. The revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception. Its proponents had to cultivate an image of centrism and pragmatism. A master of infiltration, Alinsky wooed Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.
His creed was set out in his book ‘Rules for Radicals’ – a book he dedicated to Lucifer, whom he called the ‘first radical’. It was Alinsky for whom ‘change’ was his mantra. And by ‘change’, he meant a Marxist revolution achieved by slow, incremental, Machiavellian means which turned society inside out. This had to be done through systematic deception, winning the trust of the naively idealistic middle class by using the language of morality to conceal an agenda designed to destroy it. And the way to do this, he said, was through ‘people’s organisations’. Community organisers would mobilise direct action by the oppressed masses against their capitalist oppressors. In FrontPageMagazine.Com John Perazzo writes:
These People’s Organizations were to be composed largely of discontented individuals who believed that society was replete with injustices that prevented them from being able to live satisfying lives. Such organizations, Alinsky advised, should not be imported from the outside into a community, but rather should be staffed by locals who, with some guidance from trained radical organizers, could set their own agendas.
The installment of local leaders as the top-level officers of People’s Organizations helped give the organizations credibility and authenticity in the eyes of the community. This tactic closely paralleled the longtime Communist Party strategy of creating front organizations that ostensibly were led by non-communist fellow-travelers, but which were in fact controlled by Party members behind the scenes...
Alinsky viewed as supremely important the role of the organizer, or master manipulator, whose guidance was responsible for setting the agendas of the People’s Organization... Alinsky laid out a set of basic principles to guide the actions and decisions of radical organizers and the People’s Organizations they established. The organizer, he said, ‘must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.’[40] The organizer’s function, he added, was ‘to agitate to the point of conflict’[41] and ‘to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” ‘[42] ‘The word ‘enemy,’ said Alinsky, ‘is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people’;[43] i.e., to convince members of the community that he is so eager to advocate on their behalf, that he has willingly opened himself up to condemnation and derision.
Obama’s connection with Alinsky, whom he never met but whom he reportedly idolised, was through two bodies promoting the Alinsky model of community organisation, ACORN and the Gamaliel Foundation. John Perazzo again:
Obama was trained by the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago and worked for an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of ‘a more just and democratic society’ is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method. As The Nation magazine puts it, ‘Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing...’ In fact, for several years Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method.
But Obama brought a special slant to Alinsky’s radicalism.Far from being – as he has been painted – a ‘post-racial’ politician, Obama’s politics are all about promoting the cause of black people and achieving ‘reparations’ from white society (a perspective through which his whole welfare redistribution agenda is framed). Accordingly, he saw his three-year role as a community organiser in Chicago as mobilising black people for action against their white oppressors. Finding himself hampered in creating an activist network among black churches, he decided to join such a church to give himself more credibility. That’s why he joined the infamous black-power Trinity Church of Christ – a move, it seems, that had less to do with any spiritual quest than as a radical tactic for mobilising the black proletariat.
According to Stanley Kurtz in National Review (subscription required), as a trainer for Gamaliel and ACORN Obama used his influence to secure a major increase in funding for both groups. Kurtz writes of Gamaliel, one of the least known yet most influential national umbrella groups for church-based community organizers:
Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical himself. Obama's legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions of non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors' most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago’s supposedly nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies -- at the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political career.
Kurtz also quotes Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts who, in her book Organizing Urban America: Secular and Faith-based Progressive Movements, lays out the strategy of stealth:
Swarts calls groups like ACORN and (especially) Gamaliel ‘invisible actors,’ hidden from public view because they often prefer to downplay their efforts, because they work locally, and because scholars and journalists pay greater attention to movements with national profiles (like the Sierra Club or the Christian Coalition). Congregation-based community organizations like Gamaliel, by contrast, are often invisible even at the local level. A newspaper might report on a demonstration led by a local minister or priest, for example, without noticing that the clergyman in question is part of the Gamaliel network. ‘Though often hidden from view,’ says Swarts, ‘leaders have intentionally and strategically organized these movements that appear to well up and erupt from below.’
Although Gamaliel and ACORN have significantly different tactics and styles, Swarts notes that their political goals and ideologies are broadly similar. Both groups press the state for economic redistribution. The tactics of Gamaliel and ACORN have been shaped in a ‘post-Alinsky’ era of welfare reform and conservative resurgence, posing a severe challenge to those who wish to expand the welfare state. The answer these activists have hit upon, says Swarts, is to work incrementally in urban areas, while deliberately downplaying the far-Left ideology that stands behind their carefully targeted campaigns.
To avoid seeming like radicals or ‘hippies left over from the sixties,’ Gamaliel organizers are careful to wear conventional clothing and conduct themselves with dignity, even formality. Since liberal social movements tend to come off as naïve and idealistic, Gamaliel organizers make a point of presenting their ideas as practical, pragmatic, and down-to-earth. When no one else is listening, Gamaliel organizers may rail at ‘racism,’ ‘sexism,’ and ‘oppressive corporate systems,’ but when speaking to their blue-collar followers, they describe their plans as ‘common sense solutions for working families.’
If anyone should doubt Obama’s debt to Saul Alinsky, they might ponder this encomium from no less an authority than Alinsky’s own son. In a letter to the Boston Globe, L. David Alinsky wrote of his father’s influence at the Democratic Convention:
All the elements were present: the individual stories told by real people of their situation and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd’s chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people.
Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.
Obama’s questionable links to various radicals are now well-known: the black power racists Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Fr. Michael Pfleger, the former Weather Underground terrorism supporters Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn.
DISASTER!... Obama Gets Chewed Up & Spit Out On O'Reilly
Post below recycled from Gateway Pundit. See the original for links
Holy False Prophet!... This was awful! Barack Obama went into the No Spin Zone and came out battered and bloody tonight. This interview with Bill O'Reilly was a DISASTER! It was so bad you almost felt sorry for him.
Obama had nothing-- He had no answers. He could not defend or explain his associations with terrorists, racists, and Leftist nutjobs. He couldn't defend his decision to appease the Daily Kooks. He compared Sean Hannity and FOX News to the vile nutroots radicals.
He excused Bill Ayers' terrorist attacks. He could not name one example where FOX News smeared him. He could not name one conservative friend. Obama was so bad that O'Reilly started laughing. It was horrible.
Tonight was the beginning of the end. No, actually the Sarah Palin announcement was the beginning of the end for Obama. Tonight was just more proof.
Obama's Muslim Past Dogs Campaign
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has launched a tirade against John McCain, claiming he and his campaign are behind reports tying him to the Muslim faith. Obama, a committed Christian today, was born to the Muslim faith and raised as a Muslim in his early youth, though he did not actively practice his religion.
Obama began his broadside last Friday at a campaign stop in Scranton, Pa. "When they say this isn't about issues, it's about personalities, what they're really saying is, 'We're going to try to scare people about Barack. So we're going to say that, you know, maybe he's got Muslim connections, or we're going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals, or he's not patriotic,'" Obama told his audience.
McCain's campaign chairman quickly responded to Obama, calling his comment "a cynical attempt to play the victim."
On Sunday, Obama again tried to connect McCain to questions being raised about his faith. "These guys love to throw rocks and hide their hand," Obama said on ABC's "This Week." He then claimed McCain's campaign is working behind the scenes, saying the Islamic talk is "being promulgated on Fox News ... and Republican commentators who are closely allied to these folks." "What I think is fair to say is that coming out of the Republican camp there have been efforts to suggest that perhaps I'm not who I say I am when it comes to my faith," Obama said, which he described as "my Muslim faith" in apparent verbal gaffe.
Obama's campaign clearly is concerned about the persistent discussion of matters involving him and Islam, and it even has paid search ads on Google when words like "Obama Muslim" are plugged in. One Obama search ad is headlined "Barack Obama Muslim Myth" with the following statement: "Barack Obama is a Christian. Get the facts at his official site. BarackObama.com." Obama's media offensive over the Muslim issue suggests he wants any discussion of his religious past taken off the table as the campaign enters its most heated period after the convention.
Obama's ties to Islam are hereditary. His father was a Muslim, though Obama claims he was nonpracticing. According to Islamic law, Obama was born a Muslim, as religion is passed paternally. (Judaism, for example, passes religious identification maternally.) Apparently in deference to his father, his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, is an Arabic name. The name Barack is a derivation of "Barak" -- the horse that took the prophet Muhammad on his flight into heaven.
Though Obama's biological father disappeared from his son's life soon after he was born and returned to his native Kenya, he was raised by his Kansas-born mother and her second husband, an Indonesian who was also a Muslim. Obama has described his mother as a Christian, but Newsweek recently noted she had eschewed her parents' faith in favor of secular humanism....
"In sum: Obama was an irregularly practicing Muslim who rarely or occasionally prayed with his stepfather in a mosque," Pipes writes on his blog DanielPipes.org. "This precisely substantiates my statement that he 'for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian stepfather.'"
Obama's campaign is clearly worried that his ties to Islam could become a major problem for swing voters. A Newsweek poll taken in mid-July found that 26 percent of American believe he was raised a Muslim. A survey by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics conducted when Mitt Romney, a Mormon, was a Republican presidential candidate found that 32 percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who is Mormon -- while 45 percent said they would be less likely to vote for a Muslim. And a poll by the Pew Research Center disclosed that 35 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Muslims.
Extreme Mortman posed the question about Biden yesterday: "Geez, after 36 years in the Senate, shouldn't more people like you?"
Um, could it be insensitive and boneheaded statements like this? It occurs to me the last prominent Republican to speak to the issue was Sarah Palin. In the end all he did was smear the Mother of a special needs child. Way to go, Joe. No doubt you're going to go down in history as not just the dumbest man in the Senate but the dumbest VP choice ever as well. That Obama sure has some judgment, huh?
Was Joe Biden referring to Sarah Palin, a mother of a child with Down syndrome, when he made this comment? "I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there's joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don't you support stem cell research?"
Not to mention that scientific advances have pulled the carpet out from under his alleged argument.
Slow Joe Biden's assertion today that people who support unlimited stem cell research care more about special needs children than those who don't is a new low even for Joe. Team McCain's response:
"Barack Obama's running mate sunk to a new low today launching an offensive debate over who cares more about special needs children. Playing politics with this issue is disturbing and indicative of a desperate campaign." - Ben Porritt, McCain-Palin Spokesman
Perhaps because of the spanking Biden got from Archbishop Chaput yesterday, Joe has made it his mission to single-handedly insult every pro-life voter in America, and decided to make sure parents of special needs children had to follow his lead on stem cell research or understand themselves to be uncaring.
Barack Obama tried to present a picture of perfect poise yesterday in the face of evidence that Sarah Palin is transforming the presidential race, insisting that he was less concerned about polls and newspaper headlines than "what I can do for the country". With Democrats asking if the familiar sight of a Republican resurgence is a trend or merely a post-convention bounce, Mr Obama's mask of calm has, at times, slipped to reveal him as uncertain - even disorientated - about how to tackle the unexpected phenomenon of Mrs Palin.
Although he made two weighty policy speeches in Ohio about Iraq and education policy, he now spices campaign appearances with spluttered outrage at how Mrs Palin and Mr McCain are portraying themselves as agents of change - or fulmination over the failure of the media to ask them tough questions. "This is a party that's been in charge for eight years and now they're trying to run against themselves," he told one rally. "These folks are shameless."
While acknowledging that Mrs Palin had a compelling personal story to rival his own - "mother, governor, moose-shooter, I mean, I think that's cool, that's cool, that's cool stuff" - he said that the convention last week "didn't talk about the issues".
Mr Obama's campaign is running television advertisements accusing his Republican rivals of lying about their records, including the belated opposition of Mrs Palin to the so-called Bridge to Nowhere.
If Bill Clinton once accused the media of sanitising coverage of Mr Obama, the boot is now firmly on the other foot. The Democratic nominee complained that the Republicans were "working the refs" in the press and, consequently, getting "little scrutiny" for their claims. Asked if he was getting angrier, Mr Obama said: "With two months to go, I think everybody needs to feel a sense of urgency."
The extent to which he has been overshadowed was underlined by a report from the Pew Research Centre showing Mrs Palin was a significant factor in 60 per cent of campaign stories last week and Mr McCain in 52 per cent, compared with 22 per cent for Mr Obama and only 2 per cent for his running-mate, Joe Biden.
Mr Obama is beginning to experience his first financial worries, with reports suggesting that, having turned down public subsidies, he may not meet an ambitious summer fundraising target of $300 million (œ170 million) for the campaign and a further $150 million for the party....
Obama is trying to recapture the media attention by making remarks about pigs and lipstick. It is an old expression but it is pretty clear who the target was and I think it will backfire as even more women move away from him.
He has been the media darling for so long he probably feels abandoned as Palin coverage goes into overdrive. She is pulling in big crowds for the McCain campaign and generating the excitement that will only drive more coverage.
Either Obama's dim as can be, or he is angry at having been thrown backwards week after week. When Obama denies having targeted Palin, keep in mind that everyone instantly made the connection. Is Obama really that clueless? An angry outburst does less damage than his pleading he didn't mean it that way. Remember the raised finger?
Keep in mind as well that Obama has been telling us his genius at running his campaign is evidence of his fitness to be president. Some genius. We are watching a crack-up under pressure. His Chicago handlers might be able to put the wheels back on, but we now have a glimpse of "glass jaw" Obama in a crisis.
UPDATE: Callers and e-mailers are furious with Obama. Beyond furious, really. MSM is ignoring this tsunami of a story thus far, but it has traveled around the globe and back and will keep traveling. Millions of women will never forget and they won't forgive.
You Can Put Lipstick On A Pig And Obama Will Marry It
Barack Obama, for all his gifts (and he has many) is prone to revert back to being a thug from Chicago when times get tough. We saw this in the primaries when he did the dust off on Hillary and when he said when they bring a knife you bring a gun (though I agree with that when it is a real fight). Ordinarily Obama is pretty cool and collected and he does not let things get to him and when they do he sends out surrogates to make attacks. Sarah Palin seems to have shaken the Chicago thug and he has begun to come unglued. He is down in the polls, his money raising efforts are not what he thought they would be and the PUMAs are against him (Hillary supporters are not sending him much money).
Today Obama was giving a stump speech and said "You can put lipstick on a pig but it is still a pig." He also said "You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink."
Now the pig statement is an old saying and people can draw the conclusion that this is what he meant. If that is the case then he is not as bright as everyone thinks. You see, Palin made her lipstick comment during her speech so Obama's statement is naturally going to be linked to her. I know that Obama knew it would be but that he could use the other meaning to mask the fact that he called Sarah Palin a pig. Anyone who believes that Obama could not have known the connection would be drawn is a moron. Obama is a smart and calculated man and he knew exactly what he was saying. The fact that Palin is a woman would be a clue as to whom people though he was referring. This is an extension of the sexism he displayed in the primary and that his surrogates and media branch have been demonstrating since Palin was announced.
As for the fish comment. Was he saying old fish as a jab at McCain's age but disguising it as a reference to policy? Was it a slam at Palin as a vulgar reference to a certain part of the female anatomy? Obama has enough of the hood in him to be that vulgar and to be that crass. For all of his gifts, Obama is nothing more than a two bit thug from Chicago when he gets riled. He acts like he is in the hood and he ghettos it up when he is under attack.
Obama is afraid of Palin and he has already whined about being picked on by a girl. I think that Saracuda will hit him even harder and have him crying uncle. If anyone should know about pigs in lipstick I assume it would be Obama. Michelle wears lipstick, does she not? What is it about Democrats and kinky lipstick fetishes? First you had Bill Clinton with lipstick on his dipstick and now we have Obama putting lipstick on a pig. That is probably how he got a date for the prom. Yeah, you can take the boy out of the hood but you can't take the hood out of the boy.
Offended by the word boy? It is just a variation of a common saying.
He concedes that tax increases do hurt the economy
The good news is that Barack Obama said on ABC Sunday that he might not go through with his plans to increase taxes. The bad news is that the economy has to be mired in recession to avoid the largest tax increase in the nation's history.
Our check of the Dow Jones Factiva database suggests that other than viewers of ABC's "This Week," only three or four newspapers carried an account of Senator Obama's amended tax plan. While it's possible that the story of a deferred tax increase could shock the media into paralysis, we take it as an encouraging sign. The education of Barack Obama continues apace. For the record, here is what he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos.
Mr. Stephanopoulos: "So even if we're in a recession next January, you come into office, you'll still go through with your tax increases?"
Senator Obama: "No, no, no, no, no. What I've said, George, is that even if we're still in a recession, I'm going to go through with my tax cuts. That's my priority."
Mr. Stephanopoulos: "But not the increases?"
Senator Obama: "I think we've got to take a look and see where the economy is. The economy is weak right now. The news with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, I think, along with the unemployment numbers indicates that we're fragile. I want to accelerate those tax cuts through a second stimulus package, get more money into the pockets of ordinary Americans, see if we can stabilize the housing market, and then we're going to have to reevaluate at the beginning of the year to see what kind of hole we're in."
Even individuals staring down the barrel of Mr. Obama's tax increases should not wish for an economic recession to give them a reprieve. The relevant point is that it was early last year, when the "Bush economy" was still humming, that Senator Obama first proposed pushing taxes sharply upward on "the wealthy," while giving what he calls "tax cuts" (actually they are credits, not rate reductions) to "the middle class."
At the time, Mr. Obama was the long shot in the Democratic Presidential sweepstakes, and it made some political sense to reassure the party's intensely liberal primary voters with class-war boilerplate on taxes. Under ObamaTax 1.0, he would have repealed all the Bush tax cuts, lifted the cap on wages subject to the payroll tax, put the top marginal rate up to 39.8% and raised the rate on capital gains and dividends to at least 25% from 15% now. The official campaign line was that tax rates really don't matter to economic growth.
Summer arrived, the Clinton challenge was history and with the general election ahead came ObamaTax 2.0. It posited that the top rate on capital gains now would be 20%, described on this page August 14 by economic advisers Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee as "almost a third lower than the rate President Reagan set in 1986." This was progress.
Now with the big vote less than 60 days off and John McCain pounding him as a tax-raiser and pulling ahead in some polls, the Democratic nominee has decided to release ObamaTax 3.0, the most interesting upgrade so far. If the economy is still weak in January, a President Obama might defer all of the planned increases.
Several interpretations of this shift are possible, none of which reflect badly on Senator Obama's political learning curve. At the bloodless level of simply wishing to win, the Obama camp may have concluded that in the sprint to November it is a losing strategy to be the election's only doctrinaire tax raiser. A tight race tends to focus political minds, and none forget Walter Mondale's catastrophic promise in his 1984 acceptance speech: "Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did."
Beyond this lies the economic reality of jacking up income, investment and payroll taxes on "the wealthy" amid a flat or falling economy. In the standard narrative, these taxpayers exist as fat cats atop hedge funds, banks and megacorporations. Let's toss into the vat the top-tier managers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Beltway's own fat-cat sinecure.
The reality is that the creators of new jobs in the economy are more likely to be rising entrepreneurs or filers under Subchapter S, who typically pay taxes at individual rates. Hanging three or four tax millstones around their productive necks in January if the economy is weak will likely produce unimpressive growth and job numbers in the first year of the new Obama Presidency, and likely beyond. That in turn could drag down the Democrats in Congress who will get credit for voting these higher taxes into law.
Thus Mr. Obama's unambiguous answer Sunday to whether he'd insist on his tax increases if the economy is in an official recession: "No, no, no, no, no." It seems Mr. McCain is right that taxes do matter. Mr. Obama's most ardent primary supporters may not like it, but we'll take the five "Nos" as evidence that Senator Obama may be learning the difference between liberal doctrine and sensible governance.
Embraces charter schools, ouster of bad teachers in bipartisan approach to education. Sarah has sure got him spooked
Barack Obama is promising to double funding for charter schools and replace inferior teachers, embracing education reform proposals normally more popular with Republican candidates. The Democratic presidential nominee says both parties must work together to improve education, according to remarks prepared for delivery Tuesday at a suburban high school gymnasium. The pitch was an appeal to moderate voters in this presidential election swing state, where the fight over education reform has been the focus of a longtime partisan battle.
"There's partisanship and there's bickering, but there's no understanding that both sides have good ideas that we'll need to implement if we hope to make the changes our children need," Obama said in excerpts provided by his campaign before the speech. "And we've fallen further and further behind as a result. If we're going to make a real and lasting difference for our future, we have to be willing to move beyond the old arguments of left and right and take meaningful, practical steps to build an education system worthy of our children and our future."
The federal government spends about $200 million a year on charter schools, privately run institutions that receive public money. Obama's proposal would take that up to over $400 million.
Obama recognized that charter schools have been a source of debate in Ohio. Past Republican administrations used charter schools and private school vouchers to offer families a way out of troubled public schools. But Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland has been trying to scale back the programs to focus taxpayer money on more traditional public schools.
The Ohio Federation of Teachers has complained about the management of some charter schools, which has moved money away from the schools where its members work. The union has asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate for-profit charter school operator White Hat Management for allegedly violating the terms of the tax-free status assigned to some of its schools.
"I'll work with all our nation's governors to hold all our charter schools accountable," Obama said in the excerpts. "Charter schools that are successful will get the support they need to grow. And charters that aren't will get shut down."
While teachers unions typically oppose the idea of performance-based merit pay, Obama is embracing the idea along with demands that teachers who don't meet standards are removed from the classroom. Obama's campaign said teacher performance could be judged by peer review, student test results, classroom evaluations or other processes. "We must give teachers every tool they need to be successful, but we also need to give every child the assurance that they'll have the teacher they need to be successful," Obama said. "That means setting a firm standard - teachers who are doing a poor job will get extra support, but if they still don't improve, they'll be replaced."
At the same time he's calling for bipartisan cooperation, Obama is accusing Republican rival John McCain of failing to do anything to improve the quality of public education during nearly three decades in Washington. "Not one real proposal or law or initiative. Nothing," Obama said.
Last week we wrote that " 'community organizer' is to Barack Obama what 'war hero' was to John Kerry." We didn't know the half of it. Kerry staked his claim to the presidency on the pretense that he was a war hero, notwithstanding his showy repudiation decades earlier of the war and his fellow veterans. According to a new expos‚ in the liberal New Republic, Obama, before embarking on a career in politics, similarly, albeit quietly, repudiated "community organizing," only to re-embrace it decades later, apparently out of political expediency.
TNR's John Judis tracked down Jerry Kellman, who in 1985 "hired Obama to organize residents of Chicago's South Side." Kellman describes a conversation the two "community organizers" had at a conference on "social justice" in October 1987:
"[Obama] wanted to marry and have children, and to have a stable income," Kellman recalls. But Obama was also worried about something else. He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him "to make major changes in poverty or discrimination." To do that, he said, "you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials." In other words, Obama believed that his chosen profession was getting him nowhere, or at least not far enough. . . . And so, Obama told Kellman, he had decided to leave community organizing and go to law school.
Another way of putting this might be that Obama left community organizing because he wanted a job in which he had actual responsibilities (and, of course, earned more money).
But Obama did not decide only that "community organizing" was not for him. Judis reports the future senator took part in a September 1989 symposium in which he "rejected the guiding principles of community organizing: the elevation of self-interest over moral vision; the disdain for charismatic leaders and their movements; and the suspicion of politics itself." Later, Obama "would begin to construct a political identity for himself that was not simply different from his identity as a community organizer--but was, in fact, its very opposite."
Judis offers the closest thing we've heard to a job description for "community organizers." What they do, he writes, is "unite people of different backgrounds around common goals and use their collective strength to wring concessions from the powers that be." To help illuminate this rather vague description, Judis also enumerates some of the tasks Obama and his colleagues undertook.
Before Obama's arrival in Chicago, Kellman and his "partner," Mike Kruglik, set out "to revive the region's manufacturing base--and preserve what remained of its steel industry--by working with unions and church groups to pressure companies and the city; but those hopes were quickly dashed." Apparently the presence of "community organizers" is not a strong selling point for companies making location decisions. Go figure.
Obama set his sights lower, but still missed the mark. He "got community members to demand a job center that would provide job referrals, but there were few jobs to distribute." Then "he tried to create what he called a 'second-level consumer economy' . . . consisting of shops, restaurants, and theaters. This, too, went nowhere." These efforts at economic development having failed, Obama "began to focus on providing social services for Altgeld Gardens," a government-owned and -operated apartment complex:
"We didn't yet have the power to change state welfare policy, or create local jobs, or bring substantially more money into the schools," [Obama] wrote. "But what we could do was begin to improve basic services at Altgeld--get the toilets fixed, the heaters working, the windows repaired." Obama helped the residents wage a successful campaign to get the Chicago Housing Authority to promise to remove asbestos from the units; but, after an initial burst of activity, the city failed to keep its promise. (As of last year, some residences still had not been cleared of asbestos.)
It is both funny and scary that one of America's major political parties would offer this record of sheer futility as its nominee's chief qualification to be president of the United States. Even more striking, though, is how alien the world in which Obama operated was by comparison with the world in which normal Americans live. Reader, when your toilet breaks, do you wait around for some Ivy League hotshot to show up and organize a meeting so that you can use your collective strength to wring concessions from the powers that be? Or do you call a plumber?
As a "community organizer," Obama toiled within a subculture of such abject dependency that even home repairs were "social services," provided by government (or, in Obama's Chicago, not provided). It was an utterly bizarre intersection between the cultural elite and the underclass. By Judis's account, Obama's Columbia degree was useless. He would have been more helpful if he'd gone to vocational school instead.
Judis quotes an Altgeld resident as telling Obama, "Ain't nothing gonna change. . . . We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can." Certainly no one can fault Obama for doing the same thing. But what did Obama move outta there do to? To become a politician--specifically, an "idealistic" politician who wants "to make major changes in poverty." Guys like that created this mess in the first place.
In his political career, has Obama done or even said anything to suggest that he has a different approach to "poverty," one that would reduce dependency rather than promote it? His recent rediscovery of the glories of "community organizing" certainly isn't an encouraging sign.
Obama: Palin as mother, governor, moose hunter may be cool, but she's just another politician
Listening to Barack Obama, it can seem like Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is the main person standing between him and the White House instead of John McCain. Obama is putting as much heat on Palin as he is on the man at the top of the GOP ticket, objecting to the Republican Party's portrayal of her as a reformer who can bring change to Washington. That is supposed to be Obama's distinction, and he's not taking kindly to Palin trying to claim it. Especially when it appears the new star on the GOP ticket is helping boost its standing: McCain has jumped to a dead heat or narrow lead over Obama in the latest national polls since choosing Palin as his running mate.
Obama said last week's Republican National Convention did a good job of highlighting Palin's biography - "Mother, governor, moose shooter. That's cool," he said. But he said Palin really is just another Republican politician, one who is stretching the truth about her record. "When John McCain gets up there with Sarah Palin and says, `We're for change,' ... what are they talking about?" Obama said Monday, arguing that they aren't offering different ideas from President Bush and they are just trying to steal his campaign theme because it seemed to be working. "It was just like a month ago they were all saying, `Oh, it's experience, experience, experience.' Then they chose Palin and they started talking about change, change, change," he said.
Obama's campaign seemed to be caught off guard by McCain's surprise pick of Palin on Aug. 29. Obama's spokesman initially blasted her as a former small-town mayor with zero foreign policy experience who wants to continue Bush's policies. But Obama quickly walked the statement back with more congratulatory words about Palin as a compelling addition to the ticket.
Voters, particularly women, seem to agree, according to new polls. An ABC News-Washington Post survey showed white women have moved from backing Obama by 8 points to supporting McCain by 12 points, with majorities viewing Palin favorably and saying she boosts their faith in McCain's decisions.
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said there's no doubt Palin is helping excite the GOP base, but what remains to be seen is how she plays with swing voters over the remaining two months of the campaign. "There's no question they believe Governor Palin has given them a surge of energy in the short term," he said. "We'll see where we stand eight weeks from now."
With Palin out on the campaign trail every day blasting Obama, it became increasingly clear he had to respond and try to undermine her credibility. He was careful with his approach, declining in an interview on MSNBC's "Countdown" on Monday to respond directly to a question about whether she's too inexperienced to be next in line to the presidency.
But Obama's campaign saw an opening when the McCain-Palin campaign released a new ad Monday called "Original Mavericks" that included the claim that Palin stopped the so-called Bridge to Nowhere, a nearly $400 million proposal to build a bridge to an island in Alaska occupied by just 50 residents and an airport. Obama called the claim "shameless." Palin voiced support for the bridge during her campaign to become Alaska's governor, although she was critical of the size, and later abandoned plans for the project. She used the federal dollars for other projects in Alaska.
"A bunch of heat started generating because people were thinking, `Why are we building a bridge to nowhere?'" Obama said to laughter from a packed gymnasium of supporters in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills. Some booed at the mention of her name. "So a deal was cut where Alaska still got the money. They just didn't build a bridge with it, and now she's out there acting like she was fighting this thing the whole time," he said, jabbing his fist in the air like a boxer. He released his own ad in response to the GOP spot that says McCain and Palin are "politicians lying about their records." [Obama forgot to mention that he himself voted for the bridge!] At an earlier stop Monday in Flint, Obama said of the bridge claim: "I mean, you can't just make stuff up. You can't just re-create yourself. You can't just reinvent yourself. The American people aren't stupid. What they are looking for is someone who has consistently been calling for change."
On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Palin has billed Alaska taxpayers for more than $43,000 in travel and lodging expenses for her children and husband during the 19 months she has been governor. Sharon Leighow, a spokeswoman for the Alaska governor's office, told the Post that many of the invitations Palin receives also request that she bring her family. And the newspaper pointed out that Palin's travel expenses are far less than those of her predecessor, Frank Murkowski.
McCain-Palin spokesman Tucker Bounds said Obama's negative attacks show he is increasingly desperate. "Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin have shook up the establishment and delivered real reforms," Bounds said. "Barack Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."
Woman Who Was Dumb Enough to Call America 'Just Downright Mean' Implies Sarah Palin Isn't All That Bright
Poor Sarah, the country bumpkin only has a lowly journalism degree from the University of Idaho. She didn't quite have what it took to get an affirmative action gig at Princeton like certain people.
Little noticed over the weekend, but while the Community Organizer was hob-nobbing at the Jon Bon Jovi soiree in Jersey, the lovely and gracious Michelle Obama was the star attraction at a LGBT event in Beverly Hills, where she took a cheap shot at Palin.
Obama then moved on to politics, where she first brought up her husband's vice-presidential choice. "I think it was a really good pick-Senator Joe Biden," she said, and later added, "People say they have amazing chemistry, and it's true." Obama continued with talk about Biden when she said, "What you learn about Barack from his choice is that he's not afraid of smart people." The crowd softly chuckled.
So what are we saying, Michelle, Greasy Joe is the intellectual superior or Sarah Palin? We'll see about that come debate time. And who exactly is saying your husband and Joe Biden have amazing chemistry?
This article is not the first to note the cultural contradiction in American liberalism, but just now the point bears restating. The election may turn on it. Democrats speak up for the less prosperous; they have well-intentioned policies to help them; they are disturbed by inequality, and want to do something about it. Their concern is real and admirable. The trouble is, they lack respect for the objects of their solicitude. Their sympathy comes mixed with disdain, and even contempt.
Democrats regard their policies as self-evidently in the interests of the US working and middle classes. Yet those wide segments of US society keep helping to elect Republican presidents. How is one to account for this? Are those people idiots? Frankly, yes - or so many liberals are driven to conclude. Either that or bigots, clinging to guns, God and white supremacy; or else pathetic dupes, ever at the disposal of Republican strategists. If they only had the brains to vote in their interests, Democrats think, the party would never be out of power. But again and again, the Republicans tell their lies, and those stupid damned voters buy it.
It is an attitude that a good part of the US media share. The country has conservative media (Fox News, talk radio) as well as liberal media (most of the rest). Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.
Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.
Because it was so unexpected, Sarah Palin's nomination for the vice-presidency jolted these attitudes to the surface. Ms Palin is a small-town American. It is said that she has only recently acquired a passport. Her husband is a fisherman and production worker. She represents a great slice of the country that the Democrats say they care about - yet her selection induced an apoplectic fit.
For days, the derision poured down from Democratic party talking heads and much of the media too. The idea that "this woman" might be vice-president or even president was literally incomprehensible. The popular liberal comedian Bill Maher, whose act is an endless sneer at the Republican party, noted that John McCain's case for the presidency was that only he was capable of standing between the US and its enemies, but that should he die he had chosen "this stewardess" to take over. This joke was not - or not only - a complaint about lack of experience. It was also an expression of class disgust. I give Mr Maher credit for daring to say what many Democrats would only insinuate.
Little was known about Ms Palin, but it sufficed for her nomination to be regarded as a kind of insult. Even after her triumph at the Republican convention in St Paul last week, the put-downs continued. Yes, the delivery was all right, but the speech was written by somebody else - as though that is unusual, as though the speechwriter is not the junior partner in the preparation of a speech, and as though just anybody could have raised the roof with that text. Voters in small towns and suburbs, forever mocked and condescended to by metropolitan liberals, are attuned to this disdain. Every four years, many take their revenge.
The irony in 2008 is that the Democratic candidate, despite Republican claims to the contrary, is not an elitist. Barack Obama is an intellectual, but he remembers his history. He can and does connect with ordinary people. His courteous reaction to the Palin nomination was telling. Mrs Palin (and others) found it irresistible to skewer him in St Paul for "saying one thing about [working Americans] in Scranton, and another in San Francisco". Mr Obama made a bad mistake when he talked about clinging to God and guns, but I am inclined to make allowances: he was speaking to his own political tribe in the native idiom.
The problem in my view is less Mr Obama and more the attitudes of the claque of official and unofficial supporters that surrounds him. The prevailing liberal mindset is what makes the criticisms of Mr Obama's distance from working Americans stick.
If only the Democrats could contain their sense of entitlement to govern in a rational world, and their consequent distaste for wide swathes of the US electorate, they might gain the unshakeable grip on power they feel they deserve. Winning elections would certainly be easier - and Republicans would have to address themselves more seriously to economic insecurity. But the fathomless cultural complacency of the metropolitan liberal rules this out.
The attitude that expressed itself in response to the Palin nomination is the best weapon in the Republican armoury. Rely on the Democrats to keep it primed. You just have to laugh.
The Palin nomination could still misfire for Mr McCain, but the liberal reaction has made it a huge success so far. To avoid endlessly repeating this mistake, Democrats need to learn some respect.
It will be hard. They will have to develop some regard for the values that the middle of the country expresses when it votes Republican. Religion. Unembarrassed flag-waving patriotism. Freedom to succeed or fail through one's own efforts. Refusal to be pitied, bossed around or talked down to. And all those other laughable redneck notions that made the United States what it is.
'Audacity of Deceit' challenging candidate's 'Change We Can Believe In'
On the same day Barack Obama is releasing a new book touting his appeal for change, bookstores are bracing for the impact of another book's release: "The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama's War on American Values," an expose that promises to reveal just how Obama's proposed changes would radically redefine American life and government. "The Audacity of Deceit," by Brad O'Leary and released by WND Books, hits the nation's largest bookstores today in a head-to-head clash with Obama's release of his campaign book, "Change We Can Believe In." Printers have produced 100,000 copies of "Audacity" already and 31,000 have been shipped to retailers and book clubs.
"Brad O'Leary has written a book that will shed new light on a public figure who's enjoyed a meteoric rise with little scrutiny," says Eric M. Jackson, president of WND Books. "We're thrilled that it will debut head-to-head against Senator Obama's own book. When the dust settles, we think 'The Audacity of Deceit' will be the defining book on his candidacy."
Challenging O'Leary will be Obama himself, with his book "Change We Can Believe In." The book is described on bookseller websites as outlining Obama's "vision for America" with the promotional line, "At this defining moment in our history, Americans are hungry for change."
O'Leary, former president of the American Association of Political Consultants, is the author of 11 books, a former talk radio host with millions of listeners and the award-winning television producer of "Ronald Reagan: An American President."
O'Leary's book suggests Obama's vision for change, if exposed, would not come close to what Americans are hoping for. "Obama has written multiple books and no major legislation, but that's not a coincidence" says O'Leary. "He's tried to hide his true beliefs from the American people behind soaring oratory promising 'hope' and 'change,' but that's just a smokescreen, and one that's been very effective. Until now."
It could be just another of his almost daily gaffes but maybe it is a Freudian slip too. A "slip of the tongue" can be revealing. Obama's 20 year attendance at a church of hate (where black Muslims were praised) is more reminiscent of Islam than of the God of Love. More commentary and background here.
Obama says he wanted to join the army but there wasn't a war on!
Tom Maguire's skeptical given that he's conspicuously failed to mention it until now, but I'll take Barry at his word simply because there's no way to prove he's lying - a point which didn't give a moment's pause to our nutroots betters in their hot pursuit of the shocking truth behind McCain's cross-in-the-dirt story a few weeks ago. (The shocking truth: Two other POWs remember Maverick talking about it in the early 70s.) I trust Sullivan will be taking a breather from his 24-hour Palin baby watch to track down the facts behind this dubious, politically self-aggrandizing personal anecdote. As for the e-mails I'm getting pointing out that he couldn't have registered for the selective service in 1979 because it wasn't reinstated until 1980, yes, that's true - he simply spaced on the date. His registration went through in September of the following year.
That's the first clip. Below that you'll find The One floating the argument that there is indeed a candidate trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq - and it ain't him. Which, in fairness, earns him an extra smidgen of respect from me just for having the sheer balls to attempt it. Even Ace, who can pop out a 5,000-thousand-word rant effortlessly, is left well-nigh speechless at the thought of Captain Withdrawal accusing someone else of fumbling the ball out of bounds on the way to the end zone. A golden moment.
Update: "Vote for Barack Obama - It is only due to bad timing he didn't get to kill livestock, cut off ears, ravage villages, blow up bodies, and behave in a fashion reminiscent of Jenjhis Khan."
NY Times Public Apologist Clark Hoyt explains the Times' role as an earnest servant of a curious public in these parlous times, with their coverage of Sarah Palin as a launch point:
In our instant-news and celebrity- obsessed culture, Palin went from Sarah Who to conservative rock star in less than a week. In less than two months, she could be elected vice president to serve under the oldest president, at 72, ever elected to a first term, and one with a history of recurring melanoma. Intense, independent scrutiny by The Times and the rest of the news media of Palin's background, character and record was inevitable and right.
Intense and independent! This from the Public Editor of the paper that has yet to use the phrase "Annenberg Challenge" in a story noting that Barack Obama and Bill Ayers worked together on education reform while with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, disbursing roughly $160 million in a venture ultimately judged by the Annenberg Foundation itself as having "limited impact".
Why isn't this news fit to print? The Times did report on the Ayers/Obama connection when George Stepanopolous brought it up during the Philadelphia debate last April. And they intensely and independently probed the right wing group that aired an ad linking Obama and Ayers, almost reporting on the Obama/Ayers link in the process. This is what they let slip:
Mr. Ayers, now a professor of education in Chicago, was a founder of the Weather Underground, which bombed government buildings in the early 1970s. He was indicted on conspiracy charges that were thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct. He served with Mr. Obama on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a charitable organization, and, along with his wife, the former Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn, hosted Mr. Obama at his home in 1995 when he was running for state office. Mr. Obama has called Mr. Ayers "'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old."
Fox News Channel and CNN declined to run the spot amid legal questions. But the commercial, a minute long, has run at least 100 times since Saturday, heavily in East Lansing and Pittsburgh.
Saying that Mr. Obama's supporters had sent 93,000 e-mails to the Sinclair broadcasting company for carrying the advertisement, Tommy, a campaign spokesman, said, "Other stations that follow Sinclair's lead should expect a similar response from people who don't want the political discourse cheapened with these false, negative attacks." The fight may move to another front this week.
The University of Illinois at Chicago is in the process or releasing documents detailing Mr. Obama's involvement with a non-profit education project started by Mr. Ayers.
That last sentence is the newspapers entire coverage of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge controversy. As I recall, they also had one post at The Opinionator blog. And their mention that Obama worked with a group Ayers founded hardly captures the fact that Ayers worked closely with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for several years while Barack was the chairman approving funding proposals. Obama did not merely work at a group Ayers founded - he almost surely worked closely with Ayers, and is concealing that now.
Sarah Palin is running for Vice President. Obama is running for President. Maybe it is time for an independent look at his record. Or maybe a candidate's history and experience with public school reform (and current cover-up of same) is simply not as newsworthy or relevant to the average voter as a story about a candidate's pregnant daughter.
Roster of Hate: Guide to Barack Obama's Extremist Ties
Post below recycled whole from Doug Ross. Pay him a visit to thank him for the huge amount of work in it
These are the documented connections -- using attribution from mainstream media sources -- that should have people thinking twice before they consider voting for Barack Obama.
The Los Angeles Times ("Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Barack Obama") reports that in 2003 controversial academic Rashid Khalidi was toasted at a going away party by Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced "about meals prepared by Khalidi's wife... and conversations that were 'consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases
The Los Angeles Times ("Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Barack Obama") reports that in 2003 controversial academic Rashid Khalidi was toasted at a going away party by Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced "about meals prepared by Khalidi's wife... and conversations that were 'consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases
