Obama: 2008 Archives

Mark Steyn wonders what the Age of Obama will do to America. Will it accelerate us down the path to the weakness bred by totalitarian "daddy knows best" government offering handouts instead of encouraging opportunity?

All inspired by a Christmas song by American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson.

December 27, 2008, 9:00 a.m.

Grow Up!
An Obamafied American Idol Christmas.

By Mark Steyn

I was at the mall two days before Christmas, and it was strangely quiet. So quiet that, sadly, I was able to hear every word of Kelly Clarkson bellowing over the sound system “My Grown-Up Christmas List.” Don’t get me wrong — I love seasonal songs. “Winter Wonderland” — I dig it. “Rudolph” — man, he’s cool, albeit not as literally as Frosty. But “Grown-Up Christmas List” is one of those overwrought ballads of melismatic bombast made for the American Idol crowd. It’s all about how the singer now eschews asking Santa for materialist goodies — beribboned trinkets and gaudy novelties — in favor of selfless grown-up stuff like world peace.

Which is an odd sentiment to hear at a shopping mall.

But it seems to have done the trick. “Retail Sales Plummet,” read the Christmas headline in the Wall Street Journal. “Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending.”

Hey, that’s great news, isn’t it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Senator Obama said on the subject? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just 4 percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we’ll be fine.”

And boy, we took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales have nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Senator Obama’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume a fair and reasonable 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in these last few months we’ve made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-Elect Obama doesn’t seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the American economy. He’s proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar “stimulus” package or whatever it is now to “stimulate” it back into its bad old ways.

And how does the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities then Senator Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? They’re aghast, they’re terrified, they’re on a one-way express elevator down to Sub-Basement Level 37 of the abyss with no hope of putting on the brakes unless the global economy can restore aggregate demand. What does all that mumbo-jumbo about “aggregate demand” mean? Well, that’s a fancy term for you — yes, you, Joe Lardbutt, the bloated disgusting embodiment of American excess, driving around in your Chevy Behemoth, getting two blocks to the gallon as you shear the roof off the drive-thru lane to pick up your $7.93 decaf gingersnap-mocha-pepperoni-zebra mussel frappuccino, which makes for a wonderful cool refreshing thirst-quencher after you’ve been working up a sweat watching the plasma TV in your rec room all morning with the thermostat set to 87. The message from the European political class couldn’t be more straightforward: If you crass, vulgar Americans don’t ramp up the demand, we’re kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption, the planet is screwed.

“Much of the load will fall on the US,” wrote Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, “largely because the Europeans, Japanese and even the Chinese are too inert, too complacent, or too weak.” The European Union has 500 million people, compared with America’s 300 million. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are advanced economies whose combined population adds up to that of the United States. Many EU members have enjoyed for decades the enlightened progressive policies Americans won’t be getting until January 20th. Why then are they so “inert” that their economic fortunes depend on the despised moronic Yanks?

Ah, well. To return to Kelly Clarkson — and Barbra Streisand and Michael Buble and Amy Grant — the striking thing about their “Grown-Up Christmas List” is how childish it is. The concerned vocalist tells Santa that what she wants for Christmas is:

“No more lives torn apart,
That wars would never start…”

Whether wars start depends on the intended target’s ability to deter. As to “lives torn apart,” that, too, is a matter of being on the receiving end. If you’re in an African dictatorship, your life can be torn apart. If you’re in a society that values individual liberty, you’ll at least get a shot at tearing your own life apart — you’ll make bad choices, marry a ne’er-do-well, blow your savings, lose your job — but these are ultimately within your power to correct. The passivity of the lyric — the “lives” that get “torn apart” is very revealing. A state in which lives aren’t torn apart will be, by definition, totalitarian: As in The Stepford Wives or The Invasion Of the Body Snatchers, we’ll all be wandering around in glassy-eyed conformity. “Lives” will no longer be “torn apart” because they’re no longer lives, but simply the husks of a centrally controlled tyranny. To live is messy but liberating: Free societies enable the citizenry to fulfill their potential — to innovate, to create, to accumulate — while recognizing that some of their number will fail. But to attempt to insulate free peoples from moral hazard is debilitating and ultimately fatal. To Martin Wolf’s list of a Europe “too inert, too complacent, too weak,” we might add “too old”: Healthy societies recharge their batteries by the aged and wealthy lending their savings to the young and eager. But Germany is a population of prosperous seniors with no grandchildren to lend to. Japan is a society of great invention with insufficient youth to provide a domestic market. That’s why if you’re Sony or Ikea or any other great global brand, you want access to America for your product. That’s why economic recovery will be driven by the U.S., and not by Euro-Japanese entities long marinated in Obamanomics.

One final thought on “My Grown-Up Christmas List.” The first two lines always give me a chuckle:

“Do you remember me?
I sat upon your knee…”

When was the last time you saw a child sit upon a Santa’s knee? Rod Liddle in the British Spectator reports that at a top London department store Santa sits at one end of the bench while a large “X” directs the moppet to a place down the other end, well out of arm’s reach. For even Santa Claus is just another pedophile in waiting. Naughty or nice? Who really knows? Best not to take any chances. That’s another way societies seize up — by obsessing on phantom threats rather than real ones.

Are free peoples now merely vulnerable infants in need of protection from the pedophile Santa of global capitalism? This is the issue that will determine the future: Euro-style state-directed protectionist sclerosis vs. individual liberty in all its messiness. I know what I want on my “Grown-Up Christmas List.”

Obama has named a woman from UCal Berkeley Christina Romer as head of the Council of Economic Advisors, perhaps on the mistaken assumption that anyone from Berkeley had to be a left-wing economist. Luckily for the country, she isn't. Last year she and her husband published the results of a study they had done which concluded this:

"The most striking finding of this exercise is that tax increases have a large negative effect on investment."

Estimating the cumulative impact of a tax increase of 1% of GDP, they found that "over the next three years output is on average 1.8% lower than it otherwise would have been."

This "is followed by a large and highly significant rise in the unemployment rate." How much job loss? "The estimated output effect after 12 quarters is a decrease of 2.9%," the Romer study found.

Also, another Romer report issued last year found that "a tax cut of 1% of GDP increases real output by 3% over the next three years."

Will Obama listen to this wisdom?

All Roads Lead To Romer

Read it all.

Britain's Channel 4 TV network created some controversy by inviting Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver a message for Christmas Day. It contended that European viewers really didn't know Ahmadinejad and his positions and it was a public service to have him, in a sense, respond to Queen Elizabeth's Christmas message as head of the Church of England.

Caroline Glick, the most perceptive of all Middle East political analysts, believes Channel 4 did the right thing.

THE FACT of the matter is that Channel 4 is right. There is a great deal of ignorance in the West about what the likes of Ahmadinejad and his colleagues in Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas stand for. But this isn't their fault. They tell us every day that they seek the destruction of the Jews and the domination of the West in the name of Islam. And every day they take actions that they believe advance their goals.

The reason that the West remains ignorant of the views and goals of the likes of Hamas and Iran is not that the latter have hidden their views and goals. It is because the leading political leaders and foreign policy practitioners in the West refuse to listen to them and deny the significance of their actions.

As far as the West's leaders are concerned, Iran and its allies are unimportant. They are not actors, but objects. As far as the West's leading foreign policy "experts" and decision-makers are concerned, the only true actors on the global stage are Western powers. They alone have the power to shape reality and the world. Oddly enough, this dominant political philosophy, which is based on denying the existence of non-Western actors on the world stage, is referred to as political "realism."

Glick rightly denounces this "realism" as fantasy, whether it involves dealing with Iran, Syria, the Hezbollah-dominated Lebanese government, Hamas or North Korea.

These foreign policy realists maintain that talking and appeasement are the way to bend these actors to the will of the West, even though years doing that have not produced the desired Western results. The age-old definition of a madman applies: Doing the same thing that failed over and over again expecting a different result.

Professor Thomas Sowell hopes that the federal governmnent will not repeat the mistakes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that unnecessarily prolonged and deepened the Great Depression.

The stock market crash, which has been blamed for the widespread suffering during the Great Depression of the 1930s, created no unemployment rate that was even half of what was created in the wake of the government interventions of Hoover and FDR.

Gov't Solutions Only Deepened '30s Downturn

By THOMAS SOWELL

With both Barack Obama's supporters and the media looking forward to the new administration's policies being similar to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies during the 1930s depression, it may be useful to look at just what those policies — and more important, their consequences — were.

The prevailing view in many quarters is that the stock market crash of 1929 was a failure of the free market that led to massive unemployment in the 1930s — and that it was the intervention of Roosevelt's New Deal policies which rescued the economy.

It is such a good story that it seems a pity to spoil it with facts. Yet there is something to be said for not repeating the catastrophes of the past.

Let's start at square one, with the stock crash in October 1929. Was this what led to massive unemployment? Official government statistics suggest otherwise. So do new statistics on unemployment by two current scholars, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, in their book "Out of Work."

The Vedder and Gallaway statistics allow us to follow unemployment month by month. They put the unemployment rate at 5% in November 1929, a month after the stock market crash. It hit 9% in December — but then began a generally downward trend, subsiding to 6.3% in June 1930.

That was when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed, against the advice of economists across the country, who warned of dire consequences. Five months after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the jobless rate hit double digits for the first time in the 1930s.

This was more than a year after the stock market crash. Moreover, the unemployment rate rose to even higher levels under both Presidents Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt, both of whom intervened in the economy on an unprecedented scale.

Before the Great Depression, it was not considered to be the business of the federal government to try to get the economy out of a depression. But the Smoot-Hawley tariff — designed to save American jobs by restricting imports — was one of Hoover's interventions, followed by even bigger interventions by FDR.

The rise in unemployment after the stock market crash of 1929 was a blip on the screen compared with the soaring unemployment rates reached later, after a series of government interventions.

For nearly three consecutive years, beginning in February 1932, the unemployment rate never fell below 20% for any month before January 1935, when it fell to 19.3%, according to the Vedder and Gallaway statistics. In other words, the evidence suggests that it was not the "problem" of the financial crisis in 1929 that caused massive unemployment, but politicians' attempted "solutions."

Is that the history that we seem to be ready to repeat?

The stock market crash, which has been blamed for the widespread suffering during the Great Depression of the 1930s, created no unemployment rate that was even half of what was created in the wake of the government interventions of Hoover and FDR.

Politically, however, Roosevelt could not have been more successful. After all, he was the only president elected four times in a row. He was a master of political rhetoric.

If Barack Obama wants political success, following in the footsteps of FDR looks like the way to go. But people concerned about the economy need to take a closer look at history. We deserve something better than repeating the '30s disasters.

There is yet another factor that provides a parallel to what happened during the Great Depression. No matter how much worse things got after government intervention under Roosevelt's New Deal policies, the party line was that he had to "do something" to get us out of the disaster created by the failure of the unregulated market and Hoover's "do nothing" policies.

Today, an increasing number of scholars recognize that FDR's policies were extensions of interventions begun under Hoover. Moreover, the temporary rise in unemployment after the market crash was nowhere near the massive and long-lasting unemployment after government interventions.

Barack Obama already has his Herbert Hoover to blame for any and all disasters that his policies create: George W. Bush.

As we celebrate the birth of a child who taught love and the value of every life, here on earth and in heaven, the world cannot close its eyes to those malign forces who are fixated on death. It must open its eyes and ears to the child's message or else the culture of death will prevail. Is the world listening, is America listening?

Kit Lange is an Air Force veteran and military writer who fears what an Obama presidency will bring (HT: Richard C).

She specializes in investigating murder cases stemming from actions in combat. Her work was used as evidence in the Lt. Ilario Pantano case, and has been quoted extensively in other news publications for other cases. In 2005, she co-wrote a 10-part series disproving war crime allegations against an elite Army unit; her blog, EuphoricReality.com, was named as one of the top 10 milblogs of the year. She is also the National Web Coordinator for Gathering of Eagles, a nationally-recognized troop support organization. Kit holds a degree in Aircraft Maintenance Technology from Spartan College of Aeronautics, and is currently working on a second degree in Aviation Technology Management. She resides in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is an occasional talk-show host.

My Predictions for the New Obama "Presidency"

Now that America has shown us all that affirmative action even works in politics, I've compiled a list of things that you can probably expect to happen. These predictions are 80% gleaned from information all of us have access to, and 15% gut instinct based on many years of research, historical study, and being glued to current affairs. The other 5% is just anger at my countrymen's stupidity--I admit it.

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- Websites and mass emails offering "free grants," courtesy of the government and "Obama's wealth redistribution." Actually, this one's a freebie, because I have an email with a date and timestamp of literally minutes after Obama was declared the winner, offering exactly that.

- Israel will understand this election was the end of any type of assistance, military or otherwise, from the U.S., and will stop holding back their defense at the request of the American administration. Look for a first strike on Iran soon, as well as increased activity by the Israeli military in general. Israel is on her own now, and God help us all because of it.

- Look for Iranian retaliation--against American targets. That goes doubly for other terrorist organizations. We just elected a man with the full endorsement of every major terrorist group in the world as leader of the free world. It's the political equivalent of hiring a child molester to babysit your kids while you leave for the weekend.
Not only is HE going to have fun with your child, but he'll probably sit and watch while his friends come over and do it too.

- Look for far-left justices appointed to the Supreme Court, effectively tying up the entire government in a trifecta of liberal humanism, the buzzwords of which remain empty platitudes like "hope and change," and the ultimate goal of which is socialism--and soon, sharia law.

- Military cases of troops being tried and convicted for killing the enemy in combat will continue to rise--and the conviction/plea-bargain rate will stay at nearly 100%, as the government seeks to use the best men and women this country has to offer as sacrificial lambs on the altar of global appeasement. Those brave and honorable men who currently reside in prison cells across the country, stripped of their rank, their careers, families, and their good name, will not taste free air again for many years. Their sacrifices and their stories will be forgotten by the general public, remembered only by those of us who continue to fight for them.

- Look for the slow but steady erosion of rights you have enjoyed for your entire lives--all the while being told it's "for your own good." Restrictions on gun ownership, home schooling, encouraged dependence on the ever-growing federal government. More nanny-state provisions will be put into place to protect the "disadvantaged" and the "poor," (read: lazy, uneducated, unwilling to better themselves) even while groups like the unborn, the mentally handicapped, elderly, and terminally ill are slowly pushed toward euthanasia. Of course, this will be done with feel-good phrases like "death with dignity," "not wanting to be a burden," and "merciful release from suffering," all of which ignore the basic fact that we are killing people without their consent for the "good of the people." Before you tell me I'm crazy, let's just remember that Barack Obama was the ONLY senator in the Illinois state senate to vote against providing medical care for babies who were inconsiderate enough to survive an abortion. Also, look for taxes to go up. Yes, they'll go up.

- You think t he economy is bad now? Just wait. You'll have the most expensive "free" health care ever. Bread lines aren't just for Russians anymore.

We have traded experience for color, freedom for slavery--and the irony is that the average American sheeple thinks their vote somehow righted an ancient wrong, somehow ENDED the spectre of slavery and ushered in some beautiful era of liberty. In reality, we are about to be less free than you ever thought possible.

I watched the faces of those crowded into the mob (excuse the pun) in Chicago. They stared at Obama like he was a god, an idol, a panacea to their every want and need. We have truly failed as a nation if we are at the point where we feel we must look to one man to take care of us all, to be our father figure and our sugar daddy. We have lost not only the "can-do" attitude of past generations, but the "MUST-do" attitude of our forefathers. We have allowed ourselves to become reduced from Patrick Henry's proud cry of "liberty or death" to the sniveling, whining idea that we are owed something. We have gone from being the honorable defenders of freedom, to being told we are the problem.

The eyes of Obama and McCain were also telling. McCain acted with class and grace in his concession speech, offering the most honorable response I've seen yet. I don't agree with all of McCain's positions, but it cannot be denied that the man has served his nation--at permanent and severe detriment to himself--for half a century. His eyes were clear and sincere, honest. His speech underlined the very reasons why, of the two men offered, he was hands down the best choice.

On the other hand, Obama's eyes were cold, calculating. His manner was smug and still carried the arrogance he has always had. His facial expression was one of barely disguised disdain for everything people like me believe in. His body language was smooth, polished--too much so. He talked of patriotism as though it is a value he is familiar with--and yet, his horrifying attitude toward the country he now leads is as well-documented as his friendships with those who seek its demise. He is charismatic to those who don't know what to look for, and he is inspiring to those who cannot or will not think for themselves. However, too many who voted for him are guilty of the most dangerous kind of hypocrisy. You see, we are told daily that we must not see color, just mankind. (We are all family, you know--or so we're told.) And yet Barack Obama was handed the White House on a silver platter by a fawning media, a bevy of foreign donors (who, to this day and in violation of U.S. election laws, remain nameless and unaccounted for), and a populace who voted based on color instead of right and wrong--even in the face of the most damning evidence against a Presidential candidate in many years , perhaps ever.

It is said that the people receive the government they deserve. Sadly, I fear that's correct. We have become complacent, unwilling to see the writing on the wall, content to frolic in the warm water without bothering to notice that it's been getting hotter by the minute. We are two seconds from a rolling boil--and perhaps it is already too late.

So, liberals, enjoy your victory. Jump around. Have a party, file for your free grants. Scream "Gimme my handout!" and make fun of those of us who fought to make sure your "messiah" didn't get access to the most powerful position in the world. Just remember when it all comes crashing down: You own the White House, the Congress, and soon the Supreme Court. You have no one to blame but yourselves for the mess you just created.

As for me, I'm buying my handguns this week so I have an answer for those who will come try to take them.

As always, Professor Thomas Sowell sees things clearly and tells it like it is simply and plainly. Would that our government and government-to-be were as clear-eyed and sensible and would have learned the lessons of history.

The auto bailout that the Bush Administration and the Democrats are discussing is for the unions, not for the companies. The sooner the companies take the necessary steps to reform themselves through Bankruptcy's Chapter XI, the better the chance they will emerge as companies ready for the competiton. It worked for the airlines, it can work for the auto companies.

In the meantime, Dr. Sowell suggests we look at the larger picture of life, of which the auto rescue plan is just one example of denying what needs to be done. Reality is still there when the fantasy fades.

Postponing Reality At Detroit's Big Three By THOMAS SOWELL | Posted Wednesday, December 17, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Some of us were raised to believe that reality is inescapable. But that just shows how far behind the times we are. Today, reality is optional. At the very least, it can be postponed.

Kids in school are not learning? Not a problem. Just promote them on to the next grade anyway. Call it "compassion," so as not to hurt their "self-esteem."

Can't meet college admissions standards after they graduate from high school? Denounce those standards as just arbitrary barriers to favor the privileged, and demand that exceptions be made.

Can't do math or science after they are in college? Denounce those courses for their rigidity and insensitivity, and create softer courses that the students can pass to get their degrees.

Once they are out in the real world, people with diplomas and degrees — but with no real education — can hit a wall. But by then the day of reckoning has been postponed for 15 or more years. Of course, the reckoning itself can last the rest of their lives.

The current bailout extravaganza is applying the postponement of reality democratically — to the rich as well as the poor, to the irresponsible as well as to the responsible, to the inefficient as well as to the efficient. It is a triumph of the non-judgmental philosophy that we have heard so much about in high-toned circles.

We are told that the collapse of the Big Three automakers in Detroit would have repercussions across the country, causing mass layoffs among firms that supply the automobile makers with parts, and shutting down automobile dealerships from coast to coast.

A renowned economist of the past, J.A. Schumpeter, used to refer to progress under capitalism as "creative destruction" — the replacement of businesses that have outlived their usefulness with businesses that carry technological and organizational creativity forward, raising standards of living in the process.

Indeed, this is very much like what happened a hundred years ago, when that new technological wonder, the automobile, wreaked havoc on all the forms of transportation built up around horses.

For thousands of years, horses had been the way to go, whether in buggies or royal coaches, whether pulling trolleys in the cities or plows on the farms. People had bet their futures on something with a track record of reliable success going back many centuries.

Were all these people to be left high and dry? What about all the other people who supplied the things used with horses — oats, saddles, horseshoes and buggies? Wouldn't they all go falling like dominoes when horses were replaced by cars?

Unfortunately for all the good people who had in good faith gone into all the various lines of work revolving around horses, there was no compassionate government to step in with a bailout or a stimulus package. They had to face reality, right then and right there, without even a postponement.

Who would have thought that those who displaced them would find themselves in a similar situation 100 years later?

Actually the automobile industry is not nearly in as bad a situation now as the horse-based industries were then. There is no replacement for the automobile anywhere on the horizon. Nor has the public decided to do without cars indefinitely.

While Detroit's Big Three are laying off thousands of workers, Toyota is hiring thousands of workers right here in America, where a substantial share of all our Toyotas are manufactured.

Will this save Detroit or Michigan? No.

Detroit and Michigan have followed classic liberal policies of treating businesses as prey, rather than as assets. They have helped kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. So have the unions. So have managements that have gone along to get along.

Toyota, Honda and other foreign automakers are not heading for Detroit, even though there are lots of experienced automobile workers there. They are avoiding the rust belts and the policies that have made those places rust belts.

A bailout of Detroit's Big Three would be only the latest in the postponements of reality. As for automobile dealers, they can probably sell Toyotas just as easily as they sold Chevys. And Toyotas will require just as many tires per car, as well as other parts from automobile parts suppliers.

UPDATE: No reality. President Bush punted to the union-supporting Obama administration and the Democratic Congress, who will use taxpayer money to save the unions, not GM and Chrysler. Painful changes are needed and Chapter XI bankruptcy is the obvious ways to accomplish them. Unaffordable contracts are dragging the car companies down: Think of this: 90,000 build cars for the Big Three, but the Big Three are paying the health care and pension costs for one million retirees. Doesn't work.

The word is that a Kerry for President in 2004 worker now living in New Hampshire made off with $100,000 in campaign funds and has now been indicted. When will somebody get indicted for the Obama campaign's fraudulent online fundraising that bought him the election? Somebody with Chicagoland political smarts had to be in on it.

On second thought, if Eric Holder is the attorney general, it probably won't happen. Anybody who engineered the pardon of multimillionaire fugitive financier Marc Rich and okayed the pardon of Puerto Rican terrorists to get the Puerto Rican vote for Hillary's run for Senate in New York probably won't be interested in such inconsequential stuff as his boss buying the presidency. Oh, and Holder also okayed the commutation of the decades' long sentences of two convicted Weather Underground terrorist friends of (guess who?) Obama friends WU terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. In the course of the WU robbing a Brinks-type truck, two policeman and a guard were killed.

As the nation at last is becomng informed about the rampant political corruption that has been business-as-usual in "Crook County," Illinois for decades, Michelle Malkin's investigations reveal that lurking behind those crooked Chicago politicians and their pals are their partners-in-crime the wives. While it's not exactly "behind every bad man is a bad woman," in Chicagoland politics it's a good working assumption. As Obama was backing Blogdejavich for Governor and doing his sweetheat home deal with Rezko, Michelle was hanging out with their wives, showing solidarity.

Michelle Obama was apparently friendly with the sordid sorority, according to Chicago Magazine. Writer James Merriner reported on a fashion show/political back-scratching gala chaired by Mrs. Rezko and co-chaired by Mrs. Blago two days before the November 2006 elections:

"Michelle Obama, wife of the Democratic U.S. senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama, was a special guest that day (even though the news had just broken about Rezko's participation in a funky real-estate transaction involving the Obamas' Hyde Park home). The fashion show attracted little if any media coverage, which may have been exactly as its organizers and sponsors had hoped. Just three weeks earlier, Tony Rezko had been indicted on charges of extorting kickbacks from businesses seeking contracts from the Blagojevich administration."

The Real Housewives of Crook County
Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Cable television introduced us to "The Real Housewives of Orange County" -- an estrogen-infused reality show featuring a coven of conniving and ambitious women living pampered lives in Southern California. Blago-gate has brought us something even juicier: The Real Housewives of Crook County, Illinois. The public may be wearying of indicted Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the Chicago boys' club, but the conniving and ambitious women behind the scenes of the corruption scandal are a must-see political drama all their own.

Mrs. Blago, the former Patti Mell, won the hearts of old-school thugs everywhere with her f-word-filled rants captured on FBI wiretaps, some of which were colorfully detailed in the criminal complaint against her hubby last week. It's old news to folks in Chicago, but the woman who masquerades as a sweet gubernatorial spouse dedicated to children's advocacy is a cutthroat wheeler-dealer in heels who schemed with the gov to fire pesky editorial writers and get herself placed on paid corporate boards in exchange for naming the president-elect's pick to the Senate. First Lady by day, Dragon Lady by night.

For the rest of the Chicagoland wives story...

President-to-be Obama wants to "reboot" America's relationship with the Muslim world and muses about making a speech in the capital of a major Muslim country.

Amir Tahiri, an Iranian journalist in exile since the Islamic state emerged in Iran, is skeptical. He urges Obama to think carefully about what he has said he wants to do and the implications of whatever move he makes. He doesn't quite call Obama "naive," but he comes close.

Obama talks of "a unique opportunity to reboot America's image," as if his nation's problems with terrorism were due to poor public relations on Washington's part. Does he think so highly of his own talent for seducing people with words that he believes that he can do with a single speech what his five predecessors have failed to do since 1979 - namely, remove the threat of Islamic terror?

Hubris has marked Obama all his life and he won't change now. He probably believes he can do it.

An Interesting read.

There are still some researchers looking into what clearly appears to be criminal violations of campaign financing laws by the Obama campaign. New information is reported on by columnist Herb Denenberg of the Philadelphia Bulletin. Hundreds of millions poured in from unidentified sources, tens of millions from unidentified foreign donors who cannot contribute legally. Only the Philadelphia Bulletin among the mainstream media is covering this scandal.

Did Obama Buy The White House With Illegal Money?
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin, Philadelphia
Published:
Monday, December 8, 2008

There is now growing evidence that Sen. Barack Obama bought the White House by using illegal and fraudulent fundraising, but that's a story you won't read in the mainstream media. You will read about it here today. While that story of Obama election law violations is still developing, what is the mainstream media reporting on? The New York Times isn't interested in election fraud ... if committed by Sen. Obama and the Democrats. So it is using its resources to investigate the amount of money the McCain campaign spent on hair stylists for Gov. Sarah Palin. (New York Times, Dec. 6, 2008). They've already investigated the amount spent on her wardrobe. Yes, the bias and dishonesty of the New York Times no longer just oozes out, it floods out in epic proportions. The once great paper has become a sad joke, a puppet and propagandist for the Democratic Party that can hardly write an honest word on politics.

The mainstream media paid little attention to ACORN, the organization that is the headquarters for election fraud, and its long-time and close association with Sen. Obama. Nor would it spend time reporting on some of the strange expenditures of the Obama campaign, such as the one for 400,000 temporary Obama tattoos. Of course, the mainstream media doesn't question how Sen. Obama spent his campaign money. In the eyes of the mainstream media, the Messiah, the Savior, the Chosen One, a.k.a. Sen. Obama can do no wrong. But the Times and the mainstream media have endless resources for how the McCain campaign spent its money.

Mainstream media and columnists have been singularly uninterested in Obama's philosophy and his immersion in Marxist studies and activities. Saul Alinsky, the founder of community organizing, was a hero to Obama and he studied his methods carefully and extensively. Alinksy wanted to overthrow capitalism and establish a totalitarian Marxist socialist (or communist) system in America. The signs are that Obama wants that, too.

Fortunately for us, British writer Melanie Phillips is paying attention even if no one in the American media is. Today she notes the first Alinsky-style steps Obama is taking to mobilize his 13 million email correspondents to help push through his programs.

Obama in a careless recorded moment in 2001 revealed his dissatisfaction with the U.S. Constitution. Its focus was on freedom of opportunity, whereas Obama wants the government to use its power for "redistributive change." He said he didn't think the Supreme Court, no matter how left wing, would be able to accomplish that, so Phillips believes he's aiming to undermine the values of the Constitution at street level.

[C]ommunity organising’ is straight out of the Alinsky/ Gramsci Marxist playbook – a means of radicalising the proletariat so that it takes power and overturns the values of the society. Instead of the Founding Fathers and the Supreme Court, America is about to get a new constitution written by the thugs of ACORN.

Obama learned the value of ACORN in the early 1990s when he worked with them on voter registration. More important, he taught ACORN operatives how to harass and intimidate bankers into making mortgage loans to people who couldn't afford them. Obama literally planted the seeds that led to today's subprime mortgage loan crisis, world credit breakdown, the collapse of the markets and the loss of hundreds of billions in savings.

In his presidential compaign, Obama used ACORN for voter registration and employed Alinksy techniques, especially rhetorically, with his calls of "hope' and "change," never identifying what change he wanted. Start with a dissastified group (ready made from the financial collapse), proceed with calm and quiet deception on the way to exciting the masses into a frenzy of demand.

Alinsky, who believed that the revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception with its proponents cultivating an image of centrism and pragmatism, set out in Rules for Radicals how capitalism would be overthrown by the mobilisation of the masses and the whipping up of their discontent.

Those who are lulled by the centrist defense and economic appointments have no idea of the radical redistributive changes Obama intends to ram through Congress and the media with the aid of his millions of community organizers. As Phillips observes, all those exhibiting the muscle at most represent the 54% who voted for Obama and not at all the 47% who did not, who will have no say. Indeed, since so many of the 54% were totally oblivious to or ignorant of Obama's radical past and demonstrated inclinations it is a fair assumption that they will be as astonished and dismayed at what is being foisted on them as the 47%.

The American system has produced the greatest prosperity the world has ever seen and an America of unparalleled economic strength. This is what Obama, by his past words and actions, seems bent on destroying and replacing with his socialist utopia. He's wasting no time in getting ready.

Phillips is open in her grave concern about an Obama presidency:

As history tells us, sometimes democratic elections bring to power a leader who threatens freedom. This is just such a moment.

Her fear-tinged observation:

December 9, 2008

Ruling by a Radical
Melanie Phillips

At the end of October, I wrote here about the interview Barack Obama gave back in 2001 in which he said the American Constitution was flawed because it only provided for “negative liberty” – which I suggest is what genuine freedom consists of – as opposed to what the state should do for individuals, or “positive rights” as this is known, which I suggest amounts to state control of individual behaviour. He regretted the fact that the civil rights movement had

a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.

I commented that, since Obama recognised that the Supreme Court was unlikely to redraft the constitution, his stated aim was to bring about some kind of undermining of its values at street level:

As has been pointed out on this blog and in numerous investigations published on the net, ‘community organising’ is straight out of the Alinsky/ Gramsci Marxist playbook – a means of radicalising the proletariat so that it takes power and overturns the values of the society. Instead of the Founding Fathers and the Supreme Court, America is about to get a new constitution written by the thugs of ACORN.

Alinsky was the Marxist thinker who preached cultural revolution from the grass roots up through community organisation, and whose thinking permeates ACORN and other community groups that in the past were associated with or funded by Obama – now the nation’s First Community Organiser. Now look at the latest email Camp Obama has sent to the 13 million-plus names on its database of supporters:

Exactly one month ago, you made history by giving all Americans a real opportunity for change. Now it's time to start preparing and working for change in our communities. On December 13th and 14th, supporters are coming together in every part of the country to reflect on what we've accomplished and plan the future of this movement. Your ideas and feedback will be collected and used to guide this movement in the months and years ahead. Join your friends and neighbors – sign up to host or attend a Change is Coming house meeting near you.Since the election, the challenges we face -- and our responsibility to take action – have only gotten more urgent.

You can connect with fellow supporters, make progress on the issues you care about, and help shape the future of your community and our country.Learn what you can do now to support President-elect Obama's agenda for change and continue to make a difference in your community. Take the first important step by hosting or attending a Change is Coming house meeting. Sign up right now: http://my.barackobama.com/changeiscoming

To get our country back on track, it will take all of us working together. Barack and Joe have a clear agenda and an unprecedented opportunity for change. But they can't do it alone. Will you join us at a house meeting and help plan the next steps for this movement?

And at the Change is Coming website itself, we learn:

As President, Barack Obama is counting on you to organize in your neighborhood and continue this movement. This guide will provide you with all the tools and resources you need to host a successful Change Is Coming house meeting. At your event you will:

• Get to know others in your area who are ready to work for change.
• Determine the issues most important to your group.
• Plan how you can reach out to your local representatives and media to ensure your voices are heard.
• Get started bringing change right away by planning a service event before the Inauguration.

It is up to each one of us to take the fate of our country into our hands. Use this guide to start planning your own Change is Coming event.

Alinsky, who believed that the revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception with its proponents cultivating an image of centrism and pragmatism, set out in Rules for Radicals how capitalism would be overthrown by the mobilisation of the masses and the whipping up of their discontent. As I noted here, the strategy revolved around creating apparently moderate local organisations that would be manipulated by community organisers – effectively deniable political agitators -- to foment grievance and dissent.

Apparently oblivious – like so many – to the implications of all this, the Washington Post has told us breathlessly that health policy is to be shaped by harnessing the campaign supporters’ database – despite a few, er, legal pitfalls.

“This is the beginning of the reinvention of what the presidency in the 21st century could be,’ said Simon Rosenberg, president of the center-left think tank NDN. ‘This will reinvent the relationship of the president to the American people in a way we probably haven't seen since FDR’s use of radio in the 1930s.”

Since those whose input is to be tapped, however, are Obama’s supporters, this “reinvention of the relationship to the American people” will effectively exclude from helping shape the policy of their country the 47 per cent of the people of that country who did not vote for Obama.

A couple of other stories have started waking up to this. Bloomberg has noted that the email list would also give Obama the ability to pressurise Congress.

“When President Obama says, "21 members of Congress are standing in the way of my health plan", one out of 10 voting Americans start to go to work on those members of Congress', said Democratic consultant Joe Trippi, who ran Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, the first to make widespread use of the Internet to raise money and organize supporters.

It’s called Ruling by a Radical.

Warning: If you click though to the publication where the article appears and click on the link in the Obama letter to his 13 million email army that says "Sign up right now," you will get caught in installing a special Obama network on your computer. Don't.

Obama's Illinois Democratic governor has been arrested for peddling Obama's Senate seat for personal benefit. Prosecutor Fitzpatrick said he stepped in to arrest the governor to stop a crime spree. Illinois and Chicago are interrelated centers of political corruption. Convicted felon Tony Rezko, who raised more than $250,000 for Obama and made it possible for him to buy his Hyde Park mansion, was a big fundraiser for Blagojevich. The 16 counts Rezko was convicted on all involved political corrupution.

Obama had a candidate which he discussed with the governor, but she withdrew her name just before Fitzpatrick struck. Hmm. Did Fitzpatrick or somebody else tip Obama off? It turns out David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist and, like Obama, an alumnus of the Chicago Democratic machine, said about a month ago that Obama had discussed the vacancy with the governor. Today Obama seemed to say he hadn't spoken to the governor about it and an Obama spokesman said Axelrod had "misspoke."

It also was learned today that the Chicago Tribune had dug out the story last October about the Democratic governor's shakedowns of campaign contributors and state contractors as well as the parent company of the Tribune itself, but had not published the story at the request of the prosecutor, who said it would interfere with the ongoing investigation. What effect might this sordid story of political corruption have had on the presidential election if published in October?

Gov. Rod Blagojevich arrested, charged

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said today that federal authorities arrested Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich today because the governor went on "a political corruption crime spree" that needed to be stopped.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said today that federal authorities arrested Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich today because the governor went on "a political corruption crime spree" that needed to be stopped.

Fitzgerald said secret tape recordings showed Blagojevich was attempting "to sell the U.S. Senate seat" that President-elect Barack Obama recently vacated. The governor has the sole power to pick Obama's replacement under the state constitution.

"The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave," Fitzgerald said, quoting Blagojevich as saying the Senate seat is "a bleeping valuable thing. You just don't give it away....I've got this thing and it's bleeping golden."

Blagojevich wasn't against the corrupt deal for the Senate seat, he was against "being stiffed in the corrupt deal," Fitzgerald said.

more ...

And read the whole Criminal Complaint here. It's amazing.

British writer Peter Hitchens is the brother of Christopher Hitchens, a wild-eyed atheist liberal except for his all-out support of the Iraq war. Peter is conservative and on most things is on the opposite pole from his brother Christopher, who supported Obama.

The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America ’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US , like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World . How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

Peter got it right.

The Daily Mail ( London ) Peter Hitchens Monday, Nov 10 2008

The night we waved goodbye to America ... our last best hope on Earth

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

Continue reading "A BRIT: WHERE NOW, OUR LAST BEST HOPE ON EARTH?"

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It's disturbing that Obama has so many aides who are anti-Israel. It's disturbing that Obama aides met with leaders of terrorist, Iran-supported Hamas during the campaign and told the Hamas leaders to keep quiet about the meeting so as not to cause upset before the election. It's disturbing that one of Obama's most virulently anti-Israel advisors went to Damascus to meet with Syrian leader Assad.

But there's even more.

This week, Middle East Newsline reported that President-elect Obama recently sent "senior foreign policy adviser" Malley to Egypt and Syria where he "relayed a pledge from Obama that the United States would seek to enhance relations with Cairo as well as reconcile with Damascus." According to an unnamed aide, "The tenor of the messages was that the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests."

Are we entering a new era of accommodation of jihad terrorists bent on Israel's — and the West's — destruction?

Diana West says, "I'm very afraid."

Gulling Americans into making terror legit?

By Diana West, Syndicated Columnist
November 17, 2008

How dumb does President-elect Barack Obama think we are?

Let me rephrase the question: Are we as dumb as Obama thinks?

Evidence is mounting that Barack Obama was elected president BECAUSE he was black.

Pride of blacks resulted in at least a 95% vote for Obama.

But white guilt fanned by Obama himself, his campaign and the media probably played an even bigger part.

So far, much of the evidence is random and anecdotal, but the accusations by Obama supporters and the media that those not planning to vote for Obama were “racists” certainly had a powerful effect. Voters were anxious to prove they weren't, that they had "moved on" from that.

Obama himself played the race card againt Hillary Clinton in the primaries and against John McCain in the final, playing the victim and inviting a guilty white reaction.

Media glorification of Obama and their trashing of Palin (a threat since she added an exciting and appealing dimension to the McCain candidacy) made it still easier to assuage white guilt with an Obama vote.

President Bush signed and sent to Congress two years ago the Colombia Free Trade Act, which the law requires Congress to have an up-or-down vote on within a short period of time. Speaker of the House Pelosi, to please her union supporters, twisted House rules, to take it out of the required process. Michael Barone called Pelosi's action the most despicable act of this Congress.

Colombia is our closest ally in the hemisphere and a valiant partner in the fight against drug trafficking. President Uribe has done a superb job weakening the drug cartels and making Colombia safer. One couldn't ask for better cooperation.

Democrats, including President-Elect Obama, have supported Pelosi in her determination to let the trade agreement die, despite the fact it is beneficial to American exporters.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, after many months of silence, the New York Times editorialists tell Congressional Democrats they should approve the Colombia agreement now. They cite all the positive reasons and also accurately describe the progress that has been made on some of the troubling history in Colombia. Bottom line: The Times said approving the agreement is in the nation's interest.

Let's see if this is sufficient cover for Obama and Pelosi to put the nation's interest before the wishes of their union supporters.

New York Times
November 18, 2008
Editorial
Pass the Colombian Trade Pact
We don’t say it all that often, but President Bush is right: Congress should pass the Colombian free-trade agreement now.

Mr. Bush signed the deal two years ago. The Democratic majority in Congress has refused to approve it out of a legitimate concern over the state of human rights in Colombia and less legitimate desires to pander to organized labor or deny Mr. Bush a foreign policy win.

We believe that the trade pact would be good for America’s economy and workers. Rejecting it would send a dismal message to allies the world over that the United States is an unreliable partner and, despite all that it preaches, does not really believe in opening markets to trade. There is no more time to waste. If the lame-duck Congress does not approve the trade pact this year, prospects would dim considerably since it would lose the cover of the rule (formerly known as fast track) that provides for an up-or-down, no-amendment vote.

Because of trade preferences granted as part of the war on drugs, most Colombian exports already are exempt from United States tariffs. The new agreement would benefit American companies that now have to pay high tariffs on exports to Colombia.

It also would strengthen bonds with an important ally in a volatile corner of South America — that also is the main source of cocaine shipped into this country and where the United States has very few friends these days.

In neighboring Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez spouts fierce anti-American rhetoric to distract attention from his autocratic policies. Last month, Bolivia expelled the United States ambassador and accused Drug Enforcement Administration agents of conspiring against his government. Ecuador has refused to renew a lease on an airbase used by American counternarcotics flights in the coastal city of Manta.

We, too, have strong concerns about human-rights violations committed by the government of President Álvaro Uribe. But Democrats opposing the trade pact on these grounds are ignoring undeniable improvements. Violence has abated considerably during the Uribe administration as it has taken on the left-wing guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and right-wing paramilitaries. The number of trade unionists killed, a major Democratic concern, is still too high but has dropped sharply.

Washington must keep pressing Bogotá to reduce abuses by Colombia’s Army, ensure the prosecution of paramilitary thugs and further rein in violence against union members. It has a powerful tool to do that: $600 million a year in mostly military and anti-narcotics aid.

Failing to approve this trade agreement would do nothing to improve Colombia’s human-rights record. Walking away from it now would alienate many people in Colombia and undermine Washington’s credibility.

Since July 13th we have been reporting on the vast potential of oil deposits in Rocky Mountains shale. It is estimated that the oil there -- 2 trillion barrels -- is twice as much as all the oil used in the world since the first oil discovery way back in 1859.

President Bush has just now issued an executive order opening up 2 million acres of public lands in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado to oil shale exploration. Rocky Mountains shale could make the U.S. independent of hostile and unstable oil producers for decades.

As Hugh Hewitt wonders, will this opportunity be seized upon by the Obama Administration or killed for ideological reasons at the expense of energy national security?

The same Democratic anti-drilling ideology may also block the development of the huge natural gas field in Alaska that the pipeline the Palin Administration has authorized could link to the lower 48. This gas could heat 100 million American homes for a decade.

The United States and the rest of the world will need oil and natural gas for decades to come. It will take many years to develop alternatives to fossil fuels to the point where they are a complete substitute for fossil fuels. The only rational course for the U.S. is to utilize all of its energy options. National energy security demands no less.

One conservative writer who feared Obama as a danger to America long before the election now delivers his post-election views. As he says, I thought I was right then and I feel the same way now. He has 20 points to make. He prays he will be wrong, as we all do. But we must be alert to the signs he will do the damage we feared.

November 13, 2008, 5:00 a.m.

Bitterfest ’08
By Jay Nordlinger
National Review

My reaction to last week’s election is one of the least important things in the world. But some readers have asked for it, so I thought I’d scribble a lil’ column. I’m hesitant, though, for two reasons.

First, I wrote about the election for months and even years. I particularly wrote about the consequences — bad — of an Obama victory. What am I supposed to do now? Say, “Just kidding”? “It won’t be as bad as all that”? “Never mind”? I’m afraid I can’t be as blasé, or chipper, as some other conservatives. I have an anxious feeling, and long have.

Which leads me to Reason No. 2 for being hesitant — for hesitating to talk: One comes off as Sore-Loserman. And now’s the time for graciousness, optimism, and all that jazz.

Well, enough prefatory typing — I will offer 20 quick points. I am bad to indulge in a bitterfest. But here I go:

1) Have the oceans shrunk to puddles? Have people stopped being sick? Or does that come after Inauguration Day?

2) Seriously, I’m afraid that the Middle East will rock — that Obama will withdraw from Iraq before the country is secured, creating havoc. He promised as much, didn’t he? (I mean the withdrawal, not the havoc.) In April ’75, the United States cut off South Vietnam, resulting in a Communist victory and what we would call today a “humanitarian disaster.” If we abandon the Iraqis to the wolves, will anyone care? (Outside of Iraq, that is.) And what about the Middle East at large?

I quote our ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, who told a group of us last month,

Iraq is really, really important. How things go here will transform the region and America’s role in the region, one way or the other. If Iraq is successful in establishing itself as a democracy, where the rule of law is paramount, that will be something remarkable . . . People are tired of Iraq. They say, “Let’s get it over and done with. We don’t want to watch the Iraq movie anymore.” But the Iraq movie will go on for many more reels, with or without us. And it will have a big effect on us, whether we like it or not.

Right.

And then there’s the matter of whether Iran will acquire nuclear weapons . . .

3) President-elect Obama and his supporters want America to be liked: by Le Monde, the Quai d’Orsay, Der Spiegel — you get the idea. But America can’t necessarily be liked by those elements and stand up for its interests. When the going gets tough, which will Obama choose — Le Monde or American interests? Won’t they ever collide? Don’t they usually?

4) I worry that the Obama years, like the Carter years, will be a field day of adventurism for the worst regimes. Some presidents are willing to stand up to bullies; some presidents are not. And we should all know what weakness invites: aggression.

5) How does Obama regard the War on Terror? Does he think we’re in something worthy of that name — another cold war, a “twilight struggle,” in the words of JFK? Or does he think that dealing with jihadists is just a matter of a little law enforcement, and intelligence-gathering, and police work? Recall the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. We took ’em to court. (One of the perpetrators skedaddled off to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but suggest that there was a connection between Iraq and terror, and you’re dismissed as a boob.)

6) At home, do Americans want to be something like a European social democracy — or is the old American republic still viable? What about abroad? Sarah Palin put the question in terms of “American exceptionalism”: Do we want it or not? And I like to borrow the words of the first Bush, spoken in 1988, when American “decline” was in fashion, and happily anticipated: Are we to be a “unique nation with a special role in the world”? Or are we to be “another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe”?

7) As a rule, I say that people in a democracy get what they deserve. Sometimes minorities don’t deserve what ensues, but such is life. I’m not so sure about the 2008 election. Why? Because the Barack Obama of the general election was so very, very different from the Barack Obama of the Democratic primaries and before. All candidates shift — that’s politics. But Obama, it seems to me, abused the privilege. And he was very good at it.

He campaigned — certainly debated — as a moderate. Not just a moderate Democrat, but practically a moderate Republican. Even citing Richard Lugar! (“Nixon’s favorite mayor,” long ago.) In one of the debates, Obama said he was for missile defense! And he said that America was the greatest nation in the history of man.

Why did Obama’s friends at Columbia and Harvard and so on stand for it? Why did Bill Ayers stand for it? Well, they were holding their noses, of course, knowing that these words were just campaign grist — something for the yokels to ingest.

In brief, I’m not sure that Americans knew what they were voting for.

8) Those interested in stopping or curbing abortion have to be disappointed. The courts will be Obama-oriented for how many years?

9) Amazing — just amazing — that the Republican party took the rap for the financial meltdown. Consider Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Consider Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd. They came out of this smelling like a rose. And GOP-ers — who never wanted the social-financial shakedown that Fannie and Freddie represented — come out the bums. As I said, amazing.

10) John McCain ran a poor campaign. I’m not sure he was capable of better. I do think Obama was beatable — he has been lucky in his opposition. He has been lucky both in Illinois and on the national level. The conventional argument is that McCain was the best possible Republican nominee, even the only possible Republican nominee with a chance of winning. I don’t believe that, for a second. There was a case to be made against Obama, and for McCain: and McCain was poor at both.

11) They say that he conducted an exceptionally mean campaign — I don’t see it. Take the case (the easy case, granted) of Jeremiah Wright. This was Obama’s pastor and “spiritual mentor”: a man who preaches that the AIDS virus was concocted in a government laboratory for the purpose of harming dark-skinned people. And this cost Obama not a thing.

Imagine if Sarah Palin’s preacher disseminated a similar doctrine — a similar lie. She would not be able to participate in public life, would she?

12) I’m sorry, but the treatment of Bush — the demonization of Bush — is appalling. Absolutely appalling. And it says something rotten about our political culture. Think for a second about Katrina — the hurricane. I have no doubt that the federal government made mistakes, and no doubt that Bush fumbled the PR aspect. But this was a huge natural disaster — and people acted as though Bush had caused it.

Crazy, crazy. Even some of my fellow conservatives have bought into the Katrina myth. I wish Bush would do more to defend himself, but he apparently thinks it’s not worth the bother. And don’t get me started on the treatment of Governor Palin after she debuted in Dayton . . .

13) In a way, it’s amazing that conservatives ever win. Conservatives will tell you the following: The Left controls education, K through graduate school. (Maybe pre-K through graduate school — I don’t know.) They control the movies, popular television, the mainstream media, etc., etc. And then conservatives get surprised, often, when liberals triumph at the polls. Well, when all the shaping institutions shape one way . . .

14) I learned something in this election — maybe you learned the same thing about yourself. I learned that I’m a knuckle-dragging moron, because I admire Governor Palin. Used to be, people considered me rather sophisticated — what with the languages, the larnin’, the music, and all. Vincent Persichetti wrote me about a piece of mine when I was eleven, I think! But come to find out, in the fall of 2008, I’m just a drooling hayseed. Funny old world.

15) There may be some positive outcomes to Obama’s election victory. It could be, now, that the Left will help us in the War on Terror. Some people said, for years, that they would never be onboard until they were in charge. Until now, they have done everything possible to thwart Bush. The New York Times delights in exposing clandestine programs, designed to keep the innocent safe. Will all that end now?

Also, maybe the Left will feel better about the country itself. Some of my neighbors (Manhattan) have gloated with me about November 4. And I’ve said, “Yes, America is a good country, isn’t it? Good constitution, good system, don’t you agree?” That leaves them a little nonplussed or annoyed.

And then there is race — about which I have written as much as I have any subject in my journalism career. (For a biggish piece on race and the ’08 election, go here.) I don’t believe that a presidential election was necessary to validate racial progress. But other people do. And it will be an even better day when skin is not an issue: when what matters is what a person thinks, and what a person is.

Besides which, if Obama fails, making bad or even disastrous decisions, will that reflect badly on black Americans as a whole? Of course not: It will reflect badly on Obama, and possibly Joe Biden, and others. (Incidentally, Biden was wrong on everything having to do with the Cold War. He fought everything that worked, tooth and nail. Will lights finally go off in his brain now?)

16) Let’s talk about Obama’s press coverage: During the campaign, he was practically immune from criticism. His coverage was almost 100 percent positive. Will President Obama be immune from criticism — or will he be treated normally? I have a feeling that the “MSM” will be so eager for him to succeed, they will treat politics as though the campaign were still on: with D’s in white hats and R’s in black hats.

17) I had a bitter thought (surprise!) after Obama’s little shot at Nancy Reagan — the one he took the day after the election, or whenever it was. You know, in the fall campaign, everyone kept telling us about Obama’s “first-class temperament.” If nothing else, the tall, collected senator had a “first-class temperament.”

Oh, really? Say what you will about Palin’s familiarity with Frantz Fanon, at least she’s not a jerk.

18) It seems to me that, after the election — after their electoral loss — Republicans and conservatives were gracious, dignified, and public-minded. Classy, even. Of course, we could have expected nothing less had Republicans won and Democrats lost . . .

19) Just possibly, the assumption of the office will concentrate Obama’s mind — will sober him up, where foreign policy and the world are concerned. He will get the same threat assessments that President Bush does, every morning. He will have to figure out how to keep the country safe. There’s a famous, somewhat annoying old saying: You may not like war, but war likes you — it has a way of finding you.

Another cliché says that we have to fight them there or fight them here. I hope that President Obama chooses, as President Bush has, to fight them there.

Furthermore, there has not been an attack like 9/11 in seven years — something most people thought was impossible. I have a suspicion that Bush and his people are doing something right. Will Obama and his people continue that something right?

20) Finally, I said, for many months, that an Obama presidency would be harmful — harmful to the country, but perhaps even more to the world, which counts so heavily on American leadership. I hope very much that I’m wrong. I have been before, believe it or not!

All right, end of bitterfest. (Twenty points wasn’t all that many, was it?)

Madeleline Albright is reported to be providing her best advice to Obama about how to deal with foreign interests hostile to the United States.

The Middle East's preeminent political analyst Caroline Glick, who writes for the Jerusalem Post, says her fears of Obama's true intent with respect to the Middle East are being realized. To win Jewish votes he seemed to shun his anti-Israeli advisers as the election neared, but it now appears that the two most virulent opponents of Israel's right to exist are deeply involved in Obama's foreign policy. The signals emanating from the Obama campaign suggest that the first target of Obama's new foreign policy will be Israel, forcing it to give way to Palestinian demands. Closely related is what appears to be Obama's desire to "reconcile" with Iran's ayatollahs.

As Glick logically asks, what wil Obama offer up to Iran for renewed relations and a supposed end to its nuclear weapons program?

As for direct talks with Iran itself, the question immediately arises, what could Obama offer Teheran in exchange for an end to its nuclear program that Bush hasn't already offered?

What it can offer is Israel.

We predicted exactly that before the election, but enough of the electorate was so giddy with the idea of electing what some call the first affirmative action president to not care much about who he was or what he stood for.

Therefore, Israel finds itself in a deadly race for survival: Iran is feverishly pushing ahead with its nuclear weapons program, which is an existential threat to Israel. Israel has two dates of urgent consequence ahead -- January 20th when the new Obama policy can begin to be implemented and February 10th, when Israel elects a new government. If Israel elects a Netanyahu govenment it can save itself. If not, Israel will be at the mercy of Iran and Obama.

Prominent American Jewish supporters of Israel now rightly fear Obama will "throw Israel under the bus." That possibility was quite obvious before November 4th, yet 78% of American Jews voted for Obama.

Some hope that Obama's Jewish chief of staff Rahm Emaneul will prevent that from happening. But Emanuel was a chief aide to President Clinton when he forced Israel to offer virtually all of Judea and Sumaria and East Jerusalem to Arafat in his last minute push for a peace agreement. Fortunately for Israel, Arafat refused (showing he really didn't want peace, he wanted all of Israel gone, as does his successor Mahmoud Abbas.)

Update:

Did we say "giddy?"

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post says the press on Obama is showing "a giddy sense of boosterism." Will honest reporting every return?

It has just been revealed that aides to Obama were meeting with Hamas representatives before the election. The Obama people told the Hamas group to keep their meetings secret since disclosure might affect the election. Obama got 78% of the American Jewish vote.

Obama's public position was that he would not meet with Hamas until they renounced terrorism and recognized Israel's right to exist. Of course, Hamas has done neither.

John Hinderaker of Power Line is deeply concerned.

It's hard to disagree with this assessment by David Hornik of Pajamas Media:

A clash between Obama's public, anodyne, mainstream statements and behind-the-scenes activities of a different nature would confirm the fears of those concerned about Obama's history of association with radical people and ideologies.

It would have been nice to know about the cordial relationship between Obama's advisers and Hamas during the campaign. But, of course, it was an article of faith in the mainstream media that Obama's many unsavory and radical associations were somehow irrelevant to any expectation as to how he would govern as President.

The Wall Street Journal interviews Obama's chief- of-staff-to-be Rahm Emanuel and seems to believe what he says, which is total nonsense and intended to mislead.

Obama is not pragmatic as Emanuel says; he's ideological. He has his agenda, which is totalitarian and socialist, and he plans to ram it through. His attitude towards elimination of life shows that. With all of the problems he will face as a new president, it is ghoulish that Emanuel says Obama wants one of his first acts to be pushing through federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that will result in the killing of untold numbers of human beings.

Why this fixation on abortion, which is what is involved in creating embryonic stem cells to kill them?

Obama in his campaign pledged to Planned Parenthood he wanted his first act as president to be the elimination of all restrictions on abortion, including partial birth abortion, making taxpayers who don't support abortion to pay for it and forcing hospital and doctors who for reasons of conscience or religious belief to perform abortions.

While he says he want to see abortion numbers reduced, he favors eliminating funding for pregnancy crisis centers, which help pregnant young women make informed choices rather than assuming abortion is their only choice. His policy, if adopted, will lead to an explosive increase in abortions. Why this priority?

Obama told his significant supporter Planned Parenthood, which makes hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the abortion business, that he would do whatever he could in effect to build their business. Planned Parenthood wants more abortions, not fewer, and more revenues as a result.

Obama's callousness is breathtaking. Emanuel's prediction that Obama will lead off with federal funding of embryonic stem cell research shows where Obama's headed. No medical advances have been attributed to use of embryonic stem cells and none are expected for many years. Recent research has indicated that using stem cells other than embryonic stem cells is just as if not more promising and does not involve killing humans. Therefore, creating and killing human embryos is needless. Nonetheless, Obama ignores these scientific results and appears to be using the embryonic stem cell debate to condition the public to supporting unlimited abortion to the last day of gestation.

Why is he so fixated on eliminating all of the safeguards that states and the federal government have built up over 30 years to reduce the killing of human beings?

Emanuel was picked as chief of staff because he, like Obama, is a member in good standing in the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine that has elected Obama to every office he has sought, including the presidency, and has the same ruthless, moral relativist attitudes (no right or wrong; no truth, just whatever works) as Obama and his mentor Saul Alinsky. The understand each other and can work together.

Obama cut his communist Alinsky community organizer teeth working with and then training ACORN operatives in bullying bankers and registering voters. Just a few years later Emanuel himself became indoctrinated in the Alinsky methods during a tour of his own with ACORN.

Congress opened up for Emanuel when convicted felon Chicago pol Dan Rostenkowski went to prison for stealing from the federal government and the Chicago Daley machine anointed him to take the Rostenkowski seat (2002), just as the Daley machine had done for Obama for Illinois state senate (1996) and U.S. Senate (2004).

It's all about power; whatever it takes.

Obama is ideologically driven to make rich America pay for the the wrongs he perceives they visited upon the non-whites of America and the world. The first of the one-two punch is the "tax cut" bill that will take money from the productive who pay taxes and give it to those who don't pay any income tax. The second will be reinstituting the federal estate tax and raising taxes on dividends and capital gains, which actionss will represent a huge tax increase for everyone. When a questioner asked why raise the capital gains tax, because every study has shown doing so decreased government tax revenue, Obama replied, well, it's the fair thing to do. Even though the federal government will lose money by doing so. Therefore, it is more important to punish the productive and the savers than gain revenue for the federal government. What Obama thinks is fair is the test.

It is natural enough for Emanuel to deny Obama has an ideological agenda, because that might frighten voters. Alinsky taught to pursue the radical agenda incrementally, so as to not to alarm and awaken opposition. Obama starts with embryonic cell funding, since most people don't understand the issue and don't know about better alternatives.

Obama will speak calmly and soothingly and so will Emanuel when it is called for.

Citizen of the world Obama, not putting the needs of the United States first, could take some very damaging steps early in his Administration that will punch holes in our national security and endanger our troops (HT:Power Line).

[By] 63 percent to 16 percent Americans said they see the U.S. Constitution, not international law, as the highest legal authority for Americans. 83 percent think of themselves as U.S. citizens, rather than citizens of the world.

Obama doesn't think so.

Dr. Sowell looks ahead to what he fears will happen when Democrats take control of the White House with strong majorities in both Houses of Congress.

Wars, economic crises and other disruptions all provide opportunities for the left to seize on current problems to create enduring changes in the institutions of society. That is what we are witnessing today. . . .

It is not just a question of being able to put scare headlines on newspapers or alarmist rhetoric on television. Such things are just the prelude to massive political "change" in fundamentally sound institutions that have for more than two centuries made the American economy the envy of most of the world.

If the left succeeds, it will be like amputating your arm because of a stomach ache.

To add to the painful irony, many of those who are most eager to have a massive government intrusion into the market are among those whose previous intrusions into the market are largely responsible for the current financial crisis.

It was the left-- the "liberals" or "progressives"-- who led the charge to force lending institutions to lend to people whose credit history made them eligible only for "subprime" loans that were risky for both borrowers and lenders.

Read it all.

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. Over the past three decades, Sowell has taught economics at
various colleges and universities, including Cornell, Amherst, and the University of California at Los Angeles, as well as the history of ideas at Brandeis University. He has also been associated with three other research centers, in addition to the Hoover Institution. He was project director at the Urban Institute from 1972 to 1974, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 1976–77, and was an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute in 1975-76.

Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. In 2003, Sowell received the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement. Sowell received his bachelor’s degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1958, his master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.

Hey, you're for 100 years in Iraq, little girl?

After all, who wouldn't prefer a world like this?

As we've reported on several occasions, communist (Marxist socialist, if you prefer) Saul Alinsky was the founder of the community organizer movement and was and is Obama's hero. (Alinsky's hero was Lucifer, who defied God and got a kingdom of his own to run.)

Alinsky wanted to "transform" America into a socialist state. First, dissastifaction and resentment had to be stirred in the masses. Then they were to be encouraged, that there was "hope" and 'change" could come. Never was it to be disclosed exactly what change would be coming; that might kill the enthusiasm for change. Class envy and resentment were of course important parts of stirring up the anger of the crowds; whatever was going wrong, it was "their" fault.

Obama steeped himself in Alinsky studies and practiced Alinsky methods as a community organizer in Chicago. He then taught classes in Alinsky socialist manipulation to ACORN operatives and others -- how to register voters, how to bully bankers. Organize the massses to prepare to bring the American system down. For the socialist state to function at its best, it should be authoritarian or totalitarian as much as possible, bending the U.S. Constitution as much as it can be bent. Critics should be harassed into silence. Power to the crush all opposition is imperative. But don't say so. Just do it.

Now that Obama will be taking over the White House on January 20th some in the media are beginning to take a look at who will be joining him.

Saul Alinsky Takes the White House

By Quin Hillyer on 11.6.08

Hard-headed British columnist Melanie Phillips provides good advice to American conservatives in the wake of the Obama victory. She cites the disaster that has been building in Britain over recent decades -- and is still building -- hastened along greatly by the ascendency into high office by Labour's charismatic leader Tony Blair, whose arrival was hailed almost as messianically as Obama's. Similar, or worse, damage looms with Obama:

Obama has talked about remedying what he sees as the flaws in the U.S. Constitution which promotes only “negative liberties,” or freedom from something rather than positive rights to something. Well, through human-rights legislation Britain has exchanged its historic concept of “negative” liberty — everything is permitted unless it is actively prohibited — for the ‘positive’ European idea that only what is codified is to be permitted.

As a result, freedom has shrunk to what ideology permits. Equality legislation has cemented a “victim culture” under which the interests of all groups deemed to be powerless (black people, women, gays ) trump those deemed to be powerful (white people, men, Christians). Since this doctrine holds that the “powerless” can do no wrong while the “powerful” can do no right, injustice is thus institutionalized, and anyone who queries the preferential treatment afforded such groups is vilified as a racist or bigot.

Her warning should be read in full and printed out to post above the desk as a constant reminder.

Read it all:

Preventing National Suicide

By Melanie Phillips

Continue reading "A BRIT WARNS: DON'T LET OBAMA DESTROY AMERICAN VALUES"

Posted by Republican on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)
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Daniel Henninger also takes note of Obama's constant habit of dissing the United States. Even in his victory speech he sounded as if the U.S. should be torn apart and rebuilt brick by brick. In fact, he actually said that.

Obama was announcing he fully intends to implement his Marxist socialist vision for America. The team he will assemble will be the one he believes is best able to help him create the utopia (if the Constitution will only let him do it) envisioned by his Marxist hero Saul Alinsky, in which all share equally in whatever the unproductive can tear from the productive, who, of course, will stop being productive.

Here's Henniger's take.

Our president-elect is still the same person he was the day before the election.

He is still a largely unknown figure, having successfully hidden much of his past thus far. Much of what was learned is disturbing.

One can hope, as we do, he will stand in the great American tradition of pride in country, proud of American exceptionalism, proud of its leadership in the world and what it has done through the centuries to better the lot of people everywhere. We hope he will, however belatedly, come to recognize the threats this nation faces and his responsibility to defend the people of America from all threats, foreign and domestic. We also hope he will at last come to realize the free enterprise system is the best way to create wealth that will benefit all who live in this great country.

So we will hope, but we will watch and we will continue to explore who this man is. We also hope he will grow in office, will learn to appreciate how great this country is, which, unfortunately, he tends to disparage more than praise.

Those who have concern must be alert and on guard and prepared to fight against all efforts to weaken America's strength and to push the U.S. along the path to a Europe of socialism, appeasement, worship of multiculturalism and "political correctness," which means limitations on free and frank speech. The Democratic party has been drifting from "liberalism" to "socialism" and with the election of Obama that process could well accelerate. The dignity and worth of every created human being, however weak and vulnerable, deserves respect under our Constitution, a value socialists and some Democrats question. Those of a Marxist socialist point of view tend to think in terms of multiples of lives, millions of lives, and not so much about each and every life. This view must be guarded against. We do believe that each and every individual has been endowed by the Creator with unalienable rights and must be protected, including from the government.

God Bless America.

God Help America.

Well, Obama's first move should give one pause there.

Reports are he's asked Rahm Emanuel to become his chief of staff in the White House. Emmanual is a very smart, very tough, hard-nosed, very left Democrat now in the House from, guess where, Chicago.

Therefore, Emanuel is totally familiar with working with the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine that brought Obama to power and will now be in the White House with Obama. (In the past Emanuel served as advisor to the head of the Chicago machine himself Mayor Daley.) He is known to be vicious to his enemies. He is highly partisan.

Emanuel ran the House of Representives' Democratic operation to increase numbers of Democrats in the House and did a very effective job. That's what the Chicago machine is expert in doiing. They will now be working to consolidate Democratic power nationally by continuing to stir class resentment and to enlarge the numbers supporiting them -- legal and illegal -- who look to the government for handouts. Is he far left? In the Senate for 2007 Obama rated 7 with the American Conservative Union; in the House Emanuel rated zero.

The good news is that Emanuel is Jewish and has a strong identity with Israel. He would work strongly against any Obama inclination to sell Israel out.

Update: Emanuel has accepted the position.

From this first move we can infer two things: Bipartisanship is out the window. Obama intends to drive his Marxist agenda hard and to consolidate power.

The corrupt Chicago Democratic machine has propelled itself and Obama into the White House. America has suffered a major defeat through electoral and campaign finance fraud and the complicity of a media that betrayed its duty to inform the public about who Obama really is. The American people have been duped.

Obama has shown in his writings and his speeches -- and his friendships with Jeremiah Wright, William (Bill) Ayers, Michael Pfleger, Rashid Khalidi and Louis Farrakhan -- that he doesn't much like America. He wants to "transform" America into something that the Founding Fathers expressly rejected. They created a society of equal opportunity. Obama's goal is a totalitarian state which spreads the wealth as it (he) sees fit. He also wants to tell you what you can say and what you should think. His hero Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals should be read by eveyone who wants to keep Obama from achieving his goal of a socialist state, In the process he intends to take a special bite out of the hide of rich white America who he, Jeremiah Wright and other of their friends blame for all the perceived ills non-white minorities have suffered through the centuries.

The challenge now becomes how to protect the nation from the extremist tendencies he has exhibited and the dangerous positions he has voiced. His rhetoric down the stretch of the campaign was close to center-of-the-road. For example, he said he wants to reduce abortions; that's good. However, in 2007 he pledged to Planned Parenthood that he wanted his first act as president to be signing a bill legalizing partial-birth abortions, forcing all doctors and hospitals to perform abortions regardless of conscience, to have all taxpayers pay for abortions and to stop funding of pregnancy crisis centers which help young girls examine other alternatives to abortion. Which will it be?

There was one positive feature of the presidential election: A black man was elected to the most important office in the nation. Hopefully, the omnipresent false charges of racism will now end. Obama received a higher percentage of the white vote than President Clinton ever did. Indeed, the media's and campaign's stoking of white guilt probably made race a plus for Obama, not a negative. Enough.

Soon we'll know the answer.

Will the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine hoodwink the American people and move its criminal kickback, payoff and patronage operation into the White House?

The machine has brought Obama along through every step of his political career and is running his presidential campaign today. It has successfully hidden the real Obama story and is poised to achieve a corrupt victory over the American people.

With the aid of ACORN, known for its voter fraud drives, registering 1.3 million in key states, hundreds of millions of dollars raised illegally from unidentifiable sources over the internet from all over the world and a media betraying its obligation to inform the Amerian people by refusing to investigate or print anything that might be damaging about the real Obama, where does America stand on election day? British political observer Melanie Phillips put it accurately:

You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant* radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.

A few brave voices ( have raised warnings of the disaster that will befall America should Obama be elected, but they have not been heard. For example, this:

After this man has wrecked the economy and destroyed constitutional law with his judicial appointments, what can he do for an encore? He can cripple the military and gamble America’s future on his ability to sit down with enemy nations and talk them out of causing trouble.

And this:

[McCain] will defend America and the free world whereas Obama will undermine them and aid their enemies.

Here’s why. McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else. McCain stands for American exceptionalism, the belief that American values are superior to tyrannies. Obama stands for the expiation of America’s original sin in oppressing black people, the third world and the poor.

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That’s why he believes in ‘soft power’ — diplomacy, aid, rectifying ‘grievances’ (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America’s defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will ‘cut investments in unproven missile defense systems’; he will ‘not weaponize space’; he will ‘slow our development of future combat systems’; and he will also ‘not develop nuclear weapons,’ pledging to seek ‘deep cuts’ in America’s arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups.

Whether through wickedness, ideology, stupidity or derangement, the [Obama true believers] firmly believe that the ultimate source of conflict in the world derives at root from America and Israel, whose societies, culture and values they want to see emasculated or destroyed altogether. They are drooling at the prospect that an Obama presidency will bring that about. The rest of us can’t sleep at night.

And this:

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word "hope", they instead hear, "handout". A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as "something for nothing". Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over. . . .

Americans question the premise of America's standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America's standing. It might take the country another generation to recover. . . .

It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. . .

Obama's dislike of America goes back to his college and pre-college days, perhaps even earlier. With the death of his white grandmother, all of Obama's relatives are adherents of the ideology of political Islam, which seeks to destroy America on its way to world domination. Jeremiah Wright, an ex-Muslim, preached a strange form of black liberation Christianity, with Obama in the pews for 20 years, blaming the world's problems on America, white people and Jews. So Obama wants to transform America into something he likes better. The inexperienced, the narcissist, the follower of the Marxist socialist community organizer Saul Alinsky, whose hero was Lucifer who rebelled against God. With power in the hands of Obama and the Chicago political machine, as the writer above advises: "Be afraid. . . be very afraid."

* Footnote: What is a Marxisant?

"The Marxist belief that the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois [middle class] society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good [socialist] society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, the values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society." This is what Jeremiah Wright -- and MIchelle Obama -- urged their listeners, not to aspire to the middle class. And, of course, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were the ultimate fighters against middle class America, seeking to destroy it through violence before they realized re-educating the young to be socialist revolutionaries, which they did with the aid of Barack Obama, would be more effective.

Update: Yes.

He's not only changing his position constantly, he keeps lying about what his positions were.

Professor Sowell has pleaded more than a few times already for America to wake up and see the danger that Barack Obama represents for this country. HIs final plea is set forth here in full.

Ego and Mouth

Obama’s trademark.

By Thomas Sowell

After the big gamble on subprime mortgages that led to the current financial crisis, is there going to be an even bigger gamble, by putting the fate of a nation in the hands of a man whose only qualifications are ego and mouth?

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise— whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team— is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama’s trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges— very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in the real world.

The signs of Barack Obama’s self-centered immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents.

The triumphal tour of world capitals and photo-op meetings with world leaders by someone who, after all, was still merely a candidate, is just one sign of this self-centered immaturity.

“This is our time!” he proclaimed. And “I will change the world.” But ultimately this election is not about him, but about the fate of this nation, at a time of both domestic and international peril, with a major financial crisis still unresolved and a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon.

For someone who has actually accomplished nothing to blithely talk about taking away what has been earned by those who have accomplished something, and give it to whomever he chooses in the name of “spreading the wealth,” is the kind of casual arrogance that has led to many economic catastrophes in many countries.

The equally casual ease with which Barack Obama has talked about appointing judges on the basis of their empathies with various segments of the population makes a mockery of the very concept of law.

After this man has wrecked the economy and destroyed constitutional law with his judicial appointments, what can he do for an encore? He can cripple the military and gamble America’s future on his ability to sit down with enemy nations and talk them out of causing trouble.

Senator Obama’s running mate, Senator Joe Biden, has for years shown the same easy-way-out mindset. Senator Biden has for decades opposed strengthening our military forces. In 1991, Biden urged relying on sanctions to get Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait, instead of military force, despite the demonstrated futility of sanctions as a means of undoing an invasion.

People who think Governor Sarah Palin didn’t handle some “gotcha” questions well in a couple of interviews show no interest in how she compares to the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate, Senator Biden.

Joe Biden is much more of the kind of politician the mainstream media like. Not only is he a liberal’s liberal, he answers questions far more glibly than Governor Palin — grossly inaccurately in many cases, but glibly.

Moreover, this is a long-standing pattern with Biden. When he was running for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination back in 1987, someone in the audience asked him what law school he attended and how well he did.

Flashing his special phony smile, Biden said, “I think I have a much higher IQ than you do.” He added, “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship” and “ended up in the top half” of the class.

But Biden did not have a full academic scholarship. Newsweek reported: “He went on a half scholarship based on need. He didn’t finish in the ‘top half’ of his class. He was 76th out of 85.”

Add to Obama and Biden House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and you have all the ingredients for a historic meltdown. Let us not forget that the Roman Empire did decline and fall, blighting the lives of millions for centuries.

Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. In 2003, Sowell received the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement. Sowell received his bachelor’s degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1958, his master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.

No one has dug deeper and written more about the real Obama than Stanley Kurtz, the independent researcher at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center. On the day before the election he provides his overall conclusion based on what he has learned from his extensive investigation: Barack Obama is a Far Left radical deeply steeped in and following the principles and practices of his intellectual and spiritual guiding light the communist agitator Saul Alinksy, whose goal was to destroy America's capitalist society and replace it with a totalitarian socialist one.

Wealth redistribution, not wealth creation, is at the center of Obama's plan. He will build support for this socialist end by vastly expanding the ACORN-style community organizating movement by linking the massive youth corps that he has said he will create as president. As Kurtz points out, ACORN, funded by Obama and Ayers through foundations, was a prime agent in undermining the credit standards of the nation's banking system as Obama supported “major redistributive change. Via ACORN, that project has already nearly wrecked our economy. What will happen when it’s generalized?"

Obama's words will be soothing and moderate as always (Alinsky preached using vague words such as "hope" and "change" rather than the specifics of the socialist agenda), but a totalitarian socialist society will continue to be his ultimate goal.

Kurtz's brilliant exposés have been ignored by the nation's mainstream media when they could and whitewashed by them when they could not. The tragedy for America is that the vast majority of voters has never seen, heard or been able to discuss Kurtz's Obama disclosures. What Obama and the Obama campaign have chosen to hide from the general public largely remains hidden because of the media's corrupt complicity.

Kurtz deserves our heartfelt thanks. If this far left radical, so far out of and opposed to mainstream American values, is elected president, at least a core few will be armed, alert and ready to do battle to defeat his totalitarian socialist agenda.

Here's Kurtz's conclusion in its entirety. To read all his investigative pieces, click here.

November 3, 2008

What We Know About Obama

The illusion of pragmatism advances far-left goals, in baby steps.

By Stanley Kurtz

Reflecting on all that I’ve written about Barack Obama over these past six months, four inter-related points stand out: Obama’s radicalism, his stealthy incrementalism, his interest in funding and organization-building, and his willingness to use — or quietly support — Alinskyite intimidation tactics. Since we stand on the cusp of the election, I’ll lay out the bottom line. For those who want to know more, go back and read the detailed studies on which I base these conclusions.

Obama’s troubling associations are more than isolated friendships or instances of bad judgment. His ties to Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Rashid Khalidi, Michael Pfleger, James Meeks, ACORN, the New Party, and the Gamaliel Foundation all reflect Obama’s sympathy with radical-left ideas and causes — wealth redistribution prominent among them. At both the Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for example, Obama and Ayers channeled money into ACORN’s coffers. ACORN, a militant group pursuing economic redistribution, succeeded in undermining credit standards throughout the banking system, thereby modeling the New Party’s plans to tame capitalism itself. So the association with Ayers is not an outlier issue, but part and parcel of a network of radical ties through which Obama’s supported “major redistributive change.” Via ACORN, that project has already nearly wrecked our economy. What will happen when it’s generalized?

Similarly, Obama’s “association” with Wright was far more than a mere pastor-parishioner — or even mentor-protégé — relationship. Obama’s work with the Gamaliel Foundation required him to “organize” left-leaning churches into a larger political force. His real interest in Wright, Pfleger, and Meeks was to turn them into the nucleus of a far broader politicized coalition of radical black churches — as shown, for example, by his work with them on the Illinois racial-profiling bill. Again, we are not dealing with mere “associations,” but with intentional political partnerships.

Although media malfeasance is at the heart of our ignorance about these broader patterns, Obama’s absorption of Alinskyite strategies of stealthy incrementalism have helped to hide the truth. Following well-worn organizer strategies, Obama knows how to wrap ideological radicalism in the soothing rhetoric of “pragmatism” and classic American values. There is a kernel of truth to the pragmatism, however. Radical though his ultimate goals may be, Obama follows classic organizer strategy — pursuing his ends in tiny, incremental, and cumulative baby-steps. The municipal “living wage” campaigns supported by Obama, Wright, and groups like ACORN and the New Party were never designed, in themselves, to bring fundamental economic change. These ordinances actually applied to only a very small number of companies. The broader purpose of these battles was to build coalitions for deeper structural change on the national level, when the moment was right. Obama would likely hew to this incrementalism in power, with the same radical long-term goals in mind.

Obama was a master at channeling funding to his organizer allies. He was the key force turning the Woods Fund toward a major increase in support for community organizers, at a moment when other foundations shied away from funding the militant and confrontational tactics of groups like ACORN. In his now infamous 2001 radio remarks, Obama’s preferred strategy for promoting “major redistributive change” was through society-wide organizing from below. As president, Obama would connect his massive youth-volunteer program to his favorite community-organizer groups, thereby creating a political force for long-term restructuring of the American economy. This was the program of the New Party, and I believe it is still Obama’s long-term goal.

In pursuit of his goals, Obama has shown himself willing to quietly support, and sometimes to openly use, radical Alinskyite tactics. At the Woods Fund, Obama’s allies bragged about the way their “post-ideological” cover had allowed them to fund ACORN’s confrontational tactics, while escaping public criticism. Obama has shamelessly used Alinskyite “direct action” to silence and intimidate political foes during the current campaign (a matter well-known to conservatives, yet little noted by the mainstream press). Victory would only cement the conviction in Obama and his allies that these tactics had “won,” and therefore should be used again.

Has Obama changed? Was he merely using his radical Chicago allies to gain national renown, and thereby an opening for a more moderate political program? I find this view unconvincing. Obama has often claimed that his early community organizing, and his redistributive legislative work, were at the very core of his political identity. We’ve heard his radicalism on the radio in 2001. Does anyone really believe that he’s changed in 2008? Obama’s political radicalism consolidated his shaky personal identity. It formed him as an adult. He cannot abandon that inner stance without losing hold of an already precarious self. Obama chose to live in Hyde Park — chose that radical setting as the site of his adult self-creation. Hyde Park was never the place Obama needed to conquer in order to escape. On the contrary, it was the personally chosen home he now hopes to nationalize by spreading his organizing gospel to America’s youth.

Obama is clever and pragmatic, it’s true. But his pragmatism is deployed on behalf of radical goals. Obama’s heart is, and will remain, with the Far Left. Yet he will surely be cautious about grasping for more, at any given moment, than the political traffic will bear. That should not be mistaken for genuine moderation. It will merely be the beginning stages of a habitually incremental radicalism. In his heart and soul, Barack Obama was and remains a radical-stealthy, organizationally sophisticated, and — when necessary — tactically ruthless. The real Obama — the man beyond the feel-good symbol — is no mystery. He’s there for anyone willing to look. Sad to say, few are.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Click here.

It ain't funny, but ...

Limbaugh reported this on his Friday show:

On Charlie Rose Show last night on PBS. He had on Tom Brokaw last night, ladies and gentlemen. Here's a montage. Now, this is last night. As you listen to this, keep in mind everything you've heard from Brokaw and others in the Drive-Bys can for the past six months, three months, two months or whatever. This is a montage of Charlie Rose and Brokaw trying to figure out who Obama is.

ROSE: I don't know what Barack Obama's worldview is.

BROKAW: No, I don't, either.

ROSE: I don't know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don't know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don't really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it's an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don't know what books he's read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There's a lot about him we don't know.

Two of the top media Obama boosters a few days before the election saying they don't know very much about Obama.

As Limbaugh said, why didn't you get reporters on the case as you did on Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.

Disgusting. They covered so much for Obama they don't even know.

Does the Obama tax plan work? Will it just be those rich making $250,000 or more who will bear the burden? And will those rich only see their marginal tax rate go to 39% from 35%?

The answers to these three questions are No, No and No. And, as for the new Obama marginal rate, it will be 93%, not 39%.

See why.

It's a plan to destroy a productive economy. Taking from the productive to spread the wealth to those who don't pay taxes sounds great, very European really, but it's a recipe for economic disaster.

As has been pointed out, taxes on the top 10% of households are higher in the U.S. than in any other developed nation, including socialist exemplar Sweden. And Obama intends to make them higher yet (even higher than he says, as the linked article shows.)

No one has done more to investigate and expose the many factors in Obama's background that disqualify him and show him unfit to be president of the United States than Stanley Kurtz. Kurtz is an independent researcher at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center. For a full list of Kurtz's articles on Obama, click here.

National Review Online has now reposted an article Kurtz did back in September and Kurtz has added a new Author's Note as a preface that is reproduced here. The dismaying fact remains that the media had not done its historic work of unflinchingly examining and exposing how totally out-of-the-mainstream, how far left and dangerous this candidate for president is.

Senator Stealth

How to advance radical causes when no one’s looking.

By Stanley Kurtz

AUTHOR'S NOTE: When I wrote “Senator Stealth,” just over two months ago, it still seemed realistic to expect that its revelations might stimulate press follow-up. After all, the Wright affair had occasioned significant media interest. Since “Senator Stealth” established that Barack Obama had intimate and long-standing ties to yet another organization with Wright-like anti-American views, the piece’s news value seemed obvious. The Wright affair was no fluke, but part of a systematic pattern. Unfortunately, as Obama moved closer to nominee status, the press circled the wagons and began its own systematic pattern of refusing to question or report on his past.

Beyond its revelation that Obama’s original community organizer home-base is pervaded by anti-Americanism, “Senator Stealth” foreshadows today’s debates over redistributionism, and shows that concerns over Obama’s radical “associations” cannot be separated from the most significant policy disputes of the campaign.

“Senator Stealth” also lays out a way of resolving the contradiction between Obama’s radical past and his apparently moderate present. After learning that incrementalism, rhetorical disguise, and ideological stealth are second nature to Obama’s community organizer compatriots, it’s tougher to take his current self-presentation at face value. More than two months later, the same issues play out in the latest flap over Obama’s ties to the New Party.

Finally, I couldn’t have guessed, more than two months ago, that the Obama campaign, abetted by the press, would have taken refuge in near-total denial of his unsavory associations, from the question of his New Party membership, to the relationship to Bill Ayers, to the links to ACORN. Obama has downplayed or denied these many ties to an extent that is shockingly at odds with the public record, while the press has played along.

As the race tightens, let us hope that, however belatedly, the sheer weight of questions and revelations are beginning to take their toll. — Stanley Kurtz

The original article Senator Stealth details yet another of Obama's anti-American connections to go along with Ayers, Wright, Pfleger, ACORN and the New Left party he belonged to when he ran for the Illinois senate. (Rashid Khalidi is anti-Israel and it is possible his dislike of America is limited to its support of Israel.)

Senator Stealth can be read by clicking here.

Most of Kurtz's articles are on this website as well and can be found by going to the SEARCH box and entering "Kurtz."

Few writers on public policy are more respected than syndicated columnist and acclaimed author of works on economics and public policy questions than Professor Thomas Sowell of Stanford's Hoover Institution.

What may be Professor Thomas Sowell's last chapter in his indictment of Barack Obama as a grave danger to America follows. Excerpts:

After the big gamble on subprime mortgages that led to the current financial crisis, is there going to be an even bigger gamble, by putting the fate of a nation in the hands of a man whose only qualifications are ego and mouth?

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama’s trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges— very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in the real world.

Dr. Sowell is deeply worried about the enormous damage an Obama presidency will do. Literally, not figuratively, he can destroy America.

After this man has wrecked the economy and destroyed constitutional law with his judicial appointments, what can he do for an encore? He can cripple the military and gamble America’s future on his ability to sit down with enemy nations and talk them out of causing trouble.

Add to Obama and Biden House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and you have all the ingredients for a historic meltdown. Let us not forget that the Roman Empire did decline and fall, blighting the lives of millions for centuries.

One can be sure this cataclysmic forecast is not made lightly.

Read it all.

For all of Professor Sowell's reasons why Obama should not be elected president, click here or click Sowell in the list of Categories on this website to the right of this column. You can also enter the word "Sowell" in the search box to the right and pull out the Sowell columns previously published on this website.

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. Over the past three decades, Sowell has taught economics at
various colleges and universities, including Cornell, Amherst, and the University of California at Los Angeles, as well as the history of ideas at Brandeis University. He has also been associated with three other research centers, in addition to the Hoover Institution. He was project director at the Urban Institute from 1972 to 1974, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 1976–77, and was an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute in 1975-76.

Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. In 2003, Sowell received the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement. Sowell received his bachelor’s degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1958, his master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.

Power Line's Paul Mirengoff grieves for America:

No self-respecting country would elect as president a man who spent 20 years taking spiritual guidance from a pastor who openly hates the country. And no country that loses its self respect can anticipate a bright future.

Obama friend Bernadine Dohrn dedicated her book about her life as a a terrorist to, among others, Sirhad Sirhan, who murdered Robert Kennedy. Dorhn, of course, is the terrorist accomplice of William (Bill) Ayers, who partnered with Obama for seven years in Chicago funding programs to indoctrinate school children in hate for America and to undermine American society..

Don't Democrats care the person they have nominated for president has such despicable people as his friends and partners?

How many friends do you have who hate America?

Synidcated columnist to the world Mark Steyn says things so much better than almost everyone else. This Saturday's observations on Barack Obama echo remarks which have previously been posted on this website, but they are so well stated it is worth reading every word.

He is so accurate in describing the vast majority of support for Obama -- "Woudn't it be nice if...." with no real understanding of or concern about who the man is. It's just assumed he's a "normal" or "average" Democratic politcian when he's anything but.

The conservatives who have jumped over to Obama swayed by his rhetorical skills, all of them, without exception, are assuming his extremist past, his extremist close allies and friends and extremist votes mean nothing and he will morph into a pragmatic, sensible, middle-of-the road sort of fellow. Steyn advises, "Don't bet on it."

Remember the movie "Bad News Bears"? The coach gave sage advice to his new team at the start of the season:

The coach (Walter Matthau) points out the folly of assumptions. He writes “ASSUME” on the chalkboard, then adds slashes “ASS/U/ME” while saying, “When you ASSUME—it could make an ASS out of U and ME!”

Get ready. Reality will come crashing in if Obama is elected.

Obama in 2-D Remember: We’re not electing a symbol, a logo, a two-dimensional image.

By Mark Steyn
Novemberf 1, 2008

In Tokyo last week, over a thousand people signed a new petition asking the Japanese government to permit marriages between human beings and cartoon characters. “I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world,” explained Taichi Takashita. “Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorize marriage with a two-dimensional character?”

Get back to me on that Tuesday night. We’ll know by then whether an entire constitutional republic has decided to contract marriage with a two-dimensional character and to attempt to take up residence in the two-dimensional world. For many of his supporters, Barack Obama is an idea. He offers “hope, not fear”. “Hope” of what? “Hope” of “change.” Okay, but “change” to what? Ah, well, there you go again, getting all hung up on three-dimensional reality, when we’ve moved way beyond that. I don’t know which cartoon character Taichi Takashita is eyeing as his betrothed, but up in the sky Obamaman is flying high, fighting for Hope, Change, and a kind of Post-Modern American Way.

The two-dimensional idea of President Obama is seductive: To elect a young black man of Kenyan extraction and Indonesian upbringing offers redemption both for America’s original sin (slavery) and for the more recent perceived sins of President Bush — his supposed enthusiasm for sticking it to foreigners generally, and the Muslim world in particular. And no, I’m not saying he’s Muslim. It’s worse than that: He’s a pasty-faced European — at least in his view of state power, welfare, and taxation.

But, in a sense, he’s not anything in particular, so much as everything in general. The media dispatched legions of reporters to hoot and jeer at Sarah Palin’s Wasilla without ever wondering: Where would we go to do this to Obama? Where’s his “home town?” Bill Clinton was famously (if not entirely accurately) from “a place called Hope.” Barack Obama is from an idea called hope. What’s the area code? 1-800-HOPE4CHANGE. The 1-800 candidate offers the hope of electing a younger Morgan Freeman, the cool, reserved, dignified black man who, when he’s not literally God walking among us (as in Bruce Almighty), is always the conscience of the movie.

You can understand the appeal of such an idea. Even if you’re not hung up on white liberal guilt or Bush loathing, there’s an urge to get it over with, to say, well, America should have a black president, and the sooner the better — ie, the sooner we do it, the better it speaks of us. They have a point. I look at the roll call of the dead on 9/11: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna, Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black, white, Scandinavian, Balkan, Arab, Asian — in a word, American. The presidential pantheon has a narrower ring: Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson. Obama has a tedious shtick about how his name sounds odd and he doesn’t look like “all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” He’s not just picking out the drapes for the Oval Office, he’s ordering up the new currency and booking the sculptors for Mount Rushmore.

And why not? Obama in the White House, Obama on the dollar bill, Obama on Rushmore would symbolize the possibilities of America more than that narrow list of white-bread protestant presidents to date.

The problem is we’re not electing a symbol, a logo, a two-dimensional image. Long before he emerged on the national stage as Barack the Hope-Giver and Bringer of Change, there was a three-dimensional Barack Obama, a real man who lives in the real world. And that’s where the problem lies.

The Senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he’s not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed non-relevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about “spreading the wealth around” was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of “social justice.” Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be “accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”

But that too is revealing. As John Hood pointed out at National Review, communism is not “sharing.” In a free society, the citizen chooses whether to share his Lego, trade it for some Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks, or keep it to himself. From that freedom of action grow mighty Playmobile cities. Communism is compulsion. It’s the government confiscating your Elmo to “share” it with someone of its choice. Joe the Plumber is free to spread his own wealth around — hiring employees, buying supplies from local businesses, enjoying surf’n’turf night at his favorite eatery. But, in Obama’s world view, that’s not good enough: the state is the best judge of how to spread Joe the Plumber’s wealth around.

The Senator is a wealthy man, mainly on the strength of two bestselling books offering his biography in lieu of policy and accomplishments. Many lively members of his Kenyan family occur as supporting characters in his story and provide the vivid color in it. But they too are not merely two-dimensional cartoons. His Aunt Zeituni, a memorable figure in Obama’s writing, turned up for real last week, when the dogged James Bone of the London Times tracked her down. She lives in a rundown housing project in Boston.

In his Wednesday-night infomercial, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief” was that “I am my brother’s keeper.” Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why couldn’t he send him a ten-dollar bill and near double the guy’s income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother’s keeper, and his aunt’s keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.

The government as wealth-spreader-in-chief was not a slip of the tongue but consistent with Obama’s life, friends and votes. The Obamacons — that’s to say, conservatives hot for Barack- - justify their decision to support a big-spending big-government Democrat with the most liberal voting record in the Senate by “hoping” that he doesn’t mean it, by “hoping” that he’ll “change” in office. “I sure hope Obama is more open, centrist, sensible,” declared reformed conservative Ken Adelman, “than his liberal record indicates.”

He’s “hoping” that Obama will buck not just Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and the rest of the gang but also his voting record, his personal address book, and his entire adult life. Good luck betting the future on that. The “change” we’ll get isn’t hard to discern: An expansion of government, an increase in taxes, a greater annexation of the dynamic part of the economy by the sclerotic bureaucracy, a reduction in economic liberty . . . oh, and a lot more Chicago machine politics.

On Tuesday many Americans will vote for the two-dimensional Obama — the image, the idea, the “hope”. But it will be the three-dimensional Obama — the real man with the real record — that America will have to live with.

Among the haters in Obama's circle was Rashid Khalidi, a former spokesman for Yasser Arafat and now, like communist and terrorist bomber Wiliam (Bill) Ayers, comfortably ensconsced on a university faculty where their prior activities don't raise an eyebrow. The Obamas and the Khalidis often had dinners together in Chicago and in 2003 Obama toasted Khalidi as he left to take over the official anti-Israel position at Columbia heading up Middle East Studies. With Ayers, it was the New York Times pooh-poohing any significance of the Ayers relationship to Obama, although the two worked together for seven years funding programs to indoctrinate Chicago school children in anti-American sentiments, teaching them that America was bad and they should join the needed social revolution. Now the Washington Post takes its turn in belittling the Khalidi-Obama relationship, denying that Khalidi was ever very close to Palestinian terrorists.

John Hinderaker of Power Line exposes that lie:

Salah Khalaf, better known as Abu Iyad, masterminded the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. By his own account in his memoirs, he personally selected the terrorists who carried out the attack and delivered weapons to them. So the fact that he was a leading terrorist was anything but a secret. Nevertheless, when Khalaf was murdered in 1991, Obama's close friend Rashid Khalidi praised him and said that he would be "sorely missed." He was, no doubt, missed by those who approve of terrorist mass murders. It is fair to say that Khalidi, a representative of the PLO, was among that number.

It was shortly after this that Obama and Khalidi became friends and, as Obama has said, Khalidi "offered constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases." Isn't this a bit odd, to say the least? A person of normal sensibility would say that someone who praises the founder of Black September and the perpetrator of the Munich horror suffers from "blind spots and biases." (I, actually, wouldn't put it that politely.) So what was it, exactly, that Obama learned from Khalidi? Why did he, by his own account, find Khalidi to be not only a congenial friend but a mentor of sorts?

In short, what sort of a person would consider a professor who speaks for Yaser Arafat's PLO and mourns the death of a proud terrorist, the perpetrator of one of the 20th century's vilest acts, to be not just a profound thinker but a moral compass? That is to say: what sort of a person is Barack Obama?

Update: The Washington Post has decided in its Obama defense to deny that Khalidi was in fact associated with Arafat and the terrorist PLO during his time in Lebanon. The Post didn't do its homework. Martin Kramer did his.

The media is now joining Obama is playing the race card. And here. Simply put, if you don't vote for Obama, you're racist. You have no legitimate reason not to.

1. That you're troubled by the elite media's attempt to force you to vote for Obama to prove you're not a racist, is no reason.

2. That you're troubled by Obama’s constant playing of the race card, first against Hillary Clinton, then against John McCain and now against anyone who raises a question or a criticism, is no reason.

3. That you're troubled by his fixation on black power and dislike of whites as revealed in his own books in which he approvingly refers to "white men's greed" as the cause of the world's problems, is no reason.

4. That you're troubled by his attraction to Marxist socialist principles that began in high school and continued through college where he “hung out” with black power advocates and Marxist socialists and distanced himself from whites, as he describes in his books, is no reason.

5. That you’re troubled that he put his Marxist socialist principles into practice by becoming a community organizer of blacks against the white establishment in Chicago working with communist/socialist ACORN and other community organizers, is no reason.

6. That you're troubled by his attraction to and absorption of the communist Alinsky method of community organizing (studied in Chicago and while at Harvard Law School) in which socialist purposes are carefully hidden by sticking to platitudes like "hope" and "change" to solve every human dissatisfaction, is no reason.

7. That you're troubled by his telling Joe the Plumber he was going to impose higher taxes on him to "spread the wealth," that is, to take money away from people who pay taxes to give to people who don't pay taxes, which is pure socialism, is no reason

8. That you're troubled by his long association (as trainer, lawyer, collaborator and employer) with the communist/socialist community organization ACORN that has been involved in vote registration fraud controversies, including convictions, across the country, including this year, is no reason.

9. That you're troubled that Obama hired ACORN this year to do voter registration, knowing as he did about its record of voter fraud registration accusations, investigations and convictions (investigations of ACORN fraud are under way right now in at least 12 states), paying $320,000 to ACORN and then covering up the payment, is no reason.

10, That you're troubled that every day there are new stories of fraud involving ACORN workers in states across the nation and all the Obama campaign can say is that such reports are "a distraction" from the real issues, is no reason.

11. That you're troubled that he was an early pioneer, working with ACORN, in showing how to intimidate banks and bankers into making uncreditworthy mortgage loans to minorities and low-income people who could not afford them, which pressure tactics spread and ultimately led to the housing bubble, its collapse and the present world financial crisis and loss of hundreds of billions for investors and tens of thousands of jobs, is no reason.

12. That you're troubled that Obama, having worked closely with the communist/socialist organization ACORN throughout his entire career, recently said his views are still pretty much the same as when he helped ACORN force banks to make risky mortgage loans they never should have made and ran a voter registration drive with ACORN, is no reason.

13. That you're troubled that Obama has vowed to the communist//socialist group ACORN and other such organizations will be called in to work with him, if he's elected president, even before inauguration to shape the agenda of his administration,, is no reason.

14. That you're troubled that in just a few months in the U.S. Senate Obama was able to become the second biggest recipient, some $126,000 -- over a 20-year period -- of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sources, is no reason.

15. That you’re troubled that when John McCain and others were proposing reforms in 2005 and 2006 to prevent a collapse of the out-of-control practices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buying up far too many risky subprime mortgage loans, Obama instead sided with Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd in opposing reform, thus bringing on the present world financial crisis, indeed being quoted saying subprime loans were a good thing, is no reason.

16. That you're troubled by his association with people who hate America such as white hater Jeremiah Wright, unrepentant admitted terrorist bomber and self-described communist William Ayers (who said in 2001 the mention of America "makes him want to puke"), Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi and nutcase Father Michael Pfleger, is no reason.

17. That you're troubled that he was attracted in the first place to black power, white-America hater, anti-Semitic pastor Jeremiah Wright and stayed with him for 20 years, knowing he was a follower of black liberation theology that preaches that any god that is not exclusively on the side of the blacks against whites must be killed, is no reason.

18. That you're troubled that he lied about never in 20 years hearing Jeremiah Wright make any of his anti-America and anti-white speeches, but then admitted he had when his campaign advisors realized the lie could be easily disproved, is no reason.

19. That you're troubled that he brought his young children to Jeremiah Wright's sermons Sunday after Sunday to listen to his bigoted tirades against whites and his hateful harangues against America, is no reason.

20. That you’re troubled that he helped Nation of Islam’s anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan organize the Million-Man March in Washington and that Farrakhan has called Obama the messiah for black Muslims, is no reason.

21. That you're troubled that, working for years jointly with unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers, who describes himself as a communist, Obama funneled $150 million to fund programs to turn Chicago teachers and students into socialist revolutionaries who hate America, is no reason.

22. That you're troubled that, working jointly with America hater William Ayers, Obama directed charitable funds to separatist Afrocentric, America-hating programs designed by allies of Jeremiah Wright, while denouncing “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation,” is no reason.

23. That you're troubled that, working jointly with America hater William Ayers, Obama, "to change America," directed charitable funds to the communist/socialist ACORN that was intimidating banks to make unsafe mortgage loans and engaging in voter registration fraud, as he well knew, is no reason.

24. That you're troubled that Obama continued his collaboration with Ayers after Ayers allowed himself to be photographed for the cover of Chicago magazine in 2001 standing on the American flag and telling an interviewer the thought of America made him "want to puke," is no reason.

25. That you're troubled that, working jointly with admitted terrorist bomber William Ayers, he steered charitable funds to an Arab-related organization that handed money over to a Palestinian terrorist organization, is no reason.

26. That you're troubled by Obama’s decision to go inside the Chicago Daley Democratic patronage and payoff political machine (often called by Chicago newspapers the “corrupt” Daley Democratic political machine) and become a go-along, loyal member of the machine, which is now running his campaign, is no reason.

27. That you're troubled that as an Illinois state senator Obama refused to support reformers against the Daley patronage and payoff machine, but supported the Chicago Democratic political machine at all times, is no reason.

28. That you’re troubled that in his first run for public office he was able to force all three Democratic opponents off the primary ballot to run unopposed, which if not unprecedented is so highly unusual as to raise questions about the objectivity of Democratic election officials beholden to the Daley political machine which Obama supports, is no reason.

29. That you're troubled by the fact that he is the most extreme advocate of abortion in public life, having pledged to Planned Parenthood as president he would like his first act as president to be signing a bill removing all restrictions on abortion, including partial birth abortion which 75% of all Americans oppose, is no reason.

30. That you're troubled by the fact that he engineered the defeat of a bill in the Illinois senate to protect babies who survive a failed abortion (and then lied about it), a bill that was identical to one that passed Congress unanimously, is no reason.

31. That you're troubled by his callous statement that, if either of his girls made a mistake, he wouldn't want them "punished with a baby," is no reason.

32. That you're troubled by his wife's statements that only now, for the first time in her adult life, she's proud of her country, is no reason.

33. That you're troubled by his wife's view of America as “just downright mean,” is no reason.

34. That you're troubled by his view of America as having done harm to the world for which he must apologize (in Berlin, to Germans no less), is no reason.

35. That you’re troubled that he so often seems ashamed of America, speaking ill of it, as in Berlin, is no reason.

36. That you're troubled that Obama didn't put hand to heart during the national anthem until his advisors told him to, is no reason.

37. That you're troubled that Obama left injured servicemen and women waiting at a military hospital in Germany when he canceled a scheduled visit to work out at a gym, is no reason.

38. That you're troubled that he is so naive that he can say tear down the walls between Muslims and Jews (as in Israel?) and there will be peace, is no reason.

39. That you're troubled by his statements in support of the Palestinian cause and his support by a former member of the terrorist-listed PLO Rashid Khalidi, who is now the director of the most rabid anti-Israel Middle East Studies department in the U.S, is no reason.

40. That you're troubled by his lukewarm and equivocal statements about Israel (for an undivided Jerusalem one day, opposed the next), is no reason.

41. That you're troubled by his vocal support by leaders of Hamas and the lack of support by a leading Israel statesman and author such as Natan Sharansky, is no reason.

42. That you're troubled that Obama's running mate Biden is reported to have told Israelis they had just better get used to the idea of a Iran with nuclear warheads on missiles that can destroy Israel, is no reason.

43. That you're troubled that Obama declined to appear at an anti-Iran rally sponsored by Jewish organizations and made sure that Sarah Palin was disinvited, is no reason.

44. That you're troubled that all Obama wants to do is talk and talk with the leader of our deadly enemy Iran and do nothing of consequence to stop their development of nuclear weapons, is no reason.

45. That you're troubled by his position well over a year ago to withdraw troops from Iraq on a fixed timetable regardless of conditions and to oppose the surge that was not only dangerous for our troops but would have resulted in al-Qaeda taking over Iraq as its new world headquarters, with riches like oil and gas that Afghanistan cannot even dream of, is no reason.

46. That you're troubled by his opposition to doing what is necessary to make America independent of hostile and unstable overseas energy suppliers by drilling for gas and oil domestically and by supporting nuclear power and clean coal along with all other alternatives, is no reason.

47. That you're troubled that Obama naively wants to cut defense spending in an increasingly dangerous world, and that Obama refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Islamic supremacist war against the non-Muslim world, is no reason.

48. That you're troubled that Obama actively and openly spoke in favor of his Muslim cousin Raila Odinga in his recent campaign for president of Kenya, during which he reportedly pledged to decree Islamic law for all Kenyans and ban Christian missionaries throughout the country, is no reason.

49. That you're troubled by his protectionist statements supporting unilaterally repealing NAFTA and opposing the free trade agreement with our hemishere's closest ally Colombia, and his lying about the facts to justify his opposition, is no reason.

50. That you're troubled that he wants to end secret ballots in union elections so as to increase the power of union intimidation, is no reason.

51. That you're troubled that he is so obsessed with himself, appears to be such a narcissist, that he can tell a campaign gathering that light will come down from above and convince them to vote for The Obama, is no reason.

52. That you're troubled that when you look at his record of accomplishment you only see that he has written two books about himself (partially fictionalized, possibly ghost written), graduated from college and law school, spent four years in socialist community organizing, and years in the Illinois senate (voting present 130 times) toeing the Democratic machine line -- and gave a nice speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, is no reason.

53. That you're troubled that he had for years as a major fundraiser (at least $250,000) Syrian-born political fixer and slumlord Tony Rezko, who has been convicted on 16 counts of political corruption, is no reason.

54. That you're troubled that while Rezko was being investigated on corruption charges and reportedly in debt for more than $10 million, Rezko's wife (said to have no assets of her own and income of only $37,000 as a city worker) somehow made it possible for him to buy his dream house in the upscale Hyde Park section of Chicago by buying an adjacent empty lot for full price ($625,000) while Obama purchased his house and lot for a $300,000 discount ($1.65 million) from the same seller on the same day, is no reason.

54. That you're troubled that Rezko's wife shortly thereafter sold a strip of land from the adjacent empty lot that Obama wanted for one-sixth her purchase price, paid for a fence Obama wanted between the properties, then sold off the lot to one of Rezko’s attorneys for an undisclosed price, is no reason.

55. That you're troubled by his plan to give $50 billion of American taxpayer money to the corrupt United Nations for a new anti-poverty program, is no reason.

56. That you’re troubled by his socialist “tax cut” plan to take more money from those who earn it – including imposing higher taxes on hundreds of thousands of small businesses -- and make welfare payments to the 44% (63 million) of American’s who pay no income tax, is no reason.

57. That you're troubled that Obama is hiding so much of his record, that he has refused to allow access to information or has blocked research about his past, such as his joint socialist programs with William Ayers in Chicago, the official State of Hawaii birth records, his Columbia College and Harvard Law School records and years and his ideological affiliations before joining Jeremiah Wright's church, is no reason.

58. That you’re troubled that his campaign has apparently raised tens of millions of dollars from sources outside the country in deliberately small sums (under $200) to avoid federal reporting requirements and the campaign has no controls to identify such sources, some of which are clearly fraudulent, whereas the McCain campaign can track every dollar, is no reason.

59. That you're troubled by what Michael Barone calls the thug tactics of the Obama campaign to silence all criticism with cries of “lies,” “discrimination,” racism,” including even discussion of Obama's socialist and machine partisan activities in Chicago, and that Barone fears an Obama Administration "thugocracy" stifling First Amendment rights, is no reason.

60. That you’re troubled that Obama’s socialism smacks of totalitarianism, as his campaign’s efforts to shut down free speech shows, is no reason.

61. That you’re troubled that Obama is rated the most far left senator in the U.S. Senate, a radical with a socialist agenda "to change" an America he is not proud of to something we will not like, and who is blind to the defense needs of the United States, is no reason.

62. That you're troubled that Obama is so "flexible" and evasive when it comes to telling the truth and just plain lies, is no reason.

63. That you're troubled that he could coldly dismiss the legitimate fears of the white grandmother who raised him as those of a "typical white person," is no reason.

64. That you're troubled that the Chicago Democratic machine that is running his campaign may be intending to take its patronage and payoff operations onto the national stage, at staggering cost to American taxpayers, is no reason.

65. That you're troubled by his elitist attitude towards simple working people, sniffing at them for clinging to their God and their guns, is no reason.

66. That you're troubled by the many, many times that Obama misstated historical facts to suit his own agenda, including misdescribing his past positions, and that the mainstream media did not challenge Obama’s statements, is no reason.

67. That you're troubled by the hypocrisy and double standard of the elite media that can proudly report that 95% of blacks now say they're voting for Obama, but can express horror that some white Americans might vote for McCain, which they assert can only be for racist reasons, is no reason.

68. That you're troubled that the elite media, which has decided it wants a Democratic black president now, whoever it is, qualified or not,, has deliberately avoided its obligations to the American public by refusing to do any detailed investigation into who Obama really is, his alliances, involvement in sleazy machine politics and his history, so that all that exists is the fictionalized narrative contrived by the Chicago Daley Democratic machine that is running his campaign, which leaves too many questions unanswered and voters still wondering "Who is Barack Obama?", is no reason.

69. That you're still troubled about who Obama really is though you are deeply troubled about what you know already and wonder what else he may be hiding, is no reason.

70. That you're troubled that Obama appears to be cleverly hiding who he is, presenting a false image to the world as postpartisan, moderate and a healer, when he is none of those, as his record shows, is no reason.

71. That you're troubled that Obama, if elected, may have a Democratic House and Senate, to implement his extreme socialist agenda of higher taxes, trade protectionism, stifling free enterprise, stifling free speech, enacting extreme pro-abortion policies such as reviving partial-birth abortion, relaxing our defense vigilance, cutting defense spending and increasing taxpayer funding to subversive organizations such as ACORN, is no reason.

72. That you're troubled that foreigners see things so much more clearly than our media and view the president candidate Obama as having a "nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters," is no reason.

73. That you're troubled that, as Professor Thomas Sowell notes, John McCain and Sarah Palin have not spent "decades working with people who hate America" and Obama has, is no reason.

74. That you're troubled that, as Professor Thomas Sowell also notes, the values of John McCain and Sarah Palin "are the values of this nation, whose loyalty and dedication to this country’s fundamental institutions are beyond question" and this cannot be said about Obama, is no reason.

75. That you're troubled by reports that as much as $63 million in campaign contributions to the Obama campaign in amounts smaller than the $200 required to be reported federally are from foreign sources, may be illegal, are not tracked by the Obama campaign though McCain tracks ALL his contributions, and more than 80% of all Obama contributions are not identified and may not be identifiable, is no reason.

76. That you're troubled that the Obama campaign had deliberately collected tens if not hundres of millions of illegal contributions by disabling all security settings on online credit card systems so as to facilitate fake and foreign contributions and contributions over the limit and have no controls for contributions under $200 though the McCain campaign has all such controls, obviously seeking to steal the election and disenfranchise American voters, is no reason.

77. That you're troubled by the Gestapo tactics against Obama critics like the attacks on Joe the Plumber and throwing reporters off the campaign plane whose organizations endorse McCain, is no reason.

That you're troubled that if you don't vote for McCain/Palin you will be doing a dangerous disservice to your country and generations of Americans is no reason, either.

Tito the Builder has had enough of one-sided reporting on Obama. He knows the way Obama hammers critics like Joe the Plumber. He's afraid of what will happen in an Obama presidency, but speaks out anyway.

You don't want to be depressed, but it's instructive to watch this video. One can question the future of democracy. The folks at Power Line have made a very good point.

The top 10% of American earners pay a higher percentage of taxes than in any other developed country in the world, including the usual example of extreme socialist Sweden. And Obama is going to stick it to that 10% even more so he can spread the wealth to those he thinks "deserve it." And those who "deserve it," like the starstruck lady in this video, are delerious about not having anymore to pay for their mortgage or their gas.

Is Obama a socialist? Yes. How long has he been so? At least since 1995? Has he been hiding this? Yes.

Redistribution of your wealth to those Obama thinks "deserve it" has been on his mind since 1995. The resentment of white America that was fed weekly by Jeremiah Wright continues to this day even though Wright has been forced off stage for political reason, as even Reverend Wright said was happening. But the resentment, the message, the intent to transfer the wealth of the successful to those who have not earned it, the "oppressed," in the Reverend's words, is in Obama's plans.

Call it redistribution, socialism, it is not what the founders built into the Constitution. Obama seeks to change that and Stanley Kurtz has sounded the warning loud and clear.

Too few are listening.

Read the evidence that the invaluable Stanley Kurtz has accumulated. While the mainstream media has been failing in its job to vet a major candidate for president of the United States, Stanley Kurtz of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center has taken on the task and performed it admirably.

The tragedy is that the shocking story he had compiled about Obama's life, relationships and positions, which should disqualify him from the presidency, has not reached a large number of the American people because major news media have failed to pick it up and inform the public.

Americans are headed for a future that Obama has sought, mostly successfully, to hide from them. The public has been duped.

Alll will suffer th consequences if Obama is elected on November 4th. Obama wants to spread the pie and will ensure the pie does not grow bigger with his taxes and punitive regulation.

For all of Stanley Kurtz's work on Obama, click here.

Life of the New Party A redistributionist success story.

By Stanley Kurtz

A variety of evidence now indicates, with a high degree of likelihood, that Barack Obama was a member of the far-left New Party, which also endorsed him in his first run for the Illinois state senate in 1996. Obama’s New party ties graphically illustrate the connection between his troubling “associations” and the core economic issues of the presidential campaign. The New Party’s agenda was radically redistributionist. More important, the New Party’s specific strategy for achieving its economic goals precisely paralleled Obama’s now infamous 2001 radio remarks on “major redistributive change.” So let’s take a tour of New Party ideology, after which we can explore the ever-increasing evidence that Obama himself was in fact a New Party member.

Continue reading "PROOF OF OBAMA'S SOCIALIST PAST, PRESENT AND AMERICA'S FUTURE"

Posted by Republican on Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)
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Obama is a typical uncaring liberal at heart, save the millions, ignore treal people, even members of your family.

All Charisma, No Heart

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

October 31, 2008

Character: Barack Obama would "spread the wealth" as president, but until lately the Obamas were giving less than 1% of their own high incomes to the needy and neglecting even poverty-stricken blood relatives.

Sen. Barack Obama is apparently quite a cheapskate when it comes to giving to charity. From 2001 to 2004, the tax returns for Mr. and Mrs. Ebenezer Obama show less than $8,500 in donations out of the nearly $1 million they made.

In 2005 and 2006, with book royalties making them millionaires, their charitable contributions rose to about 5% of income. But how "charitable" are some of the causes Obama supports? In 2006, for instance, he gave more than $20,000 to the notorious Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Imagine that. Giving tens of thousands of dollars to someone who preaches "not God Bless America; God damn America!" from the pulpit. It remains incomprehensible that John McCain chose not to hammer home Obama's close association with Wright. The Wright issue has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with radical ideology.

Another supposed charitable donation was the more than $13,000 Obama gave to the Congressional Black Caucus. The CBC last year confirmed that it is a hard-core segregationist organization. When white liberal Democrat Steve Cohen ran in a majority-black House district in Memphis in 2006, he pledged to become the first white CBC member. But once he won, caucus members told him that whites need not apply.

Juxtapose that with the South Carolina state Republican Party chairman feeling compelled last month to resign his 12-year membership in an exclusive whites-only country club. Imagine the uproar if McCain, like Obama, had given a $13,000 "charitable donation" to a group that restricts membership based on race.

How can Obama spare thousands for Chicago's Muntu Theater of African dance, while allowing his 56-year-old Aunt Zeituni, about whom he reminisces fondly in his best-selling "Dreams From My Father," to live in a South Boston slum, as exposed by the Times of London this week? While Obama was swimming in well over $600 million in cash contributions, his underprivileged Kenyan-born auntie actually sent his campaign a modest donation.

A 2003 Associated Press story profiling poor people who buy lottery tickets at check-cashing stores apparently quotes Obama's Aunt Zeituni, describing her as unemployed and cash-strapped.

Obama's Uncle Omar, also described affectionately in his book, was apparently evicted from his Boston home in 2000 after losing his job. Then there is Obama's 26-year-old half brother, George Hussein Onyango Obama, discovered by the Italian edition of Vanity Fair to be living in a hovel near Nairobi, claiming to earn "less than a dollar a month."

It's funny how Obama can sell his memoir exploiting his relatives and humanize himself for voters, yet be too busy getting ready to change the world to be there for them when they need a hand.

As we get closer to the election, we might as well read in full what people of sanity are saying.

This report of the disgusting as if not illegal (dereliction of official duty) in Ohio is breathtaking. See if you agree. And how about Missouri? And trampling over Joe the Plumber?

Does anyone want the Peolosi-Obama-Reid troika telling you what to do and how much to pony up? It's spread the wealth with your money by upping your tax to those waiting with their hands out.

In a 2001 radio interview in which Obama again expressed belief in the "redistribution of wealth," the Illinois senator regretted that the Supreme Court "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution." Will Obama, through his appointments to the court, remove those constraints? Is "Joe" only the first on an Obama's enemies list?

Obama's Plumbers

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Thursday, October 30, 2008

Election '08: Ohio Democrats refused to act on ACORN's massive vote fraud. Yet they have time to scour the private records of Joe the Plumber. No wonder Barack Obama finds the Constitution an inconvenience.

Joe Wurzelbacher (also known as Joe the Plumber) has learned there's a price to pay for being the one to get Obama to admit that he has a socialist dream to "spread the wealth." Not only are you thrust into the public eye, you get the privilege of having government officials who support Obama rifle through private files looking for dirt on you.

Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and a maxed-out contributor to the Obama campaign, has confirmed that she approved the check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher after the Oct. 15 presidential debate.

Jones-Kelley explained her governmental prying by saying, "Our practice is when someone is thrust quickly into the public spotlight, we often take a look" at them. For example, she cited the case of a lottery winner who was found to owe back child support. But Wurzelbacher didn't win the lottery; he merely asked how much more of his hard-earned money was going to be taxed away under the Obama plan.

According to the Columbus-Dispatch, at least four state computer checks on Wurzelbacher were conducted shortly after Republican John McCain frequently brought up "Joe the Plumber" during the final presidential debate. In addition to the Department of Job and Family Services, driver's license and vehicle registration information on "Joe" was pulled from Bureau of Motor Vehicles computers. BMV information on Wurzelbacher also was obtained through accounts assigned to the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.

In a 2001 radio interview in which Obama again expressed belief in the "redistribution of wealth," the Illinois senator regretted that the Supreme Court "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution." Will Obama, through his appointments to the court, remove those constraints? Is "Joe" only the first on an Obama's enemies list?

Contrast this investigative frenzy with the refusal of Ohio's Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Bruner, to use government records to check the thousands of new voters registered by ACORN and others for registration fraud. She also refused notify local election officials when fraud was discovered.

This isn't the first time team Obama has sought to stifle dissent, threatening to use the powers of government to intimidate and punish its opponents. A recent report on KMOV-TV in St. Louis said:

"The Barack Obama campaign is asking Missouri law enforcement to target anyone who lies or runs a misleading TV ad during the presidential campaign."

The Obama campaign will target anyone who says this emperor has no clothes. It wasn't long ago that a team of 30 lawyers, investigators and Democratic party operatives trekked up to Alaska to find dirt on Sarah Palin. Now they're after Joe the Plumber.

Should Obama, Sen. Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gain unfettered control of the powers of government and the Supreme Court and reinstate the so-called Fairness Doctrine, they might come after you.

Professor Sowell has written many columns on the grave danger Barack Obama presents to the nation. He, like many others, is despairing of the uncritical media coverage and the acceptance of Obama based on emotion, rather than reason, and how the words, the alliances, the mentors, the history of fraud and bullying tactics, the involvement in electoral corruption and Chicago machine politics, the inexperience, the callousness towards life, the communist/socialist philosphy are all ignored as the rhetoric of "hope" and "change" soars and fills the ears and minds. Sowell calls Obama a demagogue who appears to be on the verge of becoming a successful demagogue, instituting a totalitarian socialist regime entirely at odds with American history and the Constitution that can wreck the nation. Under the Obama regime those paying no income taxes will soon outnumber those who do, thus creating new frenzy of class warfare and higher taxation (which Obama is already promoting) against those who earn and produce. How can economic collapse not follow?

THOMAS SOWELLonObama.doc

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. Over the past three decades, Sowell has taught economics at
various colleges and universities, including Cornell, Amherst, and the University of California at Los Angeles, as well as the history of ideas at Brandeis University. He has also been associated with three other research centers, in addition to the Hoover Institution. He was project director at the Urban Institute from 1972 to 1974, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 1976–77, and was an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute in 1975-76.

Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. In 2003, Sowell received the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement. Sowell received his bachelor’s degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1958, his master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.

Another voice speaks up about the socialist Obama who wants to convert the United States into Sweden.

Is Obama a "normal" Democratic candidate? Not at all.

Too many Americans think this radical urban organizer is just another Clinton or Gore. But a vote for Obama is a vote for socialist "spreading of wealth," as Obama admitted to Joe the Plumber, and a vote for "major redistributive change," as he put it in 2001

The Real Obama

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY |

October 28, 2008

Election '08: Barack Obama's "spread the wealth" remark to Ohio's Joe the Plumber was a rare peek at the radical behind the guarded rhetoric. A newly-unearthed 2001 radio interview provides full view.

The real, unguarded Barack Obama has been exposed, and Americans should hear it for themselves before they make the most consequential electoral decision of their lifetime.

Speaking to Chicago public radio station WBEZ seven years ago, then-Illinois state Sen. Obama reflected on the history of the civil rights movement.

"Where the movement succeeded," he said, "was in court-imposed remedies regarding segregation and voting rights."

But where it failed was that "the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society."

The man now a week away from possibly being elected president then lamented that "the civil rights movement became so court-focused" that it veered away from action to "put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that."

"Redistributive change" — so that's the kind of "change we need" and "change we can believe in" that a President Obama would give America. Exactly as he told Joe the Plumber.

It's pretty hard to spin a term as obvious as "redistributive change," but the Obama campaign is doing its desperate best. He was actually defending conservative legal principles, an Obama legal adviser absurdly told the Politico Web site.

The 2001 interview also finds an unwary Obama saying the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren — which in Warren's 1953-to-1969 tenure was the most activist and power-grabbing in U.S. history — "wasn't that radical" because "it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted."

Asked by a caller about further "reparative economic work" from the federal courts, Sen. Obama replied that he was "not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts," but that "any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts."

As president, however, "economic change through the courts" would be only a Supreme Court appointment or two away, supported by dozens of Obama's lower-court appointments.

Congress too is eagerly getting ready to enact "redistributive change." Last week, top House Democrats discussed taxing Americans' pretax contributions to 401(k) plans, with the promise of tens of billions of dollars in new government revenues every year — plus forcing workers to invest in government debt, shifting trillions of dollars from private savings to government control.

Could that be part of what Obama meant in Colorado this weekend when he warned, "make no mistake . . . we will all need to sacrifice"? Was it part of what running mate Joe Biden meant last week when he said of corporate executives, "their pensions go first"? Do workers' pensions then "go" next?

Too many Americans think this radical urban organizer is just another Clinton or Gore. But a vote for Obama is a vote for socialist "spreading of wealth," as Obama admitted to Joe the Plumber, and a vote for "major redistributive change," as he put it in 2001.

The following is a copy of an ad placed by the Chatham Republican Town Committee, Walter Bilowz, Chairman, in this coming Thursday's Cape Cod Chronicle:

DOES YOUR RETIREMENT MONEY BELONG TO YOU OR THE GOVERNMENT? PREDATORY POLITICS -- or ROBIN HOOD REDUX

This campaign has brought up two major issues, the redistribution of income and the redistribution of wealth.

Joe the Plumber said to Obama "your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?"
Obama replied "I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

With this, Obama declared his intention to redistribute the tax dollars which you paid on the income which you earned. Currently, if the Earned Income Tax Credit (E I TC) exceeds a taxpayer's tax liability, the IRS refunds the difference. That is, the government takes your tax money and gives some of it to someone who qualifies for the EITC. This is a redistribution of the tax money which you paid on the income which you earned. Obama would expand this with his tax plan to further distribute more of your tax money in order to "spread the wealth around". Obama calls this a tax cut for 95% of workers! He does not stress that approximately 40% of these workers pay no taxes and thus would be receiving a cash benefit (an entitlement).

However, Obama's intent to redistribute does not end with redistribution of your income. He is on record as favoring redistribution of your wealth, which includes your retirement funds. On a Chicago program, Odyssey, station WBEZ, in 2001, he stated that redistribution of wealth was a …”basic issue of political and economic justice in the society.” He indicated that redistribution of wealth could be accomplished by legislation.

The US News and World Report published a story on October 23, 2008, when they uncovered consideration of potential legislation to eliminate 401(k) plans (retirement plans) and take control of the retirement plan savings of Americans. This was in the Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support which is chaired by Representative James McDermott, Democrat of Washington. Under the plan, your retirement money would be transferred into a government account invested in government bonds and paying around 3%. In addition there would be a loss of preferential tax treatment and a mandatory contribution imposed on workers. There is approximately $4.5 trillion invested in 401(k) plans in the US. This would be the largest loss of wealth and seizure of private assets in world history. It would far exceed the amounts recently seized by the government of Argentina in their nationalization of pension funds. The leftist government wanted to use the funds for their agenda.

If we elect Obama, a Democrat, as president, and a Democratic Congress, what is it that would stop a radical assault on the income that you earn, and on the retirement wealth which you accumulate? It happened in Argentina!

Suddenly it's dawning on people that Obama's community organizer days of learning, absorbing and practicing the lessons of the Marxist socialist (communist) Saul Alinksy are now being played out for real in this presidential race. Obama has honed the skills of agitation, making people angry and resentful and focusing their anger at the "rich," classic class warfare. And the soaring rhetoric learned in the pews of Jeremiah Wright's church against those who oppress accompanied by promises to those who rise up that there will be at last "hope" and "change" has memerized many.

It's the smooth version of the messages of hate that have emanated from Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, Louis Farrakhan and William Ayers that America is bad and must be changed. To what?

Tony Blankley examines the hypnotic effect of the Alinsky method:

Obama's early mentor in the Alinsky method of social agitation was Mike Kruglik, whom Lizza paraphrased as saying: "(Obama) was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better."

As Kyle-Anne Shiver in the American Thinker explained after quoting those words: "The agitator's job, according to Alinsky, is first to bring folks to the 'realization' that they are indeed miserable, that their misery is the fault of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations, then help them to bond together to demand what they deserve, and to make such an almighty stink that the dastardly governments and corporations will see imminent 'self-interest' in granting whatever it is that will cause the harassment to cease.

"In these methods, euphemistically labeled 'community organizing,' Obama had a four-year education, which he often says was the best education he ever got anywhere."

And in the big picture, how does Obama see America under the U.S. Constitution?

And now we have Obama's genuinely shocking words from a 2001 National Public Radio interview: "But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn't that radical.

It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. . And one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was -- because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. . The Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day. . The Framers had that same blind spot . the fundamental flaw of this country."

Obama's sees the Constitution as fundamentally flawed. Its protection of individual liberty and property from the power of the government is a fundamental flaw in Obama's eyes. He wants "change." He wants judges who will deliver him that "change," even if it means throwing off the "essential constraints" on government power the Founding Fathers put in the Constitution. What will his government do with that power?

We live in dangerous days. The world economy teeters on the edge of the abyss. The exiting American president is a failed thing. An envious world smells a momentarily vulnerable America. The political beneficiary of Republican failure believes our Constitution is fatally flawed. He may be a committed Marxist. And if he held the presidency for four years, it would be the longest stretch that he ever held a full-time job. God Save the Republic. (emphasis added)

Kevin McCullough caught Obama in full lying mode promoting class warfare:

He's told many a whopper this campaign season, but today I saw coverage of portions of three different rallies. At each one he kept invoking the same thing.

"For the last eight years - we kept giving more and more to the wealthiest among us."

Now wait a second. Argue all you want about what percentage of graduated tax rates should or should not be (I personally believe ALL graduated tax rates to be immoral and made the clear case against them in my first book.)

But no one GAVE the wealthy earners anything...

They earned high salaries, because they held jobs that PAID them high salaries. In other words they put in a full days effort, and because they had the right experience, know how, intellectual capacity, and abilities - they convinced the companies they worked for to pay them "X" amount of dollars for those hours of service rendered. (Just like Michelle Obama did when the little scandal about her position at the public hospital had never paid more than $180,000 per year, but somehow she was able to get them to pay her $300,000 plus.)

Know how, experience, network, and capacity are all marketplace commodities and one SHOULD be able to make more money than someone else if they know the job better, have done it successfully, and achieve the objectives set before them.

Nonetheless - those people are still WORKING for what they get. And to think, as Barack Obama has been saying publicly for the last few days, that the American people were giving tax dollars to those earning in the top percentage is just a LIE!

Those people still pay MORE taxes than anyone else. And under the slightly reduced tax burden that they've enjoyed under the Bush economic plan - they still created more jobs, and more wealth for many additional citizens by re-investing their earnings into the workplace as well.

When THE ONE says "taking from the poor, and giving to the rich" he is flat out, 100% telling falsehoods, he knows it.

Further he doesn't care about truth and has not for months now...

Further his economic plan will bring about ruin to the poor people he has promised hope and change to - and he is either too dumb, or too dishonest to know it.(emphasis added)

Posted by Republican on Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
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Victor Davis Hanson notes some history of Obama's methods:

Individually, the extra-electoral efforts are irrelevant. But in the aggregate, they start to add up. In 1996 Obama goes to court, challenges the petition signatures of mostly African-American voters, and gets all his rivals eliminated from the ballot and so de facto runs unopposed.

In 2004 sealed divorce records were strangely released destroying the chances of his chief Democratic rival Blair Hull; then in the general, lightning again struck, and Republican front-runner Jack Ryan's sealed divorce records were likewise mysteriously released—and he too crashed, in effect, leaving Obama without a serious primary or general election rival.

In this campaign, Acorn galvanizes to register voters and almost immediately runs into serial charges of voter registration fraud. Now an Obama ad runs asking Americans simply to take the day off to help get out the Obama vote: apparently American businesses, universities, and the government all are supposed to sacrifice hundreds of millions of dollars in lost collective work days to subsidize the Obama campaign in order "to change history"?

When one marries all that with the swarming of radio stations when someone like Stanley Kurtz goes on, the threats to go to court to stop ads, or the blacklisting of TV stations who dared to conduct tough interviews, the same old pattern reappears of by any means necessary. And in turn the explanation for all that?

Add in the demonization of Joe the Plumber, who was minding his own business in his own driveway when Obama came up looking for a vote with cameras following.

And now add in the discovery of deliberate massive fundraising to bring in illegal campaign contributions.

For Obama, the end justifies the means. In his earlier efforts the Democratic Chicago machine took care of the opposition candidates. Obama himself helped train ACORN in voter registration and intimidation of bankers, so he knows their methods. And the Chicago Democratic machine is running Obama's campaign, so the intimidation of critics and the underworld methods of fundraising are being handled by experts.

Obama's morality is traceable to his Marxist traiining. The Saul Alinsky school of communist community organizing in which Obama immersed himself makes it clear: There is no such thing as right or wrong except as you see it. The end does justify the means. All means are okay. Truth is a commodity to be bent and twisted as you see fit to reach the goal. Use the smokescreen that best works with the masses. Tell them anything they'll believe to win. Alinsky's hero, to whom he dedicated his manual for social revolution, was Lucifer, who defied God and gained a kingdom.

Hanson concludes his observation this way:

The messianic style—the cosmic tug to "change history", or stop the seas from rising or the planet from heating, juxtaposed with the creepy faux-Greek columns, Michelle's "deign to enter" politics snippet, the fainting at rallies, the Victory Column mass address, the vero possumus presidential seal, and the 'we are the change we've been waiting for' mantra—reflects the omnipresent narcissism: the exalted ends of electing a prophet always justify the often crude and all too mortal means.

If this is considered 'right', I'd rather be wrong with McCain.

It has been discovered that the Obama campaign has disabled all normal credit card security checks online. As a consequence, illegal contributions can roll in from foreign and other prohibited sources using fake names. It has now been discovered that online donations may be made using pre-paid credit cards which can be purchansed at any variety store and are totally anonymous. In September alone the Obama campaign received over $100 million of its $150 million online. Such deliberate facilitation of illegal contributions by a presidential candidate is fraud at the highest imaginable level. As Mark Steyn correctly observed:

Two-thirds of the record-breaking haul Obama raised for the final stretch of the campaign comes from a racket set up to facilitate fake names, phony addresses and untraceable cards.

This is massive fraud to steal the election. How long has it been going on? How much of these huge sums the campaign has raised are illegal? The after-the-fact checking catches a mere fraction of the illegal when the automatic security measures are shut off and names like Adolphe Hitler go sailing through. And the media is looking the other way.

And to think the man presiding over this criminal enterprise might become president.

To read more, start here or here.

More focus is suddenly (at last) being put on Obama's Marxist socialism. Spreading the wealth or redistribution of wealth, whatever the term, is a hallmark of Marxist socialism.

Obama's mentor in Hawaii before college was a black member of the Communist Party of the U.S. In college he admits seeking out Marxists. In Chicago as a community organizer in the late 1980s and while moonlighting during his Harvard Law School days he studied the philosophy and methods of communist/Marxist Saul Alinsky. In his Illinois state senate days in 2001 he lamented that the supposedly liberal Warren Supreme Court hadn't facilitated the redistribution of wealth.

Some say Obama is using Alinsky tactics today, hiding his true redistribution of wealth plans by using vague language to stoke resentment and frustration while promising "hope" and "change." (Of course, Joe the Plumber caught Obama in an unguarded moment and Obama told Joe his higher taxes were nothing personal, that he just wanted to "spread the wealth.") Alinsky was a no-holds barred warrior, treating truth as an unnecessary impediment to moving forward. To him, the right words were whatever worked. This might explain why Obama so easily changes his positions and even misstates his past positions.

Obama Affinity to Marxists Dates Back to College Days
Barack Obama shrugs off charges of socialism, but noted in his own memoir that he carefully chose Marxist professors as friends in college.

By Bill Sammon

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

German philosopher Karl Marx, author of "The Communist Manifesto," advocated redistributing wealth in order to achieve a classless society.

Barack Obama laughs off charges of socialism. Joe Biden scoffs at references to Marxism. Both men shrug off accusations of liberalism.

But Obama himself acknowledges that he was drawn to socialists and even Marxists as a college student. He continued to associate with Marxists later in life, even choosing to launch his political career in the living room of a self-described Marxist, William Ayers, in 1995, when Obama was 34.

Obama's affinity for Marxists began when he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles.

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully," the Democratic presidential candidate wrote in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father." "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."

Obama's interest in leftist politics continued after he transferred to Columbia University in New York. He lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side, venturing to the East Village for what he called "the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union."

After graduating from Columbia in 1983, Obama spent a year working for a consulting firm and then went to work for what he described as "a Ralph Nader offshoot" in Harlem.

"In search of some inspiration, I went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of Black Panther fame, speak at Columbia," Obama wrote in "Dreams," which he published in 1995. "At the entrance to the auditorium, two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature."

Obama supporters point out that plenty of Americans flirt with radical ideologies in college, only to join the political mainstream later in life. But Obama, who made a point of noting how "carefully" he chose his friends in college, also chose to launch his political career in the Chicago living room of Ayers, a domestic terrorist who in 2002 proclaimed: "I am a Marxist."

Also present at that meeting was Ayers' wife, fellow terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, who once gave a speech extolling socialism, communism and "Marxism-Leninism."

Obama has been widely criticized for choosing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an anti-American firebrand, as his pastor. Wright is a purveyor of black liberation theology, which analysts say is based in part on Marxist ideas.

Few political observers go so far as to accuse Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, of being a Marxist. But Republican John McCain has been accusing Obama of espousing socialism ever since the Democrat told an Ohio plumber named Joe earlier this month that he wanted to "spread the wealth around."

Obama's running mate, Biden, recently contradicted his boss, saying: "He is not spreading the wealth around." The remark came as Biden was answering a question from a TV anchor who asked: "How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?"

"Are you joking? Is this a joke? Or is that a real question?" an incredulous Biden shot back. "It's a ridiculous comparison."

But the debate intensified Monday with the surfacing of a 2001 radio interview in which Obama lamented the Supreme Court's inability to enact "redistribution of wealth" -- a key tenet of socialism. On Tuesday, McCain said Obama aspires to become "Redistributionist-in-Chief."

Obama has managed to cultivate the image of a political moderate in spite of his consistently liberal voting record. In 2006, he published a second memoir, "The Audacity of Hope," that leaves little doubt about his adherence to the left.

"The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact," Obama wrote in "Audacity." "Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through my mother, who to the end of her life would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal."

National Journal magazine ranked Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. The publication is far from conservative, employing such journalists as Linda Douglass, who resigned in May to become Obama's traveling press secretary.

Hillary Clinton supporters now claim that Obama committed massive fraud in their caucus contests in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. The evidence in this article sounds pretty convincing. The mystery is that the Clinton campaign did nothing about it, even thoug Obama's entire margin of victory was due to his excellent showing in the caucuses.

Obama has been involved in what looks like some variety of election fraud since his first election to office. In his first run for Illinois state senate he was able to knock all three of his Democratic opponents off the ballot by challenging their signatures. The incumbent was knocked out even though she had filed twice the number of required signatures. While challenges occur all time, for three to be knocked off has to be some sort of a record. This could only have happened with the collusion of the Chicago political machine, which apparently had decided this was a bright, young fellow they could do business with who had a promising future.

In the Iowa presidential nomination caucuses, there were reports of busloads of African-Americans pouring in from Chicago. Obama had close ties with ACORN's Chicago unit, which is reported to have worked for him in his first Illiinois race. (Since he had knocked out all Democratic opposition from the ballot and there was no Republican candidate, one wonders what they did.)

And it has now been admitted by the Obama campaign that ACORN was paid $832,000 for voter turnout work in the contest with Hillary (after they disguised the payment as being for something else.

A long account with the ring of truth.

Hillary Backers Decry Massive Obama Vote Fraud
Monday, October 27, 2008 10:45 AM

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman

With accusations of voter registration fraud swirling as early voting begins in many states, some Hillary Clinton supporters are saying: “I told you so.”

Already in Iowa, the Obama campaign was breaking the rules, busing in supporters from neighboring states to vote illegally in the first contest in the primaries and physically intimidating Hillary supporters, they say.

Obama’s surprisingly strong win in Iowa, which defied all the polls, propelled his upstart candidacy to front-runner status. But Lynette Long, a Hillary supporter from Bethesda, Md., who has a long and respected academic career, believes Obama’s victory in Iowa and in 12 other caucus states was no miracle. “It was fraud,” she told Newsmax.

Long has spent several months studying the caucus and primary results.

“After studying the procedures and results from all 14 caucus states, interviewing dozens of witnesses, and reviewing hundreds of personal stories, my conclusion is that the Obama campaign willfully and intentionally defrauded the American public by systematically undermining the caucus process,” she said.

In Hawaii, for example, the caucus organizers ran out of ballots, so Obama operatives created more from Post-its and scraps of paper and dumped them into ice cream buckets. “The caucuses ended up with more ballots than participants, a sure sign of voter fraud,” Long said.

In Nevada, Obama supporters upturned a wheelchair-bound woman who wanted to caucus for Hillary, flushed Clinton ballots down the toilets, and told union members they could vote only if their names were on the list of Obama supporters.

In Texas, more than 2,000 Clinton and Edwards supporters filed complaints with the state Democratic Party because of the massive fraud. The party acknowledged that the Obama campaign’s actions “amount to criminal violations” and ordered them to be reported to state and federal law enforcement, but nothing happened.

In caucus after caucus, Obama bused in supporters from out of state, intimidated elderly voters and women, and stole election packets so Hillary supporters couldn’t vote. Thanks to these and other strong-arm tactics, Obama won victories in all but one of the caucuses, even in states such as Maine where Hillary had been leading by double digits in the polls.

Obama’s win in the caucuses, which were smaller events than the primaries and were run by the party, not the states, gave him the margin of victory he needed to win a razor-thin majority in the delegate count going into the Democratic National Convention.

Without these caucus wins, which Long and others claim were based on fraud, Clinton would be the Democrats’ nominee running against John McCain.

Citing a detailed report on the voting results and delegate accounts by accountant Piniel Cronin, “there were only four pledged delegates between Hillary and Obama once you discount caucus fraud,” Long said.

Long has compiled many of these eyewitness reports from the 14 caucus states in a 98-page, single-spaced report and in an interactive Web site.

ACORN involvement

The Obama campaign recently admitted that it paid an affiliate of ACORN, the controversial community organizer that Obama represented in Chicago, more than $832,000 for “voter turnout” work during the primaries. The campaign initially claimed the money had been spent on “staging, sound and light” and “advance work.”

State and federal law enforcement in 11 states are investigating allegations of voter registration fraud against the Obama campaign. ACORN workers repeatedly registered voters in the name of “Mickey Mouse,” and registered the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys twice: once in Nevada, and again in Minnesota.

A group that has worked with ACORN in the past registered a dead goldfish under the name “Princess Nudelman” in Illinois. When reporters informed Beth Nudelman, a Democrat, that her former pet was a registered voter, she said, “This person is a dead fish."

ACORN was known for its “intimidation tactics,” said independent scholar Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., who has researched Obama’s long-standing ties to the group.

Fully 30 percent of 1.3 million new voters ACORN claims to have registered this year are believed to be illegitimate.

Long shared with Newsmax some of the emails and sworn affidavits she received from Hillary supporters who witnessed first-hand the thuggish tactics employed by Obama campaign operatives in Iowa and elsewhere.

Jeff, a precinct captain for Clinton from Davenport, Iowa, thought his caucus was in the bag for his candidate, until just minutes before the voting actually began.

“From 6-6:30 p.m., it appeared as I had expected. Young, old males, females, Hispanics, whites, gay and lesbian friends arriving. Very heavily for Ms. Clinton, a fair amount for Edwards and some stragglers for Obama,” he said.

That makeup corresponded to what he had witnessed from many precinct walks he had made through local neighborhoods.

“My mind began to feel victory for my lady,’ he said. “THEN: at 6:50 p.m., over 75 people of African-American descent came walking in, passed the tables and sat in the Obama section. I knew one of them from my canvassing. I knew another one who did not live in this precinct. And aside from four or five families that live on Hillandale Road, there are no other black people in this unusually white precinct. And one of those black couples were in my Hillary section,” he said.

Thanks to the last-minute influx of unknown Obama supporters, Obama won twice the number of delegates from the precinct as Hillary Clinton.

After it was over, “a very large bus was seen in the parking lot afterwards carrying these folks back” to Illinois, Jeff said.

Obama’s flagrant busing of out-of-state caucus participants from Illinois was so obvious that even Joe Biden — today his running mate, then his rival — pointed it out at the time.

At a campaign stop before the Jan. 3 caucus at the JJ Diner in Des Moines, Biden “said what we were all thinking when he got on stage and said, ‘Hello Iowa!’ and then turned to Barack’s crowd and shouted, ‘and Hello Chicago!’” another precinct captain for Hillary told Long.

Thanks to Illinois campaign workers bused across the border into Iowa, all the precincts in eastern Iowa went for Obama, guaranteeing his win in the caucuses, Long said.

Obama supporters were also bused into northeast Iowa from Omaha, Nebraska, where Obama campaign workers were seen handing out “i-pods and free stuff: T-shirts, clothes, shoes, and free meals” to students and people in homeless shelters,” according to eyewitness reports Long collected.

In Iowa City, red and white chartered buses with Illinois license plates arrived from Illinois packed with boisterous African-American high school students, who came to caucus for Obama in Iowa after being recruited by Obama campaign workers.

2,000 complaints in Texas

In a change in the Democratic National Committee rules for this year’s election season, four states had caucuses and primaries: Washington, Nebraska, Idaho, and Texas. “But Texas is the only one that counted both the caucus result and the primary result,” Long told Newsmax. “The others didn’t count the primary at all, calling it a ‘beauty contest.’”

Because caucuses are more informal, and can last hours, they tend to favor candidates with a strong ground operation or whose supporters use strong-arm tactics to intimidate their rivals.

“There is inherent voter disenfranchisement in the caucuses,” Long said. “Women are less likely to go to caucuses than men, because they don’t like the public nature of the caucus. The elderly are less likely to go to a caucus. People who work shifts can’t go if they work the night shift. And parents with young children can’t go out for four hours on a week night. All these people are traditionally Clinton supporters,” she said.

But Obama’s victories in the caucuses weren’t the result of better organization, Long insists. “It was fraud.”

In state after state, Hillary was leading Obama in the polls right up until the last minute, when Obama won a landslide victory in the caucuses.

The discrepancies between the polls and the caucus results were stunning, Long told Newsmax. The most flagrant example was Minnesota. A Minnesota Public Radio/Humphrey Institute poll just one week before the Feb. 5 caucus gave Hillary a 7-point lead over Obama, 40-33.

But when the Minnesota caucus results were counted, Obama won by a landslide, with 66.39 percent to just 32.23 percent for Hillary, giving him 48 delegates, compared with 24 for Clinton.

“No poll is that far off,” Long told Newsmax.

Similar disparities occurred in 13 of 14 caucus states.

In Colorado and Idaho, Obama had a 2-point edge over Hillary Clinton in the polls, but won by more than 2-1 in the caucuses, sweeping most delegates.

In Kansas, Hillary had a slight edge over Obama in the polls, but Obama won 74 percent of the votes in the caucus and most of the delegates. In nearly every state, he bested the pre-caucus polls by anywhere from 12 percent to more than 30 percent.

This year’s primary rules for the Democrats favored the caucus states over the primary states.

“Caucus states made up only 1.1 million (3 percent) of all Democratic votes, but selected 626 (15 percent) of the delegates,” says Gigi Gaston, a filmmaker who has made a documentary on the caucus fraud.

In Texas alone, she says, there were more than 2,000 complaints from Hillary Clinton and John Edwards supporters of Obama’s strong-arm tactics.

One Hillary supporter, who appears in Gaston’s new film, “We Will Not Be Silenced,” says she received death threats from Obama supporters after they saw her address in an online video she made to document fraud during the Texas caucus. “People called me a whore and a skank,” she said.

John Siegel, El Paso Area Captain for Hillary, said, “Some people saw outright cheating. Other people just saw strong-arm tactics. I saw fraud.”

Another woman, who was not identified in the film, described the sign-in process. “You’re supposed to sign your names on these sheets. The sheets are supposed to be controlled, and passed out — this is kind of how you maintain order. None of that was done. The sheets were just flying all over the place. You could put in your own names. You could add your own sheets or anything. It was just filled with fraud.”

Other witnesses described how Obama supporters went through the crowds at the caucus telling Hillary supporters they could go home because their votes had been counted, when in fact no vote count had yet taken place.

“I couldn’t believe this was happening,” one woman said in the film. “I thought this only happened in Third World countries.”

On election day in Texas, Clinton campaign lawyer Lyn Utrecht issued a news release that the national media widely ignored.

The campaign legal hot line has been flooded with calls containing specific accusations of irregularities and voter intimidation against the Obama campaign,” she wrote. “This activity is undemocratic, probably illegal, and reflects a wanton disregard for the caucus process.”

She identified 18 separate precincts where Obama operatives had removed voting packets before the Clinton voters could arrive, despite a written warning from the state party not to remove them.

The hot line also received numerous calls during the day that “the Obama campaign has taken over caucus sites and locked the doors, excluding Clinton campaign supporters from participating in the caucus,” she wrote.

“There are numerous instances of Obama supporters filing out precinct convention sign-in sheets during the day and submitting them as completed vote totals at caucus. This is expressly against the rules,” she added.

But no one seemed to care.

Despite Clinton’s three-and-a-half point win in the Texas primary — 50.87 percent to 47.39 percent —Obama beat her in the caucus the same day by 56 to 43.7 percent, giving him a 38-to-29 advantage in delegates.

Linda Hayes investigated the results at the precinct level in three state Senate districts. Under the rules of the Texas Democratic Party, participants in the caucuses had to reside in the precinct where they were caucusing, and had to have voted in the Democratic primary that same day.

When she began to see the results coming in from the precincts that were wildly at variance with the primary results, “I could see that something was wrong,” Hayes said.

Hayes says she found numerous anomalies as she went through the precinct sign-in sheets.

“Many, many, many Obama people either came to the wrong precinct, they did not sign in properly, they did not show ID, or they did not vote that day.” And yet, their votes were counted.

In a letter to Rep. Lois Capps, a Clinton supporter calling himself “Pacific John,” described the fraud he had witnessed during the caucuses.

“On election night in El Paso, it became obvious that the Obama field campaign was designed to steal caucuses. Prior to that, it was impossible for me to imagine the level of attempted fraud and disruption we would see,” he wrote.

“We saw stolen precincts where Obama organizers fabricated counts, made false entries on sign-in sheets, suppressed delegate counts, and suppressed caucus voters. We saw patterns such as missing electronic access code sheets and precinct packets taken before the legal time, like elsewhere in the state. Obama volunteers illegally took convention materials state-wide, with attempts as early as 6:30 am.”

The story of how Obama stole the Democratic Party caucuses — and consequently, the Democratic Party nomination — is important not just because it prefigures potential voter fraud in the Nov. 4 presidential election, which is under way.

It’s important because it fits a pattern that Chicago journalists and a few national and international commentators have noticed in all of the elections Obama has won in his career.

NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher described Obama’s first election victory, for the Illinois state Senate, in a recent commentary that appeared in the London Telegraph.

“Mr. Obama won a seat in the state Senate in 1996 by the unorthodox means of having surrogates successfully challenge the hundreds of nomination signatures that candidates submit. His Democratic rivals, including Alice Palmer, the incumbent, were all disqualified,” Fletcher wrote.

Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate “was even more curious,” conservative columnist Tony Blankley wrote in The Washington Times.

Citing an account that appeared in The Times of London, Blankley described how Obama managed to squeeze out his main Democratic rival, Blair Hull, after divorce papers revealed allegations that Hull had allegedly made a death threat to his former wife.

Then in the general election, “lightning struck again,” Blankley wrote, when his Republican opponent, wealthy businessman Jack Ryan, was forced to withdraw in extremis after his divorce papers revealed details of his sexual life with his former wife.

Just weeks before the election, the Illinois Republican party called on Alan Keyes of Maryland to challenge Obama in the general election. Obama won a landslide victory.

“Mr. Obama’s elections are pregnant with the implications that he has so far gamed every office he has sought by underhanded and sordid means,” Blankley wrote, while “the American media has let these extraordinary events simply pass without significant comment.”

Hillary Clinton supporters, belatedly, now agree.

It's shocking that Obama has been able to hide his true aims until just a few days before the election. Joe the Plumber inadvertently exposed the truth with his question to Obama about higher taxes on small businesses: Obama blurted out that he wants to "spread the wealth."

Now a more shocking disclosure comes in the form of a 2001 radio interview in Chicago (found by an individual, not the media) in which Obama expresses his dismay with the U.S. Constitution's limits on governmental power and his desire for judges who will "interpret" away the "essential constraints" incorporated into the U.S. Constitution by the founders so the government can redistribute the income and savings of some people to others. The judges he wants are those with "the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old." How about respect for the facts, the law and the Constitution? Obama wants more than just socialism, he wants totalitarian socialism, an all-powerful government to take from those with means to give to those with needs. That kind of unrestrained power the Constitution is designed to prevent.

As is often the case the brilliant lawyer John Hinderaker of Power Line puts the cards on the table so they can be clearly read.

It is extraordinary that only now, a week before Election Day, have Barack Obama's beliefs and policies come into focus. After months of "hope," "change" and "I'm not George Bush," the truth has finally tumbled out: Barack Obama wants to redistribute America's wealth, raise taxes on those who create jobs, create vast new handout programs styled as "tax relief," and appoint judges who will radically redefine the relationship between American citizens and their government.

This last point is especially remarkable. The Founders feared arbitrary government power, and drafted a Constitution and amendments intended to protect your property from expropriation. Obama would stand this constitutional framework on its head by appointing judges who believe that the Founders were wrong, and their "error" can be corrected by court decisions to the effect that the federal government has a constitutional duty to carry out a radical redistribution of wealth.

Hinderaker quotes some points McCain made today that show the sharp contrasts between his policies and Obama's, such as this one:

Senator Obama is running to be Redistributionist in Chief. I'm running to be Commander in Chief. Senator Obama is running to spread the wealth. I'm running to create more wealth. Senator Obama is running to punish the successful. I'm running to make everyone successful.

Read all of John's post and more McCain quotes by clicking on the link above or here.

As for the disasters that would flow from Obama' judicial appointments, click here to read Professor Thomas Sowell's critique.

Obama's mentor Jeremiah Wright has been sent off to hide, but should we forget Obama absorbed Wright's messages of white hate, Jew-hate and America-hate for 20 years. Why would he stay with him until he proved an embarrassment? Did he agree with what he was saying? 20 years, 1000 Sundays. What did Obama say after "God Damn America"?

Professor Thomas Sowell sounds another urgent warning about the riskiness of an Obama presidency. He can "kill" the U.S. Constitution by appointing the judges he says he likes, those with "“the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

Like so many things that Obama says, it may sound nice if you don’t stop and think — and chilling if you do stop and think. Do we really want judges who decide cases based on who you are, rather than on the facts and the law?

We can vote a president out of office at the next election if we don’t like him. But we can never vote out the federal judges he appoints in courts across the country, including justices of the Supreme Court.

Judge This
Obama and the law

By Thomas Sowell

One of the biggest and most long-lasting “change” to expect if Barack Obama becomes president of the United States is in the kinds of federal judges he appoints. These include Supreme Court justices, as well as other federal justices all across the country, all of whom will have lifetime tenure.

more...

Three Democrats stand out as responsible for costing Americans much of their life savings in the name of putting more people into affordable housing that turned out to be not affordable at all.

The three Democratic politicians who, not accidentally but deliberately, undermined the American financial system and caused this global catastrophe are Barack Obama, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank and Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd.

What is driving the world collapse of the stock markets? What is causing the savings of Americans to shrivel up? Democratic policies.

Yes, it's the world financial credit freeze-up. But what triggered the freeze-up? Democratic policies.

It was the defaults of subprime mortgages packaged and sold by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac around the world. But what caused the defaults? Democratic policies.

Who made banks make unsafe mortgage loans? Well-intentioned Democrats who thought it would be "fair" for people who couldn't afford houses to get them.

Who made Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy up those bad loans and palm them off on the world? Democrats in Congress pressured by interest groups such as Obama's ally ACORN.

The cost to investors so far has been hundreds of billions of dollars. American workers who have invested in mutual funds and 401(k)s have suffered badly. People are losing their jobs because of this crisis.

The following account is the story the mainstream media will not tell the American people because they fear it would jeopardize an Obama victory. It will be a travesty and a tragedy for Americans if Democrats capture the White House and Congress after their policies brought on this worldwide catastrophe.

It will be too late after the election to document the involvement of Obama and his Democratic colleagues, whose zeal to change America into a socialist state brought disaster to the world. You know what will happen: Democrats will convene hearings with their favorite witnesses to blame anybody but themselves. Democrats don't like the free enterprise system they meddle with and in this case brought crashing down.

Democratic policies brought on the housing bubble and its collapse, the default of U.S. backed obligations all around the world and panic everywhere. Democrats are pointing the finger at Wall Street, but that doesn't wash. Wall Street was packaging and selling Fannie and Freddie mortgage loans for years. What happened was Fannie and Freddie started buying up so many subprime loans that the packages they were now sending around the world were junk, but still backed by the implicit guaranty of the U.S. government so people, banks and governments bought.

Fannie and Freddie abandoned their obligation to protect the taxpayers of the United States to please the Democratic congressman who were pressing them to expand the subprime mortgage loan market by buying risky loans and giving banks and mortgage companies more money to make more risky loans.

President Bush and Senate Republicans including Senator McCain pleaded with Congress in 2005 and 2006 to pass legislation to get Fannie and Freddie under control. Senate Republicans even got a bill to do just that out of the Senate Banking Committee (S. 190), but Senate Democrats led by Senator Harry Reid and Christopher Dodd, with the vocal backing of Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, said there was no crisis and blocked a vote on the Senate floor. As a Democratic U.S. Senator Obama supported their action.

How key was Obama's role? Obama helped train ACORN operatives in the early 1990s how to bully and intimidate banks and bankers into making risky mortgage loans to those who couldn't afford them, shouting cries of "discrimination" and "racism." Obama was one of the very first pushing for such unsafe loans to be made. Those cries kept building through the '90s and into this decade. As a result, riskier and riskier mortgage loans were made and Fannie and Freddie was pressured more and more by Democrats in Congress to buy the unsafe mortgage loans and send them off in packages to the world as if they were of the same quality they had been in the past. They weren't. Obama lived to see the colossal damage done by his policy of intimidation of banks and indeed to help give the final push to disaster by opposing reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a senator in 2005 and 2006. Despite the world chaos and massive losses to American investors, Obama as late as 2007 was still insisting subprime mortgages were a "good idea."

To read about the roles of the other two principal destroyers of savings, click here. Also, look for the heading Categories on the right side of this website and click on Democratic Financial Crisis.

The leading American expert on Islam Daniel Pipes said this a few days ago:

Obama's multiple links to anti-Americans and subversives mean he would fail the standard security clearance process for Federal employees. Islamic aggression represents America's strategic enemy; Obama's many insalubrious connections raise grave doubts about his fitness to serve as America's commander-in-chief.

For the many reasons why, see. Dr.Pipes' explantion published in the Philadelphia Bulletin.

As Dr. Pipes points out, Obama with the complicitness of the media, has been able to hide his extensive relationships with Islamist organizations and individuals whose goal is the subversion of the U.S. Constitution and the installation of Islamic law, Sharia, in the United States. Just recently we learned of Obama's disdain for the Constitution's "constraining" principles incorporated in the document by the founders.

It is disturbing how much of Obama's life and relationships he has still been able to hide. His birth records, his life at college, his life at law school, much of his Illinois senate activity, details of his community organizing are all closed off by the Obama campaign and the media has not demanded the facts be known. So Obama, a week before the presidential election, remains an unknown to millions, who know only what the campaign has packaged as his fictionalized and incomplete life story. What is he hiding? Will we learn the truth later to our sorrow and America's peril?

Remember, we don't know what we don't know. But we know we don't know.

The distinguished British political observer Melanie Phillips earlier wrote a column of disbelief that Obama was holding a lead in the presidential campaign. She reviewed all she had found out about the people who surrounded Obama and summed up her incredulity succinctly in this telling paragraph:

You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant* radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.

In this article she turns to foreign policy. She is an expert on Islamic supremacism, having written a highly detailed account ("Londonistan") of how Islam has infiltrated the UK and is threatening its existence as an outpost of Western civilization. She examines the positions of McCain and Obama on the threat of Islam. We know that McCain has called Islamic supremacism "the transcendent challenge of our times." Obama has not really expressed himself on the threat. Ms. Phillips does her own evaluation. She concludes that McCain is the only reasonable choice for a president who will defend America. She has many reasons for her decision, but this statement is telling:

McCain understands that an Islamic war of conquest is being waged on a number of diverse fronts which all have to be seen in relation to each other. For Obama, however, the real source of evil in the world is America.

Also,

Obama assumes that Islamic terrorism is driven by despair, poverty, inflammatory US policy and the American presence on Muslim soil in the Persian Gulf. Thus he adopts the agenda of the Islamists themselves.

Obama has already stated he will emasculate America's military strength at a time of great danger from Islam and when both China and Russia are engaged in significant military build-ups.

It doesn't help that Obama has surrounded himself with enemies of Israel and appeasers of Iran and fails to see the importance of Israel to the U.S.

Obama dismisses the threat from Islamism, shows zero grasp of the strategic threat to the region and the world from the encirclement of Israel by Iran, displays a similar failure to grasp the strategic importance of Iraq, thinks Israel is instead the source of Arab and Muslim aggression against the west, believes that a Palestinian state would promote world peace and considers that Israel – particularly through the ‘settlements’ – is the principal obstacle to that happy outcome. Accordingly, Obama has said he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders – actually the strategically indefensible 1948 cease-fire line, known accordingly as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.

Her analysis is worth reading in its entirety.

Is America really going to do this?

FRIDAY, 24TH OCTOBER 2008
Melanie Phillips in the UK’s Spectator

The impact of the financial crisis on the American presidential election has somewhat obscured the most important reason why the prospect of an Obama presidency is giving so many people nightmares. This is the fear that, if he wins, US defences will be emasculated at a time of unprecedented international peril and the enemies of America and the free world will seize their opportunity to destroy the west.

Personally, I don’t give any credence to the ‘support’ for one candidate over the other that has been expressed by the enemies of civilisation (Iran and Hamas ‘support’ Obama, while an al Qaeda blogger ‘supports’ McCain). Their agenda is simply to sow confusion and promote American recriminations and disarray. Nor do I set much store by many of the remarks made by either candidate during the latter stages of this election campaign, since under this kind of pressure both will now say pretty much anything to win it. The New York Times has run a useful analysis of the candidates’ foreign policy campaign statements which shows how Obama has carefully tacked to the ‘hard power’ agenda while McCain has in turn nodded towards ‘soft power’.

No, the only way to assess their position is to look at each man in the round, at what his general attitude is towards war and self-defence, aggression and appeasement, the values of the west and those of its enemies and – perhaps most crucially of all – the nature of the advisers and associates to whom he is listening. As I have said before, I do not trust McCain; I think his judgment is erratic and impetuous, and sometimes wrong. But on the big picture, he gets it. He will defend America and the free world whereas Obama will undermine them and aid their enemies.

Here’s why. McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else. McCain stands for American exceptionalism, the belief that American values are superior to tyrannies. Obama stands for the expiation of America’s original sin in oppressing black people, the third world and the poor.

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That’s why he believes in ‘soft power’ — diplomacy, aid, rectifying ‘grievances’ (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America’s defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will ‘cut investments in unproven missile defense systems’; he will ‘not weaponize space’; he will ‘slow our development of future combat systems’; and he will also ‘not develop nuclear weapons,’ pledging to seek ‘deep cuts’ in America’s arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups.

McCain understands that an Islamic war of conquest is being waged on a number of diverse fronts which all have to be seen in relation to each other. For Obama, however, the real source of evil in the world is America. The evil represented by Iran and the Islamic jihadists is apparently all America’s fault. ‘A lot of evil’s been perpetuated based on the claim that we were fighting evil,’ he said. Last May, he dismissed Iran as a tiny place which posed no threat to the US -- before reversing himself the very next day when he said Iran was a great threat which had to be defeated. He has also said that Hezbollah and Hamas have ‘legitimate grievances’. Really? And what might they be? Their grievances are a) the existence of Israel b) its support by America c) the absence of salafist Islam in the world. Does Obama think these ‘grievances’ are legitimate?

To solve world conflict, Obama places his faith in the UN club of terror and tyranny, which is currently fuelling the murderous global demonisation of Israel for having the temerity to defend itself and is even now preparing for a rerun of its own anti-Jew hate-fest of Durban 2, which preceded 9/11 by a matter of days.

McCain understands that Israel is the victim rather than the victimiser in the Middle East, that it is surrounded by genocidal enemies whose undiminished intention is to destroy it as a Jewish state, and that is both the first line of defence against the Islamist attack on the free world and its most immediate and important target.

Obama dismisses the threat from Islamism, shows zero grasp of the strategic threat to the region and the world from the encirclement of Israel by Iran, displays a similar failure to grasp the strategic importance of Iraq, thinks Israel is instead the source of Arab and Muslim aggression against the west, believes that a Palestinian state would promote world peace and considers that Israel – particularly through the ‘settlements’ – is the principal obstacle to that happy outcome. Accordingly, Obama has said he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders – actually the strategically indefensible 1948 cease-fire line, known accordingly as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.

Obama would thus speak to Iran’s genocidal mullahs without preconditions on his side (the same mullahs have now laid down their own preconditions for America: pull all US troops out of the Middle East, and abandon support for ‘Zionist’ Israel) but has said he would have problems dealing with an Israeli government headed by a member of Israel’s Likud Party. In similar vein, it is notable that Obama opposed the congressional resolution labelling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, which passed the Senate by a wide margin with support from both parties. And had he had his way, there would have been no ‘surge’ in Iraq and America would instead have run up the white flag, with the incalculable bloodbath and strengthening of the jihad that would have followed.

Obama assumes that Islamic terrorism is driven by despair, poverty, inflammatory US policy and the American presence on Muslim soil in the Persian Gulf. Thus he adopts the agenda of the Islamists themselves. This is not surprising since many of his connections suggest that that the man who may be elected President of a country upon which the Islamists have declared war is himself firmly in the Islamists’ camp. Daniel Pipes lists Obama’s extensive connections to Islamists in general and the Nation of Islam in particular, and concludes with this astounding observation:

Obama's multiple links to anti-Americans and subversives mean he would fail the standard security clearance process for Federal employees. Islamic aggression represents America’s strategic enemy; Obama’s many insalubrious connections raise grave doubts about his fitness to serve as America's commander-in-chief.

The hatred that these Islamist connections entertain towards Israel is reflected amongst Obama’s own advisers. With one notable exception in Dennis Ross, whose late arrival in Camp Obama suggests a cosmetic exercise designed to allay alarm among Israel supporters, his advisers are overwhelmingly not only hostile to Israel but perpetrate the loathesome canard that Jews have too much power over American policy.

The former Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, not only denounced Israel’s war against Hezbollah thus:

I think what the Israelis are doing today [2006] for example in Lebanon is in effect– maybe not in intent – the killing of hostages

but also supports Mearsheimer and Walt’s notorious smear that the Jews have subverted America’s foreign policy in the interests of Israel. Merrill McPeak, vice chairman of Obama’s campaign and his chief military adviser, has similarly blamed problems in the Middle East on the influence of people who live in New York City and Miami (guess who) whom no ‘politician wants to run against’ and who he says exercise undue influence on America’s foreign affairs. Most revolting of all is Samantha Power, a very close adviser whom Obama fired for calling Hillary a ‘monster’ but who says she still expects to be in Obama’s administration. Not only has Power has advocated the ending of all aid to Israel and redirecting it to the Palestinians, but she has spoken about the need to land a ‘mammoth force’ of US troops in Israel to protect the Palestinians from Israeli attempts at genocide (sic) -- and has complained that criticism of Barack Obama all too often came down to what was ‘good for the Jews’.

There are, alas, many in the west for whom all this is music to their ears. Whether through wickedness, ideology, stupidity or derangement, they firmly believe that the ultimate source of conflict in the world derives at root from America and Israel, whose societies, culture and values they want to see emasculated or destroyed altogether. They are drooling at the prospect that an Obama presidency will bring that about. The rest of us can’t sleep at night.

To be sure, in Obama's circle of America-haters, Jeremiah Wright and Willam (Bill) Ayers rank high. Wright's rantings of "God Damn America" still ring in our ears. And how can one forget Ayers' bombings of the Capitol and the Pentagon and his (fortunately) failed plans to explode a nail bomb at a Fort Dix dance?

But are there other Obama America-haters as despicable? Some say yes.

Rashid Khalidi was a spokesman for Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization at a time when the U.S. had designated it a terrorist organization. PLO members killed the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Khalidi left Lebanon and wound up in Chicago sharing many dinners with Obama and his wife. Obama toasted him as he left Chicago to head up the most anti-Israeli Middle East Studies program in America at Columbia. Obama steered money from a foundation he chaired to an organization headed by Khalidi that in turn sent money off to the terrorist PLO.

It's no wonder that a recent poll in Israel had McCain favored overwhelmingly 46% to 34%. The Middle East expert and Israeli author Caroline Glick has called Obama's rise "frightening."

Check this Power Lilne report out.

Update: Guess what? Andy McCarthy does some digging and finds out that Ayers and Khalidi were best friends. Khalidi and Obama were buddies. And Ayers and Obama together handed out tens of millions of foundation money to radical groups, including $75,000 to Khalidi's rabidly anti-Israel foundation, which in turn funneled money to the PLO. All these fine folks gathered together for a farewell party for Khalidi who was off to head Columbia's anti-Israeli Middle East Studies department. Obama was reported to have offered a toast, as did many others. Imagine what the remarks about Israel were! Actually, one doesn't have to imagine: The Obama-backing Los Angeles Times has a tape of the reception. But the Times refuses to release it. Journalism's highest standards at work. Where's the outrage?

Andrew McCarthy, the federal prosecutor who sent the Islamic terrorist, the blind sheikh who masterminded the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, to prison for life, finds yet another despicable character in Obama's Augean stables: Communist Michael Klonsky.

As McCarthy says:

To be clear, as it seems always necessary to repeat when Obamaniacs, in their best Saul Alinsky tradition, shout down the opposition: This is not about guilt by association. The issue is not that Obama knows Klonsky … or Ayers … or Dohrn … or Wright … or Rashid Khalidi …

The issue is that Obama promoted and collaborated with these anti-American radicals. The issue is that he shared their ideology.

Here’s what you need to know. Klonsky is an unabashed communist whose current mission is to spread Marxist ideology in the American classroom. Obama funded him to the tune of nearly $2 million. Obama, moreover, gave Klonsky a broad platform to broadcast his ideas: a “social justice” blog on the official Obama campaign website.

From foundations he headed Obama doled out about $2 million for Klonsky's causes.

Read it.

October 22, 2008, 1:50 a.m.

Another Communist in Obama’s Orb
Meet Michael Klonsky, Obama's "social justice" education expert.

How does Obama see himself as president working with a Democratic Congress to "spread the wealth"? How do you take money away from those who have earned it to give to those who want it -- or who Obama says "deserve it."? Obama has been plotting to do that for years. What bothered him was the "constraining" provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Think of that: Obama complained that the Warren Court (which some say was the least conservative Supreme Court ever) "didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution" to take on the question of redistribution of wealth. The U.S. Constitution is concerned with limiting powers of government so that it cannot ride roughshod over people. Their rights are to be protected. This Obama doesn't like.

How can Obama take an oath of office -- as he did for his U.S. Senate seat --pledging to uphold the Constitution when he clearly doesn't like it and wants to find activist judges to help him get around it.

Breathtaking.

A judge who often writes at the Hugh Hewitt blog has analyzed a number of Obama statements and has reached this conclusion:

[Obama] understands precisely how to advance a hard-line liberal agenda in each brach of government. Redistribution of wealth is something best suited to a hard-left president and Congress to accomplish, working hand-in-glove. And for the giant leaps — the things which not even a left-of-center executive and legislature can accomplish — the president gets to appoint activist judges.

Even back in 2001, Barack Obama was already focused on building a "coalition of power" in the executive and legislative branches that could indeed bring about a national redistribution of wealth which even the most activist courts couldn't achieve on their own.

The reason for conservatives and moderates to be concerned about Barack Obama is not simply that he's a hard-left liberal — it's that he's an ambitious and talented hard-left liberal. He's seen where the Warren Court fell short. Barack Obama is now literally only days away from, in his words from this [2002] radio program, possibly "put[ting] together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change." Of that, we ought to all be duly terrified.

John McCain's statement: What Obama calls "fairness," Europeans call "socialism" and Americans call "welfare."

And read Bill Whittle's expressions of disgust at Obama lying about his long-held position in favor of taking a man's property away and giving it to other people and the media for not doing its job in investigating and airing the facts about the Marxist socialist Obama.

Listen to the audio.

Polls are slanted and hyped by the media hoping to discourage the turnout of those who believe McCain/Pain is the only rational choice for America.

The most reliable poll by past results has Obama up by only 4% and more than 10% undecided. Because of the relentless intimidation by the media shouting racism at anyone who doesn't support Obama, it's a fair inference that some in the Obama column will not vote for him and a large percentage of the "undecideds" will vote for McCain/Palin but just aren't saying so.

This is to say that victory for sanity and America's futre is very possible, indeed, likely.

The recent news that tens of millions of the dollars the Obama campaign is now spending to flood the airwaves are illegal contributions from foreign sources and others with a stake in an Obama election exposes the corruption at the heart of the campaign. The Chicago Democratic machine men running the campaign know how to collect money illegally from unidentiable sources -- foreigners ncluded -- by shutting down credit card ID systems.

His alliances with people who hate America and actively work to undermine it -- Wright, Ayers, ACORN, Pfleger, Khalidi, Klonsky -- cannot be ignored.

Enought people in the end will see through the Obama pretense.

Professor Thomas Sowell sums up the situation well.

Some people who see the fraud in what Obama is saying are amazed that others do not.

The vote for president on November 4th is momentous. A victory for Obama would represent, as one writer put it, the biggest lurch to the left in the history of the country. Or, as Mark Steyn, posited the alternatives: Would it be Independence Day or "Dependence Day"? It also would be a danger to the safety and security of the United States.

Professor Sowell, as a black man, has made it clear that he, like most Americans, would welcome the election of a qualified black man as president of the United States. He has examined Obama's past, his positions and what he has done and is doing and has no doubt in his mind that Obama does not have the record, the character or the integrity to be president.

Representative government exists, in the first place, because we the voters cannot possibly have all the information necessary to make rational decisions on all the things that the government does. We cannot rule through polls or referendums. We must trust someone to represent us, especially as President of the United States.

Once we recognize this basic fact of representative government, then the question of how trustworthy a candidate is becomes a more urgent question than any of the so-called “real issues.”

A candidate who spends two decades promoting polarization and then runs as a healer and uniter, rather than a divider, forfeits all trust by that fact alone.

It's worth reading all of Professor Sowell's analysis of The Great Pretender.

Can Obama Be Trusted?

By Thomas Sowell
Creators Syndicate
October 27, 2008

Although Senator Barack Obama has been allied with a succession of far-Left individuals over the years, that is only half the story. There are, after all, some honest and decent people on the Left. But these have not been the ones that Obama has been allied with — allied, not merely “associated” with.

ACORN is not just an organization on the left. In addition to the voter frauds that ACORN has been involved in over the years, it is an organization with a history of thuggery, including going to bankers’ homes to harass them and their families, in order to force banks to lend to people with low credit ratings.

Nor was Barack Obama’s relationship with ACORN just a matter of once being their attorney long ago. More recently, he has directed hundreds of thousands of dollars their way. Money talks — and what it says is more important than a politician’s rhetoric in an election year.

Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger are not just people with left-wing opinions. They are reckless demagogues preaching hatred of the lowest sort — and both are recipients of money from Obama.

Bill Ayers is not just “an education professor” who has some left-wing views. He is a confessed and unrepentant terrorist, who more recently has put his message of resentment into the schools — an effort using money from a foundation that Obama headed.

Nor has the help all been one way. During the last debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, Senator McCain mentioned that Sen. Obama’s political campaign began in Bill Ayers’s home. Obama immediately denied it and McCain had no real follow-up.

It was not this year’s political campaign that Obama began in Bill Ayers’s home but an earlier campaign for the Illinois state legislature. Barack Obama can match Bill Clinton in slickness at parsing words to evade accusations.

That is one way to get to the White House. But slickness with words is not going to help a president deal with either domestic economic crises or the looming dangers of a nuclear Iran.

People who think that talking points on this or that problem constitute “the real issues” that we should be talking about, instead of Obama’s track record, ignore a very fundamental fact about representative government.

Representative government exists, in the first place, because we the voters cannot possibly have all the information necessary to make rational decisions on all the things that the government does. We cannot rule through polls or referendums. We must trust someone to represent us, especially as President of the United States.

Once we recognize this basic fact of representative government, then the question of how trustworthy a candidate is becomes a more urgent question than any of the so-called “real issues.”

A candidate who spends two decades promoting polarization and then runs as a healer and uniter, rather than a divider, forfeits all trust by that fact alone.

If Ronald Reagan had attempted to run for president of the United States as a liberal, the media would have been all over him. His support for Barry Goldwater would have been in the headlines and in editorial denunciations across the country.

No way would he have been able to get away with using soothing words to suggest that he and Barry Goldwater were like ships that passed in the night.

If Barack Obama had run as what he has always been, rather than as what he has never been, then we could simply cast our votes based on whether or not we agree with what he has always stood for.

Some people take solace from the fact that Senator Obama has verbally shifted position on some issues, like drilling for oil or gun control, since this is supposed to show that he is “pragmatic” rather than ideological.

But political zig-zags show no such moderation as some seem to assume. Lenin zig-zagged and so did Hitler. Zig-zags may show no more than that someone is playing the public for fools.

Some people who see the fraud in what Obama is saying are amazed that others do not. But Obama knows what con men have long known, that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe. He does that very well

--Professor Thomas Sowell is the Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford's Hoover Institution, the author of many books and a recipient of the Natonal Humanities Medal. He has taught at Cornell, Amherst and Brandeis as well as Stanford. He was awarded the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement in 2003.

Mark Steyn looks at the choice for president and sees this:

An Obama Administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and UN foreign policy. Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a “point of no return”, the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.

Would it really be that bad? Professor Thomas Sowell warns that an Obama election would represent a "point of no return," would be "transformative, in Mark Steyn's view. Mark Steyn elaborates on our historical context:

The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation — the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of the last model: forty years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within. (Note: Exactly the point made by us earlier: "Having abandoned bombing as counterproductive, Ayers concentrated on early childhood education as the way to subvert the American system from within.")

All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?

Steyn concludes:

If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don’t want it, vote accordingly.

October 25, 2008, 7:00 a.m.

Point of No Return
Will we vote for the same soothing siren song as our enervated allies?

By Mark Steyn, syndicated columnist, in the National Review

Across the electric wires, the hum is ceaseless: Give it up, loser. Don’t go down with the ship when it’s swept away by the Obama tsunami. According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls show he’s going to win.

In the words of Publishers’ Clearing House, he may already have won! The battleground states have all turned blue, the reddest of red states are rapidly purpling. Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality, wake up to reality. Why be the last right-wing pundit to sign up with Small-Government Conservatives For The Liberal Supermajority? We still need pages for the coronation, and there’s a pair of velvet knickerbockers with your name on it.

Read the rest...

The Obama campaign appears to be engaged in a massive criminal enterprise that has collected tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of dollars in illegal campaign contributions online. The campaign has deliberately disabled all of the credit card security measures used to identify the true user of a credit card. Fake contributions have poured in. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been contributed online in amounts less than $200, the minimum required to be federally reported. A sampling has revealed hundreds of fake names. The Obama campaign cannot verify the identify of any such contributor and has no mechanism for doing so. One guesstimate is that something in excess of $60 million has come to the campaign from foreign sources; only Americans living or traveling abroad can contribute legally to a presidential campaign.

By contrast, the McCain/Palin campaign has all the usual credit card security checks in place, rejects automatically all would-be contributions that don't measure up to the same standards used by Amazon and Costco plus screening out foreign donations. The McCain/Palin campaign vets all contributions under $200 as rigorously as larger amounts to ensure contributions are legal and they can identify all donors.

Is it deliberate? Yes, it has to be, according to this information. The author Mark Steyn, who has his own website to sell his books, explains via the Power Line blog:

Steyn and many readers (thanks to all) wrote to explain that the Obama campaign has chosen to reject, and the McCain campaign has chosen to adopt, the Address Verification System, or AVS. It is a simple tool that prevents credit card fraud.

As Steyn observed, "the AVS security checks most merchant processors use to screen out fraudulent transactions (and, incidentally, overseas customers) were intentionally disabled by the Obama campaign -- and thus their web donation page enables fraudulent (and/or foreign) donations."

Steyn also reported the contribution of NRO reader "Della Ware" of "12345 No Way." Steyn later reported that "Ms. Ware's" contribution was actually withdrawn from her account yesterday.

Campaign contributions under false names are illegal, as are contributions by noncitizens. Federal campaign law also limits the amount any one citizen can contribute to the presidential campaign to $2,300. The acceptance of campaign contributions via credit card without AVS protection facilitates illegal contributions. This is what the Obama campaign has chosen to do, and what the McCain campaign has chosen to avoid.

Steyn elaborated on this point at the end of the day:

[I]n order to accept donations from "Della Ware" and "Saddam Hussein" et al, the Obama website had, intentionally, to disable all the default security settings on their credit-card processing. I took a look at the inner sanctum of my (alas, far more modest) online retail operation this afternoon and, in order to permit fraud as easy as that which the Obama campaign is facilitating, you have to uncheck every single box on the AVS system, each one of which makes it very explicit just what you're doing - ie, accepting transactions with no "billing address", no "street address" match, no "zip code" match, with a bank "of non-US origin" (I've got nothing against those, but a US campaign fundraiser surely should be wary), etc. When you've disabled the whole lot one step at a time, then you've got a system tailor-made for fake names and bogus addresses.

This finding was brought to the attention of the New York Times which dismissed it as inconsequential. The Washington Post also took a look and didn't seem to appreciate the immensity of what is apparently going on. At least some observers, such as Beldar on the Hugh Hewitt blog sees the seriousness of it:

For a start, every honest Democrat should demand that everyone associated with the decision to disable the most basic anti-fraud mechanisms from the Obama-Biden campaign's credit-card donations systems be publicly identified and immediately fired. Every honest Democrat should demand the immediate and full cooperation from the campaign — pointedly beginning with Barack Obama — in seeing them prosecuted and convicted.

Power Line appears totally defeatist about the media doing anything now:

Maybe after the campaign is safely over someone will be interested enough to find out how much of Obama's record campaign fundraising was criminal. Ten percent? Twenty? Fifty?

The only newspaper to address this outrage is Investor's Business Daily

While the media has expressed great admiration for Obama's ability to raise huge amounts of money, why does it not think what appears to be the facilitation of fake and foreign contributions is not a news story? The media's dereliction of duty in reporting the true Obama story to the American public throughout the campaign is now crowned by its ignoring of this massive subversion of law.

Obama came up in politics through the corrupt Chicago Democratic political machine (as so often described in the Chicgo press), which helped pave his way by eliminating would-be opponents and steering political fixers like Tony Rezko (at least $240,000 to Obama, now waiting prison sentence for political corruption) his way.

That same Democratic machine is running Obama's campaign today and has used its underworld skills to amass hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal donations for Obama's campaign.

If ever pressed on this massive fraudulent crime, one can be sure Obama will express his usual ignorance, just as he "never heard" in 20 years any of Jeremiah Wright's anti-white anti-Jewish, anti-American tirades.

After Rezko's conviction, Obama got away with "That's not the Tony Rezko I knew."

As for the terrorist bomber and communist William (Bill) Ayers who collaborated with Obama for seven years funding projects to radicalize school children and destabilize the social system, Obama first said he never had heard of the bombings and then said he was only eight when they happened. No one asked why Obama was facilitating Ayers' communist agenda. The media gave him a pass.

Can the media let Obama get away with another big lie this time, when crime on such a massive scale appears to have been committed for his benefit and which has corrupted the presidential election? Where are the federal investigators and prosecutors?

Obama has worked closely with the Chicago machne men throughout the entire campaign in falsifying his life story and hiding details that would turn away voters. No original birth certificate has been released, college and law school records are sealed, files from Obama's Illinois senate years can't be found, his health record is a one page letter. With hundreds of millions of dollars involved, how can Obama not be involved? There is no "deniablity" here.

If the election isn't stolen by ACORN's fradulent voter registration campaign on behalf of their decades-long friend and champion Obama, it may be stolen by these hundreds of millions in illegal donations smothering all opposition voices.

The American people have been disenfranchised by hiding information about Obama, by media looking the other way and, now, by what appears to be massive illegal contributions. The American people would not knowingly vote for a fraud like Obama if they knew the truth. The real Obama has been successfully kept hidden. There is much to fear from this man who will do anything to become president, such as presiding over this fundraising enterprise. One worries more every day about what Obama is hiding as well as what he is doing.

Who is he?

The American people are being duped.

It's hard to say this better than this: The Obama craze represents "a recklessness and abandonment of rationality,"

Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I've never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama's past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media's role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It's as if the media use the Obama campaign's talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn't hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we've read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism.

Read it all right here.

The Obama Temptation

[Mark R. Levin] at The Corner, National Review Online

I've been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way.

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.

Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I've never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama's past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media's role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It's as if the media use the Obama campaign's talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn't hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we've read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism. And, of course, while experience is crucial in assessing Sarah Palin's qualifications for vice president, no such standard is applied to Obama's qualifications for president. (No longer is it acceptable to minimize the work of a community organizer.) Charles Gibson and Katie Couric sought to humiliate Palin. They would never and have never tried such an approach with Obama.

But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.

Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands.

The question is whether enough Americans understand what's at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others. And while America will certainly survive, it will do so, in many respects, as a different place.

As a local group in Chatham, Massachusetts the Chatham Republican Town Committee runs this website and also from time to time places ads in our local weekly The Cape Cod Chronicle, which covers Chatham and the adjacent town of Harwich. The McCain campaign nationally and we locally are trying to get the word out to the American people about how radical and out of the mainstream of America Obama is.

This past week a few readers wrote to the Chronicle to say they did not like our ads about Barack Obama, but no one could challenge the facts, because they were true and accurate. However, the Chronicle’ editor in an editorial claimed Obama has been thoroughly vetted by the media, suggesting in effect that no other comment, particularly “negative” comment, was called for.

This is precisely the problem. Obama has been called the “most secretive” candidate for president in at least a century. The media is not fulfilling its obligations to the American public to find out and present the truth about Obama.

John McCain’s life is an open book. Obama hides in the pages of his own two memoirs and the fictionalized and incomplete biography carefully constructed by the Chicago political machine (often called the “corrupt Democratic machine” by Chicago newsmen) that nurtured his political career and is now running his campaign.

Most disturbing are his close and long relationships with people who hate America, the two most prominent of which are Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers. Not only did Obama spend 20 years listening to his “spiritual mentor” Wright’s bigoted message of hate of whites, Jews and America and about his war on the middle class, he gave thousands of his own dollars and tens of thousands from foundations he chaired for Wright’s causes.

Obama chaired a foundation (the Chicago Annenberg Challenge) established by William Ayers. Ayers describes himself as “far left, a radical, a small “c” communist." When Ayers concluded that bombing the Pentagon and the Capitol was counterproductive (forced him into hiding for ten years), he decided the best way to “change America” was through indoctrination of the young in early education. After collecting degrees in early education at Columbia, Obama’s college, Ayers collaborated with Obama over the better part of a decade in sending millions of dollars into subversive programs, many designed by Ayers, to teach Chicago’s mostly black schoolchildren hatred for America, that America was bad and could and should be brought down and changed through political revolution.

One who knew Ayers during his terrorist bombing days said this recently about Ayers' new line of work:

His hatred of America is as virulent as when he planted a bomb at the Pentagon. And this hatred informs his educational "reform" efforts....Mr. Ayers is not a school reformer. He is a school destroyer.

Obama, at about the time he took over the chairmanship of Ayers' foundation, said he rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation.” Obama had already immersed himself in the communist Saul Alinsky’s methods of surreptitiously remaking America as a community organizer working with other community organizers such as ACORN. (That's the same ACORN involved in more than a dozen current voter registration fraud investigations, the same ACORN which uses confrontation and intimidation to force public officials and bankers to do what they say.)

In some respects, the message of the Ayers-Obama partnership was much the same as that of Jeremiah Wright. The researcher who has done the most extensive investigation of the Ayers-Obama joint efforts in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge is Stanley Kurtz of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center. Kurtz said this of one particular program aimed at black youths: Ayers’ accomplice “Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright.” (Kurtz's research can be accessed by clicking here.) The media has ignored or suppressed all such information and certainly hasn’t been out looking for it or anything else that could be damaging to Obama.

Obama has been hiding his past and who he is and the media is complicit. Isn't it amazing that his birth records, his college records and his law school records are all sealed from public view?

Also, for example, have readers or viewers of the mainstream media been told that Obama is the most extreme public official in America on abortion, that he wants to legalize partial birth abortion (and at taxpayer expense), which 75% of the American public oppose and to eliminate the “conscience clause” for doctors and hospitals to force them to perform abortions? That he wants to weaken our military by dismantling and discontinuing national defense programs in order expand welfare programs? That Obama and Obama’s ACORN planted the seeds of today’s worldwide financial crisis by being among the first, in the early 1990s, to bully banks into making mortgage loans that never should have been made? That U.S. Senator Obama opposed legislation John McCain supported in 2005 and 2006 to rein in Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s packaging and selling off of unsound mortgage loans before it was too late; that, as late as September 2007 as the housing bubble was collapsing because of the weight of these unsound loans, Obama was still insisting that mortgage loans to people who couldn’t afford them is a “good idea?” It was Joe the Plumber not the media who forced Obama to admit his socialist plan to “spread the wealth” -- taking money from taxpayers to give to non-taxpayers.

The American people deserve to learn about the real Obama. And, in our small way, we are seeking to help do that. Even though there are still massive amounts of information about Obama still sealed from public view, based on what we know so far, we consider Obama unfit and unqualified to be president and a danger to the principles and safety of this nation.

Note: The Chatham Republican Town Committee has submitted a letter to the editor of the Chronicle on these matters, but since it's in his discretion to publish the letter or not, we have placed our extended reply here.

Update: The editor will not publish our letter in "our" local paper, so we have taken an ad in "our" local paper for a shortened version of this reply.

The Middle East's most perceptive observer Caroline Glick looks at an Obama presidency from the point of view of an American and an Israeli and shudders.

Some main points:

In speaking as he did, Biden essentially acknowledged three things. First, he recognized that Obama projects an image of weakness and naiveté internationally that invites America's adversaries to challenge him.

Second, by stating that if Obama is tested a crisis will ensue, Biden made clear that Obama will fail the tests he is handed as a newly inaugurated president. After all, when an able leader is tested, he acts wisely and secures his nation's interests while averting a crisis.

Finally, Biden made clear that Obama's failure will be widely noted, and hence, "it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

IN LIGHT of Biden's dire warning about his running-mate, the central question that Americans ought to be asking themselves is whether or not Biden is correct. Is it true that Obama projects a posture of weakness and incompetence internationally and is it likely that this posture reflects reality?

Unfortunately, it appears that Biden knows exactly what he is talking about.

Obama has called for slashing the US military budget, cutting back the US's anti-missile programs and scaling back drastically the US nuclear arsenal. That is, although Obama has claimed that he will never take the option of the use of force off the table, by refusing to strengthen the US military which he perceives as weak, he is making certain that the US military option is ineffectual.

Iran will likely be the first US adversary to test Obama. And Obama will have no idea what to do. While Obama has stated repeatedly that a nuclear-armed Iran is a "game-changer," Obama's own rule book for international relations has no relevance for dealing with Iran's game.

Obama views international relations as a creature of American will. If America is nice to others, they will be nice to America. But the fact of the matter is that regimes like Iran hate the US regardless of how it behaves. The only question with strategic relevance for Washington is whether the Iranians also fear the US. And Obama has given them no reason to fear him. To the contrary, he has given them reason to believe that under his leadership, the mullahs can defeat America.

AMERICA STANDS to elect its new president in times of nearly unprecedented dangers. Iran is on the threshold of nuclear weapons. Thanks to the Bush administration, North Korea now feels free to vastly expand its nuclear proliferation activities. Oil rich states like Venezuela, Russia and Iran recognize that with global oil prices decreasing, now is the time to strike before they are impoverished. And the international economic turmoil will cause Western nations to recoil from international confrontations and so embolden rogue states to attack their interests.

Is Obama the man for this job? Clearly not.

Read the entire article, which includes comparisons to Israel's situation and the hugely increased existential risk and danger to Israel from an Obama presidency.

Testing Obama's mettle

Oct. 24, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

In a week and a half, American voters will elect the next US president. Their decision will impact the entire world.

Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama now enjoys a significant lead in the polls against Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain. For McCain to win, a lot of Obama supporters will need to reassess their choice for president. This week, Obama's running-mate Senator Joseph Biden gave Obama supporters a good reason to change their minds.

Joe Biden was picked by Obama as his vice presidential running mate because he knew foreign affairs. So what's Biden's view of the dangerous world we live in today? He told us.

Obama's qualification to be president of the United States is being questioned. Is he a natural born citizen of the U.S. as the U.S. Constitution requires? To prove that, all he has to do is produce an original or certified birth certificate. Obama has not done that.

A suit has been brought to disqualify Obama. This video presents an interview of the attorney who brought the suit. A lifelong Democrat, he calls Obama a fraud, which is why Obama is refusing to release all official records, such as college and law school records, which might indicate a nationality other than American.

It's an 11-minute video very much worth your time.

Are the attorney's allegations true? Does he have his facts and law right? We can't say, but the matter is, to say the least, puzzling.

How secretative has Obama been? And why?

This article details a number of the areas where Obama has refused to provide information.

Obama: Most Secretive Democratic Presidential Candidate Ever
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 7:58 PM

By: David A. Patten

Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign says his campaign will bring a new level of honesty and transparency to the White House. Obama proudly touts that he and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla, passed a law requiring more transparency via a public database of all federal spending.

But when it comes to offering the public documents about his own public and private activities, Obama’s record for openness gets an "F" grade.

During the heated Democratic primary, Obama complained of the Bush White House being “one of the most secretive administrations in our history” and chided Sen. Hillary Clinton for not releasing her White House schedules.

Ironically, Obama, just days away from possibly being elected president, continues to stonewall a growing chorus of information requests for documents about his legislative, personal health, education, financing, and background -- leaving many voters to cast ballots based on incomplete information.

And serious questions about his past continue to swirl as Election Day looms, fueled in part by his own campaign’s refusal to make relevant documents available.

And the press, usually banging at the door for candidates to make “full disclosure” is strangely quiet about Obama’s stonewalling.

A Newsmax survey of key Obama aspects of Obama’s public and private life continued to be shielded from the public.

Among the examples:

Obama has released just one brief document detailing his personal health. McCain, on the other hands, released what he said was his complete medical file totaling more than 1500 pages. After criticism on the matter, last week the Obama campaign also released some routine lab-test results and electrocardiograms for Obama. All test results appeared normal, but many details about his health remain a mystery.

Obama has refused to offer his official papers as a state legislator in Illinois, and has been unable to produce correspondence, such as letters from lobbyists and other correspondence from his days in the Illinois state senate. There are also no appointment calendars available of his official activities. “It could have been thrown out,” Obama said while on the campaign trail during the Democratic primary. “I haven’t been in the state Senate now for quite some time.”

Obama has not released his client list as an attorney or his billing records. Obama has maintained that he only performed a few hours of legal work for a nonprofit organization with ties to Tony Rezko, the Chicago businessman convicted of fraud in June. But he has not released billing records that would prove this assertion.

Obama won’t release his college records from Occidental College where he studied for two years before transferring to Columbia.

Obama’s campaign refuses to give Columbia University, where he earned an undergraduate degree in political science, permission to release his transcripts. Such transcripts would list the courses Obama took, and his grades. President George W. Bush, and presidential contenders Al Gore and John Kerry, all released their college transcripts. (McCain has refused to release his Naval Academy transcript.)

Obama’s college dissertation has simply disappeared from Columbia Universities archives. In July, in response to a flurry of requests to review Obama’s senior thesis at the Ivy League school, reportedly titled “Soviet Nuclear Disarmament,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told NBC News “We do not have a copy of the course paper you requested and neither does Columbia University.”

The senator has not agreed to the release of his application to the Illinois state bar, which would clear up intermittent allegations that his application to the bar may have been inaccurate.

Jim Geraghty of the National Review has written extensively about Obama’s unwillingness to release records related to clients he represented while he was an attorney with the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill, and Gallard. Obama was required to list his clients during his years in the Illinois senate. “Obama listed every client of the firm,” Geraghty reported, making it impossible to discern which clients he represented.

Obama has never released records from his time at Harvard Law School.

Obama also has not disclosed the names of small donors giving $200 or less to his campaign. An exception to the finance-reporting laws exempts the campaign from reporting those who donate less than $200, but that law never envisioned the more than $300 million that has been raised by Obama in small amounts. The Republican National Committee has released its small donors, as well as McCain’s, on a public database.

On several occasions, the Obama campaign has offered to provide additional information to reporters if they have specific questions or issues. And in some cases, it has done so.

When Internet rumors began to fly that perhaps Obama was born outside the United States, for example, the campaign released images of a birth certificate that verified his birthplace as Honolulu, Hawaii. When that led to suggestions the birth certificate had been altered, the campaign again responded, allowing reporters to examine the actual birth certificate, complete with raised seal. (In late July, according to FactCheck.org, a researcher uncovered an announcement of Obama’s birth in the August 13, 1961 edition of the Honolulu Advertiser).

Such instances of cooperation pale, however, compared to the many unanswered questions surrounding Obama, such as the financing of his education, and requests for the complete release of all donors to his campaign.

Of course, candidates are often reticent to disclose any information that opposition researchers could use against them.

But Politico.com notes that the Obama’s failure to share documents is “part of his campaign’s broader pattern of rarely volunteering information or documents about the candidate, even when relatively innocuous.”

The hue and cry from the media for disclosure usually forces candidates to release sought after documents. But the press has largely acquiesced to Obama’s stonewalling.

This website has noted several times the many unaswered questions about Barack Obama and his campaign's refusal to release records covering a great deal of his life.

One of the most basic questions asked that remains unanswered concerns where Obama was born. It's a simple question that can be answered with providing access to the State of Hawaii birth records or producing a certified copy of the birth certificate. That hasn't bee done. The campaign produced what it said was a copy of the birth certificate for the far left website Daily Kos. Forensic specialists who examined it online said it was a fake.

This question has suddenly hit center stage because in a suit in federal court in Philadelphia filed by attorney Philip J. Berg challenging Obama's eligibility to serve as president Obama failed to answer papers in the proper time frame and is deemed by court rules to have admitted in effect that he was born in Kenya.

EXPLOSIVE PRESS RELEASE

This week, on October 21, 2008, Mr. Berg released the result of his investigation. In a startling press release, he has announced that "Obama & DNC admit all allegations in Berg v. Obama."
In his release, Berg explained that "by way of failure to timely respond to Requests for Admissions...the DNC `ADMITTED' that Obama is "NOT QUALIFIED" to be President and therefore Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President and the DNC shall substitute a qualified candidate."

Berg stated that he filed Requests for Admissions on September 15, 2008 with a response by way of answer or objection had to be served within thirty [30] days. No response to the Requests for Admissions was served by way of response or objection. Thus, all of the Admissions directed to Obama and the DNC are deemed "ADMITTED." Therefore, Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President.

According to Berg, Obama - by default - admitted to every charge the lawyer made, among them:
1. I was born in Kenya.
2. I am a Kenya "natural born" citizen.
3. My foreign birth was registered in the State of Hawaii.
4. My father, Barrack Hussein Obama, Sr. admitted Paternity of me.
5. My mother gave birth to me in Mombosa, Kenya

If Obama was in fact born in Hawaii, why has the Obama campaign let this controversy explode to this level two weeks before the election?

Here's the story as of today.

Where is Obama’s Birth Certificate and Why Doesn’t He Produce It?
Joan Swirsky
October 23, 2008

Update: The suit was dismissed on technical grounds, in effect, that an American citizen does not have "standing" to bring such a suit. That's hard to swallow as a legal proposition: If an American citizen is being defrauded in the election process by an ineligible candidate, he would be suffering real harm. (Whether there was merit to the suit was not discussed or decided.) There will be an appeal on the question of standing.

There is no question that ACORN, Obama's partner since 1991, is doing its best to steal the presidential election for Obama. It is being investigated for fraudulent voter registration activity in more than a dozen states. ACORN recently announced it had registered 1.3 million new voters; how many of those new voters are really ineligible or "repeats" or "dead"? So far, false registrations in the tens of thousands have been thrown out, but it's a safe bet that many, many more will slip through the screening process.

Obama in his early years as a lawyer actually trained ACORN workers in voter registration and ran a registration drive with ACORN himself. He also taught them how to browbeat banks and bankers into making mortgage loans they never should have -- the very beginning of the subprime loan disaster that has brought down the world's financial system and cost investors hundreds of billions of dollars.

What Obama thought was a great idea, beating up banks to make mortgage loans to uncreditworthy borrowers, mushroomed over the years with ACORN very much involved in pressuring banks, Congress and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The subprime loan boom created the housing bubble that ended in its inevitable collapse and the worst stock market fall since 1929 and a world credit freeze-up. Obama, in 2006, opposing legislation putting an end to Fannie and Freddie buying up these dangerously risky subprime loans, insisted the house of cards he helped create was "a good idea."

And guess who's been helping fund ACORN? The taxpayers. Taxpayers helped fund the disaster that has befallen them. Belatedly, there are now demands for investigations and an end to taxpayer assistance to this criminal enterprise.

Obama did not cause this catastrophe all by himself. In Congress, Democratic Senators Dodd and Reid worked to block legislation in 2005 and 2006 from getting a vote in the Senate after Senate Republicans voted S. 190 out of committee. Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts was prominent at hearings insisting that Fannie and Freddie were sound and in no trouble and didn't need a new regulator and didn't need to stop buying the subprime loans banks and mortgage lenders were more than happy to get rid of.

These Democratic economic policies have cost the nation, taxpayers and investors dearly.

Barack Obama's efforts in the 1990s to force banks to make unsafe mortgage loans was his early attempt to "spread the wealth." It ended in catastrophe.

Obama's new plan to "spread the wealth" which he inadvertently disclosed to Joe the Plumber will likewise lead to catastrophe for the American and world economies.

The sane vote is for a Republican Congress and McCain/Palin. But will Obama's ACORN deliver enough fraudulent votes to bring more grief to America?

October 23, 2008
Obama's Red Shirts
Voter Fraud: Republican leaders want to defund and criminally investigate ACORN. Why should taxpayer dollars fund a "nonpartisan" organization that proclaims "Obama needs ACORN, and we need Obama."

ACORN calls itself a "nonpartisan" group seeking to register minorities and the poor. But its political arm has endorsed Barack Obama, who both trained the group's staff and sued the state of Illinois on their behalf. And Obama's campaign has given ACORN affiliates $800,000 for a get-out-the-vote drive.

In fact, it's a get-out-the-vote for Obama drive as evidenced by a video recently aired by Fox News that showed just how "nonpartisan" the group is. It was taken at ACORN's national convention where Rep. Maxine Waters spoke to a sea of ACORN organizers wearing their uniform of red baseball caps and shirts.

Waters, to great applause and cheers, said: "This has been the worst presidency that this country has ever known. But that's all right. We're getting rid of his (President Bush's) ass. He's got to go."

The next speaker, an ACORN representative defined who "we" meant. She said: "We're getting Obama for president! Obama needs us, ACORN, but we need Obama. Don't we? Yeah!"

A list of government funding of ACORN released by Boehner reveals that some $31 million in taxpayer dollars have been given to the group since 1998. Using Federal Register records, Boehner found ACORN got the money through 54 individual grants in 11 different states.

They would have gotten much more if the original Democratic version of the federal rescue bill had passed. It gave to groups such as ACORN 20% of any profits from the future resale of acquired mortgages, a massive potential rip-off of taxpayers.

"House Republicans worked together to stop the majority from using taxpayer dollars to fill a slush fund created just for ACORN, but now we must go further to turn off the spigot of federal grants on which ACORN depends," Boehner said last week.

Cornyn notes that, due to the efforts of ACORN's red shirts in "Harris County, Texas, which includes the City of Houston, election officials either rejected or discovered serious deficiencies with nearly 40% of the 27,000 registration cards filed by ACORN from January through July of this year."

ACORN will say its voting activities are separate and not funded by the taxpayer. But money is fungible. Cornyn recently wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, arguing "that because the violations of federal voting laws by ACORN employees appear to be so widespread, ACORN and its affiliates should be investigated as a criminal enterprise."

We agree. Those orchestrating this attempt to steal the 2008 election should go to jail.

The Comprehensive Argument Against Barack Obama is an excellent work of two young conservatives. It is only online and consists of texts and several videos.

Click here to view.

Professor Thomas Sowell makes another plea to Obama supporters to return to sanity and look at the facts before voting for Obama. Think of the future of this country.

Some of what the professor points out:

When one thinks of all the men who have put their lives on the line in battle to defend and preserve this country, it is especially painful to think that there are people living in the safety and comfort of civilian life who cannot be bothered to find out the facts about candidates before voting to put the fate of this nation, and of generations yet to come, in the hands of someone chosen because they like his words or style.

Of the four people running for president and vice president on the Republican and Democratic tickets, the one we know the least about is the one leading in the polls — Barack Obama.

What specifics do we know about Barack Obama’s track record that might give us some clue as to what kinds of “changes” to expect if he is elected?

We know that he opposed the practice of putting violent young felons on trial as adults. We know that he was against a law forbidding physicians to kill a baby that was born alive despite an attempt to abort it.

We know that Obama opposed attempts to put stricter regulations on Fannie Mae — and that he was the second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae. We know that, this very year, his campaign sought the advice of disgraced former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines.

Fannie Mae and Raines were at the heart of “the mess in Washington” that Barack Obama claims he is going to clean up under the banner of “change.”

The public has been told very little about what this man with the wonderful rhetoric has actually done. What we know is enough to make us wonder about what we don’t know. Or it ought to. For the true believers — which includes many in the media — it is just a question of whether you like him or not.

Believers in Barack
Apparently, Obama-love is blind.
Creators Syndicate
By Thomas Sowell

Telling a friend that the love of his life is a phony and dangerous is not likely to get him to change his mind. But it may cost you a friend.

It is much the same story with true believers in Barack Obama. They have made up their minds and not only don’t want to be confused by the facts, they resent being told the facts.

Read it all.

Newsweek publishes an article taking issue with self-identified pro-life Catholics who argue that it's okay to vote for Obama, indeed that he's even pro-life since he will do more for the poor, despite his extremist pro-abortion position, even supporting legalizing partial-birth abortion.

Pope John Paul II's official biographer George Weigel makes it very clear: Obama is a "pro-life nightmare." His "views and the public record on the life issues are reprehensible."

Weigel regrets that he was forced to leave the Democratic Party in which he grew up because it embraced policy positions "on the life issues that offend the Catholic faith and reason."

Catholics of conscience must heed the plea of Pope John Paul II to protect the unborn.

[A]s the Most Rev. Charles Chaput, archbishop of Denver recently put it (speaking, he emphasized, as a private citizen), "To suggest—as some Catholics do—that Senator [Barack] Obama is this year's 'real' pro-life candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse. To portray the 2008 Democratic Party presidential ticket as the preferred 'pro-life' option is to subvert what the word 'pro-life' means."

Weigel's refutation of the flawed thinking of Catholics who think they can ignore that message and vote for Obama follows.

Flawed Thinking
George Weigel
NEWSWEEK
I want to offer a response to Nicholas Cafardi, M. Cathleen Kaveny, and Douglas Kmiec's "A Catholic Brief for Obama"—which was itself a response to my essay on the subject.

I take it as an iron law of controversy that when three tenured law professors like Nick Cafardi, Cathy Kaveny, and Doug Kmiec fret in print about "intellectual siren calls" and "elegant theorizing," something other than real argument—moral argument or policy argument—is afoot. A serious, bipartisan, national debate about the ways in which people of goodwill in both political parties can work together to build a culture of life in 21st-century America would be welcome. Professors Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec are not making the contributions to that argument of which they were once capable. Indeed, as the Most Rev. Charles Chaput, archbishop of Denver recently put it (speaking, he emphasized, as a private citizen), "To suggest—as some Catholics do—that Senator [Barack] Obama is this year's 'real' pro-life candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse. To portray the 2008 Democratic Party presidential ticket as the preferred 'pro-life' option is to subvert what the word 'pro-life' means."

Why? Because the public record amply demonstrates that Senator Obama is not the abortion moderate of our professors' imagination, but a genuine abortion radical.

Continue reading "FLAWED THINKING OF CATHOLICS FOR OBAMA EXPOSED"

Posted by Republican on Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 4:20 PM | Comments (0)
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Andrew McCarthy is the former federal prosecutor who sent the blind shiekh who masterminded the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 to prison. He knows his stuff.

McCarthy has exposed in detail the close relationship Obama has had with ACORN for decades -- which Obama is now piously trying to deny -- and expresses amazement at the cynical propaganda ploy of the Obama campaign which is calling for a federal investigation of the McCain campaign for suggesting that ACORN is knowingly invovolved in voter registration fraud. Chutzpah, he says.

As detailed by Steve Gilbert at Sweetness & Light, Project Vote has long been ACORN’s “voter mobilization” arm. In 1992, it was directed in Chicago by a young “community organizer” named Barack Obama. The resulting registration of 150,000 new voters became the springboard for his political career. As observed about Obama’s efforts by top ACORN agitator Madeline Talbott (a staunch proponent of the lawlessness ACORN euphemistically calls “direct action”): “Barack has proven himself among our members. He is committed to organizing, to building a democracy. Above all else, he is a good listener, and we accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.”

ACORN is not just carrying out voter fraud in the here and now. Over the years, as Hoft recounts, several its operatives have been convicted for these activities. And how could it be otherwise? What voters need to understand is that ACORN is a revolutionary Leftist organization. It was founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke, a former member of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) — the Communist organization from which Bill Ayers’ Weatherman terrorist group split off in the late Sixties. It is adherent to the radical principles of Saul Alinsky, of whom Obama is a disciple — in fact, he authored a chapter in an anthology called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.

Under the aforementioned heading of “direct action,” ACORN has made fraud, extortion, harassment, and menacing core parts of its modus operandi. As a matter of principle, ACORN believes that the established bourgeois American order is racist, materialist, imperialist and illegitimate. ACORN no more cares about election laws than about other laws it decides must be circumvented in the service of the higher purpose it reveres: “Change.”

For nearly 20 years, Obama and ACORN have been attached at the hip.

They still are.

Read the McCarthy piece in its entirety. Click through the links he provides to get the full picture of the Obama/ACORN corruption of the electoral system.

ACORN’s White Horse

Facts don't seem to matter with those who intend to vote for Obama, but we continue to add to the library of information that clearly demonstrates his unsuitabilty for any public office, let alone the presidency of the United States.

Obama has successfully hidden vast swaths of his life from the public throughout this campaign and the mainstream media has not bothered to investigate him as they have Joe the Plumber or Sarah Palin. The free ride he has been given on his life extends also to his campaign financing. The Obama campaign reporting system is set up in such a way as to allow, some might say "facilitate," obtaining illegal contributions. Unlike the McCain campaign, which can and does track every contribution, no matter how small, the Obama campaign does not.

This particular article concerns those contributions and Obama's making a pledge to save the public finance system for president and inviting Republican contenders to join him in pledging to take public financing. McCain agreed and pledged along with Obama. A few weeks later Obama broke his pledge; McCain did not.

In addition, Obama has collected hundreds of millions in contributions smaller than $200, the mimimum required to be federally reported. Obama has neither disclosed the source of any of that money or, apparently, even kept track of it. Some who have analyzed what's been reported have discovered that more than $60 million have come from foreign countries. Only Americans living in foreign countries can make campaign contributions legally. The Obama campaign says it has no way to determine the legality of such contributions, though the McCain campaign can and does vet such contributions. Of Obama's contributors only about 20% are identifiable. No one, not even the Obama campaign, knows who the 80% are, since its system isn't set up to learn who they are. Since a great many contributions to Obama on their face have been seen to be fradulent, one can at least speculate that many more are, particularly those in the uner $200 category, where fraud is much more easily hidden. The Chicago Democratic machine (often referred to in Chicago as the "corrupt machine") that nurtured and gave rise to Obama and is now running his campaign has once again here demonstrated its political savvy.

October 22, 2008, 8:00 a.m.

Fake Donors, Phony Pledge
On campaign finance, Obama declared independence from his promises.

By David Freddoso in National Review

Starting in June, Barack Obama’s website stopped asking for donations. Instead, it began asking for citizens who would “declare their independence from a broken system by supporting the first presidential election truly funded by the people.”

Perhaps the campaign did not expect that among those “declaring their independence would be donors named “Doodad Pro,” “Derty Poiiuy,” and “Jgtj Jfggjjfgj.” (And you thought Barack Obama had a funny name.) They may not have known that at least four Missourians and one Virginian would declare their independence involuntarily and later find fraudulent donations to Obama’s campaign on their credit card statements. The Obama campaign cannot claim ignorance of “Good Will,” whose address is the Goodwill headquarters in Austin, and whose occupation is “Loving You.” The Goodwill office received a letter from Obama last month indicating that Mr. Will had exceeded the legal limit with his $7,000 in contributions, and asking whether part of the money could be directed to Obama’s general election campaign.

Professor Thomas Sowell:

Whatever the shortcomings of John McCain and Sarah Palin, they are people whose values are the values of this nation, whose loyalty and dedication to this country’s fundamental institutions are beyond question because they have not spent decades working with people who hate America.

One person who has spent decades working with people who hate America is Barack Obama.

People are justifiably angry at the way the mainstream media is seeking to whitewash and downplay Obama's decades-long relationship with unrepentant terrorist bomber William (Bill) Ayers are putting together their own videos.

Obama of course dismisses Ayers as somebody who did something bad when he was eight years old.

The real story is that Obama joined with Ayers to further his -- make that "their" -- agenda to subvert the United States from within by creating social and racial division. Together they fundied programs to teach school children to hate America, using the funds of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Foundation. Their goal was to train future leaders who would "change" the America they grew up hating.

But was Bill Ayers really such a bad guy?

We knew Obama was all for driver's licenses for illegal aliens, but he wants them to get Social Security, too? And health care that taxpayers will also pay for? No way.

More chicanery in the Obama campaign.

NewsMax's Ken Timmerman reports that as much as $63 million of Obama's $150 million September haul may originate from illegal foreign donations. (Conveniently, the campaign refuses to release the names of more than 80% of its 2.5 million contributors.) Obama's tax returns also indicate that in 2000 and 2002, he violated Illinois state law by accepting speaking fees while serving as a state senator.

The National Post of Canada carried the observations of Catholic priest Raymond Sousa on the American presidential election, who noted the obvious: Obama's extreme pro-abortion position places an "insuperable obstacle between himself and pro-life voters." These are mostly Catholics and Evangelicals, but are likely to include many others, since 75% of Americans oppose partial-birth abortion which Obama wants to legalize.

[O]n abortion, Mr. Obama is the most extreme nominee to date -- far more than even Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Joe Biden. He is against the ban on partial-birth abortion.

He is against parental-notification for minors seeking abortion. He is against "conscience-clauses" for pro-life doctors who refuse to do abortions. He favours federal funding of abortions. He has said that his first act as president would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate by federal statute any abortion regulations in all of the 50 states.

And then there is the controversy over the "born-alive" act -- a federal law that mandates full legal protection for any child that survives a late-term abortion. It passed the U. S. Senate unanimously. Mr. Obama was not in the United States Senate at the time, but he voted against a nearly-identical law in the Illinois Senate in 2003. While he often says that he wants to reduce the number of abortions -- who doesn't? -- in adopting the most extreme pro-abortion policy in presidential history, Mr. Obama puts an insuperable obstacle between himself and pro-life voters.

One of Obama's Hyde Park (Chicago) academic neighbors confesses he doesn't know who Obama is, either. He has observed that Obama is very careful not to reveal himself to anyone, so that no one can be sure what he's really thinking. This tactic or habit was also noted by the Asia Times essayist Spengler, who said Obama was a consummate manipulator and observer of people, much like an anthropologist detached from his subjects, in this case manipulating the American electorate. "Sociopath" was one descriptive he applied to Obama.

But here a neighbor who is a law professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution does his best to interpret the signs he has seen from Obama and puts them in the electoral context of a probable Democratic House and Senate and sees disaster for the economy ahead.

At heart, he is an unreconstructed New Dealer who can see, and articulate, both sides on every question--but only as a prelude to championing the old corporatist agenda with a vengeance.

That program has three key components, which, taken together, can convert a shaky financial situation into a global depression.

The Libertarian
The Obama I (Don't) Know
Richard A. Epstein 10.21.08, 12:01 AM ET
Forbes Magazine

Chicago -
My Obama number is one. I know him through our association at the University of Chicago Law School and through mutual friends in the neighborhood. We have had one or two serious substantive discussions, and when I sent him e-mails from time to time in the early days of his Senate term, he always answered in a sensible and thoughtful fashion. And yet, for assessing the course of his likely presidency, I don't know him at all.

It should come as no surprise that the traditionally liberal Hyde Park community is a veritable hotbed of support for Obama. So my manifest reluctance on his candidacy raises more than a single eyebrow: Loyalty for the home team counts.

The odd point is how his many learned and thoughtful supporters couch their endorsement. Almost without exception, they praise the man, not the program. Their claim is that Obama has proved himself to be a consummate politician who understands that the first principle of holding high office is to get reelected. His natural moderation in tone and demeanor, therefore, translate into getting advisers who know their substantive areas, and listening to them before making any rash moves. The dominant trope is that he will be a pragmatic president who will move in small increments toward the center, not in bold steps toward the left.

But is it all true? The short answer is that nobody knows. Virtually everyone who knows him recognizes that he plays his cards close to the vest, so that you can make your case to him without knowing whether it has registered. At this point, my fear is that the change in office will not lead to a change in his liberal voting record, as reinforced by a hyperactive Democratic platform. My great fear is that a landslide victory will give him solid majorities in both Houses of Congress, so that no stalling tactics by Republicans can slow down his legislative victory procession. At that point his innate pragmatism will line up with his strong left-of-center beliefs on issues that have thus far been muted during the campaign.

Put otherwise, Obama's vague calls for change that "you can believe in" are, to my thinking, wholly retrograde in their implications. At heart, he is an unreconstructed New Dealer who can see, and articulate, both sides on every question--but only as a prelude to championing the old corporatist agenda with a vengeance.

That program has three key components, which, taken together, can convert a shaky financial situation into a global depression. The first of these is his anti-free trade attitude that loomed so large in the primaries. But even Obama cannot repeal the principle of comparative advantage. Any efforts to scuttle NAFTA, deny fast-track approval to other agreements, or limit outsourcing will not be as dramatic as the Smoot-Hawley tariff. But combined, they would act as a depressant on general economic growth. Everyone would suffer.

Second, Obama is committed to strengthening unions by his endorsement of the Employer Free Choice Act, a misnamed statute that forces union recognition without elections and employment contracts through mandatory arbitration thereafter. That one-two punch could tie up the very small businesses that Obama seems determined to help. Tax relief won't work for firms that won't get formed because a labor fight is not in their initial budget.

And third, he is in favor of progressive individual taxes and high corporate taxes. It is as though the U.S. does not have to compete for labor and capital in global markets. My fear is that with his strong egalitarian bent, he has not internalized the lesson that high rates do not offset declining revenues.

Thus, even before we get to the added bells and whistles of the modern welfare state--windfall profits taxes, ethanol subsidies, health care--an Obama administration could lock us into a downward spiral by ignoring the simple fundamentals of sound governance. Boy, does this stalwart libertarian ever hope that his friends are right and his gloomy prediction is wrong!

Richard Epstein writes a weekly column for Forbes.com. He is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a professor of law at the University of Chicago, visiting this fall at the New York University School of Law.

Obama isn't even president, but Canada and Colombia aren't taking any chances, they've started free trade discussions with Europe. After all, Pelosi blocked a vote on the Colombia free trade agreement (and Obama supports her) and Obama proclaimed he's going to unilaterally change NAFTA, which affects Canada and Mexico.

Michael Barone has called Pelosi's twisting of House rules to prevent a vote on the Colombia free trade agreement the most despicable act of this Congress. And Obama supports her action.

Along with all of Obama's plans that will sink the American economy, add protectionism.

Sarah Palin campaigning in Colorado says Joe the Plumber got it right.

And, you know, I’ve really got to hand it to Joe over there in Toledo. Somehow, he got our opponent to finally state his intentions in plain language. And if you ask me, that makes Joe the winner of last week’s debate. Senator Obama said he wants to “spread the wealth.” He wants the government to take your money and dole it out however politicians see fit.

Barack Obama calls it “spreading the wealth.” Joe Biden calls it “patriotic.” But Joe the Plumber said it sounded to him like “socialism” … and now is no time to experiment with that!

Whatever the shortcomings of John McCain and Sarah Palin, they are people whose values are the values of this nation, whose loyalty and dedication to this country’s fundamental institutions are beyond question because they have not spent decades working with people who hate America. Nor are they people whose judgments have been proved wrong consistently during decades of Beltway “experience.”

The person who has spent decades working with people who hate America is Barack Obama.

The person whose judgment has been proved wrong consistently during decades of Beltway "experience" is Biden.

Read all of Professor Sowell's analysis.

October 20, 2008.

Record Vs. Rhetoric
Obama vs. Palin.

By Thomas Sowell
National Review Online

Apparently there is something about Sarah Palin that causes some people to think of her as either the best of candidates or the worst of candidates. She draws enthusiastic crowds and provokes visceral hostility in the media.

The issue that is raised most often is her relative lack of experience and the fact that she would be “a heartbeat away from the presidency” if Sen. John McCain were elected. But Barack Obama has even less experience — none in an executive capacity — and his would itself be the heartbeat of the presidency if he were elected.

Sarah Palin’s record is on the record, while whole years of Barack Obama’s life are engulfed in fog, and he has had to explain away one after another of the astounding and vile people he has not merely “associated” with but has had political alliances with, and to whom he has directed the taxpayers’ money and other money.

Well, Obama may have missed a few of Jeremiah Wright's hate-America, hate-whites sermons over the 20 years he sat in the pews, but it turns out Obama was more into the hate-America black culture than his Sundays with Jeremiah.

Stanley Kurtz from Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center has been examining the papers of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to see how Obama and his colleague unrepentant terrorist bomber, America hater and self-described communist William (Bill) Ayers doled out the $150 million they had to spend. As chairman, Obama was the key person in steering grants where he wanted them to go.

Key finding: "Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright."

So where did Obama send grant monies?

Excerpts:

It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy — and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago.

Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.

The rites of passage movement is a way to teach young Africans in the United States how to reject America and recover their authentic African heritage.

In other words these programs which Barack Obama and William Ayers funded taught young blacks to hate America and lead separate lives. Obama himself made that clear by publicly rejecting “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation.”

When Jeremiah Wright turned toward African-centered thinking in the late 1980s and early 1990s (the period when, attracted by Wright’s African themes, Barack Obama first became a church member), many prominent thinkers from Carruthers’s Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations were invited to speak at Trinity United Church of Christ, Carruthers himself included. We hear echoes of Carruthers’s work in Wright’s distinction between “right brained” Africans and “left brained” Europeans, in Wright’s fears of U.S. government-sponsored genocide against American blacks, and in Wright’s embittered attacks on America’s indelibly white-supremacist history. In Wright’s Trumpet Newsmagazine, as in Carruthers’s own writings, blacks are often referred to as “Africans living in the diaspora” rather than as Americans.

As Wright himself made plain, it seems virtually impossible to find respectable scholars of any political stripe who approve of the extremist anti-American version of Afrocentrism promoted by Hilliard and Carruthers....

An important exception to the rule is Bill Ayers himself, who not only worked with Obama to fund groups like this at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, but who is still “palling around” with the same folks. Discreetly waiting until after the election, Bill Ayers and his wife, and fellow former terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn plan to release a book in 2009 entitled Race Course Against White Supremacy.

Can Obama deny this as he has other connections ("not the Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, {insert name here] I knew"?

Given the precedent of his earlier responses on Ayers and Wright, Obama might be inclined to deny personal knowledge of the educational philosophy he was so generously funding. Such a denial would not be convincing. For one thing, we have evidence that in 1995, the same year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation,” a stance that clearly resonates with both Wright and Carruthers.

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke.

Is this the "change" America wants?

Something to ponder for those who wonder why it was that Obama was attracted to America haters Jeremiah Wright, Willllam Ayers, Michael Pfleger, Louis Farrakhan and to assorted comunists and Marxist socialists such as the disciples of Saul Alinsky and ACORN.

The brilliant essayist who writes for the Asia Times under the pen name Spengler analyzed Barack Obama a few months ago. Spengler said the two greatest influences on Obama were his mother and his wife. His mother was an anti-American communist and his wife is an angry black resentful of her slavery heritage. So Obama inherited anti-Americanism in "his mother's milk" and instinctively sought it out in his marriage partner. "Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common."

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point.

Since the Ronald Reagan boom began in 1984, the year the American stock market doubled, Americans have enjoyed a quarter-century of rising wealth. Even the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000 did not interrupt the upward trajectory of household assets, as the housing price boom eclipsed the effect of equity market weakness. America's success made it a magnet for the world's savings, and Americans came to believe that they were riding a boom that would last forever, as I wrote recently....

Americans regard upward mobility as a God-given right. America had a double founding, as David Hackett Fischer showed in his 1989 study, Albion's Seed . Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present, but the course of the past quarter-century has made wealth-creation the sine qua non of American life. Now for the first time in a generation Americans have become poorer, and many of them have become much poorer due to the collapse of home prices. Unlike the Reagan years, when cutting the top tax rate from a punitive 70% to a more tolerable 40% was sufficient to start an economic boom, no lever of economic policy is available to fix the problem. Americans have no choice but to work harder, retire later, save more and retrench.

This reversal has provoked a national mood of existential crisis. In Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching, for richer or poorer, remain what they always have been. But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim makings of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm - "Great Awakenings" – every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen.

Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word "hope", they instead hear, "handout". A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as "something for nothing". Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over. . . .

Americans question the premise of America's standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America's standing. It might take the country another generation to recover. . . .

It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. . . .

Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals - and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.

One of the most articulate and influential American prelates spoke out this past Friday on the candidacy of Barack Obama, calling him the most committed abortion-rights candidate from a major party since Roe v. Wade.

"To suggest - as some Catholics do - that Senator Obama is this year's 'real' pro-life candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse," Chaput said according to his prepared remarks, titled "Little Murders."

Archbishop criticizes Obama, Catholic allies

Oct 19, 6:34 AM (ET)

By ERIC GORSKI

DENVER (AP) - Denver Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput labeled Barack Obama the "most committed" abortion-rights candidate from a major party in 35 years while accusing a Catholic Obama ally and other Democratic-friendly Catholic groups of doing a "disservice to the church."

Chaput, one of the nation's most politically outspoken Catholic prelates, delivered the remarks Friday night at a dinner of a Catholic women's group.

His comments were among the sharpest in a debate over abortion and Catholic political responsibility in a campaign in which Catholics represent a key swing vote.

While Chaput has won praise from traditionalist Catholics for stressing opposition to abortion as a foundational voting issue, voices on the Catholic left have sought to apply church teachings to war, poverty, the environment and other issues.

Although the Catholic left is not new, several advocacy groups have either formed or ramped up activities since 2004. Partly, their efforts are a response to attention given to the pro-abortion rights stance of Democrat John Kerry, a Catholic who was criticized by a few bishops who suggested he should be denied or refrain from Communion.

Chaput, without getting into much detail, called Obama the "most committed" abortion-rights major-party presidential candidate since the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion in 1973.

"To suggest - as some Catholics do - that Senator Obama is this year's 'real' pro-life candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse," Chaput said according to his prepared remarks, titled "Little Murders."

more...

This from National Review's The Bench (wich deals with legal matters):

Obama's Trouble With the Truth--and With Life [Matthew J. Franck]

In the final presidential debate two nights ago, John McCain brought up Barack Obama's shocking opposition, in the Illinois state senate, to a bill essentially identical to the federal Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. Obama's response began, "If it sounds incredible that I would vote to withhold lifesaving treatment from an infant, that's because it's not true. The—here are the facts."

Where Obama is concerned, the incredible is often the exact truth. For the real facts, turn to Robert George and Yuval Levin at The Public Discourse. A supporter of infanticide and a liar. (But who could be the first and not the second?) And this man bids fair to be our next president . . .

For the full analysis of this particular Obama lie about his oppositon to a bill to protect babies born alive after a failed abortion, click here.

Yes, most if not all politicians shade the truth now and then, but Obama is in a league by himself. He constantly misstates his past statements whenever he wishes to do so. His bald-faced lies go unremarked upon by his supportive media, so they join him in making his lies "the truth."

In both Obama's early upbringing in Muslim society (in Indonesia) and in his immersion in Marxist and communist teachings which began right after his arrival in Hawaii from Indonesia and has continued to this day (high school, college, community organizing, readings in Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, courses at Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation while at Harvard Law School and back into involvement with community organizations in the Alinksy style such as ACORN that do and say whatever works), truth is not a cultural value. See, for example, this and this.

Mark Steyn is back in the swing of things (that is, writing weekly columns) and Joe the Plumber is his subject this week.

The National Republican Trust has created an ad pointing out the danger of Barack Obama's plan to issue driver's licenses to all illegal aliens.

British political observer Melanie Phillips writing in the UK's Spectator cannot believe what's going on in the United States:

You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant* radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.

As she sees it:

Pinch yourself

Tuesday, 14th October 2008

The contrast between, on the one hand, the huge amount of material about Obama’s radical associations that has been published in on-line journals and in a few brave newspapers, and on the other the refusal by big media to address it and to vilify those who do, becomes more astounding by the day. The Obamaniacs are spinning the relationship between Obama and William Ayers, former of Weather Undergound Terrorism Inc, as of no consequence because this was supposedly a chance acquaintance and because the educational project they worked on, the Annenberg Challenge, was a worthy one.

Stanley Kurtz now nails that canard by showing how, through the Annenberg Challenge, Obama and Ayers channelled funds to extremist anti-American Afrocentric ‘educational’ programmes which were a carbon-copy of the world view of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s black racist mentor who, under pressure, Obama was forced to repudiate. These programmes promoted, amongst other radical ideas, the ‘rites of passage’ philosophy which attempted to create a ‘virtually separate and intensely anti-American black social world’ in order to ‘counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society.’ One such teacher taught that

‘The submission to Western civilization and its most outstanding offspring, American civilization, is, in reality, surrender to white supremacy.’

Kurtz concludes:

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright.

No surprise there, since back in June Kurtz pointed to evidence that Obama shared the black racism of the Trinity United Church of Christ. In this article Obama was reported as rejecting ‘integrationist assimilation’ and wanting to channel black rage more effectively into political organisation. Kurtz dug out a chapter in a 1990 book called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois in which Obama sketched out how radical black churches could be harnessed to help radicalise the black population. As Kurtz wrote:

So it would appear that Obama’s own writings solve the mystery of why he stayed at Trinity for 20 years. Obama’s long-held and decidedly audacious hope has been to spread Wright’s radical spirit by linking it to a viable, left-leaning political program, with Obama himself at the center. The revolutionizing power of a politically awakened black church is not some side issue, or merely a personal matter, but has been the signature theme of Obama’s grand political strategy.

Those few brave souls who do try to enlighten the public about all this come up against the kind of intimidation by Camp Obama charted here by Michael Barone:

Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg's WGN radio program in Chicago. Mr. Kurtz had been researching Mr. Obama's relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago - papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters. Obama fans jammed WGN's phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest e-mails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Mr. Rosenberg's example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.

Other Obama supporters have threatened critics with criminal prosecution. In September, St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce warned citizens that they would bring criminal libel prosecutions against anyone who made statements against Mr. Obama that were ‘false.’ I had been under the impression that the Alien and Sedition Acts had gone out of existence in 1801-'02. Not so, apparently, in metropolitan St. Louis. Similarly, the Obama campaign called for a criminal investigation of the American Issues Project when it ran ads highlighting Mr. Obama's ties to Mr. Ayers.

No such threats, of course, will be made against this new book whose publication is tactfully timed for next year so as not to frighten the horses -- Race Course Against White Supremacy, by none other than William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Meanwhile, it turns out that not only did Obama do favours for convicted Chicago fraudster Tony Rezko, but as this story reports Alexi Giannoulias, who reputedly bankrolled Michael ‘Jaws’ Giorango, a Chicagoan twice convicted of bookmaking and promoting prostitution, became Illinois state treasurer last year after Obama vouched for him, and has now has pledged to raise $100,000 for Obama’s campaign.

You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant* radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.

* The Marxist belief that the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois [middle class] society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, the values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society. [This what Jeremiah Wright -- and MIchelle Obama -- urged their listeners, not to aspire to the middle class. And, of course, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were the ultimate fighters against middle class America, seeking to destroy it through violence before they realized re-educating the young to be socialist revolutionaries was more effective.]

Obama lies, again.

Colombia under President Uribe is our most reliable ally in Latin America. It is fighting the drug war with us with increasing success. Uribe has fought the drug dealers and other criminal elements and reduced their power. His coutrymen support his aggressive policies; Colombia cities are safer as a result.

Yet Democrat Speaker of the House Pelosi has chosen to ignore the rules of the House and deferred a vote on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement to a later time -- perhaps never.

Colombia had done much to support America. Michael Barone has justly called Peolosi's sidestepping of the required vote by legislative chicanary the most despicable act of this Congress. Obama defends that position.

Shame.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK OCTOBER 17, 2008

Obama Makes It Up

Repeating union distortions.

In Wednesday night's debate with John McCain, Barack Obama defended his opposition to the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement this way: "The history in Colombia right now is that labor leaders have been targeted for assassination, on a fairly consistent basis, and there have not been any prosecutions." Among the many falsehoods in this Presidential campaign, this is one of the worst.

It is true that Colombia has a history of violence. But since President Álvaro Uribe took office in 2002, that violence has been substantially reduced. The homicide rate through the end of 2007 was down by 40.4% and the rate among union members was down almost 87%. There is nothing "consistent" about a drop to 26 union member murders in 2007 from 155 in 2000.

As for prosecutions: In union-member killings, there were zero convictions from 1991-2000 and one in 2001. But from 2002-2007, there were 80. According to the Colombian attorney general's office, 29% of those murders were "found to have been results of theft, petty crime and random violence unrelated to union activity." Mr. Uribe has nonetheless created a special investigative unit for crimes against union members, and he expanded a special government protection program for unions.

More broadly, in 2004 Mr. Uribe pushed through congress a judicial reform that has reduced the average time needed to issue an indictment for a homicide to 50 days from 493. He also increased the budget for the attorney general's office to $598 million in 2008, from $346 million in 2002 -- a 73% increase.

If Colombia hopes to keep spending on judicial improvements and better law enforcement, it needs an expanding economy. In addition to misrepresenting the country's progress on reducing violence, Mr. Obama has never explained how denying Colombians the FTA will help the country reduce violence. Maybe this is because he knows he's merely repeating union distortions.

The New York Post reported today:

October 17, 2008 --

THOUGH he's battling GOP accusations that he's an Ivy League elitist, Barack Obama has a lifestyle of the rich and famous, like TV show host Robin Leach, who always signed off, "Champagne wishes and caviar dreams!" While he was at a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Michelle Obama called room service and ordered lobster hors d'oeuvres, two whole steamed lobsters, Iranian caviar and champagne, a tipster told Page Six.

Any scraps for Joe the Plumber?

We talk about the hidden Obama, the unknown Obama.

McCain is a known whose national public life has been an open book for many years. His record and posItions are available for all to see. He is a war hero, one who survived more than five years in prison in Vietnam. His record in the Senate is that of an honorable public servant trying to do his job to the best of his ability and forging bipartisan alliances where desirable to get legislation enacted. Before presIdential politics intervened McCain received glowing praise often from Democrats in the Senate. He has the reputation of being a maverick, because he sometimes sees things differently from his Republican colleagues. But he has universal respect.

McCain understands the overarching threat this nation faces from Islamic supremacism of which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran are important components. For the safety of the country, it is of concern that Obama does not recognize that threat, perhaps because most of his relatives are Muslims.

McCain understands that national security is the first priority of a president and is determined to defend and protect this country. He believes in the free enterprise system and providing equal opportunity for all Americans without distinction. It is not clear that Obama shares these priorities.

Obama is an unknown who came to national notice for the first time for his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. His campaign has issued his authorized biography and Obama has written two books about himself. The campaign has steadfastly refused to release any information about Obama's life and beliefs that aren't covered by the "official" version.

The national media, led by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times, are so enamored of the prospect of a black president they have abdicated their duty to the public to do the kind of scrutiny demanded of a person with a serious chance to become president of the United States. Just look what they can find out when they try: Joe the Plumber has been drawn and quartered by the national media in a mere handful of hours. But they haven't done that kind of in-depth examination of Obama. When bloggers or some independent researcher comes up with new information, the immediate response is to whitewash the story and dismiss it (as the New York Times just did about the William Ayers/Obama relations.)

So people with access to the internet are currently the only ones digging for and then distributing information that isn't available elsewhere. One thing about the blogosphere: If something untrue appears, it can be readily discredited. But news that isn't being developed by the mainstream media it does get around and fast.

At this site we ask questions and seek out what we deem to be relevant information about the unknown, that is, Barack Obama, and pass it on.

In the face of the obstacles erected by the Obama campaign to block access to information and the Obama's campaign of harassment against critics (flooding radio shows with emails demanding critics be shut off) or those raising questions (look at Joe the Plumber), it is difficult to develop the Obama story. So information comes out piecemeal and it's hard to put the whole picture together since all pieces of the puzzle haven't been found yet. What's concerning is that when someone is clearly hiding something one can conclude there is something to hide. And Obama is hiding. Why?

Some examples: The Obama campaign has refused access to Obama's birth records in the State of Hawaii. Some have wondered if Obama was in fact born in Kenya and later had his birth registered in Hawaii. Any question could be easily answered by opening access to the records.

The Obama campaign refuses to provide any information about Obama's time at Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Some information has been developed, but not much. No transcripts have been released, no questions are allowed. The absence of information gives rise to speculation,

Why did he switch to Columbia? What courses did he take? Since his book indicated he associated with black power and Marxist socialists, did he take courses on Marxist socialism and the Middle East or Islam? Who did he associate with while in college (beyond what's in Dreams from My Father)? Did he attend classes of the notorious Palestinian supporter and Israel critic Columbia's Edward Said? (In 1998 Obama and his wife were seated at a table for four with Said and his wife at a dinner honoring Said in Chicago when Obama was an obscure new Illinois state senator, suggesting a prior relationship.)

Who are the Marxist socialists he associated with? Did they include William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who were not only in New York City at the time Obama was, but Ayers also attended Obama's Columbia. Did they meet then? If they did, did they discuss continuing the revolution against American values together in Chicago? Obama spent one post-grad year in New York City while Ayers was still at Columbia and then moved to Chicago, a place he had never been, to become a community organizer. Chicago is the city where Ayers' roots are and his powerful family still lived. (Ayers' father got Michelle Robninson (now Obama) a job at Sidley Austin, his company's main law firm. A year later Barack Obama got a summer job there in 1989 after his first year at Harvard Law. Did Willam Ayers get his father to push Obama on Sidley? How come?)

UPDATE: It turns out that Andrew McCarthy, the brilliant lawyer who successfully prosecuted the blind shiekh who masterminded the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, has been wondering about the same things and has arrived at the same conclusion: Ayers and Obama had met long before 1995 when Obama kicked off his campaign for Illinois State Senate in Ayers' living room and when Ayers picked Obama to chair the new foundation he had established to pour $50 million plus (it turned out to be $160 million) into radicalization programs for the Chicago schools. As McCarthy notes, it is impossible to believe that Ayers would hand over his prime project to a third year associate in a small law firm he had just met.

When and how did Obama meet Khalid al-Mansour, the Muslim Black Panther alumnus and enemy of Israel, who helped Obama get an important recommendation for Harvard Law School and is reported to have assisted him financially?

No answers.

And so it goes.

The list of unanswered questions is long and grows. Without the cooperation of the Obama campaign it is extremely difficult to find the answers. What has been learned about the hidden Obama thus far is uniformly disturbing. What else is he hiding that the American people should know before the election?

For an excellent compilation of Obama information that has been independently gathered and put into book form, David Freddoso's book "The Case Against Barack Obama" is important reading.

Stanley Kurtz of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center is producing explosive article after explosive article based on his investigations, most of which the mainstream media is ignoring. When they do acknowledge it, it's to whitewash it, as the New York Times has been doing. References to his work, which is appearing in various publications, can be found by linkiing to the Center.

As the hidden Obama is revealed, we will carry the story.

Has William (Bill) Ayers changed in the years since he bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and various police facilities and homes? One who knows says absolutely not.

"His hatred of America is as virulent as when he planted a bomb at the Pentagon. And this hatred informs his educational "reform" efforts."

Over many years Obama worked with Ayers to fund radicalization of the Chicago schools and to teach young blacks to hate white-dominated America. As an "education specialist" Ayers was acting out the same hatred of America he had as a bomber but in a different way. As the estimable Stanley Kurtz has found, based on a study of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge archives, Ayers' accomplice "Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright." Hatred of America drove Ayers. What drove Obama?

Joe the plumber exposes Obama's plan to take tax money from you and give it to those 30-40% who don't pay any tax at all. "Spread the wealth" is how he describes using you as his piggy bank for his new federal welfare plan.

The racism injected into the presidential campaign by Barack Obama and his supporters in the mainstream media -- beginning with the New York Tiimes and the Washington Post -- is a disgrace to this country. It has unjustly dishonored John McCain, who has been scrupulous -- overscrupulous -- in even avoiding the risk of appearing racist. Why, McCain won't even ask why Obama spent 20 years with the anit-semitic, white-hating, America-hating Jeremiah Wright.

As Charles Krauthammer points out, Obama in the primary campaign even used the race card against Bill Clinton.

Clinton has many sins, but from his student days to his post-presidency, his commitment and sincerity in advancing the cause of African-Americans have been undeniable. If the man Toni Morrison called the first black president can be turned into a closet racist, then anyone can.

Krauthammer concludes:

What makes this all the more dismaying is that it comes from Barack Obama, who has consistently presented himself as a healer, a man of a new generation above and beyond race, the man who would turn the page on the guilt-tripping grievance politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

I once believed him.

This unknown man who may become president is being revealed piece by piece and the picture is ugly. HIs callous and vicious use of the race card springs from his history of hatred of the white man for his presumed oppression of blacks. If Clinton or McCain gets in his way, they are to be swept aside by whatever means work. If it's playing the race card or lying, well, that's what Obama does. And the media lets him get away with it.

Melanie Phillips, a highly regarded UK political commentator, can barely contain her shock and disbelief as to what is happening in America. As she sees it:

You have to pinch yourself – a M[arxist] radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.

Is there anything false in what Phillips has said? Obama has spent years consorting with Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Louis Farrakhan, Rashid Khalidi, Tony Rezko and the communists who run the voter registration fraud organization ACORN and doing the bidding of the corrupt Chicago political machine.

Despite the efforts of Obama and his supporters to keep his true story hidden, facts are leaking out on the internet, in blogs and by word of mouth and polls are tightening. The American people will save the republic on election day from this glib, hate-filled unknown and elect an honorable man John McCain who will defend and protect this country and expand opportunities for all Americans.

As for Krauthammer, it's hard to say whether he is angry or disgusted, or both.

Obama's Betrayed Message
Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post
Friday, October 17, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Let me get this straight. A couple of agitated yahoos in a rally of thousands yell something offensive and incendiary, and John McCain and Sarah Palin are not just guilty by association -- with total strangers, mind you -- but worse: guilty according to The New York Times of "race-baiting and xenophobia."

But should you bring up Barack Obama's real associations -- 20 years with Jeremiah Wright, working on two foundations and distributing money with William Ayers, citing the raving Michael Pfleger as one who helps him keep his moral compass (Chicago Sun-Times, April 2004) and the long-standing relationship with the left-wing vote-fraud specialist ACORN -- you have crossed the line into illegitimate guilt by association. Moreover, it is tinged with racism.

The fact that, when John McCain actually heard one of those nasty things said about Obama, he incurred the boos of his own crowd by insisting that Obama is "a decent person that you do not have to be scared (of) as president" makes no difference. It surely did not stop John Lewis from comparing McCain to George Wallace.

The search for McCain's racial offenses is untiring and often unhinged. Remember McCain's Berlin/celebrity ad that showed a shot of Paris Hilton? An appalling attempt to exploit white hostility at the idea of black men "becoming sexually involved with white women," fulminated New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. He took to TV to denounce McCain's exhumation of that most vile prejudice, pointing out McCain's gratuitous insertion in the ad of "two phallic symbols," the Washington Monument and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Except that Herbert was entirely delusional. There was no Washington Monument. There was no Leaning Tower. Just photographs seen in every newspaper in the world of Barack Obama's Berlin rally in the setting he himself had chosen, Berlin's Victory Column.

Herbert is not the only fevered one. On Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek fell over themselves agreeing that the "political salience" of the Republican attack on ACORN is, yes, its unstated appeal to racial prejudice.

This about an organization that is being accused of voter registration fraud in about a dozen states. In Nevada, the investigating secretary of state is a Democrat. Is he playing the race card too?

What makes the charges against McCain especially revolting is that he has been scrupulous in eschewing the race card. He has gone far beyond what is right and necessary, refusing even to make an issue of Obama's deep, self-declared connection with the race-baiting Jeremiah Wright.

In the name of racial rectitude, McCain has denied himself the use of that perfectly legitimate issue. It is simply Orwellian for him to be now so widely vilified as a stoker of racism. What makes it doubly Orwellian is that these charges are being made on behalf of the one presidential candidate who has repeatedly, and indeed quite brilliantly, deployed the race card.

How brilliantly? The reason Bill Clinton is sulking in his tent is because he feels that Obama surrogates succeeded in painting him as a racist. Clinton has many sins, but from his student days to his post-presidency, his commitment and sincerity in advancing the cause of African-Americans have been undeniable. If the man Toni Morrison called the first black president can be turned into a closet racist, then anyone can.

And Obama has shown no hesitation in doing so to McCain. Just weeks ago, in Springfield, Mo., and elsewhere, he warned darkly that George Bush and John McCain were going to try to frighten you by saying that, among other scary things, Obama has "a funny name" and "doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills."

McCain has never said that, nor anything like that. When asked at the time to produce one instance of McCain deploying race, the Obama campaign could not. Yet here was Obama firing a pre-emptive charge of racism against a man who had not indulged in it. An extraordinary rhetorical feat, and a dishonorable one.

What makes this all the more dismaying is that it comes from Barack Obama, who has consistently presented himself as a healer, a man of a new generation above and beyond race, the man who would turn the page on the guilt-tripping grievance politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

I once believed him.

Who are the fathers of today's world financial meltdown?

Who has cost investors hundreds of billions and workers hundreds of thousands of American jobs? Who has put the world on the edge of a Depression?

Three Democratic politicians who, not accidentally but deliberately, undermined the American financial system: Barack Obama, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank and Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd.

The following account is the story the mainstream media will not tell the American people because they fear it would jeopardize an Obama victory. Maybe after the election they will document the involvement of Obama and his Democratic colleagues, whose zeal to change America into a socialist state brought disaster to the world.

Free trade came up in the McCain/Obama debate Wednesday night. Stephen Spruiell argues this important matter does not get the attention it deserves. It is incredible that Obama and the Democratic Congress have refused to approve the free trade agreement with Colombia, our closest ally in Latin America. McCain said it was an unconscionable position. Obama claimed Colombia was killing union officials. Not true. Obama follows the line of the unions that all free trade agreements are bad in defiance of all evidence and the near universal statements of economists.

Obama opposes the Colombia deal because organized labor opposes it, and his fealty to the AFL-CIO on that and every other issue should be causing more concern than it is. Whether workers will retain the right to a secret ballot in union elections is a question that the next president will almost certainly decide, and Obama has already come out in favor of taking that right away.

Americans are on the verge of electing the most anti-trade, pro-union candidate of the last three decades, but these issues have received scant attention compared to Obama’s tax plan. Obama’s redistributionist approach to taxes is important to highlight, but his protectionism is also a form of redistribution: It would force consumers to pay higher prices for certain goods in order to benefit favored domestic industries. Joe the Plumber was the star of Wednesday night’s debate, but tax policy is not the only way Barack Obama seeks to “spread the wealth.”

We reported in July on Democratic Speaker of the House Pelosi twisting House rules to prevent a required up-or-down vote on the Colombia free trade agreement from taking place. Michael Barone termed her action the most shameful act of the current Congress. It remains so, for Pelosi, the Democratic Congress and Obama.

HIstory has shown that protectionism is a recipe for disaster. Even the Democrat economist Paul Krugman in his sane days said, "A country serves its own interests by pursuing free trade regardless of what other countries may do.”

Joe the Plumber has emerged as the star of the presidentiial campaign. His complaint about Obama's "tax cut" plan that would raise taxes on him that evoked Obama's response that he just wants to "spread the wealth around" did more to expose Obama's socialist plans than anything else to date. Joe's exchange with Obama certainly was a major factor in the final debate between John McCain and Obama, since it highlighted the kind of handout America Obama would create if elected president:

We first covered Joe's exchange with Obama here in which he let slip he just wanted to "spread the wealth" around. Clearly, Obama plans to roll back the welfare reform worked out by a Republican Congress and the Clinton Administration.. Obama apparently is counting on having a Democratic Congress to go along with his "spread the wealth" plans.

Well, that remark will live on. The plan will not if John McCain is elected president.

Two videos:

The first is the original airing of Joe's exchange with Obama.

The second is a phone interview Joe had with Neil Cavuto yesterday. As Joe points out, he's just a simple, hard-working guy trying to make a living and he doesn't want the government telling him who he should give his money to.

Well, if McCain doesn't have the gumption to let people know who the real Obama is, there are some folks who will. This ad, run by an independent group, has just started airing in some key states. The message is that Obama just doesn't have the values that most Americans do. Jeremiah Wright is the emblem of that. A study released just yesterday found that Obama did more than rub shoulders with and take inspiration from Jeremiah Wright.

As Stanley Kurtz reports, as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama poured funds into programs that taught young blacks to hate America and to keep themselves separate: "Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright."

Why does someone who says he loves America (Obama MUST have said he does at some point) fund hate-America programs?

UPDATE: McCain in the debate did get into Obama's America hating pals that seemed to get The One a bit flustered. As he was in his weak response (a lie, by the way) on why he opposed an anti-infanticide bill.

Power Line picked up this report of ACORN fraud in Philadelphia. Obama's ACORN deliberately hires those to get new voters who are desperate for money, such as drug addicts who get paid only if they get signatures.

Here's what John Hinderaker had to say:

ACORN continues to perpetrate voter registration fraud around the country; here is CNN's report on what is happening in Philadelphia:

Some excerpts:

CNN: According to city officials, close to 8,000 applications turned in by ACORN are problematic, including the 1,500 already sent to the U.S. Attorney, and officials expect the number to climb. Greg Voigt says so far his office is catching them, making sure no bad registrations lead to bad votes, but admits he has limited staff.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER FRED VOIGT: Are there going to be bad votes? Sure, there are going to be bad votes. There are always bad votes. Am I concerned this is a close election? Of course, I'm concerned it's a close election. But, you have to weigh everything in terms of your capacity to find things out.

CNN: Voigt says the problem is ACORN hires people desperate for money, including drug addicts, homeless, recovering alcoholics, even recent parolees who only get paid if they get signatures. ...

If next month's election is one-sided, the potentially explosive issue of voter fraud may recede once again--until the next election, anyway. But even if the Presidential race isn't close, some races will be. And given the massive voter registration fraud that has been carried out on behalf of the Democratic Party, it will likely be impossible to tell whether that fraud influenced the composition of the House, the Senate, or the governorships in one or more states.

If the Presidential election does turn out to be a cliffhanger, the potential consequences are even worse. In that event, and if Obama wins, there is a real possibility that many millions of Americans will view him as an illegitimate President who was installed in the White House through fraud. That's a risk, though, that the Obama campaign is evidently willing to take.

At last, somebody is demanding that the truth be told about about Barack Obama.

At this stage of the campaign, with the media refusing to do its job, it's John McCain's duty to tell the American people who Barack Obama really is. The nation deserves to know. As Tony Blankley so accurately says, "the only thing standing in the way of the American public making the most uninformed presidential decision since the invention of the telegraph" is John McCain.

Obama is a product of the corrupt Democratic Chicago political machine that cleared the field of candidates for all of his prior elections and is now running his campaign. His record is clearly that of a Marxist socialist who views this election as a way to change America from a free enterprise economy into one in which those in control of government -- Obama and the Chicago machine -- can dispense patronage and payoffs to their friends and distribute handouts and welfare to supporters at the expense of hard working Americans, thus buying their continuing political support to remain in power.

From his own statements, it is clear Obama will jeopardize the nation's defenses to free up taxpayers' money "to spread around" in a vastly expanded welfare system. He will allow our dependence on Middle East oil to continue to please his friends in the Muslim world. His Chicago political machine patrons don't mind his socialist agenda, indeed, it suits their ends, too.

Obama's close working alliances for decades with America haters Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers to stoke resentment and hate towards America in congregations and schools is clear evidence that the face he is now presenting to the American public is false. He is the opposite of a healer. He and the Chicago political machine will do anything to acquire power, as evidenced by their false cries of racism at every turn and the huge number of cases of fraudulent voter registration now being reported from all around the country, mostly attributable to Obama's long time ally ACORN. (Since ACORN registers Democrats, that suits the Chicago Democratic machine just fine.)

Obama spins his mantra of "hope' and "change," showing he has absorbed the central lesson of his communist "organizer" mentor Saul Alinsky very well, that in the pursuit of power truth is inconsequential.

In reality, Obama is full of anger anger at "white oppression" and is aching for power to strike back at, in his wife's words, the "just downright mean" country that has treated them so well. The only one left to unmask Obama is John McCain, since the media has refused to perform its duty to inform the public. But will the facts be listened to and make the difference?

John McCain's task:

John McCain has an unambiguous duty to the nation to force the public to at least be informed as to the nature and character of Sen. Obama. He needs to lay out all the accurate available information of Obama's prior alliances, affiliations and conduct both for the purpose of revealing Obama's character and Obama's radical policy disposition.

The Obama campaign has raised to a high art the technique of politically intimidating people from commenting honestly about Obama. They play the race card dishonestly, and almost the entire deck from which they deal is filled with race cards and threats of litigation. Real racism is appalling, but the act of falsely charging racism undercuts the very causes of equality and tolerance.

As courageous as John McCain's life has been to date, the next three weeks may be his most heroic. He must do his duty and alert the public despite the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" that will be shot into his back as he does so. Once he has discharged that duty -- and arranged for sufficient lawyers to protect the ballot boxes from what is likely to be an unprecedented campaign of attempted voter fraud -- Sen. McCain may be confident that his honor will be intact. And he will be ready to serve as our 44th president.

Read it all -- and weep that this nation has reached this dangerous position because of the deliberate decisions of elites, themselves corrupt, to hide the truth from the American people.

October 15, 2008
McCain's Next Duty Call
By Tony Blankley
Creators Syndicate

The essence of this election season couldn't be simpler. The American public is so appalled at the condition of the country (which it unfairly, but not implausibly blames on the despised President Bush) that with fate casting John McCain in the role of Bush's surrogate, a majority actually is considering voting for Sen. Obama. And when an electorate is intent on doing something, the last thing it wants to hear about are the facts. Moreover, the public's lack of interest in the facts is facilitated by the major American media's refusal to report them.

For example, as Obama has portrayed his political career as one extended beau geste to the ideal of American democracy, a slightly curious media would have thought to report on how he ran his previous elections. And those prior elections, far from being models of honest elections honestly fought, are redolent of Chicago politics at their most suspect.

Obama's first election was described recently by Martin Fletcher, a foreign correspondent for NBC News, in the British newspaper The Times (not on NBC): "Mr Obama won a seat in the state senate in 1996 by the unorthodox means of having surrogates successfully challenge the hundreds of nomination signatures that candidates submit. His Democratic rivals, including Alice Palmer, the incumbent, were all disqualified." Hmm.

Obama's election to the U.S. Senate was even more curious, as described by Gerard Baker in the Irish Independent: "Two exquisitely timed divorces smoothed the way.

"In the Democratic primary, he was a long shot. But a month before the election, his main opponent, Blair Hull, a wealthy Chicago futures trader, was forced to publish divorce papers that revealed, among other charming details, his wife's claim that he had once threatened to kill her.

"In the general election, lightning struck again. His opponent, the engaging Jack Ryan, had run a campaign as a different sort of Republican. But a few months before the election, his divorce papers revealed that, while he might have been a different sort of Republican, he was from precisely the same stable of Obama political opponents. He had, it turned out, once tried to force his former wife to go with him to sex clubs in Paris."

Was Obama really the innocent beneficiary of these rare events? Anything is possible. But when a fellow deals himself two royal flushes in a row, the other players are entitled to be suspicious. Moreover, when a politician is suspected of hypocrisy, the Washington press corps usually is supercharged in its efforts to prove their suspicions. But despite the fact that these bare outlines of Obama's elections are pregnant with the implications that he has gained every office he has sought so far by underhanded and sordid means -- while posing as a Gary Cooper-like idealist in a corrupt political world -- the American media have let these extraordinary events simply pass without significant comment.

During the past few weeks, as I have been traveling extensively across the country, I have yet to find anyone (including a few reporters and producers at local news stations in Florida, California and New York) who has heard of these facts. The response when I recite the facts is always about the same. More or less: "Really? Wow!"

A few days ago, a senior McCain campaign aide was reported to have said that McCain would rather lose with dignity than win by questionable means. I hope that isn't Sen. McCain's view because the aide has it exactly backward. If the polls are reasonably accurate, three weeks of John McCain's campaigning is the only thing standing in the way of the American public making the most uninformed presidential decision since the invention of the telegraph.

John McCain has an unambiguous duty to the nation to force the public to at least be informed as to the nature and character of Sen. Obama. He needs to lay out all the accurate available information of Obama's prior alliances, affiliations and conduct both for the purpose of revealing Obama's character and Obama's radical policy disposition.

The Obama campaign has raised to a high art the technique of politically intimidating people from commenting honestly about Obama. They play the race card dishonestly, and almost the entire deck from which they deal is filled with race cards and threats of litigation. Real racism is appalling, but the act of falsely charging racism undercuts the very causes of equality and tolerance.

As courageous as John McCain's life has been to date, the next three weeks may be his most heroic. He must do his duty and alert the public despite the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" that will be shot into his back as he does so. Once he has discharged that duty -- and arranged for sufficient lawyers to protect the ballot boxes from what is likely to be an unprecedented campaign of attempted voter fraud -- Sen. McCain may be confident that his honor will be intact. And he will be ready to serve as our 44th president.

Catholics and Evangelicals are being wooed to support Obama on the grounds his economic policies would result in fewer abortions, even though he is pro-abortion.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Professor George examines the arguments put forth by Obama supporters and finds them to be "delusional."

In the end, the efforts of Obama's apologists to depict their man as the true pro-life candidate that Catholics and Evangelicals may and even should vote for, doesn't even amount to a nice try. Voting for the most extreme pro-abortion political candidate in American history is not the way to save unborn babies.

For those who are carefully considering this vital moral issue as election day draws near, Professor George's analysis should be read.

Does anyone in real life put more faith in what people say than in what they do? A few gullible people do — and they often get deceived and defrauded big time.

Barack Obama has carried election-year makeovers to a new high, presenting himself as a uniter of people, someone reaching across the partisan divide and the racial divide — after decades of promoting polarization in each of his successive roles and each of his choices of political allies.

Yet the media treat exposing a fraudulent election-year image as far worse than letting someone acquire the powers of the highest office in the land through sheer deception.

Read Dr. Sowell's words carefully.

Going Negative!

That's what the media cry when you accurately present the track record of liberal candidates.

By Thomas Sowell
October 14, 2008
Creators Syndicate

One of the oldest phenomena of American elections — criticism of one’s opponent — has in recent times been stigmatized by much of the media as “negative advertising.”

Is this because the criticism has gotten more vicious or more personal? You might think so, if you were totally ignorant of history, as so many of the graduates of even our elite universities are.

Although Grover Cleveland was elected president twice, he had to overcome a major scandal that he had fathered a child out of wedlock, which was considered more of a disgrace then than today. Even giants like Lincoln and Jefferson were called names that neither McCain nor Obama has been called.

Why then is “negative advertising” such a big deal these days? The dirty little secret is this: Liberal candidates have needed to escape their past and pretend that they are not liberals, because so many voters have had it with liberals.

In 1988, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts called himself a “technocrat,” a pragmatic solver of problems, despite a classic liberal track record of big spending, big taxes, and policies that were anti-business and pro-criminal.

When the truth about what he actually did as governor was brought out during the presidential election campaign, the media were duly shocked — not by Dukakis’s record, but by the Republicans’ exposing his record.

John Kerry, with a very similar ultra-liberal record, topped off by inflammatory and unsubstantiated attacks on American military men in Vietnam, disdained the whole process of labeling as something unworthy. And the mainstream media closed ranks around him as well, deploring those who labeled Kerry a liberal.

Barack Obama is much smoother. Instead of issuing explicit denials, he gives speeches that sound so moderate, so nuanced, and so lofty that even some conservative Republicans go for them. How could anyone believe that such a man is the very opposite of what he claims to be — unless they check out the record of what he has actually done?

In words, Obama is a uniter instead of a divider. In deeds, he has spent years promoting polarization. That is what a “community organizer” does — creating a sense of grievance, envy, and resentment — in order to mobilize political action to get more of the taxpayers’ money or to force banks to lend to people they don’t consider good risks, as the community organizing group ACORN did.

After Barack Obama moved beyond the role of a community organizer, he promoted the same polarization in his other roles.

That is what he did when he spent the money of the Woods Fund bankrolling programs to spread the politics of grievance and resentment into the schools. That is what he did when he spent the taxpayers’ money bankrolling the grievance and resentment ideology of Michael Pfleger.

When Barack Obama donated $20,000 to Jeremiah Wright, does anyone imagine that he was unaware that Wright was the epitome of grievance, envy, and resentment hype? Or were Wright’s sermons too subtle for Obama to pick up that message?

How subtle is “Goddamn America!”?

Yet those in the media who deplore “negative advertising” regard it as unseemly to dig up ugly facts instead of sticking to the beautiful rhetoric of an election year. The oft-repeated mantra is that we should trick to the “real issues.”

What are called “the real issues” are election-year talking points, while the actual track record of the candidates is treated as a distraction — and somehow an unworthy distraction.

Does anyone in real life put more faith in what people say than in what they do? A few gullible people do — and they often get deceived and defrauded big time.

Barack Obama has carried election-year makeovers to a new high, presenting himself as a uniter of people, someone reaching across the partisan divide and the racial divide — after decades of promoting polarization in each of his successive roles and each of his choices of political allies.

Yet the media treat exposing a fraudulent election-year image as far worse than letting someone acquire the powers of the highest office in the land through sheer deception.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Obama's tax plan, he says, will give 95% of Americans an income tax cut. That's odd; 44% of Americans don't pay any income tax at all. What will happen is that the 44% will get a check from the government paid for by those who do pay taxes -- you. In other words, Obama is using his tax plan for welfare. He just wants to, in his words, "spread the wealth around." At the heart of Obama's "change for America" is socialism and increased reliance on the government for more handouts.

Since Obama believes, along with anti-white America Jeremiah Wright and self-described communist Willam Ayers, that America oppresses its non-white low income minorities, it is only just and fair that those who have earned enough to pay taxes hand some of their money over to those who haven't.

Power Line has the video of Obama's retort to a plumber who has figured out he's going to pay more under Obama's "tax cut" plan. Power Line also excerpts the Wall Street Journal's explanation of how Obama is undoing welfare reform as a first step to his new socialist society to replace the free enterprise system that has created the world's most successful economy.

Obama's "tax" plan would in effect undo the greatest accomplishment of the Republican Congress, welfare reform. It would reinstate the federal welfare system that we thought was gone for good with the repeal of AFDC. Not only a welfare system: a welfare system that would rapidly grow from more than a half trillion to over a trillion dollars a year.

ACORN is a communist/socialist organization whose mission is to "change America.,"

Barack Obama has been allied with ACORN since at least 1992 in its efforts to "change America." He has trained ACORN workers in how to intimidate banks and bankers into making mortgage loans they should not make and how to register voters. Obama ran a voter registration drive himself with ACORN in the early 1990s. Obama has represented ACORN in suing to "change America."

The kind of unsound loans that ACORN forced banks to make in its mission to "change America" are at the heart of the housing bubble, its collapse and the financial wreckage now destroying the savings of Americans and costing American jobs.

ACORN also has been working to "change America" by massive voter registration fraud to register Democratic voters. This year it claims it has registered 1.7 million new voters; one can guess the percentage of Democrats. Voter registration fraud investigations involving ACORN are ongoing in 12 states right now. Obama paid ACORN over $800,000 this year for voter registration despite its long and notorious involvement in voter registration fraud complaints, investigations and convictions. One recent report is of a young man bribed by ACORN with "cash and cigs" to sign up 72 times.

ACORN did not stop with intimidation of mortgage lenders to force them to make bad loans. Stanley Kurtz details how ACORN moved on to Congress to get Democratic support for throwing sane lending standards out the window and authorizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up these unsound loans from mortgage lenders. The present world financial crisis is the result. As Kurtz notes, "the bad seed that started it all was ACORN."

HOW does Barack Obama fit into all of this? Obama has been a key ally of Chicago ACORN going back to his days as a community organizer.

Later, as a young lawyer, he offered leadership training to the activists who were forcing Chicago banks into high-risk subprime loans. And when he made it on to the boards of Chicago's Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he channeled money ACORN's way.

Obama was perfectly aware of ACORN's intimidation tactics - indeed, he oversaw a Woods Fund report that boasted of managing to fund the radical group despite its shocking behavior.

And as a lawmaker, in Illinois and in Washington, he has continued to back ACORN's legislative agenda.

And allied with ACORN in Congress in pushing to loosen mortgage lending standards was none other than Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank. And later, in 2005 and 2006, it was Barney Frank, Senators Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama who blocked efforts of the President and John McCain and other Republicans to stop Fannie's and Freddie's dangerous subprime mortgage purchase programs that brought on this world financial crisis.

The kind of change Obama's bad judgment has already brought to America has cost the nation dearly in dollars, lost jobs and the integrity of the voting system. Will voter fraud nonetheless win him the election?

Read the appalling story in its entirety.

Obama's friends are a cause for concern, concludes the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer.

What is more important, decades of close alliance with Reverend Wright, a bigoted, anti-American racist, William Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist bomber, America-hater par excellence and a self-described communist and Tony Rezko, convicted of 16 counts of political corruption and Obama fund raiser to the tune of $250,000 or Obama's campaign statements separating himself from these people?

Today, on the threshold of the presidency, Obama concedes the odiousness of these associations, which is why he has severed them. But for the years in which he sat in Wright's pews and shared common purpose on boards with Ayers, Obama considered them a legitimate, indeed unremarkable, part of social discourse.

Do you? Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect. There is a difference between temperament and character. Equanimity is a virtue. Tolerance of the obscene is not.

Obama & Friends: Judge Not?

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 10, 2008; Washington Post

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.

But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.

More...

ACORN's voter registration activities have provoked so much concern and so many investigations that the FBI has now stepped in. This IBD editorial recounts what's going on and what's at stake.

Is ACORN Stealing The Election?
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Thursday, October 9, 2008

Election Fraud: A radical group Barack Obama used to work for is committing voter-registration fraud in several states, ahead of the election. What does Obama know about this scam?

It's a legitimate question to raise now that the FBI has raided the offices of the nonprofit Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now in Nevada and North Carolina, two states where Obama and John McCain are running neck-and-neck. ACORN has registered bogus voters in both states.

The group's voter-registration fraud is rampant, and authorities plan a nationwide sweep of ACORN offices to collect records.

In Nevada, state officials say the fraudulent registrations included forms for the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team, including quarterback Tony Romo.

"Romo is not registered to vote in the state of Nevada," Secretary of State Ross Miller said, "and anybody trying to pose as Terrell Owens won't be able to cast a ballot on Nov. 4."

While those names will be flagged on Election Day, felonious voters may have better luck using other cutouts. Nevada, along with several other key battleground states, requires no ID to vote.

In North Carolina, where Obama has been running nonstop ads, ACORN has registered a record number of new voters, many of them suspicious. Statewide, Democrats are doing better than the GOP in new converts — even in traditionally Republican counties.

There have been 218,749 newly registered Democrats in North Carolina since January — more than five times the 38,337 new Republicans, state records show.

The numbers show a startlingly close political battle even in Republican-dominated Union County, with 4,233 new voters registering as Democrats and 4,362 as Republicans. In previous election years, new Republicans have outnumbered Democrats 2-to-1 in the fast-growing Charlotte-area county.

In Missouri, one ACORN registrant named Monica Rays showed up on no less than eight forms, all bearing the same signature.

Suspicious election officials sent letters to some 5,000 ACORN registrants in St. Louis, asking the letter recipients to contact them.

Fewer than 40 reponded.

In Kansas City, 15,000 registrations have been questioned, and last year four ACORN employees were indicted for fraud.

In addition, ACORN officials have also been indicted in Wisconsin and Colorado. Investigations against others are active in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

ACORN has also been registering convicted felons — including inmates — in Florida and other battleground states. ACORN boasts registering a record 1.5 million new voters so far this election.

What does all this have to do with Obama, besides the fact that he'd be the beneficiary of most, if not all, of these new votes?

For starters, Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for "advance work.")

What's more, Obama worked as executive director of ACORN's voter-registration arm, Project Vote, in 1992. Joined by two other community organizers on Chicago's South Side, Obama conducted the voter-registration drive that helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the Senate that year.

The next year, 1993, Obama joined the civil-rights law firm Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, where he sued the state of Illinois on behalf of ACORN to implement the federal "Motor Voter" law, which the GOP governor at the time refused to do. Then-Gov. Jim Edgar argued, presciently, that the Clinton law would invite voter fraud.

Obama downplays his ties to ACORN, and his campaign denies coordinating with ACORN to register voters.

Meantime, New Orleans-based ACORN maintains that it has no control over volunteers who are falsifying application forms, that they're like employees who steal from the store.

But the fraud is widespread and not isolated. It also turns out that some ACORN execs allegedly are involved in a $1 million embezzlement cover-up at their headquarters. Representing them in the case is none other than Michelle Obama's old law firm in Chicago.

ACORN's corruption is not just out in the field, as they claim. There's a pattern of corruption from the top down.

McCain would be wise to start preparing a challenge to voter registration rolls should he lose the race in a close contest. He'd be crazy not to contest the results in light of these events.

First it was Obama saying that Reverend Wright of the "God Damn America" videos was not the Jeremiah Wright he knew over 20 years. That statement was quickly exposed as utter nonsense.

Then it was unrepentant terrorist bomber and self-described communist William Ayers Obama tried to pass off as just somebody from the neighborhood when in fact they worked together for several years dispensing over $150 million in an attempt to make socialists out of Chicago's teachers and students.

Now Obama is trying to disassociate himself from ACORN, the radical socialist organization in the forefront of intimidating banks and bankers to make subprime mortgage loans to low-income and minorities whose credit did not warrant the loans. ACORN also has a long history of voter registration fraud, not only in Chicago, but across the nation. ACORN, like most socialists, want to replace the free enterprise system with an authoritarian socialist state and all means to accomplish this end are allowable, including violent intimidation and, shall we say, careless and negligent voter registration efforts. Despite -- or because of -- this history the Obama campaign paid over $800,000 to an ACORN unit for voter registration work this year.

Obama first ran a voter registration project with ACORN in the early 1990s, so he has to be familiar with its long history of accusations, investigations and convictions involving fraudulent voter registration. Obama trained ACORN workers in the art of pressuring banks to make unsound loans. As a lawyer he even represented ACORN in a law suit to force the Clinton Administration to loosen mortgage loan standards even farther. In the last couple of years Obama said his views were still pretty much what they were during his ACORN days and this past November he was quoted as saying he had been fighting alongside ACORN" his entire career. ACORN's political arm has endorsed him for president and proudly announced it has registered 1.7 million this year; ACORN is being investigated by public officials in at least 12 states for registration fraud in this election cycle. (For voter fraud in 2006 ACORN workers went to jail in Washington State.) Again, Obama' denials are total nonsense, but the mainstream media is not calling him on them, but is giving him a pass as it has done for Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers.

Stanley Kurtz, an independent researcher from Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, sets the record straight on yet another of Obama's prevarications (ok, lies). Read "Inside Obama's ACORN" in National Review of May 29, 2008 and Kurtz's follow-up October 8th in the same publication. Also, see this IBD editorial.

We have covered ACORN's close relationship with Obama over several months. For example, click here and here.

Just as Obama learned from his first foray into community organizing it would be easier and more effective to get inside the system to effect socialist change, so too did ACORN. In his book Obama admits he went to Harvard Law School to learn how to game the system at the highest levels. ACORN followed the same route: It switched from holding city council protests to working the system. Rather than fight from outside, infiltrate the system with voter registration drives to elect your people and use the law courts to change such things as mortgage loan regulations to force more loans to be made to those with subpar credit. All along the way, Obama supported ACORN, using his position on charitable boards to pour money into ACORN's radical agenda.

McCain is now running ads detailing the Obama-ACORN connections and his preposterous denials as well as the long alliance with unrepentant terrorist and communist William Ayers in promoting socialist goals, which included, guess what, funding ACORN.

Despite all the mainstream media fawning over Obama and his massive outspending of McCain on television and voter registration, a strange thing is occurring. The polls are tightening.

The story about the real Obama is leaking out on the internet and in small circulation magazines. Is he a socialist? Yes. Did he really work with an admitted "small "c" communist (former but unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers)" to radicalize the Chicago schools? Yes. Did he stay in Jeremiah Wright's racist hate-America church for 20 years because he agreed with its message? Why else? And why has he been allied with ACORN, repeatedly accused, investigated and condemned for voter fraud, for more than 20 years? And was he really one of those who taught ACORN workers how to intimidate banks into making subprime loans they never should have made?

Things the mainstream media should have looked into many months ago but didn't are just now surfacing. Who knows? If the media had done it's job earlier, Hillary Clinton may well have been the Democratic nominee for president?

Karl Rove, former Bush strategist, believes the situation is still fluid, that with all the distractions and fear because of the economic crisis voters are just now looking for information about the candidates. They know who McCain is, but they are still asking, "Who is Barack Obama?"

Voters Haven't Decided Yet
Now it's up to the candidates to drive home their message.

By KARL ROVE
October 9, 2008
Wall Street Journal

Tuesday night's presidential debate was good entertainment. Both candidates were animated and loose throughout a wide-ranging discussion. Sen. Barack Obama did well in Sen. John McCain's favorite format. Mr. McCain was more focused and sharp than in the first debate, though the cameras above him made his balding pate more prominent.

APTom Brokaw was often a distraction: Did he really need over a hundred words -- including the name "Sherard Cowper-Coles" -- to ask about Afghanistan?
Mr. McCain's advocates were cheered by him advancing the theme that Mr. Obama lacks a record of accomplishment or bipartisanship in the Senate. Mr. McCain also described how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac constituted "the match that started this forest fire" that's engulfed our economy, and nailed Mr. Obama and Democrats for being AWOL on GSE reform.
Mr. McCain was most effective on taxes and spending. He argued now is not the time to raise taxes and hit Mr. Obama's proposal to hike small business taxes: three out of four filers in the top 5% report small-business income. Mr. McCain called for a spending freeze and attacked earmarks, including Mr. Obama's $3 million for a Chicago planetarium's "overhead projector." Mr. Obama weakly replied earmarks were only $18 billion.
Advocates of Mr. Obama, on the other hand, saw him scoring points on style and connecting with questioners. He patiently explained to one how the Wall Street rescue package would help him and his neighbors on Main Street. He had the night's emotional high point when he talked about his dying mother fighting her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition. He called for dramatic change and tied Mr. McCain to the Bush administration, though not too often to be obnoxious.
Mr. Obama also offered his villain responsible for the current crisis: "the deregulation of the financial system." Many voters will accept Mr. Obama's designation, despite it being both wrong and a slap at President Bill Clinton, who signed the 1999 deregulation legislation that Mr. Obama seems to object to, and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin and Undersecretary Larry Summers, who helped fashion it. What do these Obama advisers think of being blamed for the credit-market meltdown?
What about swing voters? There are probably more undecided and persuadable voters open to switching their choice than in any election since 1968.
About Karl Rove
Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.
Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.
Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.
For those open to Mr. McCain, it is unclear how they will respond to his plan to order the Treasury secretary "to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes." It came across as both impulsive and badly explained. No experts were ready to defend it. No explanatory paper was flung at journalists. Nor were surrogates like Mitt Romney briefed. But the campaign did admit it borrowed the idea from Hillary Clinton.
While it was good Mr. McCain engaged on health-care reform, his explanations were not crisp or powerful. And he failed to defend his proposed corporate tax cut. Why not say America has the world's second-highest corporate tax rate, putting the U.S. at a disadvantage in creating jobs?
For those leaning to Mr. Obama, there was no evidence of bipartisanship. There was no talk of accomplishments. Did he really think it was smart to answer Mr. McCain on Fannie by dismissing the GSE reform bill and pointing to a letter he wrote? In the Senate, is the pen mightier than legislation? And Mr. Obama's say-one-thing, do-another approach was apparent. Blast Mr. McCain for talking up the economy, then say, "I am confident about the American economy." Blame Mr. McCain for the credit meltdown, and end the assault with "you're not interested in hearing politicians pointing fingers." Say "only a few percent of small businesses" will get taxed when 663,000 small enterprises are in the top 5%.
There were no knockouts. What matters now is how well the candidates prosecute the themes they have laid out in the election's remaining 26 days. Interest is high. People are paying more attention than usual.
Each faces a big challenge. Mr. McCain's is that events have tilted the field towards Mr. Obama. To win, Mr. McCain must demonstrate he stands for responsible conservative change, while portraying Mr. Obama as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal not ready to be president.
Mr. Obama's test is that voters haven't shaken deep concerns about his lack of qualifications. Having accomplished virtually nothing in his three years in the Senate except to win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama must show he is up to the job. Voters like him, conditions favor him, yet he has not closed the sale. He may be approaching the finish line with that mixture of lassitude and insouciance he displayed in the spring against Mrs. Clinton.
But here's a warning sign for Mr. Obama. Of recent candidates, only Michael Dukakis in 1988 has had a larger percentage of voters tell pollsters they believe he lacks the necessary qualifications to be president.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

It isn't often that one can identify with precision the principal culprits who cause a disaster, but that is not the case with this financial crisis. We know who. It's Frank, Obama and Dodd.

At its heart is the housing bubble and its collapse largely due to the explosion of subprime loans to those who reality has proven couldn't afford them.

Democrats and community agitators like Barack Obama pushed -- intimidated and terrorized -- banks to make mortgage loans they would never make in their sound business judgment. Subprime loans rose from 2% of total loans to 30% in just four years -- 2002 to 2006. And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought most of them, to the relief of the banks who made the loans under pressure from Clinton-era Community Reinvestment Act rules, urged on by Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank and Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd.

Barack Obama, fresh out of college, learned the practices of intimidation as a community organizer. He soon realized he could accomplish more working for his socialist goals inside the system rather than from the outside. So he went to law school to learn how to wield power on higher levels. During his time at law school, he learned even more about the Alinsky community organizing tactics of intimidation by moonlighting at the Industrial Areas Foundation. On his return to Chicago, Obama, working for ACORN, was a pioneer in forcing unsound loans to be made, training those who terrorized banks, bankers and public officials into making loans they shouldn't have. (He also ran a voter registration drive for ACORN, which has been implicated in voter registration fraud time and time again.)

Meanwhile, Frank and Dodd in the U.S. Congress were pushing Fannie and Freddie to buy up those shaky loans, stamp them with the U.S. guaranty and sell them to buyers around the world. As a consequence, subprime loans mushroomed.

Frank and Dodd blocked Bush and McCain efforts to restore sanity to Fannie and Freddie. When the Bush Administration together with Senate Republicans, including John McCain, tried to rein Fannie/Freddie in in 2003, 2005 and 2006, Democrats led by Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd blocked all those efforts, scoffing that there was no Fannie/Freddie crisis. Obama, who in earlier years had worked to force banks into subprime lending, of course did nothing and remained silent, while collecting over $100,000 in campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie. In fact, as a senator he was quoted as saying that a subprime loan was a good thing.

The inevitable collapse occurred. Fannie and Freddie had spread so much subprime debt around the world, panic resulted.

As Obama's Reverend Jeremiah Wright said in another context, the Democratic chickens have come home to roost, but these three haven't suffered, It's average Americans who have lost hundreds of billions in their savings because of the reckless policies of Frank, Obama and Dodd.

Socialist agitators such as Saul Alinsky, whose methods Obama studied and applied in his community organizing and lawyer days in Chicago, believed the best way to get to a Marxist socialist society is to create chaos and bring the free enterprise system down, while blaming it for all the problems his followers helped to create. Was financial chaos in the Obama vision as a prelude to a socialist society? If so, Marxist revolutionary change is at hand. That hundreds of millions have suffered in the process is just an unfortunate side effect of creating a more humane, more just socialist society. Obama made it clear that higher taxes will be the start of Obama's socialist program of wealth redistribution, taking what's yours to those who claim it should be theirs.

Those who could not afford their mortgages and now face foreclosure, the government will not only give them interest relief, it will reduce the mortgage principal (that is, the money borrowed in the first place) and stretch out payments for up to 50 years. If the house wasn't affordable before, it certainly will be now. (Section 110 of the bailout bill.) If you are struggling but making your payments to protect your home, you get no relief from section 110. Only the deadbeats benefit.

It may seem complicated, but it's really simple.

Subprime loans created the housing bubble. When the housing bubble broke, the crisis spread throughout the world since Fannie/Freddie obligations were held by central banks and commercial banks in all countries. They bought because the obligations were sold by government-sponsored agencies, so of course the U.S. government stood behind them. Rating agencies agreed and rated the paper AAA, triple-A, the highest and safest rating there is.

But those at Fannie/Freddie were working to please their Democratic sponsors in Congress and ignored the lack of creditworthiness that was increasing in the portfolios they were selling. The much maligned Wall Street firms relied on Fannie and Freddie to assemble creditworthy packages that protected the credit of the U.S,, which was their prime responsibility. Fannie and Feddie officials such as Raines and Johnson, both advisors to the Obama campaign, are the ones at Fannie who failed to protect the American people.

Now Barney Frank is trying to deflect criticism of his socialist profligacy by claiming that any criticism of the subprime loan explosion is a Republican slam at black borrowers. In other words, criticism of the disaster they created is racist.

How pathetic.

Investor's Business Daily does an excellent job of summarizing the sorry saga.

Barney Frank's Bankrupt Ideas
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY |Tuesday October 07, 2008

Financial Rescue: Democrats created the mortgage crisis by forcing banks to give loans to people who couldn't afford them. Now Obama and Biden want bankruptcy judges to bail out the same deadbeat homeowners.

It's been said that history is a lie agreed upon. Democrats are trying to rewrite history by blaming the Bush administration for the current crisis and claiming that the rescue bill is necessary to save the economy from Republican mismanagement.

More blarney from Barney.

Last Thursday on Fox News, when Bill O'Reilly tried to suggest that both parties might share the blame, House Finance Committee Chairman Frank, in a not atypical meltdown, disowned any responsibility for his lack of oversight over the last two years and his complicity before that.

Frank also claimed: "The fact is, it was 1994 that we passed a bill to tell the Fed to stop the subprime lending. We tried to get them to do it." In other words, those rascally Republicans did it all when they took control of Congress that November.

More...

Dr. Sowell despairs that Americans are swept up in empty rhetoric and are ignoring decades of actions and behavior that are alien to the average American.

There is a "huge gulf" between the values of Americans and those of Barack Obama.

Obama is presenting a false face to fool the American people. In fact, what is Obama? Sowell, himself a black man who has said that he, too, along with millions of Americans, hopes that one day a qualified black American will be elected president, says this:

The old phrase, “a man of high ideals but no principles,” is one that applies all too painfully to Barack Obama today. His words expressing lofty ideals may appeal to the gullible but his long history of having no principles makes him a danger of the first magnitude in the White House.

Why does he hold that view? Read the article.

October 08, 2008, 3:00 a.m.

High Ideals and No Principles
A huge gulf exists between Barack Obama’s values and those of most other Americans.

By Thomas Sowell

A recent Republican campaign ad sarcastically described as Barack Obama’s “one accomplishment” his supporting a bill to promote sex education in kindergarten.

During an interview of a Republican spokesman, Tom Brokaw of NBC News replayed that ad and asked if that was something serious to be discussed in a presidential election campaign.

It was a variation on an old theme about getting back to “the real issues,” just as Brokaw’s question was a variation on an increasingly widespread tendency among journalists to become a squad of Obama avengers, instead of reporters.

Does it matter if Barack Obama is for sex education in kindergarten? It matters more than most things that are called “the real issues.”

Seemingly unrelated things can give important insights into someone’s outlook and character. For example, after the Cold War was over, it came out that one of the things that caught the attention of Soviet leaders early on was President Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the air traffic controllers’ strike.

Why were the Soviets concerned about a purely domestic American issue like an air traffic controllers’ strike? Why was their attention not confined to “the real issues” between the United States and the Soviet Union?

Because one of the biggest and realest of all issues is the outlook and character of the President of the United States.

It would be hard to imagine any of Ronald Reagan’s predecessors over the previous several decades — whether Republicans or Democrats — who would have broken a nationwide strike instead of caving in to the union’s demands.

This told the Soviet leaders what Reagan was made of, even before he got up and walked out of the room during negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev. That too let the Soviet leaders know that they were not dealing with Jimmy Carter any more.

There is no more real issue today than “Who is the real Barack Obama behind the image?” What does being in favor of sex education in kindergarten tell us about the outlook and character of this largely unknown man who has suddenly appeared on the national scene to claim the highest office in the land?

It gives us an insight into the huge gulf between Senator Obama’s election-year image and what he has actually been for and against over the preceding decades. It also shows the huge gulf between his values and those of most other Americans.

Many Americans would consider sex education for kindergartners to be absurd but there is more to it than that.

What is called “sex education,” whether for kindergartners or older children, is not education about biology but indoctrination in values that go against the traditional values that children learn in their families and in their communities.

Obviously, the earlier this indoctrination begins, the better its chances of overriding traditional values. The question is not how urgently children in kindergarten need to be taught about sex but how important it is for indoctrinators to get an early start.

The arrogance of third parties, who take it upon themselves to treat other people’s children as a captive audience to brainwash with politically correct notions, while taking no responsibility for the consequences to those children or society, is part of the general vision of the Left that pervades our education system.

Sex education for kindergartners is just one of many issues on which Barack Obama has lined up consistently on the side of arrogant elitists of the Far Left. Senator Obama’s words often sound very reasonable and moderate, as well as lofty and inspiring. But everything that he has actually done over the years places him unmistakably with the extreme left elitists.

Sadly, many of those who are enchanted by his rhetoric are unlikely to check out the facts. But nothing is a more real or more important issue than whether what a candidate says is the direct opposite of what he has actually been doing for years.

The old phrase, “a man of high ideals but no principles,” is one that applies all too painfully to Barack Obama today. His words expressing lofty ideals may appeal to the gullible but his long history of having no principles makes him a danger of the first magnitude in the White House.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Unrepentant terrorist bomber (Pentagon, Capitol) William Ayers and Obama were friends and colleagues from at least 1995. Ayers to this day expresses his hatred of America (the thought of which makes him "want to puke") and has worked continually since his terrorist bombing days to destroy the American system. Ayers calls himself "a small "c" communist."

In 1995 Ayers conned a charity into giving $50 million to a new organization he formed to make socialist revolutionaries out of Chicago school teachers and children. Who did he pick to chair the board of the new organization to dispense the money to the left-wing, socialist groups that would do the indoctrination? Barack Obama, fresh out of Harvard Law School.

What better indication of the soul mates they were than for Ayers to trust that Obama would send the money to fellow socialist revolutionaries? And over the next several years at that new organization and another one that Obama chaired (with Ayers on the board), that's just what Obama did to the tune of more than $160 million -- and bragged about it in written reports. (ACORN, the violent intimidator of banks and bankers and voter registration fraud expert, was one of Obama gift recipients. As was Jeremiah Wright's and Obama's racist church).

For Obama to say he really didn't know Ayers is not a joke but a lie.

Dr.Thomas Sowell says the true story about Barack Obama is "not a pretty story." He is the opposite of what he appears. He is a product of the corrupt Democratic machine in Chicago, where he sided with the machine time and again against reform.

Some excerpts:

Obama could have allied himself with all sorts of other people. But, time and again, he allied himself with people who openly expressed their hatred of America. No amount of flags on his campaign platforms this election year can change that....

Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers and Antoin Rezko are not just people who happened to be at the same place at the same time as Barack Obama. They are people with whom he chose to ally himself for years, and with some of whom some serious money changed hands.

Senator Obama is running on an image that is directly the opposite of what he has been doing for two decades. His escapes from his past have been as remarkable as the great escapes of Houdini.

For those who want the cold, hard, real facts Dr. Sowell urges reading David Freddoso's highly documented book "The Case Against Barack Obama."

Read it all.

Dr. Thomas Sowell is a distinguished senior felllow in economics and public policy at Stanford's Hoover Institution, an author and a widely-syndicated columnist. He is one of America's most respected economists.

Dr. Sowell cannot understand how the American people can be so fooled by the propaganda of the Democratic Party as echoed by the mainstream media.

Can the media, the Obama campaign and Congressional Democrats make people believe what are demonstrably flat-out lies? "Don't facts matter?" he asks.

The McCain campaign and the Bush Administration have been silent in the face of the relentless propaganda spin of the Democrats and their supporters. They have to speak out now to let the people know the truth about how Democrats, including Barack Obama, brought on this financial crisis and what Obama's real plans are for the America he and his friends want to see.

Democratic policies have brought on this crisis, but the Obama Marxis socialist agenda make things worse.

Speak out, John McCain. Enough of Mr. Nice Guy. You have a responsibility to the American people. As Sarah Palin has pleaded, "Take the gloves off!"

Dr. Sowell says it correctly:

The media alone are not alone in keeping the facts from the public. Republicans, for reasons unknown, don't seem to know what it is to counter-attack. They deserve to lose.

But the country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

As we said, hoped, several weeks ago, not all of the people can be fooled all the time, as Abraham Lincoln confidently proclaimed.

Or can they?

Do Facts Matter?
Thomas Sowell
Friday, October 03, 2008

Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."

Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time.

The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain-- which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis.

It raises the question: Do facts matter? Or is Obama's rhetoric and the media's spin enough to make facts irrelevant?

More...

Half of Obama's staggering fundraising total comes from donations of less than $200 -- which, guess what, don't have to be reported. Also, guess what? It turns out that many of them, in the many millions, are fraudulent. Donors like "Good Will" and "Doodad Pro" have given millions in contributions of less than $200 from overseas. The Republican National Committee has filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission, but you can be sure nothing will come of it till long after the presidential election on November 4th. The FEC has never had to deal with fraud of this magnitude.

RNC: Obama Accepted Illegal, Foreign Campaign Cash
Amanda Carpenter at 1:01 PM
The Republican National Committee is filing a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission over what they believe are illegal donations made to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign from foreign sources.

"We believe they have been accepting donations from foreign nationals and excessive contributions," said RNC Communications Director Danny Diaz. He said there were "questions with regards to the legitimacy" of the hundreds of millions low-dollar contributions Obama has received.

Federal campaign finance law forbids campaigns from accepting donations from foreign nationals. The complaint will be formally filed with the FEC Monday. The RNC is requesting that the FEC begin auditing Obama's campaign contributions.

If the RNC's allegations are true, it won't be the first time the FEC has found Obama guilty of taking money from foreign sources. Earlier this year, the FEC ordered the Obama campaign to return an illegal donation worth $31,100 made from two brothers in the Gaza Strip.

The RNC's complaint was spurred by a story written by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff on October 4. It said the Obama campaign had accepted online donations from people named "Doodad Pro" and "Good Will." The "Good Will" donor said his employer was "Loving" and his occupations was "You." The address he submitted was for a GoodWill Industries store.

Before Isikoff wrote his piece, several conservative blogs had discussed some of these odd-sounding donations as well.

RNC General Counsel Sean Carincross said various press reports have called into question at least 11,500 donors names. Those names donated approximately $33.8 million to Obama's campaign.

Carincross said, "There were no quality control devices," such as a method to verify a U.S. passport if a citizen was donating to Obama's campaign from overseas. He said he believed Obama had knowingly accepted foreign donations and taken no reasonable action to investigate the illegal donations.

"This is a widescale problem," he said.

It's rather curious, to say the least, how many mentors, allies and friends Obama has who hate America.

Yet most of America doesn't know about most of them because the Obama campaign has created a fictionalized narrative about Obama and the mainstream media hasn't done its job of investigating since it's so eager to get Obama elected.

So to many if not most Americans Obama remains a mystery.

This week at her campaign appearances Sarah Palin got the biggest reaction -- ovations, really -- to a quietly stated demand she directed to the media: Tell people about the real Barack Obama.

The real Obama story is disturbing. Let's start with some friends.

When Obama as a young man returned from Indonesia to Hawaii, he linked up with a member of the Communist Party of the U.S. Frank Marshall Davis. By definition, Communists hate America and its free enterprise system; it is fundamentally flawed and they want a totalitarian socialist system for America. Davis is reported to have warned Obama never to trust the white man.

In college, as he reports in his first book, Obama "hung out" with black power advocates and Marxist socialists, enemies of America the way it is.

While he has been hidden away of late, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was shouting about black power and his hatred of America and of white oppression for 20 years with Obama in the congregation. Obama often referred to him as a mentor and friend. Indeed, the title of his second book "Audacity of Hope" was taken from a Wright sermon on "white man's greed" being responsible for oppressing the world.

Also in Chicago there is the nutcake priest Father Michael Pfleger, who mimicked his friend Jeremiah Wright on America's oppression of blacks and advocated building black power. He has finally been silenced by the Archbishop of Chicago. Obama has referred to him as a friend and mentor as well.

Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan is a life long hater of America. The Reverend Wright has saluted Farrakhan as an American hero. Obama helped Farrakhan organize the Million Man March in Washington and Farrakhan has strongly endorsed Obama.

Unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers and his terrorist bomber wife Bernadine Dohrn have been Obama friends since 1995 (despite the New York Times attempted whitewash apologia yesterday). On, of all days, September 11, 2001 Ayers gave an interview in which he expressed his regret he hadn't done more bombing during his terrorist days. Obama and Ayers worked together for years in two different "charitable" endeavors to subvert the American system, seeking to implement a socialist ethos by radicalizing teachers and students in the Chicago school system.

Ayers also posed for the cover of a Chicago magazine in 2001, while working closely with Obama on their radical programs, that speaks volumes.

Ayers as recently as 2006 described himself as a "small 'c" communist." Ayers' published remarks include a statement that the thought of America makes him "want to puke."

The most recent disclosure about an Obama friend who had a hatred of America was a Muslim advisor to a Saudi billionaire who worked to obtain a positive recommendation for Obama to enter Harvard Law School. Khalid Al-Mansour was a Black Muslim and Black Nationalist who was a “mentor” to the founders of the Black Panther party at the time the party was founded in the early 1960s. It is not known how or why a Texas Muslim came to befriend Obama and, according to speculation, contribute financially to his Harvard Law School education.

And, of course, Obama has been for decades deeply involved with organizations such as ACORN, which is a Marxist socialist organization dedicated to overturning the American economic system. It was one of the early leaders in intimidating and terrorizing banks and bank officials into making mortgage loans they never in sound business judgment would have made. Obama pursued his Marxist socialist interests after college as a community organizer using the Alinsky method of dissembling and terrorizing in Chicago with ACORN and, while in Boston at Harvard Law School, took advanced training in socialist indoctrination with Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation.

Obama trained ACORN people in intimidation strategy and tactics to force banks to make subprime loans. The nation is suffering from the fruits of that terrorizing that begat the subprime loans that have produced today's financial crisis.

ACORN is also a national leader in voter registration fraud, seeking to "change America" by any means, including corrupting the electoral system by filing false and forged registrations. ACORN is the subject in this election cycle in vote fraud investigations in at least 12 different states. Several ACORN workers went to jail for massive voter fraud in Washington state in the last election cycle.

Obama still calls himself a friend of ACORN, whose political arm has endorsed Obama. He also said recently his views today are pretty much what they were during his ACORN days. Speculation has it that ACORN in this election could be responsible for hundreds of thousands of voter registrations, many of which, if history is a guide, will be fraudulent and never found out. The Obama campaign paid more than $800,000 to ACORN's Project Vote arm this year, after first hiding the payment for voter registration as work for "polling."

And one should not forget Michelle Obama, who wrote ill of America in her senior thesis at Princeton, on the campaign stump called America "just downright mean," and during the campaign said more than once, for the first time in her adult life, she was "proud of her country."

Is there a dislike of America lurking inside Obama? Why did he feel it necessary to go to Berlin and apologize to 200,000 Germans for the sins of America when America rescued the Germans from Nazi rule? Does that lack of enthusiasm for America explain his failure to place his hand on his heart durng the playing of the national anthem until told to do so by his staff after reporters commented on it?

Whatever the present patriotic campaign rhetoric now is, one has to wonder about the associations Obama sought out over more than 20 years of his adult life.

What unites these friends in their hatred of America is a desire to bring down the present system, to replace equality of opportunity with equality of benefits.

Higher taxes, increased welfare spending and taking from the successful to give to the rest are on the agenda of Obama and all of these friends. It's called state socialism.

Has the media performed its duty to the American people to tell them the real Obama story?

To ask the question is to answer it.

As Democrats aided by the media have been doing all they could to blame eight years of the Bush Administration for the financial panic now circling the globe, it was Congressional Democrats who allowed the housing bubble to get out of control, leading to the inevitable collapse that was so big it has shaken the entire financial system.

It started with local agitators across the country demanding banks make loans they never should have to people who couldn't afford them. In the forefront was ACORN, the national socialist organization, terrorizing and intimidating banks, bank and public officials into loosening lending standards. The ACORN chapter in Chicago was one of the national leaders in blackmailing banks; their people were trained in their intimidation tactics by none other than Barack Obama.

Then Democrats in Congress urged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up all these risky loans that banks were more than happy to get rid of; they didn't want to make them in the first place. Then Fannie and Freddie had Wall Street package the loans and sell them around the world. With the assumed guaranty of the U.S. government behind the securities of these public sponsored agencies everyone bought relying on the credit of the U.S.

Efforts to slow down and stop the incredible expansion of subprime loans made possible by Fannie and Freddie (from 2% of total loans in 2002 to 30% in 2006) were blocked by Democrats in Congress led by Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. John McCan was urging reform; Obama was not. Instead, Obama in just his very short time in the Senate became the second biggest recipient over 20 years of Fannie/Freddie campaign contributions (second only to Senator Dodd).

As a result of the Democrats' "do good' socialism, taxpayers will wind up paying hundreds of billions of dollars. Investors have already lost hundreds of billions of dollars and it could get worse if the bailout doesn't succeed. Warren Buffet thinks the $700 billion bailout may not be enough to stave off recession or worse.

Before the bailout bill to rescue the financial system from Democratic excess passed, Fox News presented an excellent short summary of how it all came about.

So put the blame where it belongs -- on Obama-type Marxist socialism pushed along by Democrats in Congress.

ACORN finally is getting the attention it deserves. It is a symbol of corruption that is taking place in our banking system that has led to today's financial crisis and the corruption of the voting process. But it's more than a symbol, it is one of the major players in such corruption. And Democrats in Congress want to give it taxpayer money.

As Mona Charen points out, Democrats and Congress added a slush fund to the bailout bill to give tens of millions to ACORN to continue its "community organizing" work. Republicans reacted in disbelief and stripped the provision out.

Stanley Kurtz has reported in detail how ACORN proudly touted "affirmative action" lending and pressured banks to make subprime loans. Madeline Talbott, a Chicago ACORN leader, boasted of "dragging banks kicking and screaming" into dubious loans. And who trained those ACORN recruits who stormed banks and directors' meetings, intimidating bankers and public officials to make unsound mortgage loans? Barack Obama.

ACORN's pioneering work in forcing mortgage loans to be made that never should have been made led to the housing bubble, its collapse, the loss of homes and investments by milliions of innocent Americans and world financial chaos.

Voter registration is also one of ACORN's specialties. And despite rules about nonpartisanship being required for those receiving tax money for registration drives, ACORN somehow seems to only register Democrats.

Because they are on the side of righteousness and justice, they aren't especially fastidious about their methods. In 2006, for example, ACORN registered 1,800 new voters in Washington. The only trouble was, with the exception of six, all of the names submitted were fake. The secretary of state called it the "worst case of election fraud in our state's history." As Fox News reported:

"The ACORN workers told state investigators that they went to the Seattle public library, sat at a table and filled out the voter registration forms. They made up names, addresses, and Social Security numbers and in some cases plucked names from the phone book. One worker said it was a lot of hard work making up all those names and another said he would sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out the forms."

Several ACORN workers went to jail. But reports like these on vote fraud involving ACORN are coming in from all over the country in this election, including from so-called swing states such as Ohio and New Mexico. Obama's campaign paid ACORN some $800,000 for work during the primary campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton (and tried to hide the payment).

[ACORN's] philosophy seems to be that everyone deserves the right to vote, whether legal or illegal, living or dead.

Barack Obama has supported ACORN since the 1980s, not only training staff in Marxist socialist tactics, but representing them as a lawyer in their campaigns of intimidation and steering charitable (and tax?) money to them to fund their radical activities. And they are going all out to elect him.

Obama was not just sympathetic -- he was an ACORN fellow traveler.

Now you could make the case that before 2008, well-intentioned people were simply unaware of what their agitation on behalf of non-credit-worthy borrowers could lead to. But now? With the whole financial world and possibly the world economy trembling and cracking like a cement building in an earthquake, Democrats continue to try to fund their friends at ACORN? And, unashamed, they then trot out to the TV cameras to declare "the party is over" for Wall Street (Nancy Pelosi)? The party should be over for the Democrats who brought us to this pass. If Obama wins, it means hiring an arsonist to fight a fire.

Obama in Iraq violated the golden rule that the opposition party does not question or interfere with negotiations being conducted with a foreign government, especially while in that country. Ted Kennedy observes the rule, so did Ronald Reagan and so does Hillary Clinton. No wonder the Iraqis were astonished when Obama suggested that negotiations between the Iraqis and the U.S. ought to wait until after the presidential elections. While at home Obama was talking about withdrawal of forces from Iraq just as soon as possible, he was doing the oppositte in private in Iraq, in effect urging Iraqis to delay any agreements with respect to withdrawals from Iraq or the status of forces in Iraq until after the new president was sworn in.

September 19, 2008,

Obama 101
My firsthand lesson
National Review Online
By Amir Taheri

On Monday, in an opinion piece published in the New York Post, I suggested that Senator Barack Obama had urged Iraqi leaders to postpone making an agreement with the United States until there was a new administration in Washington.

I said this because Obama himself had said it.

In an interview broadcast by NBC on June 16, 2008, Obama said that he had told Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari that “the Congress should be involved in any negotiations regarding the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq” and “suggested it may be better to wait until the next administration to negotiate such an agreement.”

I said it because Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari said it.

In an interview published by the pan-Arab daily Asharq Alawast on September 11, 2008, Zebari raised the issue at length. This is part of what he said: “Obama asked me why, in view of a change of administration, we were hurrying the signing of this special agreement, and why we did not wait until the coming of a new administration next year to agree on some issues and matters.”

I said it because my Iraqi sources, who asked not to be identified because they do not wish to pick a quarrel with someone who could be the President of the United States next year, said it.

A day after my op-ed was published, Obama’s campaign issued a statement, in effect confirming what I had said.

It said, in part, “Senator Obama has consistently said that any security arrangements that outlast this administration should have the backing of the US Congress — especially given the fact that the Iraqi parliament will have the opportunity to vote on it.”

On Wednesday, the senator issued another statement — also in response to my op-ed — denying that he had ever opposed “a redeployment and responsible drawdown” of U.S. forces in Iraq. But I never said he did. I also never said that he opposed motherhood and apple pie; In any case, no one would oppose “redeployment and responsible drawdown,” something that is happening all the time. Redeployment means moving some units from one location to another. Drawdown means reducing the size of the expeditionary force in accordance with the task at hand. Right now troops are being redeployed from Anbar province to Salahuddin. There is also drawdown: The number of U.S. troops has been drawn down to 136,000, the lowest since a peak of 170,000 in 2003.

What Obama hopes his more radical followers will not notice is that he is no longer speaking of “withdrawal.”

He also hopes to hide the fact that by telling the Iraqi leaders that a putative Obama administration might scrap agreements reached with the Bush team, he might have delayed the start of a process that should lead to a withdrawal of U.S. forces within a mutually agreed timeframe. The later you start the negotiating process, the later you get an agreement. And the later you have an agreement, the later you can withdraw your troops based on the agreed necessary security arrangements to ensure their safe departure.

By trying to second-guess the present administration in its negotiations with Iraq, Obama ignored a golden rule of American politics. I first learned about that rule from Senator Edward Kennedy more than 30 years ago. During a visit to Tehran, Kennedy received a few Iranian reporters for a poolside chat. The big question at the time was negotiations between Washington and Tehran about massive arms contracts. When we asked Kennedy what he thought of those negotiations, his answer was simple: He would not comment on negotiations between his government and a foreign power, especially when abroad. That, he said, was one of the golden rules of American politics.

A few years later, I spent a day with Ronald Reagan during his visit to Iran. I asked what he thought of the strategic arms limitation talks between the U.S. and the USSR. He echoed Kennedy’s golden rule: He would not comment on his government’s negotiations with a foreign power, especially when abroad.

A couple of years ago, I ran into that golden rule again. At a meeting with Senator Hillary Clinton in Washington, I asked what she thought of the Bush administration’s negotiations with the Iraqis concerning security cooperation. She said she would not second-guess the president and would wait for the outcome of the negotiations. In a statesmanlike manner, Senator Clinton reminded me of the golden rule—one that is common to all mature democracies where the opposition is loyal and constitutional.

Today, Senator Obama is the leader of a loyal opposition in the United States, not the chief of an insurrection or a revolutionary uprising. What we are witnessing in the U.S. is an election, not an insurrection or a coronation, even less a regime change.

Obama should not have discussed the government-to-government negotiations with the Iraqis. That he did, surprised the Iraqis no end. Raising the issue with them, especially the way he did, meant that he was telling them that he did not trust his own government. The Iraqis could not be blamed for wondering why they should trust a government that is not trusted by the leader of its own loyal opposition. (There was also no point in raising the matter, because Obama did not know the content of the negotiations.)

An opposition leader’s foreign trips are useful as fact-finding missions. This means that the opposition leader listens to the locals, asks questions, and tries to get the political feel of the place. He is not there to lecture the natives or bad-mouth his own government back home.

Obama might have attended a session of the new Iraqi parliament and congratulated the people of Iraq for defying death to go through one referendum and two general elections to build a new democracy.

He might have visited some of the good work done by over 1.2 million Americans, both military and civilian, who have heroically served in Iraq since its liberation.

He might have visited some of the wounded victims of terrorism, both U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, to comfort them, and assure them of continued U.S. determination to fight the forces of evil.

He did none of those things during his eight-hour photo-op visit.

In the American system, the administration can conclude agreements with foreign powers on a range of issues backed by an executive order from the president. I am no expert, but the U.S. has signed scores, maybe hundreds of such agreements with many countries across the globe. To be sure, the U.S. legislature always has the power to seek the abrogation of any of these agreements. When it comes to treaties, however, they cannot come into effect without full Senate approval.

However, Iraq and the U.S. are not negotiating a treaty, and, if they were, Obama could have waited until the draft text was submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by his vice-presidential running mate Joseph Biden.

In any case, every agreement and every treaty contains mechanisms for its suspension or abrogation. Therefore, even supposing Bush was negotiating an absolutely terrible agreement with the Iraqis in which he would be selling the family silver, Obama should have waited until he saw the text, and then demanded the cancellation of the accord through the constitutional channels.

One key feature of all mature powers, at least since the Congress of Vienna, is the reliability of their international commitments. Even putschists who seize power in a military coup make sure that their first pronunciamento includes this key sentence: We shall honor all of our country’s international obligations and commitments. Even regime change does not absolve states from their international obligations. The new Iraqi government, for example, has not rejected the estimated $100 billion in foreign debt left by Saddam Hussein.

Instances of a state reneging on all its obligations as a result of change are rare in history. One instance came in 1918 when Trotsky, appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs by Lenin, announced that he had abrogated all of Tsarist Russia’s treaties with foreign nations and ordered the texts burned to heat the rooms of an empty foreign ministry.

What Obama was attempting, however, was more original. It amounted to preemptive diplomacy used against one’s own government: opposing an agreement not yet negotiated and of the content of which he knew nothing. A neophyte in matters of politics and diplomacy, the young senator is certainly not wanting for originality.

Since I do not wish to become involved in an Alphonse-and-Gaston number with Obama, I suggest that we focus our attention on the fact that the nominee is left without anything resembling a policy on Iraq. So, rather than coming out with another denial of something I never said that he had done, the esteemed senator should ponder these questions:

Does he still believe that toppling Saddam Hussein was illegal and “the biggest strategic blunder in U.S. history”? If yes, we might wonder why he is prepared to deal with the new Iraqi leaders who, by definition, have usurped Hussein’s power in Baghdad with American support.

Does he still want to withdraw from Iraq or does he want to stay, doing a bit of “drawdown” and “redeployment” every now and then? And, if he wants to stay, on what basis, for what purpose, and for how long?

Is Senator Biden’s plan to carve Iraq into three separate states still a live option or has it been thrown into the dustbin where it should have been from the start?

Would Obama now support the conclusion of a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and a Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) through negotiations between the Bush administration and the Iraqi administration of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, also a “lame duck,” as it faces elections early next year?

— Amir Taheri’s new book, The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution, is due for publication in November.

When Barack Obama was seeking to get into Harvard Law School (he entered in the fall of 1988) he had the assistance of Khalid Al-Mansour, a Black Muslim and Black Nationalist who was a “mentor” to the founders of the Black Panther party at the time the party was founded in the early 1960s.

There is some suggestion that Mansour had provided financial assistance to Obama for Harvard Law School, though the Obama campaign denies this.

Obama has refused all requests that Harvard and Columbia open up his records for examination, as he has refused requests to have the official birth records of the State of Hawaii opened to resolve questions that have been raised about his place of birth. [Nonetheless Columbia confrmed Obama graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science, but without honors.]

At that time Obama was applying to Harvard Law School he was a community organizer in Chicago working with, among others, ACORN, the national housing advocacy group that has been involved many times in cases of fraudulent voter registration. Mr. Mansour lives in Texas. Since Mansour is described as a black Nationalist, it is possible that the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan might be the person who put Obama and Mansour together. Farrakhan was a close friend of Jeremiah Wright, a former Muslim, whose church Obama was attending.

Mansour refused to comment one way or the other about his Obama connection.

Here's the gist of the story:

[Former Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton told a New York cable channel that a former business partner who was “raising money” for Obama had approached him in 1988 to help Obama get into Harvard Law School.

In the interview, Sutton says he first heard of Obama about twenty years ago from Khalid Al-Mansour, a Black Muslim and Black Nationalist who was a “mentor” to the founders of the Black Panther party at the time the party was founded in the early 1960s.

Sutton described al-Mansour as advisor to “one of the world’s richest men,” Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Prince Alwaleed catapulted to fame in the United States after the September 11 attacks, when New York mayor Rudy Guiliani refused his $10 million check to help rebuild Manhattan, because the Saudi prince hinted publicly that America’s pro-Israel policies were to blame for the attacks.

Sutton knew Al-Mansour well, since the two men had been business partners and served on several corporate boards together.

As Sutton remembered, Al-Mansour was raising money for Obama’s education and seeking recommendations for him to attend Harvard Law School.

“I was introduced to (Obama) by a friend who was raising money for him,” Sutton told NY1 city hall reporter Dominic Carter. “The friend’s name is Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, from Texas.”

That Obama had substantial ties to rich, influential Muslim radicals in 1988 at age 26 or 27, long after he had left Indonesia and about the time he joined Jeremiah Wright's church is surprising, if true.

UPDATE: Later a press release from a "spokesman for the Sutton family" said that Percy Sutton's memory was faulty (he was 88) and his account should be disregarded. Timmerman, the author of the initial report, contacted the Sutton family who said they knew nothing of the press release or the person said to be their spokesman and that Percy's mind was sharp. The Obama campaign denied the report and referred Timmerman to the "spokesman," but Timmerman went to the family instead.

Joan Swirsky is a nurse who became an author. She has her point of view and she expresses it forcefully. Her website tells you something about her. However, her recent article explaining why, as a Jew, she would never vote for Obama has created somewhat of a stir.

Russian emigré to Israel Natan Sharanksy (author of the best-selling "The Case for Democracy" also recently said he could not support Obama; he was a "risk" to Israel. As for McCain, Sharanksy said he was "a person of principle" who has "absolutely a great record of supporting Israel."

Swirsky lists many reasons why she, as a Jewish American, cannot and will not vote for Barack Obama. Her stinging conclusion:

I ask: Does Obama have any friends, associates, mentors or advisors who don’t hate America and Israel? If so, e-mail me. I haven’t found one yet!

Any voter – whether Democrat, Republican or Independent – should find Obama’s far-left voting record and silly-putty changes-o- mind on crucial policy issues reason enough not to vote for him in November.

Certainly, every American Jew should consider his ascension to the presidency a virtual death knell for Israel.

If the corrupt ACORN group he so heartily supported in the Chicago machine – where he “made his bones” – doesn’t rig the election with the votes of millions of dead people and convicts, as they have so many times in the past. I trust the electorate will do the right thing.

The right thing, of course, would be vote against Obama, a candidate who has been infested with far more odious things than fleas, specifically the treacherous anti-American, anti-Israel advice that has clearly shaped his worldview.

Obama would make America less safe, and an unsafe America – which is the last, best hope for the survival of the Jews and Israel – would destroy the twin pillars of steadfast Judeo-Christian values. Destroying both nations is the goal of the Jihadists that Obama would sooner chat with than confront.

Read the whole thing here. We don't think she would mind.

By now many people have learned that Barack Obama is the most pro-abortion public official in the nation. He even supports the relegalization of partial-birth abortion, which Congress banned, which ban the Supreme Court upheld (criticized by Obama) and which 75% of the American public oppose. Indeed, at a gathering of Planned Parenthood in 2007 he said he wanted his first act as president to be signing a bill to remove all restrictions on all abortions, including partial-birth abortions.

Fewer are aware of Obama's support of infanticide while he was a senator in Illinois and then lied about what he had done and why he did it. But his lies were disclosed when transcripts of proceedings in the Illinois Senate became available.

The legal affairs editor of National Review Andrew McCarthy examined the circumstances when Illinois State Senator Barack Obama singlehandedly blocked the Illinois Born Alive Act from being adopted. The identical federal version had already been approved by unanimous vote in both Houses of Congress and signed into law by the President. The need for such a bill arose when it was disclosed that babies who survived abortions were tossed aside and left to die. McCarthy reports:

My friend Hadley Arkes ingeniously argued that legislatures, including Congress, should take up “Born Alive” legislation: laws making explicit what decency already made undeniable: that from the moment of birth — from the moment one is expelled or extracted alive from the birth canal — a human being is entitled to all the protections the law accords to living persons.

Such laws were enacted by overwhelming margins. In the United States Congress, even such pro-abortion activists as Sen. Barbara Boxer went along.

But not Barack Obama. In the Illinois senate, he opposed Born-Alive tooth and nail.

The shocking extremism of that position — giving infanticide the nod over compassion and life — is profoundly embarrassing to him now. So he has lied about what he did. He has offered various conflicting explanations, ranging from the assertion that he didn’t oppose the anti-infanticide legislation (he did), to the assertion that he opposed it because it didn’t contain a superfluous clause reaffirming abortion rights (it did), to the assertion that it was unnecessary because Illinois law already protected the children of botched abortions (it didn’t — and even if it arguably did, why oppose a clarification?)....

As an Illinois state senator, he voted to permit infanticide. And now, running for president, he banks on media adulation to insulate him from his past.

The record, however, doesn’t lie.

Infanticide is a bracing word. But in this context, it’s the only word that fits....

When it got down to brass tacks, Barack Obama argued that protecting abortion doctors from legal liability was more important than protecting living infants from death. (emphasis added)

On the floor of the Senate arguing to defeat the bill Obama lied about the condition of infants who survive abortions. Obama said this:

I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births. Because if these are children who are being born alive, I, at least, have confidence that a doctor who is in that room is going to make sure that they’re looked after.

McCarthy's incredulous reaction to this bald-faced lie:

This is staggering. As Obama spoke these words, he well knew that children were being born alive but precisely not looked after by the abortion doctors whose water the senator was carrying. As Stanek [the nurse who testified in committee in the Illinois Senate before Obama] put it, as many as one in five — twenty percent — were left to die. That was what prompted the legislation in the first place....

Obama wasn’t worried about “the least of my brothers,” the child. He agitated, instead, over “what liabilities the doctor might have in this situation.” And what kind of doctor? A charlatan who would somehow “continue to think that it’s nonviable” notwithstanding that “there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead.”

Given the choice between the charlatan and “that fetus, or child — however you want to describe it [quoting Obama],” Barack Obama went with the charlatan.

Read it all.

And see our prior report on Obama's problem with Catholic voters. Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessors have made it crystal clear that abortion (and certainly infanticide) stands on a moral plane of its own. It is not one of a number of things as to which reasonable Catholics might differ, such as on just war, global warming and the death penalty. The Democrat candidate for president is a pro-abortion extremist and has promised pro-abortion action if elected. His running mate is pro-abortion. As is well known, the Republican candidates for president and vice president are solidly pro-life. Since the Democrats became the abortion party, many Catholics have left it in despair. Acting with an informed conscience, more will almost certainly do so this year as well.

Are you aware of how Obama and his campaign supporters are encouraging violations of the First Amendment and using threats and intimidation -- even by public prosecutors --to silence all criticism -- indeed, all discussion -- of his associations with haters of America, his Marxist socialist involvement in the creation of the housing bubble and collapse and the world financial crisis, his use of the race card, his extremist postions on abortion and infanticide and his constant misuse of the truth (which some call "lying")?

Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who sent the blind shiekh who mastreminded the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 to prison, details how Obama and his supporters are doing exactly that right now.

Sen. Obama and his supporters despise free expression, the bedrock of American self-determinism and hence American democracy. What’s more, like garden-variety despots, they see law not as a means of ensuring liberty but as a tool to intimidate and quell dissent....

The Prophet of Change is only to be admired, not questioned. In the stretch run of an American election, there is to be no examination of a candidate for the world’s most powerful office — whether about his radical record, the fringe Leftism that lies beneath his thin, centrist veneer, his enabling of infanticide, his history of race-conscious politics, his proposals for unprecedented confiscation and distribution of private property (including a massive transfer of American wealth to third-world dictators through international bureaucrats), his ruinous economic policies that have helped leave Illinois a financial wreck, his place at the vortex of the credit market implosion that has put the U.S. economy on the brink of meltdown, his aggressive push for American withdrawal and defeat in Iraq, his easy gravitation to America-hating activists, be they preachers like Jeremiah Wright, terrorists like Bill Ayers, or Communists like Frank Marshall Davis. Comment on any of this and risk indictment or, at the very least, government harassment and exorbitant legal fees.

In his narcissism and his inability to abide any perceived criticism, the Prophet of Change resembles an earlier prophet, Muhammad. Anyone criticizing Muhammad, even in poetry, was to be killed. That certainly put a chill on criticism.

For example, in St. Louis,

local law-enforcement authorities, dominated by Democrat-party activists, were threatening libel prosecutions against Obama’s political opposition. County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, abetted by a local sheriff and encouraged by the Obama campaign, warned that members of the public who dared speak out against Obama during the campaign’s crucial final weeks would face criminal libel charges — if, in the judgment of these conflicted officials, such criticism of their champion was “false.”

McCarthy cites several other disturbing incidents in which Obama supporters have sought to squelch discussion about Obama and then analyzes how those using their offices to threaten free speech can be prosecuted. Federal fraud laws are one way:

[F]ederal law (Section 1346 of the penal code) prohibits schemes to deprive citizens of their “intangible right of honest services” from their public officials. Prosecutors and police who abuse their enormous powers in order to promote the election of their preferred candidates violate their public trust.

But the main problem, McCarthy points out, with what Obama and his supporters are doing is their assault on our American way of life.

Regardless of the legal landscape, however, it is the political consequences that matter. Day after day, Obama demonstrates that the “change” he represents is a severing of our body politic from the moorings that make us America. If we idly stand by while he and his thugs kill free political debate, we die too.

McCarthy has it right: "Stifling political debate with threats of prosecution is not the “rule of law” — it’s tyranny."

Investor's Business Daily has caught up with Stanley Kurtz's devastating in-depth investigative piece on Obama's role in helping to corrupt bank mortgage lending practices in Chicago. He advised and as a lawyer representated ACORN in its confrontational tactics to intimidate banks into making loans to credit unworthy borrowers. Working with his comrade socialIst the unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers, he also steered charitable funds to ACORN for its radical activities.

See our earlier report.

The IDB editorial notes the various ways that Obama helped ACORN; for example:

In the early 1990s, reports Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center, Obama was personally recruited by Chicago's ACORN to run training sessions in "direct action." That's the euphemism for the techniques used under the cover of the federal Community Reinvestment Act to intimidate financial institutions into giving what have been called "Ninja" loans — no income, no job, no assets — to people who couldn't afford them.

ACORN has also been knee-deep in voter registration and has been investigated for and accused of vote fraud on many occasions. Several of its workers were sent to jail in Washington State for their involvement in a massive voter fraud.

Did Obama train ACORN workers in voter registration as well? With his long relationship with ACORN he must be aware of their chronic problem with voter fraud charges.

Nonetheless, Obama's campaign is reported to have hired ACORN's voter registration arm in the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton and paid some $800,000 for their services, despite their less than stellar record of obeying the law on voter registration.

ACORN has launched a massive voter registration effort for Obama throughout the country. Reports of vote fraud investigations of ACORN are coming from key electoral battlegrounds such as Ohio, MIssouri, Wisconsin and New Mexico.

Some may well wonder if ACORN will try to steal the election for their friend and mentor Barack Obama.

See our three earlier reports on ACORN and vote fraud.

We do know that Obama has said his current views aren't so different from when he was learning the techniques of Alinsky socialism and putting them into practice with ACORN in Chicago.

This is hardly surprising since it confirms what we see and hear every day from network TV and radio news and cable outlets like CNN and MSNBC and read in the NY Times, the Globe and Washington Post. They have abandoned their duty to inform the American people honestly.

Instapundit reports:

September 29, 2008
A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: "Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working." I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.

Just weeks until the presidential election and Barack Obama is still a largely unknown mystery figure because the national media has refused to do the intensive investigation into his background that it does for, say, a white Republican woman from Alaska.

All we know is the carefully crafted biographical narrative put together by the Chicago Democratic machine that is running Obama's campaign, as approved by Obama himself. Like the two memoirs about his life, the Obama narrative is part fiction and omits a great deal of disturbing information about what Obama believes, what he has done and what he intends to do.

Because of the work of bloggers and independent researchers are doing, some information is belatedly coming to light. What has been found so far is frightening.

Obama's fixation on building black power to fight white America, his associations with terrorists and others who hate America, his years of work to advance Marxist socialist goals, his long involvement with organizations such as ACORN deeply involved in vote fraud and thuggish intimidation to corrupt the banking system, his go-along relationship with the patronage and payoff Chicago Democratic machine, his close friendship with a slumlord convicted of political fraud, his callous disregard for human life and his casual disregard fo truth are all being revealed despite fierce threats from the the Obama campaign to prevent such disclosures. Are these disclosures coming too late? Will the national media continue to shut their eyes?

Don't the American people deserve to know the truth about Barack Obama?

Melanie Phillips views the situation with amazement, concern and horror from London:

Barack Obama appears to sit on a nexus between Marxist revolutionary activists, unrepentant former terrorists, Black Power racists, Chicago mobsters – oh, and a Saudi who is trying to buy up America. If you were to turn up at US immigration control with a background of such associates, it’s a fair bet they wouldn’t let you off the air-bridge. Yet this man may well become President of the US! If any other candidate had had merely a fleeting relationship with William Ayers, his candidacy would have been terminated before it was even articulated -- let alone what we now know about Obama’s key role in Ayers’s CAC and its funding of radical groups; let alone the fact that Obama had been mentored during his formative years by a Communist Party plant; let alone his work for organisations modelled on the seditious philosophy of Saul Alinsky; let alone his two-decade membership of a Black Power church; let alone his relationship with fraudster Tony Rezko.

And yet despite all of this, virtually no-one in the mainstream media is asking any questions. Has there ever been a more staggering, surreal and scary race to the White House?

William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the Weathermen terrorist bombers of the 1970s, hosted Obama's campaign kickoff for the Illinois Senate in 1995 and have been closely associated with Obama ever since in radical, socialist activities in the Chicago area. Ayers makes no bones about his desire to change America into a socialist state. He describes himself as a "small "c" communist." Ayers and Dohrn have been busy rounding up Communists, Marxist socialists, radicals, terrorists and so-called progressives to elect Obama president.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are involved in an organisation uniting three Marxist parties, a host of '60s radicals and terrorists and a new generation of militant activists.

That organisation has spawned a spin-off organisation specifically designed to put Barack Obama in the White House and to bring about massive social change across the US.

Ayers and Dohrn helped launch Barack Obama's political career. Do they guide it still?

For more on the Obama/Ayers nexus see, for example, one of our prior positings.

William Ayers and Barack Obama were closely linked in radical politics in Chicago for years.

Ayers is the unrepentant terrorist bomber of the Capitol, the Pentagon and police stations who escaped prison time because of prosecutorial error. One of his compatriots who was separately investigated was sentenced to 58 years in prison for the same things Ayers did as a member of the Weather Underground. (He has claimed he only meant to blow up property and never intended to hurt anyone. This lie has been exposed: three of his people assembling a nail bomb according to his design were killed. The bomb was intended to be set off at a dance at Fort Dix to kill soldiers and their dates.)

When Obama first ran for public office in Illinois, his kickoff event in 1995 was hosted by Ayers in the home he shared with fellow terrorist bomber Bernadine Dohrn. Over the next six years Obama and Ayers worked closely together seeking to instill radicalism into the Chicago school system, not seeking to improve education, but to turn teachers and the kids into community agitators. The project ran through $160 million in charitable contributions and a study found it had no discernible effect.

Ayers and Obama worked as paid directors on the small board of another charity funding radical groups in the Chicago area, including one Arab American group that funneled money to a known Palestinian terrorist organization.

In 2001, while they were still actively collaborating, Ayers published a book glorifying his days as a terrorist bomber in the 1970s, expressing no regret except he hadn't done enough. In a newspaper interview, also in 2001, he showed his continuing hatred of America, saying the very thought of it made him "want to puke." For a Chicago magazine that same year he was shown on the cover standing on the American flag.

Obama has tried repeatedly to downplay his relationship with Ayers and the mainstream media have shown no interest in looking into it. It fell to a researcher at the respected Washington Ethics and Public Policy Center Stanley Kurtz to do the leg work. He has been harrassed by Obama supporters every step of the way and for a time public records in Chicago to which he sought access -- for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge --were blocked.

What Kurtz found is illuminating.

What drew Ayers and Obama together was "community organizing." That's what the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was all about. Teachers were to be taught to become dedicated to provoking (the kids they're teaching, presumably) resistance to "American racism and oppression." Ayers has said in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," his goal is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

Does this sound like what Obama was fixated on during his high school and college days when he "hung out" with black power advocates and Marxist socialists and then went on to live the real thing in Chicago as a community organizer before going off to get a law degree?

Ayers describes himself much like Obama thought about himself, as recounted in "Dreams From My Father." Ayers says: "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist."

Together, Obama and Ayers tried to advance their Marxist socialist goals by making teachers and children in the schools into radicals like themselves. Fortunately, they seemed to have failed in their mission. Hopefully, providing a good education for the kids is still the priority of the Chicago school system.

So Ayers is not only an unrepentant terrorist he is still a radical seeking to change the system. Obama has gone underground with his radicalism, seeking to achieve his goals from the inside of the system rather than from without. There is no indication that his Marxist socialist goals have changed at all.

Clearly, a distaste, a hatred of America still powers Ayers. There is much in Obama's rhetoric that exhibits the same distaste.

A renowned disciple of the late socialist agitator Saul "The Red" Alinksy, helped train Obama in Alinsky community organizing and them recommended him for Harvard Law School. "Alinsky, the father of community organizing, dreamed of socialism one day replacing the "jungle" of American capitalism."

Obama says that the goals he had as a socialist community organizer haven't changed since his days organizing on behalf of radical groups such as Gamaliel and ACORN.

During that period Obama worked with the unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers, who described himself as "a small "c" communist, on programs to radicalize teachers and students in the Chicago school system.

Some key items:

Obama approached Northwestern University professor John L. McKnight – a loyal student of Alinsky's radical tactics – to pen the Harvard letter in the late 1980s. McKnight serves on the boards of radically anti-American groups in Chicago, including one accused of thuggery.

[McKnight] helped train him in the agitation tactics of Alinsky, who wrote the organizing manual, "Rules for Radicals," which he dedicated to mankind's "very first radical, Lucifer."

The Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation lists McKnight as a board director. From 1985 to 1988, Obama worked for a subsidiary of Gamaliel, where he cut his teeth as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. McKnight and Gamaliel, which was founded on Alinsky's principles, provided training for [Obama].

Alinsky, the father of community organizing, dreamed of socialism one day replacing the "jungle" of American capitalism. He wrote that he hoped "for a future where the means of production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful."

Alinsky dedicated the first edition of his book, "Rules for Radicals," to Satan: "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer."

Obama, in his 1995 memoir, said he wanted to go to Harvard Law School to "learn power's currency in all its intricacy," with the goal of "making large-scale change" as a national politician.

Obama says ...his views haven't really changed from his days organizing on behalf of radical Alinsky groups like Gamaliel and ACORN in Chicago.

Obama did training himself, as shown here at the blackboard doing "Power Analysis."

"My views are not so much more refined than they were when I labored in obscurity as a community organizer," he averred in his 2006 autobiography.

Read it all.

Update: See also this item about Obama's socialist upbringing.

Power is what Obama has always sought, and he has learned how to get it and use it at the feet of some of the most radical socialists in America. Now he seeks the power of the presidency to organize every community of America according to their agenda.

While Democrats in Congress were pressuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to plunge deeper and deeper into the subprime swamp, there were activists on the frontlines doing all they could to force banks to make loans that in the ordinary course they wouldn't make. Why not? Because those not getting mortgages had bad credit histories, not enough money for reasonable downpayments or lived in areas where housing values were deteriorating.

One of the hotbeds where forcing banks to make loans sane bankers wouldn't make was Chicago, about the time Barack Obama came back from law school to take his community organizing to a higher level.

Since Obama has said he learned more as a community organizer than he did in college and law school many have wondered just what a community organizer does.

Stanley Kurtz has done an astonishingly thorough job of recreating how one community organization ACORN, playing the race card charging discrimination, using intimidation and confrontation and pressure on regulatory officials, forced banks to make mortgage loans they otherwise would not make. His report is also a devastating exposé of Obama's Marxist socialism in action. Wealth redistribution is his goal: Take from the haves and give it to the have-nots.

Read it all and you will see how ACORN and Obama worked the levers of black power to undermine sound financial policies. The result of their efforts, along with similar ones throughout the nation, has been a financial disaster of historic proportions.

Key Kurtz excerpts:

Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit. In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers. In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

ONE key pioneer of ACORN's subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott - an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae's mortgage policies.

By September 1992, The Chicago Tribune was describing Talbott's program as "affirmative-action lending" and ACORN was issuing fact sheets bragging about relaxations of credit standards that it had won on behalf of minorities.

And Talbott continued her effort to, as she put it, drag banks "kicking and screaming" into high-risk loans.

What made this [pilot] program different from others, the [Chicago Sun-Times said], was the participation of Fannie Mae - which had agreed to buy up the loans. "If this pilot program works," crowed Talbott, "it will send a message to the lending community that it's OK to make these kind of loans."

Well, the pilot program "worked," and Fannie Mae's message that risky loans to minorities were "OK" was sent. The rest is financial-meltdown history.

IT would be tough to find an "on the ground" community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

[Obama] returned to Chicago in the early '90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama's legal services for a "motor voter" case and partnered with him on his 1992 "Project VOTE" registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago's Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation's board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN's Madeline Talbott in her pioneering efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards. Yet he supported Talbott in every conceivable way. He trained her personal staff and other aspiring ACORN leaders, he consulted with her extensively, and he arranged a major boost in foundation funding for her efforts. And, as the leader of another charity, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama channeled more funding Talbott's way - ostensibly for education projects but surely supportive of ACORN's overall efforts.

IN short, to understand the roots of the subprime-mortgage crisis, look to ACORN's Madeline Talbott. And to see how Talbott was able to work her mischief, look to Barack Obama.

Then you'll truly know what community organizers do.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.

Here's the top five recipients of campaign contributions (all Democrats) from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the period 1989-2008.

What's amazing is that Obama collected so much money in such a short time in the U.S. Senate to be number 2 on the list that covers 20 years.

Oh, and Massachusetts' Barney Frank, who was perhaps the major figure in blocking efforts to rein Fannie and Freddie in in 2003 and later, was 16th, with $40,100 in campaign contributions.

1. Dodd, Christopher J
S
D-CT
$133,900

2. Kerry, John
S
D-MA
$111,000

3. Obama, Barack
S
D-IL
$105,849

4. Clinton, Hillary
S
D-NY
$75,550

5. Kanjorski, Paul E
H
D-PA
$65,500

Here is more information on the Democratic effort to slide money from the bailout bill into the hands of socialst activists such as ACORN, which has a long history of working with Barack Obama, as well as a long history of involvement in voter registration fraud. Some 20% of any "profit" from the rescue bill will go into a Housing Trust Fund to be tapped by ACORN and its ilk.

Who is ACORN and why should we care?

Key info:

ACORN routinely commingles funds from its housing arm into political projects such as voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives. Money is fungible. Any taxpayer money that ACORN gets for housing makes it easier for the group to put its other funds into voter drives.

"These are taxpayer funds, in an indirect method, being used to subsidize political activism," says Rep. Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican and chairman of the conservative House Republican Study Committee. "I'm sure they're not going out and registering any Republicans."

Obama cut his community organizer teeth with ACORN. As a young lawyer he represented the group in a suit against the state of Illinois, which was concerned that postcard registration and a new motor voter law might invite fraud. ACORN later invited Obama to train its staff in leadership seminars.

ACORN has a political arm that endorsed Barack Obama for president in February and has stepped up its registration efforts to help elect a future benefactor. The Obama campaign admits to failing to report $800,000 in campaign payments to ACORN. They were disguised as payments to a front group called "Citizen Services Inc." for "advance work."

Consumer Rights League official Jim Terry says: "ACORN has a long and sordid history of employing convoluted Enron-style accounting to illegally use taxpayer funds for their own political gain. Now it looks like ACORN is using the same type of convoluted accounting scheme for Obama's political gain."

A major part of ACORN's sordid history is vote fraud. ACORN has been implicated in voter fraud and bogus registration schemes in Missouri, Ohio and at least 12 other states. Last July, ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in Washington state history, involving nearly 2,000 bogus voter forms. In Ohio in 2004, ACORN submitted forms for the likes of Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and someone named Jive Turkey.

ACORN uses taxpayer money to elect people like Barack Obama who will work to get them more taxpayer money. Democrats are willing to rip off taxpayers in a national crisis to make it happen.

Read it all.

The so-called bailout bill being worked on already has had Democratic pork shoved into it. There is a provision that 20% of any "profits" coming out of the deal will go to housing community organizers, including the most notorious of them all ACORN, which has been linked to vote registration fraud on behalf of Democrats in more than a dozen states. Last year in Washington State, for example, ACORN settled a massive vote fraud suit and several of its workers went to prison. This year there are ongoing investigations of fraud by ACORN in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. We have reported on ACORN's fraudulent activities several times this year, wondering if fraud might win the election for Obama. ACORN is working nationally for Obama's election and it's political committee has endorsed Obama for president. It has 850 offices in 70 major cities, including, for example, Philadelphia, where it is being investigated for voter registration fraud.

While he was in Chicago as a community organizer, Obama trained ACORN workers and later represented the organization as a lawyer. He is fully aware of its tactics, its Democratic orientation when it is supposed to be nonpartisan and its extensive hilstory of voter fraud cases. Obama hired ACORN in his run for the state senate in Illinois and has used ACORN in his primary campaign for president.

That some of the taxpayer money that is supposed to go to unfreeze credit markets is going to wind ou with ACORN is unconscionable and unacceptable.

Here is the first public report last night that money for ACORN had been stuck into the bailout bill.

For a great deal more on ACORN, click here.

From his high school days into college, Obama was obsessed with his race. He wasn't a "real African-American," sharing a history of slavery. But he wondered what he wanted to be. He recounts in his his partially fictionalized autobiography that as early as age 12 he had decided to distance himself from the white race, his mother's race. He no doubt was influenced by the American communist party member the black Franklin Marshall Davis, who became a mentor of sorts in his pre-college days, who advised Obama never to trust the white man.

Certainly in college, again as recounted in his first memoir, he made a point of "hanging out" with black radicals, Marxist socialists and black power advocates like Franklin Marshall Davis. And then we learn of a romance with a white woman, whom he rejected because she was white.

September 25, 2008

Exclusive: Obama's Soft Core Racism

Dr. Yale Kramer

“It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved –such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.” - Barack Obama

Is any of what you see of Barack Obama what you get? Is it all good manners and show? What does he really believe? If you read his first book, the memoir “Dreams from My Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance,” would you recognize today’s confident charmer, the Jedi Knight, the post-racial candidate for the Presidency of the United States? Probably not.

Obama played the race card successfully against Hillary Clinton and has tried it now several times against McCain and, despite some oh-so-light crticism, is still at it. Now the media is joining him: There is no reason to vote against Obama unless you are a racist. Prove you're not a racist: Vote for Obama.

So it's come to this.

The media plays Obama's race card

America's journalists insist that anyone who doesn't favor Obama is a racist. It's not only wrong, it's the Democrats who have the racism problem.

Jonah Goldberg
Los Angeles Times
September 23, 2008

The news media have been shamefully stoking the idea that the only way Barack Obama could possibly lose the presidential election is if American racists have their way. Indeed, the fact that Obama isn't leading in polls by a wide margin “doesn’t make sense ... unless it’s race,” says CNN's Jack Cafferty.

Slate's Jacob Weisberg says Obama is losing among older white voters because of the "color of his skin," in an article subtitled "Racism is the only reason McCain might beat him."

Continue reading "MEDIA NOW JOINING OBAMA IN PLAYING THE RACE CARD"

Posted by Republican on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 7:35 AM | Comments (0)
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As the photo session shown above was taking place on Monday,September 22nd, Barney Frank, surrounded by the ever attentive press, is quoted as saying this:

"The private sector got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it."

George Orwell, report to Congress. Actually, this is more than doublespeak. It is a deliberate misstatement of historical fact, what sometimes is called a bald-faced lie.

If one can point to one person and one moment when a dangerous situation was given what turned out to be an irrreversible push towards inevitable financial disaster, it is to Barney Frank in 2003:

Fannie and Freddie retained the support of many in Congress, particularly Democrats, and they were allowed to continue unrestrained. Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass), for example, now the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, openly described the "arrangement" with the GSEs at a committee hearing on GSE reform in 2003: "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have played a very useful role in helping to make housing more affordable . . . a mission that this Congress has given them in return for some of the arrangements which are of some benefit to them to focus on affordable housing." The hint to Fannie and Freddie was obvious: Concentrate on affordable housing and, despite your problems, your congressional support is secure.

The financial cost to American taxpayers will not be known for years, but early estimates place it in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Some say more than a trillion.

Barney Frank not only gave Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the green flag in 2003, he brushed aside attempts to rein them in. In April, 2004:

Rep. Frank ignored the warnings, accusing the Administration of creating an "artificial issue." At a speech to the Mortgage Bankers Association conference, Rep. Frank said "people tend to pay their mortgages. I don't think we are in any remote danger here. This focus on receivership, I think, is intended to create fears that aren't there."

Democrats in Congress, led by Frank and Dodd, encouraged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their reckless lending and then turned a deaf ear to warnings, from Alan Greenspan, the Bush Administration and John McCain among others, that tighter standards and oversight had to be put in place or financial disaster would follow.

In 2005 the Republican-controlled Senate Banking Committee passed a bill to provide supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but the Senate Democratic leadership rejected it. Since not enough Democrats would vote for it to achieve a 60-vote filibuster proof majority, the bill died. The House version never received any action, because other bills to give Fannie and Freddie more money for affordable housing initiatives and Katrina hurricane relief took precedence.

While it has been widely reported that Democratic Senate Banking Committee Chairman Dodd was number one in campaign contributions from Fannie/Freddie sources and Obama was number three, Barney Frank's number 16 position has not received the attention it deserves. These Democrats got Fannie and Freddie campaign money because of their unquestioning support.

Now the press will dutifully report that it's the dreaded private sector that is responsible for the American public's financial losses and it is up to government to save them.

Two different articles appeared over the weekend about how and why the current world financial crisis came about. We touched on this subject several days ago as well, dealing not only with the financial crisis but the self-imposed oil shortfall that is driving up prices of gasoline and heating oil and everything else for average Americans.)

It's simple: It all started with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and loose lending standards to promote home ownership among those who realistically couldn't afford it.

In 2004 and 2005 a major effort backed by President Bush began in the Senate to rein in the two super government sponsored agencies. A reform bill, S. 190, co-sponsored by three senators, including Senator McCain, appeared to be gaining momentum, but then was blocked by Democrats in both the Senate and the House. If that bill had become law, the terrible consequences being experienced today would not have happened.

Rush Limbaugh made the unvarnished statement that Obama was exploiting racial tensions for political purposes. His basis for the statement was an Obama Spanish language ad aimed at Hispanic voters that took Limbaugh totally out of context, linked him to McCain on immigration policy (which is a fantasy), all with the purpose of inflaming race hatred. As Limbaugh said in his Wall Street Journal article;

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.

Limbaugh concluded that Obama was "unworthy of the presidency."

This website has carried extensive commentary about Obama's playing of the race card. See the category "Hall of Shame."

On Monday (tomorrow) Limbaugh will devote a major portion of his three-hour show dissecting the Obama ad. His show runs in all 50 states, not just the four that the false Obama ad has been run in. It will feature Spanish language translations, since Obama's false charges were in Spanish.

Because of the uproar, AOL Hotseat created a poll: "Is Obama exploiting racial tensions for political benefit?" The poll is totally unscientific and appears on a conservative website, but so far more than 16,000 have voted and 66% say yes, only 32% say no. Massachusetts, the bluest of states, checks in with 67/31% and California with 64/34%.

Monday's Limbaugh show is sure to have an attentive audience.

Obama is playing the race card every day now. Vote for me or you're a racist. Any criticism of him or his supporters is racist, according to him and his supporters in the media.. At the same time he is fanning the fire of racism himself to draw minorities and elites to him by whatever works, lies included.

A recent Spanish language Obama ad took quotes from old Rush Limbaugh shows and turned them on their head to make it appear that the "ugly" words of Limbaugh (which "ugly" they weren't) were words from McCain. Since the issue involved is immigration, to suggest that McCain and Limbaugh are singing the same song is laughable if it weren't so diabolical.

Limbaugh said he wasn't going to shrug this insult off and as a first step wrote the following article for the Wall Street Journal. As a follow-up he will devote his Monday radio show broadcasting nationwide, not just in the four states where Obama ran his racist commericals, with Spanish interpreters assisting, to dissect the Obama commercials and reveal them for the false appeal to racism that they are.

LImbaugh's position is that anyone who appeals to racism as Obama is doing in this instance, and as he has done in many other instances, is unfit to be president.

Obama Is Stoking Racial Antagonism
By RUSH LIMBAUGH
Wall Street Journal
September 19, 2008

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.

Mr. Limbaugh is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host.

What a mess.

Oil and gasoline prices are sky high because world oil supply growth is stagnating. The U.S., once the largest producer in the world, is seeing its mature fields fade and its oil reserves decline.

Suddenly, the U.S. financial markets are in free fall. Retirement savings in 401(k)s are vanishing. House values are collapsing. The world worries that the entire financial system will freeze up.

How did this all happen?

Democratic policies are responsible for both crises we face.

Oil blackmail. For decades Democratic Members of Congress, beholden to their extremist environmental backers, have prevented drilling for oil and gas offshore and in the most promising areas of Alaska. Since only recently has technology been developed to extract oil economically from Rocky Mountains shale, that was not included in the annual renewal of the drilling ban, so Colorado Democratic senator Salazar had a separate moratorium slapped on that.

The U.S. has within its land mass and its territorial waters enough untapped oil to make the U.S. totally independent of hostile and unstable oil producers overseas. Yet Democratic policies have made us vulnerable to supply imbalances that drive up oil and gasoline prices to levels the public cannot afford.

When it's finally obvious to all that it's imperative for national energy security as well as fair treatment of the public to drill now, the Democrats still say no, then say, well, maybe as part of a comprehensive plan and then produce sham bills that can't pass and are sure to be vetoed if somehow they get through Congress.

McCain/Palin are for doing all that is possible to increase our energy supplies starting with drilling for oil and gas in an environmentally responsible manner and developing all of the alternative energy sources that make economic sense. But make no mistake about it: Oil will be vital for a long time. Its use will not end in ten years, as Obama predicts. It will still power the world's ships and aircraft for many years to come.

The time to end the Democratic policy against developing our own resources is now.

Unaffordable housing. Democratic pressure to make home ownership available to those who really couldn't afford it built through the years, reaching a crescendo during the Clinton years. The two secondary mortgage market corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were universally considered as having 'implicit' federal guarantees and the debt they issued was rated high accordingly. Their job was to buy mortgage from originators, thus supplying them with fresh money to make new mortgages. More and more Fan and Freddie were pressured to buy loans that originated in subprime, often minority neighborhoods, when in the ordinary course local banks would shun such loans as too risky.

A study done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 1992 suggested that banks were doing "redlining," refusing to make loans in tough, usually minority, neighborhoods. The usual charges of racism and discrimination followed and Fannie and Freddie said they would take such loans on their books. As standards loosened, more and more people bought houses that just a few years earlier they could not buy. Private mortgage buyers competing with Fannie and Freddie had to loosen standards even more to keep the quasi-federal Fannie and Freddie from "creeping" into their business.

President Bush expressed concern several times during his first and second terms and proposed new sweeping regulatory authority over the two agencies, backed by Senator McCain, but Democrats fought the proposals, armies of Fannie and Freddie lobbyists worked over Congress and the President's reform efforts went nowhere. The present chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank brushed off the proposed reforms as totally unnecessary as did the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee Chris Dodd and after 2004 so did Barack Obama. Senator McCain was especially prescient in warning in 2005 of the dangers to housing and the economy Fannie and Freddie represented because of their huge size.

It is no surprise that the Dodd and Obama are among the top four recipients of Fannie/Freddie campaign contributions. The top four (John Kerry and Hillary Clinton are the other two) all received more than $100,000. Obama's money total was the most remarkable because he was number two after just a few months in the Senate, while the others had been collecting their loot over years. (Some have suggested that the least Obama can do is give back the $100,000 plus he received from Fannie/Freddie.)

Years of Democratic pressure to make loans easier to get resulted in the greatest homeownership in American history. But in 2006 the new building boom was not finding as many buyers and prices had run up so high for existing homes since everyone could now get a mortgage almost regardless of credit that existing home sales started to slow as well. Furthermore, the looser standards encouraged buyers "to reach," to buy a more expensive house than cash flow would support on a regular mortgage by getting an adjustable or interest only mortgage. As those mortgages started to reset, buyers found themselves unable to make the payments. Since house value increases were slowing, it was no longer possible to refinance with a bigger mortgage using the new money borrowed to pay the bigger mortgage payments.

So when housing slowed, then entered a serious dive it was only a matter of time before the ripples caught up with the secondary market mortgage buyers, from Countrywide Credit up to the biggest of all, Fannie and Freddie. Ironically and sadly, Richard Syron, who was CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston when it issued the "redlining" report that triggered the call for more "realistic, "affordable" and racially blind mortgage lending standards, was at the helm of Freddie when it collapsed and was taken over by the federal government.

The housing values domino was the first to fall, then mortgage defaults escalated and some tranches of mortgage-backed securities sold to buyers around the world fell to zero and world financial panic resulted. No one knew how big the bust was going to be or how long it would last. It's said by some it won't be over until housing values stabilize, which could be in 2009 or later.

This all started with well-meaning but financially disastrous Democratic policies to make it possible for more Americans to own homes. Money flowed into housing like never before from Fannie and Freddie and private mortgage lenders. But the music stopped and there aren't enough chairs to go around.

These crises are still unfolding. The U.S. has gone through difficult times before and has, with strong leadership, come out of them stronger than ever. Senator McCain has correctly said the fundamentals of the economy are strong and expressed optimism that this challenge will be met successfully. Obama, in contrast, said he sees a future America as poorer and meaner than today.

Democratic opposition to drilling and Democratic opposition to tighter lending standards for home mortgages and oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have created these disasters. Yet Obama opposes comprehensive drilling and Obama's campaign advisors include former top officials of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who walked away with tens of millions of dollars of Fannie and Freddie money in severance payments even though they were authors of the failure that taxpayers will now have to pay for.

Reform is desperately needed in Washington, but will be difficult to achieve. McCain and Palin are two tough reformers who have bucked the system. Obama has reformed nothing. McCain and Palin can shake up Washington and will serve the taxpayers, not special interests.

The nation cannot afford a continuation of the disastrous Democratic policies that have already cost Americans billions and will in the end cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps even more.

Obama's favorite fraudulent vote registration organization ACORN is currently under investigation in Michigan for submitting phony forms (all Democrats, you can be sure), and now it is in the middle of another phony vote registration mess in New Mexico. ACORN, funded in generous part by taxpayer dollars tucked into Democratic affordable housing authorization bills, from all appearances seems bent on stealing the election for the candidate its political action commitee has endorsed, Barack Obama.

Michelle Malkin, who has written extensively (as have we) about ACORN's trail of criminal charges involving vote registration fraud, covers the New Mexico situation.

ACORN Watch: 1,100 suspicious voter cards in NM
By Michelle Malkin • September 17, 2008 06:19 PM

Barack Obama’s dear friends at ACORN are busy trying to lie, cheat, and steal their way to victory in November.

The latest ACORN Watch entry comes to you from the battleground state of New Mexico, where election officials have notified prosecutors of an estimated 1,100 possibly fraudulent voter registration cards.

More...

See also our previous articles here and here. And where is ACORN's heartland? Chicago.

Who's responsible for the high price of gas? Pure and simple, Democrats in Congress. They made most of the U.S. off limits to drilling years ago and as a consequence U.S. reserves have been dwindling and our dependence on hostile and unstable foreign oil producers has increased.

It's in America's interest for world oil production to increase. One of the most promising untapped source -- beside the U.S. itself -- is Iraq. With violence down and attacks on antiquated pipelines and other oil faciliites mostly a matter of the past, it was time, the Iraqi govenment thought, to start rebuilding its oil infrastructure. So it drafted no bid contracts to hire Western oil companies -- Exxon Mobil and Chevron (American), BP (British), Shell (British/Dutch) and Total (French) -- to put their expertise to work to help increase its oil production.

A good deal for everyone, right? Well, not everyone thought so. Three Democratic senators John Kerry of Massachusetts, Chuck Schumer of New York and Claire McCaskill of Missouri objected, created a public uproar in the U.S. and Iraq and as a result Iraq canceled the contracts with the Western oil companies. Now, months later Iraq hired the Chinese to do the job.

The partisan meddling by Kerry, Schumer and McCaskill in foreign affairs in an attempt to dicate foreign policy and to punish American oil companies has delayed any increase in the production of oil from Iraq and cost these oil companies revenues, jobs and the chance to be at the head of the line for future work.

That's disgusting. Jeff Beatty, running to unseat John Kerry this November, released an ad today pointing out that Kerry has done nothing in his years -- decades, actually -- for oil indepedence. In fact, Kerry has repeatedly voted to ban drilling in the U.S. along with his fellow Democrats, which is a major reason why the U.S. now faces this grave national security risk. Now add in this latest blow to world oil production by his meddling in Iraq. Like Obama privately seeking to get Iraq to hold off working out a timetable for American troop withdrawal until after "he's" elected, the Kerry/Schumer/McCaskill meddling, in the words of Fred Kagan, is "harmful to American interests and our prospects in Iraq.

Below is Jeff Beatty's new ad and Fred Kagan's report on how Kerry,Schumer and McCaskill's meddling gave China the first big new oil contract in Iraq.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

No Oil for Blood

By Frederick W. Kagan
The Weekly Standard | 9/17/2008

Yesterday morning, I had the honor of testifying before the House Budget Committee on the situation in Iraq. The discussion was polite and civilized, and was a reminder that even now it is possible for people who disagree about what to do in Iraq to argue without raised voices and disagreeable language (apart from the Code Pink women, yelling for those who think that shouting opponents down is preferable to arguing with them). Congressman Brian Baird once again demonstrated that it is possible even for those who bitterly opposed the war to recognize the importance of doing the right thing now--as well as the possibility of crossing the Republican-Democrat sectarian divide on this issue. One question came up repeatedly in the hearing that deserves more of an answer than it got, however: Why, after all the assistance we've given to Iraq over the past five years, was the first major Iraqi oil deal signed with China and not with an American or even a western company? The answer is, in part, because three Democratic senators intervened in Iraqi domestic politics earlier this year to prevent Iraq from signing short-term agreements with Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, Chevron, and BP.

The Iraqi government was poised to sign no-bid contracts with those firms this summer to help make immediate and needed improvements in Iraq's oil infrastructure. The result would have been significant foreign investment in Iraq, an expansion of Iraqi government revenues, and an increase in the global supply of oil. One would have thought that leading Democratic senators who claim to be interested in finding other sources of funding to replace American dollars in Iraq, in helping Iraq spend its own money on its own people, and in lowering the price of gasoline for American citizens, would have been all for it. Instead, Senators Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, and Claire McCaskill wrote a letter to Secretary of State Rice asking her "to persuade the GOI [Government of Iraq] to refrain from signing contracts with multinational oil companies until a hydrocarbon law is in effect in Iraq." The Bush administration wisely refused to do so, but the resulting media hooraw in Iraq led to the cancellation of the contracts, and helps to explain why Iraq is doing oil deals instead with China.

Senators Schumer, McCaskill, and Kerry claimed to be acting from the purest of motives: "It is our fear that this action by the Iraqi government could further deepen political tensions in Iraq and put our service members in even great danger." For that reason, presumably, Schumer went so far as to ask the senior vice president of Exxon "if his company would agree to wait until the GOI produced a fair, equitable, and transparent hydrocarbon revenue sharing law before it signed any long-term agreement with the GOI." Exxon naturally refused, but Schumer managed to get the deal killed anyway. But the ostensible premise of the senators' objections was false--Iraq may not have a hydrocarbons law, but the central government has been sharing oil revenues equitably and there is no reason at all to imagine that signing the deals would have generated increased violence (and this was certainly not the view of American civilian and military officials on the ground in Iraq at the time). It is certain that killing the deals has delayed the maturation of Iraq's oil industry without producing the desired hydrocarbons legislation.

Nor is it entirely clear what the senators' motivations were. Their release (available along with their letter to Secretary Rice at the New York Observer quoted Senator McCaskill as follows: "'It's bad enough that we have no-bid contracts being awarded for work in Iraq. It's bad enough that the big oil companies continue to receive government handouts while they post record breaking profits. But now the most profitable companies in the universe--America's biggest oil companies--stand to reap the rewards of this no-bid contract on top of it all,' McCaskill said. 'It doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect these dots--big oil is running Washington and now they're running Baghdad. There is no reason under the sun not to halt these agreements until we get revenue sharing in place,' McCaskill said." So was this about what's best for Iraq and American interests there or about nailing "big oil" in an election year?

Either way, like Barack Obama's asking the Iraqi foreign minister to hold off on a strategic framework agreement until after the American election, it was nothing but harmful to American interests and our prospects in Iraq.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Finding the Target: The Transformation of the American Military (Encounter).

Doesn't everyone now know this is the way it is? The media is panting to elect Obama and is doing all it can to destroy McCain and Palin. Joel Mowbray highlights how the New York Times, once the venerable paper of record and undisputed authority for truth and objectivity, has now become a propaganda outlet devoid of balance and fairness.

It's an incredible litany worth reading.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin shows that the Times is not alone, although it is leading the pack of jackals at the heels of McCain and Palin. Isn't the supposedly genial, affable and even-handed Charlie Gibson ashamed of his insulting and condescending interview of Governor Palin? Maybe that's it. There is no longer any professional pride in the mainstream media, so they no longer can feel shame. It's all about their power to sell their agenda, their candidates and to destroy anyone in their way. It's a war the media can't be allowed to win.

September 15, 2008

Into the Obama Tank for the Final Push
By Jennifer Rubin

John McCain believes he is in an existential war. America is engaged in a death struggle against Islamic terrorists.

But he is also fighting for his life: against a media establishment dedicated to his political destruction.

Any pretense of fairness by the mainstream media is gone. The MSNBC duo of anchor buffoons have been downgraded but not fired. The Washington Post runs dueling front page articles -- one a recycled tabloid-like piece (apologies to our tabloid friends who generally don't recycle old material) about Cindy McCain's past drug problems and one, made up out of whole cloth, that Sarah Palin's allegedly believes and told departing troops that Iraq was behind 9-11. Caught concocting the latter story, the Post tried a hasty edit on the piece (in the middle of the night, no less) -- a maneuver which bloggers quickly spotted.

We saw the oozing condescension of normally mild-mannered Charlie Gibson in his Palin interview. Assuring Palin he was using a direct quote (he was not) to accuse her of believing her son was on "task form God" and laying a gotcha trap on the Bush Doctrine (which has no single meaning), Gibson seemed himself to have a "task" -- to trip up a figure held in contempt by most of his colleagues.

A shocking report out of Iraq reveals that Obama during his visit there asked the Iraqi government to delay any agreement on troop withdrawal until after the election and the installation of a new adminisration. Iranian exile Amir Taheri writing in the New York Post reports (HT: Power Line):

Amir Taheri details what he believes is Barack Obama's sorry record of double-dealing on Iraq:

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.

Power Line's John Hinderaker nails it for what it is:

This is shocking, although, coming from Obama, not surprising. It's not just that he has tried, in private, to achieve the exact opposite result from the one he has advocated in public. Worse, Obama has in effect tried to conduct his own foreign policy as a President-in-waiting, thereby undermining the actual foreign policy of the United States

[I]f what Taheri says is right, Obama is carrying out his own foreign policy, in opposition not only to his own stated position on Iraq, but in opposition to the foreign policy of the United States, with a view toward bringing about failure, not success, in Iraq. Nice.

For the Tahiri article, click here. For Power Line's take on it, click here.

Obama as a lawyer in Chicago represented and worked with ACORN on their voter registration drives. ACORN is notorious for its fraud in voter registration drives, only registering Democrats and throwing away Republican registrations. Even more important, they aggressively register phantom citizens -- total fakes. Numerous ACORN workers have been indicted for such fraud. ACORN's PAC has endorsed Obama for president. See our previous report on ACORN's history of vote fraud.

Now there is this new report of ACORN fraud in the swing state of Michigan.

More ACORN Vote Fraud Attempts
September 15, 2008
-By Warner Todd Huston

The union supporting, Democratic Party pushing, extreme leftist Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has been caught trying to gerry rig voter applications in Michigan. It is looking like fraud on a massive scale in Detroit as ACORN tries to fill the Democrat voter rolls with fake Democrat voters.

ACORN is being investigated after several Municipal Clerks discovered fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications.

The majority of the fraudulent and duplicate applications are coming from the liberal ACORN group based in Detroit, Michigan, which now has ACORN investigating the problem once again as well as the Secretary of State’s Office turning over some of those applications to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
And it isn’t just Detroit that has found fraud being perpetrated by ACORN.

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.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is also reporting that the Obama campaign has been forced to amend a report to reflect over $800,000 of previously unreported ACORN donations to his campaign.

ACORN is at the heart of one of the most massive voter fraud campaigns in American history. ACORN is intimate with Barack Obama and is a major supporter of unions throughout the country and is doing its level best (and illegally at that) trying to assure that Obama wins this election.

Clark Judge, who served in the Reagan Administration, decided he, too, would analyze the respective qualities of Obama and Sarah Palin for leadership on national security matters. The mainstream media has made it clear what they want to think, but perhaps they're missing something in their haste to shore up the credentials of their chosen one.

Judge reviews what the media has been saying and doesn't begrudge their right to say it. But fair analysis of capabilities is what is needed.

For the answer to the question posed in the title to this item, follow Judge's analysis to the end. You'll be glad you did.

So what are the now hysterical, frightened Obama followers saying in New Hampshire?

“You want to know the honest truth? I think she’s [that's Sarah] like a bad actor from a B-list sex movie,” said Paula Vanbuskirk, an Obama-supporting independent, whose contempt for the Alaska governor and self-styled “hockey mom” was shared by almost everyone questioned by the Financial Times. (subscription required)

My, my, we know their vision is blurred if they have been supporting The One, but we had no idea how curdled their humanity had become.

Just because so many of Obama's friends and backers are haters of America shouldn't mean that the good folks of New Hampshire should become haters, too. But "contempt" for Sarah Palin was shared by almost everyone?

One Obama supporter in Manchester worried:

“I had become complacent,” she said. “I thought the election was in the bag. Then, all of a sudden, we’ve got this big fight on our hands.”

The Financial Times (a British newspaper) concluded:

Her anxiety was widely shared among the 8,000 people that turned up to see Barack Obama in Manchester over the weekend, amid mounting Democratic jitters about declining poll numbers and escalating Republican attacks.

If it was Mr McCain’s intention to ignite a fresh “culture war” between middle America and east coast liberals by nominating Ms Palin, the evidence in Manchester suggested he has succeeded in spectacular fashion.

It appears from this report that if a "culture war" has broken out it's the "east coast liberals" who are lighting the fire.

An exasperated Obama supporter proved the point, letting slip her true feelings:

I just do not trust the American people,” said Eleanor Shavell, 58, a computer programmer, who, along with several others, joked she would move to Canada if Mr Obama loses. “I cannot believe that 80 per cent of this country thinks we’re headed in the wrong direction yet 50 per cent are supporting McCain and Palin. I guess it’s like at school, there’s always got to be a bottom 50 per cent."

Well, John McCain and Sarah Palin do not agree with that Obama view: They do trust the American people.

It’s an old saying that you are known by the company you keep. When any candidate for public office emerges, the candidate’s record, his positions, his promises and his associations are all looked at. The slimmer the record, the more important associations are.

There is a good deal that is unsettling about Obama’s history – his admitted Marxist socialist associations in high school, college and his community organizing days, his easy comfort with black power haters of white America such as Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan and his friendship with others with a record of continuing hatred of America, such as unrepentant terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

While Obama tried to shrug Ayers and Dohrn off as just folks in the ‘hood, in fact there had been a close working relationship between Obama and the terrorists going back to at least 1995.

Obama kicked off his first campaign for the Illinois state senate in 1995 in the Ayers/Dohrn home. In 1995 Ayers established the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and named Obama as Chairman of the Board, a post he held till 2000. A study showed the $110 million CAC spent on trying to inculcate radical ideas into Chicago schools had a negligible effect. (Friends of Obama blocked a distinguished researcher from Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center from gaining access to the public records of the CAC, but the resulting uproar caused the University of Illinois, Chicago to step in to allow such access. Interesting information is sure to follow.)

From 1999 to 2002 Obama served together with Ayers as paid directors on the board of a left wing foundation, the Woods Fund. During the time that Obama was a director, the Woods Fund made generous contributions to an Arab group founded by Obama friend and campaign contributor Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, a supporter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization while it was labeled by the U.S. State Department as a terror group; Khalidi explained he hosted an Obama fundraiser and gave him money because he was sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. The group in question, the Arab American Action Network, subscribes to the notion that the establishment of the state of Israel was a catastrophe.

So the myth peddled by the Obama campaign about the Obama/Ayers ties is just that, a myth.

As the outlines of the Obama/Ayers relationship get filled in by independent researchers, the Obama campaign has reacted hysterically, doing all it can to cut off all discussion of Obama-Ayers, from flooding talk radio shows with threatening phone calls and emails to urging federal prosecutors to bring legal action to cut off free speech. As noted, supporters for a time were able to block access to the public records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Ayers himself has sought to calm the storm and, like Obama, is telling the best story, not the true story.

Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who sent the blind sheikh to prison for the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, has caught Ayers flat out in preposterous lies. Ayers said in a Fox News interview that he and his fellow terrorists didn’t really intend to hurt anybody, just bang up some property.

Absurd.

Three of Ayers' associates were killed when a bomb they were building – according to Ayers’ design – exploded. It was a nail bomb to be used to murder American soldiers at a dance at Fort Dix. If the plan had been successful, hundreds of lives would have been lost as the bomb tore “though windows and walls and, yes, people, too,” in the words of William Ayers.

Ayers described the Weatherman organization he was forming as “an American Red Army” the purpose of which was murder: Its ideology was, according to Ayers, “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cards and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents.”

In his 2001 book Fugitive Days Ayers told of the glee he felt in the bombings of the Capitol building and the Pentagon – “the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.” He also said in the book that America “makes me want to puke.”

McCarthy concludes:

These savages wanted to kill massively. That they killed only a few people owes to our luck and their incompetence, not design. They and the Democrat politicians who now befriend and serve them can rationalize that all they want. But those are the facts.

Despite the publicity surrounding the publication of Ayers’ book in 2001, including an article in the New York Times in which Ayers clearly said he was not sorry for what he had done and actually wished he had done more, the Obama/Ayers relationship continued. The unrepentant Ayers even was featured in 2001 on the cover of a Chicago area magazine standing on an American flag. Will Obama say he didn’t see that as he didn’t hear Reverend Wright slandering America?

At a gathering of “old” terrorists in 2007 Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn were caught on tape waxing nostalgic for their “activist” days.

So Obama lied about his close association with this unrepentant terrorist and Ayers lied about what he intended with his bombings. What drew Obama and Ayers to each other? What world view did they share?

The same could be asked about Obama's relationship with Jeremiah Wright and other America haters such as Louis Farrakhan.

For the complete article by Andrew McCarthy exposing Ayers’ lies, read on.

Bill Ayers: Unrepentant LYING Terrorist
Andrew McCarthy in NROnline
August 27, 2008

[In a Fox News interview], Ayers preposterously claimed that he and his fellow Weather Underground terrorists did not really intend to harm any people — the fact that no one was killed in their 20 or so bombings was, he said, "by design"; they only wanted to cause property damage:

Between October 1969 and September 1973, the Weather Underground claimed credit for some twenty bombings across the country, in which no one was harmed — save the three cell members who perished in a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970, when one of their creations detonated prematurely. Ayers claimed the fact that no other individuals were killed as a result of the Weathermen’s actions was “by design.”

In his autobiography, Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Ayers recalled, he posed the question: “How far are you willing to take that step into what I consider the abyss of violence? And we really never did, except for that moment in the townhouse.… I actually think destroying property in the face of that kind of catastrophe is so — restrained. And I don’t see it as a big deal.

Right.

First of all, "that moment in the townhouse" he's talking about happened in 1970. Three of his confederates, including his then girlfriend Diana Oughton, were accidentally killed when the explosive they were building to Ayers specifications (Ayers was a bomb designer) went off during construction. As noted in Ayers' Discover the Networks profile, the explosive had been a nail bomb. Back when Ayers was being more honest about his intentions, he admitted that the purpose of that bomb had been to murder United States soldiers:

That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, "tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too."(emphasis added)

In fact, Ayers was a founder of the Weatherman terror group and he defined its purpose as carrying out murder. Again, from Discover the Networks:

Characterizing Weatherman as "an American Red Army," Ayers summed up the organization's ideology as follows: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents."

Now he wants you to think they just wanted to break a few dishes. But in his book Fugitive Days, in which he boasts that he "participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972," he says of the day that he bombed the Pentagon: "Everything was absolutely ideal. ... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."

And he wasn't singular. As I noted back in April in this article about Obama's motley collection of radical friends, at the Weatherman “War Council” meeting in 1969, Ayers' fellow terrorist and now-wife, Bernadine Dohrn, famously gushed over the barbaric Manson Family murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and three others: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” And as Jonah recalled yesterday, "In appreciation, her Weather Underground cell made a threefingered 'fork' gesture its official salute." They weren't talking about scratching up the wall-paper.

A Weatherman affiliate group which called itself "the Family" colluded with the Black Liberation Army in the 1981 Brinks robbery in which two police officers and an armed guard were murdered. (Obama would like people to believe all this terrorist activity ended in 1969 when he was eight years old. In fact, it continued well into the eighties.) Afterwards, like Ayers and Dohrn, their friend and fellow terrorist Susan Rosenberg became a fugitive.

On November 29, 1984, Rosenberg and a co-conspirator, Timothy Blunk, were finally apprehended in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. At the time, they were actively planning an unspeakable bombing campaign that would have put at risk the lives of countless innocent people. They also possessed twelve assorted guns (including an Uzi 9 mm. semi-automatic rifle and an Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun with its barrel sawed off), nearly 200 sticks of dynamite, more than 100 sticks of DuPont Trovex (a high explosive), a wide array of blasting agents and caps, batteries, and switches for explosive devices. Arrayed in disguises and offering multiple false identities to arresting officers, the pair also maintained hundreds of false identification documents, including FBI and DEA badges.

When she was sentenced to 58 years' imprisonment in 1985, the only remorse Rosenberg expressed was over the fact that she and Blunk had allowed themselves to be captured rather than fighting it out with the police. Bernadine Dohrn was jailed for contempt when she refused to testify against Rosenberg. Not to worry, though. On his last day in office, the last Democrat president, Bill Clinton, pardoned Rosenberg — commuting her 58-year sentence to time-served.

These savages wanted to kill massively. That they killed only a few people owes to our luck and their incompetence, not design. They and the Democrat politicians who now befriend and serve them can rationalize that all they want. But those are the facts.

Charles Moore is the former editor-in-chief of London's Telegraph newspaper. He is currently working on the official biography of the former prime minister, the lioness Margaret Thatcher, who was the political soulmate of Ronald Reagan. Nonetheless, he travels in high liberal circles in Britain and reports on the overwhelming support for Barack Obama and the disdain for John McCain and the uncouth savage from Alaska.

But Moore has done his homework and has found Obama's books interesting, particularly the first, "Dreams from my Father." He tracks Obama's spiritual journey and wonders whether it actually runs in the wrong direction, from America to Kenya. It perhaps discloses more about Obama than he meant to disclose.

Mr Obama's more recent book, his political testament, is called The Audacity of Hope. But his more interesting one, published in 1995, before many had heard of him, is called Dreams From My Father. In it, Obama explains that "The Audacity of Hope" was the title of a tremendous sermon by a minister in Chicago called the Rev Jeremiah Wright.

When he heard this sermon, Obama first fully connected God with his politics ("I felt the tears running down my cheeks"). Mr Wright subsequently married the Obamas.

The sermon was strong stuff. It drew on the suffering of Hannah in the book of Samuel, barren until blessed by God, to depict a world "where white folks' greed runs a world in need". It showed how black people could throw off their oppression and move "beyond our narrow dreams".

This year it emerged that the Rev Mr Wright had preached that people should not sing "God Bless America!", but "God Damn America!" because of its racist sins. Obama quickly put some distance between himself and his closest clerical friend.

But it raised the question, are black politics in America still defined by their hatred of white domination? If Obama's politics are "black" in that sense, he does not stand a chance.

Moore accurately identifies and names the theme that runs through Obama's book and life. Obama had a black communist mentor in Hawaii who warned him never to trust whites. He sought out black power advocates in college, went to Chicago after college to learn how to organize blacks using the fabled communist Alinsky method of stoking discontent and rallying -- and masking the real purpose of -- a socialist movement behind vague promises of "hope" and "change." There Obama quickly learned the best way to achieve and exercise black power was to work within the system, not against it. So get a law degree and run for office with the backing of the Chicago political machine, learning all the while the rhetorical skills of white America hater Jeremiah Wright, with whose racist policies he obviously agreed.

No one in the U.S. in the mainstream media or the blogosphere has raised the question that Moore has. If asked, there would be no answer from the Obama campaign but denial. But a review of the history leads to another concusion.

Rather than post-partisanship and healing, Obama has been using his race skillfully --falsely claiming racist attacks on him --- to vault over Hillary Clinton and now John McCain. Black power is being subtly advanced.

At the end of his rumination, Charles Moore says this:

So Americans, who actually have to decide what all this means, have a much more serious task than we do. It will not prove that they are bigots if they decide that Barack Obama is too big a risk.

What's astonishing is the near unanimity of American and British commentators thoroughly confused by Moore's article. Most thought he was urging the election of Obama. A few thought he was inveighing against the prevailing British Obama worship. The other near unanimity was the rejection of Obama by the commentators; Obama might appeal to the elites lunching with Moore, but he had little or no support among those who cared to post on this newspaper website. The Telegraph, a once might conservative organ, has more or less thrown in with its liberal brethern under its new ownership.

This is what coul be called a typical entry:

"It is time for a black president, I thought,"...

What you're missing, Charles, is that most of America could't care less whether or not Obama is black. That's an utterly vacuous reason to vote for a leader, particularly in America where the office of president is very strong and not a figurehead. Those who do care that he is black- African-Americans who will vote for him in racial solidarity and non-black Americans who will not vote for him out of racism essentially cancel each other out. Call it a wash. What you are left with is the rest of the voting public who prefers to analyze a candidate's qualifications for president. And after you get past his race the reason to vote for Obama is...what exactly? He is the least qualified presidential candidate of the last fifty years and you want him with his finger on the nuclear button? I suspect a majority of Americans will disagree.

Read the comments. They are fascinating.

Polls at this stage don't mean what they show will happen on November 4th, but trends seems to be developing in these key states. HotAir? Read.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is a liberal redoubt in the conservative south that, like the Boston Globe in oh-so-blue Massachusetts, allows a conservative voice like Jeff Jacoby speak out every so often. In Atlanta, it's Jim Wooton.

Obama and the Chicago Democratic machine that is running his campaign have been very careful about constructing the Obama story. It's largely fiction and that is finally coming to light.

Reverend Jeremiah Wright for 20 years -- I never heard a thing. Bill Ayers, the terrorist who planted bombs in the Pentagon and police stations whose girl friend died constructing a nail bomb of his design intended to kill soldiers at a dance -- just someone in the neighborhood (though I did work with him for 13 years on paid boards and I appreciate his fundraising help.). Good old Tony Rezko who raised $240,000 for me (Too bad he's convicted on charges of political corruption; glad I bought my house with him when I did.). But my wife is finally proud of America (after all those years being educated at Princeton and Harvard Law and being on the payroll at $300,000 plus at a Chicago hospital) because I did so well against Hillary despite her racial smears at me -- like John McCain is doing.

My two books about me, understandably spiffed up a bit to make a good story even better, you understand, shows how qualified I am to be commander-in-chief. I can talk the talk so I never have to walk the walk; who else can say that?

I am ready to have the safety of the nation placed in my hands. Working with the United Nations, we will create a safe new world for all of us. Those new taxes I will impose will be put to good use to raise up the poor of the world; the UN has assured me they will take care of your tax money.

Indeed, we are the ones you have been waiting for. It's our time.

Who says different?

Jim Wooten has talked to a few.
.
Here's his take.

Panic sets in for Obama, Democrats
By Jim Wooten | Friday, September 12, 2008, 09:04 PM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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 will lose because with less than two months remaining voters won’t be able to get comfortable with him. He can’t stay on message and he can’t avoid sending signals that interfere with the message when he does.

McCain, on the other hand, has been superb going back at least to Obama’s European tour. Mainstream America is comfortable with him and, with Palin’s selection, conservatives who had their doubts are onboard. The GOP is energized and suddenly an unwinnable election is reversed.

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.

In this election, voters will decide early. Obama’s been in a yearlong campaign; McCain’s familiar. The two are sufficiently exposed and known for voters to make a decision now.

It’s not over. But it’s getting there — and Obama knows it.

What do you think will work for the American economy?

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.

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.

Obama will pattern the federal program after what has failed in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.

Here's the real killer example:

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.

Conclusion:

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.

The Financial Times reports (HT: Power Line):

SEPTEMBER 11, 2008 THE PANIC SPREADS... ...to Capitol Hill: Democratic jitters about the US presidential race have spread to Capitol Hill, where some members of Congress are worried that Barack Obama’s faltering campaign could hurt their chances of re-election. ... “There is a growing sense of doom among Democrats I have spoken to . . . People are going crazy, telling the campaign ‘you’ve got to do something’.” The generic Congressional ballot is, indeed, getting closer. Likewise, the gap in party identification is narrowing. In general, the tide is flowing in the Republicans' direction. Of course, the Republicans are starting from a very bad point. Still, it appears that by November the Republican Party will be in better shape, broadly speaking, than has been the case for the last few years.

But what does a panicky Obama himself do?

He runs an ad mocking McCain for not being able to send an email.

Outrage immediately filled the internet. Jonah Goldberg pointed out that as far back as 2000, the Boston Globe reported on McCain's well known problem:

The reason he doesn't send email is that he can't use a keyboard because of the relentless beatings he received from the Viet Cong in service to our country. From the Boston Globe (March 4, 2000):

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain's severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain's encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He's an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can't raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

Instapundit has a round up of the many comments, one of which was this:

"It's extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief knows how to send an e-mail ...but not how to do a five-minute Google search." Or even how to hire someone who can . . . .

And another:

"I think they spent months trying to figure out how they can position Obama as better qualified than McCain, and basically came up with the fact that Obama can type."

John Hinderaker of Power Line had the most acid comments of all:

I've always thought that Barack Obama is unqualified for the office of President--he isn't qualified to be a Senator, either--but I've never thought he was particularly mean-spirited. Until now....

"I guess now we'll find out whether Barack Obama is capable of shame."

The British correspondent for the Times of London in the U.S. is home for a few days and is running into folks left and right who suddenly are startled, concerned and alarmed that The One, who they too adore, might lose the election to, well, a former beauty queen.

Baker tells them no, the real problem is the veneer is wearing off Obama and, despite the soaring rhetoric, promise of reform and bipartisanship, he's being revealed as what he has always been, a pol from the corrupt Chicago Democratic political machine, the most partisan Democrat in the Senate and a go-along guy when faced with a choice to back reform.

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.

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.

A specific example:

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.

So what do you believe, the record or the rhetoric?

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.

Gerard Baker's report appeared in The Times of London today, Friday, September 12th.

Barack Obama the speechmaker is being rumbled

There is a yawning gulf between what the Democratic candidate says and how he has acted. That's why the race is so close

Gerard Baker

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.

Read it all.

Charles Krauthammer chronicles the swelling of the Obama bubble, carried aloft by hot air, and now in danger of collapse.

Obama's problem: Never in the history of presidential politics has "the gap between adulation and achievement been so great." Two books about himself and a speech in 2004 do not a president make.

The one most impressed by his ascension to the heights was Obama himself. "We are the ones (That's me) we've been waiting for!"

Why, he told one group at a campaign stop that a light would come down from above and shine on them with the word that they would vote for Obama.

Though there was much excited talk about the wonderful Democratic convention, deflation was already evident. The Greek temple backdrop was an object of ridicule, no longer the setting for a god.

As Spengler reported in the Asia Times,

Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech last week seemed vastly different from the stands of this city's Invesco Stadium than it did to the 40 million who saw it on television. Melancholy hung like thick smog over the reserved seats where I sat with Democratic Party staffers. The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at the tag lines, flourished placards, and even rose for the obligatory wave around the stadium. But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat, and the crowd took shallow breaths.

And all this before the new star flashed across the TV screens.

How did this happen? Krauthammer counts the ways.

Obama's Balloon Was Leaking Even Before Palin
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Washington Post
September 12, 2008

The Democrats are in a panic. In a presidential race that is impossible to lose, they are behind. Obama devotees are frantically giving advice. Tom Friedman tells him to "start slamming down some phones." Camille Paglia suggests, "Be boring!"

Meanwhile, a posse of Democratic lawyers, mainstream reporters, lefty bloggers and various other Obamaphiles are scouring the vast tundra of Alaska for something, anything, to bring down Sarah Palin: her daughter's pregnancy, her ex-brother-in-law problem, her $60 per diem, and now her religion. (CNN reports — news flash! — that she apparently has never spoken in tongues.)

Not since Henry II asked if no one would rid him of his turbulent priest, have so many so urgently volunteered for duty.

But Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great.

Which is why McCain's Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama's meteoric rise was based not on issues — there was not a dime's worth of difference between him and Hillary on issues — but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.

The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer's remorse, was the Democrats' realization that the arc of Obama's celebrity had peaked and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.

It was inevitable. Obama had managed to stay aloft for four full years. But no one can levitate forever.

Five speeches map Obama's trajectory.

Read it all.

Will the OBAMA take advice from Karl Rove? Unlikely. Nonetheless, what Rove suggests makes sense for Obama.

As we noted a day or so ago, Obama is a classic narcissist and he just can't stand all the excitement Palin is generating. Hence, he can't help himself; he must attack her.

Every time he does, he loses. His cute lipstick on a pig remark (and "old fish" for McCain) universally was seen as a slap at the Republican VP candidate.

For a presidential candidate to be whacking at the VP candidate is a loser, says Rove. Republicans will say "keep it up." Democrats should shout, "Are you nuts?"

An op-ed in the New York Sun summarizes the zigs and zags of Obama assertions. If the assertion doesn't fit the facts, why, deny the facts.

Mr. Obama has changed his position on numerous occasions, cannot explain why he has done so, and yet his campaign expects us to believe that he never changed his mind on any of those issues.

"They must think you're stupid."

Read it all.

Iranian exile Amir Tahiri takes the occasion of a joint visit by McCain and Obama to Ground Zero to contrast their views on the existential threat of Islam to the rest of the world. McCain calls it the "transcendent challenge" of our times. Obama doesn't see it.

WHEN all is said and done, this election may well have only one big issue: the existential threat that Islamist terrorism poses to America's safety. Since McCain and Obama offer radically different policies for facing that threat, American voters do have a real choice.

Tahiri's article:

THE LESSONS OF 9/11 By AMIR TAHERI in the New York Post

September 11, 2008 --
TODAY's joint visit to Ground Zero may give the impression that John McCain and Barack Obama share a common analysis of the causes of 9/11 and how to deal with its legacy. They don't.

The divide starts with the question: Why was America attacked?

McCain's answer is simple (or, as Obama might suggest, simplistic): The United States was attacked because a resurgent Islam has produced a radicalism that dreams of world conquest and sees America as the enemy.

In different shapes and sizes and under a range of labels, that radical streak of Islam has waged war on America since 1979, when Khomeinists seized the US embassy in Tehran and held its diplomats hostage for 444 days.

The killing of 241 Marines in Beirut in 1983, the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 and a host of other operations that claimed more American lives were episodes in a war - the reality of which the United States faced only after 9/11.

McCain doesn't hesitate to acknowledge that his country is engaged in a Global War on Terror. He doesn't believe that 9/11 might've been prompted by some wrong America did to others. To him, the nation was an innocent victim of "Islamic terrorism."

McCain asserts, "America faces a dedicated, focused and intelligent foe in the War on Terrorism. This enemy will probe to find America's weaknesses and strike against them. The United States cannot afford to be complacent about the threat, naive about terrorist intentions, unrealistic about their capabilities, or ignorant to our national vulnerabilities."

He'd pursue and fight these "enemies" wherever they are - including, especially, in Iraq. "If we run away," he says, "they are going to follow us home."

OBAMA, by contrast, doesn't use terms such as "the Global War on Terror" or "Islamic terrorism." Nor does he claim that America was simply an innocent victim.

In one speech, he used the image of a US helicopter flying over the poor countries in Africa and Asia, where it's seen as a symbol of oppression. He says his objective is to turn that helicopter into a symbol of American aid to the downtrodden.

For Obama, the threat comes not from terrorists but from "extremists" and their "program of hate." He never uses such terms as "jihadist," judging them hurtful to Muslims. He speaks of "violent extremists who are a small minority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims."

In one speech, he claimed that the Islamists aim only at "creating a repressive caliphate." He seemingly hasn't heard of jihadist movements whose declared aim is to destroy the United States in the name of Islam.

For McCain, the War on Terror is a "just war" in which Americans fight for their security and their allies'. Obama rejects the concept of "just war." He dismisses the Iraq war as both "unnecessary and unjust" - though the struggle in Afghanistan is "a necessary war."

ONE constant Obama theme is the claim that poverty and economic factors breed terrorism; this echoes the analysis of Jimmy Carter back in the '70s. Strengthening that impression is Obama's pick of Sen. Joseph Biden as running mate.

Read it all.

Right after 9/11 Illinois State Senator Barack Obama thought we should try to understand the conditions of povetry and helplessness that drove those frustrated men to do what they did.

Really.

At least he didn't say, as did his then spiritual mentor and pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that the "chickens were coming home to roost."

As for poverty and despair, one commentator said this:

In an opinion piece in Commentary magazine, writer Abe Greenwald commented on Obama's belief that the 9/11 attacks were rooted in poverty and despair. "Strange," he called it, "considering our attackers were wealthy and educated, connected and ecstatic."

As Greenwald put it, Obama "could have asked (terrorist and colleague) Bill Ayers, 'Bill, did your 'failure of empathy' stem from your impoverished upbringing as the son of the CEO of Commonwealth Edison?" Did poverty and despair also cause the Weather Underground member and host of Obama's first fundraiser to bomb government buildings?

Fact is, the roster of terrorists and their handlers reads like a list of of Ivy Leaguers.

Investor's Business Daily addresses Obama's concerns.

Obama And 9/11
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Wednesday, September 10, 2008 4:20 PM PT

The Anniversary: Eight days after terrorism declared war on America, a young state senator blamed it on "a failure of empathy" — yet another reason why Barack Obama should never be commander in chief.

The July 20 issue of the New Yorker magazine got a lot of attention for its cover, which carried a "satirical" cartoon depicting Michelle and Barack Obama that Obama supporters found tasteless and offensive. Buried inside that issue's feature story, however, was a reaction by Obama to 9/11 that all voters should find even more tasteless and offensive.

The article reprised a piece published in Chicago's Hyde Park Herald on Sept. 19, 2001, and written by a then-unknown and otherwise undistinguished state senator from Illinois. The senator, a former community organizer, wrote that after tightening security at our airports and repairing our intelligence networks, we "must also engage . . . in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness."

According to Barack Obama, the madness that drove terrorists to turn passenger jets into manned cruise missiles aimed at our centers of finance, government and military power "grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."

As if the answer to the attacks should have been food stamps for al-Qaida.

Hardly anyone in America knows that Barack Obama rose in politics because he played ball with the corrupt Democratic political machine that runs Chicago and is now running his campaign. That's because the mainstream media have not bothered to report on it, because, it might, well, damage Obama's image.

Was Obama a reformer, did he fight they system or fit right in?

Since Mayor's Daley machine is running his campaign -- David Axelrod, his chief strategist, was Daley's right hand man -- the answer is obvious. No doubt the Chicago machine thinks they can profit from running Washington as they have from running Chicago.

Finally, a serious, careful reporter, not from mainstream media, is starting to dig in. What he finds is corruption that's easy to understand, that continues despite indictments here and there because it's so profitable. After short jail terms, they're baaack.

Obama’s Days with Daley

Reform . . . the Chicago way.
By David Freddoso

In 2003, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s son Patrick and nephew Robert Vanecko became original investors in Municipal Sewer Services, a sewer cleaning and inspection company which had bought out a bankrupt firm. The company quickly had the old firm’s contracts with the city of Chicago extended without competitive bidding, at a value of $3 million to the company.

MSS did not disclose the Daley family members as investors in its official filings, as required by city ordinance, and it remains unclear how much money Daley’s family members made when they cashed out of the firm in late 2004. MSS would go on to acquire other city contracts and receive $7.9 million from Chicago before Tim Novak of the Chicago Sun-Times reported the conflict of interest late last year. The company was forced to walk away from a live contract and close its doors earlier this year.

On Friday, that same sewer contract was awarded to another company on a non-“friends and family” basis. It was one more story of dirty Chicago politics that went unnoticed in the national media.

This story of Patrick Daley feeding from the trough — or more properly, from the sewer — exemplifies the sweetheart deals that are typical of the political environment in which Senator Barack Obama rose. It rounds out the story of how each member of the family of Obama’s Illinois Senate mentor, Emil Jones, somehow manages to make big money from government salaries and contracts. It may evoke memories of the illegal pension-fund manipulation that landed Obama’s fundraiser, Tony Rezko, in federal prison — or of the millions in corporate welfare that Obama, as a state senator, showered upon Rezko and his other major donors in Chicago’s slum development business.

When news broke about Obam'a "lipstick on a pig" crack while campaigning, it didn’t necessarily mean Obama was taking a shot at Sarah Palin. However, Jake Tapper, reporting for ABC News thought so, since he said “some of them no doubt” thought Obama was alluding to Sarah Palin, obviously projecting his own reaction onto the crowd, which responded with laughter and applause.

As the controversy swirled and McCain took after Obama about the crack (and Tapper wrote another blog entry that of course Obama wasn’t doing that), it was only fair to go back and read the whole thing as reported by Tapper.

Here it is:

"You know, you can put lipstick on a pig," Obama said, "but it's still a pig."
The crowd rose and applauded, some of them no doubt thinking he may have been alluding to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's ad lib during her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech last week, "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick."

"You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called 'change,'" Obama continued, "it's still gonna stink after eight years.”

Well, it immediately became clear that indeed Obama was calling Sarah a pig despite his denial, because, right after the dig at Sarah, he took a shot at McCain’s age, calling him “an old fish in a piece of paper called ‘change, it’s still gonna stink after eight years.”

Apparently, Obama was pleased with his pig charge and decided to go after the "old fish." Too, too cute.

So the personal attack was actually a deliberate, double-barreled one: Palin is a pig (the ultimate Muslim insult) and McCain is an old fish that will still be stinking after eight years.

Well, at least he’s conceding that the "old fish" will be alive after eight years in the presidency.

Not nice.

Update: My, how disappointing to go back to Tapper's blog Thursday morning, September 11 to find that he had updated his entry to eliminate his own reading of the audience reaction where he said "some of them no doubt" thought Obama was referring to Palin, obviously putting his own reading onto the laughter and applause. Now Jake says,

The crowd rose and applauded, some of later telling reporters that they thought Obama had been alluding to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's ad lib during her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech last week, "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick."

Here Tapper is rewriting his own history, no longer revealing his reaction to the Obama line ("some of them no doubt" thought), but now saying that some later were "telling reporters." In other words, since he took the side of Obama in the denial when the controversy erupted, he had to cover what his reaction had been. The telltale evidence shows in the hasty editing: Note that there is an obvious extra word "of" that doesn't belong in the rewritten text. The original phrase had been "some of them" as seen in the original quoted first above. Tapper did note that his post had been updated, though he didn't say where. Tapper is thought to be a reputable reporter, but here he is jumping into the controversy as a player and rewriting his report to hide his own reaction to Obama's knock at Palin.

Not right.

Obama has many of the characteristics of the classic narcissist. After all, his major accomplishment has been writing two books about himself.

Now a marketing executive emailed Hugh Hewitt about how badly Obama has gone off message since the sudden emergence of Sarah Palin as the "new star." Consider:

--He hasn’t had a “good communicator” day since his acceptance speech.

--Tell me where he’s looked or sounded Presidential?

--He keeps comparing himself and his record to his opponent’s VP pick – thereby diminishing himself as POTUS

-- He’s looking elitist again, with the small town mayor attack

-- A “fighter for families” and his campaign attacks a woman’s family (with teen pregnancy and a Downs baby) – not good

-- They’ve now gone negative big-time. That “pig” statement is going to hurt him. And it may hurt him with those Hillary supporters and feminist groups who have bit their tongues up until now.

He can't stand it.

Doctor Sowell is blessed with practical wisdom and the ability to express his thoughts with great clarity. We are the beneficiaries of his gifts. Today he focuses on the Left's world and the real world.

September 09, 2008, 6:00 a.m.

Grow Up
The vision of the Left.

By Thomas Sowell

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the Left.

Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological preference for a world in which there are many inequalities.

Even fewer would prefer a world in which vast sums of money have to be devoted to military defense, when so much benefit could be produced if those resources were directed into medical research instead.

It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political Left. The only reason for rejecting the Left’s vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the Left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow.

Most of us learn that from experience — but experience is precisely what the young are lacking.

“Experience” is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong.

This homemade video by a soldier returned from Iraq is powerful.

Incredible, gross insults were leveled against our President and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate on MTV's annual MTV music award show by the British MC, who pleaded with viewers to vote for Obama.

I know America to be a forward-thinking country, right. Because, otherwise, you know, would you have let that retarded cowboy fellow be president for eight years?

We were very impressed. It was nice of you to let him have a go. Because in England, George Bush wouldn’t be trusted with a pair of scissors.

I am obliged by broadcasting law to show some balance in this situation, which means, uh, the Republicans might be alright. Sarah Palin. She’s a VILF! A vice president I’d like to…fumble, fondle, I dunno. I do feel a little bit sorry for her daughter, getting pregnant, poor kid. Is it a boy? Is it a girl? It’s a P.R. stunt. Come on. Be honest.

And I feel most sorry for that poor teenaged father. Boy. One minute, he’s just a teenaged lad in Alaska having joyful, unprotected sex. And the next minute: Get to the Republican convention. I think that is the best safe sex message of all time. Use a condom or become Republican! …That boy will spend the rest of his life masturbating while wearing a condom…

Oh, well, Hollywood, what can you do, right? Wrong. MTV is part of the Viacom entertainment empire controlled by Sumner Redstone from Newton, Massachusetts. It also controls 1500 threaters around the world, incuding Showcase Cimemas. As you drive north on Route 128 in Dedham, Massachusetts, you will see the headquarters of Viacom's National Amusements on the right. So when you buy a ticket at Showcase, you're feeding this organization that is doing so much to corrupt American culture. Go elsewhere.

National Amusement has its tentacles in many places. It has power and it seeks favors. It has donated more than $350,000 to the Obama campaign. This summary:

Donor: National Amusements

How Much: $352,603

What They’ll Want: What could a theatre chain want from a potential Obama administration that could inspire over $350,000 in donations? Don’t be misled. National Amusements has long been media mogul Sumner Redstone’s vehicle of choice when making campaign contributions. Through the company Redstone owns controlling interests CBS, Viacom (which owns MTV, BET), Paramount Pictures, and Dreamworks. Look for National Amusements to ask for looser regulations from the FCC regarding television ownership that prohibits cable television stations from also owning broadcast stations in the same market. Beyond the six figure donation, Redstone can donate “in-kind” with favorable press to the Obama campaign - look for the media maven to ride out his agenda to the fullest extent possible

Read Michelle Malkin's report.

McCain/Palin is out with a new ad emphasizing that they are "two mavericks" aiming to cut wasteful spending and expose the pork barrel politicians who feed on Washington goodies. (Obama is one of those, having steered taxpayer money to his wife's employer in Chicago.)

In this ad, the statement that Governor Palin killed the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" is denounced by a hysterical Obama-man as a "lie." But as the estimable Power Line blog notes, even Alaska Democrats said so: 'Gov. Palin recently cancelled the Gravina Island Bridge near Ketchikan that would have connected the Alaska mainland with Gravina Island (population: 50)." Obama does have trouble dealing with the truth. As he admitted, even his two autobiographies were buffed up to make him look better. Can't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

William Safire was the token conservative on The New York Times opinion pages for years and it was a sad day when he retired. His successor David Brooks is such a pale imitation that the new editor of the opinion pages added Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard for once-a-week commentary.

However, for today, the Times asked Bill Safire to comment on the speeches at the two conventions. The most moving speech for the Democrats was Joe Biden's son tribute to his dad. Obama didn't live up to his Greek god temple settng.

He thought Joe Liberman was especially effective speaking directly to Democrats and indepdependents at home as to why in this time of increasing danger the battle-scarred man of judgment John McCain was the leader America needs. Safire noted that McCain has never been a very good orator, but what came through was "trust" in what he says and promises to do. As for Sarah Palin, Safire had this to say:

[T]he St. Paul convention was hit by Hurricane Sarah and her admirable family. The cliché is that — faced by part of a party long troubled by McCain’s different drumming — the governor of Alaska was able to “energize the base” of social conservatives. The more salient fact is that her skillful speech and joyful demeanor was even more impressive than Obama’s introduction to the Democratic Party four years ago. The establishment-shaking candidate was a happy warrior in the glare of major-league scrutiny. Most of the huge, uncommitted audience at home enjoyed this strong woman’s national audition.(emphasis added)

In a bipartisan aside, he warned the media that their ferocious attacks on McCain/Palin and "media adulation" of Obama would backfire. Public opinion of the media is now about as low as that of the Democratic Congress and polls show that substantial majorities know they are being treated like sheep and fed pro-Obama fodder by the mainstream media (led, of course, by The New York Times).

To read it all, click here.

The Middle East's most perceptive strategic analyst Caroline Glick wrote in the Jerusalem Post about the brilliance of John McCain in making a hard-eyed assessment of his own strengths and weaknesses and those of Barack Obama and in taking the bold action he did as a consequence. It's trite to say "Know thyself, know thy enemy," but too often that fundamental advice is forgotten or ignored.

What about Obama?

In Sen. Barack Obama, McCain faces a young, vigorous and charismatic opponent who has successfully energized his supporters and the powerful US liberal media establishment. Owing to that excitement, Obama has raised unprecedented amounts of campaign contributions. He has also rallied tens of thousands of loyal foot soldiers who have volunteered to serve his campaign. Both the donors and the volunteers are essential for winning voters and bringing them to the ballot boxes on November 4.

Obama's velvet tongue is also a formidable asset. His ability to mesmerize audiences with soaring rhetoric is compared favorably to president John F. Kennedy's eloquence.

Obama's other massive advantage is the liberal media. Since he first launched his primary campaign, the liberal media - which include the major US newspapers, television news networks and two out of three cable news networks - have been actively advocating on his behalf while downplaying his opponents.

But all of these formidable strengths are matched by countervailing vulnerabilities. While Obama's supporters are energized, the drawn-out primary election battle with Sen. Hillary Clinton splintered the Democratic Party base. Whereas most of Clinton's voters will no doubt vote for Obama in the general election, their support is more tenuous in swing states where Obama's cultural cache is less appealing.

And while Obama is a stunning speaker, his record of actual accomplishments is all but nonexistent. The combination of his extraordinary speeches and his ordinary empty resumé engenders a sense that Obama suffers from extreme arrogance.

Then, too, while the media has done its best to project a positive and credible image of Obama, his past political associations with radicals such as Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayres and corrupt influence peddler Tony Rezko call both his patriotism and his honesty into question.

So how did McCain see himself?

On the other hand, McCain has been unable to generate excitement in his party. His reputation as a maverick has often been earned at the expense of his political base, which is overwhelmingly socially conservative and suspects him of being a closet liberal. This has made fund-raising a challenge, and raised concerns that many conservatives will simply not vote on Election Day.

Moreover, McCain has never distinguished himself as a great communicator. His war wounds, which prevent him from raising his arms above his shoulders, make him appear even older than his 72 years. When compared to the vigorous, handsome 46-year-old Obama, McCain tends to look and sound like an old man.

This age and rhetorical distinction is only magnified by the disparity of media coverage of the two candidates' campaigns. The media have a pronounced and documented tendency to play up McCain's weaknesses and Obama's strengths while downplaying McCain's strengths and Obama's weaknesses.

What did McCain have to do?

IN LIGHT of these realities, McCain's strategic challenge has been on the one hand, to transform Obama's strengths into weaknesses while bringing Obama's actual weaknesses to the public's attention in a persuasive way. On the other hand, McCain needs to unify his own party around his candidacy without alienating independents and Democrats whose votes can be won.

In recent weeks, largely through the well-conceived, satirical use of television ads, McCain sought to meet these basic challenges. By comparing Obama's speech in Berlin to Moses's parting of the Red Sea, he playfully yet effectively drew attention to Obama's arrogance and called the credibility of his rhetorical skill into question. Other ads effectively brought Obama's slim record of actual achievements into view. Still other ads sought to attract disaffected Clinton voters by using her own primary campaign denunciations of Obama's record and radical associations.

Most importantly, in the lead-up to Palin's selection as his running mate, McCain has successfully provoked a public debate about the fairness of the media's support of Obama.

McCain's selection of Palin as his running mate, then, came after he had set the conditions for a strategic assault on Obama by successfully weakening him and discrediting his support base. The surprise entry of a young, accomplished woman with a compelling personal story who was all but unknown to the national audience, placed the Obama campaign and particularly his media supporters in a state of shock. And in their shocked reaction to her selection, the liberal media destroyed their own credibility - not to mention likability - among the general public.

The media instantly attacked -- inexperience, they shouted, thus highlighting the very meager accomplishments of Obama -- two books about himself.

She shouldn't be running because she has a special needs child. That blew up in their faces immediately.

Then they trumpeted the fact that Palin's unmarried daughter was pregnant and created a media circus that totally destroyed any illusion that the media was being fair in this election.

The unfair attacks instantly angered, energized and solidified the base, because, after all, Sarah Palin was one of them, and John McCain had shown, by picking her, he was, too, putting to rest any nagging doubts.

Far from a gamble, his move was a stroke of brilliance that showed an acute understanding of who Palin is, how he himself is perceived, and what motivates both the media and his own party base.

McCain's undoing of the elite, leftist media provides a universal lesson for contending with the Left. At base, the Left's ideology, whether relating to women's rights, human rights, academic inquiry or war and peace is not universal but tribal. Moreover, when the Left is challenged on any one of its signature issues, because it cannot actually make a case for the universal applicability or even logic of its views, it tends instead to embrace the politics of personal destruction while ignoring the obvious contradictions between its stated beliefs and actual behavior.

McCain has weakened Obama and exposed the hypocricy of the media.

Now McCain and Palin have to deliver. But McCain has shown outstanding judgment and leadership in positioning for victory when all seemed to be going against him.

McCain's strategic grasp of the requirements for a successful presidential race provide an important lesson for policy-makers and political leaders. To win in politics and war you must be willing to acknowledge both your strengths and your weaknesses, and those of your opponent. It is never easy to look reality in the face. But unless leaders are willing to do so, they will never win

Column One: John McCain - master strategist
Sep. 4, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

For those who may have missed it or want to read it now or download it, here is the text of Senator John McCain's speech accepting the mandate to shake up Washington and protect the nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic. The video is courtesy of C-Span.

Maverick John McCain made it clear in his speech to the Republican National Convention that he had chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his VP because she was a maverick, too. She fought the establishment to root out corruption and waste, as McCain has done throughout his career. He said that together they will "shake up" Washington. To underscore that message, the campaign released a new ad.

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Some of the comments after the Palin triumph:

John Hinderaker the Power Line blog quoted from an AP story:

"One speech does not a campaign make. ... Even as she spoke, airplanes in Alaska were unloading reporters and political operatives sent to pore through her personal and public life."

John notes:

It's interesting, isn't it? Where are the planeloads of "reporters and political operatives" poring through Barack Obama's "personal and public life?" Those poor newspapers and other media organizations have been strapped for resources for so long that they just haven't been able to look into Obama's career and associations. Now, thankfully, planeloads of reporters have become available. Maybe when they're done investigating Sarah Palin's daughter's boyfriend, do you think they will turn their attention to the Democrats' nominee for President of the United States?

That was just a rhetorical question, of course. After all, news organizations have to have priorities!

A reader's email to radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt:

I work in a small manufacturing facility in the greater Syracuse NY area. It is pretty darn "blue" around here, but kind of a "centrist dem, labor-oriented, working class value blue-collar blue". Not the "fever swamp truther, BushCo kind of blue". Anyway, to the point. No one EVER talks politics here, but the place is BUZZING with Palin fever. Everyone's talking about her, and the most often used phrase I hear is "finally, one of us!"

The left is in serious, serious trouble. I myself wasn't enthused about McCain, though my respect for the man's sacrifice alone gets my vote. But now I will be writing my first EVER check to any candidate. And I will gladly support the McCain/Palin ticket because she inspires me.

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Some favorites from Sarah's speech:

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening. We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.”

“What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to take more of your money…give you more orders from Washington…and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy… our opponent is against producing it.”

"With Russia wanting to control a vital pipeline in the Caucasus, and to divide and intimidate our European allies by using energy as a weapon, we cannot leave ourselves at the mercy of foreign suppliers. To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of world energy supplies ... or that terrorists might strike again at the Abqaiq facility in Saudi Arabia ... or that Venezuela might shut off its oil deliveries ... we Americans need to produce more of our own oil and gas. And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: we've got lots of both."

"But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate. This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word "victory" except when he's talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed ... when the roar of the crowd fades away ... when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger ... take more of your money ... give you more orders from Washington ... and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world."

"Some candidates use change to promote their careers. John McCain has used his career to promote change. "

My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of "personal discovery." This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn't just need an organizer. And though both Senator Obama and Senator Biden have been going on lately about how they are always, quote, "fighting for you," let us face the matter squarely. There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you ... in places where winning means survival and defeat means death ... and that man is John McCain.

How did some of the Obama supporters take it?

At Talking Points Memo they are stunned:

Yet if you didn't sense last night how deeply Sarah Palin channeled some of the country's deepest, most powerful currents of pent-up indignation and yearning, you don't sense the trouble we Democrats are in.
Rhetorically, she was the anti-Obama,. She was stirring precisely because she was so artless, matter-of fact, and "American" — with no cadences or grand, historic resonances, but with plenty of mother wit and shrewdness. Credit her as much as the speechwriters.

In Canada, Andrew Coyne at Macleans isn't necessarily predisposed to liking Palin, but he admits he witnessed something very impressive, calling her "the best natural speechmaker since Reagan":

It was that good. No, she’s not qualified, and the substance was thin, but my God — that was perhaps the greatest bit of political theatre I have ever witnessed. Her critics in the media and in the opposition may regret having piled on quite so enthusiastically, and with so little heed for who they hurt — or angered. Watching the tumultuous, ecstatic reaction in the hall, I was reminded of the famous words of the Admiral Yamamoto after Pearl Harbour: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant, and fill him with a terrible resolve."

Showing that some decency still flickers in the Democratic Party, law professor Susan Estrich, campaign manager of the failed Dukakis presidential bid, expressed outrage at the hatchet job Sally Quinn of the Washington Post and other elites, particularly feminist elites, were doing on Governor Palin. On the Greta van Susteren Fox News show, Estrich fumed:

I’ve never seen anything this bad in my life, and, Greta, I was with Geraldine Ferraro in ‘84 – and this is worse.... I don’t agree with Sarah Palin on the issues. I mean, she and I are very far apart, but I have never seen from some of my friends such vicious and mean-spirited attacks on her most personal choices, which is what they are. We ask that our choices be respected. Hers should be respected. And this questioning of whether she should as a mother of five be running for Vice President, I don’t recall anybody saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger shouldn’t run for governor of California because he’s got four kids. I think this is just really unfair, really sexist, and very likely to provoke a backlash.

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Though US Magazine is trashing Sarah Palin in its cover article out tomorrow with a lurid cover caption "Babies, Lies & Scandals," their online readers seem to be rejecting the attempted brainwashing. (The owner of the magazine is a Obama supporter and contributor who has maxed out.)

Poll of US Magazine online readers

The highlights of the evening were speeches by former Senator Fred Thompson and Senator Joe Lieberman. Just eight years ago Lieberman was the vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, but last night he was urging Democrats and Independents to vote for America, not for a party, and to vote for McCain/Palin.

Lieberman in one reference contrasted McCain and Obama very well:

Senator Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who can do great things for our country in the years ahead. But eloquence is no substitute for a record -- not in these tough times.

In the Senate he has not reached across party lines to get anything significant done, nor has he been willing to take on powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party.

Contrast that to John McCain's record, or the record of the last Democratic President, Bill Clinton, who stood up to some of those same Democratic interest groups and worked with Republicans to get important things done like welfare reform, free trade agreements, and a balanced budget.

Click here for Lieberman's speech (video and transcript).

Click here for Fred Thompson's remarks (video and transcript).

Thompson made many fine observations, but this is an unanswerable one:

It’s pretty clear there are two questions we will never have to ask ourselves: ‘Who is this man?’ and ‘Can we trust this man with the presidency?’

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe summarizes the "stark" difference between the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin tickets on issues of life. Speaking at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania earlier this year, Obama said that if his daughters made a mistake, he didn't want them "punished with a baby."

Jacoby goes on:

Obama advocates abortion rights even more sweeping than those enacted under Roe v. Wade. "The first thing I'd do as president," he assured the Planned Parenthood Action Fund last year, "is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." The measure would not only codify Roe, it would eliminate even restrictions on abortion that the Supreme Court has allowed - the federal ban on government funding of abortion, for example, or the law prohibiting partial-birth abortion.

Polls show that 75% of all Americans oppose partial-birth abortions, which Obama wants to bring back.

Jacoby again, this time on Obama's opposition to protecting babies who survive failed abortions:

As an Illinois lawmaker, he [Obama] opposed a bill making it clear that premature babies born alive after surviving a failed abortion must be protected and cannot be killed or simply left to die. Even after virtually identical legislation passed unanimously in the US House and Senate, Obama continued to oppose the state version. On abortion, no presidential candidate has ever been so extreme.

As for the McCain/Palin ticket, Jacoby says this:

And when has a Republican ticket ever been so unabashedly antiabortion? Senator John McCain, long one of the Senate's reliably antiabortion votes, is a father of seven, including an adopted orphan from Bangladesh. His running mate lacks McCain's voting record, yet her bona fides are even more impressive: When Palin and her husband learned last winter that she was carrying a baby with Down syndrome, they never considered not having him. More than 90 percent of pregnant American women in the same position choose abortion. Palin chose life.

Jacoby concludes:

The next president and vice president will be the most pro-choice in US history. Or the most pro-life.

Read the entire article by clicking here.

How does the leading analyst of the Middle East Caroline Glick view the Obama/Biden ticket? She asks whether the addition of Biden as VP nominee means Israel can trust Obama. Her unequivocal answer in effect is “Hell, no.”

OBAMA is currently receiving the support of some 57 percent of American Jews. Although this is less than any Democratic presidential nominee in recent memory, it is still disturbing that a large majority of American Jews support him. The Obama campaign no doubt hopes the Biden selection will shore up Jewish support.

It can only be hoped that despite their party loyalty and what they're telling pollsters, American Jews (indeed, American voters generally) will judge Biden and Obama by their records and positions.

Biden has consistently denied the threat emanating from Iran and Syria not only for Israel but for the U.S. as well. And Obama's statements and actions expose him as a man ill disposed not only toward Israel but America itself.

Here's her analysis.

With Biden On Board, Can Obama Be Trusted?
By Caroline Glick, Aug. 28, 2008

Many American Jewish observers welcomed Barack Obama's selection of Sen. Joseph Biden as his vice-presidential running mate. As a member of the Senate since 1973, and the serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden is a seasoned political player and foreign policy heavyweight. His experience, it is argued, will make up for Obama's inexperience; his moderate liberal views will make up for Obama's radical liberal views.

Biden has a track record of often supporting Israel. And as he entered the Democratic presidential primaries last year, he stepped up his pro-Israel pronouncements. In an interview with the Forward for instance, Biden rejected the anti-Israel call to distance the U.S. from Israel in a bid to ratchet up Arab support for the U.S. As he put it, "In my 34-year career, I have never wavered from the notion that the only time progress has ever been made in the Middle East is when the Arab nations have known that there is no daylight between us and Israel. So the idea of being an 'honest broker' is not, as some of my Democratic colleagues call for, the answer. It is being the smart broker, it is being the smart partner.

But while Biden's rhetoric on America's relationship with Israel is firm, his positions on issues critically important to Israel's national security call into question his willingness to stand by Israel. He is a staunch supporter of an Israeli transfer of the strategically critical Golan Heights to Syria and has harshly criticized the Bush administration for its refusal to support Israeli negotiations with Syria. At the same time, he downplays the significance of Syria's strategic alliance with Iran and its sponsorship of terrorists in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. Belittling those ties, Biden has claimed repeatedly and without a shred of evidence that the Syrians really want to put all of that behind them.

The Democratic attack machine is going into overdrive hitting on Sarah Pallin, making charges and creating false rumors, thus showing how frightened they are of the appeal of this corruption fighting governor.

McCain/Palin is working just as hard to rapidly transform Governor Palin from an unknown into a public persona, which means shedding virtually all vestiges of privacy. This contrasts sharply with Obama's stonewalling and intimidation to hide parts of his past that conflict with and undermine the campaign-scrubbed narrative put together by the guiding lights of the Chicago political machine running the Obama campaign.

However, today's big news, that Palin's 17-year old daughter is pregnant and will have her baby, doesn't concern Palin's politics at all. The news is being made public now to counter slimy rumors traced to the left wing Daily Kos website that the son Sarah had four months ago was really her daughter Bristol's baby and Palin was covering up for her.

Sarah Palin and her husband Todd released this statement:

"Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents," Sarah and Todd Palin said in the brief statement.

"Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family."

So the Democratic attackers succeeded in making it impossible for the 17-year old to have her baby quietly in peace.

Obama must be incredulous. Back in March he said this:

"Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old," he said. "I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby.

The Palin family doesn't think the response to such a mistake is abortion, but protection of the life of the unborn.

Dr. James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family issued the following statement:

"In the 32-year history of Focus on the Family, we have offered prayer, counseling and resource assistance to tens of thousands of parents and children in the same situation the Palins are now facing. We have always encouraged the parents to love and support their children and always advised the girls to see their pregnancies through, even though there will of course be challenges along the way. That is what the Palins are doing, and they should be commended once again for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.

Obama said that if anyone in his campaign was found to be involved in spreading this false rumor or going after families of McCain or Palin he or she would be fired.

Gerard Baker is the Washington correspondent for London's newspaper The Times. He has developed his own comparison of Obama and Palin as the liberal media try to rip Palin apart. His calm look is worth reading every word.

September 01, 2008
Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama
By Gerard Baker The Times, London

Democrats, between sniggers of derision and snorts of disgust, contend that Sarah Palin, John McCain's vice-presidential pick is ridiculously unqualified to be president.

It's a reasonable objection on its face except for this small objection: it surely needs to be weighed against the Democrats' claim that their own candidate for president is self-evidently ready to assume the role of most powerful person on the planet.

At first blush, here's what we know about the relative experience of the two candidates. Both are in their mid-forties and have held statewide elective office for less than four years. Both have admitted to taking illegal drugs in their youth.

So much for the similarities. How about the differences?

Political experience

Obama: Worked his way to the top by cultivating, pandering to and stroking the most powerful interest groups in the all-pervasive Chicago political machine, ensuring his views were aligned with the power brokers there.

Palin: Worked her way to the top by challenging, attacking and actively undermining the Republican party establishment in her native Alaska. She ran against incumbent Republicans as a candidate willing and able to clean the Augean Stables of her state's government.

Political Biography

Obama: A classic, if unusually talented, greasy-pole climber. Held a succession of jobs that constitute the standard route to the top in his party's internal politics: "community organizer", law professor, state senator.

Palin:A woman with a wide range of interests in a well-variegated life. Held a succession of jobs - sports journalist, commercial fisherwoman, state oil and gas commissioner, before entering local politics. A resume that suggests something other than burning political ambition from the cradle but rather the sort of experience that enables her to understand the concerns of most Americans..

Political history

Obama: Elected to statewide office only after a disastrous first run for a congressional seat and after his Republican opponent was exposed in a sexual scandal. Won seat eventually in contest against a candidate who didn't even live in the state.

Palin: Elected to statewide office by challenging a long-serving Republican incumbent governor despite intense opposition from the party.

Appeal

Obama: A very attractive speaker whose celebrity has been compared to that of Britney Spears and who sends thrills up Chris Matthews' leg

Palin: A very attractive woman, much better-looking than Britney Spears who speaks rather well too. She sends thrills up the leg of Rush Limbaugh (and me).

Executive experience

Obama: Makes executive decisions every day that affect the lives of his campaign staff and a vast crowd of traveling journalists

Palin:Makes executive decisions every day that affect the lives of 500,000 people in her state, and that impact crucial issues of national economic interest such as the supply and cost of energy to the United States.

Religious influences

Obama: Regards people who "cling" to religion and guns as "bitter" . Spent 20 years being mentored and led spiritually by a man who proclaimed "God damn America" from his pulpit. Mysteriously, this mentor completely disappeared from public sight about four months ago.

Palin: Head of her high school Fellowship of Christian Athletes and for many years a member of the Assemblies of God congregation whose preachers have never been known to accuse the United States of deliberately spreading the AIDS virus. They remain in full public sight and can be seen every Sunday in churches across Alaska. A proud gun owner who has been known to cling only to the carcasses of dead caribou felled by her own aim.

Record of bipartisan achievement

Obama: Speaks movingly of the bipartisanship needed to end the destructive politics of "Red America" and "Blue America", but votes in the Senate as a down-the-line Democrat, with one of the most liberal voting records in congress.

Palin: Ridiculed by liberals such as John Kerry as a crazed, barely human, Dick Cheney-type conservative but worked wit Democrats in the state legislature to secure landmark anti-corruption legislation.

Former state Rep. Ethan Berkowitz - a Democrat - said. "Gov. Palin has made her name fighting corruption within her own party, and I was honored when she stepped across party lines and asked me to co-author her ethics white paper."

On Human Life

Obama: Devoutly pro-choice. Voted against a bill in the Illinois state senate that would have required doctors to save the lives of babies who survived abortion procedures. The implication of this position is that babies born prematurely during abortions would be left alone, unnourished and unmedicated, until they died.

Palin: Devoutly pro-life. Exercised the choice proclaimed by liberals to bring to full term a baby that had been diagnosed in utero with Down Syndrome.

Now it's true there are other crucial differences. Sen Obama has appeared on Meet The Press every other week for the last four years. He has been the subject of hundreds of adoring articles in papers and newsweeklies and TV shows and has written two Emmy-award winning books.

Gov Palin has never appeared on Meet the Press, never been on the cover of Newsweek. She presumably feels that, as a mother of five children married to a snowmobile champion, who also happens to be the first woman and the youngest person ever to be elected governor of her state, she has not really done enough yet to merit an autobiography.

Then again, I'm willing to bet that if she had authored The Grapes of Wrath, sung like Edith Piaf and composed La Traviata , she still wouldn't have won an Emmy.

Fortunately, it will be up to the American people and not their self-appointed leaders in Hollywood and New York to determine who really has the better experience to be president.

Gerard Baker is US Editor and Assistant Editor of The Times of London.

P.S. Baker has a genius for characterization. If you missed his comments after Obama orated to 200,000 Germans, click here.

Bill Kristol is the token non-left op-ed writer in the New York Times. Today he weighs the Palin risk and says she will be the key to election or defeat for McCain. Was this a shrewd choice? Only if she does well. He thinks she will.

He's wrong about one thing he says, however:

Voters are unlikely to learn much that is new or surprising about Obama, McCain or Joe Biden over the next two months. Palin’s performance as the vice-presidential nominee, on the other hand, is the open and unresolved question of this campaign. She is, in a way, now the central figure in this fall’s electoral drama.

The carefully-hidden real story of Barack Obama is starting to come out. The fictional dressing is being stripped away and the real agenda behind the uninformative call for "change" is finally being dug out, against howls of protest from the Obama campaign. Why bespoil the romantic tale they have spun with an unblinking look at the hard facts about "God Damn America" Jeremiah Wright, unrepentant bomber of the Capitol and the Pentagon William Ayers and convicted felon Tony Rezko and the central role of the Chicago political machine in Obama's rise?

Kristol's take on Palin:

I think she can pull it off. I’m not the only one. The day after the V.P. announcement, I spoke with an old friend, James Muller, chairman of the political science department at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He said that Palin “has been underestimated over and over again. She took on the party and state establishments here in Alaska, and left them reeling. She’s a very good campaigner, a quick study and a fighter.”

Muller called particular attention to her successes in passing an increase to the oil production tax and facilitating the future construction of a huge natural gas pipeline. “At first the oil companies thought she was naïve, and they’d have their way. Instead she faced them down and forced them to compromise on her terms.”

Can she face down the Democrats, Joe Biden and the national media over the next couple of months?

John McCain is betting she can. Perhaps, as he pondered his vice-presidential selection, he recalled the advice of Margaret Thatcher: “In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”

The Obama campaign is getting desperate as academic researchers (where’s the mainstream media?) start digging in earnest into the Obama narrative.

It is disturbing that so many of Obama’s influential friends hate America and seem determined to undermine (they call it "change") American society.

Based on Obama's own writings, Obama’s 20-year association with black power advocate Reverend Jeremiah Wright does not appear to represent a philosophical aberration for Obama. What attracted Obama over a 13-year period to unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers, who has demonstrated his hatred of America with real bombs and is now pushing a socialist agenda on public school children?

Obama has tried to pass Ayers off as just someone who lives in the neighborhood, but it it turns out there was a close continuing relationship, including through a foundation established by Ayers and chaired by Obama to fund radical socialist and black identity policies centered on the Chicago public school system.

While both Ayers and Obama sent their children to private school, Obama opposes school choice for public school children.

Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington is looking into what was accomplished with the $110 million raised by the Ayers foundation. Where did the money go, what good did it do? So far, the answer seems to be "not much." Kurtz has only recently been able to get into the files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge at the University of Illinois after having been initially refused access.

The viciousness which the Obama campaign has attacked the highly respected Kurtz ("slimy charcter assassin") in an effort to keep him off a Chicago area talk show demonstrates vividly its panic that its carefully crafted Obama story will be exposed as the fairy tale it is.

Kurtz, in Chicago to review the 1,000 CAC [Chicago Annenberg Challenge] files the university library relented and allowed him to see, was asked to discuss the matter with host Rosenberg. The Obama camp was invited to send a representative and refused to do so although the headquarters is but four blocks away. Instead the campaign organized a swarm of non-stop callers to WGN attacking Kurtz as a “vicious racist” a “slimy character assassin” and suggesting WGN failed its obligations as a broadcaster by allowing him to publicly air his views. The baseless charges and the vitriolic nature of them were startling to the station, the host, and the guest. Except for telling outright lies about the Ayers connection and the CAC, the campaign has done everything in its power to show us that it does not believe there is a free speech right to examine Obama’s record — such of it as has not been buried or “lost.” The unexamined life of Barack is what they prefer we vote on.

Kurtz has only had time for a preliminary look at the CAC files, but actions such as these raise a red flag.

The CAC files show the organization funneled money to activist organizations and did so on ideological grounds, favoring applications that focused on ethnic identity and bilingual education and turning down grant proposals which did not. Thus, CAC funded a Juneteenth (sic) effort by the South Shore African Village Collaboration and a peace school but rejected proposals by the Chicago Algebra Project aimed at increasing student achievement and the District 5 Math Science Initiative which was trying to increase the math and science competence of Hispanic youngsters.

In the Democratic platform is a warning of the socialist program planned for America:

Take a close gander at the draft Democrat platform. It is full of plans to bring community organizers to your own neighborhood — undoubtedly offering us all the chance to watch more money wasted on programs and people unable to improve public school academic performance.

School choice for poor kids? Nah.

Check out how this sordid story of Obama campaign intimidation and attempted cover-up is unfolding.

The Obama-supporting mainstream media is having a field day trashing Governor Palin on her inexperience. A McCain-Palin supporter has put together a comparison chart that must be seen. Click here.

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal also is demanding that the Obama campaign come clean. There is ugliness, deceit, evasiveness and secrecy in the Obama campaign. They are hiding information about Obama's past. In some cases the media is not doing its investigative job, but often it is the campaign that is refusing to cooperate.

Obama remains a mystery because he has been hiding details of his past life. Fund details some of the matters on which Obama is stonewalling.

"They're terrified of people poking around Obama's life," one reporter told Gabriel Sherman at the New Republic. "The whole Obama narrative is built around the narrative that Obama and [campaign strategist] David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it's not entirely true." The stakes are high. If the full story of Mr. Obama's relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright had been revealed before the Iowa caucus, he wouldn't have won.

David Axelrod is Chicago Mayor Daley's right hand man in running the Democratic patronage and payoff machine, which is Obama's principal patron. Over the years the machine has become expert in stalling, twisting and hiding facts and obfuscating what's really going on. Obama is a beneficiary of that expertise.

Fund also describes the ugly steps the Obama campaign are taking to stifle all criticism of Obama.

Team Obama has launched an offensive against WGN, the Chicago Tribune's radio station, for interviewing Stanley Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz is a conservative writer who this week forced the University of Illinois to finally open its records on Sen. Obama's association with William Ayers, the unrepentant 1970s Weather Underground terrorist.

An Obama campaign email to supporters called Mr. Kurtz a "slimy character assassin" whose "divisive, destructive ranting" should be confronted. WGN producer Zack Christenson says the outpouring of negative calls and emails is "unprecedented." He also notes that it is curious -- because "we wanted the Obama campaign's take" on Mr. Kurtz's findings, but the campaign declined to put anyone on air.

Stanley Kurtz is a highly respected senior fellow at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, hardly a "slimy character assassin."

For a rundown of the obstacles and barriers put in his way as he sought information about Obama's relationship with terrorist bomber William Ayers, see Kurtz's article "Chicago Annenberg Challenge Shutdown?"

The reaction of Republicans and conservatives to the selection of Sarah Palin has been overwhelmingly positive. Predictably, starting with the Obama campaign itself, Democrats have sneered at Palin as a small town mayor and governor of a state with a population (600,000) smaller than many mid-size cities in the U.S. Yet she has more executive experience than Obama and Biden combined.

A few thoughtful conservatives such as Charles Krauthammer think that the Palin selection was a mistake because it takes the issue of Obama inexperience and "readiness to lead" off the table.

Most disagree. Obama is still totally inexperienced in foreign policy and national defense, as he demonstrates on an almost daily basis. McCain's advantage is still universally acknowledged. McCain has been a fighter against corruption and pork; Obama is still someone who played ball with "the good old boys" and practiced pork politics.

The choice of Palin opens up some new territory for examination. The mainstream media will now go over Palin's history with a fine tooth comb because she's an "unknown." But the media have failed or refused to do that kind of examination of Obama's history. After months and months of soaring rhetoric about "hope" and "change" Obama is still a mystery to many because the media hasn't done its job.

Some examples of media neglect:

Palin is a fighter against corruption and waste in government. What has Obama done in his years in the Illinois senate and in Washington? He has indulged in pork barrel politics and played ball with Chicago's patronage-ridden Democratic machine, which is running his campaign. But you wouldn't know that if you just read the newspapers and watch television.

For many months bloggers have been asking the Obama campaign to open up the birth records in Hawaii. The campaign has refused and has only offered a copy of a supposed birth certificate to a left wing website that at least three forensic experts claim is a forgery. Not a word of this controversy has been seen in the national media. Since the matter can be cleared up easily by authorizing access to the original official records, why hasn't the Obama campaign done that?

Long-time Obama friend and fundraiser Tony Rezko, who helped Obama financially in his purchase of his Chicago mansion, has been convicted of 16 counts of political corruption. The media has brushed off the association. Why was Rezko, of Middle East origins who obtained large loans from an Iraqi convicted of grand theft from the Iraqi government, so eager to help Obama?

What has shaped Obama's economic views? Before college his mentor (as identified in Obama's first book) in Hawaii was or had been a member of the Communist Party of the U.S. who railed against the American economic system and white capitalist oppression. Obama's book also disclosed he sought out socialists and black power advocates while in college and progressively distanced himself from his mother's race (which is white). The media shrugs, even though Obama continued his association with haters of America and advocates of black power against white oppression by joining forces with "God Damn America" Reverend Jeremiah Wright for 20 years. He helped organize Nation of Islam's Million Man March and found inspiration in the words of black power zealot Louis Farrakhan. Why did he go to Chicago to learn the Alinsky method of community organizing for socialism, which stresses hiding the real purpose of changing the American economic system by uttering vague appeals to "hope" and "change"? Is none of this relevant?

Recently, sources outside the mainstream media have brought to light Obama's fight against the Illinois Born Alive Act and the fact he lied about why he opposed saving the lives of babies who survived failed abortions. Also, Obama's close association with unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers has been ignored by the media and only came to public light through a privately financed TV ad, which the Obama campaign is trying to force off the air.

So, as the digging into the life story of Palin begins, voters should demand that the same diligence be given to Obama's history, from birth to today. Obama's inexperience is known, but his character and the shaping of his worldview are not. Why are so many haters of America his friends? So far, the media has taken Obama's words as the last word. There is too much at stake in this election for the media not to live up to its obligations to the American public.

There is another reason why Palin is a big plus for McCain. She is an expert on energy, a champion of drilling now, including in ANWR (which is in Alaska). For many Americans gasoline prices are at the top of their list of concerns. Palin has been and is a strong voice for America to use its own resources to end dependence on hostile and unstable oil producers. Even if oil prices come down somewhat, America has finally learned its lesson: Let's rely on ourselves as much as we can.

There's much more to like about the selection of Palin, but these two reasons alone justify the choice. Let's finally learn the full Obama story as we learn the full Palin story.

And drill now.

We don't need Barack Obama to create "change." Things change in politics, in the economy, and elsewhere in American society, without waiting for a political messiah to lead us into the promised land.

Who would have thought that Obama's big speech at the Democratic convention would disappoint expectations, while McCain's speech electrified his audience when he announced his choice of Governor Sarah Palin for his running mate?

Some people were surprised that his choice was a woman. What is more surprising is that she is an articulate Republican. How many of those have you seen?

Despite the incessantly repeated mantra of "change," Barack Obama's politics is as old as the New Deal and he is behind the curve when it comes to today's economy.

Not only is Obama peddling failed economic policies and stirring up class warfare, his national security policies would put the nation at great risk.

Senator Obama's rhetoric today is the anti-business and class warfare rhetoric that worked so brilliantly in a political sense for FDR in the 1930s. But Obama is following an opposite course from FDR when it comes to recognizing threats to American national security.

Senator Obama has repeatedly tried to deal with national security threats with rhetoric. He tried to dismiss the threat of a nuclear Iran with because Iran is "a small nation"-- even though it is larger than Japan, which launched a devastating attack against the United States at Pearl Harbor.

FDR had the good sense to begin urging greater military preparedness in 1940, more than a year before the United States was attacked. He said, "If you wait until you see the whites of their eyes, you will never know what hit you."

Cutting the military budget and taking foreign policy problems to the United Nations are Obama's version of "change."

That is change that we dare not believe in. It is the audacity of hype.

Obama's actions to stifle criticism and debate about him is gettng to be really disturbing. Just a few days ago he asked the U.S. Attorney General to sue the principal funder of a TV ad detailing the long association of Obama with unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers.

Now his campaign tried to keep a researcher off a radio talk show in Chicago.

Charles Krauthammer expresses his continuing amazement that America knows so little about Obama and yet he now stands as the official Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

As Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News points out (and national polls repeatedly confirm), Obama is where he is because, not in spite of, his race. Many whites and non-black minorities in this country WANT to vote for a qualified black to be president, while more than 90% of blacks do, too. But how do we know he's qualified? Before bestowing the mantle of Martin Luther King, Jr. on him, Williams says we at least should know where he stands on issues affecting race, but we do not.

Not only has Obama carefully not disclosed his positions on key issues, instead offering "hope" for "change," there is an even more basic lack that Krauthammer points out: If we cannot measure Obama by his very thin resumé of accomplishments, then who are the persons of stature who can vouch for his character? Certainly not long-time associates American-haters Reverend Jeremiah Wright or unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers.

Eerily missing at the Democratic convention this year were people of stature who were seriously involved at some point in Obama’s life standing up to say: I know Barack Obama. I’ve been with Barack Obama. We’ve toiled/endured together. You can trust him. I do.

Is this absence of witnesses the reason for the sense of anxiety that pervaded the Democratic convention?

Barack Obama is an immensely talented man whose talents have been largely devoted to crafting, and chronicling, his own life. Not things. Not ideas. Not institutions. But himself.

Nothing wrong or even terribly odd about that — except that he is laying claim to the job of crafting the coming history of the United States. A leap of such audacity is odd. The air of unease at the Democratic convention this week was not just a result of the Clinton psychodrama. The deeper anxiety was that the party was nominating a man of many gifts but precious few accomplishments — bearing even fewer witnesses.

The question hangs in the air: "Who is this stranger?"

The oddity of this convention is that its central figure is the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby. The palpable apprehension is that the anointed is a stranger — a deeply engaging, elegant, brilliant stranger with whom the Democrats had a torrid affair. Having slowly woken up, they see the ring and wonder who exactly they married last night.

It's long past time to find out who Barack Obama really is.

Power Line picked up a Reuters report that "Barack Obama's big speech on Thursday night will be delivered from an elaborate columned stage resembling a miniature Greek temple." . . . . The Political Inquirer can see it now.

Obama in so many ways says I'm better than you. Trashing those white rural rubes who "cling" to their God. "We are the ones we've been waiting for," which of course means "I am The One you have been waiting for." To supporters at a rally he even said a shaft of light would come down from above and inspire them to vote for Obama.

McCain's ad "The One" captures that elite arrogance well.

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were terrorists who bombed federal buildings in the late '60s and early '70s and as recently as 2001 said they wished they had done more. Ayers even said the thought of America made him want to puke. In 2001 Ayers was featured on the cover of a Chicago magazine standing on the American flag.

The terrorist couple (now married) hosted a coming-out party for Obama as he geared up to run for the Ilinois senate in 1995. Obama and Ayers served together on the board of a charity which made grants to questionable groups in the Chicago area. Obama and Ayers appeared together as the star presenters on a Chicago panel organized by Michelle Obama.

Recently there was a gathering of one-time terrorists where Ayers and Dohrn were caught on tape making it clear they were not sorry at all for the bombings they had done, but thought bombing federal buildings (such as the Capitol and the Pentagon) were good deeds.

This association of Obama with terrorists has been ignored or downplayed by the media in their quest to make Obama president. So an independent group not connected with the McCain campaign put this TV ad together to let people know about some of Obama's friends so they can assess his judgment and his indulgence towards those who hate America. It isn't just "God Damn America" Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger and Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan.

Obama has gone ballistic about this ad and has had his campaign demand that the U.S. Attorney General sue the people funding the ad so it will be taken off the air. The campaign hasn't identified what is false in it. Free speech seems to be for Obama only.

Obama has earned his way into our Hall of Shame.

Before a gathering of San Francisco sophisticates he demeaned rural rubes who "cling" to their God and their guns.

He falsely accused John McCain of racism in his campaign rallies more than once till he was called on it. He tried to play the race card in his favor, but it backfired.

He canceled a scheduled visit to American military personnel in a hospital in Germany because he couldn't bring his campaign aide along, there couldn't be any media accompanying him or he'd rather go to the gym or all of the above.

Not only is he an extremist on partilal-birth-abortion, he even lied about his key role in blocking a bill that would have saved the lives of babies born alive after failed abortions.

Why does John McCain describe radical Islam as the "transcendent challenge" of our times?

Unless there is a revolution of the natives, European civilization in Europe will disappear before the end of this century. Already 20 to 50 million Muslims are in Europe, most of whom have refused to assimilate. They cluster in their own neighborhoods living as they would in Pakistan or Sudan, maintaining their alien Islamic culture and intimidating the natives to change their practices and ways. Continuing immigration and high birth rates -- while the natives are failing to even reproduce their numbers -- are leading to increasing Muslim dominance. Amsterdam and Rotterdam, for example, are close to being majority Muslim cities now.

What will a Muslim-dominated Europe be like?

Under Islamic law, if one refuses to become Muslim, one is subject to death unless he or she agrees to a humiliating, underclass status (dhimmitude) and pays special (historically onerous) taxes not levied on Muslims. During the so-called Golden Age of Islam Islamic centers such as Baghdad and Damascus flourished with the riches of those taxes and the hired talents of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and other non-Muslims. As the generations went on, non-Muslims tired of their underclass status and converted to Islam and became as warlike and and uninterested in real work as their fellow Muslims. So Muslim society collapsed and has been revived only because of the discovery and development in Muslim lands -- by westerners -- of oil and gas vital to the West.

Europe is succumbing to a demographic and ideological takeover, the kind of jihad that is already being waged against the United States.

Muslims are smart enough to realize they have the best chance now in 1400 years to take over the world: They have the oil, they have the money, they have the true believers (growing greater in numbers every day as Saudi madrassas recruit the young to what Mohammad commanded was every Muslim’s duty – jihad until Islam rules the world). What Iran’s leaders say about killing Americans (Great Satan) and Israeli (Little Satan) is no aberration, no departure from Koranic teaching at all. They and the House of Saud may be contending for leadership of the Islamic masses or ummah, but they are united in their goal of achieving power over the world.

With their supreme sense of superiority, an imperial ideology, more than a billion adherents (whom they are willing to sacrifice in the millions) and, soon, nuclear weapons facing off against an anxious-to-please, politically correct, pacifist, let-us-reason-together West, who will have to lead the fight against them if not the United States?

Unflortunately, for America's and the world's sake, Obama doesn't see the challenge at all. As he said in Berlin, all walls between Muslims and the rest of the world should come down and peace will prevail. History tells a different story.

This article from May has even more relevance today.

May 24, 2008, 0:00 a.m.

Wright Connection
A haunting presence for Obama.

By Michael Barone

As Barack Obama makes his slow but steady way toward the Democratic nomination, the assumption in the admiring precincts of the press corps is that voters have dismissed as irrelevant his longtime association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But that may prove as mistaken as the assumption, back in 1988, that voters would not be impressed by Michael Dukakis’s 11-year support of a law granting weekend furloughs to convicts sentenced to life without parole, an issue brought up in the primaries by Al Gore but largely ignored in press coverage at the time.

Evidence for this comes in the exit polls from the West Virginia and Kentucky primaries on May 13 and 20. In both, about half the voters — and these are voters in the Democratic primary — said that they believe Obama shares Wright’s views either somewhat or a lot. And slightly under 50 percent of these voters said that Obama is honest and trustworthy.

To be sure, these were primaries in which Obama was beaten, and beaten badly, by Hillary Clinton — 67 percent to 26 percent in West Virginia, 66 percent to 30 percent in Kentucky. So they would be inclined, one might believe, to think ill of Obama. Yet it is not universally the case that voters who choose one candidate in a hotly contested election doubt whether the other candidate is honest. You can oppose someone who you believe to be trustworthy. Only 38 percent of Americans voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George McGovern in 1972. But probably a higher percentage believed that they were basically honest.

Which leads me to ask why these voters declined to say Obama is honest. When have they seen him lie or being caught in a lie? The response to the question on Wright may provide the answer. They know that he attended Wright’s church for 20 years. They know that he said, both on March 18 when he refused to renounce Wright and on April 29 when he did renounce him, that he was not aware of his pastor and spiritual mentor’s incendiary comments. Yet half of these voters also think that, despite those statements, Obama agrees with what Wright has been saying.

It’s a little dangerous in interpreting polls to assume that voters’ thinking proceeds along logical lines. People who aren’t professionally involved in politics, whose knowledge comes from bits and snippets of news, can hold beliefs that are contradictory or in tension with each other. They don’t feel obliged to resolve contradictions. But even granting that, it seems to me that about half of West Virginia and Kentucky Democratic primary voters were saying that Obama lied about not knowing what Wright has been preaching and that he agrees with him a lot more than he has let on.

Now West Virginia and Kentucky are not typical primary states. They, together with Arkansas, where Hillary Clinton was First Lady for 12 years, were Obama’s weakest states in this year’s primaries. And some percentage of registered Democrats in these states have been voting Republican in recent presidential elections. Nevertheless, the negative verdict these voters render on Obama’s honesty and his relationship with Wright is likely to be typical of some significant quantum of potential Democratic voters this year. And not just in states like West Virginia and Kentucky, which he will certainly lose, but in marginal states which he must carry in order to be elected.

I find confirmation from this in a recent focus group conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center by pollster Peter Hart (for whom I worked for seven years) of non-primary voters in Charlottesville, Va. As Hart and Alex Horowitz note in their analysis of reactions to Obama, “When asked to recount any two memories of the total presidential campaign so far, seven of the 12 participants cite Rev. Wright by name. So far, clips of Rev. Wright clearly are the one ‘key defining moment’ of this campaign.”

Most reporters are liberals, whose circles of friends and acquaintances have included people with views not dissimilar to those of Wright or William Ayers, the unrepentant Weather Underground bomber with whom Obama served on a nonprofit board and at whose house his state Senate candidacy was launched. Such reporters don’t find these views utterly repugnant or particularly noteworthy. But most American voters do. And they wonder whether a candidate who associates with such people agrees with them — or disbelieve him when he says he doesn’t.

Though most in the press won’t admit it, that’s a problem — for the Obama candidacy and for the whole Democratic party once it nominates him.

Democrat Speaker of the House Pelosi seems to be reacting to the pressure by McCain and Congressional Democrats to drill now with the same slippery ploy that Obama used.

She is now open to consideration of offshore drilling as part of a larger energy package.

How cute. The 2007 energy bill took two years to put together and it was inadequate. Like Obama, she is trying to put off an up and down vote on drilling to provide relief to average Americans at the gas pump till after the election, indeed, until next year.

A simple up or down vote can eliminate the moratoriums on offshore, Rocky Mountains and ANWR drilling. Already, just the possibility of such a vote is contributing to oil prices coming down.

A great majority of Americans now say they want drilling now. McCain and the Congressional Republicans should keep the pressure up. Get an up and down vote on drilling now. If that doesn't work, don't let Pelosi-Obama-Reid try to sneak a renewal of the moratoriums through in an omnibus budget bill; any such bill should be voted down. Pelosi-Obama-Reid will be responsible for shutting down the government to avoid a vote Americans want.

There's been a lot said about Obama's “Catholic problem.” In polls and in the primaries he has done poorly with the Catholic vote, but also with evangelicals and other people of faith. His belittling of rural folks who cling to their God and their guns certainly didn't help.

But many feel that it's Obama extremism on abortion that really turns the religious and many who aren't so religious off. He isn't "just" pro-choice. There is no one in the U.S. Senate (perhaps in American public life) who is more pro-abortion than Obama. He has opposed all efforts to end partial birth abortions. He fiercely criticized the Supreme Court decision upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortions passed by Congress and signed by the President. 70% of all Americans oppose partial-birth abortions, so as Linda Chavez notes, “Obama’s views put him in a distinct minority.” He has promised that, if elected President, his first act will be to seek to pass a law that will end all restrictions on abortion, including partial-birth-abortions.

If anything, Obama's problem with those who view partial-birth abortion with horror just got worse. Obama, while a state senator in Illinois, singlehandedly blocked a bill which provided that, should a baby be born alive as the result of a failed abortion, all possible steps must be taken to keep the baby alive. This week it was disclosed he has been lying about what he did.

When he was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004 Obama was criticized by his opponent for supporting infanticide. Obama at that time said he had opposed the bill to preserve the lives of babies who survive abortions because it lacked language that was in the federal bill stating the bill did not affect the status of a fetus. Now Illinois state records show that what Obama said was not true.

Our best friend in the Caucuses the nation of Georgia is being attacked by Russia and hundreds of civilians have already been killed by Russian tanks and planes. Russians appear to be making bombing runs against a vital oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean that bypasses Russia by going through Georgia.

The Russian aggression has been condemned by the United States government, NATO, the European Union and very forcefully by John McCain. When the attacks broke out, the Obama position was that both sides were to blame and called upon the United Nations to mediate. With Russia on the Security Council, that's close to being a sick joke.

John Hinderaker, one of the lawyer bloggers of the excellent blog Power Line, expressed his disgust:

It is often said that Obama is not ready to be President, but I don't think this is exactly right. It seems pretty obvious that Obama, given his temperament, his self-regard, his blithe ignorance of history and of the material conditions of life on this planet, will never be ready to be President. He is not unready: he is unsuited for, and inadequate to, the office.

The following letter from a Cuban who escaped Communist Cuba after Castro appeared in Letters to the Editor in the Richmond Times Dispatch, Richmond, VA on July 7, 2008. As it circulated by email ,it was immediately attacked by the Obama netroots, claiming it was a fake right wing smear.

Well, no. Click the title of the Letter to the Editor to go to the newspaper. And do read the letter.

Beware Charismatic Men Who Preach 'Change'
Editor, Times-Dispatch:

Each year I get to celebrate Independence Day twice. On June 30 I celebrate my independence day and on July 4 I celebrateAmerica's. This year is special, because it marks the 40th anniversary of my independence.

On June 30, 1968, I escaped Communist Cuba and a few months later I was in the United Sates to stay. That I happened to arrive in Richmond on Thanksgiving Day is just part of the story, but I digress.

I've thought a lot about th e anniversary this year. The election-year rhetoric has made me think a lot about Cuba and what transpired there. In the late 1950s, most Cubans thought Cuba needed a change, and they were right. So when a young leader came along, every Cuban was at least receptive.

When the young leader spoke eloquently and passionately and denounced the old system, the press fell in love with him. They never questioned who his friends were or what he really believed in. When he said he would help the farmers and the poor and bring free medical care and education to all, everyone followed. When he said he would bring justice and equality to all, everyone said "Praise the Lord." And when the young leader said, "I will be for change and I'll bring you change," everyone yelled, "Viva Fidel!"

But nobody asked about the change, so by the time the executioner's guns went silent the people's guns had been taken away. By the time everyone was equal, they were equally poor, hungry, and oppressed. By the time everyone received their free education it was worth nothing. By the time the press noticed, it was too late, because they were now working for him. By the time the change was finally implemented Cuba had been knocked down a couple of notches to Third-World status. By the time the change was over more than a million people had taken to boats, rafts, and inner tubes. You can call those who made it ashore anywhere else in the world the most fortunate Cubans. And now I'm back to the beginning of my story.

Luckily, we Americans would never fall for a young leader who promised change without asking, what change? How will you carry it out? What will it cost America? How will you pay for all this "change" and where will the money come from?

Would we?

Manuel Alvarez Jr.
Sandy Hook

While Pelosi-Obama-Reid continue to keep their heads buried in desert sand, Brazil is showing there is lots of oil in the continental shelf.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently marveled at the stupidity of Democrats in not doing what every sensible American wants done: Drill our way out of high prices and dependence on the Middle East and Venezauela.

American oil reserves have been in decline because Democrats in Congress have banned new exploration and development for decades.

Brazil’s oil reserves are soaring because Brazil is developing its own resources. Even its European partners are benefitting.

As new discoveries are made, the estimate of new reserves for Brazil are going up. Speculation now centers around 50 billion barrels of new oil in Brazil’s offshore region. That’s five times Brazil’s reserves as of last year (11 billion) and 2½ times all of the reserves of the U.S (21 billion).

Yet the estimates for banned areas offshore the U.S., in ANWR and in Rocky Mountain shale exceed one trillion barrels of oil or oil equivalents. The results of this failure to drill are high prices for gas, home heating oil and jet fuel and crude oil itself and unhealthy dependence on hostile and unstable oil producers.

The number one exporter of oil to the U.S. is Canada. Canada, like Brazil, has been aggressively exploring and developing its own natural resources. Canada has been building its reserves even as production in mature oil fields is flattening or declining. That’s fortunate for the U.S., since Canadian oil exports to the U.S. have been growing to help support economic growth.

Here’s the most recent news out of Brazil:

Galp Advances After Making New Oil Find in Brazil
By Joao Lima
Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Galp Energia SGPS SA, Portugal's biggest oil company, rose in Lisbon trading after finding light crude oil in a deepwater well in Brazil's Santos Basin, the location of the biggest discovery in the Americas since 1976. …
Tupi is the largest oil discovery in the Americas since Mexico's Cantarell field was found in 1976, and compares with the 12 billion barrels held at Kazakhstan's Kashagan field, the largest oil find in the last three decades.
Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, is the operator and owns 65 percent of the BM-S-11 block where both the Iara and Tupi wells were drilled. BG owns 25 percent and Galp owns 10 percent.
Estimated Reserves
``Given the discovery, recoverable reserves on block BM-S- 11 could increase to 10 billion barrels from currently 5 billion to 8 billion barrels,'' Kapadia said.
Iara is in Brazil's ``pre-salt'' offshore region, a new oil province that may contain about 50 billion barrels of oil according to Peter Wells, a director at U.K. research company Neftex Petroleum Consultants Ltd. The Iara well, which has yet to be declared commercially viable, is still being drilled in the hope of finding more oil at greater depths.
Some oil industry analysts, including David Thomas from Citigroup Global Markets Inc., have said that Tupi, Tupi Sul and Iara may be linked as part of a larger offshore deposit.
Petrobras in January said that a gas and oil discovery known as Jupiter, in the Santos Basin's BM-S-24 block, could be as big as Tupi. Petrobras owns 80 percent of Jupiter and operates the well. Galp has 20 percent of Jupiter. …

Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who has herself admittedly become enthralled by the messianic orations of Obama, says that feelngs are shifting and concerns are rising:

A seven-year old girl asks Obama why he's running for president of the United States. Obama's inspiriational reply?

Now here's a frightening thought from Obama: [My] wife is "the most quintessentially American woman I know."

He may be telling the truth.

Michelle Obama, no doubt aided by affirmative action and financial aid, made her way through Princeton and Harvard Law School, landed at a big Chicago law firm and then quickly left for easier work at a major Chicago hospital which tripled her salary to over $300,000 when her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Her Princeton thesis pretty much pledged herself for life to black power against white oppression, which viewpoint certainly explalns her assertion in February that "for the first time in her life" she was proud of America.

In addition to Barack Obama's fixation on himself, he has another, perhaps even more disturbing fixation -- how bad America is.

His "Blame America" theme was on world exhibition when he spoke before tens of thousands of Berliners and orated about the "imperfect" nation he was seeking to lead.

In a thoughtful article "Barack's "Tragic" Emphasis", Ben Johnson asks,

Can Barack Obama go the rest of the campaign without demeaning the country he seeks to lead?

Johnson is bothered by Obama's "seemingly omnipresent emphasis on the ills and maladies of the nation whose presidency he seeks." For example, just this week, at a gathering of minority journalists, Barack Obama said, “I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged.”

Obama's choice of mentors and friends is troubling -- America haters such as Reverend Jeremiah Wright (for 20 years "God Damn America" was his theme) and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, who as recently as 2001regretted he hadn't bombed more.

His wife seems to reflect his -- and Jeremiah Wright's --negative attitude towards America. She repeatedly gave speeches about America being "just downright mean" and disclosed -- only after her husband had won a few primaries -- she was "for the first time in my adult life" proud to be American. She complained how America was always raising the bar: "it's always just quite out of reach."

Other signs, too, indicate something less than enthusiam for his country. Obama wouldn't wear a flag lapel pin, wouldn't cover his heart with his hand during the playing of the national anthem and he belittled small town America's religiousness.

Why isn't the media examining "just how obsessed is Obama with the ills and evils of his country’s past?" He may want to think of himself as a citizen of the world, as he said in Berlin, but he's running to be president of the United States.

Could this scene have anything to do with it?

When Obama walked on stage at the McCormick Center, many journalists in the audience leapt to their feet and applauded enthusiastically after being told not to do so. During a two-minute break halfway through the event, which was broadcast live on CNN, journalists ran to the stage to snap photos of Obama.

As Tammy Bruce commented, “Yeah, no bias there.”

The media refuse to see, but all Americans with a heart for their country’s well-being in a time of war should discern the significance of this bias – of the media for Obama, and of Obama against his country.

British-born Tony Blankley was until recently editorial page editor of the Washington Times, but now is a syndicated columnist. His book on the threat of radical Islam to the West was well-received. In his lifetime, he has seen a great deal, but he is "stunned" by Obama.

[T]he more I watch this man the more stunned I am at His overconfidence and towering pride. I have known a number of great and powerful men (and read biographies of many more), and they surely don't lack confidence or ego. But who among the great would have answered the question posed to the junior senator from Illinois a few weeks ago as He did? Asked whether He had any doubts, He said "never." .....

Here is a man who talked almost contemptuously of Gen. Petraeus. Explaining His differences with the general, He said that His "job is to think about the national security interest as a whole; (the generals') job is just to get their job done (in Iraq)." Of course, right at the moment, the junior senator from Illinois doesn't yet have "His" job, while Gen. Petraeus, as confirmed Centcom commander, has direct responsibility for both Afghanistan and Iraq and everything in between and around them. But in the mind of Sen. I Am, He already is, while He thinks the man who is perhaps our greatest general in two generations is just another flunky carrying out routine orders. It is repulsive to see such a mentality in a man who would be president.

All of us have our shortcomings, of course. But there is none so dangerous both to a man and to those for whom he has responsibility than the sin of pride. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great recognized that pride breeds all the other sins and is therefore the most serious offense. St. Thomas Aquinas reaffirmed that pride is rebellion against the very authority of God.....

For a man, his personality is his destiny. If he becomes president, his flaws become the nation's dangers. The voters must judge carefully both the personalities and the ideas of those who would be president.

Read it all.

One would think that after even supporters started speaking about Obama's "presumptuousness" and "arrogance," some humility might be forced on the candidate by his campaign staff. The same might be said about his patriotism and his enthusiam about America. Criticism about not wearing a flag lapel pin eventually had him putting one on -- sometimes.

But now he has re-outfitted his campaign plane for the general election. The American flag on the tail is gone; in its place is Obama's symbol of himself.

As for humility, Obama had his own special chair labeled this way:

Democrats are working hard to win this November's presidential election, as the old adage says, "by hook or crook." History provides us with key evidence about how the "crook" side of things work in voter registration, so is there any doubt that registration fraud is happening now and will be happening in the run-up to election day?

Democrat candidate Obama is intimately aware of how the system works. During his years as a community organizer and lawyer in Chicago, Obama worked closely with and later represented as a lawyer ACORN, a group dedicated to registering Democratic voters, using whatever it takes, including fraud or, indeed, especially fraud.

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal did some investigating and came up with an extraordinary number of fraud cases involving Acorn around the country, including this one from the state of Washington:

But the most interesting news came out of Seattle, where on Thursday local prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers. The Acorn defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of State Sam Reed says is the "worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history" of the state.

The list of "voters" registered in Washington state included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names were local homeless shelters. Given that the state doesn't require the showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people could have illegally voted using those names.

Local officials refused to accept the registrations because they had been delivered after last year's Oct. 7 registration deadline. Initially, Acorn officials demanded the registrations be accepted and threatened to sue King County (Seattle) officials if they were tossed out. But just after four Acorn registration workers were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., on similar charges of fraud, the group reversed its position and said the registrations should be rejected. But by then, local election workers had had a reason to carefully scrutinize the forms and uncovered the fraud. Of the 1,805 names submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34 are still being investigated. The rest--over 97%--were fake. (emphasis added)

True to form, Barack Obama, finally reading the polls and feeling the heat created by John McCain and congressional Republicans, has now switched from adamant opposition to seeming support for offshore drilling. But wait: Offshore drilling will only be included in a comprehensive energy package if that's what it takes to put a bill together. Too clever by half.

His statement is absurd on its face. Obama knows very well the more items that go into "an energy bill" the longer it will take to achieve a compromise, assuming one can be reached. The wholly inadequate energy bill of 2007 took years to put together. So while he grandly says he's for offshore drilling, he's actually playing for delay so that the clock will run out in this legislative year with no new drilling authorized.

Do you think the media will tell the truth about BO's phony conversion to support for offshore drilling? No way.

Informal soundings indicate there is a majority in both houses of Congress for ending the moratorium on offshore drilling. Therefore, a straightforward bill to authorize offshore drilling would pass. But the Democratic leadership has blocked every Republican effort to bring a drilling vote to the floor and shut down Congress for the August vacation without doing a thing to help bring gas prices down and lessen dependence on overseas oil. You can bet that Pelosi-Obama-Reid are working together to do what their environmental extremists want them to do.

There is a second chance for Americans suffering from high prices of oil, gasoline and home heating oil to win this year. The moratorium actually expires by its own terms on September 30th; it has to be renewed for one or more years by a new vote. That vote will be buried in a huge appropriations bill to run the government, so the Democratic leadership is betting Republicans (and sensible Democrats) won't dare vote "no" and the president won't dare to veto the bill, because the government might shut down, with enormous adverse consequences and finger pointing. Who would be to blame for that? It's really the Democrats trying to pull a fast one and avoid a yes/no vote on drilling. But you know how the media will play it.

Contact your Democratic representatives in Congress and demand they vote now for drilling offshore, in ANWR and in the Rocky Mountains shale. Virtually all Republicans are onboard already.

Another thing: Jeff Beatty supports drilling offshore, in ANWR and in Rocky Mountains shale. John Kerry is lined up with the Democratic "NO" to the price concerns of Americans. This November the right vote is for Beatty.

Obama believes in Obama. Do you?

There's still at least a few dozen people out there who haven't yet viewed the McCain ad reminding folks that celebrity doesn't equal qualification for leadership.

Massachusetts' own Dean Barnett of The Weekly Standard explains why the ad is so effective (if it's slow to load it's because so many people are still watching it):

Someone tell me precisely why Barack Obama “has become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.” Was it because of His spectacular achievements as a community organizer? Or His stellar work as a part-time lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School? Or maybe it all boils down to those good grades He got in law school.

The point is, like Britney and Paris, Barack Obama hasn’t earned the status that He (like they) so enjoys. And then there’s the further and still more relevant issue that He’s unworthy of that status. Obama’s ranking as a Savior would be easier to handle if it turned out He had all the right stuff to handle the presidency. But repeatedly, Obama has shown Himself to be ill-informed, historically illiterate and more impressed with His own superficial analyses than actual facts.

The ad is right on the mark. Some people are famous for being famous. To some extent we have become worshippers of celebrities and there is no question that the media has made Barack Obama a major celebrity. Even John McCain thinks that Barack right now is the world's biggest celebrity. "So what?" you ask. Exactly.

Barack Obama is at it again, playing the race card, which we called him on awhile back.

Jake Tapper of ABC News reports on Obama's remarks during a stop in Rolla, Missouri on July 30th:

"And so the only way they figure they’re going to win this election is if they make you scared of me. So what they’re saying is, ‘Well, we know we’re not very good but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he’s... doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency, you know, he’s got a, he’s got a funny name."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does it not seem as if Obama just said McCain and his campaign -- presumably the "they" in this construct -- are saying that Obama shouldn't be elected because he's a risk because he's black and has a foreign-sounding name?

Tapper continued:

Then in Union, Mo., this evening [still July 30th] in Union, Missouri, Obama seemed to specifically accuse McCain and the GOP of peddling racism and xenophobia.

Tapper quoted Obama:

"But, since they don’t have any new ideas the only strategy they’ve got in this election is to try to scare you about me. They’re going to try to say that I’m a risky guy, they’re going to try to say, 'Well, you know, he’s got a funny name and he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills and, and they’re going to send out nasty emails.

Tapper did not hide his disgust:

There's a lot of racist xenophobic crap out there. But not only has McCain not peddled any of it, he's condemned it.

It's heartening that at least one national reporter picked up on what Barack Obama is doing. But this racism ploy is not new. Obama used it against Mrs. Clinton very effectively and then switched his target to McCain as soon as Clinton was out. On July 7th we pointed this out:

What Obama says about the opposition is now about John McCain. So there he was once again, at a Democratic fundraiser in Jacksonville on June 20th, suggesting -- with no history to justify such a remark -- that his opponent will inject the issue of race into the campaign: "And did I mention that he's black?"

Such a slander against McCain is unpardonable, but it's, sadly, every day fare for Obama. Obama knows many Americans would welcome a qualified black president and fanning the flames of racism works to his advantage. It did against the Clintons.

Will others in the media report on the slimy racism game Barack is playing?

Barack Obama's campaign has put out at least three different stories on why Obama stiffed visiting the wounded at the hospital in Germany. Obama himself said he decided not to go because he couldn't bring his campaign aide(s) along. That condition had been made clear by the military for weeks. So just leave the campaign aide behind and go. But, no, it was off to the gym, leaving the soldiers wondering what happened, since no explanation was given at the time why the visit was canceled.

Michael Ramirez Investor's Business Daily

There are many sharp differences between the positions of John McCain and Obama. McCain wants to give kids at the bottom of the economic ladder a chance to get a better educuation. Parents should have a choice. John McCain puts it very well:

"When a public system fails, repeatedly, to meet these minimal objectives, parents ask only for a choice in the education of their children." Some parents may opt for a better public school or a charter school; others for a private school. The point, said the Senator, is that "no entrenched bureaucracy or union should deny parents that choice and children that opportunity."

Obama backs the teachers union in opposing that opportunity, brushing it aside by calling it nothing but "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice." It is no coincidence the teachers unions support Obama for president.

The Wall Street Journal calls the nation's failure to provide a decent education to children in the inner cities "The Greatest Scandal." It is a tragedy not only for the children and their parents, but for the communities and the nation. HIgh drop-out rates lead to more crime, lower lifetime incomes, more welfare dependency and the loss of a productive citizenry.

The success of alternatives which parents can and do choose is overwhelming. But the Democratic Party is doing all it can to deny families school choice -- in Congress and at the local school boards in inner-city neighborhoods, wherever the unions are strong. Democrat Obama exercises his choice and sends his own children to private school in Chicago instead of the public schools in his district.

Just another reason why the nation will be far better off with John McCain as president and Jeff Beatty as a senator from Massachusetts.

Read the WSJ piece here.

The Middle East’s leading political and military analyst Caroline Glick is asked her reaction to Obama’s visit to Israel. Some excerpts from the interview:

There is trepidation in Israel about the statements he has made about Iran and the division of Jerusalem and his associations with anti-Semites like Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

His repeated assertions of his commitment to Israel's security were repeatedly contradicted by the policies he wishes to adopt if elected.

Continue reading "OBAMA IN ISRAEL: NO SALE"

Posted by Republican on Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 9:42 AM
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John Bolton was a tough U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and fought ably to expose corruption at the very top of the U.N. (Saddam Hussein's food-for-oil ripoff being number one) and to defend America's interests against the nations that would tie us down. His brilliant service ended because the Democrats in Congress refused to extend it.

Few writing today have the perspective John Bolton has of the place of America on the world stage and how the enemies of freedom are constantly plotting against us. Therefore, it is not surprising that he reacted to Obama's Berlin speech to his "fellow citizens of the world" with shock, dismay and sad disbelief. Obama exhibited no sense of history, no sense of the real world. Platitudes about "one world" and "the world stood as one" are just false, particularly in the Cold War context Obama was evoking in his speech.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Bolton calls the speech "radical" and "naive." Obama seems not to comprehend the historic role the U.S. has played and still plays in defending freedom. It's a hard business and suggestng that if we all join hands and take down all the walls that divide us the world will be at peace is juvenile nonsense. Something the Beatles might sing.

Obama used the Berlin Wall metaphor to describe his foreign policy priorities as president: "The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. 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."

This is a confused, nearly incoherent compilation, to say the least, amalgamating tensions in the Atlantic Alliance with ancient historical conflicts. One hopes even Obama, inexperienced as he is, doesn't see all these "walls" as essentially the same in size and scope. But beyond the incoherence, there is a deeper problem, namely that "walls" exist not simply because of a lack of understanding about who is on the other side but because there are true differences in values and interests that lead to human conflict. The Berlin Wall itself was not built because of a failure of communication but because of the implacable hostility of communism toward freedom. The wall was a reflection of that reality, not an unfortunate mistake.

Tearing down the Berlin Wall was possible because one side -- our side -- defeated the other. Differences in levels of economic development, or the treatment of racial, immigration or religious questions, are not susceptible to the same analysis or solution. Even more basically, challenges to our very civilization, as the Cold War surely was, are not overcome by naively "tearing down walls" with our adversaries.

Read it all.

After word:
Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe also notes that, out of blindness, historical illiteracy or just a refusal to acknowledge America's vital role, Obama praised the world's coming together (which it did not) rather than Truman's leadership and fortitude and America's military might for savng Berlin and Europe.

"People of the world," Obama declaimed, "look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." But the world didn't stand as one during the Cold War; it was riven by an Iron Curtain. For more than four decades, America and the West confronted an implacable enemy on the other side of that divide. What finally defeated that enemy and ended the Cold War was not harmony and goodwill, but American strength and resolve.

Obama's speech was a paean to international cooperation. "Now is the time to join together," he said. "It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads." No - it was a Democratic president named Truman, who had the audacity to order an airlift when others counseled retreat, and the grit to see it through when others were ready to withdraw.

Sixty years later, it is a very different kind of Democrat who is running for president. Obama may have wowed 'em in Berlin, but he's no Harry Truman.

It's even worse if you read the full story: 100 to 1.

The London Times' American correspondent Gerard Baker postively glows as he expounds on the gospel of Obama as he "ventured forth to bring light to the world."

The deservedly popular blog Power Line written by three lawyers (friends since their days at Dartmouth) today carried excerpts from a speech Senator McCain gave in Denver before a military audience.

Power Line called it "his strongest attack yet against Barack Obama. The attack was devastating because it was true." In the last analysis we are left with this:

Senator Obama said this week that even knowing what he knows today that he still would have opposed the surge. In retrospect, given the opportunity to choose between failure and success, he chooses failure. I cannot conceive of a Commander in Chief making that choice.

The consequences if Obama's view had carried the day?

If Senator Obama had prevailed, American forces would have had to retreat under fire. The Iraqi Army would have collapsed. Civilian casualties would have increased dramatically. Al Qaeda would have killed the Sunni sheikhs who had begun to cooperate with us, and the "Sunni Awakening" would have been strangled at birth. Al Qaeda fighters would have safe havens, from where they could train Iraqis and foreigners, and turn Iraq into a base for launching attacks on Americans elsewhere. Civil war, genocide and wider conflict would have been likely.

Above all, America would have been humiliated and weakened. Our military, strained by years of sacrifice, would have suffered a demoralizing defeat. Our enemies around the globe would have been emboldened. ...

Senator Obama told the American people what he thought you wanted to hear. I told you the truth.

Melanie Phillips is a veteran columnist in Britain. Her major recent work is Londonistan, a horrifying account of how the blind officialdom of Britain allowed wishful thinking to convince them that millions of Muslim immigrants could insist on contining to live and follow their Islamic ways and become loyal sons and daughters of Britain. That illusion is giving way to reality.

Today, as Obamamania sweeps through Europe and Britain she is also reminded of the wishful thinking, the infatuation of Brits with Princess Diana, who invested in her all their fantasies, unaware of her “unstable and manipulative nature.” It was all emotion, no reason.

So it is with Obama. Americans’ natural optimism makes them want to believe that, as a black man with a Muslim background (another thing he has cleverly obfuscated), he can heal all wounds, including the U.S.’s history of racism, and bring peace to the world just by being who he is.

They see in his attractiveness a flattering reflection of themselves. He doesn’t embarrass them; he makes them feel proud. . . ..

]W]here the Democrat candidate is concerned, the normal faculties of judgment appear to have been suspended.

Important questions about Obama’s judgment, consistency and honesty are not being asked, let alone answered.

He has got away with the fact that for 20 years he belonged to a church which preaches black power racism against white people.

He disavowed his long-time mentor, pastor Jeremiah Wright, only when his extreme views could no longer be ignored — despite the fact that Wright is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the black power Nation of Islam.

How will it end for America?

Obama, trying to explain his way out of statement that he would be willing to sit down with Iran, said he was now supporting new sanctions against Iran. He then said this (HT: Power Line):

Now, in terms of knowing my commitments, you don't have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds. Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon.

But Obama is not a member of the Senate Banking Committee. Obama just made that up so he could count the committee's action as one of "my deeds."

The so intelligent Obama doesn't know what Senate committees he's on? This statement indicates how effortlessly he can lie about what he said (Before a Jewish group he said Jerusalem must remain undivided -- until the Palestinians objected.) and even what Senate commmittees he serves on. He clearly expects his adoring press not to pick him up on his lie. So far, none have.

One astonished observer called Obama's casual falsehood "scary."

Can you believe this? (HT: Hugh Hewitt):

In an interview yesterday with Senator Obama, ABC’s Terry Moran listed just a few of the by now seemingly endless data points demonstrating that the so-called surge, which Obama opposed at the time it was announced, is a success. Moran then asked this (excellent) question: Knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?”

Obama’s answer was, “No.”

This must surely rank as among the most misinformed, ideological, and reckless statements by a presidential candidate in modern times. The McCain campaign should do everything they can to make Obama pay a high price for it. That one word answer, “No,” should be advertised in bright neon lights. It should become Exhibit A that Obama not only doesn’t have the “judgment to lead;” he has now supplied us with evidence that few people possess judgment as flawed as his.

Knowing what Obama now knows he would have still opposed the surge, because at that time he needed a campaign issue against the Bush Administration and victory or defeat in Iraq by the United States armed forces was of no concern to him.

Incredible.

The Obama cheerleadering Washington Post is getting a bit anxious about his detachment from reality. On his foreign summer vacation, Obama orated on where the nation's priorities should be. The editors were shocked and dismayed and said this:

Mr. Obama's account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is "the central front" for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama's antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

The recent sudden very public scramble by Obama towards the center from the far left shows he is trying the same shell game of hiding his extreme liberalism that Dukakis did in 1988. Dukakis and Obama knew that if their real liberalism and that of their friends and supporters was revealed, they wouldn't stand a chance to get to the White House.

Here's what Dukakis said in 1988:

"This election isn't about ideology, it's about competence."
-- Michael Dukakis, 1988

Here's Obama in 2008:

"The choice in this election is not between left or right, it's not between liberal or conservative, it's between the past and the future."
-- Barack Obama, 2008

But, despite Obama's efforts to mask his true beliefs, indeed that is the choice, between liberals who are strangling our economy and those who support sensible economic growth policies that create jobs and a better life. Right now it is the liberal policy on energy that has produced today's crisis.

Obama is opposed to new drilling and nuclear power, both of which John McCain supports. Obama's views are shared by the liberals of his party and most congressional Democrats and all of their leaders. Obama's liberals have blocked new refineries, nuclear power plant development, drilling for oil in Alaska (even outside ANWR), drilling for natural gas and mining for oil in the shale deposits of the Rocky Mountains.

Obama's all-consuming ego is becoming more and more obvious. When he finally disowned his 20-year spiritual mentor, white-America hating Jeremiah Wright, he so not because of Wright's accusation about the government spreading AIDS among blacks or for "God Damn America," but because Wright, by saying Obama was just another politician, had "disrespected" him. What struck us then about Obama, as we observed in a post on June 9th, "It's all about me."

Obama's latest pretention, seeking the backdrop of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, for a political speech was too much for the Germans and for Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who today writes about "The Audacity of Vanity."

Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials. What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn.

President Ronald Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final "tear down this wall" liquidation.

When President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush the elder -- who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap -- called "a Europe whole and free"?

Indeed, Obama's campaign is all Obama all the time, not the future safety and prosperity of the United States.

Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself. There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

All of which leads inexorably to another question about Obama.

For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?

We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when "our planet began to heal." As I recall -- I'm no expert on this -- Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas.

To read this devastatingly accurate critique in full, click here.

The Washington Post expressed dismay about Obama's tone-deaf speech about Iraq:

The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war's outcome -- that Iraq "distracts us from every threat we face" and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That's an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world's largest oil reserves. Whether or not the war was a mistake, Iraq's future is a vital U.S. security interest.

John Hinderaker, a highly respected, nationally known litigator from Minneapolis, is one of the three superb lawyers, all graduates of Dartmouth College, writing at one of the internet's premier blogs Power Line. Hinderaker read and then tore to shreds the op-ed on Iraq his fellow Harvard Law School graduate Barack Obama published in the New York Times today (July 14, 2008). Bottom line conclusion:

It is possible that at some point in American history there may have been a major politician as dishonest as Barack Obama, but I can't offhand think of such a miscreant.

As you read, you can sense the controlled anger in HInderaker as he points out that Obama seeks defeat not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan, too. Obama's op-ed twisting his past record so he can "catch up" with the success in Iraq he said could never happen exposes him, in Hinderaker's words, as a "complete fraud."

Rather than pick out a paragraph here or there, we believe it best to present Hinderaker's entire analysis, the cumulative effect of which is devastating evidence of the shallowness and poor judgment of Obama, to say nothing of his duplicity.

Commander-in-chief?

The New Yorker chuckles with glee that its Manchurian candidate will make it to the Oval Office despite who he is.

Though this is presumably satire by the left-wing magazine, many will see the cover as making it legitimate to raise questions about such things as Obama's sympathy for the Palestinian cause, why he downplays the seriousness of the War on Terror and his friendship with terrorists who blew up buildings in Washington and New York and with his Muslim cousin Raila Odinga who ran for president of Kenya reportedly promising to Muslim groups that, if elected, he would impose Sharia, Islamic law, and stamp out all Christian missionary activity.

If The New Yorker can raise such issues, why can't others?

Obama has been working diligently to shut down all questioning about his lack of experience, his unsavory associations and his extremism by equating criticism of him with racism. The New Yorker has blown that strategy with its cover. Freedom of speech wins.

For other views on what looks like a bungled effort to show support for Obama, see PowerLine and Michelle Malkin.

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For all the talk during the Democratic primary contest about how the Clintons were injecting the issue of race into the campaign, it was really Obama who was most energetically slapping down the race card.

It was little noticed in the uproar over his elitist remarks about the rural rubes who "cling" to their guns and their God that he also implied they were racists, too. At the chardonnay and brie fundraising reception for the Democratic high rollers in the hilltop mansion in San Francisco's Pacific Heights, he intoned what "they" would be saying, "And did I mention he's black?"

Now that the general campaign has for all practical purposes begun, Obama is once again throwing down the race card, this time at John McCain.

What Obama says about the opposition is now about John McCain. So there he was once again, at a Democratic fundraiser in Jacksonville on June 20th, suggesting -- with no history to justify such a remark -- that his opponent will inject the issue of race into the campaign: "And did I mention that he's black?"

Such a slander against McCain is unpardonable, but it's, sadly, every day fare for Obama. Obama knows many Americans would welcome a qualified black president and fanning the flames of racism works to his advantage. It did against the Clintons.

Michael Barone agrees with Obama that the issue of race is an Obama plus.

By raising the specter of racial attacks from John McCain (without any justification for doing so) Obama seeks to divert attention from -- and to choke off all criticism of -- his inexperience, extremism, embrace of black power and his many troubling personal associations, hoping he can brand all such criticism of him as "racism."

Michael Barone has done some historical analysis and concludes that Americans have already passed the "race" test and have nothing to prove with Obama.

Citing polls when Colin Powell was a possible candidate for president, Barone says this:

I would submit that the vast majority of American voters have already passed the test. They've shown they're willing to vote for a black candidate, provided he has acceptable views on issues and appropriate experience for the job.

Barone concludes:

On balance I think Obama's race has been a political asset. I believe that most Americans think it would be a good thing, all other things being reasonably equal, for our country to elect a black president. I know I feel that way myself. I think that impulse has inspired many voters, ever since his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, to give Obama a sympathetic look-over, to be readier perhaps to appreciate his strengths and to overlook his weaknesses than they might be with an otherwise similar non-black candidate. The refusal of a very small number of voters to support a black candidate does not, I think, offset this significant advantage. The Obama candidacy is indeed a test -- a test not of American voters, but of Barack Obama. (emphasis added)

As Michael Barone suggests, Amercians should look beyond the color of skin and the soaring rhetoric to evaluate Obama's experience, his extremism, his embrace of black power and those many troubling personal associations he chose for himself.

Is this the person to be commander-in-chief of the United States in a time of peril?

Before the glow from Independence Day fades, one should consider what Professor Thomas Sowell asks.

How did "God Bless America" become "God Damn America"?

Does Patriotism Matter?
Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, July 02, 2008

The Fourth of July is a patriotic holiday but patriotism has long been viewed with suspicion or disdain by many of the intelligentsia. As far back as 1793, prominent British writer William Godwin called patriotism "high-sounding nonsense."

Internationalism has long been a competitor with patriotism, especially among the intelligentsia. H.G. Wells advocated replacing the idea of duty to one's country with "the idea of cosmopolitan duty."

Perhaps nowhere was patriotism so downplayed or deplored than among intellectuals in the Western democracies in the two decades after the horrors of the First World War, fought under various nations' banners of patriotism.

In France, after the First World War, the teachers' unions launched a systematic purge of textbooks, in order to promote internationalism and pacifism.

Books that depicted the courage and self-sacrifice of soldiers who had defended France against the German invaders were called "bellicose" books to be banished from the schools.

Textbook publishers caved in to the power of the teachers' unions, rather than lose a large market for their books. History books were sharply revised to conform to internationalism and pacifism.

The once epic story of the French soldiers' heroic defense against the German invaders at Verdun, despite the massive casualties suffered by the French, was now transformed into a story of horrible suffering by all soldiers at Verdun-- French and German alike.

In short, soldiers once depicted as national heroes were now depicted as victims-- and just like victims in other nations' armies.

Children were bombarded with stories on the horrors of war. In some schools, children whose fathers had been killed during the war were asked to speak to the class and many of these children-- as well as some of their classmates and teachers-- broke down in tears.

In Britain, Winston Churchill warned that a country "cannot avoid war by dilating upon its horrors." In France, Marshal Philippe Petain, the victor at Verdun, warned in 1934 that teachers were trying to "raise our sons in ignorance of or in contempt of the fatherland."

But they were voices drowned out by the pacifist and internationalist rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s.

Did it matter? Does patriotism matter?

France, where pacifism and internationalism were strongest, became a classic example of how much it can matter.

During the First World War, France fought on against the German invaders for four long years, despite having more of its soldiers killed than all the American soldiers killed in all the wars in the history of the United States, put together.

But during the Second World War, France collapsed after just six weeks of fighting and surrendered to Nazi Germany. At the bitter moment of defeat the head of the French teachers' union was told, "You are partially responsible for the defeat."

Charles de Gaulle, Francois Mauriac, and other Frenchmen blamed a lack of national will or general moral decay, for the sudden and humiliating collapse of France in 1940.

At the outset of the invasion, both German and French generals assessed French military forces as more likely to gain victory, and virtually no one expected France to collapse like a house of cards -- except Adolf Hitler, who had studied French society instead of French military forces.

Did patriotism matter? It mattered more than superior French tanks and planes.

Most Americans today are unaware of how much our schools have followed in the footsteps of the French schools of the 1920s and 1930s, or how much our intellectuals have become citizens of the world instead of American patriots.

Our media are busy verbally transforming American combat troops from heroes into victims, just as the French intelligentsia did-- with the added twist of calling this "supporting the troops."

Will that matter? Time will tell.

The Wall Street Journal editors (June 4 2008) observed the brilliance of Senator Obama's rhetoric and the skill of the campaign that has brought him the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. The editorial went on to note that Obama was "the least tested and experienced major party nominee in modern times."

My mentor of 20 years, my friend -- until he "disrespected me" and said I was a politician like all the rest of them.

Obama wasn’t fazed by Jeremiah Wright’s "God Damn America" or his accusation that the U.S. government invented AIDS to wipe out blacks. He couldn’t disown him when the videos came out, but then when the good reverend repeated these accusations at the National Press Club, and then went on to say that Obama, who said he had never heard any of that stuff in his 20 years in the pews, was just another politician who said what he had to and did what politicians do, well, that was too much for Obama. Time for the reverend to go under the bus with his "typical white person" grandmother.

What was different this second go-round? Obama made it clear -- It's all about me:

‘[A]t a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough. That's -- that's a show of disrespect to me. It's a -- it is also, I think, an insult to what we've been trying to do in this campaign.’

Obama's strange collection of friends included Antoin Rezko, who did Obama a big favor in having his wife (income $37,000) buy an unusable lot (for the full asking price of $625,000) next to the main lot Obama wanted which Obama bought for a discounted price. Obama couldn't afford the asking price otherwise. Rezko got the money from a loan from an Iraqi Muslim while he was essentially bankrupt. It is not known if the lender knew where most of the money was going or if Obama knew where the money was coming from. What Rezko didn't use for buying the Obama companion lot went to pay lawyers for his tangle of law suits, including federal prosecution for influence peddling charges. Rezko raised about $160,000 for Obama's campaigns.

Today Rezko was convicted of influence peddling by a federal jury.

Rezko Convicted of Influence Peddling Updated 5:23 p.m. By Peter Slevin CHICAGO -- A federal jury today convicted political fundraiser Antoin Rezko, a longtime backer of Sen. Barack Obama, of influence peddling in the high councils of Illinois state government.

The verdict comes after weeks of vivid insider accounts about attempts to sell political favors in the administration of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich (D).

The jury concluded that Rezko was part of a corrupt money-making scheme and found Rezko guilty of 16 of 24 felony counts, including fraud, money laundering and joining a bribery conspiracy.

Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, was not connected to the case and has not been implicated in wrongdoing.

The verdict nonetheless makes it more likely that critics will continue to question his relationship with Rezko, who contributed to and raised money for earlier campaigns and bought property adjacent to Obama's Chicago home.

Indeed, within 20 minutes of the verdict's announcement, the Republican National Committee sent an e-mail to reporters under the subject line, "Rezko: Obama's Longtime Friend and Money Man."

Obama has said whenever asked -- and he has been asked often -- that Rezko asked for no favors and that he did him none.

Rezko, once the prosperous owner of restaurant chains, did not testify at the trial.

More...

The leading analyst of the Middle East Caroline Glick called Barack Obama' rise to prominence and his foreign policy "frightening." (And see our earlier post "Obama: Frightening" below.)

Today, Pulitizer Prize winner columnist Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post said this of the Democratic oratorical wonder and his intention to meet with all of the world's leading thugs in his first year as president:

Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure -- then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration's refusal to do so not just "ridiculous" but "a disgrace."

What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity.

Having lashed himself to the ridiculous, unprecedented promise of unconditional presidential negotiations -- and then having compounded the problem by elevating it to a principle -- Obama keeps trying to explain. On Sunday, he declared in Pendleton, Ore., that by Soviet standards Iran and others "don't pose a serious threat to us." (On the contrary. Islamic Iran is dangerously apocalyptic. Soviet Russia was not.) The next day in Billings, Mont.: "I've made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave."

That's the very next day, mind you. Such rhetorical flailing has done more than create an intellectual mess. It has given rise to a new political phenomenon: the metastatic gaffe. The one begets another, begets another, begets ...

This all would be just too hilariious if it weren't so deadly dangerous. To think that such absurdites are being uttered by the leading contender for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States is, yes, "frightening."

The West's premier analyst of the Middle East Caroline Glick, who writes for the Jerusalem Post, was in the audience when President Bush gave his address to Israel's Knesset pledging American support for Israel in the face of Iran's threat to wipe it off the map.

In particular, the President said this:

'Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided. We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Glick had this to say:

‘To Israeli ears, Bush's words were uncontroversial. Israel is beset by enemies who daily call for its physical annihilation and while doing so, build and support terror forces who attack Israel. For most Israelis, the notion that these enemies can be appeased is absurd and deeply offensive.’

‘From an Israeli vantage point then, it was shocking to see that immediately after Bush stepped down from the rostrum, Obama and his Democratic supporters began pillorying him for his remarks. Most distressing is what Obama's reaction said about the Democratic presidential hopeful.’

‘OBAMA'S RESPONSE to Bush's speech was an effective acknowledgement that appeasing Iran and other terror sponsors is a defining feature of his campaign and of his political persona. As far as he is concerned, an attack against appeasement is an attack against Obama.

She went on to observe:

‘LIKE HIS life story, Obama's policies are not based on facts, but on his attitude. And his attitude, like Mencken's in the 1930s, is based on a naïve and arrogant belief that the worst thing that can happen is to have someone who talks about evil in the White House.

Peter Osnos, Obama's former publisher told the Times that Obama's meteoric rise to the pinnacle of politics is due in large part to his gift as a storyteller. In his words, "It's almost all based on these two books, two books not based on a job of prodigious research or risking one's life as a reporter in Iraq. He has written about himself. Being able to take your own life story and turn it into this incredibly lucrative franchise, it's a stunning fact."

Indeed, it is stunning. And frightening. It says that in a world in which evil men are combining and preparing for war and genocide, good men are preparing for pleasant chitchat with their foes because they have come to prefer attitude to substance. It is a world in which indignation can be summoned as readily (and perhaps more easily) for partisan political attacks as for delusional dictators’ open preparation for genocide. And it is a world in which it is more important to discuss "healing" emotional wounds than devising policies capable of coping with an ever-more-dangerous international coalition of murderers.

That Glick was shocked and dismayed at Obama's naivete, self-absorption and indifference to reality is to state the obvious. Indeed, "frightening." To read her entire article, click here.

Who's smarter and more sophisticated than we are?

Who "understands" the comfort the little people get by clinging to their God and guns and hating immigrants and free trade?

Who knows he is better than us?

Who?