Socialism: 2008 Archives

Massachusetts sends an all-Democratic team to Congress and they are powerful. Some even revel in their power. As in 2008.

For example, Cape Cod's own Congressman Willam Delahunt took pleasure in outing a government security official so al-Qaeda could get a good look at him. We can be sure his family didn't enjoy the Congressman's joke. He earned a place in our Hall of Shame.

Then there is the powerful and shameless rolled into one. Congressman Barney Frank did more than any other U.S. public official in bringing about the worldwide financial crisis. He was among those who pressed the Clinton Administration to loosen up mortgage lending standards so that mortgage lenders would be required to make loans to uncreditworthy borrowers. Then, to give nervous banks and other mortgage lenders somewhere to offload those risky loans, he (along with Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut) badgered the Democrats running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the latter run by another Massachusetts boy) to buy those risky loans, package them up and sell them around the world as securities backed by the U.S. government. A concerned Bush Administration and Senate Republicans tried to bring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under control, but Barney Frank was there, 2003-2006, blocking those efforts, saying everything was fine and no changes were neeeded. When the subprime mortgage defaults started and exploded into an unraveling of the world financial system, there was Barney Frank blaming Wall Street. Shameless.

Chicago Democrats are also powerful, but their speciality is racial politics, payoffs and corruption. The Chicago Democratic machine put its candidate for president forward, hid his problematic past with a fictionalized biography, counted (correctly) on reverse racism to elect him and raised hundreds of millions of dollars illegally online to propel him into the White House. All of those unsavory buddies, Wright, Pfleger, Rezko, Ayers, Dohrn, Khalidi, Farrakhan, were shoved offstage with the media's acquiesence. Then the Mayor Daley spinmaster and Obama campaign orchestrator David Axelrod and Chicago Congressman and Obama's choice for White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel thought Democratic governor Blagojevich should name an Obama pick to Obama's Senate seat, all of which has now blown up into the "Senate Seat for Sale" scandal caught on tape by federal agents. The Chicago Three will now run the country from the White House, no doubt drawing on all the expertise accumulated by the Chicago Democratic machine over decades.

The biggest story of 2008 really was the turnaround in Iraq, which, as soon as it became obvious it was to be a success, disappeared from media top news. Replacing a terrrorist-supporting tyrant in the Middle East with a democratically-elected government that is an ally in the war against violent Islam is a tremendous accomplishment for which President Bush and General Petraeus will not get credit from the Democrats who opposed and ridiculed them. Or from their collaborating media.

Victor Davis Hanson reviews the year (but without the Massachusetts side notes) and calls it "A Year Like None Other." He sees three decades rolled into 2008, the Roaring 20s, the "bleak" 1930s and the Sixties. See if you agree.

White Mark Steyn give us a few chuckles as he sees the U.S. on the road to totalitarian socialism, Peter Schiff sees the result of all this government intervention and bailouts with printing press money as soaring inflation and a stifled economy. Schiff doesn't use the term, but the message is there: There's no such thing as a free lunch.

After years of overspending and expansion of debt, a correction is coming due. It's called a recession.

The good news is that economics is not all that complicated. The bad news is that our economy is broken and there is nothing the government can do to fix it. However, the free market does have a cure: it's called a recession, and it's not fun, easy or quick. But if we put our faith in the power of government to make the pain go away, we will live with the consequences for generations.

Schiff's good sense is worth reading.

There's No Pain-Free Cure for Recession

Belt-tightening is required by all, including government.

By PETER SCHIFF
December 27, Wall Street Jounal Opinion

As recession fears cause the nation to embrace greater state control of the economy and unimaginable federal deficits, one searches in vain for debate worthy of the moment. Where there should be an historic clash of ideas, there is only blind resignation and an amorphous queasiness that we are simply sweeping the slouching beast under the rug.

With faith in the free markets now taking a back seat to fear and expediency, nearly the entire political spectrum agrees that the federal government must spend whatever amount is necessary to stabilize the housing market, bail out financial firms, liquefy the credit markets, create jobs and make the recession as shallow and brief as possible. The few who maintain free-market views have been largely marginalized.

Taking the theories of economist John Maynard Keynes as gospel, our most highly respected contemporary economists imagine a complex world in which economics at the personal, corporate and municipal levels are governed by laws far different from those in effect at the national level.

Individuals, companies or cities with heavy debt and shrinking revenues instinctively know that they must reduce spending, tighten their belts, pay down debt and live within their means. But it is axiomatic in Keynesianism that national governments can create and sustain economic activity by injecting printed money into the financial system. In their view, absent the stimuli of the New Deal and World War II, the Depression would never have ended.

On a gut level, we have a hard time with this concept. There is a vague sense of smoke and mirrors, of something being magically created out of nothing. But economics, we are told, is complicated.

It would be irresponsible in the extreme for an individual to forestall a personal recession by taking out newer, bigger loans when the old loans can't be repaid. However, this is precisely what we are planning on a national level.

I believe these ideas hold sway largely because they promise happy, pain-free solutions. They are the economic equivalent of miracle weight-loss programs that require no dieting or exercise. The theories permit economists to claim mystic wisdom, governments to pretend that they have the power to dispel hardship with the whir of a printing press, and voters to believe that they can have recovery without sacrifice.

As a follower of the Austrian School of economics I believe that market forces apply equally to people and nations. The problems we face collectively are no different from those we face individually. Belt tightening is required by all, including government.

Governments cannot create but merely redirect. When the government spends, the money has to come from somewhere. If the government doesn't have a surplus, then it must come from taxes. If taxes don't go up, then it must come from increased borrowing. If lenders won't lend, then it must come from the printing press, which is where all these bailouts are headed. But each additional dollar printed diminishes the value those already in circulation. Something cannot be effortlessly created from nothing.

Similarly, any jobs or other economic activity created by public-sector expansion merely comes at the expense of jobs lost in the private sector. And if the government chooses to save inefficient jobs in select private industries, more efficient jobs will be lost in others. As more factors of production come under government control, the more inefficient our entire economy becomes. Inefficiency lowers productivity, stifles competitiveness and lowers living standards.

If we look at government market interventions through this pragmatic lens, what can we expect from the coming avalanche of federal activism?

By borrowing more than it can ever pay back, the government will guarantee higher inflation for years to come, thereby diminishing the value of all that Americans have saved and acquired. For now the inflationary tide is being held back by the countervailing pressures of bursting asset bubbles in real estate and stocks, forced liquidations in commodities, and troubled retailers slashing prices to unload excess inventory. But when the dust settles, trillions of new dollars will remain, chasing a diminished supply of goods. We will be left with 1970s-style stagflation, only with a much sharper contraction and significantly higher inflation.

The good news is that economics is not all that complicated. The bad news is that our economy is broken and there is nothing the government can do to fix it. However, the free market does have a cure: it's called a recession, and it's not fun, easy or quick. But if we put our faith in the power of government to make the pain go away, we will live with the consequences for generations.

Mr. Schiff is president of Euro Pacific Capital and author of "The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets" (Wiley, 2008)

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.”

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.

The president-elect says he wants to "jolt" the economy. Metaphor aside, will it do any good?

Professor Thomas Sowell sees the frenzy whipped up by the media as a wonderful opportunity for politicians to spend money on their favorite groups which they will take away from those who have earned it. Could that be?

What we are talking about is a golden political opportunity for politicians to use the current financial crisis to fundamentally change an economy that has been successful for more than two centuries, so that politicians can henceforth micro-manage all sorts of businesses and play Robin Hood, taking from those who are not likely to vote for them and transferring part of their earnings to those who will vote for them . . . .

No doubt we could all use a few billion dollars every now and then. But the question of who actually gets it will be strictly in the hands of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. It is one of the few parts of the legacy of the Bush administration that the Democrats are not likely to criticize.

Professor Sowell's timely warning is of what looks like a good imitation of totalitarian socialism. But who can stop them?

Read "Jolting" the Economy

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

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.

It ain't funny, but ...

In efforts to make the U.S. energy independent of overseas hostile and unstable suppliers, coal will play a big part. As is often said, the U.S. is the "Saudi Arabia of coal," since the U.S. has the largest reserves of coal in the world. As drilling offshore proceeds (unless Democrats block that again) and other alternatives become commercially viable, coal is the rock solid base on which energy independence will be built. More coal is used to generate electricity in this country than any other power source and that is not likely to change soon. Developing nuclear power plants will no doubt replace some coal-fired power plants, but they won't be active for a decade or longer. Natural gas is a cleaner fuel for power plants, but availability is constrained by pipeline capacity. And, of course, there are urgent research projects underway on clean coal technology. Why not use what the U.S. has the most of, particularly since there are established companies employing thousands of Americans?

Yet Obama has promised he will drive those companies out of business, putting those workers out a job. Once again, the media has neglected or deliberately refused to do its job in exposing the real Obama and his intentions. Listen to this audio from January of this year:

This is another example of Obama's extremist ideology driving him, in this case without regard of the consequences to energy independence, the cost of electricity, national priorities and the jobs of working Americans. Some 80,000 have jobs in the coal industry, with 25% of them in West Virginia.

And in that same interview, Obama also promised that "[u]nder my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." So much for the working family trying to make ends meet.

Update: Mike Carey, President of the Ohio Coal Association, issued this statement:

Regardless of the timing or method of the release of these remarks, the message from the Democratic candidate for President could not be clearer: the Obama-Biden ticket spells disaster for America's coal industry and the tens of thousands of Americans who work in it.

These undisputed, audio-taped remarks, which include comments from Senator Obama like 'I haven't been some coal booster' and 'if they want to build [coal plants], they can, but it will bankrupt them' are extraordinarily misguided.

It's evident that this campaign has been pandering in states like Ohio,Virginia, West Virginia,Indiana and Pennsylvania to attempt to generate votes from coal supporters, while keeping his true agenda hidden from the state's voters.

Senator Obama has revealed himself to be nothing more than a short-sighted, inexperienced politician willing to say anything to get a vote. But today, the nation's coal industry and those who support it have a better understanding of his true mission, to 'bankrupt' our industry, put tens of thousands out of work and cause unprecedented increases in electricity prices.

In addition to providing an affordable, reliable source of low-cost electricity, domestic coal holds the key to our nation's long-term energy security - a goal that cannot be overlooked during this time of international instability and economic uncertainty.

Few policy areas are more important to our economic future than energy issues. As voters head to the polls tomorrow, it is essential they remember that access to reliable, affordable, domestic energy supplies is essential to economic growth and stability.

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.

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.

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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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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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!

Obama has had a 17-year relationship with ACORN, the "small "c" communist community organizer, which has a multi-year history of corrupting our electoral system with voter registration fraud. He trained its workers in how to intimidate bankers into making loans they shouldn't make and how to register voters. This past winter he pledged to have community organizers like ACORN working with him even before his inauguration as president to shape the agenda of the administration.

Obama shares the same radical views of William Ayers, that America is bad, an oppressive society and needs to be changed. Indeed, they both have the same views as Obama's 20-year pastor Jeremiah Wright -- God Damn America for white oppression of blacks. Having abandoned bombing as counterproductive, Ayers concentrated on early childhood education as the way to subvert the American system. Investigator Stanley Kurtz of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center analyzed the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in which Obama and Ayers worked together. They made grants grants to extremist groups with the purpose of to radicalizing young children in the Chicago schools. What Kurtz found was this: Ayers' accomplice "Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright." The programs were to incite hatred among young blacks for white America and to resist assimilation and the "middleclassness" that Wright preached blacks should avoid.

We've presented a great deal of documentation on the illegal activties of the voter registration fraud experts ACORN and how Obama in his community organizing days trained their workers not only in voter registration but in how to intimidate bankers into making loans to minority and low income borrowers with inadequate credit. (Click in the right hand column on ACORN in the listing of Categories for some of them.) Of particular interest are three articles by Stanley Kurtz, here and here, which should not be missed.

Now the McCain campaign has produced an effective ad on Obama's long involvement in ACORN's unsavory business of forcing banks to make loans they should never have made and voter registration fraud. Subprime loans are at the root of our world financial crisis and registration fraud corrupts our electoral system.

Mark Steyn is back in the swing of things (that is, writing weekly columns) and Joe the Plumber is his subject this week.

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.]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.