Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Real Americans talk about the campaign:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A28Edyuw2QQ

Even small contributions are important

PayPal Donations

Indiana’s Secretary of State seeking criminal investigation of ACORN

The request is based on Secretary of State Todd Rokita's preliminary examination and analysis of 1,438 questionable voter registration applications ACORN submitted in the county, which includes the city of Gary. Rokita, a Republican, has concluded there is "significant, credible evidence" that ACORN violated Indiana and federal law.

ACORN, with which Barack Obama has had a long and close association, has been found to have registered ineligible voters and even fictitious characters in many states across the nation

"This is a fraud perpetrated on all of the people of Indiana, because fraudulent registrations are the first step in diluting the voice of honest voters and rendering an inaccurate tally on Election Day," Rokita wrote in his request to state and federal law enforcement officials.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/27/indiana-official-seeks-criminal-probe-of-acorn/

MSNBC Ripped by participants at luncheon

The cable news channel is "completely out of control," said writer-producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat.

She added that she would prefer a lunch date with right-leaning Fox News star Sean Hannity over left-leaning MSNBC star Keith Olbermann.

Olbermann was criticized by many who attended Monday's luncheon sponsored by the Caucus for Producers, Writers & Directors at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The event was dubbed "Hollywood, America and Election '08."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i28df3fc9f6707d1478700b7bc78273ae

The most important lower federal court in the country: the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is threatened by the thought of a victory by Barack Obama

If Barack Obama wins the presidency, he will almost certainly fill two vacant seats older Clinton appointees and most likely the seats of four older Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointees.  The net result is that the legal left will once again have a majority on the nation's most important regulatory court of appeals.
As in the case of Obama’s threat to “share the wealth” in basic Marxist terms, Obama’s ominous shadow falls across a judiciary already badly skewed to the left.
Not only respect for the courts, but honest actions by them, are very much at risk should Obama win.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122515067227674187.html

Opinion:
Stories that shape today’s headlines

As the election comes ever closer, people are giving Obama a closer look.  Often, the view is dark and threatening.

Obama is pro-abortion, of course.  Even his record as a state senator shows that – his words reinforce those actions – suggesting expansion of “abortion rights” will be expanded should he win.

Of late, Obama’s avowed support for the Marxist system calling for spreading the wealth has drawn even more attention.  Nothing demonstrated the terror within the Obama campaign concerning discussions of his socialist tendencies, than the “Biden-eruption” when a TV reporter asked questions the media should have been asking about Obama throughout the campaign.

Biden bristled and the Obama campaign sought to strike back at the Orlando TV station.  “How dare a reporter ask Biden about Obama’s political philosophy” – the Biden bristle confirmed what any who have listened closely to that campaign already knew – Obama threatens the nation with an ominous cloud moving in from the extreme left.

Buddy

Here are today’s top articles:

1.

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ZDFkMGE2MmM1M2Q5MmY0ZmExMzUxMWRhZGJmMTAyOGY=
 
The L.A. Times Suppresses Obama’s Khalidi Bash Tape

Why is the Los Angeles Times sitting on a videotape of the 2003 farewell bash in Chicago at which Barack Obama lavished praise on the guest of honor, Rashid Khalidi — former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat?

At the time Khalidi, a PLO adviser turned University of Chicago professor, was headed east to Columbia. There he would take over the University’s Middle East-studies program (which he has since maintained as a bubbling cauldron of anti-Semitism) and assume the professorship endowed in honor of Edward Sayyid, another notorious terror apologist.

2

http://corner.nationalreview.com/

The Obama Temptation   [Mark R. Levin]

I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and aban donment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way.

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me.

3.

Amanda Carpenter: Dem Playbook Shows Dirty Tactics

Democrat Playbook Shows Dirty Tactics

Documents obtained by Townhall show the Democratic Party encouraged party activists to accuse the GOP of intimidating minorities on Election Day even if no evidence of intimidation existed in the 2004 presidential election.
Dirty campaign tricks don’t die. They just become more refined with age.
Documents obtained by Townhall show the Democratic Party encouraged party activists to accuse the GOP of intimidating minorities on Election Day even if no evidence of intimidation existed in the 2004 presidential election. The tactic is being used again in 2008, this time to downplay fraud charges against a predominantly minority non-profit supporting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

4.

Exclusive: Former FBI In Charge of Operations – FBI 'Would Not Have Hired' Someone with Obama's Associations

The Editors
Brought to you by the editors and research staff of FamilySecurityMatters.org

Recently, FSM sat down with Buck Revell, former Associate Deputy Director of the FBI who was in charge of all FBI operations before his retirement in 1994. What he has to say about the idea of a security clearance for Barack Obama, a man who could be our next president, is stunning and sobering, to say the least.

5.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/2550646/the-sacrifice-of-truth-to-power.thtml

The sacrifice of truth to power

London Spectator

Is America really going to do this?

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

6.

ABC columnist Michael Malone protests:

Media Corruption Today

What I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del. If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography....

7.

 

http://americansentinel2.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/barack-obama-master-of-the-half-truth/

Barack Obama, Master Of The Half-Truth

Posted by jay1949 under Election 2008, McCain-Palin, Obama-Biden, Politics | Tags: half truth, McCain, Obama, trust |

"A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent." - - William Blake.

Although many have criticized Barack Obama as inexperienced, there is one area in which he must be acknowledged as a master: the use of the half-truth. So many examples . . . which to choose?
The "John McCain Is A Socialist, Too" Half-Truth: Here's the half-truth by Obama:  "What I want to do is repeal the Bush tax cuts; John McCain opposed those tax cuts; so if I'm a socialist, John McCain is a socialist, too."  The other half of the truth:  Obama wants to use tax revenues to redistribute income (to, in his words, "spread the wealth around"); McCain does not.  Redistribution of wealth is a socialist tenet ("From each according to his means, to each according to his needs").
Now for the details:
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ZDFkMGE2MmM1M2Q5MmY0ZmExMzUxMWRhZGJmMTAyOGY=
.
Obama, Ayers, and PLO supporters toast Edward Said’s successor, but the press doesn’t think it’s quite as newsworthy as Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Let’s try a thought experiment. Say John McCain attended a party at which known racists and terror mongers were in attendance. Say testimonials were given, including a glowing one by McCain for the benefit of the guest of honor ... who happened to be a top apologist for terrorists. Say McCain not only gave a speech but stood by, in tacit approval and solidarity, while other racists and terror mongers gave speeches that reeked of hatred for an American ally and rationalizations of terror attacks.

Now let’s say the Los Angeles Times obtained a videotape of the party.

Question: Is there any chance — any chance — the Times would not release the tape and publish front-page story after story about the gory details, with the usual accompanying chorus of sanctimony from the oped commentariat? Is there any chance, if the Times was the least bit reluctant about publishing (remember, we’re pretending here), that the rest of the mainstream media (y’know, the guys who drove Trent Lott out of his leadership position over a birthday-party toast) would not be screaming for the release of the tape?

Do we really have to ask?

So now, let’s leave thought experiments and return to reality: Why is the Los Angeles Times sitting on a videotape of the 2003 farewell bash in Chicago at which Barack Obama lavished praise on the guest of honor, Rashid Khalidi — former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat?

At the time Khalidi, a PLO adviser turned University of Chicago professor, was headed east to Columbia. There he would take over the University’s Middle East-studies program (which he has since maintained as a bubbling cauldron of anti-Semitism) and assume the professorship endowed in honor of Edward Sayyid, another notorious terror apologist.

The party featured encomiums by many of Khalidi’s allies, colleagues, and friends, including Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, and Bill Ayers, the terrorist turned education professor. It was sponsored by the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which had been founded by Khalidi and his wife, Mona, formerly a top English translator for Arafat’s press agency.

Is there just a teeny-weenie chance that this was an evening of Israel-bashing Obama would find very difficult to explain? Could it be that the Times, a pillar of the Obamedia, is covering for its guy?

Gateway Pundit reports that the Times has the videotape but is suppressing it.

Back in April, the Times published a gentle story about the fete. Reporter Peter Wallsten avoided, for example, any mention of the inconvenient fact that the revelers included Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife and fellow Weatherman terrorist. These self-professed revolutionary Leftists are friendly with both Obama and Khalidi — indeed, researcher Stanley Kurtz has noted that Ayers and Khalidi were “best friends.” (And — small world! — it turns out that the Obamas are extremely close to the Khalidis, who have reportedly babysat the Obama children.)

Nor did the Times report the party was thrown by AAAN. Wallsten does tell us that the AAAN received grants from the Leftist Woods Fund when Obama was on its board — but, besides understating the amount (it was $75,000, not $40,000), the Times mentions neither that Ayers was also on the Woods board at the time nor that AAAN is rabidly anti-Israel. (Though the organization regards Israel as illegitimate and has sought to justify Palestinian terrorism, Wallsten describes the AAAN as “a social service group.”)

Perhaps even more inconveniently, the Times also let slip that it had obtained a videotape of the party.

Wallsten’s story is worth excerpting at length (italics are mine):
It was a celebration of Palestinian culture — a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi's friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi's wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table," but around "this entire world."...

[T]he warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor's going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.

Their belief is not drawn from Obama's speeches or campaign literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and from his association with the Palestinian American community in his hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.

At Khalidi's 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, "then you will never see a day of peace."

One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."

Obama adopted a different tone in his comments and called for finding common ground. But his presence at such events, as he worked to build a political base in Chicago, has led some Palestinian leaders to believe that he might deal differently with the Middle East than … his opponents for the White House....

At Khalidi's going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. "You will not have a better senator under any circumstances," Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

Though Khalidi has seen little of Sen. Obama in recent years, Michelle Obama attended a party several months ago celebrating the marriage of the Khalidis' daughter.

In interviews with The Times, Khalidi declined to discuss specifics of private talks over the years with Obama. He did not begrudge his friend for being out of touch, or for focusing more these days on his support for Israel — a stance that Khalidi calls a requirement to win a national election in the U.S., just as wooing Chicago's large Arab American community was important for winning local elections.
So why is the Times sitting on the videotape of the Khalidi festivities? Given Obama's (preposterous) claims that he didn’t know Ayers that well and was unfamiliar with Ayers’s views, why didn't the Times report that Ayers and Dohrn were at the bash? Was it not worth mentioning the remarkable coincidence that both Obama and Ayers — the “education reform” allies who barely know each other … except to the extent they together doled out tens of millions of dollars to Leftist agitators, attacked the criminal justice system, and raved about each others books — just happen to be intimate friends of the same anti-American Israel-basher? (Despite having watched the videotape, Wallsten told Gateway Pundit he “did not know” whether Ayers was there.)

Why won’t the Times tell us what was said in the various Khalidi testimonials? On that score, Ayers and Dohrn have always had characteristically noxious views on the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. And, true to form, they have always been quite open about them. There is no reason to believe those views have ever changed. Here, for example, is what they had to say in Prairie Fire, the Weather Underground’s 1974 Communist manifesto (emphasis in original):
Palestinian independence is opposed with reactionary schemes by Jordan, completely opposed with military terror by Israel, and manipulated by the U.S. The U.S.-sponsored notion of stability and status-quo in the Mideast is an attempt to preserve U.S. imperialist control of oil, using zionist power as the cat's paw. The Mideast has become a world focus of struggles over oil resources and control of strategic sea and air routes. Yet the Palestinian struggle is at the heart of other conflicts in the Mideast. Only the Palestinians can determine the solution which reflects the aspirations of the Palestinian people. No "settlements" in the Mideast which exclude the Palestinians will resolve the conflict. Palestinian liberation will not be suppressed.

The U.S. people have been seriously deceived about the Palestinians and Israel. This calls for a campaign to educate and focus attention on the true situation: teach-ins, debates, and open clear support for Palestinian liberation; reading about the Palestinian movement—The Disinherited by Fawaz Turki, Enemy of the Sun; opposing U.S. aid to Israel. Our silence or acceptance of pro-zionist policy is a form of complicity with U.S.-backed aggression and terror, and a betrayal of internationalism.

SELF-DETERMINATION FOR THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!

U.S. OUT OF THE MIDEAST!

END AID TO ISRAEL!
Barack Obama wouldn’t possibly let something like that pass without a spirited defense of the Israel he tells us he so staunchly supports … would he? I guess to answer that question, we’d have to know what was on the tape.

But who has time for such trifles? After all, isn’t Diana Vreeland about to critique Sarah Palin’s sartorial splendor?

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy chairs the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’s Center for Law & Counterterrorism and is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008).

The Obama/Ayers/Khalidi Connection   [Andy McCarthy]

I just caught up with an interview by one of my favorite guys, Hugh Hewitt, of another of my favorite guys, Stanley Kurtz.  (It's on Hugh's Townhall blog, which always has plenty of required reading.)
Stanley, of course, has done singularly vital investigative work on Obama's background — you should check out his NRO archive, here, as well as important articles he's recently written in the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal (see. e.g., here, here and here).  But Hugh's interview is a real primer for those who haven't delved into it much.  It also spotlights an important point that has largely been missed.  That is, while there has been focus on the Obama/Ayers tie and the Obama/Khalidi tie, no real attention has been paid to the Ayers/Khalidi tie — which is very strong and tightens the circle significantly.

Specifically, Hugh asked about the strands of the Ayers/Obama connection.  After Stanley recounted them in detail, he added this:

SK:  Now if you lived just a few blocks away from someone, and you’ve been on a foundation together, and at least in the first year, you were on the board together, and then you’re on a panel together, when you run into each other, what are you going to be talking about? Here’s something I also haven’t mentioned. Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers were practically best friends. People don’t know this, and I’m actually saying this for the first time. I haven’t written about this. They were best friends, and we know that Obama had interactions with Khalidi, that Khalidi had held the coffee that kicked off his Congressional campaign, I believe. And Ayers and Khalidi were extremely close if you look at the acknowledgements in their books. 
HH: Tell us about Khalidi. Tell us who he is and his role in Obama’s life. 
SK: Rashid Khalidi is really, in a sense, the American successor of Edward Said, a very strong advocate for the Palestinians, extremely radical in his views and his opposition to American foreign policy. He was a friend and colleague of Obama. Apparently they used to get together and discuss world affairs. And he’s practically the best friend of Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers features Khalidi in some of his books about how to politicize the teaching for students. So actually, the more you look into it, the more you see that this is not just people running into each other. And again, I object to the idea of just simply counting the times people were together in a room. When you fund Bill Ayers education projects, with hundreds of thousands of dollars, when you as Bill Ayers publish Rashid Khalidi’s essay in your book of collected essays, they might have gone on.  That’s a lot without meeting once. 
*     *     *
HH: So Stanley Kurtz, Rashid Khalidi, very close to Barack Obama, read during the break that Khalidi had a farewell dinner in 2003 that Obama was one of the presenters at, and in those remarks, alluded to the numerous dinners he’d had at the home of the Khalidi’s. 
SK: Yes.
HH: It simply defies imagination to think that Khalidi was not a bridge between Ayers, that this is not an operating subgroup of Hyde Park, doesn’t it?

SK: Right. I mean, that’s what it seems like when you look, when you read these acknowledgements back and forth between Khalidi and Ayers of how close they are as friends, and you see that Khalidi had dinners at Obama, it really, to think…and then that Khalidi hosted something to kick off Obama’s Congressional campaign, you’ve got to think that Ayers and Khalidi are both talking about Obama, because they’re so close. And you’ve go to think that…it begins to look like a pretty tight network. You know, you can only show what’s actually in the papers, and what are in the documents as far as the number of meetings and everything else. But it sure looks a lot tighter than what we can absolutely see. It looks like a lot more. But it’s hard to show for sure, just like people, I think rightly assume that Barack Obama had to have known a lot more about what Jeremiah Wright was saying all those years than he’s letting on.

ME:  Again, these people were drawn to each other because they shared a revolutionary, anti-American ideology — these were not guys who just happened to know each other from the Hyde Park softball league.

Stanley is ever the meticulous scholar — which is why it's so hysterical to read Obamaphiles try to paint him as a right-wing hack.  He will go only as far as the hard evidence takes him, so, without speculating on where or when the Ayers/Obama relationship actually began, he deals with what we know for certain, which is that they had enough of a relationship to strike a significant business partnership in 1995.

As readers may recall, I think the relationship traces back years before 1995 — possibly in the Morningside Heights area in the early 80s (when Ayers had just come out of hiding and Obama was at Columbia ... years Obama refuses to discuss), and was almost certainly in place by the late 1980s in Chicago (when Obama and Ayers were both working on education reform and their wives were working at the same law firm).  I've laid out my theory (which relies in part on common connections like Khalidi and Edward Said) in this article, called "Why Won't Obama Talk About Columbia?"

http://corner.nationalreview.com/

The Obama Temptation   [Mark R. Levin]

I've been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and aban donment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way.

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.

Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I've never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama's past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media's role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It's as if the media use the Obama campaign's talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn't hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we've read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism. And, of course, while experience is crucial in assessing Sarah Palin's qualifications for vice president, no such standard is applied to Obama's qualifications for president. (No longer is it acceptable to minimize the work of a community organizer.) Charles Gibson and Katie Couric sought to humiliate Palin. They would never and have never tried such an approach with Obama.

But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.

Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands.

The question is whether enough Americans understand what's at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others. And while America will certainly survive, it will do so, in many respects, as a different place.

Amanda Carpenter: Dem Playbook Shows Dirty Tactics
Democrat Playbook Shows Dirty Tactics

Documents obtained by Townhall show the Democratic Party encouraged party activists to accuse the GOP of intimidating minorities on Election Day even if no evidence of intimidation existed in the 2004 presidential election.
Dirty campaign tricks don’t die. They just become more refined with age.
Documents obtained by Townhall show the Democratic Party encouraged party activists to accuse the GOP of intimidating minorities on Election Day even if no evidence of intimidation existed in the 2004 presidential election. The tactic is being used again in 2008, this time to downplay fraud charges against a predominantly minority non-profit supporting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Weeks before the Nov. 4 election Barack Obama’s campaign said the Republicans are attempting to suppress votes by drawing attention to the Association for Community Organizers for Reform Now’s involvement in rampant voter registration fraud across the nation. The nonprofit actively supports Democratic causes, such as minimum wage increases and housing assistance. ACORN endorsed Obama for president last February and has been paid by his campaign to conduct get out the vote activities during the Democratic primary.
ACORN wasn’t a household name in the last election but documents show Democrats were just as eager to accuse the GOP of treating minorities unfairly in 2004 as they are in 2008.
A nine-page section of 66-page 2004 Kerry Edwards Colorado state Election Day Manual titled “Minority Voter Intimidation” begins: “Over the past twenty years, there have been repeated efforts by the Republican party and Republican Party candidates to harass and intimidate minority voters in an effort to reduce the number of African-American and/or Latino voters.” The manual then instructs Democrats how to look for minority voter intimidation tactics and how to publicize it to the media with special tactics designed for mainstream and specialty press.
Such intimidation tactics might take the forms of “efforts to create longer lines at the polls, targeting in minority communities,” or “slower responses to voting machine breakdowns in minority precincts.”
“If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a ‘pre-emptive strike.’” The manual said this should be done by placing stories in mainstream and specialty press “in which minority leadership expresses concern about the threat of intimidation tactics” and “prime minority leadership to discuss the issue in the media; provide talking points.”
Some of the suggested talking points included lines like “Nothing is more despicable than trying to deprive any American of the previous right to vote, the foundation of our democracy for which so many have sacrificed.”
The 2004 manual said a preemptive strategy was “particularly well-suited to states in which there [sic] tactics have been tried in the past.”
The Democrats’ preemptive strike has been delivered from Barack Obama’s legal team this time around.
Obama’s lawyers are demanding that the Department of Justice to investigate GOP presidential candidate John McCain, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and other Republican politicians because they have drawn attention to ACORN’s fraudulent activities on the campaign trail.
“Agents of the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee have been striking locally at election officials and boards around the country, sowing confusion and seeking through baseless legal maneuvers to discourage and harass voters and impede their exercise of their right to vote,” Obama for America’s General Counsel Robert Bauer said on a conference call with reporters last week.
Obama’s legal team is specifically taking issue with McCain’s remarks that ACORN’s voter registration fraud “threatens the fabric of our Democracy” and Palin’s assessment that there is a “choice between a candidate who won’t disavow a group committing voter fraud and a leader who won’t tolerate voter fraud.”
Bauer made his request for an investigation in a letter to the DOJ that said McCain and Palin were “sensationalizing this message by repeating it at the state and local level in violation of the law to harass voters and impede their exercise of their rights.”
Former Republican Sens. John Danforth of Missouri and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire are chairing an “Honest and Open Elections Committee” on behalf of the McCain campaign to take action against voter fraud. The GOP has asked Obama to participate, but the Democrats have declined.
Bauer said the committee will impede people from voting rather than safeguarding against voter fraud.
“They get a United States senator who's the head of the Republican ticket doing everything he can to make it harder for them to be -- to vote, making it harder for them to get through the lines quickly, making it harder for them to cast their ballot without impediment, without harassment, without humiliation,” Bauer told reporters.

 Exclusive: Former FBI In Charge of Operations – FBI 'Would Not Have Hired' Someone with Obama's Associations

Exclusive: Former FBI In Charge of Operations – FBI 'Would Not Have Hired' Someone with Obama's Associations

The Editors

Recently, FSM sat down with Buck Revell, former Associate Deputy Director of the FBI who was in charge of all FBI operations before his retirement in 1994. What he has to say about the idea of a security clearance for Barack Obama, a man who could be our next president, is stunning and sobering, to say the least.

FSM: It has been said that Sen. Obama would not be able to get a security clearance now if he applied for one because of the many relationships he has had in the past, and now, with people like Khalid al-Mansour and Bill Ayers. Is that true?

BR: Well, of course, all I can do to render my opinion is to the time I served in government, and I retired after 35 years in 1994. But at one time I was the Assistant Director in charge of the administrative division of the FBI, which as part of its duties was hiring and clearing personnel, and certainly we would not have hired during my tenure a person that had the background, associates and relationships that Obama has had over his adult life.

Now, that’s not saying that he has engaged in any illegal or improper activity, but when you associate with people of the likes of Bill Ayers, who is not only a known radical but an unrepentant radical, and teaches a radical socialism – some would say communist – approach to government, and espouses the use of violence if “necessary,” and he determines when it’s necessary, this is not the kind of person that an association with – and an association that was both voluntary and lengthy – would give you the necessary satisfaction that the applicant himself was not involved to some degree or at least acknowledged and agreed with parts of that person’s social or political agenda.

Certainly with the Rev. Wright, if we had an individual who was coming in for an agent application, and he belonged to the Aryan Nation’s Church and he had as his counselor and pastor Richard Gibb Butler, who was a radical white extremist, we would not have considered that person for a position in the Bureau because that is essentially a relationship with a racist entity; and being counseled by a vehement racist – whether he is black, white, red or brown – in and of itself is reason not to give someone access to highly classified information or a job in government that requires that. 

Obama’s relationships with various hoodlum figures in the Chicago area certainly would be something to look into and you’d have to determine the extent and degree of that relationship to make that determination, but it would be examined very carefully. I have no knowledge that Obama himself has engaged in any illegal or improper activities; I don’t know that he has himself engaged in the radical activities that his associates have – or certainly the criminal activities that they have – but the fact that he knowingly associated with people – and he knew their backgrounds and he continued to associate with them – would have, in my opinion, been disqualifying for special agent position, an analyst position, in fact any position that required a security clearance.

By what has been reported and to some degree acknowledged, would in my view, have disqualified him for a position in the FBI based upon the fact that he wouldn’t have qualified for a security clearance.

FSM: It sounds to me that the FBI operates less on the idea of “guilt by association” and more on the idea of “a man is known by the company he keeps.”

BR: It’s not guilt by association, but it’s essentially if you associate with people on a continuing basis who have posed a threat to our nation by either advocating anarchy and/or an overthrow of the government or who are racist and advocate the potential of racial conflict or who are engaged in criminal activities, then you have not shown good judgment. You have not shown that you are the kind of person who can differentiate between those who are appropriate to associate with and those who are not. So on the basis of the judgment issue, and then of course, if you found any specific activity, you’d judge that as well. But just the judgment in continuing to associate with people that he knew were engaging in racist and radical, violence-prone socialist activities would be sufficient to disqualify him from consideration for the top secret clearance and the FBI position.

Now, you may get some people in the Bureau today to say “well, that’s not so,” but I’m telling you what it would have been when I was there, and I certainly stand by that.  

FSM: Is it possible if someone like that were to achieve the office of the presidency, might there be some kind of effort among our intelligence services to watch him as he goes through his daily routines? Would anyone worry because of some of these associations or that he might divulge any of the classified information he will be seeing? That’s what worries many Americans.   

BR: Well even the president can’t divulge classified information to unauthorized persons. Now, he has the ultimate authority to declassify information, but certainly if he declassified something that was very sensitive that resulted in harm to our society, he’d be subject to an impeachment process because the president is not above the law. We found that with President Nixon and then with investigations into the Iran Contra affair and so forth. Whether anyone would withhold information from him, as Commander-in-Chief, he is entitled to all of the information that is relevant to his position and decision-making process. Certainly, you would not expect that to be done.

And the president has to sign off on covert operations, so agencies and other services that carry out covert operations of a significant type have to be signed off on by the president. So I suspect if there was an instance where covert operations were presented and declined, they might be much less likely to present covert operations that would be necessary to prevent some type of action against the United States. So I think the agencies would certainly provide the president all the relevant intelligence. If they believed it was being abused, it would become more constrained and certainly if there was evidence it was abused and it was clearly and illegal and improper act – if he didn’t go through the declassification process – that would be an offense that could be taken before the Congress to consider the impeachment process.

So a president is not above the law and can be held accountable by the law, but the individual agencies or agents of those agencies shouldn’t withhold information from the president unless there is an ongoing and formal process that would indicate he’s not trustworthy to have that information.

FSM: It seems that there are three unsavory groups with whom Sen. Obama has had relationships, and they are 1) the people who have ties or relationships, or have been named as unindicted co-conspirators to, Islamic terrorists or organizations – people who are referred to as “radical Islamists”; 2) the Black Liberation Theology or Black Nationalist people such as Rev. Jeremiah Wright and 3) the domestic terrorists, such as Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground. In these three major groups, do you consider them all to be the same in terms of their threat to American freedoms?

BR: Well I don’t consider the Rev. Wright to be a threat. I consider him to be a bigot and a racist and anyone who would sit and listen to him certainly is not showing good judgment in associating with the person… just like it would be if it was a minister who was a member of the KKK and a white politician would be a part of that congregation and sit and listen to him rant about blacks and Hispanics and Catholics and whomever didn’t fit their particular mold. And we certainly had many ministers in the U.S. in the south during the ‘50s and ‘60s who associating with them would have been a very difficult circumstance if a person had applied to be an FBI employee because they were clearly involved with the white racist element.

But the Wright situation, I don’t think that there was, to my knowledge, that there was a group coming out of that church who were involved in committing hate crimes or things of that nature. It was simply that Obama allowed himself to be caught up in all this white-hate rhetoric – hate-America rhetoric – that he should have, as an educated and respected member of the community, said “This is not acceptable, this is not American, this is not the way to go and either you cease and desist or I’m leaving this church.” That’s the choice that all of us have and if you don’t agree with what is being said, then you just disassociate.

As far as the relationships with Ayers and the Islamic groups, that may well have been his attempt to reach out and broaden the relationships, but if they are inappropriate because they have not reformed themselves and they still advocate an anti-American bias, either through direct action through civil disobedience, or in some cases violence, I find it very troublesome that he showed the lack of judgment to disassociate himself from the radical fringe, whether it be the Islamists or the social activists such as the Weather Underground element, which were essentially making a cross between the anarchists and communists – they couldn’t quite decide what they were – Ché Guevara was their idol and they engaged in direct action by setting off bombs, and actually, some of the elements of that group killed police officers and innocent bystanders. This was not a protest organization…it was a terrorist organization.

FSM: Considering this situation we find ourselves in today, do you think presidential candidates should be vetted more before they are allowed even to run for their party’s nomination?

BR: Well that’s very difficult to say how you would do that – no elected official – senator or congressman or the vice president or president – goes through a security clearance process. The very election process itself is considered vetting. Now there have been many members of congress that we would not provide information to. Even though they are entitled to a security clearance doesn’t mean that agencies that have discretion would trust them, and we knew that there were some that we could not trust. With the president and the vice president you really have no choice but to provide the information unless and until you determine that it’s being abused and then you have to take the action of going to the attorney general, and if the attorney general won’t act, you go to the oversight committees of the Congress to explain that there have been inappropriate actions taken on highly sensitive and classified information. Now that’s a drastic step but, on the other hand, it’s one that is called for under the law and it’s exactly what should be done if either the president or the vice president is engaging in unlawful activity.

FSM: Has that ever happened where you had to go to the oversight committees and so forth?

BR: Well actually during the Watergate investigation there were Congressional committees that came out of the ongoing criminal investigation, and of course those committees eventually ended up in making recommendations for impeachment. In the Iran Contra affair, the president had to give a statement under oath. He also was considered a potential suspect in improper or illegal activities. It was determined that he hadn’t leaked any information or taken any action that was improper. But certainly you cannot indict a sitting president but you can take an action that would result in impeachment and once a person is impeached, tried in the Senate and convicted and removed, then they can be charged as any other citizen.

FSM: OK. Well, thank you very much for your time today; you’ve been very generous with it, and we appreciate it a lot.

BR: You’re very welcome.

Brought to you by the editors and research staff of FamilySecurityMatters.org

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www.newsmax.com

Hillary Backers Decry Massive Obama Vote Fraud

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman

With accusations of voter registration fraud swirling as early voting begins in many states, some Hillary Clinton supporters are saying: “I told you so.”
Already in Iowa, the Obama campaign was breaking the rules, busing in supporters from neighboring states to vote illegally in the first contest in the primaries and physically intimidating Hillary supporters, they say.
Obama’s surprisingly strong win in Iowa, which defied all the polls, propelled his upstart candidacy to front-runner status. But Lynette Long, a Hillary supporter from Bethesda, Md., who has a long and respected academic career, believes Obama’s victory in Iowa and in 12 other caucus states was no miracle. “It was fraud,” she told Newsmax.
Long has spent several months studying the caucus and primary results.
“After studying the procedures and results from all 14 caucus states, interviewing dozens of witnesses, and reviewing hundreds of personal stories, my conclusion is that the Obama campaign willfully and intentionally defrauded the American public by systematically undermining the caucus process,” she said.
In Hawaii, for example, the caucus organizers ran out of ballots, so Obama operatives created more from Post-its and scraps of paper and dumped them into ice cream buckets. “The caucuses ended up with more ballots than participants, a sure sign of voter fraud,” Long said.
In Nevada, Obama supporters upturned a wheelchair-bound woman who wanted to caucus for Hillary, flushed Clinton ballots down the toilets, and told union members they could vote only if their names were on the list of Obama supporters.
In Texas, more than 2,000 Clinton and Edwards supporters filed complaints with the state Democratic Party because of the massive fraud. The party acknowledged that the Obama campaign’s actions “amount to criminal violations” and ordered them to be reported to state and federal law enforcement, but nothing happened.
In caucus after caucus, Obama bused in supporters from out of state, intimidated elderly voters and women, and stole election packets so Hillary supporters couldn’t vote. Thanks to these and other strong-arm tactics, Obama won victories in all but one of the caucuses, even in states such as Maine where Hillary had been leading by double digits in the polls.
Obama’s win in the caucuses, which were smaller events than the primaries and were run by the party, not the states, gave him the margin of victory he needed to win a razor-thin majority in the delegate count going into the Democratic National Convention.
Without these caucus wins, which Long and others claim were based on fraud, Clinton would be the Democrats’ nominee running against John McCain.
Citing a detailed report on the voting results and delegate accounts by accountant Piniel Cronin, “there were only four pledged delegates between Hillary and Obama once you discount caucus fraud,” Long said.
Dr. Long has compiled many of these eyewitness reports from the 14 caucus states in a 98-page, single-spaced report and in an interactive Web site: www.caucusanalysis.org.
ACORN involvement
The Obama campaign recently admitted that it paid an affiliate of ACORN, the controversial community organizer that Obama represented in Chicago, more than $832,00 for “voter turnout” work during the primaries. The campaign initially claimed the money had been spent on “staging, sound and light” and “advance work.”
State and federal law enforcement in 11 states are investigating allegations of voter registration fraud against the Obama campaign. ACORN workers repeatedly registered voters in the name of “Mickey Mouse,” and registered the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys twice: once in Nevada, and again in Minnesota.
A group that has worked with ACORN in the past registered a dead goldfish under the name “Princess Nudelman” in Illinois. When reporters informed Beth Nudelman, a Democrat, that her former pet was a registered voter, she said, “This person is a dead fish."
ACORN was known for its “intimidation tactics,” said independent scholar Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., who has researched Obama’s long-standing ties to the group.
Fully 30 percent of 1.3 million new voters ACORN claims to have registered this year are believed to be illegitimate.
Long shared with Newsmax some of the emails and sworn affidavits she received from Hillary supporters who witnessed first-hand the thuggish tactics employed by Obama campaign operatives in Iowa and elsewhere.
Jeff, a precinct captain for Clinton from Davenport, Iowa, thought his caucus was in the bag for his candidate, until just minutes before the voting actually began.
“From 6-6:30 p.m., it appeared as I had expected. Young, old males, females, Hispanics, whites, gay and lesbian friends arriving. Very heavily for Ms. Clinton, a fair amount for Edwards and some stragglers for Obama,” he said.
That makeup corresponded to what he had witnessed from many precinct walks he had made through local neighborhoods.
“My mind began to feel victory for my lady,’ he said. “THEN: at 6:50 p.m., over 75 people of African-American descent came walking in, passed the tables and sat in the Obama section. I knew one of them from my canvassing. I knew another one who did not live in this precinct. And aside from four or five families that live on Hillandale Road, there are no other black people in this unusually white precinct. And one of those black couples were in my Hillary section,” he said.
Thanks to the last-minute influx of unknown Obama supporters, Obama won twice the number of delegates from the precinct as Hillary Clinton.
After it was over, “a very large bus was seen in the parking lot afterwards carrying these folks back” to Illinois, Jeff said.
Obama’s flagrant busing of out-of-state caucus participants from Illinois was so obvious that even Joe Biden — today his running mate, then his rival — pointed it out at the time.
At a campaign stop before the Jan. 3 caucus at the JJ Diner in Des Moines, Biden “said what we were all thinking when he got on stage and said, ‘Hello Iowa!’ and then turned to Barack’s crowd and shouted, ‘and Hello Chicago!’” another precinct captain for Hillary told Long.
Thanks to Illinois campaign workers bused across the border into Iowa, all the precincts in eastern Iowa went for Obama, guaranteeing his win in the caucuses, Long said.
Obama supporters were also bused into northeast Iowa from Omaha, Nebraska, where Obama campaign workers were seen handing out “i-pods and free stuff: T-shirts, clothes, shoes, and free meals” to students and people in homeless shelters,” according to eyewitness reports Long collected.
In Iowa City, red and white chartered buses with Illinois license plates arrived from Illinois packed with boisterous African-American high school students, who came to caucus for Obama in Iowa after being recruited by Obama campaign workers.
2,000 complaints in Texas
In a change in the Democratic National Committee rules for this year’s election season, four states had caucuses and primaries: Washington, Nebraska, Idaho, and Texas. “But Texas is the only one that counted both the caucus result and the primary result,” Long told Newsmax. “The others didn’t count the primary at all, calling it a ‘beauty contest.’”
Because caucuses are more informal, and can last hours, they tend to favor candidates with a strong ground operation or whose supporters use strong-arm tactics to intimidate their rivals.
“There is inherent voter disenfranchisement in the caucuses,” Long said. “Women are less likely to go to caucuses than men, because they don’t like the public nature of the caucus. The elderly are less likely to go to a caucus. People who work shifts can’t go if they work the night shift. And parents with young children can’t go out for four hours on a week night. All these people are traditionally Clinton supporters,” she said.
But Obama’s victories in the caucuses weren’t the result of better organization, Long insists. “It was fraud.”
In state after state, Hillary was leading Obama in the polls right up until the last minute, when Obama won a landslide victory in the caucuses.
The discrepancies between the polls and the caucus results were stunning, Long told Newsmax. The most flagrant example was Minnesota. A Minnesota Public Radio/Humphrey Institute poll just one week before the Feb. 5 caucus gave Hillary a 7-point lead over Obama, 40-33.
But when the Minnesota caucus results were counted, Obama won by a landslide, with 66.39 percent to just 32.23 percent for Hillary, giving him 48 delegates, compared with 24 for Clinton.
“No poll is that far off,” Long told Newsmax.
Similar disparities occurred in 13 of 14 caucus states.
In Colorado and Idaho, Obama had a 2-point edge over Hillary Clinton in the polls, but won by more than 2-1 in the caucuses, sweeping most delegates.
In Kansas, Hillary had a slight edge over Obama in the polls, but Obama won 74 percent of the votes in the caucus and most of the delegates. In nearly every state, he bested the pre-caucus polls by anywhere from 12 percent to more than 30 percent.
This year’s primary rules for the Democrats favored the caucus states over the primary states.
“Caucus states made up only 1.1 million (3 percent) of all Democratic votes, but selected 626 (15 percent) of the delegates,” says Gigi Gaston, a filmmaker who has made a documentary on the caucus fraud.
In Texas alone, she says, there were more than 2,000 complaints from Hillary Clinton and John Edwards supporters of Obama’s strong-arm tactics.
One Hillary supporter, who appears in Gaston’s new film, “We Will Not Be Silenced,” says she received death threats from Obama supporters after they saw her address in an online video she made to document fraud during the Texas caucus. “People called me a whore and a skank,” she said.
John Siegel, El Paso Area Captain for Hillary, said, “Some people saw outright cheating. Other people just saw strong-arm tactics. I saw fraud.”
Another woman, who was not identified in the film, described the sign-in process. “You’re supposed to sign your names on these sheets. The sheets are supposed to be controlled, and passed out — this is kind of how you maintain order. None of that was done. The sheets were just flying all over the place. You could put in your own names. You could add your own sheets or anything. It was just filled with fraud.”
Other witnesses described how Obama supporters went through the crowds at the caucus telling Hillary supporters they could go home because their votes had been counted, when in fact no vote count had yet taken place.
“I couldn’t believe this was happening,” one woman said in the film. “I thought this only happened in Third World countries.”
On election day in Texas, Clinton campaign lawyer Lyn Utrecht issued a news release that the national media widely ignored.
“The campaign legal hot line has been flooded with calls containing specific accusations of irregularities and voter intimidation against the Obama campaign,” she wrote. “This activity is undemocratic, probably illegal, and reflects a wanton disregard for the caucus process.”
She identified 18 separate precincts where Obama operatives had removed voting packets before the Clinton voters could arrive, despite a written warning from the state party not to remove them.
The hot line also received numerous calls during the day that “the Obama campaign has taken over caucus sites and locked the doors, excluding Clinton campaign supporters from participating in the caucus,” she wrote.
“There are numerous instances of Obama supporters filing out precinct convention sign-in sheets during the day and submitting them as completed vote totals at caucus. This is expressly against the rules,” she added.
But no one seemed to care.
Despite Clinton’s three-and-a-half point win in the Texas primary — 50.87 percent to 47.39 percent —Obama beat her in the caucus the same day by 56 to 43.7 percent, giving him a 38-to-29 advantage in delegates.
Linda Hayes investigated the results at the precinct level in three state Senate districts. Under the rules of the Texas Democratic Party, participants in the caucuses had to reside in the precinct where they were caucusing, and had to have voted in the Democratic primary that same day.
When she began to see the results coming in from the precincts that were wildly at variance with the primary results, “I could see that something was wrong,” Hayes said.
Hayes says she found numerous anomalies as she went through the precinct sign-in sheets.
“Many, many, many Obama people either came to the wrong precinct, they did not sign in properly, they did not show ID, or they did not vote that day.” And yet, their votes were counted.
In a letter to Rep. Lois Capps, a Clinton supporter calling himself “Pacific John,” described the fraud he had witnessed during the caucuses.
“On election night in El Paso, it became obvious that the Obama field campaign was designed to steal caucuses. Prior to that, it was impossible for me to imagine the level of attempted fraud and disruption we would see,” he wrote.
“We saw stolen precincts where Obama organizers fabricated counts, made false entries on sign-in sheets, suppressed delegate counts, and suppressed caucus voters. We saw patterns such as missing electronic access code sheets and precinct packets taken before the legal time, like elsewhere in the state. Obama volunteers illegally took convention materials state-wide, with attempts as early as 6:30 am.”
The story of how Obama stole the Democratic Party caucuses — and consequently, the Democratic Party nomination — is important not just because it prefigures potential voter fraud in the Nov. 4 presidential election, which is under way.
It’s important because it fits a pattern that Chicago journalists and a few national and international commentators have noticed in all of the elections Obama has won in his career.
NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher described Obama’s first election victory, for the Illinois state Senate, in a recent commentary that appeared in the London Telegraph.
“Mr. Obama won a seat in the state Senate in 1996 by the unorthodox means of having surrogates successfully challenge the hundreds of nomination signatures that candidates submit. His Democratic rivals, including Alice Palmer, the incumbent, were all disqualified,” Fletcher wrote.
Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate “was even more curious,” conservative columnist Tony Blankley wrote in The Washington Times.
Citing an account that appeared in The Times of London, Blankley described how Obama managed to squeeze out his main Democratic rival, Blair Hull, after divorce papers revealed allegations that Hull had allegedly made a death threat to his former wife.
Then in the general election, “lightning struck again,” Blankley wrote, when his Republican opponent, wealthy businessman Jack Ryan, was forced to withdraw in extremis after his divorce papers revealed details of his sexual life with his former wife.
Just weeks before the election, the Illinois Republican party called on Alan Keyes of Maryland to challenge Obama in the general election. Obama won a landslide victory.
“Mr. Obama’s elections are pregnant with the implications that he has so far gamed every office he has sought by underhanded and sordid means,” Blankley wrote, while “the American media has let these extraordinary events simply pass without significant comment.”
Hillary Clinton supporters, belatedly, now agree.
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.   

ABC columnist Michael Malone protests:

What I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del. If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography....
Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?
The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber. Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.
So much indeed. That’s why, as Mark Steyn observes, the media has had a feeding frenzy over Sarah Palin’s clothes allowance while all but ignoring the evidence of criminal fundraising for the Obama campaign being facilitated by the Obama campaign :

The gentleman who started the ball rolling made four donations under the names ‘John Galt’, ‘Saddam Hussein’, ‘Osama bin Laden’, and ‘William Ayers’, all using the same credit card number. He wrote this morning to say that all four donations have been charged to his card and the money has now left his account. Again, it’s worth pointing out: in order to enable the most basic card fraud of all - multiple names using a single credit card number - the Obama campaign had to manually disable all the default security checks provided by their merchant processor.

Now look at this. Back in April, the LA Times ran this story reporting on the going-away party for Rashid Khalidi, Obama’s close friend, who justifies Palestinian violence against Israel and who was leaving for a job in New York. Khalidi is a deeply troubling individual, a former PLO operative and close friend of unreprentant former Weatherman terrorist William Ayers. As I have reported before, in 2000 Khalidi and his wife Mona held a fundraiser for Obama’s unsuccessful congressional bid. The next year, an Arab group whose board was headed by Mona Khalidi received a $40,000 grant from the Woods Fund of Chicago when Obama was on the fund’s board of directors. Obama has said that his many talks with the Khalidis had been
consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases... It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation -- a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table, but around this entire world.’

The LA Times reported:
During the dinner a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, ‘then you will never see a day of peace.’ One speaker likened ‘Zionist settlers on the West Bank’ to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been ‘blinded by ideology.’

The paper reported that not only had Obama been present at the party but had praised Khalidi – and it actually had obtained a videotape of the whole event. Yet it has refused to make this video public – even though it would be of great interest, to put it mildly, to see who else was there. Indeed, as the now defunct New York Sun reported:
In Chicago, the Khalidis founded the Arab American Action Network, and Mona Khalidi served as its president. A big farewell dinner was held in their honor by AAAN with a commemorative book filled with testimonials from their friends and political allies. These included the left wing anti-war group Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers (my emphasis).

As Gateway Pundit comments:
It's hard to imagine that the LA Times would hold onto a video of Sarah Palin praising an antisemitic radical and former PLO operative...But, that is today's mainstream media.
But now look at what happens when the media does begin to do its job properly. As the Orlando Sentinel reported:
WFTV-Channel 9's Barbara West conducted a satellite interview with Sen. Joe Biden on Thursday. West wondered about Sen. Barack Obama's comment, to Joe the Plumber, about spreading the wealth. She quoted Karl Marx and asked how Obama isn't being a Marxist with the ‘spreading the wealth’ comment. ‘Are you joking?’ said Biden, who is Obama's running mate. ‘No,’ West said. West later asked Biden about his comments that Obama could be tested early on as president. She wondered if the Delaware senator was saying America's days as the world’s leading power were over. ‘I don't know who's writing your questions,’ Biden shot back. Biden so disliked West's line of questioning that the Obama campaign cancelled a WFTV interview with Jill Biden, the candidate's wife.
In that interview, Biden also flatly denied that the Obama campaign was funding corrupt Acorn to deliver voter registration. But as the Investor’s Business Daily has reported, it did – and then tried to hide it:
Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for ‘advance work.’)
At NRO Mark Levin identifies a terrifying historical echo when he shudders that, such is the tide of irrationality running in this campaign, the American public appears to be falling under the cult-like spell of an authoritarian demagogue. He is surely correct. For all Obama’s laid-back, attractive appearance this election is being fought in an atmosphere of menace. Menace in the way ACORN is intimidating voters into multiple registrations. Menace in the way criminal donations to the Obama campaign have been institutionalised. Menace in the serial lies being told by Obama, Biden and the campaign rebuttal team. Menace in the way the few remaining proper journalists such as Stanley Kurtz are finding sources of information shut down and themselves shut out when they attempt to probe Obama’s deeply dubious associations. Menace in the smears and hysterical abuse directed at anyone who questions The One. Menace in the threat of violence if Obama doesn’t win. Menace in the pre-emptive smear that the only thing that could bring about an Obama defeat is the inherent racism of the American voters – a smear that potentially identifies all those who vote against him as public enemies.
Over the past seven years, the media has created the Big Lie that America is the biggest rogue state in the world, with Israel its proxy.  Now it is ensuring that a man who will act on that very premise to crush America and destroy Israel will be placed in the White House to do so. It is not just that the west’s Big Media can no longer be trusted. It has become the most important weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of the free world.
 
http://americansentinel2.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/barack-obama-master-of-the-half-truth/

Barack Obama, Master Of The Half-Truth

Posted by jay1949 under Election 2008, McCain-Palin, Obama-Biden, Politics | Tags: half truth, McCain, Obama, trust |

"A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent." - - William Blake.
Although many have criticized Barack Obama as inexperienced, there is one area in which he must be acknowledged as a master: the use of the half-truth. So many examples . . . which to choose?
The "John McCain Is A Socialist, Too" Half-Truth: Here's the half-truth by Obama:  "What I want to do is repeal the Bush tax cuts; John McCain opposed those tax cuts; so if I'm a socialist, John McCain is a socialist, too."  WTF? The other half of the truth:  Obama wants to use tax revenues to redistribute income (to, in his words, "spread the wealth around"); McCain does not.  Redistribution of wealth is a socialist tenet ("From each according to his means, to each according to his needs").
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Albert Einstein's last writing, unfinished when he died, was a draft of a speech to mark Israel's Independence Day. In the draft, Einstein wrote, "You may think this is a small and insignificant problem and that there are more serious things to worry about. But this is not true. In matters of truth and justice there can be no distinction between big problems and small…Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs…."
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The "McCain Wants To Tax Your Health Insurance Benefits" Half-Truth: This one is all over the airwaves in Obama ads.  "John McCain's health care plan will tax your employer-provided health care benefits!" OMG! The other half of the truth: the value of employer-provided health care plans would be included in income BUT would be more than offset by the $5,000.00 tax credit.  It works this way:  assume John Q. Taxpayer has $50,000 in taxable income and employer-provided health care of $10,000 (the average is actually about $6,000, but let's go high to make the point).  John Q's marginal tax rate is 25%; adding $10,000 to his taxable income will therefore raise his Federal tax liability by $2,500 - - HALF of the $5,000 tax credit amount.
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"He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much." - - Luke 16:10 (New American Standard Bible).
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I could gave many more examples - - William Ayers "is a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and so on.  This is all part of Obama's campaign of smoke and mirrors.