Internet Scofflaw

The London Times reports:

Barack Obama’s senior advisers have drawn up plans to lower expectations for his presidency if he wins next week’s election, amid concerns that many of his euphoric supporters are harbouring unrealistic hopes of what he can achieve.

The sudden financial crisis and the prospect of a deep and painful recession have increased the urgency inside the Obama team to bring people down to earth, after a campaign in which his soaring rhetoric and promises of “hope” and “change” are now confronted with the reality of a stricken economy.

One senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the transition, immediately after the election, were critical, “so there’s not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair”.

Unrealistic expectations? Where could those have come from?

Note that the expectation-lowering is scheduled for immediately after the election. The Times suggests that Obama may already be starting to lower expectations, but I see just the opposite, an ever-growing list of crazy promises.

Fox News reports:

Journalists from three major newspapers that endorsed John McCain have been booted from Barack Obama’s campaign plane for the final leg of the presidential race.

The Washington Times reported Friday that it was notified of the Obama campaign’s decision Thursday evening — even though the paper has covered Obama from the start.

Executive Editor John Solomon told FOXNews.com that the Obama campaign said it didn’t have enough seats on the plane, but “I don’t think the explanation makes sense to us.”

“We’ve been traveling since 2007 with him. … We’re a relevant newspaper — every day we break news,” Solomon said. “And to suddenly be kicked off the plane for people who haven’t covered it as aggressively or thoroughly as we are … it sort of feels unfair.”

He said the newspaper protested but was turned down again by the campaign.

“I can only hope that the candidate who describes himself as wanting to unite the nation doesn’t have some sort of litmus test for who he decides gets to cover the campaign,” Solomon said, noting that the Obama campaign’s decision came just two days after the paper endorsed McCain.

The New York Post and Dallas Morning News also have been kicked off Obama’s plane.

(Via Instapundit.)

I’ve noted before that Obama is remarkably thin-skinned.  He’s gotten a free ride from almost the entire media, but he wants it to be unanimous.  For the few major papers that endorse his opponent, there are consequences.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Just for fun: imagine the furor if President Bush had booted newspapers that endorsed John Kerry.

Slate shows that Obama could easily disclose his small-donor list if he wanted to do so. They produce a searchable database (from dummy information, obviously) in a couple of hours using Microsoft Excel and one commodity PC. This puts the lie to the campaign’s claim that it’s infeasible for them to do so.

Slate suggests that they ought to do so, writing:

Politically, there would be several advantages in releasing the names. Obama has campaigned (effectively) on a platform of making government more transparent, citing his efforts to do so in Chicago and Washington as signature achievements. He has also disclosed the bundlers who raise large amounts of money for his campaign. Finally, making the list public would rebut McCain’s broad and unsubstantiated claims that the list (and the huge sums of money it represents) is shot through with fraud.

(They write this without a hint of irony.)  Slate is right, it would be to his advantage to release the list, if indeed he has nothing to hide.  Too bad Slate cannot see the implications of their own experiment.

(Via Instapundit.)

ABC’s Jake Tapper likens Obama to Santa Claus, with his “astoundingly lengthy” list of promises given in a single campaign appearance.  I think he reminds me more of Homer Simpson.

(Via Instapundit.)

He predicts the Democrats will end up with 58.  (Via the Corner.)

CBS says Obama’s promises don’t add up:

The very bigness of [Obama's] ideas is the problem: he seems blind to the concept his numbers don’t add up.

Obama has already proposed a new stimulus package of $188 billion over two years. His tax cuts will cost $85 billion a year. His “army of new teachers”: $18 billion. Renewable energy: $15 billion. CBS News and various independent experts estimate Obama’s total first year spending could exceed $280 billion.

Still Obama repeated his claim he can find the money to pay for every proposal.

“I’ve offered spending cuts above and beyond their cost,” he has said.

The fact is the savings Obama has identified do not cover his spending. According to a CBS News estimate, he’s around $90 billion short.

(Via Instapundit.)

Well, the tax cuts won’t survive to inauguration day. That would put him only $5 short, by CBS’s estimate.

The real bad news is the numbers are far worse than this. They’re based on the idea that government action won’t change individual behavior (except when it’s supposed to). Stifling the economy with high taxes and regulation will lead to slower economic activity and lower tax revenues. His tax hikes won’t raise the projected revenue and his revenue-neutral regulation won’t be. His tax cuts might cost less than projected, but that’s moot since they’ll never happen.

According to the Rendell administration, preventing voter fraud is racist:

The head of the [Luzerne] county bureau of elections hasn’t encountered any suspected voter registration fraud, but allegations in other parts of Pennsylvania have sparked a lawsuit and a verbal exchange between a state official and the Republican Party.

The Pennsylvania Republican Party filed a lawsuit to assure the vote count is accurate – a move that Gov. Ed Rendell’s press secretary described as a “Jim Crow attitude.”

Playing the race card is probably just his reflex response, but if we take him seriously, he seems to be saying that preventing voter fraud hurts blacks.  So isn’t he saying that blacks are likely to commit voter fraud?  Doesn’t that make him the racist? (Answer: Of course not, he’s a Democrat.)

(Via Hot Air.)

The London Times has located Obama’s beloved aunt, living in poverty in South Boston:

Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.

A second relative believed to be the long-lost “Uncle Omar” described in the book was beaten by armed robbers with a “sawed-off rifle” while working in a corner shop in the Dorchester area of the city. He was later evicted from his one-bedroom flat for failing to pay $2,324.20 (£1,488) arrears, according to the Boston Housing Court.

Furthermore:

The most damning part of the Obama aunt story is that once his campaign found her living in squalor they told her to not talk to the press until after the election, but they didn’t try to help her.

She did as she was asked, too. I guess she likes him more than he likes her.

AFTERTHOUGHT: How sad is it that it falls to British newspapers to do the job of investigating our leading presidential candidate?

Here. (Via the Corner.)

Mark Steyn adds:

This is an amazing race. The incumbent president has approval ratings somewhere between Robert Mugabe and the ebola virus. The economy is supposedly on the brink of global Armageddon. McCain has only $80 million to spend, while Obama’s burning through $600 mil as fast as he can, and he doesn’t really need to spend a dime given the wall-to-wall media adoration. And tonight Chris Matthews’ doctors announced that his leg tingle has metastasized leaving his entire body like a vibrating cellphone whose ringtone is locked on “I’m In Love, I’m In Love, I’m In Love, I’m In Love, I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy.”

And yet an old cranky broke loser is within two or three points of the King of the World. Strange.

Elizabeth Edwards criticizes McCain’s health care proposals, because they leave decisions up to individuals. This is a bad thing (!), because individuals frequently “make stupid economics decisions.”

(Via the Corner.)

Sheesh:

Dear Senator Obama:

Two recent campaign advertisements seriously misrepresent the views of my client, The Heritage Foundation. They suggest, quite falsely, that The Heritage Foundation and one of its analysts support your tax plan.

The print ad on your Website as well as your ad entitled “Try This” reference a quote from policy analyst Rea Hederman. In fact, Mr. Hederman never said what is quoted there. Rather, the words you quote are from a New York Sun reporter who interviewed Mr. Hederman and summarized his views erroneously.

That the reporter’s summary is erroneous is evident from the actual quotes from Mr. Hederman presented in the article, which make it quite clear that Mr. Hederman believes your tax plan would be bad not only for the country, but for the middle class. By omitting the direct quotes from Heritage that are contained in the article and attributing to Heritage a conflicting statement not made by its analyst, the advertisement appears to be an intentional attempt to mislead.

Surely there can be no doubt within your campaign as to how Heritage truly views your tax plan.

Isn’t there a rule about keeping your lies plausible?  One might just as well claim the New York Times endorsed John McCain.

(Via Instapundit.)

Pajamas Media interviews Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated the Weather Underground for the FBI. He was asked about Ayers’s plans for genocide in America:

Pajamas Media: Was this merely an academic matter to them, or were they serious about killing 25 million Americans that would not bend to their political will?

Larry Grathwohl: I suppose you could consider this a purely academic discussion in that the Weathermen never had the opportunity to implement their political ends. However, I can assure you that this was not the case. There was an absolute belief that they, along with the international revolutionary movement, would cause the collapse of the United States and that they would be in charge. Nixon was of great concern and how his end would be conducted. This may sound absurd in today’s context, but the Weatherman believed they would succeed.

Pajamas Media: Did they ever devise a cover story to explain to the rest of America how roughly one in ten disappeared?

Larry Grathwohl: When I suggested that this might be a difficult proposition they looked at me like I had three heads. They would be in charge! They would be in control! Who would oppose them? Lambs to the slaughter I guess.

Pajamas Media: Were any of those Weathermen involved in concocting this plan particularly excited or enthusiastic about the death camps, or was it merely a means to an end?

Larry Grathwohl: Of course they were enthusiastic as it was representative of the success of “the revolution.”

Obama’s principal collaboration with Ayers was on education policy in Chicago.  Grathwohl also commented on Ayers’s educational views, and on his connection with Obama:

Pajamas Media: Would you let your children attend a college or university class taught by Ayers or his wife, Bernadine Dohrn? What would you tell parents who have had their children exposed to Ayers’ academic programs, like the Small Schools Workshop?

Larry Grathwohl: As for Billy’s ideas on education, isn’t it apparent? Reading, writing, and arithmetic aren’t important! Radicalism is what’s important. Fits right in with the Billy Ayers view of creating mindless soldiers to follow his commands — where best to lay the foundations of a revolution than with the young?

Pajamas Media: Do you think there is there any way that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama could not have known that Bill Ayers was a domestic terrorist? Is there any reason that the American people should accept Barack Obama’s newest excuse about his relationship with Bill Ayers, where Obama claimed that he thought Ayers was “reformed”?

Larry Grathwohl: If we are to believe Mr. Obama, he just didn’t know Billy was as radical as he apparently is. Really? Just like he didn’t know the Rev. Wright was as radical as he is? Obama is a politician and he wants me to believe that he never discussed politics with the Rev Wright or Billy Ayers?

Obama has defended his relationship with Ayers, saying that he was only 8 when Ayers’s criminal activities took place, but Grathwohl says that Ayers’s radicalism is hardly a thing of the past:

Pajamas Media: Bill Ayers came out of hiding around 1980, became an college professor, and has served on numerous boards and foundations. Do you think he’s changed in his radicalism?

Larry Grathwohl: Has Billy changed? I hardly think so.

Pajamas Media: If conditions permitted, do you think Ayers would still engage in violence to further a political agenda?

Larry Grathwohl: He has acknowledged his support of anti-American groups and stated he felt that the Weathermen hadn’t done enough.

Pajamas Media: Do you consider Bill Ayers an attempted mass murderer?

Larry Grathwohl: I’m not certain Billy is a mass [murderer]; his ego just wants him to be in charge. Note that Billy never does anything that involves risk. He has no problem allowing his women to do the evil task, Diane Oughton and even Bernardine, but never him. As for what he might do, hasn’t he said he doesn’t rule out the possibility of future bombings? [Ayers said he didn't "want to discount the possibility" in this New York Times article from  September 11, 2001. -- Ed.]

By the way, isn’t this an obvious interview to conduct?  But it had to fall to Pajamas Media to do it, because the mainstream media’s investigative reporters are busy interviewing John McCain’s daughter’s friends and such.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

Good for CBS for covering this story.  Obama takes some heat for his massive non-transparency, but even more heat where he is transparent.

I shouldn’t have to compliment a network for covering such an obvious story, but there you go.

One paper calls it for Obama.  (Via the Corner.)

Fox News reports:

Joe Biden on Monday compared Barack Obama to Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. . .

Biden . . . stressed that his Obama is a genuine force for change. As proof, Democratic vice presidential candidate pointed to the kind of attacks that have historically been directed at new leaders with new ideas.

“The defenders of the status quo have always tried to tear down those who would change our nation for the better,” Biden said. “They said Thomas Jefferson wasn’t … a real Christian. That was the essence of the campaign against him. Well, does that sound familiar?” he said.

“Ladies and gentlemen, they said Abraham Lincoln … wanted to take away individual rights. Ladies and gentlemen, they said Franklin Roosevelt would destroy the American system of life. Sound familiar? And ladies and gentlemen, they said that John F. Kennedy was, quote, ‘a dangerous choice in difficult times.’ … Sound familiar?”

A few thoughts:

• Actually, every presidential candidate faces these sorts of attacks. It’s called politics. The question is whether the attacks are fair.
• New ideas? Does Obama actually have any new ideas? I’ve not heard a single one that isn’t just an old liberal retread.
• Jefferson was attacked for not being a Christian (which, for the record, was true), but more seriously was attacked for being too enamored of the French revolution. The French revolution, of course, led to the reign of terror, and eventually to the re-institution of the monarchy, which is not something one would have wanted to see repeated in America. History has vindicated Jefferson, but going in there was legitimate reason for concern on the latter issue.
• What, no love for Reagan? I thought Reagan was a bipartisan figure now. New ideas? Check! Vicious attacks? Check!

Obama says that the “tragedy” of the civil rights movement was its failure to redistribute wealth:

A 7-year-old radio interview in which Barack Obama discussed the failure of the Supreme Court to rule on redistributing wealth in its civil rights rulings has given fresh ammunition to critics who say the Democratic presidential candidate has a socialist agenda.

The interview — conducted by Chicago Public Radio in 2001, while Obama was an Illinois state senator and a law professor at the University of Chicago — delves into whether the civil rights movement should have gone further than it did, so that when “dispossessed peoples” appealed to the high court on the right to sit at the lunch counter, they should have also appealed for the right to have someone else pay for the meal.

Even more frighteningly, he also said the Warren Court “wasn’t that radical,” because it focused on limitations of what the government can do, rather than inventing affirmative obligations of the government to do things, such as redistribute wealth.  In so doing, he said:

[The Supreme Court] 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.

(Emphasis mine.)  Apparently, Obama thinks the Constitution ought to be interpreted to require the government to redistribute wealth.

Ironically, Biden chose today to say that comparing Obama to Karl Marx is off the mark.

Murtha’s “racist” and “redneck” insults may prove to cost him re-election.  Michelle Malkin reports that a new poll, not yet released, has John Murtha now trailing in his bid for his re-election, 48-35.

BONUS: Murtha gets the treatment from Saturday Night Live.

Tzipi Livni has failed to form a government and will recommend calling an election. The sticking point in coalition negotiations was the status of Jerusalem in Palestinian negotiations:

Prior to the press conference, Shas had released a statement in which it said: “Throughout the negotiations, Shas hasn’t asked for political upgrades or fancy titles. It has asked for only two things: a profound assistance to the weak socioeconomic classes living in Israel and the protection of Jerusalem,” the statement read.

“…Our negotiators proposed solutions for these two issues, but their opinion was not accepted,” the statement said.

One of Livni’s close advisers said that Yishai was told as soon as the negotiations started that Livni would not accept a coalition agreement that excluded Jerusalem from the political talks with the Palestinians and that Yishai had nevertheless been willing to start coalition talks.

(Via Power Line.)

By the way, I’m glad we don’t have a parliament.

The Obama campaign is starting to face some questions about why its website has disabled all the basic protections against fraud. It makes their website very friendly to illegal and fraudulent contributions. Setting aside credit card fraud and foreign contributions, its easy to break up large donations into many small ones and they’ll be accepted. When combined with his refusal to release the names of his donors, it makes it look deliberate.

Obama’s defense is “the other guy does it too.” That’s not much of a defense, especially when the other guy actually doesn’t do it too.

When you couple this with Obama’s record fundraising, raising more in a month than McCain is spending overall, you can’t help wondering how much his haul is illegal. That’s the sort of question the media would ordinarily be eager to investigate.

(Previous post.)

UPDATE: The Washington Post reports:

Sen. Barack Obama’s record-breaking $150 million fundraising performance in September has for the first time prompted questions about whether presidential candidates should be permitted to collect huge sums of money through faceless credit card transactions over the Internet.

Lawyers for both the Republican and Democratic parties have asked the Federal Election Commission to examine the issue, pointing to dozens of examples of what they say are lax screening procedures by the presidential campaigns that permitted donors using false names or stolen credit cards to make contributions. . .

While the potentially fraudulent or excessive contributions represent about 1 percent of Obama’s staggering haul, the security challenge is one of several major campaign-finance-related questions raised by the Democrat’s fundraising juggernaut.

Concerns about anonymous donations seeping into the campaign began to surface last month, mainly on conservative blogs. Some bloggers described their own attempts to display the flaws in Obama’s fundraising program, donating under such obviously phony names as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and reported that the credit card transactions were permitted.

Obama officials said it should be obvious that it is as much in their campaign’s interest as it is in the public’s interest for fake contributions to be turned back, and said they have taken pains to establish a barrier to prevent them. Over the course of the campaign, they said, a number of additional safeguards have been added to bulk up the security of their system.

Perhaps a good “additional safeguard” would be to reactivate the standard precautions that they disabled.  And the 1% figure was provided by the Obama campaign, with no evidence (reported by the Post) to back up the figure.

(Via Instapundit.)

Just a reminder: we have a comment policy at Internet Scofflaw.  Uncivil comments will be thrown out with the spam.  Let’s leave the name calling for Daily Kos.

John Steele Gordon has an interesting historical perspective on the current financial mess, going back to the Jackson administration. As you might expect, the heart of the tale centers on Fannie and Freddie:

The aggressive pursuit of an end to redlining also required the active participation of Fannie Mae, and thereby hangs a tale. Back in 1968, the Johnson administration had decided to “adjust” the federal books by taking Fannie Mae off the budget and establishing it as a “Government Sponsored Enterprise” (GSE). But while it was theoretically now an independent corporation, Fannie Mae did not have to adhere to the same rules regarding capitalization and oversight that bound most financial institutions. And in 1970 still another GSE was created, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, or Freddie Mac, to expand further the secondary market in mortgage-backed securities.

This represented a huge moral hazard. The two institutions were supposedly independent of the government and owned by their stockholders. But it was widely assumed that there was an implicit government guarantee of both Fannie and Freddie’s solvency and of the vast amounts of mortgage-based securities they issued. This assumption was by no means unreasonable. Fannie and Freddie were known to enjoy lower capitalization requirements than other financial institutions and to be held to a much less demanding regulatory regime. If the United States government had no worries about potential failure, why should the market?

Forward again to the Clinton changes in 1995. As part of them, Fannie and Freddie were now permitted to invest up to 40 times their capital in mortgages; banks, by contrast, were limited to only ten times their capital. Put briefly, in order to increase the number of mortgages Fannie and Freddie could underwrite, the federal government allowed them to become grossly undercapitalized. . .

That was bad enough; then came politics to make it much worse. Fannie and Freddie quickly evolved into two of the largest financial institutions on the planet. . . But unlike other large, profit-seeking financial institutions, they were headquartered in Washington, D.C., and were political to their fingertips. Their management and boards tended to come from the political world, not the business world.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

ACORN claimed to have registered 1.3 million voters this year, but it is now revealed that the real number is about a third of that:

On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.

The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Mr. Slater acknowledged.

In registration drives, it is common for a percentage of newly registered voters to be disqualified for various reasons, although experts say the percentage is higher when groups pay workers to gather registrations. But the disclosure on Thursday that 30 percent of Acorn’s registrations were faulty was described by Republicans as further proof of what they said was Acorn’s effort to tilt the election unfairly.

One-third new registrations (as far as we know), one-third address changes, one-third fraud.

(Via Instapundit.)

If there’s any doubt that free speech in Canada is dead, this story removes it:

The Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) kept its head down during the recent federal election. With no less than four ongoing investigations into its conduct, it wisely stayed beneath the radar. But with the election over, it’s back at it, with its most egregious violation of our civil rights yet.

In Saskatchewan, the CHRC is prosecuting a former Member of Parliament for politically incorrect mail that he sent to constituents five years ago.

Jim Pankiw, an MP who served from 1997 to 2004, is on trial for sending out flyers criticizing Indian crime in Saskatchewan. If convicted, Pankiw can face massive fines. He could also face other orders, ranging from a forced apology to a lifetime ban on commenting about aboriginal issues. If Pankiw refuses to comply with such an order, he could serve time in jail.

Aboriginal crime was a big issue for Pankiw’s constituents. According to Statistics Canada, aboriginals make up only 9% of Saskatchewan’s population, but they are 52% of the province’s criminally accused.

Pankiw wanted to get tough on crime; he wanted to abandon aboriginal “sentencing circles,” and end racial quotas. His tone was aggressive, but talking tough about crime isn’t supposed to be a crime in itself. Whether or not his was the best solution was up to his constituents. That’s how a democracy works.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Canadian kangaroo courts have prosecuted clergy for their sermons, periodicals for their content, and now a member of parliament for political communications. I don’t understand why Canadians aren’t upset about this. Is there no constituency for free speech in Canada?

POSTSCRIPT: Good thing nothing like this could ever happen here.

(Previous post.)

Patrick Ruffini writes that the Obama web site has disabled a standard mechanism that protects against credit card fraud:

The Obama campaign has turned its security settings for accepting online contributions down to the bare minimum — possibly to juice the numbers, and turning a blind eye towards the potential for fraud not just against the FEC, but against unsuspecting victims of credit card fraud.

The issue centers around the Address Verification Service (or AVS) that credit card processors use to sniff out phony transactions. I was able to contribute money using an address other than the one on file with my bank account (I used an address I control, just not the one on my account), showing that the Obama campaign deliberately disabled AVS for its online donors.

AVS is generally the first line of defense against credit card fraud online. AVS ensures that not only is your credit card number accurate, but the street address you’ve submitted with a transaction matches the one on file with your bank.

Authorize.net, the largest credit card gateway provider in the country, lists AVS as a “Standard Transaction Security Setting,” recommends merchants use it, and turns it on by default. So, in order for AVS to be turned off, it has to be intentional, at least with Authorize.net.

(Via Instapundit.)

Power Line has been asking about this too, but this is the first explanation I’ve seen for what Obama is actually doing.

(Previous post.)

After the revolution swept America, the Weather Underground planned to have re-education centers to retrain people as communists.  Those who could not be re-educated, a projected 25 million, would be killed.

No wonder Ayers says he didn’t do enough.  He came up about 25 million murders short.

(Via Instapundit.)