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.
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.
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.
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.
Thirteen campaign workers for Barack Obama yesterday yanked their voter registrations and ballots in Ohio after being warned by a prosecutor that temporary residents can’t vote in the battleground state.
A dozen staffers – including Obama Ohio spokeswoman Olivia Alair and James Cadogan, who recently joined Team Obama – signed a form letter asking the Franklin County elections board to pull their names from the rolls. . .
Earlier in the week, O’Brien spoke with lawyers for both camps and urged them to make sure their staffs met permanent-residency rules, or face possible felony charges.
Question 1: Haven’t we been told that bogus registrations never turn into bogus votes? Question 2: Shouldn’t Obama’s Ohio spokeswoman have known better?
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.
The Ohio state patrol is looking into why, shortly after the third presidential debate, its motor vehicle database was used to investigate Joe the Plumber:
Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher became part of the national political lexicon Oct. 15 when Republican presidential candidate John McCain mentioned him frequently during his final debate with Democrat Barack Obama.
The 34-year-old from the Toledo suburb of Holland is held out by McCain as an example of an American who would be harmed by Obama’s tax proposals.
Public records requested by The Dispatch disclose that information on Wurzelbacher’s driver’s license or his sport-utility vehicle was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database three times shortly after the debate.
Information on Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.
It has not been determined who checked on Wurzelbacher, or why. Direct access to driver’s license and vehicle registration information from BMV computers is restricted to legitimate law enforcement and government business.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Virginia campaign officials for GOP presidential candidate John McCain are saying some Fairfax County absentee ballots — and possibly some in Hampton Roads — from overseas service members are being rejected over a technicality.
But the Fairfax registrar said he was following state law in rejecting a small number of absentee ballots that came in at the same time as the voter’s application.
Fairfax General Registrar Rokey Suleman said Thursday that he had had to reject some of the ballots because of a Virginia law passed in 2002. That law — then called Senate Bill 113, sponsored by then-state Sen. Bill Bolling — requires that when an overseas citizen wants to request an absentee ballot and cast a vote with the same paperwork, it requires not only a witness signature but the current address of the witness.
The McCain campaign said there’s not even a space for the witness to list an address. Suleman agreed; he said that the federal document was changed in recent years and that the space for the witness address was removed. But the Virginia law hasn’t changed.
Suleman said he brought up the issue last month at a Pew Foundation conference on overseas voting.
Now, he said, he’s getting hammered by the McCain camp as someone trying to prevent service members from voting.
“I can’t ignore the law,” Suleman said. “I think it stinks.”
The Daily Press apparently wasn’t able to determine whether Suleman has a party affiliation, but since it matters, but my crack research staff has determined that he is a Democrat. He recently made news when he held a voter registration drive at the county detention center.
Anyway, didn’t the Democrats establish a few years ago that in order to protect voting rights, the law should be “liberally construed“? I guess that’s only when the law doesn’t favor them.
Is the media starting to get annoyed with Joe Biden? CBS‘s Ryan Corsaro seems to be:
While the once silent Palin has taken questions from reporters that travel with her three times in the last week, Biden has not offered the same type of access to reporters who cover his every move on the campaign trail in almost two months.
As for comments that Biden made last weekend in Seattle about Obama facing an “international, generated crisis” in his first six months, Biden has said nothing more on the matter. . . Biden spokesperson David Wade said on Tuesday that Biden had no plans to revisit those statements. Obama, when asked today about Biden’s statement, called them “rhetorical flourishes.”
The handful of reporters from Biden’s national press corps who have followed him incessantly for two months have not had the opportunity to ask questions regarding the “crisis” matter – even to allow Biden to clarify his remarks – because he has not taken questions or held a press availability with his press corps since Sept. 7.
Last month in Akron, Biden chided McCain and Palin for not holding such availabilities with the press.
“I got asked a question by the press this morning, er, yesterday,” Biden told the crowd last month. “I’ve done a lot of press, I’ve done, I don’t know, I was told I did 68, 70 press conferences, and the person says, ‘What do you think about Sarah Palin?’ I said, ‘When she does three, I’ll let you know, I don’t know, I don’t have any idea, I don’t know, I don’t know.’ You know, I mean, look, and it’s not, look guys, it’s not just Sarah Palin, when’s the last time John, when’s the last time John’s had a press conference? I’m serious.”
When she does three, you say? She’s done three this week. How about Biden? Hmm:
Biden was factually incorrect – he had conducted at the time over 80 interviews, not press conferences, ranging from local newspapers to network morning shows, with an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and a dozen interviews with major networks and newspapers.
And to belatedly answer Biden’s question, it has been 55 days since he held a press conference. He has held two since being named Obama’s running mate.
That’s one fewer than Palin has done this week.
Biden has also not taken questions from voters in a town hall style setting since Sept. 10 in Nashua, New Hampshire, when he told a supporter that Hillary Clinton might have been a better pick for vice president.
Since then, Biden has only held “community gatherings” and “rallies” where he makes a speech and chats briefly with supporters on the ropeline under the blare of music, no questions asked. Even there, Biden says very little after a digital recorder caught him making statements on clean coal that did not coincide with Obama’s energy policies.
He told Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” that it was the reason he stays mum when greeting voters, hoping to avoid making comments that might be publicized and used against Obama.
UPDATE: A commenter points me towards this document at WikiLeaks, purporting to be the memorandum of understanding between Odinga and Kenya’s National Muslim Leaders Forum. I cannot attest to its authenticity, but the document is consistent with the agreement’s description in the Washington Times.
A poll by the Military Times newspaper group suggests that there is overwhelming support for John McCain among U.S. troops in every branch of the armed forces by a nearly 3-1 margin.
According to the poll, 68 percent of active-duty and retired servicemen and women support McCain, while 23 percent support Barack Obama. The numbers are nearly identical among officers and enlisted troops.
The Military Times, which publishes the Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times and Air Force Times, polled 80,000 subscribers from Sept 22 to Sept. 29. The non-scientific survey gathered 4,300 respondents — all of them registered and eligible to vote. . .
The Military Times offered certain caveats for its poll, which was open only to its 80,000 subscribers. Responses were entirely voluntary and were not focused on a representative sample of the public, as scientific polls are. The troops polled were also somewhat older than average enlisted servicemembers and included more officers than is representative of the military as a whole.
Yet judging by the numbers, it appears that the Democratic party has not made many inroads into the traditionally Republican military.
UPDATE: Yes, this is a non-scientific study. As far as I’m aware, there’s no way to do a scientific study of the military. So take it for what it’s worth. (I would note that the left has found Military Times polls credible when they favored them.)
Still, the result is consistent with my experience. Liberal servicemen tend to support Democrats, and conservative ones tend to support Republicans, but the military tends to attract or create conservatives much more than liberals. I’ve been out of the military for years, but I doubt that’s changed.
Also, the campaigns clearly recognize that servicemen vote Republican. Remember Florida 2000:
Both parties quickly recognized the importance to Mr. Bush of the uncounted overseas ballots, especially those from military installations. But the Democrats were preoccupied, particularly with their pursuit of manual recounts in several heavily Democratic counties. And their strategy for absentee ballots, which consisted of challenging as many overseas ballots as possible, backfired after they were accused of disenfranchising men and women in uniform.
It’s not for no reason that Democrats try to prevent the military from voting. We can’t be sure of the 68/23 figure, but you can be sure than McCain has more support than Obama.
UPDATE (10/27): That same article sheds a little bit of quantitative light on the question:
Applying widely varying standards from one county to the next, election officials threw out 1,527 ballots, according to an unofficial tally by The Associated Press, or 41 percent of the total, and the remaining ballots produced a net gain of 630 votes for Mr. Bush.
This gives us enough information to compute (with some algebra) the proportion of the late overseas vote that wasn’t thrown out as 64% Bush and 36% Gore. Now this doesn’t precisely give us an estimate of the military voter nationwide. However, there don’t seem to be any systematic factors that would bias this number towards Bush. Florida voters closely mirrored voters nationwide in 2000, and the fact that the vote also includes expatriates would only shift the numbers toward Gore. So unless voting late correlates with voting Bush, which there’s no evidence for, we can guess that the 2000 military vote went at least 64/46 for Bush. This suggests that a 68/23 figure today is plausible.
U.S. Rep. John Murtha is calling many of the people who put him in office “rednecks.”
The news comes one week after Murtha claimed the area is racist, then apologized for that comment.
In explaining his comments about racism, Murtha, D-Johnstown, told WTAE Channel 4 Action News on Monday it’s difficult for many in the area to change. Murtha said that just five to 10 years ago the entire area was “redneck.”
If he dislikes his constituents so much, I suggest that he find someone else to represent.
It was less than two weeks ago when Sarah Palin astonished her traveling press corps by lifting the curtain (literally) and journeying to the back of her campaign plane to answer reporters’ questions for the first time after 40 days on the campaign trail. But the candidate who has been criticized for having a bunker mentality when it came to the national media can now lay legitimate claim to being more accessible than either Joe Biden or Barack Obama.
In the past two days alone, Palin has answered questions from her national press corps on three separate occasions. On Saturday, she held another plane availability, and on Sunday, she offered an impromptu press conference on the tarmac upon landing in Colorado Springs. A few minutes later, she answered even more questions from reporters during an off-the-record stop at a local ice cream shop.
By contrast, Biden hasn’t held a press conference in more than a month, and Obama hasn’t taken questions from his full traveling press corps since the end of September. John McCain—who spent most of the primary season holding what seemed like one, never-ending media availability—hasn’t done one since Sept. 23.
Though she often turns the “mainstream media” into a punching bag on the stump, Palin clearly enjoys interacting with reporters. She seems to relish the opportunity to demonstrate that her breadth of knowledge far exceeds what she offered to CBS News’ Katie Couric in a series of interviews that were marked by vague, often convoluted answers to straightforward questions.
A government report that found old-fashioned reusable nappies [diapers] damage the environment more than disposables has been hushed up because ministers are embarrassed by its findings.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has instructed civil servants not to publicise the conclusions of the £50,000 nappy research project and to adopt a “defensive” stance towards its conclusions.
The report found that using washable nappies, hailed by councils throughout Britain as a key way of saving the planet, have a higher carbon footprint than their disposable equivalents unless parents adopt an extreme approach to laundering them. . .
The conclusions will upset proponents of real nappies who have claimed they can help save the planet.
Restricted Whitehall documents, seen by The Sunday Times, show that the government is so concerned by the “negative laundry options” outlined in the report, it has told its media managers not to give its conclusions any publicity.
Newsmax reports that Obama has collected between $13 million and $63 million in illegal foreign contributions, before September’s record-breaking month. They also allege he has over 2000 donors who have given more than the legal maximum. (Via the Corner.)
The fact that Obama (unlike McCain) won’t reveal the names of his contributors does suggest that he has something to hide. Will we see the press investigate this?
“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you – not financially to help him – we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”
Biden is right; if Obama is elected, someone will stage a crisis to test him. Further, Biden says, at first it’s going to appear that he’s screwing up. But we need to stand by them, despite how things will appear.
Dozens of incentive schemes have been uncovered which allow GPs to profit by slashing the number of patients they refer for hospital care.
Under one scheme, GPs stand to gain £59 for every patient not referred to hospital, if they cut an average referral rate by between two and eight per cent.
Torbay care trust in Devon will pay up to £15,000 to the average-sized GP practice if it hits a swathe of targets, including reducing hospital referrals.
NHS managers say referral rates, which rose 16 per cent nationwide during the first quarter of this year, have to be cut to save money. They claim many patients can receive equally good care from community NHS staff, such as physiotherapists and nurses.
But critics fear that patients could suffer if GPs’ decisions are swayed by the prospect of a cash bonus.
And yes, this cost-cutting measure is hurting people:
A leading surgeon said that patients’ cancers had already gone undiagnosed after they were denied specialist care under two such “referral management” schemes.
Orthopaedic surgeon Stephen Cannon, former president of the British Orthopaedic Association and a consultant surgeon at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, described the cases as an “absolutely terrible” warning that decisions by non-specialist doctors could have devastating consequences.
He said: “I recently encountered two cases in which patients referred to physiotherapists later turned out to have a malignant tumour. If they had been sent to a consultant the outcome may have been very different.
If this policy hasn’t killed anyone yet, it’s only a matter of time.
This, of course, is the model of “health care” that Democrats want to see imposed in the United States.
Obama concedes that media bias matters, in a backwards sort of way:
“I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls,” Obama told me. “If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me, right? Because the way I’m portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?”
He could be right. If there were no Fox News, every major media outlet would be in the tank for Obama. That could well be worth 2-3 points. Of course, for Obama to complain about media bias is a little like Richard Daley (the elder) complaining about election fraud.
But just for fun, let’s take Obama’s estimate at face value and do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. (Don’t take any of this too seriously!)
The Groseclose-Milyo media-bias study scored Fox News at 39.7, where higher is more liberal and the center (i.e., the average voter) is 50.06. Thus, each point of Fox News bias results in a quarter of a point in the polls (by Obama’s estimate).
So, let’s compute how much it benefits Obama to be favored by nearly every other media outlet. To do the calculation, we need to have estimates of the relative influence of the various outlets. Since this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, let me make some very conservative assumptions (er, conservative in the sense of cautious; that is, assumptions unfavorable to my case) that also turn out to make the calculation easy.
First, let’s suppose that every outlet in the Groseclose-Milyo study other than Fox News has equal influence. This is a cautious assumption, since most would agree that the farthest left outlets (e.g., New York Times, CBS, Washington Post) are some of the most influential. The composite score of all non-Fox outlets is then simply the average, 63.9.
Second, let’s suppose that Fox News has one-quarter the influence of every other news outlet combined. (That is, assume that Fox News itself has about 20% of the influence of the entire mainstream media. In my dreams!) That means that each point of non-Fox bias is worth four times each point of Fox bias, which works out to about one point in the polls. Thus, 13.8 points of non-Fox bias translates to about 14 points in the polls.
That is pretty close to the 15-point estimate that Newsweek’s Evan Thomas gave for how much media bias was helping Kerry in 2004. If Obama is right that Fox News is costing him 2.5 points (a big if!), and if there exists a linear relationship between media bias and poll results, and if media bias hasn’t lessened since the study was conducted (unlikely!), then Thomas’s 15 points has to be an underestimate, given our cautious assumptions.
The latest RCP poll average has Obama up by 6.3 points.
Obama calls for an ACORN-related investigation. Not, not into ACORN’s criminal activity, of course, but into press leaks about the investigation. I am not making this up:
Robert Bauer, general counsel to the Obama campaign, wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey a day after the Associated Press, citing unidentified law enforcement officials, reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating ACORN. The name is short for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. . .
Bauer said the news leaks are part of a coordinated effort by McCain’s presidential campaign and Republicans. They are “fomenting specious vote-fraud allegations and there are disturbing indications of official involvement or collusion,” Bauer said.
“It is apparent,” he wrote, that law enforcement officials are serving “improper political objectives” that could inhibit voter participation in the Nov. 4 election. The aim is to “suppress the vote and to unduly influence investigations and prosecutions,” Bauer wrote.
That’s right, the real villains here are the investigators, not the people perpetrating vote fraud.
Tomorrow, when the media picks up Obama’s talking points, we will be treated to the spectacle of the media complaining about press leaks. Press leaks are good, you see, only when they hurt Republicans. Leaks that hurt Democrats are very bad. (See Armitage-Plame affair.)
UPDATE: Perhaps I’m mis-reading this. Another article says that Obama’s gripe is not with the press leaks, but with the very existence of the investigation:
Tensions began to escalate Thursday with disclosures that the FBI is investigating ACORN and the possibility that it’s engaged in a vote-fraud scheme.
On Friday, Obama’s legal counsel, Robert Bauer, wrote Attorney General Michael Mukasey, charging that the inquiry is politically motivated and that it risks repeating the 2007 scandal over the Bush administration’s politicization of the Justice Department.
Bauer asked Mukasey to broaden a special prosecutor’s investigation to examine the origin of the ACORN inquiry.
Now that’s chutzpah! ACORN submits thousands (at least) of bogus voter registrations, and it’s the investigation that’s improper.
Also, it’s pretty rich for Obama to complain about politicization of the Justice Department when his campaign asked Democrats in Missouri law enforcement to prosecute his critics.
We are concerned that if effective regulatory reform legislation for the housing-finance government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole. . .
Today, almost half of the home mortgages in the U.S. are guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would pay this debt if Fannie or Freddy could not?
Substantial testimony calling for improved regulation of the GSEs has been provided to the Senate by the Treasury, Federal Reserve, HUD, GAO, CBO, and others. . . It is vitally important that Congress take the necessary steps to ensure that these institutions benefit from strong and independent regulatory supervision, [and] operate in a safe and sound manner. . . Most importantly, Congress must ensure that the American taxpayer is protected in the event either GSE should fail.
Sadly, I am not making this up. Some Democrats, seeking to exploit uncertain financial times, are proposing to abolish 401(k) accounts, and replace them with a government-run plan. The government plan would guarantee a 3% real return. (This is not a typo.)
Breaking news: the Supreme Court has issued a stay of an Appeals Court ruling requiring that Ohio verify 200,000 voter registrations with mismatched information. Few details yet.
What Obama’s plan does do is offer a raft of subsidies and government payments to individuals and families that he redefines as “tax cuts.” His proposal looks more like a redistribution scheme than an honest effort to reduce taxes — as he revealed on Monday when he told a now famous Ohio plumber that his plan aimed to “spread the wealth around.”
Klein also reports that Obama’s spokesmen were not at all forthcoming when questioned on the subject.
Okay, it’s interesting that Obama is redefining spending increases as tax cuts, but I think this misses the point. Obama is lying. Whatever you choose to call it, the net flow of revenue between individuals and the government is not going to shift in the individual’s direction for 95%. It’s not going to happen.
Democrats, and particularly far-left Democrats like Obama, take money from the people and spend it on their priorities. It’s what they do. Bill Clinton (a far more moderate Democrat than Obama) promised a middle-class tax cut. A month into his administration he admitted it wouldn’t happen, bleating “I’ve worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life to meet that goal, but I can’t.” (Poor guy, that must have been a really tough month.) Instead, he passed a massive tax increase.
You simply cannot raise the revenue that Obama needs for his massive spending plans without taxing the middle class. That’s where the money is. Anyone who believes that middle-class taxes will go down (even in the Bizarro-world way Obama is defining taxes) is a sucker.
The chief executives of the nine largest banks in the United States trooped into a gilded conference room at the Treasury Department at 3 p.m. Monday. To their astonishment, they were each handed a one-page document that said they agreed to sell shares to the government, then Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said they must sign it before they left. . .
The chairman of Wells Fargo, Richard M. Kovacevich, protested strongly that, unlike his New York rivals, his bank was not in trouble because of investments in exotic mortgages, and did not need a bailout, according to people briefed on the meeting.
But by 6:30, all nine chief executives had signed.
Apparently, the government will not be voting the stock it is forcing the banks to sell, but it’s not clear from the article whether that commitment will be binding on future administrations:
The Treasury will receive preferred shares that pay a 5 percent dividend, rising to 9 percent after five years. It will get warrants to purchase common shares, equivalent to 15 percent of its initial investment. But the Treasury said it would not exercise its right to vote those common shares.
Also, the terms are apparently designed to encourage banks eventually to buy out the government, but again it’s not clear whether the government has a binding commitment to sell:
The terms, officials said, were devised so as not to be punitive. The rising dividend and the warrants are meant to give banks an incentive to raise private capital and buy out the government after a few years.
So it’s possible we’re looking at something less than bank nationalization, but it’s by no means certain.
I don’t know anything about Joe Wurzelbacher, but I just have one bit of advice. If you have anything in your past that you’re not proud of — a messy divorce, a DUI, an unpaid bill, an indiscreet comment, whatever — be prepared for it to become public knowledge. The lefty blogosphere, along with allies in the press, will see to that.
Stephen Green summarizes the Mahoney scandal, and drops a big load of richly deserved mockery on the media for ignoring such an incredibly juicy scandal, just because it involves a Democrat.
The EFF thinks that McCain should care more about the free speech rights of individual citizens, and not just candidates. Fair enough. That’s not been his pattern, though.
Unfortunately, free speech advocates don’t have a horse in this race. McCain has long been a crusader for speech restrictions, and Obama looks to be even worse.
ACORN has been unseated as the champion facilitator of voter fraud. The new champion is Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio Secretary of State. Brunner, a Democrat, has been widely called the most partisan official in the State of Ohio. Recently Brunner has been fighting a court order forcing her to verify the information on new voter registrations, but the full 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has now ruled against her.
One thing we’ve now learned is how many new registrations with mismatched information her office has been sitting on: over 200 thousand. We have no way of knowing how many of these registrations are legitimate, but if even 10% are fraudulent (and the number is almost certain much higher than that) we’re talking about 20 thousand voter registrations that Brunner has been trying to shield from examination.
For reference, the 2004 election was decided in Ohio by 118,457 votes; quite a bit less than the number of potentially fraudulent registrations Brunner has been try to jam onto the rolls.
AFTERTHOUGHT: Brunner, as one would expect, protests that this order will potentially disenfranchise many voters; forcing them to use provisional ballots if her office is unable to verify that they are legitimate voters. But her concern over disenfranchisement is very selective. Last month, Brunner threw out thousands of Republican absentee ballot requests on a technicality. In that case, she was concerned that accepting the forms could lead to voter fraud.
U.S. Rep. John Murtha said today he expects Democratic nominee Barack Obama to carry Pennsylvania in next month’s presidential election. . . Mr. Murtha said it has taken time for the state’s voters embrace a black presidential candidate.
“There’s no question Western Pennsylvania is a racist area,” said Mr. Murtha, whose district stretches from Johnstown to Washington County. “The older population is more hesitant.”
Right, there’s no other reason why Western Pennsylvanians might dislike Barack Obama.
It will be interesting to see how Murtha’s constituents (who are Western Pennsylvanians) like being accused of racism by their congressman.
ASIDE: The Post-Gazette oddly buries the lede; giving their story the bland title “Murtha expects Obama to win Pa.”
Inspirational poster or openly partisan politics? That is the question over a large poster featuring Sen. Barack Obama that was on display over a middle school in Brooklyn.
The New York City Department of Education has reportedly ordered MS 61 in Crown Heights to remove the poster. The Gladstone H Atwell School is located a few blocks east of Prospect Park. . .
The Post says the action continues the DOE’s crackdown on politically charged expression in schools – as the teachers union defends workers’ rights to wear partisan campaign buttons in class.
The teachers union complains that this crackdown violates their right to free expression, and they have a point. But perhaps it’s not the point they want.
The fact is that when you become a public employee, you sacrifice some of your right to free expression while you’re on the job. As a public employee you are representing the government and your activities are paid by it, and as such your position is incompatible with electioneering.
But there is a simple way to resolve this issue. Don’t be a public employee. If all education were private, teachers could do whatever they wanted (provided their employer agreed). Problem solved.
As a bonus: we wouldn’t have to fight over public school curricula any more. Private schools would teach what they want, and parents would vote with their feet.
Rep. Tim Mahoney, the Democrat who replaced the disgraced Mark Foley, and who is now embroiled in his own scandal for having an affair and paying $121,000 in hush money, is in new trouble. The AP is reporting that Mahoney was actually having two affairs at once. There’s no word yet on whether the second mistress was also receiving hush money.
Obama is still trying to distance himself from ACORN and its criminal activities. Although Obama worked with ACORN in his days as a community organizer, and as a lawyer, and as recently as his primary campaign, Obama’s campaign says they are not working with ACORN in the general election. Ancient history, I guess.
According to this Washington Times column, Kenya’s new Prime Minister is not a good guy:
By mid-February 2008, more than 1,500 Kenyans were killed. Many were slain by machete-armed attackers. More than 500,000 were displaced by the religious strife. Villages lay in ruin. Many of the atrocities were perpetrated by Muslims against Christians.
The violence was led by supporters of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who lost the Dec. 27, 2007, presidential election by more than 230,000 votes. Odinga supporters began the genocide hours after the final election results were announced Dec. 30. Mr. Odinga was a member of Parliament representing an area in western Kenya, heavily populated by the Luo tribe, and the birthplace of Barack Obama’s father.
Mr. Odinga had the backing of Kenya’s Muslim community heading into the election. For months he denied any ties to Muslim leaders, but fell silent when Sheik Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum, appeared on Kenya television displaying a memorandum of understanding signed on Aug. 29, 2007, by Mr. Odinga and the Muslim leader. Mr. Odinga then denied his denials.
The details of the MOU were shocking. In return for Muslim backing, Mr. Odinga promised to impose a number of measures favored by Muslims if he were elected president. Among these were recognition of “Islam as the only true religion,” Islamic leaders would have an “oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions [emphasis in original],” installation of Shariah courts in every jurisdiction, a ban on Christian preaching, replacement of the police commissioner who “allowed himself to be used by heathens and Zionists,” adoption of a women’s dress code, and bans on alcohol and pork.
This was not Mr. Odinga’s first brush with notoriety. Like his father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, the main opposition leader in the 1960s and 1970s, Raila Odinga is a Marxist He graduated from East Germany’s Magdeburg University in 1970 on a scholarship provided by the East German government. He named his oldest son after Fidel Castro.
Other than his involvement in post-election violence, I hadn’t heard any of this before. The news reports that Kenya is currently at peace, with a power-sharing arrangement in place between Odinga and President Kibaki, but with this man at the center of Kenyan politics, it doesn’t sound like that peace will last.
There is an American angle to this story, too. If Odinga is at the center of Kenyan politics, it’s because Barack Obama helped put him there:
Initially, Mr. Odinga was not the favored opposition candidate to stand in the 2007 election against President Mwai Kibaki, who was seeking his second term. However, he received a tremendous boost when Sen. Barack Obama arrived in Kenya in August 2006 to campaign on his behalf. Mr. Obama denies that supporting Mr. Odinga was the intention of his trip, but his actions and local media reports tell otherwise.
Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama were nearly inseparable throughout Mr. Obama’s six-day stay. The two traveled together throughout Kenya and Mr. Obama spoke on behalf of Mr. Odinga at numerous rallies. In contrast, Mr. Obama had only criticism for Kibaki. He lashed out against the Kenyan government shortly after meeting with the president on Aug. 25. “The [Kenyan] people have to suffer over corruption perpetrated by government officials,” Mr. Obama announced.
“Kenyans are now yearning for change,” he declared. The intent of Mr. Obama’s remarks and actions was transparent to Kenyans – he was firmly behind Mr. Odinga.
Obama has shown extraordinarily poor judgement by becoming associated with this character, the latest in a long line of dubious characters (Ayers, Wright, Rezko, Samantha Power, Jim Johnson).
I don’t think I could make up a story more perfect than this one.
In 2006, the GOP hopes of holding on to control of the House of Representatives were sunk by Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), who was revealed to have sent inappropriate messages of a sexual nature to House pages. The scandal extended beyond Foley himself because it was revealed that some in the House leadership had a hint of the problem and did nothing. (Democratic leaders also knew of the problem, and also did nothing, apparently preferring to save the matter for the election.) The GOP was swept from control, placing Nancy Pelosi in charge of what she pledged would be “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.”
Yesterday the story broke into the national media that Rep. Tim Mahoney, Foley’s Democratic successor in Florida’s 16th district, is embroiled in his own sex scandal involving $121,000 in hush money. As is the case with most stories of Democratic wrongdoing these days, the blogosphere (in particular, Gateway Pundit) had the story long ago.
ASIDE: There’s a media-failure angle to the story as well. Gateway Pundit spotted the story on the web site of the Tampa Tribune, which later edited its story to remove the scoop.
The story is nearly perfect already; it’s just missing one thing, and here it is. The Democratic leadership says they didn’t know:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi today issued the following statement on Congressman Tim Mahoney of Florida:
“I just learned today about the serious allegations concerning Congressman Tim Mahoney. These charges must be immediately and thoroughly investigated by the House Ethics Committee.”
Two prominent House Democrats — U.S. Reps. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland — say they heard rumors that Democratic U.S. Rep. Tim Mahoney was having an affair and spoke to him about it before allegations became public today that Mahoney paid $121,000 to settle a lawsuit threatened by a former staffer. . .
Emanuel, who recruited Mahoney to run in 2006, only heard vague rumors in early 2007 and didn’t know they involved a staffer or payments, spokeswoman Sarah Feinberg said.
“Upon hearing a rumor, Congressman Emanuel confronted Congressman Mahoney, told him he was in public life and had a responsibility to act accordingly and appropriately, and urged him to do so. They had no further conversations on this topic,” Feinberg said.
Van Hollen, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, heard rumors about Mahoney only last month, a spokeswoman said.
“After a rumor recently surfaced on a blog about Mr. Mahoney’s affair, the Chairman spoke briefly once with Mr. Mahoney about his responsibility as an elected official to act appropriately and urged him to come clean with his constituents if there was any truth to the rumor,” DCCC spokesoman Jennifer Crider said.
Emanuel may be off the hook, depending on what exactly he knew. Van Hollen, on the other hand, was aware of the particulars, since they were in the blog post that Mahoney’s office acknowledges reading. Emanuel and Van Hollen are both in the House Democratic leadership, yet the Democratic leadership did nothing.
While researching my last post, an interesting sponsored link popped up on Google:
Obama-ACORN Lies Debunked
Get the Facts Now. Barack Obama
Never Organized with ACORN.
Obama.FightTheSmears.com
Here’s what they say:
Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.
Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.
Obviously, this contradicts a lot that’s been written in the conservative blogosphere. Who’s right? Well, “fact” one depends on your definition of “ACORN community organizer” so that’s hard to dispute. Regarding the other two, ABC News’s Jake Tapper has the story. After an earlier version was shown to be untrue, “fact” two was carefully phrased to be literally, but very narrowly, truthful:
As reports pile up of voter registration fraud connected to ACORN — the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, a group that advocates for low-income voters – the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has sought to downplay his past ties with the group.
But in their efforts to do, Obama campaign officials found themselves forced last week to correct an erroneous assertion made on the campaign’s “Fight the Smears” webpage that “Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.”
That wasn’t true.
In fact, ACORN spokesman Lewis Goldberg told the New York Times that Obama conducted two unpaid leadership training sessions for ACORN’s Chicago affiliate in the late 1990s.
The “Fight the Smears” website now asserts, “Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.”
Key word: hired.
Goldberg told the Times that Obama’s work for ACORN was unpaid.
So Obama did work for ACORN, but he worked for free. That hardly refutes the “smear” allegation that Obama has ties to ACORN. Tapper goes on to explain that “fact” three isn’t true either.
Moreover, it is undisputed that Obama and ACORN have close ties today. In this election cycle, the Obama campaign paid ACORN over $800,000 for its efforts on behalf of the campaign.
ACORN has outdone itself in Indiana. They recently submitted 5000 new voter registrations in Lake County. Every single one of them that the county has checked, 2100 so far, was fraudulent. Unfortunately for the county, the law requires that they continue to check the remaining 2900.
When confronted with their fraud, ACORN’s lawyer says it’s partly the government’s fault:
BONUS: In their five-and-a-half minute story, CNN didn’t manage to mention whether ACORN has any ideological or party preferences. I don’t want to bash them too much — after all, they did run the story — but come on. Not only does this organization work to advance the Democratic party, it is actually paid by the Obama campaign.
David Post reflects on the state of economic liberty:
In a recent post, Eric Posner asks a very interesting question:
No one who believes that the government exploited fears after 9/11 to strengthen its security powers is now saying that the government is exploiting financial crisis fears in order to justify taking control of credit markets. No one who thinks that government would use fear to curtail civil liberties seems to think that government would use fear to curtail economic liberties. Why not?
Putting aside the question of whether it’s strictly correct to say “no one” . . . , I think Eric is on to something important, and I think I have the “answer” (sort of). The answer is: the vast majority of people place economic liberties on a decidedly lower plane than they place “civil” liberties.
Examples of this are everywhere. It’s one of the reasons why people who believe strongly in economic liberties get so angry in law school — it’s not just the way the Supreme Court has basically stripped away any constitutional protection for economic liberties while waxing poetic about civil liberties, it’s the way pretty much all of the professors and students seem to think this is perfectly sensible.
While musing about that, consider this item from the Tartan (CMU’s student paper):
The independence of Carnegie Mellon students living on Beeler Street is under the public eye and may soon be tested. In the past month, a grievance has been filed with the city citing a Pittsburgh ordinance that makes it illegal for landlords to rent out houses to a group of more than three unrelated residents.
This information was initially communicated to David Chickering, the Mudge housefellow and a resident of Beeler, at the beginning of this school year.
“I was going down the street, and I noticed that people from the city were looking at houses, and they let me know that there was a possible violation,” Chickering said. “Afterwards, I spoke to Councilman [William] Peduto’s office and he let me know that they were checking if there were possible code violations and that the Bureau of Building Inspections would investigate.”
This is a perfect case in point. Economic liberty matters. Who chooses to live together is none of the government’s business. Unfortunately, once money changes hands it becomes an “economic matter” and our protection against government intrusion disappears.
Naturally, students are upset at the prospect of being forced from their homes:
Carnegie Mellon students are concerned with the unfair nature of the law.
“Beeler has turned into a college student’s opportunity to find alternative housing, so if there is a house with rooms that could fit more than three residents then it seems unfair to students and landlords to restrict residence by an outdated law. Students are looking for economical housing,” said Yarden Harari, a senior architecture student and resident of Beeler Street.
This sentiment was echoed by other Beeler residents.
“It’s an unfair law because it’s mostly students living on Beeler. If we could have more people live in a house and pay less, why not? Technically, the house I am living in is $2400 a month, and if we split it between only three people, that would be $800 a month, which is ridiculous — if we are legally allowed to have up to four people on the lease, it makes more sense to split the rent among them,” said In-Kyoung Kim, a sophomore architecture major. . .
“It definitely seems like an outdated law, and honestly I can’t really see the purpose of the law in the first place. I would argue that it should not affect me or my peers at all, seeing as it should be the landlord’s responsibility, not ours, to make sure that they are being consistent with Pittsburgh ordinances,” Kumar said.
All of this misses the point. Of course people have good reasons to share a house, but what those reasons are should matter not a whit. No one should have to justify their choices to the government just because money changes hands. It’s a free country, after all.
The economic free fall gripping the nation may bring down one of the main environmental objectives: capping the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming.
Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate, and both presidential candidates, continue to rank tackling global warming as a chief goal next year. But the focus on stabilizing the economy probably will make it more difficult to pass a law to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. At the very least, it will push back when the reductions would have to start.
As one Republican senator put it, the green bubble has burst.
“Clearly it is somewhere down the totem pole given the economic realities we are facing,” said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy Corp., an electricity producer that has supported federal mandates on greenhouse gases.
Just months ago, chances for legislation passing in the next Congress and becoming law looked promising. . . But the most popular remedy for slowing global warming, a mechanism know as cap-and-trade, could put further stress on a teetering economy.
Not long ago, it was fashionable to mock the idea that we shouldn’t damage the economy to fight climate change. Now, people are realizing that having a strong economy might be pretty important after all.
BONUS: For sheer economic idiocy, it’s hard to beat this:
Other Democrats, however, see a cap-and-trade bill — and the government revenues it would generate from selling permits — as an engine for economic growth. Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama supports auctioning off all permits, using the money to help fund alternative energy.
“If you see this as a job creation opportunity for the U.S. to develop the products that are then sold around the world, then you should be optimistic about what the impact of passage would mean for the American economy,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass.
They want to auction the privilege to continue doing business. Yeah, that’s going to be a big economic driver.
Michael Barone has an summary of recent liberals efforts to stifle conservative speech. Nearly all of it has appeared in these pages before, but it’s helpful to have it all in one place. Barone’s title (“The Coming Obama Thugocracy”) is slightly though; only about half this stuff can be directly pinned on the Obama campaign.
The Connecticut Senator [Chris Dodd] has been out front denouncing the “companies that form the foundation of our financial markets,” for “their insatiable appetite for risk.” He has also decried “reckless, careless and sometimes unscrupulous actors in the mortgage lending industry” and he has proclaimed that “American taxpayers deserve to know how we arrived at this moment.” To that end, we propose he take the stand — under oath.
Former Countrywide Financial loan officer Robert Feinberg says Mr. Dodd knowingly saved thousands of dollars on his refinancing of two properties in 2003 as part of a special program the California mortgage company had for the influential. He also says he has internal company documents that prove Mr. Dodd knew he was getting preferential treatment as a friend of Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide’s then-CEO.
That a “Friends of Angelo” program existed is not in dispute. It was crucial to the boom that Countrywide enjoyed before its fortunes turned. While most of the company was aggressively lending to risky borrowers and off-loading those mortgages in bulk to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Mr. Feinberg’s department was charged with making sure those who could influence Fannie and Freddie’s appetite for risk were sufficiently buttered up. As a Banking Committee bigshot, Mr. Dodd was perfectly placed to be buttered.
In response to the charge that he knew he was getting favors, Mr. Dodd at first issued a strong denial: “This suggestion is outrageous and contrary to my entire career in public service. When my wife and I refinanced our loans in 2003, we did not seek or expect any favorable treatment. Just like millions of other Americans, we shopped around and received competitive rates.” Less than a week later he acknowledged he was part of Countrywide’s VIP program but claimed he thought it was “more of a courtesy.”
Mr. Feinberg, who oversaw “Friends of Angelo” from 2000 to 2004, begs to differ. He told us that as the loan officer in charge he was supposed to make sure that the “VIP” clients knew at every step of the process that they were getting a special deal because they were “Friends of Angelo.”
The story continues with details of how Countrywide made sure its VIP clients knew they were getting a special detail. It concludes:
Mr. Feinberg says he went public with his story because when he heard Senator Dodd on TV talking about predatory lending, he felt it was “hypocritical” and he says, “I just thought, ‘This is wrong.'”
Mr. Dodd hasn’t yet released his copies of the mortgage documents, though he promised to do so more than two months ago. His office told us this week they’d get back to us on that. Meanwhile, presumably the Justice Department can have Mr. Feinberg’s Countrywide documents, if it’s interested.
I, for one, am glad the Democrats have ended the culture of corruption in Washington.
TaxProf has the details. The rate for high-income taxpayers also goes up from under 40% to nearly 50%. This is a growth killer, since it is the marginal rate that determines people’s behavior. (McCain’s plan leaves the top rate and the high-income rate unchanged.)
The Obama campaign said it was a mistake for an outreach coordinator to join a meeting last month attended by leaders of two controversial Muslim groups as it seeks votes from large Muslim populations in swing states.
Minha Husaini, newly named as head of the campaign’s outreach coordinator to Muslims, attended a discussion session Sept. 15 with about 30 Muslim leaders and community members in suburban Washington, the Obama campaign confirmed. Participants included leaders of the Council of American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, which have been cited by the government in the past for ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
In August, the campaign’s previous coordinator, Mazen Asbahi, resigned over a similar issue, pointing up one kind of challenge facing the campaign: pursuing the votes of the Muslim community while not perpetuating any misunderstandings about Sen. Barack Obama’s religion. Sen. Obama is a Christian.
One doesn’t have to buy into the Obama-is-a-closet-Muslim theories to be discomfited by the fact that his campaign has repeatedly cozied up with terrorist apologists and enablers. (And, of course, actual terrorists.) Does it mean he is sympathetic to terrorists? No, but it does mean that he fails to share our revulsion to them.
At the same time the Bush administration was negotiating a still elusive agreement to keep the U.S. military in Iraq, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tried to convince Iraqi leaders in private conversations that the president shouldn’t be allowed to enact the deal without congressional approval.
Mr. Obama’s conversations with the Iraqi leaders, confirmed to The Washington Times by his campaign aides, began just two weeks after he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination in June and stirred controversy over the appropriateness of a White House candidate’s contacts with foreign governments while the sitting president is conducting a war.
Some of the specifics of the conversations remain the subject of dispute. Iraqi leaders purported to The Times that Mr. Obama urged Baghdad to delay an agreement with Mr. Bush until next year when a new president will be in office – a charge the Democratic campaign denies.
Mr. Obama spoke June 16 to Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari when he was in Washington, according to both the Iraqi Embassy in Washington and the Obama campaign. Both said the conversation was at Mr. Zebari’s request and took place on the phone because Mr. Obama was traveling. However, the two sides differ over what Mr. Obama said.
The allegation is very similar to one made last month the New York Post’s Amir Taheri. The truth of that allegation was never determined. The Obama campaign denied it, but in the denial actually seemed to confirm Taheri’s central claims. Later, however, the allegation was better denied by some outside the Obama campaign, including Senator Hagel. After that, the story dropped out of the media.
The Washington Times, however, makes clear that this is a separate allegation. It refers to a conversation in June, while the Post referred to conversations in July:
A recent article in the New York Post quoted Mr. Zebari as saying that Mr. Obama asked Iraqi leaders in July to delay any agreement on a reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq until the next U.S. president takes office. Miss Morigi denied this.
Is it true? I think it’s clear that something happened. The Washington Times seems to be confident in its story, reporting it as a news exclusive and claiming to have confirmed it. Moreover, the Obama campaign’s non-denial denial of Taheri’s allegation indicated to me that there was something there.
So what exactly did happen? Obama will deny the story, but that may tell us nothing. Obama has been known to deny an entire story due to minor incorrect details, and has denied stories that were accurate in every particular, but of course he has also denied stories that really were wrong. So the denial itself won’t tell us anything at all. What might tell us something is the way he denies it. (For example, the “denial” of the Taheri allegation was rather revealing.)
In any case, at this point it seems certain that Obama did indeed urge delay in some sort of negotiation with Iraq. It remains to be seen exactly what he tried to delay, and how he tried to delay it. I wouldn’t bet against the Washington Times though.
A gardener who fenced off his allotment with barbed wire after being targeted by thieves has been ordered to take it down – in case intruders scratch themselves.
Bill Malcolm erected the 3ft fence after thieves struck three times in just four months, stealing tools worth around £300 from his shed and ransacking his vegetable patch.
But Bromsgrove district council has ordered the 61-year-old to remove the waist-high fence on health and safety grounds. . .
Sergeant Nick Husbands, of West Mercia Police, said: ‘We can confirm that five thefts from Round Hill allotments have been reported in the past year.
‘These have mainly been from sheds and our advice to allotment holders is not to leave anything of value there.’
Mr Malcolm’s plight comes just weeks after Bristol council angered allotment holders by urging them not to lock their sheds in case burglars damaged them breaking in.
Can today’s UK be described as anything but objectively pro-criminal? The police are unable or unwilling to protect your property, you aren’t allowed to defend your property yourself, and now it seems you aren’t even allowed to erect passive obstacles. Pretty soon you’ll be required to leave your door unlocked.
But, I shouldn’t give the impression that the police is entirely unable to enforce the law. If you sell products using non-metric measures, they’ll be all over you.
This makes three plausible alternatives that don’t raise the ethical issues of embryonic stem cells:
Cells taken from men’s testicles seem as versatile as the stem cells derived from embryos, researchers reported Wednesday in what may be yet another new approach in a burgeoning scientific field.
The new type of stem cells could be useful for growing personalized replacement tissues, according to a study in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. But because of their source, their highest promise would apply to only half the world’s population: men.
In light of this, I imagine someone will look at ovarian cells pretty soon.
The Democrats should really think again about whether winning elections is more important than the integrity of the system. We’re headed for a complete breakdown of public confidence in the democratic process. Is that really what they want? An unelected government will lose any moral authority it ever had. A minimalistic government might survive that, but the Democrats want to use the government to carry out grand feats of social engineering. Doing so without the acquiescence of the people will be very hard, or very dangerous.
The AP is reporting that the Bush Administration is considering taking an equity stake in banks (the Schumer plan), which would be the first step down the slope to nationalizing them.
Apparently, the bailout bill gave them the power to do this. Oops. With all the fury over the bailout, why didn’t we hear anyone complaining about this aspect?
They are largely invisible, and sometimes as simple as a small, plastic marker affixed to a utility pole. There’s an eruv around the White House and one in Manhattan that sprawls from the East River to the Hudson.
Now, in a village at the gateway to the Hamptons, the wealthy eastern Long Island playground, a battle has erupted over this religious symbol for Orthodox Jews, pitting them against their more secular neighbors.
Rabbi Marc Schneier, who counts New York Gov. David Paterson among his friends, wants the Westhampton Beach mayor and village board to approve the placement of the religious boundary called an eruv, which would allow observant Jews to perform minor tasks on their Sabbath or on religious holidays like Rosh Hashana, which was observed on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The proposal has stirred controversy among the 2,000 full-time residents of Westhampton Beach, a community 75 miles east of Manhattan where the population can grow to 20,000 in the summer. Mayor Conrad Teller says 85 percent of village residents oppose the eruv. . .
Opponents worry that if the eruv is established, Westhampton Beach — a wealthy community but one less glitzy than its better known neighbors Southampton and East Hampton — may evolve into an Orthodox enclave.
The mayor, who declined to take a position on the eruv because he may eventually have to vote on it, believes those fears are overblown. He said the village has retained an attorney to research the constitutional issues.
Another opposition group, the Alliance for the Separation of Church and State in the Greater Westhampton Area, also has hired an attorney.
Their leader, Mark Williams, says the alliance is concerned that village approval would amount to sanctioning a particular religion — and is unconstitutional.
A typical eruv is essentially invisible, and serves only to allow Orthodox Jews to go about their lives while adhering to their interpretation of Jewish law governing the sabbath.
The usual suspects say that an invisible line on public property violates the separation of church and state. To the contrary, a federal appeals court has ruled that, not only is an eruv constitutionally permissible, it must be allowed if the municipality allows any other attachments to telephone polls, such as flyers:
A group of Orthodox Jews in Tenafly, N.J., won a six-year battle in 2006 to create one. A federal judge had ruled the borough had the right to ban the eruv, but an appeals court disagreed, saying the borough had selectively enforced the ban on utility pole attachments. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
It’s not about anti-Semitism, opponents say:
Several groups have sprung up to fight it, including Jewish People Opposed to the Eruv.
“The objection to the eruv has nothing to do with religion, per se,” said group chairman Arnold Sheiffer, a semiretired advertising executive. “What they object to is creating a division in the village where none ever existed.” . . . Their intention, he says, is to blunt talk that anyone opposed to the eruv is anti-Semitic.
So it’s not about opposition to Jews, just Orthodox Jews. That’s so much better.
Jerome Corsi, the author of a highly critical book on Barack Obama, was arrested yesterday in Kenya (where Obama is extremely popular) on trumped-up charges. There’s probably only one person in the world with the influence to stand up for Corsi’s right to free speech, and that’s Barack Obama. Yet Obama has remained silent:
A spokesman for Obama said the campaign had no comment on the deportation.
Why not? There’s no political downside whatsoever to standing up for the free-speech rights of your political opponents, especially one whom you’ve already succeeded in marginalizing. It would allow Obama to rehabilitate his tarnished free-speech credentials at very little cost. Even if, for some reason, you don’t want to highlight a free-speech issue, it would be easy enough to respond to a request for comment with a single sentence like “Senator Obama believes strongly in the right to free speech and is disappointed by Kenya’s action.”
So why not? If politically it would be all upside, his refusal must be personal. Obama doesn’t want to stand up for his opponent’s rights, even though it would benefit him politically to do so. For the man who could be President of the United States, that’s worrisome.
Sebastian Mallaby writes in the Washington Post that we shouldn’t blame deregulation for the financial meltdown. Among the true culprits, he writes, are Fannie and Freddie:
If that doesn’t convince you that deregulation is the wrong scapegoat, consider this: The appetite for toxic mortgages was fueled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the super-regulated housing finance companies. Calomiris calculates that Fannie and Freddie bought more than a third of the $3 trillion in junk mortgages created during the bubble and that they did so because heavy government oversight obliged them to push money toward marginal home purchasers. There’s a vigorous argument about whether Calomiris’s number is too high. But everyone concedes that Fannie and Freddie poured fuel on the fire to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
That’s the Fannie and Freddie that Democrats so vigorously resisted reining in.
Next, let’s take a trip down memory lane to September 1999, courtesy of the New York Times:
In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits. . .
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.
(Emphasis mine.) During the last year of the Clinton administration, there was a lot of talk about what Bill Clinton’s “legacy” would be. Now I think we know.
The American author of a best-selling book attacking Barack Obama as unfit for the presidency was being deported from Kenya on Tuesday, a criminal investigations official said.
Jerome Corsi, who wrote “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” was picked up by police Tuesday for not having a work permit, said Carlos Maluta, a senior immigration official in charge of investigations.
He was briefly detained at immigration headquarters before being brought to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport for deportation, said Joseph Mumira, head of criminal investigations at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
NPR reports further (no link, sorry) that Corsi was arrested at the hotel where he was about to launch the Kenyan edition of his book.
Will Obama issue a statement defending Corsi’s right to free speech? We’ll see.
UPDATE: It appears that the government has a damning case. According to the affidavit, ACORN was hiring criminals on work-release from a state prison to commit identity theft. (Via the Corner.)
A woman was refused the “morning-after pill” by a supermarket’s duty pharmacist because it was against his religious beliefs
Ruth Johnson, 33, who has two children, including a month-old baby, had not been using her usual method of contraception with her fiancée.
She went to the Tesco dispensary in Hewitts Circus, Cleethorpes, Lincs, and asked an as assistant for the pill Levanelle.
Miss Johnson was told it could only be dispensed by the locum pharmacist who was called to speak with her.
She said: “He came out from behind a screen and told me that he would not be allowing me to buy the pill from him because he had a right to refuse to sell it on the basis of his personal beliefs.
“The pharmacist was of Asian origin so I asked him if it was because of his religion and he replied ‘Yes’.”
Miss Johnson, from Cleethorpes, was left feeling ashamed and worried and complained to the store manager who told her they couldn’t force the pharmacist to sell the product.
If your party is based on a political philosophy, you can have a debate on the merits. But if your party is just a collection of tribes, it comes down to one voice against another.
Okay, you House GOP geniuses. Please tell me how you improved anything by voting down the first bailout bill. Now we have the same bill, plus $110 billion in pork. Well done!
New measures are being taken to make sure irregularities in September’s D.C. Primary vote don’t happen in November. Officials at the D.C. Board of Elections say they now know what caused 1,500 extra votes to appear in the count.
326 people voted at the Reeves Center precinct on primary election day in September. Their votes were captured on a computer cartridge, but the Board of Elections says when it put the cartridge into the citywide computer to be counted, 1,500 write in votes appeared from nowhere. The board completed its investigation of what might have happened and blames static electricity.
Static electricity! I’m so glad we replaced those old, unreliable paper ballots.
What struck me the most about the debate – and it probably helped having quintessential Obamaphiles in the room – was how Biden’s “gravitas” is derived almost entirely from the fact that he can lie with absolute passion and conviction. He just plain made stuff up tonight. I read a long list tonight in my debate with Beinart here at Wash U, we can visit the details tomorrow.
Just a few: Flatly asserting that Obama never said he’d meet with Achmenijad; that absolute nonsense about spending more in a month in Iraq than we’ve spent in Afghanistan (“let me say it again,” he said as if he was hammering home a real fact); the bit about McCain voting with Obama on raising taxes; his vote in favor of the war etc.
It’s amazing how the impulse to see Biden as the more qualified and serious guy stems almost entirely from his ability to be a convincing b.s. artist. . . When Biden spews up a warm fog of deceitful gassbaggery the response seems to be “what a great grasp of the issues he has!”
From last night’s debate, Biden’s “no Soviet domination of eastern Europe” moment:
When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”
What? We kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon? When did that happen?! Biden and Barack wanted to move NATO forces into Lebanon? When was that? What is he talking about?
I know I’m just piling on now, but I can’t help it. The WSJ has a catalog of Democrat statements defending Fannie and Freddie from reform. Here’s the best one:
House Financial Services Committee hearing, Sept. 25, 2003:
Rep. Frank: I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing. . . .
Sure enough, we tried it his way. Roll the dice, with no focus on safety or soundness.
How bizarre is it that Democrats are profiting politically from the mess they created?
BONUS: She also permits same-day registration, in violation of Ohio law, based on the theory that “casting your vote” does not constitute “voting.” I am not making this up.
Jonah Goldberg (iirc) has written that, increasingly, any kind of outrageous behavior or policy can be accepted if it ostensibly serves the environment. For example, urging children to inform on their parents for “climate crimes.”
This just in from the you-couldn’t-make-this-stuff-up-if-you-tried department. A new website designed by npower, a British electric company, is recruiting children using games, badges and cartoons to enlist as “Climate Cops”; their duties are to actively keep records on their parents and neighbors for violations of “energy crimes” against the planet. Children then use the results of their spying to build a “Climate Crime Case File” on the perps, which they then “report back to your family to make sure they don’t commit those crimes again (or else)!” The site also warns children that they “may need to keep a watchful eye” to prevent future violations. Did I mention I’m not making this up? It gets worse.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi paid her husband’s real estate and investment firm nearly $100,000 from her political action committee over the past decade, a practice that she voted to ban last year and that her party condemned as part of the “culture of corruption” when Republicans did it.
The Washington Times is reporting that the California Democrat’s husband, Paul F. Pelosi, owns Financial Leasing Services Inc., which has received $99,000 in rent, utilities and accounting fees from the speaker’s “PAC to the Future” over the PAC’s nine-year history.
Last year, Pelosi supported a bill that would have banned members of Congress from putting spouses on their campaign staffs. The bill banned not only direct payments by congressional campaign committees and PACs to spouses for services including consulting and furndraising, but also “indirect compensation,” such as payments to companies that employ spouses.
This is horrifying. The consequences will probably be worse than an Obama victory.
The best-case scenario now is the Democrats come back and pass a new bill without GOP support. That bill won’t be remotely as good as the one the House just rejected. Goodbye insurance plan; hello ACORN slush fund, mortgage cramdowns, bank nationalization.
The worst-case scenario is the economy completely melts down and President Obama institutes a New Deal 2.0. (This is Vin Weber’s nightmare scenario.)
My Congressman, a Republican, voted against the bill. Idiot. I’m going to think about voting for his opponent; there has to be a consequence for stupidity of this magnitude.
UPDATE: Doesn’t it sting when Barney Frank urges you to behave like a grown-up?!
UPDATE (10/3): Thankfully, things worked out better than I feared. The final bill, with its $110 billion in pork, was worse than the one the House voted down, but not by as much as I expected.
The root cause of the present crisis is the federal government’s insistence beginning with passage of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act that private sector lenders loosen their credit rules in order to give mortgages to buyers who could not repay them. Then in the 1990s and thereafter, an ill-advised government policy was transformed into a financial toxin as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac used their status as government-backed corporations to backstop millions of such sub-prime loans and to encourage their packaging in mortgage-backed securities as investment tools. Wall Street knew better than to build on such an economic house-of-cards, but did it anyway. The bottom-line remains that well-intentioned but ill-advised government policies are at the heart of the immediate economic crisis.
One member of the “Barack Obama truth squad,” prosecutor Jennifer Joyce, now denies that they plan to prosecute anyone. But, as far as I can tell, she hasn’t explained what the truth squad actually is, or why KMOV reported the opposite. Also, she doesn’t appear to deny that the Obama campaign is behind the operation.
Moreover, as Glenn Reynolds points out, the chilling effect is already in place, particularly considering Obama’s other threats to his critics.
This story will go nowhere, because the media won’t pursue it, and it’s far too dangerous for McCain to touch. It probably shouldn’t go anywhere, either. Jopek’s family just wants to be left alone. But rest assured, if this were McCain (or Palin especially), there would be news trucks on the family’s front lawn.
Newsbusters has found another 1999 article praising the Clinton administration policies that led to the subprime meltdown, this time in the New York Times. It’s not quite as explicit as the LA Times article; it doesn’t mention (as the LA Times article did) how the Clinton administration, through Fannie and Freddie, pushed for securitization of mortgages. But, it still mentions how they pushed lenders to make loans that we can now see were irresponsible:
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.
”Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990’s by reducing down payment requirements,” said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s chairman and chief executive officer.
(Yes, that’s the same Franklin Raines that later faced legal difficulties, and still later was reported to have advised Barack Obama on economics.)
Note that, like the LA Times article, this is not a retroactive attempt to pin blame. Both articles were published long before any problems were visible, and, more importantly, both articles are positive portrayals of Clinton Administration policy.
The two articles put paid to the idea that our current woes are the result of Republican deregulation policies. Our current woes are the result of Bill Clinton’s housing policy, which pushed for lenders to make irresponsible loans, and pushed for those loans to be securitized and traded. Then in 2004 and 2005, there were efforts to rein in Fannie and Freddie, but those efforts were successfully blocked by Democrats.
Even when the subprime market melted down, and mortgage-backed securities began to fail, the Democrats still didn’t learn. When Fannie and Freddie were already in freefall, just two days before their bailout was announced, Christopher Dodd (D-CT) pronounced “They’ll be fine,” adding they were “fundamentally sound and strong.” That’s the same Dodd who was the #1 recipient of Fannie and Freddie campaign contributions. (The others incidentally, were the Democrats’ actual and presumed presidential candidates of 2004 and 2008: Kerry, Obama, and Hillary Clinton.) And that same economic genius was chosen to lead the negotiations for the current bailout.
Not only were the Democrats standing against regulation (the opposite of their usual stance), they literally were angry at the very proposal. Now they have the audacity to pin the fault on Republicans.
The left is always attacking Republicans for allegedly questioning their patriotism, when no one is actually doing so. On the other hand, the Democrats come right out and explicitly call Republicans unpatriotic.
The latest is Nancy Pelosi, who says House Republicans were “very unpatriotic” not to participate in bailout negotiations. (ASIDE: I also don’t know what Pelosi is talking about. A Washington Post story makes it clear that House Republicans were being squeezed out until John McCain intervened to force their inclusion. But that’s beside the point.)
UPDATE: I didn’t want to go out on a limb and assume that the meeting Pelosi was complaining about was the same one that Democrats failed to invite Republicans to, but Gateway Pundit says it was.
The Washington Post has a very interesting story on the bailout negotiations, and in particular on McCain’s role in those negotiations. There’s a lot there, but the main point is that McCain was instrumental in getting the negotiations to take House Republicans seriously:
It is unclear whether the day’s events will prove to be historically significant or a mere political sideshow. If the administration and lawmakers forge an agreement largely along the lines of the deal they had reached before McCain’s arrival Thursday, the tumult will have been a momentary speed bump. If the deal collapses, the recriminations spawned that day will be fierce.
But if a final deal incorporates House Republican principles while leaning most heavily on the accord between the administration, House Democrats and Senate Republicans, all sides will be able to claim some credit — even if the legislation is not popular with voters.
“If there is a deal with the House involved, it’s because of John McCain,” Graham, one of the Arizonan’s closest friends in the Senate, said yesterday.
If the rumors are true, things are moving in the direction of that optimistic third possibility. That will make for a much better bill, and McCain will be responsible for the improvement.
As for the politics, it’s interesting that both Democrats actually seem to be telling the truth about McCain’s role, at least from their own perspective. When Harry Reid blasted McCain for screwing up the negotiations, that wasn’t merely campaign-season blather. Reid was happy with the direction things were going, and when McCain step in, he forced everyone to back up and include House Republicans, thereby taking things in a somewhat more conservative direction. From Reid’s perspective, the negotiations had been screwed up.
I don’t know who will win the election, but John McCain has already done America a great service.
AFTERTHOUGHT: Obviously we have to withhold judgement until we see the final result, but the political process actually seems to be working. I don’t care about the acrimony; that’s as old as the Republic, and we pay our representatives to deal with it. What matters is what the process produces. James Madison was right; the process of compromise between the President and four caucuses is making for a better bill. It makes me proud to be an American.
JEFFERSON CITY – Gov. Matt Blunt today issued the following statement on news reports that have exposed plans by U.S. Senator Barack Obama to use Missouri law enforcement to threaten and intimidate his critics.
“St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, and Obama and the leader of his Missouri campaign Senator Claire McCaskill have attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.
“What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.
“This abuse of the law for intimidation insults the most sacred principles and ideals of Jefferson. I can think of nothing more offensive to Jefferson’s thinking than using the power of the state to deprive Americans of their civil rights. The only conceivable purpose of Messrs. McCulloch, Obama and the others is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.
“Barack Obama needs to grow up. Leftist blogs and others in the press constantly say false things about me and my family. Usually, we ignore false and scurrilous accusations because the purveyors have no credibility. When necessary, we refute them. Enlisting Missouri law enforcement to intimidate people and kill free debate is reminiscent of the Sedition Acts – not a free society.”
I hope Republicans don’t go after Obama too hard for his flip-flop on missile defense. There are so many areas where Obama is vulnerable, they shouldn’t attack him on the one issue where he’s moved to a sensible position.
The Democrats have a choice; they can pass a plan on their own (and accept responsibility for it), or they can work with Republicans on a bipartisan plan. But the notion that Republicans, particularly in the House, will simply to accede to a Democratic plan (particularly one with unacceptable add-ons like a slush fund for the ACORN voter fraud machine) in nonsense. As long as they don’t take Republicans seriously, they’re simply wasting time.
Henry Kissinger believes Barack Obama misstated his views on diplomacy with US adversaries and is not happy about being mischaracterized. He says: “Senator McCain is right. I would not recommend the next President of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level. My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my friend Senator John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality.”
Joe Biden claims that John McCain will impose the largest tax increase in US history by making health benefits taxable. The Washington Post fact checker calls Biden’s claim a “whopper” (they give it four Pinocchios, the worst score). They point out that McCain’s plan includes a tax credit for health care, which would more than compensate for taxing benefits, and actually put taxpayers ahead. But what’s the difference between a massive tax hike and a tax cut between friends, anyway?
It strikes me that this is not only a lie, but a stupid one. People know what Democrats and Republicans are. Are they really going to believe that McCain will raise taxes more than Obama? I doubt it.
So the debate is back on. What will be the political impact of McCain’s intervention in the bailout negotiations? I can’t predict what the political impact of the negotiations themselves will be, but I do have three thoughts about its impact on the debate.
One is the effect on the expectations game. Having spent a few days appearing to dodge the debate will have been much more effective at lowering expectations than any of the usual talk would. This should help McCain marginally.
On the other hand, McCain has not been spending the last few days preparing for the debate, as candidates usually do and Obama surely has. This could hurt him.
Finally, what McCain ought to do is change the topic of the debate from foreign policy to economics. With all that’s happened in the last week, Obama could hardly argue against such a change. But it would render Obama’s debate prep largely useless, and Obama really needs that prep, as is clear from his performance whenever separated from his teleprompter. I don’t know if McCain is smart enough to do this though. We’ll see in the next hour or so.
UPDATE: So much for my prediction. As it turned out, Obama was better prepared on economics than foreign policy.
I think my internet connection is broken, because I’m reading articles that can’t possibly exist: a new story in the New York Times is highlighting several dishonest Obama ads.
The article makes some mistakes, such as toeing the Democratic line that McCain’s ads are somehow dishonest (they mention only three explicitly — sex education for kindergartners, lipstick-on-a-pig, and celebrity — which are all accurate, or at worst matters of interpretation). But, that attack is already priced in, and I don’t think that repeating it has much of an impact at this point. It also inaccurately states that Sarah Palin opposes stem cell research (she opposes embryonic stem cell research), but that also is probably priced in.
What could have an impact is the NYT pointing out that, despite all his high supposed principles (“I’m not going to start making up lies about John McCain.”), Obama is willing to lie. Of course Obama has been lying for a long time (just read this blog), but this may be the first time the NYT’s readers will have heard of it. Many, like Democratic strategists Joe Trippi and Chris Lehane, quoted in the article, will simply shrug, but the NYT doubtless has a few readers who will be bothered. And, if nothing else, it gives McCain material to use in his own ads.
Posted by K. Crary 
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