Truth As A Weapon

in the hands of this Black conservative...a must see vid.

Now this is one guy I'd love to see in politics.

Just Another Embarrassing Question....

As you know, both Teddy Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy have endorsed Barack Obama and are actively campaigning for him.Caroline Kennedy is in Florida shilling for the One as I write this.

I wonder if they're aware that Obama's good friend and political ally Bill Ayers wrote a book in 1974 entitled 'Prairie Fire' - and dedicated it to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's assassin?



I'd love to know what they have to say about that.

National Security Rears It's Ugly Head

We've been assured by the dinosaur media that the coming election was all about the economy, and that the idea of a president as a strategic leader and commander-in-chief was secondary. But that fallacy was torpedoed in a most interesting way, courtesy of Joe Biden, of all people:

"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....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."

Exactly what did Joe Biden inadvertently let slip? Where are the challenges likely to surface, and what are the implications of what he had to say?


What Biden essentially admitted is that Obama is seen as weak, naive and untested by our enemies, that this will lead our adversaries to challenge him early on, and that he is likely to fail miserably..at which point Obama and Biden will need loyal supporters to rally around them to fend off criticism.

This is an astounding admission, especially from an opportunistic senator who's been a large part of the congressional feeding frenzy involved in playing politics to attempt to undermine the present administration's foreign policy in Iraq and elsewhere.

When it comes to national security, perception plays a major role, and leaders are challenged when they are seen as weak and untried.

Barack Obama has little in the way of an actual record on foreign affairs, but what there is quite revealing. His call for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, unconditional talks with Iran's Ahmadinejad,and his initial feckless reaction when Russia invaded Georgia give us a pretty good idea how a President Obama would react to international challenges.

Obama is also on record as saying repeatedly that the Bush Administration `took it's eye off the ball' in Afghanistan. He's called for the sending two brigades,a mere 6,000 men, to invade a region in Pakistan almost the size of Texas over some of the roughest terrain in the world. Not only were his ideas for an invasion of Waziristan militarily ignorant, as one of my correspondents from the 10th Mountain Division who knows the ground intimately pointed out, but this unprecedented, irresponsible outburst from the presidential candidate of a major party helped undermine Pakistan's President Musharraf, perceived in Pakistan as a US ally.

During the last presidential debate, Obama reiterated these ideas of his about invading Pakistan. He apparently doesn't realize that Afghanistan is landlocked, that 75% of the supplies for our troops come through Karachi and overland to Afghanistan through the Torkham border crossing. If that route is blocked off by a Pakistan angered at what they would perceive as attacks on their sovereignty, the alternative is either a costly and inefficient airlift or shipping the stuff through the Black Sea into Georgia and Azerbaijan (assuming they let us) and then crossing the Caspian Sea and shipping the stuff through Turkmenistan and then over impassable, mountainous country into Afghanistan from the Northwest. To underline this, the last time we attacked Waziristan with drones the Pakistanis cut off supplies to our troops for a couple of days.

Obama's flawed and dangerous judgment would create a hostile Pakistan, doom our efforts in Afghanistan and result in chaos, just as the policies he wanted for Iraq would have.

All that aside, what challenges would an Obama-Biden White House face?

If we look at the recent history of the last two administrations, there's a definite pattern of Islamist fascists choosing the opening months of the new president's term to launch a major attack on American soil, and there's no reason to suspect that the pattern should change. Both President Clinton and President Bush had to deal with attacks on the World Trade Center during the opening months of their time in office.

Assuming that happens, and it's a successful attempt, what would a President Obama's likely response be? It's worth noting that a great many of Obama's advisers have ties to the Clinton administration, and it's not a huge stretch to imagine a President Obama following the Clinton response... basically downgrading the incident, treating it as a law enforcement problem and making sporadic, uncoordinated attempts to head off the perpetrators.That response led to increased aggression against places like our African embassies and the USS Cole, culminating in the second WTC bombing. As a matter of fact, I would expect an attack on the US to be at least as serious as 9/11, and possibly more so, especially since that new administration would be headed by an inexperienced and untested president,just as the Bush and Clinton administrations were.

Another factor to consider is the influence of Biden himself, who was ostensibly made part of the ticket to reassure the electorate by adding experience and foreign policy gravitas to an Obama administration.

Unlike Senator Obama, Senator Biden does have a foreign policy record we can examine. In that light, it's worth noting that Joe Biden was a major supporter of the version of the SALT II treaty as engineered by President Jimmy Carter, which would have significantly weakened America's deterrent ability while vociferously opposing President Reagan in deploying Pershing II missiles in Europe to strengthen NATO, a major step in winning the Cold War and destroying the Soviet Empire.

Biden also voted against the Gulf War, one of the few senators to do so. More recently, he advocated a precipitous pullout of US forces from Iraq and, like Senator Obama, derided and opposed the successful surge strategy.

And, if you were listening to the vice presidential debate , you found out that Joe Biden is under the impression that the US somehow 'kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon' at some point..something that would be news to anyone who knows anything much about the Middle East.

What we have here is is an inexperienced commander-in-chief and a vice president who's supposedly an expert on foreign affairs but whose gotten nearly every major foreign policy question wrong since he's been in the Senate.

With that realization, Biden's remarks that “it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right” becomes prophecy.

Aside from our jihadist friends, what other foreign policy challenges seem likely in the opening months of a new president's administration? I see two major ones looming over the horizon, and neither is likely to be solved by 'muscular diplomacy', to use the facile turn of phrase so popular with Obama and his disciples.

The first concerns Russia and the Ukraine.I think it's likely that Russia will attempt to absorb all or part of the Ukraine during the winter of 2008-2009, either by political subversion and sabotage or by a direct military intervention to 'protect' Russian citizens in Moscow's former colony, similar to what occurred in Georgia...or as Putin likes to put it, Russia's 'near abroad.'

The reason it is likely to happen in winter is because of Russia's stranglehold on the energy supply routes from Central Asia to Europe, thus thwarting any possibility of NATO intervention by countries like Germany dependent on those supplies.

In spite of all the noise about its military prowess and Putin's dynamic leadership, Russia is a dying nation with a low birth rate well below replacement level, a rapidly aging population, an army that is mostly equipped with sub par armaments and an economy that is increasingly a one trick pony and shrinking as the government continues to gobble up and confiscate private enterprise. For proof of this, you might recall that during the so-called financial crisis here in America, Russia's entire stock market was compelled to close for several days in order not to completely bottom out. What's kept them afloat is the oil boom and their thuggish willingness to use 'the energy weapon' as a foreign policy tool, and with oil prices dropping there's a limit to how far that can go. They will either have to expand or die, and I'd bet on a shot at expansion.

The second major challenge a new administration is likely to face concerns Iran,Israel and Iran's ongoing quest for nuclear weapons.

'Muscular diplomacy', as John Bolton pointed out on FOX the other day, has been tried for some time by the Europeans acting as our surrogates and has done absolutely nothing to constrain Iran from continuing its rogue nuclear weapons development. Nor will it.

The mullahs desperately need to expand because Iran, like Russia, is a basket case of a country. Iranian dissidents put unemployment at 50% and unemployment in what I like to call the cannon fodder portion of the population - 18 to 29 - at 30% and climbing. Without government subsidies, there would be widespread hunger and want in Iran...and it's an open question how long Iran will be able to continue those subsidies, especially once it becomes a net importer.

At least one report(which the Iranian government, to be fair, denies) shows Iran as a net importer already, with imports that exceed $60 billion, against the official estimate of $45 billion. This kind of deficit wouldn't be a problem in a country that has access to capital markets or foreign investment, but Iran has neither. In fact, with the Rial an unwanted stepchild among the world's currencies and inflation regularly wavering between 17% and 22%, capital is actually fleeing the country,mostly in the direction of the UAE.

With those kind of numbers and an expanding demographic under thirty, Iran, like Russia needs to expand or die, and the quickest way for them to do so is to absorb the neighboring Shi'ite dominated countries as colonies and proxies, and develop a nuclear weapon as soon as possible in order to blackmail the oil producing nations of the Persian Gulf to keep oil and gas prices artificially high and manipulate OPEC policy to Iran's diktat.

In other words, there's literally nothing much to negotiate aside from an American withdrawal from the region and an end to US support for Israel, and the Iranians just said as much the other day..

The real challenge in the Middle East, and the one likely to come up during the opening months of a new administration is dealing with Israel's response to Iran's nuclear weapons development. The Bush Administration has dealt with this problem by using the Europeans as diplomatic proxies, placing its bets on ineffectual sanctions and essentially taking any military option off the table while doing its best to insure that Israel refrains from an attack on Iran's nuclear sites. That strategy that has done absolutely nothing to curb Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, and in fact has likely encouraged the mullahs to be even more intransigent.

Having been essentially hung out to dry thus far by the failure of this policy, the Israelis are faced with what all but the most Left-leaning and unrealistic of them understand as an existential threat. Most of my sources are pretty confident in predicting a successful test of an Iranian nuclear weapon within the next six months...sometime around April 2009.If nothing changes, I'd be very surprised if the Israelis didn't attempt to preempt the Iranian nuclear program before then, regardless of American opposition.

For the Israelis, as for the US, the immediate threat is not necessarily Iranian missiles raining down on them so much as an Iranian handoff to someone like Hamas or Hezbollah.For obvious reasons, I'll refrain here from detailing exactly how that might play out either in Israel or here in the US.

My gut feeling is that the Israelis realize that they're on their own and are not going to wait for events to catch up with them and the unthinkable to happen. They will mount a raid and destroy as many of Iran's nuclear facilities as they can. Assuming that an Obama administration follows the Bush non-strategy and continues the ongoing diplomatic farce, it would then be faced with how to deploy to protect our assets in the Persian Gulf from Iranian retaliation. And of course, whether to continue to back our ally Israel or to join the expected chorus of condemnation from people like the Muslim world, Russia, the EU and the UN as well as how to deal with what might end up as a regional war.

Given that most of Obama's foreign policy advisers (with the possible exception of Dennis Ross) are fairly anti-Israel and regard it as the 'problem' in the Middle East to be solved there's not much question about which side an Obama administration would come down on, but the problem of dealing with a hostile Iran, its terrorist proxies and tensions in the Persian Gulf would remain regardless.

For the most part, Americans still yearn for the good old days when we had oceans separating us and we could afford to ignore the antics going on overseas.

Joe Biden just reminded us of the fact that those days were over a long time ago and we no longer have the opportunity to take a vacation from history. And he also gave us an insight into how our foreign adversaries are likely to see Barack Obama as president.

Would they feel as confident in challenging a President McCain, a decorated military hero tested in the crucible of war with thirty years of foreign policy expertise who's been on the opposite side from Obama and Biden in each of the issues I've mentioned?

That's the question we ought to be asking ourselves when we step into the voting booth on November 4th.


I should like to extend my gratitude to Larrey Anderson at American Thinker,who contributed a number of editing suggestions that helped shape the ideas expressed herein and improved this piece greatly. Any deficiencies remaining are of course my own.

Watcher's Council Results, 10/31/08

The Council has spoken! A complete rundown of the voting tallies is here.


Among the Council members, the winner this week was my piece at Joshuapundit, A Spectator At The Orgy. As always, thanks gang..it's an honor.

Coming in second was Lemuel at Hillbilly White Trash with The gap between the media’s version and the actual truth grows wider

Also getting votes were Cheat-Seeking Missiles for Is a Barack Victory Predestined? and The Colossus of Rhodey with We’re tired of it already .


Among the non-Council entries, the winner was the one and only Iowahawk - Balls and Urns.

In second place was Winds of Change - The Newspaper Crash of 2009… And How You Can Help

As usual, congratulations not only to the winners, but to the participants.

Campaigning In Ohio

Joe The Plumber And The McCains....

Iowahawk Strikes Again....

Laugh out loud funny...don't read this with a mouthful of liquid!

As a Conservative, I Must Say I Do Quite Like the Cut of this Obama Fellow’s Jib.


When my late father T. Coddington Van Voorhees VI founded the iconoclastic conservative journal National Topsider in 1948, he famously declared that “Now is the time for all good conservative helmsmen to hoist the mizzen, pour the cocktails, and steer this damned schooner hard starboard.” In the 60 years since he first uttered it after one-too-many Cosmopolitans at one of Pamela Harriman’s notorious foreign policy black tie balls, father’s pithy bon mot has served as a rallying cry for conservatives from Greenwich to Chevy Chase. Today, I say it’s time for we conservatives to once again grab the rigging and set sail with the flotilla of the true conservative in this race: Barack Obama.

Trust me, I haven’t taken this tack lightly. No Van Voorhees has supported an avowed socialist since great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandpapa Cragmont Van Voorhees lent Peter Minuet $24 and a sack of wampum to swing a subprime mortgage on Manhattan Island. Old dad himself often recounted how, as a lad, he would command the family chauffeur Carleton to drive the Duesenberg down to the Times Square Trans-Lux so he could hiss Roosevelt. But I’ve taken a good measure of this Obama fellow, and I must say I like the cut of the man’s jib.

How can I say this, you ask? One look at this Obama chap is all the answer you need. Suave, tanned, unflappable, Harvard connections; it’s obvious that here is a man to the conservative manor born. One imagines him at the helm of the Ship of State, basked in the sunlight diffusing through the seaspray over the bow, like some beautiful rugged Othello from a rapturous Ralph Lauren catalog, calmly issuing instructions to the deck crew in that magnificent mellifluous baritone of his. It’s that easy-going, almost effortless grace that has all the A-list conservatives like David Frum and Kathleen Parker whispering Reaganesque in hushed tones. Even Peggy Noonan — the Grand Dame of Gipperism — has succumbed to Obama’s undeniable conservative charms. Just last month I listened to her wax poetic about the Adonis of Chicago between chukkers at the Newport Club polo tournament final. “Why Peggy, you old dowager,” I quipped, “I believe you just had an orgasm.”

Certainly, my endorsement has raised more than a few eyebrows around the National Topsider water cooler, particularly among the alumni of jejune cow colleges like Michigan or Dartmouth. They sometimes point to Mr. Obama’s radical Rolodex and his hooey about “weath edistribution” and “dictatorship of the proletariat.” But, as I patiently explain, this is precisely the point - it is
hooey, over-the-top rhetorical flourishes obviously designed by Mr. Obama to win over benighted inner city hoi polloi (a feat, I might add, that even the Great Communicator himself was unable to accomplish).

As for his so-called radical ties, who among us hasn’t sent dinner party invitations to Gore Vidal and a leftwing terrorists or two to enliven the postprandial conversation? Leonard Bernstein loved hosting all manner of Weathermen and Black Panthers and Symbionese Liberation Army celebrities at his Park Avenue pied a terre, but it didn’t mean the Maestro wasn’t in favor of low
taxes. On the contrary; I know for a fact he itemized every cent of the catering bills for his famous terrorist cocktail parties.

Read the whole thing...

How Obama's Credit Card Fraud Works..

You'll remember a piece I did a few days ago on Obama's Questionable Campaign Dollars , which examined how the Chosen One's campaign has gone to knowingly operate a system that is designed to evade campaign finance regulations on contribution limits, fake donors and illegal foreign contributions by deliberately disabling the built-in safeguards that match credit card numbers to names and addresses (known as the Address Verification System or AVS) that are part of the vendor set up that allow credit cards to be accepted as payment.

Ace received communications from professionals that gives us further detail on exactly how it was done..and more importantly, the implications:

Because many of our colleagues in the media have failed to investigate the shenanigans of the Obama Campaign, I have taken upon myself to uncover some improprieties. One that has troubled me greatly is Obama's very relaxed donation policies.

I have over 8 years experience working in the payment services industry. By taking a closer look at Obama's online donation site, I have noticed that his team has left the door wide open for credit card fraud by not putting inthe security measures to ensure full visa/mastercard authorization compliance. This is outright irresponsible behavior on the part of Obama's team and in direct violation of their agreement with Visa/Mastercard.

I did a test on his site. Acting as Joe Stalin, I went onto the Obama site and donated $5.00. I used false information, address: 100 Red Square,telephone number 323-666-1953, zip code 10001, Employer: Kremlin Occupation: Dictator. I did use my valid credit card numbers and
expiration date. The typical security measures, Address Verification System and the Card Validation Code are not present on the Obama site. So there is nothing in place to verify who I am. I clicked submit. The transaction went through.
Then I went to McCain's site, and entered in the same information. Joe Stalin. $5.00. As you can see, my donation was rejected for errors.

* What's the big deal? Obama has left the door open for anyone to run prepaid cards and foreign credit cards without proper screening. In addition, it is easy to run multi-transactions on the same card but under different aliases. In other words, an organization like Move On.org could run tens of thousands of transactions for millions of dollars using essentially cards belonging to only handful of very large liberal donors like George Soros, Peter Lewis and Eric Schmidt.

In addition, Obama's site violates his agreement with Visa/Mastercard. Visa Mastercard regulations require each credit card acceptor to "obtain the 3 digit Card Validation Code [CVV2 found on the back of your credit card. 4 digits for American Express Cards] and submit this code with all authorization requests with respect to transactions where the card is not present..." [cite:] Visa/Master Program Guide.

(Please see attachment or go to Obama's site. You will notice that Obama's donation site does not have this code requirement, which is in direct violation of Visa/Mastercard regulations.)

Speculations as to why?

Many foreign credit cards do not have CVV2 codes. Requiring such codes would limit foreign donations.

Secondly, disabling the security allows would be credit card thieves to"ping" numbers till they get a hit. In other words, a crook could simply type in random numbers until he found one sequence that worked in some fashion. That could give a thief a starting point for committing credit-card fraud. If all they had to do was type nonsense values for names and addresses, such as Doodad Pro, they could quickly determine which numbers were valid - and they could probably program bots to do that kind of work.

No Address Verification System (AVS)

The Value of AVS from a credit card expert: I have over 30 years of experience in investigating Credit Card Fraud and I can tell you, which you may or may not know, that the merchant acquirer that is conducting the collection of credit / debit card for the Obama campaign are responsible for the actions to be taken regarding the Address Verification System responses.The value of the AVS system is that the issuer of the card being used provides back to the merchant
acquirer a response based upon the information provided during the authorization process. This response indicates to the merchant acquirer if the card information was validated as to ownership of the account. It is the merchant acquirer that determines what to do when the authorization response is received. In most cases the transaction that comes back with any negative meaning is denied. However, if the merchant acquirer has adjusted their system to accept any response as acceptable the transaction would be completed.

The value of the AVS system is to deny Card Not Present transactions (CNP)which are suspicious. This protects the merchant against charge backs for bad transactions. What is interesting to me is that the merchant acquirer has knowingly violated a basic CNP fraud prevention technique to accommodate a merchant (Obama Campaign). I think that both the Associations (VISA & MasterCard) would be highly interested in looking at the merchant acquirer that was processing these transactions. The value of ignoring the AVS responses is that multiple invalid transactions may be made without fear of being rejected by the authorization systems. This means that the real owner of the credit card account is willing to allow multiple transactions to be made on the account using different names and addresses that under normal conditions would be denied. The merchant acquirer has a complete listing of all transactions done and it would be very interesting to see how many transactions were conducted on the same account number using different names. I would think that this would be a Federal violation under the current campaign funding laws.

I hope you will take this inquiry seriously. I want a fair election. I do not want either side to STEAL the election literally. Obama's tactics have gone too far in my opinion. McCain is doing the honorable thing on his site and playing by the rules. Obama is in clear violation of the rules. Is this change we can believe in?

Needless to say, the dinosaur media want absolutely no part of this story...an dth eprecedent it's set for future elections, aside from the criminal aspects, is highly toxic for our democracy.

Justice Department Won't Investigate Ohio Voter Fraud

Nah. Busy. Can't be bothered.

The U.S. Justice Department is not expected to intervene before Tuesday's election in a dispute about verifying new voter registrations in Ohio, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said today.

"That is our clear understanding," Brunner said a press conference to discuss preparations for the election.

House Minority Leader John Boehner had asked the Justice Department and President Bush to seek an order to force Brunner to release details about discrepancies in registrations, arguing it's necessary to weed out any fraud.

At issue is what should be done with the "mismatches" that occur when the names and other information provided by newly registered voters are checked by computer against state motor vehicle and federal Social Security records.

The Ohio Republican Party had sued unsuccessfully to force Brunner, a Democrat, to give counties lists of voters with mismatches to investigate, but Brunner said that's not possible because the state's voter registration database was not constructed properly by outside contractors. {...}


Republicans are accusing Brunner of trying to conceal potential fraud by refusing to release details about the database mismatches, which she has estimated to be about 200,000 of the 786,000 people who have registered since Jan. 1.

"I'm disappointed by the Justice Department's refusal to stop Secretary Brunner's calculated effort to undermine the integrity of Ohio's election," Boehner, a West Chester Republican, said in a statement.

I'll say it again, and remember you read it here.. President Bush has no intention of helping John McCain to get elected. There's no love lost between them, Bush has told his major donors, the 'Pioneers' to keep their wallets closed and the Bushes figure that Obama will be a one termer like Jimmy Carter. After which Jeb can become the standard bearer and rally the troops in 2012.

Iran Building Up Its Naval Bases On The Strait Of Hormuz

While we're involved in the dog and pony show our election has become, the mullahs are not sleeping.They're enlarging their naval bases on Strait of Hormuz, the narrow neck of water that controls the Persian Gulf's oil supply:

Iran has begun building a line of naval bases along its southern coast and up to the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the strategic Gulf oil waterway, the Tehran Times quoted an Iranian commander as saying.

Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said the bases were being built on the Sea of Oman coast from Pasa Bandar, near the Pakistan border, to Bandar Abbas, Iran's major port on the Strait of Hormuz, the English-language newspaper reported on Thursday. {...}

"The new mission of the navy is to build an impenetrable line of defence at the entrance to the Sea of Oman," Sayyari said in Hormuzgan province in south Iran, the Tehran Times reported.

"If the enemy goes insane, we will drown them at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and the Sea of Oman before they reach the Strait of Hormuz and the entrance to the Persian Gulf," he said.

Iran has threatened to close the strait, the sea route through which two-fifths of the world's globally traded oil passes, if the United States attacked. Iranian officials have often said Washington would be foolish to contemplate an attack.

The object for the mullahs, of course is not to build major naval installations for their own navy. It's to build missile launchers and bases to target oil facilities in the OPEC states to blackmail them to comply with Iran's diktats,to provide port facilities for the Russians and to have the ability to offset US power by acquiring the ability to shut down the oil routes from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

On The Campaign Trail, 10/30/08

A roundup of what's good today...

WIRE: U.S. absentee voters in Israel back McCain over Obama by 3-1... Hardly surprising.

Poll gives McCain has the lead in Florida early voting?... Again, not surprising. considering the military vote in Florida.

Chris Matthews gives us yet another moment of butt kissin' drivel in his comments on the One's infomercial..

Rasmussen poll; More now trust McCain than Obama on Taxes and the Economy A narrow shift, but an important one that could signify a trend.

Pennsylvania Poll Mason Dixon/NBC shows Obama 47, McCain 43, Undecided 9 with a 4 point margin of error...pretty close to a dead heat.

Yet more Brits sticking their nose into our business..this time, it's the Economist,urging us stupid yanks to 'take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world.' I've said it before..if YOU want him that bad, you're welcome to him. A doctrinaire socialist with major ties to Islamists and a disdain for the military seems to fit in pretty well with where the UK is about now. But keep your noses out of OUR business, cousins. OK?

OCTOBER SURPRISE: UFO ALIEN NOW ENDORSES McCAIN! — kinda funny...


Jules Crittenden: Why I'm Voting For Obama - You'll like this one. Pajamas media's own curmudgeon says 'I for one welcome our new insect overlords.'

The Audacity of Humility - Katherine Ernst from the City Journal talks about the One's pretensions.

Don't Let the Polls Affect Your Vote - Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal gives us an excellent rundown on polls and explains how they're manipulated. And why the only one that counts is the one that occurs November 4th.

Enjoy!

Watcher's Council Nominations, 10/29/08

The Watcher's Council is a group of some of the most incisive blogs in the`sphere. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one of their own and one from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.

A full list of entries, including some excellent non-Council ones can be found here.

So, let's see what we have this week:

Joshuapundit - A Spectator At The Orgy - This week's piece concerns how and why the vast majority of the dinosaur media has been behaving the way they have during campaign `08. It's impossible for me not to feel a sense of foreboding, just from the look and tone of the party. They have no clue how dangerous a game they're playing or the ultimate consequences, and I don't think they're going to fully appreciate the effects even on the morning after until it's too late.

Bookworm Room - Obama wants the government to redistribute wealth -Ms. Bookworm, like many of us was struck by the recent revelations of Barack Obama's long time affinity for socialism and his feelings on using the Courts to enforce equality of results, as revealed in an interview on Chicago public radio. It relates to my piece this week in that it raises the question of why this is suddenly surfacing now...and why it's surfacing in the blogosphere and talk radio and not the dinosaur media.

Hillbilly White Trash - The gap between the media’s version and the actual truth grows wider Lemuel notes the difference between the dinosaur media's predictions on polls and early voting favoring Obama and the reality, and also remarks on media bias in this election.

Cheat-Seeking Missiles - Is a Barack Victory Predestined? - Laer has a fine post this week, wherein he uses Scripture to make the point that G-d governs our actions and has a plan for this world. I couldn't agree more.

The Colossus of Rhodey - We’re tired of it already - What Hube is tired of is the constant refrain that anyone not voting for the One is a de facto racist....and in this case, the subject he uses to illustrate this is an astonishingly servile column by Deborah Leavy in the Philly Daily News.

Soccer Dad - The campaign and israel: take 3029 - Soccer Dad takes an in-depth look at the aspects of the 2008 campaign focusing on Israel, and makes the point ( at least where the Jewish vote is concerned) that whom you support is very much a product of how important an issue support for America's ally Israel is for you...all th esmoke and mirrors to the contrary.

The Razor - The Good Daughter - This week, Scott writes on his feelings and thoughts while assisting his wife in sending his mother-in-law's ashes out to sea.

The Glittering Eye - Both Candidates Suck - Dave Schuler calls it like he sees it. I agree with him in many respects, but there is this, and it's important...character matters. And on that basis, John McCain seems like the obvious choice to me, given the alternative.

A Spectator At The Orgy

'After The Orgy' -Reginald Marsh,1898-1954


Observing the way the vast majority of the dinosaur media has been behaving in the closing closing days of campaign `08, it's impossible for me not to feel a sense of foreboding, just from the look and tone of the party.

They have no clue how dangerous a game they're playing or the ultimate consequences, and I don't think they're going to fully appreciate the effects even on the morning after until it's too late

James Madison, the father of our Constitution - you know, the one Barack Obama thinks was a nifty political document for it's time but so-oo outdated nowadays- made rather a large deal of saying that "without an educated citizenry, popular government is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both."

Part of the education of that citizenry has always been an objective, free and skeptical press, which is why the Founders made freedom of the press a cornerstone of the Bill Of Rights...even though most of them had any number of complaints about the scurrilous nature of some of it.

That safeguard seems to have fallen apart this election cycle, at least where most of the dinosaur media is concerned.I've never seen anything quite like it.

What we've been witnessing is the proposed elevation to the presidency of a candidate who's escaped even a cursory vetting by the supposedly objective journalists, whose function in a free society is to do exactly that. An dnot only are they not vetting him, they're actively pushing him. It's an astonishing lowering of journalistic standards and even a dereliction of the primary duty of a free press...to educate the citizenry.

A new study by the Pew Research Center found that, while 71 percent of Obama’s recent media coverage has been “positive” or “neutral,” almost 60 percent of McCain’s coverage over the same period has been “decidedly negative.”

McCain's positive coverage? A whopping fourteen per cent.

Another Pew study showed that almost 85% of the respondents not only agreed that most journalists were biased towards Obama, but were actually slanting coverage to help him get elected.

No kidding.

The little man behind the screen is not even bothering to draw the curtain anymore, even when he's caught in the middle of the act. They simply don't care anymore.

Here's just a few examples..and I won't even mention the simpering, softball interviews:

* The Los Angeles Times briefly mentioned that it has a video of the Obamas toasting prominent former PLO spokesmouth Rashid Khalidi at a meeting of an anti-Israeli group called the Arab American Action Network meeting in 2003, where the Chosen One praises a man who called homicide bombers 'legitimate resistance' while Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn look on. Obviously this is of interest, considering that Obama has made courting the Jewish vote a big part of his campaign while routinely surrounded himself with Islamists and anti-Semitic political allies like Jeremiah Wright and Khalid al-Mansour. But The Times, in response to numerous requests to make this video public so the electorate can see this for themselves decided that a brief mention in print was all the peons were entitled to.At a time when t the Times is hemorrhaging readers and ad revenues and laying off staff, one would think that a newsworthy item like this would be a priority. Unless the Time's political agenda is taking precedence.

* Speaking of questionable associations, there's been no coverage in the dinosaur media of Obama's connections to the Nation Of Islam and the Saudis. Nor,outside of Stanley Kurz in the NRO, has anyone delved into Obama's connection with Bill Ayers and the Woods Foundation, and more importantly the radical groups that Foundation gave substantial amounts of money to.Nor has anyone explored the relationship between Obama, Tony Rezco and Saddam Hussein's bagman Nadhmi Auchi .

* Aside from a few cursory mentions, there's been virtual silence by the media on the Obama Campaign's willful circumventing of campaign finance laws.And silence on Obama's blatant mistatements regarding his radical positions on what amounts to infanticide.

* Aside from his relationships with Ayers, whole areas of Barack Obama's past records remain hidden and off the record - his doctoral thesis, his college transcripts, his health records, his list of law clients, whether he ever renounced his Indonesian citizenship..the list is simply astounding, especially when you consider the microscopic attention applied to every detail of the life of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber.

And those are just a few of the many items I could cite.

So, why exactly has the dinosaur media become so obsessively slanted and one-sided - even to the point of becoming advocates?

Forget about journalistic ethics for a moment, but simply consider the profit motive. Wouldn't the coffers of the dinosaur media be served by running stories about the above items in an election year when there's obvious interests?

Instead, what it really comes down to, at least for a lot of the denizens of the newsroom is sheer survival.

Bias in media towards the Left and the Democrat Party has been going on for quite some time, but the major difference now is the emergence of New Media -talk radio, the blogosphere, FOX and other outlets - that has disrupted what amounted to a monopoly on news and commentary. People no longer have to put up with the likes of Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather. They can go elsewhere.

And it shows. Viewership for the Big Three networks is plummeting, as is the circulation for most major newspapers. Part of it is simply the constant presence of the Internet and the 24 hour news cycle that can no longer be fed by the morning paper and the evening news, but the biggest single reason is that there are other channels of information and that bias is perceptible now. At least with enough of the audience that it's affecting the bottom line.

Could a number of the editors who decide what gets on the news be making a last ditch effort to try and put in a candidate who, with the aid of one party rule in Washington will re-enact the Fairness Doctrine and give them back the lion's share of the action?

At least one news professional thinks so:

Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power … only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.


With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country …

What I'm more concerned with is the morning after of this particular orgy. The party is so loud and out of control that the revelers are clueless about the danger they're courting, even if they pull this off.

One obvious symptom of how bad it is , as I see one press acolyte after another diving in to uncritically praise the Chosen One is how eager they've been to suppress their normal skepticism and indulge in the audacity of hoping. They hope Obama's radical associates and past positions are going to have little or no influence on him now. They hope that the far Left views he's espoused during the campaign are just rhetoric, and he's going to govern more towards the center. They hope that his near total inexperience with foreign affairs can be offset the likes of Joe Biden, a senator who's been proven wrong on nearly every national security position he's ever taken - and that nothing really bad happens anyway. They hope they're going to continue to be welcome at the party, no matter what. And they hope that the thuggish bent Obama and his political advisers have shown in suppressing dissent, punishing 'enemies', and circumventing the law for the Greater Good is just politics, to be abandoned once the One is inside the White House. And they hope that it will never be turned on them

Of course, the biggest hope they have is that if Obama gets in with a complaisant Democrat Congress and the Fairness Doctrine gets re-enacted, their fellow Americans are going to forget all about the way most of the dinosaur media behaved at the orgy and go back to trusting them again, just like old times.

Unfortunately, that genie's already out of the bottle.

And once a major institution in a free society loses credibility the way much of the dinosaur media have in this election cycle, once people no longer believe in it, there's no going back. And as Madison observed, that's a dangerous place for a democracy to be.

Obama's Figure For Who's 'The Rich' Keeps Lowering....

You've heard Obama constantly saying that anyone making $250,000 or less will not see a tax increase. (lies, of course, since the One's plans call for increasing taxes on payroll and investment that affects almost everyone, but I digress).

As I predicted the threshold for who's 'rich' is steadily dropping, since there simply isn't enough money to be had from the $250,000 + group to pay for the extra spending Obama's been promising his followers. Repealing the Bush tax cuts from that group only raises a mere $40 billion...leaving a shortfall of $360 billion the Chosen One will need to pay for healthcare and the other bribes he's dangling in front of the voters.

Obama and Biden realized this a long time ago, so they're now involved in lowering the threshold on who's 'rich'. In a recent commercial, Obama lowered it to a mere $200,000 in income per year, and in the above video, Joe Biden lowers it to $150,000.

In some parts of the country, $150,000 is a fair amount of money.But in most of urban America, it's a middle class income for a family....say, a nurse and a policeman with a couple of kids.

And make no mistake about it. Even that $150,000 figure is going to come down a lot further once these people get their hands on the White House.

hat tip to Sammy over at Yid With Lid

Tito The Builder Emasculates David Corn..And Introduces Sarah Palin

Ooooh, this is good one.

David Corn is an ultra-Leftist tool who writes for the far Left publication the Nation. Tito the Builder is a Colombian immigrant who's now a US citizen and who inately understands what freedom, hard work and the American dream are. In this vid, Tito absolutely chops Corn off at the knees, criticizing him for the media's bias and accurately labeling Obamanomics as socialism. From what I've heard through the grapevne, Tito's takedown of Corn was even more one sided than this edited vid suggests.



And about a week later, having become a folk hero along the lines of Joe the Plumber, Tito was picked to introduce Sarah Palin at another Virginia rally. Listen to his words...and remember what's at stake here.

Obama's Questionable Campaign Dollars

One of the great stories of this campaign season, one that's been almost ignored is the efforts the Obama campaign has gone to circumvent campaign finance laws.

Team Obama have taken advantage of two gaping holes in the laws..gaping, that is if you're determined to circumvent them based on an 'any means to an end' philosophy.

The first hole involves the fact that donations under $200 need not be reported. A campaign is required by law to keep a record of these donations to make sure that no one donor contributes say, fifty $200 donations to go over the $2,300 limit. We'll discuss how the Obama campaign dealt with that issue shortly.

The second hole involves a practice known as 'bundling.' Simply put, it means that one person may circumvent the maximum personal donation rule by submitting a maximum personal donation for themselves, their spouses, their adult and not so adult children, people who later turn out to be the gardener or the nanny, the family dog....

Here's how the Obama campaign has dealt with both the spirit and the letter of the law calling for transparency in campaign finance. Most of Obama's campaign donations have been raised over the web via credit cards. Taking credit card payments automatically involves built-in safeguards that match credit card numbers to names and addresses (known as the Address Verification System or AVS) that are part of the vendor set up that allow credit cards to be accepted as payment.

If there's a discrepancy...say, if you buy something over the net in the name of Joe Stalin and/or give a different address than the one on the card, the red flag goes up.

As Scott Johnson of Powerline reveals in today's New York Post, what the Obama campaign did was not only to disable those safeguards so donations could be made via fraudulent names and addresses, but to purge most of the records to camouflage this:

The Federal Election Commission says the Obama campaign has reported well over $200 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only a small portion of that sum is attributable to donors the Obama campaign has disclosed.

No presidential campaign has ever before received such a gargantuan sum of money from unidentified contributors.

The campaign's records reveal big contributors with names like "Doodad Pro" (employer: "Loving," profession: "You") and "Good Will" (same employer and profession). Both donated via credit card. Other reports have suggested that some donations come from overseas - raising the question of whether Obama is accepting donations from foreigners, another violation of federal law.

All of which prompted an enterprising citizen to test the controls put in place to enforce compliance with federal campaign law by the Obama and McCain campaigns. Last Thursday, he decided to conduct an experiment.

He went to the Obama campaign Web site and made a donation under the name "John Galt" (the hero of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged"). He provided the equally fictitious address "1957 Ayn Rand Lane, Galts Gulch, CO 99999."

He checked the box next to $15 and entered his actual credit-card number and expiration date. He was then taken to the next page and notified that his donation had been processed.

He then tried the same experiment on the McCain site, which rejected the transaction. He returned to the Obama site and made three more donations using the names Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Bill Ayers, all with different addresses but the same credit card. The transactions all went through. By Saturday, he'd reported that the transactions had all posted to his credit-card account.

Others repeated "John Galt's" experiment last week, giving to Obama under such fictitious names as Della Ware, Joe Plumber, Idiot Savant, Ima BadDonation (with a Canadian bank card) and Fake Donor.

This had to have been done deliberately by the campaign because AVS is a default system that would need to be overridden manually not to kick in.

The Obama campaign is knowingly operating a system that is designed to evade campaign finance regulations on contribution limits, fake donors and illegal foreign contributions.

Pam over at Atlas has more, and she was one of the first to break this story.

Like Obama's $825,000 donation to ACORN, this is a deliberate attempt to subvert our democracy and the election process.

And the fact that they're quite willing to do so in order to gain power should give you a clear warning about how Team Obama plans to govern.

UPDATE: CBS felt they fulfilled their journalistic duty by barely mentioning this story in passing for maybe twenty seconds, tops....so let's all move along now.

If the McCain campaign had done half of this #@@!, it would have been the lead story with ten minutes worth of coverage. Guaranteed.

Obama In 2001:"Tragedy Redistribution Of Wealth Not Pursued"

From the One's own mouth, on Chicago Public Radio WBEZ-FM, 2001...

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendancy to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

Hmmm...using the courts to 'redistribute' wealth and property to those the State decides are more 'deserving'? Sounds suspiciously like the Soviet Union to me.

Apparently Thomas Sowell has a similar view on the type of change Barack Hussein Obama is promising to bring to America. History does repeat itself if you aren't paying attention.

What Obama is actually saying is that it's a pity the courts didn't do the job, so it's up to the political branch..which he's now attempting to be elected to head.

I wouldn't count on hearing about this on the dinosaur media.

The Latest From The Holy Land Foundation Trial

You'll remember the Holy Land Foundation case,which highlighted how money was collected here in America for 'Islamic charities' and actually used to fund jihad and terrorism with the full knowledge of the charity's organizers.

The Holy Land Foundation was essentially a fund raising and money laundering outfit for the Salafist Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas and the inspiration and mentor of al-Qaeda. Last year, an attempt by the Bush Justice Department to bring these people to justice ended in a hung jury, largely because the prosecution's case was poorly prepared and the lines between the HLF and Hamas were insufficiently drawn for a jury with no prior knowledge of how Islamist terrorist funding works...and because of blatant jury tampering during deliberations.

The Feds are retrying the case, and this time things are very different:

Prosecutors last week unveiled a series of detailed charts that point jurors to the exact page of documents already in evidence allegedly showing the Hamas affiliations of the zakat committee leaders.

This roadmap to the nearly 500 documents, videos, wiretap transcripts and bank records – some with hundreds of pages – is a marked departure from last year's trial, which collapsed in a hung jury.

Last year's jurors had scant context to help them navigate the mind-numbing array of evidence and keep track of hundreds of Arabic names, leaving the defense team ample room to assert reasonable doubt.

The defense has long acknowledged that their clients sent more than $12 million to the zakat committees. But they say the money did not benefit Hamas. {...}

To counter that, the government last week called Georgetown University professor and terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman, who did not testify last year. He told jurors that "almost without exception," successful terrorist groups throughout history have relied on charitable front groups to raise money and build good will among those they seek to control.

"They don't have the same name as the terrorist group," he said of these front groups. "But the communities know there is this connection."

Prosecutors last week told jurors that Holy Land supported more than 400 Hamas members that Israel deported to southern Lebanon in 1992. Jurors saw a video of several known Hamas deportees huddled in a tent, thanking the Richardson foundation for its support. Some said on tape they worked with the zakat committees to which Holy Land gave money.

{...}

Prosecutors say documents and wiretaps show that some of the defendants and their Islamist cohorts worked to put Hamas members on the zakat committee boards.

A 1991 roster seized from a co-conspirator's home referred to some committees as "ours," which the FBI says is a reference to Hamas. Defense attorneys pointed out that Hamas is never mentioned in the roster, whose author is unknown.

A key defense argument is that none of the committees Holy Land supported are on U.S. lists of banned terrorist entities, even today.

They do not have to be, as long as Hamas is banned, testified Robert McBrien, with the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees the lists. He also did not testify last year.

It looks like things may turn out a little differently this time. Let's hope so. This is a landmark case that goes to the very heart of the Islamist penetration into America.

US Attacks Syrian Outpost

US forces were involved in an air-ground raid in Syria today that reportedly left eight Syrian 'workers' dead and several buildings destroyed.There were no reported US casualties.

The Syrians told al-Jazeera's Arabic news that th eAmericans had killed several children in th eraid and the BBC dutifully picked this nonsense up, but aside from al-Beeb no other Western media sources was silly enough to be sucked in by this.

What was actually going on was a raid by special forces targeting the jihadi network of foreign fighters that runs through Syria into Iraq. The Syrians, in spite of a lot of rhetoric have been remiss to shut down the traffic in men, money and arms to keep the Iraq insurgency alive.

"We are taking matters into our own hands," the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids.

The attack came just days after the commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq said American troops were redoubling efforts to secure the Syrian border, which he called an "uncontrolled" gateway for fighters entering Iraq.

A Syrian government statement said the helicopters attacked the Sukkariyeh Farm near the town of Abu Kamal, five miles inside the Syrian border. Four helicopters attacked a civilian building under construction shortly before sundown and fired on workers inside, the statement said.

The government said civilians were among the dead, including four children.

A resident of the nearby village of Hwijeh said some of the helicopters landed and troops exited the aircraft and fired on a building. He said the aircraft flew along the Euphrates River into the area of farms and several brick factories. The witness spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information,

Syria's Foreign Ministry said it summoned the charges d'affaires of the United States and Iraq to protest against the strike.

"Syria condemns this aggression and holds the American forces responsible for this aggression and all its repercussions. Syria also calls on the Iraqi government to shoulder its responsibilities and launch and immediate investigation into this serious violation and prevent the use of Iraqi territory for aggression against Syria," the government statement said.

The area targeted is just across the border from the Iraqi city of Qaim, which had been known as the main crossing point for the jihadis.

On Thursday, U.S. Maj. Gen. John Kelly said Iraq's western borders with Saudi Arabia and Jordan were fairly tight as a result of good policing by security forces in those countries but that Syria was a "different story."

"The Syrian side is, I guess, uncontrolled by their side," Kelly said. "We still have a certain level of foreign fighter movement."

I'd also speculate that while the US may have been planning this for awhile, we may have had intel about a big fish in the vicinity.

We may find out more later...

Livni Unable To Form Government; Israel Goes To Elections

Sorry about the light blogging..I was working on two projects that I should have more info for you on later...

Israeli prospective prime minister Tzipi Livni has thrown in the towel on trying to form a coalition government in Israel.

Shas declined to join her coalition over two issues..her refusal to accept their demands for increased government subsidies for families with children and her refusal to commit to not engaging in any negotiations that would involve redividing Jerusalem.

Livni informed Israeli president Shimon Peres and advised elections.

According to Israeli law, Peres has the option of taking three days going to another member of the Knesset to see if they are capable of forming a government. Otherwise, the country will finally get the chance to pick new leadership, most likely by February 9th.

The polls all show Likud ahead, which most likely points to a Center/Right coalition with Bibi Netanyahu as prime minister.


Meanwhile the odious Ehud Olmert is still part of a caretaker government, at least until he either flees the country or they drag him and Aliza off to jail. But he essentially has no power to negotiate any of the country away to the Arabs, and he'd be unwise to try.

It's taken awhile, but it looks like the beginning of the end of Israel's long nightmare.

Selah.

Watcher's Council Results 10/24/08

The Council has spoken! A complete rundown of the voting tallies is here.


Among the Council members, the winner this week was Bookworm Room for Why Obama’s “share the wealth” argument should hurt him , a fine analysis from Ms. Bookworm on what 'spread the wealth around' really means.

Coming in second was Soccer Dad with The Washington Post chooses hope ahead of substance , Soccer Dad's fisking of the WAPO's endorsement of the One in the absence of any real concrete evidence except their 'feeling' that Obama's not as radical as his associations and past record indicates.

Also getting votes were The Razor with If Obama Wins… Part 2 , Cheat-Seeking Missiles for Media Bias #89 - The Audacity Of Inexperience and The Glittering Eye for Unforeseen Secondary Effects .

Among the non-Council entries, the winner was Hot Air - The Comprehensive Argument Against Barack Obama

In second place was Daled Amos - o so far… Saturday, October 18, 2008 “In what kind of nation, do the media investigate critics more than candidates?”

As usual, congratulations not only to the winners, but to the participants.

Burning Sarah At The Stake

I doubt we've ever seen the like in American politics of the public vilification of Governor Sarah Palin and her family.

The fact that she resonates so well with average Americans would be reason enough to destroy her as far as the Left is concerned because it's how they play the game.
Think of it as a classic meme in child psychology:"you impede me, so you're evil and I hate you..."

Or to put it another way, precisely because her impact and repoir with ordinary Americans is so feared, she has to be eliminated.

Of course it's not just Governor Palin's ideas and public record that have to be distorted, held up to ridicule and debunked...she and her family have to be destroyed personally, so that no other uppity woman ever thinks of going off the reservation without a small 'd' after her name and the proper Leftist views.

To that end, she's been characterized as an airhead and a buffoon, a redneck trailer trash breeder from yahooville. The parentage of her children has been questioned, her pregnant teen age daughter (something most families, even those in the public eye are allowed by common decency to deal with in private) made into a public laughing stock, vague rumours about a supposed affair were circulated and a trumped up 'scandal' regarding the firing of one of her cabinet officers was concocted by her political enemies in her home state who were involved in the Obama campaign and blown out of all proportion by the media.

Huge platoons of reporters for the dinosaur media as well as squads of Democrat operatives made the trek up to Alaska looking to find something, anything that would stick. They found virtually nothing, so they simply Made Stuff Up, lying about how Mayor Palin banned books in the Wasilla Library and how Governor Palin supposdly charged victims of sexual assault for their rape kits.

Later they stooped to hostile, heavily edited interviews and out of context soundbites to try and attack her credibility and make her look like an idiot.

Governor Palin happens to be an attractive woman with traditional religious beliefs and conservative and pro second amendment views..and she's pro-life. That last especially infuriated woman on the Left, and as usual when a conservative woman is involved, she was subjected to incredibly vile and sexist insults that wouldn't have even been tolerated for a second if she was a Leftist politician touting abortion on demand.

And needless to say, the Obama campaign not only refused to condemn any of this but actually encouraged it.

It's not only the Left that decided that Sarah Palin needed to be burnt at the stake but a number of establishment self-described conservative pundits on the Right. Instead of seeing her potent mixture of populism and traditional American ideals as a breath of fresh air, they saw her as an embarrassment,especially in the predominantly liberal circles they work, socialize and live in. They've forgotten, even if they once knew, that this was exactly the ideas, appeal and constituency that put Ronald Reagan in the White House for two terms by a landslide and developed enough revolutionary momentum to have had decent chance to engineer a permanent conservative majority in Congress - until George W. Bush willfully destroyed it.

The line coming from these folks nowadays is that Palin was McCain's 'mistake' and if he loses, it will be his pick of Governor Palin as a running mate that will be the thing that costs him the election.The ironic thing is that picking Sarah Palin was one of the few things McCain has done right in his campaign, especially since he's absolutely refused until recently to attack the Bush Administration's farcical mismanagement of the country or his pals in the most dysfunctional Congress in recent history.

Sarah Palin was exactly the jolt of electricity a tired underdog McCain campaign needed. She gave people a reason to turn on to the campaign, pumped up the McCain campaign's moribund fundraising and she hit the ground running in a way that was simply astonishing.

And no matter what sort of slime has been thrown on her, she still managed to keep on message,keep smiling and continue connecting with the huge crowds she drew in an astonishing way.

Lorne Michaels, talking about Palin's stint on Saturday Night Live that brought the show the highest ratings it had in fourteen years said it best:

"I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she's powerful. Her politics aren't my politics. But you can see that she's a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she's had a huge impact. People connect to her."

The most surprising thing some people - especially those supporting Barack Obama - continue to say about Sarah Palin is that she's inexperienced and not ready.

Aside from her past record, after what she's had to deal with these last two months I don't think she'll have a problem dealing with the spotlight or the pressure of running the Senate and keeping it in line (yes, buckaroos, she was 100% correct about that one - read the Constitution where it gives the Vice President the responsibility of PRESIDING over the Senate) or with dealing with higher office in the future.

Among her other attributes, she's proved she can deal with the pressure and adversity. And no matter what happens November 4th, she's not disappearing...provided the treatment she's received hasn't simply disgusted her with the whole sordid mess of seeking public office nowadays
.

I hope not. We need her and others like her to put our beloved Republic back on course.

Some Good News...Murtha Way Behind

Ahhh, I love this.

According to the polls,Code Pink poster boy and abscam crook Jack Murtha is trailing badly in the polls against the challenger for his House seat, ex-Lt. Colonel Bill Russel.

One poll shows Russel ahead 48-45, another more recent one shows him ahead 48-35.

It would be poetic justice for this creep to get beaten like a junkyard dog..and then have to defend himself against the suits filed against him by the 7 acquitted Haditha Marines he libeled on national TV.

For that alone, Fat Jack oughta be put in a cage on wheels and towed through his district while those bitter redneck racists toss garbage at him through the bars.

If any of you have a few shekels laying around, you can donate to the Russell Brigade, help take Fat Jack down and put a fine conservative congressman in office.

And, need I mention that if Murtha goes down, it has implications for Obama's chances in Pennsylvania?

San Francisco To Vote On Legalizing Prostitution

Interesting muni election they're having up in my former home town...

One proposition on the ballot would name a sewage plant after President George W. Bush, something I'm sure is getting big yuks around certain circles in Sodom-By-The-Bay. Another, Proposition K, would effectively legalize prostitution by prohibiting local authorities from investigating, arresting or prosecuting anybody involved in it.

San Francisco currently spends around $11 million per year on prostitution busts, and Proposition K's proponents - which includes the local Democrat party, naturally - are pushing this as a savings to the taxpayers, probably the first time they've been concerned about that particular issue in their entire lives. But the real reason is ostensibly to prevent prosecution of what the pro-K advocates call 'sex workers' for what they term is a victimless crime,under the auspices of tolerance. Supposedly, freedom from prosecution is supposed to eliminate the pimps and allow sex workers to protect themselves.

My personal opinion? Because the measure doesn't legalize prostitution per se or regulate it in the least but merely prohibits the police from policing it, it amounts to open season for pimps and human trafficking and will bring street hookers into neighborhoods that haven't seen them before, thus lowering the quality of life still further for the residents.

Most pimps don't have to use force to get their girls out on the street, and what physical coercion does take place is done behind closed doors where nobody sees. For example, you can beat the crap out of a woman and cause her intense pain by letting her have it with a rubber hose on various parts of her body without leaving marks or damaging the 'merchandise'. Anyway, most street hookers tend to be underage girls ( or boys) manipulated by their mac daddies either through emotional con games or by simply making addicts out of them who are dependent on their pimps for supply. The only thing that will change if K passes is that law enforcement will be prohibited from curbing the worst of the excesses or intervening to send some 15-year-old runaway back to Oklahoma or Ohio.

K will also make it increasingly difficult for the SFPD to investigate and prosecute human trafficking, even though that would technically remain a crime. The bill specifically prohibits the cops from taking federal money for investigations that involve what's termed racial profiling. i.e 'Asian massage parlors', many of which are notorious for importing young underage girls into the US under the pretense of getting them jobs as maids or domestics. Once they're here, they're virtually at the mercy of their 'employers' since they usually don't speak the language, have no money and no place else to go and are easily intimidated into turning tricks if they want to eat or stay healthy. Under Proposition K, that situation will now be business as usual.

Rather than being a referendum on whether prostitution should or shouldn't be a legal endeavor, with the oversight, regulation, zoning control and worker protection that implies, the most horrible part of this is that it amounts to simply looking the other way, and will simply make the city a less humane and liveable place.

Sorry to say, it's about what I'd expect from San Francisco these days.We'll see if it passes....