and I feel like I need to keep repeating this – Bush (in 2003) and McCain (in 2006) warned about this happening and put forward legislation that would move us away from these failed policies. you can find this in older blog posts. -pf

Link to full story above

YouTube video – Covering Your Fannie, Who Really Caused Our Economic Crisis?

corptaxrates_usstates_vs_oecdcountries-20080813.pdf

Jim Johnson’s trouble with Fannie Mae that allowed him to rake in almost 100 million dollars.   High pay while company was sowing the seeds of failure and hiding it?  key-member-of-obamas-vp-co.pdf

Senator Dodd runs the Banking Committee, and is the only one who received more $ from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack than Barry did. And he got a sweetheart deal from Country Wide.  dodd-deserves-financial-scr.pdf

Next! Franklin Delano Raines fd-raines-wapost.pdf

don’t forget this post where there are documents to show that McCain warned about this in 2006.

How much of this is going to hit the MSM in the next days?  Nothing?

46 days to go.  (pix provided by mf- thanks)

A busy day with McCain/Palin in Cedar Rapids and spending time with CRs at HDQs on their assignments.

Got to love these guys; they are trying to keep democracy vital.

Is it too late?

Check out the video here.  My hearing of the speeches real time was disrupted three times by crazies. You only really see one disruption in the video.

I’m beat, but I settled in to read my RSS feeds and this one is worth some discussion:  Link to American Thinker Article.

I cringe when I see the word Conservative over and over again. I don’t want to be known as a Conservative I want to own and be proud of the Republican label again.  If you read the article I linked to above I’d be interested in some thoughts of where this country is going.  I read a foreign article yesterday that said that said (my words) that (with the economic turmoil in the US this week) the American Experiment is dead.  I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s certainly on a precipice which is why I find myself so active in this political season.

Change is an easy message.  What attracts me to both McCain, Palin and yes Miller-Meeks is that they are proven change agents.  Do they, will they, make mistakes?  sure.  Are they smooth talkers?  Miller-Meeks was on her game as I’ve never seen her today. 

Spend some time on her website http://millermeeksforcongress.com there is a new note up there almost every day now… 

Miller-Meeks was the last Iowa political speaker, then a new citizen of Bettendorf, Iowa, a former citizen of Palin’s home town of Wassilla, Alaska introduced the Governor – a great talk…

These all are “country first, party second” people.  Obama and Dave Loebsack (aka PAC-Man) are so far away from that it’s scary.

A friend called to wrap up the day and told me he watched the 6pm news to see them report that the Iowa contingent was upset that McCain/Palin only flew in and out of the area.  The news reported they did not visit the flood damage that has still not been cleaned up into the 4th month after water ravaged Cedar Rapids (among other towns).   Well they did visit the area in more detail and my friend was right to call and correct that misinformation.  (the station told him there were others who had called in and it would be corrected in the next broadcast – whatever – you can’t undo the news)

[10:30 update - I watched the local news and they did correct the story by adding a sentence to the 30 second piece "McCain and Palin toured..." without noting the reporting error in the 6pm show.  And this 30 second piece was not in the first 10 minutes, but at 10:26 after Sports.  - make of that what you will ]

It seems like we all need to change.

I think it’s time to bring a real outsider in to shake things up in DC.  And don’t get me wrong, McCain has been a real outsider for the majority of his career in DC.  The corruption and manipulation not to speak of the greed of those who run our home loan system is nothing more than disgraceful.  That is only one example.  McCain tried to bring this to our attention a few years ago; he was ignored.

It’s time to give McCain a try.  McCain is right when he says he has fought both parties. Me first Country second (or never) in DC has GOT to stop.  Now.  The same old politics as usual has put us in this mess.  It’s really Obama that will provide more of the same – and Obama’s “Change” policies are little more than income redistribution and weakening of American’s National Defense.

Vote for Real Change.

Vote McCain/Plain and also for Dr. Miller-Meeks for Congress.

It’s your future.

.

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”  — Plato

Link to source document 

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama was quick to blame the bankruptcy of Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers on Republicans’ “failed philosophy”. Obama’s September 15 comments were repeated throughout the media–yet reporters have not noted Obama’s glaring conflict of interest—the Lehman debt owed to a bank owned by the financier who loaned millions of dollars to Tony Rezko.

Jockeying among the other debtors seeking repayment under Chapter 11 bankruptcy rules is BNP Paribas, a large French bank whose largest single private shareholder is Nadhmi Auchi’s General Mediterranean Holdings (GMH). BNP Paribas is owed $250 million by Lehman.

Nadhmi Auchi is an Iraqi whose Baathist ties go back to 1959. A formerly high-ranking official in Iraq’s Oil Ministry, Auchi left Iraq at the end of the 1970s. His wealth then grew exponentially as a procurer of arms for Saddam Hussein’s government during the Iran–Iraq war. He is now one of the richest men in Britain. Saddam Hussein in 1995 selected BNP, which later merged with Paribas, as the sole conduit bank handling Oil-for-Food transactions. This Clinton-era arrangement was changed in 2001 by the incoming Bush administration.

Auchi was also a key financial backer for Chicago political fixer and dual US-Syrian citizen Tony Rezko. This writer explained the complex web of relationships in an August 24 article titled, “Iraqi Billionaire Threatens Reporters Investigating Rezko Affair”:

A secret$3.5 million loan from an Auchi company to key early-money Barack Obama fundraiser Antoin Rezko was exposed while Rezko was awaiting trial on fraud and money-laundering charges earlier this year. Rezko’s bail was revoked and police showed up banging on the doors of his Wilmette Chicago mansion to drag him off to jail early in the morning of January 28th. Auchi’s loan to Rezko had come on May 23, 2005 but had not been disclosed to the Court as required in his bail agreement. Three weeks later, on June 15, 2005, Rezko’s wife assisted the Obamas in the purchase of their South Chicago mansion by purchasing a next-door undeveloped lot being sold with the house. 

According to the Times of London, “Mr. Rezko’s lawyer said his client had ‘longstanding indebtedness’ to Mr. Auchi’s General Mediterranean Holding (GMH). By June 2007 he owed it $27.9 million. Under a Loan Forgiveness Agreement described in court, M. Auchi lent Mr. Rezko $3.5 million in April 2005 and $11 million in September 2005, as well as $3.5 million transferred in April 2007. That agreement provided for the outstanding loans to be ‘forgiven’ in return for a stake in the 62-acre Riverside Park development.”

Rezko’s relationship with Barack Obama goes back to at least 1990, when Obama’s law firm did work relating to thousands of now-decaying Rezko apartment units in South Chicago. Rezko was a key early-money fundraiser in Obama’s state Senate campaigns and his failed run at the U.S. Congress.

According to The Times of London, “Mr. Auchi first met Mr. Rezko after the 2003 Iraq war and they have a business relationship.” At the time Auchi was facing the possibility of extradition to France. The Times of London explains: “Mr Auchi was convicted of corruption, given a suspended sentence and fined £1.4 million in France in 2003 for his part in the Elf affair, described as the biggest political and corporate scandal in post-war Europe. He, in a statement from his media lawyers, claims he is appealing against the sentence.”

In 2003, Nick Cohen of the UK Guardian wrote:
Allow me to introduce you to Nadhmi Auchi. He was charged in the 1950s with being an accomplice of Saddam Hussein, when the future tyrant was acquiring his taste for blood. He was investigated in the 1980s for his part in alleged bribes to the fabulously corrupt leaders of post-war Italy. In the 1990s, the Belgium Ambassador to Luxembourg claimed that Auchi’s bank held money Saddam and Colonel Gadaffi had stolen from their luckless peoples. In 2002, officers from the Serious Fraud Squad raided the offices of one of Auchi’s drug companies as part of an investigation of what is alleged to be the biggest swindle ever of the (British National Health Service). With allegations, albeit unproven, like these hanging over him, wouldn’t you think that British MPs would have the sense to stay away?

One might think Obama would also stay away, but in truth it is only the US media who are ducking this story. While ideological bias and a predisposition towards inanity might explain some of the media ignorance, the August 24 article cites another cause:

Working for Auchi… attorneys from London law firm Carter-Ruck have for several months been flooding American and British newspapers and websites with letters demanding removal of material they deem “defamatory” to their client. 

In its June 28 edition, British satirical magazine Private Eye explains: “Until Carter-Ruck and Partners and England’s stifling libel laws got to work, the few American journalists not caught up in Obama-mania were turning to the archives of the British press to answer an intriguing question: who is Nadhmi Auchi?”

What is so “stifling” about English libel law? In the U.K., as Carter-Ruck explains on its own website, “A libel claimant does not have to prove that the words are false or to prove that he has in fact suffered any loss. Damage is presumed.”

The Obama campaign recently issued a non-denial denial in response to claims that Obama met with Auchi―contained in Jerome Corsi’s bestseller, The Obama Nation. They cited only two references.  One is, “Mr. Auchi’s lawyer” who told the February 27, 2008 London Evening Standard, “As far as he can remember he has had no direct contact with Mr. Obama.” Another is, “A lawyer for Auchi, Alasdair Pepper” who says, according to the April 16, 2008 Washington Post, “Auchi Had ‘No Recollection’ Of Meeting Obama or Michelle.” Alasdair Pepper is the attorney whose name appears on the Carter-Ruckdemand letters.

Here are some questions reporters should be asking Barack Obama:

Senator Obama: Lehman Brothers owes over $250 million to a bank owned in part by Nadhmi Auchi’s holding company. Auchi was a key financial backer of Tony Rezko. Sources indicate you met Auchi twice when he visited Chicago in 2004. If elected, how will your relationship with Rezko and Auchi affect your policy towards Lehman Brothers?

Senator Obama: There are reports that Nadhmi Auchi was in 2004-2005 seeking US residency while appealing his French court conviction in the ELF-Aquitaine case. If elected, would you look favorably on a US residency application from Auchi?

Senator Obama: You stated that the Lehman bankruptcy shows that Americans cannot afford four more years of the Republicans’ “failed philosophy”. Can Americans afford a President whose home was purchased with the assistance of now-convicted-felon Tony Rezko, a man characterized as having “permanent indebtedness” to Nadhmi Auchi?

Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made a personal appeal to Barack Obama: Help me grow the Democrats’ Senate majority by sharing some of the $77 million you’ve got in the bank.

Obama’s campaign said no.

———-

Monday’s New York Post included a revealing column by Amir Taheri, a respected commentator on the Middle East. The piece, bolstered by firsthand reporting, provided a troubling glimpse into Senator Barack Obama’s trip to Iraq in July.

According to Taheri, Sen. Obama used the trip to press Iraqi leaders to delay negotiations with a “weak” and “politically confused” Bush administration. Calling the U.S. presence in Iraq “illegal,” Sen. Obama also tried to press General Petraeus & Co. for a realistic withdrawal date, to no avail.

———-

Many were skeptical of Taheri’s report that Barack Obama had asked Iraqi officials to delay a security agreement until after the elections, and the Obama campaign denied it—but their denial is actually a confirmation of Taheri’s article.

Obama’s national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri’s article bore “as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial.”

In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a “Strategic Framework Agreement” governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.

———-

Barack Obama is the second biggest recipient of political money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the last ten years. And he’s only been in Washington for four.

———–

Barack Obama, meet your nightmare? On Monday night, BornAliveTruth.org, a new 527 released an ad starring Gianna Jessen, a 31-year-old woman who survived a saline abortion.

“I’m a survivor, as are many others . . . but if Barack Obama had his way, I wouldn’t be here,” Jessen says in the ad. “Four times, Barack Obama voted to oppose a law to protect babies left to die after a failed abortion. Senator Obama, please support born alive infant protections. I’m living proof these babies have a right to live.”

———-

(CNN) — It appears Barack Obama’s teleprompter is hitting the campaign trail.

The Democratic presidential nominee has never tried to hide the fact he delivers speeches off the device, though normally he doesn’t use one at standard campaign rallies and town hall events.

But the Illinois senator used a teleprompter at both his Colorado events Monday — making for a particularly peculiar scene in Pueblo, where the prompter was set up in the middle of what is normally a rodeo ring.

———-

“Let’s have some straight talk,” McCain said in Vienna, Ohio. “Sen. Obama is not interested in the politics of hope. He’s interested in his political future, and that is why he is hurling in insults and making up facts about his record. Today he claimed that the congressional stimulus package was his idea. That’s news to those of us in Congress who supported it. Sen. Obama didn’t even show up to vote.

“He talks a tough game on the financial crisis, but the facts tell a different story. Sen. Obama took more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than anyone but the chairman of the committee they answer to. And he put Fannie Mae’s CEO, who helped create this problem, in charge of finding his vice president. That’s not change, that’s what’s broken in Washington.”

———-
Barry Donors
Goldman Sachs $691,930
University of California $611,207
Citigroup Inc $448,599
JPMorgan Chase & Co $442,919
Harvard University $435,769
Google Inc $420,174
UBS AG $404,750
National Amusements Inc $389,140
Microsoft Corp $377,235
Lehman Brothers $370,524
Sidley Austin LLP $350,302
Moveon.org $347,463
Skadden, Arps et al $340,264
Time Warner $338,527
Wilmerhale Llp $335,398
Morgan Stanley $318,070
Latham & Watkins $297,400
Jones Day $289,476
University of Chicago $278,885
Stanford University $276,038

It’s sad to watch the rush to attempt to destroy the first female republican on a Presidential ticket.

Many journalists quoting bad sources without attribution – the silliest is watching the changes made in text or headlines as online copy is posted.

journalist=bloggers       bloggers=journalists       crap=crap

you have to weed through a lot of data to find the truth.  I believe NOTHING I read unless I have a history of trusting the source.

Powerlineblog has been among the best, and is run by three lawyers.

Littlegreenfootballs blog was part of the group that uncovered some lies about BUSH in 2004 which lead to the “retirement” of Dan Rather.

here is Weekly Standard blog post on “The Bush Doctrine” dialog in the interview yesterday

well I have to get to work – but read this post from powerlineblog.com today

As part of its campaign to discredit Governor Sarah Palin, the Washington Post carries a front page article this morning by Anne Kornblut that headlines, falsely: “Palin Links Iraq to Sept. 11 In Talk to Troops in Alaska.” The article begins:

Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself.

News flash to Ms. Kornblut: the Alaska National Guard isn’t going to Iraq to fight “the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein.” Saddam is dead, and the government of Iraq is now our ally. The only organized opposition these troops will encounter in Iraq comes precisely, as Palin said, from “the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans,” al Qaeda.

Kornblut’s claim that the Bush administration “once promoted” the assertion that Saddam “helped plan the [September 11 attacks]” is false, too.

The Post apparently realized that its page one story was dead wrong at some point, because it belatedly added this sentence to Kornblut’s text, as noted by Jennifer Rubin:

But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

Of course, once the Post acknowledges that Governor Palin was talking about fighting al Qaeda, not Saddam’s defunct regime, the entire logic of its article (not to mention the headline) disappears, and the only remedy is to yank the article entirely. Evidently it was too late for that.

So what emerges is yet another false hit-job on Governor Palin. It is a continuation of a false hit-job that the Post and other media outlets perpetrated against President Bush over a period of years. Notwithstanding its now obvious falsity, the Post continues to crank out the same old attack, like a frog that has died but whose legs continue to kick, mindlessly.

http://redstate.com

there’s a lot more.

Palin’s memory better than Gibson’s research skills?

Ah, he relied on the AP. Silly, silly man.

Let’s set the scenario:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.”

PALIN: You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said — first, he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words.

See also Hot Air, which keeps going; and ABC News for the partial transcript. Anyway, her comment actually makes perfect sense, given that what she originally said was (via HuffPo):

“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God,” she exhorted the congregants. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

It was the AP that turned it into this:

“Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God,” she said. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”

Ahh, the Dread Ellipsis – not to mention, Big Oops on ABC News’ part. Come on, guys: we gave you first dibs on the interview everyone was going for. The least that you can do is do some prep work ahead of time for it. Particularly since Hot Air corrected the mistake a week ago. This was pretty much an unforced error.

I mean, AP? Nobody blindly relies on AP anymore.

Moe Lane

PS: I would like to thank Charlie Gibson, by the way: seldom do we get such an obvious tell as this. Anybody spouting this particular exchange as a reason for not voting for the Big Scary Woman can be safely written off as a mindlessly robotic idiot with minimum fuss and muss all around.

Below find a list of lies debunked by a liberal group (to show you how screwy some of them are) posted from the Newsweek site
sliming-palin-newsweek.pdf

And by the way news is today for your information, the rest of the world is voting for Obama… like they had a vote.  I suppose the MSM just had to say something positive about the BO campaign with the surge for McCain Palin that they are witnessing first hand.  Must be frustrating for all the BO champions to see someone that they see as having “charisma only” take over the political season :::snicker:::

Apparently they are decending on Alaska to go over the Governor’s office travel expenses with a fine tooth comb – asking questions why she is charging some of her family travel and housing costs.  Seems petty when she’s spending much less than half of what the previous Governor spent on the same.  I’m sure they’ll find something to talk about – but it sure seems desperate to me.

My understanding of the story below is that the gent who was “fired” was placed in another job and has said publicly that he was not pressured to terminate the former brother in law of the governor and the former brother in law is still working after a 5 day suspension.  Just Don’t get the hysteria, other than Palin ain’t Obama.  This is getting very odd.

Here’s another link to sort through the lies.  if it comes up with an error, try it again – he’s either dealing with a lot of traffic or someone is killing the site for another reason…  intro to this link from another site:

 Charles Martin has established a clearinghouse for all the existing rumors about Sarah Palin, and any new ones you want to make up, if you want to try your hand at being a professional journalist like Elizabeth Bumiller.

http://explorations.chasrmartin.com/2008/09/06/palin-rumors/

The Hunt for Sarah October

City slickers invade Wasilla
September 9, 2008

Democrats understand Sarah Palin is a formidable political force who has upset the Obama victory plan. The latest Washington Post/ABC Poll shows John McCain taking a 12-point lead over Barack Obama among white women, a reversal of Mr. Obama’s eight-point lead last month.

It’s no surprise, then, that Democrats have airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers into Anchorage, the state capital Juneau and Mrs. Palin’s hometown of Wasilla to dig into her record and background. My sources report the first wave arrived in Anchorage less than 24 hours after John McCain selected her on August 29.

The main area of interest to the Democratic SWAT team is Mrs. Palin’s dismissal in July of her public safety commissioner. Mrs. Palin says he was fired for cause. Her critics claim he was fired because he wouldn’t bend to pressure to get rid of a state trooper, Mike Wooten, who had been involved in a bitter divorce battle with Mrs. Palin’s sister. Mr. Wooten is certainly a colorful character. He served a five-day suspension after the Palin family filed a complaint against him alleging he had threatened Mrs. Palin’s father. They also accused him of using a Taser on his 10-year-old stepson, drinking in his patrol car and illegally shooting a moose.

Mrs. Palin will return to Alaska for the first time in nearly two weeks on Wednesday night, when she is scheduled to arrive in Fairbanks. Local Republicans will hold a “Welcome Home” rally for her. You can bet some of the Democratic opposition research contingent will be in the audience taking notes. They’ll be the ones arriving in rental cars and wearing fancy dress shoes from back east.

– John Fund

I’m not on the same side as M. Malkin on many issues, but her research on issues is always spot on.  The more BO and his team hipes the Community Organizer work BO did the more blog space these types of articles will get (no one cares about researching anything about BO in the MSM – when they have College transfers and hair dos of Palin to talk about).  It’s important to understand for the most part these Community Organizers are using federal, state or local funds – sometimes for good purposes, frequently for not so good purposes (like voter fraud and embezzlement).  Jesse Jackson has made a living and a carreer of bribery and coercion and that’s where the politics of community organizers can go bad.

THIS is the challenge of the 2008 election.  I have confidence we can get out the vote – if there is only limited voter fraud.  I remember thinking that WISCONSIN votes were close enough last election and fraud that bad - WISCONSIN could have gone red without the fraud. 

I’ve bolded what I think are important segments, but the entire article is worth your time.  -pf

Return to the Article

here are more articles on BO’s past as an Organizer:

Byron York

Steven Malanga (City Journal)

September 05, 2008

Why Obama’s “Community Organizer” Days Are a Joke

By Michelle Malkin
Rudy Giuliani had me in stitches during his red-meat keynote address at the GOP convention. I laughed out loud when Giuliani laughed out loud while noting Barack Obama’s deep experience as a “community organizer.” I laughed again when VP nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin cracked: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Team Obama was not amused. (Neither were the snarky left-wingers on cable TV who are now allergic to sarcasm.) They don’t get why we snicker when Obama dons his Community Organizer cape. Apparently, the jibes rendered Obama’s advisers sleepless. In a crack-of-dawn e-mail to Obama’s followers hours after Giuliani and Palin spoke, campaign manager David Plouffe attempted to gin up faux outrage (and, more importantly, donations) by claiming grave offense on the part of community organizers everywhere. Fumed Plouffe:

“Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack’s experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed. Let’s clarify something for them right now. Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.”

Let me clarify something. Nobody is mocking community organizers in church basements and community centers across the country working to improve their neighbors’ lives. What deserves ridicule is the notion that Obama’s brief stint as a South Side rabble-rouser for tax-subsidized, partisan nonprofits qualifies as executive experience you can believe in.

What deserves derision is “community organizing” that relies on a community of homeless people and ex-cons to organize for the purpose of registering dead people to vote, shaking down corporations and using the race card as a bludgeon.

As I’ve reported previously, Obama’s community organizing days involved training grievance-mongers from the far-left ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). The ACORN mob is infamous for its bully tactics (which they dub “direct actions”); Obama supporters have recounted his role in organizing an ambush on a government planning meeting about a landfill project opposed by Chicago’s minority lobbies.

With benefactors like Obama in office, ACORN has milked nearly four decades of government subsidies to prop up chapters that promote the welfare state and undermine the free market, as well as some that have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and voter fraud. Since I last detailed ACORN’s illicit activities in this column in June (see “The ACORN Obama knows,” June 19, 2008), the group continues to garner scrutiny from law enforcement:

Last week, Milwaukee’s top election official announced plans to seek criminal investigations of 37 ACORN employees accused of offering gifts to sign up voters (including prepaid gas cards and restaurant cards) or falsifying driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers or other information on voter registration cards.

Last month, a New Mexico TV station reported on the child rapists, drug offenders and forgery convicts on ACORN’s payroll. In July, Pennsylvania investigators asked the public for help in locating a fugitive named Luis R. Torres-Serrano, who is accused “of submitting more than 100 fraudulent voter registration forms he collected on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to county election officials.” Also in July, a massive, nearly $1 million embezzlement scheme by top ACORN officials was exposed.

ACORN’s political arm endorsed Obama in February and has ramped up efforts to register voters across the country. In the meantime, completely ignored by the mainstream commentariat and clean-election crusaders, the Obama campaign admitted failing to report $800,000 in campaign payments to ACORN. They were disguised as payments to a front group called “Citizen Services, Inc.” for “advance work.”

Jim Terry, an official from the Consumer Rights League, a watchdog group that monitors ACORN, noted: “ACORN has a long and sordid history of employing convoluted Enron-style accounting to illegally use taxpayer funds for their own political gain. Now it looks like ACORN is using the same type of convoluted accounting scheme for Obama’s political gain.” With a wave of his magic wand, Obama amended his FEC forms to change the “advance work” to “get-out-the-vote” work.

Now, don’t you dare challenge his commitment to following tax and election laws. And don’t you even think of entertaining the possibility that The One exploited a nonprofit supposedly focused on helping low-income people for political gain.

He was just “organizing” his “community.” Guffaw.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/why_obamas_community_organizer.html

at September 05, 2008 – 06:23:42 AM CDT

HUH? check out the bold – yeh taunted, that’s why she’s talking to Charlie…  geez.

Palin to Sit Down With ABC News’ Charlie Gibson

Veep Pick Is Elusive Target for the Democrat

Sept. 7, 2008

Gov. Sarah Palin will sit down with ABC News’ Charlie Gibson for her first interview since winning the Republican vice presidential nomination, the network’s news division confirmed today.

Palin accepted the nomination to be Sen. John McCain’s running mate 10 days ago, but has yet to submit to questions from reporters covering the election.

The Alaskan governor was taunted by the spokesman of her Democratic counterpart, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, for not submitting to a grilling by the press.

Reporters covering Biden gave the candidate a cardboard cutout of McCain, and Biden spokesman David Wade promptly used the gag to take a poke at Palin.

Link to original article 

Media Bias? What Media Bias?
To the Left media, rumors are enough — if their victim is on the Right.

By Mark Hemingway

St. Paul — Oscar Wilde famously quipped that the problem with a socialism was all the meetings; similarly, it’s hard not to wonder if the problem with journalism is all the panel discussions. The only thing worse than media bias is sitting around listening to a bunch of journalists flapping their gums in a vain attempt to justify it.

Since Republicans have for years complained (rightly) about this media bias, it only makes sense that the thousands of journalists descending on the G.O.P. convention would find at least one occasion to dissemble and unconvincingly pretend to be the praetorian guard of the public interest.

And so the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and The Politico sponsored a panel — “Politics and the Media: Bridging the Divide in the 2008 Election.” As for the name of the event, well it was half-right. Listening to the assembled media panelists — which included Fortune’s Nina Easton, Catalina Camia of USA Today, Bush and McCain media advisor Mark McKinnon, and Roger Simon and Jim VandeHei of The Politico — the divide between the media and political reality was never so evident, but there was nary a bridge in sight.

Naturally, the discussion turned to the Bristol Palin kerfuffle and the media’s collective decision to pursue it with prurient zeal, to the exclusion of all else. Somewhat surprisingly, they admitted that they were sent crusading by the paranoid fantasies of an anonymous left-wing ideologue.

Over the weekend, a pseudonymous blogger posted a lengthy diary on Daily Kos speculating that Gov. Palin’s infant son Trig was not hers — that, in a preposterously elaborate cover-up, she was claiming a child born to her teenage daughter, Bristol.

“I don’t know a reporter who off-the-record wouldn’t say there’s some compelling stuff in here if you look at the photos,” Politico founder Jim VandeHei said of the post, which purported to show photos of Sarah Palin not looking very pregnant seven months along.

Another panelist upheld this as a fine example of citizen journalism. There was only one small hitch, as Politico columnist Roger Simon thankfully pointed out: “It shouldn’t be overlooked that the original story was inaccurate.” And wildly inaccurate at that.

But it was enough to let slip the dogs of journalism on Sarah Palin and her family. That a vice-presidential candidate would be forced to endure harsh media scrutiny would be something of a defense, if there were not such a blatant double standard at work. An audience member asked about, and the distinguished panelists struggled to explain, the media’s collective decision to ignore the allegations of John Edwards’ affair and lovechild — while entertaining no such reservations about the Bristol Palin story. In just a few days, they’d flooded the zone with reports about Palin’s family — whether she’s breastfeeding, untrue rumors about her supporting Pat Buchanan’s presidency, etc. But on Edwards, nothing — for weeks.

“Why not just put [the Edwards accusations] out there?,” Simon asked rhetorically. “There are human beings involved in this, the story turned out to be true so you could say, ‘Well, the mainstream media should have reported it long ago.’ But there are scores of rumors out there, scores of stories that turn out not to be true — should the mainstream report every rumor that someone has raised?”

The answer to Simon’s conundrum is painfully obvious. The media should never report “rumors.” The media’s job is to investigate rumors and report the truth. Mainstream media outlets never even seriously investigated the basis of the Enquirer’s legitimate story — despite the tabloid’s record for breaking major stories, as it did with regularity during the O.J. trial.

The other justifications for the media’s falling down on the job with regard to the Edwards story could scarcely be believed. As VandeHei put it, “I remember the sort of collective response was, ‘Ah, he [Edwards] can’t be that dumb.’” But as dumb as it was for Edwards to have the affair, it might well have been even dumber for the media to treat Edwards’ denials of the affair as credible. Strictly as an issue of character, Edwards should have been treated with a heaping dollop of media suspicion. Prior to the accusations of the affair surfacing last year, Bob Shrum — famed Democratic electoral strategist and one of the architects of the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004 — wrote an article in Time magazine accusing Edwards of lying to John Kerry and exploiting the death of his teenage son in an attempt to further his political career.

So then, as the media continues to dig into Sarah Palin’s personal life, the question remains: Are the media biased, or are they simply daft? To paraphrase Fox news, the mainstream media will continue to report — and you can decide.

how does that go?   All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…

Tonight and tomorrow night will be the Republican opportunity to shine on a national stage.  The stage is set.  Harry is Mad.  Life is good.

Harry is mad that a Senator that was roundly cast aside by the Democrats of Connecticut in 2006, spoke in favor of  the McCain Palin Ticket for the 2008 election.  Joe still caucuses with the Democrats, still calls himself a Democrat, but understands what’s at stake in this election.

If the Democrats win a wider Senate majority than they have today (Joe caucusing with the Democrats GIVE democrats the majority today in the Senate) Joe will be booted out of the Caucus or certainly stripped of any Committee positions. 

Joe’s treatment by Democrats is what you get when you put Country above Party.

Country First

Joe Lieberman and John McCain structure the Country First meme better than any politicians have in recent memory.  There are many things that are “broken” in both parties; both men have spoken to the pandering, politics of greed and power – and Sarah Palin also fits that maverick model well.

Politics has always been an ugly business.  I am looking forward to the Palin speech tonight – and meeting up with my Congressional Candidate in Iowa City for a “Shattered Glass” party to watch the speeches.  Thinking what these three mavericks could do in DC with the support of good people like Joe Lieberman, makes me smile. 

The funny thing to me is that most people think McCain pulled Palin into the race because she’s a woman.  Not true, not even close.  He saw a kindred spirit in Palin – someone who sees the world as he does and has been called to serve and root out corruption and END party politics as usual. 

COUNTRY FIRST

Argh – happened again and I did hit “save and edit”.  Anyway…I’ll try to remember everything I just typed out….

I think the news of Gov. Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy may well be the final straw against her.  While admittedly I was doing a happy dance at McCain’s ”change” choice of Palin.  This may now be spun by the Dems as showing too much a lack of judgment by McCain and by Palin herself.  People/the Dems are already saying in essence – “what kind of mother would agree to the national glare with her daughter needing privacy…” and “what a hypocrite to have a daughter become pregnant out of wedlock…”  On the flip side – it could show that Palin has the same issues that many American Families are faced with – that she is just “one of us” but I doubt that sentiment will be viewed by enough people.

I liked that McCain took a “risk” but there will be many (again Dems/Leftists) who say that a President can not take risks without caution and listening to advisors (reportedly who advised against Palin).

While Obama has not been held accountable by half the nation’s people and the media for all his inexperience (at the top of the ticket), all his many ”Present” votes, his questionable associations with Rev. Wright/the “terrorist” guy who sits on a board with him/Chicago “bosses,” too few accomplishments as a legislator, and still offers no concrete answers about all his grandiose plans – I do believe that he will be, for better or worse, the next President.

I can still talk about my guy Truman who was held at arm’s length by FDR – who was not involved in any foreign policy meetings/decisions by FDR and his advisors and that he was not aware of the A-bomb’s existence until AFTER he took the oath of office.  And for all the worry about McCain’s age - FDR was pushed back into office by the DEMS while he was, by all intent and purposes, on his death bed.  If ever there was a cover up about one’s health – that was.  50-60 years later after he was ridiculed about being a hick from Missouri and amidst great worries about risks to the nation when he was sworn in, Truman is now hailed as one of the US’s best Presidents.  I still believe these are all valid arguments for giving Palin a chance. 

However, in this day and age with blogs and you-tube and the proliferation of pundits and 24 hour news channels for which they need to fill up with talk and controversy, and the meanness of political debate – I think Palin will no longer be seen as an asset whether it is fair to do so or not.

Ironically the news on the economy is improving apparently but it may be too late to aid McCain.

What do you all think?                         Libra Girl

Link to article

Democrats Offer Lesson in Misleading on Taxes: Kevin Hassett
Commentary by Kevin Hassett

Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) — Last week, the Government Accountability Office released a report that revealed why Washington is so broken: Democratic politicians too often act like U.S. businesses are the enemy.

The report had the unassuming title of “Comparison of the Reported Tax Liabilities of Foreign- and U.S.-Controlled Corporations, 1998-2005.” It is hard to imagine that such a dry topic could set off a firestorm, but it did.

The problem was the first chart in the report. It showed that 60 percent to 70 percent of companies in the U.S. pay no taxes. That led to an Associated Press story with the startling headline, “Most Companies in U.S. Avoid Federal Income Taxes,” and to a frenzy of business bashing by leading Democrats.

Byron Dorgan, the Democratic senator from North Dakota, said in a statement, “It’s shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi piled on, arguing that the data revealed a fundamental unfairness in the U.S. system, and called for reform.

“When two-thirds of corporations pay no taxes,” Pelosi said, “American workers are forced to pay too much in taxes even as they cope with rising prices and falling wages.”

The study seemed to play right into the Democratic us – against – them playbook. Evil corporations rake in the cash and then play dirty tricks to avoid taxes. That leaves the little guy with the bill for our government.

The problem is, the study showed no such thing.

No Profit, No Tax

First, while it is true that 60 percent to 70 percent of companies in the study paid no tax in a given year, there was a big qualification. The study focused on an Internal Revenue Service tax database that included millions and millions of companies. The vast majority of firms in the study were tiny mom- and-pop enterprises.

Why did the tiny mom-and-pop enterprises pay no taxes? Because they didn’t make any money! The study reported that was the reason about 80 percent of the firms in the sample avoided taxes in a given year. How terrible of them.

If the GAO issued a report that added together data for nine hot dog stands and General Electric Co., and found that 90 percent of companies didn’t pay any tax, it would be a harmless and silly thing to do. But if the Democrats then rush to the microphones and insinuate to the general public that 90 percent of companies are tax dodgers, the stakes change.

How can it be that so many small businesses made no money? Companies tended to have no profits because they had large deductions including wages. Hot dog vendors can pay themselves a wage, in which case they have no profits but pay wage taxes, or they can take their money in profits, in which case they pay profits tax. The data suggest they tend to do the former.

Double Taxation

Most of them do this for a simple reason: we still have double taxation of dividends. If you are a hot dog vendor in the top tax bracket and you pay yourself $100, then you pay $35 in taxes. If you keep it as profit and then pay it to yourself as a dividend, you pay a $35 corporate tax, and then a 15 percent dividend tax on top of it. Why would anyone choose the latter? To do so would be to pay more taxes voluntarily.

For big corporations, the story is different, and utterly inconsistent with the Democratic screed. The study found that about 75 percent of large companies (those with sales above $50 million) paid taxes in 2005, about typical for recent U.S. history. And those that didn’t pay taxes in 2005 did so earlier, so almost no companies went through the sample period without paying taxes. The latter is, again, typical.

News Hole

In other words, there was virtually no news in the study. But that didn’t stop the Democrats, and that’s what is so disturbing. Democratic politicians misused and misrepresented the results of this modest GAO study to bash America’s corporations and call for sweeping “reforms.” If they will do so in response to this minor document, one can only conclude that they will do so on the flimsiest of excuses.

Leaders of the Democratic Party are so eager to portray American business as villainous that they will twist and distort facts in order justify even more punitive taxes than we already have.

The truth is, of course, that we are all in it together. Workers will have better jobs if the U.S. is a more attractive climate for corporations. That means we need to reduce corporate taxes, not increase them.

And that is why Washington is so broken. You can’t split the difference when one side is so egregiously wrong.

(Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He is an adviser to Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona in his bid for the 2008 presidential nomination. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Kevin Hassett at khassett@aei.org

Last Updated: August 18, 2008 00:03 EDT

One might wonder how one can manage “respect for the office while not always respectful of the occupant” in the course of writing “opinion columns” in her office.

Charming… 

And I love how the MSM separates itself as special by saying… “the mainstream press under perpetual siege” … ??? From whom?  For what?  Really?  Is it scary out there? Aren’t humans of all nationalities under perpetual siege of some type?  Whaaaa… Get over it. -pf

UPDATE AM 7/10 – the MSM media picks the story up – it’s in a NYTIMES BLOG

===========

good stuff again from http://littlegreenfootballs.com blog

17 hours ago: A video grab from Al Alam television shows three of nine long- and medium-range missiles being fired during a test in Iran July 9, 2008. Iran test fired nine long- and medium-range missiles, including one which it has previously said could reach Israel and U.S. bases in the region, state media in Iran reported on Wednesday.

but AP chooses to use the more impressive picture (below)

16 hours ago: In a handout picture released on the news website of Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards, four long and medium range missiles rise into the air after being test-fired at an undisclosed location in the Iranian desert on July 9, 2008. Iran today test-fired a missile it said is capable of reaching Israel, angering the United States amid growing fears that the standoff over the contested Iranian nuclear drive could lead to war.

Why do they do this? Silly people. And why can’t the MSM verify pictures before putting them up for posting?

Link to story

Clintons: it aint media bias unless it’s happening to them. So much for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

The story is too long to post it here, but this is the latest in a long line of hit pieces on Hillary or Bill.

Clinton’s temper has continued to get the better of him. By the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, he was reduced, in a Philadelphia radio phone interview, to denying that his comments in South Carolina had been in any way racially charged, and instead insisted that the Obama camp “played the race card on me.” He sputtered, “I mean, this is just, you know … You really gotta go something to play the race card with me—my office is in Harlem.” At the end of the interview, apparently unaware that he was still on the air, Clinton was heard to say, “I don’t think I should take any shit from anybody on that, do you?” Asked the next day by another reporter what he had meant by saying the Obama campaign “was playing the race card,” Clinton would have none of it. “No, no, no, that’s not what I said,” he erupted, as if he did not know that his earlier comments had been recorded and were all over the Internet. He added, “You always follow me around and play these little games, and I’m not going to play your games today.” It’s a nice question, just who was playing the games.

Now that’s sweet. It will be interesting to see how gracefully these two walk into the sunset.

I decided last fall it was better to face the unknowns of BO than the Clinton machine in 2008, regardless of Hill and John’s relationbuddyness.

Rumors have Hillary as Secretary of HHS in a BO administration to have at it one last time on universal government sponsored health care. I doubt it.

ANYWAY, aint gonna happen because McCain and Miller-Meeks will win and wash away all this crap.

Did you hear Susan Sarandon is moving to Italy if McCain wins? Isn’t that enough for you to vote for Johnny? -pf

Linky to source article

Return to the Article

May 31, 2008

Soros Publisher ‘Shaped’ McClellan’s Hit Job: Other publishers don’t recognize it as the same book

By William Tate

An examination of published reports reveals that Scott McClellan’s kiss-and-smell betrayal of George W. Bush is a far cry from the book McClellan started out to write and was shaped into an offensive tome by a publisher with close ties to George Soros.

To understand how McClellan’s literary knife-in-the-back evolved, one has to know something about the book industry.

Unlike fiction, a non-fiction book usually hasn’t been written before it’s sold to a publisher. The author normally puts together an outline and/or synopsis detailing what the book will be about and how it will be structured, and writes 1-3 sample chapters to show the author’s writing ability. The author’s agent then shops the proposal around to prospective publishing houses.

The agent actually lands the deal, so the choice of agents is crucial. Any author normally starts at the top of the A list and works his or her way down until–or if–they find an agent with whom they can work. According to an Associated Press article,

“McClellan’s book does not fit the pattern of Washington megadeals. He was not represented by Washington, D.C., attorney Bob Barnett, whose clients include Tenet and countless political leaders, but by the much less known Craig Wiley, whose most famous client is actor Ron Silver.”

Not to slight Mr. Silver, a gifted talent, but that’s hardly the reaction one would expect to a proposal promising the kind of sensational accusations which have created a media furor and catapulted McClellan’s book to the top of Amazon’s charts. Oh, and put quite a bit of coin in Messrs. McClellan and Wiley’s pockets. Agents are paid on a percentage of sales basis. The more controversial and sellable they think the book will be, the more likely they are to take it on.

Nor did publishers see enough in the proposal to jump at the chance to publish it.

“It was shopped around but, like others who publish in the category, we didn’t even take a meeting….” said Steve Ross, who was head of the Crown Publishing Group at Random House Inc. at the time McClellan was offering his manuscript. This in an industry that, just like newspapers, appears to be dying a slow death at the hands of new media, print-on-demand, and other modern technologies, and is desperate for books that can add substantial numbers to the bottom line.

Again, agents start at the top of the food chain and work their way down. McClellan finally reached a deal with PublicAffairs, which according to the AP “specializes in policy books by billionaire George Soros” and others.

Further, the unwritten book wasn’t published based upon McClellan’s proposal. “(Public Affairs founder Peter) Osnos said he didn’t even read the proposal” the article reports. Instead, Osnos “sought out people who knew McClellan and said they regarded him as an honest man unhappy in his job.”

In other words, Osnos didn’t look at the proposal of the book McClellan wanted to write; he was more interested in confirming that McClellan was disgruntled with the White House.

PublicAffairs editor Lisa Kaufman confirmed to the AP that the proposal McClellan shopped around was nothing like the book that plunges the knife into his benefactor’s back. “The original proposal was somewhat general,” Kaufman admits, “so before making an offer on the book we talked to Scott at some length.”

It takes little imagination to gather how the conversation between George Soros’s publisher and a disgruntled former Bush administration official hawking his unwritten memoirs, still unsold after having gone through the top tier of publishers, went.

A book’s editor and its author work extremely closely–with the author sweating over every word, every detail, and the editor helping shape the pacing and overall tone of the manuscript. Kaufman told the AP that as McClellan wrote the book the “tone began to be directed toward issues and events that some people would rather he not be straightforward and candid about.” (Emphasis added.)

PublicAffairs reportedly paid McClellan a $75,000 advance. An advance is the only part of an author’s financial deal with a publisher that’s guaranteed. It is literally an advance on the author’s royalties. If the book sells enough copies that the author’s royalties exceed the advance, the author will make more money.

Some have argued that McClellan’s small advance negates the financial incentive as a reason for McClellan to bring forward these charges, when the opposite is true. When George Tenet or Bill Clinton are offered millions in advances, they’ve already made their money. The books will probably not “earn out” (pay the author more than the advance) no matter how many copies are sold. With a small advance, the author is under pressure to sell as many copies as possible.

With only a $75,000 advance, and working with a publisher and editor who were more interested in producing a book written by a disgruntled former Bush staffer than they were in the book McClellan had proposed, McClellan had every financial incentive to give them exactly the book they wanted.

According to the AP article, “Rival publishers say they had no sense that McClellan would make such explosive observations.”

Could that be because the proposal McClellan presented them, the book he set out to write before financial pressures and a left-wing publisher took over, didn’t contain them?

And how is the public now expected to believe them?

MORE!!!   Link  welcome to our world Bill!

… Say what you want about Bill Clinton…the guy doesn’t hold back.

That was the case again during his recent interview with People magazine. Yeas & Nays has obtained an advanced copy of the June 2 issue (on stands this Friday) and here’s what the former prez has to say:

-”I think most of the press people are in Obama’s demographic. … There have been times when I thought I was literally lost in a fun house.”

Link

McAuliffe says media ‘in the tank’ for Obama

Terry McAuliffe, campaign chairman for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), said Tuesday that the former first lady is hamstrung by a biased media.

“Clearly it has been a biased media, no question about it,” McAuliffe said on Fox News. When asked how much of the mainstream media is “in the tank” for Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), who leads Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination, McAuliffe estimated that about 90 percent of the media favor Obama.

“It is what it is. We’re not complaining,” he stated. “We have to deal with the hand we’re dealt with.”

McAuliffe added that “every independent study has said that this is the most biased coverage they’ve ever seen in a presidential campaign.”

He also praised Fox News, which is often viewed as a conservative media outlet, as “one of the most responsible in this presidential campaign.”

welcome to our world Terry – pf

Eliot Spitzer is a Republican? I don’t think so.

AP reports “Congress Endorses Post-Bush Tax Hikes” with a picture of John McCain with a hands up gesture…  The content of article indicates Democrats are pushing the taxes, Republicans are against tax increases -

STOP THE PRESSES! after 7 years of bias against George Bush and his policies – we have NEWS! The media IS biased – against Clinton! (apparently they can spot it when it’s against one of their own) -pf

Media tainted by anti-Clinton bias

By Bill Maxwell, Times Columnist
Published March 9, 2008

The conclusion: Of course we are. Any journalist who denies this fact is unable to recognize objectivity if it were branded on his eyeballs.

I am not referring to opinion writers, who are expected to bring their personal perspectives and slants to issues and events. I am talking about editors and reporters charged with delivering a product the public can trust as truth and fairness. (For the record, though, most pundits, conservatives and liberals, also show bias against Clinton.)

If Clinton had not raised the issue and if Saturday Night Live had not spoofed journalists for fawning over Sen. Barack Obama, like puppies licking their owners’ mouths, the charge of bias probably would have remained a mere wink-and-nod charade.

The charge of bias picked up more credence when Clinton fundraiser Walter Shorenstein, founder of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, sent a memo to Democratic Party superdelegates criticizing media coverage of Clinton and Obama.

Shorenstein wrote: “The stakes are so high – for our security, our economy, our health care, our future and our country. … Is it in the country’s best interest that voters received far more information about Hillary’s laugh than Obama’s legislative record?”

Several independent watchdog organizations, including Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and the Center for Media and Public Affairs, have documented persistent and widespread bias against Clinton and in favor of Obama.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs reported that since mid December, when the Iowa caucuses came into play, Obama has received the lion’s share of the positive coverage: “From Dec. 16 through Jan. 27, five out of six on-air evaluations of Obama (84 percent) have been favorable, compared to a bare majority (51 percent) of evaluations of Mrs. Clinton. The gap in good press widened since the New Hampshire primary, with Clinton dropping to 47 percent positive comments and Obama holding steady at 83 percent positive.

“NBC’s coverage has been the most critical of Clinton – nearly 2 to 1 negative (36 percent positive and to 64 percent negative). Conversely, ABC’s coverage was most supportive – nearly 2 to 1 positive (63 percent vs. 37 percent). CBS and Fox were more balanced – 50 percent positive comments on Fox and 56 percent positive on CBS.”

The Pew Research Center found a sharp difference in tone between coverage of Clinton and Obama. Here, I also must address the pundits. Most, left and right, have been unfriendly to Clinton, some writing her obit and others advising her to fold up her tent. Obama, on the other hand, has been treated like the Second Coming.

If you do not believe me, go back and reread your newspapers and magazines. Order transcripts of your network nightly news and read them. I guarantee that you will hear a lot of Hillary bashing and a whole lot Obama serenading.

The most surprising finding, at least to me, was the pervasive bias in coverage of the two candidates’ foreign policy. “When it comes to foreign policy coverage – perhaps the most important issue in the coming election,” Shorenstein wrote in his memo, “the media monitoring group, Media Tenor, found that there was not a single positive story about Hillary Clinton and foreign policy in the month of February.”

If we only had anecdotal evidence, I would be willing to question, or even dismiss, claims of media bias against Clinton. But each watchdog group conducted content analyses and crunched the numbers.

When I conducted my own analysis, I found that real or perceived bad news about Clinton earned front-page placement more often than for Obama. Rarely have I seen a story about Obama’s influence-peddling pal from Chicago, Tony Rezko, on the front page. Nor have I seen much on the front page about Obama’s linguistic sleight of hand with NAFTA and the Canadians.

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? I do not think so. Journalism is important to me. It is my profession. And I agree with Shorenstein: “Our democracy depends upon the Fourth Estate (journalism) to fulfill the uniquely critical role of informing voters about the important issues facing our nation – yet far too often, the campaign coverage has been biased, blase, or baseless.”

With its coverage of the Clinton-Obama campaign, the Fourth Estate has failed miserably.

Best of the Web Today – February 4, 2008

By JAMES TARANTO

More ‘Accountability Journalism’
In June we noted that the Associated Press had embraced a new idiom called “accountability journalism.” The AP’s Ron Fournier explained that the venerable wire service, long known for its just-the-facts style of reporting, now aimed to be “provocative,” telling readers not only what happened “but why it happened,” “what it might mean,” and “what it might reveal about the people who presume to be our leaders,” who “sometimes” are “just plain wrong.”Yet he promised the AP would somehow do this without editorializing or becoming partisan. How well has it done? Here are a few examples.

An AP dispatch yesterday explained the differences in the two political parties’ processes for selecting convention delegates via presidential primaries. A key distinction is that many states’ Republican primaries are winner-take-all–that is, whichever candidate gets a plurality of the vote is allotted the state’s entire slate of delegates. The Democrats, by contrast (along with Republicans in some states), divide up delegates proportionately. The result is that a strong second-place showing is worth more to a Democrat than to a Republican.Here is how the AP’s David Espo sums this all up in his lead paragraph:

When it comes to presidential primaries, Democrats and Republicans play by different rules. One party likes to share. The other, not so much.

Nope, nothing partisan there. Then there’s a piece by the AP’s Calvin Woodward that actually defends congressional earmarks. It starts off in a similarly cutesy style:

Earmarks are only pork when someone else is feasting on them. On your plate, they’re veggies. They are the train that takes you to visit Aunt Betty, or the health clinic down the street, or the waste treatment plant that makes your water safer to drink. They’re not all bridges to nowhere. They’re also bicycle trails to somewhere. If John McCain is true to his rhetoric in the Republican presidential campaign, he would take a broad ax to spending that voters, upon closer examination, might wish were cut in a more discerning way.

Woodward goes on to list a series of earmarks he considers to be worthy:
This actually is a useful news story, a corrective to the most outrageous earmark examples typically offered by foes. Woodward’s conclusion is this:

Pork haters like McCain say an agency with its eye on the national interest and an objective way of looking at a region’s needs should decide on such spending, not members of Congress currying local–sometimes very local–favor. But McCain’s spending plan does not make such distinctions between waste and worthy. In his accounting, if it’s an earmark, it’s bad and it’s gone.

This is a very shallow analysis that seems designed to paint the Republican front-runner as both simple-minded and uncaring. He’s against abused children and the Red Cross! In truth, though, there is a strong argument that even these “worthy” earmarks should be anathema, not only to limited- government conservatives but to welfare-state liberals as well.

To understand why, imagine that Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing a tough re-election bid and needs to court voters in upstate New York. She slips into an appropriations bill an earmark allocating federal money to provide free health insurance to every man, woman and child in Schenectady, N.Y. Would this not be a betrayal of her welfare-state ideals? After years of arguing that health care should be a universal right, she suddenly (in this hypothetical example) is treating it as simply a goodie to be given out in exchange for votes.

How does this differ from local congressmen allocating money for gang prevention in Monterey, Calif., and hospital equipment in Oneonta, N.Y.? What makes abused children in St. James, Mo., more worthy of federal assistance than those down the road in Rolla? Woodward says that earmarking lawmakers justify the practice by insisting “they know their district’s priorities better than Washington could.” But if their chief concern is with local priorities, maybe they should run for City Council or state Senate.

One more example of the AP’s colorful but not terribly detached reporting comes from economics writer Jeannine Aversa:

In a shower of pink slips, U.S. employers cut jobs last month for the first time in more than four years, the starkest signal yet that the economy is grinding to a halt if it hasn’t already toppled into recession.

The headline refers to “a Pink Slip Blizzard,” which directly contradicts the lead paragraph (a shower is an event of short duration, while a blizzard is prolonged). Aversa further explains:

Conditions are deteriorating, according to the latest employment snapshot by the Labor Department, which showed nervous employers slicing payrolls by 17,000.

We checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics press release, and it didn’t say anything about employers being “nervous” or indeed give any clue at all to their emotional state. Moreover, the BLS characterizes the 17,000-job loss as a “small” one, and it’s hard to argue with that. It amounts to less than 1 in 8,000 of the total 138.1 million nonfarm jobs in the country, and it isn’t enough to affect the unemployment rate.

So how did a small decline in employment in one month turn into a “blizzard”? When in doubt, blame global warming.

Media to Clinton: We Blame Ourselves
Here’s a revealing blog entry from New York Times reporter Katharine Q. Seelye:

The negative coverage of Bill Clinton over the past couple of weeks seems to have hurt his standing with the public. A new survey finds that fewer voters these days like the idea of the former president being back in the White House. Forty one percent of registered voters told the latest Pew Research Center survey that they disliked the idea of Mr. Clinton back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which could happen if his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, is elected president. In October, 34 percent of voters disliked the idea.

Why does Seelye attribute Mr. Clinton’s declining popularity to “negative coverage” rather than to his own off-putting behavior? More to the point, can you imagine a New York Times reporter beginning a story, “The negative coverage of George W. Bush over the past few years seems to have hurt his standing with the public”?

As the article below documents reasons why the Kennedy endorsement of Obama should not be given the banner of ”Camelot”, this cartoon suggests how misleading Teddy Kennedy is being, leaning on the mantle of his older brother.

There are those who can conclude JFK’s policies would put him right of center of today’s political masses, not to the extreme right were Obama and Teddy reside.  JFK believed very much in a strong Military, was a tax cutter and wanted us to “ask not, what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  

I don’t think it sounds like either Hillary or Obama; how about you?   -pf

Media Swallows Kennedys’ Arrogant Presumption

By Froma Harrop

Are we done worshipping the Kennedys yet? And what do you mean by “we”?

That was quite a spectacle — the commentariat gushing superlatives over the alleged power of Ted and Caroline to deliver liberals to Barack Obama. Half the electorate wasn’t even born when the sainted John F. Kennedy was assassinated — and few have any idea who Ethel is. Though the Kennedy brand is in steep decline, the wave of conformist opinion still thinks this endorsement is very big.

Americans fought a revolution to free themselves from ruling families. Thomas Paine wrote that “we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government than hereditary succession, in all its cases, presents.”

Nonetheless, the Kennedys fancy themselves liberal kingmakers, and the media swallow their presumption whole. “The torch is passed,” the chroniclers scribble, as candidates beg Kennedys for their “prized endorsements.”

JFK was indeed a charismatic figure, but the more we learn about his Camelot in Washington, the less perfect it sounds. (One might with the dissection of the 1960 election) Daughter Caroline was adorable, but could someone please explain her cosmic significance today?

The career of dynasty elder, Ted Kennedy, meanwhile, is headed for a disgraceful end. The Massachusetts senator has been caught in a sneaky plot to kill a clean-energy project in Nantucket Sound. Seems he doesn’t want to see wind turbines from his waterfront estate. “Don’t you realize — that’s where I sail!” he famously said.

The heck with his constituents, who live with some of the foulest coal-burning plants in the country. The heck with the United States, trying to free itself from foreign oil. The heck with the planet, threatened by global warming. Environmentalists now boo at the Kennedy name — not that many in the media have noticed.

In 1994, the family parked Ted’s troubled son Patrick in a Rhode Island congressional seat. Patrick recently condemned a wind farm proposal for his state — with references to “monster windmills.” You see, making any New England waters safe for wind turbines would undercut Dad’s efforts to keep them off his Hyannisport horizon.

Patrick moves in and out of rehab over pills and booze. In 2000, he shoved a security guard at Los Angeles International Airport. Later that year, he “trashed” a leased sailboat, according to the vessel’s owner. In the wee hours two years ago, he crashed his car into a barrier near the Capitol building. One wishes Patrick luck in recovery, but doesn’t his district does deserve a fully functional representative?

A new Obama ad shows the Illinois senator flanked by Patrick and Ted, with Caroline spouting the same sort of vacuous platitudes that (sadly) have characterized his own speeches. Obama is better than any of these people, and the spot emphasizes what’s missing in his campaign: substance.

In a non-romantic look at the family, “The Dark Side of Camelot,” author Seymour Hersh described John’s 1960 strategy as follows: “He made his mark not in the Senate, where his legislative output remained undistinguished, but among the voters, who responded to Kennedy as they would to a famous athlete or popular movie star.”

Sound familiar?

The Obama campaign has, with justification, criticized Hillary Clinton’s candidacy as another example of dynastic politics. But now that Obama is playing adopted son of the Kennedy clan, that argument falls apart. As for Clinton, her trolling for the endorsements of other family members lacked dignity. And she missed an opportunity to dismiss the Kennedy mystique as so much hot air.

The idea of political dynasties insults a free people. Why this obvious point gets lost in the glowing and lazy reportage of the Kennedy endorsements beats me.

Link

If I can be allowed a bit of whining here… there are two assumptions made in the post below from powerlineblog that I would like to understand more…

1) I don’t believe that Rudy and John’s # of appearences in Iowa or NH were all that different and neither engaged in the Straw Poll.

2) Keeping Rudy out of the headlines is only under the control of the Main Stream Media who I still believe think (as powerline notes below) Rudy is the strongest candidate for the general election.  The MSM will have done their job minimizing his candidacy to an electorate that just has NOT been paying attention.

Rudy was NOT going to win the early primaries regardless of strategies and he did compete at the retail level as I’ve mentioned before – he was actively fundraising or handshaking and townhall-ing, nearly every day since he announced in Feburary 2007.

Sadly (although his attacks against Romney on the time table issue are lame) – I can support McCain but Rudy is clearly the more conservative of the two by a country mile.  Not even close.  And I don’t think he can beat Clinton. And McCain standing beside the rhetorically sublime Obama – he will fail the visual test too (screams past v. future) – people will not take time to listen to issues.  I’ve lost a lot of faith in the electorate in the last months.

What does it say about a system where the press can report a demise and then make it so? Conservatives will get what they wanted (Rudy out of the race) but if they get McCain as an alternative – who won? -pf

(emphasis added below is mine..)

——————————————

Every indication is that Rudy Giuliani is sinking like a stone in Florida. Barring a miracle, he’ll finish either a bit above or a bit below Mike Huckabee. Once Florida Republicans saw that Rudy was dropping in the polls, I think a lot of them jumped ship, thinking they’d rather make a choice between McCain and Romney than use their vote on a candidate who isn’t going to win. Hence, I suspect, the continued downward slide.

If Florida is between McCain and Romney, then the nomination race is between McCain and Romney. It’s too bad; I think Giuliani might have been our strongest candidate in the general election. He was expected to fight McCain to be the first choice of the party’s moderate wing, and, given the problems McCain has had with the party’s base, Rudy had every reason to think he could come out on top and be one of the last candidates standing, even if he skipped the early primaries.

That strategy was a huge gamble, and it doesn’t appear to have paid off. One lesson, I think, is that Rudy’s participation in the debates, in which he always performed well, wasn’t enough to keep him in the public eye given his absence from the day-to-day headlines associated with the early primaries. It’s too bad; at the same time, it’s hard not to credit McCain for going out and wresting the finalist’s slot through hard work in the early states.

Barring a surprise in Florida, Republican primary voters and caucus-goers on mega-Tuesday will face a stark but classic political choice: do they go with Romney, whose views across a broad range of issues are more palatable to conservatives and whose economic expertise may be badly needed, or with McCain, who seems pretty clearly more likely to prevent the Clintons from re-inhabiting the White House? It’s not an easy choice. We’ll have more to say about it in due course.

Neither Bear or Hawkeye football carried into January, but politics remain.

January was a struggle, completing the County Caucus and watching Rudy’s chances for the republican nomination diminish day by day. Iowa was particularly painful as I had to manage a balance between running Rudy’s county efforts and running the county caucus. In most cases the county efforts prevailed.

The Iowa Republican Party (RPI) is dysfunctional. Just today one of the county chairs from my district sent a blistering email to most of the republican hierarchy in the state, complaining about the lack of communication, grass roots engagement and over all dysfunction of RPI. All of this was enforced by the newspaper reports that Ray Hoffman, the Chairman of RPI had just resigned – later in the day we heard (again through a newspaper article) that a new Chairman was unanimously voted in (swell).

Anyway, about the caucus. We drew over 1220 voters and it was a mess. I have been complimented by many people for my efforts but a lot of people were involved and worked hard, and it was still a mess. Here is one email I replied to a disconcerted caucus goer – complaining that the event was not very well organized…

Well I was the organizer for the caucus so you can blame me for your woes. In my defense I spent over 200 hours of my personal time organizing the caucus including 2 weeks vacation and on the phone calling people for the last 2 months on weekends. Those calls included 4 people your state congressman gave me who thought would help for your township. All turned me down, and no one attended from your township to pull from in 2006.

There were 50 volunteers who helped including 10 from the Community College Republican Club, 10 from the Republican Women’s Group and central committee members as well as temporary chairs – no one from your township.

We registered over 200 new Republicans in less than an hour in a first ever “same day registration” mandated by a new Iowa law. Though crowded, some over crowded and mistakes made – most precincts and townships ran fine.

I did focus on organizing the larger caucus groups, making sometimes 10 calls to get a commitment to find the ones who finally ran them. Those that had no chairmen were supposed to be joined with other townships in the cafeteria but that never happened, alas, they were overwhelmed themselves. Won’t blame them for that… At that point I went to two of those smaller townships myself to get them started and proceeded to laugh with some friends from one that I didn’t know were Republicans and got yelled at from a guy from the other who thought I should have spent 200 and ONE hours prepping for the chaos that ensued.

I drove 60 miles round trip on Christmas Eve Day to talk to two township caucus leaders who were caucusing on their own as they usually do.

We also had one or two caucus chairs that could have done a better job. We need to work with them. We had 30 people attend pre-caucus training session in December that no one had conducted before and some of us traveled to Mt Pleasant for other training.

One caucus chair we decided at the last minute should stay home due to health problems and a couple stepped up that night volunteering to run that precinct as you did yours.

We fed 250 people and raised $700 and another $500 in general donations for the scholarship fund at the soup supper.

Now we know who to contact for your township. Again, thanks for helping on the 3^rd. We promise to use our lessons learned to improve the process for the next large group, which we will not expect in 2010 but do hope the party grows.

Please remember this is fully a volunteer effort and we could use volunteers.

Keep up to date on Republican happenings by viewing the county website http://muscatinecountygop.org which I maintain in my spare time as a volunteer for county republicans and my role as secretary of the central committee.

Regards,

Then there was this story – Link

I asked a local well known businessman to give the speech for Rudy. Initially I was hoping to get Tommy Thompson to attend and speak for Rudy but that would have been nuts in hind-site and the campaign decided not to send any surrogates in to speak.

Today, I am still organizing data (caucus chairmen, delegates, alternate delegates, junior delegates) we still need to get the platform planks posted and organize other county convention issues.

Next caucus even though we don’t expect as large of a crowd, we will plan for it and have registration and check-in INSIDE the precinct or township room locations.

Our County Rudy totals, however small – ranked 5th of the 99 Counties in Votes for Rudy by total votes cast.

Now about Rudy. I still firmly support his candidacy. I’ve hesitated writing this because it sounds like some paranoid conspiracy theorist but this campaign has made no sense to me. But first yesterday in Naples:

I thought I would write this – putting a stake in the ground before Jan 29 (the FLA primary).

The media has been declaring Rudy’s campaign dead since Iowa, but let’s think about this.

Rudy’s numbers started to tank with this fake story. Link

You can read story after story I’m posting on this site documenting the bias against Rudy.

The political pundits seem to want to be the shining face of the 2008 race, not allowing the candidates and certainly not the facts tell the story.

Tonight the pollsters were off by double digits forecasting Obama’s win. The Rudy staff still thinks Rudy will win Florida even though media pollsters have him behind by double digits today. The NY Times seems to have picked up on the absentee ballot program Rudy’s team has been working on the ground all month, and Romney’s team is now spinning how little time Mitt has spent there. (lowering expectations)  Be prepared to see Rudy’s numbers get propped – the pollsters need to hedge their bets. (sad)

Have you noticed almost every talking head (including radio talk show host) seems to be supporting a candidate? Free Advertising, and ZERO of it is for Rudy. James Carville and Paul Bagala were removed from CNN reporting because of their obvious shilling for Clinton – because Obama complained. IS that ALL you have to do? (but it’s only until after the Democrat Convention, so we’ll still see them shilling for a Dem later)

People see McCain and Rudy as similar type candidates (moderates) but they are very different. McCain, IMO is too old – he would be older than when Reagan was first sworn in if he wins; and he’s already said he’s in it for one term only. Rudy is much more fiscally conservative – and McCain is just too prone to compromise – something that is useful in the Senate but not as a leader of the free world. I’ve told people McCain is my 4th or 5th choice, with Rudy my 1st 2nd and 3rd choice. Romney is 5th or 6th, no one else is on the list.

And what is this about McCain picking Lindsey Graham for his VP?  Bleh!

Just something about Rudy that is strong, knows his mind, sticks to it, tough on crime and prosecution of the terrorists’ war on us.  I like his stat programs, AND I’m pro choice in the same way Rudy is… We can’t legislate morality, we must change hearts and minds… But he would still appoint judges that don’t re-invent law. Tough guy with a heart – Link.

To watch these politicians duck and weave is disconcerting. The media is making a game of this race and not listening to what Rudy says – he never planned to play to win in any state before Florida. (even though Rudy has raised as much money and appeared in Iowa and New Hampshire about the same number of times as McCain did) Rudy just keeps telling his story and putting out white papers on what he would do and gathering some great people around him like Ted Olsen, Bill Simon and Steve Forbes (and check out the video at the bottom of the page).

Whether Rudy’s strategy makes sense can’t be known until Jan 29. To decide and pronounce otherwise is to affect election results. Deciding election results is no more the media’s job (as much as they would like it to be) as it is right to announce the “forecasted” winner before the polls close.

All the talking heads saying “Rudy’s campaign is dead” haven’t spent much time on the ground in Florida.

Will write more later. Rudy is my guy – and is right for 2008 -this is why (video)

Although Rudy was in Iowa and New Hampshire about as many days as McCain – he has also said since the start of his campaign almost a year ago – his measurement of success will be winning Florida.  Where is the surprise he’s been there for a while?

note – early voting did not start in Florida until January 14, 15 days before primary day.

note – early surge in voting has not been reported as deceptive practices in prior elections or even in the Clinton/Obama race – but Rudy?

Democrats “intense interest”

Rudy “flaws in early voting exposed”

Link

January 27, 2008

Surge in Early Balloting Shifts Florida Races

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

BOCA RATON, Fla. — A surge of early voting by Florida Democrats and Republicans has startled officials here and injected additional complexity into the state’s presidential primaries on Tuesday.

Democratic candidates are not overtly campaigning here because of the Democratic National Committee’s decision to penalize the state for moving its primary to an earlier date than authorized by the national party, but the number of early votes cast suggests intense interest in the race.

The activity appears fueled in part by unofficial efforts by Florida supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

By Friday night, nearly 350,000 Democrats had cast early votes, either in person or by mail, and party officials predicted that about 400,000 will have voted by Election Day. By contrast, just 97,000 Democrats voted early in the 2004 presidential primary, which was not as intensely contested. There are 4.14 million Democrats registered to vote in Florida.

The level of interest, if it is matched by turnout at the polls on Tuesday, could make the results in Florida more important for Democrats than they had assumed, given both the absence of candidates here and the fact that no delegates are at stake. The Democratic National Committee penalized Florida for holding its primary too early, saying it would not seat its delegates.

Along with the Democratic contest in South Carolina on Saturday, the Florida results could help set the stage for the almost nationwide primary battle on Feb. 5. Three days before the polls are to open here, the number of Democrats who have voted here has already exceeded the turnout in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.

“There is a race going on,” said Karen Thurman, the chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, who has been urging Floridians to defy the national party and vote. “And there will still be a headline: ‘So-and-so has won Florida.’ ”

There has also been a flood of early ballots from Republican voters which has, again, already exceeded the turnout in the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. As of Friday night, nearly 400,000 party Republicans had cast early votes, either in person or by mail, party officials reported. By contrast, just under 200,000 Republicans had voted in person or by mail at this point in 2006, when there was a heavily contested Republican primary for governor. There were 3.8 million Republicans qualified to vote on Tuesday.

That development offers at least a glimmer of hope to Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York. He has made a calculated effort to get his supporters to vote early over the past month, hoping to bank a substantial number of votes before losses in other early states raised questions about his viability and his competitors arrived in the state, driving down his numbers in the polls.

As late as Thursday, Mr. Giuliani, at an appearance here, was still reminding supporters to vote for him early, as he has done at almost every stop here this month. “We are already voting, right?” he asked the crowd.

Florida is one of 37 states that permit residents to vote early, either with early voting or wide-open absentee voting, according to Electionline.org, a Pew Center Web site that tracks election law. This is the first big test of the practice in 2008, preceding the Feb. 5 primaries, when seven more states will count early votes as part of their final tallies.

Advocates of early voting argue that it makes it easier for people to vote — in some states, 50 percent of the votes are cast in advance — while taking pressure off voting machines and making Election Day easier to manage.

But the practice has been questioned by some academics, who note that voters often make their decisions before they have a chance to hear all the arguments that lead to a final voting decision. Mr. Giuliani’s supporters and some rivals said his effort to bank early votes could save him from a devastating defeat, even though it may not be enough to bring him victory, and thus serve as a case study of one of the objections to the system.

“This is a case where some of the flaws in early voting are exposed,” said Paul Gronke, a political scientist at Reed College in Portland, Ore., who is a consultant to Electionline.org.

The rush of Democrats to vote before Tuesday’s primary has come despite Democratic candidates having stayed out of the state in deference to the Democratic National Committee and a pledge they signed to the four states with authorized early contests: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

Still, unlike in Michigan, the other state that defied the Democratic National Committee and went ahead with an early primary, the names of Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama and a third candidate, John Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, are on the ballots that Floridians saw when early voting started 15 days before the primary and on absentee ballots that were distributed as early as Dec. 15.

The Democratic surge here is hardly taking place in a vacuum. Mrs. Clinton has a network of supporters, including elected officials, who have organized get-out-the-vote efforts and are planning statewide victory parties. One prominent Clinton supporter, Gerald W. McEntee, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, was headed here this weekend to urge union members to turn out for Mrs. Clinton.

“We have 26,000 members and we probably have a like amount of retirees there,” Mr. McEntee said by telephone. “We are going to have three or four meetings and give our pitch in terms of Hillary Clinton and ask them to be active in the remaining days of the campaign with the specific focus of trying to bring out three our four neighbors next Tuesday.”

Mrs. Clinton is scheduled to fly here on Sunday for two fund-raisers. Although the events are not open to the press or public — her aides said she would attend no public event that would result in her breaking her word — her arrival here the day after the South Carolina vote seems likely to produce coverage on Florida television stations and newspapers on the day before the vote. On Friday, her campaign issued a statement saying that she would urge her delegates at the Democratic convention this summer to seat the Florida delegation.

Even as Mr. Obama’s advisers have sought to play down the results, his campaign has bought television time on national networks that has been hard to miss on Florida television stations. Grass-roots groups who say they are operating independently of Mr. Obama’s headquarters in Chicago have also been organizing across the state, trying to encourage support for him.

Terry Watson, who heads one of the grass-roots groups, said his organization handed out thousands of leaflets promoting Mr. Obama and asked Floridians to vote for him at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in St. Petersburg last Monday. Mr. Watson said his group was “the largest grass-roots organization” in the state and was preparing to help Mr. Obama should he win the presidential nomination.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides are hoping that, delegates or not, the attention paid to a potential big victory in Florida, the nation’s fourth-largest state, if not as prominent as a victory in other states to date, will at least give her a public relations boost heading into Feb. 5, and will mitigate against a potential defeat Saturday in South Carolina.

“Here’s the bottom line: Hundreds of thousands of Floridians are going to vote,” said Howard Wolfson, the communications director for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. “They have been watching this campaign, and their votes and their preferences matter.”

That has stirred concern in Mr. Obama’s campaign; a front-page poll in The Miami Herald on Thursday showed Mrs. Clinton with a sizable lead.

Mr. Obama’s campaign argued that the Florida vote is a meaningless beauty contest, given the absence of candidates in the state and the fact that no candidate will win delegates in a contest that both sides have increasingly viewed as a race for delegates, rather than states.

“Although Senator Obama did not remove his name from the Florida primary ballot because Florida law did not allow him to do so, Senator Obama is firm in his commitment to neither participate nor campaign in the Florida primary and its outcome has no bearing on the nomination contest,” Mr. Obama’s campaign said in a memorandum sent to “interested parties.”

On the Republican side, party officials said Mr. Giuliani had made the most concerted effort to get his vote early. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, decided not to move early on, calculating that it would not make sense to do so until he scored some victories and appeared to look politically viable, which has now happened. Financial problems led Senator John McCain of Arizona to close down his operation in the state last fall and he did not have the organization here to do a significant early voter turnout program.

“Rudy’s people have aggressively worked the absentees, particularly in South Florida,” said Sally Bradshaw, a longtime Florida Republican operative who is running Mr. Romney’s campaign here. “It makes sense for them to do so. They knew Rudy was not strong in the early primary states and they needed people to vote for Rudy before the results from that state came on.”

ARG put out a new FL primary poll today, and they show McCain winning handily – but, get this – they included independents, and Florida is a closed primary.

http://www.americanresearchgroup.com/pres08/flrep8-706.html

simply amazing.

Everything I’m hearing is that Rudy is doing really well and has a lot of votes sent in (absentee ballots) before others set foot in the state.

He’s using $ others don’t have any more for his campaign in FLA and Super Tuesday.

This may not work but the press and polsters are doing whatever they can to minimize his candidacy.

Mark Steyn – Hits a home run. A piece that interestingly describes the media that is not only making the news but controlling the message of this political season.  Look at the candidates and how they flex or try to flex to the drum beat the media creates.  The article would be very funny if it wasn’t so very sad.   -pf

Link

January 19, 2008, 1:00 a.m.
UnphenomenalTimes
Fake but … fake.
By Mark Steyn

Have you been in an airport recently, and maybe seen a gaggle of America’s heroes returning from Iraq? And you’ve probably thought, “Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old ‘Support Our Troops’ fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service.”

No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You’re in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could snap at any moment.

You hadn’t heard that? Well, it’s in the New York Times: “a series of articles” — that’s right, a whole series — “about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.” It’s an epidemic, folks. As the Times put it: “Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: ‘Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.’ Pierre, S.D.: ‘Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.’ Colorado Springs: ‘Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.’”

Obviously, as America’s “newspaper of record,” the Times would resent any suggestion that it’s anti-military. I’m sure if you were one of these crazed military stalker whackjobs following the reporters home you’d find their cars sporting the patriotic bumper sticker “We Support Our Troops, Even After They’ve Been Convicted.” As usual, the Times stories are written in the fey more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that’s a shoo-in come Pulitzer time: “Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

“Patchwork picture,” “quiet phenomenon”… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture?” The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either “committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one.” The “committed a killing” formulation includes car accidents.

Thus, with declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story: “America’s soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand.” New story: “Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand.” In the quagmire of these veterans’ minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin’ Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.

It was the work of minutes for the Powerline website’s John Hinderaker to discover that the “quiet phenomenon” is entirely unphenomenal: It didn’t seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It’s not. Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about a fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-34 year-old American male. Better yet, the blogger Iowahawk meticulously drew his own “patchwork picture” of another “quiet phenomenon”: the Denver newspaper columnist arrested for stalking, the Cincinnati TV reporter facing child-molestation charges, the Philadelphia anchorwoman who went on a violent drunken rampage. As Iowahawk’s one-man investigative unit wondered:

“Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence that America’s newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters?”

Why would the Times run such a series? My columnar confrere Clifford May connected it to a notorious anniversary: Seventy-five years ago, in February 1933, the Oxford Union passed a famous resolution, by an overwhelming margin, that “this House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” The Union was the world’s most famous debating society, in a great university of the dominant global power; its presidents have gone on to serve as Prime Ministers at home and overseas, from Gladstone in the 19th century all the way to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s.

So the debate and its resolution sent a message to Britain’s enemies: As Churchill saw it, the vote was a “disgusting symptom” of the enervation of the ruling elites. Clifford May sees that same syndrome today around the western world, but, in fact, it’s worse than that.

The Oxford debate took place a decade and a half after the worst carnage in human history. The First World War cost the lives of some 20 million people. Do you remember back in 2004 when Ted Koppel devoted one episode of Nightline to reading out the names of everyone killed in combat in Iraq? If he’d attempted a similar task with the British Empire’s war dead in 1919, the half-hour episode of Nightline would have had to be extended to ten months — or longer if Ted took bathroom breaks, or indeed pauses for breath. The war reached into the smallest English hamlet and culled a generation of young men. It swept through the glittering palaces, too: The brother of Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the present queen) was killed on the western front in 1915. It would be a statistical improbability to have been at that Oxford Union debate and have come from a home in which on some mantle or bureau there was not a photograph of a son or uncle or fiancé forever young.It would be as if millions upon millions had been slaughtered in the first Gulf war, and 15 years later Harvard or Yale were debating whether we should do it all over again.

In other words, we don’t have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever, and, when they get so low that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid temporarily give up the quagmire bleating, the Times invents bogus stories to suggest that the few veterans lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive are ticking timebombs ready to explode across every Main Street in the land.

A few days before the Times series began, The National Journal published the latest debunking of a notorious survey: in 2006, the medical journal The Lancet reported that the Iraq war had killed over 650,000 civilians, over 90 percent victims of the US military. That’s 500 civilians a day. Which is quite a smell test. The figure was over ten times the estimates even of hardcore antiwar left-wing groups. Who are these 500 daily victims? Why aren’t there mass riots by Iraqi civilians protesting the daily bloodbath?

Because it’s fake. It didn’t happen.

Yet it’s indestructible. I picked up a local paper in New Hampshire the other day, and a lady psychotherapist was twittering about our “mentally wounded” troops returning home after killing gazillions and bazillions of Iraqi civilians. In 1933, the debaters at Oxford were horrified by the real cost of war. In 2008, the editors of the Times, our college professors and Hollywood celebrities, are horrified by a fiction. Faced with an historically low cost of war, they retreat into fantasy. Who’s really suffering from mental trauma? Who needs the psychotherapy here?

© Mark Steyn 2008

Link

below from Flap’s blog and Real Clear Politics – this is getting ridiculous.

We already know Fox hates Rudy – all Brit Hume’s “panel” have their own candidates they’re supporting and find every reason to ignore or bash Rudy. But this is over the top. I would not agree with flap that a 5% lead in this atmosphere is “leading handily” but it’s also not 4th place. Polls are difficult to ignore but are not to be believed unless you’re going to read the background. Picking and choosing poll numbers is disingenuous at best and lying at worst. Interpreting the news is not “Fair and Balanced” reporting.

I’ve been watching RCP for new poll numbers for weeks two days ago they posted Rudy up from 2 to a 5 point lead. (again that’s not secure, just what I saw) We heard nothing about that poll. Then to quote a robo-poll as fact is just wrong. At the very least, just quote the RCP averages. That doesn’t totally balance outliers but mitigates them a bit.

The dumbasses, including Carl Cameron, over at Fox News said twice this afternoon that Rudy Giuliani was in fourth place in Florida.

Not true according to the Real Clear Politics averages.

Rudy is in first place and leads a crowded field handily.

Fox is referring to a Datamar poll which is a Robo-poll (automated dialer) and obviously an outlier.

Of course, we saw last night how good the pollsters and pundits are anyway in predicting last night’s Obama victory in New Hampshire.

Really? Link I disagree. 

McCain has burned as many bridges or more than Rudy has but McCain against Obama would highten the age difference.  And I’m still not convinced Obama will be the candidate dispite his recent surge. I’ve said it here before, I still expect algore to be in the mix at some point.  Agreed, Hillary is Rudy’s best opponent, but I’d still prefer to see her OUT of the race – she is WRONG for the country.  Not that Obama is right, but there is no out of control machine in his background (yet) to be concerned about.  And believe me, McCain has his problems with issues and temperment that have yet to be clearly exposed.  McCain has always been the darling of old media.  And Joe Lieberman will not run for VP again.

January 07, 2008

Only McCain Can Beat Obama

By Richard Baehr

I know John McCain does not go down easily among many conservatives. But with Barack Obama looking like the victor among Democrats, his party needs the Arizona Senator at the top of the ticket.

Conservatives may decry his support of campaign finance reform (a mistake to be sure — it simply moved the money around to new vehicles, but with less disclosure of contributors), his opposition to the size of the Bush tax cuts, his support for the Bush immigration plan, his embrace of global warming fears. But this is the reality ten months before the November election: if the Republicans nominate anyone other than John McCain, they are doomed to defeat against Barack Obama, maybe even a decisive defeat. McCain on the other hand, has a real shot at winning against Obama.

For a while, I thought Rudy Giuliani could also win. But his ideal match-up was against Hillary Clinton, not Obama. Rudy’s campaign has also been damaged by a steady drip of opposition research leaks, coming from candidates in both parties and publicized by a journalist rat pack, that have cumulatively eliminated his lead in the national polls. In a Rudy-Hillary race, the warmth factor would have been lacking on both sides (who do you want to sit down and have a beer with?), but Rudy could have won on his toughness and resilience after 9/11 and his record as Mayor (which trumps Hillary Clinton’s bogus claim of 35 years as a change agent — 20 of them as a first lady!).

One of the questions the Giuliani team needs to ask itself is why they relied so heavily on 9/11, and spent so little time highlighting Rudy’s record of accomplishment as Mayor in New York City, where he turned around a dangerous, declining city, and made it world class again by bringing back a sense of personal security and safety. Cutting the murder rate by over 70% was a very big deal. The Mayor had a “surge” strategy of his own in the use of his police force as Mayor, and as in Iraq, it worked.

Unlike certain defeatists, I think it matters that the GOP win the Presidency this year. This is not 1992, and the GOP is a party that appears to be in decline. The Republicans lost control of both Houses of Congress in 2006 and will not reverse that result this cycle. Much more likely are further Democrat pickups, particularly in the Senate. If a Democrat is elected President, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and John Paul Stevens will probably both retire from the Court, to be replaced by younger liberal jurists.

One of George Bush’s signature achievements, if you are a conservative, was getting both John Roberts and Samuel Alito onto the bench. The Democrats would strike back if Obama or any other nominee from the Party wins in 2008. That would likely lead to Anthony Kennedy pivoting left, giving liberals a 5 to 4 majority on the Court.

A Republican win could secure a more solid conservative majority on the Court. John Paul Stevens will not live forever. Would the Democrats filibuster Orrin Hatch were he appointed to replace Stevens? The Congressional GOP is not on the upswing as a minority party, ready to seize back power in 2010 or 2012. There is no Newt Gingrich to provide the intellectual firepower and energy to get that job done. So a Democratic presidential win in 2008 means years in the wilderness as a minority party for the Republicans, and the likelihood of re-election for Obama, a man with considerable political skills, in 2012.

For years, the GOP easily outspent their Democrat rivals in House and Senate races and in Presidential campaigns. No more. Bill Clinton evened things up by making money-raising (from whatever country) a key part of his mission for the Democrats. Now the Democrats have stormed past the GOP, and are the real money party. John Edwards may rail against special interests who control Washington, but the Democratic Party is in the grip of left wing unions, wealthy trial lawyers and environmental groups. In addition, many of the newly-minted mega-millionaires in finance and technology now identify with the Democratic Party, in part because of their greater comfort level with the more liberal social agenda of the party, and in the case of some, because they smell a winner, and want to jump on board.

I am convinced Obama will be the nominee. He appears to be headed for a big victory Tuesday in New Hampshire. His poll numbers are climbing every day, as Clinton’s drop off. He could win by a bigger percentage margin than in Iowa. Clinton’s stridency and lack of charm in the Saturday night debate won’t help her.

In the coming months as her campaign unravels, it will not be pretty. A woman who has aimed for the White House for 40 years, lived through her husband’s success and thought this time was hers, will not go quietly or in a dignified fashion into the night. One can sense the seething bitterness over this young interloper arriving on the scene to trump her glass ceiling-breaking vision of the first woman president with a much bigger ceiling-smasher, race.

And Obama is an African American (in the real sense of the word), with real political gifts. It is not in the debate forum where he shines, but on the stump and in front of an audience allowed to cheer and respond. Hillary Clinton leaves a lot of people cold. She is suffering some of the same fate as Mitt Romney on the Republican side — the hardest working star student who displays no warmth and argues from a list of debating points. Put simply, Hillary Clinton is a bore. A radio listener might have thought Clinton won the debate Saturday night, just as radio listeners thought Nixon beat Kennedy in their crucial first debate in 1960. But TV viewers took away something else Saturday: Obama calm and poised and unflappable; Clinton bitter and angry.

Obama would be a strong general election candidate. Many whites feel better about themselves for supporting him — as if they are personally closing the racial divide, and bringing back the better days of the civil rights movement. Obama has successfully morphed into the modern day Martin Luther King, while not emphasizing his race (it is obvious), unlike Clinton who now pushes her gender identity at every turn, in one more desperate attempt to fight back.

So how does McCain beat Obama? Obama has his weak spots, and over ten months we can expect some to come out. Look for GOP ads of Bill Clinton telling Charlie Rose that Obama is untested and not ready to run the country. This has the virtue of being true. Obama is three years removed from the Illinois State Senate, and half the time he has been in the US Senate he has been running for President. A case can be made that US Senators and House members who run for President should resign their seats. That is what Bob Dole did, very honorably I think, in 1996.

On national security and foreign policy issues, Obama is a novice, and already has made some telling mistakes during the campaign, including his support for pre-emptive action in our ally Pakistan, the very thing he opposed in Iraq, and his misstatement in the debate Saturday night on why the violence was down in Anbar Province in Iraq. Obama said the violence has ebbed in Anbar because of reconciliation between Sunni and American Forces once Iraqis read the results of the 2006 congressional races in America. In fact, what happened is that Iraqi Sunni insurgents turned on foreign Al Qaeda fighters. No less an authority on the subject than Osama Bin Laden has decried the Sunni insurgents for their treacherous behavior.

Obama has made it his signature issue that he was right on the Iraq War by opposing it from the start. But if he were President, he would need to follow-through on his pledge to end the war. And if he is in against McCain in the fall campaign, there is a huge opening for McCain to talk directly to the American people about our mission and how to wind it down with dignity and honor, and with success. That success has come from the Bush Administration’s belatedly rejecting the Rumsfeld light footprint approach and accepting McCain’s call for troop reinforcements (“the surge”) to re-establish security, the precondition for a political solution.

While Obama has enormous appeal to younger voters, and will attract many first time voters, older Americans vote in much greater numbers. In an interview with Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation Sunday, the CBS newsman was almost reverential toward McCain. The old warhorse, the former flyboy, has a lot of appeal to this group.

And McCain also may have a trump card or two. One of them might be to pledge to serve only one term — to get the job done right in Iraq. This would be consistent with a career of calling for sacrifice by Americans to contribute to a greater cause. And most Americans are at heart, patriotic. Unlike defeatists like Harry Reid, they would rather a good outcome than a defeat in Iraq, and that may now seem possible.

Compare McCain’s career and personal courage to Obama’s steely ambition, demonstrated by his current campaign, after categorically denying any interest in running for President in 2008. The Obama campaign is all about him, as the healer, the unifier, the political messiah. Over the next ten months, we may see a reality check. What has he done? What would he do as President? We are in the throes now of a star-struck media Obama lovefest. Something similar will happen again after the Democratic convention in late summer. But if I were a Republican, I would like to have John McCain debating Barack Obama one-on-one in the fall .

And then there is the vice presidential half of the ticket to fill. McCain could pick a social conservative like Huckabee who has demonstrated some of the same ability as Obama to speak directly to voters who are uneasy about their economic future — without the nasty class warfare rhetoric of John Edwards, who, thankfully, is going nowhere again, and now can go back to fighting for the middle class from his new 26,000 square foot house in North Carolina. On a more serious note, he can spend time with his ailing wife Elizabeth and their family, which many people think is where he should have been all along.

Or McCain could pick Joe Lieberman, creating a real fusion ticket, which might, I repeat might, threaten the Democratic Party’s long stranglehold on the votes of Jewish Americans. Given Obama’s past dalliance with pro-Palestinian groups in Chicago, and the perception that he will do nothing to stop Iran’s nuclear program, those Jews who are concerned more with Israel’s survival than Obama’s symbolism might think twice about how they vote. Jewish votes matter in swing states like Florida, and Pennsylvania, and maybe even New Jersey. McCain has indicated that if nominated he will select for his running mate someone who could fill in as President. In a time of war, that is a sounder policy than looking merely for geographic or ideological balance in a running mate.

If McCain were the nominee, the debate between the candidates in the Fall would automatically be focused more on national security and foreign policy than it would otherwise. That is the GOP’s strength, and this year the news on Iraq is much better than it was when the Democrats won in 2006. If the debate is primarily about national health insurance, global warming and stem cell research, the Democrats will have the edge. The economy may be in the doldrums in 10 months, another advantage for the Democrats.

But McCain, or whoever the GOP nominee is, can hold their own here, because substantial tax increases, as the Democrats are proposing, is exactly the wrong medicine for a recession or impending recession, and almost guarantees that any economic weakness will be intensified. Raising taxes on some, and cutting rates for others, will also not provide any real economic stimulus. Raising the social security income threshold to apply the payroll tax, which Obama has supported, will raise taxes for many Americans, not just the ultra rich.

McCain’s biggest challenge may be to get nominated. Mitt Romney may not drop out, even if loses a string of primaries, and his money supply is effectively unlimited. Fred Thompson may hang around hoping he can emerge as the consensus choice among conservatives, if Huckabee fades. Rudy Giuliani may get some momentum back in Florida and in the big state races on February 5th. But Republicans may want to heed the words of Bill Clinton and Bob Beckel, both very savvy Democrats, on the one Republican the Democrats do not want to run against this year- John McCain. McCain runs much better at the moment against every Democratic opponent than any other GOP candidate.

Many Republicans are not enamored of the Arizona Senator, of course. He is, to be sure, an imperfect Republican. But if only McCain can win for the party in November, Republicans might want to really consider carefully if they want to choose a candidate with greater ideological purity and the President Obama that will go with it.

The left and the right doesn’t want Rudy running because they know he can win.

I still puzzle @ why the right fears him so. The race is exceedingly volatile right now and will continue to be through Super Tuesday (FEB 5). It’s my understanding that Fred is really short on cash, so he’s on a bus in Iowa up to the caucus. Huckabee had an audience of 50 when in town today.

It’s the holidays.  I still wonder how many people will show up on January 3rd.

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/tabhartas.cgi/16394

Chris Matthews, no friend of Republicans, was horrified on his 12/21 broadcast because he ran with the story last week about the big flap about Rudy’s payroll paying for his “mistress trysts” – which is now being retracted – by everyone. He posted this banner on his show on 12/21 (below). Chris Matthews is actually extremely embarrassed – you can watch it here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_LWWu5S9uI
if you want to use the bandwidth….

Chris was musing out loud if the NYT will “give back” the 10 points he lost over this last week… I wonder where it may be covered elsewhere – it’s not showing up on FOX News – which seems to be all about Fred or Huckabee – except for George Will…. And they talk about Blogs needing to be regulated……  bleh…..  The Main Stream Media, becoming more irrelevant every day.
 

December 21, 2007

The Buried, Unquotable Exoneration

The New York Times exonerates Rudy Giuliani from charges that he moved travel expenses around through subsidiary agencies in order to hide his affair with his now-wife, Judith. People looking for that exoneration on their feedreaders will find themselves frustrated. Not only did the Times bury the story on one of its blogs, it put it in a graphic format that doesn’t allow for copy-and-paste. In fact, it isn’t even shown as an entry on the blog itself:

All eight of Mr. Giuliani’s trips to the Hamptons in 1999 and 2000, including the period when his relationship was a secret, were charged to his own mayoral expense account, according to the records.

In fact, the amount of money transferred through those agencies represent an insignificant percentage of the total cost of those travel expenses. Furthermore, the Times found that Giuliani had started spreading the costs of travel through subsidiary agencies two years before his affair with Judith, which makes it rather obvious that the motive was not to hide his infidelity. Russ Buettner ends by concluding that Giuliani’s accounting had nothing to do with his relationship to Judith.

One might believe that these conclusions might make a few headlines, given all of the attention paid to these allegations. Anderson Cooper asked Giuliani about this pseudoscandal during the nationally-televised CNN/YouTube debate, after all, and Giuliani’s record as mayor might be of particular interest to a New York City newspaper. Instead, the Times seemed to go out of its way to hide this report and its exoneration of Giuliani on accusations of manipulating public records for his own personal motivations.

Of course, even a front-page report on this wouldn’t unring the bell; the damage has been done, and it has been considerable. It looks like the Times wanted to make sure none of it got undone. (via Power Line)

Link

Well you’ll need to take it as an element of faith as they’ve pulled the article… but it went like this:

No Such Thing As Good News

This is one of those headlines you couldn’t make up: As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch:

At what’s believed to be the world’s largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn’t good.A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

This goes in Best of the Web’s “World’s Smallest Violin” category. Via InstaPundit.

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

The paragraph above is what will “last words” from The New Republic Magazine, but never “famous last words” because many more will have read the lies before they read this – if they do. The damage has been done.

It took TNR 14 pages to explain why they “cannot stand by these stories”.

If you want to read that manifesto go here.

To very briefly summarize – in July The New Republic published a story from a soldier named Beauchamp who wrote about events in Iraq that were not favorable (some horribly ugly) focusing on US soldiers. As usual, bloggers, notably Michael Yon and Little Green Footballs and their readers, researched and reported on the story doubting major elements. As it turned out even though Beauchamp admited problems with the article himself, TNR would never admit any wrong doing. Until now.

Five months later they can’t deny it. But so what, they won… no one will remember this part of the story.

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

This was true when Mark Twain said it and truer now when the MSM reports whatever it wants to say and doesn’t verify it’s sources adequately. Media Bias at its horribly worst.

Here is a link to some documentation on this “story” on Little Green Footballs if you want to look through the entire sad story.

The 11/28 “youtube” debate was promoted as Republicans sending in questions.  So much for that…  at least 4 of the more pointed questions were sumbitted by clearly Democrat citizens - it would have taken almost NO research time to uncover that information – follow the links below to read the details.  

1) Gay question linked to Clinton 

Link to documentation of summary above 

2) Abortion questioner is declared Edwards supporter

3) Log Cabin Republican questioner is declared Obama supporter

4) Lead toy questioner is a prominent union activist for the Edwards-endorsing United Steelworkers

click on this line to read another article about the debate

And so the revolutionary facade of the great YouTube Experiment has fallen in spectacular fashion: Many of these questioners weren’t the ordinary Americans as advertised by CNN at all. Many in fact were activists, partisans and ideologues, who unsurprisingly gamed CNN, when they weren’t making total fools of themselves.

to read the entire article, click here 

Oh yeah, and Clinton the male was in town a few days ago and stirred up some dust of his own.

Link to article below

Bill Clinton stumbles on stump for wife

By Jill Lawrence
USA TODAY 

WASHINGTON — It was a partial clause in a sentence uttered in Muscatine, Iowa. But Bill Clinton’s assertion Monday that he’d opposed the Iraq war “from the beginning” triggered outbursts across the political spectrum.From the left, the right and the media establishment, the judgment was the former president had committed a gaffe that could hurt his wife’s presidential bid.“Bill Clinton Rewrites History on Iraq?” wondered ABC News’ Political Radar blog. “A political blunder of monumental proportions,” Dan Spencer wrote at the conservative Redstate.com. At liberal DailyKos .com, the headline was “Bill Clinton’s ‘truthiness’ problem.”Clinton’s comment, reported by the Associated Press, came in a discussion of tax cuts for wealthy Americans during wartime. “Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers,” he said.New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign posted quotes Tuesday from Bill Clinton in which he highlighted his reservations about using force. Before the war started in 2003, he said that “we don’t invade everybody whose regime we want to change” and that if Saddam Hussein disarms, the United States should seek regime change by helping his rivals.“As he said before the war and many times since, President Clinton disagreed with taking the country to war without allowing the weapons inspectors to finish their jobs,” said campaign spokesman Jay Carson.Clinton was more oblique in Little Rock and Iowa City less than a week after the invasion. “Whatever our politics” and “whatever your views,” he said, it was time to support President Bush and the troops.Bloggers, however, posted quotes that underscored Clinton’s support for Bush and concern about Saddam. For instance:•In April 2003 in New York, Clinton said “Saddam is gone and good riddance” and Bush shouldn’t be criticized “for trying to act” on the belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

•In May 2003 at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., he said that “I supported the president when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

The hubbub comes as polls show Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama neck and neck in the race to win Iowa’s leadoff nomination contest. They were tied at 29% in a Strategic Vision poll of Iowa Democrats released today.

University of Iowa political scientist Peverill Squire said Clinton’s remark may revive concern about his wife’s vote to authorize war. “It’s undoubtedly a distraction,” he said.

Obama gave a strong anti-war speech in late 2002, while he was a state legislator. Asked Tuesday about Clinton saying he opposed the war from the start, Obama laughed and said: “If he did, I don’t think most of us heard about it.”