II. Barack Obama: The Greasy Pole Note on sources: You can follow the links here, as I’ve linked to sources for nearly all the factual assertions, and mark additional sources with an asterisk *. Where appropriate I’ve indicated sources whose credibility I was uncertain of, but have generally tried to avoid citing much in the way of rumor. Fairly late in the game in assembling | Read More »
B. The Extremists To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway | Read More »
C. ACORN The left-wing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a national umbrella group of, well, community organizers, sits at the intersection of Obama’s ties to extremists and his ties to machine politics. ACORN is indisputably Sixties-style “New Left” in its orientation, pursuing what Sol Stern describes as an agenda of “undisguised authoritarian socialism.” The group has both money and foot soldiers, | Read More »
D. The Machine Chicago politics, of course, have been famously corrupt and totally dominated by the Democratic machine since beyond living memory. (In Illinois at the state level, corruption is endemic and bipartisan: “four of the last nine governors have been indicted on charges of corruption, and three were convicted”). This is the city where top aides to Mayor Daley were convicted in May 2006 | Read More »
E. The Favor Factory With the expansion of federal intervention in the economy that will inevitably follow the current financial crisis – ranging from the $700 billion financial industry bailout to the $25 billion auto industry bailout to the federal government investing billions directly in major banks – there will be even more opportunities than usual for the next Administration to use federal dollars to | Read More »
F. “New Politics” In OId Wineskin Obama’s supporters like to shift the conversation away from his record at all costs and focus on his campaign. One of the principal themes of that campaign has been his commitment to “a ‘new politics for a new time’ shorn of partisanship and division,” exemplified by a higher standard of integrity in campaigning, what John Dickerson of Slate called | Read More »
I’ll cover this in more detail in a few days in Part II of my series on the Integrity Gap between the two tickets, but as the evidence mounts+ of the involvement of the left-wing community organizer group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in extensive voter fraud across multiple states, Barack Obama has tried to minimize his involvement with ACORN and the | Read More »
So the Politico tells us: Three weeks of historic economic upheaval has done more than just tilt a handful of once-reliably Republican states in Barack Obama’s direction. Democratic strategists are now optimistic that the ongoing crisis could lead to a landslide Obama victory. Well, maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong about how they can profit from the misery of the average American, | Read More »
From the annals of silly, and perhaps revealingly silly, arguments – an email from the Obama campaign following last night’s debate repeats a line he’s used before: I will fight for the middle class every day, and — once again — Senator McCain didn’t mention the middle class a single time during the debate. It’s true that Senator McCain didn’t use the words “middle class.” | Read More »
Who won this one? Well, it depends where you stand, where you think the candidates stand, what they were trying to accomplish and whether you saw the first debate. The elephant in the room for those of us who follow these things carefully – and for the candidates – was Obama’s recent surge in the polls. Obviously that colors everything, in the sense that it | Read More »
UPDATE: I can’t resist. Via Constant Reader Rod_Patrick in comments, check this video out: Stop digging, guys. – Moe Lane In light of the mounting common-sense evidence of the total implausibility of Barack Obama’s claim to have not known that Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were not just terrorists but nationally famous terrorists when he worked with Ayers in the mid-1990s (including funnelling millions of | Read More »
Stanley Kurtz has been doing tremendous work on Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers lately, but his examination of Obama’s Chicago years doesn’t end there. Given the sharp contrast presented by the first debate – when John McCain called for across the board spending cuts to tighten our collective belts for the coming recession, while Obama’s effort to answer the same question found him launching into | Read More »
Kevin has linked to a great CNN piece that explodes some of Barack Obama’s untruths about the depth of his ties to unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. You should go watch the video, which is excellent and includes new reporting quoting Alice Palmer, the leftist state senator who Obama succeeded in office. The Obama camp and its media allies have used two main rhetorical strategies | Read More »
So far as I can tell, nobody in the history of modern polling has won a presidential election from as big a hole as John McCain now stands in, at last check a national polling advantage in the neighborhood of 5 points for Obama. Now, if you are a betting man, surely you like your odds on Obama. But does that mean that the race | Read More »
From today’s Best of the Web: A hilarious example of press bias against Palin occurred last FridayI on “The Diane Rehm Show,” a production of Washington’s WAMU-FM. The exchange between hostess Rehm, caller Tom of Norwich, Vt., and Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne begins at about 46:10 of the “10:00 News Roundup”: ) Tom: I just wonder why not more has been made of the | Read More »
I have previously discussed at length the extent to which the public mood has focused on the issue of integrity in this presidential election. If anything, the recent credit crisis has heightened that concern – frankly, the public doesn’t understand the crisis and isn’t convinced the candidates do, either, but wants reassurance that the next President will be above outside influence in dealing with its | Read More »
An SEC Press Release issued today offers a clarification that may relieve institutions that feel compelled to use “mark to market” or “fair value” accounting for debt securities as to which there is no liquid market (I’ll try to just offer a neutral description here; other people at my law firm will no doubt be offering our clients more detailed advice on this topic). This | Read More »
So neither party’s House leadership was able to deliver the votes to save the bailout. As Erick noted above, John McCain fought valiantly but came up short in trying to find support in his own caucus, while Barack Obama sat on his hands: Mr. Holtz-Eakin said Mr. McCain had made “dozens of calls” on the bill, some to House Republicans who opposed it. Aides to | Read More »
From Nancy Pelosi’s speech just prior to the bailout vote: I must recognize the outstanding leadership provided by Chairman Barney Frank, whose enormous intellectual and strategic abilities have never before been so urgently needed, or so widely admired. Heckuva job, Barney.
UPDATE: Looks like they are voting anyway and at last check, the House is all but set to vote the deal down. Hold on to your seatbelts, folks. So, the word just came down that the Senate will not vote on the bailout package until Wednesday night. House Republicans should refuse to vote on the deal until the ballots are cast in the Senate. And | Read More »
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