The attack in Pennsylvania was no attack. The young lady either needs jail time or mental help or both.

For the members of the left now gloating, please remember we correct our stories. You do not.

[UPDATE]: Moe Lane here, and I’d like to offer an apology… to Constant Reader Han Pritcher, who I yelled at the beginning of the thread yesterday. I’m sorry, Han: I can only plead heat of the moment, coupled with righteous indignation at what appeared to be at the time a contemptible act of violence against a woman, which is something that pushes every button that I own. I regret any harshness that resulted: again, my apologies for the rudeness. As for everyone I banned… suffer. I enjoyed tossing all of you, I don’t regret it in the slightest, and you know and I know that the truth or falsity of this story wouldn’t have mattered to any of you at all.

And that last bit is most assuredly your problem, not mine.

Orrin Hatch is fighting mad. He is fired up. I spoke with him late yesterday afternoon. He’s been out on the campaign trail explaining to people what would happen if the Democrats got to sixty votes in the Senate. And he is throwing punches.

He’d also kill me if I did not plug the NRSC’s website: http://www.nrsc.org

Go there and be a part of what he is calling “Orrin’s Army.” Say what you will about the NRSC’s operations from two years ago. John Ensign is doing an awesome job, but he needs help.

I asked Senator Hatch first about ACORN. “We’ve known for years that ACORN is an arm of the Democratic Party,” he said. They never talk about Republicans he said, just like the unions. He thinks ACORN does need to be investigated. But, he told me, the problem is that a lot of ACORN’s activities are at the state level and the Democrats won’t go after them. The Democratic officials at the state level “create a very bad situation,” he said. They are allowing ACORN to create “major defects in election laws.” Likewise, he said unions are a huge problem.

Unions covet a filibuster proof, Democrat controlled Senate relentlessly. “They are unaccountable. They’ll spend a billion dollars this election and $950 million will be soft money to get out the vote for Democrats,” he said. Meanwhile, the GOP must use hard dollars for GOTV operations. Senator Hatch used Gordon Smith as an example. “You have to agree that Gordon Smith is a fine Senator,” he said. “And despite massive spending against him, Gordon is even in the polls.” Nonetheless, it is a very tough race with union dollars and ACORN fraud trying to corrupt the election.

At this point in the conversation, he again plugs the NRSC’s website: http://www.nrsc.org.

Read More →

Linda Ketner, running against Congressman Henry Brown down in South Carolina, apparently has a porn filter on her campaign fax machine.

At least that is what her staff told the South Carolina GOP when it called to verify a fax had been received. A staffer told Rob Godfrey of the SCGOP, “‘We have a porn filter on our fax machine so nothing like that would have gotten through.’ Then, she hung up.”

Now Ketner’s office denies there is a porn filter on the fax machine and says it was all a joke.

But maybe there really is one. Ketner, an open lesbian, received the endorsement of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund. But Ketner has never mentioned it and never thanked them.

In fact, on her campaign website and in her campaign literature she never mentions it, but she’s been happy to take LGBT money. So the porn filter must explain it. She just hadn’t received notice of the endorsement because the porn filter was blocking it.

So why now deny she has a filter? Maybe she realizes her voters are a bunch of licentious rabble rousers and admitting there was a porn filter would signal she’s a prude and they can’t vote for her.

Or maybe there really is no porn filter and her staff lied to Rob Godfrey and are also lying to the voters of SC-01 about her stance on gay marriage. After all, the good folks in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District are opposed to gay marriage. They may be okay with electing an open lesbian, but they don’t want her pushing her values off on them.

Knowing that she’s being endorsed and heavily funded by a group of people who want to force gay marriage on South Carolina might be why she’s keeping quiet about the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund endorsement. Oh, and because of her hypocrisy on dealing with the DCCC, her staff had to lie to Rob Godfrey too.

For some reason, the media in Minnesota has never thought it necessary to show this picture or track it down.

It’s Congressman Tim Walz being arrested for a DUI. The picture is 13 years old. Why is it still relevant? Because Tim Walz two years ago and more recently lied about being arrested for being drunk. But now the truth is trickling out that he claimed he was “deaf” and couldn’t hear the cop’s commands, despite a blood test showing he was drunk.

H/t to Minnesota Democrats Exposed

Oh . . . there is more coming too. Better go to MDE, because you probably won’t hear about it from the Minnesota press.

There is now ample, ample evidence that Barack Obama’s campaign is accepting donations from foreigners in violation of federal law.

There is now ample evidence that Barack Obama’s campaign has intentionally opted out of credit card address verification services (“AVS”) thereby making it extremely easy to contribute to his campaign while the campaign can claim ignorance to theft, excessive contributions, improper contributions, and illegal contributions.

See, here, here, here, here, and here.

As Patrick Ruffini notes,

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

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

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

There have been ample stories since the first reports of questionable donations, but the campaign still has not turned on AVS.

To be clear: this cannot be done with John McCain’s website. This could not be done with Hillary Clinton’s website. This could not be done with Fred Thompson’s website. This could not be done with Joe Biden’s website. This could not be done with any other candidate’s website. Only Barack Obama’s website is set up to allow transactions without any screening for fraud or other inappropriate or illegal activity.

The media has patently, willfully failed to report this story.

There is nothing you or I can do to force the media to cover this story. Nothing.

But let us not be under any delusions. Were this George W. Bush in 2000 or 2004 when he saw record fundraising numbers from low dollar donors, the media would have been all over his campaign if AVS had been turned off.

The watch word for the media right now? Crickets.

Ooohhhhhhhhh. Good point Josh. Obama did tell his supporters to get in their faces.

I lay this at the feet of the mainstream media. For weeks they have cooked up tales about Republican verbal violence. They let Barack Obama get away with claiming someone called for killing him at a Sarah Palin rally — an outright lie that the media let get by.

This morning, Jim Galloway, a friend in Georgia and reporter at the AJC, put up a post at the AJC Political Insider blog about a campaign staffer to a local Republican state senator. The staffer was worried about violence on election night. Left wing bloggers blew this up into a big deal because the kid used his campaign account. Naturally, this must be a Republican Senator whipping up hostility. Never mind that the Republican Senator in question is out of the country.

But Jim, in his report, went on to write, “Speaking of reining in some out-of-bounds behavior, take a look at the YouTube clip below, showing a Oct. 21 confrontation with Barack Obama supporters at a Sarah Palin rally in Nevada.

“In the video, Palin supporters shout, “Vote McCain not Barack Hussein, Vote McCain not Barack Hussein.”

Now there is nothing per se wrong about Jim writing that. It is perfectly acceptable and a fact that this happened. But the media narrative has become one that highlights the hostile words of Republicans and downplays the hostile acts of Obama supporters. And note that these were Obama supporters disrupting a Palin rally. What gets flagged is the Palin supporters’ response.

Words versus actions. How many news outlets have covered the Obama supporters trying to block Sarah Palin’s motorcade? How many news outlets covered the vandalism of Senator Norm Coleman’s property? Compare that to how many covered the words spoken at a Palin rally that allegedly foment hostility toward Barack Obama.

Today there is a new, more violent twist. A McCain supporter, a 20 year old college Republican volunteer, was savagely attacked by a Barack Obama supporter in Pennsylvania. She was at an ATM getting money. He saw the McCain sticker on her car, robbed her, and carved a “B” into the side of her face.

He carved her face like it was a pumpkin Picture here

But someone yelled “kill him” at a Sarah Palin rally in reference to Bill Ayers.

UPDATED: Josh points out in RedHot that Obama did tell his supporters to get in people’s faces. Hey! The dude was just doing what The One asked him to. Full pardon on January 21st [Ed. -- This means we cannot just blame the media. We must blame Obama too. "This is not the thug I knew. I've known some, but not this one. The thugs I know kill police and blow up government buildings."]

UPDATE 2: Note how Memeorandum covers this story. Nothing political here. No political implications. Just a random act of violence.

Congressman Jim Marshall (D-GA) is already getting flack for filming an ad explaining his bailout position from the offices of a Washington lobbyist.

But now there are more questions about another ad.

Jim Marshall, running for the House in Georgia, and Ronnie Musgrove, running for the Senate in Mississippi, are both up with ads. Upon close inspection, they are at the same place standing at the same fence post with the same trees in the background.

Here is Marshall:

And here is Musgrove:

The question is, did Musgrove go to Georgia or did Marshall go to Mississippi.

By the way, this wouldn’t happen to be a lobbyist’s farm, would it?

I like this.

Yesterday I vented about the NRCC pulling money from Michelle Bachmann’s race. A friend at the NRCC emailed me and pointed out that the NRCC is legally not allowed to talk to or coordinate with the Bachmann campaign for independent expenditures. It has to be an independent decision. And Tom Cole did not order the expenditures yanked.

There is, in fact, a separate office from the NRCC where the independent expenditures people make the call themselves. And they did.

So let’s look at this from a different angle without the invective hurled at Tom Cole — dispassionately if you will.

The independent expenditure department looks at polling and finds Michelle Bachmann comfortably in the lead. They also find she has more than ten million dollars on hand with two weeks go to. They make the rational decision to shift their funding elsewhere. That does, in fact, make a lot of sense.

But now add these data points:

(1) Bachmann is in a terrible local and national news cycle relating to her comments on Hardball.

(2) Her opponent is raising millions of dollars from the far left by recycling Bachmann’s comments and pushing the idea that Bachmann is now vulnerable.

(3) The local media is echoing the challenger’s message of vulnerability.

(4) Pulling NRCC funding, though rationale because of cash on hand plus polling, does nothing but further drive the story that even the national Republicans are rebuking her.

In fact, add these four data points to the above paragraph and stories like this one and the narrative they form are wholly predictable. And the challenger’s wave of fundraising continues.

The independent expenditures folks did not need to talk to the Bachmann campaign about any of this. They could have read the local paper. Hell, they could have read the local papers in Washington, D.C. and predicted what would happen.

So why continue the anti-Bachmann reporting in the press by yanking those ads when they did?

H/t to Jason Pye

Let’s just call Tom Cole (R-OK), the head of the NRCC, what he is: a douchebag.

Some of you will be upset by the language, but I think it is an accurate description.

We chronicled for you the need to ditch Tom Cole from the NRCC months ago. Sure, we knew it was going to be a bad year, but Cole seemed more interested in the perks of the office than actually trying to mitigate damages.

Cole defended Don Young.

He also defended Rick Renzi despite the criminal investigation that forced Renzi from office.

And while Rome was burning, Cole fiddled away demanding an apology to Indians.

Now, in the height of all douchebaggery, he has pulled all funding from Michelle Bachmann’s very winnable race in Minnesota, in which she is presently leading, though not by a great deal.

Why? Because Bachmann had the nerve to point out Obama pals around with anti-American domestic terrorists and other unsavory characters, i.e. she’s echoed Sarah Palin.

But that’s okay. Apparently we have Republicans to spare.

Help Michelle Bachmann. This race is absolutely winnable. Hell, she’s winning right now. But she needs our help.

And then call Tom Cole and give him a piece of your mind.

UPDATED: For perspective, Tom Cole has been sending money to Don Young in Alaska. So attacking the Democrats is unacceptable to Tom Cole, but taint and corruption is perfectly fine.

You still upset I called him a douchebag?

Ask yourself what the media and public reaction would be if this were about Barack Obama.

Seriously.

An artist in New York has set up an exhibit that features cardboard cutouts of Sarah Palin and her youngest daughter. It’s of Palin killing a caribou. The caribou is a three dimensional stuffed animal with its guts splattered out of it.

Here’s the catch:

People can join the ‘photo-op’ by donning a vest and gun. The artist admits in the video link that many of the visitors shoot Sarah Palin.

But that’s okay. She’s just a she, not the first black man to run for President.

That makes it all okay.

This morning I had breakfast with General Rick Goddard and Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The GA-08 race is one of the bright spots on the horizon for the GOP. Two years ago Democrat Jim Marshall only held off Mac Collins by less than 2000 votes. This year, the 8th district will probably go to McCain and with it, could tip the balance to Goddard.

There was an enthusiastic crowd for Goddard this morning. That the event was held in Macon is interesting. Macon, in Bibb County, is Jim Marshall’s home base. Bibb and Houston Counties, adjacent to each other, are the population centers of the district. Goddard was the Commanding General of Robins Air Force Base, a major employer in Houston County. He now works for Mercer University, my alma mater and Marshall’s former employer.

This district can be won. The Speaker gave a great talk pointing out what havoc the Democrats could wreck. He continues to set himself up as the ideas man in the GOP, which he actually is.

If you live in the eighth district, go here to volunteer. Everyone else can send money.

According to the Military Times,

McCain, R-Ariz., handily defeated Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., 68 percent to 23 percent in a voluntary survey of 4,293 active-duty, National Guard and reserve subscribers and former subscribers to Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times and Air Force Times.

The results of the Military Times 2008 Election Poll are not representative of the opinions of the military as a whole. The group surveyed is older, more senior in rank and less ethnically diverse than the overall armed services.

But as a snapshot of careerists, the results suggest Democrats have gained little ground in their attempts to significantly chip away at a traditionally Republican voting bloc in campaign messages and legislative initiatives, such as the recent expansion of GI Bill benefits, experts said.

We know this is a damnable lie because the media went out of its way to tell us Barack Obama and Ron Paul have gotten more campaign contributions from soldiers than John McCain.

See here, here, and here for example.

Surely the media would not hype Obama’s support among our servicemen based on campaign contribution reports and then discover the reality was the opposite. Surely they would not have lied to us and distorted coverage of the military to suggest American servicemen and women want to go with the candidate of surrender when in fact they did not.

Okay, yeah, you’re right. Yes, the media did in fact lie. The media did in fact hype donations to Obama from the military as proof of military support for Obama. We all knew they were full of crap.

Now we have polling data to prove we were right and the media was wrong. Note that the men and women of the United States military support the fighter, not the effete wimp.

Now from the media? Crickets.

I’ll try to put a bunch of these in the queue, assuming I can get it to work.

Have at it.

The United States Chamber of Commerce is serious about the card check bill. As we noted in our Directors post this morning,

The vanguard of this movement to redistribute political power to the Left – the sign you will see early on to know that an Obama Administration is prioritizing political entrenchment – is legislation with the Orwellian title of the Employee Free Choice Act, which was stopped in this Congress only by GOP filibuster. The “card check” bill puts its thumb on the scales of union organizing in a number of ways, most notoriously by eliminating the secret ballot in union elections, allowing workers to be coerced to form unions which will then route coerced union dues to the Democratic party.

The Chamber has a new ad out highlighting Union thuggery. You can read the full post right here and the ad is below:

Now that we largely have the bugs worked out of the site (we still have few surprises left for you guys in the maintenance of RedState), I want to propose something:

(1) If you haven’t signed up for email alerts, you should do so;

(2) We’re going to integrate into the site a way to contact Congress via the site through email, etc. on specific issues, as well as the local media;

(3) Once we have that going, I want to get volunteers for a rapid response strike force.

In essence, we’d find the people who most aggressively take action based on the alerts and invite them to opt-in to an SMS system.

Then, in cases where we need an instantaneous response on an issue, e.g. Congressman X has a vote in 15 minutes and he is wavering, we’d blast an SMS out with a phone number and let you guys call. It’d be a lot faster than an email blast, etc.

I imagine there’d only be a few hundred people on the SMS list, but they’d be damn effective in my estimation.

Likewise, in a few weeks, after we’ve installed a super-secret package of awesomeness at RedState, I want to get people to start putting their zipcodes in their profiles so we can link up people online for offline activism.

Any and all thoughts on this are appreciated.

I’ve posted the neverfindout.org ads here and here. This one is really awesome.

Here is another one worth watching:

Donate to Let Freedom Ring now and keep these ads on the air. They are currently airing in the swing states. Keep them on the air.

and

There are lots more here.