Recently in Media bias Category

As usual, Mark Steyn says it better than anybody:

For two years, the U.S. media have been polishing Obama's boots, mostly with their drool, to a degree unprecedented in American public life.

While he's oh so tough with Fox News, he's a laughingstock in Russia, Iran and North Korea, imperiling all Americans with his weakness.

October 24, 2009, 7:00 a.m. Mister Tough Guy Who are the real "Untouchables" here?

By Mark Steyn in National Review Online

Benjamin Disraeli's most famous advice to aspiring politicians was: "Never complain and never explain." For the greatest orator of our time, a man who makes Churchill, Lincoln, and Henry V at Agincourt look like first-round rejects on Orating with the Stars, Barack Obama seems to have pretty much given up on the explaining side. He tried it with health care with speech after speech after exclusive interview for months on end and the more he explained the more unpopular the whole racket got. So he declared that the time for explaining is over, and it's time to sign on or else.

Meanwhile, to take the other half of the Disraeli equation, Obama and his officials and their beleaguered band of surrogates never stop complaining. If you express concerns about government health care, they complain about all these "racists" and "domestic terrorists" obstructing his agenda. If you wonder why the president can't seem to find time in his hectic schedule of international-awards acceptance speeches to make a decision about Afghanistan, they complain that it's not his fault he "inherited" all these problems. And, if you wonder why his "green jobs" czar is a Communist 9/11 truther and his National Endowment for the Arts guy is leaning on grant recipients to produce Soviet-style propaganda extolling Obama policies, they complain about Fox News.

Continue. . .

The mainstream media's total abdication of its responsibility to report fairly and accurately the Obama administration's plan to sacrifice the American capitalist economy to the false god of manmade climate change is shocking.

The House of Representatives disgraced itself rushing a bill off to the Senate that had not even been assembled into a single thousand-page plus document -- let alone not having been read by anyone -- so Members could go party for Fourth of July.

At least Michael Ramirez is paying attention.

Skepticism about the religion of global warming is growing. Australia has put a hold on its cap & trade effort, as has New Zealand. The Wall Street Journal followed up on an important report that appeared online. See our most recent prior report on the myth.

In the past, Omnia21 has wondered more than once whose side the New York Times is on.

Now, universally respected analyst Michael Barone asks the same question.

Whose side is the New York Times on?

By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
06/23/09

The New York Timeshas revealed that its reporter David Rohde was kidnapped and held by terrorists in Afghanistan for seven months and that it and, at its request, other media refrained from reporting this to protect Rohde's safety. The story has come out only after Rohde was rescued by American forces. Here is the Times's explanation for covering up this story.

"From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David's family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages. The kidnappers initially said as much," said Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times. "We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organizations that learned of David's plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support."

To which I'm inclined to say, good for the Times and for all those, including conservative blogger Ed Morrissey, who kept the lid on this story.

But the Times of course did not take the same approach when it published its December 2005 story on NSA surveillance of communications between suspected terrorists abroad and persons in the United States and its June 2006 story on the entirely legal Swift surveillance of terrorist financing.

Bill Keller was a wonderful reporter, whose coverage of the downfall of the apartheid system in South Africa and the downfall of Communism in Russia deserved all the awards he received. He's a fine writer and was a thoughtful and interesting columnist for a couple of years early in this decade.

But his decisions and those of his colleagues at the Times indicate pretty clearly whose side they are on. They are determined to protect their brave and admirable colleagues from danger. But they are not concerned to protect the people of the United States and friendly nations from dangers which, while perhaps more remote, have proved painfully real, and not only on September 11, 2001. They seem to see themselves as transnational journalists, with responsibilities to their colleagues and their profession, but with no particular responsibilities as American citizens.

Juan Williams got it right in his Wall Street Journal article on President Obama. Yes, it's a signal and historic event in America for a black man to become president.

Now it is time to treat him just like a white man, praise him when he's right, criticize him when he's wrong.

Every American president must be held to the highest standard. No president of any color should be given a free pass for screw-ups, lies or failure to keep a promise.

The time for media fawning and cheerleading, always embarrassing, for the good of the country must stop.

[T]to allow criticism of Mr. Obama only behind closed doors does no honor to the dreams and prayers of generations past: that race be put aside, and all people be judged honestly, openly, and on the basis of their performance.

President Obama deserves no less.

Read it all.

This video of a pollster asking questions of 12 Obama supporters on Election Day is instructive. It shows what average voters learn by reading, hearing and listening to the mainstream media.(HT: Power Line)

It's worth the ten minutes.

Update: Power Line provided more information about the poll behind the video with comments from John Hinderaker:

Here are some highlights of Zogby's poll of Obama voters:

* 57 percent thought the Republicans still control Congress. Note that this is worse than a random result, since there are only two possible answers.

* Only 12 percent could identify Obama as the candidate who said that his energy policies would cause the cost of electricity to skyrocket.

The only issues on which the Obama voters were well-informed (or thought they were, anyway) had to do with Sarah Palin. Thus:

* 94 percent knew that Palin was the candidate with a pregnant teenage daughter, the highest correct score recorded by the Obama voters.

* Likewise, 86 percent knew that Palin was the candidate whose party bought her a $150,000 wardrobe.

Those answers suggest that the mainstream media's emphasis in this election was not exactly on the nuances of public policy. To be fair, though, they probably also reflect where the interests of Democratic voters tend to lie. This one is interesting:

* 87 percent said that Sarah Palin was the candidate who said she could see Russia from her house. Actually, it was Tina Fey who said that. Once again, though, it shows that Palin seemed to be the candidate who made the biggest impression, for better or worse.

It's worth noting that the Obama voters in Zogby's sample were 97 percent high school graduates and--rather shockingly--55 percent college graduates. It's almost enough to make you wonder about the future of democracy.

Limbaugh reported this on his Friday show:

On Charlie Rose Show last night on PBS. He had on Tom Brokaw last night, ladies and gentlemen. Here's a montage. Now, this is last night. As you listen to this, keep in mind everything you've heard from Brokaw and others in the Drive-Bys can for the past six months, three months, two months or whatever. This is a montage of Charlie Rose and Brokaw trying to figure out who Obama is.

ROSE: I don't know what Barack Obama's worldview is.

BROKAW: No, I don't, either.

ROSE: I don't know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don't know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don't really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it's an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don't know what books he's read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There's a lot about him we don't know.

Two of the top media Obama boosters a few days before the election saying they don't know very much about Obama.

As Limbaugh said, why didn't you get reporters on the case as you did on Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.

Disgusting. They covered so much for Obama they don't even know.

Few writers on public policy are more respected than syndicated columnist and acclaimed author of works on economics and public policy questions than Professor Thomas Sowell of Stanford's Hoover Institution.

What may be Professor Thomas Sowell's last chapter in his indictment of Barack Obama as a grave danger to America follows. Excerpts:

After the big gamble on subprime mortgages that led to the current financial crisis, is there going to be an even bigger gamble, by putting the fate of a nation in the hands of a man whose only qualifications are ego and mouth?

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama’s trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges— very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in the real world.

Dr. Sowell is deeply worried about the enormous damage an Obama presidency will do. Literally, not figuratively, he can destroy America.

After this man has wrecked the economy and destroyed constitutional law with his judicial appointments, what can he do for an encore? He can cripple the military and gamble America’s future on his ability to sit down with enemy nations and talk them out of causing trouble.

Add to Obama and Biden House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and you have all the ingredients for a historic meltdown. Let us not forget that the Roman Empire did decline and fall, blighting the lives of millions for centuries.

One can be sure this cataclysmic forecast is not made lightly.

Read it all.

For all of Professor Sowell's reasons why Obama should not be elected president, click here or click Sowell in the list of Categories on this website to the right of this column. You can also enter the word "Sowell" in the search box to the right and pull out the Sowell columns previously published on this website.

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. Over the past three decades, Sowell has taught economics at
various colleges and universities, including Cornell, Amherst, and the University of California at Los Angeles, as well as the history of ideas at Brandeis University. He has also been associated with three other research centers, in addition to the Hoover Institution. He was project director at the Urban Institute from 1972 to 1974, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 1976–77, and was an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute in 1975-76.

Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. In 2003, Sowell received the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement. Sowell received his bachelor’s degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1958, his master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.

Tito the Builder has had enough of one-sided reporting on Obama. He knows the way Obama hammers critics like Joe the Plumber. He's afraid of what will happen in an Obama presidency, but speaks out anyway.

It has been discovered that the Obama campaign has disabled all normal credit card security checks online. As a consequence, illegal contributions can roll in from foreign and other prohibited sources using fake names. It has now been discovered that online donations may be made using pre-paid credit cards which can be purchansed at any variety store and are totally anonymous. In September alone the Obama campaign received over $100 million of its $150 million online. Such deliberate facilitation of illegal contributions by a presidential candidate is fraud at the highest imaginable level. As Mark Steyn correctly observed:

Two-thirds of the record-breaking haul Obama raised for the final stretch of the campaign comes from a racket set up to facilitate fake names, phony addresses and untraceable cards.

This is massive fraud to steal the election. How long has it been going on? How much of these huge sums the campaign has raised are illegal? The after-the-fact checking catches a mere fraction of the illegal when the automatic security measures are shut off and names like Adolphe Hitler go sailing through. And the media is looking the other way.

And to think the man presiding over this criminal enterprise might become president.

To read more, start here or here.

Three Democrats stand out as responsible for costing Americans much of their life savings in the name of putting more people into affordable housing that turned out to be not affordable at all.

The three Democratic politicians who, not accidentally but deliberately, undermined the American financial system and caused this global catastrophe are Barack Obama, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank and Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd.

What is driving the world collapse of the stock markets? What is causing the savings of Americans to shrivel up? Democratic policies.

Yes, it's the world financial credit freeze-up. But what triggered the freeze-up? Democratic policies.

It was the defaults of subprime mortgages packaged and sold by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac around the world. But what caused the defaults? Democratic policies.

Who made banks make unsafe mortgage loans? Well-intentioned Democrats who thought it would be "fair" for people who couldn't afford houses to get them.

Who made Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy up those bad loans and palm them off on the world? Democrats in Congress pressured by interest groups such as Obama's ally ACORN.

The cost to investors so far has been hundreds of billions of dollars. American workers who have invested in mutual funds and 401(k)s have suffered badly. People are losing their jobs because of this crisis.

The following account is the story the mainstream media will not tell the American people because they fear it would jeopardize an Obama victory. It will be a travesty and a tragedy for Americans if Democrats capture the White House and Congress after their policies brought on this worldwide catastrophe.

It will be too late after the election to document the involvement of Obama and his Democratic colleagues, whose zeal to change America into a socialist state brought disaster to the world. You know what will happen: Democrats will convene hearings with their favorite witnesses to blame anybody but themselves. Democrats don't like the free enterprise system they meddle with and in this case brought crashing down.

Democratic policies brought on the housing bubble and its collapse, the default of U.S. backed obligations all around the world and panic everywhere. Democrats are pointing the finger at Wall Street, but that doesn't wash. Wall Street was packaging and selling Fannie and Freddie mortgage loans for years. What happened was Fannie and Freddie started buying up so many subprime loans that the packages they were now sending around the world were junk, but still backed by the implicit guaranty of the U.S. government so people, banks and governments bought.

Fannie and Freddie abandoned their obligation to protect the taxpayers of the United States to please the Democratic congressman who were pressing them to expand the subprime mortgage loan market by buying risky loans and giving banks and mortgage companies more money to make more risky loans.

President Bush and Senate Republicans including Senator McCain pleaded with Congress in 2005 and 2006 to pass legislation to get Fannie and Freddie under control. Senate Republicans even got a bill to do just that out of the Senate Banking Committee (S. 190), but Senate Democrats led by Senator Harry Reid and Christopher Dodd, with the vocal backing of Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, said there was no crisis and blocked a vote on the Senate floor. As a Democratic U.S. Senator Obama supported their action.

How key was Obama's role? Obama helped train ACORN operatives in the early 1990s how to bully and intimidate banks and bankers into making risky mortgage loans to those who couldn't afford them, shouting cries of "discrimination" and "racism." Obama was one of the very first pushing for such unsafe loans to be made. Those cries kept building through the '90s and into this decade. As a result, riskier and riskier mortgage loans were made and Fannie and Freddie was pressured more and more by Democrats in Congress to buy the unsafe mortgage loans and send them off in packages to the world as if they were of the same quality they had been in the past. They weren't. Obama lived to see the colossal damage done by his policy of intimidation of banks and indeed to help give the final push to disaster by opposing reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a senator in 2005 and 2006. Despite the world chaos and massive losses to American investors, Obama as late as 2007 was still insisting subprime mortgages were a "good idea."

To read about the roles of the other two principal destroyers of savings, click here. Also, look for the heading Categories on the right side of this website and click on Democratic Financial Crisis.

How does Obama see himself as president working with a Democratic Congress to "spread the wealth"? How do you take money away from those who have earned it to give to those who want it -- or who Obama says "deserve it."? Obama has been plotting to do that for years. What bothered him was the "constraining" provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Think of that: Obama complained that the Warren Court (which some say was the least conservative Supreme Court ever) "didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution" to take on the question of redistribution of wealth. The U.S. Constitution is concerned with limiting powers of government so that it cannot ride roughshod over people. Their rights are to be protected. This Obama doesn't like.

How can Obama take an oath of office -- as he did for his U.S. Senate seat --pledging to uphold the Constitution when he clearly doesn't like it and wants to find activist judges to help him get around it.

Breathtaking.

A judge who often writes at the Hugh Hewitt blog has analyzed a number of Obama statements and has reached this conclusion:

[Obama] understands precisely how to advance a hard-line liberal agenda in each brach of government. Redistribution of wealth is something best suited to a hard-left president and Congress to accomplish, working hand-in-glove. And for the giant leaps — the things which not even a left-of-center executive and legislature can accomplish — the president gets to appoint activist judges.

Even back in 2001, Barack Obama was already focused on building a "coalition of power" in the executive and legislative branches that could indeed bring about a national redistribution of wealth which even the most activist courts couldn't achieve on their own.

The reason for conservatives and moderates to be concerned about Barack Obama is not simply that he's a hard-left liberal — it's that he's an ambitious and talented hard-left liberal. He's seen where the Warren Court fell short. Barack Obama is now literally only days away from, in his words from this [2002] radio program, possibly "put[ting] together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change." Of that, we ought to all be duly terrified.

John McCain's statement: What Obama calls "fairness," Europeans call "socialism" and Americans call "welfare."

And read Bill Whittle's expressions of disgust at Obama lying about his long-held position in favor of taking a man's property away and giving it to other people and the media for not doing its job in investigating and airing the facts about the Marxist socialist Obama.

Listen to the audio.

Polls are slanted and hyped by the media hoping to discourage the turnout of those who believe McCain/Pain is the only rational choice for America.

The most reliable poll by past results has Obama up by only 4% and more than 10% undecided. Because of the relentless intimidation by the media shouting racism at anyone who doesn't support Obama, it's a fair inference that some in the Obama column will not vote for him and a large percentage of the "undecideds" will vote for McCain/Palin but just aren't saying so.

This is to say that victory for sanity and America's futre is very possible, indeed, likely.

The recent news that tens of millions of the dollars the Obama campaign is now spending to flood the airwaves are illegal contributions from foreign sources and others with a stake in an Obama election exposes the corruption at the heart of the campaign. The Chicago Democratic machine men running the campaign know how to collect money illegally from unidentiable sources -- foreigners ncluded -- by shutting down credit card ID systems.

His alliances with people who hate America and actively work to undermine it -- Wright, Ayers, ACORN, Pfleger, Khalidi, Klonsky -- cannot be ignored.

Enought people in the end will see through the Obama pretense.

Professor Thomas Sowell sums up the situation well.

Some people who see the fraud in what Obama is saying are amazed that others do not.

The vote for president on November 4th is momentous. A victory for Obama would represent, as one writer put it, the biggest lurch to the left in the history of the country. Or, as Mark Steyn, posited the alternatives: Would it be Independence Day or "Dependence Day"? It also would be a danger to the safety and security of the United States.

Professor Sowell, as a black man, has made it clear that he, like most Americans, would welcome the election of a qualified black man as president of the United States. He has examined Obama's past, his positions and what he has done and is doing and has no doubt in his mind that Obama does not have the record, the character or the integrity to be president.

Representative government exists, in the first place, because we the voters cannot possibly have all the information necessary to make rational decisions on all the things that the government does. We cannot rule through polls or referendums. We must trust someone to represent us, especially as President of the United States.

Once we recognize this basic fact of representative government, then the question of how trustworthy a candidate is becomes a more urgent question than any of the so-called “real issues.”

A candidate who spends two decades promoting polarization and then runs as a healer and uniter, rather than a divider, forfeits all trust by that fact alone.

It's worth reading all of Professor Sowell's analysis of The Great Pretender.

Can Obama Be Trusted?

By Thomas Sowell
Creators Syndicate
October 27, 2008

Although Senator Barack Obama has been allied with a succession of far-Left individuals over the years, that is only half the story. There are, after all, some honest and decent people on the Left. But these have not been the ones that Obama has been allied with — allied, not merely “associated” with.

ACORN is not just an organization on the left. In addition to the voter frauds that ACORN has been involved in over the years, it is an organization with a history of thuggery, including going to bankers’ homes to harass them and their families, in order to force banks to lend to people with low credit ratings.

Nor was Barack Obama’s relationship with ACORN just a matter of once being their attorney long ago. More recently, he has directed hundreds of thousands of dollars their way. Money talks — and what it says is more important than a politician’s rhetoric in an election year.

Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger are not just people with left-wing opinions. They are reckless demagogues preaching hatred of the lowest sort — and both are recipients of money from Obama.

Bill Ayers is not just “an education professor” who has some left-wing views. He is a confessed and unrepentant terrorist, who more recently has put his message of resentment into the schools — an effort using money from a foundation that Obama headed.

Nor has the help all been one way. During the last debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, Senator McCain mentioned that Sen. Obama’s political campaign began in Bill Ayers’s home. Obama immediately denied it and McCain had no real follow-up.

It was not this year’s political campaign that Obama began in Bill Ayers’s home but an earlier campaign for the Illinois state legislature. Barack Obama can match Bill Clinton in slickness at parsing words to evade accusations.

That is one way to get to the White House. But slickness with words is not going to help a president deal with either domestic economic crises or the looming dangers of a nuclear Iran.

People who think that talking points on this or that problem constitute “the real issues” that we should be talking about, instead of Obama’s track record, ignore a very fundamental fact about representative government.

Representative government exists, in the first place, because we the voters cannot possibly have all the information necessary to make rational decisions on all the things that the government does. We cannot rule through polls or referendums. We must trust someone to represent us, especially as President of the United States.

Once we recognize this basic fact of representative government, then the question of how trustworthy a candidate is becomes a more urgent question than any of the so-called “real issues.”

A candidate who spends two decades promoting polarization and then runs as a healer and uniter, rather than a divider, forfeits all trust by that fact alone.

If Ronald Reagan had attempted to run for president of the United States as a liberal, the media would have been all over him. His support for Barry Goldwater would have been in the headlines and in editorial denunciations across the country.

No way would he have been able to get away with using soothing words to suggest that he and Barry Goldwater were like ships that passed in the night.

If Barack Obama had run as what he has always been, rather than as what he has never been, then we could simply cast our votes based on whether or not we agree with what he has always stood for.

Some people take solace from the fact that Senator Obama has verbally shifted position on some issues, like drilling for oil or gun control, since this is supposed to show that he is “pragmatic” rather than ideological.

But political zig-zags show no such moderation as some seem to assume. Lenin zig-zagged and so did Hitler. Zig-zags may show no more than that someone is playing the public for fools.

Some people who see the fraud in what Obama is saying are amazed that others do not. But Obama knows what con men have long known, that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe. He does that very well

--Professor Thomas Sowell is the Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford's Hoover Institution, the author of many books and a recipient of the Natonal Humanities Medal. He has taught at Cornell, Amherst and Brandeis as well as Stanford. He was awarded the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement in 2003.

Mark Steyn looks at the choice for president and sees this:

An Obama Administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and UN foreign policy. Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a “point of no return”, the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.

Would it really be that bad? Professor Thomas Sowell warns that an Obama election would represent a "point of no return," would be "transformative, in Mark Steyn's view. Mark Steyn elaborates on our historical context:

The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation — the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of the last model: forty years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within. (Note: Exactly the point made by us earlier: "Having abandoned bombing as counterproductive, Ayers concentrated on early childhood education as the way to subvert the American system from within.")

All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?

Steyn concludes:

If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don’t want it, vote accordingly.

October 25, 2008, 7:00 a.m.

Point of No Return
Will we vote for the same soothing siren song as our enervated allies?

By Mark Steyn, syndicated columnist, in the National Review

Across the electric wires, the hum is ceaseless: Give it up, loser. Don’t go down with the ship when it’s swept away by the Obama tsunami. According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls show he’s going to win.

In the words of Publishers’ Clearing House, he may already have won! The battleground states have all turned blue, the reddest of red states are rapidly purpling. Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality, wake up to reality. Why be the last right-wing pundit to sign up with Small-Government Conservatives For The Liberal Supermajority? We still need pages for the coronation, and there’s a pair of velvet knickerbockers with your name on it.

Read the rest...

Obama's friends are a cause for concern, concludes the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer.

What is more important, decades of close alliance with Reverend Wright, a bigoted, anti-American racist, William Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist bomber, America-hater par excellence and a self-described communist and Tony Rezko, convicted of 16 counts of political corruption and Obama fund raiser to the tune of $250,000 or Obama's campaign statements separating himself from these people?

Today, on the threshold of the presidency, Obama concedes the odiousness of these associations, which is why he has severed them. But for the years in which he sat in Wright's pews and shared common purpose on boards with Ayers, Obama considered them a legitimate, indeed unremarkable, part of social discourse.

Do you? Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect. There is a difference between temperament and character. Equanimity is a virtue. Tolerance of the obscene is not.

Obama & Friends: Judge Not?

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 10, 2008; Washington Post

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.

But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.

More...

Despite all the mainstream media fawning over Obama and his massive outspending of McCain on television and voter registration, a strange thing is occurring. The polls are tightening.

The story about the real Obama is leaking out on the internet and in small circulation magazines. Is he a socialist? Yes. Did he really work with an admitted "small "c" communist (former but unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers)" to radicalize the Chicago schools? Yes. Did he stay in Jeremiah Wright's racist hate-America church for 20 years because he agreed with its message? Why else? And why has he been allied with ACORN, repeatedly accused, investigated and condemned for voter fraud, for more than 20 years? And was he really one of those who taught ACORN workers how to intimidate banks into making subprime loans they never should have made?

Things the mainstream media should have looked into many months ago but didn't are just now surfacing. Who knows? If the media had done it's job earlier, Hillary Clinton may well have been the Democratic nominee for president?

Karl Rove, former Bush strategist, believes the situation is still fluid, that with all the distractions and fear because of the economic crisis voters are just now looking for information about the candidates. They know who McCain is, but they are still asking, "Who is Barack Obama?"

Voters Haven't Decided Yet
Now it's up to the candidates to drive home their message.

By KARL ROVE
October 9, 2008
Wall Street Journal

Tuesday night's presidential debate was good entertainment. Both candidates were animated and loose throughout a wide-ranging discussion. Sen. Barack Obama did well in Sen. John McCain's favorite format. Mr. McCain was more focused and sharp than in the first debate, though the cameras above him made his balding pate more prominent.

APTom Brokaw was often a distraction: Did he really need over a hundred words -- including the name "Sherard Cowper-Coles" -- to ask about Afghanistan?
Mr. McCain's advocates were cheered by him advancing the theme that Mr. Obama lacks a record of accomplishment or bipartisanship in the Senate. Mr. McCain also described how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac constituted "the match that started this forest fire" that's engulfed our economy, and nailed Mr. Obama and Democrats for being AWOL on GSE reform.
Mr. McCain was most effective on taxes and spending. He argued now is not the time to raise taxes and hit Mr. Obama's proposal to hike small business taxes: three out of four filers in the top 5% report small-business income. Mr. McCain called for a spending freeze and attacked earmarks, including Mr. Obama's $3 million for a Chicago planetarium's "overhead projector." Mr. Obama weakly replied earmarks were only $18 billion.
Advocates of Mr. Obama, on the other hand, saw him scoring points on style and connecting with questioners. He patiently explained to one how the Wall Street rescue package would help him and his neighbors on Main Street. He had the night's emotional high point when he talked about his dying mother fighting her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition. He called for dramatic change and tied Mr. McCain to the Bush administration, though not too often to be obnoxious.
Mr. Obama also offered his villain responsible for the current crisis: "the deregulation of the financial system." Many voters will accept Mr. Obama's designation, despite it being both wrong and a slap at President Bill Clinton, who signed the 1999 deregulation legislation that Mr. Obama seems to object to, and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin and Undersecretary Larry Summers, who helped fashion it. What do these Obama advisers think of being blamed for the credit-market meltdown?
What about swing voters? There are probably more undecided and persuadable voters open to switching their choice than in any election since 1968.
About Karl Rove
Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.
Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.
Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.
For those open to Mr. McCain, it is unclear how they will respond to his plan to order the Treasury secretary "to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes." It came across as both impulsive and badly explained. No experts were ready to defend it. No explanatory paper was flung at journalists. Nor were surrogates like Mitt Romney briefed. But the campaign did admit it borrowed the idea from Hillary Clinton.
While it was good Mr. McCain engaged on health-care reform, his explanations were not crisp or powerful. And he failed to defend his proposed corporate tax cut. Why not say America has the world's second-highest corporate tax rate, putting the U.S. at a disadvantage in creating jobs?
For those leaning to Mr. Obama, there was no evidence of bipartisanship. There was no talk of accomplishments. Did he really think it was smart to answer Mr. McCain on Fannie by dismissing the GSE reform bill and pointing to a letter he wrote? In the Senate, is the pen mightier than legislation? And Mr. Obama's say-one-thing, do-another approach was apparent. Blast Mr. McCain for talking up the economy, then say, "I am confident about the American economy." Blame Mr. McCain for the credit meltdown, and end the assault with "you're not interested in hearing politicians pointing fingers." Say "only a few percent of small businesses" will get taxed when 663,000 small enterprises are in the top 5%.
There were no knockouts. What matters now is how well the candidates prosecute the themes they have laid out in the election's remaining 26 days. Interest is high. People are paying more attention than usual.
Each faces a big challenge. Mr. McCain's is that events have tilted the field towards Mr. Obama. To win, Mr. McCain must demonstrate he stands for responsible conservative change, while portraying Mr. Obama as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal not ready to be president.
Mr. Obama's test is that voters haven't shaken deep concerns about his lack of qualifications. Having accomplished virtually nothing in his three years in the Senate except to win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama must show he is up to the job. Voters like him, conditions favor him, yet he has not closed the sale. He may be approaching the finish line with that mixture of lassitude and insouciance he displayed in the spring against Mrs. Clinton.
But here's a warning sign for Mr. Obama. Of recent candidates, only Michael Dukakis in 1988 has had a larger percentage of voters tell pollsters they believe he lacks the necessary qualifications to be president.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

It's rather curious, to say the least, how many mentors, allies and friends Obama has who hate America.

Yet most of America doesn't know about most of them because the Obama campaign has created a fictionalized narrative about Obama and the mainstream media hasn't done its job of investigating since it's so eager to get Obama elected.

So to many if not most Americans Obama remains a mystery.

This week at her campaign appearances Sarah Palin got the biggest reaction -- ovations, really -- to a quietly stated demand she directed to the media: Tell people about the real Barack Obama.

The real Obama story is disturbing. Let's start with some friends.

When Obama as a young man returned from Indonesia to Hawaii, he linked up with a member of the Communist Party of the U.S. Frank Marshall Davis. By definition, Communists hate America and its free enterprise system; it is fundamentally flawed and they want a totalitarian socialist system for America. Davis is reported to have warned Obama never to trust the white man.

In college, as he reports in his first book, Obama "hung out" with black power advocates and Marxist socialists, enemies of America the way it is.

While he has been hidden away of late, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was shouting about black power and his hatred of America and of white oppression for 20 years with Obama in the congregation. Obama often referred to him as a mentor and friend. Indeed, the title of his second book "Audacity of Hope" was taken from a Wright sermon on "white man's greed" being responsible for oppressing the world.

Also in Chicago there is the nutcake priest Father Michael Pfleger, who mimicked his friend Jeremiah Wright on America's oppression of blacks and advocated building black power. He has finally been silenced by the Archbishop of Chicago. Obama has referred to him as a friend and mentor as well.

Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan is a life long hater of America. The Reverend Wright has saluted Farrakhan as an American hero. Obama helped Farrakhan organize the Million Man March in Washington and Farrakhan has strongly endorsed Obama.

Unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers and his terrorist bomber wife Bernadine Dohrn have been Obama friends since 1995 (despite the New York Times attempted whitewash apologia yesterday). On, of all days, September 11, 2001 Ayers gave an interview in which he expressed his regret he hadn't done more bombing during his terrorist days. Obama and Ayers worked together for years in two different "charitable" endeavors to subvert the American system, seeking to implement a socialist ethos by radicalizing teachers and students in the Chicago school system.

Ayers also posed for the cover of a Chicago magazine in 2001, while working closely with Obama on their radical programs, that speaks volumes.

Ayers as recently as 2006 described himself as a "small 'c" communist." Ayers' published remarks include a statement that the thought of America makes him "want to puke."

The most recent disclosure about an Obama friend who had a hatred of America was a Muslim advisor to a Saudi billionaire who worked to obtain a positive recommendation for Obama to enter Harvard Law School. Khalid Al-Mansour was a Black Muslim and Black Nationalist who was a “mentor” to the founders of the Black Panther party at the time the party was founded in the early 1960s. It is not known how or why a Texas Muslim came to befriend Obama and, according to speculation, contribute financially to his Harvard Law School education.

And, of course, Obama has been for decades deeply involved with organizations such as ACORN, which is a Marxist socialist organization dedicated to overturning the American economic system. It was one of the early leaders in intimidating and terrorizing banks and bank officials into making mortgage loans they never in sound business judgment would have made. Obama pursued his Marxist socialist interests after college as a community organizer using the Alinsky method of dissembling and terrorizing in Chicago with ACORN and, while in Boston at Harvard Law School, took advanced training in socialist indoctrination with Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation.

Obama trained ACORN people in intimidation strategy and tactics to force banks to make subprime loans. The nation is suffering from the fruits of that terrorizing that begat the subprime loans that have produced today's financial crisis.

ACORN is also a national leader in voter registration fraud, seeking to "change America" by any means, including corrupting the electoral system by filing false and forged registrations. ACORN is the subject in this election cycle in vote fraud investigations in at least 12 different states. Several ACORN workers went to jail for massive voter fraud in Washington state in the last election cycle.

Obama still calls himself a friend of ACORN, whose political arm has endorsed Obama. He also said recently his views today are pretty much what they were during his ACORN days. Speculation has it that ACORN in this election could be responsible for hundreds of thousands of voter registrations, many of which, if history is a guide, will be fraudulent and never found out. The Obama campaign paid more than $800,000 to ACORN's Project Vote arm this year, after first hiding the payment for voter registration as work for "polling."

And one should not forget Michelle Obama, who wrote ill of America in her senior thesis at Princeton, on the campaign stump called America "just downright mean," and during the campaign said more than once, for the first time in her adult life, she was "proud of her country."

Is there a dislike of America lurking inside Obama? Why did he feel it necessary to go to Berlin and apologize to 200,000 Germans for the sins of America when America rescued the Germans from Nazi rule? Does that lack of enthusiasm for America explain his failure to place his hand on his heart durng the playing of the national anthem until told to do so by his staff after reporters commented on it?

Whatever the present patriotic campaign rhetoric now is, one has to wonder about the associations Obama sought out over more than 20 years of his adult life.

What unites these friends in their hatred of America is a desire to bring down the present system, to replace equality of opportunity with equality of benefits.

Higher taxes, increased welfare spending and taking from the successful to give to the rest are on the agenda of Obama and all of these friends. It's called state socialism.

Has the media performed its duty to the American people to tell them the real Obama story?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Bill Kristol as the token conservative on the New York Times op-ed page today reported on his interview with Sarah Palin. She was candid when asked about her comment about the terrorist bomber William Ayers being a buddy of Obama's and whether she thought Reverend Wright was a campaign issue:

“To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

Kristol asked if she had any advice for John McCain after her weekend campaigning during which she had wild reaction to her demand that the media tell the people who the real Obama is.

She did: "Take the gloves off."

A blogger decided to some homework on Governor Palin's accomplishments. He was impressed by how she routed an incumbent governor of her own party in the gubernatorial primary, charging him (correctly) with corruption, and then went on to handily defeat a popular former Democratic governor in the final.

But governors, unlike legislators, can compile a record of what they've done, not just sponsor a piece of legislation or get a chairmanship based on seniority. So in her two years as governor, here's what he found:

If you only know three things that Sarah Palin has accomplished as Governor of Alaska, it should be these three:

Gov. Palin is a proven fiscal conservative who used her line-item veto to slash hundreds of millions of dollars in spending from the state budget. In considering this accomplishment, keep in mind that the Alaska Legislature is controlled by the GOP, meaning that the funding she cut had already been approved by legislators of her own party. Nevertheless, she made her vetoes stick. Consider, too, that because of the current high price of crude oil, Alaska is enjoying record budget surpluses. It's harder to practice restraint in times of plenty. And look at her entire record over time (more than as revealed by her position on a single bridge): Although Alaska has traditionally been more dependent than other states on federal funding (since the federal government owns such a large portion of the state's property and resources), even the often-critical Anchorage Daily News admits that Gov. Palin has "increasingly distanced herself from earmarking" since 2000, and that her having done so over the past year has been "the leading source of tension between Palin and the state's three-member congressional delegation." Actually exercising fiscal discipline in a time of plenty, at both state and federal levels and against the will of the members of her own party, is a better predictor for how she would actually govern on a national level than ten thousand campaign promises.

Gov. Palin kept her campaign promise to revamp the state's pre-existing severance tax on oil & gas production, replacing a structure negotiated behind closed doors by ethically challenged predecessors and the big energy companies with one negotiated in full public view — and then rebated part of the resulting surplus directly to tax-payers. Severance taxes are a kind of property tax charged on a one-time basis, at the time of production, on subsurface assets (like oil, gas & minerals) which can't be quantified and taxed through regular property taxes. There was widespread resentment and distrust over the version negotiated by Gov. Palin's predecessor with the three big energy companies who've traditionally ruled the roost in Alaska (ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and BP). The new version negotiated and passed with Gov. Palin's support was thoroughly disinfected by the sunshine of public scrutiny. Although it's not a "windfall profits tax" — indeed, the base rate only went from 22.5% to 25% — it did permit the Alaskan people to share in a larger portion of the current high prices for oil by raising the additional, progressive portion of the tax from 0.25% to 0.40% on revenues between $32.50 and $90/bbl. Above that, however, the new law actually cut taxes by dropping the rate on revenues above $90/bbl to 0.1%. With the resulting budget surplus, after contributing to the state's fund for that future day when its oil & gas wealth is exhausted, she pressed for and got legislation to rebate a healthy chunk directly to tax-payers on a per capita basis, trusting them to spend the proceeds from this sale of the state's commonly-owned resources rather than trusting government to spend it for them.

Gov. Palin broke a multi-year stalemate over the financing and construction of a $40 billion cross-state gas pipeline that will deliver cleaner, cheaper natural gas to Alaska's own population centers (Alaskans themselves pay some of the nation's highest energy prices), while also delivering gas to the energy-hungry Lower 48. To do this, she had to break the monopoly power of the big energy companies by opening the project to competitive international bidding. Not only has a development contract with a Canadian company now been signed on better terms than had previously been discussed, but the former monopolists — finally spurred by competition — are cranking up their own plan that would not require any taxpayer investment. How precisely this will shake out remains to be seen, but Gov. Palin's vigorous action — calling special sessions of the state legislature and injecting herself directly and vigorously into the process — has ended the deadlock in ways that seem certain to benefit consumers. By this accomplishment, Gov. Palin has done more to advance the cause of American energy independence than any other politician — of any party, and at any level of state or federal government — in this century. But the national media have generally ignored this accomplishment.

It's understandable with that strong performance that Governor Palin's popularity rating in Alaska is in the 80s. (The Democratic Congress approval rating is 9%.)

Will Sarah Palin be provided the opportunity to talk about what she's done as governor by the moderator (who has just sent off to her publisher the final proof of her book about the Age of Obama, to be released on Inauguration Day in January) or will it be more of the "gotcha" journalism that we've seen in the Couric and Gibson interviews with some Obama bias thrown in?

In his 36 years in the Senate Joe Biden can't point to a record of accomplishment like Governor Palin's. Talk and do are different things.

Sarah Palin did real things besides being a mayor and a governor. She and her husband ran a small business for years.

This is hardly surprising since it confirms what we see and hear every day from network TV and radio news and cable outlets like CNN and MSNBC and read in the NY Times, the Globe and Washington Post. They have abandoned their duty to inform the American people honestly.

Instapundit reports:

September 29, 2008
A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: "Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working." I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.

So the rescue bill failed and the media immediately began babbling about how the Republicans in the House didn't come through. In fact, the majority Democrats have all the votes they need to pass a bill without a single Republican vote. Democrat Speaker of the House Pelosi did not crack the whip of party discipline and 95 Democrats voted no, when if only 11 more of them had voted yes the bill would have passed.

Much has been made of Pelosi's highly partisan pre-vote speech ladling blame for the financial crisis on the Bush Administration and Republican policies. Is that the way to build a coalition on a must-pass bill?

Some have speculated that Members of the House may have decided Pelosi knew something they didn't know, that perhaps the bill wasn't all that do-or-die or else she wouldn't have leveled such a partisan shot against Republicans. Calls to Congress were running 40 or more to 1 against the bailout bill, so many Members were nervous about voting yes. Well, if Pelosi didn't think the bill was all that important, it's not surprising that a number of Republicans (who despised the bill) and 95 Democrats voted no.

Such reckless Democratic incompetence in economic matters -- and governing -- is taking a savage toll on the American economy and the life savings of all Americans.

Those who track such figures note that the losses in the U.S. stock markets at the close of business after the bill's defeat were $1.1 trillion, some $400 billion more than the rescue bill would have authorized be spent to stabilize the financial markets.

Principally responsible for the housing bubble and its collapse is of course Democratic House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, who blocked the many demands for reining in Fannie and Freddie by the Bush Administration and Republicans, including Senator McCain, going back to 2003 and continuing into 2007. Now Pelosi has added one trillion dollars to the Frank-induced losses as American savers watch in horror as their life savings shrivel.

More losses are almost certain to follow as rescue proponents regroup and the clock ticks on without a solution. No official business is expected in Congress till Wednesday or, more likely, Thursday.

UPDATE: A Karl Rove analysis of the vote and other sources indicate that Speaker Pelosi allowed several of her senior colleagues, including House Chairmen, and 16 vulnerable freshmen to vote no. Republicans saw and heard this and concluded that Pelosi apparently had some inside information and didn't think the vote was such a big deal. So many Republicans voted what they felt: It was a bad bill, representing too much government intervention in the economy.

Also, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Obama campaign co-chairman, from Chicago, voted no. A subcommittee chairman on Barney Frank's committee voted no.

SECOND UPDATE: A Republican on Capitol Hill explains why the bill is viewed as bad by Republicans and offers a few alternatives that would be more in keeping with a market economy:

And as for alternatives:

- how about reinforcing FDIC to give people confidence in their savings? Maybe more support for money markets?

- How about cutting corporate taxes or cap gains taxes?

- How about buying up (or financing the purchase of) the AAA securities that currently are having trouble moving but are not “toxic,” in order to increase liquidity and help with possible insolvency for healthier institutions rather than the old line investment banks?

- How about doing something about the silliness of the $62 Trillion Credit Default Swap market (e.g. the margin requirements, etc…)?

- How about immediately changing mark-to-market rules?

- And – heaven forbid – how about belt-tightening in Washington? Don’t hold your breath – but imagine what a signal that would send – a freeze in discretionary spending, a moratorium on earmarks and a real plan to educate America about entitlements and talk about the need to get our fiscal house in order.

THIRD UPDATE: It now appears that Pelosi planned it all. She gave her people a pass, figuring the Republicans would provide enough votes to put the bill through anf then the Democrats would use their votes to beat them over the head in the November election. Too clever and her cynical politicizing cost the nation's markets one trillion dollars.