Most Fraudulent Election EVER

federal election law, any presidential campaign that participates in public financing is automatically audited after an election. When Barack Obama broke his promise to the American people by forgoing the public financing system, his campaign became the first since public financing became law to have a chance of not being audited. Federal law does still allow the Federal Election Commission to audit a presidential campaign that doesn’t participate in public financing, but at least four of the six FEC commissioners must first vote to pursue an investigation “for cause.” No doubt there is great “cause” to be concerned about Obama’s fundraising efforts.

Late last month, the venerable and independent National Journal tested reports that the Obama campaign’s online fundraising system was built to facilitate fraud. Veteran journalist Neil Munro bought two pre-paid American Express gift cards worth $25 each to donate to the Obama and McCain campaigns online. Munro purchased the cards with cash and then accessed the Obama and McCain campaign websites from a public library in Fairfax, Va. The Obama campaign’s site accepted the $25 donation, but the McCain campaign’s site rejected it . Contacted by National Journal, the McCain campaign explained its system rejected the donation because American Express could not verify that the donor lived at the address given with the online contribution.

Contacted to explain why its campaign accepted the donation despite the existence of any safeguards, the Obama campaign replied by e-mail: “Name-matching is not a standard check conducted or made available in the credit card processing industry. We believe Visa and MasterCard do not even have the ability to do this.” But Juan Proano, whose technology firm handled online contributions for John Edwards’ presidential primary campaign, told the Washington Post it is possible to require donors’ names and addresses to match those on their credit card accounts. But some campaigns are reluctant to impose that extra layer of security. “ Honestly, you want to have the least amount of hurdles in processing contributions quickly,” Proano said.

Obama’s donation fraud facilitation does not end there. Pressed by National Journal to explain why the campaign failed to identify hundreds of thousands of low-dollar donors, the Obama campaign responded that it “would be a pretty hard thing for us to be able to process.” National Journal responds:

But there is much widely used and inexpensive technology that allows Republican and Democratic campaigns to sort and identify millions of donors and to highlight or exclude overseas contributors. The technology is offered by companies that complete credit card transactions, by banks that provide credit cards to customers, by telecommunications companies that maintain digital networks, and by a variety of smaller firms that track Internet activity. … [A] five-minute phone call to Bank of America’s merchant-services department showed how a campaign could sort transactions to identify any credit cards that were used to make small donations under fake names and fake addresses. The campaign could download transaction data from the bank’s Web site and transfer the file into a database, such as Excel, said the Bank of America employee. “Then highlight all your transactions and click your sort button,” the employee said.

So there you have it. Instead of making a 5-minute phone call to protect the integrity of U.S. elections, the Obama campaign did nothing. This is exactly the same approach the campaign has taken toward ACORN’s massive and well-established voter registration fraud campaign. Hear no evil, see no evil. ACORN takes a zero-effort approach to preventing vote fraud during its registration drives. Nate Toller, who headed an ACORN campaign against Wal-Mart in California until 2006, told John Fund: “There’s no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances .” And Anita MonCrief, another ACORN whistleblower, agrees: “It’s ludicrous to say that fake registrations can’t become fraudulent votes. I assure you that if you can get them on the rolls you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots.”

Already Obama and Democrat staffers have been forced to resign for registering and casting ballots in more than one state. If Americans are ever to trust the electoral process again, a full investigation and audit of Obama and ACORN are an absolute necessity.

The Choice is Easy

When you go to the voting booth, the choice is easy.

Candidate A= graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958. He became a naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, he nearly lost his life in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. In October 1967, while on a bombing mission over Hanoi, he was shot down, badly injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese. He was a prisoner of war until 1973, experiencing episodes of torture and refusing an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer; his war wounds left him with lifelong physical limitations.

He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981, moved to Arizona, and entered politics. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982, he served two terms, and was then elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986, winning re-election easily in 1992, 1998, and 2004. While generally adhering to conservative principles, He at times has had a media reputation as a “maverick” for having disagreed with his party. After being investigated and largely exonerated in a political influence scandal of the 1980s as a member of the “Keating Five,” he made campaign finance reform one of his signature concerns, which eventually led to the passage of the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002. He is also known for his work towards restoring diplomatic relations with Vietnam in the 1990s, and for his belief that the war in Iraq should be fought to a successful conclusion. He has chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, has opposed spending that he considered to be pork barrel, and played a key role in alleviating a crisis over judicial nominations.

Candidate B= says he was born in 1961 in Hawaii, to a white mother from Kansas and a black Muslim father from Kenya who met as students at the University of Hawaii. His place of birth is a matter in dispute, however. As Frank Gaffney reported in The Washington Times on October 14, 2008. When he was six, his mother married an Indonesian oil manager, a “non-practicing Muslim,” and the family moved to Jakarta, where his half-sister was born. The family would reside there for four years. His good friend, the attorney and novelist Scott Turow, wrote that “Candidate B” as a child spent “two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school.” School records show that when he attended Catholic school, he was enrolled as a Muslim.

In the Seventies, his family became friendly with Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987), a black writer and fellow Hawaiian resident. Davis wrote for the Honolulu Record (a Communist newspaper) and was a known member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA). He soon became the young future candidates mentor and advisor. Just prior to heading off to Occidental College (in California) in 1979, he spent some time with “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self.” he writes that “Frank” told him that college was merely “an advanced degree in compromise,” and cautioned the young future candidate not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.”

This candidate also reveals that during his student years at Columbia he “went to socialist conferences at Cooper Union and African cultural fairs in Brooklyn.” These were Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC) events held at Cooper Union, a privately funded college for the advancement of science and art. SSC events featured the elite of socialist academia as well as union activists, political revolutionaries, reformers, and opponents of “corporate greed.” According to the libertarian writer Trevor Loudon, guest speakers at these conferences included “members of the Communist Party USA and its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence, as well as Maoists, Trotsyists, black radicals, gay activists and radical feminists.”

Candidate B was trained by the Saul Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago. (The Developing Communities Project itself was an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of “a more just and democratic society” is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method.) Alinsky was known for helping to establish the aggressive political tactics that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States.

In the Alinsky model, “organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution” — a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America’s social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted — a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo’s complete collapse — to be followed by the erection of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal “changes” are needed.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, he worked with ACORN, a creation of the Alinsky network. ACORN was a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley’s National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), whose members in the late 1960s and early 70s had invaded welfare offices across the U.S. — often violently — bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law “entitled” them.

He also worked for Project Vote, the voter-mobilization arm of ACORN. Project Vote’s professed purpose is to carry out “non-partisan” voter-registration drives; to counsel voters on their rights; and to litigate on behalf of voting rights — focusing on the rights of the poor and the “disenfranchised.” He was the attorney for ACORN’s lead election-law cases, and he worked as a trainer at ACORN’s annual conferences, where he taught members of the organization the art of radical community organizing.

In 1988 he applied for admission to Harvard Law School. At the time, a Muslim attorney and black nationalist named Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour asked civil rights activist Percy Sutton to send a letter of recommendation to his (Sutton’s) friends at Harvard on his behalf.

Al-Mansour formerly had been a close personal adviser to Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, having helped them establish the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. He thereafter became an advisor to a number of Saudi billionaires known for funding the spread of Wahhabi extremism in America. Al-Mansour also would show himself to be a passionate hater of the United States, Israel, and white people generally.

In 1993 he took a job as a litigator of voting rights and employment cases with the law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C. (a.k.a. Davis Miner), where he remains a Counsel today. In 1993 he also became a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, another position he still holds.

In 1994 he worked for Davis Miner on a case titled Barnett v. Daley, where he was part of a legal team that challenged the racial makeup of Chicago’s voting districts. His team sought to raise the number of black super-majority districts from 19 to 24. According to the judge in the case, Richard Posner, Candidate A and his fellow litigators held that “no black aldermanic candidate in Chicago has ever beaten a white in a ward that had a black majority of less than 62.6 percent, and it is emphatic that the ward in which the population is 55 percent black is not a black ward — is indeed a white ward, even though only 42 percent of its population is white.”

In a 1995 case known as Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, Candidate A and his fellow Davis Miner attorneys charged that Citibank was making too few loans to black applicants, and they won the case.  Also in 1995, he sued, on behalf of ACORN, for the implementation of the Motor Voter law in Illinois. Jim Edgar, the state’s Republican Governor, opposed the law because he believed that allowing voters to register using only a postcard would breed widespread fraud.  ACORN would later invite him to help train its staff. Moreover, he eventually would sit on the Board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which gave a number of sizable grants to ACORN — including $45,000 in 2000, $75,000 in 2001, and $70,000 in 2002.

In 1995 Candidate A — along with such notables as Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright — helped organize the Washington, DC-based Million Man March which featured Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Said Candidate A in the immediate aftermath of the March:

“What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society…. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn’t care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.”

 In the mid-1990s, he developed a friendship with fellow Chicagoans Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, university professors who hosted meetings at their home to introduce him to their neighbors during his first run for the Illinois state senate in 1996. Ayers (who contributed money to his 1996 campaign) and Dohrn had been leaders of the 1960s domestic terrorist group Weatherman, a Communist-driven splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society. The pair had participated personally in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. To this day, both have remained unrepentant about their former terrorist activities and their hatred of the United States.

In 1995 he sought the endorsement of the so-called New Party for his 1996 state senate run. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers. By 1996, he had become a member of the New Party.

Co-founded in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a former staffer for Jesse Jackson‘s 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel Rogers (a sociology and law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), the New Party was a Marxist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials — most often Democrats. The New Party’s short-term objective was to move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of new Marxist third party.

Most New Party members hailed from the Democratic Socialists of America and the militant organization ACORN. The party’s Chicago chapter also included a large contingent from the Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and Communist Party USA members.

So the choice is simple this November, Vote Candidate A or Candidate B

Obama’s view on race and power

A 1995 radio interview with Barack Obama contains some interesting verbiage on the subject of race and salvation: specifically his claim that his salvation lies in collective salvation through politics — which is consistent with the Black Liberation Theology he abosrbed from Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He also disparages suburban whites as unwilling to pay taxes for the benefit of inner city blacks.

Watch this four minute YouTube video and see for yourself:

What Worries Me About Barack Hussein Obama

This election has me very worried.  So many things to consider. 

About a year ago I would have voted for Obama. I have changed my mind three times since than.  I watch all the news channels, jumping from one to another.  I must say this drives my husband crazy.  But, I feel if you view MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, you might get some middle ground to work with.  About six months ago, I started thinking “where did the money come from for Obama”.  I have four daughters, who went to College, and we were middle class, and money was tight.  We (including my girls) worked hard and there were lots of student loans.

I started looking into Obama’s life. 

Around 1979 Obama started college at Occidental in California.  He is very open about his two years at Occidental; he tried all kinds of drugs and was wasting his time but, even though he had a brilliant mind, did not apply himself to his studies. “Barry” (that was the name he used all his life) during this time had two roommates, Muhammad Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, both from Pakistan.  During the summer of 1981, after his second year in college, he made a “round the world” trip.  Stopping to see his mother in Indonesia, next Hyderabad in India, three weeks in Karachi, Pakistan where he stayed with his roommate’s family, then off to Africa to visit his father’s family.  My question – Where did he get the money for this trip?  Neither I, nor any one of my children would have had money for a trip like this when they where in college.  When he came back he started school at Columbia University in New York.  It is at this time he wants everyone to call him Barrack – not Barry.  Do you know what the tuition is at Columbia?  It’s not cheap! To say the least.  Where did he get money for tuition?  Student Loans? Maybe. After Columbia, he went to Chicago to work as a Community Organizer for $12,000. A year.  Why Chicago?  Why not New York? He was already living in New York. 

By “chance” he met Antoin “Tony” Rezko, born in Aleppo Syria, and a real estate developer in Chicago.  Rezko has been convicted of fraud and bribery this year.  Rezko was named “Entrepreneur of the Decade” by the Arab-American Business and Professional Association”.  About two years later, Obama entered Harvard Law School.  Do you have any idea what tuition is for Harvard Law School?  Where did he get the money for Law School?  More student loans?  After Law school, he went back to Chicago. Rezko offered him a job, which he turned down.  But, he did take a job with Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Guess what?  They represented “Rezar” which is Rezko’s firm.  Rezko was one of Obama’s first major financial contributors when he ran for office in Chicago.  In 2003, Rezko threw an early fundraiser for Obama which Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendelland claims was instrumental in providing Obama with “seed money” for his U.S. Senate race. In 2005, Obama purchased a new home in Kenwoood District of Chicago for $1.65 million (less than asking price).  With ALL those Student Loans – Where did he get the money for the property?  On the same day Rezko’s wife, Rita, purchased the adjoining empty lot for full price. The London Times reported that Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born billionaire loaned Rezko $3.5 million three weeks before Obama’s new home was purchased.  Obama met Nadhmi Auchi many times with Rezko.

Now, we have Obama running for President.  Valerie Jarrett was Michele Obama’s boss.  She is now Obama’s chief advisor and he does not make any major decisions without talking to her first.  Where was Jarrett born? Ready for this? Shiraz, Iran!  Do we see a pattern here?  Or am I going crazy?

On May 10, 2008 The Times reported, Robert Malley advisor to Obama was “sacked” after the press found out he was having regular contacts with “Hamas”, which controls Gaza and is connected with Iran.  This past week, buried in the back part of the papers, Iraqi newspapers reported that during Obama’s visit to Iraq, he asked their leaders to do nothing about the war until after he is elected, and he will “Take care of things”. 

Oh, and by the way, remember the college roommates that were born in Pakistan?  They are in charge of all those “small” Internet campaign contributions for Obama.  Where is that money coming from?  The poor and middle class in this country?  Or could it be from the Middle East? 

And the final bit of news.  On September 7, 2008, The Washington Times posted a verbal slip that was made on “This Week” with George Stephanapoulos.  Obama on talking about his religion said, “My Muslim faith”.  When questioned, “I made a mistake”.  Some mistake! Date: Friday, September 19, 2008, 11:39 AM

All of the above information I got online.  If you would like to check it – Wikipedia, encyclopedia, Barack Obama; Tony Rezko; Valerie Jarrett: Daily Times – Obama visited Pakistan in 1981; The Washington Times – September 7, 2008; The Times May 10, 2008.

Now the BIG question – If I found out all this information on my own, why haven’t all of our “intelligent” members of the press been reporting this?

A phrase that keeps ringing in my ear – “Beware of the enemy from within”!

 

 

Who is Funding Barack Obama?

If OUR COUNTRY and its citizens are in such terrible financial condition, who is funding the Barack Obama campaign of RECORD SPENDING?

As Barack Obama reaped a stunning $150 million in campaign donations in September, bringing his total to more than $600 million, new questions have arisen about the source of his amazing funding.

By Obama’s own admission, more than half of his contributions have come from small donors giving $200 or less. But unlike John McCain’s campaign, Obama won’t release the names of these donors.

A Newsmax canvass of disclosed Obama campaign donors shows worrisome anomalies, including outright violations of federal election laws.

For example, Obama has numerous donors who have contributed well over the $4,600 federal election limit.

Many of these donors have never been contacted by the Obama campaign to refund the excess amounts to them.

And more than 37,000 Obama donations appear to be conversions of foreign currency.

According to a Newsmax analysis of the Obama campaign data before the latest figures were released, potential foreign currency donations could range anywhere from $12.8 million to a stunning $63 million in all. With the addition of $150 million raised in September, this amount could be much more.

When asked by Newsmax about excess contributions, Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said that contributions already identified as excess had been returned and that those the campaign was just learning about — either through news accounts or from the Federal Election Commission — “will be returned.”

“Every campaign faces the challenge of screening and reviewing its contributions,” LaBolt said. “And we have been aggressive about taking every available step to make sure our contributions are appropriate, updating our systems when necessary.”

But many of the donors Newsmax canvassed said they had “never” been contacted by the Obama campaign or seen any refunds, even though their contributions went over the limit months ago.

In all, Newsmax found more than 2,000 donors who had contributed in excess of the $4,600 limit for individuals per election cycle.

Such donations, if not returned within 60 days, are a clear violation of federal campaign finance laws.

Lisa Handley, a stay-at-home mom from Portland, Ore., recalled giving $4,600 to the Obama campaign by credit card, contributions she made because “I love Obama,” she said.

According to FEC records, however, she gave an additional $2,300 to the campaign, putting her over the limit.

The Obama campaign reported that it had “redesignated” the excess money, which could mean that it had contributed it to a separate party committee or a joint fundraising committee, which have higher limits.

But if that happened, it’s news to Handley. “No one ever contacted me to return any of the money or told me they were redesignating some of the money,” she said.

Ronald J. Sharpe Jr., a retired teacher from Rockledge, Fla., appears in the Obama campaign reports as having given a whopping $13,800.

The campaign reported that it returned $4,600 to him, making his net contribution of $9,200 still way over the legal limit.

But there’s one problem with the Obama data: Sharpe doesn’t remember giving that much money to the Obama campaign in the first place, nor does he recall anyone from the campaign ever contacting him to return money.

“At the end, I was making monthly payments,” he told Newsmax. The Obama campaign records do not show any such payments.

Many donors refused to answer questions about the political campaign contributions appearing in their name when they learned that the caller was from a news organization.

John Atkinson, an insurance agent in Burr Ridge, Ill., refused to discuss his contributions, which totaled $8,724.26, before numerous refunds.

Atkinson and others gave in odd amounts: $188.67, $1,542.06, $876.09, $388.67, $282.20, $195.66, $118.15, and one rounded contribution of $2,300.

Sandra Daneshinia, a self-employed caregiver from Los Angeles, made 36 separate contributions, totaling $7,051.12, according to FEC records. Thirteen of them were eventually refunded.

In a bizarre coincidence, those 13 refunded contributions — for varying amounts such as $223.88 and $201.44 — added up exactly to $2,300, the amount an individual may give per federal election.

Also giving in odd amounts was Robert Porter, an accountant for the town of Oviedo, Fla. Porter gave a surprising $4,786.02 to the Obama campaign.

In all, Newsmax found an astonishing 37,265 unique donors to the Obama campaign whose contributions were not rounded up to dollar amounts. That amounts to more than 10 percent of the total number of unique donors whose names have been disclosed by the Obama campaign to the public.

Of those, 44,410 contributions came in unrounded amounts of less than $100. FEC regulations only require that campaigns disclose the names of donors who have given a total of $200 or more, so that means that all these contributors were repeat donors.

Another 15,269 contributions gave in unrounded amounts between $101 and $999, while 704 of the unrounded contributions were in amounts of more than $1,000.

Campaign finance experts find the frequent appearance of unrounded contributions suspicious, since contributors almost invariably give in whole dollar amounts.

One expert in campaign finance irregularities offers a possible explanation.

“Of course this is odd. They are obviously converting from local currency to U.S. dollars,” said Ken Boehm, the chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center.

“The overwhelming number of large dollar contributors — and even small donors — are in even dollar amounts,” he told Newsmax. “Anyone who doubts that can go to FEC.gov and look through the campaign contribution data bases. You will not find many uneven numbers.”

Boehm said he had rarely seen unrounded contributions in his 30 years as a lawyer doing campaign finance work.

“There’s always the odd cat who wants to round up his checkbook, but they are very rare,” he said.

Richard E. Hug, a veteran Republican fundraiser in Maryland who who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and spearheaded the successful 2002 gubernatorial race for Bob Ehrlich that brought in a record $10 million, told Newsmax that unrounded contributions were extremely unusual.

“I’ve never seen this in all my years of raising money for political candidates,” he said. “The first thing it suggests is foreign currency transactions — contributions from foreign donors, which is clearly illegal.”

Top Republican fundraiser Steve Gordon, who has raised $65 million for GOP candidates over the past 30 years, told Newsmax that such contributions in uneven amounts would be “pretty unusual.”

“You might have a rounding process if there was some kind of joint event, but since all appears to be on the Internet, it’s pretty unusual. At the very least, it would need to be explored.”

LaBolt attributed the uneven amounts to the online “Obama store,” which sells T-shirts and other campaign items.

“Contributions made to the Obama store often produce totals that are not exact dollar amounts,” he said.

But the campaign has never produced any accounting for proceeds from its online store, which virtually shut down several weeks ago after Newsmax and news organizations revealed that Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and other foreigners had made large purchases there.

The Republican National Committee has filed a complaint against the Obama campaign for “accepting prohibited contributions from foreign nationals and excessive contributions from individuals,” which incorporated reporting from Newsmax and other news organizations.

“Their responses to FEC inquiries have often been inadequate and late,” RNC general counsel Sean Cairncross told Newsmax.

The Obama camp claims to have 2.5 million donors in all. But until now, they have kept secret the names of the overwhelming majority of these money-givers. According to a Newsmax analysis, the Obama campaign finance records contain just 370,448 unique names.

Even accounting for common names such as Robert Taylor or Michael Brown, which can signify multiple donors, Obama’s publicly known donor base is less than 20 percent of the total number of donors the campaign claims to have attracted. But the identity of the other 2 million donors is being kept secret.

As of the end of August, those secret donors have given an incredible $222.7 million to Obama, according to the FEC — money whose origin remains unknown to anyone other than Obama’s finance team, who won’t take calls from the press.

While no exact figures are available, if the same percentage of potential foreign contributions found in the itemized contribution data is applied to the total $426.9 million the Obama camp says it has taken in from individuals, this could mean that Obama is financing his presidential campaign with anywhere from $13 million to a whopping $63 million from overseas credit cards or foreign currency purchases.

The sum of all unrounded contributions in the itemized FEC filings for the Obama campaigns comes to $6,437,066.07. That is the actual amount of money that appears to have been charged to foreign credit cards that the Obama campaign has disclosed.

If the same ratio applies to the unitemized contributions, which are again as large, then the Obama campaign may have taken as much as $13 million from foreign donors.

However, the donors who made those unrounded contributions gave a total of $31,484,584.27, meaning that as much as $63 million may have come from questionable sources.

Both presidential campaigns are required to submit detailed fundraising reports for September on Monday.

© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Barack Obama – Record vs Rhetoric

written by Thomas Sowell

Apparently there is something about Sarah Palin that causes some people to think of her as either the best of candidates or the worst of candidates. She draws enthusiastic crowds and provokes visceral hostility in the media.

The issue that is raised most often is her relative lack of experience and the fact that she would be “a heartbeat away from the presidency” if Senator John McCain were elected. But Barack Obama has even less experience– none in an executive capacity– and his would itself be the heartbeat of the presidency if he were elected.

Sarah Palin’s record is on the record, while whole years of Barack Obama’s life are engulfed in fog, and he has had to explain away one after another of the astounding and vile people he has not merely “associated” with but has had political alliances with, and to whom he has directed the taxpayers’ money and other money.

Sarah Palin has had executive experience– and the White House is the executive branch of government. We don’t have to judge her by her rhetoric because she has a record.

We don’t know what Barack Obama will actually do because he has actually done very little for which he was personally accountable. Even as a state legislator, he voted “present” innumerable times instead of taking a stand one way or the other on tough issues.

“Clean up the mess in Washington”? He was part of the mess in Chicago and lined up with the Daley machine against reformers.

He is also part of the mess in Washington, not only with numerous earmarks, but also as the Senate’s second largest recipient of money from Fannie Mae, and someone whose campaign has this year sought the advice of disgraced former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, who was at the heart of the subprime crisis.

Why then the enthusiasm for Obama and the hostility to Sarah Palin in the media?

One reason of course is that Senator Obama is ideologically much closer to the views of the media than is Governor Palin. But there is more than that. There are other conservative politicians who do not evoke such anger, spite and hate.

Sarah Palin is the one real outsider among the four candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency on the Republican and Democratic tickets. Her whole career has been spent outside the Washington Beltway.

More than that, her whole life has been outside the realm familiar to the intelligentsia of the media. She didn’t go to the big-name colleges and imbibe the heady atmosphere that leaves so many feeling that they are special folks. She doesn’t talk the way they talk or think the way they think.

Worse yet, from the media’s perspective, Sarah Palin does not seek their Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

Much is made of Senator Joe Biden’s “experience.” But Frederick the Great said that experience matters only when valid conclusions are drawn from it.

Senator Biden’s “experience” has been a long history of being on the wrong side of issue after issue in foreign policy. He was one of those Senators who voted to pull the plug on financial aid to South Vietnam, which was still defending itself from Communist invaders after the pullout of American troops.

Biden opposed Ronald Reagan’s military buildup that helped win the Cold War. He opposed the surge in Iraq last year.

Sarah Palin will not be ready to become President of the United States on the first day that she and John McCain take office. Nobody is.

But being Vice President is a job that can allow a lot of time for studying, and everything about Governor Palin’s career says that she is a bright gal with her head on straight. The country needs that far more than it needs people with glib answers to media “gotcha” questions.

Whatever the shortcomings of John McCain and Sarah Palin, they are people whose values are the values of this nation, whose loyalty and dedication to this country’s fundamental institutions are beyond question because they have not spent decades working with people who hate America. Nor are they people whose judgments have been proved wrong consistently during decades of Beltway “experience.”

Obama Campaign Worker Sicks Secret Service on Citizen

This actually happened TO ME and I am hoping people will send this on so that Americans can know the sort of fascist tactics being used by the Obama Campaign:

On Wednesday the 1st of October I received a call on my cell while in the car with my husband. It was a woman who identified herself as calling from the Obama Campaign. The phone # she called from was 903-798-6020 which lists as “Obama Volunteers of Texarkana” (Texas).
 
She asked if I was an Obama supporter to which I replied: “No, I don’t support him, your guy is a socialist who voted four times in the State Senate to let little babies die in hospital closets; I think you should find something better to do with your time.” I hung up.

Thursday, October 2, I answered the front door to find the Secret Service. Immediately I thought of the call and was furious that apparently you are not allowed to call Obama a Socialist without the Secret Service coming to investigate. Instead, they asked me about the following comment, relayed by the Obama Volunteer of Texarkana who called me, unsolicited on my cell phone:

“I will never support Obama and he will wind up dead on a hospital floor.”

My husband laughed and told them “No, she called him a socialist but she never said a word about him dying.” I gave them my actual quote. The woman asked insolently “Oh? Well why would she make that up?” I replied that I supposed she wasn’t happy about what I said about her candidate and the Agent said “That’s right, you were rude!” The last time I checked being rude wasn’t a crime in America.

Luckily the big file they had gathered on me didn’t indicate mental instability or a past life of stalking/crime, however they did want to know how I felt about Obama. That was my limit. I told the Agent in no uncertain terms that my thoughts were not pertinent to their investigation, that this was America and the last time I checked I was allowed to think whatever I wanted without being questioned by the Secret Service. In fact, even if I had said what she claimed, that isn’t a threat. I told them (again) and my husband verified that the statement reported by Obama’s volunteer was a lie. I asked them if there was a tape of the call and they said no. I said, “So on the word of a ticked off Obama supporter you are on my porch with no other evidence and you want to question me about my THOUGHTS!?”

They informed me that there was no evidence she was an Obama supporter. someone calling from his campaign. are you kidding?

I was not allowed to know the name of my accuser at which point they informed me that it wasn’t like I was in a court of law, YET, as if this was a good thing. I recognized this as a veiled threat. I told them I would happily go to court since I did nothing wrong and at least then my accuser would have to face me rather than sending the thought police to my house.

They then said they were trying to do me a favor, that they came to me first before “embarrassing you by going to all your neighbors and family”, another threat? I told them to be my guest and talk to whomever they wanted but they weren’t going to investigate my thoughts on my porch.

They also informed me that it would be easier if the next time a supporter calls me I just say “Yeah sure count me in, or just hang up” apparently so she won’t get her undies in a bundle and give them more useless trips. Yeah right. I said “Look, someone calls me unsolicited on my cell phone to ask me to support their candidate and I can’t tell them why I don’t?” I said I was sorry they made a wasted trip but if they had a problem with some made up lie they needed to go talk to her about it because it wasn’t my fault they had to drive from Houston for nothing.

At one point I went inside and got a notepad to record their badge numbers and they refused to show me their badges. They had done the quick flip when they arrived. I asked for a card and the female Agent refused to give me one stating “You’re not going to get a card.” The male Agent gave me a card and told me I could contact Houston with any questions.

The fact that the volunteer lied, the fact that the Secret Service came to my house to question me about my thoughts and feelings and threaten to embarrass me to my neighbors and go to court if I didn’t cooperate is not really the tragedy here. Because that girl on the phone doesn’t have the pull to send the Secret Service to my home. Someone high in the ranks of a campaign working for a man who may be the next President of the United States of America felt comfortable bringing the force of the Federal Government to bear on a private citizen on nothing but the word of a partisan volunteer.

Do I hear jackboots?

Jessica Hughes
Lufkin, Texas