Where has all the money (come from)?

Power Line reports how a reader at National Review Online “Corner” had his clearly phony $5 Obama donation accepted, but rejected by the McCain campaign. PL concludes: 

Everyone knows that Barack Obama has created the biggest money-machine of any politician in American history. But it is becoming increasingly evident that Obama’s money-machine is largely fraudulent and therefore criminal.

He speculates about media coverage:

One can imagine a world in which newspaper reporters think it’s a serious matter when a Presidential candidate tries to buy an election with illegal and fraudulent contributions. That, of course, is not the world that we live in. Have you seen Sarah Palin’s shoes?

I know.  Page one NYTimes stuff if I ever saw one.

Newsweek offers more on the fund-raising point.

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Who wrote Dreams?

Literary mystery here:

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called — with a straight face — “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”

The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn’t happen.

And yet, given the biases of the literary establishment, no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama’s role in the writing, then or now. As the New York Times gushed, Obama was “that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself.” These accolades matter all the more because Obama has built his political persona around his presumably superior intellect, Dreams being exhibit A.

The rest of it is here.  With yet more here, beginning,

Evidence continues to mount . . .

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Throw the bums out of your living room

Power Line on promotion of high-risk mortgage lending as product of Democrat, not Republican, ideology and maneuvering, quoting a fellow calling for “each reporter and editor . . . insisting on telling the truth” in the matter:

But the mainstream media–which is to say, most reporters and editors who work for “mainstream” news organizations–have no honor and are not interested in truth. They are, as Card says, “the public relations machine of the Democratic Party.”

It’s time to accept that fact and move on. Our existing news organizations–the New York Times, the Associated Press, NBC, CNN, CBS, and so on–can’t be reformed, they can only be ignored.

It is time for conservatives, libertarians, moderates, and normal citizens who are interested in straightforward reporting of the news to build their own news organizations in competition with the corrupt ones that now exist.

Ignoring is the best policy, accompanied by journalistic entrepreneurship.

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Alinsky loved, Alinsky ruthless, Obama the MAN

In today’s Wednesday Journal, I ask Oak Parkers: Did you ever see so many political signs? The Big O has Oak Park in a hammerlock. But you John-and-Sarah supporters-don’t you just love her?-need not fear. Oak Park‘s Republican committeewoman, Marlene Lynch, has a few left of the ten (10!) signs she got from the Cook County party. She’d prefer not having her number given out, however. Republicans lie low in Oak Park.

Meanwhile, Big O signs metastasize, and so what? He’s most Oak Parkers’ beau ideal. Heck, I met him at a reception for him in an

Oak Park home in the mid-’90s, before few besides William Ayers, that unrepentant son of a ComEd CEO, knew his potential. He was running Annenberg Challenge, funding school programs in how to overthrow the government and helping ACORN register voters as only ACORN knows how-look them up under vote fraud. Little did I know, sipping wine and munching cheese, what a giant was in our midst. 

 

. . . .  There’s more more more here.

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Impeaching Obama, latest of the big spenders, etc.

It’s too soon to get out your “Impeach Obama” buttons, but not too soon to call Colin Powell’s credentials into question or take careful note of Obama fund-raising, the biggest yet and the first since Watergate to go all-out.  Typical Democrat chutzpah, of course.  Soon as coast is clear, up to old tricks.  It’s the “Chicago-izing of the nation,” as commenter Margaret says in re: Pelosi, etc.

I might amend that, to “Cook County-izing,” with a nod to the Stroger hegemony, bidding fair to rival the Daleys, who of course have a hand in the county cookie jar.  The father headed the Cook County party as mayor, of course (so does the son and heir), the first to wear both crowns, and they say the son has put him to shame for sheer control of things.

So.  As to premature impeachment proceedings, we should note our favorite pollster, Zogby, with his within-margin-of-error Obama lead.  Yes!  Not to mention Gallup four days ago, with its also thin Obama lead. 

Then there’s the tax on businesses earning (or taking in?) $250G/year.  Which is it?  Does Obama know?  Hear Joe the Plumber:

Mr. Obama also muffed details of his own tax plan, confusing a small business’s revenue and net income [he told John Fund], and the tax rate that would apply under his proposals.

Joe had more to say about That One, reports Fund in WSJ.com Political Diary:

He also seemed hazy about the Flat Tax, put forward by Steve Forbes and Dick Armey a decade ago, confusing it with proposals for a national sales tax and saying the rate would have to go to 40%. “I was talking about one thing, and he was answering me about something else,” Mr. Wurzelbacher recalls.

The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank in Chicago, points out that a flat tax would let Americans see exactly how much government costs in one easy, transparent and accountable tax. Mr. Obama’s reforms, in contrast, would only add to the thousands of loopholes, exemptions and complications of the current 67,000 page tax code. “A candidate for president should at least know the difference between a flat tax and a national sales tax,” Heartland concludes. “But both a flat tax and a national sales tax are head and shoulders over the convoluted tax system we have now.”

* Last night’s “Boston Legal” featured a full-throated endorsement of the idea that U.S. military are “not like us,” if we are the suited lawyers of this show, ignoring JAG lawyers.  Arguing before a judge whether the military could be sued for malpractice in a veterans’ hospital, the younger but not so young lawyer said wounded GI’s are “not our children” but children of poor people (who need protection), relying on “the canard that the our military is the last resort of the poor and uneducated.”  That’s show biz as those lefties understand it.

* In these hard times, we feature government bailouts or rescue packages or government investment — whatever — in private banks.  But protective tariffs can’t be far away:  “In a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of protectionism will blow,” say Princeton prof Aaron Friedberg and Commentary editor Gabriel Schoenfeld.

And with them will come withdrawal “from the world stage,” leaving “a dangerous power vacuum” — what’s been called elsewhere economic isolation. 

* John Kerry is a natural-born cutup.  Here he is at the podium 10/20, having fun with dumb-question askers among our mediums:

“Barack got asked the famous boxers or briefs question,” Kerry went on. “I was tempted to say commando.”

. . . .

“Then they asked McCain and McCain said, ‘Depends,'” Kerry said to lots of laughter from the crowd.

* More on Barry Obama’s tax-unconsciousness:

He also seemed hazy about the Flat Tax, put forward by Steve Forbes and Dick Armey a decade ago, confusing it with proposals for a national sales tax and saying the rate would have to go to 40%. “I was talking about one thing, and he was answering me about something else,” Mr. Wurzelbacher recalls.

The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank in Chicago, points out that a flat tax would let Americans see exactly how much government costs in one easy, transparent and accountable tax. Mr. Obama’s reforms, in contrast, would only add to the thousands of loopholes, exemptions and complications of the current 67,000 page tax code. “A candidate for president should at least know the difference between a flat tax and a national sales tax,” Heartland concludes. “But both a flat tax and a national sales tax are head and shoulders over the convoluted tax system we have now.”

* My question entirely, as in last month’s Wed. Journal column:

How do you create more jobs when you want to levy higher tax rates on the small business owners who are the nation’s primary employers?

Or as I put it:

However the cookie crumbles in November, when the final poll is taken, I’m a winner. Even if my man and woman come up short, I will get to watch a miracle-when Big O. and his Delaware sidekick create jobs while raising tax rates. He will truly be The Messiah if he pulls that off.

* This from PowerLine fits with my column of tomorrow, in which I speak of Saul Alinsky and his ends-and-means thinking.  The writer has shown how Obama lied when he said called it “absolutely not true” that he “launched [his] political campaign in William Ayers’ living room.”  He comments:

Barack Obama is obviously a candidate who believes that the end–his election–justifies any means, no matter how dishonest. He is not the first Presidential candidate to harbor such a conviction. There was a time, though, when newspaper reporters thought it was part of their job to keep such candidates honest, rather than enabling their deceit.

It does come back to the lemmings of the daily press and television.

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When to stop growing

Here’s a very great thought that must not die a-borning: Out of Obama’s $250G limit on allowable gross income before being hit by higher tax rate can come some very good things for tax lawyers and accountants, who will be hired on to warn the business owner when to stop making and selling his product and hiring people. 

These guys can make a bundle at this, and their charges will be well worth it to employers coast to coast.  Who’s giving Obama these ideas anyway.  Maybe a hard-hitting Chi Trib or Sun-Times investigation possibility here.

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Home in Indiana with Sarah

This Tribune fellow earns his spurs as a card-carrying NYT imitator with this page one piece about Indiana, in which he kisses Palin off with a paragraph or so.

Contrast it — Glory be! — with this p-1 blaster in Sun-Times that seems to do her justice.  To do the story justice, that is.  She’s still news, isn’t she?  Not for Chi Trib.

Pallasch and Byrne do it right, getting the other side’s position along the way, which is how it’s done among professionals, I have long understood. 

“ACORN is under investigation for rampant voter fraud in 13 states. ACORN received over $800,000 from the Obama campaign,” Palin said. All 13 are swing states like Indiana.

Then the opposite position:

Obama has said the $800,000 was for voter canvassing during the primary election, not for voter registration during the general election.

“We have not worked with ACORN at all in the general election,” Obama spokesman Ben Labolt said. “Rather than make these false, desperate attacks, . . .

. . . Blah, blah, blah.

But the $800,000 is fungible, is it not?  Nothing left over for ACORN in the general?  How do we know that?

Moreover, ACORN has severe internal-honesty problems of its own, having fired the founder’s brother for making off with a million of its hard-begged money.  The founder, a campus radical in the ‘60s, himself had to quit, though it’s doubtful he’s not still in their pitchin’ for ACORN and Obama.  Here he is:

Wade Rathke is seen in a Tuesday Feb. 26, 2002 file photo, in New Orleans. A lawsuit filed in August by two ACORN board members accuses ACORN founder and former chief organizer Wade Rathke of either concealing or failing to properly report that his brother Dale embezzled around $948,000 from New Orleans-based ACORN and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000. (AP Photo/Bill Haber, File)

Some of the dirty, from AP yesterday:

Leaders of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now are locked in a legal dispute stemming from allegations that the brother of the group’s founder misappropriated nearly $1 million of the nonprofit’s money several years ago.

The embezzlement case, a recent revelation to some board members, has spawned a lawsuit and set off a power struggle inside ACORN at a time when the liberal group’s voter registration practices are the subject of fraud investigations and fodder for presidential campaign attacks.

I know I should be spelling out the McCain health care package, not mooning over Reform Now in its more virulent aspects, but with money siphoned hand over fist by an insider, doesn’t ACORN look like an embarrassing support group for O., who lawyered for and trained them and gave them lots a bucks — also hard–begged, by the way?

Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s interim chief organizer, called the lawsuit “a distraction from us marshaling our forces to deal with the Republican right-wing attacks” over ACORN’s voter registration.

When in doubt, changed the subject.

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Pelosi, ACORN, etc.

Balance of power

is what more people want (48%) than want one-party rule (41%). This is a big, big issue. Dems will probably add to their majorities in both houses, even gain a supermajority in the senate, making their plans filibuster-proof. So McCain presents himself as “a buffer” between the people and the Reid-Pelosi combo. Congress limps along with 13% approval rating, vs. Bush’s 29%, and 23% like Pelosi, vs. 30% who like Bush.

So hang her around Obama’s neck:

“Were my opponent elected with a Democratic Congress in power, not only would there be no check on my opponent’s reckless economic policies, there would be considerable pressure on him to tax and spend even more,” [McCain] said earlier this week in Blue Bell, Pa.

That’s the idea. Tell your friends.

Voting early, often:

Tell them about vote fraud too, if they haven’t heard. It’s spelled A-C-O-R-N this season.

“It remains our belief that American citizens should be guaranteed that their legitimate votes are not wiped away by illegally cast ballots,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said in a statement Friday.

Such a good point. Yowling Dems speak of disenfranchisement — of felons, etc. — as if that’s the issue. But every fraudulent vote for their man or woman negates a legal vote for the other. It’s like jobs for precinct door-knocking. They are jobs of which someone else is deprived.

And sometimes the piper has to be paid.

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Reid-Pelosi around O’s neck?

Quick, before I forget this: Obama should be saddled with Reid and Pelosi at least as much as he wants to saddle McCain with Bush.  Two long years ago, they got their majorities, and look where we are.

Well, I looked that up and found my idea is old.  Repubs were about to use

“Pelosi-Reid-Obama” in the all-in-the-same-breath way that Democrats now use “Bush-McCain” — to make the parties’ popular candidates indistinguishable from their less beloved incumbents.

Did they?  Did McCain?  Well, here’s McCain today in Miami, among other things defending Joe the Plumber:

Let me give you the state of the race today. We have 18 days to go. We’re 6 points down. The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes, and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections, and concede defeat in Iraq. But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.

And here’s a chilling reminder of what’s ahead if Obama wins:

If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.

[Review & Outlook] AP

Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven’t since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.

In brief, this is coming:

WSJ on super Dems

That union card check means no more secret ballot in union elections and mandatory unionization that works this way:

The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union “contract” after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.

Not bad for a community organizer.

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Who now reads Shakman?

Obama’s manager Axelrod in a Chi Trib op-ed in 2005 commenting on, actually objecting to, prosecution of patronage workers in Chicago:

Indeed, the decades-old Shakman federal consent decree proscribes hiring and firing for political reasons. But as I listened to [U.S. Attorney Patrick] Fitzgerald’s news conference after the government brought charges against the city workers, I realized he was saying something much more.

Fitzgerald proclaimed his vision of a day when the recommendations of elected officials, business, labor and community leaders will no longer count – a day when we entirely remove politics from government. And he seemed to be declaring his intention to use the criminal code to enforce that vision.

Yes, and if Obama wins, how long will Fitzgerald last in Chicago?

Read more of this at NBC5–Chicago’s Division Street blog by Steve Rhodes, who carefully and with all deliberation lays out the Obama-Daley connection.

Believe me, happy days will be there again among Cook County Democrats when The One comes marching into Washington, the laurel wreath on his head.  This town ain’t ready for reform, and neither is the Big O.

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