Hillary Campaign to Cicilline: Just Raise Taxes!

[This post originally appeared on February 22, 2008. I've bumped it up so that commenter Jayzeeh can judge first hand my opinion of David Cicilline and firefighters.]

Because the Providence firefighters had promised to picket Senator Hillary Clinton's Rhode Island event this weekend over their lack of a contract with the city, her campaign has asked Mayor David Cicilline not to attend the event.

But before dropping that bomb on His Honor, Hillary's campaign suggested as an alternative that the Mayor of the capital city of the fourth highest taxed state simply give in to the firefighters' demands.

My own view of the "dispute" between the Mayor and Local 799 is that it amounts to play-acting by David Cicilline, who believes that this stance will confer upon him the title "Champion of the Taxpayer". He is mistaken. It is clear that Providence needs to make some adjustments to its budget. But such adjustments must be across the board. The Mayor has, instead, selected a very short list of line items to adjust. This is not only ineffectual but unfair. Further, if, as the Mayor contends, there is room to negotiate within the firefighters' contract (which there may well be), then there is also room for negotiation in a city contract ten times larger - the teachers' contract. The Mayor has not seen fit to look for such flexibility in the latter case, only in the former, which involves a far smaller block of municipal employees and, accordingly, a much smaller block of potential political supporters. For these reasons, it is difficult to be impressed by his production "starring" the firefighters.

At the same time, the philosophy espoused by Senator Clinton's campaign - "just cave" - in addition to not being very sensitive to taxpayers, is the very one which has led to Rhode Island being the fourth highest taxed state in the country. Roland Benjamin has an excellent post today about the extravagant proposals Senator Obama has made while campaigning. Following upon the advice by the Hillary campaign to the Mayor of Providence, it appears that these two Presidential candidates are in a race to see who can spend down the taxpayer's wallet the fastest, one with expensive proposals and the other with an irresponsible approach to the negotiation of government contracts.

UPDATED: Is Obama clueless or are his actions intentional?

UPDATED: Roger Kimball:

I was having lunch yesterday with a prominent critic of the Spender in Chief, and he raised a possibility that many of us have entertained over the past several weeks: that Obama is simply out of his depth: that he hasn’t a clue about what makes the economy tick and his talk about the "profit-to-earnings ratio" was not a slip of the tongue but a worrisome confirmation of the suspicion that he is an empty suit floundering around in the dark.

We kicked around that possibility for a few minutes: certainly the Obama administration seems like a monument to incompetence. Consider the multiple appointment fiascos. Consider his treatment of Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the country that has been our staunchest ally. Consider, if you can stand it, the economy: That sucking sound–the only palpable trace of the once-mighty U.S. stock market–reminds us what the market makes of Obama’s plans to raise taxes on "the rich," the middle class, business. It reminds us what the market thinks of his efforts to shove the coal industry into a death spiral with absurd cap-and-trade carbon emissions regulations. And that’s all before breakfast, before he sets about wrecking the U.S. health care industry by turning it, too, over to Washington for ruination.

Yes, we agreed, it certainly looks like incompetence and, judged by its results, is effects, its consequences for this great country, it is incompetence on a breathtaking scale.

And yet, is it only incompetence? Remember, shortly before the election, Obama boasted to his mesmerized supporters that "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Is that not what he has set about doing–with a vengeance? [Here.]

And here’s where we began talking about another possibility: that Team Obama was deliberately targeting the U.S. economy, deliberately impoverishing millions of Americans, deliberately angering our closest allies while coddling dictators like Putin and his puppet Medvedev and funneling millions to terrorist organizations like Hamas...

...Each step strengthens the role of government in people’s lives. That’s exactly what Lenin sought to do...

Lenin, too, wished to "spread the wealth around." And Obama, like Lenin, has been perfectly frank in recommending that we need to go beyond the "merely formal" rights enunciated in the Constitution in order to "bring about redistributive change" in society.

That’s where Obama’s much heralded–and astronomically expensive–"green" initiatives come in. Only they aren’t really (or are only incidentally) "green," i.e., concerned with the environment. At bottom, they are pink, i.e., they are political weapons in a socialist battle against "greedy" business interests.

Who, I wonder, was the political genius who saw the advantages of exploiting people’s sentimental gullibility about the environment for partisan profit? We’ve long known that environmentalism, as the philosopher Harvey Mansfield put it, is "school prayer for liberals." But I wonder whether even Professor Mansfield could have foreseen what a tool pseudo-environmentalism would be for the radical wing of the Democratic party? The inestimable value of a green, that is, a pink, philosophy is that you can never be green enough. And in pursuit of zero-carbon-emissions purity a government can impose crippling sanctions in order to force compliance. And don’t say Obama didn’t warn you: as I and many others pointed out during the campaign, he promised that, if elected, he would do all he could to "bankrupt" the coal industry...

ORIGINAL MARCH 5 POST & ADDENDUMS

Hmmm.

Jennifer Rubin has written a piece entitled 'I'm Maureen Dowd, and I've Been Had' (H/T):

They may need a support group before the month is out. They could gather in New York or Washington where many victims reside. The meetings would start: “I’m Maureen [or David]. I’m a duped Barack voter. And I’m mad.”

The ranks indeed are filling with the disaffected and the disappointed — Chris Buckley, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, David Gergen, and even that gynecological sleuth and blogger Andrew Sullivan. And then there is the very angry Marty Peretz. Their complaints are varied but expressed with equal amounts of remorse and bitterness. They all have been done wrong by Barack...

All in all it is one dismayed and bitter group, filled with recriminations and a bit of self-flagellation. And it’s not hard to recognize that, as in any grieving process, they have passed through denial (when all who criticized their beloved Obama were excoriated and ridiculed) and are in the second step: anger. They were misled or deluded into believing Obama was a moderate or an indefatigable supporter of Israel or a fiscal grown-up or a reformer (take your pick).

They and the rest of the country are figuring out the bitter truth: Obama bears little resemblance to the moderate and soothing figure who tied up John McCain in knots. He bears even less resemblance to the Agent of Change. Rather he’s pretty much the Chicago pol who went to the Senate to be its most liberal member.

And for the wounded Obama supporters, we can offer just one bit of counsel: you have lots of company. There are trading floors filled with sympathetic souls and businesses filled with stunned executives. They didn’t get what they bargained for either...

Kind of like yesterday's post here on AR. Stuart Taylor has more: Obama's Left Turn - Centrists fear that the president's budget reveals his liberal leanings.

Peter Robinson: "A couple of implications here are worth noting. The first is that a deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite...The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right. As our national drama continues to unfold, bear that in mind."

More here and here.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama, with strong majorities in both houses of Congress, will get every legislative initiative he wants. And from a sheer vote counting viewpoint, that would certainly be true.

But could the countervailing force not be the oft-spineless Republicans with their limited votes in Congress?

Could the real counter come from the financial markets themselves, which sense both the magnitude of the economic downturn and how Obama's proposed statist solutions will only compound the problems and adversely impact any recovery?...

So is it a race between a financial market collapse, accelerated by its reaction to Obama's policy proposals, and Obama's aggressive and statist policy implementation effort?

Will the financial markets then be the force which galvanizes a broad reaction from the American people?...

Incentives matter deeply and drive human behavior. It is a lesson statists and socialists never learn...

Ledeen on de Tocqueville from the second link above:

...We will not be bludgeoned into submission; we will be seduced. [Tocqueville] foresees the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state that manages all the details of our lives. His words are precisely the ones that best describe out current crisis:

That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

It is evident that our associations, along with religion one of the two keys to the great success of the American experiment, are prime targets for the appetite of the state. In the seamless web created by the new tyranny, everything from the Boy Scouts to smoking clubs will be strictly regulated. It is no accident that the campaign to drive religion out of American public life began in the 1940s, when the government was consolidating its unprecedented expansion during the Depression and the Second World War, having asserted its control over a wide range of activities that had previously been entrusted to the judgment of private groups and individuals.

When we console ourselves with the thought that the government is, after all, doing it for a good reason and to accomplish a worthy objective, we unwittingly turn up the temperature under our lobster-pot. The road to the Faustian Deal is paved with the finest intentions, but the last stop is the ruin of our soul.

Permitting the central government to assume our proper responsibilities is not merely a transfer of power from us to them; it does grave damage to our spirit. It subverts our national character. In Tocqueville’s elegant construction, it "renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself."...

...The great Israeli historian Jacob Talmon coined the perfect name for this perversion of the Enlightenment dream, which enslaves all in the name of all: totalitarian democracy.

These extreme cases help us understand Tocqueville’s brilliant warning that equality is not a defense against tyranny, but an open invitation to ambitious and cunning leaders who enlist our support in depriving ourselves of freedom. He summarizes it in two sentences that should be memorized by every American who cherishes freedom:

The…sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

Will the next question for these disillusioned pundits be to ask whether Obama is truly clueless on economic issues OR whether he is intentionally acting in a way to bring down the economy so as to justify his socialist beliefs/policies?

One man's thoughts (H/T).

There is a paper trail which stands behind these thoughts regarding Obama's radical beliefs - More here, here, here, here, and here.

Then there is Obama's pre-election paper trail with numerous links to his many statements not covered well by the MSM.

A thoughtful person has to admit that no other U.S. President has ever had political connections or espoused beliefs which are so questionnable and out-of-line with mainstream opinions.

Is the evidence pattern enough to at least make more people stop and think about what are Obama's true intentions? Will they then take the next step and speak up against Obama's wealth-destroying and liberty-limiting policies?

Or are we all going to be looking belatedly for our own support groups where we talk about how we were also duped?

ADDENDUM

Power Line writes:

[Obama doing it intentionally] is, I admit, an intriguing theory, but I don't buy it. Obama can't possibly want to be a one-term failure. That's what happened to Jimmy Carter, and Obama must know that it will happen to him, too, if his policies are perceived as dragging down the economy.

More likely the explanation is that Obama is an economic illiterate, and subscribes to the idea--which I think is rather common among Democrats--that what the government does has little impact on the economy. Obama likely believes that the economy will recover on its own, and in the meantime--in Rahm Emanuel's immortal words--he shouldn't let the crisis go to waste. So he enacts every left-wing measure that he wanted to do anyway, expecting that when the economy eventually recovers he can take credit for it, even though his policies, if anything, retarded and weakened the recovery.

That's a cynical strategy, although not quite as cynical as destroying the economy on purpose; the difference is that it may well work.

During the general election, Obama showed himself to be ignorant about history so it is not unreasonable that he would also be economically illiterate, too.

But he is also showing himself to be quite the leftist ideologue. Since ideologues act based on their faith beliefs, regardless of empirical evidence, I think it is hard to say definitively it is just illiteracy.

ADDENDUM 2

Meltdown (H/T).

Boskin: Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow. Rubin's comments:

...Democrats may shrink from the label "socialist," but they can’t deny the scope and direction of the president’s agenda. More important, they’re not embracing a model which has (ever?) succeeded in producing growth and prosperity. So whatever you call it, it is not a recipe for recovery.

The radical implications of Obama's budget proposal. Victor Davis Hanson provides some historical context. Michael Barone:

The Obama tax plan, combined with major state tax plans, puts not a three in front of the high earners' tax rate as the Clinton plan did, it puts a four or a five in front of it. And at that point, I fear, the animal spirits of high earners are going to be directed away from productive investment and toward tax avoidance and tax shelters. Away from creating new enterprises that can provide avenues upward for any and all, and toward gaming the system for the well-connected and shrewd insiders. Away from an economy that grows more than anyone imagined and toward an economy where system-gamers take shares of a static pie away from the rest of us. Is that where we really want to go?

More Rubin:

Fred Barnes is onto the scam: "Given the moderate-to-conservative viewpoint of voters, Obama has a motive in pushing to have his uniformly liberal agenda approved by Congress as rapidly as possible–before voters catch on to the fact it’s not what they voted for."

Or to put it differently, the Wall Street Journal editors conclude that "economies don’t spiral down forever without a reason and without policy encouragement. What’s worrying about the plunge in equities since January 2, and especially in the last week since Mr. Obama released his radical budget, is that it has come amid the unveiling of the President’s policy agenda. Equity prices have reacted to those proposals by signaling that they expect a much deeper and longer recession."...

Charles Krauthammer calls Obama on the bait-and-switch: "Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime." Actually the proposals not only aren’t the cure, the taxes and regulatory regime which accompany these plans are likely to make things worse.

Healthcare policy: The latest example of Obama's disdain for liberty.

ADDENDUM 3

Rediscovering first principles. (Lots more here if you want to do a deep dive on many first principles.)

A focused, video comparison between two different world views: Obama versus Reagan.

Riding the buyers' remorse train on day 44 of Obama's presidency

Christopher Buckley.

David Brooks.

Even David Gergen.

Jim Cramer.

Now Silicon Valley entrepreneurs see their incentives are being altered for the worse:

Like the college students who stayed up late to be inspired by his campaign rallies only to find Obama's first significant action to be a stimulus program that will transfer about a trillion dollars from them to the Baby Boomers, Silicon Valley Obama supporters are likely to find that a government-dominated economic era will not a great one in which to start companies that threaten big incumbent corporations that have juice with the government. I hope they appreciate the irony.

More here on entrepreneurs in general from the ever-thoughtful Jim Manzi. How do statists like Obama think jobs are created?

Whose next on the Obama buyers' remorse train?

Will it matter enough to force changes in Obama's radical agenda?

ADDENDUM

Democratic Senator Evan Bayh writes in the Wall Street Journal:

...Our nation's current fiscal imbalance is unprecedented, unsustainable and, if unaddressed, a major threat to our currency and our economic vitality. The national debt now exceeds $10 trillion. This is almost double what it was just eight years ago, and the debt is growing at a rate of about $1 million a minute.

Washington borrows from foreign creditors to fund its profligacy. The amount of U.S. debt held by countries such as China and Japan is at a historic high, with foreign investors holding half of America's publicly held debt. This dependence raises the specter that other nations will be able to influence our policies in ways antithetical to American interests. The more of our debt that foreign governments control, the more leverage they have on issues like trade, currency and national security. Massive debts owed to foreign creditors weaken our global influence, and threaten high inflation and steep tax increases for our children and grandchildren.

The solution going forward is to stop wasteful spending before it starts. Families and businesses are tightening their belts to make ends meet -- and Washington should too.

The omnibus debate is not merely a battle over last year's unfinished business, but the first indication of how we will shape our fiscal future. Spending should be held in check before taxes are raised, even on the wealthy. Most people are willing to do their duty by paying taxes, but they want to know that their money is going toward important priorities and won't be wasted...

...But what ultimately matters are not meetings or words, but actions. Those who vote for the omnibus this week -- after standing with the president and pledging to slice our deficit in half last week -- jeopardize their credibility.

As Indiana's governor, I balanced eight budgets, never raised taxes, and left the largest surplus in state history. It wasn't always easy. Cuts had to be made and some initiatives deferred. Occasionally I had to say "no."

But the bloated omnibus requires sacrifice from no one, least of all the government. It only exacerbates the problem and hastens the day of reckoning. Voters rightly demanded change in November's election, but this approach to spending represents business as usual in Washington, not the voters' mandate...

More on 14 centrist Democratic Senators from Politico.

Jennifer Rubin comments:

Barack Obama’s lurch to the left is costing him some support among centrist pundits, but now he’s lost a prominent Democratic Senator, Evan Bayh.

...Bayh and Nelson both pushed back against the idea of raising taxes in a recession. Presumably there are more legislators who are not ready for this lurch to the left.

This is potentially a turning point, as Democrats step forward willing to say, "Enough!" Whether they succeed in dragging the president back to a more centrist and sensible agenda remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: the center, at least in the Senate, is closer to the Republicans than to the Obama administration when it comes to fiscal sobriety and taxation.

Want the definition of overreach? When even Maureen Dowd whines about Obama. LOL.

President Obama and Article Two: Do We Really Want to Know?

Unless an objection was filed, Occidental College had until 10:00 am Pacific time today to respond to a subpoena filed on behalf of "Keyes et al" requesting

Academic and housing records of Barack Hussein Obama, including but not limited to approximately two years from September 1979 to June 1981

Why do Plaintiffs wish to review such documentation?

The gravamen of the Petition is the question as to whether United States Senator Barack Hussein Obama, of Illinois, is eligible to serve as president of the United States pursuant to the requirements for that office in the United States Constitution. The records sought may provide documentary evidence, and/or admissions by said Defendant, as to said eligibility or lack thereof.

My initial reaction to this avenue of investigation, one of three as of a month ago, was, huh, that's pretty clever. My second reaction was, you know, they might be on to something, especially as there are reports that the Obama administration would attempt to block the effort.

My ultimate reaction was of dread.

If Barack Obama does not qualify to be President of the United States under Article Two, Section One of the Constitution, I don't want his presidency challenged and I don't want him removed from office.

It's not because the worst has already happened and a truly egregious bill will become law as a result of his efforts. (Though the administration certainly is sending mixed signals about the urgency of its passage.) And it's not because the Republican candidate, John McCain, would not be his replacement.

It's because, rightly or wrongly, so many people believe that a milestone was reached and the ultimate glass ceiling was broken for African Americans. (Me, I've thought all along that America has known for a long time that Martin Luther King Jr. was on to something.) It's because of the false yet ugly accusations that would be made. (The fact that one of the Plaintiffs of this subpoena is himself African American would be deliberately overlooked.) It's because, rightly or wrongly, so many people of all colors would be so bitterly disappointed if Barack Obama were disqualified "now that he has come so far", "now that we have come so far".

Yes, if the worst happened, ultimately, it would be Barack Obama himself who would let everyone down because he failed to ... well, properly vet himself before running. But many people believe that this is larger than one man. And if that one man were removed from the White House, too many people would never understand the real reason, or would refuse to understand the real reason. I'm not sure I can face their reaction, even if it is based upon flawed information or reasoning.

Praise Song for That Day

Yesterday, Dan Yorke was talking about the inauguration poem, "Praise Song for the Day", by Elizabeth Alexander and asking for impressions. For his part, Dan thought that it was a solid effort that was essentially a snapshots across America (a "literary split screen" as Dan called it). He thought that it could have been improved upon both stylistically and in the way it was presented. His callers ran the gamut--people confessed to being confused, uplifted, or...whatever. Overall, it was a good bit of "lit-crit" on the radio. For my part, I shot off a quick email that Dan read on the air:

Dan, I agree….a “literary split screen” on a day in the life is a good way to put it. But the end [of the poem] is important:

”In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.“

See, it’s not about just any day, Dan, but that PARTICULAR day. The day when the ONE (Obama) has ascended. To me it was yet one more creepy, though predictable, aspect of the whole over-the-top, messianic feel of this inauguration. Another example of people thinking that, somehow, the election of a politician has single-handedly made everything better. Simplistic.

I've tried to explain this before, but historian and commentator Victor Davis Hanson has honed in and hit on what really bothers me:

I distilled from the press coverage and the crowds and the punditry yesterday that for all too many suddenly a vote for Obama redeems America. Now, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, for the first time in their lives they are apparently proud of the United States....So I am surprised that suddenly the election of a single individual means that we are united, patriotic, proud of America? Suddenly Okinawa or Antietam, or all those who died at the Argonne, are ours to claim again?

....But America was always ours, the public, and the nation transcends the proposition of whether Obama gets elected or not—given that the United States, in its worst hour, was better than the alternatives at their best. So I think it would be wise to cool it on the “I am now proud of America” rhetoric. If getting your way means suddenly the dead at Iwo or those who were blown up in B-17s over Germany are at last your own and matter, then we are in deep trouble.

History did not begin on January 20, 2009.

Inauguration or Coronation?

The inauguration festivities seem to be particularly "big" this time around. Wonder why? It seems much more like a coronation than an inauguration (I know, this will probably be taken as me being just another cranky-con. Oh well). Anyway, Michael Drout, Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Wheaton College (I don't know his politics), offers an illustrative recounting of a conversation he had in his faculty lounge:

Background: Wheaton has arranged for a sophomore January experience. Sophomores come two days early and do some stuff. This happens to be on the day of the inauguration, so the planners decided that all the sophomores could be brought to the field house where they would watch the ceremony on a giant screen.

Drout: (as tactful and politically savvy as I always am): I'm just glad I never had to participate in such a creepy experience when I was in college.

X: (confused): Why would you call it creepy?

Drout: You are rounding up a large group of people and forcing them to watch political theater. On a giant screen. In a gymnasium.

[Long pause while people look uncomfortable.]

Drout: It never occurred to any of you who planned this that it was the slightest bit creepy, did it?

X: The way you describe it makes it sound creepy. It is a major event that most people will want to watch.

Drout: Couldn't they watch it without being herded together into a gymnasium? Maybe hang out with their friends, watch it on the various lounge TVs? Make comments?

X: But then there wouldn't be the bonding experience.

Drout: Bonding over a political spectacle is, in your view, a good thing?

[another uncomfortable pause]

X: Maybe you should be one of the faculty members afterwards who can give talks to contextualize the event. You could analyze the rhetoric.

Drout: I'm pretty sure I don't want the students to see me as part of the creepy event.

X: But you'd have a chance to express your point of view.

Drout: But you've got my entire point of view. I think it's creepy.

X: (Gives up in exasperation).

Look, I do GET it. I really do believe that this is a significant moment in our nation's history. Yet, the 24/7 coverage of the week long celebration...I don't remember this happening before. Is it just because we, as entertainment/news consumers, are getting more demanding (or the suppliers of the aforementioned more aggressive?) when it comes to our politics-meet-entertainment appetite? I know there is a need to fill programming time--and what better way than covering inauguration festivities (plus, it's relatively cheap). To say nothing of the MSMs love for Obama.

I'm sure there are several factors that go into this. The coincidence of the inauguration of the nation's first black President with our annual commemoration of our country's greatest civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has certainly, and correctly, heightened the emotions this time around. But the idea that we as a nation need to "bond" over the inauguration of a new political leader? It all seems just a little overboard. And creepy.

Even Lenin would be impressed

Melanie Phillips:

Trevor Loudon has got hold of a fascinating analysis of Prez-elect Obama's administrative appointments by Mark Rudd and Jeff Jones, two former Weather Underground terrorists (chums of Obama's old ally [chance acquaintance], the unrepentant former WU terrorist William Ayers). The two of them are now on the board of Movement for a Democratic society, in turn the parent body of Progressives for Obama, the leading leftist lobby group behind Obama's presidential campaign. And waddya know - just like me they believe Obama is practising stealth politics with a degree of sophistication and success with which 'even Lenin would be impressed.' As they say, Obama knows that he must be subtle and reassure even the most conservative of his opponents if he is to achieve his radical goals...

Read Phillips for key excerpts from the articles by MDS members. Here is the link to Trevor Loudon's writeup with more complete information.

Phillips continues:

The key is the stupidity of so many of Obama's opponents, amplified by the credulousness and prejudices of the media and the ignorance of the public. The shallow Republicans and their supporters in the media and blogosphere have in large measure fallen for Obama's stealth politics hook, line and sinker. As a result of his 'centris' appointments which have got them absurdly cooing over people like Clinton and Holder, Gates and Jones, their guard is now totally lowered. They still don't know the true nature of what has hit them -- and at this rate will never know until they wake up one morning to a transformed America and a free world that has lost the war being fought against it.

And the more the left shrieks 'betrayal', the more American conservatives will wrap themselves in denial. But characters like Rudd and Jones are the horse's mouth. They know from the inside the manipulative and stealthy game that is being played here. Lenin would be impressed indeed.

As further background, here are a series of Obama posts from the general election:

Clarifying the deeper problems with Barack Obama
Summarizing the philosophical problems with Barack Obama's view of the world
More troubling thoughts about the One
Crisply defining the core problem with Obama's economic and tax policies
On Obama's economic and tax policies
Multiple choice options regarding Obama's "spread the wealth" comment
Any bids for $75,000?
Socialism
Yep, that'd be my reaction
Obama and ACORN's overt and criminal voter fraud acts
McCarthy: Stifling political debate with threats of prosecution is not the "rule of law" - it's tyranny
Obama on his desire for a civilian national security force
Does Obama believe in liberty?
Obama vs. McGovern on eliminating secret union elections
Obama's fundraising: Insufficient transparency and yet more unanswered questions
A rare Zen moment of simplicity
Senator Obama's naive, ahistorical, and unrealistic foreign policy viewpoints: His Achilles Heel for the November election
On Obama's disarmament priorities
On Obama's healthcare policies
On Obama's extreme abortion beliefs
Obama's views on coal industry
Oh my, it just never stops: In the tank for Obama
Creepy, indeed
Creepy, again
An argument for divided government

Anyone want to bet on what direction Obama wants to take America?

Hillary Acts Coy

How did President-Elect Obama wind up in the awkward position of standing by while the person on top of his short list vacillates about accepting arguably the most prestigious position in his Cabinet?

Hillary Clinton's "agonizing" decision over whether to accept Barack Obama's offer of the secretary of state position could be the result of her weighing whether she has a better option staying put in the Senate or just no taste for the workload.

The New York senator, who was vanquished by the president-elect in the Democratic presidential primaries, may also not want to play second fiddle, say observers watching the to-and-fro between Clinton and Obama.

Clinton's hesitation could very well be tactical, said Dr. Allan J. Lichtman, a professor of American political history at American University in Washington.

Is this one of those rare occasions when it might be possible to take an emulation of Lincoln too far? Further, as WPRO's Matt Allen asked tonight, should Senator Obama take her hesitation as a life-line and simply move on to the next person on his list?

The Primacy of Identity

The left's investment in identity politics has proven to reap rewards. In battling the concept that people should develop their senses of self in such a way as to deemphasize a relative superficiality like ethnicity, the planners and plotters and goers-along cleared the field for such results as this:

Political and sociological analysts in several interviews and teleconferences Nov. 5 pointed out that Obama's vote among Catholics reflected a 7-point increase over the Catholic vote for Kerry.

The exit polls divided voters into "all Catholics" or white, non-Hispanic Catholics. In the latter group, the shift toward the Democratic candidate was less pronounced than among Catholics overall. Fifty-two percent of white Catholics supported McCain, and 47 percent voted for Obama. Majorities of white Catholics also voted for Bush in both his elections, by 56 percent in 2004 and 52 percent in 2000.

Approximately 40 percent of U.S. Catholics are Hispanic and another 3 percent are African-American. Asian and Pacific Islanders constitute about 4 percent.

Latinos nationwide voted for Obama by 67 percent to 31 percent for McCain. African-Americans voted for Obama by 95 percent to 4 percent. Asians supported Obama by 62 percent to 35 percent.

Without doubt, the inauguration of a black man represents a milestone in America, but there is potential, at least, for race to increase its prominence, as the now-more-powerful identity contingent wrings its investment for every drop of power.

Hitchens: Next Stop - Back Down to Earth

In view of his grumpiness with both candidates, if you jumped into Christopher Hitchens' post-election column randomly and missed that one crucial sentence, you'd have no idea who he voted for.

It was Senator Obama. But Hitchens has some choice words about inflated expectations of the President-Elect which have been raised by a fawning media and even, possibly, supporters wearing pink-tinged eyewear.

The recognition of these obvious points should also alert us to a related danger, which is the cousinhood of euphoria and hysteria. Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing, empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of Bush-Cheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen, and I don't think a diet of hope is going to cover it. Nor even a diet of audacity, though can you picture anything less audacious than the gray, safety-first figures who have so far been chosen by Obama to be on his team?

* * *

More worrying still, there are vicious enemies and rogue states in increasing positions of influence throughout the world (one of the episodes that most condemned the Republican campaign was its attempt to slander Sen. Joe Biden for his candid attempt to point this out), yet many Obama voters appear to believe that the mere charm and aspect of their new president will act as an emollient influence on these unwelcome facts and these hostile forces. I can't make myself perform this act of faith, and I won't put up with any innuendo about my inability to do so.

The President's Troopers

On some level, this makes sense, and thus far, it's just an idea, but frankly, it's unsettling and has the potential to go very, very wrong (emphasis added):

After Obama declared victory, his campaign sent a text message announcing that his supporters hadn't heard the last from the president-elect. Obama conveyed a similar message to his staff in a campaignwide conference call Wednesday, signaling that his election was the beginning, and not the culmination, of a political movement.

Accordingly, the president-elect's http://www.change.gov transition Web site features a blog and a suggestion form, signaling the kinds of direct and instantaneous interaction that the Obama administration will encourage, perhaps with an eye toward turning its following into the biggest special-interest group in Washington.

Once Obama is sworn in, those backers may be summoned to push reluctant members of Congress to support legislation, to offer feedback on initiatives and to enlist in administration-supported causes in local communities. Obama would also be positioned to ask his supporters to back his favored candidates with fundraising and turnout support in the 2010 midterm elections.

So the least of what Obama's troopers will be doing is getting in their neighbors' faces, as he put it during the campaign. I also wonder whether this database will be the field from which he'll cull the first ranks of his national security force.

Presidents always remain partisan, of course, but I've had a sense, at least, that they put aside or hand over some of their "movement" infrastructure so as to lead the entire country. Presidents are persuaded by special interests, of course, and tend to have more affinity with some than others, but almost by definition, they are supposed to concern themselves with the national interests. Intellectually, the leap to tyranny looks smaller and smaller.

Gulp if You Think He Meant It

Here and there across the Internet, one can still find expressions of hope that Obama's actions, when in office, would be tempered by the economy and the reality of responsibility. Peggy Noonan said, before the election, that Obama would be the dog that caught the car. This morning, even I suggested that he'd be tempered by politics, if nothing else.

It appears that his first official statement, however, is going to be one of decisiveness, probably to the detriment of the nation's financial and moral health:

President-elect Barack Obama is poised to move swiftly to reverse actions that President Bush took using executive authority, and his transition team is reviewing limits on stem cell research and the expansion of oil and gas drilling, among other issues, members of the team said Sunday. ...

"There's a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for Congressional action, and I think we'll see the president do that," John D. Podesta, a top transition leader, said Sunday. "He feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set."

And more:

Rahm Emanuel also hinted that Obama would not postpone a tax increase for families earning more than $250,000 a year despite the deepening economic gloom.

The president-elect may, indeed, intend to remain somewhat of an enigma, but he's got a lot of constituencies to reward, and those who've hoped that he'd rein in some of his left-of-center proclivities are likely to be disappointed.

The Defining Difference

So Julia Steiny gave me a change for which to hope in an Obama presidency:

Last summer, presidential candidate Barack Obama addressed the National Education Association's annual convention, by way of video stream projected onto a big screen. ...

But then, without changing his tone of voice, he enthusiastically endorsed charter schools. The crowd was eerily silent, and stayed that way as he proudly proclaimed his career-long support of public-school choice. ...

And then, without apology, he swore that he would support allowing districts to "reward" teachers who take on extra responsibilities, or work in hard-to-serve areas, or perform consistently well in the classroom. He doesn't use the words, but this is none other than union-loathed "merit pay." The assembly outright booed the man. Loudly. He responded by saying "I know this wasn't necessarily the most popular part of my speech last year, but I said it then, and I'm saying it again today, because it is what I believe."

Wow.

The video is as Steiny describes it, although I'd note that Obama, that masterful architect of speeches, positions his declaration of belief as the down-note from which to declare that he'll "always be an honest partner to you [union educators] in the White House." Moreover, it cannot be ignored that these were mere words — and delivered via streaming video, so the impact of the live audience could not be felt.

That extrapolates to my continuing unease about others' faith in Obama. He drops a hopeful hint from time to time. He'll speak beyond his audience periodically, giving nods to those outside of the room, metaphorically speaking. But that's all it is: talk and nods. Kyle-Anne Shiver describes her measure of our next president thus (all emphasis in original):

My opinion was gradually set in steel as I read and studied and pored over Obama's own books. The incongruous details of his race-obsessed memoir — the invented episodes, the composite characters, the utter lack of humility and true introspection — all bespoke a man of innate dishonesty and a lack of healthy shame. His audacious book on politics did nothing but hammer home his lack of principles and values, as he equivocated every single position, until the reader could determine absolutely nothing coherent about the writer.

Barack Obama has lived 47 years. In all that time, he has presented himself in public as a multi-dimensional symbolic figure, self-anointed as far more special than any of his actual deeds have ever — even in a single instance — validated as reality. If ever there was a more enigmatic figure in American public life, I have yet to discover him.

I don't suspect that Obama intends to reach the Oval Office and throw off the veil, as it were, proving all of conservatives' darkest fears within those first 100 days. Rather, he's likely to try to perpetuate the practice that has gotten him where he is: He'll try to speak music to every ear and act with enigmatically enough to disallow stark assessment.

Even in that, though, I fear that my exuberant friend Rocco DiPippo is correct in his assessment of the reception that Obama's self-representation is likely receiving in the arid fever-swamps of terrorist enclaves:

From his promises to hold non-conditional talks with America's enemies to his promises to strip funding for America's military, they smell weakness. For instance, Obama's trademark "gender neutral" hazy blue motifs -- the ones that grace his website and his campaign merchandise -- put forth a message of softness, femininity and oozing pliability. Our enemies read signals like those and strategize accordingly. ...

Be prepared, you Obama and media-snookered fools. You have elected a weakling, a pacifist in a time of war against a determined, ruthless enemy who wishes death to all of you.

Prepare yourselves to have the blood of innocent Iraqis on your hands -- and to have America's broken promise of a peaceful, terror-free Iraq on your consciences when your false Messiah abandons 25 million souls to the beheaders and the rapists and the torturers and the mass murderers. All in the name of "Change."

Graceless...and ahistorical

Nice start.

Once again, Obama can't get his history straight.

And some of us, who have no use for astrology, will take astrology silliness over the thuggery of Saul Alinsky any day.

Sorry, but it gets back to that love-of-liberty thing...again.

Does Obama believe in liberty?

Well, does he?

And, how about the ongoing airbrushing by Obama and his team when they get caught promoting something that stirs a reaction by those of us who have an affinity for the principles of the American Founding? Haven't seen this much airbrushing since the fall of the Soviet Union.

ADDENDUM

The airbrushing continues.

The President-Elect Is Like a Box of Chocolates

Andrew McCarthy has an excellent piece up on NRO noting the ambiguity of which Barack Obama will actually emerge as president and leaving home that it will be the centrist one painted in the candidate's rhetoric. McCarthy also points toward the shadow that ought to be feared:

Alinsky, too, rejected ideological dogmatism. He taught that the successful radical is the wolf in sheep's clothing: burrowing into the institutions of Western capitalism, altering their character from within, seducing the society with a high-minded summons to "social justice," "participatory democracy," and, yes, "change." Is Obama following this stealthy roadmap? If that is his intention, it's hard to imagine how he could have done so more perfectly.

Now What?

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Looking Ahead

Well, a positive note from the election results is that John McCain is not the next president. If the Democrats had chosen anybody less worrisome than Obama, the results wouldn't have been even as close as they were.

Although it certainly stretched the truth to say that a McCain administration would have been a third Bush term, the Senator would most definitely have allowed the perpetuation of the Left's stratagem of tarring conservatism with Republican policies that by no means deserved the label. Now conservatives can rebuild free of the weight of inaccurate characterization. Sometimes incremental adjustments of bearing simply don't make the turn before the moment has passed.

Another positive note is that a segment of the country that had been drifting away from faith in the mechanisms of United States governance have had that faith renewed. An open democratic competition can bring anybody to the controls, if enough people are motivated to make it happen.

Therein lies Obama's challenge: His rhetoric about anything being possible in the United States of America is antipathetic to the policies that he has expressed and supported as a Senator. He is the president elect because he was free to dissent — both from the government and from the party — and because people were free to organize in his behalf and to collect large sums of money, freely given. He marketed and sold himself and had sufficient windfall profits to reinvest in his candidacy.

That possibility is of a piece with America's approach to business and to personal freedom. Yet, were he to keep his promises, were he to behave so as to preserve his followers' faith in the system, were he to enact even some moderate portion of their lunatic vision, he would necessarily have to contradict the principles that made his rise possible.

Perhaps he'll grow in office and turn his back on his own past. Style-wise, his presentation as an erudite black man will undo the damage of many a gansta rapper. Perhaps some inner-city child will send him a letter that makes the choice explicit and The One, himself, will have an epiphany.

Probably not, but this is, after all, the land of opportunity.

In the first 6 months? Nah, in the first 24 hours

Abe Greenwald on The Baltic Missile Crisis?

And you think the Russians haven't listened carefully to the video in this post, where Obama essentially promises to unilaterally disarm? That video took me right back to reliving the nuclear freeze movement in 1983. Or they haven't noticed Obama's lack of historical knowledge?

BTW, how about this?

Just like we learned after the 1990's, there can be no holiday from history. ACORN and related thuggery may help you commit domestic voter fraud, raise illegal monies, and win domestic elections but such Alinsky-esque "community organizing" won't help a bit when dealing with real Commie thugs who come from a political lineage which has killed tens of millions of people in their pursuit of power and control.

ADDENDUM

More.

And even more.

Obama Wins

We have a new President, Barack Obama. The symbolism and historical import is unmistakable and speaks volumes about our country, to both ourselves and to the world. So congratulations to him for the campaign he ran and for his victory. I hope he governs more as the politician he campaigned as, not as the Senator his record indicates. I'll give him a chance, be critical when I think necessary, but I'll always strive to be fair. I also hope I never find myself in the position of placing the blame of everything wrong in the world on his shoulders. I certainly don't think he can make everything right. The world is more complicated than that. I hope those who supported Barack Obama realize that, too.

We should take a step back, set the politics aside, and recognize the history that has been made. Not only because we elected an African-American President, but because we did so through the normal means we've always followed: through a vociferous debate over ideas and principles. Even those of us who find ourselves on the losing side of things can appreciate the skill and talent and weight of Obama's ideas that carried the day.

Few thought this moment possible, but America is about possibilities. Americans have proved yet again that we are a land of opportunity, that we do live up to our ideals--if sometimes we take too long--and that we truly are the greatest nation in the world.

Tomorrow is another day.

Obama Gets Ohio...Lights out for Mac

Ohio has gone to Obama and that about does McCain in. 'Nuff said.

Picking Obama's Theme Song

OK. This one might only ring bells for anybody who worked in a record store in the early '90s.

When I heard Obama's "righteous wind" comment, my first thought wasn't Mao, but a certain song that would work well for the One. And no, it's not the one that Shannen Coffin suggests, but "Break Like the Wind" from Spinal Tap's little known reunion album. Here's an apropos slice from the lyrics:

We made a promise in the night
Swearing to Heaven
Is this a promise we keep?
Or will we break like the wind?

Nobody Beats Him!

The imagery of the Obama phenomenon has reminded me of something in recent pop culture, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it until today:

You'll recall that Elaine was entranced by a man because she was subliminally remembering the glow and audio of an old commercial in which he was The Wiz. How long will it take Obama's glow to wear off, if he wins tomorrow?

Summarizing the philosophical problems with Barack Obama's view of the world

Roger Kimball does an excellent job at articulating the core philosophical problems with Barak Obama's candidacy:

When he looks back on campaign 2008, what will Obama most regret? I suspect it will the same thing John McCain most appreciated: the now-famous off-hand comment to Joe the Plumber. It’s not, said Obama, that I want to punish success. I merely want to "spread the wealth around."

That was indeed a revelatory statement. I think it was the second most alarming thing he said in the entire campaign (more on the most alarming thing in a moment). Taken together with other observations by Obama–his almost equally infamous lament in a 2001 interview that the Supreme Court had not ventured into "issues of the redistribution of wealth," for example–it gave the electorate a rare glimpse behind the carefully constructed "yes-we-can" façade of Obama the messianic healer into the grim "no-you-can’t" engine room of his leveling political philosophy. Let’s say that Obama was successful in overcoming what he disparaged as "essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution" on what government should be required to do to, or for, citizens; let’s say that he succeeded in transforming the Constitution from a "charter of negative liberties" into a menu of positive prescriptions: what then?

It’s my sense that more and more people are asking themselves that question. What, when you come right down to it, would an Obama administration mean for me and my family? What would it mean for the United States? What would happen after all the Greek columns were retired and Obama stepped from the hustings into the Oval Office? Political campaigns thrive on the intoxication of possibility. They end with the sobering strictures of the indicative. Compromise. Trade-offs. Competing interest groups.

It’s easy to see why Obama was (as Colin Powell put it) an "electrifying" figure. Leave aside the $650 million he raised (you can buy a lot of "electricity" for $650 million). Obama was young. He was suave. He exuded energy and confidence. He was the anti-Bush: a first-term Senator who had already distinguished himself as the most left-wing inhabitant of that august chamber. Above all, he was (at least in part) black. What better receptacle for the hopes and dreams of liberal, guilt-infatuated America? What prodigies of expiation might be accomplished were this young, charismatic, half-black apostle of egalitarian change elected President of the United States?

His comment to Joe the Plumber gave us some indication: he would set about trying to "spread the wealth around." But redistributionist initatives do not take place in a vacuum. They unfold in a context of moral expectation. And this brings me to what may be the most alarming thing Obama let slip in the course of his campaign. I mean his suggestion, uttered in the final few days of the race, that those who do not favor higher taxes are guilty of "selfishness." (In criticizing his tax and welfare plan, Obama said, McCain and Palin "wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.")

I know, I know: nannies through the ages have upbraided their charges with complaints about "selfishness," an unwillingness to "share," etc., etc. Such moralism might even be an admirable trait in a nanny. The question voters are beginning to ask themselves in earnest is whether they want a President who regards himself as a sort of super-nanny, supervising the behavior of his charges, i.e., U.S. citizens.

We know what a President as nanny-in-chief looks like, because we had one in Jimmy Carter. In 1979, Carter took to the airwaves to berate the American people for their lack of moral fiber and profligate appetite for energy. Obama echoed that rhetoric when he said, in the course of his campaign, that

We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times...and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.

People sat up when they heard that: We can’t drive the sort of car we want, eh? We can’t eat as much as we like, or keep our houses at a temperature we find comfortable? We should alter our behavior to court the approval of "the rest of the world"?

That Carter-moment was soon buried in the progress of the campaign. It deserved more than the flurry of concern it elicited. It showed, just as Obama’s call for the redistribution of wealth shows, the sort of thing he intends to do to address the "selfishness" he perceives in the American people.

Remember his call for "a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded as the military"? Remember his suggesting the creation of "national service programs" that high-school and college students would be required to participate in? Those, too, were initiatives meant to combat our "selfishness."

As I observed in this space a few weeks ago, Obama espouses a form of what James Piereson has called "punitive liberalism." Because he regards the American people as essentially selfish (a sentiment memorably reinforced by Michelle Obama when she described the America was "just downright mean"), Obama cannot help regarding success as a form of failure. That side of Obama’s program does not play well outside his inner circle, so he has been careful to overlay it with seductive talk about "tax cuts for 95 percent of taxpayers"–an absurdity on the face of it since 43 percent of those who file do not pay any income tax at all. (Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that those reporting the top 1 percent of adjusted gross income pay nearly 40 percent of all income taxes collected, while the top 5 percent pay more than 60 percent. To use another word Obama likes, is that "fair"? How much more does want?)

"Selfishness" can be a vice. It can also be another name for that "well-ordered self-love" that Thomas Aquinas extolled as "right and natural." (I have more to say about selfishness and altruism here.) But the important issue facing the American people at the moment is whether they wish to elect a commander-in-chief or a nanny-in-chief. Obama’s seductive rhetoric and and emollient promises have not been able to conceal his ambitions to become America’s protector and nanny-in-chief. He wants you to be happy–but on his terms. He wants to tell you what to drive, what temperature to keep your house, how much to eat. He wants to conscript your children in "voluntary" national service programs that are all-but-mandatory. He wants to determine how prosperous you will be allowed to be–and then to tax you back to a pre-determined level if you make too much. He has similar plans on the international front. He craves approval for America from the "international community," which means he will do everything he can to accommodate that community. He dislikes criticism so much, he is willing to call upon his supporters to silence journalists and besmirch the character of Joe the Plumber, using supposedly protected state information to do it.

In short, it’s your life and Obama wants to run it for you. On Tuesday, Americans will have the choice between electing a leader and a chaperone. Obama has vastly out-spent and–it saddens me to say–out-campaigned McCain. But that doesn’t mean he is better suited to lead America in this difficult time. I suspect that, in their heart of hearts, most Americans know that.

All of which is consistent with the types of people Obama has associated with over the years. And why McCain had these words to say

...John McCain unveiled a new attack on Barack Obama, criticizing his comment that his victory in Iowa's caucuses last winter had "vindicated" his faith in the American people.

"My country has never had to prove anything to me, my friends," McCain said while campaigning in the Washington suburbs in northern Virginia. "I've always had faith in it and I've been humbled and honored to serve it.

McCain was referring to a remark Obama made at a campaign stop in Des Moines on Friday.

"My faith in the American people was vindicated and what you started here in Iowa swept the nation," Obama said...

Jennifer Rubin asked some further pertinent questions nobody in the MSM has been willing to ask.

Thomas Sowell makes these observations:

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.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise-- whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team-- is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

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 real world.

The signs of Barack Obama's self-centered immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents.

The triumphal tour of world capitals and photo-op meetings with world leaders by someone who, after all, was still merely a candidate, is just one sign of this self-centered immaturity.

"This is our time!" he proclaimed. And "I will change the world." But ultimately this election is not about him, but about the fate of this nation, at a time of both domestic and international peril, with a major financial crisis still unresolved and a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon.

For someone who has actually accomplished nothing to blithely talk about taking away what has been earned by those who have accomplished something, and give it to whomever he chooses in the name of "spreading the wealth," is the kind of casual arrogance that has led to many economic catastrophes in many countries.

The equally casual ease with which Barack Obama has talked about appointing judges on the basis of their empathies with various segments of the population makes a mockery of the very concept of law.

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.

Obama on his desire for a civilian national security force

Obama calls for a civilian national security force.

Questions for Obama.

Given the intimidation and threats we have seen from Obama supporters against those who oppose the One, don't you wonder if people like Stanley Kurtz and Joe the Plumber are feeling as free today at the thought of this CNSF?

Obama's views on coal industry

Obama Promises San Francisco Audience He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry!!

Send to your friends in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Colorado, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.

More.

ADDENDUM

Power Line:

Maybe the American people just didn't have quite enough time to get to know Barack Obama. It seems inconceivable to me that a candidate as arrogant as Obama could be ahead in the polls if the voters had fully absorbed how out of touch he can be. A case in point is this MTV interview, where Obama says that the tax increase he proposes on people who earn $250,000 or more is "chump change, that's nothing." But wait! If it's "chump change," how is it going to fund the hundreds of billions in new spending that Obama wants?

Likewise with Obama's casual declaration that he intends to bankrupt the coal industry, which currently supplies around one-half of all electricity produced in the United States. Today Mike Carey, President of the Ohio Coal Association, issued this statement:

Regardless of the timing or method of the release of these remarks, the message from the Democratic candidate for President could not be clearer: the Obama-Biden ticket spells disaster for America's coal industry and the tens of thousands of Americans who work in it.

These undisputed, audio-taped remarks, which include comments from Senator Obama like 'I haven't been some coal booster' and 'if they want to build [coal plants], they can, but it will bankrupt them' are extraordinarily misguided.

It's evident that this campaign has been pandering in states like Ohio,Virginia, West Virginia,Indiana and Pennsylvania to attempt to generate votes from coal supporters, while keeping his true agenda hidden from the state's voters.

Senator Obama has revealed himself to be nothing more than a short-sighted, inexperienced politician willing to say anything to get a vote. But today, the nation's coal industry and those who support it have a better understanding of his true mission, to 'bankrupt' our industry, put tens of thousands out of work and cause unprecedented increases in electricity prices.

In addition to providing an affordable, reliable source of low-cost electricity, domestic coal holds the key to our nation's long-term energy security - a goal that cannot be overlooked during this time of international instability and economic uncertainty.

Few policy areas are more important to our economic future than energy issues. As voters head to the polls tomorrow, it is essential they remember that access to reliable, affordable, domestic energy supplies is essential to economic growth and stability.

Where will the "little people" get electricity if Obama's environmental policies destroy the coal industry? That, apparently, is of no concern to "The One." It would have been nice if this news had come out more than a couple of days before the election.

UPDATE: After writing this post, I talked to Mike Carey on the telephone. He was very cordial, but deeply concerned about the future of his industry. Here is some of what he told me:

We originally were pretty neutral in this race, as neither candidate had been a strong supporter of coal. But after we saw Joe Biden's comments [no new coal plants in the U.S.], we tried to get information on clean coal to both campaigns.

Some people in the Obama campaign weren't very nice to the clean coal people who tried to talk to them.

The mainstream media haven't done their job. This is stuff that should have been found out a long time ago.

Nationally, 52% of all electricity comes from coal. In Ohio it's 89%, in West Virginia, 97%. Virginia and Pennsylvania get a lot of their electricity from coal as well. Here in Ohio, a lot of industries have left the state, but one that is growing is coal, which directly provides for around 4,000 jobs. I think it is remarkable that any political candidate would talk about bankrupting an industry that supplies more than one-half of the country's electricity.

ADDENDUM #2

And how does Obama describe the consequences of his policies on American citizens?

...under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket...

Oh, that sounds constructive.

Two Ideas in Two Dimensions

Mark Steyn had reason for a unique perspective, among pundits, of the presidential campaign:

I was away for much of the summer and, when I returned, the entire campaign felt like an absurd satire I wasn't quite up to speed on. But truly, in a world in which the many illegal foreign contributions to the leading candidate's unprecedented fundraising include his own deportation-ordered aunt, satire is dead.

This point of reference is apparent behind Steyn's latest must-read column, in which he notes that Obama exists in the national imagination more as a literary character than a person drawn from the crowds of real life:

... Obama in the White House, Obama on the dollar bill, Obama on Rushmore would symbolize the possibilities of America more than that narrow list of white-bread protestant presidents to date.

The problem is we're not electing a symbol, a logo, a two-dimensional image. Long before he emerged on the national stage as Barack the Hope-Giver and Bringer of Change, there was a three-dimensional Barack Obama, a real man who lives in the real world. And that's where the problem lies.

The Senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he's not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed non-relevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about "spreading the wealth around" was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of "social justice." Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be "accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten." ...

In his Wednesday-night infomercial, Obama declared that his "fundamental belief" was that "I am my brother's keeper." Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother's keeper, why couldn't he send him a ten-dollar bill and near double the guy's income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother's keeper, and his aunt's keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.

In essence, then, Obama is being treated as if he were an historical figure. Evidence of his proclivities and policy instincts are treated as if they must be contextualized in circumstances that no longer exist. The people who float into and out of his biography are handled as if they are creatures of their times and, at any rate, are not available for comment. Not wishing to disturb that particular delirium may be, as Victor Davis Hanson suggests, the reason behind the decreased candidness from those connected to the Obama campaign. (Perhaps it partially helps to explain the candidate's recent breaks from the trail.) It certainly offers a bit of complexity to Paul Kengor's observation that the news-gathering armies have not sought comment from some central figures in the debate over Obama's past and ideology:

No two figures relating to Barack Obama have been talked about as much as Ayers and Wright. That being the case, why aren't these two figures talking? Why is no one talking to them, or demanding to talk to them? ...

This is no minor, trivial point. I can't recall a similar instance where two such controversial figures, so damaging to a presidential campaign, so quickly disappeared from the public eye. Conservatives often accused the Clintons of all kinds of nefarious deeds to quiet their detractors. Yet, Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers could always be hunted down for comment by reporters. But that's not the case with Ayers and Wright.

It's odd, isn't it? For all the talk about Ayers's significance in Obama's political life, I don't think I've heard a single comment from the man himself. It's as if he's not a flesh-and-blood person out there somewhere, walking the American street.

Somehow, I tend to doubt that the characters in the Tale of the One will remain abstract should their guy gain the power of the presidency.

Re: Any bids for $75,000?

Donald notes the latest lowering of the income level at which a taxpayer "will not see one dime's worth of tax increase" in an Obama administration. Let's be clear that it has been a steady and orderly backing down from that $250,000.

> Starts at $250,000.

[The campaign presumably figures out shortly thereafter, either from calculations put forth in the media or by Senator Obama's own redistribution supporters, that the tax initiative cannot work at such a high income level.]

> It then goes to $200,000 during the half hour commercial. Remember that the commercial was taped a week earlier.

> Joe Biden makes it $150,000 on Monday.

> Enter Governor Richardson who today, takes it down another notch to $120,000.

Politicians usually wait until they get in office to begin breaking campaign promises. It took Bill Clinton two years, for example, to break the campaign promise (China and human rights) that flipped me away from him and got me to vote Republican in a presidential race for the first time.

Not so with Senator Obama, who has punctuated the campaign trail itself with substantial flip-flops. Public campaign financing, promptly getting out of Iraq, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the embargo on Cuba - now a steady narrowing of the qualification to escape higher taxes.

The question is, how does one determine that Senator Obama has well and finally settled on a particular stance? Would it be possible for his campaign to arrange some sort of signaling system? "The green flag is up and waving. Yes, that's it - $120,000 is the tax-hike ceiling."

Any bids for $75,000?

You gotta love these pillaging Dems:

For the second time in a week, a prominent Democrat has downgraded Barack Obama's definition of the middle class -- leading Republicans to question whether he'll stick to his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making under $250,000.

The latest hiccup in the campaign message came Friday morning on KOA-AM, when New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson pegged the middle class as those making $120,000 and under...

"What Obama wants to do is he is basically looking at $120,000 and under among those that are in the middle class, and there is a tax cut for those," Richardson said in the interview, according to a clip posted on YouTube.

Joe Biden caused headaches for the campaign Monday when he told a Scranton, Pa., TV station that Obama's tax break "should go to middle class people -- people making under $150,000 a year."...

Geez, these fools can't even keep their stories straight. And we haven't even gotten to the topic of whether the numbers work in the first place, something even AP is reporting as a problem. LOL.

ADDENDUM

Oh, for those of you who have the audacity to resist the One's call to let the government forcibly take more of your hard-earned monies because He thinks politicians and bureaucrats in government know how to spend it better than you and your family do, He has now scolded you:

"...The point is, though, that -- and it’s not just charity, it’s not just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are trying to get in the middle class -- it’s that when we actually make sure that everybody’s got a shot – when young people can all go to college, when everybody’s got decent health care, when everybody’s got a little more money at the end of the month – then guess what? Everybody starts spending that money, they decide maybe I can afford a new car, maybe I can afford a computer for my child. They can buy the products and services that businesses are selling and everybody is better off. All boats rise. That’s what happened in the 1990s, that’s what we need to restore. And that’s what I’m gonna do as president of the United States of America."

"John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic," Obama continued. "You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness."

Yep, you fools who don't willingly pony up are both unpatriotic and selfish. So there! Guess this is how things work on the corrupt streets of Chicago: Keeping your hard-earned monies is selfish.

Remember that the next time you think that liberty in America means having the freedom to work hard and build wealth by keeping what you earn.

Some related thoughts:

Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation
"Who You Gonna Call?" The Little Platoons
The Radically Different Visions of Tax-Eaters Versus Taxpayers

ADDENDUM #2

A very telling story from John Hood:

Speaking in front of a huge audience at downtown Raleigh rally yesterday, Barack Obama threw off a humorous line about John McCain's accusation that the Obama tax plan is redistributionist:

McCain has "called me a socialist for wanting to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans so we can finally give tax relief to the middle class," Obama said. "I don’t know what’s next. By the end of the week he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten."

Ha ha. [Well, actually, He was the first one to raise how He hung with Commies.]

Only, in this passage Obama revealed precisely why he is vulnerable to such charges: he can't seem to tell the difference between a gift and a theft. There is nothing remotely socialistic or communistic about sharing. If you have a toy that someone else wants, you have three choices in a free society. You can offer to trade it for something you value that is owned by the other. You can give the toy freely, as a sign of friendship or compassion. Or you can choose to do neither.

Collectivism in all its forms is about taking away your choice. Whether you wish to or not, the government compels you to surrender the toy, which it then redistributes to someone that government officials deem to be a more worthy owner. It won't even be someone you could ever know, in most cases. That's what makes the political philosophy unjust (by stripping you of control over yourself and the fruits of your labor) as well as counterproductive (by failing to give the recipient sufficient incentive to learn and work hard so he can earn his own toys in the future).

Government is not charity. It is not persuasion, or cooperation, or sharing. Government is a fist, a shove, a gun. Obama either doesn't understand this, or doesn't want voters to understand it.

Based on His and Biden's charitable giving history, He doesn't seem to understand charity either.

All of which is why Mona Charen offers this perspective:

Barack Obama is rallying his supporters with the words "One week until we change America." I find that creepy. Other politicians have talked of changing Washington, or hoping to "get this country moving again" or even promising to "come home America." Voters who think they're just being asked to change the party affiliation of one administration should take his words to heart.

And this man thinks He is qualified to lead the FREE world? I think not.

Candidate of Death

Just in case you're pro-life and have somehow talked yourself into believing that Obama will be tolerable as president:

When Barack Obama admitted to Joe the Plumber that he planned on spreading the wealth around, he didn't mention that the tax dollars he will take from you will be used to pay for elective abortions for others. The following is a brief outline of three ways that current pro-life protections against federal funding of elective abortions stand to be repealed and routed under an Obama presidency.

1. President Obama will spread the wealth to fund elective Medicaid abortions with your tax dollars. ...

2. More of your tax dollars will to go to fund Planned Parenthood, and the Crisis Pregnancy Centers in your neighborhood will be defunded. ...

3. Your tax dollars will fund organizations that perform or promote abortion overseas.

According to the writer, Dorinda Bordlee, Planned Parenthood killed 264,943 unborn children in its 2005–2006 fiscal year. Think about that staggering number before giving your vote to the Chosen Candidate of Vague Change.

A New America

Jeff Jacoby notes that Bush haters have been surprisingly unharassed, considering that they often decried the President's "dictatorial" rule. He goes on:

Will we be able to say the same of his successor?

If opinion polls are right, Barack Obama is cruising to victory. As president, would he show the same forbearance as Bush in allowing his opponents to have their say, unmolested? Or would he attempt to suppress the free speech of those whose views he detested? It is disturbing to contemplate some of the Obama campaign's recent efforts to stifle criticism.

When the National Rifle Association produced a radio ad last month about Obama's shifting position on gun control, the campaign's lawyers sent letters to radio stations in Ohio and Pennsylvania, urging them not to run it - and warning of trouble with the Federal Communications Commission if they did. "This advertisement knowingly misleads your viewing audience," Obama's general counsel Bob Bauer wrote. "For the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should refuse to continue to air this advertisement."

Similar lawyer letters went out in August when the American Issues Project produced a TV spot exploring Obama's strong ties to former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Station managers were warned that running the anti-Obama ad would be a violation of their legal obligation to serve the "public interest." And in case that wasn't menacing enough, the Obama campaign also urged the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation.

In Missouri, an Obama "truth squad" of prosecutors and other law-enforcement officials vowed to take action against anyone making "character attacks" on the Democratic candidate - a threat, Missouri Governor Matt Blunt later remarked, that had about it the "stench of police state tactics."

Perhaps these efforts to smother political speech are simply the overly aggressive tactics of a campaign in its adrenaline-fueled sprint to the finish. But what if they are the first warning signs of how an Obama administration would deal with its adversaries?

During a related conversation that I had the other night, while labeling and stamping thousands of postcards for Tiverton Citizens for Change, somebody asked if I really had that little trust in the American people. It seems to me that, these days, one is compelled to request clarification: which America?

Look, citizens of the United States do not have the long genetic mutuality that one finds in most other countries. What history we have, as a people, has been broadly taught in a dark, divisive light over the last few decades. In other words, the defining quality of "the American people" — more so than is true anywhere else — derives entirely from culture. Our tendency toward independence, ingenuity, respect for liberty, and general toughness aren't imbued with our water or inhaled in the air. We are what we believe ourselves to be.

How long do you suppose the United States can remain a 50:50 nation, with the stark difference being nothing less than the essential meaning of our nationality, before one side decides to press an advantage? I'll go further and suggest that the likelihood of which side will break the truce is not, itself, a 50:50 proposition. One side is defined by the primacy of government in resolving social and cultural problems, and it will be quite natural for that side to define its opposition's views as beyond the pale.

The Spendthrift

Neither the Associated Press…

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures he would face in office.

Obama's assertion that "I've offered spending cuts above and beyond" the expense of his promises is accepted only by his partisans.

…nor CBS News…

[Obama] seems blind to the concept his numbers don't add up.

Let's start with his highly suspect, and widely discredited, claim that he can find federal "spending cuts beyond the costs" of his promises. Very few independent economists believe he has identified the savings needed to offset his remarkable list of tax credits, tax cuts and spending pledges.

…believe that Barack Obama has an actual plan to pay for all of the government expansions and increased resdistribution he's promising.

This comes as no surprise to conservatives. But what about the Obama supporters out there? Are you expecting him, if elected, to advance much more aggressive “revenue enhancing” proposals than he’s talked about so far? Or are you expecting him not to deliver most of what’s he’s promising? Or do you think all this policy talk is for losers, and that the only important thing is to have the right man in charge, no matter what he has to say to get there?

Senator Tardy

H/T

Redistribution Obama Is Opposed To

Well, this struck me as apropos of so many things. Sorry if you've seen it elsewhere:

The Cash and Carry Politics of Obama

With a week to go, former Democratic Senator Bob Kerry, CNN's Campbell Brown and the Washington Post have decided to pipe up about the gobs of cash Barack Obama has raised. Kerry notes the Democratic Party's hypocrisy on the subject:

On the question of public funding of presidential campaigns, we Democrats who strongly support Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy and who previously supported limits on campaign spending and who haven't objected to Obama's opting out of the presidential funding system face an awkward fact: Either we are hypocrites, or we were wrong to support such limitations in the first place.

For now, Kerry says he's probably a hypocrite but that he's also changed his mind. Heh. Funny how that works. For her part Brown, possibly inspired by Kerry, notes that Obama broke a campaign promise regarding campaign finance and takes issue with one line of his reasoning:

Without question, Obama has set the bar at new height with a truly staggering sum of cash. And that is why as we approach this November, it is worth reminding ourselves what Barack Obama said last November. One year ago, he made a promise. He pledged to accept public financing and to work with the Republican nominee to ensure that they both operated within those limits.

Then it became clear to Sen. Obama and his campaign that he was going to be able to raise on his own far more cash than he would get with public financing. So Obama went back on his word.

He broke his promise and he explained it by arguing that the system is broken and that Republicans know how to work the system to their advantage. He argued he would need all that cash to fight the ruthless attacks of 527s, those independent groups like the Swift Boat Veterans. It's funny though, those attacks never really materialized.

The Post report on the questionable on-line donations coming into the Obama campaign made Page 2 (why not Page 1?):

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor's identity, campaign officials confirmed.

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.

The Obama organization said its extensive review has ensured that the campaign has refunded any improper contributions, and noted that Federal Election Commission rules do not require front-end screening of donations....

"They have opened the floodgates to all this money coming in," said Sean Cairncross, chief counsel to the Republican National Committee. "I think they've made the determination that whatever money they have to refund on the back end doesn't outweigh the benefit of taking all this money upfront."

Mark Steyn and others have been on this story for a few days now. Steyn elaborates on the Post report and offers this spot on insight into why the MSM is playing this story up so late in the day:

There is an element of art to these calculations: The Obamatron editors in the media want to be able to cover themselves by saying they raised the story, but the trick is to do so at a time and place that prevents it going anywhere before November 4th.

One Way to National SSM

Look, I'm not making any claims as to whether and how Obama will seek to silence the political right wing, or how much he'll succeed if he tries. As I've been reading various news items throughout the campaign season, a plot has begun to form. It's not a matter of predicting the future; it's a matter of imagining a scenario and considering whether there's a plausible path from here to there — not to argue that it will happen, but to entertain the imaginative question of whether it could. Behind all the writing, I'm a novelist at heart, and the emergence of a storyline intrigues me.

So, again, I'm not arguing that the following is likely, much less probable. I'm pointing out that something is possible, depending on a wide variety of other factors, and creating that world in a work of fiction would make for an interesting story.

To the above-linked post, msteven comments (in part):

How would Obama or anyone for that matter implement same-sex marriage nationally? Presidents or any political executives don’t have that type of power. Just ask the Mayor of SF. This is not to mention that Obama has already gone on record being against SSM? ...

There is a significant difference between changing positions on taking public campaign money and on same-sex marriage, where the majority of the public is against it. The only reason he would even pursue implementing SSM is if it were to benefit him politically.

Put aside msteven's faith that Obama's relative silence on same-sex marriage indicates a lack of ideological drive rather than the existence of political calculation that would be subject to change. As far as I can tell from his Web site, Obama isn't saying much about the marriage issue, probably for the very reason that msteven notes: his views conflict with those of the majority of the public. From what I've gleaned of Obama's position, though, it's consistent with the "civil unions" solution of giving homosexuals the same benefits and privileges, but without calling it marriage.

Well, unhappily, that's precisely the route to the redefinition of merriage that California and Connecticut have blazed in recent months: Create a "different in name only" institution and then leave it to the courts to declare it unconstitutional not to fold them together. At the national level, that could negate every state law or constitutional amendment defining marriage as strictly an opposite-sex relationship, as well as every federal law (e.g., the Defense of Marriage Act) meant to keep the issue in check.

There are a variety of preconditions required for this to happen, of course, but in a (probably fictional) future that casts Obama in an attempt to suppress the conservative movement, the steps are not implausible. And if, in that world, the president (with the help of a supermajority of his own party in Congress) has successfully minimized the power of talk radio and the Internet, and perhaps begun to manacle private enterprise through unionization, he would have political reason — and cover — to gun for the churches.

Getting from Here to There

The notions of the mainstream media and its demagogue and the transformation to something hardly recognizable as the United States of America spark an imaginative exercise. Admittedly, one begins to edge toward the line from analysis to creative writing with this stuff, but a few threads in current events point to an interesting tangle.

Picture this:

Shortly after his inauguration, Obama sets out to reward the mainstream media for its support. Oh, he won't put it that way. Instead, he'll express his gratitude that the "objective" press was able to overwhelm the "smears" of the propaganda machine on talk radio and the Internet. "What a shame," he'll say, "that those swamps of anger and divisiveness are draining the financial lifeblood from professional journalism." Surely, it'd be in the nation's interest — in the name of unity and fundamental change — to implement a modern day Fairness Doctrine, along with something new, something to ensure that the knowledge and experience of consummate professionals were able to dominate the Web, as well.

Having lost valuable ground with the undermining of two media that have enabled it to flourish over the past few decades, the political right would have seek other venues for communication and other spheres for influence. An obvious one, for social conservatives, is the territory of religious organizations, both the churches themselves and the groups and networks of groups that spring up around faith-based action. Since they don't proclaim themselves as sources of information, blocking them off would require an indirect strategy. The administration would have to find other issues with which to barricade the door.

One opportunity would be to institute same-sex marriage throughout the nation. Any groups that have anything to do with marriage would face the loss of their tax exempt status and any licenses necessary for operation (as with the Catholic adoption agency in Massachusetts) if they wouldn't fold. Any group with publicly available assets could be flushed with applications to allow events that are contrary to their religious beliefs, again facing the loss of government recognition and allowances.

One by one, the bastions of the right, the opposition, the subversives, could be felled beneath the benign smile of tolerance and fairness. Unity. Every discrete argument about this civil right or that government protection might come together until the line is reached at which the government would have license to jail and ruin dissenters.

Provided it doesn't come true too quickly, it's probably a story worth thinking through and composing.

What We'll Know When the Center Isn't So Critical

Surely we've all had experiences with those deceitful practices that get us every time. Perhaps you've had the lover whose word you, for some reason, take every time he or she promises not to cheat again. Perhaps you've had the boss whose nakedly arbitrary and false deadlines always manage to ratchet up the stress. Well, the great political feint to the center during general elections is like that.

Even if Melanie Phillips's fears of a post-election Barack Obama prove to be partially true, it ought to be enough to demotivate some among his throngs:

Obama assumes that Islamic terrorism is driven by despair, poverty, inflammatory US policy and the American presence on Muslim soil in the Persian Gulf. Thus he adopts the agenda of the Islamists themselves. This is not surprising since many of his connections suggest that that the man who may be elected President of a country upon which the Islamists have declared war is himself firmly in the Islamists' camp. Daniel Pipes lists Obama's extensive connections to Islamists in general and the Nation of Islam in particular, and concludes with this astounding observation:

Obama's multiple links to anti-Americans and subversives mean he would fail the standard security clearance process for Federal employees. Islamic aggression represents America's strategic enemy; Obama's many insalubrious connections raise grave doubts about his fitness to serve as America's commander-in-chief.

Phillips isn't saying that Obama is himself Muslim, or that he supports Islamic nations' domination of the West, but that he's of that liberal "camp" that comes to common conclusions with the Islamists. We'll have to wait with bated breath, if Obama wins the race, to see whether actually running the most powerful nation on Earth forces him to discard the cherished platitudes of the academy or, with his presumption of divine destiny, he believes that he will be The One to soften America's hand just enough to win over the good will of the peace-loving Muslim world.

If the latter, many voters' refrain is likely to be "How could we have known?"

Socialism

Barack Obama in 2001.

ADDENDUM

An analysis.

...There is nothing vague or ambiguous about this. Nothing...

The entire purpose of the Constitution was to limit government. That limitation of powers is what has unlocked in America the vast human potential available in any population.

Barack Obama sees that limiting of government not as a lynchpin but rather as a fatal flaw...

There is no room for wiggle or misunderstanding here. This is not edited copy. There is nothing out of context; for the entire thing is context — the context of what Barack Obama believes. You and I do not have to guess at what he believes or try to interpret what he believes. He says what he believes...

...we have never, ever in our 232-year history, elected a president who so completely and openly opposed the idea of limited government, the absolute cornerstone of which makes the United States of America unique and exceptional.

If this does not frighten you — regardless of your political affiliation — then you deserve what this man will deliver with both houses of Congress, a filibuster-proof Senate, and, to quote Senator Obama again, "a righteous wind at our backs."

That a man so clear in his understanding of the Constitution, and so opposed to the basic tenets it provides against tyranny and the abuse of power, can run for president of the United States is shameful enough...

I happen to know the person who found this audio. It is an individual person, with no more resources than a desire to know everything that he or she can about who might be the next president of the United States and the most powerful man in the world...

I do not blame Barack Obama for believing in wealth distribution. That’s his right as an American. I do blame him for lying about what he believes. But his entire life has been applying for the next job at the expense of the current one. He’s at the end of the line now.

I do, however, blame the press for allowing an individual citizen to do the work that they employ standing armies of so-called professionals for. I know they are capable of this kind of investigative journalism: It only took them a day or two to damage Sarah Palin with wild accusations about her baby’s paternity and less time than that to destroy a man who happened to be playing ball when the Messiah decided to roll up looking for a few more votes on the way to the inevitable coronation.

We no longer have an independent, fair, investigative press. That is abundantly clear to everyone — even the press. It is just another of the facts that they refuse to report, because it does not suit them.

Remember this, America: The press did not break this story. A single citizen, on the Internet did.

There is a special hell for you "journalists" out there, a hell made specifically for you narcissists and elitists who think you have the right to determine which information is passed on to the electorate and which is not...

ProJo Endorses Obama

I wonder if local liberals feel like they're in bizarro world? What to do when the much maligned "BeloJo" endorses The One?

The next president will have to deal with a Congress that, although almost certainly Democratic, will sometimes want to go its own way. And all successful American politicians must be willing to shift course and endlessly experiment in that broad center that Americans want to stay in.

“We do not know what the future will bring except that it will be different from any future we could predict,” said John Maynard Keynes. So above all, our choice comes down to broad themes and a sense of a candidate’s judgment, temperament and experience, and hence ability to lead the country as unforeseen events roll in. Thus we endorse Barack Obama.

There's that word "temperament" again and they favor Obama's over McCain's. Like others, the ProJo editors put much stock in Obama's "experience" of running his own Presidential campaign while ignoring that this agent of change and reconciliation has rarely, if ever, reached across the political aisle to work with his ideological opponents. But they have faith that he will now, even with a Democratic Congress. All in all, it's of a piece of other endorsements that have been coming out in favor of Sen. Obama. Style and promise trumps all. And it apparently goes unrecognized that--if you strip it all away--what you have is a candidate who has spent his relatively short political career advocating for....himself.

The Mirror Speaks, the Reflection Lies

Mark Levin is concerned that media brazenness and the various vague endorsements of Obama indicate that "this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue":

I've been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way.

The matter could have more weight than just a gamble on a chief executive. Enough fair-weather libertarians of the left may prove that what they've hated about the last eight years were not the president's methods (as exaggerated as their characterization may have been), but that it wasn't their guy employing them. Such is inevitably the case: In the service of your objectives, bending the rules is a risky abrogation of fail-safes; in the service of mine, they are necessary, well, over-interpretations.

There are good reasons especially to lament the final plunge of the mainstream media. If Obama wins the election, the media will have played a significant role in putting him there. Do you think that will make journalists more or less likely to report and excoriate abuses of power?

Not Knowing What They're Doing

It's becoming unremarkable to remark upon the lack of substance in the latest round of Obama endorsements. Saying he'll bring "change" or be "transformative" means little. As Thomas Sowell points out, recent pages of history have their share of stories about transformation toward something worse. Of course, as Sowell notes elsewhere, a con man's "job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe." In that capacity, Obama is certainly a uniter.

Mark Steyn follows up on Sowell's comments thus:

McCain vs Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then it's not an "ideal world", and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will "heal the planet" and those of us who support McCain faute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls "a point of no return". It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, "Jimmy Carter's second term", but something far more transformative. 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.

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 goes on to make a point that I've sounded before, in conversation and writing, and never heard so much as an attempt at a defensible reply:

More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany this long is because America's America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which western Europe has dozed this last half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?

Sowell counts the Soviet Union among the historical transformations toward something worse, and one can imagine a similar trajectory for the United States. One can imagine many things, of course, and if we recall the ideological parity that the last few election cycles have proven to exist between right and left, it's clear that the path from here to there would necessarily be a bloody one — so much so as to be surpassingly unlikely. However, even just the loss of the United States as an exemplar of stalwart individualism would be an unprecedented shift in the world stage.

Optimist that I am, I'll predict — in the face of the mantric conventional wisdom — that an Obama presidency would be the last gasp of liberalism. When the hidden supports of Belgian Belgium et al. cease to exist, so will the illusion of many cherished policies of the left. Either the wishfully thinking conservatives who've admitted a fondness for him will luck out and Obama will discover the necessity of governing from the right, or the liberal government in the United States will be such a globally abysmal failure that the world will be forced to give up the fantasy.

Suspending Disbelief on Tax Policy

Bill Clinton's state of the union speeches encouraged running tallies of impossible promises. Everybody got more, at no cost to anybody. Obama's tax policy has that feel. There are so many ways to massage the numbers that the various claims are almost as impossible to assess as the likelihood that the candidate will actually follow through once in office.

Take one example. According to Obama's tax policy fact sheet (PDF; emphasis added):

Obama's plan will cut taxes overall, reducing revenues to below the levels that prevailed under Ronald Reagan (less than 18.2 percent of GDP). The Obama tax plan is a net tax cut — his tax relief for middle class families is larger than the revenue raised by his tax changes for families over $250,000.

A look at the table on page 24 of the Tax Policy Center report (PDF) that Obama uses to support his claims, however, reveals that this is true "against current law," but false "against current policy." The former compares the candidate's plan to the reality if Bush's tax cuts expire, and it results in a $2,796,400,000 decrease in tax revenue under Obama's plan. The latter compares the plan to a scenario in which Bush's tax cuts remain, and in this case, Obama's plan actually increases tax revenue by $778,300,000.

The long and short of the matter is that, even in this sunniest, most gratuitously promissory version of a possible tax policy, Obama is going to increase taxes from what Americans are currently paying. McCain, by contrast, will cut taxes by any measure.

Dressing Up the Spin

In case anybody's wondering, Clothing-gate is a non-story. Governor Palin didn't hit the streets of New York on a Pretty Woman shopping spree. The campaign sent out aids to outfit a sudden candidate who had an Alaskan wardrobe for a whirlwind tour of the country in an environment in which campaigning has become showbiz. Rich Galen's got it right:

"If they hadn't done this, Saturday Night Live would be doing jokes where Governor Palin would be dressed in elk skin," said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant not associated with the McCain campaign.

The linked New York Times story doesn't mention it, for some reason, but according to top McCain adviser Nicolle Wallace, the clothes will be donated to charity upon the completion of the campaign.

Leaving Obama in the Impulse Rack

In the comments to "The Passive Vitriol of the 'Intellectual' Left," Joe Bernstein gives a personal weight to a phenomenon that many of us have observed:

Maybe they'll continue using the "racist" taunt until they get the reaction they weren't expecting.

It wouldn't be a bad thing if the US DID elect an Afro-American president.It would put it in the world's face that we walk the walk with regard to anyone being able to do whatever they want here.This man just isn't the right candidate.He acts entitled and swaggers around while trying to make it seem like he's just a regular guy.

I wonder what McCain was thinking when he chose Palin over Romney.Or did he cave in to James Dobson & Co.? She is really hurting McCain's candidacy at this point.Romney obviously had what was needed to step into the Oval Office the second it became necessary.I know too many of my own friends who are voting for Obama for this specific reason.They seem convinced McCain may not make it through 4 years.I find that to be a poor attitude,but that's the way a lot of people think.The clothing spree and the kids' travel is just another pile on or two that are adding up to help Obama.His half hour infomercial may be the make/break point.

Hopefully he will be suitably arrogant and talk down some more. ...

These are people I know for decades.I don't get it,but there have been a lot of surprises as far as people supporting Obama,and I'm not referring to Powell,because everyone is aware of that endorsement.

Nothing's true for everybody, of course, but there are two factors playing strongly in Obama's favor:

1. Americans are parellized by identity politics. Not for nothing has the left spent decades investing heavily in the racist, sexist, otherist notion that people's categories are an overriding aspect of who they are and how they should be treated. It would, indeed, be a great thing for the country to elect a black man president (or a woman of any race). The grandness of that milestone, however, has been perverted such that many folks feel, deep down, that it would be morally better to vote for a black man than a white man — not just voting for the best candidate without regard to race.
2. People naturally want to be part of something. They want to vote for the hero, the one knighted as Good among those who write the public storyline. They want to vote with the celebrities, and to feel that they've been on the "right" side of an historic event.

And yet, the questions and concerns about Obama are manifold. The left will only have one chance to cash in on its investment with the first ever black American president, and it's pressing its advantage. For all the downsides and questions that have been suppressed, voters have a sense that something unsavory lingers behind the smooth words and star power.

The United States of America has been walking around the store with two items in its hands — one trendy and expensive (that will probably end up costing twice its price as it lingers on the credit card bill) and one safe and affordable (the old cash-in-pocket standby). The country is pacing the aisles trying to talk itself into buying the fashionable one. It doesn't want to acknowledge its flaws, even as it amplifies the flaws of the other one. We're standing in line at the register imagining how impressed our friends will be and how we'll be able to take credit for being ahead of the curve, before the maker works out the bugs and lowers the cost.

Deep down we know we should leave Obama in the impulse rack.

If he loses, that will have been the reason, although we'll collectively be accused of racism. On that count, however, an Obama victory won't finally get us over the line to a new future unburdened by racial discord and pressure. If an Obama presidency proves catastrophic, it will be blamed on Americans' racism. If he fails to implement the full liberal Democrat agenda, that will be the fault of racism. Of he succeeds in the task and the policies fail, that will be attributed to racism, not the governing philosophy's lack of merit.

There is no redemption down this road, because the sin has been enshrined as the penance. One man's success — to the point of free license to change the course of history — has been made the price of slavery and racism, and the left has made sure that no course will count but its own.

ADDENDUM:

As for Joe's incredulity over McCain's choice of Palin, the urge to second guess ought to be resisted. No doubt, many of the campaign's potential running mates would have been less susceptible to the unfair accusations of inexperience (unfair by comparison with the candidate leading the other ticket), but with Romney, for example, McCain might never have had his second and third winds. He might never have bounced, instead fading slowly toward Obama's fait accompli.

In other words, the fact that Palin's weakness was another potential VP's strength doesn't mean that the latter's weaknesses wouldn't have been more substantial.

The Passive Vitriol of the "Intellectual" Left

This MClatchy "report" by David Lightman is really too much:

An ugly line has been crossed in this presidential campaign, one in which some people don't mind calling Barack Obama a dangerous Muslim, a terrorist and worse.

"To me, this all feels much worse than we've seen in some time," said Kathryn Kolbert, the president of People for the American Way, which monitors political speech.

No evidence is provided. Instead we get feelings from a member of People for the American Way, presented as if that group is some non-ideological arbiter. The tone is that half-smile with a knife twist sometimes performed by those who think they're too clever to be seen as being vitriolic in their own way.

Just doing their part, I guess, to hammer home the message that anybody who doesn't vote for Obama is a racist. Predicting the future is risky business, but I wouldn't be surprised if the operative word used in historians' description of an Obama presidential term is "silenced."

Changing Toward Decline

It's not quite comprehensive, but this multimedia review of some of the arguments against Barack Obama is certainly extensive. There's been an inclination, with Obama, to hope against reality, but it isn't enough to recycle the candidate's slogans as justification for giving him your vote.

The Worst of the Campus in the White House

In a chilling piece, yesterday, Andy McCarthy argues — I would phrase it — that Barack Obama is the fruit of the leftist lunacy that has flourished on American campuses:

For Obama, that society is an ineradicably racist "white world." He is more opaque than mentors like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, who mince no words in portraying America as an apartheid state. Still, as Hank De Zutter wrote in a fawning 1995 profile, Obama learned to see "integration was a one-way street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that never gave ground." One hears the echoes of Obama's wife, Michelle, whose Princeton thesis decried the thought of "further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant."...

As Obama wrote in his chapter [in a tribute to Saul Alinsky], "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City":

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches. [Emphasis added.]

Breathtaking. Observe that the organizer does not reject separatism, menacing, and civil disobedience. They are iterations of the hard power he "bridges" with soft power, the exploitation of the system's regular politics. And in a society that venerates dissent and free association, there is much to exploit in the blurry line between critiquing our society and advocating its destruction.

In his partial review of laws likely to be signed into law by an "unchecked" Obama, David Freddoso is correct to note that Republicans' abandonment of their principles has helped to bring us to the point at which the likes of Obama have a shot of running the country, but if he wins, dark days seem to be looming for freedom in the American sense.

If Clinton's era was a "vacation from history," Obama's will be nostalgia for the fantasies of co-ed years, during which several generations learned to pump their fists in a show of disconnected, play-acting vanity. He'll be a "transformative" figure, indeed, but not in a way amenable to the spirit in which that banality has so often been uttered.

"... we’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy"

Setting aside for a moment matters of substance as well as my own preference in the presidential race, Senator Obama has to be saying to himself right about now, "Why didn't someone tell me about this guy's mouth?"

Enter Joe Biden.

Yesterday, the Republican camp was trying to score some points from speeches the Delaware Senator gave on Sunday where he guaranteed an international crisis if the Obama-Biden ticket is elected.

“Mark my words: It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy,” Biden told the crowd. “The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Watch, we’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“He’s going to have to make some really tough - I don’t know what the decision’s going to be, but I promise you it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it’s going to happen,” he said.

Powell Latest to Endorse the Obama Aesthetic

Progressives are excited by Colin Powell's endorsement of Sen. Obama for President.

It will be interesting to see how some will square it with their anger at the then-Secretary of State for purportedly helping the Bush Administration lie us into war, etc. (Though some liberals haven't forgotten). Hey, maybe they were right after all and Powell's judgment really isn't that great.

For their part, the NY Times thinks Powell is engaged in a bit of legacy building. To that end, stay tuned for stories about how Powell was bamboozled, railroaded, lied to, etc. in the prelude to the Iraq War.

Most of Powell's endorsement was devoted to explaining why he didn't like the GOP ticket. Fair enough. But all in all, the reasons given by Powell for supporting Obama are more of the same we've seen from other Republicans or conservatives who have decided to go the Obama route. "Transformational figure," "reaching out," "inclusive nature", etc. Aesthetics and emotion with few facts but a lot of "hopes." Not much scrutiny of Obama's actual record. But I guess as long as we all feel better on November 5.

Welcome to Stuart Smalley's America--where Stuart himself may end up in the Senate.

Poise by Contrast

Ann Althouse isn't sure how to understand Saturday Night Live's script as delivered by Alec Baldwin, standing next to Sarah Palin:

Alec Baldwin got to stand next to Palin and insult her -- by accident, thinking she was Tina -- and then got to say something that's true: Sarah Palin is more attractive than Tina Fey. Did Fey deserve that? No. Palin seemed like a seasoned actor, which is nice... but disturbing. If our politicians are great actors, we have a big problem. [ADDED ON REWATCH: Did Baldwin say Palin is more attractive than Fey? He mistook Palin for Fey, then, corrected, told Palin she was more attractive in person. I think that means he believed Palin was less attractive than Fey, but now, seeing Palin in person, he acknowledges Palin's equivalent attractiveness. Or something. The disrespect to Fey that I thought was there is, technically, not.]

Considering that Baldwin goes on to express incredulity that SNL would allow a woman like Fey to play a woman like Palin, I think the joke was meant to be Baldwin's sycophancy. If taken at face value (again, analyzing from within the script), that would certainly have been disrespectful of the actress).

For my part, I wouldn't go quite so far as his feigned compliments, but even in the short clip, there is a stark contrast between Palin and Fey that highlighted the exaggerations in Fey's characterization and the fact that one is a woman of poise and power while the other is an actress.

Putting the Inside In

Mark Patinkin's mea culpa back on the twelfth gave a vaguely unsettling impression that he believes skill at being a Washington insider ought to translate to promotion as a Washington insider:

I'll admit, Palin did better in the debate than I expected, and certainly deserves credit for becoming governor. But when you picture a possible first woman president, I'm surprisingly thinking: Shouldn't it have been Hillary Clinton? ...

... Obama earned his way onto the ticket through a year of debates, primaries and scrutiny, outgunning all rivals. Joe Biden, too, has been tested by decades in office and two presidential runs. Certainly, John McCain is unequaled in his experience as a national figure.

Note that the main qualification that Patinkin cites for the presidency is politics — playing the game. I'd suggest that we've lost sight, in these days of mass media and cults of personality, of the fact that the president is a leader, not just a leading practitioner of the campaign. Note that Joe Biden's never come close to actually winning the office. Say what you will of him, but few Americans look at Mr. Biden and think, I would follow him.

Another Patinkin column expounding on the theme of "regular Joe" politicking points to the heart of the matter. Comparing Sarah Palin's ascension to that of a mediocre pitcher who exudes an everyman quality, Patinkin writes:

... in this campaign, it's how many are ready to pick a leader. I doubt that history will consider Sarah Palin a political visionary, but she draws tens of thousands to rallies because, well, she's a folksy hockey mom, and that sells.

If you applied for a job as a carpenter, accountant or plumber, and your skills didn't outshine other interviewees, I doubt you'd get hired by being folksy. You do in politics.

Even if Obama is not your candidate, let's focus for a moment on his gifts as an orator who is well-spoken in interviews. That may be hard to do if you're a McCain person, but humor me for a moment.

You'd think people would consider this a positive. Historically, our most notable figures, from Lincoln to Roosevelt, have used soaring language to move policy and inspire a nation. Fine oratory enhances leadership. And what better for America’s children than to have a president model superior speech.

But in this campaign, Obama's oratory has been attacked as a negative. Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain have implied it proves Obama is nothing but fancy words — and that his soaring speech even makes him an out-of-touch elitist. Who knows, maybe he is. But they're not just attacking Obama, they're attacking eloquence itself and saying prose — even on the stump — beats poetry.

Fine. Let's stipulate that compelling oratory "enhances leadership." So does empathy with those whom one leads. Obama's good at relating to intellectuals (whether actual or self-presumed); Palin's good at relating to just about everybody else. Neither skill is leadership, per se.

With that admission ought to come a further note that presidents have cabinets and commissions. Advisers and (sometimes) astrologers. The key determinant of our votes, in a representative democracy, is whether we trust those whom we elect to take the various forms of input and respond in a way that's consistent with our beliefs and needs as we understand them.

In that respect, being an insider truly ought to be a hindrance, because insiders are invested in the solutions that they've helped to contrive in the past. What we need are leaders who will sort through the file cabinets of government and create a "stupid idea" pile. Obama promises that sort of leadership, but his claims have become increasingly laughable as the partisan days have passed. Sarah Palin (running for VP, let's remember) may or may not be that sort of leader, but she's articulated the spirit with an eloquence beyond words.

Multiple choice options regarding Obama's "spread the wealth" comment

John Podhoretz:

Is Obama’s "spread the wealth around" remark to Joe the Plumber the 2008 version of:

a) "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe"?

b) "I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy, the other day, before I came here, to ask her what the most important issue was. She said the control of nuclear arms"?

c) "Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did"?

d) "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it"?

e) Eh, no big deal.

Here's a big difference: President Ford, President Carter, Walter Mondale, and John Kerry did not respond like this to criticism of their revealing comments:

Welcome to the "thugocracy": the Obama camp wants to Department of Justice to investigate not voter registration fraud, but people talking about voting fraud–including the GOP ticket. If you don’t believe it, read the bizarre letter sent by the Obama campaign’s lawyer. This one follows on the heels of another letter asking the DOJ to "investigate" the 527 independent group which ran one of the first Bill Ayers ads.

The McCain camp is naturally not pleased and put out a statement which reads in part:

Today’s outrageous letter to Attorney General Mukasey and Special Prosecutor Dannehy at the Justice Department asking for a special prosecutor to investigate Senator McCain and Governor Palin’s public statements about ACORN’s record of fraudulent voter registrations (including in this week’s Presidential debate) is absurd. It is a typical time-worn Washington attempt to criminalize political differences. For someone who promises ‘change,’ it is certainly only more of the same.

The letter’s request that the Department of Justice investigate 'recent partisan Republican activities throughout the country' is almost a parody of the Obama campaign’s attempt to intimidate their political opponents. In case Sen. Obama’s lawyer did not notice, we are in the midst of a political campaign, not a coronation, and the alleged criminal activity he calls ‘recent partisan Republican activities’ are what the rest of us call campaign speeches and debates. All of this is unfortunately reminiscent of the Obama campaign’s recent creation of a 'truth squad' of Missouri prosecutors and sheriffs to 'target' people who criticize Sen. Obama.

And if you are wondering where civil liberties groups and the mainstream media are, you have to understand: the First Amendment ranks considerably lower than getting The One elected. On his way out the door, Attorney General Mukasey might perform one last bit of public service and give a series of lectures on the centrality of free speech, the sanctity of free and fair elections, and the utter inappropriateness of using the power of the state to silence your opponents.

And, as we start to bear an uncanny resemblance to a banana republic — complete with a cult of The Leader, roaming thugs in support of the same, and fraud-tainted voting – you’ll know that we really are experiencing "change." Whether this is a passing spasm of election exuberance or a frightful look at the future remains to be seen.

More on thuggish behavior by the Obama campaign here and here. All of which reminds me of Richard Nixon.

ADDENDUM

In response to the NYTimes hit piece on Cindy McCain, her lawyer responds:

...It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama’s drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father. Nor have you interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescued them. Thus, there is a terrific lack of balance here.

I suggest to you that none of these subjects on either side are worthy of the energy and resources of The New York Times. They are cruel hit pieces designed to injure people that only the worst rag would investigate and publish. I know you and your colleagues are always preaching about raising the level of civil discourse in our political campaigns. I think taking some your own medicine is in order here...

Jennifer Rubin adds these thoughts on what the media is not looking into:

...If MSM wants to be treated as impartial arbiter, a "watchdog" and not a lapdog of one candidate, its members should consider some behavior modification.

Demand not just medical records but earmark records from Joe Biden. Ask Barack Obama why he served on the Woods Fund with Bill Ayers for years and if he specifically approved grants to ACORN and a host of leftwing groups. Do a 3000-word piece on Obama’s earmarks and ties to corrupt Chicago officials to counterbalance the dozens of 3000-word pieces going after the other side (e.g. "Palin annoys Wasilla librarian" and "Cindy McCain was addicted to pain killers").

Even more shocking, not a single one of the networks news outlet or mainstream national newspaper has looked at Obama’s unprecedented attempt to use the Justice Department to chill speech. In all the pieces on "temperament" no one has reminded voters that the last president to try to employ law enforcement officials — as Obama did in Missouri — to go after opponents exercising First Amendment rights was Richard Nixon, not exactly the model of presidential temperament...

More on Obama and the presidential temperament issue here:

With the sudden emphasis on temperament in election coverage, you’d think that Americans are going to the polls on November 4 to pick the White House dog. Focus on this farcical dimension is due to the fact that the MSM is madly in love with Barack Obama, but have run out of reasons to say exactly why.

They used to cite his objection to the Iraq War, but the U.S. is now winning, and a troop withdrawal plan has been negotiated without his input. They used to talk about his plan to tax the "rich" and relieve the poor, but with the market meltdown, raising anyone’s taxes sounds petrifying–plus Joe the Plumber brought out Obama’s socialist side on this issue and the press would rather try to discredit Joe. They used to praise his eagerness to re-establish America’s standing in the world, but in the nearly two years he’s been preparing his penance, America’s image has gotten a boost from its military achievement, the rise of the Right in Europe, the need for an ally against Russian aggression, and the call for leadership on the global financial crisis. They used to rave about his willingness to upset the status quo, but with his tacking to the center on a dozen different issues, that’s out the window. His outsider status? Sarah Palin swooped into the election from outside of the continental United States, while Obama is now running with a career D.C. benchwarmer.

They could never tout his experience.

So what’s left? This amorphous, quasi-mythical thing everyone’s decided to call temperament. And Obama’s, we’re told, is just right for the job: Measured, unflappable, and patient. And how far are legitimate media outlets willing to go to push the temperament line? Far enough to make Nancy Gibbs declare, in her contribution to Time, that "[t]he presidency is less an office than a performance."

In other words, the MSM is now telling us this isn’t really Election 2008, but a spin-off of the West Wing, and we therefore should be superficial in choosing the leader of the free world. The problem is: when the world outside the borders of the television screen erupts, Obama is caught out like an Emmy-winner having a cue-card malfunction. After Russia invaded Georgia, Obama improvised some line about both sides needing to cease hostilities. It was only after John McCain identified the aggressor and where the U.S. interest lay in the conflict that Obama felt comfortable following suit. But while he was calm and collected, he said absolutely nothing about the potential start of the second cold war.

Here–after the most hyped-up, over-analyzed media-circus of an election in American history–is the distillation of the final pitch for the Democratic nominee: Vote Obama, he’s cool.

How cool indeed: Obama wants to redistribute your wealth in the spirit of "fairness" and chill your free speech, like Nixon tried, when you dare to challenge him by asking why.

Crisply defining the core problem with Obama's economic and tax policies

Expanding on the problems with Obama's economic and tax policy issues described here, John McCain finally nailed it today in describing the true essence of Obama's economic and tax policies:

My opponent’s answer showed that economic recovery isn’t even his top priority. His goal, as Senator Obama put it, is to "spread the wealth around."

You see, he believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it. Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism. And a lot of Americans are thinking along those same lines. In the best case, "spreading the wealth around" is a familiar idea from the American left. And that kind of class warfare sure doesn’t sound like a "new kind of politics."

This would also explain some big problems with my opponent’s claim that he will cut income taxes for 95 percent of Americans. You might ask: How do you cut income taxes for 95 percent of Americans, when more than 40 percent pay no income taxes right now? How do you reduce the number zero?

Well, that’s the key to Barack Obama’s whole plan: Since you can’t reduce taxes on those who pay zero, the government will write them all checks called a tax credit. And the Treasury will cover those checks by taxing other people, including a lot of folks just like Joe.

In other words, Barack Obama’s tax plan would convert the IRS into a giant welfare agency, redistributing massive amounts of wealth at the direction of politicians in Washington. I suppose when you’ve voted against lowering taxes 94 times, as Senator Obama has done, a new definition of the term "tax credit" comes in handy.

At least in Europe, the Socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives. They use real numbers and honest language. And we should demand equal candor from Senator Obama. Raising taxes on some in order to give checks to others is not a tax cut, it’s just another government giveaway.

What’s more, the Obama tax increase would come at the worst possible time for America, and especially for small businesses like the one Joe dreams of owning. Small businesses provide 16 million jobs in America. And a sudden tax hike will kill those jobs at a time when we need to be creating more jobs.

Jennifer Rubin continues:

There it is — finally. The "it" is the argument against Barack Obama: he’s wedded to income re-distribution, not growth, which is exactly the wrong philosophy at the worst possible time...This is the heart of the "choice election" formula (as opposed to "experience vs. choice") which McCain has been struggling to articulate.

If he gives this speech (or the Alfred E. Smith roast remarks) every day and repeats the substance in every interview — with a reminder that the trio of Obama-Reid-Pelosi will be an unchecked liberal juggernaut — he might make the race very interesting...

To Democrats, "Cutting" Taxes Means Not Raising Them

Surprisingly, here's a point I haven't heard made:

One thing: the 95% number is fundamentally dishonest because I'm pretty sure it measures against the CBO baseline — which assumes all of the '01 and '03 tax cuts expire in 2010. Politically, that's nonsense. But it allows Obama to count extending the politically popular Bush tax laws as an "Obama tax cut."

The Problems with John McCain

One of the most striking observations in reading comments by Obama partisans here on Anchor Rising is their utter unwillingness to engage in any debate about the substantive policy issues with people who oppose their viewpoints. Just like their candidate has raised the "racist" label when pushed to explain himself. Charles Krauthammer, who has previously praised Obama, offers an updated perspective.

But this is not new behavior by the Left; more on all that later. The point is that some of the rest of us have always been perfectly willing to criticize anybody in politics when we think they made bad decisions or said improper things - whether we generally support them or not.

At the macro level, I believe the national Republican Party is in a state of near-total disarray thanks to George W. Bush, with lots of support from Congressional Republicans. They have deserved to spend some time roaming the wilderness to rediscover its philosophical and policy bearings. To rediscover bearings, though, requires acknowledging being lost and it is far from clear they have had the courage to look in the mirror. It is not like they haven't had opportunities as the Democratic Party in Washington, DC has looked like a bunch of buffoons since they regained the Congressional majorities in 2006.

Some personal history: I voted Libertarian in 1992. Why? Because George H. W. Bush broke his no-new-taxes pledge from 1988 and there was no way I was going to vote for either Bill Clinton or Ross Perot.

Fast forward to 2008: None of the Republican candidates in this election cycle excited me. I wanted to get enthused about Fred Thompson but was never convinced he had the requisite fire-in-the-belly. So I began the 2008 election deeply dissatisfied by all candidates in both parties. Like for many people, Obama was a blank slate with a troubling set of beliefs and associations. McCain was not a blank slate and that was the problem.

Until recent weeks, I fully expected either to vote Libertarian as I did in 1992 - although I don't care for Bob Barr - or sit out the November election in protest like I did the 2006 RI Senate race. Rather unexpectedly for me along the way, though - as some of my rather humorless philosophical opponents have noted in the Comments sections to past posts - my concerns about Barack Obama's beliefs have grown tremendously as more information about them has seeped into the public domain. Obama and his supporters have shown audacity along the way but it has no connection to hope.

But that doesn't mean John McCain gets off easy and here is why:

I have written about how McCain's campaign finance reform beliefs reflect a lack of commitment to free speech, a flawed approach when a more realistic view of incentives and human nature would lead to better public policies. George Will discusses the broader issues at stake in the never-ending debate about liberty.

I abhor McCain's preferences for amnesty for illegal immigrants, which differs from my broader view of the strategic issues.

I thought McCain's Gang of 14 approach to Senate ratification of judges reflected an unwillingness to address the deeper philosophical issues underlying the polarized public debate about our judiciary. That polarization will continue until some people show the courage necessary engage in a genuine public debate which tackles some of the hard issues. Sometimes more political and moral strength is gained by losing a political battle for strategic reasons and the judiciary issue was one of those issues.

I disagreed with his prior opposition to the Bush tax cuts, an opposition which is consistent with his self-professed ignorance about economic issues. His lack of fluidity in discussing economic issues is an ongoing concern.

McCain does deserve great respect for his support of the surge in Iraq. And I appreciate his ability to discuss foreign affairs with knowledge and the underlying recognition that there are evil people in the world who seek to destroy our country.

I also think his speech at the Al Smith dinner, noted in Marc's earlier post, showed a commendable humor that Obama's speech did not come close to matching. That matters.

All in all, though, I consider McCain to be effectively a Democrat except for some foreign policy differences, a man who has no strategic vision which integrates his various beliefs into a narrative to share with the American people. Peter Wehner describes it this way:

...It’s true that John McCain has never provided the country with a compelling economic vision and an overarching, easily accessible governing philosophy. That may be because McCain himself is a man animated not so much by ideas as a sense of "honor politics" and causes that catch his attention. Senator McCain is a man of unquestionable bravery and considerable talents, and the fact that as recently as mid-September he was tied with Senator Obama in the polls is remarkable, given the tremendous headwinds he has faced this year.

Unfortunately for Senator McCain, his limitations are being exposed at precisely the moment when they are costing him the most.

More thoughts here.

On a related note, I don't understand why McCain lets Obama and Congressional Democrats off the hook so easily. Frank Warner writes about Why does John McCain avoid attacking Democrats’ abuses?

...McCain has made it clear he’s willing to take on the Republican Party when it’s wrong. Why McCain avoids attacking the disastrous Democratic Congress is beyond understanding.

Why McCain is so accommodating when there are such deep philosophical and political divides is simply beyond me and speaks to a weakness in both his vision and leadership skills.

So the choice this November 4 is a poor one where there is no compelling choice. But the fact pattern now does not justify sitting out the election. More thoughts on the latter in the coming days.

The Palin Effect with an Exclamation Point

I've had the same reaction to the investigation of Joe the Plumber that Don noted earlier this morning. It's frightening, and one gets the sense that it's a taste of what would be to come (perhaps outside of public view) were Obama to be elected.

One wonders whether the stage was set by the American elite's preparation for Obama's coronation (as indicated by some conservative intellectuals' RSVPs). Watching video of Obama actually mocking the man and his profession, it struck me that this may be a Sarah Palin redux, only with an exclamation point. In his comfort, he's letting slip dinner party remarks for public consumption. "Who ever heard of a plumber making a quarter-million dollars?" If they made that much, they wouldn't have to cling to God and guns.

So now Joe is being told, in not so many words, "Go away. We'd decided." Americans were sickened by the instasmear campaign against Palin when she leaped onto the national stage, but his is worse: This is just some guy who asked a question. It could be you.

Yeah, he owes some taxes. Perhaps he's been working without a license or without the proper registration. He's divorced. Scarcely an American alive could emerge unstained from such scrutiny, but we sense there to be a protective gap of public interest. We muddle along understanding that the Eye of Sauron tends to focus on those who step forward to be seen. Even such common practices as undeclared cash-paid side work would look shady in its accusing glow.

Just answering a candidate's question when approached on one's own lawn oughtn't qualify one for the same treatment as those who scrub their lives in preparation for the big time. But Obama's army of zealots won't be able to stop themselves now or if they gain the presidency's power.

Presidential Candidates Put Things in Perspective

The Al Smith Dinner is an opportunity for presidential candidates to take a break and poke a little fun at each other and themselves.

Here is John McCain (part 1 and part 2) and Barack Obama.

Kinda puts things in perspective. As I've written before, while politics is important, they need to be kept in their proper perspective and the candidates themselves seem to recognize that. A good lesson for their supporters.

Healthcare Intrigue

Granted, they devoted some time to debate talk, but it says something encouraging that Andrew and Matt Allen actually pushed past the time slot on Wednesday to further discuss healthcare. I, for one, would have liked a whole hour of that conversation. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

Yep, that'd be my reaction

Getting a lot of emails along these lines:

I don't know why I'm e-mailing you, except that I just need to vent to someone on The Corner. Pass this around to the others if you like — I bet I'm not the only one.

I really don't like McCain. I'll probably vote for him just as a vote for divided government. I'm far too libertarian in my leanings to be comfortable with McCain (or Obama, for that matter).

That said, the way the pro-Obama media and bloggers, and Obama himself, have responded to Joe has got me nearly shaking with rage. They are attempting to destroy a man — a private citizen — who had the audacity to ask The One a question. Mind you, Joe was on his front lawn playing football with his son when Obama strolled up to give him his hopenchange spiel. Obama approached Joe, not the other way around. And Joe asked Obama an honest question. And Obama gave him an honest — and very, very revealing — answer. Again, mind you, the embarassment was on Obama's end, not Joe's. It wasn't a gotcha question.

And yet, for that Joe is being pilloried, every aspect of his private and professional life being sorted through and exposed. To prove ... what? What does that have to do with Obama's answer? What does Joe's situation have to do with Obama's philosophical answer — that he wants to "spread the wealth"? Obama's answer goes down the memory hole while the nation concentrates its fire on obliterating Joe the Plumber.

It's sickening, it's maddening and it's downright chilling.

Sorry for the length. But I am just SEETHING.

Elsewhere, there were these additional perspectives:

...They've done more investigations into Joe the Plumber in 24 hours than they've done on Barack Obama in two years...

The harassment of Joe the plumber is the singular biggest mistake of the Obama campaign. The MSM is making Joe a martyr. Heck, DKos just published Joe's home address. Obama is now not only a Marxist but a Marxist bully - just another Chicago thug. America roots for the underdog and they will not take this action kindly. If Joe were a hero yesterday, wait a few days.

Obi Wan's line in Star Wars when fighting Darth Vader comes to mind - "Strike me down and I will return more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Americans will realize what happened to Joe could easily happen to them. And they will remember this come November...

What I find really fascinating is the fact that the media elites are treating Joe the Plumber as if he is the one who is out of step with mainstream America, while Bill Ayers is an 'Eagle Scout'...

There is a stench of desperation surrounding this, as if they sense defeat coming from a moment of honesty from Obama about his real intentions to institute a regime of redistribution. They want to discredit the man who only asked the question as if he’s some political operative who magically forced Obama to sound...well, a little like a Marxist. Why? They want to distract people from Obama’s answer by sliming the man Obama picked at random to ask a question...The Tanning-Bed Media seems to feel that they have a duty to expose every last part of Wurzelbacher’s life, but that asking Obama to explain his political partnerships with Tony Rezko and William Ayers, and his long friendship and financial support of rabid demagogues Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger, are not just out of bounds but downright racist." Whatever it takes.

This, too:

The MSM can’t destroy Joe the plumber, because everyone is Joe the plumber. If he does have a tax lien on his property, he will be more sympathetic to average Americans. Aren’t we all in fear of losing our personal property because we can’t afford the taxes on it??

They can try to destroy him all they want, his basic question remains: "Does Barack Obama have a right to take my property and give it to someone else?"

And this:

ABC News reports on Joe the Plumber, who seems to be the most effective spokesman for the McCain tax position:

"To be honest with you, that infuriates me," plumber Joe Wurzelbacher told Nightline’s Terry Moran. "It’s not right for someone to decide you made too much—that you’ve done too good and now we’re going to take some of it back."

"That’s just completely wrong," he added.

Joe is now everywhere explaining why raising taxes on little businesses is wrong. He is now a handy reference point for the argument that Obama’s tax scheme is not just going to impact Warren Buffett. (Obama never did answer in the debate why he’s raising anyone’s taxes.)

This is no small bit of luck for McCain...

Obama's response to Joe the plumber crystallizes what a lot of people have instinctively felt was the problem with Obama but could not verbalize or be heard over the worshipful response of the MSM.

This development could be one of those unplanned pivot points that sometimes alters the course of elections...as long as the multi-state voter fraud efforts by Obama's friends at ACORN don't overwhelm it.

Time will tell soon enough.

ADDENDUM

Patterico:

The Los Angeles Times reports:

According to court records, creditors have secured at least two liens against [Joe the Plumber] Wurzelbacher, whose legal name is Samuel. Ohio has a $1,182 lien for owed taxes and St. Charles Mercy Hospital has filed a 2007 lien for $1,261.

I think we can all agree that this is critical information.

Not because it says anything about Joe the Plumber, mind you. But it does serve a useful function: it warns any future citizen who might dare question Barack Obama that his life will be closely scrutinized for any irrelevant but embarrassing information.

So, you know. Critical in that sense.

Oh — I almost forgot to mention: Martin Nesbitt, the treasurer of Obama’s campaign, has tax liens. So do his companies.

You’d think that matters more than the tax liens of Joe the Plumber, wouldn’t you? But good luck finding a Big Media story about Nesbitt’s liens.

ADDENDUM #2

Jennifer Rubin:

The liberal media throng and Democratic elites never learn the right lesson. It’s been only a month since they vilified Sarah Palin, leading to a gigantic backlash and the largest surge in John McCain’s standing in the polls yet. But they didn’t learn. They are at it again with Joe the Plumber and, once again, are exercising no self-restraint.

They don’t, at bottom, respect non-elites from middle America or listen to their concerns. They treat them as cartoon characters or as frauds sent to foil their own quest for power. So they set upon Joe the Plumber in the mistaken view that what was significant about the interchange with Barack Obama were Joe’s concerns. And–surprise, surprise–you’ve got the makings of a backlash.

There are two problems with the approach of the Obama supporters. One, as with the Palin feeding frenzy and Bittergate, it convinces ordinary voters that the Democrats are vicious snobs. Two, it doesn’t address the problem: voters may begin to suspect that Obama is fixated on wealth re-distribution. That’s the idea the Democrats should be working to dispel. But since they can’t imagine that the public would have a problem with raising taxes in a recession, they don’t even bother to reassure voters that of course Obama wants the private sector to grow and of course he understands that you must tread carefully in tax-burdening small businessmen.

The McCain team must be pinching themselves: they can hardly believe their luck that the Democrats have attacked an everyman and prolonged a dangerous storyline...

ADDENDUM #3

On sliming Joe the plumber.

Mary Katharine Ham:

...While the media and Left blogs continue to dig into Joe's personal life and affairs for asking The One a question.

If Obama were truly a purveyor of a new kind of politics or a decent leader, in any sense of the word, he'd stick a different sentence into his stump speech. Something like, "Hey, everyone chill out. Joe is a man who asked me a question. As presidential candidates, John McCain and I have faced plenty of tough questions. The good citizens who ask those questions don't deserve to be torn down for their efforts."

Obama's frowning upon the practice would go a long way toward quelling the bad practice of vetting every townhall and ropeline questioner as if he were a Supreme Court justice.

But you see, Obama is not a man of new politics or leadership. He is a man who endorses raising the cost of free speech for everyone who disagrees with him. He is a man who sends out Action WIre alerts to mobilize voters to shout down detractors who appear on the radio. He is a man who sends letters to the Department of Justice to ask it to investigate political ads that aren't even inaccurate, much less criminal.

Joe's experience is making every sensible American voter wonder whether it's worth asking their representatives that question they have on their minds. The man who talks endlessly about the value of getting new Americans involved in the democratic process is allowing their intimidation without comment.

It seems Obama only approves of getting dead people, cartoons, and the Dallas Cowboys involved, via voter registration fraud. Mickey Mouse just don't talk back like Joe the Plumber does.

ADDENDUM #4

Jim Lingren via Instapundit:

...I was stunned to see some document showing Joe the Plumber's tax problems on my 10pm (CT) newscast on the local NBC affiliate in Chicago on Thursday night. They have very little time for any national news and they actually spent time on Joe the Plumber's tax problems. Amazing!

But when an actual candidate — Barack Obama — released his tax returns, which on their face seemed to show an ethics violation of Illinois law, the press couldn't care less.

Just to remind you, Illinois prohibits state legislators from taking speaking fees, and Barack reported "speaking fees."...

Gotta love the MSM doing the work for it's favored candidate.

The Wisdom of Joe the Plumber

Google "Joe the Plumber": you'll get 1,953 news articles, like this. For those who don't know, Joe Wurzelbacher had this conversation with Senator Obama last weekend:

Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed "more and more for fulfilling the American dream."

"It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success too," Obama responded. "My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody ... I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Is this something that can resonate with the American voter? Perhaps. It certainly featured prominently in last night's debate. And though some in the media are trying to show that, despite his concerns, "Joe" will actually benefit from Obama's plan, they miss the actual point that Joe Wurzelbacher is trying to make.

I mean, not that I don't want to be taxed. You have to be taxed. But to -- just because you work a little harder to have a little bit more money taken from you, I mean, that's scary. You know, as opposed to other people. I worked hard for it. Why should I be taxed more than other people...? Well, I mean, quite honestly, why should [the top 5%] be penalized for being successful? I mean, that's what you're telling me. That's what it sounds like you're saying. That's wrong. Because you're successful, you have to pay more than everybody else? We all live in this country. It's a basic right. And Obama wants to take that basic right and penalize me for it, is what it comes down to. That's a very socialist view and it's incredibly wrong. I mean, $250,000 now. What if he decides, well, you know, $150,000, you're pretty rich, too. Let's go ahead and lower it again. You know it's a slippery slope. When's it going to stop?

Yes, when? And this is but another example of the sort of down-to-earth wisdom that too often gets overlooked and dismissed in the coastal regions. An accent doesn't indicate stupidity. Nor does the lack of a sheepskin. To quote Victor Davis Hanson, writing about Sarah Palin:

Half of what I learned did not come from books or graduate school or teaching or writing, but from some rather rough characters who taught me how to prune, hammer, wire, and fix things—as well as their world view that came along with those tasks. Thank God, we have that experience represented in Sarah Palin. Can’t her critics grasp that? It ain’t easy to step up to the city-council, mayorship, or governor’s office while raising kids, on a short budget, without family money or connections, and out in Alaska? Did not the career of Truman teach us anything? We have plenty of highly educated politicos, so there is no worry we are a nation of populist yokels; what is lacking in public life are just a few people who aren’t lawyers, professors, consultants, and bureaucrats.

As a former merchant mariner who also holds an MA, I've got to second that. I've gained wisdom from the stories of old salts and from the annals of History and scholarly journals, but not everyone can have that experience. So, as Hanson argues, we should really listen some of both to get a more complete picture. I know she drives some people crazy, but Sarah Palin resonates with some people. So does Joe the Barber.

Looking into the Wilderness

Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos himself) recently wrote (h/t) that he wants to "break the conservative movement's backs and crush their spirits." He wants to "destroy their most beloved leaders" and silence "some of their most cherished voices." Further, he writes, with the 2008 election, the liberal/progressive/Democratic movement "[has] been blessed with an opportunity to help that process along." The neo-religious terminology is indicative of how "Kos" and many of his ideological allies view politics: "spirits", "beloved leaders", "cherished voices", "blessed with an opportunity".

I suppose that's the difference between the role that politics plays in the daily lives of leftist, partisan ideologues and traditional conservatives like me. My psychological well-being is not tied to whether or not Obama becomes the next President of the United States. I don't first look to politicians and government for answers. My optimism won't be undone by the success or failure of a particular politician or political party. And my faith resides in a higher power, not in the workings of fallible men. In short, I don't invest in the political careers of strangers as a way towards personal fulfillment.

Now I'm not naive and I know that there will be many conservatives emotionally devastated by an Obama presidency and a Democratic super-majority in Congress. I suppose they will be the proof to Moulitsas' theorem. But most conservatives won't "turtle" simply because a shiny new, liberal administration is in Washington, D.C. Remember, conservatives generally don't exactly view a potential McCain presidency as a new high-water mark for conservatism. No, the writing has been on the wall for a few months now, and conservatives are well prepared.

While I've chosen to side with the Maverick over the Messiah--my least worst of the two--I fully expect to disagree with whomever is elected President in 2008, if only by differing degrees. As such, I've made my serious philosophical differences with Barack Obama known. But my critique is not based on hatred or dislike for a man I don't know. Instead, it is based on my disagreement with his stated policies and his apparent worldview. Questioning his judgment based on past associations isn't a personal attack. Doubting the sincerity of a smooth orator with a sparse track record is not hate speech.

Yet, after years of GOP leadership, the American people seem ready to hand the keys of government over to the Democratic party and the cipher at the top of the ticket. It doesn't look like any minds are going to be changed this far along. So we will soon be witness to the Democrats' grand plans. They are sure they have all of the answers and are smart enough and good enough to see them through. They don't have much time to pay attention to the proponents of the past. Progress, after all, has won.

And no doubt they will take great pleasure in denigrating the conservative ideas they purport to have failed. Well, I suppose they will have earned their day in the sun.

But any potential success will depend less on the theory behind the policies implemented than on the practical effect those policies have on the lives of every day Americans. And the role that contingency plays--Will the economy continue to stagnate? Will we be attacked again?--and the concomitant reaction--Will Obama's policies hurt or help...or matter? Will a huminatarian peace-keeping mission turn into a war?--shouldn't be overlooked. The American people are not as patient as they used to be and will blame the President and Congress whether deserved or not. Lest we forget, way back in 2004 there was a so-called permanent Republican majority. It lasted all of 2 years. Voters could very well experience buyers' remorse in 2010 or 2012 as they did in 2006. The times change. Quickly.

As a traditional conservative, I believe that our society and culture was built on and continues to require certain principles that have proven successful over time. Though political winds may shift, bedrock principles aren't so easily changed. They have allowed us to prosper as individuals, as families, as communities and as a nation. They must be constantly defended and, where appropriate, modified, if slowly (to paraphrase Edmund Burke), to meet the new challenges of the time. And they endure, even if unheeded, no matter the ephemeral presence that occupies the Oval Office. After all, if conservative principles can survive long years in the wilderness of Canada (and Europe, for that matter), they can certainly survive an election cycle or two here in the U.S.A.

So, regardless of who is "running the country," I'll still continue to devote most of my energy to--and derive the majority of my happiness from--my family and friends and neighbors. And I'll continue to espouse and defend and debate over the principles upon which, I believe, offer us all the best chance for success. And, hopefully, I'll do it all with a smile and a chuckle in-waiting. It's only politics, after all.

Open Thread: McCain/Obama III

Offer your own thoughts in the comments on the beginning of the end of the campaign...

Emulating Fannie Mae in the Health Insurance Industry; Yes We Can!

Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama’s health plan has the Federal government getting directly into the health insurance business. He wants the government to create "a new public plan" for health insurance that would compete with existing private insurers. Senator Obama also wants the administrators of this new plan, or some other government-created insurer, to assume nationwide responsibility for catastrophic health insurance -- creating a government monopoly over one segment of America's healthcare economy.

If the idea of a targeted, government-backed monopoly sounds vaguely familiar, it's because another government created monopoly, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae, for short) has been in the news lately, and not in a good way. Fannie Mae was the "government sponsored enterprise" that held a virtual monopoly in the secondary mortgage industry whose mismanagement and collapse helped trigger the current worldwide financial crisis.

Fannie Mae collapsed because it was allowed to take risks that regulators would have quashed had they been attempted by a company identical in every way to Fannie Mae, save for the government backing. As blogger Mickey Kaus has noted, the unsound financial practices were accepted because of Fannie Mae’s aggressive advocacy of its social agenda -- increasing the rate of homeownership -- when challenged and because Congress and executive branch regulators responded to Fannie Mae's lobbying with a collective cognitive non-sequitur: because the organization’s intentions were good, no one needed to pay serious attention to its financial situation. Enmeshed in a culture that denied the need for oversight, warning signs were missed and Fannie Mae’s problems built up until a multi-hundred billion dollar bailout (separate from the much publicized $700B bailout of private institutions) became necessary to keep it and the mortgage industry which it dominated functioning.

Here’s the question for the future: why, in the long run, should the public expect the fate of Barack Obama's government created insurer to be any different than that of Fannie Mae? Like Fannie Mae, Barack Obama's new insurance company will be created in pursuit of a social goal (expanding access to health insurance). Like Fannie Mae, the government created insurer will be inextricably tied to the Federal government. And like Fannie Mae, the government created insurer will almost certainly be given regulatory advantages over its private competitors -- which may or may not make fiscal sense -- to help it achieve its social goal.

If you view government entities as organizations created and staffed by the same flawed humans that exist in every other walk of life, the potential danger here is obvious; allowing an organization, in this case, the Federal government, to create and run a national scale monopoly and then expect it to effectively regulate itself is an invitation to more Fannie Mae levels of mischief.

Will government remember this lesson by the time it takes up an Obama healthcare plan? Or is an assumption the government-does-it-better, no need to think this through, all that Democrats need to know when formulating their health plans?

Obama vs. McGovern on eliminating secret union elections

Power Line discusses Obama's support for the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation which would effectively eliminate private votes for union elections.

Not even George McGovern agrees with Obama on this one.

If elected, maybe Obama could send union members who resist coercive pressures off to a re-education camp run by Bill Ayers!

Hey, if our federal tax dollars can underwrite voter fraud, why should our options be restricted here? Now, that would be change you can believe in. LOL.

On Obama's extreme abortion beliefs

Robert George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Professor George explains Obama's extreme abortion beliefs.

Read the whole thing.

ADDENDUM

Here is Obama in his own words. More.

ADDENDUM #2

More about infanticide from Robert George and Yuval Levin.

UPDATED: Obama and ACORN's overt and criminal voter fraud acts

Building on Marc's earlier post, comes this latest report from CNN. Listen to the video.

Instapundit has more.

More on ACORN here and here.

Which brings us to the question: Is ACORN Stealing The Election?

...What does all this have to do with Obama, besides the fact that he'd be the beneficiary of most, if not all, of these new votes?

For starters, Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for "advance work.")

What's more, Obama worked as executive director of ACORN's voter-registration arm, Project Vote, in 1992. Joined by two other community organizers on Chicago's South Side, Obama conducted the voter-registration drive that helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the Senate that year.

The next year, 1993, Obama joined the civil-rights law firm Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, where he sued the state of Illinois on behalf of ACORN to implement the federal "Motor Voter" law, which the GOP governor at the time refused to do. Then-Gov. Jim Edgar argued, presciently, that the Clinton law would invite voter fraud.

Obama downplays his ties to ACORN, and his campaign denies coordinating with ACORN to register voters...

And why isn't anyone asking Obama about his $800,000 funding of ACORN's efforts?

Guess we now know part of what a "community organizer" does...commits voter fraud.

If you can't trust the integrity of votes, we don't have a functioning democracy anymore.

But maybe that's the point Obama's campaign has been making already. More here. Will restoring the Fairness Doctrine be the next step?

ADDENDUM

The ACORN criminal voter fraud issue will not die because it is so massive across the nation, Obama has extensive ties to ACORN, and his campaign gave over $800,000 to ACORN.

This overview is a very good place to get a quick summary of the extensive voter fraud efforts by ACORN.

More from Instapundit. On a related issue; more here. And why stop at voter fraud?

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial entitled Obama and ACORN: Community organizers, phony voters, and your tax dollars:

...It's about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government.

Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage," for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting "strikes" against banks so they'd lower credit standards.

But the organization's real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an "affordable housing" provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.

All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real...

Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago "community organizer" at Acorn's side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn's leaders for being "smack dab in the middle" of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls.

During his tenure on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for "staging, sound, lighting." It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.

The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it's disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you're shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he's on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties...

Rubin has these comments:

...It is almost inconceivable that Barack Obama should not have been grilled on this – either by his opponent or the media...Obama’s ties are deep and extensive with an organization that embraces goals and tactics well outside the political mainstream and that has engaged in a pattern of illegal activity usually seen only in RICO indictments. ACORN’s present involvement in coast-to-coast fraud is jaw-dropping and should raise the issue as to whether an Obama Justice Department would vigorously investigate and, if warranted, prosecute this entity and all involved.(A helpful compilation of ACORN’s suspect activities is here.) Put simply, Obama worked for and helped funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to a fraud-infested, corrupt organization and has yet to explain himself, let alone apologize for the same.

If the voters want such a president they will have him, but he should first explain himself and justify why his participation in and assistance to such an enterprise should not be serious grounds to question his fitness for office.

Character does matter in our leaders, as we learned in multiple ways with Bill Clinton, including this instance. Along the way, we continue to learn more troubling things about Obama nearly daily, like this.

We can all — Republicans and Democrats — be against voter fraud ... right?

Let's start with this idea:

There ought to be a law. In fact, there ought to be 50.

Every state from Hawaii to Maine and from Alaska to Florida should adopt emergency measures to require photo ID for every American who goes to the polls on November 4. Legislatures, executives, and courts should move quickly to avoid what has become a pending electoral crisis.

The 13 states investigating the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) are discovering “toxic vote registrations” to rival the “toxic mortgages” that triggered the current turmoil rattling financial markets. While roughly 95 percent of homeowners are paying their mortgages on time, the other 5 percent in default and foreclosure were all it took to spin the global economy out of control.

Similarly, the relatively small number of fraudulent vote registrations discovered so far could represent just enough systemic infection to sicken the entire body politic, especially if this election turns out closer than most now expect.

Still-unfolding revelations of shenanigans by ACORN and a handful of other groups should worry voters of all parties. Notwithstanding the fact that Barack Obama was ACORN’s one-time attorney, former trainer, and Woods Fund donor — and, more recently, the purchaser of its campaign services and its endorsee for president — these questions cannot be dismissed as one or two isolated incidents that Republicans are flogging for partisan advantage. As of Monday, ACORN was under investigation in Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin...

With the election exactly three weeks away, the hour is late to sift through all of the nation’s voter rolls and separate live voters from dead ones, citizens from aliens, the law-abiding from felons, adults from minors, and real people from those merely fabricated. This needs to be done, but is unlikely to be accomplished in time.

What could be done quickly is to require photo ID at the polls, something the U.S. Supreme Court ruled constitutional last spring. Only seven states (Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, and South Dakota) mandate photo ID before citizens can step into voting booths. Beyond these Sensible Seven, 17 states require ID, though it need not include a photo. The remaining 26 states demand no proof that voters are who they say they are.

Requiring photo ID, and making it available for free to any voter who needs it, is the easiest way to assure that corrupt or overzealous people do not show up and vote while ineligible or impersonate someone who has moved away, passed away, or never even existed...

But voter ID requirements won't solve absentee ballot problems like this.

Oh, silly us, this voter fraud is just a distraction, according to Obama. Some distraction.

This is a HUGE deal that goes straight to the issue of a conscious intent to subvert our American democracy by fraudently stealing an election through a massive fraud effort across the country.

McCain Has Opportunity in Maine-2

As I mentioned Friday, I spent the weekend visiting family in Maine. I also had the chance to talk to folks, observe the local media and get a gauge of how the political winds are blowing in the Pine Tree State's 2nd Congressional District. The region I visited was in the southern part of Maine-2, close to the more liberal/Democratic Maine-1 that surrounds Portland and travels along the coast to August, Maine's capital. Based on a non-scientific survey of campaign signs, McCain/Palin placards outnumbered Obama/Biden by at least 20 to 1.

More importantly, in talking to people, including some who supported Clinton and Kerry in the past, I got the impression that Obama was simply too much of a blank slate, had too little experience and was too liberal. This view was espoused by both conservatives and independents, including some union members, who indicated that they weren't alone amongst the rank-in-file in not following the union leadership's endorsement of Obama. Basically, people don't trust Obama because of his stated policies and lack of a track record.

As a native of thise region, I'm not surprised that many of its residents don't support a candidate who seems to put a lot of stock in government "help." They are independent (and not racists) who fundamentally distrust "big" anything, whether it be business or government.

That being said, others explained that they knew quite a few Mainers who had bought into Obama's "change." I was told that one gentleman--a politically astute and intelligent individual--had explained that he didn't know exactly why he was voting for Obama other than it just seemed like the way to go. Perhaps he didn't want to get into a debate, though.

Finally, Todd Palin also visited Maine-2 over the weekend and Governor Palin will be visiting this week. For their part, the McCain campaign obviously thinks there may be an opportunity and I agree.

ADDENDUM: In my previous post, commenter "Rhody" theorizes that Mainers will be cold to Palin because they would have preferred McCain picking one of Maine's Senators, Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins, instead of Palin. Rhody is right in his implication that Maine's independents are more likely to vote for moderates like Snowe and Collins than a conservative like Palin. However, that appeal to moderates is more important for a statewide office, like Senator, than for a rural congressional district like Maine-2. There are plenty of independents in Maine-2, but they are generally more conservative than moderate. They don't like any political party! Insofar as Palin is appealing solely to this district, she will find a welcoming audience.

An argument for divided government

Many of us don't like McCain and also think he has run a terrible campaign.

But the more we learn about Obama, the more willing some of us will be to hold our nose and vote for McCain.

Because, in the end, it's not just Obama. It's the risk of Obama, possibly a filibuster-proof Senate under Reid, and a Pelosi-led House. Unrestrained left-wing politics.

Which leads Fred Barnes to these thoughts.

If we can't send the entire Federal government home on an extended paid vacation, then a vote for divided government may be the best we can hope for.

ADDENDUM

Geez.

ADDENDUM #2

Power Line on Charles Kesler's assessment of Obama:

...Based on a comprehensive reading of Obama's books and speeches, Professor Kesler deduces that Obama's ambition is not merely personal, but is political and Rooseveltian in scope...This is the possibility that Fred Barnes contemplates...In a sense, however, Barnes only scratches the surface. Professor Kesler's important contribution -- from which I have only quoted the set-up to Professor Kesler's extended exploration -- makes out the scope of Obama's ambition and the seriousness of his purpose.

ADDENDUM #3

Mona Charen:

All of a sudden, this election is shaping up as a verdict on capitalism. The Obama campaign wanted it to be about George W. Bush. The McCain campaign wanted it to be about character. But instead, because the markets are shooting off in all directions like bullets from a dropped pistol, the stakes have suddenly been raised dramatically.

We are in the midst of the worst panic in history, it’s true (because it is global). But as historian John Steele Gordon helpfully pointed on in the Wall Street Journal, panics are not unusual in American history. We’ve experienced them almost every 20 years since 1819...Gordon believes more sensible banking policy would prevent future panics. But if we elect a crypto-socialist like Barack Obama and give him a bigger Democrat majority in the House and a filibuster-proof Senate, banking regulation may be the least of our troubles.

Well, you may say, "Win some, lose some. McCain isn’t all that great anyway. Conservatives and Republicans will simply have to examine their consciences and come up with a winning strategy for next time." Perhaps. But there are a few problems with that sanguine approach.

In the first place, the Democrats can, with a super-majority, change the rules of the game. They can make the District of Columbia the 51st state with two new senators (guaranteed to be Democrats in perpetuity). They can reinstitute the so-called Fairness Doctrine that required radio stations to provide equal time to all political viewpoints. While the doctrine was enforced by the Federal Communications Commission, radio stations shied away from politics altogether. With the demise of the doctrine, conservative talk radio flourished. Liberal talk radio has never found much of an audience. Reviving the doctrine would kill one of the principal irritants to liberals and Democrats — to say nothing of disemboweling the First Amendment.

To elect a super-majority of Democrats at a time of economic dislocation is to flirt with depression. Nearly all economists agree that two moves by the Hoover administration deepened and prolonged the panic of 1929 and turned it into the Great Depression. One was raising taxes and the other was imposing protectionist trade policies. Senator Obama proposes to do both of those things...

...He seems determined that more people will ride in the wagon than pull it.

"Well," you may say, "if the Democrats drive the country into a deep recession, so much the worse for them. The Republicans will come back strong — even with two senators from D.C.!" Perhaps...this tumble started while George W. Bush was in the White House. Franklin Roosevelt continued to invoke the boogey man of Herbert Hoover long after the Depression was his own...

Finally, there is a one-way ratchet in public policy. Liberal reforms are never undone. How hard have conservatives tried to eliminate the Department of Education or subsidies to public television? Would they have more success uncreating a new nationalized health-care system?

An Obama/Pelosi/Reid regime — if it were to get a filibuster-proof majority — will certainly be able to shift the country’s direction sharply to the Left. The only question is — would the shift be permanent?

On Obama's disarmament priorities

From Power Line:

We are now three weeks out from the presidential election, and so far as I am aware Barack Obama has not been asked a single question about the disarmament credo he sets forth in the video...

Isn't it time for someone who covers politics for a living to ask Obama a few serious questions about this credo? Or for John Mccain to note it?

Watch the video and hear Obama in his own words.

ADDENDUM

Rubin describes one of the obvious implications of a unilateral disarmament mentality:

Joe Biden said it again today: "We will end this war." Referring to Iraq neither he or Barack Obama ever say "win." They never even say "secure the gains." One hopes they don’t really believe their campaign hooey. They must understand victory is nearly at hand, and all that is required is a patient transition and a deliberate plan for insuring that violence does not resurface, right? We really don’t know, but at some point the rhetoric becomes reality and he, his supporters and the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress will act accordingly.

This all might be a good topic for the final debate: why is "end" always the goal and not "win"? What does that message transmit to our enemies?...

On Obama's healthcare policies

From The Corner:

Obama says we shouldn't allow people to shop for insurance across state lines because some states allow health insurers to exploit nefarious loopholes.

Doesn't this argue for, not against, letting people in shop across state lines to get more favorable coverage?

In other words, if you are trapped in a state where these dubious entities are duping innocent policy holders, shouldn't you have the freedom to get on the Internet and escape to another plan?

Obama is in effect saying no. We have to be trapped in the tangle of our state's regulatory mess even if there is a better deal just over the fence.

I would ask Obama if he supports generic prescription-drug importation. I suspect the answer is yes, in which case he is saying we can get our drugs from Mexico, but we can't get our health insurance from Michigan. Pills from Canada "yes." Policies from Connecticut "no." Does that make any sense?

More:

The Cabinet of Dr. Obama: Dissecting the health care proposals of Obama and McCain

The Dems’ Health-Care Distortions: Seeing through the Obama smokescreen

Obama’s Glass House: It’s his health-care plan that would push people out of job-based coverage

ADDENDUM

By contrast, McCain in today's Daily Standard:

McCain's remarks on health care in his speech today are worth highlighting: "I will provide every single American family with a $5000 refundable tax credit to help them purchase insurance. Workers who already have health care insurance from their employers will keep it and have more money to cover costs. Workers who don't have health insurance can use it to find a policy anywhere in this country to meet their basic needs."

Few know how ironic it is that post-WWII government actions created the problem in the first place where health insurance was "owned" by your employer instead of the insured person.

Meanwhile, Don Boudreaux shreds E. J. Dionne's equally stupid thinking on healthcare policy.

On Obama's economic and tax policies

From TaxProfBlog, with H/T to Instapundit:

Hundreds of economists (including Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Vernon Smith) have signed letters opposing Barack Obama's economic and tax plans (here, here, and here):

We are equally concerned with his proposals to increase tax rates on labor income and investment. His dividend and capital gains tax increases would reduce investment and cut into the savings of millions of Americans. His proposals to increase income and payroll tax rates would discourage the formation and expansion of small businesses and reduce employment and take-home pay, as would his mandates on firms to provide expensive health insurance.

After hearing such economic criticism of his proposals, Barack Obama has apparently suggested to some people that he might postpone his tax increases, perhaps to 2010. But it is a mistake to think that postponing such tax increases would prevent their harmful effect on the economy today. The prospect of such tax rate increases in 2010 is already a drag on the economy. Businesses considering whether to hire workers today and expand their operations have time horizons longer than a year or two, so the prospect of higher taxes starting in 2009 or 2010 reduces hiring and investment in 2008.

Seems like Obama needs to discover Economics 101. From an earlier series I did in 2006, excerpting thoughts from other leading economists:

Part I: What is Economics?
Part II: Myths About Markets
Part III: Why Policy Goals are Trumped by Incentives They Create & the Role of Knowledge in Economics
Part IV: The Abuse of Reason, Fallacies & Dangers of Centralized Planning, Prices & Knowledge, and Understanding Limitations
Part V: The Relationship Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom
Part VI: More on the Relationship Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom
Part VII: The Role of Government in a Free Society
Part VIII: The Unspoken, But Very Real, Incentives That Drive Governmental Actions
Part IX: More on the Coercive Role of Government
Part X: The Power of the Market
Part XI: Prices
Part XII: I, Pencil - A Story about the Free Market at Work
Part XIII: It is Individuals - Not the Society, Government or Market - Who Think & Act
Part XIV: On Equality
Part XV: Consequences of Price Controls
Part XVI: The Ethics of Redistribution
Part XVII: What Does "Social Justice" Mean?

ADDENDUM

The Wall Street Journal's editorial entitled Obama's 95% Illusion: It depends on what the meaning of a 'tax cut' is:

One of Barack Obama's most potent campaign claims is that he'll cut taxes for no less than 95% of "working families." He's even promising to cut taxes enough that the government's tax share of GDP will be no more than 18.2% -- which is lower than it is today. It's a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he's also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all? There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of "tax cut."

For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase "tax credit." Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand no fewer than seven such credits for individuals...

Here's the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be "refundable," which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer -- a federal check -- from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this "welfare"...

There's another catch: Because Mr. Obama's tax credits are phased out as incomes rise, they impose a huge "marginal" tax rate increase on low-income workers...the marginal rate for millions of low- and middle-income workers would spike as they earn more income.

Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of "making work pay," but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you're a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year. One mystery -- among many -- of the McCain campaign is why it has allowed Mr. Obama's 95% illusion to go unanswered.

From The Corner:

The Democrats want another round of tax-rebate checks, in addition to the $100 billion in tax-rebate checks that went out last spring. Democrats are essentially conceding that tax cuts are good for the economy, but they are opposed to the kind of long-term tax relief workers and businesses can count on. They'd rather confiscate your money first, so they can take credit for giving it back. Viewed in this light, it is appropriate that so much of Obama's tax plan consists of "tax credits."

Ed Morrissey writes, "Put it this way: does it cost more to take money from taxpayers and then pay bureaucrats to filter it back to us, or just leave it in our pockets in the first place?"

This is economic amateur hour, all at the expense of small businesses and American families.

ADDENDUM #2

Listen to this. It's called socialism.

More on Obama's exchange with the plumber here.

ADDENDUM #3

More on Obama's "spread the wealth" statement and a history of taxation in America, including who pays how much right now.

ADDENDUM #4

Philip Klein writes about Searching for Obama's 95%:

...It's a claim that the Wall Street Journal editorial board dubbed "Obama's 95% Illusion," noting that more than a third of Americans don't pay any income taxes, and that what Obama's plan does do is offer a raft of subsidies and government payments to individuals and families that he redefines as "tax cuts." His proposal looks more like a redistribution scheme than an honest effort to reduce taxes -- as he revealed on Monday when he told a now famous Ohio plumber that his plan aimed to "spread the wealth around."

So when Plouffe reiterated the 95 percent claim, I asked him a simple question aimed at clarifying whether Obama's tax plan was about cutting rates, or merely handing out government checks. "What rates would actually go down"? I asked.

"Middle class people are going to see, systemically, their taxes reduced, and small businesses," Plouffe responded.

"But what rate would go down for lower-income Americans?" I persisted, seeking more information.

"We'll have to get you the exact details on that," Obama's campaign manager told me.

I followed up, recapping the claim he had just made moments ago: "Well, you said that there's going to be a tax cut on 95 percent, so what rate would go down?"

He replied, "I'll have to get you the exact rate differential."

Given that he wasn't clear on the actual rate changes involved, I asked, "but which type of tax would go down?"

He insisted that under Obama's plan, income taxes would be lower, as well as capital gains taxes on start up businesses and small entrepreneurs (though the capital gains tax would otherwise increase)...

In fairness, politicians long ago began to use the tax code as a tool for crafting social policy rather than merely as a way to raise revenue. Republicans and Democrats alike have abused terms such as "tax credit" and "tax rebate" to make their policy goals more palatable. But Obama is getting away with defining tax cuts so broadly, that future candidates will simply claim any form of increased government spending as a tax cut...

If Barack Obama can effectively claim that his plan cuts taxes on 95 percent of Americans, then the term "tax cut" has no meaning.

On McCain

Jennifer Rubin:

...GOP angst about the McCain team is bubbling over: make character an issue or don't, come up with a comprehensive economic plan or don’t. It’s the indecision and half-heartedness that are so frustrating. Few would quibble with Bill Kristol’s assessment that "it’s really become a pathetic campaign in the sense that there’s no strategy." (It’s tempting to go one step further and "fire the campaign.")...

McCain finally finds the "divided government" argument. It’s a compelling one for Independents who don’t trust either party and have seen Nancy Pelosi in action...

I’m not alone in surmising that McCain’s campaign isn’t about anything because he has no core governing philosophy: "He’s been running for president, more on than off, for almost a decade, but his determination hasn’t had much to do with a highly defined ideology, program or set of policies. What underlies his ambition are values: service, patriotism, duty, honor." That’s all well and good, except if the country needs a defined ideology, program or set of policies to guide us through an economic trauma...

Whoa! Not So Fast Linking Obama to Another Violent Thug

(The first was American. This one is African.)

NewsBusters's Kerry Picket asks

When Will The MSM Report On Obama's Support for Kenyan Tyrant Raila Odinga?

In 2006, US Senator Barack Obama went to Kenya (at the expense of the American taxpayer) and campaigned for Raila Odinga, a man running for the presidency of that country. Senator Obama apparently did so because he is a distant cousin of Odinga.

The NewsBusters post refers to an article in today's Washington Times describing the terrible election violence in Kenya carried out by Odinga supporters. That article also reports that Raila Odinga signed a secret Memorandum of Understanding that he would bring Sharia law to Kenya if elected president. The article then goes on to describe in a disapproving tone the campaigning Senator Obama did for Odinga in 2006.

However, the terrible violence which followed Kenya's elections began in December of 2007. And Odinga signed that odious memorandum in August of 2007. So these events took place after Obama had campaigned for Odinga.

In the interest of telling the whole story, we should note here that Mr. Raila Odinga was not a saint even prior to 2006, participating as he had in a violent coup attempt in 1982. Now, should Senator Obama have informed himself fully of his cousin's history before campaigning for him? Probably. If any of us had been contacted by a cousin from the Old Country asking us to assist in his or her run for president, would we have stopped to do some research before flying off? A lot of us probably would not have.

But Obama's failure to know of his cousin's past is not the allegation levelled by NewsBusters, the Washington Times and others. From the same Washington Times article:

Mr. Obama's judgment is seriously called into question when he backs an official with troubling ties to Muslim extremists and whose supporters practice ethnic cleansing and genocide.

What am I missing? Don't we judge people on their actions? How could Senator Obama have judged Odinga or his character on the basis of actions he had not yet committed?

There is enough to criticize about Senator Obama's candidacy and his own history, including but not limited to his deliberately choosing to associate with some shady Americans, without adding the charge that he failed to see into the future of an African cousin.

The Drama of Steyn

Have I mentioned that I'm glad to see Mark Steyn columns again? With his latest, I laughed:

Gaze into the giant zero of the Obama logo, the hole in the star-spangled donut, the vast fathomless nullity that is the gaping keyhole to the door of utopia. To a sad shriveled Republican cynic, there's nothing there but the wide open spaces of Obama's blank resume. But a believer will see therein the healing of the planet and the receding of the oceans. The black hole of Obama will suck you in through the awesome power of its totally cool suckiness.

I cried:

Epic events swirled all around, but the two men fighting to lead the global superpower could only joust with cardboard swords: Why, Obama was such a bold leader on this issue that only two years ago he "sent a letter" to somebody or other. Why, long before Obama sent his letter, McCain "issued a statement." Rarely has the gulf between interesting times and the paperwork of "big government" yawned so widely.

I screamed:

If the more frightening polls are correct, America is about to elect the most left-wing government in history: an Obama Oval Office, a Pelosi House of Representatives, a filibuster-proof Senate and a year or two down the road maybe three new Supreme Court justices. It would be a transformational Administration that would start building (in Michelle Obama's words) "the world as it should be." That big empty hole in the heart of the Obama logo will not stay blank for long.

Northern Exposure

In the wayback, I kinda enjoyed Northern Exposure, especially the quirky Alaskan Maggie O'Connell as portrayed by Janine Turner. Turner is a big Sarah Palin fan, pro-life and conservative.

I was always so proud to portray the spunky, self-reliant, smart Maggie O’Connell. Maggie flew her own plane, shot her own moose, marched to the beat of her own drum. She was a breakthrough television character at the time. I am very flattered when the comparisons are made between Maggie O’Connell and Governor Palin. I created a character, but Governor Palin is the real deal.

I am supporting Governor Palin with pride. I actually cried when I heard she was nominated and heard her acceptance speech via Fox News XM radio. (I was driving to Austin to film Friday Night Lights). I am supporting and applauding her character, moral fiber, intellect, feistiness, and spunk. She is the essence of the independent spirit of America — the pioneer spirit — the type of spirit that made and makes America great. I have always supported Senator McCain, and I am sure I would have supported his vice-presidential candidate, but Governor Palin has really motivated me. I am making public/press appearances to rally support for her ( Inside Edition, ABC News, Bill Bennett radio, etc) and I am also sporting a McCain/Palin bumper sticker on my car — which I am driving onto the FNL set) and wearing my McCain-Palin hat around town. I have also joined a fabulous group of women in a movement called, “Team Sarah” dedicated to advancing and defending Gov. Palin’s candidacy.

To preempt commenter "Rhody," there goes the Hollywood left-wing conspiracy.... (Though the east-coast intellectual one is alive and well).

Anyway, I'm heading north to Maine for the weekend and will be getting some northern exposure myself. It'll be interesting to hear how "my" people view the election up there. As a native, I can tell you that "real" Mainers--ie; not the transplants living around Portland--are an iconoclastic, independent-minded bunch (Perot did very well up there in '92). They don't have much time for a slick guy like Obama and they'll lend a sympathetic ear to John McCain. Not for nuthin' does the McCain camp consider Maine's 2nd district up for grabs. I'll see if there's any merit in that idea.

More troubling thoughts about the One

Charles Krauthammer on Obama & Friends: Judge Not?.

Kimberly Strassel on Obama's Magic.

Mark Halperin interviews Obama spokesman Gibbs about when Obama knew about Ayers' terrorist past. Andy McCarthy has more and Jonah Goldberg adds these thoughts.

[ADDENDUM: Andy McCarthy puts the Ayers matter in perspective, elaborating on its implications for Obama.]

Washington Times on Obama's apparent efforts to undermine Iraqi negotiations.

Don't forget Marc's recent post about ACORN. More here.

It also looks like Obama belonged to a Socialist party just last decade. Contrast the media's lack of interest about it versus the fake story about Palin and the Independent Party of Alaska.

More from Andy McCarthy about Obama here. Jonah Goldberg adds more thoughts here.

Jay Nordlinger reflects on the situation here, here, and here.

All of which is why I enjoy reading Don Boudreaux.

Oakbama and his ACORNs

About a decade ago, Obama worked for ACORN (yes he did, really) and now it appears they're doing everything to work for him....

In Ohio.

In Wisconsin.

In Michigan.

In Pennsylvania.

In Missouri.

In Nevada.

In Indiana (105% voter registration!).

Maybe in Connecticut?

Best of all, you paid for it!

Don't Count the Turtle Out of the Race, Yet

As Anthony pointed out at the tail-end of our debate blog, a new Zogby poll shows Obama's margin shrinking. Of particular note is that his lead went entirely into the "Others/Not sure" column. That's why I'm not buying the spin that McCain had to do very well last night (even though the poll was conducted before the debate).

In all political races, and to an exponential degree with Obama, the storyline is the thing. Obama's storyline is the lightning flash of The New, and in these debates, he sounds like nothing so much as a run-of-the-mill candidate. His negativity and egregious anti-Bush partisanship won't help.

John McCain, on the other hand, is the steady hand (albeit connected with an often wrongheaded mind). Nobody expects him to do well in these debates. His image is entirely consistent with a bit of awkwardness at the nuts and bolts of campaigning.

Put slightly differently, if the broadest mood of the electorate is fatigue with Washington, smooth campaigning could prove to be a detriment during the general election's slide toward the middle.

Palin's Lack of Experience Solved

... by commenter BobC who, under Justin's post "Obama's Nightmare in Passing", points out

To be sure if McCain should pass during his time in office, all Palin has to do is pick her "Biden" for Vice-President. That would take care of her lack of experience. It seems to have worked for Obama.

Why won't McCain and Palin take it to Obama and the Dems over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

Why McCain Goes Easy on Fannie and the CRA.

How McCain could respond.

More on how McCain could respond.

An ad.

More historical particulars here and here.

ADDENDUM

And now this news about Barney Frank's conflict of interest.

Creepy, again....

More, following this.

ADDENDUM

Instapundit has more.

ADDENDUM #2

More: Dear Leader.

Effects of the Obama Tax Plan

From my liveblog of last night's Vice-Presidential debate…

[9:15] I don't believe the "no one under $250,000 will see a tax-increase" claim. Isn't the Obama tax plan based on a child tax-credit?

The exact statement by Joe Biden I was referring to was…

No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama's plan will see one single penny of their tax raised, whether it's their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax.

The source of my skepticism is the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. According to their "Analysis of the 2008 Presidential Candidates’ Tax Plans", because Obama's plan is based on various credits and deductions, rather than a direct change in rates, taxes will go up for some households making less than $250,000, if they don't qualify for the full package of adjustments…

…The breaks are (in 2008 dollars): 20% $18,981, 40% $37,595, 60% $66,354, 80% $111,645, 90% $160,972, 95% $226,918...

Note the the entries in the column at the far-right are not all zeros, as Joe Biden and Barack Obama claim they should be except for the "top quintile" entry.

So should the claim of "no one under $250,000" be considered an exaggeration within the usual bounds of politics -- or should the standard that progressive bloggers have been applying to the McCain campaign be applied here also, and the statement that Barack Obama won't raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 be considered an outright lie?

Obama's Nightmare in Passing

I mention this only because I caught it out of the corner of my eye and thought it was striking: On the FoxNews "focus group" of undecided voters who watched the debate together for the network, they were discussing reactions to Governor Palin and whether she's qualified, and one gentlemen pointed out that she'd been a governor and a mayor — i.e., an executive — and a black woman sitting near him cut in: "She's been there, she's done that, and she'll do it again."

I attribute no broad significance to this one speaker (people being, you know, individuals), but the image would have to give the Obama campaign chills.

Liveblogging the Palin-Biden Vice-Presidential Debate!

[Final] The more I hear "ya know, people don't really vote for the Vice-President" from Dem-leaning analysts, the more I will think that Palin "won". If I had to make a lame sports analogy, I would say that Palin pitched a scoreless 7th with her team one run down.

[10:33] Nothing remarkable in the closing statements.

[10:27] Palin's answer of I don't need to compromise because I can be bipartisan is not a model of coherence.

[10:25] Biden says his decision to apply ideological litmus tests to judges was a change away from what he previously believed.

[10:24] Good emotional appeal by Biden in response to the "maverick" issue.

[10:22] ...except she just choked while trying to force "McCain" and "maverick" into her answer yet again.

[10:20] If you're into it's all about expectations reasoning, Palin is winning the last third of this debate with safe but coherent answers.

[10:18] I predict lots of chatter from the more serious parts of the blogosphere tomorrow that Biden's answer on the VP, the executive and the legislative branch was just Joe being Joe.

[10:15] Still here. Just not finding anything worth typing about.

[10:13] If I'm lucky, I'll lose my connection again during this "what's the importance of the Vice-President" question.

[10:10] Lost my connection for a second. Fortunately, it was during the stupid how-would-your-administration-be-different-from-your-running-mate's question.

[10:08] Biden just criticized the Bush doctrine he tacitly endorsed in his previous answer. Just Joe being Joe, I guess.

[10:05] Biden is pretty much articulating the Bush doctrine right now, we should intervene if we think we can make a difference, and countries that harbor terrorists lose the full protection of sovereignty.

[10:04] Palin supports a no-fly zone in Darfur.

[10:03] Biden supports pretty direct military involvement in Darfur.

[10:00] The pool camera-guy gave Palin a good angle on her answer on counter-insurgency principles! She cowed Biden for a moment, then he defaulted over to fibilbuster mode.

[9:57] Palin's answer on nukes: see my comment at 9:24.

[9:54] What's Biden's point on Israel? I got the we'll stand behind Israel part. But we'll stand behind Israel and then...

[9:51] Biden's point about Spain saves his substantively incoherent answer.

[9:49] To use the progressive lingo, Ifill goes with the Obama "frame" on pre-conditions and negotiations. Palin gets the anwer right, but probably too subtly for most of the public to pick up on.

[9:48] On no, it's the preconditions issue again...

[9:46] Ifill is a terrible moderator. Lots of charged, contentious stuff is left hanging there, and she just moves on.

[9:44] Call me biased, but I don't think the "McCain voted to cut off funding for the troops" charge is going to stick.

[9:42] Wait...calling the Obama plan a "surrender" is a pretty strong charge. How will Biden respond...

[9:41] I'm not learning anything new from either candidate's Iraq answer.

[9:38] No support for gay marriage from either candidate. Andrew Sullivan might have a fit about Biden saying he doesn't support gay marriage, then going on to say he supports full civil rights for gay couples -- if Biden were a Republican, of course.

[9:36] I'm still confused on the clean coal issue.

[9:33] Will Ifill push Biden on his clean-coal answer? Stay tuned...

[9:32] But the mention of the Alaska climate-change sub-cabinet is fair. It does involve actual governing.

[9:31] Palin obviously doesn't like talking about the details of climate change.

[9:27] Biden is winning on the who's a better financial-industry reformer question because he's being more specific.

[9:24] Palin has mastered the art of the televised debate: give good, coherent statements, even if they're only marginally related to the questions.

[9:22] Biden is apparently going to pay for $700B in new spending by not cutting taxes.

[9:20] Let me get this straight. Biden wants us to be shocked that health insurers will receive the payments for health insurance?

[9:18] Palin should be asking is a Fannie Mae for healthcare a good idea? Otherwise, a pretty good defense of the McCain tax plan.

[9:15] I don't believe the "no one under $250,000 will see a tax-increase" claim. Isn't the Obama tax plan based on a child tax-credit?

[9:12] Neither side is glorifying themselves on substance...

[9:09] Palin noticably relaxes whe she doesn't feel she has to work McCain's name into her answer. SO STOP TRYING TO FORCE IT IN.

[9:08] Good defense against Biden's canned talking point against McCain.

[9:06] Palin was doing well until she started robotically mentioning McCain's name.

[9:03] First gaffe is Ifill's -- the bailout "passing" the House on Monday!

[9:02] No book promo in Gwen Ifill's intro.

[9:00] Chances are, either the race is even tomorrow, or conservatives are on day #1 of planning for the aftermath, so this is a good night to do a liveblog.

A Creative Lack of Imagination

In search of a Why for my heartbroken disappointment at finding the fifth installment of George R.R. Martin's excellent Song of Ice and Fire series absent from the bookstore shelves although long expected, I found my way to this post on the author's blog:

Doing Good Is Its Own Reward...

... but when you can Do Good and add some nifty autographed books to your collection at the same time, well, that's even better.

So here's your chance to end the war, defend the constitution, and help take back this country from the corrupt plutocrats who have given us this latest financial crisis. And get some great swag at the same time.

I'm talking about Books for Barack.

Shortly thereafter, I came across the following blurb on the cover of the Providence Journal's Lifebeat section:

Rock stars Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel are teaming up for their first joint concert to benefit Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Obama plans to attend the concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City on Oct. 16, the day after Obama's final debate with Republican John McCain at Hofstra University, located several miles outside the city in Hempstead, N.Y.

Seeing the two superstars together won't come cheap. Tickets start at $500 and range up to $10,000.

What's painful — from this talented writer, my fellow Jersey boy made it big, and one of the principal comforters of my churning adolescence — is how little imagination they display. Their advocacy, their message, and their promises and expectations are all according to script and serve to reinforce the laughable trope that liberals are anti-establishment rebels fighting for all that's good and true. Think of that the next time some left-wing conformist strikes the Brave One pose.

And think of it the next time the Obama campaign pushes an agenda of silence and, in Andy McCarthy's words, "severing of our body politic from the moorings that make us America."

Insufficient transparency and yet more unanswered questions

For a guy who already has associations with unrepentant terrorists, America-hating preachers, and convicted felons, this latest information does not inspire trust or confidence in his judgment, now does it?

(H/T to Instapundit.)

ADDENDUM

Joe raises a fair point in the Comments section about NewsMax and I posted this because the article's author, Timmerman, has been a generally credible reporter over the years in my opinion.

I believe the bigger issue here is the refusal by Obama's campaign to disclose his donors. Unlike McCain who has. I have been extremely critical of McCain's definition of campaign finance reform and the resulting impact on limiting free speech but at least he has told us who has given money to his campaign.

More to the point, as I have written before, if I could set the campaign finance laws of this land, I would strip away all dollar limits by donors and require that all donations be given to the candidate directly, the party directly or to defined third parties...on the condition that the names of specific persons making the donations to any such entity are posted on the Internet within 24 hours of the donation. Complete and immediate transparency. I don't care if George Soros wants to give Obama $25 million tomorrow. But I do care about knowing it within 24 hours thereafter. And I don't want Soros or anyone else hiding anonymously behind some PAC entity.

Maybe Obama's getting foreign donations. Maybe he isn't. The problem is that we don't know the answer today and that means there could be unacceptable foreign influences on this campaign. It is unacceptable to only find out the answer to that after the election. I want everyone to know the answers now and I want Obama to have to explain any anomalies. Same with any Republican. One standard: complete and immediate transparency...and then let the public decide if the resulting information influences their opinions.

ADDENDUM

More here, here, and here.

McCarthy: Stifling political debate with threats of prosecution is not the "rule of law" — it’s tyranny

Andy McCarthy:

In London last week, a frightful warning was sounded about encroaching tyranny. At an important conference, speaker after impassioned speaker warned of the peril to Western values posed by freedom-devouring sharia — the Islamic legal code. Like all tyrannies, sharia’s first target is speech: Suppress all examination of Muslim radicalism by threats of prosecution and libel actions, and smugly call it "the rule of law."

But we may already be further gone than the London conferees feared. And without resort to the Islamicization that so startled them. For that, we can thank the campaign of Barack Obama.

I’ll be blunt: Sen. Obama and his supporters despise free expression, the bedrock of American self-determinism and hence American democracy. What’s more, like garden-variety despots, they see law not as a means of ensuring liberty but as a tool to intimidate and quell dissent.

We London conferees were fretting over speech codes, "hate speech" restrictions, "Islamophobia" provisions, and "libel tourism" — the use of less journalist-friendly defamation laws in foreign jurisdictions to eviscerate our First Amendment freedom to report, for example, on the nexus between ostensible Islamic charity and the funding of terrorist operations.

All the while, in St. Louis, local law-enforcement authorities, dominated by Democrat-party activists, were threatening libel prosecutions against Obama’s political opposition. County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, abetted by a local sheriff and encouraged by the Obama campaign, warned that members of the public who dared speak out against Obama during the campaign’s crucial final weeks would face criminal libel charges — if, in the judgment of these conflicted officials, such criticism of their champion was "false."

The chill wind was bracing. The Taliban could not better rig matters. The Prophet of Change is only to be admired, not questioned. In the stretch run of an American election, there is to be no examination of a candidate for the world’s most powerful office — whether about his radical record, the fringe Leftism that lies beneath his thin, centrist veneer, his enabling of infanticide, his history of race-conscious politics, his proposals for unprecedented confiscation and distribution of private property (including a massive transfer of American wealth to third-world dictators through international bureaucrats), his ruinous economic policies that have helped leave Illinois a financial wreck, his place at the vortex of the credit market implosion that has put the U.S. economy on the brink of meltdown, his aggressive push for American withdrawal and defeat in Iraq, his easy gravitation to America-hating activists, be they preachers like Jeremiah Wright, terrorists like Bill Ayers, or Communists like Frank Marshall Davis. Comment on any of this and risk indictment or, at the very least, government harassment and exorbitant legal fees.

Nor was this an isolated incident.

Item: When the American Issues Project ran political ads calling attention to Obama’s extensive ties to Ayers, the Weatherman terrorist who brags about having bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, the Obama campaign pressured the Justice Department to launch an absurd criminal prosecution.

Item: When commentator Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center was invited on a Chicago radio program to discuss his investigation of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an "education reform" project in which Obama and Ayers (just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood") collaborated to dole out over $100 million, the Obama campaign issued an Internet action alert. Supporters, armed with the campaign’s non-responsive talking points, dutifully flooded the program with calls and emails, protesting Kurtz’s appearance and attempting to shout him down.

Item: Both Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, have indicated that an Obama administration would use its control of the Justice Department to prosecute its political opponents, including Bush administration officials responsible for the national security policies put in effect after nearly 3000 Americans were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

Item: There is a troubling report that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Section, top officials of which are Obama contributors, has suggested criminal prosecutions against those they anticipate will engage in voter "intimidation" or "oppression" in an election involving a black candidate. (Memo to my former DOJ colleagues: In a system that presumes innocence even after crimes have undeniably been committed, responsible prosecutors don’t assume non-suspects will commit future law violations — especially when doing so necessarily undermines the First Amendment freedoms those prosecutors solemnly swear to uphold.)

Obama may very well win the November election but he, like Sen. McCain, should be forced to win it fair and square: by persuading Americans that he is the superior candidate after our free society has had its customary free and open debate.

One understandably feels little sympathy for McCain here. His years-long assault on the First Amendment under the guise of campaign-finance "reform" has led inexorably to the brazenness of Obama’s Chicago-style strong-arming. But the victim here is not McCain. The victim is democratic self-determination. The victim is our right to informed participation in a political community’s most important decisions. The victim is freedom.

The Justice Department’s job is to prosecute those actively undermining our freedom, not to intimidate citizens in the exercise of that freedom. Consequently, instead of threatening criminal investigations of phantom future civil-rights violations, it should be conducting criminal investigations into whether public officials in St. Louis are abusing their offices to affect a national election.

The federal Hatch Act (codified in Title 5 of the U.S. Code) prohibits executive officials (such as prosecutors and police) from using their offices to interfere with federal elections. The statute may be of limited utility in St. Louis since it principally targets federal officials. Still, state and local government may come within its ambit if their activities are funded in part by the national Leviathan — as many arms of municipal government are these days.

The same bright-line demarcation does not limit application of the federal extortion and fraud laws. The extortion provision (also known as the Hobbs Act and codified at Section 1951 of the federal penal code) makes it a felony for anyone, including public officials, to deprive people of their property by inducing fear of harm. Property interests have been held to include, for example, the right of union members to participate in a democratic process; the harm apprehended can be either physical or economic. Inducing voters to fear prosecution and imprisonment unless they refrain from exercising their fundamental right to engage democratic debate may well qualify.

An easier fit may be fraud, which under federal law (Section 1346 of the penal code) prohibits schemes to deprive citizens of their "intangible right of honest services" from their public officials. Prosecutors and police who abuse their enormous powers in order to promote the election of their preferred candidates violate their public trust.

Regardless of the legal landscape, however, it is the political consequences that matter. Day after day, Obama demonstrates that the "change" he represents is a severing of our body politic from the moorings that make us America. If we idly stand by while he and his thugs kill free political debate, we die too.

Oh my, it just never stops: In the tank for Obama

Gwen Ifill, moderator for this Thursday's VP debate, is in the tank for Obama.

From Instapundit:

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.

It just never stops, does it?

ADDENDUM

More on Ifill's questions about Palin at the RNC. The earlier link shows how she wrote a positive magazine article about the Obama family while she negatively questioned Palin. Also, Ifill appears not to have disclosed the existence of the book to the people selecting the moderator and the McCain campaign didn't know about the book. As Greta writes elsewhere, the failure to disclose would be reason for a mistrial in the legal world.

Even more:

The problem with the Ifill selection is not that she is for Obama (how could the media easily find any moderator who was not?), but that her Age of Obama encomium is, according to press releases, set to appear on January 20, Inauguration Day — the implication being that the book will sell far more copies as a timely analysis of Obama just as he assumes office. Yes, moderators are usually liberal, and yes, authors of books on contemporary politics usually try to find timing gimmicks to sell them; but in this case, the problem is that Ifill's book stands to do far better should Obama be elected, and her publishers seem in advance to have recognized, and thus counted on, that. That's the rub, and the result is that it will make it hard for her to seem unbiased when moderating a debate in which one side is trying to demonstrate to the nation why we should not have embrace an age of Obama. As a matter of ethics, this is a no brainer.

ADDENDUM #2

More from the Columbia Journalism Review.

Creepy, indeed

A Kinder, Gentler, Happier Cultural Revolution.

At least as long as you don't speak out against The One.

ADDENDUM

From Instapundit:

Reader Raymone Eckhard writes that this is creepy. Yes. Roger Simon finds it disturbing, too. "It is the kind of exploitation of children that reminds me of Young Pioneer Camps I saw when visiting the Soviet Union in the Eighties...And they complain about the religious right - can you imagine the reaction to a similar group of kids singing about McCain under the tutelage of an evangelical minister?"

UPDATE: "Daddy says if we sing well enough, we might get an extra flour ration!"

Comments from this link:

Obama's not that bad. It's not like he has his own flag (oops, he does in that first video). Well, it's not like he has his own presidential seal (Oh wait, he did, but he stopped using it). It's not like he has his own gold coins with his image on them (Oh, wait, yes does).

Uh oh...

And its not like he wrote his own book detailing his radical past or plans...(Oh, wait, he did.)...

But at least he didn't give a rousing speech to a huge crowd in Berlin.

Oh...

Well, at least he never proclaimed that his ascension would heal the planet and make the rising waters recede.

Oh, man...

Looks like the video is no longer available on certain links. Hmmm. Think somebody is unhappy with the attention it is getting?

If "No" Is Racist, then Race Must Be an Ideology

Jerry Landay provides an inkling as to why the Left is so viciously anxious to destroy any successful minorities who do not carry its water: They scuttle a semantic game that otherwise allows disagreement to be portrayed as bigotry. Consider:

Race determined the primary outcome in three industrial swing states. Hillary Clinton, a white, won by large margins in the Democratic primaries of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Barack Obama, half-black, but self-identified as an African-American, lost. Some 15 to 20 percent of voters confessed to post-election pollsters that race was a “factor” in their decision. Obama must win these states. ...

A York law-enforcement officer declared that America was ready for a black president. But . . . "I just don't think Obama's the right one." He declared that Palin "has more experience than he does. No one has ever told me what a community organizer is." In fact, in speeches and two books, Obama has repeatedly described his efforts to help the people who live in southside Chicago. "Community organizer" in this context has been made a code word for "black."

I'm sure that in certain company this is treated as high wisdom, but for my part, this "code word" legerdemain is so much gibberish. The officer in the anecdote raises "community organizer" in Obama's biography as a comparison to "mayor" in Palin's. The utility of liberal word games, though, is that any phrase may be made suspect for the purposes of promoting representatives of the ideology.

If Obama loses, many among his supporters will not ask themselves those tough introspective questions that failure ought to inspire. They'll simply blame racism — so simple, so comforting. And if Obama wins, the rest of us will have the opportunity to observe how quickly it becomes a matter of racial bigotry to oppose a far Left agenda.

The real and unforeseen public consequences of "private" behaviors

Setting aside for a moment how the MSM has made itself an all-but-formal part of the Obama presidential campaign team, there is another undiscussed angle to how Obama became his party's nominee for President.

Remember a decade ago how we were told Bill Clinton's improper behavior with Monica Lewinsky was a "private" matter which had no relevance or impact on his public role as President?

Well, maybe not. Is it really all that suprising that the same man who had no principles in his private life would carry the same ethical indifference into his public role as President?

Consider this issue and its impact nearly a decade later on this year's presidential race:

'Smear!" "Guilt by association!" "Politics of fear!" The Obama campaign has its cue cards at the ready whenever any of us right-wing demagogues has the temerity to suggest it might be relevant that a candidate for president is a friend of — is a business partner of, is simpatico with — a died-in-the-wool, America-hating terrorist.

The campaign doth protest too much. The sheer thuggery in their reaction to patently relevant questions about Obama's ties to Bill Ayers, raised by the intrepid Stanley Kurtz and the American Issues Project, betrays their candidate's panicked self-awareness. Of course it's relevant. Compound an era of terrorist threat with the Democrats' decision to nominate a walking, speechifying tabula rasa and what could be more relevant?...

Here's the dirty little secret: You can thank Bill Clinton and his co-president.

For all Bill's whining about Obama playing the race-card, for all the armchair psychoanalyses of Hillary campaign infighting and mismanagement, the Clintons and all the rest of us should know that Hillary — not Barack Obama — would be the Democrats' Anointed One today were it not for a single, solitary, gut-check issue.

Terrorism...

...No, Barack Obama is the Democrats' nominee because Bill and Hillary Clinton, reputed geniuses, are short-sighted Hedonists, so self-absorbed, so intoxicated by their craving of the moment, that they can't plan for the fix they'll need five moments from the moment.

In 1999, Hillary Clinton — feminist champion whose claim to fame was riding her more politically gifted husband's coattails — was scheming a run for the legendary Pat Moynihan's U.S. senate seat. Rudy Giuliani, New York City's fabulously successful but then-reeling Republican mayor, loomed as a potential opponent. Rudy would eventually drop out, but the Clintons couldn't resist: Despite a terrorist onslaught that had just claimed over 200 innocent lives in Kenya and Tanzania, the Clintons decided Hillary's prospects could be advanced if Bill pardoned terrorists.

To appease Democrat activists, who somehow seem always to have a soft spot for assassins, Clinton pardoned 16 members of the FALN terror organization who'd set off scores of bombs in the United States. How better to lock up the Puerto Rican vote …. in an election Hillary could have won with no Puerto Rican votes?

That, though, was little-league stuff. On the last day of his presidency — that is, on his way out the door, with no debts to pay and no groundwork to lay — Bill Clinton decided it was time to use his raw, unreviewable power to make his bones with the Communist radicals he'd always admired but lacked the courage to join.

The embassy bombings were almost a distant memory. Not three months had passed since terrorists bombed the U.S.S. Cole, murdering 17 American sailors and nearly sinking a U.S. destroyer. No matter. Clinton's last official acts in office included the pardons of Susan Rosenberg, a Weatherman terrorist serving a richly deserved 58-year sentence, and Linda Sue Evans, a Weatherman terrorist serving a richly deserved 40-year sentence.

Barack Obama has an inexplicable relationship with Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers — and Ayers's wife, the equally disgusting Weatherman terrorist Bernadine Dohrn. It's a disqualifying relationship. All that needed to happen was for Obama's opponent to point it out.

Hillary Clinton couldn't point it out.

You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Remember this story the next time you hear another argument about how improper private behaviors have no relevance to that person's public role. Yes, there are real and unforeseen public consequences to "private" behaviors. Maybe even four years of an Obama presidency.

Now think of how Obama dismisses his longstanding connection to unrepentant Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers. Is that really all that different from how Clinton dismissed his relationship with Lewinsky? Yet, at another level, a "private" relationship with potentially far more serious public implications?

Then ask yourself what could be the real and unforeseen consequences in the future should America, at a time of war and growing tensions in the world, elect a man as president who not only has longstanding relationships with terrorists, convicted felons, and other people who openly state their hatred and disdain for America but can't come out and say he is committed to leading us to victory against the terrorists who threaten our very existence.

Thanks, Bill and Hillary.

Clarifying the deeper problems with Barack Obama

What is so unsettling about Barack Obama?

Jay Nordlinger says:

...What's depressing, to a person like me, is that Obama has mastered the trick of coming off as perfectly moderate — even when your career and thought have been very different. Listening to Obama last night, you would have taken him to be a Sam Nunn, David Boren type. No ACORN, no Ayers, no Wright, no community-organizin' radicalism, no nothing. He certainly knows what it takes to appeal to people in a general election. Then, once he's in — if he gets in — he will govern as far to the left as possible...

I agree with much of what Nordlinger says but think the issue requires further elaboration.

Underneath Obama's very liberal tax-and-spend policies which - for some of us - would be reason alone not to support him, there are some deeper philosophical problems with Obama's world view, a troubling world view which he layers on top of a track record devoid of tangible accomplishments. The differences in his world view from mainstream American values are not like the differences between Ford Republicans and Reagan Republicans or what used to be differences between Scoop Jackson Dems and other Dems years ago.

Why is this important? Because, since no one can predict today what world events will occur in the next four years, understanding Obama's world view offers insights into how he might approach issues should he be elected President.

There are many unanswered and disturbing questions about Obama's radical associations, associations unparalleled in the history of a major party candidate for President. These associations have been written about in various places such as here and here. More links can be found here, here, and here. Add to that spending 20 years attending a church whose pastor preached hatred of America, including getting married there and having children baptized there.

No less significant is Obama's prior affiliation with ACORN. More here.

Then there is his association with convicted felon Tony Rezko and questions about Obama's house purchase.

More on Obama's poor judgment in selecting associates here.

This heritage of radical associations translates periodically into Obama articulating an unsettling post-modern and relativistic view of the country he says he wants to lead, as he did in last Friday's debate:

...But then Obama concludes [the first debate] by saying "I don't think any of us can say that our standing in the world now, the way children around the world look at the United States, is the same." CLANG. He then states, reminiscent of Kerry's "Global Test", that we need to "show the world that we will invest in education" and "things that will allow people to live their dreams".

The Obama campaign spent months countering Michelle Obama's "for the first time in my life I'm proud of my country" statement and then Obama himself suggests our ideals and values don't inspire the world, and that we ourselves realize our values and ideals are suspect.

Criticizing George Bush or any of our other political leaders is one thing. Contending America's ideals and values are somehow suspect is a breathtaking statement for a prospective commander in chief to make, especially when thousands of Americans have given life and limb, sons and daughters, in brave demonstration of our ideals and values.

In case Mr. Obama missed it, millions remain sufficiently inspired to try to come to America; our values and ideals still cause the rest of the world to look to us first whenever there's a crisis. And we always respond.

Like Obama and millions of other Americans, my father also came to America from another country. Not after writing letters trying to come to a prestigious college here, but after escaping from the death squads of the Soviet empire. Once here, he saluted the American flag every single day. And although he has since passed, I'm certain he'd marvel at our ideals and values today. He'd hold Obama's statement in contempt.

Insulting the values and ideals of America may be fashionable in the salons occupied by William Ayers and Rev. Wright. It may be a matter of course at swanky fundraisers in San Francisco attended by pampered glitterati. But it's not something likely to fly with those who expect their president to have unwavering pride in America and the sacrifices of its best and bravest.

No less unsettling are the instances of how his campaign seeks to silence criticism from domestic opponents via Alinsky-Chicago thuggery, with the latest examples being here, here (follow the links), here, and here.

Steyn writes:

...As Stanley Kurtz, Milt Rosenberg and David Freddoso can tell you, this pattern is well established: The Obama campaign's response to uncongenial allegations is not to rebut them but to use its muscle to squash the authors. This is especially true when it comes to attempts to lift the curtain however briefly on the Senator's mysterious past...

Even more from Stanley Kurtz here:

...As I point out in "Not Without a Fight," what really protects free speech here in the United States is the value we place upon it, and the shame we would feel handling criticism by way of law suits. When it comes to silencing critics, on the other hand, the Obama campaign appears to have no shame. That augers poorly for the culture of free exchange. As Tocqueville reminds us, habits of the heart, even more than the law itself, stand as our most important protections against tyranny. If Obama continues to break one free-speech taboo after another, the law will surely follow.

So continued media silence on Obama’s intimidation tactics threatens not only the fairness of this election, but press freedom itself. Yet to defend the freedom of the right as if it were their own is something our left-leaning press has forgotten how to do.

And if Stalinist-type intimidation isn't used against its domestic opponents, the Obama campaign has been willing to play the race card all while claiming it is the other side which is playing the race card, a cynical move that would make George Orwell smirk.

While he tries to silence domestic opponents in a most un-American way, Obama has said he is willing to meet with Castro, Chavez, Ahmadinejad, etc. - dictators committed to destroying freedom and America - and to do so without preconditions in the first year of his presidency.

Furthermore, even as he is willing to meet with the tyrants of this world, it is particularly disturbing that Obama is unwilling to come out and stand up for America's interests in the broader world:

...Saturday, before the Sportsmen Alliance, John McCain had this to say:

I noticed during our debate that even as American troops are fighting on two fronts, Barack Obama couldn't bring himself to use the word "victory" even once. The Obama campaign saved that word for the spin room, where they tried to convince themselves and others that their man had left the stage victorious. Well, maybe this attitude helps explain why it wasn't such a good night for my opponent. When Americans look at a candidate, they can tell the difference between mere self-confidence and an abiding confidence in our country. They know that the troops who are bravely fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan want to come home in victory and in honor. And we need a president who shares their confidence — a commander in chief who believes that victory for America will be achieved.

McCain has a point. With the help of the nifty "Speech Wars" tool, I checked on Barck Obama. It appears that Obama didn't use the word "victory" in his Denver speech either. It is simply not something he says much. (You have to go back to the Berlin speech to find "victory" in an Obama speech – generally referring to what we did in the past.)

Should that concern voters? Only if you think our national security requires victory over determined enemies. If you think it's all about getting along and making ourselves understood or convincing others to like us, this should be of no concern.

Just to add a bit more to the picture, Charles Krauthammer documents all of Obama's recent policy flip-flops and concludes:

...When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia — only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.

Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.

On top of all these issues, Peter Robinson comments on the personal character issue of Obama's lack of any sense of humor:

...What Barack Obama lacks is simple--and a lot more important than it might seem: a sense of humor.

Evident throughout his campaign for the Democratic nomination--can you recall a single Obama witticism?--this proved especially striking at his party's convention. In an acceptance speech of some 4,600 words, Obama provided not a single good laugh...

Gov. Palin's performance undermined Sen. Obama in two ways. It made him appear prim and self-serious by comparison. And it thoroughly unnerved the man...Even now, more than two weeks later, he has yet to employ humor effectively. Instead he has "sharpened his speeches," to quote the Associated Press, adding "bite." Obama can take a blow. What he can't take is a joke...

Humor reveals character. It shows voters that a candidate possesses a certain fundamental confidence in himself and in the country. It demonstrates that he's in command...

Newt Gringrich offers another take on Obama's non-existent track of record of accomplishments, noting how all Obama has ever done is talk and write about himself.

And when talk by Obama about his candidacy includes messianic wording like this

...I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless...this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal...this was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

it is enough to make one agree with the commentator who stated: "Maybe Obama thinks he is running for dictator or he thinks he is the messiah. Does he even know that our system of government was not designed for this type of radical change?...This is just Kool Aid Cult stuff."

If you had asked me how I was going to vote just over one month ago, I would have told you that I was seriously considering sitting out this election. That I had no particular liking for either presidential candidate. I still don't care for McCain.

But now I must say that the more I learn about Obama, the more frightening it is to consider him leading our great country in an increasing hostile world.

ADDENDUM

In the Comments section, TomW provides a link to this IBD series about Obama.

ADDENDUM #2

A friend writes these words after reading the post: "Very nice. But I must say that nothing is more convincing of the danger of Obama than reading the Audacity of Hope, which I did a week ago. Anyone who can suffer through that and not be persuaded that this is a very dangerous, if slyly talented man, must be a pre-determined convert."

Re: Sarah Palin, revisited

We've all seen movies or TV shows in which the unlikely, different-from-the-norm character somehow acquires a position of influence. (For some reason the mid-'80s classics Brewster's Millions and Protocol spring to mind.) And it always seems so utterly natural when they convey their charmingly naive selves with perfect ease when the plot puts them before microphones and reporters' cameras.

Now, I've no reason to have even formed expectations for Sarah Palin, but the inaccuracy of Everyman's eloquence in film came to mind when I watched her interview with Katie Couric (once, that is, I got over Couric's crystal clear conveyance of scorn). Palin's pauses followed by a repeat of what she'd just said are strongly suggestive of a mental Rolodex flipping: The question is asked, an answer thought, the answer compared against a lists of dos and don'ts, and a more compatible answer sought and spoken. Whether that's habitual or evidence of overhandling, I don't know, but I'm still inclined to give a successful woman (in politics, no less!) the benefit of the doubt on that count.

With that, I'll confess a certain personal sympathy to her plight. There are a number of activities at which I'm reasonably competent, and sometimes, I find new ones that I'm able to learn with relative rapidity. The premier exception to that general proposition is sales, and I think the reason is that my strategy when faced with new challenges is to fit their components to my skills and personality, whereas sales require one to make a skill of mirroring personalities. When, for example, I've been tasked with managing people as part of my job, I've fallen back on my organizational abilities and willingness to fill any gaps personally (staying ahead of coworkers and leading by example, as it were). An extemporaneous motivator, I am not, so when I've been pressed to be more taskmaster than job-site adviser, I've found myself at a loss.

There's something of that in Palin's awkward pauses and garbled responses, I think. The loner struggling to hew to the team line for the greater cause. I could, of course, be projecting. Although perhaps it's still possible (albeit a hair shy of fantastical) that the campaign is using the media's predictable hostility to lull the other side into yet another rope-a-dope.

Sarah Palin, revisited

Some of us had an initial positive impression of Sarah Palin. At the same time, we acknowledged that only time would tell whether she could cut it on the national stage. Her selection also brought out into full public view again the political agenda of the feminists and Left as the attempts to destroy Palin reached new extremes. All of which were discussed in the earlier posts noted below at the bottom.

Palin did not do well in the Couric interview. She seems to have lost her mojo. Is it because she is being overhandled? Is it because she is in over her head? Or both? Does she have the talent but her time on the national stage is premature? Who knows. Only more time and exposure will tell.

Here are several recent commentaries which speculate on these questions:

Free Sarah Palin!
Has the McCain Campaign Broken Sarah Palin?
Should Palin walk the plank?

Unlike those who are afraid of competition and the resulting success or failure, let's see how it plays out. Let her be herself and let the chips fall where they fall. No bailouts.

EARLIER POSTS:

Where is the "REDO" button?
The complete Palin interview with Gibson
The Bush doctrine and the psyching out of Barack Obama
Left-wing feminist masters to Sarah Palin: How dare you try to leave our plantation!
Sarah Palin's speech
The ferociously totalitarian response of the Left to Sarah Palin: Sexism, intolerance, and fear
Sarah Palin's refreshing words

Presidential Debate Open Thread

Something witty may be retrofitted into this space later.

UPDATE:

I like this new more aggressive Jim Lehrer. Where's he been for his last 30 years of interviews?

Presidential Debate Open Thread

Something witty may be retrofitted into this space later.

UPDATE:

I like this new more aggressive Jim Lehrer. Where's he been for his last 30 years of interviews?

Yep. Scary.

Irwin Stelzer writes New Capitalism: Market capitalism in the United States will never be the same:

No matter what deal is finally cut between Hank Paulson, the Democrats, and unhappy conservative Republicans, or even if no deal at all is finally worked out, market capitalism as practiced in the United States will never be the same. Well, "never" might be too long, so let's say it won't be the same for a very, very long time.

We are witnessing a radical modification of capitalism. Some of this is obvious. We know that the old view that some banks are too big to fail has been augmented by the view that some financial institutions are too interconnected to fail. So Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, AIG and others are bailed out by one device or other, even though no depositors were directly threatened by the demise of these institutions. Carnegie Mellon economist Allan Meltzer might be right when he says, "Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin." But it seems safe to say that our tolerance of failure is just not what it used be. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter talked of capitalism's awesome power of creative destruction. Were he still around he would be unhappy to note that we are in for both less destruction and less creativity. There is a growing desire for shelter from the storms of market economics.

But the change in attitudes and policy towards failure--the greater willingness of policymakers to risk moral hazard in order to reduce risks of threat to the financial system--is only one of the changes reshaping market capitalism.

Another is increased dissatisfaction with the way incomes are distributed. The picture of executives of failed companies strolling off with multimillion dollar bonuses has made more and more people wonder whether what goes on in the nation's boardrooms is a search for ways to reward stellar performance, or a meeting of cronies to decide how to cut up the pie, far from the view of the shareholder-owners of the company.

More important is the fact that globalization, which along with free trade has done more to alleviate world poverty than all the misbegotten foreign aid programs combined, is now producing results that are seen as unacceptable. Over one billion workers in India, China and elsewhere have entered the world labor market, putting pressure on the wages of low and not-so-low income workers. At the same time, globalization has expanded the canvass on which skilled managers can paint. That makes them more valuable, and higher-paid.

This is not the place to resolve the dispute over whether the non-rich have done well or badly in recent years. Suffice it to say that the benefits of free trade--the t-shirts and sneakers in Wal-Mart, the rising living standard of developing-country workers--are less obvious to many Americans than the costs. The perception that trade has inflicted collateral damage on innocent bystanders has taken hold sufficiently to allow Barack Obama to attack trade-opening measures, and to force John McCain to promise training and other programs to soften its consequences. Neither believes the market should be left free to sort things out, despite America's record of creating millions of new jobs every year.

Add suspicion over executive salaries, ostentatious displays of wealth by some private equity and other financial types, pressures on real wages of ordinary workers, the feeling that free trade is not "fair" trade, and you have a cocktail that might prove lethal to the principle of minimalist government intervention.

Instead we have a capitalism in which financial institutions trade freedom for the protection of access to the government's balance sheet (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley). In which institutions under stress accept pervasive government regulation in return for insurance against failure. In which the advantages of free trade are sacrificed in the interests of preserving jobs in industries best left to adjust to the winds of change. In which regulation of executive salaries is seen as a necessary political price to pay for preventing systemic failure of the banking system. In which taxes on the "rich" and not-so-rich are seen as necessary to offset the inequities of the income distribution system created by capitalism as we have known it.

These changes are already being played out in the campaign for the American presidency. Barack Obama is calling for higher taxes on the "rich"--families with incomes of $250,000 or more--with the proceeds to be redistributed to the middle class. He also wants to end free trade deals that his union supporters tell him depress the wages of blue collar workers.

Meanwhile, John McCain is railing against Wall Street bankers and assorted other villains, including most notably short sellers. And promising to fund huge training programs to enable workers displaced by trade to find new jobs in growth industries--the intelligent man's alternative to protectionism.

Both do have a tiny problem: they have made promises they cannot possibly keep, now that the government has taken uncounted billions onto its balance sheet. McCain will find it impossible to cut the corporate tax rate, and Obama to spend billions on infrastructure, alternative energy and an expansion of the social programs dear to his party.

None of this is meant to do more than catalogue the changes that are occurring far from the glare of the headlines that instead report day-to-day fluctuations in markets and in the progress of various bail-out plans. Those changes will undoubtedly deny us of some of the benefits of the creativity and dynamism of a capitalism in which failure was a greater goad to achievement. Sic gloria transit mundi.

Of Economics, Leadership, and Debate

I took the Anchor Rising Slot with with Matt Allen on 630AM/99.7FM WPRO last night to talk about John McCain's return to work, this week, and Barack Obama's pledge to debate. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

McCain Suspends Campaign to Assist Bailout Negotiation

From Drudge:

MCCAIN SUSPENDS CAMPAIGN TO FOCUS ON ECONOMY; WANTS DEBATE DELAY

Wed Sept 24 2008 14:58:02 ET

McCain: America this week faces an historic crisis in our financial system. We must pass legislation to address this crisis. If we do not, credit will dry up, with devastating consequences for our economy. People will no longer be able to buy homes and their life savings will be at stake. Businesses will not have enough money to pay their employees. If we do not act, ever corner of our country will be impacted. We cannot allow this to happen.

Last Friday, I laid out my proposal and I have since discussed my priorities and concerns with the bill the Administration has put forward. Senator Obama has expressed his priorities and concerns.This morning, I met with a group of economic advisers to talk about the proposal on the table and the steps that we should take going forward.I have also spoken with members of Congress to hear their perspective.

It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the Administration' proposal. I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.

Tomorrow morning, I will suspend my campaign and return to Washington after speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative. I have spoken to Senator Obama and informed him of my decision and have asked him to join me.

I am calling on the President to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself. It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.

We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved.I am directing my campaign to work with the Obama campaign and the commission on presidential debates to delay Friday night's debate until we have taken action to address this crisis.

I am confident that before the markets open on Monday we can achieve consensus on legislation that will stabilize our financial markets, protect taxpayers and homeowners, and earn the confidence of the American people. All we must do to achieve this is temporarily set politics aside, and I am committed to doing so.

Following September 11th, our national leaders came together at a time of crisis. We must show that kind of patriotism now. Americans across our country lament the fact that partisan divisions in Washington have prevented us from addressing our national challenges. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country.

Developing...

The report yesterday by ABC's Jake Tapper that both Democrats and Republicans on Capital Hill had balked at approving any bailout unless McCain voted yea may have in part precipitated the senator's decision.

[Tapper] It's McCain who may hold the fate of the $700b bailout proposal in his hands.

* * * *

And Democratic leaders have told the White House a deal without McCain on board will mean no sale.

* * * *

[Senate President Harry Reid] "We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do."

ADDENDUM

Senator Obama has declined to postpone the debate or suspend his campaign. From Reuters.

Democrat Barack Obama on Wednesday rejected opponent John McCain's call to postpone the first U.S. presidential debate to work on legislation dealing with the worst U.S. financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Obama made the statement shortly after McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona, called for Friday's debate to be postponed and said he would suspend his campaign to help work out agreement among lawmakers on a proposed $700 billion financial bailout plan.

"What I'm planning to do now is debate on Friday," Obama said from the hotel where he has been preparing for the debate.

"It's my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible for dealing with this mess," he said. "I think that it is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once."

Aren't some situations serious enough to warrant the president's full attention? Wouldn't this be one of them? Further, Senator McCain did not suspend his campaign indefinitely; he proposed to negotiate a resolution with all parties by Monday morning.

Faced with such a serious problem, would a President Obama "multitask", inclusive of tending to his reelection campaign, through a resolution?

Where is the "REDO" button?

This week has been the latest version of the perfect storm on why it seems appropriate to say, how about we punt on all the presidential candidates and press the REDO button.

John McCain
George Will
Back to Square One
More on Andrew Cuomo

Sarah Palin
(okay, what follows below is a bit dated because the only visible thing this week is actually a positive)
The Bush Doctrine
More on the Gibson interview

Barack Obama
Obama's Leftism
Obama’s Challenge: The campaign speaks to "Radicalism."
Obama and Ayers
Pushed Radicalism On Schools
Barack's Glass House

Joe Biden
Victor Davis Hanson
Interview with Katie Couric
Historical ignorance
No coal plants, either

And none of the above even touches how, under George Bush, we are seeing the nationalization of the financial sector of the economy. A fitting conclusion for a man who brought us outrageous domestic spending increases, NCLB, and the new Medicare spending program.

Then there is the proposal to ban short-selling. Heck, why don't we just turn over all matters to control by Washington politicians and bureaucrats since they seem to understand everything better than the rest of us.

Or touches the likes of Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid, neither of whom is capable of talking about public policy issues such as energy here and here (or theology issues, in Pelosi's case) without sounding like a buffoon.

Where is the REDO button? Too bad we can't send all of Washington's politicians and bureacurats on an extended vacation. Even a paid vacation as long as they all got out of town so they stopped messing with our freedom and our hard-earned monies!

Creeping socialism is shifting into galloping mode right in front of our eyes. Scary.

Christopher Hitchens Identifies the Candidate Stronger on Pakistan

That would be Senator Barack Obama.

First, from the text of Senator Obama's mid-July speech on Iraq and Afghanistan.

The greatest threat to that security lies in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where terrorists train and insurgents strike into Afghanistan. We cannot tolerate a terrorist sanctuary, and as President, I won't. We need a stronger and sustained partnership between Afghanistan, Pakistan and NATO to secure the border, to take out terrorist camps, and to crack down on cross-border insurgents. We need more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, more Predator drones in the Afghan border region. And we must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights.

Make no mistake: we can't succeed in Afghanistan or secure our homeland unless we change our Pakistan policy. We must expect more of the Pakistani government, but we must offer more than a blank check to a General who has lost the confidence of his people. It's time to strengthen stability by standing up for the aspirations of the Pakistani people.

[Side question: How does this differ from President George Bush's policy on Iraq and his aspirations for the Iraqi people?]

Now, from Hitchens' September 15 column Fighting Words on slate.com. It should be noted that the column was posted days prior to the horrendous attack on the Islamabad Marriott, an attack believed to have been carried out by the Pakistan Taleban.

Meanwhile, and on Pakistani soil and under the very noses of its army and the ISI, the city of Quetta and the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas are becoming the incubating ground of a reorganized and protected al-Qaida. Sen. Barack Obama has, if anything, been the more militant of the two presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the "good" war in Afghanistan with the "bad" one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he's ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

Levelling

Sen. Joseph Biden, September 18, 2008:

“We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of middle class people. Anyone making over $250,000….Is going to pay more. You got it. It’s time to be patriotic, Kate. It’s time to jump in, it’s time to be part of the deal, it’s time to help get America out of the rut.”

Alexis de Tocqueville:

The evils that freedom sometimes brings with it are immediate; they are apparent to all, and all are more or less affected by them. The evils that extreme equality may produce are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame; they are seen only at intervals; and at the moment at which they become most violent, habit already causes them to be no longer felt.

The advantages that freedom brings are shown only by the lapse of time, and it is always easy to mistake the cause in which they originate. The advantages of equality are immediate, and they may always be traced from their source.

Political liberty bestows exalted pleasures from time to time upon a certain number of citizens. Equality every day confers a number of small enjoyments on every man. The charms of equality are every instant felt and are within the reach of all; the noblest hearts are not insensible to them, and the most vulgar souls exult in them. The passion that equality creates must therefore be at once strong and general. Men cannot enjoy political liberty unpurchased by some sacrifices, and they never obtain it without great exertions. But the pleasures of equality are self-proffered; each of the petty incidents of life seems to occasion them, and in order to taste them, nothing is required but to live.

McCain Explains Government's Role in Current Financial Crisis

John McCain today (via The Corner):

The financial crisis we're living through today started with the corruption and manipulation of our home mortgage system. At the center of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who succeeded in persuading Congress and the administration to ignore the festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

These quasi-public corporations led our housing system down a path where quick profit was placed before sound finance. They institutionalized a system that rewarded forcing mortgages on people who couldn't afford them, while turning around and selling those bad mortgages to the banks that are now going bankrupt. Using money and influence, they prevented reforms that would have curbed their power and limited their ability to damage our economy. And now, as ever, the American taxpayers are left to pay the price for Washington's failure.

Two years ago, I called for reform of this corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Congress did nothing. The Administration did nothing. Senator Obama did nothing, and actually profited from this system of abuse and scandal. While Fannie and Freddie were working to keep Congress away from their house of cards, Senator Obama was taking their money. He got more, in fact, than any other member of Congress, except for the Democratic chairmen of the committee that oversees them. And while Fannie Mae was betraying the public trust, somehow its former CEO had managed to gain my opponent's trust to the point that Senator Obama actually put him in charge of his vice presidential search. {Johnson resigned over the controversy --ed.}

This CEO, Mr. Johnson, walked off with tens of millions of dollars in salary and bonuses for services rendered to Fannie Mae, even after authorities discovered accounting improprieties that padded his compensation. Another CEO for Fannie Mae, Mr. Raines, has been advising Senator Obama on housing policy. {This charge is based on Washington Post reporting and the Post now says it's a stretch, apparently, it is doubting its own veracity -- ed. This even after Fannie Mae was found to have committed quote "extensive financial fraud" under his leadership. Like Mr. Johnson, Mr. Raines walked away with tens of millions of dollars. {All links added -- ed.}

"Two Faced": Does a Constituency Even Exist for the Obama Campaign's Latest Ad?

One of the requirements for American citizenship is naturally:

Language

Applicants for naturalization must be able to read, write, speak, and understand words in ordinary usage in the English language.

Applicants exempt from this requirement are those who on the date of filing:

- have been residing in the United States subsequent to a lawful admission for permanent residence for periods totaling 15 years or more and are over 55 years of age;

- have been residing in the United States subsequent to a lawful admission for permanent residence for periods totaling 20 years or more and are over 50 years of age; or

- have a medically determinable physical or mental impairment, where the impairment affects the applicant’s ability to learn English.

Such a requirement is reflected in the immigration laws of most if not all other countries. The recent Barack Obama ad referring to John McCain as two-faced is voiced entirely in Spanish. ABC's Jake Tapper dissects the accuracy issues of the ad's content, here. [The ad itself is apparently no longer available at the Obama website.]

The target of all campaign ads sponsored by McCain, Obama and their supporters is presumed to be eligible voters. My question is simple if, perhaps, naive. In view of the reasonable and universal citizenship requirement to learn the language of the destination country, what is the necessity to create a campaign ad in some other language?

Equal Pay? Acta non Verba Senator Obama

Senator Obama is accusing Senator McCain (via this ad, for instance) of not being for equal pay for equal work (specifically as it concerns woman and men). This is based on John McCain's opposition to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Legislation is fine, Senator Obama, but what about putting your policy position into practice?

"Barack Obama says he's for equal pay for women, but women working in his Senate office earn an average of $9,000 less than men. By contrast, women in John McCain's Senate office actually earn an average of nearly $2,000 more than men. The American people understand that real leadership for the change we need is all about what you do, not just empty words." -- McCain-Palin spokesman Brian Rogers

The Boston Globe tries to spin this:

The study that McCain's campaign cites, however, notes that a major reason for the disparity is that McCain has more women in senior, higher-paid positions -- not that women are being paid less than men for the same job.

So, let me get this straight. To follow the Globe's line of reasoning: just because Senator McCain has more top-level--and thus higher-paid--women campaign staffers than Senator Obama doesn't mean that Senator McCain necessarily supports equal opportunity and equitable pay for women. I guess he just makes it look that way by his actions.

Press to McCain: "Don't Cross Us... or Our Messiah"

With suspect editing of the VP candidate's recent interview and dueling front page hit pieces against her, yesterday, Boston Phoenix blogger Adam Reilly would say that "by declaring war on the media, McCain has given them license to cover his candidacy the way they should have from the beginning." The move "could actually be a corrective to the fawning press treatment the allegedly liberal media has for years lavished on McCain."

Now that the Democratic and Republican pep rallies are over, the candidates desperately need the press’s assistance to get their message out. But now that McCain has given the press the finger, most members of the media will be a lot less inclined to do anything that aids his campaign.

Some of them may actually respond by leveling direct, aggressive challenges at the McCain-Palin ticket.

So much for the pretense of news being an uninvested, objective medium! (It's just Obama's turn to for lavishment, I suppose.)

Rather than an objective analysis, however, Reilly's piece reads as a balm for a newly insecure mainstream media. Never fear that our candidate doesn't have the lead one would expect based on our candidacy, the subtext goes, the other guy has finally given us reason to take off the gloves.

That's not unexpected. What's surprising is how very Old Media the column sounds. As far as I can tell, it's now an open question as to whether candidates "desperately need" the establishment media to communicate with voters. Those massively successful "The One" ads grew their buzz on the Internet, which is a force that The Press can no longer ignore, and which by its very openness exposes egomaniacal twists of the truth — whether out of liberalism or revenge — as politicking masked as journalism.

The complete Palin interview with Gibson

Here is the complete transcript of the Palin interview with Gibson.

Now everyone can see what was edited out. NewBusters comments:

A transcript of the unedited interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson clearly shows that ABC News edited out crucial portions of the interview that showed Palin as knowledgeable or presented her answers out of context...

we see that Palin was not nearly as hostile towards Russia as was presented in the edited interview...

We also see from Palin's...remark, which was also edited out, that she is far from some sort of latter day Cold Warrior which the edited interview made her seem to be...

Palin's extended remarks about defending our NATO allies were edited out to make it seem that she was ready to go to war with Russia...That answer presented Palin as a bit too knowledgeable for the purposes of ABC News and was, of course, edited out.

Palin's answers about a nuclear Iran were carefully edited to the point where she was even edited out in mid-sentence to make it seem that Palin favored unilateral action against that country...

Laughably, a remark by Gibson that indicated he agreed with Palin was edited out...Gibson took her point about Lincoln's words but we wouldn't know that by watching the interview since it was left on the cutting room floor...

H/T Power Line.

And, after a performance like that, the MSM is upset over how IT is being treated. LOL.

You would think at some point these people would catch on that their behaviors and words make them come across like a bunch of partisan imbeciles.

ADDENDUM

The contrast is stark:

Sending lots of people into Alaska to investigate Palin's history is fine. Aggressively questioning Palin is fine.

But it is the double standard which is appalling. Not sending anybody into Chicago to do a similar investigation of PRESIDENTIAL candidate Obama doesn't cut it. What about Wright, Ayers, Woods Foundation, Rezko? There you have specific and explicitly known questionnable behaviors and affiliations by Obama and the MSM has no interest. Combining that with a lack of aggressive questioning of Obama about these dubious affiliations only magnifies the contrast, magnifies the bias. In addition, the MSM also don't even have any interest in digging into Obama's missing years earlier in his life.

But the MSM has spent months publishing glowing, uncritical stories about Obama, ignoring all the strange and seedy relationships in his past. Or his lack of experience and how easily rattled he has gotten. And then publish stories about Palin which contain either thin gruel or outright falsehoods. Flagrant contrast.

Missed Opportunity on How Our Constitution Works

As loath as we must all be to slip into the mire of political discussion on The View, I have to note that McCain missed an excellent opportunity to provide a grown-up explanation for a reckless question from Whoopi