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September 2008
Monday September 29, 2008
O'S DANGEROUS PALS BARACK'S 'ORGANIZER' BUDS PUSHED FOR BAD MORTGAGES
Posted by: Iconoclast at 11:15PM CST on September 29, 2008

O'S DANGEROUS PALS

BARACK'S 'ORGANIZER' BUDS PUSHED FOR BAD MORTGAGES

By STANLEY KURTZ

Chutzpah: ACORN's drive to lower mortgage standards paved the way for the meltdown - yet last week, it was holding protests like this one in Florida, trying to get a cut of the financial-market-rescue bill.
Chutzpah: ACORN's drive to lower mortgage standards paved the way for the meltdown - yet last week, it was holding protests like this one in Florida, trying to get a cut of the financial-market-rescue bill.

Posted: 3:53 am
September 29, 2008

WHAT exactly does a "community organizer" do? Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

THE seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Commu nity Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.

Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA - and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.

In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions.

Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up their bad loans and offering them for sale on world markets.

Fannie and Freddie acted in response to Clinton administration pressure to boost homeownership rates among minorities and the poor. However compassionate the motive, the result of this systematic disregard for normal credit standards has been financial disaster.

ONE key pioneer of ACORN's subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott - an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae's mortgage policies.

Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in "direct action" - organizers' term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a "living wage" law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.

In February 1990, Illinois regulators held what was believed to be the first-ever state hearing to consider blocking a thrift merger for lack of compliance with CRA. The challenge was filed by ACORN, led by Talbott. Officials of Bell Federal Savings and Loan Association, her target, complained that ACORN pressure was undermining its ability to meet strict financial requirements it was obligated to uphold and protested being boxed into an "affirmative-action lending policy." The following years saw Talbott featured in dozens of news stories about pressuring banks into higher-risk minority loans.

IN April 1992, Talbott filed an other precedent-setting com plaint using the "community support requirements" of the 1989 savings-and-loan bailout, this time against Avondale Federal Bank for Savings. Within a month, Chicago ACORN had organized its first "bank fair" at Malcolm X College and found 16 Chicago-area financial institutions willing to participate.

Two months later, aided by ACORN organizer Sandra Maxwell, Talbott announced plans to conduct demonstrations in the lobbies of area banks that refused to attend an ACORN-sponsored national bank "summit" in New York. She insisted that banks show a commitment to minority lending by lowering their standards on downpayments and underwriting - for example, by overlooking bad credit histories.

By September 1992, The Chicago Tribune was describing Talbott's program as "affirma- tive-action lending" and ACORN was issuing fact sheets bragging about relaxations of credit standards that it had won on behalf of minorities.

And Talbott continued her effort to, as she put it, drag banks "kicking and screaming" into high-risk loans. A September 1993 story in The Chicago Sun-Times presents her as the leader of an initiative in which five area financial institutions (including two of her former targets, now plainly cowed - Bell Federal Savings and Avondale Federal Savings) were "participating in a $55 million national pilot program with affordable-housing group ACORN to make mortgages for low- and moderate-income people with troubled credit histories."

What made this program different from others, the paper added, was the participation of Fannie Mae - which had agreed to buy up the loans. "If this pilot program works," crowed Talbott, "it will send a message to the lending community that it's OK to make these kind of loans."

Well, the pilot program "worked," and Fannie Mae's message that risky loans to minorities were "OK" was sent. The rest is financial-meltdown history.

IT would be tough to find an "on the ground" community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early '90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama's legal services for a "motor voter" case and partnered with him on his 1992 "Project VOTE" registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago's Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation's board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

That committee's report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama's organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott's ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.

MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report ac knowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN - whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public's eye. The Woods Fund's claim to be "nonideological," it says, has "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship."

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?

The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN's Madeline Talbott in her pioneering efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards. Yet he supported Talbott in every conceivable way. He trained her personal staff and other aspiring ACORN leaders, he consulted with her extensively, and he arranged a major boost in foundation funding for her efforts.

And, as the leader of another charity, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama channeled more funding Talbott's way - ostensibly for education projects but surely supportive of ACORN's overall efforts.

In return, Talbott proudly announced her support of Obama's first campaign for state Senate, saying, "We accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer."

IN short, to understand the roots of the subprime-mort gage crisis, look to ACORN's Madeline Talbott. And to see how Talbott was able to work her mischief, look to Barack Obama.

Then you'll truly know what community organizers do.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.

Shocking Video Unearthed Democrats in their own words Covering up the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Scam that caused our Economic Crisis 

 


Sunday September 28, 2008
Barack “The Silencer” Obama’s Gangland Assault on Free Speech
Posted by: Iconoclast at 10:11PM CST on September 28, 2008

Barack “The Silencer” Obama’s Gangland Assault on Free Speech

By Michelle Malkin  •  August 29, 2008 08:57 AM


Photoshop credit: Bob Owens

My second syndicated column this week looks at the chilling trend of left-wing political speech-squelching and reports on the total apathy of the AWOL ACLU and fairweather free-speech crowd. Feel the chill yet?

***

Barack “The Silencer” Obama’s Gangland Assault on Free Speech
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008

Where are all the free speech absolutists when you need them? Over the past month, left-wing partisans and Democratic lawyers have waged a brass-knuckled intimidation campaign against GOP donors, TV and radio stations, and even an investigative journalist because they have all dared to question the radical cult of Barack Obama. A chill wind blows, but where the valiant protectors of political dissent are, nobody knows.

On August 11, I called the American Civil Liberties Union national headquarters in New York for comment about the Chicago gangland tactics of one of these groups — a nonprofit called “Accountable America” that is spearheaded by a former operative of the Obama-endorsing MoveOn outfit.

“Accountable America” is trolling campaign finance databases and targeting conservative donors with “warning” letters in a thuggish attempt to depress Republican fundraising. (You’ll be interested to know that the official registered agent of Accountable America is Laurence Gold, a high-powered attorney for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) who has testified before the Senate complaining about the use of campaign finance laws to stifle the speech of union workers — a pet cause of the ACLU.)

The ACLU press office failed to respond to my initial call. On August 13, I followed up through e-mail:

“I called on Monday requesting a statement from the ACLU about Accountable America’s intimidation campaign against GOP donors. What is the ACLU’s position with regard to such efforts? Waiting for your statement…”

ACLU press officer Pamela Bradshaw e-mailed back:

“Michelle, My apologies that I cannot be of more assistance, but we don’t have anyone available. Thanks, Pam.”

My reply: “Pam — Does this mean you don’t have anyone available today, this week, or for the foreseeable future?”

On August 20, after a week of silence, I forwarded the message again to the ACLU press office. No response.

So, I won’t bother asking the ACLU’s opinion of the latest wave of speech-squelching moves by the Obama campaign:

On Monday, Obama demanded that the Justice Department stop TV stations from airing a documented, accurate independent ad spotlighting Obama’s longtime working relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Obama summoned his followers to bombard stations, many of them owned by conservative-leaning Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails to squelch the commercial.

On Tuesday, the Obama campaign sent another letter to the Justice Department demanding investigation and prosecution of American Issues Project, the group that produced the Ayers ad, as well as Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, who funded it.

And on Wednesday, Obama exhorted his followers to sabotage the WGN radio show of veteran Chicago host and University of Chicago Professor Milt Rosenberg. Why? Because he invited National Review writer Stanley Kurtz to discuss his investigative findings about Obama’s ties to Ayers and the underwhelming results of their collaboration on a left-wing educational project sponsored by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The “Obama Action Wire” supplied Rosenberg’s call-in line and talking points like this:

“Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse. … It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves.”

Behind the glowing, peaceful facade lies Barack “The Silencer” Obama and his silent enablers on the left. While mainstream journalists schmoozed with liberal celebrities in Denver, practiced yoga with left-wing bloggers and received massages at the Google convention tent near touchy-feely Barackopolis, Team Obama was on an ugly, aggressive warpath sanctioned by Mr. Civility. While compassionate Obama prepared to stand before thousands of worshipers at Invesco Field, purporting to give voice to the voiceless, his Chicago-schooled campaign machine was working overtime to muzzle conservative critics. “We want it to stop,” ordered one pro-Obama caller to WGN.

Welcome to the future: the politics of Hope and Change enforced by the missionaries of Search and Destroy.


Wednesday September 24, 2008
Obama’s Challenge - The campaign speaks to “Radicalism.”
Posted by: Iconoclast at 5:15AM CST on September 24, 2008
Obama’s Challenge
The campaign speaks to “Radicalism.”

By Stanley Kurtz

Today, in a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools,” I offer a report on my research into the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), an education foundation once headed by Barack Obama. As I explained in “Chicago Annenberg Challenge Shutdown?” the Richard J. Daley Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago first agreed to grant, then abruptly denied me, access to the files of this foundation. Subsequently, the Daley Library again reversed their decision and made the CAC files available.

As I note in today’s Journal piece, I’ve conveyed the gist of my Annenberg findings to the Obama campaign and offered them a chance to respond. In reply, the Obama campaign has sent me an extended “on the record” statement about Obama’s role at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and about the nature of his relationship with Bill Ayers. I present that statement in its entirety here:

The Annenberg Challenge records only serve to establish clearly that while Barack Obama and Ayers had occasional contact during Obama’s 6 years of service on the bipartisan board, they did not work closely together to exchange and develop policy ideas. In fact, as these records show, Ayers attended a total 6 meetings of the Board during the 6 years of Obama’s Board service. And, as these same records also demonstrate, the advisory committee that Ayers co-chaired played no operational role whatsoever once the Challenge hired its Executive Director at the end of its first year.

Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s recruitment to the Board. Barack Obama was encouraged to run for Chair by Deborah Leff, with whom he served on another board, recommended by Pat Graham, and elected by the bipartisan founding board members: Susan Crown, Pat Graham, Stanley Ikenberry, Ray Romero, Arnold Weber, and Wanda White.

Barack Obama months ago confirmed that he had contact with Ayers during the course of his foundation work, and he pointed out that “We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education”. Senator Obama also said earlier this year that Ayers was “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis”, a fact that is not in any way contradicted by their contact through the Annenberg Challenge which ended 12 years ago, or by any of the Challenge records.

The suggestion that Ayers somehow dominated the policy or direction of the bipartisan Challenge Board, imprinting it with radical views, is absurd. The Annenberg Challenge was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend Walter Annenberg. Republican Governor Jim Edgar, who wrote to Walter Annenberg to encourage the creation of the Challenge, joined Mayor Daley to announce the formation of the Challenge and his administration continued to work closely on education reform with the Board. John McCain has praised an initiative funded by the Challenge. The Challenge’s work is still carried on today through to the bipartisan Chicago Public Education Fund, which coordinates closely Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley to improve teacher performance and has included such board members as Illinois Republican Party Chair Andrew McKenna.

The Challenge was established to allocate grants targeted to improve student performance and promote teacher training and leadership development in the Chicago Public Schools. One objective of the Challenge was to improve education for the bottom quartile of students attending Chicago Public Schools — whose reading, math, and basic skills scores improved markedly during the years in which the Challenge invested in city schools. Due to the work of the Challenge and the Fund, the number of board certified teachers in Chicago Public Schools has increased by the hundreds.

As is well known, by the time Barack Obama met him, Ayers was a faculty member at the University of Illinois, and he has held the title of ‘distinguished scholar’ the University of South Carolina for many years — Ayers held both positions at universities while Republican Governors served on their Boards of Trustees. The detestable acts that Ayers committed decades before occurred when Senator Obama was 8 years old and the Senator has condemned them in no uncertain terms.

While I’ve addressed this statement in the “Radicalism” piece, I’ll extend my response here.

Let’s first review CAC’s initial setup. In the first year, 1995, Obama headed the board, which made fiscal decisions, and Ayers co-chaired the Collaborative, which set education policy. During that first year, Obama’s formal responsibilities mandated close cooperation and coordination with the Collaborative. As board chair and president of the CAC corporation, Obama was authorized to “delegate to the Collaborative the development of collaborative projects and programs . . . to obtain assistance of the Collaborative in the development of requests for proposals . . . and to seek advice from the Collaborative regarding the programmatic aspects of grant proposals.” All this clearly involves significant consultation between the board, headed by Obama, and the Collaborative, co-chaired by Ayers.

During this initial year of 1995, Ayers also sat as an ex officio member of the board. The Obama campaign is trying to minimize his cooperation with Ayers by counting the number of board meetings where both sat together. That will not do. For one thing, as long as we’re counting occasions on which Obama and Ayers were together, the Obama campaign omits Obama’s appearances before the Collaborative, when it was co-chaired by Ayers. In 1995, Obama and Ayers also sat together on the board’s Governance Committee, with at least one independently scheduled meeting, and who knows how many others. Ayers and Obama were also part of a group of four instructed to draft the bylaws that would govern CAC. Surely that endeavor would have involved significant interaction between them. Then there’s the question of unrecorded meetings of both the board and the Collaborative. For example, the archives contain an intriguing note indicating that, although a CAC board meeting took place on July 25, 1995, “No minutes were recorded.” Were Ayers and Obama both present at that meeting? More important, what took place there?

The partnership between Ayers and Obama is about much more than the number of occasions on which the two were recorded together in the same room. As CAC board chair, Obama was essentially authorizing the funding of Ayers’s own educational projects, and the projects of Ayers’s radical allies. And especially in CAC’s first year, Ayers was largely in charge of the process. One of CAC’s own evaluations notes that during 1995, CAC was a “Founder-Led Foundation.” That is, Ayers was not merely an ex officio board member that year, but as the key founder and guiding spirit of CAC, he was effectively running the show.

This is consistent with what I found in the documents, which, for example, show Ayers not only speaking for the Collaborative before the board, but speaking in place of absent board members when they couldn’t be present to make a report. In general, in 1995, Ayers seems to be deeply involved in the work of every important body and committee at CAC. Of the three CAC founders, Ayers, Anne Hallett, an urban school advocate, and Warren Chapman, a state school reformer, only two, Ayers and Hallett, were Collaborative co-chairs and ex officio members of the board. And in a letter, Hallett describes herself as “joined at the hip” with Ayers. Clearly Ayers was the senior partner of the pair, given his prominence as an author, and as a national spokesman for educators consciously committed to politicizing their classrooms. Ayers is not only an activist, but a sort of father-figure to radical educators, authoring not only books of his own, but editing collections of like-minded authors, and putting together coalitions of educators, as he did at CAC. Hallett and Ayers may have co-chaired the Collaborative and together been ex-officio on the board, but this was largely Ayers’s show.


So when CAC’s own evaluators call 1995 the period of the “Founder-Led Foundation,” they are essentially saying that, in 1995, Ayers was the most powerful individual at CAC. The Obama campaign treats that suggestion as “absurd,” yet it is effectively made by CAC’s own evaluators. This needs to be kept in mind when considering the Obama campaign’s minimization of the Ayers-Obama connection that year. Ayers’s outsized role at CAC also needs to be kept in mind when considering the Obama camp’s claim that Deborah Leff and Patricia Graham first suggested Obama’s name as board chair. Given the degree of Ayers’s power at this early stage, it’s hard to believe that the ultimate decision on Obama’s elevation to the board was not made by Ayers himself. After all, Ayers and his immediate ally, Michael Klonsky, would end up seeking major financial support from CAC for their own “Small Schools” network. Ayers could not have been indifferent to the choice of board chair, since his own funding, and that of his many allies, would depend on it.

This brings us to the ethical concerns that led to a restructuring of the relationship between the CAC board and the Collaborative after 1995. The Obama camp points to this shift as if it quiets questions about the Obama-Ayers relationship. In fact, the post-1995 restructuring of CAC more urgently raises such questions. Precisely because Collaborative members like Ayers were themselves up for CAC grants, stronger barriers had to be created between the board and the Collaborative. So after 1995, Ayers appears to have lost his ex officio status on the board, and the Collaborative lost its theretofore prominent role in advising the board on grant applications.

I found little explicit discussion, in either board or Collaborative minutes, about the need for this major structural change. Could the unrecorded July 25, 1995, board meeting have addressed the issue? That meeting would have taken place just as the responses to the initial “Request for Proposals” were coming in. At that point, it would have been evident that many Collaborative members were seeking money from CAC itself. This was at the high point of Collaborative’s power, before CAC had an executive director in place. Perhaps discussion of the “self-dealing” issue, and the need to make structural changes, began at that meeting. The specific question of what happened at the unrecorded July 25, 1995 meeting is only speculation, of course. But we do know, from internal and external evaluations of CAC, that ethical concerns did in fact lead to a formal demotion of the Collaborative’s power after 1995.

While the appearance of self-dealing receded after CAC’s first year, the reality may still have been in place. Evaluators, both internal and external, have criticized CAC for over-committing its funds in 1995, and also for doing far too little to demand accountability from grant recipients, very much including the initial batch. Many of the initial grantees continued to receive funds for years. Evaluators consistently note the lack of flexibility in grants, and complain that the huge 1995 commitments, with relatively few changes in follow-on years, significantly undercut CAC’s impact and effectiveness.

So although Ayers may have lost his formal position on the board after 1995, and while the Collaborative he co-chaired may have surrendered its formal influence over the grant-making process, grant decisions Ayers put in place when he was effectively running CAC were respected for years by the board. And according to internal and external evaluations, this appears to have been greatly to the detriment of CAC. Why, then, did the board, chaired by Obama, adhere so assiduously to the funding decisions and strategies put in place by Ayers in 1995, even after CAC’s formal structure changed?

I’ll have more to say about that issue down the road, but you can read the key evaluations for yourself. (See Dorothy Shipps et al.,”The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” here; Alexander Russo, “From Frontline Leader to Rearguard Action: The Chicago Annenberg Challenge,” here; and Mark A. Smylie et al., “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: Successes, Failures, and Lessons for the Future, Part ,1 here and especially Part 2, here.)

The Obama camp denies CAC’s radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it’s true. Yet the story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds “captured” by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC’s story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg’s personal politics don’t change that one iota.

The fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees. Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones — Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers.

The Obama campaign notes that during the CAC years, achievement test scores improved markedly in the Chicago public schools. That’s true, but deeply misleading. The real source of improvement was the leadership of accountability-oriented Chicago Public School (CPS) CEO, Paul Vallas, who began to reform CPS in 1995, the year of CAC’s founding. Vallas established clear standards, began high-stakes testing, ended social promotion, forced thousands of students to attend summer school to advance a grade, and put failing schools on probation. That’s what pushed up Chicago test scores. CAC’s own final evaluation carefully compared students at schools with Annenberg projects and schools without. According to CAC’s own report: “There were no statistically significant differences in student achievement between Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools. This indicates that there was no Annenberg effect on achievement.” It also indicates that Annenberg failed, not because it’s altogether impossible to improve urban schools, but because CAC’s heavily politicized community-organizer partners weren’t any good at doing so.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.


Tuesday September 23, 2008
Obama's Church
Posted by: Iconoclast at 10:21PM CST on September 23, 2008

Obama's Church

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, January 15, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election 2008: Since we first drew attention to Barack Obama's Afrocentric church a full 12 months ago, other media have weighed in. And additional disturbing information has come to light.

Related Topics: Election 2008

At the core of the Democratic front-runner's faith — whether lapsed Muslim, new Christian or some mixture of the two — is African nativism, which raises political issues of its own.

In 1991, when Obama joined the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he pledged allegiance to something called the Black Value System, which is a code of non-Biblical ethics written by blacks, for blacks.

It encourages blacks to group together and separate from the larger American society by pooling their money, patronizing black-only businesses and backing black leaders. Such racial separatism is strangely at odds with the media's portrayal of Obama as a uniter who reaches across races.

The code also warns blacks to avoid the white "entrapment of black middle-classness," suggesting that settling for that kind of "competitive" success will rob blacks of their African identity and keep them "captive" to white culture.

In short, Obama's "unashamedly black" church preaches the politics of black nationalism. And its dashiki-wearing preacher — who married Obama and his wife and now acts as his personal spiritual adviser — is militantly Afrocentric. "We are an African people," the Rev. Jeremiah Wright reminds his flock, "and remain true to our native land, the mother continent."

Wright once traveled to Libya with black supremacist Louis Farrakhan to meet with terrorist leader Muammar Qaddafi. Last year at a Chicago gala, Wright honored his old pal Farrakhan, who's fond of calling whites "blue-eyed devils," for lifetime achievement.

It comes as little surprise then that Wright would think Israel a "racist" occupier of Palestinians, while describing the 9/11 attacks as a "wake-up call" to "white America" for ignoring the concerns of "people of color."

Wright makes the Rev. Jesse Jackson look almost moderate and patriotic. Yet this is whom Obama picked to baptize his daughters, plus to act as his "sounding board" during his presidential run.

The candidate already has heeded his church's "nonnegotiable commitment to Africa," spending an inordinate amount of his campaign time on the Kenyan crisis, for one. Obama has close family ties to Kenya, and even founded a school in his ancestral village — the Senator Obama School.

In the bloody conflict there, which already has claimed some 700 lives, Obama appears to have sided with opposition leader Raila Odinga, head of the same Luo tribe to which Obama's late Muslim father belonged.

Obama's older brother still lives there. Abongo "Roy" Obama is a Luo activist and a militant Muslim who argues that the black man must "liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture." He urges his younger brother to embrace his African heritage.

Beyond family politics, these ties have potential foreign policy, even national security, implications.

Odinga is a Marxist who reportedly has made a pact with a hard-line Islamic group in Kenya to establish Shariah courts throughout the country. He has also vowed to ban booze and pork and impose Muslim dress codes on women — moves favored by Obama's brother.

With al-Qaida strengthening its beachheads in Africa — from Algeria to Sudan to Somalia — the last thing the West needs is for pro-Western Kenya to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists.

Yet Obama interrupted his New Hampshire campaigning to speak by phone with Odinga, who claims to be his cousin. He did not speak with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki.

Would Obama put African tribal or family interests ahead of U.S. interests?

It's a valid question, and one voters deserve to have debated regardless of the racial and religious sensitivities. Thanks to a media blackout of these issues, the electorate has yet to benefit from a thorough vetting of Obama.

We have to wonder how much of the national agenda Africa would consume under an Obama administration. Of the six "world threats" Obama lists in stump speeches, at least half of them concern that chronically troubled Third World continent.

Yes, some of his African priorities are noble, such as fighting AIDS and genocide. But how much U.S. aid, resources and presidential time would he devote to them? How much is enough? If Bill Clinton was America's "first black president," would Barack Hussein Obama be our first president for Africa?

Then there is the issue of his Muslim past. Obama, 47, was raised by two Muslim fathers and attended Islamic classes in Indonesia.

He denies being Muslim, however, and says he "embraced Christ" while answering the altar call 20 years ago at Trinity. (Contrary to anonymous e-mail rumors circulating, Obama never took the oath of office on the Quran. He used a Bible, and Vice President Dick Cheney swore him in during his Senate ceremony.)

This merely raises another concern, beyond that of the controversial church he chose to baptize him. If Obama were ever Muslim, even as a youth, he would now be viewed as an apostate, which in radical Islam is punishable by death. As Mideast expert Daniel Pipes has noted, a President Obama could be the target of a fatwah.

Still, his Muslim heritage is not the signal issue before the electorate. It's his Afrocentric church, which preaches black socialism and black nativism, and his family ties to an African tribe that's fanning the flames of Marxism and militant Islam in a country once considered strongly democratic and a friend of the U.S.

"I believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change," Obama has asserted. He also says his faith has led him to question "the idolatry of the free market."

If a President Obama's foreign and domestic policies are anything like the Afrocentric doctrine he's pledged to uphold, Americans will pay a hefty price, including those among the growing black middle class.


Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:11AM CST on September 23, 2008

Obama and Ayers
Pushed Radicalism
On Schools

By STANLEY KURTZ


Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

[Obama and Ayers] AP

Bill Ayers.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.

The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.

CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.

The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.

The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place.

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.

Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.


Monday September 22, 2008
Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated "Grassroots" Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them
Posted by: Iconoclast at 8:28AM CST on September 22, 2008

September 22, 2008

Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated "Grassroots" Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them

Extensive research was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine the source of smears directed toward Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Those smears included false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views.

Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.

It is also likely that the PR firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign. Namely:

  • Evidence suggests that a YouTube video with false claims about Palin was uploaded and promoted by members of a professional PR firm.
  • The family that runs the PR firm has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.
  • Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in a concerted effort to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. Yet this effort took place on company time.
  • Evidence suggests that these distribution efforts included actions by at least one employee of the firm who is unconnected with the family running the company.
  • The voice-over artist used in this supposedly amateur video is a professional.
  • This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David Axelrod's firm, which has a history of engaging in phony grassroots efforts, otherwise known as "astroturfing."
  • David Axelrod is Barack Obama's chief media strategist.
  • The same voice-over artist has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign.

This suggests that false rumors and outright lies about Sarah Palin and John McCain being spread on the internet are being orchestrated by political partisans and are not an organic grassroots phenomenon led by the left wing fringe. Our findings follow.

WHO PRODUCED THE VIDEO?

[UPDATE: Within 1 hour of posting, "eswinner" has removed all videos from YouTube and began removing any traces of his activities. But we have the video and all relevant websites backed up.

If "eswinner" isn't Ethan Winner of the Publicis Groupe, then why did "eswinner" yank the video so quickly? Or if this was just an innocent homemade ad, then what does he have to hide? You'd think he'd want more attention for it.

I uploaded it to my YouTube acount from the original unwatermarked Google version (see below for explanation) and that is the version you now see embedded below. Here's an image that show's he had the videos in question just moments ago. Click for bigger. I'll be able to provide a backup of the original YouTube page in the morning. For now, this will have to do.]

Who is behind this video against Sarah Palin? It alleges:

Sarah Palin was a member of an Anti-American separatist organization.
It claims that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party and cites The New York Times for that source. Then it quotes the founder of that Party with some pretty outrageous statements.

But here's what FactCheck.org says about that:

[Sarah Palin] was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, a group that wants Alaskans to vote on whether they wish to secede from the United States. She’s been registered as a Republican since May 1982.
And The New York Times was forced to retract their earlier claim that Palin was a member of the party, blaming the error on the party's chair. That retraction was published Sept. 3rd, 8 days before the video was first made publicly available.

Sarah Palin wasn't even physically at the party's convention. The clip you see is part of Palin's videotaped welcome for the convention's opening in which she gives some general remarks about the need for party competition and then tries to draw some common ground on the need to reel in government spending. Hardly evidence of extremism or anti-American sentiment.

In our opinion the Palin smear video appears professionally produced. Especially revealing is the voice over, which has a ring of familiarity to it and which also sounds professional.

If we are correct, that means that someone paid for the ad and for the talent behind it. Yet no one identifies themselves as being behind the video.

Using techniques that we've used in the past to find the identity of online terrorist supporters, the Jawa team went to work trying to figure out who was behind what appeared, in our opinion, to be a professionally orchestrated smear campaign aimed at Sarah Palin with the ultimate goal of electing Barack Obama.

VIOLATION OF FEC RULES?

Federal election law requires that a disclaimer from those paying for campaign ads, "must appear on any "electioneering communication" and on any public communication by any person that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate or solicits funds in connection with a federal election." Even when the ad is not paid for nor coordinated with the candidates election committee, "the disclaimer notice must identify who paid for the message, state that it was not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee and list the permanent street address, telephone number or World Wide Web address of the person who paid for the communication."

No such disclaimer appears on the ad in question. However, "General public political advertising does not include Internet ads, except for communications placed for a fee on another person’s web site." It is not clear to us whether a video is considered an "internet ad" or if the wording only meant to include banner ads or other more common forms of internet advertising.

All of the web only video ads that we could find produced by the Obama campaign carried the disclosure or some other clearly identifiable notice that they were responsible for its content.

It would appear that the ad, while professionally produced, was put on YouTube and then spread in such a way as to make it seem like amateurs had made it and spread it. We can't help but wonder if the missing disclaimer on the video was an intentional exploitation of a loophole meant to distance the people behind the ad from its outright lies?

We also can't help but wonder if maybe those who produced the ad believed that the lack of disclaimer constituted an FEC violation? Which would be an alternative explanation for why they did not wish to be connected to it.

Beyond the disclaimer, though, our reading of FEC regulations suggests that political campaign and 527 groups, such as Moveon.org, are required to report money spent on advertising opposing a candidate for public office. We can find no exception for advertising intended for web only campaigns.

We assume that if some group paid for the production of the video, that it would be reported to the FEC. Not doing so, we believe, would constitute a breach of federal campaign law.

PR FIRM BEHIND THE VIDEO?

The YouTube poster who uploaded the video did so under the account name "eswinner". He names his channel "AGroupofConcernedAmericans". The goal of his channel, says "eswinner", is:

Offering a fair and unbiased view towards life and politics...

I try to give an unbiased account of all things American.

The video was uploaded four times under the "eswinner" account, using different titles for each video. The video was also uploaded to Google Video on the same day and with the same title.

A Google search of other people using the nickname or account name “eswinner” reveals that someone very interested in yachts also goes by that name. There is, for example, a Picasa page under the account name “eswinner”. I won't link to that page because it also has pictures of his family, but I will include a screenshot here.

picassa_page_eswinner_screenshot.gif

That Picasa page of "eswinner" is used by an "Ethan" advertising on Craig's List that he will rent out his yacht to interested parties. But "Ethan" also leaves his e-mail account: ewinner@winnr.com.

And just what is winnr.com? An alternate dns designation for Winner & Associates. A firm that employs one Ethan S. Winner.

Hundreds of pictures on the Picassa page belonging to "eswinner" show that the page belongs to the same Ethan S. Winner that is employed by the public relations firm of Winner & Associates. Other instances of an "eswinner" or "ewinner" posting on the internet are found sprinkled here and there. All of those postings seem to fit the profile of Ethan S. Winner and suggest that eswinner and Ethan Winner are one and the same.

The company he works for, Winner & Associates, is one of the largest PR firms in the country and part of an even larger international conglomerate Publicis Groupe, which is, "one the world's top 10 advertising and communications firms."

A firm that specializes in "helping companies survive and succeed" a "controversial issue such as a lawsuit, a government investigation, a political protest, a labor dispute, or a defective product or recall."

A firm that also happens to produce TV ads. And owns a number of affiliated firms which do similar work.

These people are professional guns for hire. Looking at their portfolio makes that clear. And they only work for big clients. The kind of clients that pay big bucks. The kind of people hired by Exxon to convince people that the effects of the Valdez spill were over. The kind of people hired to help push through oil fields in Chad and Cameroon or help companies respond to boycott threats over the Beijing Olympics.

The kind of people who would have an in-house attorney to handle PR for Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. And get them a movie deal.

Also the kind of people hired by the European Union to help sell the new EU treaty. Who was the lead in that effort? Ethan S. Winner.

Winner_Ethan.jpg

In other words, probably not the kind of people who make anti-Palin advertisements with professional voiceovers in their spare time. But also not the kind of people to be averse to running a seemingly grassroots Palin smear campaign .

What I am told by a friend in the business is called "cyber ambuscade" when done by corporations. Apparently it is common practice for corporations to try to plant untraceable rumors about their competitors. In other words some corporations pay professionals to slime the competitors.

While it is clear that W&A are very big guns for hire, those that run it have been strong financial supporters of Democrat candidates and have links to the leftist netroots that first championed Barack Obama.

TIES TO THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND LIBERAL CAUSES

This is Charles "Chuck" N. Winner, the President of the company.

chuck_winner.jpg

Charles "Chuck" Winner was once described as:

A revered political consultant, Winner began his career working for California Gov. Pat Brown in 1958; he later worked for President John F. Kennedy. Winner is frequently called upon by a wide range of political groups, candidates and organizations for his unparalleled skills as an adviser, planner and strategic thinker.
Chuck owns $23,000 court-side seats for UCLA basketball. He's the type of guy who own horses that have raced at the Kentucky Derby.

He is a Barack Obama contributor. As are the rest of the Winner & Associate employees who share the family name. Chuck Winner contributed to Obama as early as February of 2007, which means he was a supporter from the beginning.

As have many of the employees of Strategy Workshop, headed by Leslie Song Winner and which once employed Ethan Winner who appears to have been in charge of their internet strategy. Leslie is Charles Winner's former wife, mother of Ethan, and the daughter of Alfred Song--who was California's first Asian-American legislator and a Democrat.

A cursory inquiry into the political contributions of the Winner clan--including Ethan-- also shows that they collectively contributed to: Max Baucus (D-Montana); John Morrison (D-Montana-ran for Senate); Claire McKaskill (D-MO); Democratic National Congressional Committee; Howard Berman (D-CA); Amy Klobuchar (D-MN); Albert Robles (D-CA); Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA); Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee; Sherrod Brown (D-OH); John Kerry (Pres campaign); Chris Dodd (D-CT); Wesley Clark (Presidential campaign); Diane Feinstein (D-CA); Maxine Waters (D-CA); Katrina Swett (D-NH ran against Sununu); John Dingell (D-MI)

Partner in their subsidiary of Winner & Mandabach Campaigns, Paul J. Mandabach, is an Al Franken (DFL-MN) contributor. He also contributed to Hillary, Edwards, Kerry, and Clark.

Notice a pattern here? These aren't just local Democrats, but are big name Democrats in big name races. All over the country.

But more importantly, look who else Charles Winner contributed to: ACTBLUE, "the nation's largest source of funds for Democrats" and which is "particularly favored by the netroots and left-leaning bloggers."

THE SOCKPUPPET GOES CORPORATE

Can we be sure, based on the above, that Ethan S. Winner and/or Winner & Associates was involved in production and/or promotion of the ad? No, but there’s even more evidence than what we've presented so far tending to indicate that Ethan S. Winner, Winner & Associates, and/or the Winner family are connected to this video.

As of the first draft writing of this report (9/12/2008) YouTube user "eswinner" had exactly three subscribers. One of them just happened to create a YouTube account on the very day the video was uploaded: "cnwinner".

cnwinner_youtube_account.gif

Is “cnwinner” an account created by Charles N. Winner, founder and president of Winner & Associates? If so, that would explain why the age listed by the creator of the “cnwinner” profile [68] generally matches that of published reports on the age of Charles N. Winner.

YouTube user “cnwinner” (Charles N. Winner?) appears to be directly involved in a concerted effort to add legitimacy to the video's lies about Palin. How do we know? Because during the initial draft writing of this report a number of comments --including one by me -- have been left disputing the allegations made in the video. And our "cnwinner" (Charles N. Winner?) responds:

cn_winner_youtube_comments.gif

And “eswinner” (Ethan S. Winner?) joins in the sockpuppet game with "cswinner” (his father Charles N. Winner?), pretending to be a bystander when he is the one who uploaded the video!

cn_winner_and_eswinner_youtube_comments.gif

Other apparent early sockpuppets included "Truthiness99" & "nowaymccain" both of whom joined YouTube within a day of the original video posting and seem eager to make claims that the video has its facts straight.

The same day (9/12/2008) another apparent sockpuppet account "gocamerica" was created. It is our opinion, based on activity under this account, that this account was created solely or primarily for the purpose of helping the video spread; "gocamerica" reuploaded the video naming it "Sarah Palin ABC Interview". Gocamerica apparently has as little problem lying about the contents of the video as he has with the lies directed at Sarah Palin in the video.

Does the user name sound familiar? As in Group Of Concerned AMERICAns or "gocamerica".

And what does "gocamerica" have to say in the thread where many of the commenters laugh at the outright lies in the video?

gocamerica_comments.gif

How transparent is gocamerica's sock puppetry? He says the same thing, word for word, in the comments thread of all four versions of the video. A cut and paste job.

Apparently someone has been taking sock puppet lessons from Glenn Greenwald!

[UPDATE: The "gocamerica" account was deleted within 2 hours of publication. Confirmed: gocamerica = Ethan Winner sockpuppet. But we backed up "gocamerica's" YouTube page. Will provide backup in the morning]

LYING ABOUT SARAH PALIN: BUSINESS OR PLEASURE?

Many of the comments seem to have been written during normal business hours. Which, if everything else wasn't enough evidence, indicates that they are probably doing this on company time. For instance, this reply by "gocamerica" to a comment I left:

gocamerica_comment_315pm.gif

You'll notice the message was left two hours before 5:16 pm Central time on 9/17/2008. Since it's highly likely that "gocamerica" is on Pacific time, then it follows that he left the comment sometime around 1:16 pm Pacific --- right in the middle of the work day.

On 9/19/2008 "eswinner" logged into his YouTube account sometime just before 3 PM Central -- or sometime just before 1 PM Pacific.

es_winner_last_login_9-19.gif

From the available evidence, it certainly appears that someone is spending time on the company clock boosting the video. Trying to get the video to go viral. To take a life on of its own. Seeing how many people have viewed it.

What appears, in our opinion, to be a third sockpuppet account was created on 9/16/2008. This account belongs to "grpcncrndamrcns" and has only one video -- the same video uploaded by "eswinner" and "gocamerica": Sarah Palin: A Heartbeat Away.

As further evidence that these two are sockpuppets of the owner of the "eswinner" account, the videos uploaded by "gocamerica" and "grpcncrndamrcns" do not bear the hallmark signs of one YouTube user reuploading a video he or she found at YouTube -- the double YouTube watermark. Instead, all versions of the YouTube video have a single YouTube watermark indicating that the person/persons probably uploaded an original unwatermarked version of the video.

[Update: Within 2 hours of initial post, "grpcncrndamrcns" deleted video as well. Confirmed, these accounts are all sockpuppets.]

GETTING THE LIE TO SPREAD WITHOUT DETECTION

And their efforts didn't stop there. Someone emailed the video to a forum administrator at the Democratic Underground--a message board considerably to the left and far nuttier than even the far left wing bloggers. Says "EarlG" about the video he posted on the very day after it was created (and the same day that this particular version was uploaded):

Nice independent YouTube attack ad. I don't know who made this, it arrived in my email inbox this morning from "A Group Of Concerned Americans." [emphasis added]
As previously noted "A Group of Concerned Americans" just happens to be the name of the YouTube channel created by a person who we have reason to believe is Ethan S. Winner (aka, "eswinner") of the W&A PR firm.

But getting a video to go viral would take more than the Democratic Underground, it would take many more in the netroots willing to push the video. The video appeared on the largest leftwing blog on 9/12/2008 and became lauded as the prime example of what the netroots should be doing on their own to smear the McCain campaign.

Daily Kos is the blog that really launched Obama's successful campaign. DailyKos diarist "geekesque" tells his audience of a plan to get this and other smear videos to go viral. And I mean just that: he admits that the video and others like it make false claims, but that the ends justify the means. It's pretty long but I'll post the whole thing just to show I'm not taking this out of context:

Viral attacks are where it's at in 2008. Emails, blogs, online news sources. Content flows upstream in today's media environment.

We can be the gun.

Indeed, if Barack can't or won't do the dirty work, then we have to do it for him. No excuses. No more hand-wringing.

Let's get to work.

How, you ask? Simple.

It's all about finding really damaging stuff--news stories, YouTubes, informative blog posts. And then circulating those with the intent of having them work their way up the media stream. Email it to your friends. Email it to any journalists whose email you have. Post it in diaries or blog comments.

Example, here is a devastating YouTube on Sarah Strangelove:

[The Palin smear video was inserted here]

You should email this to ten people. Or ten bloggers. Or both. Spread it far, spread it wide.

If you would like to do this on a regular basis, I've set up a couple of Google Groups to help out with that process.

One group, [group's name] is a gathering point for potentially damaging stories about the enemy. Folks who belong to that one can post whatever stories they find anonymously. Just post a link or create a page, and others will take it from there.

That brings me to the other group, [other group's name]. This group is the actual action group--the one where the most damaging stories collected by folks at the VMP. It's real simple. You log in or get an email alert, you copy and paste, and you email it to various folks--either friends and family or content-based websites like blogs and online news sources.

I am more than happy to add folks to either group or both. Just email me at:

[redacted e-mail]

and let me know which you'd like to join.

Let's go out and expose these #####s for what they are.

To the barricades.

Note: If you don't believe in scorched-earth politics, no one is forcing you to join this effort, of course. We all contribute in our own way.

How do DKos readers respond to the notion that spreading lies is acceptable behavior in getting their preferred candidate elected? Not a single negative response as of this writing. Here are some samples:
already sent the video on your diary to 300 contacts.

by rapcetera on Fri Sep 12, 2008 at 12:27:36 PM PDT ...

Let's hammer these #####s any way we can. We have to influence the media narrative ourselves.

Cotton Mouth

by Countificus on Fri Sep 12, 2008 at 11:58:45 AM PDT...

If you want to win without a dirty candidate... (5+ / 0-)

Recommended by:
slinkerwink, Geekesque, BachFan, kat68, Floande

...the candidate him/herself can't fight dirty.

When Johnson wanted a rumor spread that his opponent f*cked farm animals, he didn't stand up and make a speech to that effect. He told his campaign manager to spread the word on the sly.

Johnson? Remember that guy, back from when the Democrats actually won elections?

On s'engage, et puis, on voit. (Napoleon)

by sagesource on Fri Sep 12, 2008 at 12:06:48 PM PDT

Spreading the message seems to be a theme that is echoed by one "Justyn Winner" who shares an unusually spelled name with a W&A Vice President, General Counsel, and Valerie Plame representative. From a comment "Justyn Winner" left about Obama's race speech at noted leftwing blog Crooks and Liars:
Fantastic spech! the best thing people can do is to circulate a link of it or its segements to all friends and family. Exposure is essential
Knowing the right people to prod into action is the key ingredient in getting a "grassroots campaign" off the ground and making it seem "spontaneous" and "ground up". The netroots of dKos are the perfect people to contact if one wanted to spread the message, but do it in such a way that it would appear to be spontaneous and undirected.

FERTILIZING THE ASTROTURF

But it wasn't just dKos and the DU that appear to have been contacted. Also posting the video on the very day it was created is noted gay-rights activist Pam Spaulding. Jesus' General posted it the next day.

Incidentally Jesus' General, who posted the video on his own blog without comment, thought he should leave his two cents in the video's comments. It appears that he knows the video presents outright lies as truth, but he doesn't care: the other side lies, he reasons, so why shouldn't the left?

jesuss_general_comment.gif

Another person interested in helping the smear go viral is David "Ben" Burch whose White Rose Society is dedicated to "fighting the new fascism" by.... lying about a VP candidate? A dedicated fan of Cindy Sheehan, of left wing radio, and of harassing Wikipedia users who don't see eye to eye with him. Burch also doesn't appear to have a problem spreading lies about Sarah Palin. It's for the greater good, you see. Nothing fascist about that!

There's no telling how many other bloggers or activists were emailed by the sockpuppet "A Group Of Concerned Americans" who we have reason to believe is Ethan S. Winner or other employees of one of the largest PR firms on the planet.

But would the people at Winner & Associates have the kind of experience to try and organize a grassroots campaign? From the Publicis website describing what W&A does.

grassroots_organizing.gif

It appears that they do.

JUST A FAMILY AFFAIR?

Even if “eswinner” is indeed Ethan S. Winner and “cnwinner” is indeed Charles N. Winner, it is possible, of course, that the attack ad on Palin is a Winner family project, unconnected to Winner and Associates and their corporate owners at the mega-PR firm of Publicis. In fact, FEC regulations carve out an exception for individuals to use their computers -- even their office computers -- to spread political messages.

There is evidence, however, from which one might reasonably surmise that the attack ad on Palin was a project of the company itself. In particular, there are indications that other employees of Winner and Associates, not members of the family, have been actively involved in dissemination of the video.

As we've already seen, "eswinner" uploaded the same Sarah Palin smear video four times giving it four separate titles. Likely seven times, really, since "gocamerica" & "grpcncrndamrcns" both appear to be just other sockpuppets; and the video was also uploaded to Google. We've already seen how someone sent the video to two prominent leftwing internet websites--the Daily Kos and the Democratic Underground--and possibly to other leftwing bloggers.

What I haven't mentioned is that a second version of the same video uploaded by "eswinner" was posted separately at the Democratic Underground on the same day as the one forum administrator "EarlG" claims it was sent to him by "A Group Of Concerned Americans."

This version was posted by DU user "stckyfngz" on Sept. 12th. Here's a screenshot:

stickyfngz_du_post.gif

Who is this "stckyfngz" who posted the video at The Democratic Underground the day after "eswinner" uploaded it to YouTube? There is evidence that leads us to believe that the “stckyfngz” who posted the video at DU is named Jared Liu-Klein.

jared_liu_klein_stickyfngz_big.gif
jared_liu_klein_stickyfngz.gif

Jared Liu-Klein, aka, "stckyfngz", you see works in "Public Relations". And there just happens to be a Jared Liu-Klein who donated to Barack Obama.

That would be the same Jared Liu-Klein who represented Valerie Plame for Winner & Associates.

LiuKlein_Jared.jpg
From the Publicis website:
Associate, Winner & Associates

Jared Liu-Klein, an Associate, has almost a decade of experience in the information technology, new media, and multimedia sectors....

He is involved on the production side with several accounts, taking on roles such as conceptualization, scriptwriting, editing, and direction.

It looks like Jared does more than just represent Valerie Plame at W&A--he also helps write scripts!

Jared's mother is Carol Liu, a Democratic politician who previously served in the State Assembly & is currently running for State Senate. His father is Michael Peevey, the Gray Davis appointed President of the California Public Utilities Commission.

There was a bit of a scandal involving Jarad's parents last year when it was revealed by the L.A. Times that tens of thousands of dollars contributed to Carol Liu's campaign came from industries regulated by her husband. Businesses that also hired W&A to handle PR for them during the California Energy crisis. The crisis which would eventually lead to Gray Davis' recall.

DEEP THROAT SAYS "FOLLOW THE MONEY"

So what do we have so far? Evidence which strongly indicates that Ethan S. Winner and Charles "Chuck" N. Winner are behind a smear campaign aimed at discouraging people from voting for McCain/Palin. The production value of the ad indicates that it was produced by a professional firm. The family that runs that company has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.

The timing of the comments seems to indicate that the video's promotion was done on Winner & Associates company time. At least one employee, Jared Liu-Klein, appears to have been instrumental in its dissemination. A concerted effort was made to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. There appears to be corporate sponsorship and organization behind a new "grassroots" smear campaign.

So, the million dollar question is who, if any one, paid Winner & Associates to produce this ad?

[NOTE: The Jawa Report legal department has pleaded with me to point out that everything from this point forward is pure conjecture on my part.

That said…]

THE OBAMA CONNECTION

My initial money was on George Soros who has contributed to Winner run campaigns in the past, . The sheer viciousness of the attack bears all of the hallmarks of Moveon.org.

But it could be any number of 527s that Obama has now given the wink-wink-nudge-nudge to start hammering away at McCain.

Or the money could come from an untraceable source like the "charitable organization" run by Justyn Winner.

So why would any one hire a PR firm like W&R? Did I mention that they specialize in "crisis communications?" Again, from the Publicis website:

crisis_communications.gif

Which leaves open the possibility that Obama or the Democratic Party might also be the ones paying for the campaign. Is there anything that might be suggestive of that? Yes there is.

First there is Ethan Winner's Facebook account. Among the 27 friends Ethan has on Facebook, one of them is David Washington. Dr. David Washington is described as a senior Obama campaign adviser in California.

In and of itself, that's not much of a link. Washington is involved in hosting fundraisers for Obama in the L.A. area, and as we've already noted the Winner family has contributed to Obama's campaign. Perhaps that explains the connection. But there are more compelling links between the video which we believe was uploaded by Ethan Winner and the Barack Obama campaign.

PROFESSIONAL WORK FOR OBAMA CAMPAIGN?

We began this post by noting that a video uploaded to YouTube appeared to have been produced with a voice over done by a professional. As this Politico article makes clear, voice over artists are often used over and over by the same campaign. That shouldn't be shocking to any one. That when called upon to make an advertisement a producer will use people that they've worked with before.

What is surprising is that voice artists are often partisans. Not only do they work for the same producers over and over, they often only work for one side of the political aisle. For instance, Betsy Ames is one of the premier voices for Republican campaigns. Kathryn Klvana is often heard on political ads -- but only Democratic ones.

We believe that the artist in the "eswinner" Palin smear video has also worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign. What we think is her voice can be heard in Obama's "Burden" video, released on Sept. 15th -- less than a week after the "eswinner" Sarah Palin, a Heartbeat Away video.

Audio from each advertisement was ripped by Dan Riehl and spliced so that a better compare and contrast between the two voices could be made. I then equalized volume levels on the two ads, producing this video. Sorry about its poor quality, I don't have the resources of a PR firm!

Are the two voices the same? You be the judge.

We think it is.

We also believe that she worked on this Obama ad, released on Sept. 20th, and this one, from August. She may be on others, but with over 1300 videos on Obama's YouTube channel we just didn't look for any more.

LINKS TO THE "KING OF ASTROTURFING" -- DAVID AXELROD

We believe the voice can also be heard on these AKP&D Message and Media produced videos. In fact, all of the female voice overs showcased on the AKP&D website seem to belong to the same woman. That's right, all of them. The same voice heard in some Barack Obama ads, and which was used for the "eswinner" slime campaign.

More importantly, though, what is AKP&D? It's the Chicago based political consulting firm headed by David Axelrod. Yes, that David Axelrod. As in the David Axelrod who is Barack Obama's chief media strategist.

david_axelrod.jpg

David Axelrod is also known as The master of "Astroturfing", which is what PR industry insiders call the practice of "manufacturing grassroots support." As Ace notes:

It tries to disguise itself as a "grassroots" phenomenon -- but it's artificial and inorganic. Hence, "Astroturf."

And David Axelrod is notorious for making extensive use of this controversial tactic -- and was notorious for it even before he begain running Barack Obama's campaign.

According to Businessweek, one of Axelrod's astroturfing campaigns stealthily spent $15 million convincing Illinois taxpayers that their power would be shut off if they didn't approve an increase in their electric bills. It wasn't until a complaint was filed with the state's regulators that it was revealed that Axelrod's "grassroots" campaign was fully funded by ComEd -- the power company which would benefit from the rate hike.

Axelrod is a "community organizer" you might say.

This does not mean that we believe that Barack Obama's campaign is behind the stealth Palin smear campaign. In fact, a preliminary analysis of Obama's campaign expenditures filed with the FEC did not find any payouts to Winner & Associates or Publicis. But our familiarity with how to search FEC expenditures is limited, and there are tens of thousands of recorded transactions.

What we do believe we have found is that David Axelrod's firm has worked with the voice over artist in the "eswinner" Palin smear video. In fact, each and every political ad showcased on Axelrod's website that has a female voice over seems to be the same voice from the Palin smear ad. That Axelrod used her over and over again in his videos going back several years.

We also believe that Axelrod has used her in several official Obama campaign videos.

We also know that David Axelrod is considered the master of orchestrating grassroots campaigns that appear spontaneous and which are difficult to trace to him.

In fact, Axelrod has a second company called ASK Public Strategies who's sole purpose seems to be running professional astroturfing campaigns. We can't help but wonder if they ever outsource any of their work?

We also can't help but ask if the Obama campaign has ever hired Publicis or Winner & Associates to do any work for them? Or the extent to which those advertising firms hired by Axelrod on behalf of the Obama campaign subcontract out to other large corporate PR firms?

A BROADER ASTROTURFING CAMPAIGN?

We believe that the case has been made that the Palin smear video was produced by the Publicis Groupe's Winner & Associates. We believe the evidence to this effect is compelling.

We also believe that the evidence shows that W&A tried to spread the lies about Palin in such a way as to catch the attention of the left-wing netroot supporters of Barack Obama. We think it is unlikely that one of the largest PR firms in the world would do this for free. That they would pay for video production out of their own pockets, hire a well known voice actress, or that its employees would work together in their free time to help the video go viral.

So, if we're right, who paid them? As of this writing we cannot answer that question. Our initial reaction was that this campaign had all the hallmarks of the Soros funded Moveon.org, but given David Axelrod's known predilection to these type of stealth campaigns it would not surprise us in the least if the Obama campaign itself was orchestrating it.

That this is what Obama meant by "taking the gloves off". Especially given the timing of the video's release -- during the brief period when Obama trailed McCain in the polls, and when most of McCain's sudden surge was attributed to the popularity of Sarah Palin.

And if the company has been hired to stealthily spread these Palin smears, what other smears might they be paid to spread? Ones in which they more successfully covered their tracks?

The Palin smear video analyzed here fits in nicely with the post-Palin pick narrative being offered by the Obama campaign. That narrative is that John McCain may not fill out his term in office. The narrative is bolstered by questions about McCain's age, the present status of the skin cancer he once had, and by demands that his medical records be released.

The second ingredient in the narrative paints Sarah Palin -- who would take McCain's vacated Presidential office -- as not ready for the job. Obama's campaign has called her experience & intelligence into question, but there is also a "grassroots" viral campaign of deception that claims Palin is on the political fringe and is a religious lunatic.

Just in the past week, since we first began following the astroturfing of Sarah Palin, rumors have circulated that Palin was a member of the John Birch Society and that she hates rape victims. Bored with the spreading the lie that Palin thinks the Earth is 6,000 years old and that she banned books, this week the netroots are claiming that she supports witch hunts. Not metaphorical witch hunts, actual witch hunts.

Sometimes rumors and lies get spread organically with no need from direction. But sometimes what may seem to be an organic bottom up grassroots movement, may actually be led from the top and may be professionally organized.

We believe at least one such campaign to discredit Sarah Palin is currently underway. It seems highly likely that others are as well. We've done the initial work, but now it's time for the professionals to take over and ask the tough questions.

UPDATE: Within an hour of this post going up, YouTube videos implicating Ethan Winner were yanked, sockpuppet accounts deleted, and more importantly, the Wikipedia entry on David Axelrod began to edit out mentions of his well know astroturfing campaigns. Hmmm, it sounds to me like we're on to something.

---
Thanks to Jane & Stable Hand who did a lot of the Googling on this one, the Jawa team for input, and our legal division for extensive advice. Also thanks to Dan Riehl and Ace for input and help with drafts; and Patterico for putting together the bullet point summary.


By Dr. Rusty Shackleford at September 22, 2008 12:32 PM | Comments (187) | Trackbacks (21) l digg this

Sunday September 21, 2008
Why Is Media Allowing Joe Biden to Lie About Drunk Driver Killing His First Wife?
Posted by: Iconoclast at 9:29AM CST on September 21, 2008

Why Is Media Allowing Joe Biden to Lie About Drunk Driver Killing His First Wife?

September 21, 2008

-By Warner Todd Huston

Along with the claim that Joe Biden had a “blue-collar” upbringing — he had a decidedly upper class (though not “rich”) childhood — Joe Biden has for years claimed that his first wife and his daughter were killed by a “drunk driver” in 1972. However, closer examination of the records proves that the man driving the truck that slammed into the Biden family car was never charged with drunken driving. So, why has the media allowed this perception that Biden lost his wife to a drunk driver to persist?

As late as 2007 Biden said that the man who was involved in the fatal crash that killed his wife and daughter was a “guy who allegedly … drank his lunch” before he got behind the wheel of his truck and in 2001 the TV show Inside Edition aired a tape of Biden saying the truck driver “stopped to drink instead of drive.” Additionally, several media outlets have included the drunk driver claim in their bios of the Senator from Delaware.

This drunk driving accusation, though, is simply a Biden creation and every time this claim is uttered it pains the family of the poor, maligned man involved in the tragic accident with Biden’s family, truck driver Curtis C. Dunn. Gannett owned DelewareOnline reports the anguish that Biden’s continued lie causes the man’s family every time it is uttered.

“To see it coming from [Biden’s] mouth, I just burst into tears,” Dunn’s daughter, Glasgow resident Pamela Hamill, 44, said Wednesday. “My dad was always there for us. Now we feel like we should be there for him because he’s not here to defend himself.”

In truth, there was no finding of alcohol being involved in this tragic incident. In fact, some investigators thought at the time that the accident was caused by Biden’s wife pulling out into the intersection not having seen Dunn’s truck bearing down upon her. It was simply a horrible accident with no blame saying Dunn was at fault, much less drunk.

According to the research that DelewareOnline did for the story, neither Biden’s book nor his website bio contains that drunk driver reference but Biden has delivered the claim in several appearances.

The New York Times reported the 2007 crowd at the University of Iowa grew silent as Biden gave his version of what happened that day.

“Let me tell you a little story,” The newspaper quoted Biden as saying. “I got elected when I was 29, and I got elected November the 7th. And on Dec. 18 of that year, my wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree. A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly, and killed my daughter instantly, and hospitalized my two sons, with what were thought to be at the time permanent, fundamental injuries.”

Biden told a similar story when addressing an audience at the Bob Carpenter Center at the University of Delaware a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“It was an errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive and hit a tractor-trailer, hit my children and my wife and killed them,” Biden said, according to a transcript archived on his Senate Web site.

Now, I suppose for a politician looking for the sympathy vote, saying your wife was killed by a drunk is better than saying that your wife made a fatal mistake behind the wheel. But the truth says something else, entirely contradicting Biden’s great campaign soundbites.

“The rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver, is incorrect,” said Jerome O. Herlihy, a Delaware Superior Court judge who was chief deputy attorney general and worked with crash investigators in 1972.

Still, there have been several news sources that have included the drunk driver aspect in Biden bio reports.

For instance, Cristina Chang of the Huffington Post posted on September 10, 2008:

But Delaware’s Senator-elect would face a more difficult challenge soon after his election, when a drunk driver struck the car carrying his family, killing his wife Neilia and daughter Naomi and severely wounding sons Hunter and Beau.

The Economist Magazine published a story on August 28th saying the same basic thing:

He endured an unspeakable personal tragedy, shortly after his first run for the Senate in 1972, when his wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver.

And NPR initially published a Biden bio with the same drunk driver claim, but later corrected the story with this disclaimer:

Correction: Earlier versions of this story said that a drunk driver was responsible for the deaths of Sen. Biden’s wife and daughter. There is no evidence that the driver was drunk.

Kudos to NPR for correcting the record.

But, here is the thing. Biden himself has made this claim in public at least two times — most likely far more. So, why has the media basically stayed mum about this lie? Isn’t it important for the American people to know what sort of man Biden is? Why are they ignoring this story?

As Thomas Lifson of the American Spectator says, “Is this an attempt to exploit the death of his first wife for political gain? The thought is sickening. Even if Biden was inititially misinformed, he and his campaign have allowed a lie to propagate throughout the media.”

But, should we put the onus on the lying politician as Lifson seems to do, or should we place the onus on the media that should be investigating and illuminating this lie? Of course, it is a disgusting exploitation of his wife’s tragic death but that he uses that tragedy on the campaign trail isn’t the problem. In fact, it is a legitimate segment of his life’s story perfectly proper to use for campaign fodder. What isn’t legitimate is inventing aspects of that story out of whole cloth to make it seem a more sympathetic tale instead of sticking to the truth.

Isn’t the news about getting to the truth?

Apparently not because, thus far, they are letting Biden get away with a whopper.


The Palins and the Obamas
Posted by: Iconoclast at 9:25AM CST on September 21, 2008

The Palins and the Obamas

STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
Posted Sep 11, 2008 @ 12:03 AM
Last update Sep 11, 2008 @ 07:53 AM

One wonders: What did Sarah Palin ever do to inspire the rage and bile that exploded on her selection by John McCain? What is there either in this woman’s record or resume to elicit such feline ferocity?

What did we know of her when she was introduced?

That she was a mother of five who had brought into this world a baby boy with Down syndrome, thus living her Chris-tian beliefs. That she was a small-town conservative who had risen from mayor of Wasilla (Pop. 9,700) to be governor of a state twice the size of Texas.

That she was a reformer who had dethroned an Old Boys’ Network by dumping a sitting Republican governor. That she had taken on Big Oil, taxed the companies and returned the money in $1,200 checks to every citizen of Alaska. And that she had cut a deal with Canada to build a pipeline to bring natural gas to her fellow Americans.

What, in any or all of this, is there to justify the attacks within minutes of her introduction? What had she done to cause this outburst? Answer: Absolutely nothing.

No. Sarah Palin is not resented for what she has done, but for who she is: a Christian conservative who believes unborn children are gifts of God, even those with birth defects, and have a God-given right to life.

No sooner was Palin introduced than the media went berserk over the news that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. As one in three births in America is out-of-wedlock and Hollywood celebrates this lifestyle, why did The New York Times and The Washington Post splash this “news” on Page One above the fold? How does Bristol Palin’s pregnancy disqualify Sarah Palin to be vice president? Why is it even relevant?

They did it because they thought it would damage Palin in the eyes of a Christian community they do not comprehend.

If one would wish to see the famous liberal double standard on naked display, consider.

Palin’s daughter was fair game for a media that refused to look into reports that John Edwards, a Democratic candidate for president, was conducting an illicit affair with a woman said to be carrying his child and cheating on his faithful wife Elizabeth, who has incurable cancer. That was not a legitimate story, but Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is?

Why did the selection of Palin cause a suspension of all standards and a near riot among a media that has been so in the tank for Barack even “Saturday Night Live” has satirized the infatuation?

Because she is one of us — and he is one of them.

Barack and Michelle are affirmative action, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard Law. She is public schools and Idaho State. Barack was a Saul Alinsky social worker who rustled up food stamps. Sarah kills her own food.

Michelle has a $300,000-a-year sinecure doing PR for a Chicago hospital. Todd Palin is a union steelworker who augments his income working vacations on the North Slope. Sarah has always been proud to be an American. Michelle was never proud of America — until Barack started winning.

Barack has zero experience as an executive. Sarah ran her own fishing fleet, was mayor for six years and runs the largest state in the union. She belongs to a mainstream Christian church. Barack was, for 15 years, a parishioner at Trinity United and had his daughters baptized by Pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons are saturated in black-power, anti-white racism and anti-Americanism.

Sarah is a rebel. Obama has been a go-along, get-along cog in the Daley machine. She is Middle America. Barack, behind closed doors in San Francisco, mocked Middle Americans as folks left behind by the global economy who cling bitterly to their Bibles, bigotries and guns.

Barack, says the National Journal, has the most left-wing voting record in the Senate, besting Socialist Bernie Sanders. Palin’s stances read as though they were lifted from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 “no pale pastels” platform. And this is what this media firestorm is all about.


Saturday September 20, 2008
Crony capitalism
Posted by: Iconoclast at 10:15PM CST on September 20, 2008
Crony capitalism

LENDING money to people who probably won't pay it back isn't good business.
If you wrap crummy loans in a clever package, they're still crummy loans.
Your typical Wal-Mart shopper understands this. But the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street and in Washington evidently didn't.
There are a lot of people to blame for the subprime mortgage crisis.
The Federal Reserve Board under Chairman Alan Greenspan (1987-2006) pursued what seems in hindsight clearly to have been way too loose a monetary policy. Banks were awash with money to lend and got careless in how they lent it.
Ostensibly to aid the poor and working class, the Clinton administration and Congress encouraged lenders to give mortgages to bad credit risks. The combination of easy money and the expansion of the number of borrowers unable to repay their loans sent housing prices through the roof, creating the bubble whose bursting has led to this crisis.
Congress in 1999 repealed the law that established a bright line between commercial and investment banks. This meant bad investments by banks could jeopardize depositors.
Wall Street created "derivatives" that multiplied profits in good times, but also multiplied risk if there were defaults.
Most important was corruption and mismanagement at the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac), which together controlled 90 percent of the secondary mortgage market.
Once your bank has lent you money to buy a house, it can't lend the money again until you pay it back. But if your bank sells your mortgage, it can make another loan right away. Without the secondary market, most of the funds for home mortgages would dry up.
Fannie and Freddie went broke because they bought billions of dollars worth of subprime mortgages, on which borrowers defaulted when the housing bubble popped. Fannie bought most of its bad mortgages from Countrywide Financial, whose CEO, Angelo Mozilo, gave sweetheart loans to senior executives of Fannie Mae.
Fannie and Freddie cooked their books so senior executives would be paid millions of dollars in bonuses to which they were not entitled. Inadequate regulation kept the book-cooking from being discovered until the crisis had become a catastrophe.
President Bush proposed regulatory reforms in 2003, but Congress took no action. In 2005, John McCain and three other GOP senators proposed a strong reform bill. It died when Democrats threatened a filibuster. Democrats opposed reform in part because they feared it would mean fewer loans to poor people.
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis," Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) told the New York Times when the Bush bill was introduced. "The more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."
Democrats and some Republicans opposed reform in part because Fannie and Freddie were very good at greasing palms. Fannie has spent $170 million on lobbying since 1998 and $19.3 million on political contributions since 1990.
The principal recipient of Fannie Mae's largesse was Sen. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. No. 2 was Barack Obama.
Mr. Dodd was also the second largest recipient in the Senate of contributions from Countrywide's political action committee and its employees, and the recipient of a home loan from Countrywide at well below market rates. The No. 1 senator on Countrywide's list? Barack Obama.
Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines was forced to resign in December, 2004, because of "accounting irregularities." The Washington Post reported July 16 that the Obama campaign has called Mr. Raines "seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters."
Mr. Obama appointed Mr. Raines' predecessor, James Johnson, as head of his vice presidential search committee until he also was implicated in "accounting irregularities," and it was revealed he'd received cut-rate loans from Countrywide.
Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker, head of Mr. Obama's finance committee, chaired the now-defunct Superior bank when it began to cook the books to conceal losses from subprime mortgages. The holding company her family owned collected $200 million in dividends on phony profits.
The trouble with crony capitalism isn't capitalism. It's the cronies.
Permanent Link

Friday September 19, 2008
10 Things You Need To Know About Obama's Tax Proposals
Posted by: Iconoclast at 10:49PM CST on September 19, 2008

10 Things You Need to Know About Senator Obama’s Tax Proposals

Under the tax plans of Barack Obama and his Democratic friends in Congress, American families will only be left with… the change in their pockets.

In 2009, Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress have an idea for a bill. Well, really, it’s a lot of bills that will be paid for by nearly every American in the form of higher taxes and higher costs for food, energy and other products.

So if you have a retirement account, work in or shop at a small business, are close or in retirement, or even flip on a light switch, then there are a few things that you should consider.

Under that plan:

  1. Small main street businesses would be forced to pay tax rates as high as 62.3% under Senator Obama’s tax proposals.1
  2. Senator Obama’s tax plan would tax small businesses at a higher rate than Wal-Mart!2
  3. Taxes on retirement income and savings could increase by at least 33%, hitting millions of seniors when they need these resources the most.3

  1. 4 million workers over the age of 50 – those eagerly looking forward to retirement – would be hit with increased tax bills. 4
  2. Millions of Americans would only keep 38 cents of every dollar that they earn.5
  3. Senator Obama’s tax plan would reduce the after tax wages of millions of workers by 17.7%.6
  4. It will take 227 days per year, nearly 8 months, just to pay your tax bill!7
  5. 97,065 carpenters, 110,908 police officers, 254,992 nurses, 208,562 postsecondary teachers and 237,000 dentists would see tax increases, if the earnings cap was successfully eliminated.8
  6. 10.3 million workers would see an average of $5,650 taken from their paycheck and given to government programs.9
  7. Even YOU might be considered “Rich.”

But don’t just take our word for it.
Be a geek. Click Here. Learn More.


Citations


McCain warned of Fannie/Freddie, Obama took their money and Dems killed McCain reform bill
Posted by: Iconoclast at 8:32PM CST on September 19, 2008
FEDERAL HOUSING ENTERPRISE REGULATORY REFORM ACT OF 2005

The United States Senate

May 25, 2006
Section 16

In This Section...

Sen. McCain [R-AZ]: Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae's regulator reported that the company's quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were "illusions deliberately and...

Record Text

Sen. John McCain [R-AZ]: Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae's regulator reported that the company's quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were "illusions deliberately and systematically created" by the company's senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae's former chief executive officer, OFHEO's report shows that over half of Mr. Raines' compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets. The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.

The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator's examination of the company's accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform.

For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs--and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO's report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO's report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.

Quick Info
Last Action: Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably.
Status: Dead

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.

 

Look who's advising Obama! Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac execs
Posted by: Iconoclast at 7:10AM CST on September 19, 2008

Friday, September 19, 2008

Look who's advising Obama! Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac execs
Senator's links to mortgage giants also include campaign contributions
Posted: September 17, 2008
9:10 pm Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi

WorldNetDaily


Fannie Mae headquarters in Washington, D.C.
NEW YORK – Campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made to Barack Obama may backfire if the Democratic presidential hopeful wages an aggressive campaign to cast blame on rival John McCain and the Republicans in Congress for the mortgage-related losses that forced the U.S. Treasury to take over the quasi-governmental mortgage giants.

A review of Federal Election Commission records back to 1989 reveals Obama in his three complete years in the Senate is the second largest recipient of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae campaign contributions, behind only Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., the powerful chairman of the Senate banking committee. Dodd was first elected to the Senate in 1980.

According to OpenSecrets.com, from 1989 to 2008, Dodd received $165,400 in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign contributions, including contributions from PACs and individuals, followed by Obama, who received $126,349 in such contributions since being elected to the Senate in 2004.

In contrast, McCain warned of the coming mortgage crisis as he pressed in 2005 for regulatory reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

(Story continues below)

"For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – known as government-sponsored entities or GSEs – and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market," McCain said on the floor of the Senate in 2005, speaking in favor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005.

McCain pointed out Fannie Mae's regulator had stated the company's quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were "illusions deliberately and systematically created" by the company's senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.

The bill passed the House but was never brought up for a vote in the Senate, largely because of Democratic opposition to change in the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac regulatory structure that remained in place until the Treasury takeover two weeks ago.

As evidenced by the failure to pass the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, the Democrats in Congress have repeatedly fought back Republican Party efforts to reform the two mortgage banking giants.

Instead, Democrats in Congress have sought to preserve the quasi-governmental status of the mortgage giants, seeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as places to locate former top Democratic Party operatives, where they have earned millions in compensation, despite a continuing series of financial scandals. Enron-like accounting manipulation, for example, boosted earnings to a level at which massive executive bonuses could be paid.

In the aftermath of the U.S. government takeover, attention has focused on three Democrats with close ties to Obama who served as Fannie Mae executives: Franklin Raines, former Clinton administration budget director; James Johnson, former aide to Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale; and Jamie Gorelick, former Clinton administration deputy attorney general.

All three Obama-related executives earned millions in compensation from Fannie Mae.

Johnson earned $21 million in just his last year serving as Fannie Mae CEO from 1991 to 1998; Raines earned $90 million in his five years as Fannie Mae CEO, from 1999 to 2004; and Gorelick earned an estimated $26 million serving as vice chair of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2003, according to author David Frum, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

All three have been involved in mortgage-related financial scandals.

In 1998, according to the Washington Post, Gorelick, as Fannie Mae vice chairman, received a bonus of $779,625, despite a scandal in which employees falsified signatures on accounting transactions to manipulate books to meet 1998 earning targets. The moves, in turn, triggered multi-million-dollar bonuses for top executives.

Gorelick was embroiled in another controversy over an alleged conflict of interest when a 1995 memo she authored as deputy attorney general surfaced while she was a member of the 9/11 commission.

The memo, which became known as the "Gorelick Wall," appeared to establish barriers that barred federal anti-terrorist criminal investigators from accessing various federal records and databases that may have assisted them in their criminal investigations.

According to the Associated Press, Raines and several other Fannie Mae top executives were ordered in a civil lawsuit to pay nearly $31.4 million for manipulating Fannie Mae earnings over a period of six years to trigger their massive bonuses.

Raines was also forced in the settlement to give up Fannie Mae stock options valued at $15.6 million.

Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged Freddie Mac had engaged in accounting fraud from 2000 to 2002, imposing a $50 million fine on the company and on four executives fines for amounts ranging from $65,000 to $250,000.

Raines currently advises Obama on housing policy.

Johnson was appointed to head Obama's vice presidential selection committee, until a controversy concerning an alleged $7 millions in questionable real estate loans he received on favorable terms from failed sub-prime mortgage lender Countrywide Financial surfaced and forced him to step down.

WND previously reported a panel chaired by Elena Kagan, dean and professor of law at Harvard Law School, speculated at the June two-day meeting of the American Constitution Society that Gorelick was a possible attorney general cabinet appointment if Obama should be elected president.

The decision by the U.S. Treasury to take over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae could end up costing the U.S. taxpayer as much as $100 billion, although the extent of losses at the two giant mortgage companies remains to be determined.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Freddie and Fannie own or guarantee about $5.2 trillion worth of mortgages.

The riskiest loans held by Freddie and Fannie are known as "Alt-A" and sub-prime mortgages, worth about $780 billion, or about 15 percent of the total portfolio.

The federal government takeover of Freddie and Fannie passes to U.S. taxpayers the contingent liability for failures in the entire $5.2 trillion loan portfolio held by the two mortgage giants.

Over the past four quarters, Freddie and Fannie have suffered losses of about $14 billion, as the mortgage market has been hit by a wave of defaults and foreclosures not seen in the U.S. since the 1930s.


Barack Obama's Top Ten Campaign Gaffes
Posted by: Iconoclast at 7:05AM CST on September 19, 2008
Barack Obama's Top Ten Campaign Gaffes
John Hawkins
Friday, September 19, 2008

Barack Obama's surrogates have been trying to convince the American people that his judgment is so impeccable that his lack of experience is irrelevant. However, it's hard to make that case when the candidate in question is the single biggest gaffe machine to hit American politics since Howard Dean. You think Joe Biden cranks out a lot of dumb quips? Well, Biden is a rank amateur compared to Obama. As you read these brainless comments, keep in mind that the biggest challenge I had in creating this list was limiting it to only 10 snafus.

In fact, there were so many of them that some of Obama's most famous slip-ups, like "I don't want them punished with a baby" and "Why can't I just eat my waffle?" didn't even make the list.

Well, let's get to it, shall we?

First up, here's the quotation that became the genesis of the "Obama is an elitist snob" meme.

10) "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they're charging a lot of money for this stuff."

When the internet is afire with false rumors that you're a Muslim, do you really want to bizarrely reference your "Muslim faith?"

9) "Let's not play games. I was suggesting - you're absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith."

I wonder if abortion is above Sarah Palin's pay grade? I think not.

8) “Rick Warren: ...Now, let's deal with abortion; 40 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. As a pastor, I have to deal with this all of the time, all of the pain and all of the conflicts. I know this is a very complex issue. Forty million abortions, at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?"

Barack Obama: "Well, you know, I think that whether you're looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade."

This part of Obama's speech sounds like it was written for him by one of King Canute's courtiers.

7) "...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. This was the moment -- this was the time -- when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals."

Whether this "joke" was about Sarah Palin or not, it was a rather foolish line given that even his own supporters in the audience took it as a sexist jab at her expense.

6) "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called 'change,' it's still going to stink. After eight years, we've had enough of the same old thing. It's time to bring about real change to Washington and that's the choice you've got in this election."

As he tried to explain why he tossed his grandmother under the bus in a previous speech, Obama actually managed to make it worse by showing that he thinks of white people as a generic group, not as individuals.

5) "The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person..."

Dan Quayle, who was unfairly pilloried as a #####, never said anything half as dumb as this.

4) "Over the last 15 months, we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been in 57 states? I think one left to go."

In his counterproductive race speech, which was mistakenly praised as genius by his supporters in the media, Obama managed to cement his association to the racist, anti-American rantings of Jeremiah Wright while simultaneously coming across as remarkably callous towards his own grandmother.

3) "I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

It's no secret to people who pay attention that Barack Obama is not a patriotic man and he managed to unwittingly hammer that point home when he rather foolishly made a big deal about refusing to wear a flag pin anymore.

2) "You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a (flag) pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we're talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest..."

If you're from a small town and you're wondering what Barack Obama thinks of you, this quote tells you everything you need to know and then some.

1) "You got into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Monday September 15, 2008
Idols of Crowds
Posted by: Iconoclast at 11:36PM CST on September 15, 2008
Idols of Crowds
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, September 16, 2008

"A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence."

Jean-François Revel was not referring to the United States when he wrote those words, nor to his own France, but to human beings in general. He was certainly not referring to Barack Obama, whom he probably never heard of, since Revel died last year.

To find anything comparable to crowds' euphoric reactions to Obama, you would have to go back to old newsreels of German crowds in the 1930s, with their adulation of their fuehrer, Adolf Hitler. With hindsight, we can look back on those people with pity, knowing now how many of them would be led to their deaths by the man they idolized.

The exultation of the moment can exact a brutal price after that moment has passed. Nowhere is that truer than when it comes to picking the leader of a nation, which means entrusting that leader with the fate of millions today and of generations yet unborn.

A leader does not have to be evil to lead a country into a catastrophe. Inexperience and incompetence can create very similar results, perhaps even faster in a nuclear age, when even "a small country"-- as Senator Obama called Iran-- can wreak havoc anywhere in the world, when they are led by suicidal fanatics and supply nuclear weapons to terrorists who are likewise suicidal fanatics.

Barack Obama is truly a phenomenon of our time-- a presidential candidate who cannot cite a single serious accomplishment in his entire career, besides advancing his own career with rhetoric.

He has a rhetorical answer for everything. Those of us who talk about the threat of Iran are just engaging in "the politics of fear" according to Obama, something to distract us from "the real issues," such as raising taxes and handing out largesse with the proceeds.

Those who have studied the years leading up to World War II have been astonished by how many people and how many countries failed to see what Adolf Hitler was getting ready to do.

Even though Hitler telegraphed his punches, few people seemed to get the message. Books about that period have had such titles as "The Gathering Storm" and "Why England Slept."

Will future generations wonder why we slept? Why we could not see the gathering storm in Iran, where one of the world's leading oil producers is building nuclear facilities-- ostensibly to generate electricity, but whose obvious purpose is to produce nuclear bombs.

This is a country whose president has already threatened to wipe a neighboring country off the map. Does anyone need to draw pictures?

When terrorists get nuclear weapons, there will be no way to deter suicide bombers. We and our children will be permanently at the mercy of the merciless.

Yet what are we talking about? Taxing and spending policies, socking it to the oil companies and rescuing people who gambled on risky mortgages and lost.

Are we serious? Are we incapable of adult foresight and adult responsibility?

Barack Obama of course has his usual answer: talk. Rhetoric seems to be his answer to everything. Obama calls for "aggressive" diplomacy and "tough" negotiations with Iran.

These colorful adjectives may impress gullible voters but they are unlikely to impress fanatics who are willing to destroy themselves if they can destroy us in the process.

Just what is Senator Obama going to say to Iran that has not been said already? That we don't want them to develop nuclear weapons? That has already been said, every way that it can possibly be said. If talk was going to do the job, it would already have done it by now.

Go to the United Nations? What will they do, except issue warnings-- and when these are ignored, issue more warnings?

But what does Obama have besides talk-- and adoring crowds?


More Obama Lies: Resume Inflation
Posted by: Iconoclast at 10:43PM CST on September 15, 2008
logo
Published on NewsBusters.org (http://newsbusters.org)

More Obama Resume Inflation: His Days at Business International

By Tom Blumer
Created 2008-09-15 22:02

Sweetness & Light (S&L) has the goods [1] (HT Michelle Malkin [2]) on yet another instance of resume enhancement in a Barack Obama book.

It is also yet another example of something an inquisitive media has failed to discover in the 21 months since an Obama presidential run became likely.

It's too bad. It's clear, from an underlying 2005 post [3] at Analyze This, and other information S&L gathered, that had anyone in the media undertaken an effort to speak to Obama's co-workers at Business International, the firm where he worked after earning his bachelor's degree from Columbia, they would have found that the reality of that job differed sharply from how Obama described it in his best-selling Dreams from My Father [4].

Here are just three of many examples from S&L, comparing how Obama characterized his job and the reality described at Analyze This:

(Per Obama)

Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant.

(Per Analyze This)

First, it wasn’t a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I’m sure we all wished that we were high-priced consultants to multinational corporations.

(Per Obama)

As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool.

(Per Analyze This)

It’s also not true that Barack was the only black man in the company. He was the only black professional man. Fred was an African-American who worked in the mailroom with his son. My boss and I used to join them on Friday afternoons to drink beer behind the stacks of office supplies. That’s not the kind of thing that Barack would do. Like I said, he was somewhat aloof.

(Per Obama)

The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary; money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors .....

(Per Analyze This)

If Barack was promoted, his new job responsibilities were more of the same - rewriting other people’s copy. As far as I know, he always had a small office, and the idea that he had a secretary is laughable. Only the company president had a secretary. Barack never left the office, never wore a tie, and had neither reason nor opportunity to interview Japanese financiers or German bond traders.

Another commenter at the Analyze This post corroborated the post's content. A "bill millar," who in part wrote (bold is mine):

Funny thing… A journalism/political science major… Writing about finance… Pretending in his book to be an expert on interest rate swaps.

I remember trying to explain the nuance of these instruments to him in the cramped three Wang terminal space we called the bull pen. In contrast to his his liberal arts background, I had a degree in finance and Wall Street experience, so I knew what I was talking about.

But rather than learn from a City College kid, the Ivy Leaguer just sort of rolled his eyes. Condescendingly. I’ll never forget it. God forbid he leave the impression that a mere editor like myself knew more about something than did Barack.

He was like that…

But know what? I can forgive him for being immature–which is probably all that was at the time. Don’t we all believe we know everything at just around that age?

That said…he was a lot older when he wrote his book. Mature enough by this time to realize that his account of his time at Business International could be described as embellishment…

Apparently not; or, he didn't care, as long as it would help him get to where he wanted to go. Also, go figure: The Analyze This author nonetheless describes himself as an Obama fan.

Speaking of embellishment: When is Oprah Winfrey, who famously dressed down James Frey [5] in early 2006 for the fabrications in his book, "A Million Little Pieces," going to go after Barack Obama for:

  • Omitting, and thus not dealing with, the sordid elements [6] of his father's life?
  • Creating composite characters [7] instead of describing real people -- in an autobiography?
  • And now, inflating the importance of his first job out of college to the point where co-workers don't even recognize it?

As to traditional media outlets, Tom Maguire at Just One Minute, writing on another matter [8] (Obama, Bill Ayers, and the Annenberg Challenge has a good prediction as to when they'll get around to questioning the accuracy of Obama's books: "after they resolve open issues about Ms. Palin's 4-H dues from 1971."

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com [9].

Source URL:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2008/09/15/more-obama-resume-inflation-his-days-business-international
Links:
[1] http://sweetness-light.com/archive/did-obama-turn-down-a-wall-street-career
[2] http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/14/obamas-co-workers-call-bs/
[3] http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/07/09/barack-obama-embellishes-his-resume/
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Dreams-My-Father-Story-Inheritance/dp/1400082773
[5] http://www.bizzyblog.com/2006/01/26/oprah-moves-to-damage-control-mode/
[6] http://www.bizzyblog.com/2008/08/17/bizzyblog-post-reprise-nearly-18-months-later-i-have-seen-no-substantive-response-to-this/
[7] http://www.bizzyblog.com/2007/01/15/bhoo-cant-ignore-this-item-where-i-come-from-this-is-known-as-making-stuff-up/
[8] http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2008/09/the-ace-comes-u.html
[9] http://www.bizzyblog.com/2008/09/15/more-obama-resume-inflation-his-days-at-business-international/

Saturday September 13, 2008
Change
Posted by: Iconoclast at 8:54PM CST on September 13, 2008

Friday September 12, 2008
Obama Sinks to New Low
Posted by: Iconoclast at 9:55PM CST on September 12, 2008
Barack Obama, fresh from calling Governor Palin a pig, has now sunk to a new low.  - And I don't just mean in the polls.

His campaign has just launched a new ad that mocks McCain for his supposed inability to use a computer.  There are just two problems with this idea:

1.  McCain knows HOW to use a computer,

and

2. He is not ABLE to use a computer because he was beaten by the North Vietnamese while serving his country as a Prisoner of War.

Since Obama has thirty staffers to send to Alaska to see if Governor Palin has any overdue library books, and since a simple Google search turned up the eight year old article linked above among the many articles detailing the extent and nature of Senator McCain's injuries, and since those staffers presumably know how to use Google, it's pretty clear that this ad intended to mock Senator McCain.

I know that Obama thinks patriotism is old fashioned, and he doesn't like to wear a flag pin on his lapel, or put his hand over his heart to salute the flag - but honestly!  How arrogant would he have to be not understand that he ought to respect McCain's service and injuries, not mock them.

 


Thursday September 11, 2008
The Swift-Skirting of Sarah Palin
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:16AM CST on September 11, 2008
The Swift-Skirting of Sarah Palin

-By Warner Todd Huston

Apparently the media wants to get even for the Swift-Boaters successful torpedoing of John Kerry in 2004 because they are by the dozens every day promulgating lies about the career and life of Governor Sarah Palin. I recently posted a piece on the lies, exaggerations and misbegotten assumptions of a Baltimore Sun columnist and it got me to thinking to try and gather one thread rebutting the media’s ever evolving negative memes against this strong woman. From unproven claims of infidelity, to claims she is a book banner and a negligent Mother, the media have been smearing this woman daily since she stepped out onto the national stage. One recent Politico attack on Palin was made up solely of the claim that she was once mean to someone… yes, Politico actually was trying to say that their report was serious.

In any case, I’d like to present and knock down some of the swift-skirt attacks the media is launching. So, in no particular order…

Lie- Palin Slashed spending for teen moms from $5 million dollars to $3.9 million in the Alaska state budget.

Truth- Palin actually increased by three-fold the budget for the Covenant House teen pregnancy programs. What she “cut” was the Covenant House’s request for $5 million! Palin’s $3.9 million was still a massive increase from the previous budget.

Lie- Palin belonged to the Alaska Independence Party, a group that wants Alaska to secede from the United States.

Truth- The Governor’s political registration shows that she has been a Republican since 1982 and she has never been a member of the AIP, though he husband has in the past.

Lie- Palin wants Creationism taught in school alongside of the Theory of Evolution.

Truth- Palin has spoken in favor of open discussion in the classroom of the two competing ideas, but has never spoken for, advocated for, or tried to make a policy that would make Alaska’s schools add creationism to their curriculum. Palin quote: “I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.”

Lie- Palin was so mired in controversy as a mayor that she was almost recalled while mayor of Wasilla.

Truth- Only a small number of Wasilla residents supported the recall effort and the idea died stillborn.

Lie- Palin cheated on her husband with her husband’s former business partner. This man had his divorce papers sealed to hide Palin’s affair.

Truth- Turns out it is untrue and the reason the man wanted his divorce papers sealed is to prevent the media from intruding into his life and the life of his young son.

Lie- Palin faked her recent pregnancy to cover for an out-of-wedlock birth of her teenaged daughter.

Truth- Many eyewitnesses and photos easily debunk this story. And even if you didn’t believe that, the fact that Palin’s daughter is pregnant NOW makes it physically impossible that she could have had a baby earlier in the year.

Lie- Palin was a supporter of Pat Buchanan when he ran for president in 1999.

Truth- Palin actually supported Steve Forbes in 1999 and was the co-chair on his Alaska campaign.

Lie- Palin is hiding her real religion from the public. She claims to be “just” a Christian, but is really a Pentecostal.

Truth- Palin left the Pentecostal Church she belonged to in Alaska 6 years ago.

Lie- Palin wanted a long, long list of books to be banned in the Wassilla library.

Truth- Palin did ask the library about what the process might be to ban a book, but the long list of books being circulated to “prove” she wanted books banned is really a list of all the books that have been banned at one time or another over the last 100 years. In fact, as far as the Harry Potter Books on that list goes, some of them came out after Palin left the office of Mayor of Wasilla.

Lie- Palin is lying when she says she sold the state’s jet plane on ebay.

Truth- Palin never said she sold the jet on ebay. She says she put it up to sell on ebay. And she did. But it didn’t sell there. The state sold it in a private sale to Larry Reynolds.

These are just some of the lies that the media are trying to sell us to swift-skit Sarah Palin. They cannot stand to see a strong woman like Sarah that actually got to the top by her own efforts… as opposed to some female Senators who got where she is because her philandering, but powerful husband paved the way for her.


Wednesday September 10, 2008
Obama: Content of his Resume, Content of his Character
Posted by: Iconoclast at 10:35PM CST on September 10, 2008

I wrote the following in a response to Maurice (who I disagree with profoundly, but enjoy debating immensely) on another blog, and decided I wanted to see what kind of a discussion it would spark:

Obama is no JFK, and he's no Lincoln.

What substantive accomplishment can you point to in his 143 days in the Senate? He's called no subcommittee hearings, he's voted "present" more often than not, and for the past two years he's been doing nothing but running for president.

This is Obama's track record: Harvard Law Review, but did not author any articles. On the faculty of one of the world's preeminent research universities, Chicago, where there is a definite faculty expectation of published research, and he published nothing.

He worked as an "organizer" (read "agitator") for ACORN, an organization best known for its role in facilitating election fraud, including right here in Racine. He served in the Illinois state legislature, where he had no leadership role. He had shady dealings with (including having part of his house purchase paid for by) Tony Rezko, a man currently under indictment for influence peddling and dirty politics.

And what about is experiences beyond the professional realm? When faced with the opportunities to lead in his personal life, he also failed to step up: He counts among his friends a man, William Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, and was behind a number of terrorist attacks, armed robberies, and murders, and who, on September 11th 2001, when asked about his terrorist attacks, told the New York Times he wished he could have done more. Ayers, in fact, was recently photographed trampling on an American flag. It was at Ayer's house where Obama announced his Senate bid.

Other of his friends include Louis Farrakhan, a notorious anti-semite who believes that Israel should be destroyed, and his pastor of twenty years and close friend Jeremiah Wright, who spouted racist hatred and hatred of his country for twenty years when Obama sat in the front pew. Or Michael Pfleger, a rogue Catholic priest who echoes many of Wright's sentiments.

Or, how about the line in his speech about "being his brother's keeper" - Pretty ironic that Obama's own half brother lives in abject poverty in a shack outside Nairobi on an income of $12 a year - and Obama, who has a family income of over half a million a year and lives in a mansion in Hyde Park (that Tony Rezko helped him buy) couldn't find $20 to send him. Some leadership experience there, huh?

Here's a picture of Obama's half brother holding a picture of him and Obama:

 


Tale of the Tape: Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama
Posted by: Iconoclast at 10:31PM CST on September 10, 2008

Tale of the Tape: Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama

Don't forget, by the way, that they're running for different positions

Sarah Palin

Barack Obama
Office being sought Vice President President of the United States and Leader of the Free World
Full name Sarah Louise Heath Palin Barack Hussein Obama II
Nickname Sarah Barracuda Barry Obama; "The One"
Public opinion Smoking hot in a "naughty librarian" sort of way May be The Messiah
Age 44 48
Children 5: two sons, three daughters 2: two daughters
Religion/Church attendance

Evangelical Christian;

attends Juneau Christian Center when in Juneau and grew up attending Wasilla Assembly of God

 Attended Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years, a "black liberation theology" church formerly led by Rev. Jeremiah Wright and governed according to the Black Value System
Current Job Governor of Alaska Junior Senator from Illinois
Previous Public Jobs

Mayor of Wasilla, AK (1996-2002); President of Alaska Conference of Mayors;

City Council member (1992-1996)

State Senator (1997-2004);

Community Organizer
Executive Experience

Governor for 2 years;

Mayor for 10 years

 None
Foreign Relations experience Governor of state that borders two foreign countries (Canada and Russia)

Chaired Senate subcommittee on Europe but never called it into session;

once gave a speech to 200,000 screaming Germans
Military Affairs experience

Commander in Chief of Alaska National Guard;

Son is enlisted Infantryman in U.S. Army

 None
Private Sector Experience

Sports reporter;

Salmon fisherman

 Associate at civil rights law firm
Speaking ability Beautifully executed initial stump speech in Dayton, OH hockey arena without a teleprompter An enter...wait--did you say without a teleprompter??
Spouse's name Todd Mitchell Palin Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama
Spouse's occupation

Salmon fisherman;

Former North Slope production supervisor for BP Oil

Vice President for Community and External Affairs at University of Chicago Hospitals;

former Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago;

former Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies;

former Assistant to the Mayor of Chicago;

former associate at Sidley Austin law firm
Reaction to spouse's political success Quit 17-year BP oil job when BP became involved in natural gas pipeline negotiations with wife's administration

Promoted and given 160% pay raise by UofC hospitals within months of husband's election to U.S. Senate;

Employer received $1,000,000.00 federal earmark, requested by husband, after her promotion
Coolest thing about Spouse

Tesoro Iron Dog Snowmobile race champion (longest snowmobile race in the world);

In 2008, while defending his championship, was injured when he was thrown 70 feet from his machine. He was sent to the hospital but still finished in fourth place

 Sister of Oregon State University head basketball coach Craig Robinson
Most Courageous Moment in Public Service Resigned in protest from position of Ethics Commissioner of Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in order to expose legal violations and conflicts of interest of Alaska Republican leaders, including the former state Attorney General and the State GOP Chairman (who was also an Oil & Gas Commissioner), who was doing work for the party on public time and supplying a lobbyist with a sensitive e-mail. Gave an anti-Iraq war speech to a crowd of anti-Iraq war demonstrators in Hyde Park in 2002
In Current Office Because... Upset sitting Governor in GOP primary due to public support for her efforts to clean up corrupt government establishment Republican opponent, who was leading in the polls, was forced to leave race after unsealing of divorce records exposed a sex scandal
Theme: Change and Clean Government

Hope and Change;

"Bringing Change from Outside Washington"
What they've done to live that theme:

Replaced entire Board of Agriculture and Conservation because of conflict of interest;

Resigned from position of Ethics Commissioner of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in order to expose corruption among members of own party

 Selected 36-year incumbent Senator as running mate
Family Affairs May have removed State Public Safety Commissioner as part of effort to protect sister in messy divorce and child custody battle

Often says, "I am my brother's keeper";

Brother lives in a hut in Nairobi on $12 per year
Union affiliation Union member, married to Union member Endorsed by a union
Iraq and Troop Support

Formerly (pre-surge) critical of apparent lack of long-term strategy for Iraq;

Visited wounded U.S. soldiers in Germany;

visited AK National Guard soldiers deployed to Kuwait;

Son deploying to Iraq on 9/11/08 as Army infantryman

Gave an anti-Iraq war speech to a crowd of anti-Iraq war demonstrators;

almost visited wounded troops in Germany, but decided to go shopping in Berlin instead
Bipartisan/"maverick" credentials

Married to a non-Republican;

Exposed corruption within own party;

Campaigned for Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell against corrupt GOP congressman Don Young;

Called out Sen Ted Stevens (R-AK) to "come clean" about financial dealings that are under fed investigation

 Talks about bipartisanship
Legislative Record

Passed a landmark ethics reform bill;

Used veto to cut budgetary spending;

Prevented "bridge to nowhere" that would have cost taxpayers $400 million dollars.

 Voted "present" over 100 times as IL state senator
How they dealt with corrupt individuals in home city/state

Exposed legal violations and conflicts of interest of Alaska Republican leaders;

Campaigned against corrupt GOP Representative;

Ran against and defeated corrupt incumbent governor in GOP primary

Launched political career in home of unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers (and still refers to him as a part of "mainstream Democratic Chicago";

Purchased home with help of convicted felon Tony Rezko
Guns

Lifetime member of NRA and avid hunter;

video can be found on YouTube of Palin firing an M4 at a military firing range

 Worked to pass legislation in Illinois that would prevent all law-abiding citizens from owning firearms
Earmarks

Opposed "Bridge to Nowhere" project;

Said Alaska should avoid relying on federal money for projects;

Campaigned against porker Don Young (R-AK) in 2008 primary

 Secured federal earmarks for wife's employer and for campaign bundlers
Abortion

Pro life;

gave birth to 5th child knowing that he would have Down's syndrome

Pro-choice;

only IL state sen. to speak against the Born Alive Infant's Protection Act, which required medical care to be given to live infants who survived abortions
Energy

Believes energy independence is a matter of national security;

For drilling in ANWR, which is in her state

Says Americans should "get tune-ups" and "check tire pressure";

Says "we can't expect the world to be okay with" our use of heating and air conditioning
Environment

Chair of Alaska Conservation Commission (2003-4);

Announced plans to create sub-cabinet group of advisors to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in AK

 Talks about the environment a lot
Athletic prowess Runs marathons Has reporters tailing him to the gym

Saturday September 6, 2008
Which party represents the wealthy, and why?
Posted by: Iconoclast at 10:58PM CST on September 6, 2008

 The following post, and my response, appeared on Blowhardometric Pressure's blog.  I thought this warranted a separate discussion.

Posted by: I_Live_Here_2 on September 6, 2008 9:50PM EST
"...However, I do not think a president should be allowed to run this country when they have no acknowledgement or understanding of the poverty that is in this country, as I see it as a major issue. In a prior blog, I referred to the poor people in this country, and heard responses about how there are no impoverished people in this country. For a while I decided not to blog, becasue I felt like, well if that individual believes that, they are far more ignorant about Americans overall than i first thought. I think the facts are that people want to vote for someone they have faith in and someone that they believe understands their histories, struggles, and perpectives. I agree that McCain does not have the same values as people who can barely pay their rent, car note, and medical bills like the majority, not the far and few that do not struggle. The truth for me is that the majority of people I know and are in my circle, do struggle and do not identify with McCain on any level.

Posted by: Iconoclast on September 6, 2008 11:48PM EST
I Live Here 2:

The Democrats like to talk that talk, but here's the truth:

McCain did not grow up wealthy. He grew up in a Navy family. John and Cindy McCain's wealth comes from her family, from the business her dad built from the ground up. Are they well off? Yes. But McCain's sons have the same sense of duty that their father does, as they are all in the military.

Do you think Obama is poor? Guess again. He bought a multi-million dollar house with help from a guy, Tony Rezko, who was subsequently indicted for political corruption, so let's just say that the means Obama used to accumulate his wealth are probably not open to the politically unconnected. His wife more than doubled her salary when Obama got elected to the senate, and pushed through a big fat earmark for her employer - our tax money, laundered through the University of Chicago Hospital, and paid out to the Obamas, who by the way earned over $4 million dollars last year, which is ten times the $400,000 that McCain earned himself. McCain's wife earned $6 million, so their family incomes are relatively comparable, however McCain gave over $100,000 to charity in 2007, compared to only $60,000 for the Obamas. By the way, the Clintons make them both look poor; They earned over $20 million in 2007.

Kind of kills that whole "Republicans can't understand me" theory, doesn't it? The reason Obama and Clinton can advocate higher taxes is simple: They've got theirs, and they don't care if you get yours.

You see poverty, but Republicans see opportunity. We see the glass as half full. I grew up poor, as did many of my friends. I worked for what I have, and I do OK for myself now. I'm not wealthy, I haven't amassed enough of an investment portfolio to retire early, but I'm working on it - and that's why I vote Republican.

 

We are the party of social mobility, and of wealth accumulation. Republican policies allow people to invest their money, build a business, create jobs, and build wealth. Democrats like to interfere with that process by claiming that anyone with an income higher than they deem appropriate is somehow undeserving, and responsible for other people's lack of financial success.

Biden Pads his Resume, Plagiarizes... Did he really earn a law degree?
Posted by: Iconoclast at 2:51PM CST on September 6, 2008

 Joe Biden not only plagiarized a speech from Neil Kinnock, he stole his entire life story and claimed it as his own.  He had to drop out of the 1988 Dem primary as a result.

Later, it came out that he cheated and plagiarized his way through law school.

Is this the kind of man we want as Vice President?  A liar and a cheater?

Joe Biden's plagiarism problem

Thomas Lifson
Political insiders have long known about Joe Biden getting caught plagiarizing almost word-for-word a speech given by British Labour politician Neil Kinnock. In fact, that killed his 1988 presidential campaign.

But a more serious plagiarism charge has been out there even longer - that he plagiarized in law school. That is something that can get you thrown out if proven.

Sweetness & Light remembers this 1987 New York Times article:

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democratic Presidential candidate, was accused of plagiarism while in his first year at Syracuse University Law School, academic officials familiar with Mr. Biden's record said today.  [....]

According to the people familiar with the record of the 44-year-old Senator from Delaware, he was called before the disciplinary body at the law school during his first year because of charges that he had committed plagiarism on a paper. Mr. Biden entered the school in 1965 and graduated in 1968.

CBS News tonight quoted an aide to Mr. Biden as saying he had been exonerated. However, an academic official said Mr. Biden had been found guilty, "threw himself on the mercy of the board" and promised not to repeat the offense. This, according to the official, persuaded the board to drop the matter and allow Mr. Biden to remain in law school. Mr. Biden's office declined to clarify the circumstances surrounding the case, saying the Senator had insisted on handling the matter himself at the news conference. [....]
 
Unsurprisingly, the New York Times article actually downplays the Kinnock plagiarism. For Mr. Biden didn’t just plagiarize his words, he plagiarized his life.

From a concomitant article in the (FL) St. Petersburg Times:

Biden’s way with words now seems to be a liability

JOHN HARWOOD
Sep 20, 1987


… But it was just last month that Biden appropriated an inspirational speech by British Labor leader Neil Kinnock. Kinnock told of ancestors who played football after long days underground in the mines, who recited poetry poetry and paved the way for him to become the first in his family to attend college.

When he saw a tape of Kinnock in action, Biden said Thursday, “it was a connect. I mean, I could tell how that man felt. That’s how I feel.”


So he used it - changing the names but little else - at a debate last month in Iowa. But instead of crediting Kinnock, he told the audience he thought of it on the way to the debate…

Biden acknowledged Kinnock’s language didn’t fit his family perfectly. His father was in used car sales, his grandfather was a mining engineer. But he had been told and “assumed” that other relatives had worked in the mines. And, “to make it clear,”  members of his mother’s family had, indeed, been to college…

 Bad enough he stole the words and ideas of others, but now he's trying to suppress the truth about it...

Biden's 1988 Campaign Plagiarism Goes Well Beyond What Wiki Reveals

 

http://newsbusters.org/node/23545/print

By Tom Blumer
Created 2008-08-25 11:14

Joe Biden's 1987 stump-speech plagiarism of Neil Kinnock likely occurred more than once. Additionally, according to contemporaneous New York Times reports, including an editorial, Biden's orations featured unattributed speech-lifting from John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey.

That's a lot more than Joe Biden's defenders and two of his Wikipedia entries have thus far revealed.

Previous posts (here [0] and here [0] at NewsBusters; here [1] and here [2] at BizzyBlog) noted "interesting" modifications to the main Wikipedia entry of Biden, who Barack Obama selected as his vice-presidential running mate this past weekend.

The first post reported that the detail of Biden's undergraduate grades (generally C's and D's, with two A's in phys ed and an F in ROTC) "strangely" disappeared between Friday and Saturday. The second ultimately noted that a section relating to Biden's involvement in the presidential campaign of 2004 had been deleted, but that its text had inexplicably been moved to before 1988. It was as if the idea that Biden had "campaigned" in 2004 was true before Barack Obama selected him, but no longer true after that.

But to get to the next example of Wiki whitewashing by Obama-Biden's busy bees -- the worst found thus far -- we need to go back 21 years to the New York Times.

The first relevant article is from September 12, 1987 [3] ("Biden's Debate Finale: An Echo From Abroad"), and comes from Maureen Dowd, who wrote (bold is mine):

At various campaign appearances last month, the Senator talked admiringly about Mr. Kinnock's themes and incorporated phrases and concepts after first crediting the Briton. But, in his closing remarks at the Iowa State Fair forum, he did not mention the Labor leader, nor did he some days later in an interview when he recounted the positive response.

Then, on September 17 [4] ("Biden Was Accused of Plagiarism in Law School"), E.J. Dionne expanded the scope of the stump-speech plagiarism beyond Kinnock (bolds are mine):

This week politicians from both parties - some of them partisans of other candidates in the Democvratic Presidential race - told members of the press of additional instances in which Mr. Biden had used the language and syntax of others, including John F. and Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey.

..... Some of the similarities in speeches were noted by The San Jose Mercury News and by The Des Moines Register in their Tuesday editions, and by The New York Times today. CBS News and ABC News broadcast reports on the subject this evening.

Mr. Biden and his aides have argued that the charges concerning his speeches are unfair, saying he used Mr. Kinnock's remarks often and usually attributed them to the British leader. The instance in which he did not, his aides said, was a lapse. Mr. Biden's campaign also argues that public officials frequently use material from the speeches of politicians of earlier generations.

At that point, the Dionne seemed to be casting doubt on the alleged non-Kinnock lifting. But a caustic Times editorial that same day [5] was a lot less skeptical about at least one such specific example, and about one other person named by Dionne (bolds are mine):

As generations of teachers keep saying, plagiarism is theft. Considering their content, the Biden speeches sound like grand larceny. For instance, in a California speech last February, Senator Biden adopted almost word for word what Robert Kennedy said in 1968 about the gross national product: ''It doesn't measure the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debates, the integrity of our public officials.'' ..... Lifting that language trashes the very values he was urging.

What makes Senator Biden's behavior mystifying is recklessness. It's one thing to misappropriate someone else's words. It's another to take passages so clearly someone else's that you're likely to get caught. That's true of the Kennedy quotes and even more so of the Senator's abundant lifts of highly personal thoughts about ancestry from Neil Kinnock, the British Labor Party leader. It's a bit like Gary Hart inviting reporters to follow him even as he was seeing women other than his wife - a bit like daring people to catch you.

The misappropriations are troubling for another reason. Hackneyed political oratory gives voters one measure. But Mr. Biden claims to be a candidate with something to say and asks to be measured by that standard. By passing off the words of Neil Kinnock or Robert Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey as his own he deprives voters of his thoughts and his words. His message, counterfeit, clanks.

With that context, let's wheel on over to Wiki.

Here is what the main Wiki entry about Biden had about the 1987 speech plagiarizing as of Friday (with two relevant footnotes included), followed by what was there as of 9:00 a.m. this morning, followed by what the Wiki entry devoted solely to Biden's 1988 campaign [6] had as of 9:00 a.m.:

BidenWikiMainEntryKinnock082208.jpg

____

BidenWikiMainEntry0825at9am.jpg

____

BidenWiki1988PrezEntry0825at9am

Now it's time to call out the relevant Wiki wackiness:

Wiki washout #1 -- Supposedly, the "in all speeches but one" reference (#24) originally had footnoted support. As you can see, Footnote #24 does not deal with how often Biden failed to credit Kinnock. Though others have found evidence that Biden indeed credited Kinnock at other times, I have found no evidence proving, as Wiki breezily claims (but now only in its 1988 Biden presidential campaign entry, in the first red-underlined sentence), that the videotaped speech was the only such example. And where's the footnote in the new location of the "in all speeches but one" claim?

Wiki washout #2 -- Contemporaneous articles at the Times cast significant doubt on the "in all speeches but one" claim. Dowd noted an interview where Biden also failed to credit Kinnock (though it's not a "speech," it is definitely a second example), making it appear that Biden's failures to credit Kinnock may have been repeated and not a mere one-off (Footnote #23 links to Dowd's report). Additionally, Dionne's reference above is to "usually" crediting Kinnock, not doing it "all but once."

Wiki washout #3 -- The second red underlined sentence in the current 1988 presidential campaign entry would seem to contradict, or at least not to support, the idea that Biden failed to properly credit Kinnock only once.

Wiki washout #4 -- Worst of all, there is no indication at either Wiki entry that Biden was accused, and from all appearances accurately, of engaging in additional stump-speech plagiarizing of the Kennedys and Humphrey. Clearly the New York Times of 1987 would agree that it belongs.

The effects of all of this Wiki wackiness are not insignificant:

  • Current entries lead readers to believe that Biden only plagiarized Kinnock one time. This is highly unlikely at best, and known by Team Biden to be untrue at worst.
  • Current entries lead readers to believe that Kinnock was the only politician whose speeches were plagiarized. Given the evidence presented, that's virtually impossible.
  • Current entries give credence to Biden's specious claim at the time he withdrew from the 1988 presidential race that he was undone by "the exaggerated shadow" of his mistakes. The Wiki-driven context supports the presumption of exaggeration.
  • Ultimately, many readers will likely infer that all should be forgiven, because even at the time the whole thing seems to have been overblown. That's ridiculous: It's very clear from reading the New York Times articles from the period that once Biden was caught, repeated examples of stump-speech plagiarism cascaded forth, accompanied by demonstrated resume exaggeration and other dishonesty. Biden had to quit to stop the bleeding.

A NewsBusters commenter yesterday [6] regaled me with the notion that what is happening to Biden's Wiki information represents "clean-up, reorganization, and general improvements." I would suggest that this commenter, who unlike me appears to have the time and detailed knowledge and experience to engage in such activities, get to work.

So when will we learn from traditional media beat reporters that at least two of their predecessors called out Joe Biden for serial and far from isolated plagiarism in 1987? Or will MoDo and EJ come clean on their own?

Biden Also Plagiarized, Padded His Resume

A bit of history from archives of the New York Times:

Biden Was Accused of Plagiarism in Law School

By E. J. DIONNE JR., SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: September 17, 1987

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democratic Presidential candidate, was accused of plagiarism while in his first year at Syracuse University Law School, academic officials familiar with Mr. Biden’s record said today.

Mr. Biden, who as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is presiding over the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork, has called a news conference for 9 A.M. Thursday to discuss this charge and reports that he has lifted material from speeches by other politicians to use in his public addresses.

A Biden aide, who asked not to be identified, declined to comment on the plagiarism charge, saying Mr. Biden wanted to discuss it himself. ”It’s his life,” the aide said.

According to the people familiar with the record of the 44-year-old Senator from Delaware, he was called before the disciplinary body at the law school during his first year because of charges that he had committed plagiarism on a paper. Mr. Biden entered the school in 1965 and graduated in 1968.

CBS News tonight quoted an aide to Mr. Biden as saying he had been exonerated. However, an academic official said Mr. Biden had been found guilty, ”threw himself on the mercy of the board” and promised not to repeat the offense. This, according to the official, persuaded the board to drop the matter and allow Mr. Biden to remain in law school. Mr. Biden’s office declined to clarify the circumstances surrounding the case, saying the Senator had insisted on handling the matter himself at the news conference.

One academic official said Mr. Biden asked for and obtained his law school records several weeks ago and requested then that the school not distribute them until he had had a chance to examine their contents.

Mr. Biden and his aides were meeting late tonight to discuss the apparent crisis confronting him.

For a time this afternoon, on the second day of hearings on the Bork nomination, Mr. Biden left the hearing room. It was not immediately clear whether his departure was precipitated by reports swirling around the Capitol about his record at Syracuse.

However, Dan Forbush, vice president for public relations at the university, said Mr. Biden was ”in touch with the law school today.” …

The controversy surrounding Mr. Biden began after The New York Times reported last Saturday that he had appropriated, without attribution, the language of Neil Kinnock, the British Labor Party leader, to close a debate in Iowa last month.

In a television commercial during the British election campaign last spring, Mr. Kinnock asked, ”Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?” Pointing to his wife, he asked, ”Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?”

In closing remarks at a debate at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 23, Mr. Biden asked,”Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?” Further, he asked, ”Why is it that my wife, who is sitting out there in the audience, is the first in her family to ever go to college?”

This week politicians from both parties - some of them partisans of other candidates in the Democvratic [sic] Presidential race - told members of the press of additional instances in which Mr. Biden had used the language and syntax of others, including John F. and Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey. The information provided to The New York Times today about Mr. Biden’s academic record, however, did not come from any rival Presidential campaign.

Some of the similarities in speeches were noted by The San Jose Mercury News and by The Des Moines Register in their Tuesday editions, and by The New York Times today. CBS News and ABC News broadcast reports on the subject this evening…

Political professionals, including those working for rival Democratic campaigns, were divided over the impact of the reports of speech-lifting.

Some said it would be particularly damaging because Mr. Biden’s campaign had emphasized his oratorical skills and capacity for ”inspirational leadership.”

”He, in one sense, created the standard by which he was to be judged,” said Harrison Hickman, a Democratic poll taker. ”He has said consistently that the next President must be the one who can motivate the American public. And if you’re going to make that argument, it seems a fair test to ask whether Joe Biden is a visionary or is Joe Biden a good speaker.” …

As for the latest charge, that of plagiarism, one Democratic political consultant not associated with any of the campaigns said one factor in the way Mr. Biden would be judged was to what extent, if any, he had been exonerated by the law school.

”There are exonerations and there are exonerations,” this consultant said, noting that Mr. Biden might have been spared punishment without actually being cleared of the charge.

Mr. Biden, a passionate orator, entered the Presidential race on June 9. He cast himself as the candidate who understood the aspirations of the generation of Americans from the post-war baby boom, and also as a political leader who understood the anxieties and aspirations of the American middle class. Mr. Biden’s aides have said that it was Mr. Kinnock’s evocation of the struggles of working people that drew Mr. Biden to the British leader’s speech.

Although he has gained considerable ground in the polls in Iowa, whose caucuses are only five months away, Mr. Biden has not succeeded in sparking the broad enthusiasm that he thought his candidacy would provoke.

Mr. Biden and his aides hoped that the Bork hearings would raise his visibility and stature, casting him as an intelligent and articulate critic of Judge Bork’s conservative judicial philosophy. Instead, the weekend before the hearings was dominated by stories of Mr. Biden’s lifting of Mr. Kinnock’s rhetoric.

And a mere two days later Mr. Biden and the New York Times were also forced to admit:

Biden Admits Errors and Criticizes Latest Report

By E. J. DIONNE JR., SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: September 22, 1987

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. issued a formal statement today acknowledging that he had misstated several facts about his past last April in a campaign appearance in New Hampshire…

Most of Mr. Biden’s statement was in response to a report in this week’s issue of Newsweek magazine on a tape recording made by the C-SPAN network of an appearance by Mr. Biden at a home in Claremont, N.H., on April 3. It was a typical coffee-klatch style appearance before a small group. The network regularly records and broadcasts such events as part of its coverage of the Presidential campaign.

The tape, which was made available by C-SPAN in response to a reporter’s request, showed a testy exchange in response to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as ”Frank.” Mr. Biden looked at his questioner and said: ”I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.”

He then went on to say that he ”went to law school on a full academic scholarship - the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,” Mr. Biden said. He also said that he ”ended up in the top half” of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was ”the outstanding student in the political science department” and ”graduated with three degrees from college.”

In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: ”I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inacurate.”

As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: ”I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors - I said ‘three’ and should have said ‘two.’ ” Mr. Biden received a single B.A. in history and political science…

”With regard to my being the outstanding student in the political science department,” the statement went on. ”My name was put up for that award by David Ingersoll, who is still at the University of Delaware.”

In the Sunday interview, Mr. Biden said of his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: ”My recollection is - and I’d have to confirm this - but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.” Newsweek said Mr. Biden had gone to Syracuse ”on half scholarship based on financial need.” …

As for the continued, minute probing of his past, Mr. Biden told The Times: ”I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.” …

It really is to laugh.

Unsurprisingly, the first New York Times article actually downplayed the Kinnock plagiarism.

For Mr. Biden didn’t just plagiarize Mr. Kinnock’s words, he plagiarized his life.

From a concomitant article in the (FL) St. Petersburg Times:

Biden’s way with words now seems to be a liability

JOHN HARWOOD
Sep 20, 1987

… But it was just last month that Biden appropriated an inspirational speech by British Labor leader Neil Kinnock. Kinnock told of ancestors who played football after long days underground in the mines, who recited poetry poetry and paved the way for him to become the first in his family to attend college.

When he saw a tape of Kinnock in action, Biden said Thursday, “it was a connect. I mean, I could tell how that man felt. That’s how I feel.”

So he used it - changing the names but little else - at a debate last month in Iowa. But instead of crediting Kinnock, he told the audience he thought of it on the way to the debate…

Biden acknowledged Kinnock’s language didn’t fit his family perfectly. His father was in used car sales, his grandfather was a mining engineer. But he had been told and “assumed” that other relatives had worked in the mines. And, “to make it clear,”  members of his mother’s family had, indeed, been to college…

Of course Mr. Obama sees nothing wrong with using other people’s words, or padding his resume — or even making up stories about his life out of whole cloth.

As we now know, he does it all the time.



Obama’s Global Tax Proposal Up for Senate Vote
Posted by: Iconoclast at 1:55PM CST on September 6, 2008

Obama’s Global Tax Proposal Up for Senate Vote


AIM Column  |  By Cliff Kincaid  |  February 12, 2008


It appears the Senate version is being pushed not only by Biden and Obama, a member of the committee, but Lugar, the ranking Republican member.

A nice-sounding bill called the "Global Poverty Act," sponsored by Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Barack Obama, is up for a Senate vote on Thursday and could result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations.   

Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has not endorsed either Senator Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. But on Thursday, February 14, he is trying to rush Obama's "Global Poverty Act" (S.2433) through his committee. The legislation would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.   

The bill, which is item number four on the committee's business meeting agenda, passed the House by a voice vote last year because most members didn't realize what was in it. Congressional sponsors have been careful not to calculate the amount of foreign aid spending that it would require. According to the website of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, no hearings have been held on the Obama bill in that body.   

A release from the Obama Senate office about the bill declares, "In 2000, the U.S. joined more than 180 countries at the United Nations Millennium Summit and vowed to reduce global poverty by 2015. We are halfway towards this deadline, and it is time the United States makes it a priority of our foreign policy to meet this goal and help those who are struggling day to day."  

The legislation itself requires the President "to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day." 

The bill defines the term "Millennium Development Goals" as the goals set out in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2 (2000).  

The U.N. says that "The commitment to provide 0.7% of gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance was first made 35 years ago in a General Assembly resolution, but it has been reaffirmed repeatedly over the years, including at the 2002 global Financing for Development conference in Monterrey, Mexico. However, in 2004, total aid from the industrialized countries totaled just $78.6 billion-or about 0.25% of their collective GNP."  

In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits nations to banning "small arms and light weapons" and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 

The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as "the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development."  

Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the U.N.'s "Millennium Project," says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the "Millennium Development Goals," this amounts to $845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money, Sachs has written, is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.  

Obama's bill has only six co-sponsors. They are Senators Maria Cantwell, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Lugar, Richard Durbin, Chuck Hagel and Robert Menendez. But it appears that Biden and Obama see passage of this bill as a way to highlight Democratic Party priorities in the Senate. 

The House version (H.R. 1302), sponsored by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), had only 84 co-sponsors before it was suddenly brought up on the House floor last September 25 and was passed by voice vote. House Republicans were caught off-guard, unaware that the pro-U.N. measure committed the U.S. to spending hundreds of billions of dollars.  

It appears the Senate version is being pushed not only by Biden and Obama, a member of the committee, but Lugar, the ranking Republican member. Lugar has worked with Obama in the past to promote more foreign aid for Russia, supposedly to stem nuclear proliferation, and has become Obama's mentor. Like Biden, Lugar is a globalist. They have both promoted passage of the U.N.'s Law of the Sea Treaty, for example.

The so-called "Lugar-Obama initiative" was modeled after the Nunn-Lugar program, also known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, which was designed to eliminate weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union. But one defense analyst, Rich Kelly, noted evidence that "CTR funds have eased the Russian military's budgetary woes, freeing resources for such initiatives as the war in Chechnya and defense modernization." He recommended that Congress "eliminate CTR funding so that it does not finance additional, perhaps more threatening, programs in the former Soviet Union." However, over $6 billion has already been spent on the program.  

Another program modeled on Nunn-Lugar, the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention (IPP), was recently exposed as having funded nuclear projects in Iran through Russia.  

More foreign aid through passage of the Global Poverty Act was identified as one of the strategic goals of InterAction, the alliance of U.S-based international non-governmental organizations that lobbies for more foreign aid. The group is heavily financed by the U.S. Government, having received $1.4 million from taxpayers in fiscal year 2005 and $1.7 million in 2006. However, InterAction recently issued a report accusing the United States of "falling short on its commitment to rid the world of dire poverty by 2015 under the U.N. Millennium Development Goals..." 

It's not clear what President Bush would do if the bill passes the Senate. The bill itself quotes Bush as declaring that "We fight against poverty because opportunity is a fundamental right to human dignity." Bush's former top aide, Michael J. Gerson, writes in his new book, Heroic Conservatism, that Bush should be remembered as the President who "sponsored the largest percentage increases in foreign assistance since the Marshall Plan..."

Even these increases, however, will not be enough to satisfy the requirements of the Obama bill. A global tax will clearly be necessary to force American taxpayers to provide the money. 


Wednesday September 3, 2008
Obama Targets First Amendment
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:02AM CST on September 3, 2008

First Amendment targeted

Mark Hyman

COMMENTARY

"When the heavy hand of the state is imposed on the press, all of us lose," Barack Obama told a group of Kenyan journalists during an August 2006 trip to Africa. "The media does not have a formal role in the government, but it serves a critical function in providing information to the public so that they can hold the government accountable," he said.

Mr. Obama's remarks implied he supports the First Amendment. His comment that "Democracy can't function properly without a free press," suggested he understood the importance of robust scrutiny of elected officials. Yet, when given the opportunity, Mr. Obama's recent actions have contradicted his own statements.

The Obama campaign launched a multipronged assault on the First Amendment when it threatened television and radio stations airing content critical of Mr. Obama. The first targets were TV stations running an advertisement that has proven embarrassing to the presidential candidate. The ad focuses on Mr. Obama's 13-year relationship with Bill Ayers, a key member of the 1970s domestic terrorist group, the Weather Underground. The Weathermen bombed at least 12 locations, including the U.S. Capitol in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972 and the State Department in 1975. A 1970 San Francisco bombing killed one police officer and blinded another. The same year, three Weathermen perished in a Greenwich Village townhouse explosion. Unrepentant, Mr. Ayers told a New York Times reporter in remarks published on Sept. 11, 2001: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

A group called American Issues Project paid for the ad to run on several TV stations in key battleground states. Press accounts say some of the stations are owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, for whom I work.

Another Obama target is Chicago radio station WGN. The source of Mr. Obama's ire is talk-show host Stanley Kurtz who is no Friend of Barry. The Obama campaign has urged supporters to attack WGN for permitting Mr. Kurtz to practice his profession.

Obama campaign lawyer Robert Bauer warned TV stations against airing the ad he claimed of containing "malicious falsity." Mr. Bauer's repeated demands that the Justice Department intervene is an example of an intrusion the First Amendment was crafted to guard against and the type of heavy-handed tactics Mr. Obama criticized in Kenya. But in 2006, Mr. Obama was the recipient of exclusively fawning media coverage. Reporters from CNN, AP, BBC, Reuters, a pair of Chicago TV stations and dozens of international and local media accompanied Mr. Obama on his Kenya visit.

Mr. Bauer called those behind the ads "lawbreakers" and accused them of acting "illegally." Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor labeled the ad "false."

Television stations typically have procedures in place to guard against airing patently false or grossly misleading ads. Generally, stations err on the side of running the commercials. The onus of responsibility to pull an ad usually falls on the complaining party to make their case. That the Obama camp has not challenged the content of the ad using established mechanisms speaks volumes. (Of note, if media outlets did not publish or broadcast ads that may be dubious, questionable or open to interpretation, then very few political ads would ever see the light of day.)

The Obama campaign's insistence on government intervention is reminiscent of a similar threat made by a John Kerry campaign official during the 2004 presidential race. At issue was "Stolen Honor," a documentary film featuring 13 former Vietnam POWs, including two Medal of Honor recipients, who took issue with statements made by Mr. Kerry during their captivity and during the 2004 campaign. Mr. Kerry supporters branded the former POWs liars.

Appearing opposite me while on Fox News Channel, Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton threatened retaliation by a Kerry administration if Sinclair aired any portion of "Stolen Honor." Mr. Clanton warned, "They [Sinclair] better hope we don't get elected." Mr. Clanton's threat was a colossal blunder.

In 2004, Mr. Kerry received considerable support from congressional Democrats. Eighteen senators sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission imploring the agency to prevent any broadcast of "Stolen Honor." Eighty-five House Democrats followed suit. The FCC correctly denied the requests from the Censorship Caucus.

Threats by the Obama camp should alarm every media organization, and more importantly, the public. Sadly, the number of media outlets that criticized brazen attempts in 2004 by Kerry officials and supporters to undermine the First Amendment could be counted on only one hand. Countless newspapers encouraged the FCC to take pre-emptive action.

The New York Times accused of the Medal of Honor recipients and their fellow POWs of making false claims and editorialized that the FCC should revoke Sinclair's broadcast licenses. (For the record, then-deputy editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal admitted to me he never watched "Stolen Honor" despite labeling the documentary a "propaganda film" that "makes no attempt at balance or fairness.")

The New York Time's exhortation of "no attempt at balance or fairness" came from the very same newspaper that earlier this year published a journalistically flawed Page One story alleging an affair between John McCain and a female lobbyist while relying on just two unnamed sources. That is an example of the kind of freedom of the press that Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry support: one that supports their version of the truth.


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