More actually real life investigative reporting from the Columbus Dispatch:

State employee says she was ordered to check out Joe the Plumber

Friday,  October 31, 2008

By Randy Ludlow

Vanessa Niekamp said that when she was asked to run a child-support check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher on Oct. 16, she thought it routine. A supervisor told her the man had contacted the state agency about his case.

Niekamp didn’t know she just had checked on “Joe the Plumber,” who was elevated the night before to presidential politics prominence as Republican John McCain’s example in a debate of an average American.

The senior manager would not learn about “Joe” for another week, when she said her boss informed her and directed her to write an e-mail stating her computer check was a legitimate inquiry.

The reason Niekamp said she was given for checking if there was a child-support case on Wurzelbacher does not match the reason given by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

Director Helen Jones-Kelley said her agency checks people who are “thrust into the public spotlight,” amid suggestions they may have come into money, to see if they owe support or are receiving undeserved public assistance.

Niekamp told The Dispatch she is unfamiliar with the practice of checking on the newly famous. “I’ve never done that before, I don’t know of anybody in my office who does that and I don’t remember anyone ever doing that,” she said today.

Democrat Gov. Ted Strickland and Jones-Kelley, both supporters of Democrat Barack Obama, have denied political motives in checking on Wurzelbacher. The Toledo-area resident later endorsed McCain. State officials say any information on “Joe” is confidential and was not released.

Today, Strickland press secretary Keith Dailey said neither the governor’s office nor Job and Family Services officials could comment due to an ongoing investigation by Ohio’s inspector general.

Republican legislators have called the checks suspicious and Jones-Kelley’s reason for them flimsy. They are demanding to know whether state computers were accessed in an attempt to dig up dirt on Wurzelbacher.

Jones-Kelley has revealed that her agency also checked to see if Wurzelbacher was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes. “Joe the Plumber” has said he is not involved in a child-support case.

About 3 p.m. on Oct. 16, Niekamp said Carrie Brown, assistant deputy director for child support, asked her to run Wurzelbacher through the computer. Citing privacy laws, Niekamp would not say what, if anything, was found on “Joe.”

On Oct. 23, Niekamp said Doug Thompson, deputy director for child support, told her she had checked on “Joe the Plumber.” Thompson “literally demanded” that she write an e-mail to the agency’s chief privacy officer stating she checked the case for child-support purposes, she said.

Thompson told her that Jones-Kelley said Wurzelbacher might buy a plumbing business and could owe support. Thompson said he replied that he “would check him out.”

Niekamp, 38, a senior child-support manager, said she never heard any discussion of politics amid what her supervisors told her about the checks on Wurzelbacher.

Worried about her $69,000-a-year job and potential criminal charges, the 15-year state employee said she went to Inspector General Thomas P. Charles on Oct. 24. She has seen employees fired, and dismissed one herself, for illegally accessing personal information in support cases. Niekamp, a registered Republican, said politics played no role in what she told investigators.

The e-mail that Niekamp said she wrote was not among records provided today to The Dispatch in response to a public-records request. Nor did the agency, as required by state law, say it withheld any records.

Strickland spokesman Dailey later said one e-mail was withheld from The Dispatch because its release is prohibited by federal or state laws that forbid the release of information on the state’s child-support system. Daily said he was neither confirming nor denying the existence of a case on Wurzelbacher.

This story alone should be enough to warn people off of electing any more Democrats.

Let alone giving them control of our entire federal government.

From Mr. Obama’s second 2006 autobiography, The Audacity Of Hope – Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream, pp 24-5:

In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—played out on the national stage. The victories that the sixties generation brought about—the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority—have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions—that quality of trust and fellow feeling—that bring us together as Americans.

So where does that leave us? Theoretically the Republican Party might have produced its own Clinton, a center-right leader who built on Clinton’s fiscal conservatism while moving more aggressively to revamp a creaky federal bureaucracy and experiment with market- or faith-based solutions to social policy. And in fact such a leader may still emerge. Not all Republican elected officials subscribe to the tenets of today’s movement conservatives. In both the House and the Senate, and in state capitals across the country, there are those who cling to more traditional conservative virtues of temperance and restraint—men and women who recognize that piling up debt to finance tax cuts for the wealthy is irresponsible, that deficit reduction can’t take place on the backs of the poor, that the separation of church and state protects the church as well as the state, that conservation and conservatism don’t have to conflict, and that foreign policy should be based on facts and not wishful thinking.

But these Republicans are not the ones who have driven the debate over the past six years. Instead of the “compassionate conservatism” that George Bush promised in his 2000 campaign, what has characterized the ideological core of today’s GOP is absolutism, not conservatism. There is the absolutism of the free market, an ideology of no taxes, no regulation, no safety net—indeed, no government beyond what’s required to protect private property and provide for the national defense.

There’s the religious absolutism of the Christian right, a movement that gained traction on the undeniably difficult issue of abortion, but which soon flowered into something much broader; a movement that insists not only that Christianity is America’s dominant faith, but that a particular, fundamentalist brand of that faith should drive public policy, overriding any alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberal theologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas Jefferson.

And there is the absolute belief in the authority of majority will, or at least those who claim power in the name of the majority—a disdain for those institutional checks (the courts, the Constitution, the press, the Geneva Conventions, the rules of the Senate, or the traditions governing redistricting) that might slow our inexorable march toward the New Jerusalem.

Of course, there are those within the Democratic Party who tend toward similar zealotry. But those who do have never come close to possessing the power of a Rove or a DeLay, the power to take over the party, fill it with loyalists, and enshrine some of their more radical ideas into law. The prevalence of regional, ethnic, and economic differences within the party, the electoral map and the structure of the Senate, the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections—all these things tend to prevent those Democrats in office from straying too far from the center. In fact, I know very few elected Democrats who neatly fit the liberal caricature; the last I checked, John Kerry believes in maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military, Hillary Clinton believes in the virtues of capitalism, and just about every member of the Congressional Black Caucus believes Jesus Christ died for his or her sins.

You see, Obama’s Democrats would never put partisan zealots like Rove and DeLay in power.

(Never mind Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid or any of the new chairmen of the House and Senate committees.)

They would never do that. You have Obama’s word.

Oh, but have you heard, Mr. Obama has already announced that once he is elected President Rahm Emanuel will be his chief of staff?

From Rolling Stone magazine:

[T]here’s the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting “Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!” and plunging the knife into the table after every name. “When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape,” one campaign veteran recalls. “It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you.”

You see, Mr. Obama would not surround himself with radicals like the evil Karl Rove.

Any cursory reading of Mr. Obama’s writings will show that Obama’s big idea has always been to bring back Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s socialism of the 1930s.

Even before our recent economic crisis Mr. Obama was hoping that the competition of the global economy would bring about enough of a “crisis” to make us long for those good old days of the Great Depression.

From Obama’s second 2006 autobiography, The Audacity Of Hope – Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream, pp 86-95:

Opportunity

YOU’LL GET LITTLE argument these days, from either the left or the right, with the notion that we’re going through a fundamental economic transformation… But there’s also no denying that globalization has greatly increased economic instability for millions of ordinary Americans. To stay competitive and keep investors happy in the global marketplace, U.S.-based companies have automated, downsized, outsourced, and off-shored. They’ve held the line on wage increases, and replaced defined-benefit health and retirement plans with 401(k)s and Health Savings Accounts that shift more cost and risk onto workers.

The result has been the emergence of what some call a “winner-take-all” economy, in which a rising tide doesn’t necessarily lift all boats. Over the past decade, we’ve seen strong economic growth but anemic job growth; big leaps in productivity but flatlining wages; hefty corporate profits, but a shrinking share of those profits going to workers…

For the most part, though, the Republican economic agenda under President Bush has been devoted to tax cuts, reduced regulation, the privatization of government services— and more tax cuts. Administration officials call this the Ownership Society, but most of its central tenets have been staples of laissez-faire economics since at least the 1930s: a belief that a sharp reduction—or in some cases, elimination—of taxes on incomes, large estates, capital gains, and dividends will encourage capital formation, higher savings rates, more business investment, and greater economic growth; a belief that government regulation inhibits and distorts the efficient working of the market; and a belief that government entitlement programs are inherently inefficient, breed dependency, and reduce individual responsibility, initiative, and choice.

Or, as Ronald Reagan succinctly put it: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

So far, the Bush Administration has only achieved one-half of its equation; the Republican-controlled Congress has pushed through successive rounds of tax cuts, but has refused to make tough choices to control spending—special interest appropriations, also known as earmarks, are up 64 percent since Bush took office…

But over the long term, doing nothing probably means an America very different from the one most of us grew up in. It will mean a nation even more stratified economically and socially than it currently is: one in which an increasingly prosperous knowledge class, living in exclusive enclaves, will be able to purchase whatever they want on the marketplace—private schools, private health care, private security, and private jets— while a growing number of their fellow citizens are consigned to low-paying service jobs, vulnerable to dislocation, pressed to work longer hours, dependent on an underfunded, overburdened, and underperforming public sector for their health care, their retirement, and their children’s educations.

It will mean an America in which we continue to mortgage our assets to foreign lenders and expose ourselves to the whims of oil producers; an America in which we underinvest in the basic scientific research and workforce training that will determine our long-term economic prospects and neglect potential environmental crises. It will mean an America that’s more politically polarized and more politically unstable, as economic frustration boils over and leads people to turn on each other.

Worst of all, it will mean fewer opportunities for younger Americans, a decline in the upward mobility that’s been at the heart of this country’s promise since its founding.

That’s not the America we want for ourselves or our children. And I’m confident that we have the talent and the resources to create a better future, a future in which the economy grows and prosperity is shared. What’s preventing us from shaping that future isn’t the absence of good ideas. It’s the absence of a national commitment to take the tough steps necessary to make America more competitive—and the absence of a new consensus around the appropriate role of government in the marketplace…

But it was during the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression that the government’s vital role in regulating the marketplace became fully apparent. With investor confidence shattered, bank runs threatening the collapse of the financial system, and a downward spiral in consumer demand and business investment, FDR engineered a series of government interventions that arrested further economic contraction. For the next eight years, the New Deal administration experimented with policies to restart the economy, and although not all of these interventions produced their intended results, they did leave behind a regulatory structure that helps limit the risk of economic crisis…

Again, it took the shock of the Great Depression, with a third of all people finding themselves out of work, ill housed, ill clothed, and ill fed, for government to correct this imbalance. Two years into office, FDR was able to push through Congress the Social Security Act of 1935, the centerpiece of the new welfare state, a safety net that would lift almost half of all senior citizens out of poverty, provide unemployment insurance for those who had lost their jobs, and provide modest welfare payments to the disabled and the elderly poor. FDR also initiated laws that fundamentally changed the relationship between capital and labor: the forty-hour workweek, child labor laws, and minimum wage laws; and the National Labor Relations Act, which made it possible to organize broad-based industrial unions and forced employers to bargain in good faith.

Part of FDR’s rationale in passing these laws came straight out of Keynesian economics: One cure for economic depression was putting more disposable income in the pockets of American workers. But FDR also understood that capitalism in a democracy required the consent of the people, and that by giving workers a larger share of the economic pie, his reforms would undercut the potential appeal of government-managed, command-and-control systems—whether fascist, socialist, or communist— that were gaining support all across Europe. As he would explain in 1944, “People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

For a while this seemed to be where the story would end—with FDR saving capitalism from itself through an activist federal government that invests in its people and infrastructure, regulates the marketplace, and protects labor from chronic deprivation. And in fact, for the next twenty-five years, through Republican and Democratic administrations, this model of the American welfare state enjoyed a broad consensus. There were those on the right who complained of creeping socialism, and those on the left who believed FDR had not gone far enough. But the enormous growth of America’s mass production economy, and the enormous gap in productive capacity between the United States and the war-torn economies of Europe and Asia, muted most ideological battles.

Without any serious rivals, U.S. companies could routinely pass on higher labor and regulatory costs to their customers. Full employment allowed unionized factory workers to move into the middle class, support a family on a single income, and enjoy the stability of health and retirement security. And in such an environment of steady corporate profits and rising wages, policy makers found only modest political resistance to higher taxes and more regulation to tackle pressing social problems—hence the creation of the Great Society programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare, under Johnson; and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Health and Safety Administration under Nixon.

There was only one problem with this liberal triumph—capitalism would not stand still. By the seventies, U.S. productivity growth, the engine of the postwar economy, began to lag…

In this more competitive global environment, the old corporate formula of steady profits and stodgy management no longer worked. With less ability to pass on higher costs or shoddy products to consumers, corporate profits and market share shrank, and corporate shareholders began demanding more value. Some corporations found ways to improve productivity through innovation and automation. Others relied primarily on brutal layoffs, resistance to unionization, and a further shift of production overseas. Those corporate managers who didn’t adapt were vulnerable to corporate raiders and leveraged buyout artists, who would make the changes for them, without any regard for the employees whose lives might be upended or the communities that might be torn apart. One way or another, American companies became leaner and meaner—with old-line manufacturing workers and towns like Galesburg bearing the brunt of this transformation…

Without any clear governing philosophy, the Bush Administration and its congressional allies have responded by pushing the conservative revolution to its logical conclusion— even lower taxes, even fewer regulations, and an even smaller safety net…

But our history should give us confidence that we don’t have to choose between an oppressive, government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism. It tells us that we can emerge from great economic upheavals stronger, not weaker. Like those who came before us, we should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility. And we can be guided throughout by Lincoln’s simple maxim: that we will do collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as well or at all individually and privately.

In other words, we should be guided by what works.

WHAT MIGHT SUCH a new economic consensus look like? I won’t pretend to have all the answers, and a detailed discussion of U.S. economic policy would fill up several volumes. But I can offer a few examples of where we can break free of our current political stalemate; places where, in the tradition of Hamilton and Lincoln, we can invest in our infrastructure and our people; ways that we can begin to modernize and rebuild the social contract that FDR first stitched together in the middle of the last century…

Readers will recognize this quote:

FDR also understood that capitalism in a democracy required the consent of the people, and that by giving workers a larger share of the economic pie, his reforms would undercut the potential appeal of government-managed, command-and-control systems—whether fascist, socialist, or communist— that were gaining support all across Europe. As he would explain in 1944, “People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

This is from Roosevelt’s 1944 State Of The Union Address, where he talked about the need for a “Second Bill Of Rights“:

“The Economic Bill of Rights”

Excerpt from President Roosevelt’s January 11, 1944 message to the Congress of the United States on the State of the Union:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

This is how Mr. Obama intends to “reclaim the American Dream.”

From Babble.com via YouTube:

The deep thinking of Mr. Obama’s supporters in a nutshell.

From Iran’s Press TV:

Obama popular among Arab Americans

Fri, 31 Oct 2008

The support of Arab American voters for Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama has increasingly been on the rise.

A Zogby poll conducted on behalf of the Arab American Institute found that some 54 percent of Arab Americans support Senator Barack Obama for president.

This is while only 27 percent are rooting for Republican Senator John McCain. In 2000, the Democratic/Republican break was 40 percent to 38.

More than three million Americans are of Arab descent, the majority of whom are Christians and only about 700,000 are Muslim.

“They (Arabs) know that McCain will probably continue the policies of the Bush administration … which has been lopsidedly pro-Israel. And the only chance for that to change is to have somebody who is more open-minded,” political science professor Jim McClellan told Press TV.

“He (Obama) could bring about change that we need and McCain is just taking a step backwards,” an Arab American woman told our correspondent Jihan Hafiz.

Arab Americans say they are mostly worried about the economy, war in Iraq, healthcare and education.

Many Arab American voters have also expressed concerns about the way the words ‘Arabs’ and ‘Muslim’ have been negatively used in the White House race, VOA reported.

McCain supporters have repeatedly accused Obama of being a Muslim. The senator is a Christian and came under fire earlier this year over his two-decade membership in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

A recent poll in the state of Texas, which has a predominantly Republican base, has found that 23 percent of Texans think the Democrat is a Muslim.

Of course Mr. Zogby is the same gentleman who also does polling for Iran.

But isn’t this an odd juxtaposition of sentences:

More than three million Americans are of Arab descent, the majority of whom are Christians and only about 700,000 are Muslim.

“They (Arabs) know that McCain will probably continue the policies of the Bush administration … which has been lopsidedly pro-Israel. And the only chance for that to change is to have somebody who is more open-minded,” political science professor Jim McClellan told Press TV.

By the way, the Texas poll the article mentions was conducted by the University of Texas at Austin Government Department and something calling itself the Texas Politics Project.

Weirdly, the Texas Politics Project does not seem to exist apart from its mention with regard to this poll.

From Fox News:

Report: Journalists From Three Newspapers Booted From Obama’s Plane

Reporters from three newspapers that endorsed John McCain have reportedly been told that they can’t travel aboard Barack Obama’s plane in the final days leading before Election Day.

Friday, 2008-31-305

Journalists from three major newspapers that endorsed John McCain have reportedly been booted from Barack Obama’s campaign plane for the final leg of the presidential race.

The Washington Times reported Friday that it was notified of the Obama campaign’s decision Thursday evening — even though the paper has covered Obama from the start.

Executive Editor John Solomon told FOXNews.com that the Obama campaign said it didn’t have enough seats on the plane, but “I don’t think the explanation makes sense to us.”

“We’ve been traveling since 2007 with him. … We’re a relevant newspaper — every day we break news,” Solomon said. “And to suddenly be kicked off the plane for people who haven’t covered it as aggressively or thoroughly as we are … it sort of feels unfair.”

He said the newspaper protested but was turned down again by the campaign.

“I can only hope that the candidate who describes himself as wanting to unite the nation doesn’t have some sort of litmus test for who he decides gets to cover the campaign,” Solomon said, noting that the Obama campaign’s decision came just two days after the paper endorsed McCain.

The New York Post and Dallas Morning News also have been kicked off Obama’s plane, according to the Web site The Drudge Report. It said the three reporters were told to find alternative transportation by Sunday so that the plane could accommodate “network bigwigs” and reporters from two black magazines, Essence and Jet…

We are looking into our future under an Obama regime.

No criticism — no differing views — no opposition will be tolerated.

It’s the Messiah’s way or the highway.

From the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer:

Sign battle starts with a zzzzzzzt!

Jay Price, Staff Writer

October 31, 2008

CHAPEL HILL – After Shawn Turschak saw two sets of McCain-Palin signs disappear from his yard within hours of being planted, he took steps to protect the latest pair.

On Monday, he ran wires from his house and hooked the signs into a power source for an electric pet fence. Then he mounted a surveillance camera in a nearby tree and wired it to a digital recorder.

Tuesday afternoon, the camera saw this: A neighbor trotting up with an Obama-Biden sign, grabbing a handful of volts as he touched a McCain-Palin sign, then fleeing at top 9-year-old boy speed.

A few minutes later, the boy’s father, Andrew Noble, was at Turschak’s door, demanding an explanation from Turschak’s 13-year-old daughter, who called her parents on the phone to say a man was yelling at her. Both families agree on one aspect of the exchange, that Noble chastised her for “electrocuting” his son, then left.

The Turschaks hurried home and received another visitor: an Orange County sheriff’s deputy.

Campaign signs are vandalized or stolen so often that many people don’t report it, and, when they do, law officers often don’t investigate.

This time was different.

The corner of the Turschak’s yard where the signs are posted is a prominent point in the Oak Crest subdivision just south of Chapel Hill, so the homeowners association maintains it.

It’s far enough from the Turschaks’ home that it’s not obviously part of their yard, and the boy’s mother, Johanna Gisladottir, said she and many neighbors thought it was community property. They were troubled, she said, that someone had apparently claimed the corner on behalf of the Republican Party.

Her son, whom she declined to name, took the Obama sign to the corner on his own, she said, after being inspired by a discussion she had with a neighbor about adding one to the mix.

“I don’t know what his intention was when he ran out, or I would not have allowed him to leave,” Gisladottir said. “I honestly don’t think he had a concrete plan.”

Noble told an investigator that the boy had been trying to pull up the McCain sign so that he could see how it was constructed, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department said Wednesday.

The video, Turschak said, makes clear that the boy was planning to switch the signs, which are essentially sheathes that slip over metal framework. The boy had only brought the Democratic sheath, not the legs.

Not all the thefts, Turschak said, could have been caused by a misunderstanding about the land. One sign had been beside his driveway, and a next-door neighbor lost a McCain sign, too.

Turschak, who has a degree in electrical engineering, said he tested the shock on himself while wiring the signs, and did so again while a reporter watched Wednesday, touching both signs repeatedly without flinching. Under each was a yellow sign warning that they were electrified.

Turschak , it turns out, isn’t a member of Orange County’s perennially embattled Republicans, who are outnumbered nearly 3 to 1 by Democrats. He’s registered as an unaffiliated voter and said he doesn’t agree fully with either party.

“This isn’t about politics,” he said. “This is about my right to protect my property and my ability to display my beliefs.”

Capt. James Nida of the Sheriff’s Department talked to both families Wednesday. Nida, who as a child experienced the charms of electric fences, didn’t feel the need to test Turschak’s signs.

“Been there, done that,” he said.

Sheriff Lindy Pendergrass said he doesn’t plan to file charges. The deputy who investigated Tuesday said the pet-fence setup probably was legal, Turschak said, but perhaps more trouble than it was worth. Turschak said Wednesday morning that he would pull the plug on the signs. The camera, though, stayed.

And Wednesday afternoon while the Turschaks were at a daughter’s soccer game, it captured an angry-looking woman striding up.

“We got home and both signs were gone,” he said. “Broad daylight.”

Well, it’s a small victory.

But we’ll take it.

By the way, the other media accounts of this incident, such as the AP’s make this sound a lot more sinister than this article — which is the original report. 

(Thanks to Brad for the heads up.)

From Al Qaeda’s mouthpiece, Reuters:

Qaeda wants Republicans, Bush “humiliated”: Web video

DUBAI (Reuters) – An al Qaeda leader has called for President George W. Bush and the Republicans to be “humiliated,” without endorsing any party in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, according to a video posted on the Internet.

“O God, humiliate Bush and his party, O Lord of the Worlds, degrade and defy him,” Abu Yahya al-Libi said at the end of sermon marking the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr, in a video posted on the Internet.

Libi, one of the top al Qaeda commanders believed to be living in Afghanistan or Pakistan, called for God’s wrath to be brought against Bush equating him with past tyrants in history.

The remarks were the first comments from a leading al Qaeda figure referring, albeit indirectly, to the U.S. elections. Muslim clerics often end sermons by calling on God to guide and support Muslims and help defeat their enemies…

Isn’t it odd how closely Al Qaeda’s talking points and those of the Democrat Party align?

Speaking of the DNC, somehow this video has yet to make an appearance on Google’s YouTube.

Instead, a YouTube search for Al Qaeda returns “Al Qaeda Endorses McCain” as the top hit.

Why is that, do you think?

Apparently Mr. Obama touched upon his mother’s death and lack of health insurance in his infomercial last night.

A little more than a year ago Mr. Obama ran an ad featuring his mother’s death from cancer.

From the Obama campaign and the Chicago Tribune:

Obama’s mother in new ad

by John McCormick

Posted September 20, 2007

Sen. Barack Obama is using an image of his deceased mother in a new campaign ad that seeks to make the case that he is the best qualified to bring change in the way the nation delivers health care.

Called “Mother,” the 30-second ad briefly shows a picture of Stanley Ann Dunham, who died of cancer in 1995. The image includes a very young Obama in her arms….

It’s an anecdote Obama has been recently field testing on the campaign trail. This is how he told the story of his mother’s illness during a recent campaign stop in Santa Barbara, Calif.:

“I remember my mother. She was 53 years old when she died of ovarian cancer, and you know what she was thinking about in the last months of her life? She wasn’t thinking about getting well. She wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality. She had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs.

And she wasn’t sure whether insurance was going to cover the medical expenses because they might consider this a preexisting condition.

I remember just being heartbroken, seeing her struggle through the paperwork and the medical bills and the insurance forms. So, I have seen what it’s like when somebody you love is suffering because of a broken health care system. And it’s wrong. It’s not who we are as a people.” …

Like most of Mr. Obama’s life, the details about his mother’s death are sketchy and often contradictory.

But just going on the few details we have been permitted, some questions arise.

From the Washington Post:

Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible

Sunday, August 24, 2008; Page A22

… But now [Obama] was drawn back to Hawaii to say goodbye to his mother. Too late, as it turned out. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, before he could get there.

Ann had returned to Honolulu early that year, a few months before “Dreams From My Father” was published. She was weakened from a cancer that had been misdiagnosed in Indonesia as indigestion. American doctors first thought it was ovarian cancer, but an examination at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York determined that it was uterine cancer that had spread to her ovaries.

Stan had died a few years earlier, and Madelyn still lived in the apartment on Beretania. Ann took an apartment on the same floor, and underwent chemotherapy treatments while keeping up with her work as best she could. “She took it in stride,” said Alice Dewey, chair of the University of Hawaii anthropology department, where Ann did her doctoral dissertation. “She never complained. Never said, ‘Why me?’”

As the article notes, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetero developed cancer in 1994 while in Indonesia (it was mis-diagnosed). She then moved to Hawaii where she died in 1995.

According to the article she was treated at the best cancer treatment center in the world, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. So so much for her lack of care.

Moreover, Sloan-Kettering often offers National Institute Of Health “protocols” where one gets treatment for free (even transportation is paid).

Did she try to get into one of these protocols. If not, why not? If so, what medical expenses did she have?

Apparently, Mrs. Soetero later received chemotherapy at the Straub Clinic in Hawaii. Straub claims to be Hawaii’s best health care organization, and may have also offered NIH protocols at the time, or have been part of the Sloan-Kettering protocol.

Obama has also at times claimed his mother was on food stamps at the time of her death. If that’s true, why wouldn’t she have been also eligible for Medicaid as well?

Also, according to the Washington Post article, Mrs. Soetero was “between jobs.” But also it states that she worked up to the time of her death.

If that is so, given that her daughter was being taken care of by her mother and Obama had long since left home, why did she need food stamps at all?

Furthermore, if Mrs. Soetero was having issues with insurance while she was dying, why didn’t Obama, a Harvard Law graduate, try to assist her instead of letting her deal with it by herself?

Also, one wonders why Mr. Obama didn’t get a better paying job to help his mother with her medical expenses — if only temporarily. He has often bragged that he could have taken jobs that would have given him outlandish figures.

And then there is the claim about Mr. Obama not being able to get to his mother before she died:

But now [Obama] was drawn back to Hawaii to say goodbye to his mother. Too late, as it turned out. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, before he could get there.

As the article notes, Mrs. Soetero died on November 7th, 1995. From all reports, such as those about his grandmother’s recent illness, Obama never went to Hawaii to see his mother in the several months before her death.

What was he doing instead?

In 1995 Barack was preparing for his Illinois State Senate race. In late summer he took time off to go around the country on a book tour for his “Dreams From My Father.”

On September 19th he launched his campaign in Chicago. In October Barack Obama helped to organize Minister Farrakhan’s “Million Man March.”

Where was Mr. Obama’s compassion then?

And if Mr. Obama will lie about his dying mother, is there anything he won’t lie about?

From those art lovers and economic mavens at the Associated Press:

A man passes by an ice sculpture entitled ‘Main Street Meltdown,’ in New York, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008. The sculpture, which is the work of artists Nora Ligano and Marshall Reese, made it’s debut on the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression.

A passerby peers through an ice sculpture called ‘Main Street Meltdown,’ in New York, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008, on the 79th anniversary of ‘Black Tuesday,’ the stock market crash that caused the 1929 Great Depression. The sculpture is the collaboration of artist Nora Ligano and Marshall Reese. The artists say it will take 10-24 hours to completely melt down.

Nelson Lee stops to photograph an ice sculpture entitled ‘Main Street Meltdown,’ in Lower Manhattan in New York, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008, on the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression. Artists Nora Ligano and Marshall Reese designed the sculpture, the fourth in a series addressing important political issues, to vanish by melting down within 10 to 24 hours.

A passerby snaps a photo as nine year-old Carolina Soto from Princeton, N.J., pokes her head through an ice sculpture entitled ‘Main Street Meltdown,’ on the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression in New York, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008.

Nine year-old Carolina Soto from Princeton, N.J., pokes her head through an ice sculpture entitled ‘Main Street Meltdown,’ on the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression in New York, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008. The sculpture is the work of artists Nora Liganno and Marshall Reese and is the fourth in a series addressing political issues.

An ice sculpture entitled ‘Main Street Meltdown,’ is melting on the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008 in New York. The sculpture is the work of artists Nora Liganno and Marshall Reese and is the fourth in a series addressing political issues.

An ice sculpture entitled ‘Main Street Meltdown,’ is melting on the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression, as pedestrians pass by Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008 in New York. The sculpture is the work of artists Nora Liganno and Marshall Reese and is the fourth in a series addressing political issues.

Isn’t it wonderful to see our artists taking such an interest in this country’s economic history?

And to see our media taking such an interest in such an important work of art? (Twelve inch high letters made out of ice!!)

It’s clear that all the arms of our one party establishment are out beating the drum for a recession — or better yet, a depression — so that we can inaugurate another 30s-style socialist regime.

After all, it worked out so well the last time. (Maybe Ms. Liganno and Mr. Reese are hoping for a WPA grant.)

By the way, in the worker/artist paradise of the Soviet Union such “wreckers” would be shot and their families charged for the expense of the bullets.

From the Obama campaign’s Associated Press:

Economy shrinks as consumers cut back on spending

WASHINGTON – A day after the Federal Reserve slashed a key interest rate to battle an economic downturn, the government reported Thursday the economy did shrink in the summer, sending the strongest signal yet that a recession may have already begun.

The Commerce Department reported that the gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic health, fell at an annual rate of 0.3 percent in the July-September period, a significant slowdown after growth of 2.8 percent in the prior quarter…

The classic definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. Many analysts believe the GDP will decline in the current October-December period by an even larger amount and they are forecasting a negative GDP figure in the first three months of next year.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the official arbiter of recessions in this country, has not said when it will make its determination of whether the country has entered a recession.

Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported Thursday that applications for unemployment benefits remained at an elevated level last week, another sign of the economy’s struggles. The number of laid-off workers filing new claims totaled 479,000, the same as the previous week, disappointing analysts who had expected a small drop.

On Wednesday, the Fed cut the federal funds rate — the interest banks charge each other on overnight loans — by half a percentage point, and the government finally began distributing funds from the billions in the financial rescue package.

Those efforts were part of a concerted drive by officials, just days before a national election, to demonstrate they are moving as quickly as possible to deal with the most serious financial crisis to hit the country since the 1930s.

Analysts also noted that just lowering rates cannot serve as a panacea to overcome a credit crisis…

Meanwhile, the administration announced that the spigot had been opened on the $700 billion fund created by Congress Oct. 3 to rescue the U.S. financial system. Treasury issued a report showing checks had been disbursed for $125 billion in payments to nine major banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The goal is to bolster their balance sheets so they will resume more normal lending.

And the administration was nearing an agreement on a plan to help around 3 million homeowners avoid foreclosure, according to sources who had been briefed on the matter. The program would be the most aggressive effort yet to limit damages from the severe housing slump…

Isn’t it amazing to see the Associated Press finally admit that we are not in a recession, in an article that once again contends that we really are:

The classic definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. Many analysts believe the GDP will decline in the current October-December period by an even larger amount and they are forecasting a negative GDP figure in the first three months of next year.

Of course they remain ever-hopeful:

The National Burea of Economic Research, which is the official arbiter of recessions in this country, has not said when it will make its determination of whether the country has entered a recession.

And note this paragraph:

The Commerce Department reported that the gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic health, fell at an annual rate of 0.3 percent in the July-September period, a significant slowdown after growth of 2.8 percent in the prior quarter.

The AP somehow neglects to mention that this is far better than what they and other economic experts had been predicting. (They had promises a decline of at least three times that size.)

And how long will it be before we are told that even this number has been revised up? (Somehow the first reported numbers are always worse news than they turn out to be.)

Also note that we finally hear that last quarter wasn’t so bad after all, despite the AP and the rest of our one party media claiming that we were in recession even then.

Similarly:

The number of laid-off workers filing new claims totaled 479,000, the same as the previous week, disappointing analysts who had expected a small drop.

The AP can’t admit the good news that unemployment has not gone up. Instead, they have to couch it by claiming analysts had predicted a drop. (Which, of course, is a blatant lie.)

More generally, isn’t it strange to see the media decrying the government throwing money at this problem?

Isn’t that their usual solution to every other problem? But here, where it actually does work, they are deeply incensed.

First we have from Reuters, the fearless front page above the fold promise that Mr. Obama is going to win in a landslide:

Obama takes 7-point lead on McCain

By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democrat Barack Obama has opened a 7-point lead over Republican rival John McCain with five days left in the race for the White House, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Thursday.

Obama leads McCain by 50 percent to 43 percent among likely voters in the three-day national tracking poll, building on his 5-point advantage on Wednesday. The telephone poll has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

It was the second consecutive day Obama’s lead has grown as the two-year presidential battle draws to a close. McCain is struggling to overtake Obama’s lead in every national opinion poll and in many battleground states.

“This is not good news for McCain. The race was tightening for a few days but now it is going back the other way,” pollster John Zogby said.

Support for Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, hit or exceeded the 50 percent mark for the seventh time in the last 10 days. McCain’s support has not reached 46 percent in more than three weeks of polling…

The poll also found Obama was doing a better job of reaching across ideological lines, earning the support of nearly 20 percent of self-described conservatives. McCain wins about 10 percent of liberals…

Then we have, also from Reuters, this little cover your bases article, surely intended to be buried in the back pages of a few obscure media outlets.

Are polls accurate in presidential race?

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With the U.S. presidential election less than a week away, Democrat Barack Obama holds a steady lead over rival Republican John McCain in opinion polls, leading many pundits to say McCain is effectively finished.

Could the polls be wrong?

They have misled before. The most famous time came in 1948 when polls showed Republican Thomas Dewey on his way to winning the White House but missed the late surge that carried Democrat Harry Truman to victory.

More recently, polls showed Obama ahead of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the January New Hampshire primary by an average of 8 percentage points. Clinton won.

McCain’s campaign thinks it could happen again on November 4.

“All signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday,” McCain pollster Bill McInturff wrote in a memo released on Tuesday.

Pollsters are careful to say their work does not predict a race’s outcome but only captures a snapshot of the electorate at a certain point in time.

And there is always the possibility of error in a discipline that combines science with a certain amount of guesswork.

“We are engaged to some degree in some artwork and assumption,” said pollster John Zogby, whose Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby tracking poll shows Obama leading by 7 percentage points.

Pollsters can’t simply tally up the results of their telephone surveys but must make educated guesses about who will actually show up to vote.

These “likely voter” models vary from poll to poll, leading to results that can vary as well…

Gallup publishes two separate polls based on varying likely-voter models. Its traditional model showed Obama ahead by 2 percentage points on Wednesday, while its “expanded” model, which assumes higher turnout rates among minorities and young people, showed Obama leading by 7 percentage points.

Zogby’s poll and the Pew poll also assume that black voters, inspired by the chance to elect Obama as the first black president, will make up a higher percentage of the electorate this year.

But the McCain campaign argues that turnout will be high among all demographic groups, diluting any impact from black voters.

Another question is the “Bradley Effect” — the notion that white voters fearful of being labeled racist overstate their support of black candidates in polls…

But polls might be underweighting any racial backlash because intolerant voters tend to hang up on pollsters, said Pew Research Center president Andrew Kohut said.

“That could be a factor in a close election, but it’s probably not a factor in an election that seems as wide open as this,” Kohut said.

The increasing number of people who decline to participate in opinion polls, and the difficulty of reaching cellphone-only households pose challenges as well…

Despite these concerns, pollsters say they’re confident in their work. After all, it’s hard to overlook the fact that major polls have lined up closely with the actual vote in every presidential election since 1980.

“We bring a whole lot more science to who’s ahead and who’s behind than a handful of old white men sitting at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington having breakfast,” Zogby said.

What media bias?

[A] handful of old white men sitting at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington having breakfast…

This is practically hate speech, is it not? And from such an unbiased “pollster.”

From Wikipedia:

James J. Zogby

James J. Zogby (born 1945) is an American academic, political consultant and founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Arab American Institute. In 2001, Zogby was elected to the Executive Committee of the United States Democratic National Committee (DNC). He is a senior analyst with the polling firm Zogby International, founded and managed by his brother John Zogby, and is a lecturer and scholar on Middle East issues.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Zogby was a founding member and leader of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Save Lebanon, Inc.

As co-president of Builders for Peace, Zogby promoted US-Arab business investment in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Then United States Vice President Al Gore tapped Zogby to help lead the effort in 1993, following the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord in Washington. The next year, Zogby led a US delegation to the signing of the agreement in Cairo, Egypt, along with his Builders co-president, former US Congressman Mel Levine.

Since 1992, Zogby has written a weekly column on American politics for major Arab newspapers, Washington Watch, and authored a number of books, including What Ethnic Americans Really Think and What Arabs Think: Values, Beliefs and Concerns. He also blogs at The Huffington Post.

In 1995, Zogby was elected as co-convener of the National Democratic Ethnic Coordinating Council (NDECC). Zogby also serves on the Human Rights Watch Middle East Advisory Committee and on the national advisory boards of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigration Forum, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Alas, most of us here realize that the purpose of polls is solely to drive the media’s agenda. Which, in this case, is to help elect Mr. Obama and other Democrats by suppressing the Republican turnout.

But most of our citizenry don’t realize this.

Consequently, Reuters and the rest of the media and their polling fronts probably do more to undercut the fairness and accuracy of our elections than even ACORN/Project Vote and the ACLU.

From a disappointed Associated Press:

Detroit Mayor Ken Cockrel addresses the media during an Angels’ Night news conference with members of local law enforcement agencies in Detroit, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008.

Thousands to douse annual Detroit arson tradition

By BEN LEUBSDORF, Associated Press

DETROIT – The city that used to burn on the night before Halloween as mischief-makers torched abandoned buildings has largely doused its Devil’s Night by mobilizing tens of thousands of citizens and law-enforcement personnel each year to patrol city neighborhoods…

At its peak in 1984, 810 fires were reported in Detroit from Oct. 29 to 31, fueled by, among other things, Devil’s Night’s growing notoriety and the city’s large number of abandoned buildings.

But the number of blazes has dropped — 147 fires were reported last year for the three days ending Oct. 31, up from the 113 reported in 2006 and 121 in 2005.

That’s in part thanks to volunteers and law enforcement officials who patrol neighborhoods and monitor abandoned buildings starting the night of Oct. 29, part of what has been called Angels’ Night since the 1990s.

This year, officials worry that the national foreclosure crisis, and a spate of vacant homes left in its wake, could be tempting targets for arsonists. Detroit ranked as the 14th hardest-hit metropolitan area in the third quarter of this year by foreclosure listing service RealtyTrac Inc.

About 35,000 volunteers have signed up with the city for this year’s Angels’ Night, and about 50,000 people will volunteer, said Daniel Cherrin, a spokesman for Mayor Ken Cockrel Jr. The city also imposes a youth curfew and takes other preventative measures.

“It’s a testament to Detroiters that we understand that we have to be proactive,” Keith said. “We can’t afford complacency by any means.”

Personnel from the city’s fire and police departments will be joined this year by state and federal agencies, as well as 25 volunteers from the Michigan Army National Guard, some of whom will patrol in uniform…

Isn’t it wonderful the great “traditions” in some parts of our country?

The article does mention in passing that besides these laudatory patrols, Detroit has imposed an “emergency curfew” upon juveniles for years.

From the Angels’ Night website:

WATCH YOUR CHILDREN – ENFORCE THE CURFEW

Again this year an emergency curfew is in effect for juveniles under the age of 18. It is unlawful for juveniles under the age of 18 to be on City streets, unaccompanied by a parent or guardian, from 6 p.m. October 30 to 6 a.m. October 31.

Our children are the future of Detroit. You can encourage them to take pride in their City and become responsible citizens of Detroit by asking them to:

    * Observe the regular and special Halloween curfews.

    * Encourage their friends to do the same.

    * Encourage adults to play an active role in the anti-arson campaign.

    * Turn on their porch lights during the three-day Halloween period.

    * Participate in activities such as the Halloween parties sponsored by the City of Detroit Recreation Department.

Hopefully someone is organizing “Angels’ Night” volunteers across the country for the evenings after November 4, no matter how things turn out.

Maybe we had better have a curfew as well. And maybe the National Guard should be turned out.

Just like the “tradition” in third world countries on election day.

From Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch:

Checks on ‘Joe’ more extensive than first acknowledged

Tax, welfare info also sought on McCain ally

Wednesday,  October 29, 2008 8:05 PM
By Randy Ludlow

A state agency has revealed that its checks of computer systems for potential information on “Joe the Plumber” were more extensive than it first acknowledged.

Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, disclosed today that computer inquiries on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher were not restricted to a child-support system.

The agency also checked Wurzelbacher in its computer systems to determine whether he was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes, she wrote.

Jones-Kelley made the revelations in a letter to Ohio Senate President Bill M. Harris, R-Ashland, who demanded answers on why state officials checked out Wurzelbacher.

Harris called the multiple records checks “questionable” and said he awaits more answers. “It’s kind of like Big Brother is looking in your pocket,” he said.

If state employees run checks on every person listed in newspaper stories as buying a business, “it must take a lot of people a lot of time to run these checks,” he said. “Where do you draw the line?”

The checks were run after the news media reported that Wurzelbacher was considering buying a plumbing business with more than $250,000 in annual income, Jones-Kelley wrote.

“Given our understanding that Mr. Wurzelbacher had publicly indicated that he had the means to purchase a substantial business enterprise, ODJFS, consistent with past departmental practice, checked confidential databases ,” she wrote.

“Not surprisingly, when a person behind in child support payments or receiving public assistance is receiving significant media attention which suggests that the person appears to have available financial resources, the Department risks justifiable criticism if it fails to take note and respond,” Jones-Kelley wrote.

The results of the searches were not publicly released and remain confidential, she wrote. Wurzelbacher has said he is not involved in a child-support case and has not purchased any business.

Jones-Kelley wrote that the checks were “well-meaning,” but misinterpreted amid the heated final weeks of a presidential election…

Republicans have painted the checks on Wurzelbacher as a politically motivated bid by Democrats to dig up dirt and discredit the McCain ally. The Obama campaign has said it has no ties to the checks and supports investigations.

The administration of Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland has said the information was not improperly shared and that there were no political motives behind the checks.

The Dispatch has uncovered four uses of state computer systems to access personal information on Wurzelbacher, including the child-support check authorized by Jones-Kelley.

She said on Monday that her department frequently runs checks for any unpaid child support obligations “when someone is thrust quickly into the public spotlight.”

Republican legislators have challenged Jones-Kelley’s reason for checking on Wurzelbacher as “frightening” and flimsy.

Jones-Kelly also has denied any connections between the computer checks on Wurzelbacher and her support for Obama. She donated the maximum $2,500 this year to the Obama campaign.

Ohio Inspector General Thomas P. Charles is investigating whether the child-support check on Wurzelbacher was legal.

Where is the outrage?

Alas, we may have to get used to this.

From the UK’s Times:

Found in a rundown Boston estate: Barack Obama’s aunt Zeituni Onyang

James Bone in Boston, Rob Crilly in Kogelo and Ben Macintyre

October 30, 2008

Barack Obama has lived one version of the American Dream that has taken him to the steps of the White House. But a few miles from where the Democratic presidential candidate studied at Harvard, his Kenyan aunt and uncle, immigrants living in modest circumstances in Boston, have a contrasting American story.

Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.

A second relative believed to be the long-lost “Uncle Omar” described in the book was beaten by armed robbers with a “sawed-off rifle” while working in a corner shop in the Dorchester area of the city. He was later evicted from his one-bedroom flat for failing to pay $2,324.20 (£1,488) arrears, according to the Boston Housing Court…

In his book Mr Obama writes that “Uncle Omar” had gone missing after moving to Boston in the 1960s – a quarter-century before Mr Obama first visited his family in Kenya. Aunt Zeituni is now also living in Boston, and recently made a $260 campaign contribution to her nephew’s presidential bid from a work address in the city.

Speaking outside her home in Flaherty Way, South Boston, on Tuesday, Ms Onyango, 56, confirmed she was the “Auntie Zeituni” in Mr Obama’s memoir. She declined to answer most other questions about her relationship with the presidential contender until after the November 4 election. “I can’t talk about it, I just pray for him, that’s all,” she said, adding: “After the 4th, I can talk to anyone.” …

Isn’t it funny that Mr. Obama’s destitute relatives would be turned up by a British paper, rather than by members of our stateside watchdog media?

And isn’t it odd how Ms Onyango cannot speak to the press until after Election Day?

Still, as the article notes, Aunt Zeituni looms large in Mr. Obama’s first autography, Dreams From My Father.

We will let Mr. Obama’s musings on the meaning of family (pages 152-4), brought about by meeting Aunt Zeituni and the rest of his family in Kenya:

What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?

I could list various possibilities. But I’d never arrived at a definite answer, aware early on that, given my circumstances, such an effort was bound to fail. Instead, I drew a series of circles around myself, with borders that shifted as time passed and faces changed but that nevertheless offered the illusion of control. An inner circle, where love was constant and claims unquestioned. Then a second circle, a realm of negotiated love, commitments freely chosen. And then a circle for colleagues, acquaintances; the cheerful gray-haired lady who rang up my groceries back in Chicago. Until the circle finally widened to embrace a nation or a race, or a particular moral course, and the commitments were no longer tied to a face or a name but were actually commitments I’d made to myself.

In Africa, this astronomy of mine almost immediately collapsed. For family seemed to be everywhere: in stores, at the post office, on streets and in the parks, all of them fussing and fretting over Obama’s long-lost son. If I mentioned in passing that I needed a notebook or shaving cream, I could count on one of my aunts to insist that she take me to some far-off corner of Nairobi to find the best bargains, no matter how long the trip took or how much it might inconvenience her.

“Ah, Barry…what is more important than helping my brother’s son?”

If a cousin discovered, much to his distress, that Auma had left me to fend for myself, he might walk the two miles to Auma’s apartment on the off chance that I was there and needed company…

At first I reacted to all this attention like a child to its mother’s bosom, full of simple, unquestioning gratitude. It conformed to my idea of Africa and Africans, an obvious contrast to the growing isolation of American life, a contrast I understood, not in racial, but in cultural terms. A measure of what we sacrificed for technology and mobility, but that here-as in the kampongs outside Djakarta or in the country villages of Ireland or Greece — remained essentially intact: the insistent pleasure of other people’s company, the joy of human warmth.

As the days wore on, though, my joy became tempered with tension and doubt. Some of it had to do with what Auma had talked about that night in the car — an acute awareness of my relative good fortune, and the troublesome questions such good fortune implied. Not that our relatives were suffering, exactly. Both Jane and Zeituni had steady jobs…

Still, the situation in Nairobi was tough and getting tougher. Clothes were mostly secondhand, a doctor’s visit reserved for the direst emergency. Almost all the family’s younger members were unemployed, including the two or three who had managed, against stiff competition, to graduate from one of Kenya’s universities. If Jane or Zeituni ever fell ill, if their companies ever closed or laid them off, there was no government safety net. There was only family, next of kin; people burdened by similar hardship.

Now I was family, I reminded myself; now I had responsibilities. But what did that mean exactly? Back in the States, I’d been able to translate such feelings into politics, organizing, a certain self-denial. In Kenya, these strategies seemed hopelessly abstract, even self-indulgent. A commitment to black empowerment couldn’t help find Bernard a job. A faith in participatory democracy couldn’t buy Jane a new set of sheets.

For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking deeply about money: my own lack of it, the pursuit of it, the crude but undeniable peace it could buy. A part of me wished I could live up to the image that my new relatives imagined for me: a corporate lawyer, an American businessman, my hand poised on the spigot, ready to rain down like manna the largesse of the Western world.

But of course I wasn’t either of those things. Even in the States, wealth involved trade-offs for those who weren’t born to it, the same sorts of trade-offs that I could see Auma now making as she tried, in her own way, to fulfill the family’s expectations…

It was the same dilemma that [the Communist] old Frank [Marshall Davis] had posed to me the year I left Hawaii, the same tensions that certain children in Altgeld might suffer if they took too much pleasure in doing their schoolwork, the same perverse survivor’s guilt that I could expect to experience if I ever did try to make money and had to pass the throngs of young black men on the corner as I made my way to a downtown office.

Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind. And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled-the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns still held sway; that no one here could tell me what my blood ties demanded or how those demands could be reconciled with some larger idea of human association.

It was as if we — Auma, Roy, Bernard, and I-were all making it up as we went along. As if the map that might have once measured the direction and force of our love, the code that would unlock our blessings, had been lost long ago, buried with the ancestors beneath a silent earth…

Obviously Mr. Obama’s guilt about his suffering relatives was merely a literary affectation.

From Reuters:

Wed Oct 29, 1:40 PM ET

Mark Salter, senior advisor to Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain sits backstage at a campaign rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, October 28, 2008.

Wed Oct 29, 1:40 PM ET

Senior advisors to Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain Steve Schmidt, Mark Salter and Steve Dupree wait for an elevator in New York, September 24, 2008.

Wed Oct 29, 1:40 PM ET

McCain advisors Mark Salter (L), Nicolle Wallace (C) and Brooke Buchanan listen as Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain makes a statement to reporters in West Des Moines, Iowa, September 29, 2008.

Please note that the second two photos are from a month ago, and yet Reuters has them up as if they are news.

It’s almost as if they are trying to make it look like the McCain people are despondent.

Why is that?

From a series of book interviews from back in 1995 with Connie Martinson, via the American Spectator, who got it from the pro-Obama site Old Man McCain:

“Wright, who is my pastor, and he is a wonderful man… He’s a pastor of a large congregation in Chicago, and one of the interesting things that I discover in my journey to discover what my identity is and who my father is, is also discovering my own faith, which is not necessarily a traditional faith.

I don’t come out of an institutionalized religious setting. But what becomes important to me as I work with churches in the South Side of Chicago and low income neighborhoods is to realize that all of the stories and songs of the Church, the hope that is embodied in the Church, the sense of liberation that is embodied in the historically African American Church, is really something that moves me deeply.

And I think is probably the main pillar around which a lot of inner city communities are going to be built, and Reverend Wright, my pastor who I speak about in the chapter in the book, I think represents the best of what the black Church has to offer.”

Testify!

Some excerpts from Mr. Obama’s second autobiography, The Audacity Of Hope, pp 34-37:

“WE HOLD THESE truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundation of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not every American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of the Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought. But the essential idea behind the Declaration—that we are born into this world free, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can’t be taken away by any person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and must, make of our lives what we will—is one that every American understands. It orients us, sets our course, each and every day…

At its most elemental level, we understand our liberty in a negative sense. As a general rule we believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicious of those—whether Big Brother or nosy neighbors—who want to meddle in our business. But we understand our liberty in a more positive sense as well, in the idea of opportunity and the subsidiary values that help realize opportunity—all those homespun virtues that Benjamin Franklin first popularized in Poor Richard’s Almanack and that have continued to inspire our allegiance through successive generations. The values of self-reliance and self-improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance, and hard work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility.

These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will—a confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the circumstances of our birth. But these values also express a broader confidence that so long as individual men and women are free to pursue their own interests, society as a whole will prosper. Our system of self-government and our free-market economy depend on the majority of individual Americans adhering to these values. The legitimacy of our government and our economy depend on the degree to which these values are rewarded, which is why the values of equal opportunity and nondiscrimination complement rather than impinge on our liberty.

If we Americans are individualistic at heart, if we instinctively chafe against a past of tribal allegiances, traditions, customs, and castes, it would be a mistake to assume that this is all we are. Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends. We value the imperatives of family and the cross-generational obligations that family implies. We value community, the neighborliness that expresses itself through raising the barn or coaching the soccer team. We value patriotism and the obligations of citizenship, a sense of duty and sacrifice on behalf of our nation. We value a faith in something bigger than ourselves, whether that something expresses itself in formal religion or ethical precepts. And we value the constellation of behaviors that express our mutual regard for one another: honesty, fairness, humility, kindness, courtesy, and compassion…

But we cannot avoid these tensions entirely. At times our values collide because in the hands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we’ve seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.

When this happens—when liberty is cited in the defense of a company’s decision to dump toxins in our rivers, or when our collective interest in building an upscale new mall is used to justify the destruction of somebody’s home—we depend on the strength of countervailing values to temper our judgment and hold such excesses in check. Sometimes finding the right balance is relatively easy…

More often, though, finding the right balance between our competing values is difficult. Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but simply because we live in a complex and contradictory world. I firmly believe, for example, that since 9/11, we have played fast and loose with constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism. But I acknowledge that even the wisest president and most prudent Congress would struggle to balance the critical demands of our collective security against the equally compelling need to uphold civil liberties. I believe our economic policies pay too little attention to the displacement of manufacturing workers and the destruction of manufacturing towns. But I cannot wish away the sometimes competing demands of economic security and competitiveness.

Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don’t even get to the point where we weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policies we don’t like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control people’s sexual practices. Conversely, it’s easy to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman’s reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare. In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship…

Of course, this approach to policy making doesn’t always work. Sometimes, politicians and interest groups welcome conflict in pursuit of a broader ideological goal. Most antiabortion activists, for example, have openly discouraged legislative allies from even pursuing those compromise measures that would have significantly reduced the incidence of the procedure popularly known as partial-birth abortion, because the image the procedure evokes in the mind of the public has helped them win converts to their position.

And sometimes our ideological predispositions are just so fixed that we have trouble seeing the obvious. Once, while still in the Illinois Senate, I listened to a Republican colleague work himself into a lather over a proposed plan to provide school breakfasts to preschoolers. Such a plan, he insisted, would crush their spirit of self-reliance. I had to point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who spent their formative years too hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of the state.

Despite my best efforts, the bill still went down in defeat; Illinois preschoolers were temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk (a version of the bill would later pass). But my fellow legislator’s speech helps underscore one of the differences between ideology and values: Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

Notice how this passage starts out, and how it ends up.

That is really the alpha and omega of Mr. Obama as well.

Did you know that Barack Obama had a “diary” at the Daily Kos?

But back in September of 2005 Mr. Obama was so concerned about the good opinion of the denizens there, he felt he had to write an apology about not having attacked those Democrats who voted for the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court more forcibly.

Mind you, Obama himself did not vote for Roberts.

Still, he felt the need to explain how he and the Democrats in general need to pretend to be less radical than they really are if they are going to get enough people elected into power to really change things the way they and the folks at Daily Kos want to.

In other words, Mr. Obama tells the Kossacks about the need to hoodwink the American public in order to get their way.

From the Daily Kos:

Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party

by Barack Obama
Fri Sep 30, 2005

I read with interest your recent discussion regarding my comments on the floor during the debate on John Roberts’ nomination. I don’t get a chance to follow blog traffic as regularly as I would like, and rarely get the time to participate in the discussions. I thought this might be a good opportunity to offer some thoughts about not only judicial confirmations, but how to bring about meaningful change in this country.

Maybe some of you believe I could have made my general point more artfully, but it’s precisely because many of these groups are friends and supporters that I felt it necessary to speak my mind.

There is one way, over the long haul, to guarantee the appointment of judges that are sensitive to issues of social justice, and that is to win the right to appoint them by recapturing the presidency and the Senate. And I don’t believe we get there by vilifying good allies, with a lifetime record of battling for progressive causes, over one vote or position. I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly-held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.

According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists – a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog – we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in “appeasing” the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.

I think this perspective misreads the American people. From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don’t think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don’t think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don’t think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib which violate our ideals as a country.

It’s this non-ideological lens through which much of the country viewed Judge Roberts’ confirmation hearings. A majority of folks, including a number of Democrats and Independents, don’t think that John Roberts is an ideologue bent on overturning every vestige of civil rights and civil liberties protections in our possession. Instead, they have good reason to believe he is a conservative judge who is (like it or not) within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, a judge appointed by a conservative president who could have done much worse (and probably, I fear, may do worse with the next nominee). While they hope Roberts doesn’t swing the court too sharply to the right, a majority of Americans think that the President should probably get the benefit of the doubt on a clearly qualified nominee.

A plausible argument can be made that too much is at stake here and now, in terms of privacy issues, civil rights, and civil liberties, to give John Roberts the benefit of the doubt. That certainly was the operating assumption of the advocacy groups involved in the nomination battle.

I shared enough of these concerns that I voted against Roberts on the floor this morning. But short of mounting an all-out filibuster — a quixotic fight I would not have supported; a fight I believe Democrats would have lost both in the Senate and in the court of public opinion; a fight that would have been difficult for Democratic senators defending seats in states like North Dakota and Nebraska that are essential for Democrats to hold if we hope to recapture the majority; and a fight that would have effectively signaled an unwillingness on the part of Democrats to confirm any Bush nominee, an unwillingness which I believe would have set a dangerous precedent for future administrations — blocking Roberts was not a realistic option.

In such circumstances, attacks on Pat Leahy, Russ Feingold and the other Democrats who, after careful consideration, voted for Roberts make no sense. Russ Feingold, the only Democrat to vote not only against war in Iraq but also against the Patriot Act, doesn’t become complicit in the erosion of civil liberties simply because he chooses to abide by a deeply held and legitimate view that a President, having won a popular election, is entitled to some benefit of the doubt when it comes to judicial appointments. Like it or not, that view has pretty strong support in the Constitution’s design.

The same principle holds with respect to issues other than judicial nominations. My colleague from Illinois, Dick Durbin, spoke out forcefully – and voted against – the Iraqi invasion. He isn’t somehow transformed into a “war supporter” – as I’ve heard some anti-war activists suggest – just because he hasn’t called for an immediate withdrawal of American troops. He may be simply trying to figure out, as I am, how to ensure that U.S. troop withdrawals occur in such a way that we avoid all-out Iraqi civil war, chaos in the Middle East, and much more costly and deadly interventions down the road. A pro-choice Democrat doesn’t become anti-choice because he or she isn’t absolutely convinced that a twelve-year-old girl should be able to get an operation without a parent being notified. A pro-civil rights Democrat doesn’t become complicit in an anti-civil rights agenda because he or she questions the efficacy of certain affirmative action programs. And a pro-union Democrat doesn’t become anti-union if he or she makes a determination that on balance, CAFTA will help American workers more than it will harm them.

Or to make the point differently: How can we ask Republican senators to resist pressure from their right wing and vote against flawed appointees like John Bolton, if we engage in similar rhetoric against Democrats who dissent from our own party line? How can we expect Republican moderates who are concerned about the nation’s fiscal meltdown to ignore Grover Norquist’s threats if we make similar threats to those who buck our party orthodoxy?

I am not drawing a facile equivalence here between progressive advocacy groups and right-wing advocacy groups. The consequences of their ideas are vastly different. Fighting on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable is not the same as fighting for homophobia and Halliburton. But to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, “true” progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive “checklist,” then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.

Beyond that, by applying such tests, we are hamstringing our ability to build a majority. We won’t be able to transform the country with such a polarized electorate. Because the truth of the matter is this: Most of the issues this country faces are hard. They require tough choices, and they require sacrifice. The Bush Administration and the Republican Congress may have made the problems worse, but they won’t go away after President Bush is gone. Unless we are open to new ideas, and not just new packaging, we won’t change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious energy or fiscal policy that calls for serious sacrifice. We won’t have the popular support to craft a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorism while avoiding isolationism and protecting civil liberties. We certainly won’t have a mandate to overhaul a health care policy that overcomes all the entrenched interests that are the legacy of a jerry-rigged health care system. And we won’t have the broad political support, or the effective strategies, required to lift large numbers of our fellow citizens out of numbing poverty.

The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives’ job. After all, it’s easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it’s harder to craft a foreign policy that’s tough and smart. It’s easy to dismantle government safety nets; it’s harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It’s easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it’s harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that’s our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

Let me be clear: I am not arguing that the Democrats should trim their sails and be more “centrist.” In fact, I think the whole “centrist” versus “liberal” labels that continue to characterize the debate within the Democratic Party misses the mark. Too often, the “centrist” label seems to mean compromise for compromise sake, whereas on issues like health care, energy, education and tackling poverty, I don’t think Democrats have been bold enough. But I do think that being bold involves more than just putting more money into existing programs and will instead require us to admit that some existing programs and policies don’t work very well. And further, it will require us to innovate and experiment with whatever ideas hold promise (including market- or faith-based ideas that originate from Republicans).

Our goal should be to stick to our guns on those core values that make this country great, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention that can achieve those goals, and try to create the sort of serious, adult, consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will. This is more than just a matter of “framing,” although clarity of language, thought, and heart are required. It’s a matter of actually having faith in the American people’s ability to hear a real and authentic debate about the issues that matter.

Finally, I am not arguing that we “unilaterally disarm” in the face of Republican attacks, or bite our tongue when this Administration screws up. Whenever they are wrong, inept, or dishonest, we should say so clearly and repeatedly; and whenever they gear up their attack machine, we should respond quickly and forcefully. I am suggesting that the tone we take matters, and that truth, as best we know it, be the hallmark of our response.

My dear friend Paul Simon used to consistently win the votes of much more conservative voters in Southern Illinois because he had mastered the art of “disagreeing without being disagreeable,” and they trusted him to tell the truth. Similarly, one of Paul Wellstone’s greatest strengths was his ability to deliver a scathing rebuke of the Republicans without ever losing his sense of humor and affability. In fact, I would argue that the most powerful voices of change in the country, from Lincoln to King, have been those who can speak with the utmost conviction about the great issues of the day without ever belittling those who opposed them, and without denying the limits of their own perspectives.

In that spirit, let me end by saying I don’t pretend to have all the answers to the challenges we face, and I look forward to periodic conversations with all of you in the months and years to come. I trust that you will continue to let me and other Democrats know when you believe we are screwing up. And I, in turn, will always try and show you the respect and candor one owes his friends and allies.

In effect, Mr. Obama is just saying, “tone it down. I’m doing it. But you will screw it up if you make it too obvious.”

Which, as many will recall, is pretty much what other Democrats were telling the radical left about withdrawing troops from Iraq around this same time.